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- Genre: Historical Fiction, Fictional Memoir - Title: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Point of view: First person, narrated by Lily as an old woman - Setting: Chinese villages in Hunan Province, 1823-1903 - Character: Lily. Description: The narrator of the novel, daughter of Mama and Baba, wife of Dalang, and laotong to Snow Flower. Lily longs for love, even though as a woman, she's considered unworthy of receiving it. As such, Lily conceptualizes love in terms of duty and what she should do to show or earn her love rather than treating it as an emotion. Her feet are perfect "golden lilies" after her foot binding, which allows her to advance socially and marry well. However, the process of foot binding reinforces the belief that Lily's worth is dependent on her feet and her ability to bear sons, rather than her ability to experience emotion or care. Lily is quick to obey those who are superior to her, and learns to fall back on these conventions and traditions rather than express true feelings or sympathy. When Lily feels that someone has wronged her, she develops a habit of lashing out at them and then cutting them out of her life while she hangs onto her grievances for years. It is this habit that ends Lily's relationship with Snow Flower and also brings about Lily's final coming of age as Lady Lu. Lily does, however, learn the true meaning of "deep-heart" love after Snow Flower's death. While she continues to hold tightly to convention in her old age, she uses her power as Lady Lu to encourage other women to value their lives in a way that she never valued her own life or Snow Flower's. - Character: Snow Flower. Description: Daughter of Snow Flower's Mother and Snow Flower's Father, wife of the butcher, and laotong to Lily. Snow Flower is very sophisticated as a child and is obsessed with birds, flying away, and breaking rules, in part because she was born in the year of the horse and has a free spirit. Throughout her laotong match with Lily, she encourages Lily to push boundaries and defy conventions. However, she keeps many secrets that anger Lily, although she keeps them because she fears losing Lily's affection. When Snow Flower marries out to a family that abuses her in a variety of ways, her spirit begins to break. She grieves the loss of stillborn daughters and one son who dies at age five, becomes nearly suicidal at points, and suffers domestic violence at the hand of her husband. Her only joys in life are her friendship with Lily and "bed business" with her husband, although when Lily proves herself unable to show empathy, Snow Flower turns to a group of sworn sisters (Plum Blossom, Willow, and Lotus) for comfort and support. Later in life she contracts uterine cancer that eventually kills her. She loves Lily unconditionally through their entire relationship. - Character: Mama. Description: Lily's mother, and the wife of Baba. Mama was born in the year of the monkey, so she's seen as being calculating and always looking out for herself. She regards Lily as little more than a burden until her feet are deemed to be full of potential, and then begins to show her "mother love" in the form of physical violence towards Lily. Mama's own feet were poorly bound, so she walks with a cane or flaps around like a bird if her cane isn't close at hand. She keeps it a secret from Lily that Snow Flower's father is addicted to opium and that her family as a whole is not the wealthy, high-class family that Snow Flower leads Lily to believe they are. When Lily realizes the truth, she closes off her emotions towards Mama and their relationship remains stony until Mama's death. - Character: Aunt. Description: Lily's aunt, Beautiful Moon's mother, wife to Uncle, and sister-in-law to Mama. Aunt isn't beautiful but is very kind and logical in her thinking and arguing. She comes from a learned family and teaches Lily and Beautiful Moon nu shu. She and Uncle have a good marriage, but have led generally miserable lives. Aunt has suffered a number of miscarriages and stillbirths. - Character: Madame Wang. Description: The matchmaker who binds Lily and Snow Flower as laotong and later arranges their marriages, as well as that of Beautiful Moon. Lily never likes Madame Wang and sees her as gaudy and hawkish. Upon Snow Flower's marriage, Lily learns that Madame Wang is actually Snow Flower's aunt. Madame Wang's love for Snow Flower means that she negotiated the best marriage she could for her, and was further willing to follow Lily's instructions to pay village girls to attend Snow Flower's wedding ceremonies. Late in life, Lily sees Madame Wang as a woman who made the best of her life, was a shrewd businesswoman, and did very well for herself. - Character: The Butcher / Snow Flower's Husband. Description: Snow Flower's husband. Being a butcher is considered to be one of the worst professions, but he doesn't seem to dislike it. He is physically abusive to Snow Flower, especially in the aftermath of each stillbirth or miscarriage she experiences, and even induces miscarriages through beatings. However, despite his negative qualities, Lily comes to see him as very competent, filial, and both willing and able to care for Snow Flower in regards to food, shelter, and sexual intimacy. - Character: Elder Sister. Description: Daughter of Mama and Baba, and Lily's older sister. She is quiet and compassionate, which leads her to discover Third Sister's septic shock after allowing her to lie down and rest during foot binding. She marries into a family where she's not treated well, but not so badly that it's not considered normal or to be expected. - Character: Third Sister. Description: Daughter of Mama and Baba, and Lily's younger sister by one year. Lily describes her as acting as though she's spoiled and feels entitled to love, when in truth she is neither. She makes a great show of resisting foot binding and dies of septic shock after only a few weeks of having her feet bound. - Character: Snow Flower's Mother. Description: Snow Flower's mother, wife to Snow Flower's Father, and sister to Madame Wang. Lily notes that Snow Flower's mother never seemed able to accept that her family had fallen from prosperity, and she always acts like a great and sophisticated lady despite her family's poverty. She later becomes a beggar with her husband. - Character: Snow Flower's Father. Description: Snow Flower's father and husband to Snow Flower's Mother. A nasty and temperamental man addicted to opium, he sold his family's possessions to pay for opium and nearly sold Snow Flower as a little-daughter-in-law (a concubine with unbound feet). He and his wife disappear as beggars not long after Snow Flower marries out. - Character: Yonggang. Description: Lily's personal servant girl with unbound feet at the Lu house. Yonggang takes her duties to Lily very seriously and carries correspondence between Lily and Snow Flower. She later looks out for Lily's children during the typhoid outbreak. When Lily begins destroying mementos of her relationship with Snow Flower, Yonggang hides the fan and other items. - Theme: Women and Gender. Description: Lily, Snow Flower, and the other female characters live very different lives from the men around them. In the culture and time of the novel, a woman's purpose is primarily to bring honor to her natal (birth) family and her family by marriage, and to do so primarily by bearing sons. While a woman's role in society is undeniably a product of the cultural traditions of the time, the specific beliefs and expectations guiding the women in the novel deserve special consideration. The novel sets out very specific and delineated male and female spheres and ways of being. Men work outside the home, while women spend their entire lives in the upstairs and entirely female chamber of their homes, descending only to cook, clean, and attend to "bed business" with their husbands. They leave their homes only to visit with their friends, attend ceremonies, and to visit their natal homes during certain festivals. While Lily freely admits that she knows little of the world of men, what she does mention of their world is intensely focused on physical movement and travel. In contrast, women are unable to move far or fast once their feet are bound, indicating that a primary difference between men and women is linked to movement. The idea of movement as gendered carries over into the idea that even thoughts can be gendered in nature, and moving outside the appropriate thoughts for one's own gender can cause trouble. Lily sees this play out most prominently through her mother. When Third Sister and Grandmother fall sick and die (from foot binding complications and old age respectively), Lily blames Mama's "man-hope" in Lily's bright future for distracting her mother from caring for Grandmother, which should have been her top priority as the first daughter-in-law. In this way, the novel indicates that not conforming completely, in both thought and action, to the standards of one's gender has disastrous real-world consequences. Alongside a woman's thoughts, a woman's body is one of her most important assets. A woman's "lily" feet can guarantee a good marriage, which can bring prosperity to her natal family through bride gifts from their future in-laws, and her ability to reproduce and bear sons secures her place in her husband's home. This introduces the idea of the female body as currency. Lily rises in status not just because she has perfect feet, but because she has several sons, all of whom survive. Snow Flower, on the other hand, has a son who is sickly, a son who dies very young, and daughters, all but one of which are stillborn. Further, Snow Flower's husband takes his anger at her "failure" out on her by beating her and even inducing several miscarriages due to the severity of his violence. While Lily's reproductive body allows her to rise, Snow Flower's revolts in every way imaginable. When Snow Flower dies of what is likely uterine cancer, it's essentially her very womanhood that kills her. However, in the case of Snow Flower, the novel presents a paradox. While Snow Flower's physical womanhood kills her, her thoughts and fixation on birds and freedom, though very "masculine" and therefore uncouth for a woman, keep her from sinking too deeply into a deadly state of emotional despair, and arguably give her a richer inner life than that which the overly traditional and submissive Lily enjoys. - Theme: Love and Family. Description: In the first few pages of the novel, Lily, at eighty years old, explains to the reader that the story to follow is a story about love and the different forms that love can take. She explains that she has spent her entire life craving love that, as a woman, she's undeserving of receiving. This sets love up as a major motivator throughout the novel, as well as creates a dichotomy between love as a natural emotion and something contracted or earned. Lily's desire for love stems from the fact that as a woman, her society deems her unworthy and undeserving of love. However, this idea is complicated by nu shu (women's secret writing) phrases that indicate that fathers do feel love for their daughters, Lily's interpretation of what she deems "mother love," and the existence of contracted friendships between women in the form of sworn sisterhoods and laotong relationships. The existence of the contracted friendships in particular offers the possibility that women are worthy of receiving love from someone, but that someone must be from outside her natal or married family. The idea that women shouldn't expect love or respect from their married families in particular is reinforced time and again. Lily's mother-in-law goes so far as to attempt to forbid Lily from communicating with Snow Flower, while Snow Flower experiences regular violence and abuse from her husband both and her mother-in-law. However, despite the abuses women experience in their married homes, they're still expected to love their new families and care for their mothers-in-law above all else. This introduces the idea that even if the word "love" is used to describe it, an in-law relationship is truly a relationship of obligation and expectation rather than emotional investment. This idea of obligated love then extends to the emotions a woman is supposed to feel towards her own children. While they are the key to a woman's worth, even the sought-after sons are raised to inhabit a different world than their mothers. This makes a close relationship with a son impossible, while daughters are raised specifically to expect the same sort of distant or cruel relationships in her own future husband's family. Amidst the emotionally absent relationships that fill the novel, Lily and Snow Flower's laotong relationship stands as an example of what was supposed to be true love and care between the two. However, Lily is unable to escape what she's internalized about relationships being transactional and in turn, destroys her relationship with Snow Flower. Throughout their relationship, Lily views Snow Flower's love as something to be earned through good deeds and kindness, rather than as something that should be given freely. Similarly, rather than give her own love to Snow Flower freely when Snow Flower needs it most, Lily angrily holds onto the thoughts that Snow Flower is undeserving of her love. Thus, despite the fact that a laotong relationship is supposed to provide friendship and companionship for life, Lily isn't able to break her habit of viewing love as earned and as a transaction until it's too late. In this way, the novel champions the idea that while true love can indeed begin to make up for previous grievances (Lily uses her power later to help Snow Flower's children and grandchildren in an attempt to atone for neglecting Snow Flower in life), true caring and friendship must be given without question or justification. While Lily likely didn't have the power to save Snow Flower from cancer, she certainly had the power to make Snow Flower's last several years happier and more comfortable. - Theme: Language, Storytelling, and Communication. Description: As women, Lily and Snow Flower are forbidden from learning "men's writing" and instead learn nu shu, a form of writing created by and for women to communicate secretly with each other. Nu shu, however, isn't just writing in the conventional sense; it encompasses an entire cultural system that is specifically female, comprised of songs and stories meant to be performed for other women, embroidery and other textile work, and more conventional correspondence, like written prayers, stories, and autobiographies. While men's writing is logographic (each character represents a whole or part of a word), nu shu is a phonetic script, making the understanding of its written form dependent entirely on context. This idea that language can be slippery and confusing drives many of the conflicts of the novel, but the fact that language, and women's language in particular, is powerful also offers a sense of purpose to women who otherwise are considered useless. Lily as the narrator peppers her story with asides that explain some of the intricacies of how her region's dialect informs certain cultural ideals, such as the words for "shoe" and "child" being the same, and the word for "wife" being the same as the word for "guest." Through these asides, the reader is reminded that language doesn't just describe something; through its very structure it can actually create and reinforce meaning. Lily states that as the language implies, a wife is merely a guest in her husband's home, and a guest in terms of an alien foreigner rather than someone to be respected. This builds on the idea that language is powerful and can be used to exert control, as so many of the women in the novel are treated as aliens in their husbands' homes. In an opposite way, this concept extends to the practice of nu shu, as the language is constructed and described as one of the only ways women are able to express themselves and obtain some degree of control and power over their own lives. It allows women to communicate secretly with each other and express thoughts and desires not considered appropriate to express in any other format. Most importantly, Lily comes to realize that while nu shu is supposed to be secret from men, men certainly know of its existence and can likely read it. She realizes then that the power of nu shu comes from the fact that the female lives and struggles the script is intended to express are deemed worthless, and therefore not worth a man's time to censor. While language at times works to control and assert power, the novel also places a great deal of emphasis on instances where language is ambiguous or misunderstood. While language is used by Lily and Snow Flower to build their relationship, it also works to tear it apart when Lily misunderstands, for example, Madame Gao's use of the word "pipe" (mistakenly understanding that Snow Flower's father uses the pipe for tobacco, rather than opium) or misreads nu shu and believes that Snow Flower has violated their laotong relationship. At Snow Flower's death, then, Lily must come to terms with the fact that she spent much of her life misunderstanding the language that was supposed to provide her with both power and emotional intimacy. This recalls the idea that language contains multiple levels of meaning and requires a great deal of nuance to understand. As Lily accepts her lack of knowledge in that realm, she learns too late that the nuance required to understand nu shu is something she should have applied to all aspects of her life. Lily ends her life as a powerful woman, and spends her final years transcribing the stories of women who cannot read or write nu shu. During these last years especially, her lifelong education in language is completed, as she finally has the freedom and power to turn her own life into nu shu songs and stories to teach Snow Flower's granddaughter, thereby giving value to her own life and experiences through language. - Theme: Pain, Suffering, and Coming of Age. Description: Experiencing pain and suffering is linked early on to the simple fact of being female. A girl is expected to undergo the painful process of foot binding starting around age six. While tiny bound feet are considered attractive, the pain a girl experiences during the binding process is also supposed to prepare her to endure the emotionally wrought experience of "marrying out" and leaving one's natal home, and then the physical pain of childbirth. Further, a girl is told from birth that she's worthless unless she can eventually bear sons, adding another layer of psychological trauma. The persistence and acceptance of this suffering carries Lily and Snow Flower through their lives, creating a cycle of violence from which the characters never truly escape, even as adults. The novel describes the process of foot binding in excruciating and horrifying detail, the physical aspects of which are only made worse by the fact that the process of binding is commonly performed by a girl's own mother as an act of love. Further, despite regular mention of the pain of childbirth, the pain from bound feet is the only pain ever described in such detail. This indicates that while a woman's life is guaranteed to be full of pain, it is this first experience of pain that is truly transformative and allows a girl to become a woman. Notably, this process isn't just a normal part of life for girls; it's something that's deeply desired. Even though the process is extremely painful and very dangerous, Lily wants to have golden lily feet, and even as a small child she understands that this process is the key to her future. Further, as Mama and Aunt's decision to continue the process when Third Sister's bound feet become septic indicates, it's considered better to die from foot binding than live as a crippled, "big-footed" girl. Because of this, the cycle continues for two more generations over the course of the novel. Lily binds not just her own daughter's feet but also the feet of Snow Flower's granddaughter, heralding both of them into adulthood. The sad fate of being a woman is addressed again as a young woman undergoes the rituals of marriage. A bride isn't allowed to eat for the ten days of marriage ceremonies, and much of the singing and chanting during the ceremonies speaks of sadness at leaving one's natal home. While Lily suffers all the normal emotions about getting married, the extent of her suffering pales in comparison to what Snow Flower must undergo because of her family situation and Snow Flower's husband's lowly profession as a butcher. While both girls experience similar trauma at the process of becoming married women, the rest of Snow Flower's married life is even more traumatic as she faces stillbirths, miscarriages, domestic violence, and finally cancer. Further, the way in which Lily makes sense of and engages with Snow Flower's miserable lot in life indicates that while it's certainly sad, Lily doesn't find it exceptional or worthy of special consideration. Essentially, Lily accepts Snow Flower's fate as something normal and expected of womanhood, thereby refusing to accept the intensity of Snow Flower's grief and sadness and denying Snow Flower the comfort and sympathy she desperately craved. Lily's coming of age is tied directly to her process of becoming Lady Lu, the most powerful woman in her county. This process of becoming follows neatly the process of deterioration that her laotong relationship with Snow Flower experiences. Lily's final step towards becoming Lady Lu comes when she experiences the pain of ending her friendship with Snow Flower. By humiliating snow Flower publicly, Lily is then admired by other women for exposing Snow Flower's uncouth actions, raising her status as the whistleblower. Through the same action, however, Lily violates the laotong contract, which effectively denies her Snow Flower's love. In this way, Lily's coming of age comes about because of her rejection of love. The pain described in the novel creates an intense and almost grotesque reading experience, presenting the idea that physical and emotional pain are necessary parts of growing up, becoming an adult, and especially for Snow Flower, being female. - Theme: Chinese Culture and Tradition. Description: As a work of historical fiction, the culture, traditions, and actual historical events of the time (1823-1903) permeate every aspect of the novel, simply by virtue of the genre. However, Lily's engagement with culture and tradition doesn't just dictate how her life should be lived; rather, the way in which she internalizes and uses her culture and beliefs blinds her to a more holistic understanding of the individuals and events in her life. One of the major ways this plays out is through Lily's interpretation of individuals' zodiac signs. Both she and Snow Flower were born in the year of the horse, meaning that their personalities are supposed to be free-spirited and independent, but also hardworking. As children, Lily is both enthralled and intimidated by Snow Flower's desire for independence. As they grow older, Lily attempts to use Snow Flower's horse nature to encourage Snow Flower to rise above the abuse from her husband and conform tightly to tradition. Lily's attempts to "help" Snow Flower in this way backfire, however, as Lily's insistence on viewing Snow Flower through the lens of her horse personality limits her ability and willingness to understand the trauma Snow Flower experiences. Along the same lines, when Lily discovers the truth of Snow Flower's childhood and family, Lily blames Mama's monkey nature for keeping the truth a secret. Later on, Lily despises Snow Flower's mother-in-law for actions she attributes to being born under the sign of the rat. In all these instances, Lily uses the personality traits set out by one's zodiac sign to justify and understand individuals' thoughts and actions. Simply put, Lily consistently flattens people into one-dimensional caricatures and uses these caricatures to attempt to control them, explain their behavior, and justify the righteousness of her own beliefs and actions. Lily's ability to receive and understand love is often hindered by her habit of leaning heavily on tradition and what should or shouldn't be done in a given situation. This happens especially as she attempts to comfort Snow Flower after a number of stillborn daughters and miscarriages. Rather than empathize with Snow Flower about the loss of children, Lily consistently encourages Snow Flower both to try again for a boy, and to be happy that only one of her "useless" daughters survived. By meeting her friend's grief with broad conventional platitudes, Lily indicates a belief that it's possible to use the upholding of traditional values as a surrogate for personal emotional comfort, as in her mind, there's little reason to grieve the loss of a female child. As a result, Snow Flower, in her attempt to follow Lily's advice to try again to conceive sons, actually breaks tradition by having sex with her husband before the mandated 100 days after birth have passed. While Snow Flower saw this as a way to improve her situation by becoming pregnant again sooner, Lily uses it to justify Snow Flower's continued misfortune as something deserved for flouting tradition. Interestingly, Lily is aware of her habit of substituting tradition for empathy and at points recognizes that it's not particularly helpful, but she finds she simply doesn't have the skills to truly empathize with snow Flower. Further, Lily's very traditional and prescribed actions later in life stand in stark contrast to how she behaves in her childhood, particularly during the early days of her relationship with Snow Flower. Their match was unconventional to begin with, and Lily put a great deal of thought into the unconventional decision to return Snow Flower's first message on the same fan rather than a different one, as is customary. However, while Lily sees this as a way to build the loving laotong that she dreams of, and Madame Wang deems Lily's choice evidence of a good match with Snow Flower, Lily is unable to truly internalize these early lessons that breaking tradition can bring great joy and love to her life. Thus, by considering Lily's whole life in terms of how and where she upholds or dismisses tradition and cultural conventions, particularly where she does so as a substitute for emotion, the novel begins to paint a picture of the dangers of viewing tradition as static and unyielding. Rather, the reader is asked to consider the possibility that tradition can be fluid and molded, and is capable of both providing comfort and inflicting great pain. - Climax: When Lily and Snow Flower exchange their "Letters of Vituperation" - Summary: Lily, an 80-year-old Chinese woman, is a widow now, and old enough that she can say things that would once have gotten her in trouble. She says she spent her life longing for love, despite being undeserving of love as a woman. She was an obedient girl and woman, but took obedience too far. Her only rebellion was nu shu, or secret women's writing, and she describes a fan sitting in front of her covered in nu shu notes she exchanged with her laotong (bonded female companion), Snow Flower. The story to follow is Lily's autobiography, which will be burned upon her death. Lily is born in Yongming County, China, in 1823. At age five, she begins to desire affection from her Mama. When Lily and her cousin, Beautiful Moon, turn six, Mama and Aunt send for a diviner to select an auspicious date to begin their foot binding. Diviner Hu looks at Lily and suggests they consult with a matchmaker. Madame Wang arrives the next day and, after inspecting Lily's feet, tells Mama that Lily's feet could be perfect if they wait a year. Further, Lily may be able to marry into Tongkou (a richer town) and be eligible for a laotong match. Later that night, Mama slaps Lily for the first time, and Lily takes the slap as a sign of love. Aunt begins teaching Lily and Beautiful Moon nu shu, which must be kept secret from men. The next year, Lily, Beautiful Moon, and Third Sister, who's a year younger, begin their foot binding. The pain is excruciating, and Third Sister puts up a violent fight. One day, Elder Sister allows Third Sister to sit down so she can massage her legs, and she realizes that Third Sister's legs are turning red. Mama unwraps her feet to find putrid, rotten flesh. Third Sister dies soon after, as does Grandmother. Madame Wang visits and tells Mama she's found Lily a laotong match with a girl named Snow Flower, who is supposedly of a higher class than Lily's family. She offers Lily a fan and tells Mama to think about the match. Aunt reads the note on the fan to Lily, which is a request to be "old sames." Lily's family agrees to accept the match and Lily decides to send her reply to Snow Flower on the same fan, which goes against tradition. Several weeks later, Madame Wang takes Lily and Snow Flower to the Temple of Gupo Fair to sign their laotong contract. Madame Wang returns both girls to Lily's house, where Snow Flower stays for several days. Once Snow Flower returns home, the girls pass notes to each other often through Madame Wang. Snow Flower's messages are all about birds and flying away, which scares Lily. By age eleven, Lily, Beautiful Moon, and Snow Flower's feet are healed. Lily's are indeed perfect, and Madame Wang arranges marriages for both Lily and Beautiful Moon in Tongkou. Snow Flower will marry out to the town of Jintian, but the girls worry that Snow Flower's husband isn't a good match. The girls learn how to behave as women and perform domestic duties, and Snow Flower, who knows the families that Lily and Beautiful Moon will marry into, tells them about their future husbands. Elder Sister is married soon after. The women sing of their sadness as Elder Sister goes, but Lily's county practices the tradition of not moving in with one's in-laws permanently until the woman becomes pregnant. At one point Elder Sister returns from a visit with her in-laws crying, and both Mama and Aunt say it's futile to try to change a woman's miserable life. When Lily and Snow Flower turn 15, Snow Flower travels to Lily's home for the Catching Cool Breezes festival. All of Lily's other female relatives are visiting family and the weather is oppressively hot. On the third night, Lily and Snow Flower strip their clothes off and write nu shu characters on each other's bodies. Beautiful Moon returns home the next day, and Baba (Lily's father) and Uncle set the girls up to work on embroidery outside. A bee stings Beautiful Moon and she dies in minutes. Uncle and Aunt are distraught. Two years later, Lily's wedding day approaches. During Lily's Sitting and Singing ceremony, Madame Wang tells "The Tale of Wife Wang," a story about a woman who marries a butcher but triumphs in the end. Lily thinks it's a cautionary tale for her. Over the next several days Lily attends several banquets where she cannot eat anything, and her panic about "bed business" (sex) rises. Mama tells Lily, "you have promised to be united for life." Lily is terrified. The next morning Snow Flower gives Lily their fan and a note before Lily's in-laws take her to Tongkou. The note reads that Snow Flower is afraid that once she learns the truth, Lily won't love her anymore, and Lily is perplexed. Later that day, Lily and her husband (Dalang) are officially married. Snow Flower doesn't attend the ceremony three days later, and Lily is very hurt. The next day, Lily goes to Snow Flower's house for the first time, for Snow Flower's Sitting and Singing. When she arrives she thinks she's in the wrong place, as the house has no furniture and smells horribly. Snow Flower explains that her father smokes opium and has sold all their possessions. She finally admits that she'll be marrying a butcher. No women want to come for Snow Flower's Sitting and Singing, so Lily sends Madame Wang to pay girls to come. When Lily attends Snow Flower's after-wedding ceremony, she finds that Snow Flower's new family is unsavory at best. Lily, upset at Mama for lying to her about Snow Flower's situation, cuts Mama out of her life emotionally. Lily and Snow Flower then spend the next two years praying for sons before finally becoming pregnant. Snow Flower's son is weak, while Lily's son is strong. Lily's mother-in-law refuses to allow Lily to see Snow Flower and Lily is crushed. However, Lily disobeys and invites Snow Flower to her natal home for the next festival. Snow Flower is already pregnant again, and Lily determines that Snow Flower and her husband haven't followed the "pollution laws" and had sex too soon after birth. Snow Flower's daughter is stillborn. Two years later, Lily has a second son and Snow Flower has another stillborn daughter. Lily and Snow Flower then both have daughters, Jade and Spring Moon, and Lily and Snow Flower decide to arrange a laotong match for them. Snow Flower begins to talk of Taipings and rebellions. When drought strikes, Lily's husband decides to travel to faraway Guilin to purchase salt to sell. Not long after he leaves, typhoid strikes Tongkou. Lily barricades herself and her three children in her room and only leaves twice per day. After several weeks the banished servants return and the epidemic wanes. Lily's mother-in-law, however, falls ill. Lily cares for her, as is her duty as the eldest daughter-in-law, but she dies anyway. Lily's father-in-law dies soon after. Lily's husband returns with salt, and he and Lily become the new Master and Lady Lu. That fall, Lily travels to Jintian to visit with Snow Flower. On the second day of her visit they hear sounds of fighting—the Taiping rebellion has arrived. Snow Flower's husband, the butcher, won't allow Lily to wait for her husband to fetch her and they begin to march up the mountain to safety. They march for a full 36 hours in the freezing cold and listen to the screams of people who slip off the narrow mountain path. When they reach a sheltered area, Snow Flower recognizes some of her friends from Jintain and they set up camp with the three families. The butcher becomes a hero, as he's willing to perform hard tasks. Snow Flower gets pregnant again, as the butcher continues to demand "bed business." Snow Flower's mother-in-law, a nasty woman, tries to starve Snow Flower's first weak son, but Lily makes it clear she won't allow that to happen. One day, Snow Flower's second son dies unexpectedly. The butcher takes his grief out on Snow Flower and beats her until she miscarries. He beats her daily for the next few weeks. Snow Flower walks to the edge of a cliff and Lily follows her. Lily is afraid she'll jump, but Snow Flower only says that she's wanted to die for a while, and tells Lily that Lily never understood Snow Flower's grief at her stillborn daughters. The groups are told to return to their villages the next day. Lily's husband comes for her and when they greet each other, Lily says his name for the first time. Lily and Snow Flower see each other regularly over the next few months, but Snow Flower never seems to quite recover from the ordeal in the mountains. Lily begins writing Snow Flower suggestions for how to be a better wife or how to conceive a son. In August, Snow Flower is supposed to visit Lily for a festival, but Lotus, a woman from the mountains, arrives instead with the fan. The fan says that Snow Flower has found other women who love her, and Lily won't have to listen to Snow Flower's laments anymore. Lily is hurt beyond belief. When Madame Wang arrives several weeks later to arrange the laotong match between Jade and Spring Moon, Lily refuses to accept the match. Both Lily and Snow Flower attend the Sitting and Singing ceremony for a girl in Tongkou. Snow Flower sings a "Letter of Vituperation," trying to explain herself to Lily. Lily retaliates with her own Letter of Vituperation and accuses Snow Flower of violating their laotong relationship. She tells the full room everything bad about Snow Flower. Snow Flower leaves crying, and afterward Lily truly becomes Lady Lu, as the other women respect her for exposing Snow Flower's discrepancies. Lily tries to burn every note from Snow Flower, but can't find the fan and several other items. Eight years later, a beggar girl shows up in Lily's house. Lily recognizes her as Spring Moon, who says that Snow Flower is dying and asking for Lily. When Lily arrives, Snow Flower is surrounded by Lotus, Plum Blossom, and Willow, the women from the mountain. Snow Flower apologizes and Lily sees that Snow Flower has a tumor on her stomach the size of a baby. Lily tries to help Snow Flower with diviners, doctors, and special foods, but Snow Flower only gets worse. She dies two weeks later, asking Lily to be an aunt to her two remaining children. After Snow Flower's burial, Plum Blossom, Lotus, and Willow explain to Lily how badly she'd behaved towards Snow Flower. Lily realizes she treated Snow Flower exceedingly poorly and vows to make it right through Snow Flower's children. Spring Moon commits suicide on her wedding night, but Lily arranges for Snow Flower's granddaughter, Peony, to marry her own firstborn grandson. Lily binds Peony's feet herself and tells her stories about herself and Snow Flower. Lily realizes now that she treated Snow Flower like a bad husband treats his wife. She asks her, and others who witnessed her life, for forgiveness.

- Genre: Epistolary novel, Feminist novel, Post-colonial literature, Négritude - Title: So Long a Letter - Point of view: First person - Setting: Dakar, Senegal - Character: Ramatoulaye. Description: Ramatoulaye is the narrator of So Long a Letter; the book is both her diary and a long letter to her friend Aissatou. Ramatoulaye belongs to the generation that grew up under the French colonial regime and came of age just as Senegal was achieving its independence. Accordingly, she is very politically engaged, and reflects often on the future of her country, the role of tradition in modern life, and the prospect of women's liberation. She is fundamentally a feminist, though she holds certain beliefs that some feminists might find unfamiliar or perhaps even disagree with. For one, she is a devout Muslim, and follows the dictates of her faith even when they seem to advocate the unequal treatment of women. Though she is a teacher and has a professional life of her own, she is also a devoted mother. Her faith and her patience are tested when her husband, Modou, decides to take a young second wife (perfectly acceptable in Senegalese-Muslim culture) and proceeds to abandon Ramatoulaye and her twelve children. Despite Modou's infidelity, though, she chooses to remain married to him. - Character: Aissatou. Description: Aissatou is Ramatoulaye's old childhood friend, and the addressee of her letter. She comes from a rather poor family; her father is a goldsmith. Aissatou experiences similar trouble in her marital life—her husband takes on a young second wife, of noble birth, in order to please his mother—but she reacts to it quite differently. Unlike Ramatoulaye, Aissatou decides to leave her husband on principle. Of a much more independent spirit than Ramatoulaye, Aissatou decides to pursue her education. She ends up moving to America, to work in the Senegalese embassy there. - Character: Modou. Description: Modou is Ramatoulaye's husband. He is a union organizer and, like Ramatoulaye, engaged in his country's politics. At first, the two are very deeply in love, and they marry despite the protestations of Ramatoulaye's parents. However, their love fades as they grow older. Modou takes secret interest in his daughter's young friend Binetou. He lavishes her with gifts and money, and eventually decides to marry her without telling Ramatoulaye. After this second marriage, Modou essentially abandons Ramatoulaye and their twelve children. His death occasions Ramatoulaye's letter to Aissatou. - Character: Mawdo. Description: Aissatou's husband. Mawdo is a doctor, an upstanding citizen, and a member of Senegal's class of nobles. He and Aissatou fall in love despite the class difference between their two families. This upsets Mawdo's mother, who eventually tricks him into taking on his young cousin Nabou as a second wife. He does so somewhat reluctantly, but then proceeds to have children with Nabou, claiming all the while that he only loves Aissatou. Aissatou cannot accept this and leaves him. Even after Aissatou's departure, however, Mawdo remains a good friend to Ramatoulaye. - Character: Binetou. Description: Modou's second wife, and a friend of Daba. She is only 17 when she reluctantly marries Modou. She does so at the urgings of her family, who are after Modou's money. Binetou survives her marriage to Modou by making fun of him, ordering him around, and making him buy her things. - Theme: Custom, Modernity, and Progress. Description: The Senegal depicted in So Long a Letter is a country on the threshold, passing between two historical eras. Ramatoulaye is born and educated under the French colonial regime, and she lives through Senegalese independence. Hers is the generation responsible for the slow process of Senegalese self-determination. They have taken on the enormous task imagining a new sociopolitical order, and with it a postcolonial future for their country.Ramatoulaye is extremely politically engaged, and while she herself is not active in the political scene, she is surrounded by those who are—her husband, Modou, works as an adviser to the Ministry of Public Works, and her friend Daouda is a member of the National Assembly. She spends much of the book reflecting on the future of her country. The people of Senegal have cast off the bonds of colonial rule. No longer beholden to colonial demands of assimilation, they can reimagine and/or reassert a national identity. Yet colonial rule has left an indelible mark on Senegalese society. Modernity, progress, self-determination, the very concept of "nationhood"—all these terms are central to the new Senegalese political discourse, yet in some sense they are also imports of the West and, by that same token, artifacts of a long history of oppression. Independence and liberation mean entrance into an increasingly global economy, participation which is perhaps just another form of assimilation, or, worse, acquiescence to colonial exploitation by another name.But neither is there hope of returning to a pre-colonial past, nor does that seem like the right path forward. Ramatoulaye is nostalgic for certain Senegalese customs (she mourns the decline of traditional crafts and professions) while she remains skeptical of others (she is scornful of Aunty Nabou's devotion to dusty social hierarchies and notions of nobility). Conversely, she is eager for progress and modernization while wary of the alienation it may bring. As she writes, "We all agreed that much dismantling was needed to introduce modernity within our traditions. Torn between the past and the present, we deplored the 'hard sweat' that would be inevitable. We counted the possible losses. But we knew that nothing would be as before. We were full of nostalgia but were resolutely progressive."While this ambiguity between nostalgia for custom and eagerness for modernization is never fully resolved by Ramatoulaye, she seems ultimately to advocate for a synthesis of the two: a steady march of progress tempered by an attentiveness to the past, and a reinvigorated sense of cultural identity. - Theme: Feminism and Islam. Description: The opposing pulls of custom and progress that Ramatoulaye encounters in the Senegalese political climate become personal and particular in her struggle to reconcile her abiding faith in Islam with her feminism. The central drama of the novel is the disintegration of Ramatoulaye's marriage to Modou after the latter takes on a second wife—his daughter's young friend, no less. Ramatoulaye's faith permits polygyny (a man taking more than one wife), and dictates that she remain with her husband even after he marries another woman. And yet Ramatoulaye can't help but feel the injustice of her position—Modou takes on his second wife without any warning (he even refuses to be the one to break the news to Ramatoulaye) and then proceeds to effectively abandon Ramatoulaye and her twelve children.When Modou suddenly dies, it appears at first as though his entire inheritance will fall to his in-laws and his second wife, Binetou. Ramatoulaye has to fight off her mother-in-law in order to claim the house that Ramatoulaye and Modou acquired on a joint bank loan, a house that is thus rightfully hers. Both the circumstances of her husband's second marriage and the events following his death indicate to Ramatoulaye that, in the Senegalese-Islamic model of marriage, the woman is seen as something of a disposable commodity, who can be cast aside as soon as the husband grows bored of her.Aissatou, who endures a similar misfortune when her husband marries his young, nobly born cousin in order to appease his mother, provides Ramatoulaye with an example of escape. Rather than endure her husband's second marriage, Aissatou divorces him on principle (he claims to still love her) and seeks an education in France, before eventually moving to America. While she never disavows her faith, her decision entails an implicit rejection of certain Senegalese-Islamic norms. Despite Aissatou's example, however, Ramatoulaye brings together her outspoken feminism with her religiously-inflected notions of family. She resolves to remain married to Modou, even though he has effectively abandoned her, and endures the indignities of the mourning period as the fulfillment of a vow. While she is a professional woman, working long hours as a school teacher, she also remains committed to her role as the homemaker. She turns her feminism inward, seeking empowerment within the constraints of custom. She learns to drive and singlehandedly raises her twelve children to become sensitive adults. When, following Modou's death, Tamsir and Daoudu propose marriage to her, Ramatoulaye rejects them both (publically humiliating Tamsir) and resolves to live a life of self-reliance. Not long afterward, she manages to win back the house that she and Modou bought together. Ramatoulaye lives at an intersection likely unfamiliar to most Western readers: she is African, she is Muslim, and she is a feminist. Rather than reject any one of those identities, she seems to value and embody each equally. This refusal to choose is itself an expression of empowerment. - Theme: Motherhood. Description: Ramatoulaye is a devoted mother to her twelve children. When Modou abandons her for Binetou, and then when he eventually dies, Ramatoulaye must redouble her efforts as a mother and face with courage the prospect of being a single parent. Ramatoulaye's struggles as a mother are not just particular to her marital situation—they are also particular to the times in which she lives, as her children are growing up during the dawn of Senegalese independence. They are entering a society that is less repressed and inhibited than it once was, but by that same token is full of new dangers for teenagers, who are now exposed to a much wider array of temptations and urges.Ramatoulaye faces this very difficulty in the final of third of the book. A progressive mother, she treats her adolescent children with a laissez-faire ("hands off") attitude, allowing her daughters to wear trousers (unusual for Senegalese-Muslim women) and go out at night. As she puts it, "I wanted my daughters to discover [love] in a healthy way, without feelings of guilt, secretiveness or degradation." However, when Ramatoulaye finds three of her daughters smoking, and soon afterward discovers that another daughter, Aissatou II, has gotten pregnant out of wedlock, she comes to reconsider her parenting methods. She grows angry at her children, and worries that her hands-off parenting has left them in peril.In the end, however, Ramatoulaye brings herself to meet her children's mistakes with equanimity and love. Rather than spurn her pregnant daughter, she remembers how her daughters supported her in her time of need, and welcomes her with open arms, writing "one is a mother in order to understand the inexplicable…one is a mother in order to love without beginning or end." And, in any case, she is impressed by her children's ability to confront and resolve their missteps completely of their own accord. In particular, she is surprised to find that Aissatou, upon learning she was pregnant, worked together with her boyfriend to determine how the child would be cared for, arranging that her boyfriend's grandparents would care for the child in the first years of its life. For Ramatoulaye, motherhood is an ongoing, mysterious, hugely difficult, and ultimately reciprocal process. Her decision to meet her pregnant daughter with boundless love, while not exactly conventional by her community's standards, brings her closer to her child, and reinvigorates her with a new understanding of motherhood. - Theme: Friendship vs. Marital Love. Description: Throughout the novel, Ramatoulaye's close bond with her friend Aissatou is continually posed against the disintegration of both of their marriages. For both Ramatoulaye and presumably Aissatou, friendship—especially female friendship—offers a richer and more intimate connection than marriage ever can. This contrast is evident in the very form of the novel. Ramatoulaye's intense feelings of kinship with Aissatou, even while Aissatou lives thousands of miles away, can be felt in the intimacy of her address. The novel is framed as both a letter to a friend and a private diary, and it seems that for Ramatoulaye there should be no distinction between the two: what one friend endures privately, the other one shares. As if to confirm their solidarity in each other's struggles, Aissatou—without being asked, and without asking for anything in return—buys Ramatoulaye a car.Modou's abandonment of Ramatoulaye convinces her that friendship is more resilient and rewarding than marital love. As she writes, "Friendship has splendors that love knows not. It grows stronger when crossed, whereas obstacles kill love. Friendship resists time, which wearies and severs couples. It has heights unknown to love." Ramatoulaye's eldest daughter, Daba, echoes this sentiment when she says "Marriage is no chain. It is mutual agreement over a life's programme. So if one of the partners is no longer satisfied with the union, why should he remain?" Then again, Ramatoulaye does not share completely in her daughter's liberal and pragmatic view of marital love. While she feels that friendship has "greater heights" than love, she also believes strongly in the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of raising children along with a spouse. And, finally, Ramatoulaye's younger daughter Aissatou II provides a rejoinder to Daba's pragmatism, and with it a glimmer of hope: Aissatou and her husband-to-be are deeply in love, yet they also succeed in maintaining a practical, mutually respectful relationship. While Ramatoulaye is skeptical of the institution of marriage, and wary of the particular injustices it has wrought in her own life, she meets marital love with a kind of stoicism, upholding it as a duty that one must take on, if only for the sake of one's children. However, it is in friendship—especially friendship with Aissatou—that Ramatoulaye finds real strength and emotional fulfillment. - Theme: Dialogue and Address. Description: So Long a Letter is formally unusual. It is at once an epistolary novel—a novel composed of letters—and a diary. Ramatoulaye, writing during the 40 days of mourning she must observe in the wake of her husband's death, addresses her reflections to her best friend Aissatou. And yet we never get to read Aissatou's response. The book has the quality of a dialogue in the sense that the writing is interpersonal, addressed to another mind, but the dialogue is ultimately one sided. Consequently, the reader comes to stand in for Aissatou, and becomes the addressee of Ramatoulaye's musings. Indeed, much of what Ramatoulaye writes seems written for the reader's sake, as so many of the details she recounts, Aissatou already knows. In this way, So Long a Letter is framed as an ongoing conversation—a conversation that may extend into the future—in which the reader is included and perhaps even encouraged to respond. The theme of dialogue is manifested not just in the form of the novel, but also in its plot. For one, Modou's abandonment of Ramatoulaye and her children is framed as a complete breakdown of communication and dialogue. Rather than confront Ramatoulaye directly about his decision to marry a new woman, he sends his brother to break the news to her. Ramatoulaye, feeling the burden of etiquette and custom, cannot respond to her husband's messengers in the way she wants. The breakup of Aissatou's marriage unfolds in a similar manner—Aissatou is left completely out of the loop when it comes to Aunty Nabou's scheming to replace her. In contrast, Ramatoulaye's arguably greatest moment of triumph occurs when she finds the strength to speak freely and without inhibition with Tamsir after he crassly proposes to her following Modou's death. Finally, Ramatoulaye's extended conversation with Daoude over the role of women in government introduces a political dimension to the theme of dialogue. The exchange demonstrates that dialogue is an important catalyst for political progress, and in fact constitutes the very foundation of democracy. At last, it seems that the ambiguities and contradictions Ramatoulaye grapples with in trying to reconcile her feminism with her faith, her political beliefs with her personal life, are really the beginnings of an ongoing conversation—a conversation in which the reader is included, and on which the future of Senegal depends. - Climax: Ramatoulaye learns that her daughter, Aissatou, is pregnant. - Summary: So Long a Letter begins when Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese woman living in Dakar, the country's capital, decides to write a letter to her old friend Aissatou, who lives in America. The letter is occasioned by the sudden death of Modou, Ramatoulaye's estranged husband. In keeping with Muslim custom, Ramatoulaye must observe a mirasse, a forty-day period of isolation and mourning. Over the course of this period she keeps a diary, which she eventually intends to send to Aissatou. Ramatoulaye begins by reflecting on the long funeral proceedings following Modou's death. Senegalese-Muslim customs dictate that Ramatoulaye serve as a host to all the mourners and well-wishers, opening her house to them and providing them with food and drink. This strikes Ramatoulaye as a grave injustice, as Modou, in his final years, wanted nothing to do with her. The mourners virtually sack her house, and though they bring gifts—mostly bank notes—the most of them end up in the hands of Modou's second wife, Binetou, and her greedy mother (Lady Mother-in-Law). Ramatoulaye goes on to reflect on her marriage to Modou. She cannot understand what led him to lose interest in her. Their first years together, as sweethearts and then as a young married couple, seemed hopeful. They married despite the protestations of Ramtoulaye's family, who saw Modou as something of a loaf. In her diary she admits that they were right, and wonders why, despite her education, she chose him over the more sensible option—Daouda Dieng, an older and more established, financially stable man. Aissatou's marriage, like Ramatoulaye's, also disintegrated. Around the time that Ramatoulaye married Modou, Aissatou married Mawdo, a medical student and overall model citizen. The two were greatly in love. However, Mawdo is of noble birth, while Aissatou is merely the daughter of a goldsmith. Mawdo's family—in particular his mother, Aunty Nabou—objected to the union. In an effort to undermine the marriage, Aunty Nabou traveled to her ancestral hometown and convinced her brother to relinquish one of his daughters—Aunty Nabou's namesake—to her care. Aunty Nabou proceeded to raise and preen young Nabou. Then, when the girl was of proper age, Aunty Nabou begged Mawdo to take young Nabou as his second wife. Mawdo, fearing that his mother would become distressed and fall ill if he declined, agreed. He assured Aissatou that he did not love young Nabou, but he also had children with her. Aissatou could not accept this and divorced him. She focused on her education, received a degree in diplomacy, and moved to America to work in the Senegalese embassy. Meanwhile, Ramatoulaye was enduring her own marital misfortune. Her daughter Daba befriended a girl name Binetou. Binetou spoke often of a "sugar daddy," an older man who bought her clothes. After a while, Binetou's family began to pressure her into leaving her education behind and marrying the man for his money. Binetou reluctantly agreed. Ramatoulaye was disappointed by this news, but not otherwise suspicious. Some days later, Mawdo, Modou's brother Tamsir, and a local Imam appeared at Ramatoulaye's house. Together they informed her that Binetou's sugar daddy was in fact Ramatoulaye's husband Modou, and that Binetou would soon be her co-wife. Ramatoulaye was left heartbroken and effectively abandoned as Modou began a new life with Binetou. Despite this, she decided to remain married to Modou, accepting her fate as if it were a duty to fulfill. Her children protested, but she remained steadfast. Now Modou has died, and Ramatoulaye must navigate the strange situation of being forced to mourn for a man who abandoned her. As her mirasse draws to a close, she is approached by Tamsir, who announces that he will marry her. Ramatoulaye is deeply offended by his crass proposal, and tells him off in front of Mawdo and the Imam. Later, Daouda Dieng proposes to her. Though he does so with considerably more tact than Tamsir, Ramatoulaye rejects him as well. She resolves to focus her efforts on raising her children. Thanks to the increasingly prevalent forces of modernity, Ramatoulaye's adolescent children become exposed to a host of new dangers, dangers from which she feels they must be protected. While playing baseball in the street, two of Ramatoulaye's sons are run over and injured by a wayward motorcycle. She catches three of her daughters smoking. Aissatou's namesake gets pregnant out of wedlock. Ramatoulaye responds to all of these crises with strength, equanimity, and poise. Ramatoulaye concludes her long letter by anticipating Aissatou's impending return to Senegal. She looks forward to seeing her friend, and trusts that despite the physical changes they've endured, their friendship will be strong as ever.

- Genre: Novella, Dissident Fiction - Title: Sofia Petrovna - Point of view: - Setting: Leningrad during the Great Purge (1936–1939) - Character: Sofia Petrovna. Description: The novel's protagonist, Sofia Petrovna is a woman living in Leningrad with her son, Kolya. After her husband dies, she finds a job as a typist at a local publishing house, wanting to ensure that Kolya will be able to pursue higher education. A proud woman, Sofia enjoys her job as a senior typist, relishing in being productive and working around literature. She also likes telling the other typists what to do, and she makes a point of developing a close friendship with the best, most accomplished typist, whose name is Natasha. When Kolya is sent to another city to work in a factory while completing his studies in mechanical engineering, Sofia passes her time gossiping with Natasha and acting as the official representative of her communal apartment—another small form of authority that she enjoys. In general, she thinks of herself as a loyal citizen who's raising an impressive son, and she values the idea that the Soviet Union is a just society that enables worthy, capable people to thrive while contributing to the Communist cause. Her optimism, however, is put to the test when the government starts arresting many of the people she respects, including the director of the publishing house, one of her husband's former colleagues. Eventually, Kolya is arrested too. Sofia only knows that he was taken in the middle of the night and that he's now imprisoned in Leningrad. Over the next year, she spends most of her time standing in line, trying desperately to get more information about his imprisonment. When she learns that he has confessed to engaging in terrorist activity against the government, she can't bring herself to believe that it's true. And yet, she also struggles to admit that the Soviet Union would beat a confession out of him. She's thus left to reconcile her misplaced faith in the government with her loyalty to her son. In the end, she finally acknowledges the government's corruption and realizes that there's little she can do to help Kolya. - Character: Kolya. Description: A young man studying mechanical engineering, Kolya is Sofia Petrovna's son. He's a confident and idealistic person who loves designing machines and working with his best friend, Alik, to solve problems. He's a strong believer in the Communist cause, joining the Komsomol (a communist youth organization) and often going on at length about the importance of remaining loyal to the Soviet Union by contributing to the Communist Party. To that end, he starts working in a factory with Alik while still completing his engineering degree. Though he's quite busy during this period, he manages to invent a new way of cutting cogwheels in the factory—an invention that earns him widespread attention. A newspaper even prints his picture in an article celebrating his ingenuity and his valuable contribution to the Soviet Union's technological advancement. And yet, Kolya is imprisoned not long after this article is printed, suggesting that even the most celebrated Soviet citizens are still at the mercy of Joseph Stalin's unpredictable regime. Kolya, for his part, is so confident that his arrest is a mistake that he refuses to heed the authorities' suggestion that he bring a towel and some extra clothes with him. He insists that he'll be back in a day or so, but this isn't the case. He ends up spending the rest of the novel in prison and remote work camps, and it isn't until over a year later that he finally gets a letter to Sofia. In this letter, he explains that an interrogator beat him until he signed a confession claiming that he engaged in terrorist activity against the Soviet Union. An old school acquaintance, Sashka Yartsev, apparently named him as a co-conspirator against the government. It's untrue, Kolya writes, but he had no choice but to sign the confession. He pleads with Sofia to appeal his case, saying that he doesn't think he'll survive much longer. But Sofia soon realizes that appealing his case will do nothing, so she simply burns his letter. - Character: Natasha Frolenko. Description: Natasha is a young woman who works as a typist at the publishing house with Sofia Petrovna. Sofia takes a liking to Natasha because of her flawless typing skills, diligent work ethic, and kind, unassuming nature. A quiet woman, she lets Sofia go on at length whenever they stay late at work, giving Sofia the opportunity to talk about her life or gossip about their coworkers. Natasha is a devoted communist, but her application to the Komsomol (a communist youth organization) is denied multiple times because her father was a bourgeois landowner and decorated member of the pre-communist military. Because of her family background, then, the Communist Party doubts that she genuinely believes in socialist principles, assuming that she thinks that her own family deserves more wealth, land, and power than everyone else. In reality, Natasha's father died when she was very young, forcing her and her mother to move in with a relative. Both her relative and her mother died before Natasha was very old, so she has spent the entirety of her young adult life in relative poverty. In other words, she has never truly lived the life of a bourgeois anti-communist. To the contrary, she believes wholeheartedly in the Communist Party and wants more than anything to join the Komsomol. Amid the hysteria at the publishing house, though, she gets fired for accidentally typing "the Ret Army" instead of "the Red Army" in a company document—a mistake that her superiors claim reveals her intent to undermine the Communist Party. Without a job, Natasha devotes herself to helping Sofia find more information about Kolya. She's especially invested in helping Sofia because she's in love with Kolya. When it's clear that trying to free Kolya is futile, though, she takes her own life. - Character: Alik Finkelstein. Description: Alik Finkelstein is Kolya's best friend. Like Kolya, he's studying to become a mechanical engineer. He looks up to Kolya and promises Sofia that he'll keep her son safe when they travel to another city to work in a factory together. But Alik is unable to stop the government from arresting Kolya in the middle of the night. At first, he assumes the whole thing is a mistake and that Kolya will be back after a day or so. When Kolya doesn't return, though, he gets worried and travels to Leningrad, where he tells Sofia and Natasha what happened. In the ensuing weeks, he takes time off of work to help Sofia seek out information pertaining to Kolya's case. He often helps Sofia by saving her a space in line so that she doesn't have to stand in the cold all night, but he soon has no choice but to return to the factory. And yet, he's eventually fired for refusing to dissociate himself from Kolya—an illustration of his fierce loyalty to his friend. He returns to Leningrad and once again tries to help Sofia Petrovna by standing in line, but she worries that he might make things worse by openly voicings his frustration with the government. Sofia thinks that Alik lets his anger get the best of him too often, assuming that this must have been why he was fired from the factory. She formulates this theory after Alik suggests that the government's persecution of innocent people has gotten out of hand. Her reaction to his complaint underscores her hesitancy to renounce the Soviet Union's practices, even when those practices have been used to harm her own son. In the end, Alik is imprisoned, too, leaving Sofia all alone. - Character: Mrs. Kiparisova. Description: Mrs. Kiparisova is a family friend of Sofia Petrovna's. Her husband is a doctor who was close colleagues with Sofia's husband, Fyodor Ivanovich. Sofia is shocked to learn one evening that Dr. Kiparisov has been arrested as an enemy of the Soviet Union. She can't bring herself to believe such a thing, and she says as much when she later bumps into Mrs. Kiparisova on the street. She's shocked by Mrs. Kiparisova's appearance, thinking that she looks older than she actually is. The old woman is dressed in felt boots even though the weather isn't that cold, and she tells Sofia that her husband isn't guilty. Sofia is overjoyed to hear this, saying that she knew Dr. Kiparisov wouldn't betray the Soviet Union and that he'll surely be let out soon, since the government doesn't imprison innocent people. But Mrs. Kiparisova isn't so sure. When Kolya is later arrested, Sofia experiences the same thing her friend went through; she even finds herself wearing felt boots in fairly warm weather. Throughout Kolya's imprisonment, Mrs. Kiparisova stays in touch with Sofia, eventually urging her not to write an appeal on Kolya's behalf. Doing so, she says, will only remind government officials that they forgot to deport Sofia. As for Mrs. Kiparisova, she and her daughter are being deported, and she has little hope of ever reuniting with her husband. - Character: The Director (Zakharov). Description: Zakharov is the director of the publishing house where Sofia works as a senior typist. An affable man in his mid-thirties, he shows Sofia kindness and strikes her as a very impressive, respectable person. She's especially pleased when he congratulates her after Kolya is celebrated in the newspaper for inventing a new way to make cogwheels. In short, she sees the director as a shining example of an accomplished Soviet citizen, so she's astounded when he's arrested for conspiring against the state. Of course, he's mainly arrested because he hired employees who were later accused of engaging in terrorist activity, but everyone seems to believe in the aftermath of his arrest that he must have done something more to deserve imprisonment. His downfall foreshadows Kolya's arrest by illustrating that even the most upstanding, respected people are in danger of persecution at the hands of the repressive Soviet government. - Character: Comrade Timofeyev. Description: Comrade Timofeyev works at the publishing house as the party secretary, serving as an official representative of the Communist Party. Alongside Anna Grigorievna (the chairman of the trade union), he orchestrates the firing of the director and a number of other employees at the publishing house—including Natasha. He claims that Natasha wants to undermine the Communist Party, using as evidence the fact that she typed "the Ret Army" instead of "the Red Army" in a company document. Despite his overzealous attempts to eradicate potential saboteurs from the publishing house, though, he himself is later fired and arrested as an enemy of the state. His fate is a good indication of just how frenzied and irrational the repressive political climate was in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. - Character: Anna Grigorievna. Description: Anna Grigorievna is the chairman of the Mestkom, which is the local trade union. Severe and unrelenting, she works at the publishing house with the ostensible goal of advocating for the workers' rights. And yet, she spends most of her time accusing employees of being enemies of the state. Along with Comrade Timofeyev, she plays an instrumental role in firing the director and Natasha. - Character: Erna Semyonovna. Description: Erna Semyonovna is a woman who works in the typing pool at the publishing house. Sofia Petrovna dislikes her because she makes so many mistakes, but Erna Semyonovna has a security clearance, which means that she's the only person allowed to type up sensitive information about the Communist Party. When an anonymous article in the newspaper attacks Sofia for speaking up for Natasha after she was fired, Sofia is certain the nameless author is Erna. - Character: The Nurse. Description: The nurse is one of the tenants living in the same communal apartment as Sofia Petrovna. She's outwardly hostile toward Sofia in the aftermath of Kolya's arrest, claiming that Sofia can't be trusted because she's related to a criminal. Her harsh viewpoint keeps Sofia from spending time in the communal spaces of the apartment, instead hiding alone in her room as much as possible. - Character: The Director's Wife. Description: Sophia Petrovna encounters the wife of the former director of the publishing house while waiting in line at the prosecutor's one day. The director's wife explains that her husband has been sent to a remote work camp and that she and her daughter are being deported. When Sofia tries to tell her to remain persistent in her attempt to make things better, the director's wife laughs in her face, implying that Sofia's outlook is insensitive and out of touch with reality. - Character: Sashka Yartsev. Description: Sashka Yartsev is a young man with whom Kolya went to school. Kolya has never liked Sashka, who insulted Alik Finkelstein one day at school by calling him an anti-Semitic name. The Komsomol decided to hold a mock trial in response, and Kolya acted as the prosecutor. Later, Sashka Yartsev tells an investigator that Kolya conspired with him against the Soviet Union. This is a bald-faced lie, though Kolya notes that Sashka was probably beaten into giving up names (the same way that Kolya himself was beaten into signing a confession). - Theme: Uncertainty and Disbelief. Description: Sofia Petrovna illustrates the intense emotional torture that often arises when people face chaos and uncertainty. The novel is set during a period in the 1930s known as the Great Purge, in which the Soviet Union imprisoned and murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of undermining the communist cause. Sofia Petrovna's son, Kolya, is one of these citizens, but Sofia doesn't know anything about his case. She doesn't know why he was arrested, nor does she know for the majority of the novel where he's being held. She's not allowed to communicate with him, and the government keeps her—and all the other mothers and wives trying to contact their imprisoned loved ones—in a perpetual state of fearful uncertainty. In this way, the government thoroughly disempowers people like Sofia Petrovna, since it's impossible for them to advocate for their loved ones without knowing what happened or how to prove their innocence. This uncertainty doesn't just make Sofia powerless; it also cuts her off from any sort of emotional closure, which is perhaps why she deludes herself by continuing to believe in the Soviet Union and its supposedly just ways. For instance, instead of losing heart and recognizing the government's corrupt tyranny, she insists that the Soviet Union doesn't let bad things happen to innocent people. "In our country innocent people aren't held [in prison]," she thinks. "Particularly not Soviet patriots like Kolya." This is a way of coping with the fact that she has no idea what might happen to Kolya in prison. On an emotional level, it's much easier to embrace disbelief (and even delusion) than it is to live with utter uncertainty. Therefore, Sofia clings to the only thing that could possibly make her feel better: the patriotic belief that the government wouldn't harm an innocent citizen like Kolya. She even starts telling everyone that Kolya wrote to her and said he's about to be freed. Of course, this isn't actually true, since Sofia doesn't even know if Kolya's alive. Still, though, she seemingly half-believes herself, and this delusion is a testament to how hard it is to deal with a lack of emotional closure. The problem, however, is that such delusions are nothing more than a form of denial. No matter what Sofia tells herself, the fact remains that Kolya disappeared into a Soviet prison and has yet to emerge. In keeping with this disappearance, the novel ends without any sort of resolution—Kolya doesn't come home, and though Sofia does receive a letter from him, it only confirms that anything could happen to him in prison. In turn, the novel leaves readers with the same uncertainty that Sofia herself experiences, ultimately highlighting how hard it is to cope with loss and hardship when everything is shrouded in a frightening sense of ambiguity, doubt, and confusion. - Theme: Patriotism and Fanaticism. Description: In one way or another, all of the characters in Sofia Petrovna get swept up in a fanatical, overzealous kind of patriotism in support of the Soviet Union. Their intense commitment to the Communist Party is largely a function of the Soviet Union's political climate in the mid-1930s—a time when the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, carried out a frenzied campaign of state repression after the assassination of a high-ranking Soviet politician. Because the government punished people accused of sabotaging the Communist Party, many citizens made an outward show of their commitment to communism. Sofia, for her part, believes strongly in the Communist Party, and everyone around her feels the same. Kolya, for instance, is an active member of the Komsomol, which is a communist youth organization. He frequently goes on at length about the importance of remaining "politically vigilant" in these uncertain times, referring to the threat of fascist saboteurs infiltrating the Communist Party and working to undermine it. However, this culture of hyper-patriotism gradually turns into something sinister, as the people in Sofia Petrovna's life succumb to mass hysteria orchestrated by an increasingly tyrannical government. For example, the publishing house where Sofia works becomes a hotspot for political fanaticism, as the employees accuse one another of betraying the Soviet Union. Even the director, who is a well-respected communist, is fired and accused of treachery. Similarly, Kolya is arrested as a saboteur even though he was recently celebrated for making great technological strides on behalf of the Communist Party. The fact that people like Kolya and the director are arrested indicates that even the most patriotic citizens are in danger of persecution, regardless of whether or not they've conspired against the government. There's also a social element at play, as nobody wants to associate with people who might attract the government's suspicion. As a result, people quickly become ostracized for small, petty reasons. Sofia's friend Natasha, for instance, is fired from the publishing house for accidentally typing "the Ret Army" instead of "the Red Army." Suddenly, it becomes dangerous for Sofia to associate herself with Natasha, even though it's obvious that Natasha isn't an actual saboteur; after all, making a subtle typo would be a pretty pathetic attempt to undermine the government. Nonetheless, Sofia ends up having to resign after sticking up for Natasha at a company meeting, thus illustrating just how absurd and irrational the people around her have become. Fueled by a culture of fear, otherwise rational citizens betray one another for insignificant reasons, suggesting that this kind of hypervigilance and performative patriotism leads to little more than societal unrest and division. - Theme: Pride, Status, and Moral Superiority. Description: Although Sofia Petrovna is primarily about the horror of losing a loved because of a corrupt and tyrannical government, it's also a novel about what happens to vanity and social status in the face of hardship. Before her son is arrested, Sofia Petrovna takes great pleasure in her role as a senior typist and the small amount of authority that comes along with the position. She condescendingly tells one of her housemates that it's a shame the housemate doesn't have a job, since working can be so fulfilling. It's clear, then, that Sofia Petrovna takes pride in her work and thinks she's doing something meaningful with her life. Her pride also extends to Kolya, who's on the path to becoming a well-regarded engineer. In fact, she has such a high opinion of Kolya that she doesn't think her own best friend, Natasha, would be a worthy romantic partner for him, despite the fact that she otherwise deeply respects Natasha. There is, then, a touch of vanity to the way Sofia moves through the world, as she clearly sees herself and her son as superior to the average Soviet citizen. But Sofia's vanity is put to the test when Kolya is arrested and the people around her begin to question her identity as a model citizen. In particular, one of her housemates—a nurse—treats her as if she's a criminal who ought to be avoided. "If one member of a family's in jail—then you can expect just about anything from the others," Sofia overhears the nurse saying one night. And yet, Sofia still clings to her pride, believing that she has "no reason to be ashamed of Kolya." In fact, she even maintains her sense of superiority while waiting outside the prison with the other women whose loved ones have been arrested. She condescendingly feels sorry for these women, thinking about how horrible it would be to find out that a loved one was a saboteur. It never enters her mind that these people are in the same situation as her; in other words, she judges the other women in a condescending way instead of recognizing that she's in the exact same boat as they are. What's more, her desire to be seen as respectable and enviable is made evident by her fantasies about Kolya returning from prison and putting her judgmental housemate to shame. It's almost as if the embarrassment of losing face in society is one of the things that torments her most about Kolya's imprisonment. She therefore starts lying about his imminent return, and though it's arguable that she genuinely deludes herself into thinking this is true, it seems likely that her invented story is mostly an attempt to show the people who have shunned her that they were wrong. The novel therefore illustrates that people still sometimes yearn for status and respectability even in the darkest, most challenging moments of their lives. - Theme: Loyalty, Political Allegiance, and Truth. Description: Sofia Petrovna questions the limits of political allegiance, exploring how long people will remain loyal to repressive governments. As someone who genuinely believes in the good intentions of the Communist Party under Joseph Stalin, Sofia Petrovna is slow to question the government's actions—even when her own son Kolya is arrested and imprisoned without just cause. For most of the novel, she insists that Kolya's arrest was nothing more than a mistake. Despite the fact that she has met multiple people who say their innocent loved ones have been in jail for months, she thinks she'll easily be able to clear up the misunderstanding and convince the authorities to free Kolya. Her optimism in this regard doesn't emerge from her own foolishness or naivety but from a strong belief in the virtues of the Soviet Union. She maintains her conviction that Stalin's regime values justice, which is why she's so convinced that she'll be able to free Kolya simply by telling the prosecutor about his commitment to communism. Once she gets the chance to do this, though, she discovers that things won't be quite so easy. The prosecutor hardly listens to her, and she learns that Kolya has signed a written confession. Of course, he surely signed this confession as a means of self-preservation in the face of torture, but Sofia doesn't consider this possibility—yet another sign of her genuine belief that the government is just and humane. However, Sofia is also a devoted mother who believes Kolya would never conspire against the Communist Party. She's thus torn between her loyalty to her son and her loyalty to her country. In order to support Kolya without thinking ill of her government, then, she performs some rather complex mental gymnastics, reasoning that Kolya—who she knows is innocent—must have encountered an "overzealous investigator" who "confused him" and made it impossible for him to prove his innocence. Her thought process reveals her attempt to make sense of the government's cruelty, essentially demonstrating how hard it can be to admit the evils and shortcomings of a corrupt political system that originally meant so much to its citizens. In fact, Sofia doesn't fully stop believing the government will do the right thing until Kolya has been imprisoned for over two years, at which point all of her close companions are either dead or in jail. The novel thus highlights how long it can take for some people to give up their deeply held beliefs in order to acknowledge the reality of their circumstances. - Climax: Sofia finally receives a letter from Kolya, in which he reveals that an interrogator beat him into confessing to false crimes. - Summary: After her husband's death, Sofia Petrovna starts working as a typist at a Publishing House in her home city of Leningrad. She takes the job because she needs to support her son, Kolya, whom she wants to have a good education. But she also comes to love her job at the publishing house, where she works as the senior typist. She makes friends with an intelligent, hardworking young typist named Natasha, appreciating her work ethic and enjoying her company. The two women often stay late to do extra work, and Sofia gossips to Natasha about the other employees. In particular, she's fascinated by the director, whom she thinks is a very impressive, admirable man. As Sofia settles into her job, Kolya studies with his best friend, Alik. They're preparing to attend the local mechanical engineering institute. They're both extremely interested in helping the Soviet Union make technological advances, clearly seeing their work as an important part of strengthening the Communist Party. Before long, Kolya is accepted as a member of the Komsomol, which is a youth branch of the Communist Party. His mother sees this as something to be proud of, especially since the Komsomol doesn't accept just anyone. Natasha, for instance, has been denied entry into the Komsomol multiple times, despite her fierce commitment to the Communist Party. Sofia is frustrated on Natasha's behalf, but Kolya insists that it makes sense for the Komsomol to deny Natasha's applications—after all, she comes from a bourgeois, landowning family, so the Komsomol is suspicious of her commitment to the communist cause. After gaining entrance to the mechanical engineering institute, Kolya and Alik are sent to work at a factory in another city. They will complete their studies by mail while working to increase productivity at the factory. During this time, Kolya invents a new mechanism for creating cogwheels, and though Sofia has no idea what a cogwheel does, she's immensely proud of her son when his invention gains him widespread acclaim. His picture is even published in a newspaper article about his ingenuity. Around this time, Sofia learns that the majority of the medical doctors in Leningrad have been rounded up and arrested on suspicion of terrorist activity. She's shocked, especially because her late husband was a doctor. His close colleague, Mr. Kiparisova, is one of the physicians that has been arrested, but Sofia can't fathom the idea of this man conspiring against the state. She intends to visit his wife, Mrs. Kiparisova, but she never gets around to it. In the aftermath of the arrests, everyone talks about how stealthy some saboteurs are—there are fascists lurking in the Soviet Union who want to undermine the Communist Party, the newspapers suggest. Even the most unsuspecting person might be a saboteur. There's a mandatory meeting at work one day. Comrade Timofeyev (who works at the publishing house on behalf of the Communist Party) gives a speech about the necessity of maintaining "political vigilance," and then the chairman of the trade union, Anna Grigorievna, announces that someone at the publishing house was arrested the previous night as an "enemy of the people." When Natasha asks what this employee did, Anna Grigorievna says he's related to a known saboteur, implying that this is reason enough to fire him. On her way home that night, Sofia runs into Mrs. Kiparisova and is shocked by how downtrodden she looks. She tells Sofia that Mr. Kiparisova is innocent, and Sofia insists that she knew he couldn't have possibly conspired against the state. She then reassures Mrs. Kiparisova that since her husband didn't do anything wrong, he will soon be freed. The Communist Party, after all, doesn't keep innocent people in prison. The very next day, the director is arrested. Sofia is shocked, as she can't believe that he would ever do anything against the Soviet Union. That evening, though, Natasha shows her a newspaper article about a respectable citizen who was duped by an attractive woman into giving up secretive state information while he was traveling abroad. The director, Natasha reminds Sofia, has traveled abroad, too, so it's entirely possible that he fell prey to a similar scheme. Just as Natasha is about to leave Sofia's apartment, Alik rushes in and tells them that Kolya has been arrested. Apparently, authorities appeared in Alik and Kolya's dormitory in the middle of the night and asked Kolya to come with them. He was sure it was a mistake, so he didn't even bring a change of clothes (even though they urged him to). They most likely brought him back to Leningrad, so Sofia goes to the prison the following morning to find out more. What she discovers, though, is that she's not the only person looking for information about the sudden imprisonment of a loved one. There's a huge line outside the prison, mostly comprised of women who have been standing in the cold for hours in order to talk to somebody about their sons or husbands. Many of these women are getting deported because of their association with their imprisoned loved ones. Others are waiting to give the authorities money, hoping that these officials will pass the cash along to their relatives in jail. But when Sofia finally reaches the attendant and confirms that Kolya is, indeed, imprisoned in Leningrad, she learns that she's not allowed to send him money. Other prisoners can receive money, but for some reason Kolya can't. In the coming weeks, Sofia takes a leave of absence from work. She spends her time standing in line at various government buildings, trying in vain to find out more about Kolya's arrest. She still doesn't know why he was imprisoned, but she's certain it's all a big mistake. Regardless, she has faith that everything will work out, since she believes the Soviet Union doesn't hold innocent people in prison. Sofia returns to work, having learned that there's not much she can do until Kolya's case is brought before a prosecutor. During this period, Natasha is fired from the publishing house for accidentally typing "the Ret Army" instead of "the Red Army." At a meeting after she's let go, Comrade Timofeyev and Anna Grigorievna claim that her typo was an intentional attack on the Communist Party. They also cite her upbringing in a bourgeois family, failing to acknowledge that her father died when she was quite young and left her to live a rather unglamorous life. Sofia speaks up and points out that Natasha clearly didn't intend to make such a typo. Her comment is met with silence, until Timofeyev insists once again that Natasha has undermined the Communist Party. Alik has returned to the factory. Now, though, he returns to Leningrad and informs Sofia that he was fired from his job because of his association with Kolya. Both he and Natasha are in a terrible predicament because nobody will hire them. Still, they wait in line for Sofia, saving her a place at the prosecutor's office on the day Kolya's case finally makes its way to his desk. When she meets with the prosecutor, though, he tells her that Kolya has already been sentenced to 10 years in a remote work camp and, moreover, that he signed a confession saying that he engaged in terrorist activities. Sofia can hardly believe what she hears, but she manages to leave the office without losing her temper. She assumes that Kolya must have confessed to undermining the state because a prosecutor confused him. Sofia soon learns that her job is at risk because she defended Natasha at the company meeting. That night, Natasha comes to her apartment and tells her that Alik has been arrested. Over the next few days, Sofia senses that everyone at work is distancing themselves from her. Eventually, Natasha pays her a visit and urges her to resign from the publishing house before she gets fired. This way, Natasha claims, it will be easier for her to find work. Sofia follows her advice, resigning the very next day. When she goes to tell Natasha, though, she discovers that her friend has taken her own life. When Sofia goes to the prison, she has nobody to wait with her—Alik is imprisoned, and Natasha is dead. Worse, she learns from the attendant that Kolya has been deported, but he won't say where; Kolya, the man claims, will write to Sofia himself. She goes home depressed and alone. She wants to send Alik money, but she sees her friend Mrs. Kiparisova one day, and she warns Sofia against doing this; if she gives Alik money, the government will connect Kolya and Alik's cases, which wouldn't be good for anyone. It has now been a year since Kolya was first imprisoned. Sofia works part-time at a library, where she keeps to herself. She also avoids her housemates, since one of them—a nurse—speaks badly about her, saying she can't be trusted because her son is in jail. She's huddled in her small room one day when Mrs. Kiparisova rushes in and tells her that some prisoners have been released. Sofia immediately assumes Kolya will soon be freed. If they're letting innocent people out of prison, she reasons, Kolya surely won't have to wait much longer. She thinks all night about this seemingly good news. The next morning, she finds herself telling a housemate that Kolya has already been released. She claims that he wrote a letter saying that he has been freed and that he's going to work for a little while at the factory, then go for a vacation paid for by the government, and then—finally—come see her at home in Leningrad. She makes this claim multiple times throughout the day, loving how the idea of Kolya's imminent return makes her feel. But then she actually receives a letter from Kolya, who explains that he's still imprisoned and that he's not sure how much longer he'll be able to survive. An interrogator beat him into signing a confession, and he had to convince a kind soul just to sneak this letter out for him. He implores Sofia to do whatever she can to appeal his case, fearing that he'll soon die if he has to stay in prison. Sofia rushes to find Mrs. Kiparisova. When she reaches her friend's apartment, she learns that Kiparisova and her daughter are being deported. But Mrs. Kiparisova still looks at Kolya's letter. After considering it for a moment, she tells Sofia not to write an appeal on Kolya's behalf. Doing so won't help his case, but it will attract attention to Sofia herself. The government, Mrs. Kiparisova says, has clearly forgotten to deport Sofia. But if she writes an appeal, the authorities will notice this oversight and finally deport her. With her friend's words in her mind, Sofia goes home and burns Kolya's letter.

- Genre: Short story, Modernist fiction - Title: Soldier’s Home - Point of view: Third person, though a very limited third person. The narrator often seems completely inside Krebs' head, in moments that are typically called free indirect discourse. - Setting: Krebs' hometown in Oklahoma - Character: Harold Krebs. Description: The story's protagonist, Krebs is a young soldier struggling to readjust to life at home following World War I. At first, Krebs feels as though he cannot discuss his experience in the war, and then, when he finally does want to talk about it, he finds that no one wants to listen to him. In an attempt to be heard, he resorts to lying about his experiences, but this just makes him feel increasingly empty, apathetic, and numb, unable to relate to others in his town or his family. Krebs suffers a distinct lack of ambition and motivation, instead busying himself with watching the girls in his town walk by his house, sleeping, reading, practicing the clarinet, and eating. Through Krebs, Hemingway paints of picture of the way many soldiers struggle to adjust to home after experiencing war. Ironically, what Krebs struggles most with in the story is clarifying his individual experiences. The idea that he represents not just himself, but many, then, ironically robs him of his individuality further still. - Character: Helen. Description: Helen is one of Krebs's two sisters, though he admits that she is the one he likes best. She is the only character in the story to whom Krebs responds with some positivity. When Helen asks whether he will always love her, for example, Krebs says, "Sure." She also teases him and calls him by a nickname, and, in this way, represents a certain joyfulness and youth—qualities that seem to appeal to Krebs. Indeed, at one point Helen tells him, "If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me play indoor [baseball]," and at the end of the story Krebs decides to do just that. This reaffirms his love for and loyalty to Helen, and also restores some hope in Krebs's somewhat bleak emotional situation. At the same time, however, the gesture is small, and associated with Helen's own naiveté about what love is. By playing baseball, Helen also represents a certain intersection of female and male gender expectations. That Helen plays baseball and pitches better than the boys blurs the line between masculinity and femininity. Though Hemingway's characters often reflect rigid, sexist ideas, the author also, at times, gestures towards the transcendence of these boundaries through female characters like Helen. - Character: Krebs's Mother. Description: Though Krebs's mother seems to try to understand her son's experience in the war, in Krebs's point of view, she fails to the point of almost making things worse. Throughout the story, she is a woman of faith, invoking God and praying frequently—a characteristic that starkly contrasts with Krebs's own inability to pray. Krebs's mother is also the most talkative character in the story, as is evident in the final scene in which she goes on about the other boys in the town who are already working and moving on with their lives; she wants Krebs to do the same. Krebs's mother is in many ways a foil to Krebs. Where she is very emotional, crying when Krebs says he does not love her, for instance, Krebs is stoic and indifferent. Where she is devout, Krebs feels no connection to God. Where she is talkative, Krebs is monosyllabic. By showing Krebs's mother coming into Krebs's room at the end of the story, Hemingway gestures towards the idea that she is trying desperately to access her son's inner, private space; her methods fail, however, as she simply cannot relate to Krebs. Krebs feels embarrassed for his mother and, by the end of the story, resolves that he will find a job just to appease her. - Character: Krebs's Father. Description: Though Krebs's father never appears in the story, he is mentioned several times. When Krebs's mother implores Krebs to get a job, for instance, she is relaying something that his father had asked her to say to him. She then tells her son to stop by his father's office, which he does not do. His resistance implies a resentment of and aversion to the traditionally male working sphere that his father represents. Where Krebs seems to fail at what is expected of men—he can neither talk to girls nor get a job—His father, who seems quite conventionally and stereotypically male in the story, represents the opposite. His working at his office poses an especially stark juxtaposition to Krebs' being at home; his father's absence calls attention to the fact that, based on traditional gender roles, the home is not where a man should be. - Theme: War and Trauma. Description: Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" tells the story of a young soldier named Krebs returning home after World War I. Though Hemingway does not explicitly narrate Krebs' emotions, the story's hard-boiled prose style represents Krebs' suppressed psyche: after the war, Krebs sleeps late, can hardly muster the energy to talk to anyone, and wanders aimlessly around his home town. This disconnect between Krebs and the people around him—his family, other soldiers, and the girls he watches from his porch—offers a critical lens into how soldiers adjust, or fail to adjust, to life after the traumatic experiences of war. In describing Krebs and his difficulties, the story further suggests that those struggles are themselves a source of trauma as deep as any caused by the war. In so doing, Hemingway paints a grim picture of how war continues to effect young soldiers even after the battles have ceased.  After the war, Krebs' life in his home town is characterized by lethargy, apathy, and alienation. He enjoys watching local girls, for instance, but has little interest in courtship and does not want to work to "get a girl." Rather, the story describes him as liking the "patterns" that the girls make. In other words, he sees the girls as pleasant art or decoration, but is unable to see them as people. This lack of desire for connection extends to all other aspects of his life as well. When Krebs' mother asks him if he loves her, he responds, "I don't love anybody." Just a few moments later, he tells his mother that he cannot pray—he has also lost the ability to connect with God. Though he apologizes shortly after, in the final passage of the story he admits that he had lied, that "none of it had touched him." Krebs' total inability to connect with others—man or God—shows just how completely he is crippled by apathy and emptiness. The story also makes clear that Krebs was not always this way. For instance, the narrator notes that before Krebs went to war, "he had never been allowed to drive the family motor car." The clear implication is that, before the war, Krebs wanted to drive the car, and that this desire was connected to the social life that having access to a car would provide. But when, after the war, his mother comes into his bedroom one morning to tell Krebs that his father has decided to allow him to drive the car—even suggesting that Krebs take "some of the nice girls out"—Krebs responds only with cynicism, shooting back "I'll bet you made him." Krebs understands that his mother is trying to coax him out of his apathetic inner world, but he wants no part of what de describes as those "complications." Notably, Hemingway rarely uses the verb "feel" to describe Krebs in the story. When "feel" is invoked, it's in reference to negative emotions: Krebs feels "embarrassed and resentful" of his mother's praying, he feels "sick and vaguely nauseated" after his mother reminds him of how she held him as a baby, and, finally, he admits that he feels "sorry for his mother." Krebs' embarrassment and nausea seem to be byproducts of an aversion to feeling, rather than true feelings themselves. Krebs seems severed not only from his town and his family, then, but also from his own self; his feelings are merely sour shadows of the feelings of others. The most obvious cause of Krebs' trauma is, of course, the war. Though it never depicts scenes from the war, the story hints at the way that it has altered Krebs—how the army taught him that one does not actually "need a girl," for instance, and how Krebs now wants to live without "any consequences ever again." There is a sense that Krebs has been more emotionally traumatized by the war than perhaps even he understands. Yet, at the same time, the story also suggests that there were moments in the war of true nobility and bravery, when Krebs "had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do" and that memories of these actions could make him feel "cool and clear inside himself." The war was traumatic, but even as it devastated Krebs, his actions during it also gave him a sense of himself. The story locates a second source of Krebs' trauma as arising not from the war itself, but from the actual experience of going home. Because he was part of the second division in the army, Krebs returns home after the first group of soldiers. As a result, he finds himself in a town that both can't comprehend what he's been through and is not much interested in talking about the war anyway; they've already heard enough exciting and gruesome stories from the other soldiers. Even Krebs' mother's attention wanders when he tries to tell her about his experiences. Krebs ends up appropriating stories of other soldiers to hold the interest of his audience, but by exaggerating in this way, the narrator says, Krebs "lost everything." By telling lies, however unimportant, about the war, he loses access to those things that could "make him feel cool and clear inside himself." Krebs' happiest moment in the story comes as he reads a book of history about the war and the battles in which he took part. The book reconnects him to his past—and the self—he has lost. That he wishes the books had more maps, however, suggests that the book can never give him the direction or sense of self that, through the double trauma of being in the war and then returning from it, now evades him. The story ends with Krebs agreeing to follow up with his mother's wish that he get a job. It's clear that his mother hopes this will be the first step in Krebs' re-entrance into society. But the last paragraph of the story notes, "He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it." Once again, the love and emotions of others feel to Krebs like complications that just force him to lie; going to Kansas City is not a way for him to rejoin society, but rather a way to try to continue to escape. The story then ends with Krebs wandering off to watch his sister play baseball, and it's unclear if he even will gather the energy to go to Kansas City at all. The only thing that is clear is that Krebs, in the aftermath of the war and his return from it, has been utterly cut off from the world around him. - Theme: Language of Suppression. Description: As is characteristic of Hemingway, the language of "Soldier's Home" is unadorned and minimalist, filled with simple, declarative sentences that emulate Krebs' state of mind. Instead of using expressive language to reveal the painful experience of war, Hemingway's style suppresses that pain under the surface of the story; his prose implies the immense trauma of the past by reflecting Krebs' inability to describe it. In fact, one could argue that Hemingway uses language not only to mimic his character's experience of suppression, but also to demonstrate how language shapes that suppression itself. The story's prose both reflects Krebs' arid inner world and constrains it; it ultimately reveals how lacking the language to articulate trauma means that Krebs has no option but to suppress his pain, as he has no words to express his feelings or experiences—even to himself. One way in which Hemingway's language reflects a suppressed state of mind is through its repetitions. Repetition can also generate a sense of dullness, which, in this case, relates to Krebs' feelings of apathy and emptiness after the war. For instance, the phrase "He liked" repeats several times as Krebs thinks about the girls he sees in town: "He liked the round Dutch collars […] He liked their silk stockings […] He liked their bobbed hair." The word "like" is, in itself, rather bland, offering little specific insight into how Krebs actually feels about the girls. Nevertheless, the simplicity of such linguistic repetition helps illustrate a key aspect of Krebs's self-suppression. Repetition is a pattern, and patterns are simple, stable, and easy to interpret. Patterns prevent the threat of complexity. For someone like Krebs, finding patterns would be a comfort following the chaos of war. Hemingway's stylistic repetition, then, reflects Krebs' desire for patterns and simplicity, to stay away from anything that might lie deeper in his subconscious or past. The story's prose further reflects the notion of suppression through its vague wording. Hemingway often includes sentences that rely on unspecific pronouns like "it" and "that." He appears to deliberately use such ambiguous language to mimic Krebs' desire to suppress the specifics of the war. For example, Krebs does not want to get a girl because he "did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it." Although the reader can understand some of what "It wasn't worth it" may be referring to, the short sentence is so vague as to make it difficult to fully grasp what "it" means. At the same time, the line gives the reader the sense that Krebs is hiding from the immensity of whatever "it" is. In the final passage of the story, the language grows even more ambiguous with sentences like, "Still, none of it had touched him," and, later, "It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over now, anyway." Although the reader can surmise what some of these words may be referring to from context, Hemingway still refuses to grant specifics. His language both reflects and contributes to Krebs' strained and hollowed state, in which the soldier seems at once empty of and incapable of expressing emotion. The reader is similarly never provided specifics about Krebs' experiences during the war—one can understand vaguely what has happened to Krebs by leaning on general knowledge about the context of World War I, but the story itself does not fill in any of these details. This seems the most obvious indicator of language being an act of suppression itself. Of course, the war happened, and Krebs was, indeed, there. But the language of the story does not permit the details of the war to surface, just as Krebs himself seems to have locked the war away behind a protective layer of apathy and emptiness. The short and declarative sentences of the novel further embody and shape Krebs' mental state. Think of the periods as stoppers of emotion; before a sentence in the story can get too long and rambling—before it can wander off to places that might be painful to visit—it is pinned down by a period. Hemingway keeps his prose unemotional by making his sentences tight and straightforward. In fact, Krebs' mother's dialogue in the final scene makes up the only passages that ramble. She speaks to Krebs in a burst of emotion and desperation, expressing her wish that he get started with his life. This moment starkly contrasts in style to the story's overall constrained prose, as Krebs' mother's character in general contrasts with Krebs'. She is open with her wishes, whereas Krebs is tightlipped and short with her in his responses. She represents a desperate expression of feelings, assigning words to her emotions, whereas Krebs represents either a pained suppression of feeling, or a lack of feeling altogether.  Throughout the story, the reader may wonder whether war has indeed rendered Krebs unable to communicate, or truly numb. Because Hemingway's sentences mimic the act of suppression itself, Hemingway invites the reader to consider whether the language represents the way the war has hollowed Krebs' emotional state, or whether the locked-down language is a barrier against a stream of emotions in Krebs that are simply, purposefully unexpressed. - Theme: Men and Women. Description: In much of his work, Hemingway's characterization of men and women tends to conform to what a modern reader might describe as rigid, sexist gender expectations. "Soldier's Home" is no exception. While Krebs' inability to express his feelings can be chalked up to the trauma of war, it also represents a traditionally stoic masculinity that holds emotional vulnerability to be a weakness. In contrast, the women in the story conform to traditional ideas of feminine emotionality. They also lack a sense of fleshed out humanity—the town girls are, to Krebs, nothing more than a "pattern," and the dialogue of Krebs' sister and mother do little to distinguish them as individuals. It is important to understand the stereotypical ways that Krebs perceives of women, as well as to recognize the extent to which the story does not question and, in fact, seems to agree with Krebs' views. After returning from the war, Krebs spends a lot of time watching the young women of his town, whom he refers to as "girls." Though "he would have liked to have a girl," the narrator notes, "he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her." He imagines looking at the girls in the same way he might enjoy looking at a nice decoration. In fact, he thinks of the girls as eye-pleasing "patterns"—he sees them as being, almost literally, two-dimensional. The story treats Krebs' hesitance about engaging with the girls as a window into his loss of feeling as a result of the war, and his resulting desire to live without consequences—that is, to live without getting stuck in the complexities of a society of which he no longer feels a part. To get to know a girl, as Krebs sees it, would force him to live a social life full of unbearable "complications." Krebs's ideas about women notably fall into traditional notions of male and female roles: women may talk and express themselves, while men either do not know how, or do not allow themselves, to do so for fear of seeming weak; women also "trap" men into a complex life of family and emotions to which men are unsuited. Krebs' preference to just simply "have" a girl also aligns with his presumptions of masculinity; he is more interested in possessing the girl as an object than in getting to know her as an individual who has independent thoughts and experiences. It is possible to argue that there is an implicit recognition in the story that the girls are, in fact, more three-dimensional than they appear, and that part of Krebs's tragedy is his failure to see this. However, such an argument ignores the fact that Hemingway never offers any of the "girls" a moment to prove that she is more than how Krebs views her—Hemingway gives the girls no dialogue and never distinguishes one individual girl from another. Instead, the story presents them in the plural— "girls"—the entire time. As a result, the story aligns itself with Krebs' perception of the girls and does nothing to undercut their sexist representation. Krebs even sees his own mother as entrapping and manipulating him with her emotions. Near the end of the story, when Krebs' mother asks if he loves her, Krebs responds that he doesn't love anybody. When she is hurt and begins to cry, he deduces that she can't possibly understand what he is trying to say and comforts her by claiming that he didn't actually mean it. All the while, the love his mother expresses makes him feel "sick and vaguely nauseated," and he resentfully thinks to himself that "he had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie." He sees the lie as her fault rather than his own, a product of her inability to understand him and her overwrought emotions. Krebs' mother not only cries dramatically when he says he doesn't love her, but also seems to vocalize every worry to him, talking more than anyone else in the story. Her talking physically pains the quiet Krebs, and she is depicted as overly-sensitive and desperate. The story never questions Krebs' sense  that his mother's feelings and lack of understanding—that is, in the view of the story, her femininity—only serve to exacerbate his struggles. The only woman whom Krebs actually seems to like is his younger sister. When she asks if he loves her, he says, "sure." It is notable, however, that his sister is young and innocent, asking him "Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?" This naiveté seems to appeal to Krebs because there is no actual threat of complication with his sister—it's just banter. At the same time, despite Krebs' more positive response to his sister, she too conforms to traditional notions of femininity. She is flirtatious, talkative, and wears her heart on her sleeve, a marked contrast to Krebs' tightlipped, stoic composure throughout the story. Even as Krebs thinks of the world in traditional gender norms—largely at the expense of the women in his life—he is subject to such terms himself. Krebs' father never appears in the story because he works at an office and is therefore not in the home, where the story primarily takes place. The dynamic of women in the home and men at work is, once again, a traditional representation of gender roles. Of course, this means that Krebs spends his time in a stereotypically feminine space. When she implores Krebs to find a job, then, Krebs' mother is also imploring him to join the male working world. The very title of the story—"Soldier's Home"—functions as a kind of ironic oxymoron. Though Krebs is returning to his home, as a man he isn't meant to stay there. Rather, the expectations of masculinity specifically require him to be out of the home. Hemingway thus further illustrates the restrictive nature of masculinity, which compounds Krebs' sense of societal alienation. Even as it fails to interrogate their merit, the story ultimately portrays gender roles as creating a state of estrangement and isolation in men; men's inability to be emotive and domestic keeps them always at a distance from their families and homes. Furthermore, the story shows how, for soldiers, masculine expectations require a certain grit against adversity, which prevents them from admitting to—let alone working through—trauma and grief. Nevertheless, the story takes for granted that its conventional conception of masculinity and femininity is simply the way the world works. The tale's pessimistic ending can thus be read as a tragedy not only in the sense that Krebs is stuck in an impossible, bleak situation, but also in the sense that the story itself fails to conceive even of the possibility of questioning the gender norms that cause Krebs such grief in the first place. - Theme: Lies and Society. Description: The idea of lying recurs several times throughout "Soldier's Home," and holds a central place in the story. While there are many hints that the trauma of war has profoundly impacted Krebs and that his apathy, disaffection, and loss of a sense of self upon returning home stems from PTSD, the story more explicitly locates Krebs' issues as stemming from the fact that, upon returning home, "to be listened to at all [about his experiences in the war] he had to lie and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it." While it might seem extreme to attribute such a loss of self to some essentially white lies, that provides all the more reason to investigate how lies function in the mind of Krebs and within the story. The concept of lying first appears near the beginning of the story, when the narrator comments that, after returning home from the war, Krebs twice exaggerated his stories by saying that minor things that had happened to other soldiers had in fact happened to him. Afterward, the narrator says, "A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves." In other words, the narrator is saying that, by lying about his past, Krebs has essentially poisoned his connection to the times in his life when he acted nobly, honorably, and like a man. And in poisoning that connection, he has lost that aspect of his self, which was the only aspect that mattered. The implication here is that lying is a dire, dreadful act that is so unbecoming of a man that it, in fact, destroys one's ability to continue to be a man. The second, third, and fourth time that lying appears in the story also relate to gender, but rather than dealing solely with men, they deal with men in relation to women. First, the narrator notes that while Krebs wouldn't mind "having a girl," he is uninterested in actually courting a girl because "he did not want to tell any more lies." That thought leads to Krebs's revelation in the army that both men who pretended that "girls mean nothing to them" and men who claimed that they "had to have them all the time" were lying, and that in fact "he did not really need a girl." The fourth time occurs at the very end of the story, when Krebs' mother asks him if he loves her. Though Krebs first responds that he doesn't love anyone, when his mother begins to cry he says that he didn't mean it and that he does in fact love her. He later thinks, resentfully, "He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie." In each of these three instances, a man lies because of a woman. First, Krebs believes that the only way to "court" a girl is to lie to her. This doesn't necessarily mean a big lie, but rather that courting involves some kind of misrepresentation of one's thoughts or feelings in order to keep a woman happy and interested. Second, Krebs believes that men lie to each other about women in order to display their own power and manhood—that they are at once independent enough to not need women, and so virile that they must have women. Third, Krebs believes that the obligations of family compel a man to lie to protect the feelings of the women around them, in this specific case the woman being his mother. That Krebs seems to see women as usually motivating men's lies offers some additional insight into his character because, throughout the story, Krebs also seems to see women—both his mother and the girls of the town—as forces dragging him back into a social world he no longer feel a part of—the world of getting a job, having a family, and so on. Krebs' lies in his war stories were similarly influenced by society, in the sense that what motivated his lies was a desire to describe and connect with other people through his war stories, and he needed the lies in order to hold people's attention. When seen in this light, it begins to seem clear that Krebs sees all social interactions—indeed all of society—as functioning only through the telling of lies, even if small ones, and he desperately desires not to be a part of it. As the narrator puts it: "He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn't worth it." The question then becomes, if telling these sorts of lies isn't "worth it," then what is it that Krebs perceives as the cost? The story doesn't explicitly answer, but it gives a hint in Krebs' thoughts immediately after he thinks lying isn't worth it: "He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences." The triple repetition puts a special emphasis on "consequences," such that the consequences to which Krebs is referring seem much more dire than merely, say, someone getting angry about a white lie. Instead, in a story about a soldier coming home from World War I—a war that was understood to have introduced a new level of brutality to warfare—the "consequences" seem likely to be the terrible death of the war. Further, the brutality of World War I was often seen as having destroyed the illusion of the ideals of a previous age—ideals of civility, chivalry, and even, to a degree, national pride that led so many young men to enlist in the war in the first place. The brutal nature of the war revealed those ideals to be lies that led to horrific death. In this way, Krebs' desire to avoid lies, and his seeming suspicion that all society involves lies, can be seen as an outgrowth of his war-trauma, and a refusal to ever be complicit in or caught up by such deadly lies again. - Climax: In the kitchen, when Krebs' mother asks him if he loves her and he says no - Summary: In the summer of 1919, Krebs returns to his hometown in Oklahoma after having fought in World War I. He is one of the last soldiers to come back, as he stayed on the Rhine until the second division left for home. Though the other soldiers had been greeted with a celebratory welcome upon their return, by the time Krebs arrives home, the hysteria has settled. Initially, Krebs does not want to talk about his experiences in the war. When he finally does want to talk, nobody in town is interested in listening, as they have already heard graphic tales from the other soldiers. In order to attract an audience for his stories, Krebs feels he must lie about the war, adopting on the experiences of other men and exaggerating his own. However minor, these lies make him feel nauseated and distasteful toward his own memories. Krebs listlessly passes the time by sleeping late, wandering around his town, eating, reading, playing clarinet, and going to the pool room. His mother seems to want to understand her son's experience in the war, but when she comes into his room to ask about it, her attention wanders. His father, a businessman, is "non-committal." Most things in the town have not changed: the family motor car that Krebs was not allowed to drive before the war is "still the same car." The only noticeable change that Krebs observes is in the local girls, who have grown up. He watches them from his front porch as they walk past. Though Krebs "vaguely" wants a girl, he believes getting to know one—and having to talk to her—is not worth it, and would only lead to telling more lies. Along with watching the girls, Krebs also reads a history book about the war. He especially enjoys looking at the maps. By reading about the war, he starts to get a better sense of what happened and feels he had been "a good soldier." One morning Krebs's mother enters his bedroom and tells him that she and his father have decided to let him take out the family car. Krebs then goes down to the kitchen for breakfast, where his favorite younger sister, Helen, teases him about sleeping late. When she asks Krebs if he loves her, he says, "Sure." She asks if he will come over to the schoolyard that afternoon and watch her play baseball, teasing him that if he doesn't come over to watch her play, he doesn't really love her. After Helen leaves, Krebs's mother, appearing worried, starts asking Krebs if he knows what he is going to do. She encourages him to start working and says that she's been praying for him. She then mentions that Krebs should go see his father in the office after they're done talking. When she asks Krebs if he loves her, Krebs responds, "No." His mother starts crying, prompting Krebs to say that he doesn't love anybody, and then that he didn't mean it. His mother's emotions make Krebs feel sick. His mother then makes him pray with her, though he says he cannot. Krebs feels sorry for his mother and reflects that she made him lie. He thinks that he will go to Kansas City and find a job but won't visit his father; he wants his life to "go smoothly." Before leaving, he will go over to the schoolyard and watch his sister play baseball.

- Genre: Magical realism, Bildungsroman, epic - Title: Song of Solomon - Point of view: - Setting: Unnamed town in Michigan - Character: Jake. Description: The son of Solomon, father of Pilate and Macon Dead II, and husband to Sing. Though his real name is Jake, his legal name is Macon Dead I, because when he told a Freedman's Bureau official that his father was dead and lived in Macon, the official mistakenly wrote "Dead, Macon" as his name. Macon Dead I was a respected man in his Virginia community, but a powerful white family, the Butlers, murdered him and took his land when Macon Dead II was a child. - Character: Macon Dead II. Description: The son of Jake (Macon Dead I), brother of Pilate, husband of Ruth, and father of Milkman, First Corinthians, and Magdalene called Lena. Macon is the jealous, unhappy patriarch of the Dead family. He is perpetually suspicious of his wife, Ruth, since he suspects her of having an incestuous relationship with her own father, Doctor Foster. Macon Dead II names each of his daughters randomly by picking text from the Bible. He has risen to great wealth, acts as a landlord to many of the residents of the town, and focuses on his businesses and building even more wealth. He eventually pressures Milkman, into working for him, a job that Milkman comes to enjoy, and sets Milkman on the quest to recover the gold he believes Pilate has stolen from him. - Character: Milkman. Description: The protagonist of Song of Solomon, his given name is Macon Dead III but he gains the nickname after Freddie sees Ruth, his mother, breastfeeding him. Over the course of the novel, Milkman changes from a callow, selfish man, willing to do almost anything to gain independence from his family, into a deeply moral, selfless man who is almost completely indifferent to material things. Milkman both loves and hates his parents. His father, Macon, encourages him to love business and money, but he longs to free himself from his father's influence and travel far away from him. He protects Ruth, his mother, from Macon, but when he learns of his father's suspicion of Ruth's incest with her own father, his relationship with her is tainted. In fact, his relationship with all women becomes tainted, including with his unfortunate cousin Hagar, whom he leaves even after a long and loving romantic relationship. While searching for Pilate's gold, which he hopes to use to gain his independence, he has a spiritual awakening, and rejoices when he learns that his great-grandfather, Solomon, could fly. It's left up to us to decide how much Milkman has changed at the end of the novel — whether, after Guitar kills Pilate, Milkman will forgive Guitar or avenge Pilate's death. - Character: Pilate Dead. Description: Macon II's sister, and a Christ-like character who selflessly devotes herself to others, including Reba, Hagar, and Milkman. Her supposed possession of a huge fortune in gold provides the setup for the second half of the novel. Pilate seems free of the anxiety and claustrophobia of the novel's wealthier characters, such as Ruth, and she challenges gender norms by wearing men's clothing and taking a traditionally masculine job, bootlegging, for herself. A largely static character, Pilate displays boundless sympathy and love for her daughter, Reba, and her granddaughter, Hagar. On the few occasions when she shows any aggression or anger, she's proving her loyalty to her family. - Character: Ruth Foster. Description: The melancholy wife of Macon Dead II, Ruth attempts early in their marriage to forge a connection with her husband, but ultimately gives up and takes refuge in her own memories, particularly those of her father, Doctor Foster. It's unclear what their relationship was — at various times, it's characterized as a sexual relationship but at others as a close, non-sexual relationship. In either event, it's clear that Ruth feels unfulfilled with her seemingly happy life as the wife of a wealthy man — her big house is a prison for her. - Character: Guitar Bains. Description: Milkman's childhood friend, and later a member of the Seven Days, a group that enacts violent revenge on white people they perceive to be guilty. He despises all white people and resents Macon Dead II for charging his family too much rent. He comes to desire Pilate's gold as necessary to fund his group, and believes that Milkman seeks the gold in part to deny Guitar from getting it. Guitar thus tries to kill his friend and does murder Pilate, and the novel ends with Milkman having to make a choice whether to avenge Pilate's death and kill Guitar or to forgive him. - Character: Solomon. Description: Milkman's great-grandfather, whose near-mythical history, in which he supposedly flew back to Africa, brings great joy to Milkman when he learns of it — and of Solomon, whom he never knew or even knew of. Solomon had a huge number of children, including Milkman's grandfather, and in many parts of the country there are towns and people named after him, and songs sung about him. - Character: Susan Byrd. Description: Susan Byrd is a calm, middle-aged, part-native-American woman who lives near the town of Shalimar. Milkman finds her late in the novel as he is searching out the history of his family and lineage. Though careful not to tell much about his past on their first visit, when the judgmental Grace Long is present, on his second visit she tells him the story that unlocks his past. Her story suggests that she is Milkman's relative: that her father, Crowell Byrd, was the brother of Milkman's grandmother, Sing. She says that Milkman was descended from "those flying African children" and tells him of how his great-grandfather Solomon flew back to Africa, leaving behind his family, including Milkman's grandfather Jake. Susan Byrd then dismisses this entire story as a fantasy, but tells how after Solomon's disappearance her mother Heddy took him in, and he and Sing eventually moved to Boston together. Despite Susan's dismissal of the myth of Solomon, her story triggers an epiphany in Milkman and sets up the events of the rest of the novel. - Theme: The Power of Names. Description: From the first page of Song of Solomon, it's clear that names have enormous power. Names tell stories, record history, and build community. The name Doctor Street, for instance, celebrates Dr. Foster, the first wealthy, influential Black man to live in the town. By repeating this name, the townspeople honor their hero and celebrate their race and their culture. Government officials are completely aware of the power of names — that's why they insist on calling the street Mains Street; Doctor Street would give Black people too much pride. The "compromise name," in which the Black community ignores the official name of the street and instead calls it "Not Doctor Street", is a way for Black people to mock government officials while both making clear white power's efforts to efface Black history and keeping that history alive. Names, then, aren't just arbitrary sounds describing arbitrary things. The right name, chosen for the right reasons, can change the way people think, and even change the thing it's describing.Although names have power, much of the novel shows how names can also imprison people. Milkman, whose given name is Macon Dead III, feels trapped by his own family name. He's named after his grandfather, who was accidentally given the name "Dead" by the Freedman's bureau. By carrying the name "Dead," Milkman feels that he's been condemned to live the same life that his father and grandfather lived, working at the family business, living in the same town, etc. In part, Milkman's dissatisfaction with his name is just another way of saying that he feels trapped in his obligations to his family. But in another sense, it is the name itself that imprisons him. As he tells Guitar many times, he feels "Dead" because his name is Dead.As he grows up, Milkman begins to see that his entire family is trapped by their names, too. Macon, like his father before him, names his children by randomly choosing a name from the Bible, even a very unusual name like "First Corinthians." Though Morrison doesn't explicit say this, this is similar to the method slave owners would use to name the people they enslaved. By repeating the slave owner's naming system, the Deads are effectively acknowledging that slavery continues to shape their thinking and their behavior. When Milkman goes to Virginia in search of his aunt Pilate's gold, he comes to realize that learning his family's names is a far greater reward than the gold could ever be. After discovering that his great-grandfather's real name was Solomon — and that people and places all over the country are named after him — he's ecstatic, and thinks to himself that every name in the world tells a long, complex story. For most of his life, Milkman had no understanding of his own story — he had no history and no culture. Now that he understands the history of his names, he feels invincible.Milkman's journey, then, brings him to the realization that learning a name can be a liberating experience. Where before the knowledge of his family name had made him feel small and confined, the knowledge of his family's "true" name, Solomon, makes him see that his family history is something to be proud of, and that like Solomon, he has the power to travel across the country, spreading his name and his culture to new places.Yet it's important to note that Morrison also complicates the idea of the power of names. Consider Pilate, who has spent her entire life singing and bringing joy to her family because she misinterpreted what her father's ghost told her when it visited her and said "Sing," as "Sing" was the name of his wife, not a command for her to continue to sing. Pilate misinterpreted a name, but her misinterpretation didn't imprison her; on the contrary, it encouraged her to live a better life. Everyone enjoys her singing — even Macon, who doesn't speak to his sister.In all, Morrison forwards a complex point about names, and their history and power. One must seek out the true meanings of names, she seems to suggest, and the rewards for doing so can be enormous. At the same time, she portrays deriving power from a name as an act of creation as well as investigation — to some extent, one can invent what names mean, one can give them new power beyond what they inherit from history, and so in this way names both carry the history and culture of the past to the present and act as vessels through which the present can interact with that past, engage it and build and shift it, and carry that culture and history into the future. - Theme: Racism. Description: Song of Solomon, set between the 1930s and the 1960s, alludes to many milestones for Black culture in the 20th century: the rise of the New Deal Coalition, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, etc. It's no coincidence that many of these milestones are related to race and Black people's battle with racism — Morrison's novel is concerned with the many different forms that racism can take.To begin with, it's important to note that there are almost no white characters in Song of Solomon. White racism, directed at Black Americans, is a real thing in the novel, but it's an offstage presence, a terrifying monster that affects how the Black characters talk, think, and behave. Morrison is concerned with the way white culture shapes and imprisons Black culture, and the way that white racism can cause Black people to be racist to other Black people — in other words, how Black people internalize racism.One form that Black people's racism against other Black people takes is economic. Macon Dead, a wealthy Black businessman, uses his influence and power to squeeze money from the poorest townspeople. He does so because, in many ways, he looks down on Black people; he wants to live far away from them, in the largely white community of Honoré. In much the same way, Hagar comes to hate her hair and dark skin because they mark her as a Black woman. She envies Lena and Corinthians, and other light-skinned Black women, because they're not so obviously African; indeed, she dies of grief because she realizes that she'll never be able to look as light-skinned as the women she thinks Milkman likes. Even if they have nothing else in common, Hagar and Macon Dead share a common desire to be as white as possible. Though they're born in a Black community, they come to dislike their own Blackness, and gravitate toward the white people who oppress them and, ironically, regard all Black people as the same.Guitar embodies another form that racism takes in Song of Solomon. Where Hagar and Macon try to be as white as possible, Guitar responds to whiteness by despising it as thoroughly as white people despise him. Ever since his father was killed in a white-owned sawmill accident, he has refused to accept any sympathy from the white community; on the contrary, he regards all white people, beginning with the man who owned the sawmill, as complicit in the murder of Black people. Milkman comes to realize that Guitar, along with his organization, the Seven Days, is responsible for murdering white people in retaliation for the murders of Black people in the area. Though most of the white people he kills weren't immediately involved in crimes against Black people, Guitar nonetheless considers them racists who deserve to die. Ironically Guitar's monolithic, unsympathetic attitude toward white people is itself a form of race-based prejudice.So the novel portrays two ways that white racism against Black people affects Black consciousness. The former, that of Macon Dead and Hagar, is an almost unconscious internalizing of white racism which leads to a hatred of Black people, and thus, hatred of the self. The latter, that of Guitar, is a retaliatory hatred of all white people. Though diametrically opposed, both responses are warping and destructive to the individual and to society. Ultimately, Morrison suggests that the true antidote to racism isn't more violence and prejudice, as Guitar thinks: the antidote is love for oneself, the necessary precursor to love for other people. In this way, Milkman's transformation from a spoiled, myopic child to a mature, loving man might symbolize an alternative to the racism from white people that Black people endure, and the internalized racism of many Black people. - Theme: Memory and Storytelling. Description: All the characters in Song of Solomon are obsessed with and in many ways controlled by their memories of the past. The structure of the novel makes this very clear: Morrison often begins in medias res (in the middle of the action), and then loops back to describe how the characters got to this point.In the first chapter, we see Macon walking through his town, unable to stop thinking about his painful experiences with his father and his sister. His memories are almost involuntary; they're a form of trauma, a set of experiences so intense that he can't help but relive them again and again. Throughout the later chapters, Morrison tells her story from the perspective of various characters; this requires telling the story out of order. Indeed, she often begins a chapter at a later stage chronologically in the plot, then loops further and further back into the past before finishing where she started. Just as the characters' minds wander and are affected and pushed by their memories, Morrison's prose has to wander to keep up with them.Memory can be a prison; it certainly is for Macon Dead. Memory is also a source of joy for Morrison's characters — often, while he's in the midst of a bad experience, Milkman remembers a better one. And memory is also a way to free oneself from self-imposed prison. Milkman travels the country, relying on others' memories of his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. By putting these memories together, he creates a loose history of his family: his great-grandfather, Solomon, flew back to Africa, leaving behind his grandfather, Jake, who married an Indian woman, Sing. This story brings Milkman joy: he's proud of his great-grandfather's achievement, and eager to travel across the country telling everyone about it.It's important to recognize that Milkman's interpretation of other people's memories isn't objective or scientific by any means. He believes what he wants to believe, and ignores the evidence that doesn't make for a good story; for instance, he decides to believe that Solomon flew back to Africa, while ignoring completely the possibility that his grandfather may have been enslaved. Memory poses a challenge, both to the people bearing the memories, and the people to whom these memories are passed. The challenge is to reshape memory into something satisfying and empowering, while still staying loyal to the basic outline of what happened. This requires creativity and imagination — one has to be a storyteller to reshape memory. Often, this kind of storytelling requires the suspension of disbelief. Milkman doesn't question that his great-grandfather flew back to Africa (though Susan Byrd certainly does). For that matter, there are all sorts of magical scenes in Song of Solomon itself — a woman who must be about 200 years old, a father rising from the dead, Milkman flying at the end, etc. Toni Morrison doesn't seem to question any of these things — she offers them as the truth, and presumably, the reader is supposed to accept them in this way. While this may seem odd, one can argue that the same is true of the Bible: characters are described as living for centuries, rising from the dead, etc. The novel suggests that what's more important than questioning the likelihood (the literal truth) of magical events — in the Bible, in Song of Solomon, and in the family history Milkman assembles — is finding moral or spiritual truth in the stories, as Milkman clearly does.By itself, memory never changes — it just repeats, endlessly and traumatically, causing pain and regret for the bearer of the memories. Memories can't always be forgotten, but they can be reshaped and assembled into a story; it's this difficult task that Milkman attempts for most of the second half of the novel. - Theme: Masculinity and Femininity. Description: As important as the relations between Black people and white people is to Song of Solomon, Morrison is equally interested in dramatizing the relationship between men and women.In spite of (or even because of) the racism they endure from white culture, many Black men in the story are abusive and cruel to Black women. Guitar, for instance, regards women as inferior beings to men, even muttering to himself that Hagar is worthless because Milkman has decided that she is worthless. Most of the other women in the novel endure abuse from men: Reba, who's attacked by a man she brings home; Ruth, who's beaten by her husband, etc. Even Solomon, according to the history that Milkman constructs from talking to Susan Byrd and Circe, is a cruel man, who when he flies home to Africa also abandons his wife, Ryna, who goes insane with grief shortly thereafter. Setting aside the specific actions that men take against women, it's clear that women and men are both, in a sense, trapped. Women are confined to the roles and places to which the rules of femininity confine them, while the same goes for men and the rules of masculinity. Most of the women in Song of Solomon are confined to the house, and occupy themselves with housekeeping duties. Ruth spends much of her adult life at home alone. At first she tries to use stereotypically feminine pastimes like decorating and cleaning as opportunities to bond with her husband, Macon. She makes decorative bowls full of fruit and flowers, but they do nothing to impress Macon — gender roles keep Ruth and Macon in their separate spheres. Similarly, Corinthians finds herself unable to find work after graduating from Bryn Mawr; she also finds it difficult to find a husband (Morrison hints that men are intimidated by intelligent women.) Eventually, she's forced to work as a maid — one of the most stereotypically feminized jobs there is — an occupation she finds humiliating.If women tend to stick to feminine jobs and pursuits, then men do the same, and in much the same sense, they're trapped there. Milkman, for instance, doesn't get to go to college and see the rest of the country because, as the son of Macon Dead, he must stay behind to help his father run the family business. For years, he's imprisoned by his own devotion to money — both the company finances and his own greed. However, while men have many obligations and duties that women don't, they enjoy much greater freedom than women do. Business obligations aside, men have an easier time traveling safely than do women; both Guitar and Milkman venture to Virginia, for example. Men also have an easier time moving from one sexual partner to another. It is Milkman who tires of Hagar, not the other way around; perhaps this is because Milkman's culture encourages men to develop their sexual potency, while women are demonized for infidelity.If the world of Song of Solomon is split into feminine and masculine spheres, what to do about it? As usual, Pilate sets a good example. Though she's a devoted mother and grandmother, she also blurs gender norms by working as a bootlegger, a stereotypically masculine profession, and when Milkman first meets her, she's wearing men's clothing. Milkman seems to be following Pilate's example at the end of the book — instead of resorting to violence, a stereotypically masculine endeavor, he seems to be offering Guitar love and friendship. The rules of masculinity and femininity can't be changed overnight, Morrison suggests, but individual people can help to change them. - Theme: Mercy and Forgiveness. Description: As Morrison has written in her introduction to Song of Solomon, the novel moves from a state of no mercy to mercy. In the early chapters, we're confronted with a cold, cruel world where even the hospital nurses aren't very sympathetic when a man jumps off the roof. Macon is ruthless in collecting rent from his tenants, and Feather is equally stubborn in refusing to allow Milkman the child into his pool hall, simply because he hates Macon. These last two examples of "no mercy" are significant, because they're identical: Macon's cruelty to Feather leads directly to Feather's cruelty to Milkman. It's the ancient principle of "an eye for an eye," and it's this principle with which mercy must be contrasted. We see "no mercy" in perhaps its most extreme form with the Seven Days group, which balances out every murder of a Black person with the murder of a white person. This is Guitar's harsh, unfeeling definition of justice: every crime must be countered with an equal crime.The doctrine of "no mercy" has no conclusion— it just leads to an endless cycle of action and reaction, crime and punishment, revenge against previous acts of revenge. Guitar's revenge will never be finished, and neither will Macon's unpopularity in Michigan. If "no mercy" is to be converted into mercy, the novel suggests, the change must begin with individual people who, either through their own innate goodness or a sudden, spiritual epiphany, decide to forgive others.The most compelling examples of mercy in the novel come from Pilate and Reba, who seem almost innately good. Even when they're victimized, they respond with as much mercy as they can muster. When Guitar and Milkman steal Pilate's bones, for instance, Pilate goes out of her way to think of a lie so that they wont be kept in jail. Even when Milkman's cruelty leads to Hagar's depression and death, Pilate doesn't kill Milkman; she hits him over the head with a bottle and later lets him go. If Guitar were in Pilate's position, he'd kill Milkman without a second thought. Mercy, then, is the suspension of "an eye for an eye," and it hinges on the principle of forgiveness.The final scene of Song of Solomon sets mercy and no mercy — forgiveness and "an eye for an eye" — against one another. Either Milkman will avenge Pilate's death and restore a "balance" of justice, or he'll forgive Guitar for his sins, remembering all the love and help Guitar has given him over the years. Ultimately, mercy is a personal choice — there's no logic or argument that can "prove" that mercy is better than no mercy. In this way, Morrison ends her novel by passing moral responsibility from herself to us: Milkman has to choose between mercy and no mercy, and so does the reader. - Climax: Milkman's discovery of his great-grandfather, Solomon. - Summary: The novel begins in 1931 with the suicide of an insurance agent named Robert Smith. Smith jumps off the Mercy Hospital, located in an unnamed town in Michigan on the so-called Not Doctor Street. Shortly after this mysterious incident, a woman named Ruth, the daughter of Doctor Foster, for whom Not Doctor Street is named, becomes the first Black woman to give birth in Mercy Hospital. Ruth is married to Macon Dead II, a cold, often violent man who has built up quite a bit of wealth and acts as a landlord for much of the town. In addition to the boy Ruth gives birth to in the hospital, they have two daughters, First Corinthians and Lena — Macon names the daughters by randomly choosing a name from the Bible. Macon was once close with his sister, Pilate, but a mysterious incident in a cave has left them estranged. Though Ruth makes some efforts to get close to Macon early in their marriage, she eventually gives up, retreating into her own memories of her father. When she's alone in the house, she breastfeeds her son, Macon Dead III, even though he's a bit too old for breastfeeding. One day, Freddie, a janitor and errand-runner who works for Macon Dead II, sees Ruth breastfeeding her son, and calls the son Milkman — the nickname sticks. When Milkman is 12, he meets a slightly older boy named Guitar. Guitar takes Milkman to meet Pilate, whom Milkman has been forbidden to see and who lives with her daughter, Reba, and her granddaughter, Hagar. Milkman is instantly attracted to Hagar. Later, Macon is angry with Milkman for visiting Pilate, but Milkman stands up to his father. Macon calls Pilate a "snake," and reveals that he and Pilate grew up on a huge farm with their father. Their father was illiterate, and accidentally took the name "Macon Dead" because the registrar at the Freedman's Bureau misinterpreted what he said about his own father having died in Macon. Soon after, Macon puts Milkman to work as a rent collector. Several years later, Ruth angers Macon while the family is eating dinner and he hits her. Milkman immediately pushes Macon into the radiator and tells him he'll kill him if he touches Ruth again. Macon is secretly proud of his son for standing up to him. That night, he tells Milkman that years earlier he caught Ruth kissing her dying father's fingers, and implies that the two of them were in an incestuous relationship. Milkman begins to feel disgust around all women, including Ruth. He has also been feeling tired of Hagar, with whom he has been having a relationship for years. He ends the relationship, leaving her devastated. He also learns that Guitar might be involved in a series of murders intended to avenge the deaths of Black people at the hands of racist white people. Guitar says that all white people are hateful and evil, even the supposedly good ones. Furious with Milkman, Hagar tries and fails repeatedly to kill him. When Ruth learns that Hagar and Milkman were involved with each other romantically, she angrily confronts Pilate, who tells her about her life. After leaving her father's farm in Danville, Pennsylvania following his murder at the hands of a racist white family who wanted his land, Pilate traveled through Virginia, where she slept with a man and gave birth to Reba; she refused to marry the man because she was afraid he'd be afraid of the fact that she had no navel. She also tells Ruth that as she journeyed she met the spirit of her dead father, who told her, "Sing," which is why she continues to sing so often and joyously. Macon, however, tells Milkman about a bag of gold that he believes Pilate keeps in her house. When he and Pilate were children, he says, they wandered through forests and caves because their father's death left them homeless. One night, they slept in a cave, where they discovered a mysterious man — afraid, Macon killed the man and then discovered that the man was carrying gold. Pilate insisted that they leave the gold with the dead man, and pushed Macon out of the cave — Macon ran off, and when he returned, Pilate and the gold were gone. He asks Milkman for his help in retrieving the gold. Milkman enlists Guitar's help, and the two of them sneak into Pilate's house and steal the green sack that hangs from her ceiling. When they open it, they're disappointed to find only bones. The two of them end up getting arrested and the police are suspicious of them because of the bones. Pilate covers for both of them instead of pressing charges, which makes Milkman feel guilty for stealing from her in the first place. Milkman's sister, Corinthians, is forced to work as a maid, despite her college education. A poor man named Henry Porter, a yard worker and formerly a drunken tenant of Macon Dead's, makes her acquaintance and tries to woo her. At first, Corinthians is reluctant to marry someone with lower social status than she, but eventually she gives in, realizing that no one else wants her. The first time Corinthians goes home with Porter he has sex with Corinthians against her will, but afterwards she stays with him. In the second part of the novel, Milkman travels to Danville, Pennsylvania to find the cave where he thinks Pilate left her gold. He meets people who remember his father and are glad to hear that Macon Dead II is now wealthy and powerful. Searching for the cave, Milkman also meets Circe, the tremendously old and devoted midwife who delivered Pilate and his father. Circe tells Milkman that his grandfather's real name was Jake, and that Jake's body was thrown in the river after the powerful Butler family killed him. She tells him where to find the cave, but when he goes to the cave he doesn't find the gold there. Based on Circe's information, he decides that Pilate has been lying about returning to the cave, and decides to follow her path to Virginia to trace where she might have hidden the gold. Milkman arrives in the town of Shalimar, where he learns that someone from Michigan — Guitar, he guesses — has been looking for him. The townspeople harass him for his snobbish attitude, and he begins to see that they have a point — he's spent his entire life caring only for himself. Milkman goes hunting with some of the men of Shalimar. During the hunt, Guitar tries to kill him. Though he doesn't yet know why Guitar wants to kill him, he guesses that he's motivated by the gold. Milkman next traces Pilate to the house of a woman named Susan Byrd, who tells Milkman that his grandfather, Jake, married a woman named Sing, who had Indian blood. When leaving Byrd's house, Milkman runs into Guitar, who accuses him of trying to steal the gold for himself. Guitar wants Pilate's gold to fund his vigilante group the Seven Days, who kill white people in retribution for any murder of a Black person (regardless of whether the particular white people killed were involved in the original murder). Guitar warns Milkman, and then departs. While walking through Shalimar, Milkman realizes that the nursery rhyme the children are singing is based on his own family. Inspired, he returns to Byrd's house, where he learns that he has a great-grandfather named Solomon who supposedly flew back to Africa, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. Though Byrd thinks this is all just a fairy-tale, Milkman is overjoyed with what he has heard and believes it. As he travels back to Michigan, he feels like a new man, thinking that every name tells a story. Back in Virginia, Milkman learns that Hagar has died of grief after trying to make herself more beautiful for him. He feels horribly guilty, and goes to see Pilate, who hits him with a bottle and knocks him out, but doesn't kill him. Milkman then tells Pilate that the body she found in the cave when she returned there — the body she's been carrying for years — belonged to her own father. Together, they return to Shalimar to bury the bones. As soon as they bury it, Pilate collapses — she's been shot by Guitar, who was aiming for Milkman and is still bent on obtaining the gold that neither Pilate nor Milkman has. In the final scene, Guitar puts down his gun, and Milkman offers him his life. He leaps toward Guitar, flying through the air, leaving it unclear if he intends to attack him or embrace him.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: Sonny’s Blues - Point of view: First person - Setting: Harlem, New York, USA - Character: The Narrator. Description: The first-person narrator of "Sonny's Blues" is a high school math teacher in Harlem. As the story begins, he has to decide how to handle his brother Sonny's trouble with addiction. The narrator is acutely aware of the drugs, violence, and lack of opportunity that pervade his neighborhood, and he has spent his whole life fighting to avoid meeting the fate of those around him. He has a good job, he's married with children, and he seems devoted to living an orderly and upstanding life—a devotion that has paradoxically served to make him bitter and obsessed with the very suffering he's trying to avoid. The narrator has a complex relationship to family. While he has crafted a traditional and loving family for himself, his relationship to his brother Sonny is fraught, and he feels guilty that he has watched Sonny suffer without intervening, as he promised his late mother that he would. Over the course of the story, as the narrator is forced to grapple more with the suffering of others, his relationship to Sonny improves and he becomes a warmer and more compassionate character. - Character: Sonny. Description: Sonny is the narrator's brother. He's a jazz musician and a heroin addict who lived a bohemian life in New York prior to being arrested for his drug abuse and sent to jail. Sonny is passionate, freethinking, and not particularly responsible. As his strained relationship to the narrator recovers over the course of the story, Sonny is able to stay off of drugs and begin to rebuild his life. While Baldwin does not maintain complete optimism about Sonny's odds of beating his addiction, Sonny does manage to bring joy into the narrator's family, and his music allows the narrator to begin to acknowledge his own suffering, a crucial development in mitigating the misery that the narrator feels about his regimented and fearful life. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: The narrator's mother is not alive in "Sonny's Blues," but the narrator remembers her at length in the middle of the story. She is described as a wise and caring woman who took on the problems and sorrows of her family; this is best shown when she tells the narrator about his father's troubles, and admits that she was the only one he ever talked to about it. Significantly, the narrator's mother also makes the narrator promise her that he will keep Sonny out of trouble and always be there for him. This shows her great insight into her sons and her deep caring for them; the promise ultimately helps not only Sonny, but also the narrator, because it keeps him from allowing his strained relationship with Sonny to persist and forces him to become more compassionate. - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The narrator's father is also not alive in "Sonny's Blues," but through the narrator's memories of him and his mother's stories about him, Baldwin gives a glimpse of who he was. The narrator's father is described as someone who could be hopeful and caring, but was also plagued by despair—he drank on weekends, eventually drinking himself to death. Though the narrator never knew this while his father was alive, the source of the narrator's father's torment was having witnessed the death of his own brother when a car of drunk white men ran him over on purpose. The narrator's father suffered deeply from this event, but kept his suffering private, preferring to handle it by drinking and only confessing his feelings to his wife. - Character: The Narrator's Father's Brother. Description: The narrator's father's brother only appears in "Sonny's Blues" through the narrator's memory of a story his mother told him, but nonetheless he is a consequential character because his death is at the center of much of their familial pain. The narrator's mother describes the narrator's uncle as a man somewhat similar to Sonny—he was a musician and enjoyed a reckless and bohemian social life. He died when, while walking home from a concert with the narrator's father, a car of drunk racists ran him over. The death broke the narrator's father's heart, leading the narrator's father to repress his sorrow, which set an example for the narrator to do the same. - Character: Isabel. Description: Isabel is the narrator's wife. She is shown to be a kind and understanding person who is happy to take Sonny into their family, despite his troubles. Isabel's great sorrow was witnessing the agonizing death of their daughter Grace, and she often cries to the narrator about it at night or wakes up with nightmares. Despite having experienced the traumatic loss of a child, she and the narrator seem to have a kind and loving marriage. - Character: The Narrator's Sons. Description: The narrator's sons are most frequently invoked in the story to demonstrate the destructive potential of Harlem. The narrator worries constantly that these kind and good-natured boys will become corrupted by the drugs, violence, and rage of Harlem. Otherwise, nearly all that is conveyed about the boys is that they are welcoming to Sonny and they treat him well. - Character: Creole. Description: Creole is the leader of the band Sonny plays with at the jazz club. He is older than Sonny and the narrator, and clearly an experienced musician—the narrator realizes quickly when they start playing that Creole is in control of everything that is happening onstage. Creole is shown to be a compassionate guide to Sonny as he navigates his first performance after his time in jail. Sonny struggles to play at first, and it is Creole's firm guidance and trust that finally pushes Sonny into playing his best. - Character: Isabel's Parents. Description: All Baldwin tells us about Isabel's parents is that they didn't approve of the narrator marrying their daughter, and yet they took in teenaged, orphaned Sonny anyway for the narrator's sake. It's a kindness that's not straightforward; while taking Sonny in is obviously generous, they don't make him feel terribly welcome, which leads him to flee. - Character: Sonny's Friend. Description: Sonny's friend is, like Sonny, an addict in Harlem. The narrator recognizes him because he's always on the streets asking for money. At the beginning of the story, Sonny's friend tracks down the narrator to tell him about Sonny's arrest, and in the course of their conversation Sonny's friend is able to elicit compassion from the narrator for Sonny's plight, even though it doesn't inspire him to reach out to Sonny in jail. - Theme: Cycles of Suffering. Description: The central concern of "Sonny's Blues" is suffering: Baldwin emphasizes that suffering is universal, and that it is also cyclical—that suffering tends to lead to more suffering. Baldwin demonstrates the effects of suffering on several different scales: he shows the way suffering affects an individual life, the way it affects a family throughout generations, and the way it affects a society overall. The story—set in 1950s Harlem, a New York neighborhood that was then at the center of urban black life—is particularly concerned with the difficult lives that await young black men in America. This is shown through the narrator's reflections on the sad futures that his high school students face (lives of drugs, violence, and rage at having "their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities"), as well as the narrator's and Sonny's difficulty leaving Harlem despite their desire to get out. Baldwin shows that suffering is a central component of the African American experience, and Harlem is portrayed as a trap—a place of violence and suffering that, because of the trauma and racism its residents experience, is nearly impossible to escape. Throughout the course of the story, Baldwin also reveals the parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of the narrator's family, which emphasizes the echoes between the sufferings of previous generations and the suffering of the present. For instance, the narrator's father's despair over having watched his brother die mirrors the narrator's own guilt and sadness about his failure to help Sonny with his addiction. Baldwin is not optimistic, either, about the next generation—the narrator, despite his becoming a schoolteacher, has not been able to provide better opportunities for his own children. They live in a rundown housing project and his daughter died an agonizing death of polio. He worries that his sons, like Sonny, will fall into the drugs that are everywhere on the streets of their neighborhood. This suggests that suffering is passed down generationally."Sonny's Blues" also explores the ways that individual suffering ruins lives, particularly due to people's reticence or inability to talk about their suffering. Baldwin shows how private suffering turns people bitter, estranges relationships, and even leads people to illness, addiction, or death. This is revealed most poignantly through the narrator who, at first glance, seems to be living a better life than Sonny. As the story progresses, however, we begin to understand the magnitude of the narrator's anger, bitterness, and fear—he seems obsessed with avoiding the suffering that has plagued his family and community, but that obsession has effectively meant that he is fixated on suffering in a way that makes him miserable. While Sonny is more able to speak of his suffering than the narrator, he too seems to have been overwhelmed by suffering, which led him to addiction (itself a microcosm of self-perpetuating suffering), legal trouble, and temporary estrangement from his brother. Baldwin does not promise an easy escape to such overwhelming suffering, but he does give hints that the burden of these cycles of suffering can be lessened. The narrator's epiphany at the jazz club shows the importance of expressing suffering in order to take control of it, and Sonny's friendships with musicians show how creating community can bring relief. - Theme: Family Bonds. Description: In "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin asks how much family members owe to one another, and he examines the fallout when familial compassion fails and obligations are only halfheartedly met. The most explicit example of this is the narrator's failure for most of the story to live up to his promise to his mother that he would always be there for Sonny. Another example of a halfheartedly met family obligation is when the narrator's wife's family takes orphaned Sonny in, but makes it clear that they only did so because it was proper, not because they had compassion for Sonny's predicament. Both of these instances of familial indifference compounded Sonny's problems and fueled his despair, showing the power of family to grievously harm. However, while familial cruelty or indifference propels the plot of "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin resolves the story by exploring how much more complex a family obligation is than it can initially appear. He suggests that family obligations, when met with real compassion, are mutually rewarding. The possibilities of a family relationship built on compassion emerge most clearly through the narrator's growth once Sonny moves in with his family. At first, the narrator believes that he has been asked to care for Sonny because he is the more stable brother—he thinks that he has something to give Sonny, but nothing to gain by helping him. As the story progresses, however, and the narrator becomes open to understanding and accepting who Sonny is, the narrator begins to absolve himself of the guilt of having failed both his brother and mother. Also, more importantly, it becomes clear that Sonny's music is an antidote to the bitterness and hopelessness that the narrator feels. Sonny and the narrator need one another—Sonny needs compassion and a place to stay, while the narrator needs a model of somebody who is striving for joy in spite of the suffering all around them. Their bond, then, is mutually beneficial. It's possible to see this complexity, too, in the narrator's promise to his mother, a promise she forced him to make. The narrator's mother sees this promise as a corrective to the previous generation's tragedy, in which the narrator's father failed to protect his own brother from a senseless and violent death. The narrator's mother was the only person who saw the extent of her husband's suffering afterwards, and, while the promise appears at first to be for Sonny's benefit, it could also be seen as the mother's attempt to spare the narrator a grief similar to his father's. Overall, the story suggests that, while it is tempting to view family relationships and obligations as straightforward and even transactional, showing real compassion for family can offer surprising rewards, including the relief of a person's most intractable suffering. - Theme: Passion, Restraint, and Control. Description: The narrator and Sonny, as black men in America, live in a world that tries to control them. They also live in a world that seems completely overwhelming because it is so saturated with suffering. Baldwin sets up the two brothers as being emblematic of two diverging responses to this pervasive suffering. One chooses a life of passion, idolizing artistic expression and casting aside a traditional life in order to find meaning, and the other is scrupulous about being responsible and living an orderly life. Both of these lifestyles are, in essence, an attempt to control the suffering they face. Baldwin does not propose that one of these modes of living is better than the other—each is shown to have severe drawbacks—nor does he suggest that suffering can ever be fully controlled, but he does show that the brothers can help one another by sharing the strengths that each mode of coping with suffering provides.The narrator, who is the older of the brothers, is shown as living a life devoted to responsibility and rational decision making. He joins the army, gets married, has a family, works as a high school math teacher, and is all the while in a simmering rage that his choices have not led him to a better life than the one he grew up with, and that his sacrifices will not provide better opportunities for his children than the ones he had. Baldwin shows that, paradoxically, the narrator's obsession with choosing a path that would lead him away from suffering has actually caused him to suffer because he has not prioritized finding joy or meaning in his life.Sonny, the younger brother, has known since he was little that he loved music, and he decides to make a life of it because, as far as he is concerned, "people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?" Sonny's pursuit of music leads him to not graduate from high school and to keep the company of people who lead him to drug use, which derails his life and lands him in prison. While Sonny is certainly the brother whose life seems, on the surface, more dominated by suffering (addiction, jail, having nowhere to go), he also is able to channel that suffering into something beautiful through his music.Since suffering has led both brothers to lives that are, in some way, incomplete or unsustainable, Baldwin shows that they need one another. Sonny's devotion to his passion means that he relies on the fruits of the narrator's restraint—his home, family, and money—in order to start rebuilding his life. The narrator, though, also needs to be close to Sonny's passion in order to bring joy and relief into his life that has been, so far, consumed by rage and bitterness. At the end of the story, Baldwin gives readers a glimpse of how the blending of their lifestyles gives them new ways to see the control they crave. Music, the narrator begins to understand, is a way to impose order and even beauty on emotions that are dark and often incomprehensible. To listen to Sonny's music liberates the narrator from his excruciating need to control all of the darkness in his world by suppressing his emotions. Music helps him understand that his feelings about suffering, while terrible, can also be an opportunity to access community and compassion. - Theme: Salvation and Relief. Description: Each of the characters in "Sonny's Blues" is living a life that is, in some way, governed by suffering, but it is the significant instances of salvation and relief that prevent "Sonny's Blues" from being utterly hopeless and tragic. Salvation and relief come in many forms in the story, some better than others, but it is the final invocation of the "cup of trembling" (a quote from the Biblical Book of Isaiah) that suggests a relief from suffering that might endure.Sonny's drug use is one way of finding relief from suffering. He describes the feeling of heroin as something that makes him feel "distant" and "in control," the latter being a feeling that "you've got to have" sometimes. Sonny, then, has turned to drugs in order to escape the feeling that the suffering in his life is not within his control. His drug use, of course, ultimately compounds his suffering instead of allowing him to escape it.Sonny's music is a more complex example of relief from suffering. While the narrator initially considers music to be a way for Sonny to shirk his responsibilities, he ultimately realizes that Sonny's music fuels his life; it's a way for him to make his suffering meaningful, and without it he would likely succumb to despair. In the passage in which the narrator listens to Sonny play at the bar, Baldwin makes clear that Sonny's music is never separate from his suffering; playing piano is not an instance of pure joy in a horrible world, but rather an art that allows Sonny to make sense of suffering and turn it into something beautiful. This then lets him communicate with others and make people feel less alone. While listening to Sonny, the narrator realizes that music has the power to "help us to be free," in his case because it helps him, for the first time, acknowledge his own sadness. The final sentence of "Sonny's Blues" describes a glass of milk and scotch that the narrator has given his brother. Baldwin writes, "it glowed and shook above my brother's head like the very cup of trembling." This references a Bible passage that describes God taking suffering away from humanity: "I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling…; thou shalt no more drink it again." The story's ending is ambiguous, but it certainly suggests that Sonny's music has taken suffering—at least temporarily—from both Sonny and the narrator. This is a complicated image, because it is both optimistic and precarious—the cup, like the relief it symbolizes, seems like it might be about to topple. The story has painted a detailed and explicit picture of the magnitude of suffering in Harlem, and Baldwin isn't asking the reader to accept that music will cure it. However, this final moment suggests a way forward; music can take suffering and make it meaningful. In other words, it can't cure suffering, but it can make the burdens of suffering easier to bear. - Climax: The ending, in which the narrator listens to Sonny play at the jazz club - Summary: The story opens on the unnamed narrator, who has just read in the newspaper that his little brother Sonny was arrested for using and selling heroin. Throughout his day, he cannot think of anything else. He's a high school algebra teacher, and he looks at his young students, wondering which ones are, like Sonny, turning to drugs to escape the suffering of their lives as young black men in Harlem. The narrator runs into an old friend of Sonny's—a drug user—on the way to the subway, and their conversation makes the narrator understand how hard prison will be for Sonny. Still, the narrator says he doesn't plan to do anything to help Sonny, though he gives Sonny's friend money when he asks. The story jumps ahead to months later, when the narrator's young daughter Grace has just died of polio and the narrator finally, in his grief, decides to write to Sonny in jail. Sonny replies that he needed to hear from his brother, but didn't want to reach out first because he knows the pain he has caused. The two strike up a correspondence, and when Sonny is released from jail he comes to live with the narrator's family in Harlem. Having Sonny around seems to trigger the narrator's memories of his childhood, and the story jumps back in time. The narrator recalls that right after his father died, his mother made him promise not to let anything happen to Sonny. The narrator didn't understand her worry, so she told him about how his father had watched his brother (a musician, like Sonny) get run over by a car of drunk white men. The narrator's mother reminds him that he has a brother too, and the world hasn't changed. When the narrator's mother dies soon after, he gets a furlough from the army to attend the funeral. The narrator is married to a woman named Isabel, and he arranges for teenaged Sonny to go live with Isabel's parents until he finishes school. During this visit he has a conversation in which Sonny reveals his desire to be a jazz musician, and the narrator discourages him harshly. Living with the narrator's wife's family, Sonny plays their piano day and night. Eventually, after the family learns he hasn't been going to school, Sonny joins the navy and leaves without saying goodbye. The next time the narrator sees Sonny is after the war. Sonny is living downtown with a group of musicians. The narrator and Sonny have a horrible fight, and they don't speak again until the narrator writes to Sonny in jail. The story then returns to the present, when Sonny has been living with the narrator for two weeks. The narrator is home alone watching a revival meeting across the street, and he sees Sonny at the edge of the crowd listening to them sing. Sonny comes upstairs and invites the narrator to hear him play in the Village that night. The narrator agrees to come, and they discuss the woman singing across the street at the revival meeting. It triggers a conversation about the intensity of suffering, and how drugs and music can be an escape from it, a way not to be shaken to pieces by the world. Sonny reminds the narrator that, while he is clean now, his troubles aren't necessarily over, and the narrator silently promises to always be there for Sonny. The two of them go to the nightclub, and the narrator is surprised by how admired and beloved Sonny is by everyone there—Sonny has his own world that the narrator doesn't know anything about. Sonny and his band begin to play, and the narrator thinks about how rare it is to have an experience where music touches you. That leads him to reflect on how difficult it must be to play music, to have to impose order on all the rage and delight and confusion inside of people. Sonny seems to struggle at first to really put himself into the music, but eventually Sonny hits his stride and the narrator, listening from a corner, tears up thinking about suffering: his own, Sonny's, their parents, and the suffering in the world around them. He realizes that music is telling everyone's story, and that it's a gift to strive to tell it anew in a way that will make an audience listen and make them confront their demons in a way that makes them feel less alone. When the band pauses, the narrator buys Sonny a drink and the bartender puts the glass on top of his piano. Sonny sips it, meets eyes with the narrator, and returns to playing. The narrator watches the glass shake sitting on the piano above Sonny's head, comparing it to "the very cup of trembling."

- Genre: Young adult fiction / philosophical novel / novel of ideas / Bildungsroman - Title: Sophie’s World - Point of view: Point of View:Third person limited—the novel cuts back and forth between Sophie and Hilde's points of view - Setting: Setting:Norway, 1990 - Character: Sophie Amundsen. Description: The titular character and protagonist of Sophie's World, Sophie Amundsen is a young teenager about to celebrate her 15th birthday. Sophie is a lonely girl, and with the exception of Joanna Ingebritsen, she seems to have no friends. Over the course of the novel, Sophie receives a series of letters from a mysterious figure, and embarks on a course in the history of Western philosophy, tutored by Alberto Knox. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Sophie is—within the context of the book—the literary creation of Albert Knag. And yet as Sophie's imaginary status becomes increasingly obvious, she also becomes more earnest, more thoughtful, and more complicated—in short, more "real" to us. In this way, Sophie is meant to be a stand-in for the reader: an inquisitive, open-minded explorer. (It's also worth noting that the name "Sophie" is similar to the Greek word for "skill" or "wisdom"—as in, philo-sophy) As the novel ends, Sophie seems to have come to terms with the nature of her reality: whether she's fictional or not, she realizes, she can attain some freedom and independence for herself by exploring the world of ideas. In all, Sophie's experiences in Sophie's World constitute something of a coming-of-age story, whereby Sophie uses philosophy and reason to come to terms with her loneliness and uncertainty about the world. - Character: Hilde Møller Knag. Description: The other protagonist of Sophie's World, Hilde Møller Knag is a teenaged girl—the same age as Sophie—who, we learn, is reading Sophie's story in installments sent by her father, Albert Knag. Hilde is similar to Sophie in many ways (reflecting the fact that Albert knows his daughter well)—she's a little shy, a little lonely, very curious, and doesn't always get on very well with her mother. Like Sophie, Hilde has a strong sense of rebelliousness, and when she begins to understand that Albert is manipulating his characters without any regard for their feelings, she decides to retaliate by giving Albert a taste of his own medicine. The novel ends with the image of Hilde and Albert, reunited at last, looking up at the stars. This suggests that the "real" plot of Sophie's World has been the story of Hilde coming-of-age with the help of her father's lessons. Now that Hilde's learned some philosophy, she and Albert might be considered intellectual equals—hence their calm, collaborative study of the stars. - Character: Alberto Knox. Description: Alberto Knox is Sophie Amundsen's friend, teacher, and—when they realize they're fictional characters in Albert Knag's novel—partner in escape. Alberto is an immensely intelligent, well-educated person, who has no trouble rattling off obscure historical facts or summarizing the ideas of great Western philosophers. In archetypal terms, Alberto resembles a magician, leading his young apprentice through a series of increasingly fantastical challenges. He teaches Sophie her most important lessons: that a good philosopher never stops asking "Why?"; that humans should never lose their sense of wonder; and that philosophy is an ongoing process. In the end, Alberto and Sophie seem to escape the confines of their own text (whether they really do so or not is up to us to decide). Surprisingly, Alberto shows some signs of weariness and cynicism about their possibilities of escape, and it's Sophie who has to lead Alberto, not the other way around. This reminds us how good a teacher Alberto has been: Sophie has obviously learned a lot from her mentor. - Character: Albert Knag / The Major. Description: Hilde Møller Knag's father Albert Knag is an intelligent, quick-witted man, who understands the importance of teaching his daughter the history of Western philosophy. Even during the course of his work for the United Nations in Lebanon, he continues to think of his daughter's education, sending her a work called Sophie's World, in which a girl named Sophie learns about philosophy. Albert uses Sophie's World to emphasize questions of epistemology: the study of what is and isn't real. In spite of—or perhaps as evidenced by—his unorthodox style of child rearing, Albert sincerely loves his daughter, and as the novel closes, he's reunited with her in Scandinavia after many months of traveling abroad. - Character: Dad / Sophie's Father. Description: Sophie's Dad is a mysterious, elusive character who never appears in the novel. We're told that he is the captain of an oil tanker, and is often at sea. In the second half of the novel, we come to realize that Sophie's Dad is a stand-in for Hilde Møller Knag's own father, Albert Knag—for this reason, we don't learn much more about Sophie's Dad; instead, the emphasis shifts to Albert. - Character: Mom / Sophie's mother / Helene Amundsen. Description: Sophie Amundsen's Mom is a pleasant but slightly dull woman, who shares none of her daughter's interest in philosophy or reason. In a sense, Mom isn't a character so much as a warning sign: this is what happens to people who don't question their surroundings. Mom lives a simple, banal life, and seems not to derive much pleasure from her work or her home life. In all, Sophie cares about her mother, but ultimately moves past her narrow-mindedness to enter the world of philosophy. - Character: Hilde's mother. Description: Hilde's mother is a confusing character. She only interacts with Hilde a few times in the text—for the most part, Hilde is too busy reading Sophie's World to spend time with her mother. Since we know that Sophie's World is a story written by Albert Knag, Hilde's father (featuring thinly-veiled versions of Hilde, Hilde's mother, and Albert himself) it's unclear what conclusion we're meant to draw when Sophie accuses her Mom of adultery—is this supposed to reflect Hilde's insecurity, Albert's suspicions, or both? While this mystery isn't resolved, it's fair to say that Hilde is far closer to her father than her mother, but the reason why is never satisfactorily explained. - Theme: Philosophy, Wisdom, and Wonder. Description: The defining theme of Sophie's World is, pretty clearly, philosophy. As the book moves along, Sophie Amundsen, a teenaged girl, learns important lessons in the history of Western philosophy from her teacher, Alberto Knox. Alberto, an intelligent man, guides Sophie through the ancient Greeks, the medieval thinkers, and Enlightenment and Romantic idealists. All this should make us wonder which philosophical ideas Alberto and Sophie believe to be true. More broadly, we might want to ask if Western philosophers make progress over time; i.e., if a 19th century thinker like Hegel is more "correct" than an ancient philosopher like Aristotle. Finally, the philosophical themes of Sophie's World make us ask: what is wisdom? (The word "philosophy" literally means "the love of wisdom," after all.)It would take too long to summarize every philosophical system that Alberto reviews with Sophie—in fact, doing so would be beside the point. By the end of the book, Sophie certainly hasn't committed to any one system of ideas. There are things about Plato, Hegel, Kant, and Nietzsche that she admires, and a few moral issues that she's particularly interested in (feminism, for example) but she's not prepared to throw in her lot as a Kantian or a Nietzschean. Even after learning about 3,000 years of Western thought, Sophie continues to wonder what to believe.The concept of "wonder"—both in the sense of questioning what is true, and in the sense of being continually astounded by the world—is crucial to understanding Sophie's World. One reason the novel doesn't end with Sophie arriving at an answer to her questions is that any such answer would be a little unsatisfactory, since it would make the universe seem "fixed," predictable, and dry. Alberto teaches Sophie about philosophy not to give her answers but to train her to ask questions—to think of herself as an outsider, trying to make sense of what's right in front of her nose. As Alberto says toward the beginning of the novel, the philosopher is like a child watching a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. Most adults are so used to seeing "tricks" of this kind that they don't bat an eye—by the same token, most adults aren't astounded by the fact that they're alive, that the universe exists, etc. A good philosopher will never lose her sense of wonder at the universe's mysteries. One could even say that the goal of philosophy as Alberto understands it is to escape banality and boredom. (Throughout the novel, Sophie's intellectual excitement is contrasted with her Mom's dullness.)In this way, Sophie's World arrives at the strange conclusion that although it's important to ask philosophical questions, it's not particularly important to choose definite answers to these questions. For this reason, Socrates may be the paradigmatic philosopher for Sophie and Alberto: a wise man who accepted that he understood nothing, and never lost his fascination with existence. For Socrates—and perhaps for Sophie and Alberto—philosophy must be an ongoing process of reading, discussing, and contemplating. (This explains why it's necessary for Sophie to learn about the history of Western philosophy, and why she often goes back to reread her lessons.) Philosophy is about preserving one's sense of wonder—this, it's suggested, is the only real wisdom. - Theme: The Nature of Reality. Description: Sophie's World may be a book about Western philosophy, but it's (inevitably) too short to encompass all of Western philosophy—it has to pick and choose which aspects of this subject to focus on. It's important to note that while the book outlines many of the major questions of philosophy, it's a little more interested in answering some of these questions than others. When Alberto Knox reviews Spinoza, Locke, Kant, Plato, etc. with Sophie Amundsen, he spends much more time discussing these figures' ideas about epistemology—i.e., the study of what is real and what can be known about the world—than he does reviewing their views on ethics, politics, etc. One reason that the book focuses more on epistemology than ethics or political philosophy is that the question of reality is directly relevant to the book's plot. As we move on, we become aware that the story of Sophie and Alberto, as it's presented in the novel, is itself being read by another girl, Hilde Møller Knag, whose father, Albert Knag, has sent her a book called Sophie's World for her 15th birthday. It's no wonder that Sophie's World focuses so extensively on epistemology—as the characters try to figure out what world they're in, and whether or not they're "real," the philosophy of epistemology becomes directly relevant to their lives. One way to start talking about epistemology and reality in Sophie's World is to ask, which of the two storylines is more real than the other? Certainly, this is the question that Sophie and Hilde keep asking themselves. Sophie begins to realize that her life—her entire "world," as the book's title says—is the product of an author's imagination. Nothing she does matters, since it'll only ever amount to a pile of ink and paper. Similarly, Hilde recognizes that Sophie is struggling to come to terms with her world's unreality. Hilde begins to resent her father for "cruelly" manipulating Sophie and her fellow fictional characters—she thinks that he has some responsibility to treat his creations with a measure of respect.The trick that Sophie's World plays on us is so clever that it can take a while to realize what it is. By asking which storyline is real—and by encouraging us, again and again, to try to answer this question—the book deceives us into forgetting that—of course—neither text is more or less real than the other: they're both equally fictional, equally made up, equally ink-and-paper. By playing this trick on us, Sophie's World makes one of its most persuasive and powerful points about the nature of reality. If we're willing to believe that one fictional story can be more real than the other, then we've already conceded that a work of fiction can be real in the first place. But in what sense can fiction be real? Throughout Sophie's World, it's suggested that ideas and stories may be more real than what we usually think of as reality (the physical, material world that we interact with every day). This is one of the oldest ideas in Western philosophy, dating all the way back to Plato (who believed that the world of unchanging, idealized "forms" was more real than the material world, which was always changing). But even if we don't agree with Plato, the idea that stories and fictions can be real and true is a basic premise of literature—if we didn't believe that Sophie's World had some relevance to our lives, or had emotional or artistic truth to it, then we wouldn't bother to read it (or even look up the LitCharts summary). By the time the book ends, we've seen that ideas can have a profound effect on people's lives. It's for this reason that the book ends with the image of Sophie—strictly speaking, an imaginary person—"stinging" Hilde—within the context of the book, a "real" person. This is a clever metaphor for the way that ideas, fictions, and abstractions—i.e., all the things that people lazily refer to as "not real"—can influence the way people behave in the real world. - Theme: Education, Mentorship, and Coming of Age. Description: Sophie's World isn't just a history of philosophy. It's also the story of how two people, a young woman named Sophie Amundsen and another young woman named Hilde Møller Knag, come to apply philosophy to their own lives. In this sense, the novel is a coming-of-age story: a dramatization of how Sophie and Hilde use their educations to gain a new sense of maturity and self-control.As in any good coming-of-age story, Sophie and Hilde—lonely girls with brusque mothers and absentee fathers—need to find role models and parent figures to guide them along the path to maturity. In one sense, Sophie's World shows how philosophy itself can be a "father figure"—a source of comfort, emotional support, and solace. Sophie's mentor, Alberto Knox, is a personification of philosophy itself (as well as a riff on his creator, Albert Knag). But Alberto isn't just Sophie's teacher—he's also her friend. This suggests that the purpose of Sophie and Hilde's education isn't just to understand philosophy; the purpose is to learn how to interact with others.What kind of educations do Sophie and Hilde receive from their mentors? From the very beginning, it's made clear that Sophie will not be learning about ordinary, day-to-day matters—there's no economics or health in this syllabus. In this sense, Sophie's contrasts with the work that she does in school, and with the lifestyle she sees at home, personified by her rather dull-minded Mom. There's a strong sense that "education," at least as Sophie's schoolteachers understand it, has impoverished Sophie's soul, leaving her lonely and unable to cope with the deep questions of life. After we learn that Hilde is reading Sophie's story, we realize that the purpose of Sophie's philosophy lessons is to teach Hilde how to live. Hilde is a lonely child—she doesn't seem to get along with her mother, and she's rarely shown interacting with friends or classmates. Hilde's father, Albert Knag, has written Sophie's World for Hilde, suggesting that he understands her loneliness and frustration (Sophie is meant to be a portrait of his daughter), and wants to teach her to cope with her emotions using philosophy. In short, philosophy isn't just a new form of information—it's also a method of coming to grips with one's feelings, and learning how to live.As Hilde and Sophie's relationships with their mentors would suggest, philosophy shows us how to live by teaching us how to interact with other people. By the end of the novel, Hilde has learned how to empathize with Sophie, despite the fact that Sophie is a fictional character: Gaarder portrays this act of empathy as a clear sign of Hilde's emotional maturity. Hilde also reunites with her father using philosophy as her tool: she turns the tables on him by planting letters at Albert's airport, confusing him into thinking that his world might be an illusion as well. Although it might seem like Hilde is being disobedient or cruel to her father, she's actually showing her affection for him, and proving that she's embraced the philosophy lessons he's sent her. In the final scene of the novel, Hilde and Albert sit together, talking about the history of the universe: a symbol of the way that philosophy, unlikely as it sounds, can bring families together.In this way, philosophy ends up being more practical than it seems. After she finishes her philosophy curriculum, Hilde isn't "all grown up" in any traditional sense (she's still living at home, still in school, still uncertain about colleges or careers, etc.), but she's demonstrated her intelligence, her thoughtfulness, and—most importantly—her love for her fictional friends and her real-life father. In this way, philosophy helps her come of age. - Theme: Free Will. Description: It's probably fair to say that the most important and relevant philosophical question in Sophie's World is "what is real?" but the question "what is freedom?" is nearly as important. As Sophie Amundsen becomes aware that her "world" is a literary creation in the mind of Albert Knag, she begins to wonder if she has any real freedom—any control over her own actions. And this question is by no means limited to Sophie and her peers. As Hilde Møller Knag reads Sophie's story, she too begins to question her own freedom: are her actions truly her own, or are they somehow predetermined? Readers of Sophie's World might well ask themselves the same thing. In order to address some of these issues, Sophie's World studies and organizes the different concepts of freedom that Western philosophers have dealt with.One kind of freedom that the novel addresses right away is the freedom to do what one likes. This is an intuitive definition, but Alberto Knox, Sophie's mentor, takes pains to show right away why it's not necessarily the best definition. As Plato and Socrates argued thousands of years ago, obeying one's impulses—hunger, lust, etc.—is its own kind of slavery (think of being a "slave to fashion" or a "slave to appearances"). Sophie's World also addresses other kinds of mental slavery. Sophie's Mom, for example, is so devoted to performing her petty responsibilities that she's lost touch with the "big picture"—she's no longer interested in philosophical question at all. By the end of the book it's clear that these two forms of slavery are one and the same: the birthday party that Sophie's mother fussily organizes for Sophie devolves into a disgusting spectacle in which Sophie's classmates give in to their instincts and act like animals. The novel suggests that the freedom of doing what one wants is overrated: first, because this freedom is its own kind of slavery (as in Plato); second, because this kind of freedom is just an illusion, one that would vanish if we had the mental capacity to understand all the causes and effects at work in our lives (see Spinoza). If we define freedom in this way then we, the readers, are no freer than Sophie or her peers.It's clear enough that Sophie—whether she's a fictional character or not—is more free than her mother or her classmates. But if this is true, what kind of freedom does she embody? While the novel doesn't exactly put forth a "correct" interpretation of free will, it does suggest that humans can find freedom from causation and freedom from their appetites by contemplating the world of ideas. Ideas are unchanging—or, even if they do change over time (as in Hegel), they must be rigorously scrutinized, anyway. By living a life based around this kind of close contemplation, people can escape the banality of their daily existences and attain a kind of self-control, as well as control over their actions—in short, freedom. We see this literally toward the end of the novel, when Sophie and Alberto free themselves from the chaos of Sophie's birthday party by escaping the story itself.There's one final sense in which Sophie's World challenges our usual understanding of free will. It's certainly possible to believe that the universe is controlled by an all-powerful figure, whether that figure is God or an author. But the novel suggests that even if such a figure exists, there's no "hierarchy" of freedom—i.e., the author figure is no more or less free than his creations. We see this clearly by the end of the novel, when Sophie and Hilde seem to have reversed positions: Sophie appears to be free of any authorial control, while Hilde is still very much under the thumb of an author-figure, even if that figure is her own father (or Gaarder himself). If this is possible—if fictional characters can be freer than their creators, and if there's more freedom in imagination than in the real world—then the only real freedom comes from philosophy and the world of ideas. By learning about ethics, epistemology, and so on, Sophie and Hilde might gain free will after all. - Theme: Women and Sexism. Description: It's important to keep in mind that Sophie Amundsen isn't just a young philosophy student—she's also a young woman. Because of her gender, Sophie has to contend with various expectations about how she should behave—for example, that she should have a boyfriend, should enjoy hosting parties, etc. Because Sophie faces sexism so often in the novel, it's strongly implied from the beginning that philosophy might be a way for her to escape this sexism, or to find ways around it.As Sophie proceeds with her studies of philosophy, however, she finds that Western philosophy is full of sexism. There are dozens of important philosophers—Aristotle is a good example—who had backwards ideas of what women were capable of and what they should do with their lives. Even philosophers like Plato, who argued for some form of equality between the sexes, believed that women were usually inferior to men.But even if the history of philosophy is strewn with sexist reasoning—i.e., reasoning that assumes without proof that women are less important than men—Sophie finds that philosophy in itself can still be a powerful tool for fighting sexism. As she proceeds with her studies, she learns to reject the sexist aspects of philosophers' thinking while embracing other components of their ideas. In this way, Sophie learns to use philosophers' own ideas against them. This becomes especially clear toward the end of the novel when Sophie learns about Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that the supposed differences between the sexes were social constructs—illusions caused by society's mistaken assumptions about the relationship between existence and essence. Sophie understands and embraces de Beauvoir's ideas about gender and essence precisely because she hasn't entirely rejected the ideas of de Beauvoir's sexist predecessors. Like de Beauvoir herself, she uses philosophical reasoning to undermine what might be called a traditional tenet of Western philosophy—the inferiority of women.In general, Sophie learns that philosophy is an important feminist weapon, in the sense that it teaches her to question things that some people take for granted—like sexist views on women. It's important to contrast Sophie's attitude with her Mom's. Sophie's mother seems to have little patience for philosophy; when her daughter sneaks out of the house to continue her lessons, she assumes that Sophie is meeting a boyfriend, not educating her mind. The implication is that Sophie's mother's unconscious sexism (assuming that her daughter is more interested in romance than knowledge) is somehow the product of her general lack of curiosity about the world—precisely the kind of curiosity that philosophy tries to generate. While there isn't much explicit talk about the feminist uses of philosophy, Sophie's World makes it clear that Sophie, a young woman, uses philosophy to find freedom, confidence, and maturity—and this makes her education a feminist endeavor as well as a philosophical one. - Climax: Climax:Alberto Knox and Sophie Amundsen escape the garden party - Summary: As the novel begins, an almost-15-year-old Norwegian girl named Sophie Amundsen receives a strange series of letters. The letters have been sent to her, but they're addressed to someone named Hilde Møller Knag. The letters pose difficult philosophical questions, such as "How was the world created?" and "Is there life after death?" Sophie isn't sure what to make of these questions, but she doesn't tell anyone that she's receiving someone else's mail—not even her best friend, Joanna Ingebritsen, or her Mom. Sophie continues to receive letters marked for Hilde. The letters offer her (Sophie) a series of lessons in the history of Western philosophy. The first few lessons consist of long letters from a man named Alberto Knox. These letters cover the origins of philosophy from superstition and religion, the rise of natural philosophy in ancient Greece, and the intellectual achievements of Plato and Aristotle. In these letters, Alberto spells out the philosophical questions that philosophers continue to ask themselves today: what is real? how should humans live? what is the world made of? etc. Sophie is particularly impressed with Alberto's lessons on Plato and Socrates. Socrates was a wise man, Sophie learns—but ironically, this meant that he claimed to know nothing at all about the universe, and insisted that all human beings had an innate capacity to understand science, logic, and morality. As Sophie proceeds with her letters, her mother begins to assume that she's receiving love letters from some boy at school. Sophie tries various tricks to track down Alberto Knox, but nothing works. She learns that Alberto delivers the letters with the help of a dog named Hermes. One day, Sophie is able to track Hermes to an abandoned cabin. In the cabin, Sophie finds two paintings, one entitled, "Berkeley," the other entitled, "Bjerkley." Sophie also finds a brass mirror in the cabin, in which she thinks she can see another girl. Sophie takes the mirror back to her house. She also begins to find strange items that don't belong to her, such as a wallet, a gold crucifix, and a scarf. Sophie continues to receive letters from Alberto. She learns about the teachings of Aristotle, who emphasized the importance of research and careful study of the physical world, the Hellenic philosophers, who built off of Plato and Aristotle without drastically rethinking their ideas, and the dawn of monotheism in the Middle East. As the letters continue, we learn that Sophie's Dad is a busy man who travels frequently for his work. Sophie also notices news reports about a UN diplomat stationed in Lebanon—she notices that some of her letters have been stamped from Lebanon. Sophie first meets Alberto Knox in an abandoned church, late at night. There, Knox gives Sophie a thorough history of the Middle Ages. He discusses the complex interplay between the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman traditions, which were merged in the writings of such seminal figures as Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine. Sophie learns that Hildegard of Bingen was one of the key thinkers of the Middle Ages. At home, she looks into her mirror and thinks she sees the face of Hilde Møller Knag. As Sophie proceeds with her lessons with Alberto, who is now permanently stationed in Sophie's town, a series of wild coincidences begins. Sophie finds money lying on the ground at the exact instant she realizes she's lost her bus fare, and she begins to see signs announcing that Hilde's father, whose name is Albert Knag, will return to Scandinavia from Lebanon very soon. Sophie's Mom asks her if she'd like to have a party in honor of her upcoming birthday, but Sophie says that she's uninterested. Sophie continues to receive letters from Albert Knag, and realizes that Albert's daughter Hilde is exactly the same age as her—they were born on the same day. Alberto teaches Sophie about the history of the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries. During this period, Europe embraced the doctrine of humanism, celebrating man's concrete, worldly achievements. It was during this time that Martin Luther launched the Protestant reformation, after which the modern sects of Christianity were established. During this lesson, Alberto refers to Sophie as "Hilde," but then corrects himself. Sophie changes her mind and tells her mother she wants a philosophically-themed birthday party. Sophie continues receiving letters from Albert Knag, in which he tells Hilde that he'll be back from Lebanon very soon. Meanwhile, Sophie covers the history of the Baroque era with Alberto—the rise of empiricism in the U.K. and rationalism in France. This era led directly to the Age of Enlightenment—the period when European intellectuals came to believe in the importance of natural law, inalienable rights, and rigorous self-study. Major philosophers of this time, such as David Hume and John Locke, questioned Christian dogma and tried to replace it with a secular system of thought. It was also around this time that figures like Baruch Spinoza questioned man's free will, arguing that the world is predetermined, so that liberty is just an illusion caused by our ignorance of causes and effects. As Sophie learns about Spinoza and his peers, she and Alberto find more signs that a powerful god-figure is controlling their world: banners fly through the sky, saying, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HILDE!" We then cut to the perspective of Hilde Møller Knag, a teenaged girl who lives in a home called Bjerkley and, we slowly realize, is reading the story of Sophie and Alberto in a binder that her father, Albert Knag, has sent her from Lebanon. The banners and letters that Sophie reads are, in fact, meant for Hilde to read—just as the mysterious items that Sophie finds in her room are real items that Hilde has misplaced. Hilde reads about Sophie's lessons in philosophy, and quickly comes to regard Sophie as an almost-real person. She even begins to resent her father for manipulating Sophie and Alberto so callously. Hilde reads as Sophie learns about Immanuel Kant and other important Enlightenment philosophers. As Sophie and Alberto talk about philosophy together, their lives become stranger and stranger, and fictional characters such as Little Red Riding Hood and Alice (from Alice in Wonderland) intrude on their interactions. Gradually, Sophie and Alberto become aware that Albert Knag is controlling them. They try to think of a way to escape his manipulations, but realize that there's no way to do so as long as they're in a book he's written. Meanwhile, Alberto proceeds with his lessons for Sophie. He goes over Romanticism, the period of European culture that followed the Enlightenment and defined much of the 19th century. Sophie learns about George Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and other important figures of the era. She also learns about "scientific" philosophers like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin, whose influence extends far past philosophy into real-world science, medicine, politics, and history. Sophie ends her lessons with Alberto by learning about the 20th century Existentialists, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sophie prepares for her birthday party, and in another world, Hilde prepares for the return of her father. Hilde calls her friends in Copenhagen, the city through which Albert Knag will be flying, and arranges for them to pull an elaborate prank on Albert. At Sophie's birthday party, the world begins to plunge into chaos—a fight begins to break out, and at the last minute, Sophie and Alberto "vanish into thin air," escaping their book altogether. Mysteriously, the story of Sophie and Alberto continues—we're not told how, or who's writing it. Sophie and Alberto drive to Oslo, realizing that the physical world is now "frozen" to them. Meanwhile, Albert Knag arrives at the airport in Copenhagen, where he's baffled to find a series of letters welcoming him home (much like the letters that Sophie found all over her home, wishing Hilde a happy birthday). Alberto and Sophie drive to Hilde's hometown, where they witness Hilde reuniting with Albert. At this point, it becomes unclear which parts of the story are which. Hilde greets Albert, and Albert admits that Hilde has spooked him with her elaborate pranks. Hilde explains that she wanted to make Albert feel like one of his own characters—Albert admits that she has done exactly this. Together, Albert and Hilde look up at the stars, discussing philosophy and science. Albert is impressed with the knowledge and wisdom Hilde has absorbed from the book he sent her. Meanwhile, Sophie and Alberto watch Hilde and Albert. Alberto tells Sophie that since the world is frozen, there's no way Sophie can communicate with Hilde. Nevertheless, Sophie hits Hilde with a heavy branch. Hilde feels a strange "sting" on her face. Albert jokes that Hilde's been stung by Socrates, but Hilde insists that it was Sophie who stung her.

- Genre: YA fiction - Title: Speak - Point of view: 1st person - Setting: Syracuse, NY - Character: Melinda Sordino. Description: The protagonist of Speak, Melinda begins high school (and the novel) traumatized by a rape that occurred at the hands of upperclassman Andy Evans at a party the summer before. She has not told anyone about the rape, however, and her classmates loathe her for calling the police on the party, while her parents and teachers are disappointed and angered by her sudden depression and apathy. She is smart, but refuses to do her homework, or go to class. She displays aptitude for basketball and tennis, yet refuses to make any effort to follow through on her skills. Terrified of opening up to anyone, or of growing up in any real way, Melinda must learn over the course of the novel to overcome her trauma and to find her own voice. Her inability to tell anyone about her rape manifests itself in an inability to speak at all, but creating art, gaining independence, and standing up to the bullies in her life helps her to regain the ability to articulate herself once again. While she is silent and cold on the outside, Melinda has a rich interior life. She is funny and perceptive, and has the ability to be both cynical and empathetic towards both her peers and the authority figures in her life. By the novel's end, Melinda has begun to come out of her shell, opening up to her art teacher and to her former friend, Ivy. Her growth reaches its peak when she fights off Andy Evans as he attempts to rape her a second time, and subsequently finishes the drawing of a tree that she has been working on all year. She has regained both her voice and her autonomy, and is finally able to move forward with her life. - Character: Andy Evans. Description: A popular and handsome upperclassman, Andy Evans raped Melinda at a party the summer before Speak begins. He is the main antagonist of the book, and spends much of the narrative harassing Melinda in various subtle but menacing ways. Despite his friendly façade, he also has a terrible reputation at school, with many girls reporting his violent behavior. When he begins dating Melinda's former best friend Rachel, Melinda at last takes action, telling Rachel about the rape. After he finds out what Melinda has done, Andy tries to rape her for a second time in the supply closet that she considers her safe space. When she calls out for help and threatens him with a shard of glass, however, the whole school finally finds out about Andy's crimes. Melinda also refers to him as "IT" and "Andy Beast" over the course of the novel. - Character: Melinda's mother. Description: Overworked and distracted, Melinda's mother is aware that her daughter has suddenly become withdrawn and depressed, but has no idea why. Rather than attempting to understand and connect with Melinda, her mother instead reacts with frustration and anger. Even when she sees that Melinda has intentionally hurt herself, she reacts coldly and dismissively. She also has a strained and combative relationship with Melinda's father, even more reason for Melinda to distrust the adults in her life. - Character: Melinda's father. Description: An insurance salesman, Melinda's father is clueless and removed, although he pretends to be warm and jocular. Like Melinda's mother, he has no idea of the trauma that Melinda has suffered, and yells at his daughter rather than attempting to understand her true feelings. He is removed and distant from both his wife and daughter, and he and Melinda's mother frequently take their frustration with Melinda out on each other. - Character: Heather. Description: A transfer student from Ohio, Heather is everything that Melinda is not—perky, friendly, and obsessed with being popular. She is willing to be Melinda's friend, however, because she initially doesn't know that Melinda called the police at the party before school began (which other students think Melinda did to get everyone in trouble but in fact she did to try to report her rape). Throughout the book, Melinda watches as Heather desperately tries to fit in with the other students at her school, only to fail over and over. Although she clearly finds Melinda strange and frustrating, Heather also takes advantage of Melinda's willingness to help her complete various tasks for the clique called the Marthas that she is trying to join. She finally ditches Melinda, telling her that she is too unfriendly and withdrawn, but later asks Melinda for help once again. When Melinda says no, she at last puts an end to the unhealthy and unequal friendship. - Character: Mr. Freeman. Description: Melinda's free-spirited, kind, warm art teacher, Mr. Freeman is the only adult whom Melinda respects or trusts. He tells his students to use art to express their emotions, and helps Melinda to once again find her voice by forcing her to focus on a single subject—a tree—over the entire year. Mr. Freeman also frequently stands up to the school administration, refusing to give students grades and protesting the budget cuts to his art supplies by painting a giant satirical mural on one of the walls of his classroom. At the end of the book, Melinda begins to tell him the story of her rape. - Character: Rachel Bruin. Description: Although she and Melinda used to be best friends, Rachel now hates Melinda, believing (like the other students at their high school) that Melinda called the police on a summer party in order to get others in trouble, when really she was attempting to report her own rape. A pretentious social climber, Rachel calls herself Rachelle for much of the book, and hangs out with foreign exchange students whom she perceives as cool. She eventually begins dating Andy Evans, Melinda's rapist, at which point Melinda finally tells her former friend about the rape. Although she does not believe the story at first, Rachel eventually breaks up with Andy, an act that incites him to attempt to rape Melinda a second time. At the end of the novel, Rachel has reached out to Melinda, but it is unclear whether the two will become friends again. - Character: Ivy. Description: A former member of the Plain Janes, Melinda's middle school friend group, Ivy is never as cruel to Melinda as Rachel is. In fact, she and Melinda begin to become friends after spending a great deal of time together in Mr. Freeman's art classroom. Together, they write graffiti about Andy Evans (Melinda's rapist) on a bathroom wall, and are surprised to see how many other girls have had negative experiences with him. Throughout the novel, Ivy is kind and supportive, helping Melinda to see the good in her peers once again. - Character: David Petrakis. Description: Like Ivy, David Petrakis becomes an ally of Melinda's, after beginning the year as her biology lab partner. Generally considered a genius, David is also a principled and moral person, qualities that he displays when he protests Mr. Neck's racist and bigoted remarks about immigrants. David acts in a friendly way towards Melinda, and may even show romantic interest in her, despite her hesitance and mistrust around people, particularly men. He also helps her to join in his fight against Mr. Neck by silently protesting the tyrannical teacher in front of the whole class, although he tells her that she needs to speak out for what she believes. - Character: Nicole. Description: Like Ivy and Rachel, Nicole used to be a part of Melinda's friend group, the Plain Janes, in middle school. She is now a talented athlete, and her strength and confidence represent to Melinda everything that she herself is not. When Melinda almost beats Nicole at tennis, this is a major boost to her self-esteem. Nicole is cordial to Melinda—not as warm as Ivy, but not as cruel as Rachel. When Andy Evans attacks Melinda in the supply closet, it is Nicole and the girls' lacrosse team who come to her aid. - Character: The Marthas (Meg n' Emily n' Siobhan). Description: An insipid and tyrannical group of girls obsessed with community service and school spirit, The Marthas are the clique that Heather tries to join. They take advantage of her insecurity and eagerness, forcing her to decorate for their events and then taking all the credit for her work, even as they tell her that she has done a terrible job. Heather frequently enlists Melinda to help her with these projects. To Melinda, these girls represent the height of high school conformity and cruelty. - Character: Greta-Ingrid. Description: Greta-Ingrid is one of Rachel's new foreign exchange student friends, whose name Melinda intentionally fails to remember. She is incredibly beautiful and, like Rachel, appears to have captured the interest of Melinda's rapist Andy Evans. When Melinda attempts to warn Rachel about Andy Evans, she tells her to warn Greta-Ingrid as well. - Character: Mr. Neck. Description: A bullying bigot, Mr. Neck is Melinda's social studies teacher, often singling her out for mistreatment because of her silence and sullenness. When his son doesn't get a job as a firefighter, Mr. Neck goes on an anti-immigrant rant, and earns the anger of David Petrakis, who eventually ends up protesting him along with Melinda. To Melinda, Mr. Neck is the epitome of everything wrong with adulthood—he uses his power to hurt people, refuses to listen, and is blind to anything that contradicts his point of view. - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: Like many novels with high school settings, Speak is deeply focused on ideas of growing up and coming of age. What makes this book's exploration of that subject particularly poignant and pointed, however, is that Melinda has already experienced a major milestone of adulthood—losing her virginity—before the novel begins. The fact that this event occurred as the result of rape, however, has derailed Mel's maturation, and for much of the book she clings to any remnants of childhood that she can find. As she begins high school (another milestone on the journey to adulthood), she acts in childish ways, from cutting class to hiding in her room, all while articulating a cynical attitude that she mistakenly believes to be "adult." Melinda's parents, meanwhile, are terrible examples of maturity, as they consistently act in ways that are childish, selfish, close-minded, and neglectful. Ultimately, Melinda must become independent in order to begin growing up once more; as she begins to do yard work, bike, stand up to a bullying teacher, and express herself through art, she begins the maturation process that froze after her rape. Through much of the book, Melinda resents the idea of growing up, but by the narrative's end, she has embraced the idea. After having her power to choose violently taken away from her, she has at last learned that adulthood is about agency, and that choosing to grow up is itself a mature decision. - Theme: Communication versus Silence. Description: Given that the name of the book is Speak, it is unsurprising that communication versus silence is a critical theme within the book. Silence sits at the narrative's core: Melinda has not told anyone about her rape at the hands of popular senior Andy Evans the previous summer, and has morphed from a happy, popular student to a traumatized outcast as a result. Throughout the book, Melinda finds it harder and harder to speak; a psychological block that symbolizes the fact that she cannot talk about her rape. It is important, too, to note that the connection between silence and rape is simultaneously destructive and common. Victims are often ashamed of what has happened to them, and think that no one will believe them; in this context, Mel's decision to keep her violation a secret is a tragic but understandable one.Every other character within the novel has problems with communication as well. Heather talks so much that she cannot hear what her friend has to say; Mel's parents find it impossible to understand either their daughter or each other; Rachel, Mel's former best friend, is so far removed from the protagonist that she literally begins to speak a different language. For Mel, redemption comes through communication. Throughout the book she explores many different methods of communicating, from passing notes to graffiti to silent protest to art. This last medium, especially, teaches her that there are many different ways to speak. Creating art gives Mel faith in herself, and proves to her that she has a valid and important voice. - Theme: Appearance versus Reality. Description: Much of Melinda's cynicism within Speak springs from what she views as a fundamental disconnect between appearance and reality. She has experienced a deeply traumatic rape, yet her parents view her as a disappointment, her teachers view her as a problem, and her classmates view her as a freak. Because she is deeply perceptive and sensitive, Mel notices gaps between appearance and reality everywhere she goes. She sees the cracks in the façade of her parents' marriage; the social climbing of her only friend, Heather; the petty tyranny of teachers who supposedly have her best interests at heart; and the true evil within her rapist, popular senior Andy Evans. She sees lies within institutions as well, believing that places like schools and shopping malls, and even concepts like family, are built on a foundation of lies. Mel is discouraged and depressed by these gaps, believing that she is the only one who can see them, and assuming that they make the world a false and deceitful place.Through art, however, Mel learns that the relationship between appearances and reality is more complicated than she thinks. As she creates her own works, she comes to see that images and appearances can in fact express emotional truth. She ends the book understanding that, although she cannot fix the gap between appearances and reality, she can act as a bridge between the two. - Theme: Family and Friendship. Description: Like any student in high school, Melinda's life revolves around family and friends. Unlike most high schoolers, however, Melinda is completely alienated from both groups. Her parents are neglectful and distant, and she feels completely unable to tell them about her recent trauma. Her friends, meanwhile, have all abandoned her, believing that she maliciously called the cops on a party when in fact she was only trying to report the fact that Andy Evans had just raped her. This separation from both friends and family makes Mel simultaneously lonely and cynical. She yearns for friendship, and is deeply hurt when her friend Heather ditches her, even though she has spent most of the book mocking Heather's stupidity and immaturity. At the same time, she finds it impossible to connect with her peers, and pushes away an offer of friendship from class geek David Petrakis because she believes that emotional attachment leads to pain and betrayal. In general, she maintains a deeply skeptical attitude about high school friendships, believing them to be superficial and harmful, even as she is incredibly jealous of these connections. This pattern is similar to the behavior she displays towards her parents, pushing them away even as she wishes that they would help and protect her.Mel must learn, over the course of the book, how to trust and connect with people. She finds allies in David, her former friend Ivy, and her art teacher Mr. Freeman, all of whom prove to her human connection is not always harmful, but is in fact necessary for health and happiness. - Theme: Isolation, Loneliness, and Depression. Description: Because Speak takes place within Melinda's mind, author Laurie Halse Anderson is able to vividly and achingly portray the effects of isolation and loneliness upon human consciousness. Throughout the book, Mel struggles to emerge from a cloud of depression and apathy that surrounds her, yet continually finds herself rejected and alone. Mel's attitude towards her isolation is conflicted. On one hand, she believes that she has chosen it, pushing away all those close to her in order to protect both them and herself from the fact of her rape. On the other hand, Mel is desperately unhappy and lonely; her self-imposed isolation is a symptom of her trauma, rather than a conscious and healthy choice. While her parents and teachers believe that she is simply a slacker, readers can understand that Mel is deep within the throes of depression. Mel's isolation and sadness does, however, give her deep insight into others characters' unhappiness. Heather, for instance, is isolated and lonely because she cannot see to fit in at her new school. Melinda's parents are isolated and unhappy as well, trapped in a troubled marriage with seemingly no way to escape. Mel's isolation, then, is a double-edged sword: it sinks her deeper into depression, but also allows her to see past the masks that people present to the world. As Mel matures, she realizes that she can connect with people while still maintaining this insight. She emerges from the book still deeply empathetic, but rejecting the isolation that she had previously sought out. - Theme: Memory and Trauma. Description: Melinda begins Speak burdened by memory and trauma: she has been raped and relives the experience every day, yet is unable to speak to anyone about it. As for her happier memories, the rape and the events that followed it have stained them. When she remembers her friends, she realizes that they have since abandoned her. When she remembers her childhood, she feels pity and nostalgia for how innocent and carefree she used to be. The novel is about the various events that happen to Melinda over the course of the school year, but it also focuses on how she interprets those events. As she experiences everything through the lens of her rape, Mel finds it difficult to enjoy anything, or to view any person or event without distrust and cynicism. In setting the entire novel with Mel's mind, Laurie Halse Anderson is portraying the effects of trauma upon the impressionable consciousness of a fourteen-year-old girl. She shows how difficult it is for Mel to move past her trauma, and depicts how painful but inescapable the act of remembering is for her. As the novel progresses, Melinda begins to learn to communicate her trauma, a process that allows her to stop reliving the past and to begin making new memories. Her healing process is slow, but the book ends on an optimistic note, allowing readers to hope that the strong and resilient Mel will one day emerge from her trauma. - Climax: Andy Evans, Melinda's rapist, tries to attack her at the end of the school year and she successfully fights him off, finding her voice in the process - Summary: Melinda Sordino begins her freshman year at Merryweather High depressed and alone. Throughout the day, students bully and isolate her. Her former best friend, Rachel, is particularly cruel. The only person who will talk to her is Heather, an annoying new girl in town who is focused on social advancement. Cynical but perceptive, Melinda mocks every aspect of Merryweather. She only becomes excited in the art room, where the passionate Mr. Freeman tells his students that they will each spend the year on a single subject; Melinda gets a tree. Melinda' describes her workaholic mother and disinterested father. She discusses her hatred for her babyish bedroom, decorated when she was in fifth grade. In the bedroom, Melinda hides her mirror; she loathes her appearance, especially her raw, bitten lips. In the following weeks, Melinda has an icy interaction with Rachel, spends time with Heather, works on her tree, and begins to use an old abandoned janitor's closet in school as a hiding spot. Although she was once "happy" and "driven," she now feels detached and depressed. This depression worsens when students at a pep rally recognize her as "the one who called the cops at Kyle Rodgers's party" and torment her. Heather becomes angry with Melinda for being an unsupportive friend, but quickly apologizes. Meanwhile, Melinda's parents are upset about her low grades and her apathy. They scold her but end up yelling at each other. In biology class, Melinda encounters David Petrakis, her brilliant lab partner. She continues to pay no attention in her classes, and spends Halloween by herself, remembering when she once had friends. Heather joins the Marthas, a preppy clique dedicated to community service. Although Melinda helps Heather with Martha duties, the other girls make fun of her lips, causing Melinda to cry in a bathroom. Even worse, Melinda sees a male student she calls IT in the hallway. She freezes, describing him as "my nightmare." Melinda cleans her closet and covers its mirror with a poster of Maya Angelou. She notes that it is growing harder to talk, and is grateful for her closet because it allows her to hide her emotions. In her social studies class, after her bullying teacher Mr. Neck goes on a racist rant, David Petrakis begins to protest for his own freedom of speech. On Thanksgiving, Melinda's mother tries and fails to cook a turkey (which she forgot to defrost). Her father can't cook the bird either, and after fighting, the family eats pizza. The next day, Melinda creates a sculpture using the turkey's bones. Mr. Freeman approves of the piece, as does Melinda's artistic former friend, Ivy. School continues, bringing an apple dissection in biology (Melinda flashes back to a childhood memory in an apple orchard) and more protests from David in social studies. As winter break starts, Melinda feels nostalgic for her childhood. On Christmas, Melinda's parents give her a sketchpad and charcoals because they've noticed her drawing. Touched, Melinda almost tells them her secret, but cannot. In the following days of winter break, she's forced to work at both her mother's and her father's jobs. School starts and Melinda struggles with her tree. She helps Heather with a Martha poster project, and faints during a frog dissection in biology (after identifying with the dead frog). Heather, having been hired as a model, asks Melinda to hang posters; as she does, Melinda encounters IT, who whispers "Freshmeat" in her ear as she stands frozen. Hearing about her terrible grades, Melinda's parents scream at her. Melinda refuses to speak, and spends the night in her bedroom closet, scratching at her wrist with a paperclip until blood appears. Matters grow even worse when IT—a senior named Andy Evans—begins to flirt with one of the Marthas, harassing Melinda as he does so. Melinda continues to earn terrible grades, and makes no progress on her tree. After missing her school bus one day, she walks toward school only to see Andy, who once again targets her. She remains frozen and then runs away from him, after which she decides to cut school, spending the day in the warm, sunny mall. School continues. Melinda's English class discusses symbolism in The Scarlet Letter, and she tries to work on her tree. She becomes deeply depressed after Heather decides to stop being friends with her, telling her that she needs "professional help." On Valentine's Day, Melinda receives a valentine that she hopes and fears might be from David Petrakis. It is actually a friendship breakup valentine from Heather, which causes Melinda to break down in her closet. She cuts school and ends up hiding in a hospital. Furious about her terrible grades, Melinda's parents have a dysfunctional meeting with her principal (whom she names Principal Principal) and her guidance counselor. She remains silent as the adults argue, and is forced to attend in-school suspension. Andy Evans is there, and blows in her ear. She fantasizes about killing him. On a positive note, Melinda is inspired by the fractured work of Pablo Picasso in art class. One day when she needs a ride to meet her mother, Mr. Freeman drives her, and tells her that she needs to use her tree to express her emotions. She also actually studies for a biology test about seeds, even though she is increasingly depressed by her friendlessness. After sleeping too long in her janitor's close, Melinda catches the final seconds of a winning basketball game. In the happy hubbub afterwards, David Petrakis asks her to come over to his house for pizza, but she panics and declines. After a night of insomnia, Melinda climbs to her roof and flashes back to the night of Kyle Rodger's party; sneaking in with her group of friends, downing three beers to keep from feeling awkward, wandering off into the trees, and being asked to dance by Andy. She recalls him kissing her and becoming more aggressive, and as her memories become fractured, remembers how he suddenly was on top of her, and how she tried to say no until he covered her mouth with his hands. Barely coherent, she recounts how he raped her, and how she dialed 911 afterwards but was unable to make a sound. As she flashes back to the present, she finds that she has bitten through her own lip. As winter turns to spring, Melinda has a positive interaction with Ivy, but finds out that Rachel and Andy are dating. Horrified, she writes an unsigned warning note to Rachel. In social studies, she turns in an extra-credit report on the suffragettes and becomes excited about the topic, until Mr. Neck tells her that she must read it aloud in front of the class. She and David come up with a plan, and Melinda protests for her right to silence (though David feels she should fight for her right to speak). As Melinda works in the art room, Andy comes in looking for Rachel, and Melinda is once again unable to speak as he approaches. Ivy comes in during the encounter, and calls Andy bad news. The next day, Melinda wakes up with a fever, and imagines being on Oprah and talking about her rape. It is May at last, and Melinda begins gardening. She and Ivy, meanwhile, name Andy Evans a guy "to stay away from" in marker on a bathroom wall. Melinda gets stronger, and even rejects Heather when her two-faced friend comes to ask for help making prom decorations. Feeling empowered, Melinda decides to talk to Rachel; the interaction goes well, up until the moment when Melinda tells Rachel that she was raped at the beginning of the year. Rachel is at first horrified and concerned, but reacts with disbelief and cruelty when Melinda reveals that Andy was the perpetrator. Although deeply upset, Melinda becomes happier when Ivy shows her that many girls have added additional warnings about Andy to the wall. After watching arborists prune a tree in her yard, Melinda goes to visit the place where she was raped; in the quiet grove, she vows to nurture her old self like a seed, hoping that she will soon be able to grow once again. She spends a night with her parents without fighting, and then finds out that Rachel broke up with Andy at prom. Melinda is ecstatic, and decides that she doesn't need to spend time in her closet anymore. Melinda goes to clean out her closet, but Andy Evans follows her in. He calls her ugly and jealous, and tells her that she's lying about her rape. He then vows to give her what she wants, and attempts to rape her a second time. As he goes to unzip his jeans, Melinda screams "no." She uses her turkey sculpture to break the closet's hidden mirror, and holds a broken shard to his neck, leaving him speechless and terrified. As she does so, the entire girls' lacrosse team breaks down the closet door. School is close to ending, and a summer school-bound Melinda suddenly finds herself popular because of the attack. She sits in the art room and at last creates an imperfect but beautiful tree. As she does so, she admits to herself that her rape happened, but that she will survive it. She then adds birds to her tree, and begins to cry. As she does so, Mr. Freeman comes over and remarks that she's been through a lot. Melinda feels as though the ice in her throat is melting, and replies, "Let me tell you all about it."

- Genre: Science fiction, speculative fiction, Afrofuturism - Title: Speech Sounds - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: Between Los Angeles and Pasadena (California) in an imagined future, sometime in the 1980s - Character: Valerie Rye. Description: Rye, the protagonist of "Speech Sounds, is a woman living in dystopian Los Angeles in the wake of a global pandemic that has left most of its survivors unable to use language. Three years ago, the pandemic killed Rye's husband and children and left Rye—who was a teacher and writer—without the ability to read or write. While (somewhat unusually) Rye can still speak, the pandemic has robbed her of everything she cares about (her family and her passion for reading and writing), leaving her hopeless, alone, and contemplating suicide. While taking a bus to find surviving relatives, however, she meets a man (Obsidian) who steps in to defuse a fight between passengers. Having learned to expect violence and cruelty from those most impaired by the disease, she is hesitant to trust strangers, but since Obsidian appears calm and relatively unimpaired, she gets in his car when he invites her. The two quickly establish trust and mutual affection, and they ultimately have sex and agree to live together. Rye's feelings for Obsidian reveal how desperate she is for genuine connection and how isolated she has felt since the pandemic—as soon as they establish their partnership, Rye no longer feels at risk of suicide. Tragically, though, Obsidian dies immediately afterwards when he pulls the car over to try to break up a fight between two parents (who also die). Sick with grief, Rye almost leaves the dead couple's young children, but she stops when she realizes that they can speak. The notion that language might be returning after the pandemic gives Rye hope, and she takes the children with her, planning to teach them language and protect them, feeling that she finally has a reason to live. - Character: Obsidian. Description: A former Los Angeles police officer who has retained his ability to read and write, Obsidian is Rye's companion and lover for much of the story. Obsidian is a kind and peaceful "protector" who is devoted to helping others and maintaining some semblance of public order, even though society and institutions have broken down in the wake of the illness. He is young, bearded, handsome, and relatively unimpaired—a rarity among men, whom the illness affected more than women. Obsidian meets Rye when he breaks up a fight on a bus she is riding; he keeps the peace with a gas bomb and refuses to engage when the bus driver tries to intimidate him. Impressed that Obsidian seems peaceful and unimpaired, Rye accepts his offer to ride in his car instead of continuing on the bus. Obsidian puts Rye at ease by following her directions and behaving respectfully towards her. When he asks (through gesture) if she would like to have sex, she accepts, and afterwards the two decide to become a couple. As they drive back to Rye's home, where they plan to live together, they witness a man with a knife chasing a woman across the street. Obsidian pulls over to help, but the man murders the woman and kills Obsidian with Obsidian's own gun. Afterwards, Rye reflects that—as a cop—Obsidian should have known how lethal domestic violence can be, although she recognizes that the knowledge wouldn't have kept him from helping someone in need. - Character: The Bus Driver. Description: The bus driver is the owner and driver of the bus that Rye takes towards Pasadena. He is a touchy and heavily-impaired man who supports his family by driving people around Los Angeles, asking for various practical items as fares. After the bus driver responds to a fight among passengers by pulling over, Obsidian throws a gas bomb onto the bus to try to quiet the fight. Despite the fact that this has saved the inside of his bus from ruin, the bus driver reacts with fury, threatening Obsidian with gestures and shouting nonsense words. It's Obsidian's peaceful and rational reaction to this that makes Rye begin to understand that he is safe. - Character: The Children. Description: At the end of the story, Rye adopts two children—a toddler boy and girl—whose parents are dead and who are miraculously able to speak. Initially, when Rye sees these children, she wants to leave them to fend for themselves, but she realizes that she wouldn't be able to live with that decision. Then, by accident, she learns that they can speak. This makes Rye wonder if perhaps the illness has run its course, and she vows to protect and teach these children. She brings them home with her, and the story implies that this has given Rye a reason to live. - Theme: Miscommunication and Violence. Description: In the world of "Speech Sounds," a mysterious illness has spread around the globe and left most of its survivors unable to speak, read, write, or understand spoken language. Because of this, society has broken down: the government and police no longer exist, armed bandits roam the streets sowing chaos, and when communicating by gesture fails—as it often does—violence erupts between civilians. By narrating a day in the life of Rye, a resident of dystopian Los Angeles who is trying to travel to Pasadena, Octavia Butler shows how the loss of language leads inevitably to chaos and violence. Butler opens the story by directly linking miscommunication with violence. As Rye takes the bus towards Pasadena, she watches two men "grunting and gesturing at each other," on the brink of physical violence—they're engaged in "a disagreement of some kind, or, more likely, a misunderstanding." As this description makes clear, these men aren't about to fight because they actually disagree or because their interests are at odds—instead, they're going to fight simply because they're failing to communicate. Showing how common this is, Rye correctly predicts how this altercation will go: that they'll fight as soon as something happens that breaks their "limited ability to communicate," such as one of their "mock punches" accidentally making contact. Rye is more or less right: the bus hits a pothole and one man is thrown into the other, who interprets this as aggression rather than seeing it as an accident. Without a way to communicate, neither man can de-escalate the fight or clear up what actually happened. This miscommunication leads to a larger brawl between other passengers on the bus, which disrupts their journey. Rye's reaction suggests that this is a regular occurrence: as soon as the driver hits the brakes, she exits the bus, wanting to duck behind a tree trunk in case the men start shooting. Clearly, this is something she's experienced before; without language, even the most normal, straightforward activities—like riding the bus—have become fraught with danger. In addition to provoking violence between strangers, loss of language triggers widespread despair that can make people violent towards themselves and the people they love. Towards the end of the story, Butler reveals the purpose of Rye's trip to Pasadena: she's leaving her home to keep herself from suicide. Before the illness, Rye was a historian, writer, and lover of books who was married with children. But the pandemic took everything she most valued: she lost her ability to read and write, her whole family died, and—in a final twist of the knife—the illness "cut even the living off from one another" by ending their ability to communicate, thereby making survivors unable to collectively grieve. Loss of language has taken from Rye what gave her life meaning, and without language, she is on the brink of ending her own life. In addition to making her contemplate violence against herself, Rye's inability to read or write provokes a jealousy that stirs violent impulses towards others. When Rye learns that Obsidian—a stranger who becomes her ally and lover—can still read and write, she feels "sick to her stomach with hatred, frustration, and jealousy." In the midst of these emotions, she notes that, "only a few inches from her hand was a loaded gun." While Rye does not shoot Obsidian out of jealousy, she speculates that this kind of jealousy does ultimately lead to his death. At the end of the story, they witness a man kill a woman, and when Obsidian tries to intervene, the man kills him, too. Once Rye learns that the dead woman's children can talk, she speculates that the woman could talk, too, and she guesses that the man killed her because he was jealous that she still had language. Rye believes that "the passions that must have driven him" were "anger, frustration, hopelessness, insane jealousy"—the same emotions that made her want to kill Obsidian earlier. Furthermore, she shows how widespread this kind of jealous violence is when she thinks that this man is just one of many people who are "willing to destroy what they could not have." This suggests that they live in a world of widespread despair over the loss of language, which has robbed people of something universally precious. Throughout the story, Rye is clear-eyed about the connection between loss of language and escalating violence: she sees how simple miscommunication, jealousy, and personal anguish are all, in the wake of the illness, routinely fatal. This leads her to bigger conclusions about the future of humanity: she pities the children growing up in this world, burning books as fuel, running through the streets and "hooting like chimpanzees." Rye says that these children have "no future. They were now all they would ever be." Losing language, she believes, has robbed people of their humanity—their ability to develop meaningful lives and relationships—leaving them, essentially, violent animals. And while the story ends with some hope for the future, that hope rests entirely on the return of language: the young children that Rye rescues can speak, which makes her wonder if the illness is over, or, at the very least, whether she can imagine a future where she isn't alone. Despite this cautiously optimistic ending, it's important to remember that this optimism rests on language. If it weren't for the possibility of language returning, Butler suggests that the world would continue to be a dismal place of chaos, despair, and relentless violence. - Theme: Language, Communication, and Peace. Description: After a global illness robs most people of the ability to use language, the world is left in chaos: institutions have collapsed, minor miscommunications spiral into brawls, and people feel isolated and vulnerable, unable to connect to others. Everyone seems on edge and ready to use violence at the smallest sign of danger. However, some of the story's characters are notably less violent: those who have maintained some language ability. Rye can still speak and understand spoken language, while Obsidian can read and write; significantly, these two characters are the story's peacemakers, associated with cooperation and order in the face of chaotic violence. By associating peace with language ability and showing how Rye and Obsidian communicate and develop a partnership, Butler suggests that language is the foundation of peace and social order. Throughout the story, Butler shows how successful communication—verbal and nonverbal—keeps people safe. For example, carrying a gun helps keep Obsidian safe, not because of its firepower but because of what its presence communicates to others. Butler demonstrates this when the bus driver becomes physically aggressive with Obsidian, but then backs away. Obsidian's gun being on "constant display" sent a clear message to the driver that Obsidian is dangerous, which (ironically) helped to keep the peace. Butler also associates successful communication with safety when Rye and Obsidian are first driving in his car. The two are strangers, and Rye suspects that Obsidian might be dangerous until she gestures to him to turn left and he follows her instruction. Rye reflects that if Obsidian is willing to listen to her, then the situation seems safe. In other words, the mere fact that they're able to communicate indicates that they're in a safe situation and they can begin to trust one another. Perhaps most poignantly, communication promotes peace and safety because human connection helps fight despair. Without language, people are hopelessly isolated from one another, which leads Rye to contemplate suicide. However, in the moment when she holds up two entwined fingers and Obsidian grabs them—a gesture that affirms their intent to be in a relationship—Rye no longer feels that she needs to go to Pasadena, a trip she was making to keep herself from suicide. Communicating with Obsidian, then, seems to have given her a hope and happiness that could save her life. In addition to communication leading to safety, Butler links language ability—even when characters aren't actively using it—to peace. This is clearest after the fight on the bus, when Obsidian refuses to react to the driver (who has no language ability) shouting wordlessly and making violent gestures towards him. As Rye watches this interaction, she reflects that "the least impaired people tended to do this—stand back unless they were physically threatened and let those with less control scream and jump around." In this moment, Butler makes clear that people without language are more likely to be violent and erratic, while those with some language capacity (the "least impaired") are more inclined towards peace. To make this connection between peace and language stronger, Butler notes that Obsidian is wearing an LAPD badge, even though the police department is long defunct. This emphasizes Obsidian's commitment to order in the face of the chaos that surrounds him. While these examples are relatively passive, Obsidian's connection to peace is also apparent in how he acts. For example, he breaks up the fight on the bus by releasing tear gas and then helping passengers get outside. Rye was initially worried that the fight would end in shooting, so it's reasonable to infer that Obsidian's intervention might have saved lives. For most of the story, Butler shows how language and communication help fight the violence, chaos, and despair of this dystopian world—but she generally shows language losing the battle. After all, practically nobody has language ability, and the moments of successful communication are few compared to the many instances of devastating disorder and violence. Within this dynamic, language and communication can provide individual comfort and can defuse some tense situations, but disorder seems to be the more powerful force. This perhaps changes at the end of the story, though, when Rye finds two children who can speak. These children were born after the outbreak, which suggests that maybe the disease has receded—maybe the next generation's language ability will be intact. Neither Butler nor Rye addresses this outright, but the story's ending implies a hope that the world might return to peace and order: if language is, in fact, returning, then peaceful society might be restored. - Theme: Self-Preservation, Protection, and Partnership. Description: After losing all of her immediate family to a mysterious illness, Rye is left alone in a world of violence and chaos. From the beginning of the story, she leads an isolated existence, unable to communicate with those around her. Though she spends all of her time fighting for her life, she finds little value in it, plagued by a sense of purposelessness and loneliness. However, Rye finds solace in her relationships with Obsidian and the children she meets at the end of the story. Butler contrasts isolation and despondency with the hope found in partnerships, suggesting that the best way to protect oneself is to live for and alongside others. Throughout the story, it's clear that isolation makes Rye vulnerable and miserable, which compromises her safety. This is immediately apparent when she describes taking a dangerous journey from Los Angeles to Pasadena simply because she's lonely and wants to see if she has surviving relatives. Her loneliness, in other words, makes her take a wild risk in traveling by bus alongside violent strangers towards relatives who might not even be alive. However, Rye's isolation would still be a danger if she remained at home. The foremost risk is suicide, which Rye admits that she has come close to doing because she finds nothing in her lonely life worth living for. Furthermore, since she has no one to protect her from the violence all around her, being alone at home leaves her vulnerable to the whims and predations of dangerous people, such as her sinister neighbor who seems to want to abduct her, or the men on the sidewalk who gesture crudely at her, making her realize that if one of them raped her, the others would be more likely to watch than intervene. Without any family or friends, Rye is all alone in combating the dangers of the world. Rye's partnership with Obsidian, however, alleviates this isolation, making Rye safer and more emotionally fulfilled. After Rye and Obsidian have sex, she is eager to do it again, realizing that "he could give her forgetfulness and pleasure. Until now, nothing had been able to do that." Obsidian is able to distract Rye from the tragedy around her, helping her to forget, at least for a moment, all the loved ones she has lost. This allows her to feel comfort and joy again for the first time since the illness, and she immediately feels that she no longer wants to die. Being with Obsidian also means that she has a measure of protection from others. Throughout the story, Rye has never once relaxed; she is constantly on alert for imminent danger, remaining skeptical of everyone around her. Once she and Obsidian establish a partnership, though, she allows him to drive while she leans back in her seat and rests her head on his shoulder, showing that she no longer feels afraid of imminent danger. Being with Obsidian finally gives her the "comfort and security" she was unable to achieve on her own. - Climax: Rye discovers two young children who are able to speak - Summary: "Speech Sounds" takes place in the aftermath of a global pandemic that left most of its survivors without the ability to speak, read, or write. A woman named Rye is traveling through Los Angeles by bus when a fight breaks out between passengers. Rye observes the violence and tries to stay out of its way, exiting the bus when the driver slams on the brakes to disrupt the fight. She waits on the sidewalk and plans to get back on board once the fight has ended, noting that public transportation has become rare and unreliable. Moments later, a man arrives in a car, which is unusual, since cars are scarce due to a shortage of fuel and capable mechanics. The man communicates with Rye through gestures, discussing the fight on the bus. She is surprised to see him wearing a police uniform, since governments and institutions have all dissolved. The man throws a gas bomb onto the bus to disrupt the fight, forcing all of the passengers out onto the sidewalk. The bus driver and some of the passengers gesture angrily at the man, but he stands back and refuses to engage—behavior that Rye notes is typical of those less affected by the disease. Through more hand gestures, the man invites her to leave with him, and Rye considers her loneliness: she has lost all her immediate family to the illness, leaving her so alone and sad that she's near suicide. She decides to leave with the man. Once in the car, the man hands Rye a black rock on a necklace to introduce himself. She perceives this as an indication that his name is Obsidian. She introduces herself with a pin shaped like wheat. Obsidian pulls out a map to ask Rye where she is going, and he reveals that he is able to read and write, a dangerous secret to share in a world marked by jealousy and rage towards less impaired people. Overcoming a brief moment of envy and fury, Rye confides in Obsidian that she is still able to speak and understand spoken language. They have sex and Rye finds solace in their closeness. She asks Obsidian to come home with her and he agrees, so they begin driving back towards Los Angeles. Just as Rye is beginning to settle in for the drive, Obsidian slams on the brakes. A woman runs across the street in front of them, followed by a man with a knife. Obsidian jumps out of the car to intervene and Rye follows. The woman and the man stab each other, both collapsing. Rye attempts to help the woman, but he realizes she is dead. As Obsidian bends over to see if the man has died, the man grabs the gun from Obsidian's holster and shoots Obsidian in the head. Rye shoots the man and is left with the three corpses. As Rye considers what to do with the bodies and mourns the sudden loss of Obsidian, two children run out into the street towards the woman's corpse, whom Rye realizes must have been their mother. Rye begins to walk away from them before remembering that she should bury Obsidian. She decides to bury the woman as well. As she grabs her corpse, one of the children shouts out in protest and the other tells the first to be quiet. Realizing the children can speak, Rye is hopeful that the disease has run its course. She decides to take them home with her to protect and teach them. She introduces herself to them, telling them that they do not have to be afraid of her. Suddenly, Rye feels that she has a reason to live, and she puts them in the car to bring them home.

- Genre: Short story, African American literature, Black feminist fiction - Title: Spunk - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: A small rural town, based closely on Eatonville, Florida, where Hurston grew up. - Character: Spunk Banks. Description: As the eponymous character, Spunk could be understood as the story's protagonist. However, through his conflict with Joe Kanty, it becomes apparent that Spunk is more suited to the role of antihero or antagonist. The story opens with Spunk walking boldly past a crowd of villagers, arm in arm with Lena Kanty, Joe's wife. As his name might suggest, Spunk embodies an expression of ideal masculinity; he is strong, daring, and unapologetically bold when "sauntering" past the general store—what appears to be the town's major hangout—with another man's wife. It is through these qualities that Spunk gains the respect and horror-fascination of the men in the village, who seem to envy, fear, and admire Spunk. When Joe follows Spunk and Lena into the woods to confront them about their affair, armed only with a razor, Spunk shoots his opponent dead, later declaring that the murder was simply an act of "self-defense." At first, Spunk is remarkably cavalier about the murder, claiming that he "didn't wanna shoot" Joe, but that "he made me do it," and ordering the villagers to remove Joe's body "in a careless voice." Later on, however, Spunk becomes unnerved when confronted with a "black bob-cat," who he believes is Joe's spirit, come back to haunt and punish him for his wrongs. Eventually, Spunk's unfaltering pursuit of power and dominance leads to his own untimely demise when he falls upon the circle saw at the sawmill where he works. Convinced that Joe's spirit has pushed him, Spunk dies without dignity, angrily "cussin'" and shouting as the life drains out of him. The funeral wake is symbolic of Spunk's downfall, where his body lies under a "dingy sheet" while the men make "course conjectures" about Lena. - Character: Joe Kanty. Description: The protagonist of the story, Joe Kanty is nervous, awkward and physically inferior to Spunk Banks, his rival. Joe is publically shamed and humiliated when a group of village folk witness Spunk arm in arm with Lena Kanty, Joe's wife. The men in the general store, who admire and revere Spunk, continually accuse Joe of weakness. His masculinity is called into question because of his inability to both control his wife and to challenge Spunk. Angered and spurred on by the men's taunting, Joe follows Spunk and Lena into the woods, armed with nothing but a razor, despite knowing that Spunk carries a gun with him. The altercation that follows leads to Joe's murder, leaving Spunk free to marry Lena (although Spunk is arrested for the murder, the trial is short, and he is quickly set free). However, the night that Spunk and Lena move in together, Spunk encounters a mysterious bobcat prowling around his property and howling at the top of its lungs, which Spunk believes is the reincarnated spirit of Joe. It remains ambiguous whether the bobcat is actually Joe or just a superstitious figment of Spunk's imagination. Likewise, when Spunk falls on a saw at the sawmill, he claims with dying breath that it was Joe who pushed him to his death. Once again, it's unclear if this is actually true, but it seems that Joe's masculinity is finally redeemed through Spunk's downfall. Walter Thomas's posthumous endorsement of Joe says as much, asserting that "Joe wuz a braver man than Spunk" the whole time. After all, Joe was genuinely terrified of Spunk and toted a lousy weapon, and yet he still mustered the courage to stick up to Spunk and fight. - Character: Lena Kanty. Description: Lena Kanty, Joe's wife and Spunk's lover, is "a small pretty woman." She is introduced when walking through the village "clinging lovingly" to Spunk. Joe and Spunk compete for Lena throughout the story, but her voice is markedly absent throughout. Lena's only line of dialogue is reported through Elijah Mosley, who recounts an altercation between Lena, Joe, and Spunk the week before. According to Elijah, when Joe pleaded Lena to return home to him, she "looked at him real disgusted," until Spunk grabbed her by the arm and declared, "Lena, youse mine." Lena is remarkably passive until she "speaks up" to explain that she wants to at least remain in her house because it was passed down to her by her father. Lena's autonomy and agency is immediately undermined, however, when Spunk warns her that, although she can keep her house, "when youse inside don't forgit youse mine." Elijah reports that Lena looked at Spunk with "eyes so full of love that they wuz runnin' over," but it's possible that Lena's tears symbolize the fear she feels under Spunk's controlling demands. Lena's body is not only a site of desire and control for Joe and Spunk, but also a battleground for them to assert their competing masculinities. - Character: Elijah Mosley. Description: Elijah works at the sawmill with Spunk Banks and admires him greatly for his strength and gumption. Frequenting the general store after work, Elijah enjoys gossiping and telling stories to the men there, who often take Elijah's word as gospel. A large portion of the story is narrated through Elijah's direct speech and, although the village men trust him, he is ultimately an unreliable narrator. As the ringleader of the men folk, for example, Elijah plays a crucial part in Joe Kanty's murder. He shames, taunts and emasculates Joe in front of the men, who then join in, provoking and angering Joe to follow the lovers into the woods, where he is promptly shot and killed. Although Elijah assures the men that "Spunk wouldn't shoot no unarmed man," this turns out to be false. Elijah's irresponsible storytelling has real, moral consequences. He is positioned as a foil to Walter Thomas, who takes a gentler and more compassionate approach to storytelling and to Joe's situation in general. - Character: Walter Thomas. Description: Walter Thomas is unique in that he is the only man in the village to speak out against perceived injustices (save for Joe Kanty, whose version of speaking up is meek and ineffective). Walter challenges the status quo and voices his opinions openly, seemingly unperturbed by the fierce backlash he might receive from his male peers. Firstly, Walter voices his discomfort about how the men—namely Elijah— treat Joe Kanty in the general store. Walter "grumble[s]" his disapproval of Elijah's bullying and "chide[s]" him, warning that "Spunk will sho' kill" Joe as a result of the men's actions, a prediction that turns out to be true. Secondly, Walter raises concerns about the immorality of Spunk's affair, saying "tain't right the way he carries on wid Lena Kanty." Finally, after Joe's murder, Walter boldly declares that "Joe wuz a braver man than Spunk," a statement that receives "derision" from the other men. In contrast to Elijah, Walter is interested in truth and justice. For Walter, Spunk receives the punishment he deserves when he's faced with Joe's ghost and has to reckon with his past immorality. - Character: The Men in the General Store. Description: Having worked a hard day of physical labor at the sawmill, the local men fraternize at the general store, drinking and swapping stories. They represent a toxic expression of masculinity in the way that they band together to police and monitor the behavior of men like Joe Kanty, who they perceive as weak, and idolize men like Spunk, who, despite his glaring flaws, they revere and admire. Under Elijah's leadership, this male pack blindly follows Elijah's lead as he taunts and teases Joe, thinking nothing of the consequences. - Character: Jeff Kanty. Description: Old Jeff Kanty, Joe's father, plays an important symbolic role in the story's ending. He arrives at Lena's house to attend Spunk's funeral wake. The third person narrator reveals that Jeff would have been "afraid to come within ten feet" of Spunk just a few hours before, but now he feels powerful and formidable as he stands "triumphantly" over him. Glaring at Spunk's dead body, Jeff imagines that "his fingers had been the teeth of steel" responsible for Spunk's death. Through Spunk's undignified death, it is implied that Jeff finally gets revenge for the murder of his son. - Character: The Sheriff. Description: After Joe's murder, the villagers wait for the sheriff to arrive from Orlando, Florida, to arrest Spunk for his crime. It is likely that the sheriff would have been a white man, and, given the quick and ineffectual trial that follows, the sheriff represents both the authority, and the incompetence, of the American legal system. - Theme: Power and Masculinity. Description: Zora Neale Hurston's "Spunk" tells the tragic tale of two men and their virulent contest for one woman's love. The two male characters at the heart of the story—Spunk Banks and Joe Kanty—are positioned as foils to one another when Spunk walks boldly through the neighborhood with Joe's wife, Lena Kanty. Through these characters, and other men's reactions to them, Hurston critiques notions of ideal or hegemonic masculinity. Examining the catastrophic consequences of the anger, shame, and jealousy experienced by men in pursuit of dominance, Hurston's story is a damning indictment of American masculinity. Admired by men and desired by women, Spunk embodies a socially constructed notion of ideal masculinity. The story opens with a telling description of Spunk, a "giant" man who "sauntered" through the town with "a small pretty woman clinging lovingly to his arm." The juxtaposition between the "small" woman and Spunk's large frame emphasizes his physical dominance. He is clearly confident, and his name, "Spunk," has connotations of bravery, virility, and manliness. His authority and status is illustrated when Elijah Mosley slaps his leg "gleefully" in approval of Spunk's boldness. Rather than condoning Spunk for strutting "round wid another man's wife," Elijah admires him for being "brassy as tacks." Elijah conflates Spunk's strength and dominance at work with his ability to win over Lena, and thus his romantic conquest is positioned as courageous, rather than immoral. Spunk's hegemonic masculinity is reinforced when Joe Kanty enters the store wearing "overalls much too large" for him. Shrunken, nervous, and embarrassed, Joe's inferior masculinity serves to strengthen Spunk's through contrast, revealing how physical strength and dominance over women constitute successful masculinity, regardless of honor or morality. The men in Hurston's story are motivated far more by their need for male approval than they are by their heterosexual desires. Throughout the story, feelings of jealousy and shame and are used to police and monitor men's behaviors and reinforce notions of ideal masculinity. When Spunk leads Lena past the general store, he is performing for—and showing off to—the men in the village. His scandalous parade down the "one street" is certainly not for Lena, who risks her reputation by being seen in public with Spunk. Instead, when he displays Lena proudly, he welcomes gossip, envy, and admiration from his peers. When Joe enters the store shortly afterwards, the men "looked at each other and winked," a silent and demeaning gesture that symbolizes the way in which power circulates among men. Joe is emasculated, while the other men maintain their power through his subjugation. Elijah intentionally humiliates Joe by asking after Lena, performing the role of bully for the benefit of the other men in the store, who undoubtedly enjoy watching the "pain" spread across Joe's face. Constantly calling Joe's masculinity into question, Elijah suggests that it isn't "decent for a man to take and take" and demands that Joe talk "like a man." For Elijah, Joe's passivity over the Lena situation renders him weak and unmanly. Although Walter Thomas tries to stop Elijah's teasing, the other men laugh "boisterously behind Joe's back" as they watch him walk nervously into the woods after Spunk, who they know will be carrying a gun. Elijah and "the loungers in the store" are therefore at least partially responsible for Joe's death. In the end, it is not Lena's affair that emasculates Joe, but the winking, mocking, laughing, and bullying that subsequently leads Joe to confront Spunk, with only a razor to protect him. The tragic ending of "Spunk" illustrates the violent and destructive nature of men's pursuit of power. Hurston demonstrates the dangerous repercussions of unchecked hypermasculinity when Spunk murders Joe in the woods. Joe's anger, stoked by the men's teasing, leads him into the woods to confront Spunk, who mercilessly shoots his unarmed assailant. Spunk's unnecessary violence doesn't lessen his status among the village men, who both revere and fear Spunk. Indeed, when one of the men explains that he's "skeered of dat man when he gits hot," it becomes clear that admiration is not enough to maintain Spunk's dominant position in the community; he relies on fear too. However, Spunk faces his own guilty conscience, which manifests in the form of the black bobcat that spooks him in the dead of night. Convinced that he is being haunted by Joe's spirit, Spunk then suffers from a lack of confidence when using the circle saw at work. When he eventually falls onto the moving saw, Spunk's desperate desire for power and admiration leads him to shout out that it was Joe who pushed him; even in death, Spunk refuses to be humiliated or to lose face in front of his male peers. Ultimately, even Spunk is unable to embody the expression of masculinity that gave him notoriety in the community. Spunk's funeral is modest and unremarkable; a "dingy shroud" covers his body as it lies upon some carpentry equipment. Joe's father, Jeff Kanty, "stood leering triumphantly down upon the fallen giant." The word "fallen" evokes Spunk's dishonor and disgrace, while Jeff imagines himself as a victorious champion, responsible for avenging Spunk. Jeff feels powerful precisely because of his domineering position as he looms over Spunk's dead body. Hurston has replaced Spunk with the figure of yet another callous and violent man, thus illustrating the destructive and interminable nature of men's pursuit of power. On the surface, this is a story about two men's fervent love for Lena, but she is curiously absent throughout. In reality, this is a tale about men performing masculinity for one another, each one striving for authority and dominance. Feelings of jealousy, shame, fear, and admiration circulate throughout the story as masculine currencies, used to generate, deprive, or distribute power among the male pack. Ultimately, at the story's tragic close, Spunk has ended an innocent man's life and destroyed his own, through his unwavering pursuit of physical and social dominance. - Theme: Women and Misogyny. Description: Writing during the Harlem Renaissance—an intellectual and artistic black liberation movement that aimed to celebrate black culture and interpret the African American experience in new and positive ways—black women writers like Zora Neale Hurston often felt they had to choose between fighting for the freedom of the black community, or fighting for the rights of women. Amid the context of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston garnered strong criticism from many of her black peers, who accused her work of pandering to white audiences, and who deemed her use of rural dialect to be a debasing portrayal of blackness. In contrast, more recent feminist readings of Hurston's work have argued that her focus on poor, rural characters served to undermine the male-dominated, middle-class, and urban-centric nature of New York's Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, in "Spunk," Hurston explores the intersections of misogyny, racism, and classism, perhaps as a way of highlighting the intensified inequalities experienced by black women in America. In "Spunk," Hurston examines the ways in which women are controlled and objectified by men. It is no accident that Lena is introduced initially as the "small pretty woman" clinging to Spunk's arm. By not immediately naming Lena, the story reduces her to her body and to her "pretty" appearance, reflecting the way in which women are valued primarily for their looks. In fact, the story is markedly male-dominated throughout, with Lena being the only named female character. Lena is positioned as an object of desire, rather than an active agent in her own love affair. For instance, Elijah explains that "Spunk wants Lena," and that he'll do anything to have her. In this context, Spunk is likened to an "alpha male" who is free to take his pick of the pack, and Lena's needs and wants become irrelevant. Elijah recalls a conversation he overheard between the two rivals, in which Spunk claimed that "Lena was his." Not only has Lena become Spunk's property—to be owned, possessed, and controlled—but she is also equated with an animal or pet when Spunk confronts Joe, saying, "Call her and see if she'll come. A woman knows her boss an' she answers when he calls." Even while mourning Spunk's death, Lena is sexualized by the drunken men attending the funeral, who make "coarse conjectures" about her. She is subjugated and dehumanized again and again by the men who supposedly love her, and her body becomes a site of patriarchal control, as the men argue over their rights to it. Hurston empowers Lena with property rights in order to draw attention to the precarious nature of women's lives in a patriarchal context. Lena doesn't have any dialogue in the story, but through Elijah's storytelling, her one line of reported speech reveals that she is afforded some security through the house passed down to her by her father: "Thass mah house […] Papa gimme that." Because she owns her own property, Lena is able to "speak up" for herself and asserts that she doesn't want to leave her home. Lena's property thus gives her a degree of resistance from patriarchal control, and in fact, it equips her with a voice for the first time in the story. However, Spunk is clearly threatened by this statement and declares that "when youse inside don't forgit youse mine," rendering her an object of his control once more. Spunk's continued use of imperatives makes it clear that Lena has little choice in the matter. The house is therefore a metaphor for women's need for control and security, but ultimately, Lena is trapped in a male-dominated system and, even in her own house, she must obey and worship Spunk. Hurston interrogates the misogyny surrounding women's reputations through the story's ending. As Lena mourns for Spunk with "lamentations [that] were deep and loud," the rest of the community discuss who will "be Lena's next." Lena's reputation as a "good" woman has been sullied through her adulterous relationship with Spunk. Spunk's actions, on the other hand, never faced the same level of critique from the community, highlighting the double standard applied to women's sexuality. Lena is expected to find a new man, partly because she is now considered a "loose" woman, but also because women were perceived to be dependent on men. Lena still owns property, however, and she fills it with "magnolia blossoms" for the wake. The flowers are decidedly feminine, and their strong smell represents her newly harnessed control over the house, and perhaps, finally, over her life. Through the character of Lena, and the curious absence of other women in the story, Hurston interrogates power and misogyny in a poor, rural community. Women (namely Lena) are silenced, sexualized, objectified, or made invisible by the men who purport to protect and care for them. Hurston illustrates how men render women property, fashioning them into tools to demonstrate their power in society, and how they utilize women's bodies as objects of desire. Written at a time when Hurston was under pressure to contribute to an important black liberation and anti-racism movement, "Spunk" sends a clear message: there will be no freedom unless women are liberated too. - Theme: Legal Justice vs. Moral Justice. Description: Born in 1891, Zora Neale Hurston's childhood was hugely influenced by religion. Her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother developed the Christian curriculum at their local church. After training as an anthropologist at university, however, Hurston devoted much of her writing to capturing the rituals and spirituality of the black folk religion practiced in the American South. Morality, superstition, and spirituality are central motifs in Zora Neale Hurston's "Spunk." Through this portrait of small-town life, Hurston examines community dynamics in a rural setting after a scandalous love affair sparks a series of immoral events. Hurston captures and pays tribute to black folklore and African-derived religious beliefs by illustrating how, in the absence of legal justice, moral justice will prevail. In "Spunk," the American legal system proves an incompetent defender of justice. After Spunk has murdered Joe in broad daylight, he walks "leisurely" into the general store, announces "calmly" that Joe has been shot, and then "saunter[s]" away home. He appears to feel no guilt for his crime whatsoever, instructing someone "in a careless voice" to bury Joe's body. That Spunk should feel remorse is clear when considering that the men in the general store had sent Joe off into the woods on Elijah's assumption that Spunk would never be so cruel as to "shoot no unarmed man." The men underestimated both Joe and Spunk when presuming that neither one would go through with the fight. Rather than Spunk, it is Elijah who faces allegations and judgment from the village men, who glare at him "accusingly" for his role in Joe's murder. By blaming Elijah, the men shirk responsibility for the part that they also played when mocking, jeering, and taunting Joe for not being "man enough" to fetch his wife back. The sheriff from Orlando symbolizes the arrival of law and order. Until he reaches the town, the community has been waiting in a morally liminal state; everybody knows that Spunk should be locked up, and yet "no one did anything but talk." During the trial, Spunk pleads not guilty due to self-defense and walks "out of the court house to freedom again." Hurston reveals the inadequate nature of the American justice system when suggesting that Spunk's callous actions warrant more serious punishment and retribution. Further, the system is incapable of holding the general community accountable for their collective role in Joe's death, a role that is left to Walter Thomas, who becomes the unofficial arbitrator of morality in the absence of law enforcement. Hurston suggests that folk spirituality is the most potent and effective harbinger of justice; although the legal justice system fails to hold Spunk accountable for his wrongdoings, moral justice is served when Joe's restless soul returns to haunt Joe. After moving in with Lena, Spunk is haunted by the sight of "a big black bob-cat" outside their house. When he gets his gun and tries to kill the creature, the wild cat howls loudly at Spunk until he got "so nervoused up he couldn't shoot." When Elijah explains that the cat was "black all over, you hear me, black," he emphasizes the spiritual power of the creature, and juxtaposes it with the sheriff from Orlando, who would have likely been white, given the time in which Hurston was writing. The bobcat is an example of the superstitious customs and black American folklore that Hurston was intensely interested in exploring throughout her writing, and it signals the arrival of moral justice in the village. When Walter Thomas exclaims that Spunk "oughter be nervous after what he done," it is the first time that another character in the story has placed blame or judgment on Spunk's shoulders. Through Walter's perspective, Spunk is no longer the admired town hero, but a despicable criminal. Although he faces "derision from the group" of men, Walter asserts that "Joe wuz a braver man than Spunk," thus inverting the power dynamics seen earlier in the story. Spunk believes that the bobcat is Joe's spirit, come back to seek revenge. Whether the bobcat is actually a vengeful Joe, or merely a manifestation of Spunk's guilty conscience, his superstitions materially, and catastrophically, affect his fate. Spunk fears the bobcat immensely, and this anxiety begins to undermine his confidence and mastery when using the circle saw at the sawmill, where he works. One day, while at work, Spunk has a terrible accident and falls onto the moving saw. The cause of Spunk's death is ambiguous; it is unclear whether the spirit of Joe pushes Spunk, as he claims, or whether he has been so disturbed by the bobcat that he loses his nerve and makes a fatal mistake when working near the saw. What is clear, however, is that through spirits, superstitions, and powerful folk stories—not law and order—Joe is finally granted justice, and Spunk receives the punishment he deserves. In "Spunk," Hurston positions judicial law and folklore in opposition with one another. The sheriff and the courthouse represent official justice procedures, while the bobcat symbolizes a spiritual morality. The juxtaposition reveals the futility and ineptitude of the official (white man's) legal system, in contrast to the superstitious (black) justice that finally triggers Spunk's moral reckoning. - Theme: Storytelling. Description: Growing up in Eatonville, Orlando, the country's first incorporated black township, Hurston loved to observe members of the local community sharing stories on from their porches. For Hurston, storytelling and folklore were important traditions that needed to be preserved, and she delighted in encapsulating the rich cultural and linguistic landscape of the rural South through her writing. Many of her stories are set in a town much like Eatonville, where her black characters speak in Southern vernacular. The majority of "Spunk" is told through the direct or reported speech of men in the community, stories that are framed by a distinct, third-person narrative voice. Hurston was interested in depicting the daily realities of the communities she observed and admired; in "Spunk," she explores the parameters of storytelling as a means of preserving black voices, traditions, and experiences. Oral storytelling is an important occupation for the town folk in "Spunk," and most of the story's action is told through their voices. By positioning the black, rural characters as storytellers in their own right, Hurston closes the gap between her and the marginalized communities she depicts, amplifying their perspectives and insisting that they are heard. The opening of the story is told through the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator. The omniscient narrator employs refined vocabulary, using words such as "sauntered" and "nonchalance," that is in direct contrast with the local dialect used by Elijah Mosley and the town folk for the majority of the story. The fact that Elijah and Walter's voices dominate "Spunk" suggests that their insight is just as, if not more, valuable than the omniscient narrator's. Elijah is a fantastic storyteller and captures the attention of all those around him whenever he speaks. Employing colorful imagery with ease and mastery, and narrating his stories through long, extended passages of speech, it's easy to forget that Elijah isn't the story's official narrator. When he describes how Joe's "Adam's apple was galloping up and down his neck like a race horse," and speculates that Joe must have "wore out half a dozen Adam's apples since Spunk's been on the job with Lena," for example, Elijah effectively makes the men in the general store hang off his every word. The dialect and vernacular used by the characters in "Spunk," is often difficult to read. The coarse language and the many local references might have seemed very alien to audiences or publishers from New York during the Harlem Renaissance. Instead of censoring or toning-down her characters' local dialect, however, Hurston refuses to pander to white or middle-class audiences, choosing instead to make a political statement about power and representation. Through the different modes of narration in the story, Hurston examines the importance of ethical and truthful storytelling. Despite Elijah's obvious charm, he turns out to be a very unreliable narrator. Initially, he makes a grave mistake when assuring the men in the general store that Joe would never dare attack Spunk. What's more, his misplaced trust in Spunk leads him to suggest that Spunk is far too honorable to shoot an unarmed man (Joe is practically unarmed, in that he only has a razor blade). Joe's murder might have been avoided altogether, had Elijah used his gift and charisma to dissuade Joe from pursuing Spunk, rather than shaming and provoking him. When Elijah relays to the crowd of men a whole conversation that took place between Lena, Spunk and Joe "one day las' week," it becomes apparent that his stories cannot be wholly accurate. It would be near impossible for Elijah to have heard, let alone remembered, all of the dialogue that took place in a private conversation a week before. The fact that Elijah begins his tale by first checking if the men know anything about this conversation, throws into question whether the story has any truth to it at all. In a way, it doesn't matter, because the men are gathered and eager for a story that confirms their worldview and opinions about the situation. In contrast to Elijah, Walter undermines and challenges the status quo throughout the story. In the beginning, Walter is the only man to voice his concern about the way Elijah and the men are mocking Joe. In fact, he challenges Elijah three times: "Aw 'Lige, you oughtn't to do nothin' like that," "You oughn't to said whut you did to him, 'Lige," and "Spunk will sho' kill him." In the context of the hazing he has just witnessed, Walter is brave to stand up against Elijah in this way. Later on, Walter articulates his disapproval of Spunk loudly. Despite "derision" from the group, he continues his monologue in support of Joe, imploring the men to see Spunk for his faults. In this way, the contrast between Elijah and Walter mirrors the opposition between Spunk and Joe, with one side clearly more representative of honesty, decency, and goodness than the other. Through their different approaches to storytelling, Hurston illustrates the importance of truth telling above all else. While Elijah's stories were clearly more gripping, Walter was brave enough to challenge people's perceptions and pursue the truth, a commitment that Hurston valued in her own writing. On the one hand, by endowing Elijah and Walter with a powerful gift for storytelling, Hurston memorializes the tradition of oral storytelling and celebrates black dialects and vernacular. On the other, she sends an important message about the ethics of storytelling, warning speakers and writers about the ethical responsibility they have to share the truth. In a way, Hurston's story is also a message for readers and listeners. She challenges her readers, in contrast to the men in the store, to think critically about the messages and stories that they receive, particularly about marginalized and vulnerable people. - Climax: Legendary throughout the town for his bravery when working at the sawmill, Spunk is eventually killed when he falls upon a moving saw. - Summary: "Spunk" opens with a description of Spunk Banks, a man respected and revered in the community for his strength and courage at the local sawmill, where he works. One day, the villagers at the general store are surprised to see Spunk walking boldly up the village's only street with Lena Kanty, a married woman, on his arm. One bystander, Elijah Mosley, commends Spunk for his audacity and fearlessness, while Walter Thomas is shocked at Spunk's conspicuousness. The men in the general store have hardly finished gossiping about Spunk when Joe Kanty, Lena's husband, enters. Joe is nervous, self-conscious, and clumsy—the complete opposite of Spunk. The men in the store are aware that Joe already knows that his wife has just passed by with another man, and so Joe's inaction and passivity renders him weak and pathetic in their eyes. Elijah begins to taunt Joe about Lena's disloyalty, eliciting laughter from all the men but Walter, who accuses Elijah of being cruel. Following the torment and humiliation he experiences in the general store, Joe announces that he is going to find Lena and "fetch her back." He shows the men the "large and shiny" razor that he has been hiding in his pocket, presumably to use in combat with Spunk. Elijah praises Joe for this new approach and suggests that Joe is finally behaving "like a man." As Joe stalks off into the woods in search for Lena and Spunk, Walter warns that Spunk will likely murder Joe, should he try to attack Spunk with the razor. Elijah dismisses Walter's concern and tells the men a story about an altercation between Spunk, Joe, and Lena just the week before, when Joe had tried to win Lena back and failed miserably. According to Elijah's version of events, Lena had looked at Spunk "with her eyes so full of love that they wuz runnin' over" when he declared that she belonged to him and that he would look after her from now on. While the men wait eagerly for Joe to return, they hear "the sharp report of a pistol somewhere distant." Spunk emerges "leisurely" from the woods with Lena and enters the general store. He explains to the men, without remorse, that he had to shoot Joe in order to defend himself. While the men direct some of their horror towards Elijah, who had previously assured them that Spunk would never direct his gun at Joe, Spunk seems wholly unfazed by the events in the woods. Although he is arrested, Spunk is found not guilty after a short trial, and he continues about his normal life with Lena and at work at the sawmill. Some time later, on the first night that he and Lena have moved in together, Spunk encounters a wild bobcat slinking around outside his window. Spunk promptly fetches his gun. Upon making eye contact with the cat, however, Spunk felt unable to shoot the creature, convinced that it was Joe "sneaked back from Hell" to haunt him. The men discuss whether the bobcat could indeed be Joe, as they've never seen a cat like that before. Walter declares that he thinks Joe "wuz a braver man than Spunk," and that Spunk is deserving of punishment. The next evening, the men gather to discuss the most recent victim of the circle saw. That day, Spunk had been "loadin' a wagon" when he fell onto the moving saw. Elijah describes how Spunk was cursing and swearing the whole time, accusing Joe of having pushed him into the machinery. At Spunk's funeral wake, Lena mourns loudly while Spunk's dead body lies on a makeshift cooling board. When Jeff Kanty—Joe's father—arrives, he looks down at the body, picturing himself as Spunk's killer. Meanwhile, the village men make crude remarks about Lena while the women wonder who her next partner will be.

- Genre: Satire - Title: Sredni Vashtar - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: Britain in the early 20th century - Character: Conradin. Description: Conradin is a ten-year-old boy living in early 20th-century England, who is supposedly in poor health and unlikely to live more than five more years (although his doctor may not be reliable). Lonely, but with an active imagination, Conradin frequently finds himself stifled by his older cousin, Mrs. De Ropp, who claims to be looking out for Conradin's best interests, but who seems to take particular pleasure in denying Conradin the things that he enjoys. To take refuge from the watchful eye of Mrs. De Ropp, Conradin begins spending time in an abandoned toolshed on his cousin's property. The shed becomes a playground for his imagination, but it's also the home of two real creatures: the Houdan hen and a polecat-ferret that Conradin paid a local boy to smuggle in. Conradin names the polecat-ferret Sredni Vashtar and that he eventually begins to worship as a pagan god. Mrs. De Ropp notices that Conradin is spending a lot of time in the shed and, as usual, decides to thwart him. She succeeds in selling off the Houdan hen, but even after it's gone, Conradin continues to spend time in the shed. He prays to Sredni Vashtar to "do one thing for me," without specifying what exactly the one thing is. At the climax of the story, Conradin watches Mrs. De Ropp go into the shed, expecting her to find and exterminate Sredni Vashtar but hoping for the opposite and whispering a battle chant that he had created for the ferret. As it happens, Sredni Vashtar survives and escapes, apparently killing Mrs. De Ropp. Conradin doesn't seem concerned—in fact, his prayers have been answered. At the end of the story, he prepares himself a piece of toast while the servants shout in dismay and argue about what to do next. - Character: Mrs. De Ropp. Description: Mrs. De Ropp is Conradin's cousin and the epitome of early twentieth-century British respectability. She is the guardian for the sickly boy, and while she is ostensibly watching out for his health, her concern frequently becomes overbearing or even sadistic. Although she is short-sighted, she is always watching, and she forces Conradin to spend most of his time in a dull garden where there is little to do and where she can see him through a window (which she can open to yell at him if he does something wrong). Eventually, Conradin discovers that he can escape Mrs. De Ropp's watchful eye by spending time in an abandoned toolshed. Mrs. De Ropp decides that for some reason this must not be good for Conradin, so she searches the toolshed herself and discovers the Houdan hen, which she promptly sells, only telling Conradin about it the next morning. She is surprised when Conradin doesn't react to the selling of the hen and even offers him toast that afternoon, perhaps out of remorse (since usually she doesn't allow him to have toast with tea). Still, if Mrs. De Ropp does regret her actions, it's short-lived, because she soon notices that Conradin is continuing to spend time in the shed, so she makes plans once again to stop him. Ultimately, this leads to her discovering the cage of Sredni Vashtar. It's ambiguous what happens to Mrs. De Ropp once she enters the toolshed, but Conradin imagines that because she is short-sighted, she probably got up close to the straw where Sredni Vashtar was hiding, giving the ferret an opportunity to strike. What is clear is that Sredni Vashtar escapes alive, while Mrs. De Ropp's body is discovered by one of her servants. The servants debate about how to break the news to Conradin, but judging by his reaction (calmly toasting some bread), it doesn't seem that he's too concerned. - Character: Sredni Vashtar. Description: Sredni Vashtar is a polecat-ferret that a local butcher boy smuggled into Mrs. De Ropp's shed in exchange for some silver from Conradin. While Sredni Vashtar is a real ferret, in Conradin's imagination he's also a pagan god, who inspires elaborate rituals of devotion, including special festivals and chants. Sredni Vashtar has sharp, dangerous teeth, and as a result must be kept locked up in a hutch (a kind of cage). The wild Sredni Vashtar represents the exact opposite of the prim, traditionally religious Mrs. De Ropp. Several times in the story, Conradin prays for Sredni Vashtar to "do one thing for me," presumably to thwart his oppressive cousin. Ultimately, Sredni Vashtar kills the short-sighted Mrs. Ropp, blurring the line between imagination and reality by seemingly answering Conradin's prayers. It's possible to argue that, just as Mrs. De Ropp seems to stand-in for respectable British Imperial society, Sredni Vashtar functions as a kind of stand-in for the people, cultures, and religions colonized by the Empire. By today's standards, such a characterization would be considered racist in a variety of ways—a wild, dark-skinned animal serving as a symbol for not just one colonized people but for all colonized people. Within the story, the implication of Sredni Vashtar killing the proper but cruel and overbearing Mrs. De Ropp can be taken as signaling a pessimistic belief on the part of Saki that British Imperial rule as practiced was likely to foster revolt that would be the Empire's demise. - Character: Maid. Description: As a relatively wealthy woman in early twentieth-century England, Mrs. De Ropp has several servants, including a maid, who informs Conradin that tea is ready just before she goes out to the shed and discovers the body of Mrs. De Ropp. None of these servants play a large individual role in the story, but their presence helps to signify that Mrs. De Ropp is a member of the upper class, and their terror at the death of Mrs. De Ropp serves to amplify Conradin's own lack of concern. - Character: Doctor. Description: The doctor is a minor character who pronounces that Conradin won't live another five years, but because he is presented as "silky and effete," his opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. Like Mrs. De Ropp (who trusts him), the doctor is a member of the respectable upper class, but he doesn't seem to have done anything particularly impressive with his life. His main function in the story is to help Mrs. De Ropp justify the paternalistic, overbearing way she treats Conradin. - Theme: Imagination vs. Reality. Description: At the heart of Saki's "Sredni Vashtar" is a lonely young boy named Conradin, who escapes from a real world that he hates by imagining that the polecat-ferret that he keeps in a cage in an abandoned toolshed is actually a pagan god named Sredni Vashtar. This violent, impatient god that Conradin invents is the polar opposite of Conradin's older cousin and guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, who is very religious in a more traditional Christian way and who constantly watches over Conradin and prevents him from doing things he enjoys. At first, it seems that Conradin's elaborate mythology of Sredni Vashtar is nothing more than the imaginings of a lonely child trying to escape a harsh reality. But when Mrs. De Ropp discovers the ferret and vows to get rid of it, Conradin begins praying to Sredni Vashtar to "do something" to change his circumstances, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred: Sredni Vashtar ends up killing Mrs. De Ropp. Ultimately, Saki leaves it ambiguous as to whether the ending of "Sredni Vashtar" is really a moment of divine intervention inspired by Conradin's imagination-fueled faith or if it's just a morbid coincidence. In this way, the ending of the story makes clear that "respectable" people like Mrs. De Ropp can't conceive of all that's possible in the world, and, further, that sometimes it isn't even possible to tell the difference between the imagined and the real. While Conradin's escapist fantasies are his own invention, they are a reaction to his experience of real-world events. In particular, Conradin's fantasies arise from his resentment toward his respectable cousin Mrs. De Ropp. The cult of Sredni Vashtar (Conradin's invented pagan religion) is described as a religion that "[lays] special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman's religion [i.e., Mrs. De Ropp's Protestant Christianity], which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction." Saki's phrasing is humorous, since it is clearly Conradin who is setting his religion in opposition to Mrs. De Ropp's and not the other way around. Moreover, the irregularly scheduled festivals of the cult of Sredni Vashtar also seem to be directly connected to events in the real world. The longest festival lasted the three-day period during which Mrs. De Ropp was suffering from a toothache. At this point in the story, there is clearly a cause-and-effect link between the real world and Conradin's fantasies, but the influence goes one way, with real-world events dictating what happens in Conradin's fantasies. Though Conrad's invented religion gives him joy and a sense of freedom, initially even he doesn't actually believe in it. When Conradin begins to actually pray to Sredni Vashtar to "do one thing for me," however, the line between an imaginary religion and an actual religion begins to blur a bit. When Conradin prays "Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar," he does not specify what the thing is, trusting his great ferret god to be able to figure it out. By doing so, he suggests that Sredni Vashtar is omniscient, a truly godlike trait. This increasing trust in Sredni Vashtar's power doesn't seem to represent real religious devotion from Conradin (given his skepticism later that his prayers will actually be answered), but it does suggest a deeper commitment to the elaborate fantasy he's created. Conradin's devotion intensifies when Mrs. De Ropp finds the key to Sredni Vashtar's hutch in Conradin's room and goes to get rid of the animal (which at that moment she thinks is a guinea pig). Conradin in that moment even begins to chant a battle hymn describing Sredni Vashtar conquering his enemies. Yet even as Conradin desperately chants, the narrator notes that Conradin doesn't believe his own prayers. Conradin's religion still doesn't exist anywhere other than in his imagination. Even so, his invented religion takes up an increasingly large part of his thoughts and provides him solace in a miserable moment, suggesting that the made-up religion is gaining power, even if this power is still limited to what goes on in Conradin's head. However, when at the climax of the story Mrs. De Ropp is killed by the Sredni Vashtar, it seems so much like an answer to Conradin's desperate prayers that it calls into question the divide between an imaginary religion and a real one. Saki deliberately withholds information so that it's impossible to tell exactly what happens at the end of the story. While Conradin is able to imagine a likely scenario (that the short-sighted Mrs. De Ropp leaned in too close to the straw where Sredni Vashtar was hiding), there is no way of knowing if this is actually what happened. The narrator's perspective mirrors Conradin's, watching the action from a distance far outside the dark shed. What is not in doubt, though, is the fact that Mrs. De Ropp has been killed by Sredni Vashtar. The shouting of the maid and the confusion of the other servants all attest to the fact that Conradin has not simply imagined the death of his guardian. But how the death occurred—whether it was just an unlikely everyday accident or whether Sredni Vashtar truly did gain some sort of power from Conradin's worship—is left in the dark of that shed. The story's ambiguous ending makes it impossible to tell exactly where the line between imagination and reality ends. Ultimately, Conradin's imagination triumphs over Mrs. De Ropp's petty practicality, and as a result, the climax of the story has a tinge of fantasy, like a darkly comic fairy tale, even though there is no explicit evidence of any supernatural events. To try to figure out whether Conradin's prayers were really answered by Sredni Vashtar would be futile and perhaps missing the point—only in the dull mind of someone like Mrs. De Ropp are fantasy and reality so easily distinguishable. - Theme: Religion. Description: There are two opposing forces in Saki's "Sredni Vashtar": the traditional, "respectable" Christian religion embodied by the prim and controlling Mrs. De Ropp and the wild, "pagan" religion embodied by the ferret-polecat Sredni Vashtar (who, in the lonely imagination of Mrs. De Ropp's young cousin and ward, Conradin, is a god). Like the Judeo-Christian God, Mrs. De Ropp is seemingly omnipotent, always able to see and judge what Conradin is doing in the garden through one of her many windows. Also like the Judeo-Christian God (at least in Saki's satirical take on British Christianity), she has strict rules and commandments about what Conradin can and can't do, often preventing him from doing things he enjoys—even things as simple as eating toast with his tea. By contrast, the religion that Conradin invents around Sredni Vashtar follows no strict schedule, provides no rules of conduct, and focuses on fantasies of violence—and gives Conradin a sense of freedom. While the story's portrayal of both Christian religion and of Conradin's "pagan" religion are not particularly nuanced and are largely satirical, the central thrust of Saki's satire is to use Conradin's cult of Sredni Vashtar as a foil to expose the stiff, cruel, and imagination-killing qualities that he saw in British organized religion. Mrs. De Ropp's devotion to Christian religion is one of her central character traits, and it's no accident that Saki portrays her as repressive and controlling, and focused on arbitrary ideas about what is "good" for Conradin that are less based on reason and more on denying him pleasure. One of Saki's most effective pieces of satire in the story is the scene where he reveals that Mrs. Ropp typically prevents Conradin from having toast because it's "bad" for him and too much of a hassle for her to make. Bread is a common religious symbol, evoking communion wafers, the unleavened bread that God commands the Israelites to eat in Exodus, and the parable of the loaves and fishes—in fact, it might be the most good-for-you food in all of Christianity. The fact that Mrs. De Ropp denies Conradin toast suggests not only that she is stingy and mean but that she is actually a hypocrite who can twist morality to be whatever she wants it to be. Perhaps the most villainous quality of Mrs. De Ropp is that she invades Conradin's shed, which is the one place where his imagination is free. This suggests intolerance on her part, because even though Conradin was not doing anything that affected her, she still felt the need to stop him. Because the story so closely associates Mrs. De Ropp with British Christianity, the story implies that British Christianity is also characterized by intolerance, hypocrisy, petty cruelty, and the need to stamp out all forms of imagination under the guise of doing what's "best" for others. While Saki was perhaps most interested in satirizing the puritanical qualities of Protestant British Christianity, his story also satirizes so-called "pagan" religions. While the cult of Sredni Vashtar is portrayed as more vital and exciting than Mrs. De Ropp's Christianity (and arguably as even more powerful, given her demise at the end of the story), Saki portrays its rituals as largely arbitrary and guided by superstition. Even in Conradin's own fantasies, it isn't clear if sprinkling stolen nutmeg on festival days has any effect on what happens in the real world. Though Conradin designs his religion to be the exact opposite of Mrs. De Ropp's, at times Saki suggests that the two of them are actually quite similar. In particular, after the Houdan hen is sold, Conradin begins treating Sredni Vashtar more like a personal Protestant Christian God, saying nightly prayers, bestowing him with omnipotence, and even singing hymns. Ultimately, while Saki satirizes both the Christianity of his fellow Britons as well as the "paganism" of religions that were more exotic to him, his story "Sredni Vashtar" does pick a clear winner between the two. When Mrs. De Ropp comes face-to-face with the great ferret Sredni Vashtar, her God is powerless to protect her from the fierce pagan deity. Perhaps Saki is satirizing the weakness of the Christian God more than he is extolling the virtues of foreign gods, but he does seem to find something vital and hopeful in the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Despite the gruesome violence, the story ends on an optimistic note, at least for Conradin, who is finally able to enjoy a pleasure that his cruel cousin had long denied him—toast. The ending may reflect Saki's own hope for a future Britain that has moved beyond the petty, hypocritical Christianity embodied by Mrs. De Ropp. - Theme: British Colonialism. Description: Born to British parents in Burma (which was at the time a British colony) and working there as an adult for a few years in the Imperial Police, Saki saw firsthand what the outer reaches of the British Empire looked like, and he brought this awareness to "Sredni Vashtar." The title character of the story, Sredni Vashtar, is a ferret whom the story's main character, a lonely boy named Conradin, has come to imagine is a god. As a name, Sredni Vashtar invokes prominent gods of Hinduism, like Vishnu (the creator of the universe) and Shiva (the destroyer of the universe), and so the story links Conradin's made-up religion with those of the British colonies, such as India, that British considered "pagan." In addition, Conradin's cousin and guardian, Mrs. De Ropp, acts as a kind of "colonizer" in the story, ostensibly watching over Conradin and setting restrictions on his behavior for his own good, but secretly despising him and enjoying the power she wields over him. While Saki himself may certainly be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about colonized people (portraying the "brown" ferret god as savagely violent, for instance), in the story he masterfully portrays how Mrs. De Ropp's seemingly good intentions are actually based on cruelty, and he ties this cruelty to racist British ideas about what constitutes "respectable" behavior and how the British then use these ideas to justify their own continued rule over their colonies. The violent climax of the story—in which Mrs. De Ropp seeks to further control Conradin by getting rid of the ferret but is instead killed when she opens Sredni Vashtar's cage—can be read as indicating Saki's pessimism about the prospects of the British Empire, as it suggests that continued British rule is likely to result in eventual revolt and bloodshed. As it turned out this was true: Britain lost most of its empire within four decades after "Sredni Vashtar" was published in 1912. While the story takes place entirely in one isolated estate in England, the actions of the respectable but loathsome Mrs. De Ropp parody the actions of the British Empire, both at home and abroad. Mrs. De Ropp is very strict about where Conradin can go and what he can do, limiting him to one barren garden where she can constantly watch him. This mirrors British colonial practices, where the colonizers tended to swoop in, extract valuable resources (leaving behind a metaphorical barren garden), then institute restrictive colonial governments that left locals with little say about what happened in their own lands. Perhaps Saki is even suggesting that the British try to "play God" in foreign countries, since restrictions that Mrs. De Ropp places on Conradin are a parody of the restrictions God placed on Adam in the Garden of Eden. Some of Mrs. De Ropp's actions are an even more direct parody of British history. When she kicks out the "Anabaptist" Houdan hen, for instance, she is unintentionally re-enacting a real moment in history when Anabaptists were expelled from England. The abandoned shed exists in a space that is both part of Mrs. De Ropp's garden and not, evoking the dual status of British colonies. Within the shed, Conradin is able to build a vibrant imaginative world, totally unlike the boring world of British respectability that his cousin represents. The wildness of this world—its only inhabitants are animals, one of which is extremely dangerous—evoke mainland British ideas about the colonies, some of which were famously popularized in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Mrs. De Ropp's strong, perhaps irrational desire to control what goes on inside the shed can also be read as a parody of British imperial ambitions. She wants to remove the wild animals from the shed, just like the colonizers who wanted to "civilize" the lands they conquered. In each case, doing "what was best" for the powerless involved the powerful oppressing them even more. Ultimately, it is Mrs. De Ropp's insatiable desire for control that leads to her downfall, foreshadowing a similar fate for the respectable British Empire she represents. Saki makes it clear that, while Conradin celebrated Mrs. De Ropp's misfortunes with festivals to Sredni Vashtar, in reality, not even Conradin believed that he had any power to actually cause her harm. Mrs. De Ropp's interference in the shed, then, is totally unnecessary—it's an excuse to further show her power, when that power was already fully established. Such a show, then, does nothing except potentially overextend herself in a way that might—and does—make her vulnerable. Mrs. De Ropp easily gets rid of the Houdan hen, suggesting that she does indeed have power, even in Conradin's realm. But her success the first time leads her to become overconfident, and this causes her to mistake Sredni Vashtar for a bunch of guinea pigs, leaving her vulnerable to his fearsome fangs. Given how the shed has been characterized as a wild place and how the ferret is specifically described as "brown," it isn't a stretch to view Mrs. De Ropp's fate as Saki's own prediction for the fate of the British Empire abroad. In the end, the dissolution of the British Empire was perhaps more violent than anything Saki could've predicted in 1912. While many former British colonies achieved independence through largely nonviolent means, this transition was made possible by the two World Wars, both of which resulted in tremendous destruction and which weakened Britain as an imperial power. As Saki predicted, the start of a new era was made possible through the violent death of the old one. - Climax: Mrs. De Ropp goes to investigate the shed where Conradin spends his time, and she is killed by the ferret Sredni Vashtar - Summary: Conradin is a ten-year-old boy living in early 20th-century England, who is supposedly so sickly that the doctor predicts he won't live another five years (although most people don't count the doctor's opinion for much, with the exception of Conradin's guardian Mrs. De Ropp). Mrs. De Ropp is Conradin's older cousin, and to him she represents everything in the world that is real and necessary but unpleasant. Ostensibly, Mrs. De Ropp is with Conradin in order to care for him, but she frequently forces him to do things he dislikes. While this is supposedly for his own good, she seems to enjoy denying Conradin what he wants, and as a result, Conradin is lonely and frequently uses his active imagination in an attempt to escape his circumstances. Conradin spends most of his time in a dull garden overlooked by windows of the house, where Mrs. De Ropp is always watching him, ready to open a window and yell if she catches him doing something he shouldn't. For Conradin, by far the most interesting part of the garden is an abandoned toolshed. Inside the toolshed, where Mrs. De Ropp can't see him, Conradin lets his active imagination run wild. He fills the toolshed with "phantoms," some based on history and others that he invents on his own. There are also two living residents of the toolshed. One is a ragged looking Houdan hen (a French breed of chicken with some combination of black and white feathers), which Conradin takes a liking to. The other is a large polecat-ferret, which lives in a large hutch (or cage) and which a local butcher boy helped Conradin smuggle into the shed in exchange for some silver that Conradin had hoarded over time. Conradin is afraid of the sharp-fanged polecat-ferret, but it's also his most valued possession. He keeps it a secret from Mrs. De Ropp and gives it a name that one day miraculously came to him: Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Conradin invents a pagan-style religion to worship the ferret, with exotic rituals that contrast with the more mundane rituals Conradin observes every week when his cousin takes him to church. Eventually, Mrs. De Ropp notices how much time Conradin is spending in the toolshed. She decides it can't be good for him, so one morning at breakfast she announces that the Houdan hen was sold and taken away overnight. She expects—perhaps even hopes—that this will make Conradin sad or angry, and she's already prepared her answers to his complaints. But Conradin just goes pale and says nothing. That afternoon, Mrs. De Ropp puts toast on the table (a delicacy she usually denies him on the grounds that it's bad for his health and too much trouble for her to make), but Conradin doesn't take any of it. That evening Conradin prays to his ferret god, Sredni Vashtar, asking for a favor. He doesn't say aloud what he'd like; instead he asks Sredni Vashtar to "do one thing for me," since, in his imagination, Sredni Vashtar is a god and should know what that one thing is. Conradin repeats variations on this prayer throughout the next few days, both in the woodshed and at night in his dark bedroom. Mrs. De Ropp notices that his visits to the toolshed haven't stopped, so one day she goes in the shed to investigate. Inside the shed, Mrs. De Ropp finds the hutch where Sredni Vashtar lives, but she doesn't see Sredni Vashtar and believes that the hutch may contain guinea pigs. She tells Conradin she is going to get rid of them and searches his room, finding a key to the hutch that he had hidden. She goes back to the shed, while Conradin stays inside the house and watches her through the window. As Conradin watches from the window, he imagines his cousin in the shed, peering down into Sredni Vashtar's straw with her short-sighted eyes and being surprised by what she finds. He repeats his prayer for Sredni Vashtar, but he fears the worst—that Mrs. De Ropp will come out of the shed with a pinched smile on her face and that later the gardner will carry Sredni Vashtar away. But after several minutes, the door of the shed is still ajar. Conradin waits, beginning to feel triumphant as under his breath he repeats a battle chant he made up about Sredni Vashtar conquering his enemies. Then, out of the shed comes Sredni Vashtar, with blood stains on his jaw and throat. The ferret walks down to a brook in the lower part of the garden, takes a drink, then disappears into some bushes. Just then a maid asks Conradin where his cousin is. He responds that his cousin went to the shed some time ago, so the maid goes to check. Conradin begins to toast himself some bread, drawing the process out and using a lot of butter. There is chaos throughout the house as the servants discover Mrs. De Ropp's body in the shed and bring it into the house. While the voices of the servants argue what to do next, Conradin makes himself a second piece of toast.

- Genre: Young Adult Fiction - Title: Stargirl - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Mica, Arizona - Character: Leo Borlock. Description: Leo is the narrator of Stargirl. He is a quiet, observant, sensitive 11th grader who doesn't enjoy the spotlight. He moved to Mica, Arizona, from Pennsylvania a few years ago and decided to start a porcupine necktie collection at this time. A couple years after his arrival, when Leo was 14, a newspaper article was published about his collection and he received the anonymous gift of another porcupine necktie in the mail. Leo's best friend is Kevin Quinlan. Leo directs and produces their school's TV show, Hot Seat, which he and Kevin came up with. He wants to become a sports announcer or news anchor when he grows up. Leo is curiously drawn to Stargirl as soon as she arrives at Mica High School. While other kids initially reject her as a fake, Leo thinks she's real, an instinct shared by his mentor, Archie Brubaker. After he learns that Stargirl likes him, Leo is initially delighted. He accompanies her on walks in the desert and learns to see beauty and opportunities for generosity the way she does. However, because of his reluctance to stand out, Leo is also torn between his affection for Stargirl and his desire for his classmates' approval. After Stargirl's failed experiment of becoming a "normal" teenage girl—something she does for his approval—Leo and Stargirl break up. However, even after going to college and becoming a set designer back East, Leo always thinks about Stargirl and wonders if she'll ever give him another chance. Fifteen years later, he receives another porcupine necktie in the mail, and he knows Stargirl is still watching over him. - Character: Stargirl/Susan Caraway. Description: Stargirl's given name is Susan Julia Caraway. Over the years, however, she's taken many different names, including Pocket Mouse, Mudpie, and Hullygully. Stargirl is a 10th grader who quit homeschooling because she wanted to make friends. From the moment she arrives at Mica High, however, she stands out and struggles to connect with her more conformist classmates. She dresses differently, serenades kids on her ukulele, and carries around a pet rat named Cinnamon. She also reads newspapers and monitors bulletin boards to find opportunities to leave people encouraging notes and gifts—always anonymously. Most of Stargirl's strangeness could be forgiven by her peers, however, if it weren't for her unconventional cheerleading: she insists on cheering for opposing teams during Mica High's basketball playoffs. Soon, she's ostracized by the entire student body and ruthlessly grilled on Hot Seat, Kevin and Leo's TV show. Around the same time, she begins dating Leo, even briefly adopting a "normal" persona as Susan Caraway to make things easier for him. This fails utterly, however, and after "Susan's" resounding victory at the state oratorical contest, she gives up the act, realizing that no matter what she does, she will never be accepted at Mica High. She breaks up with Leo soon after, though she still cares for him. Dori Dilson is Stargirl's most loyal friend in Mica, and Archie is a tutor/mentor/grandfather figure to her. After the end-of-year Ocotillo Ball—where Stargirl triumphs by leading some classmates in a joyful dance through the surrounding desert—Stargirl leaves town abruptly, moving to Minnesota with her family. Years afterward, her quirks and kindnesses are emulated by younger generations of Mica students, and she still keeps an eye on Leo from afar. - Character: Archie Brubaker. Description: Archie is a retired paleontologist and professor who moved to Mica after his wife, Ada Mae, died. He lives in a fossil-filled house with a giant, dying cactus, "Señor Saguaro," in the backyard. The kids of Mica flock to Archie's house for rambling lectures on all sorts of topics; he calls them "the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone." He often talks in riddles. Archie helped out with some of Stargirl's homeschooling lessons and is a kind of grandfather figure to her. He also has an especially close relationship with Leo. Archie encourages Leo's relationship with Stargirl, claiming Stargirl is more "real" than most people, and continues to muse about the mystery of Stargirl long after she leaves Mica. - Character: Kevin Quinlan. Description: Kevin is Leo's best friend. They moved to Arizona in the same week four years ago and usually agree on everything—until Leo starts dating Stargirl. They came up with the idea for the Hot Seat TV show together. Kevin's aspiration is to become a sleazy talk show host, but he ends up becoming an insurance salesman. - Character: Hillari Kimble. Description: Hillari Kimble is the most popular girl at Mica High and also the nastiest. She especially hates Stargirl. Hillari dates Wayne Parr, and together they epitomize the "normal" high school couple. Hillari becomes enraged whenever her typical high school experience—including her status as leader—is threatened, and she expresses that rage by leading the student body in shunning Stargirl. When Stargirl "ruins" the Ocotillo Ball, Hillari slaps her, but Stargirl forgives her. - Character: Wayne Parr. Description: Wayne Parr is Hillari Kimble's boyfriend. He rarely opens his mouth, and he's not known for his athleticism, good grades, or leadership—his main job is to be "gorgeous" and show up at Hillari's side. When interviewed by Kevin on Hot Seat, Wayne revealed that his life's ambition is to become a GQ model. Leo once assumed that Wayne would always be Mica High's "grand marshal," until Stargirl came along. - Character: Dori Dilson. Description: Dori Dilson is an inconspicuous ninth grader who writes poems in a big looseleaf notebook and is the first Mica High student to sit with Stargirl at lunch. Though angry with Stargirl when she briefly becomes "Susan," Dori is by far Stargirl's most loyal—and only publicly supportive—friend. She is the only Mica High student who shows up to cheer for Stargirl after the state oratorical contest. - Theme: Individuality and Conformity. Description: Jerry Spinelli's young adult novel Stargirl highlights the kind-hearted quirkiness of a high school girl who calls herself Stargirl. But the novel's action centers more around the reactions of her Mica High peers when the formerly homeschooled Stargirl shows up, serenading kids with her ukulele, celebrating those who are usually ignored, and—more controversially—even showing support to the school's rivals during a state basketball tournament. By focusing on the reactions of Stargirl's peers even more than Stargirl's strangeness, Spinelli argues that conformist rejection of individualism says more about conformists than about the person being rejected, and also that individualism's positive effects often appear long after the fact. At first, though Stargirl's individuality is unsettling and disruptive to Mica High's conformist environment, her peers mostly see it as harmless and even, eventually, as good. As narrator Leo Borlock explains, "Mica Area High School […] was not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. […] If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands." Everyone more or less conforms to one another, and each student has a habitual place that's neatly distinguished and makes sense within the context of the whole. Stargirl, however, with her obliviousness to conventional norms and comfort with her own "normal," disrupts all this: "We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past 'weird' and 'strange' and 'goofy.' Her ways knocked us off balance." Stargirl upsets Mica High's carefully delineated social hierarchy in a way that's hard for her peers to articulate. The students' inability to categorize her throws doubt on the way they categorize themselves, too. At first, this disruption even has a positive effect on life at Mica High. "It was wonderful to see […] Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life. For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled. […] We discovered the color of each other's eyes," observes Leo. As students begin to copy Stargirl's openness and kind gestures, they begin to discover more about themselves at the same time. Though Stargirl at first seemed like a problem to be solved, overturning "normal" at Mica High, now her disruptive presence seems to be fixing something that had been lacking among its students. When Stargirl's behaviors transgress certain social conventions, however, her individuality comes to be seen as threatening—in particular, it offends school spirit in such a way that her peers feel rejected, ostracizing her in turn. After the state basketball tournament, when Stargirl cheers for the opposing teams and sympathizes with an injured rival, Mica High students begin to find Stargirl's uniqueness disquieting. She's mobbed with angry, uncomprehending questions ("Why can't you be normal?" "[I]s something wrong with us [that] you gotta be so different?") during the school's Hot Seat interview show and is subsequently shunned by the entire student body. Stargirl's refusal to fall in line with social norms (only supporting one's own team) separates her from her peers more than her unusual clothes and lunchtime ukulele playing have done. Her peers, in fact, interpret that refusal as a rejection of themselves. When Stargirl remains oblivious to the student body's pointed ignoring of her, Leo tries to explain that she should care more about others' opinions if she hopes to be accepted: "Stargirl, you just can't do things the way you do. […] You can't just wake up in the morning and say you don't care what the rest of the world thinks." Stargirl meekly replies, "You can't? […] But how do you keep track of the rest of the world? Sometimes I can hardly keep track of myself." Stargirl's bafflement suggests that her open, undiscriminating way of interacting with the world is connected to her comfort with who she is, and, conversely, "everyone else's" preoccupation with conformity suggests they have a fundamental discomfort with themselves. Though Stargirl never does find a stable place within Mica High society, her legacy has long-term ripple effects after her departure, suggesting that nonconformity does have a positive impact, even if it's not apparent at the time. Stargirl initially tries to conform, adjusting her style, using makeup, and even trying to adopt a "normal" girl's laugh, but it doesn't win her approval from her peers. Leo explains, "She constantly quizzed me about what other kids would do, would buy, would say, would think. She invented a fictitious person whom she called Evelyn Everybody. 'Would Evelyn like this?' 'Would Evelyn do that?'" Stargirl's "normal" persona fails because it comes from Stargirl's desire to fit in, not from her honest self-expression. Despite a brief triumph at the Ocotillo Ball, when she leads some of her classmates in a freewheeling dance across the surrounding desert, Stargirl disappears soon after, suggesting that there simply isn't a place for her—or for individualism in general—within a typical high school social order. Yet, years after her disappearance, Stargirl's memory produces a gradual change at Mica High, as acts of kindness, solidarity, and outright quirkiness become more common among the student body. For instance, "at every [basketball] game, when the opposing team scores its first basket, a small group of Electrons fans jumps to its feet and cheers." This suggests that the conformity of Mica High really did need fixing, but that the change necessarily occurred over time, not all at once. To some extent, Stargirl remains a puzzle in the book. She disappears from Mica High as abruptly as she first appeared, and the origins of her oddness (she even comes from a fairly "conventional" family) are unclear. Spinelli gives her an intentionally far-fetched, fantastical aspect that prompts readers to ask questions about how they would react to such a newcomer, and in turn to question their standards for normalcy and acceptability. - Theme: Human Nature. Description: In the novel, there's a nagging question about Stargirl: how could a person like her exist? Her openness and obliviousness to social customs baffle her classmates so much that they even seem faked. Leo Borlock, in particular, makes Stargirl an object of study as he talks with his mentor Archie for insights and even joins Stargirl on her errands to surprise strangers in need of encouragement. He discovers that there isn't a tidy explanation for Stargirl; in fact, the more he studies Stargirl, the more he asks questions about himself and his peers. By portraying Stargirl as a more raw, undeveloped version of human nature, Spinelli suggests that human beings should get in touch with a kinder, less artificial, less socially divisive aspect of their natures that's already present. Stargirl is uncomfortable for her peers because she reveals things about them that they'd rather not know. Archie Brubaker, a wise, retired paleontologist who mentors many of the kids in Mica, explains to Leo that Stargirl's strangeness isn't fake; in fact, it's more authentic than what the students are used to seeing every day. "If anybody is acting, it's us. […] You'll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know," he says. In other words, Stargirl is a mirror for her peers; careful study will tell them something about themselves that has become obscured and that, under normal circumstances, they don't see easily. For example, Stargirl's willingness to cheer for rivals reveals the deeply ingrained desire to dominate and distinguish oneself from others that surfaces during Mica High's briefly triumphant basketball season: "Suddenly we were no longer comfortable with losing. In fact, we forgot how to lose. The transformation was stunning in its speed. […] One day we were bored, indifferent, satisfied losers; the next we were rabid fanatics." Stargirl, on the other hand, persists in associating with and even celebrating rivals. The contrast between Stargirl and her classmates suggests that bitter rivalry, while seemingly natural, is not the way things are supposed to be. The subsequent rejection of Stargirl suggests that she reminds students of something better they have it within themselves to be—they'd rather marginalize her than ask questions about themselves and consider changing. Stargirl's differentness, in fact, seems to be connected to buried aspects of human nature. Archie suggests to Leo that human beings are most "themselves" when they first wake up in the morning: "We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. [...] We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be." He implies that Stargirl is more attuned to that ancestral world than her peers and embodies certain aspects of it in her "strange" behavior. One example of this primordial strangeness is Stargirl's random acts of kindness to strangers. While Leo briefly dates Stargirl, "We delivered many potted violets. And CONGRATULATIONS! balloons. And cards of many sentiments. […] You would never mistake one of her cards for a Hallmark, but I have never seen cards more heartfelt. They were meaningful in the way that a schoolchild's homemade Christmas card is meaningful. She never left her name." Stargirl's kindness is characterized by childlike attentions to strangers—childlike in sentiment as well as expression. It's as if she's connected to a socially undeveloped, yet sincere, version of human nature. When Leo tries to explain that barging into other people's lives—even in well-intentioned ways, like dropping by a private funeral or giving an injured kid a bike because you truly care—is generally not viewed as socially acceptable, Stargirl begins to cry, saying, "I'm not connected!" She means that she isn't connected to the conventionality that most people "just know" intuitively and which tends to produce social conformity. Ironically, though, Stargirl is "connected" to something deeper: a version of human nature that isn't fettered by artificial barriers between people and is freer to express kindness. There's something raw about Stargirl. Even her best deeds have an unpolished and sometimes ambiguous quality about them—like assuming that shy kids love having "Happy Birthday" sung to them in the high school cafeteria. If Spinelli argues that Stargirl is connected to a more primal version of human nature, perhaps it's also true that her unrefined kindness could stand to learn a few things about "ordinary" humanity. Nevertheless, the mysterious way in which Stargirl's kindness shapes later generations still suggests that her raw form is superior, in some ways, to the more cluttered, stifled kind that has built up over the years. - Theme: Seeing, Visibility, and Invisibility. Description: Stargirl opens with the story of Leo Borlock receiving a porcupine tie in the mail, in response to a newspaper article about his necktie collection. "At the time I simply considered the episode a mystery. It did not occur to me that I was being watched. We were all being watched," he writes. This ominous-sounding statement actually refers to the harmless Stargirl, who keeps a close watch on people and events in Mica, Arizona, in order to cheer and support anyone who needs it. In time, Leo, who himself has a cameraman's eye for his environment, learns about Stargirl's way of seeing the world and witnesses its effects on those around her. By showing Stargirl through Leo's eyes, and revealing Stargirl's community through her eyes, Spinelli suggests that people's experiences of the world around them are largely determined by what they choose both to see and not to see. Leo is one example of a character who "sees," though his observations are mostly limited to his natural environment, and his eyes are only beginning to be opened to other people. As a newcomer to Arizona, Leo had to cultivate an appreciation for the seeming monotony of the desert: "What you notice [in the Sonoran Desert] are the saguaros. To the newcomer from the East, it's as simple as that. The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo." Leo's appreciation for the beauty of what seems at first to be a barren, unvarying wasteland anticipates his later appreciation for the uprising of individuality that blossoms across Mica High in Stargirl's wake. Leo's ability to notice the beauty of nature makes him more open to Stargirl's beauty than many of his peers: "each night in bed I thought of [Stargirl] as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things." Leo's sensitivity to the "otherness of things"—something he's cultivated through his enjoyment of the unshaded moonlight and the variety of the desert—prepares him to appreciate Stargirl's "otherness," too. Stargirl sees even more than Leo does. She is especially aware of those who aren't usually seen by others, and she transforms both her own and others' lives accordingly. After Stargirl becomes a cheerleader, she cheers for anyone and everything—even an unpopular kid throwing away a piece of litter. The unprecedented experience of being noticed in this way is both mortifying and thrilling: "People who never even saw you before are smiling at you and slapping your back and pumping your hand, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is calling your name, and you're feeling so good you pretty much just float on home from school." Such recognition has both personal and broader social repercussions. For example, within the first few months of Stargirl's arrival at Mica High, her kindness to those who are typically ignored transforms the whole environment there: "It was wonderful to see […] We were awash in tiny attentions. […] For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled. […] We discovered the color of each other's eyes." People who've barely looked at each other now notice and acknowledge one another's presence. The joy of being recognized inspires kids to recognize others in turn, leading to a kinder, mutually supportive environment that contrasts sharply with the atomized, clique-driven, and lonely world it was before. Stargirl's ability to "see" extends to her awareness of the broader community. She regularly hunts through the "fillers" in the newspaper and monitors the 41 bulletin boards in town for clues to things others would overlook: "A filler doesn't need to be 'news.' It doesn't need to be important. It doesn't even need to be read. All it's asked to do is take up space. […] It might mention that so-and-so's cat is missing. Or that so-and-so has a collection of antique marbles. 'I search through fillers like a prospector digging for gold,' she said." Stargirl notices the people and events that are conventionally thought to "take up space," and she sees them differently—as worthy of love, attention, and celebration. In contrast, not being seen is socially devastating and can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. At first, Stargirl seems oblivious when she's booed or ridiculed for things like cheering for Mica High's basketball opponents: "Then came the boos. She didn't seem to notice. She did not seem to notice. Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable." Stargirl is so focused on seeing the happiness and pain of others that she's unaware when the hostile gaze of her peers is directed at her. Eventually, though, Leo—who's much more attuned to Mica High's social order—points out to Stargirl that she's being shunned (intentionally not seen) by the student body. Though this doesn't deter her from continuing to show kindness to others and even winning the state oratory contest with a characteristically quirky speech, she is heartbroken when her peers virtually ignore her historic victory, realizing once and for all that she's not accepted by them. She disappears from Mica High not too long after—the shunning becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, Stargirl's peers treat her like she's invisible, so she takes that cue to slip out of sight for real. As his romance with Stargirl blossoms, Leo marvels that Stargirl "was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day. […] She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see. She was forever tugging my arm and saying, 'Look!'" Stargirl isn't just an observer of her world, but the "light" by which other people see things. This is her biggest legacy in the book: a light that lingers even after she has disappeared from the story herself. - Theme: Friendship, Love, and Social Pressure. Description: Much of the drama in Stargirl can be traced through Leo's friendship and romance with Stargirl. Leo himself is a somewhat shy, retiring young man who prefers to stay in the background. He's simultaneously drawn to Stargirl's unusual beauty and yet repelled by the social rejection that comes of associating with her at Mica High. Although Leo is Stargirl's boyfriend for a while, their overall relationship is fairly representative of the reaction of most of Stargirl's peers at Mica High. By following their relationship through puzzlement to infatuation to final rejection, Spinelli argues that even when genuine friendship develops, the pull of peer pressure is almost impossible for the average young person to overcome.  Leo is drawn to Stargirl, even as he's perplexed and repelled by her strangeness. While his classmates speculate that Stargirl can't be real, Leo can't stop thinking about her: "each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. […] In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert." Leo is drawn to Stargirl's "otherness" and even feels a mysterious personal connection to it. Though he tries to stay away, Leo can't resist trying to understand Stargirl and wants to be part of her life. "Meanwhile, I kept my distance. I observed her as if she were a bird in an aviary […] Then one day after school I followed her. I kept at a safe distance. […] We trekked all over Mica, past hundreds of grassless stone-and-cactus front yards," all the way into the desert after nightfall. This simultaneous push and pull is similar to Stargirl's power over much of Mica High, although Leo, unlike most people, dares to get close—seeing her as a person, not just an exotic newcomer to speculate about. Even though Leo genuinely likes Stargirl, however, he's haunted by his desire to be liked by his peers, too. When he finds a valentine from Stargirl in his notebook, Leo has to summon the courage to thank Stargirl when she openly confronts him in the cafeteria: "I knew I had to turn around and speak to her, and I knew she was going to stand there until I did. This was silly, this was childish, this being terrified of her. What was I afraid of, anyway? […] I felt heavy, as if I were moving through water, as if I were confronting much more than a tenth-grade girl with an unusual name. […] I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame." Even though Leo is genuinely dazzled by Stargirl's attentions, he is humiliated by public recognition of their bond. His inner conflict sets the tone for their stormy relationship. Archie Brubaker confronts Leo with the question, "Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others'?" Leo is tormented over this: "I suffered. But whose sake was I suffering for? […] I became angry. I resented having to choose. I refused to choose. I imagined my life without her and without them, and I didn't like it either way. I pretended it would not always be like this. […] I pretended she would become more like [everyone else] and they would become more like her[.]" Leo cares for Stargirl, but he also doesn't want to be deprived of the esteem of his peers, who shun him for befriending her. Leo's attempt to have it both ways represents the strong pull of peer approval. Despite his genuine fondness for Stargirl, Leo ends up giving in to peer pressure. When Stargirl transforms herself into an "average teenager," Leo's response to her new appearance is telling: "Stargirl had vanished into a sea of [average girls], and I was thrilled. […] I grabbed her, right there outside the lunchroom in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, I hoped they were […]  I had never been so happy and so proud in my life." Leo no longer cares what other people think about his relationship with Stargirl. In contrast to his embarrassment and avoidance while Stargirl was being herself, he now wants people to see that they're together, and to admire their association. When Leo suggests that Stargirl back off of her aggressively "normal" persona instead of giving it up altogether, she responds to him with disarming compassion: "'Because we live in a world of them, right? You told me that once […] I know you're not going to ask me to the Ocotillo Ball. It's okay.' She gave me her smile of infinite kindness and understanding, the smile I had seen her aim at so many other needy souls, and in that moment I hated her." Stargirl knows Leo won't ask her to the school dance because, at the end of the day, he's too conventional to be at peace with her strangeness. Leo hates that she sees him as an object of care just like the many ordinary folks she's helped in Mica—and he also hates that she's right about him. Leo's conflicted responses to Stargirl are one of the most frustrating aspects of the novel. Because he's an outsider in Mica himself and a sensitive, good-hearted kid, it's hard not to root for him, especially when he becomes one of the few students to give Stargirl a genuine chance. At the same time, his reluctance to give up his peers' approval is disappointing and undercuts expectations for a happy, romantic ending. Spinelli seems to provoke this discomfort intentionally, suggesting that most people would likely respond to Stargirl much as Leo did. In later years, a mature Leo is regretful, too—he's always haunted by what could have happened with Stargirl if only he'd stood strong. - Climax: Arriving home from the state oratorical contest, Susan/Stargirl is greeted by one classmate instead of the hero's welcome she envisioned. - Summary: When Leo Borlock was a little boy, his uncle gave him a porcupine necktie. As a newcomer to Mica, Arizona, Leo decided to start a porcupine necktie collection. His collection is mentioned in a small newspaper feature on Leo's 14th birthday. A few days later, Leo receives a package containing another porcupine necktie. The sender is a complete mystery. On Leo's first day of 11th grade, all of Mica High is whispering about a new 10th-grade girl named Stargirl Caraway. Stargirl wears flowing dresses and carries a ukulele on her back. Leo's best friend, Kevin, tells him that Stargirl was homeschooled until recently. They make plans to interview Stargirl on Hot Seat, the student TV show they co-created. Over the coming days, Stargirl's strange outfits—and her habit of serenading kids in the lunchroom—lead to speculations that she's a fake. Stargirl also brings her pet rat, Cinnamon, to school and has an unsettling habit of greeting strangers in the hallways. Mica High is "not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity," and Stargirl's ways continue to baffle the other kids. Leo, however, decides there's something wonderfully real about her, though he can't pinpoint what it is. A few weeks later, Stargirl shows up at the Mica High football game and thrills the normally dull crowd by dancing around the field. Soon after, the head cheerleader invites Stargirl to join the squad. Leo and Kevin ask the advice of Archie Brubaker, a retired paleontologist who mentors the kids of Mica. Archie admits that Stargirl is very different, but that he believes she's closer to "who we really are." He tells the boys that they'll know Stargirl "more by your questions than by her answers." By December, Stargirl has become the most popular kid in school. Both boys and girls—shy, popular, athletic, and nerdy kids alike—are drawn to her. Inspired by Stargirl's kindness, kids start acknowledging and celebrating one another, and they express their individuality more in their dress, activities, and opinions. School spirit grows alongside the outburst of nonconformity. Leo looks back on this time as a "golden age" that wasn't to last long. Things change as the Mica High Electrons make the state basketball playoffs. Suddenly, Stargirl's overenthusiastic, goofy cheering becomes threatening: she starts offering cheers for the opposing teams. When Stargirl is interviewed on Hot Seat, the student "jury" panel, led by Stargirl's meanest detractor, Hillari Kimble, turns hostile. They start by criticizing Stargirl's name and out-of-bounds cheering, and end by hurling accusations, claiming Stargirl just wants attention and demanding, "Why can't you be normal?" After Mica High is eliminated from the playoffs, Leo finds a childish valentine in one of his notebooks. It's from Stargirl. Conflicted, Leo avoids Stargirl at first, but he's helplessly drawn to her. Their first date is a walk in the desert, where Stargirl teaches Leo how to meditate. Leo is giddy with happiness about their relationship and is oblivious to much else. After a few days, though, Leo notices that the entire student body is shunning the two of them. Kevin explains that this is because they hold Stargirl responsible for sabotaging Mica High in the basketball tournament. When Leo seeks out Archie's advice, Archie says that Stargirl seems to be in touch with a more primitive part of humanity that has become obscured in most people. He says the only question that matters is whose affection Leo values more: Stargirl's or the other students'. Meanwhile, Leo and Stargirl go exploring together, and Stargirl teaches Leo how to see the beauty and magic in everyday things. He also helps Stargirl on her secret missions, delivering cards and gifts to strangers. He realizes that Stargirl was the sender of his porcupine necktie two years ago. As much as Leo loves spending time with Stargirl, he is also tormented by his classmates' shunning. He wishes he could have it both ways—Stargirl and his peers' acceptance. He finally confronts Stargirl—doesn't she care what everyone thinks of her? Stargirl is baffled by Leo's instinctive connection to "everybody else"—something she realizes she lacks. Leo tries to explain the importance of going along with the group because, like it or not, "we live in a world of 'them,'" and "they" don't like Stargirl. A couple days later, Stargirl appears at school dressed in "normal" clothes, calling herself by her birth name, Susan. Leo is delighted and now enjoys being seen with her in public. But Susan's desperate attempts to conform don't win her classmates' affection. But then Susan has a vision that she wins the state oratorical contest and receives a hero's welcome, finally becoming popular. As she'd predicted, Susan's oratorical performance is a resounding victory. But when they return to Mica High, nobody but two teachers and Susan's friend Dori Dilson has shown up to cheer for her. At school the following Monday, Susan is Stargirl once again. She kisses Leo and tells him she's given up on being normal. She also knows he won't ask her to the upcoming Ocotillo Ball, and tells him it's okay. At the Ocotillo Ball, Stargirl shows up alone. She wears a regal outfit and joyfully dances solo. One guy finally asks Stargirl to dance, and not long after, she's leading a line of students in a goofy version of the bunny hop. The long line of kids wanders off into the desert and returns, still dancing. The dance is remembered decades after the fact. Before Stargirl leaves, Hillari Kimble slaps Stargirl for "[ruining] everything," but Stargirl just kisses her cheek in return. Nobody from Mica High sees Stargirl again. Later, Archie informs Leo that Stargirl has moved to Minnesota with her family. He shows Stargirl's secret "office" for doing kindnesses to people to Leo: a toolshed filled with art supplies, a birthday calendar, and meticulous files on everybody at Mica High. Fifteen years later, Leo is a set designer back East. Nowadays, Mica High has a "Sunflower Club" dedicated to good deeds, a ukulele player in the marching band, and a tradition of cheering for their opponents. Leo still thinks about Stargirl all the time and wonders if he'll ever get another chance with her. But he doesn't feel alone. Just before his most recent birthday, he received a porcupine necktie in the mail.

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: Starship Troopers - Point of view: First Person - Setting: 27th-century Earth and several other planets - Character: Johnnie Rico. Description: Johnnie Rico was born into a wealthy Filipino family on Earth in the Terran Federation of the future. His upbringing is normal, if privileged: his family are law-abiding, upstanding legal residents of the Federation, but he doesn't come from a family with a history of military service. As he approaches high school graduation, his parents expect he'll attend elite universities to prepare for eventually taking over the family business. However, inspired overtly by his friends Carl and Carmen and more subtly by the subject matter Mr. Dubois teaches in History and Moral Philosophy class, Johnnie decides to volunteer for Federal Service shortly after his 18th birthday. His coming-of-age story, which plays out across his basic training, early military career, and stint at Officer Candidate School, showcases the development of a bright and promising child into a dutiful and virtuous future citizen of the Federation. Key to this story are his relationships with a series of father figures, whom he respects and emulates. He respects and eventually comes to admire Zim in basic training; he readily accepts guidance from Colonel Nielssen and Captain Blackstone while in OCS; and—once they're reunited and united by military service—he leans on his own Father for guidance and support. While Johnnie's initial motives for volunteering—a mix of wanting to impress his friends and an unfocused desire for franchise and the pride of citizenship—aren't very sophisticated, he readily absorbs the lessons that his military training and career offer. He attends to formal lessons, like combat drills and H&MP lectures, but he also learns by his own experience and the lessons of others: witnessing Hendrick's defensiveness about his treatment in basic training teaches Johnnie to quietly accept his own punishment when he later messes up. Johnnie represents the ideal soldier and provides a clear demonstration of how military service teaches and develops the civic duty required of Federation citizens. - Character: Sergeant Zim (The Sergeant). Description: Sergeant Zim instructs recruits as a company commander at Camp Arthur Currie. He's been there for long enough to have trained Captain Frankel when he was a recruit. Zim carries himself with dignity and style; Johnnie's initial impression of him is that he doesn't need sleep—just maintenance every several thousand miles, like a well-oiled machine. And Zim is, in many ways, a well-oiled military machine, an embodiment of the "one-man catastrophe" he's training his recruits to be. He's a competent fighter who easily bests four recruits in hand-to-hand combat on the first morning—despite being much older than them—and then leads morning calisthenics without breaking a sweat. He honors military doctrine and believes in civic virtue and duty, which he tries to cultivate among his recruits. When he fails to do so and Hendricks earns himself a dishonorable discharge, Zim feels personally responsible for his student's failure. He is an important father figure to Johnnie. When the Bug war breaks out, he returns to active duty and is assigned Fleet Sergeant under Captain Blackstone. He serves as the first platoon's sergeant under Johnnie on his apprenticeship mission. On Planet P, Zim demonstrates his sense of duty, his willingness to put his life on the line for a mission, and his considerable experience by recognizing the Bug attack as a desperate feint and taking the opportunity to drop into the tunnels and capture a Bug brain. For his role in accomplishing that critical mission, he receives a field commission. - Character: Johnnie's Father (Mr. Rico). Description: Johnnie's Father runs a successful family business that's been passed down for generations because the family hasn't bothered with Federal Service. He dotes on his son and gives Johnnie expensive presents, like a helicopter for his birthday or a vacation on Mars for his graduation. But he is also somewhat domineering and believes that his plans for his son are best, so he refuses to speak to Johnnie after he volunteers. Later, he reveals that his silence was also motivated by his own sense of internal dissatisfaction that he himself had not volunteered despite his strong conviction that it was the right thing to do. After the Bugs attack Buenos Aires, he can no longer justify his continued inaction; in part to avenge the death of Johnnie's Mother, but mostly to fulfil his sense of civic duty and to prove that he's a man, not just a piece of the economic machine, he enlists in Federal Service and joins the M.I. After the attack on Sheol decimates his first platoon, he's reassigned to Rasczak's Roughnecks just as Johnnie detaches for Officer Training School. When Johnnie, now an officer, inherits the command of his old unit from Jelly, Mr. Rico has become the Roughnecks' platoon sergeant. - Character: Mr. Dubois. Description: Mr. Dubois served in the M.I. and achieved the rank of lieutenant-colonel before retiring and becoming an instructor of History and Moral Philosophy. He served with Mr. Weiss and Sergeant Zim; both still hold him in high regard and value his opinion of Johnnie. He's disabled, having lost his left arm in combat. Although he loudly bemoans the total lack of civic virtue among his students in class, he can sense Johnnie's potential and isn't surprised to learn that he's volunteered. It's for this reason that he's one of Johnnie's father figures. Mr. Dubois uses his connections to keep an eye on Johnnie as he trains and serves. His letter to Johnnie at Camp Currie inspires Johnnie to stick through his "hump" rather than resigning. His admiration for his former student is so strong that he writes to Colonel Nielssen to ask that Johnnie be given the same set of probationary pips that he himself wore when he was an officer in training. Because he teaches History and Moral Philosophy class, and flashbacks to these lessons are often positioned as commentary or explanation for various episodes in the book, Mr. Dubois' voice seems to most closely approximate the book's beliefs about the themes it explores, especially citizenship, moral decline and discipline, and communism and moral individualism. - Character: Colonel Nielssen. Description: Fleet General Nielssen serves as the Commandant of the Officer Candidate School on Sanctuary, having taken a temporary pay cut and rank assignment of colonel to qualify. Because of this he exemplifies the ideal soldier—one who's so dedicated to military service that he skips a comfortable and honorable retirement to continue to play an active role in the military long after he's disqualified for combat roles. A disabled combat veteran, he spends most of his time in a wheelchair, although he's able to stand and walk for brief periods like parade and inspection. He worries about the safety and success of his cadets, and he dispenses a great deal of advice when giving them their temporary commissions and sending them on their training missions. He respects Johnnie enough to trust that he'll be able to break the string of bad luck that's plagued the temporary commission pips that he himself broke in on his apprenticeship cruise many years prior. - Character: Captain Blackstone. Description: On the Tours, Johnnie serves under Captain Blackstone of Blackie's Blackguards during his apprenticeship cruise. Blackstone serves as an important father figure to Johnnie, lavishing attention and advice on him to help shape him into an outstanding officer. Blackstone himself wears many hats and gracefully balances obedience to doctrine and the chain of command with clear, independent thinking; Sergeant Zim respects his "hunches" because they often keep his men out of trouble. While he does overrule Johnnie several times during the mission, for the most part he's willing to step back and let him call the shots during "Operation Royalty," and he's impressed enough by Johnnie's performance to recommend him for officer. - Character: Sergeant Jelal (Jelly). Description: Sergeant Jelal is Lieutenant Rasczak's platoon sergeant and right-hand man until the Lieutenant's death, when he is promoted to platoon commander. Jelly is of Finnish and Turkish descent, and he was born on one of the Terran Federation colonies. His elevated position in the platoon's hierarchy thus demonstrates the meritocratic impulse of the Federal Service, in which personal character is far more important than race or birthright. Jelly is demanding on duty but friendly off duty, a sort of "mother" to his men. And he ignores doctrine to allow Ace and Johnnie to make it back to the retrieval boat when they must retrieve a wounded soldier, Dizzy Flores. This shows his devotion to the cohesion and safety of the group, as he also risks his own life to complete the pickup. - Character: Ace. Description: Ace serves in Rasczak's Roughnecks. He's a career infantryman with the rank of corporal and he cares fiercely about his men, risking his life to pick up Dizzy Flores when he's wounded on a mission. When the assistant first section leader dies, Ace prefers to stay with his squad rather than be promoted, which places Johnnie above him in the platoon's chain of command. Johnnie feels he must assert his right to give Ace orders by challenging him to a fistfight, and although Ace wins, he demonstrates his willingness to follow Johnnie's orders by letting him land the final blow. Ultimately the two men become close, with Ace using his father figure position to encourage Johnnie to go career and try for Officer Candidate School. - Character: Ted Hendrick. Description: Ted Hendrick volunteered for Federal Service because he wanted to earn his franchise and go into politics so he could make some changes to the way the military and government run things. In basic training at Camp Currie, however, he demonstrates an insufficient sense of duty and a general lack of discipline when he breaks a "freeze" order because of his personal discomfort. He compounds his error by striking back at Sergeant Zim and demanding a hearing with Captain Frankel, where he proceeds to earn a court-martial with his insistence that it's unfair for the instructors to guide the recruits with corporal punishment. After a field court-martial presided over by Lieutenant Spieksma, Hendrick is sentenced to five lashes as administrative punishment, followed by a discharge from the Army that will prevent him from ever becoming a citizen or serving in politics. He thus serves as a warning to those who volunteer for the wrong reasons and as the proof that people who aren't capable of military service won't make suitable citizens. - Character: Major Reid. Description: Major Reid, a disabled combat veteran, teaches History and Moral Philosophy class at Officer Candidate School on Sanctuary. Although he's blind, he can point his face toward and call on cadets by name as if he could see them. He demands precision and historical accuracy in their understanding of the course material, and in this way he helps to clarify the relationship between the military and civilians in the Terran Federation. - Character: Captain Frankel. Description: Captain Frankel commands the battalion at Camp Currie, where he once did his own basic training under instructor Sergeant Zim. He's good at hand-to-hand combat and performs his actions with style. Yet he's overworked with administrative tasks, and he feels a deep sense of personal responsibility for the recruits. He goes out of his way to avoid having to hold a court-martial for Ted Hendrick, and when Hendrick forces his hand, he still works to keep the punishment to a minimum. Later, he expresses relief when Johnnie earns administrative punishment but accepts it without complaint. - Character: Carl. Description: Carl and Johnnie are childhood best friends who share "everything" from Carl's engineering lab to Johnnie's helicopter. Carl is a science whiz, and Johnnie enjoys taking his direction on engineering projects. His decision to serve a term in the Federal Service's research and development arm before going to college inspires Johnnie to consider volunteering, too. It also demonstrates his independence and sense of duty; unlike Johnnie, he doesn't allow his parents' concerns about his choice to dissuade him, even temporarily. During the Bug War, Carl dies in an attack on the research station on Pluto. - Character: Al Jenkins. Description: Al Jenkins is a recruit at Camp Currie with Johnnie; on the first day, he sneezes during morning exercises and Sergeant Zim sends him to run around a distant building to "warm up." Although he's frustrated by this experience, basic training helps him develop the necessary discipline to make a good soldier. After basic, he's assigned to Willie's Wildcats with Johnnie and Kitten Smith. He survives "Operation Bughouse" and is reassigned with Johnnie to Rasczak's Roughnecks, where he dies covering a pickup shortly before Johnnie goes to Officer Candidate School. - Character: Carmen Ibañez. Description: Carmen is a classmate and friend of Johnnie's who volunteers for service on her 18th birthday, along with Carl. Johnnie's decision to enlist is partially inspired by Carmen, whom he wants to impress. She's as intelligent as she is beautiful, and she's readily accepted into Federal Service for pilot training. She and Johnnie stay in touch throughout their training, and Johnnie continues to find her beauty and her example inspiring. - Character: Fleet Sergeant Ho. Description: Fleet Sergeant Ho is the face of Federal Service at the recruiting office where Johnnie, Carl, and Carmen volunteer. He's a proud combat veteran of the M.I., where he lost both his legs and most of his right arm. It's his job to scare away as many people as he can who volunteer without fully understanding the weight of that decision. - Character: Breckenridge. Description: Private Recruit Breckenridge steps forward first to answer Sergeant Zim's challenge of hand-to-hand combat on the first day of basic training. He's large, tall, broad, and a former football player; he has a thick southern accent and a beautiful singing voice. Zim quickly defeats him, breaking his arm in the process, but Breckenridge doesn't harbor ill-will towards the Sergeant, instead boasting that he'll eventually beat the instructor. He dies in the Canadian Rockies while on a wilderness survival drill; after the other recruits find his body, he's posthumously awarded the rank of Private First Class—the first in the class to be given rank—and buried with full honors. - Character: Carruthers. Description: Carruthers is a 35-year-old "geezer" who attends Camp Currie. Despite his Harvard education, he's fully committed to his Federal Service, refusing a medical discharge even after being so badly injured he can't finish basic training. Following a reassignment, he ends up as third cook on a navy ship, where Johnnie later runs into him and discovers that he's still as proud to be an alum of Camp Currie as of Harvard. - Character: Supply Sergeant. Description: One of the instructors at Camp Currie, the Supply Sergeant's fatherly manner belies the extensive military experience that the ribbons on his uniform spell out for those who can read their code. When he advises Johnnie to tailor his own uniform and provides him the materials for this work, he teaches an important lesson about discipline and responsibility. - Character: N. L. Dillinger. Description: N. L. Dillinger volunteered for Federal Service but deserts after just two days of basic training. He then kidnaps a young girl, Barbara Anne Enthwaite, demanding a ransom and mistreating her until he finally murders her. When he's caught by a local tribunal, they discover he's a deserter and return him to Camp Currie. Regimental Command gives Dillinger a bad conduct discharge and carries out the punishment for his crimes—hanging. He serves as an extreme example of moral decay; in punishing him, the military both asserts its ability and right to enforce law and order and demonstrates its moral imperative to "take care of its own," even when they don't deserve it. - Character: Lieutenant Rasczak. Description: Lieutenant Rasczak embodies the ideal qualities of an officer in the M.I., and his men—including Johnnie—look up to him adoringly. To his soldiers, he's like a distant father or demigod, somewhat aloof in formal situations, but always aware of each and every man on the battlefield. He won't leave a soldier behind and in fact dies while rescuing an injured private. His example—his willingness to put his body on the line for the good of his men and of the Terran Federation generally—shines out in Johnnie's mind as the perfect example of what it is to be a citizen - Character: Cadet Hassan ("the Assassin"). Description: Cadet Hassan, "the Assassin," was field commissioned as a first lieutenant, but he still attends Officer Candidate School with Johnnie, because his lack of formal education would otherwise impede his further promotion. Colonel Nielssen gives him his apprenticeship assignment—and a great deal of advice—at the same time as Johnnie and Byrd. - Character: Cadet Byrd ("Birdie"). Description: Cadet Byrd is one of Johnnie's classmates at Officer Candidate School; he, Johnnie, and Hassan are all given their temporary assignments together. He's very small and quite young; Johnnie estimates he could be as young as 18 or 19 years old. He's also brilliant and well-educated, and the cadets all think he's got what it takes to be a General. He dies on his training mission but does so in a way that earns him a commendation for his actions. - Character: Lieutenant Spieksma. Description: Lieutenant Spieksma works at Regimental Headquarters when Johnnie is at Camp Currie; he presides over Hendrick's field court-martial. Like Captain Frankel and Sergeant Zim, he understands the seriousness of Hendrick's crime, but wants to avoid the death penalty. After declaring Hendrick's punishment, however, he indicates the seriousness of the crime by spelling out the actions that Frankel could have taken that would have led to capital punishment. - Character: Kitten Smith. Description: "Kitten" Smith earned his name at Camp Currie when Corporal Jones criticized his hand-to-hand combat skills, claiming a kitten would punch harder. He goes to Seattle with Johnnie and Pat Leivy, where they end up in a fistfight with some angry merchant marines. Smith is sent with Johnnie and Al Jenkins to Willie's Wildcats after graduation, but he dies in the launch tube waiting for his first official drop when the Valley Forge and the Ypres collide. - Character: Johnnie's Mother. Description: Johnnie's Mother is a doting woman who is upset when Johnnie volunteers and worries about him when he's at Camp Currie. She writes him a letter reminding him of her maternal love and letting him know that he has a place to return to if he'd like to leave Federal Service; she thus represents the pull of "soft" civilian life against the harsh realities of military service. But she also symbolizes the importance of civic duty: she's on vacation in Buenos Aires when the Bugs attack, and although Johnnie doesn't learn about his loss for some time, when he does, his Mother's death becomes yet another facet of why he—and his Father—serve. - Character: Mr. Weiss. Description: Mr. Weiss once served in the K-9 corps. As the placement officer at Johnnie's local Federal Service recruiting office, he gives Johnnie placement and aptitude tests that reveal little aptitude or skill. But he's swayed by a recommendation from Mr. Dubois, whom he remembers from his time in the Army, and ultimately places Johnnie in the M.I. - Character: Pat Leivy. Description: Pat Leivy grew up in Seattle. He and Johnnie are recruits together at Camp Currie—where he was one of the witnesses to Hendrick's insubordination—and Camp Spooky Smith. It's his idea to go revisit Seattle on a day pass, where he, Kitten Smith, and Johnnie get into a fistfight with some belligerent merchant marines. - Character: Brumby. Description: Brumby has been leading one of the 1st platoon sections for a few weeks when Johnnie joins the Blackguards. Bolstered by the recommendations of Lieutenant Silva and Captain Blackstone, Johnnie promotes him to full sergeant. He and his section follow Sergeant Zim down into the Bugs' tunnels on Planet P. - Character: Shujumi. Description: Shujumi is one of Johnnie's fellow recruits at Camp Currie. His name and use of Japanese words indicate his heritage. His extensive martial arts training allows him to nearly best Sergeant Zim in hand-to-hand combat on the first day of camp, and he's later put in charge of teaching the other recruits. - Theme: Militarism. Description: The world in which Johnnie Rico, a "cap trooper" of the Terran Federation, comes of age is ruled by the military. Starship Troopers sees evolutionary pressures—especially survival of the fittest and self-preservation—as the primary drivers of humanity's destiny. Although a few civilians try to claim that violence isn't necessary, the Bugs' attack on Buenos Aires shatters this illusion, proving yet again that those who forget the power of violence to shape history pay a high price with their lives or freedoms. Later, Johnnie's research in Major Reid's History and Moral Philosophy Class is used to demonstrate the "moral perfection" of war. From Mr. Dubois, Johnnie already knew that morals arise from the survival instinct. So does population pressure—if more people survive, there are more people around—which is the root of all wars. Since war is necessary and good, the men and women who volunteer for military service—at least those who don't resign or find themselves kicked out for bad conduct, like Hendrick and Dillinger—are presumed to have fully developed morals. Johnnie, the model soldier, serves because he wants to. By the time he gets into Officer Candidate School, being a soldier has become its own reward, and he's forgotten that the right to vote and the pride of full citizenship were his initial reasons for volunteering. The number of disabled cap troopers who occupy desk jobs—from amputee Sergeant Ho at the recruitment office to wheelchair-bound Colonel Nielssen and blind Major Reid at Officer Candidate School—offer further proof of the pride soldiers take in their Mobile Infantry (M.I.) membership. The Terran Federation defends its limited, militarized system government with the arguments that violence is inherent in the human survival instinct and that only harsh military service can prove that a person is capable of feeling civic virtue for people at a "scale" greater than their immediate family or "gang." But, by excluding civilian voices and leaning on scientific verifications or mathematical proofs that exist only in its futuristic world, Starship Troopers' ability to examine—or truly prove—these premises is limited. Civilian voices are infrequent and underdeveloped: the complaints of the merchant marines in Seattle aren't repeated in a way that readers could judge their accuracy, and the civilian doctor at the recruiting station doesn't offer much proof of his assertion that soldiers are merely "ants." Johnnie's Father offers the most fully developed civilian viewpoint at first. But he joins the M.I. partway through the war because he's got the character and civic virtue of a soldier, and so civilian life has left him feeling dissatisfied and frustrated. Moreover, it quickly punishes and discharges those who volunteer for ulterior motives as "bad," undisciplined soldiers like Hendrick. Hendrick's insubordination contrasts with counter-examples of civic virtue like Carruthers, an older recruit who can't cut it in the M.I. but prefers the very lowly job of third cook in the Navy to a medical discharge and civilian life. By focusing on the noble motives of Johnnie (service and brotherhood) and his father (civic virtue and proving that he's a man) while glossing over less pure reasons  for service (revenge for loved ones' deaths, the respect offered to soldiers and veterans), the novel upholds military glorification and avoids offering an alternative to militarism. - Theme: Citizenship. Description: In the futuristic society of Starship Troopers, only people who have served in the military become full citizens. Civilians are merely "legal residents," barred from voting or working in the government. The novel thus presents a strong argument that the most successful form of government is a limited democracy in which only those with moral virtue hold power. In History and Moral Philosophy Class, Major Reid demonstrates that all forms of government have been limited by arbitrary distinctions like gender, age, or class. While citizenship in the Terran Federation is limited, it's designed to select citizens that fulfill two very specific criteria: they value their franchise, and they have sufficient responsibility to balance out their power. Citizenship is limited because things are only valued if they come at a price; without truly winning, being awarded the prize for a competition is worthless. According to Mr. Dubois, the "decadent" democracies of the 20th century collapsed because their citizens thought they could vote for—and get—whatever they wanted without having to work for it. In contrast, soldiers prove that they're willing to risk even their lives for the good of the state. Moreover, soldiers prove their ability to put the welfare of the group above their own needs by protecting their mates in battle, leaving no one behind who's still alive, and even ensuring that criminals in their midst are properly punished. Merely wanting the franchise isn't enough to guarantee that one will use it responsibly, and so people who view Federal Service as a gateway to citizenship are usually weeded out. During basic training, for example, recruit Hendrick's unwillingness to tolerate personal discomfort for the good of his team means he fails on the second charge of citizenship—putting the good of the group above oneself—and so he's dishonorably discharged and barred from ever earning his franchise.  This system appears to benefit both civilians and citizens: civilians live in a safe and prosperous society, and they don't have to believe or express civic virtue—a valuation of something greater than oneself—if they don't really feel it. Johnnie's Father initially devalues service and the franchise as unimportant; he's more concerned with his own business holdings than the good of the whole Federation. However, at the time that Johnnie volunteered, he was feeling deep dissatisfaction that he eventually realized came from frustrated civic virtue and a feeling that he should participate in the protection of his society. However, the novel's view rests on the idea that everyone without enough civic virtue—for example, the selfish and immature Hendrick or the fully criminal Dillinger—will eventually fail or leave. It also leaves unanswered the question of how service can be totally voluntary when it is the only path to citizenship—something that would-be politicians and powerholders might value in its own right. - Theme: Moral Decline and Discipline. Description: Starship Troopers presents a vision of the future where humanity thrives in a stable, prosperous society organized by reason. By contrasting this futuristic society with the "history" of the late 20th century, taught by Mr. Dubois and Major Reid in their History and Moral Philosophy Classes, the novel suggests that the way to prevent moral decay is to instill moral sense by appealing to a person's survival instinct though the threat of public, physical punishment. The novel critiques the moral decline of mid-20th century culture, which it sees as taking a soft-on-crime approach and emphasizing individual rights instead of personal responsibility. According to this perspective, the "softness" of people in the 20th century took many forms: a belief that physical punishment of children—spanking, essentially—caused permanent psychic damage; an excess of non-combatant officers in the military; commissioning officers who had never been in battle to lead the military; and an assurance that they had an inalienable right to vote, even if they didn't have the wisdom to use that power properly. These were symptoms of a social failure to accept responsibility for one's actions. The Terran Federation is guided by a belief that moral sense is an extension of the survival instinct. While all humans have a survival instinct, it is only through education and discipline that a person can gain moral sense. This discipline is public corporal punishment. Parents "paddle" their children to teach them what to do and not to do, and likewise the instructors at basic training apply their canes to unruly recruits. Hendrick's inability to follow orders earns him ten lashes with a whip in the sight of all of the recruits, while Johnnie Rico earns five for endangering his teammates; in the civilian world, lashes are also mandated for crimes like drunk driving. The novel follows Johnnie as his military training and career help him grow from self-interest and allegiance to a very small circle of others (his Father and Mother, his best friend Carl, and his crush, Carmen) to higher ideals and to a valuation of society as a whole. He matures from a recruit who doesn't know how to take care of his own uniform to an officer candidate who is willing to get his hands dirty in the work of his platoon. Ultimately, he demonstrates his willingness to risk his life both for his platoon and for the mission of "Operation Royalty" on Planet P; in doing so, he demonstrates the internalized self-discipline that the novel holds up as an ideal. - Theme: Communism vs. Moral Individualism. Description: In Starship Troopers, the Terran Federation wages war with an alien species called the Pseudo-Arachnids, or Bugs, a battle that is symbolic of the strife between democracy and communism in the 20th century. The Bugs—which represent how effective communism would be in a species evolutionarily adapted to it—share a hive mind. While this centralized control by "brains" and "queens" allows workers or warriors to work together in perfect coordination, it also has disadvantages. The Bugs are absolutely dependent on their brain caste; when the brains are stunned by nerve agents or acoustic shock waves, the warriors become helpless, twitching automatons. When Sergeant Zim kidnaps a brain Bug, the warriors can't attack him because wounding or killing the brain would be like committing suicide. Moreover, the Bug brains apparently sacrifice more than 70% of their workers and warriors on Planet P without guilt or concern, and they abandon their wounded during battles. Conversely, although some civilians compare the troops to mere "ants," suggesting that they lack their own free will, human soldiers can only achieve coordination through intense and incessant training and practice that brings them into sync with each other. Additionally, they have a moral imperative to never abandon their wounded: Ace and Johnnie risk their lives to rescue Dizzy Flores; Lieutenant Rasczak dies rescuing one of his privates; and even the disgraced Dillinger is dealt with by his own regiment. According to the novel, communism, among a species of individuals guided by their survival instincts, is a sham. By contrast, the highest expression of humanity is the moral individualism demonstrated by the cap troopers, who willingly risk their lives for the good of the group, but maintain their ability to think and act independently. It is this independence that allows Johnnie to identify the Bugs' feint on Planet P, and which prods Zim to drop down into the Bugs' tunnel and complete the operation's mission. - Climax: Johnnie completes an operation on Planet P as a probationary third lieutenant. - Summary: In the distant future, humanity is united under the Terran Federation. In this society, the only way to earn franchise and full citizenship is through volunteering for "Federal Service" in the military. Despite his Father's wish that he remain a civilian and become involved in the family business, Johnnie Rico volunteers shortly after his 18th birthday, inspired by his friends Carl and Carmen and by his desire to achieve citizenship. Based on a letter of recommendation from his History and Moral Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dubois, Johnnie is assigned to the Mobile Infantry. These foot soldiers wear special armored suits that enhance their strength, speed, and armament while protecting them from enemy fire. Johnnie goes to Camp Arthur Currie on the northern prairies for his basic training, along with 2,009 other male recruits. They learn how to fight with everything from bare hands to simulated atomic bombs. The instructors intentionally make the training regimen as challenging as possible to weed out of the group those men who won't make capable soldiers because of their age or temperament. Johnnie himself nearly resigns during the "hump" of his training. Around this time, another recruit—Ted Hendrick—both disobeys Sergeant Zim's orders during a training drill and strikes him, giving him a black eye. Hendrick feels that the training and discipline are unfair and complains to the Battalion Commander, Captain Frankel. His admission of insubordination leads to a field court-martial, after which he is dishonorably discharged and publicly flogged. Just as he is about to hand in his resignation, Johnnie receives a letter from Mr. Dubois, who expresses pride in Johnnie's character and choice to volunteer. Bolstered by this vote of confidence, Johnnie decides to complete his term. The remaining challenges of training can't break his resolve to finish, even when he himself is flogged for actions during a training drill that would have cost the life of a teammate in real life. Although Johnnie earns the maximum administrative punishment of five lashes, he gets off light compared to another recruit named Dillinger. Dillinger deserted Camp Currie two days into basic training; while he was gone, he kidnapped, tortured, and murdered a little girl. When he's returned to the M.I. for punishment, he's dishonorably discharged and publicly hanged until he's dead. Once Johnnie and the recruits move from Camp Currie into the mountains for advanced training in the M.I.'s suits, they're given more freedom and can even travel to nearby cities on "liberty." Johnnie visits Vancouver and Seattle with two other recruits, Kitten Smith and Pat Leivy; in Seattle, the three are attacked by resentful civilians. Realizing how easily they defeat these men shows Johnnie how much he's already changed during his training. By the time Johnnie graduates basic training and joins Willie's Wildcats as a private, the Terran Federation has moved from peace to a state of hostilities with two alien species called the "Skinnies" and the pseudo-arachnids or "Bugs." The Bugs, a species connected by a hive mind, attacked Buenos Aires. Johnnie makes his first combat drop in "Operation Bughouse," a Federation attack on the Bugs' home world. "Brain" Bugs coordinate the attacks of their lethal warriors, catching the M.I. off guard. Johnnie barely makes it off the planet alive; so many of the Wildcats die on Klendathu that the "orphaned" survivors are reassigned. Johnnie finds himself in Rasczak's Roughnecks, where he quickly finds a family among the other men in the unit. Johnnie is happy in the Roughnecks until he receives a letter from home telling him that his Mother had died in Buenos Aires. Assuming that his Father died there too, Johnnie finds himself orphaned. Shortly after this blow, Lieutenant Rasczak dies on a mission while rescuing a private. Military discipline and duty save the Roughnecks from their grief; despite their devastating personal losses, they must continue to behave like professional soldiers as the war continues. When the Roughnecks visit Sanctuary—a colony of the Terran Federation—for R&R, Johnnie's friend Ace talks him into making a career out of the army and taking the placement test for Officer Candidate School. Just as Johnnie detaches from the Roughnecks for OCS, he is reunited with his Father; some last-minute business kept his Father home from Buenos Aires during the Bug attack. Following his wife's death, Johnnie's Father left his business in an associate's hands and volunteered for Federal Service, requesting an assignment to the M.I. His first unit, like Johnnie's, had been decimated in a combat drop, but when he was reassigned, his request to join the Roughnecks was honored. Johnnie remains on Sanctuary for OCS while his father boards the Roger Young to ship out with the Roughnecks. At OCS, Johnnie receives a second training in History and Moral Philosophy under Major Reid. If high school H&MP teaches a teenager why a soldier should fight (to lay down his life between his home and the enemy), the OCS version elaborates on the purpose of violence in human history as a tool of evolution and covers the history of the current political system (in which only veterans can earn the right to vote and control the government). The final assignment of OCS is an apprenticeship cruise where the temporarily commissioned officers are battle-tested in the field. Johnnie's apprenticeship cruise is with Blackie's Blackguards. Because the lieutenant who should be mentoring Johnnie has fallen ill, Captain Blackstone himself takes Johnnie under his wing, helping him to develop a more mature approach to his soldiering. With the Blackstone's best Fleet Sergeant to assist him, Johnnie drops onto Planet P in command of a platoon for the first time. Their mission in "Operation Royalty" is to bleed the Bug forces dry enough that they can access the Bugs' tunnels and try to capture some of their brain caste or queens. When the Bugs overrun Johnnie's platoon, the Sergeant—who turns out to be Johnnie's old instructor, Sergeant Zim—sees an opportunity to go down into a hole and captures a brain Bug; Johnnie and the rest of the men follow after to rescue him. Johnnie is wounded by falling debris in the tunnels and wakes up aboard a Federation ship on its way back to Sanctuary, where he finishes OCS, is commissioned a second lieutenant, and is reassigned to the Roughnecks to serve under Lieutenant Jelal. Some years later, after Jelal has been wounded severely enough to retire from combat missions, Johnnie commands the Roughnecks—now "Rico's Roughnecks"—as they prepare to begin the Federation's final assault on Klendathu.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: Static - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Australia - Character: Anthony. Description: Anthony is the protagonist of "Static." He's Marie's husband, Margaret's brother, and Tom and Hannah's uncle. Throughout the family Christmas party that takes place during the story, readers learn that Anthony has strained, closed-off relationships with his wife, his mother, and his father. Although he has a "high-powered job" and all the material trappings of success, Anthony feels dissatisfied with and misunderstood by his family. In particular, his mother believes that "he'll never grow up," while Marie resents him for not wanting to have a baby as much as she does. Anthony also sees his affluent lifestyle as a betrayal of who he is rather than something to be proud of. His nephew Tom is the only member of his family he seems to genuinely connect with—indeed, the only point in the story when he seems genuinely happy is when they play with walkie-talkies together outside. The story implies that Anthony wants a family that's unconditionally loving, supportive, and effortless, much like his easy connection with Tom. The fun that he has with his nephew is enough to make Anthony realize that he doesn't want to have a child with Marie—a sudden epiphany that is so profound for Anthony that it literally brings him to his knees at the end of the story. In this way, Anthony is a man who's felt stifled and controlled by other people for so long that he doesn't know what he actually wants until a clear alternative presents itself. - Character: Marie. Description: Marie is Anthony's wife; she's a lawyer whom Anthony describes as an "immaculate blonde" but also "cold and stick-thin." The couple doesn't have a particularly happy marriage, primarily because Marie has become controlling and emotionally closed-off over the years. Throughout the story, Marie is preoccupied with creating the perfect Christmas meal for their family, intent on replicating the same picture-perfect, affluent lifestyle she sees advertised in her many magazines. She has a precise idea of what she wants her and Anthony's life to look like, and she gets upset when things don't go her way—when she thinks their new sofa is the wrong shade of taupe, for instance, or when conceiving a baby is taking longer than she wants it to. This fixation on perfection and control leads Marie to freeze Anthony out, leaving him to wonder whose side Marie will take when his mother criticizes him. At one point, he even questions if Marie loves him at all. Near the end of the story, Anthony has an epiphany that he doesn't want to have a child with Marie—or, it's implied, to be with her at all. In this way, Marie's artificially "trained" persona and high expectations backfire, as these qualities result in a lack of communication and intimacy that destroys the couple's relationship. - Character: Anthony's Mother. Description: Anthony describes his and his sister Margaret's mother as "hyper-conservative." There's a great deal of tension between her and Anthony during their family Christmas party, and it's implied that her relationship with her children has been strained and distant for some time—at one point during the party, she reflects that they're rarely "all together like this." Anthony's fraught relationship with his mother seems to stem from the fact that nothing he does is good enough for her: his mother thinks that "he'll never grow up" despite the clear success he's achieved in his life, and she often looks him with "contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence, the works." Anthony, on the other hand, is determined to "thwart her" with politeness during the party rather than standing up for himself or confronting his mother about her rude behavior. In this way, Anthony and his mother's dynamic is riddled with unspoken hurt and resentment, which seems to have eroded their relationship over time. Anthony's mother is also notably preoccupied with gifts and other material objects. She makes Anthony feel guilty about his expensive new house, and she lectures Margaret's son, Tom, about the expensive walkie-talkie set she got him for Christmas rather than simply letting him enjoy his new toy. Together, these tendencies characterize Anthony's mother as materialistic, unsupportive, and out of touch with her family members. - Character: Tom. Description: Tom is Anthony's 10-year-old nephew, Margaret and Ian's son, and Hannah's younger brother. He's a sweet, thoughtful boy who tries hard to do as he's told. During their family Christmas party, Anthony has the strong urge to hug Tom, whom he describes as "[t]oo troubled for a ten-year-old"—perhaps because his parents are struggling financially. At one point, Tom thanks his grandmother (Anthony and Margaret's mother) for the walkie-talkie set she got him, but she hardly notices when he kisses her on the cheek. From this, readers can gather that Anthony and his nephew are similar: they both try to win their family members' approval, though neither of them receives much recognition or affection for their efforts. This may be why Anthony and Tom seem to effortlessly connect with each other when they go outside to test the walkie-talkies: they seem to be similarly alienated in their family, and Tom is the only person whom Anthony is able to let loose with. The brief moment of lighthearted fun that Anthony has with Tom is perhaps what leads him to the epiphany that he doesn't want to have a baby with his wife, Marie—seemingly because he realizes that he wants all of his family relationships to be as natural and easy as his bond with Tom. - Character: Margaret. Description: Margaret is Anthony's sister, Ian's wife, and Tom and Hannah's mother. Margaret is the only adult in Anthony's family who's firmly on his side: whereas Anthony describes their mother and his wife, Marie, as judgmental and controlling, he thinks of Margaret as "loyal" and warm. He knows that only Margaret will defend him against his mother's snide remarks when he leaves the room, which is a testament to how strong their sibling bond is despite rarely seeing each other outside of holidays. But Anthony also feels guilty about the fact that Margaret and Ian are in "dire financial straits," whereas he and Marie are well-off and can seemingly afford anything they want. During the Christmas party, Anthony notices that Margaret and Ian look happy and in love—a stark contrast to his and Marie's own miserable relationship. In this way, Margaret's character represents the idea that money doesn't necessarily give people happiness or fulfillment, as her and Ian's marriage seems much more rewarding than Anthony and Marie's despite their financial difficulties. - Theme: Family, Marriage, and Dissatisfaction. Description: Anthony, the protagonist of "Static," is a man struggling to negotiate between what his family expects of him and what he wants out of life. While he longs for a supportive family and seems to like children, he feels trapped rather than excited by his wife, Marie's, businesslike approach to marriage and conceiving a baby. He also has a fraught and unsupportive relationship with his mother, which readers see play out during the family Christmas party that takes place during the story. Anthony's interactions with his family members, as well as his private thoughts, suggest that a family is only a source of joy and fulfillment when it's rooted in unconditional love and genuine connection. Otherwise, marriage and family relationships can be intensely stifling and dissatisfying. Anthony's relationships with his mother and Marie are characterized by criticism and hostility rather than love and acceptance. Anthony's mother makes numerous underhanded remarks to him during the party, subtly criticizing everything from the appetizers to his choice of home décor. Anthony knows that she thinks "he'll never grow up, no matter what sort of high-powered job he seems to find for himself," discounting the major life milestones (i.e., getting married, cultivating a successful career, buying a home) that her son has achieved. Rather than supporting Anthony, his mother is highly critical of him and places high expectations on him, making him feel like nothing he does is good enough. Anthony's marriage is similarly strained, as he misses who his wife used to be before she became controlling and antagonistic. Marie desperately wants a child, obsessively researching fertility and conception "like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win," and she resents Anthony because she doesn't think he wants a baby as much as she does. This conflict in their relationship causes Marie to act coldly toward him: at the party, she looks at him "murderous[ly]" and makes demands of him rather than asking him for help. At one point, Anthony looks across the room at her and wonders if she even loves him. Although one might assume that Anthony's wife and mother are the two women he should be closest to, they don't seem to love him unconditionally—and so his relationships with them are stressful and dissatisfying rather than comforting and fulfilling. Despite his troubled relationships, Anthony does seem to want a family—but one that's easygoing, supportive, and loving. On the night of Christmas Eve, Anthony rushes to the supermarket to get a last-minute ingredient for Christmas lunch. He notices that the person in front of him in the checkout line is buying simple premade food, which is quite the contrast to the elaborate feast that Marie insists on making for the party. This is enough to make him feel "an overwhelming, childish longing to follow them out and curl up in the back of their car and go home to their place," suggesting that he feels trapped in his own family and wants to be part of one that's more laidback and doesn't put so much pressure on him. Anthony's positive relationships with his sister Margaret and her son Tom provide further insight as to what he wants in a family. He fondly thinks of Margaret as warm and "loyal" for always defending him against their mother's snide comments, whereas he's not sure whose side Marie will take when he leaves the room. In addition, the one point in the story when Anthony seems genuinely happy is when he and Tom go outside to play with the walkie-talkie set that Tom got for Christmas. From these relationships, readers can glean that Anthony simply wants all of his family members to support and love him unconditionally, the way his sister does. Furthermore, if he's going to be a father, he likely wants it to feel organic and effortless—like his interactions with Tom—rather than forced. Yet Anthony doesn't seem to consciously realize what he wants out of life until the end of the story, which is a testament to how limiting and emotionally deadening dysfunctional family relationships can be. While Anthony and Tom are joyfully playing outside, Anthony looks at Marie through the kitchen window. His walkie-talkie has been emitting deafening static up until this point, symbolizing how Anthony's controlling wife and mother have left him figuratively deaf to his own desires and his ability to make decisions for himself. But as he gazes at his wife, "something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in"—the static dissipates, and Anthony suddenly understands that "nothing of him" could ever grow inside Marie. That is, he can never bring himself to have a child with her. Tom's voice comes through the walkie-talkie clearly just after this—"the clearest thing [Anthony has] ever heard." This moment represents a turning point for Anthony, as the effortless connection he shares with his nephew seems to free him and help him realize that his relationship with Marie is a dead end, devoid of any real care or affection. The static, both literal and figurative, has given way to clarity: Anthony can now see that while he couldn't choose the family he was born into, he does have a choice when it comes to marriage and fatherhood. The story ends on a somewhat optimistic note, then, as Anthony realizes (at least momentarily) that he isn't trapped in his dissatisfying life—he's free to create the kind of family he wants. - Theme: Communication and Authenticity. Description: Throughout Anthony's family Christmas party, it becomes clear that his relationships with his family members are far from close. The family rarely gathers together, and when they do, they're emotionally closed off from one another. None of them say what they actually think: Anthony's mother expresses herself through subtle passive-aggression and judgmental glances; his wife, Marie, has an entirely contrived personality and mannerisms; and Anthony and his father avoid conflict by keeping their thoughts and feelings private. As a result, the family doesn't communicate openly, and so they aren't able to genuinely connect and bond with one another. Through a series of tense and forced interactions, the story shows how ineffective communication and artificial personas can erode relationships and isolate people from one another. Both Anthony's mother and Marie put on false personas around other people, which makes Anthony feel like he can't have a real relationship with either of them. Both women primarily communicate not through words, but through harsh, judgmental looks that Anthony calls "Evil Rays." His mother's Evil Rays are particularly full of "contempt, accusation, disdain, puzzled faux-innocence." Alongside this, she makes comments throughout the story (about Anthony and Marie's choice of home decor, for instance) that sound polite but are actually meant as subtle insults. In this way, Anthony's mother never outright says what she thinks—instead, she conveys her true feelings through passive-aggressive compliments or nonverbally through facial expressions. And, as a result, Anthony feels like they can't be open or trust each other. Marie, too, is emotionally closed-off and inauthentic. Anthony remembers how, years ago, Marie used to have a "broad and unselfconscious" grin. Now, however, she has a different smile. It's a "trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself." Instead of openly expressing what she feels, Marie appears "trained" and "cool" at all times; she speaks and emotes in a measured, polite way, even when she's angry. Anthony can't stand this, as her artificial persona prevents the couple from hashing out their problems and leaves Anthony feeling resentful and distant from his wife. Anthony and his father also fail to openly express themselves, which further compounds the family's rift in communication. As a result of his mother and Marie's behavior, Anthony, too, feels pressured to put on a faux-polite persona and mediate his family's disagreements. In particular, he wants to "thwart [his mother] with unrelenting good cheer" rather than stand up for himself or stoop to her level during the Christmas gathering. He also passively accepts that whenever he leaves the room, his mother will openly criticize him in front of the rest of the family, and Marie may or may not defend him. In essence, Anthony quietly endures his mother and Marie's snide remarks and "murderous[]" looks, and so they continue to treat him like this throughout the party. His silent toleration of his wife and mother's mistreatment prevents him from truly resolving conflicts with either of them. Anthony's father, meanwhile, is similarly passive. Readers aren't given insight into his thoughts, and he's only mentioned a briefly, when the narration describes him watching a televised cricket game and good-naturedly eating one of Marie's appetizers to "keep the peace" during the party. He never challenges Anthony's mother's rude behavior or plays an active role in any of the family's conversations. This suggests that he, like Anthony, has chosen to stay quiet rather than involve himself in conflict—which further impedes the family's ability to communicate and meaningfully connect. These issues of emotional repression and poor communication have caused Anthony's relationships to suffer over time, which leaves him feeling isolated even when surrounded by family. Anthony reflects that, before the party, he told Marie that his parents wouldn't come to Christmas lunch unless they invited his sister Margaret and her husband and children. Moreover, during the party, Anthony's mother points out that "There's so few occasions we're all together like this." All of this hints that Anthony's family relationships are deeply broken, so much so that his parents aren't interested in seeing him and Marie, only Margaret's side of the family. They're all estranged from one another and rarely make an effort to gather together, likely as a direct result of their failure to open up and genuinely connect. Later that afternoon, while the family is opening gifts, Anthony looks over at Marie and wonders, "Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without makeup, does that count?" His uncertainty suggests that the lack of openness and authenticity in the couple's relationship has left them completely alienated from each other, to the point that Marie going makeup-free around Anthony is as intimate and vulnerable as they get. As a result of these strained relationships, Anthony feels completely alone, even on Christmas in a room full of his closest relatives. Any time there's a task or activity for him to do in another room, he "eagerly" jumps up and rushes to escape the "deoxygenated" feeling of being around his family. With this, the story suggests that a relationship devoid of authentic communication isn't much of a relationship at all—it's merely an obligation, one that's suffocating and emotionally exhausting rather than fulfilling. - Theme: Happiness, Consumerism, and Guilt. Description: Anthony's family prioritizes money and what it can buy—large houses, fancy food, expensive gifts—over personal relationships. At the family Christmas party that takes place during "Static," Anthony's wife, Marie, and his mother talk and act in ways that suggest they look to material goods for happiness, and that they value what the media tells them they should. Yet Anthony is unhappy despite having achieved an affluent lifestyle and being able to buy anything he wants—in fact, his wealth and success make him feel empty and guilty rather than fulfilled. With this, the story suggests that consumerism is a poor substitute for genuinely engaging with other people, and that money can be a source of stress and shame rather than happiness. Characters like Marie and Anthony's mother seem to think that money can buy happiness, and that emulating what they see in the media will give them the sort of life they want. At the Christmas party, Marie is fixated not on connecting with Anthony's family, but on creating an elaborate, multi-course meal that will impress the guests. She gathers recipes from "a pile of magazines hawking sunshine and patios and people in uncrushed white linen shirts," suggesting that these magazines are peddling not just recipes, but an entire lifestyle brand that Marie is trying to replicate. But Anthony warned her ahead of time that his "hyper-conservative" parents wouldn't like the fancy appetizers and cocktails she was planning to make, and indeed they don't. In this way, Marie is buying into a manufactured ideal of what advertisements suggest her life should look like, rather than accepting her life for what it is and catering to the people in it. Similarly, Anthony's mother harps on the expensive price of the gifts she bought Anthony's niece and nephew, Hannah and Tom, rather than viewing Christmas as an opportunity to be generous and genuinely connect with her grandchildren. It's possible that she, like Marie, bases her buying decisions on the media (in this case, advertisements for toys) because she assumes this will make her and her loved ones happy. After she gives Tom a walkie-talkie set, she lectures him about how much it cost and accepts his thanks and kiss on the cheek "without even looking at him, not really." This shows that Anthony's mother views gift-giving as a way to buy love and affection in lieu of genuine care and emotional involvement in her grandchildren's lives. But money certainly doesn't buy happiness in Anthony's case, as his affluent lifestyle actually makes him miserable. During the party, Anthony thinks back on signing the mortgage for his and Marie's new house. He'd felt "a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG." This language, evoking physical illness and a flatlined heartbeat, likens buying the house to a kind of death for Anthony. He also remembers how Marie used to affectionately call him "Ant" before they got the new house, but now she calls him Anthony—"a new name […] to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house." Rather than making him happy, his wealth and material possessions have only made him feel empty and disconnected from who he really is. It's also clear that Anthony and Marie have a broken marriage—at one point in the story, Anthony wonders if Marie loves him at all. Anthony's "high-powered job" and Marie's career as a lawyer don't seem to have given them anything besides material items like their large home and upscale furnishings. And these things don't create lasting happiness for the couple—their beautiful environment only makes their unpleasant relationship all the more apparent. Anthony's wealth even makes him feel guilty, and it drives a wedge between himself and his loved ones. At several points in the story, Anthony's mother makes subtle digs at Anthony and Marie's lifestyle. For instance, she tells Marie that she got her a "funny little present" for Christmas because "you're so hard to buy for, the two of you—I mean, my goodness, there's really absolutely nothing else you need, is there?" Anthony has previously described his mother as being full of "contempt" and "puzzled faux-innocence," so it's likely that her comment is meant as a passive-aggressive insult rather than a compliment. In this way, Anthony can't seem to win: he tries to appease Marie by buying her what she wants, but this makes his mother resent him for his perceived success. Anthony also feels guilty because he knows his sister Margaret and her husband, Ian, "are in some dire financial straits." This makes him feel like he has to "overcompensate" by giving his niece and nephew an expensive Christmas present (a Nintendo Wii console) and even offering Margaret and Ian one of his many plasma TVs to replace their outdated set. From this, it's clear that Anthony's affluence doesn't guarantee him happiness—in fact, it just seems to strain his relationships and make his life more complicated. At one point during the gathering, Anthony looks through his digital camera's viewfinder as he prepares to take a snapshot of his family. Through the camera, he notices how Margaret looks "overweight and worn and dowdy" next to the beautiful Marie. But from another angle, she looks "kind and comfortable, touching Ian's arm and smiling warmly," while Marie looks "cold" and unhappy by comparison. In essence, Anthony can see both "how [Margaret] sees them and how they see her, this life and that life." With this, the story suggests that people like Anthony and Marie, who have all the material trappings of success, may not be as happy as they seem. And by the same token, lasting happiness and fulfillment is found through meaningful connections, like the one Margaret and Ian seem to share, rather than money and consumption. - Climax: Anthony looks into the kitchen window at Marie and realizes that he can never bring himself to have a child with her. - Summary: At Anthony's family Christmas party, his mother turns her nose up at the punch that Anthony's wife, Marie, made. When his father, Frank, briefly leaves the lounge room to get a beer instead, Anthony feels suffocated around his mother and his wife. He can sense their hostile glances (which he calls "Evil Rays") as they try to make him feel guilty, even though he bought everything in this room—including the new lounge suite they're sitting on. When Anthony suggests that they open Christmas presents, his mother reminds him that his sister Margaret, her husband Ian, and their children Tom and Hannah aren't there yet. Anthony bitterly thinks that his niece and nephew will be used to deflect today's Evil Rays; Marie hadn't wanted to invite the children, but Anthony insisted. Presently, he decides to help Marie with the food—but his mother refuses to eat the appetizers he serves her, and his father only eats one to be polite. Anthony and his mother make small talk about how crowded the stores are at Christmastime. Anthony remembers that when he went to the market the night before, the person ahead of him was buying simple prepackaged food; he'd felt the urge to follow them out and go home with them. Anthony's mother then tells him about the expensive walkie-talkie set she got Tom this year, and Anthony assures her that Tom will love it. But really, he knows that his niece and nephew will be more excited about the Nintendo Wii console he got them. Anthony escapes his mother by going to help Marie in the kitchen. As she prepares the Christmas ham, she orders Anthony to pit cherries for lunch. Anthony tells her that he'll pit them in the lounge room to annoy his mother, which makes Marie flash a genuine smile that Anthony misses. Over time, she's trained herself to show a different smile, one that's close-lipped and artificially calm. Anthony thinks back to last week, when he and Marie went to their first fertility specialist appointment. Marie had stubbornly told the doctor that she was doing everything right, and that they were ready for "conception enhancement." As Anthony pits cherries in the lounge room, he remembers eating cherries with Margaret as children and using the pits to play a rhyming game about who they'd marry. Anthony would add more pits to Margaret's pile so that she'd end up with "poor man" at the end of the rhyme, and Anthony thinks that this came true—Margaret and Ian are struggling financially. Anthony, who has an expensive new house, feels guilty about this. Then, he begins to think about how the cherry pits look like the ball of wax that a doctor once extracted from his ear after a bad cold. He'd been surprised at how something like that had accumulated in his body, and at how clearly he could hear after it was removed. Anthony's mother interrupts his thoughts when she makes an underhanded comment about how Marie and Anthony are hard to shop for because they already have so much. This makes Anthony remember that Marie used to call him "Ant" before they bought this house, and how panicked and sick he'd felt when he signed the mortgage. Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and Anthony rushes to greet Margaret, Ian, and the kids. After lunch, Anthony looks at his family through his digital camera's viewfinder and notices that Marie looks beautiful from one angle but miserable from another. Similarly, Margaret looks sad and chubby from one angle but happy and warm from another. Hannah and Tom, meanwhile, have on trained, polite smiles as they pose for the photo. After snapping the picture, Anthony takes Tom aside and asks him to play with the present Anthony's mother got him instead of the one Anthony got him. He can tell that Tom is trying hard to behave today, and Anthony has to stop himself from hugging his nephew. When the family exchanges gifts, Tom enthusiastically thanks Anthony's mother for the walkie-talkies, but she just lectures Tom about being careful with the expensive toys. Meanwhile, Anthony looks over at Marie and wonders if she loves him. He eagerly volunteers to join Tom outside to test the walkie-talkies, though he knows his mother will criticize him in his absence. From opposite sides of the yard, Anthony and Tom begin to play a spy game over the walkie-talkies. But suddenly, Anthony thinks he hears Marie's voice instead of Tom's coming through the walkie-talkie: he hears her accuse him of not wanting to have a baby, which leaves him speechless. As the walkie-talkie begins emitting static, Anthony looks at Marie through the kitchen window and feels something shift inside him. The static clears, and he suddenly realizes that he can never have a baby with Marie. Just then, Tom's voice comes clearly to ask if Anthony is there, before more static overtakes the line. All Anthony can manage to say is "Man down. Mayday," and he knows Tom will come looking for him in a few moments. But instead of composing himself, Anthony reaches over to a potted succulent on the porch and pricks his finger with one of its spines, watching a blood droplet form as "proof that such things are real."

- Genre: Science Fiction / Dystopia / Post-Apocalyptic / Literary Fiction - Title: Station Eleven - Point of view: Third Person, With Focus on the Perspectives of Major Characters - Setting: Toronto, Hollywood, post-apocalyptic Great Lakes region - Character: Kirsten Raymonde. Description: Kirsten is eight years old when the Georgia Flu strikes. A child actor, she witnesses the onstage death of Arthur Leander during a production of King Lear the night before the pandemic breaks out. The pandemic quickly kills her parents, and she then walks with her brother for the first horrible and chaotic year of the collapse. These events traumatize her and change her: she remembers nothing of the first year, and spends her free time after the collapse collecting tabloids in an attempt to remember Arthur and the world before the Flu. She is also constantly searching for any other copies of the "Dr. Eleven" comics, which she clings to as her most prized possessions. But the collapse does not change Kirsten's profession or what she likes most about the world. After her brother also dies, Kirsten joins the Traveling Symphony, a theater troupe that travels among the small post-collapse settlements of the Great Lakes area and performs music and Shakespeare plays. The motto of the Symphony is extremely meaningful to her: "survival is insufficient." She is thus a firm believer in the notion that humans, to be humans, must do more than just survive. For Kirsten, art is the best way to truly live instead of merely surviving. In the novel, Kirsten also wrestles with her fragmented memory of the old world, with the hope of civilization building back up, and with the terrors of the post-collapse world, a world of danger in which she has had to kill in order to survive even as she believes that survival alone is not enough. - Character: Arthur Leander. Description: Arthur is an extremely successful actor who dies of a heart attack on stage the night of the Georgia Flu outbreak. During the production he was somewhat of a mentor to Kirsten, who witnesses his death. The novel describes his early days struggling in Toronto with his friend Clark Thompson, and his rise to fame and celebrity in Hollywood, where Arthur marries and divorces three times. His first wife is Miranda Carroll, who is from the same small island as Arthur. His second wife is Elizabeth Colton, who is the mother of Arthur's child Tyler. His third wife is named Lydia Marks. Towards the end of his life, Arthur comes to regret his actions and stop valuing his possessions. In the weeks before his death he decides to move to Israel and discard his old life in order to be closer with his son, the only thing he truly values. His death is made all the more tragic by this realization, as he is unable to follow through on his plans to live a better life and be a better father to his son. Of course, the Georgia Flu would probably have prevented this life from happening even if Arthur had not died of a heart attack. - Character: Miranda Carroll. Description: Miranda is the creator of the "Dr. Eleven" and "Station Eleven" comics that give the novel its title. She is an artist from Delano Island who, to support an abusive boyfriend, enters the corporate world. There she finds order, stability, and the time to work on her project, which is a constant throughout her life. She eventually leaves the boyfriend and meets and marries Arthur Leander at a young age, but feels out of place in Hollywood. After their divorce – Arthur was cheating on her – she transitions back into the corporate world and grows from a young, unkempt woman to a confident, competent, well-dressed executive. Throughout her life, Miranda attempts to push herself and live with intensity and purpose. To her last day, she is able to stare herself in the mirror and whisper "I regret nothing." And even after becoming a high-powered executive, Miranda continues to work on her passion project: the Dr. Eleven Comics. She creates the comics primarily for herself, not worrying about who will read them, and self-publishes the select few that will outlast the pandemic and become extremely important to both Kirsten and Tyler in the post-flu world. Miranda dies in Malaysia soon after hearing of her ex-husband's death. - Character: Tyler Leander / The Prophet. Description: Tyler Leander is the son of Arthur Leander and Elizabeth Colton. He is raised in Israel by his mother away from his father. During the collapse, he lives in the Severn City airport and becomes increasingly religious and extremist, coming to believe that the Flu was a divine cleansing of the population and that those who survived did so for a reason. He and his mother leave the airport to join a wandering cult, and as Tyler grows up he eventually becomes the leader of the cult and starts calling himself the Prophet. As the Prophet, Tyler runs a group of highly trained religious fanatics who carry a large arsenal of weapons and take over towns. In a strange mirroring of his father's wife-hopping, Tyler takes multiple wives, including very young girls, usually by force. He, like Kirsten, is obsessed with the "Dr. Eleven" comics. - Character: Jeevan Chaudhary. Description: Jeevan is the paparazzo turned paramedic who attempts to save Arthur's life after his heart attack and who comforts Kirsten after Arthur dies. Jeevan receives a phone call informing him of the upcoming epidemic from his friend Hua, and he decides to buy supplies and try to survive with his brother Frank. Over the course of the novel, Jeevan changes from a paparazzo to an entertainment journalist, to an EMT trainee, and finally to the role of a doctor in the post-collapse world. He at first believes that work should be difficult and painful, almost like an everyday battle, but Jeevan eventually comes to see that he wants to do something he believes is valuable and helpful to other people. - Character: Clark Thompson. Description: Clark is Arthur's best friend. Once an aspiring actor along with Arthur, Clark's career eventually leads him to become a job training executive in the years before the collapse. After the collapse he is stranded, along with Elizabeth Colton and Tyler, in the Severn City airport. After a few years there, be begins curating the Museum of Civilization in the airport, collecting technological items that no longer work and other fragments of civilization. He begins the museum since his boyfriend at the time was a curator, and since he noticed that people in the airport seemed to cling to the obsolete items that he collects. Clark makes some effort to help Elizabeth and Tyler and keep them from becoming extremists, but he ultimately gives up in favor of self-preservation. He is also the one who informs Miranda of Arthur's death, having met her at the party during which Miranda realized Arthur was having an affair. The novel ends with Clark reading a scene in "Dr. Eleven" based on this dinner party. - Character: Elizabeth Colton. Description: Elizabeth is Arthur's second wife and Tyler's mother. She is a borderline alcoholic movie star, and believes that everything happens for a reason. This belief is put to the test and then reaffirmed after the collapse, as she comes to believe, perhaps as a way to stave of despair, that the pandemic was a cleansing that allowed only those who were meant to survive to live on. Elizabeth instills this point of view in Tyler, ultimately leading to him becoming the Prophet after her death. - Character: August. Description: August is one of Kirsten's closet friends in the Traveling Symphony. He is the second violin and has only recently begun acting with the Symphony. He also writes poetry in secret. The child of military parents, August moved around often in the pre-collapse world, and television had been a constant in his life. He therefore misses television terribly and remembers shows in great detail, and he collects TV Guides after the collapse. He and Kirsten break into houses together, and the two have a pact to remain only friends and nothing more. - Character: Charlie (Charlotte Harrison). Description: Charlie (Charlotte Harrison) is the second cello of the Traveling Symphony and is a close friend of Kirsten's and August's. The three used to break into houses together, but Charlie and her husband Jeremy stopped in St. Deborah by the Water sometime in Year Eighteen so that their child wouldn't be born on the road. Her absence when the Symphony returns to St. Deborah by the Water is alarming and first raises the Symphony's suspicions about the Prophet. - Theme: Death and Survival. Description: Station Eleven begins with the death of Arthur Leander from a heart attack, and then quickly moves to portray a world in which 99 percent of the population has died from a global flu pandemic. In this way, the novel explores death both on a personal and global scale. On a personal level, the primary characters of the novel are all connected to Arthur in some way. His on-stage death affects them all, whether because they witness it, like fellow-actor Kirsten or audience-member Jeevan, or because, as for Clark and Miranda, Arthur was such an important, if complicated, part of their lives. The novel is therefore able to show how different people react to Arthur's death. This connection of the main characters in the novel through Arthur and his death also emphasizes the impact individual lives, and individual deaths, have on a surprisingly large network of other people. Yet Arthur's death is immediately followed by the Georgia Flu pandemic, in which billions of people die. Through the juxtaposition of a single death with mass death, the novel is able to suggest how all of the dead are unique and important in the same way that Arthur is, while also depicting how mass death can often make those who died anonymous or just a statistic. The novel doesn't just focus on the dead, though. It also depicts the particular experiences, both physical and psychological, of those who survived. For instance, survivors often wonder why they survived while others didn't, and the novel shows how such a desire to find meaning in survival drives some, like Elizabeth and Tyler, to grow increasingly religious. Meanwhile, the novel also shows just how random survival actually is—both through Jeevan's luck in receiving a call from a friend warning him of the pandemic and the way that Miranda's graphic novel, which she had no intention of sharing, becomes an important piece of art for a number of the survivors.Though surviving the Flu is random, the characters also have to struggle to keep surviving, to stay alive and sane in the harsh and dangerous post-collapse world. Kirsten's knife tattoos, documenting the people she has had to kill, embody both the stakes of surviving and its toll: she was forced to kill in order to remain alive, but performing those killings has marked and changed her, both figuratively and literally. Meanwhile, Jeevan's paraplegic brother Frank realizes that he is a burden on his brother, and he kills himself in order to increase Jeevan's chances of surviving. The novel emphasizes the way that characters try to avoid death at all costs, but it also shows time and again how closely survival is linked to death, like two sides of the same coin. What's more, as the words of both the Traveling Symphony's motto and of Kirsten's second tattoo read, "survival is insufficient." The novel argues that humans, to be human, must do more than just survive; they must live. It then offers art, ingenuity, and kindness as means of truly living. - Theme: Faith and Fate. Description: Station Eleven shows how, in the face of peril and struggles, many people turn to faith. In the novel, Mandel portrays faith as offering many of the same values of art: it provides purpose and community, and injects continuity and permanence into a terrifying, changing world. Further, faith is rooted in the idea that everything happens for a reason. In the face of a pandemic that decimated the Earth and left only a few survivors behind, such a viewpoint can be comforting because it offers a justification for the mass death and assuages the guilt of those who survived by making it clear that they deserved to survive. However, through the character of Tyler, the Prophet, Mandel also shows how faith can become extremely dangerous. Faith for individuals can be the means of personal survival, but in society it can become a means for power and control. The Prophet, as a cult leader, takes on such power and then abuses it by taking multiple young wives for himself and by forcing his will upon other people.Because the novel seems skeptical of faith as a social power, and therefore on the idea that things happen for a reason, it seems reasonable to assume that the novel similarly doesn't put much stock in the idea of fate. However, Station Eleven abounds with so many coincidences that it can be tempting to see them as fate. The plot focuses on figures who, by chance or by fate, keep falling in and out of each other's lives. Jeevan, the man who covered Arthur as a paparazzo, took an unflattering picture of Miranda, and broke the story of Arthur's second divorce as an entertainment journalist, was there at the moment of Arthur's death to attempt to save his life and to comfort Kirsten. Kirsten received one of Miranda's comics, possibly the only editions of the books existing other than the ones belonging to Tyler, Arthur's son, the boy who Kirsten read about in tabloids and who would grow up to become the Prophet. These wild coincidences can be seen as instances of fate, a concept that Mandel explores, complicates, and ultimately leaves open-ended in the novel. However, they might also be seen as representing a different idea of fate, one in which fate is not directed by some God but rather by the influences in people's lives. In this view, these characters are "fated" in the sense that they have become what they have become because of those they are connected to. Tyler is influenced to become the polygamous Prophet because of how Miranda's "Station Eleven" affected him, because of his mother's post-collapse religious belief in everything happening for a reason, and perhaps also because of his father Arthur's own womanizing ways. Tyler, then, isn't fated to become the Prophet in the sense that he has no other choice, but rather in the sense that the things he has inherited from those connected to him have pushed him in that direction. - Theme: Civilization. Description: Station Eleven is a story about the collapse of modern civilization, but it also explores just what civilization is. By telling the story of the collapse and including depictions of life both before and after it, Mandel is able to explore civilization through different lenses. Before the collapse, civilization is presented as mundane and at times stifling, or even as misguided and problematic. Arthur and Miranda's transition from their small native island to larger cities exhibits the disconnection between humans and nature. On Delano Island, for example, the night sky was filled with stars, but in a large city like Toronto, the stars are obscured by light pollution. Though civilization appeals to Arthur and Miranda for the anonymity, privacy, and freedom it offers, the difficulty of describing their island home to others also illustrates the way that civilization also disconnects human beings from each other. In the golden age of technology, humans seem to sleepwalk through life. Indeed, the only "zombies" in this apocalypse story are cellphone zombies who walk around completely disconnected from their environments and the people around them.But after the collapse, devices and technologies that had come to seem mundane are suddenly revealed to be miraculous. In the depiction of modern society, people seemed to be isolated by their technology. But in a world without technology – no airplanes, television, radio, or internet – people are truly, physically cut off from each other, unable to know what is going on in the world at large or even in the next town over. Meanwhile, the loss of antibiotics and medicine make formerly routine infections suddenly life threatening. Even getting food or finding shelter becomes profoundly difficult. Devices taken for granted twenty years earlier now seem to survivors as miraculous, and get preserved as artifacts in the Museum of Civilization by those hoping to preserve knowledge of and eventually return to that civilized world that they now think of as a kind of paradise. The way that the survivors think about the civilization that has disappeared shows how much humans rely on civilization, and yet also underscores how many of its miracles are taken for granted.The novel makes clear that a part of the reason people take the privileges of civilization for granted is our inability, or perhaps refusal, to see just how fragile civilization is. For instance, at one point Mandel traces the design, production, and shipping of one product that passes through countless human hands on the way to the consumer. In following the journey of this product, Mandel shows that such a journey, passing across so many minds and hands, is miraculous, but also that the entire journey is in some sense invisible: neither the person receiving the product nor those along the product's path ever thinks of it in its entirety. In a sense, then, modern civilization is built on connections while at the same time hiding those connections. At the same time, by highlighting how the connected world can accomplish such marvels, Mandel also captures the irony that this very connectivity is what enables the destruction of civilization: it is because our civilization is so advanced and connected that the virus is able to spread so quickly and efficiently throughout the globe. Finally, by highlighting the human enterprise that goes into each object, Mandel emphasizes that even while our civilization has produced amazing technology, it is not technology that makes civilization—it's people, and the failure of civilization occurs not with the failure of technology, but with the mass death of human beings.However, Mandel also makes clear that while civilization is made by humans, civilization is not what makes us human. During the collapse, many people can't accept that civilization has truly fallen. Instead, they believe that soon the lights will turn back on and the Red Cross will arrive. In other words, they can't imagine civilization failing and they continue to believe that civilization will "show up" and save them. Such fantasies provide comfort, of course, but they also fit the Georgia Flu epidemic within a larger narrative in which human civilization is unstoppable and always progressing. Civilization, though, does collapse; the Red Cross never rides in to the rescue. And yet, the novel makes clear, life continues. Towns slowly emerge out of the chaos. The Travelling Symphony travels from town to town, bringing art and culture that has endured. A museum devoted to the memory of the past emerges. Religious groups seek meaning. The post-collapse world is tenuous and dangerous, and the people in it can do terrible things, but they can also love, and build connections, and use their ingenuity, and create art. So when at the end of the novel Kirsten sees a town in the distance that seems to be using electricity, it is not the story of civilization returning, like some airplane suddenly appearing in the sky. It is instead part of the story of humanity, and how humans – because they are humans, and because for humans survival is insufficient – are creating civilization anew. - Theme: Memory. Description: With its plot set both before and after the Georgia Flu pandemic, Station Eleven depicts both pre-collapse civilization as it was and that same civilization as it is remembered by characters who have survived. Through these characters, and the different way they experience and respond to their memories, the novel engages in a nuanced exploration of memory itself. Through Kirsten alone, for instance, the novel shows how memory can be a comfort and source of hope, as Kirsten seeks out books and gossip magazines in abandoned homes in order to spark memories of people and the world she used to know to keep her vision of that world alive. At the same time, the fact that Kristin even needs such "reminders" speaks to how easily memories can slip away and be lost, and how the sense of losing one's memories can be a source of terrible anxiety.And yet, further complicating things, the novel also shows how lost memories can be a blessing: Kirsten regards her inability to remember any of Year One after the collapse as a gift, an escape from otherwise unbearable trauma. The novel also shows how memories of trauma can impact people. For instance, Tyler's polygamy as the Prophet bears a sort of resemblance to his own father Arthur's wife-hopping in pre-collapse days – wife-hopping that resulted in Arthur leaving Tyler and his mother – and seems to suggest that Tyler is in some sense re-enacting those memories in a twisted way that puts him in the position of power. The novel also shows that even good memories can be painful or damaging, as those who best remember civilization before the collapse often miss it most after. Through character after character, the novel shows how memories – both good and bad – can influence a person's behavior and identity. But it's not just individuals who have to navigate memory in the novel. Mandel also explores what might be described as communal memory. Among the survivors, there are those who remember the pre-collapse world very well, those who are younger and remember it indistinctly, and those who were either so young when the collapse occurred or who were born post-collapse and therefore can only know of the pre-collapse from what they are told. Put another way, this last group only knows of the world before based on what other people remember and choose to tell them. Communal memory, then, has an element of choice to it, and the novel portrays different communities making different choices. Some towns decide to tell their children almost nothing about the pre-collapse world in the hopes of protecting their children from the pain of having lost out on that old world. In contrast, other characters see preserving memory of the past as critical. The Traveling Symphony can be seen as preserving memories of the past by performing their art. Clark preserves memory of the past with his Museum of Civilization.Ultimately, the novel seems to side with the idea that communities have an obligation to preserve and pass memories on. Part of this obligation is immediately practical, such as the transfer of skills that pertain directly to survival or the preservation of knowledge that, in the particular setting of the novel, makes it possible for the post-collapse world to, perhaps, eventually recreate its lost technology. But even more importantly, the novel portrays how shared memories build social bonds. It shows how the strength of communities, in effect, are founded on communal memories, whether they are preserved in art, or museums, or stories told by the old to the young. Memory is valuable then, not only because it is practical, but also because engagement with communal memory is an engagement with human history, and contributing to and learning from communal memory is a way of holding on to humanity after the collapse. - Theme: Art. Description: In contrast to modern technological civilization, which Station Eleven portrays as fragile, the novel presents art as something that endures. The first scene of the book (which takes place on the evening of the collapse) and the first scene after the collapse both feature Shakespeare's famous play King Lear (one a performance, the other a rehearsal). The message is clear: even after the collapse of civilization and the death of billions, art remains. Art is powerful enough to survive the epidemic, in part because it isn't reliant on technology or modernity. But even more so, the novel implies, art survives because it is so vital and so inextricably connected to human life. Art offers people a way to understand the world and a way to connect to a world now gone. It offers a way to connect to each other – artist to audience, and audience member to audience member, and might even be said to offer a way for an artist to connect to his or her own self – as Miranda seems to explore, process, and escape her own life through her art. And, finally, art connects people to the shared history of humanity. The people watching King Lear after the collapse, despite the hardships of their lives and the world they know they've lost, still feel themselves part of the human story.Art may not be necessary to basic survival – to just staying alive – but the novel focuses on the idea that for humans, "survival is insufficient." As the novel portrays it, the insufficiency of mere survival could be described as what makes us human. Or, put another way, it is the human instinct to create and celebrate art that makes us human. Art, therefore, will endure so long as humanity does, and humanity will endure so long as art does. - Climax: The Georgia Flu Epidemic / Kirsten's Confrontation with the Prophet - Summary: Station Eleven opens during a production of Shakespeare's King Lear in Toronto. The lead role is played by Arthur Leander, an aging Hollywood actor minutes from his death. Onstage with Arthur is Kirsten Raymonde, a young girl playing one of Lear's daughters. Suddenly, Arthur suffers a massive heart attack, and Jeevan Chaudhary, a former paparazzo and now an EMT in training, leaps on stage to attempt to save Arthur with CPR. As a doctor and medics take over, Jeevan comforts Kirsten and explains to her that Arthur has died. In the theater, members of the cast and crew of Lear consider reaching out to Arthur's family, noting his young son Tyler who lives in Israel with his mother, Elizabeth Colton. They decide to reach out to Arthur's lawyer, and the narrator then states that everyone still left in the theater would die within three weeks. Meanwhile, Jeevan receives a phone call from his friend Hua, who alerts him to the pending outbreak of the Georgia Flu, which Hua believes will become a global epidemic. Jeevan acts quickly, stocking up on survival equipment before going to board up with his paraplegic brother, Frank. While Jeevan prepares for the looming pandemic, word spreads of Arthur's death to his ex wives, including Miranda Carroll, his first wife, who is in Malaysia when she receives a call from Clark Thomson relaying Arthur's death. The novel then jumps ahead to twenty years after the outbreak of the Georgia Flu and the collapse of civilization, focusing on the Traveling Symphony, a band of musicians and Shakespeare actors traveling in the Great Lakes region of the former United States. Kirsten, now a member of the Symphony, and the other actors rehearse for a production of King Lear. We learn that Kirsten and her good friend August often break into abandoned houses, and that Kirsten is constantly seeking new editions of comics that Arthur had given her back when she knew him, titled "Dr. Eleven." The Symphony arrives in a town called St. Deborah by the Water, where they expect to meet Charlie and the sixth guitar (Jeremy), two members of the Symphony who stayed behind in the town the last time the Symphony passed through because they were having a child. But the Symphony instead finds a changed town, which is now ruled by a religious leader called the Prophet. Not wanting to get caught up in the town's possibly dangerous drama, the Symphony leaves immediately after a performance. During their flight, Kirsten reflects on the tabloids she has collected that detail Arthur's life. The novel then transitions back to a time before the Flu, pivoting on one of the photos of Arthur that Kirsten has collected. Arthur and Miranda meet and fall in love, and Miranda soon leaves her abusive boyfriend and marries Arthur. We learn about Miranda's art project, the "Dr. Eleven" graphic novels that will eventually come to be treasured by Kirsten. Later, at a dinner party in Hollywood, Miranda meets Clark Thomson, and she realizes that her marriage with Arthur is ending, as he is cheating on her with a co-star in his current movie: Elizabeth Colton. After this realization, Miranda meets Jeevan, who is working as a paparazzo and who tricks her into an unflattering photograph. Through a series of excerpts from an interview Kirsten did during Year Fifteen after the Flu outbreak, we learn that Kirsten's parents died immediately in the collapse, and that she and her brother walked for the first year, of which she remembers nothing, until Kirsten's brother, too, died and she found the Symphony. Back in Year Twenty, after leaving St. Deborah by the Water and fleeing the Prophet, the Symphony realizes that a young girl named Eleanor has stowed away to avoid being forced to become another one of the Prophet's wives. Despite being afraid that it will look like they have kidnapped Eleanor, the Symphony decides to keep moving and head towards the fabled Museum of Civilization. After a few days of travel in this direction, members of the Symphony, starting with Sayid and Dieter, begin to go missing. The Symphony is unable to find them, and soon the Clarinet disappears as well, but they decide to follow their "separation protocol" and try to meet everyone who can make it at the Museum of Civilization. Soon after continuing on, Kirsten and August discover a golf course to loot. They find useful supplies, but when they emerge, they have lost the Symphony, and now must travel alone. They then find an untouched house, in which they find more useful items such as new costumes. Back before the Flu, we are given a glimpse of Arthur's mind through the letters he has written to his friend Victoria, which are published without his prior knowledge in an article called "Dear V." Clark and Elizabeth, both mentioned in the book, plan to meet to discuss it. We then return to Jeevan and his brother Frank, who have been surviving shut in Frank's apartment. The two keep each other company and slowly run through supplies, until Frank decides that his disability will be a hindrance to Jeevan. He kills himself so that Jeevan will have a better chance of survival out in the world. Around day sixty, Jeevan leaves the apartment and begins walking. Jeevan winds up working as a doctor in a post-collapse settlement in what was once Virginia. Back in the days before Arthur's death, he gets in touch with Miranda to tell her that his father has died, and to alert her to the impending publication of "Dear V." The two meet, and when they do Miranda also briefly meets young Kirsten. Two weeks later, Clark calls Miranda to inform her about Arthur's death. Clark then boards a flight for Toronto, which is grounded early in Severn City, at which point he notices that Elizabeth and Tyler are on his flight. Meanwhile, Miranda contracts the Georgia Flu and dies in Malaysia. In the terminal at Severn City, passengers are at first uncertain as to what is going on in the world. A single airplane lands after the flight bound for Toronto, but it stops on the runway and is never brought to a gate. Slowly, the severity of the outbreak becomes clear, and many, including Clark, Elizabeth, and Tyler, settle permanently in the airport, building a community. Tyler also comes into possession of some of Miranda's comic "Dr. Eleven," which he loves. Through the first difficult years, Tyler and Elizabeth become extremely religious, and they eventually leave. Clark begins curating the Museum of Civilization, collecting and preserving items from before the collapse that now, after the fall of civilization, no longer work. The novel then turns back to Kirsten and August, who have been separated from the Symphony for three days. Walking, they meet two of the Prophet's men and a boy, the three of whom are holding Sayid captive. Kirsten and August proceed to kill the two men, while the boy runs away. Sayid then reveals that Dieter has died, and that the Prophet had captured the Clarinet in the hopes of making an exchange for Eleanor. The Clarinet, though, had escaped, and alerted the Symphony to change their route. After Sayid explains what happened, the three continue on to the airport, but the Prophet intercepts them. During a tense faceoff between Kirsten and the Prophet, the Prophet quotes from "Dr. Eleven," revealing to the reader that the Prophet is Tyler Leander. Kirsten recognizes the quote from "Dr. Eleven," distracting the Prophet, and in that moment the young boy kills the Prophet and then commits suicide. Kirsten, Sayid, and Eleanor then reunite with Charlie and Jeremy at the airport, and ultimately with the rest of the Symphony as well. At the Museum, Kirsten is recognized by Clark, who has read the interview she did in Year Fifteen. Clark takes Kirsten up to the top of the control tower, where, through a telescope, a town with functional electric streetlamps is visible in the distance. After some performances, Kirsten leaves one of her "Dr. Eleven" comics in Clark's care at the Museum before setting off to new territory. As the novel closes, Clark realizes that Miranda is the artist who created "Dr. Eleven," because he recognizes a scene in the comic as originating from the dinner party where he met Miranda all those years in the past.

- Genre: Short Story, Science Fiction - Title: Story of Your Life - Point of view: First Person - Setting: United States - Character: Dr. Louise Banks. Description: Dr. Louise Banks, the first-person narrator, is a linguist recruited by the U.S. military to learn the language of the heptapods, an alien species mysteriously orbiting Earth. An intelligent professional with a wry sense of humor, Louise collaborates with the physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly to learn both the heptapods' spoken language, Heptapod A, and their written language, Heptapod B. As she learns Heptapod B, a language in which picture-words can be combined into enormous designs and read in any order, Louise realizes that the heptapods experience time differently than humans do: whereas humans experience time in a sequence from past to future, the heptapods experience their entire lives simultaneously. Learning Heptapod B changes how Louise thinks: in learning it, she gains the ability to "remember" her own future, a shadow of the heptapods' ability to experience all time simultaneously. By remembering the future, Louise learns that she and Dr. Gary Donnelly are going to have a daughter and subsequently get a divorce. Their daughter will die in a climbing accident at the age of 25. "Story of Your Life" consists of Louise telling this unborn daughter the story of her conception, and the main narrative is interspersed with Louise's future "memories" of her daughter. Louise's new ability to remember the future deprives her of free will, in that she feels compelled to do exactly what she remembers she will do. At the end of the story, Louise agrees to have a baby with Gary and reflects that while she knows what is going to happen, she doesn't know what her subjective experience of the events will be when they actually occur. - Character: Louise's Daughter. Description: Dr. Louise Banks and Dr. Gary Donnelly's daughter is a character foil for Louise. Whereas Louise is academic, risk-averse, and self-reflective, her daughter is money-oriented, daredevilish, and impulsive. Louise and her daughter's relationship reflects the loss of free will that Louise experiences when she learns Heptapod B and begins to "remember" the future. While Louise clearly loves her daughter, there's no indication that she'll try to prevent the climbing accident that she knows will eventually kill her daughter. Louise even believes that her excessively cautious parenting may, through reverse psychology, create the daredevil tendencies that make her daughter climb in the first place, yet Louise does not (and seemingly cannot) change her behavior. At the same time, Louise and her daughter's relationship also underscores the overwhelming nature of the parental impulse. While Louise's daughter sometimes acts impatient or cruel toward her mother, Louise narrates the story of her daughter's conception to her with great love and joy. Moreover, Louise compares her maternal instinct to protect her daughter with the overwhelming compulsion she feels to act out the future as she remembers it. Thus, the story suggests that parental instincts can override free will much in the same way remembering the future can. - Character: Dr. Gary Donnelly. Description: Dr. Gary Donnelly is a physicist who collaborates with Dr. Louise Banks in communicating with the heptapods (an alien species) and who eventually becomes her husband. Initially, Gary helps Louise elicit vocabulary from the heptapods by serving as her prop and acting out verbs. Later, when the humans understand the heptapods' language well enough to communicate with them, his explanations of the kind of physics concepts the heptapods find intuitive help Louise realize that the heptapods experience time not as a sequence but as a simultaneity. While working together to communicate with the heptapods, Gary and Louise begin to date. As Louise learns the heptapods' written language, Heptapod B, she gains their ability to remember the future and learns that she and Gary will marry, have a daughter together, and subsequently divorce. Like Louise's relationship with her daughter, Louise's relationship with Gary underscores the loss of free will she experiences when she begins remembering the future. Although Louise knows that she and Gary will divorce, she can neither avoid entering a relationship with him in the first place nor take action to prevent their divorce once they are married. Yet Louise does not seem to regret her relationship with Gary, suggesting that she truly loves him. - Character: Colonel Weber. Description: A member of the U.S. military, Colonel Weber recruits the linguist Dr. Louise Banks to learn the alien heptapods' language. Once he has recruited Louise, he oversees the attempts she and Dr. Gary Donnelly make to communicate with and learn from the heptapods. From the beginning, Colonel Weber suspects the heptapods of sinister motives in visiting Earth. He pressures Louise to teach the heptapods as little about human language and technology as possible, despite the problems this attitude causes her as she tries to understand the heptapods. Moreover, he seems determined to extract as much technological information from the heptapods as he can while giving as little as possible in return. Thus Colonel Weber represents how prejudice toward outsiders can impede understanding. - Character: Burghart. Description: Like Dr. Louise Banks, Burghart is a linguist assigned to learn the alien heptapods' language. Also like Louise, he becomes fluent in Heptapod B, begins "remembering" the future, and loses his free will. His character shows that the mental changes Heptapod B has on its learners are not unique to Louise. Any person who becomes proficient in Heptapod B will begin remembering the future and thus lose their ability to make choices other than the ones they are destined to make. - Theme: Language. Description: "Story of Your Life" suggests that language is not only a means of communicating our thoughts—language also determines the kind of thoughts we can think and constitutes a form of action in its own right. The story centers on Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist recruited by the U.S. government to learn the language of aliens called heptapods. The heptapods have deposited mysterious screens called "looking glasses" at various places on Earth, which Louise and other researchers use to see and communicate with the aliens. Louise is narrating the story of the heptapods to her unborn daughter. Strangely, Louise remembers events that she describes in the future tense—in other words, she seems able to "remember" the future. As the story progresses, it's revealed that this ability is rooted in Louise becoming proficient in Heptapod B, the heptapods' written language, meaning that this new language actually changes her perception of time. In Heptapod B, entire paragraphs can be expressed as a single drawing able to be understood instantaneously. By studying the heptapods' written language, Louise realizes that the heptapods do not experience their lives from past to future, the way humans do. Instead, the heptapods experience their entire lives as a simultaneous instant. Learning the heptapods' language fundamentally changes how Louise thinks: she becomes able, like the heptapods, to experience her entire life as a simultaneity and thus seemingly "remember" future events. The change in Louise's thinking after learning Heptapod B implies that the languages we know determine the kind of thinking that we can do. In "Story of Your Life," language isn't only a means of communication or a determinant of thought. It is also a kind of action. After Louise begins to remember the future, she repeatedly compares taking actions that she already knew she was going to take to acting in a play. She also compares it to telling a story to an audience that already knows the ending, to making a promise, and to officiating a wedding: all examples of language that does something rather than merely communicating about something. By showing how language is intimately tied to thought and action, "The Story of Your Life" suggests that language is about far more than just communicating: it fundamentally shapes how we perceive and move through the world. - Theme: Free Will. Description: "Story of Your Life" critiques the notion of free will by depicting aliens, called heptapods, who experience their entire life simultaneously rather than sequentially from birth to death. Because the heptapods already know what they are going to do, they do not have the ability to make choices. The heptapods' deterministic viewpoint is embedded in their written language, Heptapod B. In Heptapod B, sentences and even paragraphs can be read instantaneously and in any direction, suggesting that concepts like "end" and "beginning" or "cause" and "effect" are interchangeable. In the science-fictional world of "Story of Your Life," the ability to experience time as a simultaneity is reflected in Heptapod B. The humans who learn Heptapod B become able, like the heptapods, to remember their futures as well as their past. In so doing, they lose their ability to make choices other than the ones they "remember" making in the future. Notably, since humans who learn Heptapod B can remember their own futures, this means that they know what will happen to everyone they know as well. For this reason, when Dr. Louise Banks (a linguist who learns Heptapod B) has conversations with humans who don't know Heptapod B, she compares them to actors who are reading from a script without knowing it. And even though Louise knows from "remembering" the future that she'll eventually get divorced from her future husband, Gary, and that their daughter will die at a young age, she chooses to pursue a relationship with Gary and have a child with him anyway. Because there is only one possible future, the future that speakers of Heptapod B remember, no one has the ability to exercise free will, to go off-script. In fact, Louise muses that if a person already knows their future, they may actually feel "a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation" to make the very choices that will lead to that known outcome. "Story of Your Life" thus suggests that humans believe they have free will only because of how they experience time, from past to future, and not because they ever have the power to do something other than what they are destined to do. - Theme: Time. Description: "Story of Your Life" depicts time not as an external reality but as a subjective experience. It tells the story of first contact between humans and an extraterrestrial species called heptapods, who subjectively experience their lives as a single simultaneous instant rather than a progression from birth to death. The first description of the heptapods hints at the strange way they experience time. They have seven arms and seven eyes arrayed around their torsos, so that their bodies have no front or back. The heptapods' simultaneous orientation toward all points foreshadows the revelation that they can remember both the past and the future, an ability that suggests time is not an external reality marching straight from the past to the future, but rather an experience that changes according to one's characteristics. The heptapods are the most dramatic example in "Story of Your Life" of time as a subjective experience, but they are not the only example. The narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, also expresses a subjective experience of time in her relationship with her daughter. By learning the heptapods' written language, Heptapod B, Louise gains their ability to remember the future as well as the past. Thus, she knows exactly what is going to happen in her daughter's life. Yet she's repeatedly surprised at how fast her daughter grows up: for example, she is shocked when her adolescent daughter is embarrassed to be seen with her at the mall and shocked again when her daughter graduates from college. Louise already knows what will happen, but because time is a subjective experience, she is still capable of being surprised by its passage. In this sense, "Story of Your Life" suggests that time is an internal, subjective experiences rather than an external, objective reality. - Theme: Otherness, Prejudice, and Communication. Description: "Story of Your Life" suggests that prejudice is antithetical to communication. The story depicts the first contact between humanity and an alien species called heptapods. Throughout the story, the human military and government officials' intolerant attitude toward the aliens contrasts with human researchers' open, communicative attitude. When Colonel Weber approaches the story's narrator, the linguist Dr. Louise Banks, to get her opinion on a recording of the heptapods' speech, he's immediately aggressive and suspicious. He tries to tell Louise as little as he can about the recording, and although Louise is academically qualified to speak to the aliens, he initially refuses to let her see them. Rather than wanting to share information with the heptapods, he is adamant that they should learn as little about human language and technology as possible, even though the heptapods must inevitably learn some amount of human language for Louise to learn their language. At almost every turn, Colonel Weber suspects the heptapods of nefarious motives and thereby impedes human researchers' attempts to understand them. Moreover, his sole motive in facilitating communication with the heptapods seems to be to trick them into sharing their advanced technology. His prejudice toward outsiders closes him off from genuine communication. By contrast, Louise is interested in communicating with the heptapods simply for the sake of learning. She undergoes a painstaking process to learn the aliens' spoken language Heptapod A and their written language Heptapod B. In learning Heptapod B, Louise realizes that the heptapods have a radically "other" understanding of time and causality than do humans. Whereas humans experience time sequentially from past to future and see events in terms of cause and effect, the heptapods experience time as a simultaneity and see events in terms of goal-directed behavior. By learning Heptapod B, Louise not only becomes able to communicate with the heptapods but also appreciates and shares in their perception of time: she gains the heptapod ability to "remember" the future. She adamant that the way heptapods perceive the world is just as real and valid as the way humans do—it's just different. Notably, while Louise and another linguist named Burghart become able to understand and participate in the heptapods' alien worldview, none of the military and government personnel who want to exploit the heptapods ever do. And, importantly, the researchers are only able to gain this knowledge by working together and across different disciplines, emphasizing the value of collaboration. Thus, "Story of Your Life" shows how aggression and prejudice against outsiders impede understanding, whereas open communication fosters understanding. - Theme: Parenthood. Description: "Story of Your Life" depicts parenthood as an overwhelming instinct, something humans feel drawn to do despite knowing that it may turn out badly in various ways. In "The Story of Your Life," the linguist Dr. Louise Banks is assigned to research heptapods, an alien species that has decided to observe and communicate with earthlings. She learns Heptapod B, the heptapods' written language, and in doing so finds out that the aliens experience their entire lives as a simultaneous instant. In learning Heptapod B, Louise becomes able to "remember" her future as well as her past. Remembering her future, Louise learns that she is going to have a daughter, and that her daughter is going to die in a climbing accident at age 25. Counterintuitively, as a result of remembering the future, Louise feels an overwhelming instinct to do what she already knows she is going to do: have a child whom she knows will die at a young age. In other words, her maternal instinct usurps her free will. At one point, she compares this instinct to the instinct to protect her daughter from a falling object. By describing her parental instinct in this way, Louise suggests that having a child completely consumes parents and makes them act in ways that they never thought they would. Yet surprisingly, despite knowing her daughter will die young, Louise never seems to regret either her daughter's birth or the way her maternal instinct usurps her free will. She describes her daughter's conception as the most important moment in her life and, throughout the story, remembers various moments of her daughter's life with joy. She observes how her infant daughter kicks her legs in the hospital, marvels at her toddler daughter playing with a puppy, and is astonished at her daughter's poise and beauty during the daughter's college graduation ceremony. Thus, "Story of Your Life" suggests that people's overwhelming instinct to parent brings joys that outweigh the inevitable pains. - Climax: Dr. Louise Banks agrees to try for a baby with Dr. Gary Donnelly, despite already knowing that their daughter will die in a climbing accident at the age of 25. - Summary: In "Story of Your Life," the linguist Dr. Louise Banks is narrating to her unborn daughter the story of how she will come to be conceived. Louise tells her daughter that the story of her eventual conception begins with aliens visiting Earth. After mysterious aliens begin orbiting the planet and sending down communications devices known as "looking glasses" to the surface, Louise gets a phone call from the U.S. government asking for a meeting. Colonel Weber of the U.S. military and the physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly come visit Louise at her office. Colonel Weber plays a recording of the aliens' speech to Louise and asks her what she can tell him about it, but he refuses to give her any additional information. Louise explains to him that to learn the aliens' language, she'll need to interact with them. The U.S. military recruits Louise to learn the aliens' language in collaboration with Dr. Gary Donnelly, who is supposed to be learning the aliens' physics. They are one of many teams of researchers stationed at the aliens' "looking glasses" all over Earth. Through their "looking glass," Louise and Gary meet two aliens, called "heptapods." The heptapods, whom Louise names Flapper and Raspberry, each have seven arms and seven eyes arranged symmetrically around their torsos. At first, Louise's attempts to learn the heptapods' spoken language, which she calls Heptapod A, progress slowly. Louise gets the idea to learn Heptapod A and the heptapods' written language, Heptapod B, simultaneously. Eventually Louise realizes that Heptapod B isn't an alphabetic language like English; instead of representing the sound of their spoken language, Heptapod B consist of pictures that represent words and that can be combined in any order into giant picture-sentences or picture-paragraphs. Examining tapes of the heptapods writing sentences, Louise realizes that they don't construct their picture-sentences word by word. Rather, they use brushstrokes that cross many different words, which suggests to Louise that the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start writing. As Louise and another researcher named Burghart become proficient in Heptapod B, they realize that the heptapods experience time differently from humans. Whereas humans experience time linearly, from past to future, the heptapods experience their entire lives simultaneously. In other words, the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start because they can "remember" the future. Learning Heptapod B, Louise becomes able to remember the future as well. In so doing, she loses the ability to make different choices from the ones that she knows she is going to make. She comes to feel a tremendous impulse to act out the future script she remembers, despite potential negative consequences. She begins to date Gary, for instance, even though she already knows that they'll marry and divorce in the future. Eventually, the heptapods leave Earth without ever explaining why they came or revealing the kind of scientific or technological information the military hoped they would. Interspersed with story of Louise learning Heptapod B are Louise's memories of the future, which she narrates to her unborn daughter. As Louise falls in love with Gary, she already knows that they'll have a daughter together. Moreover, she knows that her daughter is going to die at the age of 25 in a climbing accident. Louise remembers both happy and upsetting moments from her daughter's life: funny things her daughter will say as a child, moments when the daughter will butt heads with her parents, how beautiful the daughter will look at her college graduation ceremony, and so on. At the end of the story, in the present, Louise agrees to have a child with Gary, remembering everything that's going to happen to her family but unsure of how she will feel about these things when they come to pass.

- Genre: Generational saga, family drama - Title: Sula - Point of view: Point of View:Third person limited—the novel is told from the perspectives of many different characters, including Nel, Sula, Eva, Shadrack, and Jude. - Setting: Setting:Medallion, Ohio - Character: Sula Peace. Description: The titular character of Sula, Sula Peace is a wild, resourceful woman, whose friendship with the tame and domestic Nel Wright changes in various complicated ways between the 1920s and the 1940s. From the time that she's young, it's clear that Sula is capable great acts of strength and bravery, and seems not to be frightened by even the most horrific sights (such as her mother, Hannah Peace, burning to death). Although Sula remains close friends with Nel for years, Sula begins to long for travel, and after Nel marries Jude Greene, Sula goes off to explore the country. Sula's disappointment with the "sameness" of America eventually leads her to sleep with Jude Greene himself, ruining Nel's marriage and the friendship between the two women. While the people of the Bottom tend to regard Sula simply as a "wicked woman," Morrison makes it clear that there's much more to her. Unloved by her family, Sula struggles to find an intimate connection with another human being, and refuses to embrace the self-loathing that the other people of the Bottom have come to celebrate. Though she arguably fails to do either of these things, it's telling that her final words (spoken, indeed, after her death) are about Nel—the woman whom she betrayed, but still loved. - Character: Nel Wright / Nel Wright Greene. Description: One of the two protagonists of Sula, Nel Wright is an orderly, proper young woman who tries to find peace in the face of jealousy and sexual danger. Like her mother, Helene Wright, Nel believes in the importance of virtue and following the rules. When, as a young child, she befriends Sula Peace, a girl who's as wild and unpredictable as Nel is proper, Nel secretly fears and resents Sula's vivaciousness, and even smiles when Sula accidentally kills a young child, Chicken Little. In spite of her love for rules, Nel is capable of great feats of empathy—for instance, she comes to understand Eva Peace when no one else in the Bottom will do so. In the end, however, Nel finds herself alone in the world—she gives up on Sula and Eva, and tries unsuccessfully to find a new husband. Only when it's too late does she realize that she should have ignored her instinct to remarry, and instead stayed close with Sula, her oldest and best friend. - Character: Shadrack. Description: A prematurely aged, fearsome-looking, and often incoherent resident of the Bottom. Shadrack was once a young, handsome man, but his experiences fighting in World War I left him with deep emotional scars. For the majority of the novel, Shadrack is something of a hermit—living in an abandoned shack near the Ohio River, and fishing to feed himself. Shadrack leads an annual celebration, National Suicide Day, which symbolizes his despair and self-hatred. Yet he's also capable of acts of surprising tenderness and understanding. Unfortunately, the people of the Bottom tend to misinterpret these acts as spiteful or unkind—because of one such interpretation (of the word "always"), Sula Peace and Nel Wright begin to grow apart, setting in motion most of the events of the novel. - Character: Helene Sabat Wright. Description: Helene Sabat is a proud, pious woman who was born in New Orleans, and later moved to Medallion, Ohio to marry Wiley Wright, her cousin. Helene was born in a whorehouse in New Orleans, but she was raised by her grandmother to be good and proper in all ways. Helene demands control over every part of her life—a quality she passes down to her child, Nel Wright. Like most of the other characters in Sula, Helene struggles to make sense of her painful, traumatic life—goodness and piety are ways for her to "take control" and stave off her own misery. - Character: Eva Peace. Description: The elderly matriarch of the Peace family, Eva Peace is an impressive, capable, and fiercely devoted mother and grandmother. As a young woman, she marries BoyBoy, but after BoyBoy leaves her, she throws herself into the task of raising her three children, Plum, Pearl, and Hannah. On many occasions, Eva is shown to be willing to sacrifice her own health and happiness to ensure the survival of her children—indeed, it's suggested that she cuts off her own leg in order to collect an expensive insurance policy, and spends the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Eva is highly admired in the Bottom, and is given the important task of naming babies. In spite of her capacity to help and care for others, Eva is also capable of acts of great cruelty and spite, and some acts that could be interpreted as cruel or spiteful. When her youngest and seemingly favorite child, Plum, returns from World War I with a heroin addiction, Eva burns him alive rather than see him live his life in pain. Later, when she's nearly 90 years old, Eva is sent to live in a retirement home, where she spends the rest of her days at first remembering, but then slowly forgetting, her own long life. - Character: Hannah Peace. Description: The oldest child of Eva Peace, Hannah Peace is an important influence on her daughter, Sula Peace. After the death of her husband, Rekus, Hannah has many suitors, and often has sex with them while Sula is in the house. While Hannah is a devoted mother, she seems not to feel any love for her daughter—a fact that Sula quickly becomes aware of. Hannah struggles to understand her mother, Eva, and after Eva kills Plum in his sleep, it's suggested that their relationship never recovers. Hannah dies under mysterious circumstances that Morrison never fully explains: she's burned alive as Sula watches. Her unusual behavior and sexual promiscuity make a lasting impression on Sula. - Character: Grandmother / Great-Aunt Cecile. Description: The grandmother (and effective mother) of Helene Sabat Wright, and a great aunt to Wiley Wright, who eventually marries Helene. Great-Aunt Cecile, like her granddaughter, is a proper, righteous woman who recognizes the importance of religion and good behavior. She dies before the age of 50—a tragic reminder of the harsh lives Morrison's characters lead. - Character: Wiley Wright. Description: The husband of Helene Sabat Wright, and the great-nephew of Cecile, Wiley Wright is barely present in Sula—a surprising fact, considering that he's the father of one of the novel's protagonists. Wiley is a cook on a ship, meaning that he's often out of the house for long periods of time. Helene, with her desire for total control over her house and life, prefers to be married to a man with a busy schedule. After the second chapter of the novel, Wiley is barely mentioned again. - Character: Rochelle. Description: Helene's mother and Cecile's daughter. Rochelle is described as a "Creole whore" who works in a brothel called the "Sundown House." Rochelle, who's 48 when she meets her granddaughter, Nel Wright, seems to have no concern or affection for her daughter, and only briefly appears at Cecile's house after her death. - Character: Tar Baby. Description: A pale-skinned resident of the Bottom, rumored to be either partly or entirely white. Tar Baby is a depressed, self-hating man, who's among the first to join Shadrack in "celebration" of National Suicide Day. It's rumored that Tar Baby has come to the Bottom to drink himself to death. He's despised by many of the residents of Medallion, both in and outside of the Bottom: the general belief is that a white man shouldn't be mixing with blacks, whether or not he's depressed. - Character: BoyBoy Peace. Description: The neglectful, often brutish husband of Eva Peace. BoyBoy marries Eva when she's still very young, and is a loving, happy husband at first. But after Eva gives birth to three children, BoyBoy abruptly abandons his family, leaving Eva behind to take care of the children. BoyBoy returns to the Bottom several years later, finds Eva confidently raising her family, and then leaves once again, never to return. While he's not mentioned many times in Sula, BoyBoy is one of the novel's most important characters—we can sense that if he hadn't left his family, Eva wouldn't have become the woman she is. - Character: Ralph / Plum Peace. Description: The youngest and seemingly best loved of Eva Peace's three children, Plum Peace goes off to fight in World War I, and, like Shadrack, comes back a broken man. He spends a year traveling through the biggest American cities, and, it's implied, develops a heroin habit in the process. Eva Peace, overcome with grief at her favorite child's pain and misery, decides to "mercifully" kill Plum by burning him alive—one of the central events of the novel. - Character: Ajax. Description: One of the most enigmatic characters in Sula, Ajax is a young, energetic resident of the Bottom, who seems to be a brutish, sexist man, but also proves to have a sensitive, mysterious side. It is Ajax who catcalls to Nel Wright and Sula Peace when they're still young girls, and years later, Ajax begins an affair with Sula. We learn that Ajax is unique in the Bottom, because his mother was a mysterious, theatrical woman who practiced witchcraft: as a result, Ajax has always been good at talking to women, and shows genuine interest in their thoughts and feelings. While these qualities attract Sula to Ajax at first, it's strongly implied that their relationship ends when Ajax gives in to his desire for independence, and leaves the Bottom. - Character: Jude Greene. Description: A young, handsome resident of the Bottom, who dreams of spending his adulthood working on the famed New River Road, Jude is one of the strangest characters in Sula: although he seems like a kind, respectable man, he's also capable of acts of callous cruelty that ruin the lives of people he claims to love. For ten years, Jude is a loving husband to his wife, Nel Wright, but when Sula Peace returns to the Bottom in 1937, Jude begins an affair with Sula almost immediately. Soon afterwards, Jude leaves the Bottom forever and goes to live in Detroit, where he's never heard from again. His abrupt departure from his home throws Nel's life into chaos. - Character: The deweys. Description: A group of boys who are given the same name by Eva Peace when they're born: "Dewey." Over time, the deweys (always lowercase!) remain a tight-knit group, to the point where they refuse to do anything alone. Despite the fact that the deweys are all different ages, they're treated as one unit by the people of the Bottom: the deweys are sent to school at the same time, and when one dewey is bad, they're all punished equally. In a touch of magical realism, the deweys do not age physically. It's as if their refusal to be individuals—only a group—means that they cannot develop and become adults. As a result, they're children for the rest of their lives. - Theme: Race and Racism. Description: Like most of Toni Morrison's novels, Sula studies the ways that black people struggle to live in America, a country with a notorious history of persecuting and oppressing black people.Black characters in the novel face the weight of a history in which white Americans have consistently swindled blacks out of their property and their rights by manipulating laws, social norms, and even language itself. In the city of Medallion, where the novel is set, African-Americans have traditionally been confined to the Bottom—ironically the area with the highest altitude, and the least desirable neighborhood of the city. Whites promised blacks land on the "bottom"—meaning, seemingly land that was close to the Ohio River—then backed out of their promise by giving away land in the hills, supposedly the "bottom" of heaven. As the novel goes on, we see a more of this white manipulation of the African-American community, but becoming more and more sly. By the end of the book, it's clear that whites have been systematically denying blacks in the Bottom their health care and heating, always saying that the extra resources will be used to pay for a supposed New River Road—a public works project that simply doesn't exist. While there are almost no white characters in the book, the novel shows how the white establishment—often referred to simply as "they"—has used trickery (backed up by the cynical understanding that blacks have no legal representation, and thus can't argue their position) to keep blacks as poor and as far from white communities as possible. "They" also try to keep blacks naïve and optimistic: always chasing for goals (such as the New River Road) that they'll never attain.In response to the racism they face, many of the blacks who live in the Bottom regard white culture with hatred. But because of the way white culture has shaped society, black people in the novel have no other concrete standard for beauty and sophistication other than whiteness. In this way (and despite the fact that the white establishment in Ohio clearly wants to keep them far away), many of the black characters in the Bottom are desperate to join the white community. Characters straighten their hair and painfully twist their own noses in an attempt to "look white." Eventually, some blacks in the community gain enough money and power to move to white neighborhoods of Medallion. And yet when this does happen, these white communities move away, keeping the city of Medallion segregated. Blacks' desire to join white communities comes to seem like another naïve, unreachable goal—just like the New River Road.It's crucial to understand the role of race and racism in Sula. The characters in the novel, almost all of whom are black, have been trained to think of themselves as second-class citizens, to hate their lot in life, and—in some cases—to hate each other for being black. By writing Sula, a book about the African-American experience in the 20th century, Morrison studies how a group strives for improvement in a society that's been constructed to make this improvement impossible—a theme that's relevant to readers of all races. - Theme: Love and Sexuality. Description: One of the biggest challenges of reading Sula is to understand how the characters can do things that, on the surface, appear cruel, even as they claim to be acting out of love.At times, the character's love for one another drives them to hurt and even kill each other. There's no better example of this than Eva Peace's act of "loving murder." She's always loved her youngest child, Ralph "Plum" Peace, and nearly killed herself trying to raise him through long winters. When Plum returns from World War I with a strong drug addiction, Eva can't stand to see her beloved child losing his mind. She douses him in kerosene and lights him on fire, confident that she's putting him out of the miseries of addiction and war trauma. Even now that Plum is fully-grown, Eva can't picture herself allowing him to live his life without her help. Because Eva the loyal mother can no longer take care of Plum, she "takes care" of him and ends his life.Morrison doesn't fully "explain" Eva's actions (even the explanation Eva herself gives can't convey all the intricate reasons for why she did what she did). After a certain point, love is so complicated that we'll never be able to understand why people do what they do, and Eva's attack is the central example of this. Nevertheless, Morrison tries to help us understand her characters' interpretations of love by studying a closely related subject: their sexuality.Of the two protagonists, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, Nel has been raised to regard sexuality as a sacred, essential part of becoming an adult and a wife. Sula's interpretation of sex is different: sex has been an uncontroversial, casual part of her life since she was a child. But as different as these two interpretations of sexuality may be, both Nel and Wright try to use sexuality to foster love. Both characters are taught to pursue sex with men, beginning at least when they're twelve years old. For the young girls, sexuality is indistinguishable from being—it's just that Nel thinks sexuality should be confined to marriage, while Sula thinks it shouldn't. Unsurprisingly, when Sula is much older, she's still trying to use sex to forge meaningful connections with men—indeed, she travels around America, having affairs and trying to find someone to love. After many years, Sula sleeps with Jude Greene, Nel's own husband. Sula loves Nel Wright: she's defended Nel from bullies, cheered Nel up when she's sad, celebrated Nel's wedding, etc. Yet because she's been raised to think of sexuality as both uncontroversial and extremely important, Sula winds up hurting Nel, the person she loves most.In Sula (and in real life), love is almost impossible to define. Partly because it's hard to understand, and partly because they've been raised in a hyper-sexualized community, the female characters of the Bottom try to come to grips with love by reducing it to something else: sex with a man. In a way, the tragedy of Sula is that Nel and Sula, faced with a world in which love seems strange and indecipherable, try to find love through sexuality, and in doing so give up on the purest and most important form of love in their lives: their love for each other.The great advantage of the process of "identity formation" for the people of the Bottom is that it gives them a strong sense of community. Even if they're all miserable, they're miserable together: united in their acceptance of pain. When a character like Sula Peace arrives in the Bottom, clearly unwilling to accept tragedy in her own life, we see the strength of the Bottom community. The townspeople join together in hating Sula for daring to "be" another way, a hatred that lessens their own self-hatred. But the great weakness of the townspeople's identity is obvious: they're accepting that they're doomed to be persecuted and have no reason to try to better their lives. Toni Morrison is fond of saying that she uses her writing to argue for an idea, and then show why that idea is wrong. In typical form, Morrison uses Sula to show how the townspeople's miserable process of identity formation makes their lives more bearable, and yet also condemns them to further misery. - Theme: Suffering and Community Identity. Description: In Sula, Toni Morrison examines how the people in the Bottom, most of whom are poor, have been sick, or have lost loved ones prematurely, make sense of their own tragic lives and family histories. One of the most important ways that the people of Bottom cope with tragedy is by developing an identity for themselves, and creating an identity for their community.The townspeople's identity as a community is founded on tragedy. There is plenty of this to go around: the Bottom itself is founded on whites' cynical swindling of African-Americans, and in 1917, dozens of black men in the community are sent off to fight in World War I—a dangerous job that requires these men to die defending their country, yet results in no new rights or respect for the African-Americans who manage to survive. One by one, each of the characters in the book feels a sense of profound helplessness: a sense that no matter how hard they try, they'll always be ridiculed, treated as inferior, and forced to live in poverty and misery.Surrounded by misery, the people of the Bottom come to accept a pessimistic outlook on life. The characters come to regard their own lives as painful, misshapen things—they couldn't imagine living any other way. Paradoxically, acknowledging this fact creates a sense of peace and security—even if it's impossible to make things better, at least it's possible to accept things. After that, it's possible to make light of one's own tragedy: with music, dance, prayer, or humor. This is precisely the purpose of the annual ritual that Shadrack (a World War I veteran) begins. By accepting National Suicide Day, Shadrack, and later the other townspeople, accept their own fear, depression, and self-hatred— they can try to process it, and even make light of it, by partitioning it off into one day of the year. - Theme: Women, Motherhood, and Gender Roles. Description: Although Sula moves between many different characters' perspectives, it is almost entirely told from the point of view of women living in the Bottom. Often, the men in the novel can't be "pinned down" for long: their jobs keep them away from home (Wiley Wright), or their desire for independence leads them to abandon their families (Jude Greene, BoyBoy, etc.). As a result, it's no surprise that Morrison offers many insights into the lives of women and their role in their communities.One quality that defines many of the women in Sula (Helene, Eva, Hannah, Nel, etc.) is motherhood. The men in the novel are often less closely connected with their families than are their wives—sometimes, they abandon their families altogether. Although many of the mothers in the novel leave their hometown in Ohio for long periods of time (even Eva Peace, perhaps the most devoted mother in the book, leaves for eighteen months), they're likely to come back to take care of their children, and often after they take one leave of absence, they never take another one again. As a result of the heightened presence of mothers in the lives of their children, the bond between a mother and child—and particularly a mother and her daughter—is exceptionally strong.Another important kind of feminine bond in Sula, arguably even more important than motherhood, is friendship—the paramount example being the close friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright. And yet there's always an implicit problem in the friendships between women and other women. Too often, women—certainly the women of the Bottom—are taught that they must find a husband, or else always be "incomplete." We can see this dynamic at work when Sula and Nel, only twelve years old, go off to find "beautiful boys"—an episode of their lives that ultimately drives them apart and spoils their friendship. Years later, Sula, convinced that she must find love and understanding through sex, sleeps with Nel's husband, Jude Green, destroying Nel's marriage and ending their friendship for good. When women are convinced that finding a man is their ultimate purpose in life, they will consider their friendships with other women to be only of secondary importance—and as a result, female friendships face the danger of being torn apart by competition for "beautiful boys."In a famous essay, the author Virginia Woolf praised Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night for being the first work of Western literature in which two women are friends with one another, and don't compete for a man's attention. It's worth thinking about how rare friendships between women are in literature—more often than not, women's relationships are defined by a common goal: a husband. In Sula, Morrison shows how the relationships between women hold families and entire communities together. And yet many female friendships are ruined because society teaches women that their purpose in life is to compete for a husband and make a new family. - Theme: Signs, Names, and Interpretation. Description: From the first pages of Sula, it's clear that signs and names carry a huge amount of power. The novel documents some of the ways that signs can be powerful, and how this power can be used and abused.Morrison makes it clear that the act of naming is enormously important, and always reflects the power and personality of the "namer." For example, throughout the novel various characters are given the opportunity to "name" one important and ambiguous sign: Sula Peace's oddly shaped birthmark. Each character gives a different "name" to the birthmark, and the names could be said to reflect the character's innermost thoughts and behaviors. Jude Greene thinks the birthmark looks like a snake, perhaps reflecting his sexual desire for Sula, while Shadrack thinks the mark looks like a tadpole, symbolizing his fishing and his infantile mind. In short, names are never accidents: ironically, they always say something about who's doing the naming.But even if names reflect the namer's own thoughts and desires, the name he or she chooses also exerts real, tangible power over the thing being named. Eva Peace, who's tasked with naming every child in the Bottom, gives a group of children the same name: Dewey. Over time, the children continue spending time with each other, even though they're all different ages. The name becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: because Eva gives the children the same name, they remain bound together for the rest of their lives.There's no doubt that naming is an important form of power in Sula. And yet this power can be twisted and manipulated for selfish reasons. The racist white farmers who trick their black field workers into accepting land in the hills overlooking Medallion have manipulated a name—"Bottom"—for their own advantages. The farmers, knowing full well what they're doing, have promised African-Americans one thing, then given them another, because the ambiguity in the name "Bottom" allows them this leeway. This is why naming is so difficult, and so prone to deception: because not everyone can agree on what something means, one particular interpretation is always in danger of disagreeing with the other interpretations.In the end, the tragedy of Sula is a tragedy of ambiguous signs, whose definitions and meanings can never be agreed upon. When Sula accidentally kills Chicken Little, she thinks that Shadrack has seen her, and is silently judging her for her crime. When Sula runs into Shadrack's shack, Shadrack whispers the word "always" to her, seemingly a sign that he is "always" watching, and knows about Sula's crime. The truth, which only Shadrack and we, the readers, know, is that Shadrack is actually trying to comfort Sula about her birthmark—he didn't even know that Chicken Little was drowned. One word, interpreted one way, has scarred Sula for the rest of her life. Because the people in the novel interpret different names in different ways—"always," "husband," "friend," "love"—they must live in a state of uncertainty, never sure if their loved ones can truly understand them. - Climax: Climax:The mass death at the New River Road on January 3, 1941 - Summary: The novel takes place in the neighborhood of Bottom, in the city of Medallion, Ohio—a place which, at present, is a golf course for rich white people, but which used to be a thriving black community. In the 1910s, there is a man living in the Bottom named Shadrack. In 1917, he goes off to fight in World War I. He witnesses great violence in Europe, and returns to the Bottom a broken man. Shadrack then proposes a holiday for the people of Bottom: National Suicide Day. Every year, he walks through the streets, ringing a bell and yelling. At first, the people of the Bottom ignore Shadrack, but eventually, National Suicide Day becomes an accepted part of the calendar. Another resident of the Bottom is Helene Wright. Helene was born in New Orleans, and raised by her grandmother, who taught her to be pious and moral. As a young woman, she married Wiley Wright, a cook. Wright brought Helene to live in the Bottom, and together they had a daughter named Nel. Helene quickly acquired a reputation for being a highly respectable woman, and she raised her daughter to behave the same way. When Nel is a young girl, Helene takes her back to New Orleans to visit her grandmother Cecile (Nel's great-grandmother). On the train ride to New Orleans, a racist train conductor shouts at Helene, but Helene only responds by flashing him a dazzling smile. Nel notices that the black people sitting in the train are glaring at Helene for her deferential behavior. Nel resolves never to let any black man look at her this way. In New Orleans, Nel and Helene arrive too late—Cecile is already dead. Instead they briefly meet Rochelle, Helene's mother, who is a prostitute and shows no affection or concern for Helene or Nel. Another resident of the Bottom in the early 1920s is Sula Peace, a girl with a strange birthmark, shaped like a stemmed rose, on her face. Sula lives in a house that's nearly the opposite of Nel's: big, chaotic, and full of people. Sula is largely raised by her grandmother, Eva Peace, an old, one-legged woman, and her mother, Hannah Peace. Eva was married to a man named BoyBoy, who left her after she'd given birth to three children: Hannah, Pearl, and Plum. Eva devoted herself to raising her children. One winter, she left town for months, and when she returned she had only one leg, but plenty of money. (It's rumored that Eva allowed a train to cut off her leg in order to collect an expensive insurance policy.) Eva's youngest child, Plum, went off to fight in World War I. When he returned, he was ragged-looking, and seemed to have become addicted to heroin. Overcome with grief and love for her child, Eva doused Plum with kerosene while he was sleeping and set him on fire, burning him alive. Hannah, Eva's eldest child, always sensed that Eva was responsible for Plum's death. By 1922 Sula and Nel are twelve years old, and have become good friends. Sula protects Nel from bullies in the city, and they have a similar loneliness that makes them close. One day, Sula and Nel go down to the Ohio River to look for boys to flirt with. By the river, they find only Chicken Little, a young boy. Sula dares Chicken Little to climb a high tree with her. Reluctantly, Chicken Little follows Sula up the tree. Then they climb down, and Sula swings Chicken Little around by the hands as he laughs. Suddenly, as Nel watches, Sula's grip slips and Chicken Little flies out into the river. He disappears underwater and doesn't resurface. Terrified that they've killed Chicken Little, Sula and Nel run for help, and to see if anyone witnessed the accident. The nearest house is a shack that belongs to Shadrack. Sula runs inside, where she finds Shadrack. Sula tries to ask Shadrack if he saw what happened on the river. Before she can finish, however, Shadrack says "Always"—which Sula interprets to mean that he did witness the accident. Sula runs out and Nel comforts her, noticing that Sula's belt is missing. A few days later, Chicken Little's body is found in the river. Sula and Nel feel guilty, and are frightened that they'll be punished for their role in the child's death. In 1923, Hannah Peace is burned alive, for reasons that nobody can understand. In the days leading up to her death, she confronts Eva about killing Plum. Eva doesn't deny what she did, but explains that she couldn't stand to see someone she loved so much in pain. A few days later, Eva sees Hannah standing outside the house, her dress on fire. Without hesitation, Eva pushes herself through the second-story window of her house (trying to protect Hannah) and falls to the ground below. Both Eva and Hannah are rushed to the hospital—Eva survives her fall, but Hannah doesn't survive her burns. Before she's taken off to the hospital, Eva notices Sula, quietly watching her own mother burn. Eva comes to hate Sula because of this. In 1927, Nel marries a handsome man named Jude Greene. Greene is ambitious and dreams of working on the New River Road—the big road that, white contractors claim, will one day link the Bottom with communities nearby. At their wedding, Nel and Jude are deeply in love and can't wait to start a family. Following the wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom and doesn't come back for ten years. During this time, Jude and Nel have several children. Meanwhile Sula goes to college and travels to the great American cities, looking for love but only ever finding men who want to sleep with her. When Sula returns to the Bottom in 1937, she goes to visit Eva Peace. Sula accuses Eva of cutting off her own leg to get an insurance policy. A few weeks later, Sula calls officials at a nearby nursing home, and they come to take Eva away. Sula reunites with Nel, who's still married to Jude, though she's not as happy as she used to be. Nel is overjoyed to be reunited with her old friend. When Sula greets Jude, Jude is immediately fascinated by her. Shortly thereafter, Jude begins an affair with Sula. One afternoon, Nel comes home to find Jude and Sula in bed. Jude tells Nel that he's leaving her, and within a few days he's left, without Sula, to live in Detroit. The people of the Bottom come to despise Sula—they know that she's slept with Jude and sent Eva away from her family. In 1940, Sula becomes seriously ill. Nel, who hasn't seen Jude or Sula in years, decides to go see her old friend. Nel demands to know why Sula broke up Nel's marriage and destroyed their friendship. Sula responds that she's strong and independent—she can do whatever she wants. She also asks Nel, "If we were such good friends, how come you couldn't get over it?" Furious, Nel leaves Sula, and Sula dies shortly thereafter. After Sula's death, a frost comes to the Bottom, followed by a wave of disease. In January 1941, Shadrack walks through the streets, celebrating his annual National Suicide Day. He thinks back to long ago, when a young girl with a "tadpole" shaped mark (whom we know to be Sula) ran into his shack. He remembers taking the girl's belt and whispering "Always," meaning that the girl would be fine, in spite of her strange birthmark. To Shadrack's surprise, dozens of people walk behind him, yelling and cheering for National Suicide Day. Together, they walk all the way to cliffs overlooking the river, where they survey the supposed "New River Road"—in reality, a dirty pile of bricks that'll never amount to anything. Disgusted with the hypocrisy of white businessmen, the people of the Bottom hurl stones at the road. Suddenly, a piece of the cliff breaks off, and dozens of people fall to their deaths in the river below. In the final chapter of the book, set in 1965, Nel is a middle-aged woman. She goes to visit Eva Peace, who is still living in a nursing home. Eva asks Nel why she killed Chicken Little. Nel, shocked, insists that it was Sula, not she, who killed the boy. Nel runs outside the nursing home, where she sees a cemetery. She finds the graves of the Peace family, including Sula's grave. Nel realizes that she's missed Sula all these years, though she thought she'd been missing her husband. She cries out for her old friend, but no one can hear her.

- Genre: Short story - Title: Sweat - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: 1920s Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black town to incorporate in the United States - Character: Delia Jones. Description: Delia is the protagonist and main character of "Sweat." A hardworking middle-aged black woman, she makes her living washing other people's clothes. Delia is married to the lazy and abusive Sykes. Her many years of work and suffering have stolen her former beauty, leaving her with "knotty, muscled limbs" and "hard, knuckly hands." Although she married Sykes for love, she has come to realize that all she can hope for now is some measure of peace. She wants to spend the rest of her life in the little home that she has earned through her hard work. She has a deep fear of snakes that Sykes exploits to torment her. Delia attends church regularly and turns to Christianity for comfort through her abusive relationship. She maintains a Christ-like attitude of patient suffering, although she is willing to defend herself from Sykes when he goes too far. - Character: Sykes. Description: Sykes is Delia's abusive husband and the antagonist of "Sweat." He first appears in the story by playing a nasty trick on Delia, and this event proves to represent his character as a whole. He has spent most of their marriage abusing Delia both physically and emotionally, and when she finally begins to defend herself, he does not know how to respond. He soon takes a mistress named Bertha and shows off around town with her. Sykes is so determined to hurt Delia and take the house that he resorts to unsafe extremes—like bringing a rattlesnake into the house to scare her off—which eventually lead to his own death. - Theme: Domestic Abuse. Description: In "Sweat," Hurston clearly and directly condemns domestic abuse. Her condemnation functions in two ways. First, she depicts Delia and Sykes' marriage as being wrecked by Sykes' emotional and physical abuse. Second, she uses the viewpoints of other men in the town to also criticize Sykes' behavior. In this way, Hurston does not allow abuse to be portrayed as the inevitable product of a patriarchal society. Instead, she shows it, quite simply, to be evil, and as something that can't be explained away or justified. Near the end of the story, as Delia finally tells Sykes to leave after his years of emotional and physical abuse, she says: "Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh." Delia makes clear here that she married Sykes for love, and the story makes clear that she only ever acted out of love: she worked hard to provide for her husband, she meekly obeyed him, she endured his beatings, and she did not fight back against his constant infidelity. Sykes, though, never ceased to beat her, to berate her, to play tricks on her, and to hate her all the more, it seems, for enduring his abuse. At no point in the story is it ever suggested, by anyone other than Sykes, that their marriage is wrecked by anyone other than Sykes. His emotional and physical abuse is always held front and center as cruel, unjust, and evil. Halfway through, the story shifts for a few paragraphs from Delia's point of view to that of a group of men gathered on the porch of a town store, as they see Delia out working and they talk about her and Sykes. This part of the story is rather remarkable because of the way that the men, roundly and completely, condemn Sykes' behavior. None of the men at any time suggests that Delia deserves or somehow caused Sykes' abuse of her. They don't shame Delia, or claim that she's deficient in some way. It's quite the opposite: the men blame Sykes and see his abuse of his wife as unacceptable. In fact, Joe Clarke, the store owner, speaks up to define the dynamics of Sykes' particular kind of misogynistic attitude as one that brings unhappiness. He compares sexist men's abuse of their wives to a man chewing sugarcane: they use up all the sweetness, then resent the bitterness and damage their abuse has created. Clarke asserts that men like Sykes know what they are doing, and hate themselves for it, and then hate the women they abuse as a way to protect themselves. The other men then all agree. However, despite their wisdom about abuse and condemnation of its practice, one could argue that these men then don't do enough to intervene. When Sykes shows up to the store, they do all leave, essentially shunning him. But they never step in, and no one ever tries to protect Delia. Despite the men's apathy when it comes to direct action, "Sweat" as a whole never seeks to justify or excuse domestic violence. It presents abuse, from beginning to end, as destructive, cruel, unjustifiable, and—as Sykes' abusive action of bringing the snake into the domestic "Eden" of the house would suggest—even evil. - Theme: Christianity. Description: Christian belief plays a major role in "Sweat," both in the characters' lives and words, and in the way that the story itself interacts with Biblical stories. This is particularly clear in the way faith serves as a source of emotional support for Delia, how Sykes hypocritically uses Christian ideals to assert social control over Delia, and the Biblically-inflected concept of justice that unfolds over the course of the story. Ultimately, Hurston uses "Sweat" to portray a modern alternative to the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden, one that complicates the idea of "meekness" and also relocates the source of "original sin." Hurston portrays true Christian faith as offering a person support through all manner of hardship. Delia is able to continue working hard and endure Sykes' abuse at least in part because she finds solace in Christianity. Delia and Sykes' first fight of the story takes place on Sunday night, after she has returned from church. While lying in bed after the confrontation, Delia feels able to "build a spiritual earthworks" to defend against his "shells." These terms liken their conflict to spiritual warfare, using the language of the battlefield from the recently concluded World War I. Delia's faith is her defense in this war. Hurston also explicitly compares Delia's suffering at the hands of Sykes to that of Christ before the crucifixion. At one point, the story describes Delia as crawling "over the earth at Gethsemane and up the rocks at Calvary," both important sites in the Bible story of Jesus's crucifixion. This reference portrays Delia as an innocent victim who will suffer—who has willingly endured suffering—but will eventually triumph. Whereas Delia's faith is true and authentic, Sykes uses Christian ideas and beliefs almost exclusively as way to try to control Delia, and his words are contradicted by his actions. Sykes calls Delia a hypocrite for going to church on Sunday and then working afterward, on what is supposed to be her day of rest. But Sykes' accusation of hypocrisy is immediately revealed as better aimed at himself: first, because it is his own laziness and carelessness with money that means Delia has to work so hard in the first place, and second because Sykes is calling Delia a hypocrite for a minor offense when he routinely breaks major Christian tenets by beating Delia and committing adultery. He also uses the snake, a symbol of evil in Christian iconography, to try to take what is not his. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent tempts Eve to disobey God's will. In "Sweat," Sykes' use of the rattlesnake to chase Delia out of her house—out of her Eden, which she built with her work and around which she painstakingly planted every tree—implies that he is in alliance with evil against the will of God. That Delia addresses the snake as "ol' satan" only reinforces this connection. The plot of "Sweat" centers on a Biblical ideal of justice, with Sykes punished for his faithlessness—to both Delia and to God—and Delia rewarded for her faith. In the initial confrontation between the married couple, Hurston immediately establishes Delia as meek, but only in the context of describing Delia's "habitual meekness" as falling away "like a blown scarf" when Delia picks up a frying pan and tells Sykes that she will no longer put up with his abuse. It is this action—this putting off of meekness by a normally meek woman—that puts into motion the events of the rest of the story. Yet even as Delia throws aside her meekness in regard to Sykes, she remains "meek" and faithful in her relationship to God. She does not decide to do away with Sykes, and she does not pray or demand that God do something to Sykes. Rather, even as she has suddenly stood up to Sykes she continues to put herself and her future in the hands of God. This is evident the night after the fight, when Delia thinks that Sykes will come to justice, or "reap his sowing," one way or another. Ironically, that reckoning comes through Sykes' choice to bring the rattlesnake into the house—to bring the snake into Delia's Eden to try to scare her into leaving the house to him, and then secretly releasing it in hopes that it will kill her. When Delia escapes the snake, and then later listens from outside as Sykes is fatally bitten when he goes back to check on his handiwork, it seems like the story indicates a triumph of the meek, as the cruel and evil abuser is ironically done in by his own evil plan. But the story doesn't end in a moment of triumph or joy for Delia. After Delia listens to the commotion of Sykes trying and failing to beat back the snake, she creeps up to the door and sees Sykes, dying and swollen from the snake bite, with just one eye still open. "A surge of pity too strong to support bore her away from that eye that must, could not, fail to see the tubs." Delia, in this moment, realizes that Sykes, seeing the clothes-washing tubs in the kitchen, must know that she knew the snake was in the house. In other words, she knew the danger he faced and did not warn him. Sykes let the snake loose in Eden and heeded its call. Sykes, in this story, is like Eve, who first encountered and was swayed by the snake. But Delia, like Adam, does not emerge unscathed either. Rather, she made her meekness into a weapon when she did not warn Sykes before he went into the house. The story ends with Delia still fixated on Sykes' eye, as she waits outside the house and "knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew." The focus on the words "knew" and "know" can't be an accident in a story that so clearly echoes the story of the Garden of Eden—which centers around the eating of the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Delia is a sympathetic character, and the reader is likely to feel that her actions are justified—and that Sykes' death is a kind of justice—but the ending of the story suggests that in allowing Sykes to die, Delia also has been made all too knowledgeable of good and evil, and may have been cast out of her Eden forever. - Theme: Hard Work vs. Entitlement. Description: "Sweat" is structured around the contrast between Delia and her husband Sykes, and nothing is more basic to that contrast than their attitudes towards work. Through these two characters, Hurston affirms the value of hard work as a foundation for both moral integrity and survival under difficult conditions. Likewise, she condemns Sykes' sense of lazy entitlement as morally bankrupt. Hard work is associated with integrity and worthiness in "Sweat." The fact that Delia has labored—and sweated—to care for her household means that she has a substantial claim to the house. Delia's long years of work as a washerwoman give her a sense of self-worth that not even Sykes can threaten. When he tries to prevent her from taking in washing, she replies that her washing has fed him and paid for the house, and therefore she has the right to continue doing it. Rather than respond, Sykes leaves. It seems that even Sykes finds it difficult to deny Delia's right to the house, which is why he eventually resorts to trying to scare her out of it or to kill her, rather than to just claiming it as his own. As discussed in the theme of Christianity, Hurston portrays Delia's suffering as Christ-like. This comparison is explicitly connected to her years of hard work: it is "Delia's work-worn knees" that are described as crawling over the Biblical locations of Gethsemane and Calvary. Entitlement is morally and practically untenable, Hurston suggests. Sykes believes that he should have possession of the house and anything else Delia has worked for without owing her any loyalty—simply because he is a man and her husband, presumably. This attitude, however, makes him a pariah in the community, and eventually leads to his death. Sykes' demands on Delia are shown to be hypocritical from the beginning. He tries to control her in the house that her work paid for, a fact that she points out during their initial argument. He promises his mistress Bertha that she will be able to live in the house, even though Delia has a much greater claim on it than he does. He believes that he is entitled to what he wants without consideration for who actually worked for it. The men of the community judge Sykes not only for his infidelity, but also for failing to contribute financially to the household. They consider him worthless, critiquing his failure to perform any portion of "a husband's duty," which would include helping his wife to pay the bills. Ultimately, Sykes' sense of entitlement to the house leads him to catch the rattlesnake to scare Delia off—he's trying to claim her house and get rid of her without doing any real work. Despite her protests, and comments from other community members that he ought to kill the snake with a club to the head, Sykes persists and is eventually (and ironically) killed by the snake. While Delia and Sykes operate on two different extremes of work and entitlement, the story also makes room for those in the middle. The minor characters in "Sweat" appear mainly while socializing with one another, rather than working. Still, they are not portrayed in as negative a light as Sykes. When they ask the storekeeper to bring out a watermelon, they all eventually agree to make a small contribution to pay for it, and the negotiation is friendly. By respecting one another and contributing as much as they can, the townspeople maintain their social relationships. This is especially important in light of the story's setting as a whole—a poor, all-black town in the Jim Crow South. In the face of such harsh institutional barriers, no one has much to spare, and certainly no one can afford to be entitled to another person's work—but by working together, members of the community can find room for both leisure and labor. Hurston develops a stark contrast between the virtuous, hard-working character of Delia and the unlikeable, entitled Sykes. However, she also allows space for ordinary people who do not have Delia's saint-like perseverance. The most important thing in "Sweat" is not capacity to work, but respect for work, both other people's and one's own. - Theme: Race and Class. Description: While "Sweat" is closely focused on the troubled relationship between Delia and Sykes, it is also set in a poor, all-black town in segregated 1920s Florida. The theme of race and class, although it is not a central part of the story's plot, inevitably comes into play in such a setting. Zora Neale Hurston uses this aspect of the story to explore the effects of race and class as it impacts the couple and their broader community. In doing so, she captures a community shaped by racism and poverty, and shows how these factors shape the lives of those affected by them. Poverty is one of the main sources of hardship in Delia's life, and it structures her relationship with Sykes. Delia works so hard at her washing that she cannot take a whole day off each week; she has spent her many years of "sweat, sweat, sweat!" on this task to keep the household running. Sykes resents Delia's work even though it supports him, too. He tries to assert a middle-class ideal of the man as head of the household by telling her to take her washing outside, and threatening her with violence if she does not comply. Because they are poor and Delia is a working woman, Sykes does not have financial control over her, and instead uses physical abuse to assert his will. Sykes doesn't have access to legal resources to throw Delia out of their house, so he resorts to planting a rattlesnake to scare her. Sykes and Delia's different relationships to whiteness—and white people—are also partially responsible for his failure and her success in life. Sykes resents whiteness and all things associated with it. While the individual reasons for this are not clearly articulated, simply living in the Jim Crow South is certainly justification enough for such resentment—but Sykes lets this resentment get in the way of his own happiness, and uses it as a weapon against his innocent wife as well. He scolds Delia for washing "white folks clothes" and tells her to keep them out of the house. Delia takes a more practical approach. She lives in the world she has, rather than getting caught up in resentment. Her job as a washerwoman, for instance, relies on white people's desire for her services. Further, she threatens Sykes with telling the "white folks" about his abuse if he lays hands on her again, suggesting that her work for white patrons give her some leverage against her husband. Sykes, in contrast, is not as successful in coping with the effects of racism, segregation, and poverty. He takes out his frustrations not on those actually perpetuating oppression, but rather on Delia, and he is condemned by the narrative for that domestic abuse. The exploration of race and class in "Sweat" shows the ways in which features of a story's setting can pervade every aspect of the characters' lives. Zora Neale Hurston portrays racism and poverty as serious problems that can provoke a variety of responses, some more useful than others. In particular, with the character of Sykes, she shows that the stress of inhabiting a marginalized social position may partially explain morally objectionable behavior, but it does not excuse such a choice. Regardless of his reasons for abusing Delia, Sykes is morally condemned. Delia stands as a counter-example, showing that it is possible to behave ethically even in the face of race- and class-related stress. - Climax: When Sykes returns to the house and is bitten by the rattlesnake - Summary: "Sweat" tells the story of a woman in an unhappy and abusive marriage who is eventually freed through an ironic twist of fate. The story opens on a Sunday night with Delia Jones, a hardworking washerwoman, sorting the week's laundry. Her husband, Sykes, returns home and plays a nasty trick on her with his horsewhip, which resembles a snake. She is frightened and scolds him, but he simply laughs. Sykes calls Delia a hypocrite for working on Sunday after church, stomps on the clothes, and threatens her with physical violence. Delia abandons her meek posture and stands to defend herself. She proclaims that her sweat paid for the house and she will do as she pleases in it, threatening Sykes with a cast iron skillet. Sykes, surprised, slinks away to spend the night with his mistress. Delia finishes her work and goes to bed. She lies awake, remembering the hopeful early days of her marriage and its swift turn to abuse. When Sykes returns home in the night to claim his place in bed, she no longer cares what he says or does. The following Saturday, Delia is passing the town store with her pony and cart to deliver clean clothes. A group of village men gathered on the shop's porch begin discussing Delia and Sykes. They comment on Delia's hard work and condemn Sykes for his abuse and infidelity. Joe Clarke, the storeowner, compares abusive husbands to men chewing sugarcane, who squeeze all the goodness out of something and throw away the remainder. Another man comments that they all ought to take Sykes and his mistress down to the swamp and beat them both, and the others seem to agree, but they stay on the porch and eat a melon instead. Sykes and his mistress Bertha appear, and a hush falls on the porch. Sykes makes a great show of ordering food for Bertha just as Delia drives past. Time passes, and Bertha has now been in town for three months, with Sykes paying for her room in a boarding house. He promises to move her into his and Delia's house as soon as he can get Delia out of it. Delia, meanwhile, has been through a great deal of hard work and embarrassment. She tries to ignore the situation, but Bertha keeps coming by the house. Delia and Sykes fight constantly. One hot day in August, Delia comes home to find that Sykes has caught a rattlesnake and placed it in a box by the kitchen door in order to scare her away. Delia is terrified and demands that he take it away, but she is met only with laughter and denial. People from the village come by to ask Sykes about the snake, and one man advises him to kill it, but to no avail. The snake remains in its screen-covered box by the kitchen door, and after several days digesting its latest meal, becomes more active and begins rattling its tail. Delia again tells Sykes to take the snake away, but Sykes responds that he doesn't care how she feels. Delia then astonishes Sykes by proclaiming that she hates him and telling him to get out of the house. They trade more insults, but Sykes leaves without carrying out any of his threats. The next day, Sunday, Delia goes to church in the next town over and stays for the evening service. She comes home after dark singing hymns. When she arrives, she finds the snake is absent from its box, and feels the sudden hope that Sykes might have had a change of heart. She goes to strike a match for light and, finding only one, concludes that Sykes and Bertha must have been there while she was gone. Delia starts to sort her washing, but upon opening the laundry hamper, she is horrified to find the snake waiting in the basket. He begins to slither out onto the bed, and Delia flees across the yard to the hay barn. She climbs up onto the hay and stays there for hours, first deathly afraid, then enraged, then horribly calm. She concludes that she has done her best and "Gawd knows taint mah fault." Delia falls asleep and awakens to hear Sykes destroying the snake's box in the pre-dawn light. She watches him go inside, then creeps down to peer through the bedroom window. Delia hears the snake rattling, but Sykes hears nothing until he knocks a pot lid down trying to find a match. He suddenly thinks he hears the rattle under the stove, and he flees to the bedroom. Delia hears Sykes's cries as he is bitten and his struggle with the snake. She feels ill and begins to creep away, but finds herself frozen when Sykes calls out for her. Eventually she gets up and sees Sykes crawling out, his neck swollen from the snakebite. She knows that it is too late to save Sykes, and she goes to wait in the yard, helpless to keep him from realizing that she knows of his fate.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: Tender - Point of view: First Person (Christine) - Setting: Rural Australia - Character: Christine. Description: Christine, the protagonist of the story, is married to Al, with whom she has two young children, Hannah and Jamie. She has recently discovered a tender lump under her arm, leading to a series of worrisome visits to the hospital for various examinations and tests to determine if the lump is cancerous. Throughout the story, she hints at a desire she and Al share for adhering to a natural, eco-friendly, technology-free way of life whenever possible. However, they have compromised on some matters since having children, such as owning a television and computer. Christine plans her day-to-day life meticulously to take care of her family's needs, addressing details such as cleaning up mousetraps to conceal dead mice from her children and stocking ingredients so that Al can make dinner without her. Both in the present and in flashbacks, Christine spends much of her time and effort attempting to maintain control of not only her own life but also the family's, especially in regards to her children's development. As a result, she becomes anxious and frustrated when unexpected events throw the family off course, such as the emergence of her possibly cancerous lump or Jamie's last-minute scramble to finish a school assignment. Hannah and Jamie have not grown into the well-behaved children that Christine expected, even with strict bedtimes and limits on TV time. Christine inevitably reacts to these events by trying to regain control over another part of her life in response. For example, she refuses Al's help with preparing dinner, wanting to assert her self-reliance in the face of uncertainty about the lump. Similarly, she takes over Jamie's school project after he goes to bed, determined to gain some control over the chaos his procrastination produced—and perhaps to demonstrate her worth as a mother. By the end of the story, Christine comes to terms with the illusory nature of control, embracing the rush of love that drives her to complete Jamie's diorama and removing the mousetraps in a symbolic acceptance of life's unpredictability. - Character: Al. Description: Al is Christine's easygoing and absentminded husband, who works at a community center. While Christine values order and fights to control everything in their lives, Al lets life unfold naturally around him, irritating her with his tendency to neglect his chores and home improvement projects. However, he demonstrates focus and competence when it is needed, leading his coworkers to trust that he can take care of responsibilities in the end, even if he takes somewhat of a meandering path to get there. At home, he forgets to close drawers and his unfinished bookshelves lie around the garage, but he remembers Christine's appointment time and quietly takes over washing dishes while she works on Jamie's diorama. He only knows how to cook one dish—tuna and pasta casserole—but like most things he does, it gets the job done. Christine's memory of him skillfully shaking out a pair of inside out pajamas for Hannah comforts her, reassuring her that Al can keep the household running while she is gone for the day. - Character: Jamie. Description: Jamie is Christine and Al's seven-year-old son. He seems to have inherited his father's laid-back and absentminded personality, forgetting about his school project—or simply putting it off—until the night before it is due. His presence disrupts Christine's need for order and control, as he leaves bike tracks all over the garden and action figures scattered across the floor—a sharp contrast from her earlier hopes of him developing into a responsible older brother who would read calmly to his sister. However, Jamie's focus on his project once he starts working on it triggers Christine's intense parental love. She works late into the night to complete the project, not wanting him to feel disappointed or embarrassed by bringing an unfinished diorama to school. - Theme: The Illusion of Control. Description: Cate Kennedy's "Tender" portrays one night and morning in the life of the story's protagonist, Christine. In anticipation of an appointment for a biopsy, she attempts to exercise control over her home and her family, which consists of her husband, Al, and two young children, Hannah and Jamie. However, Christine finds that, in spite of her efforts, their lives are inevitably full of uncertainty. Through Christine's actions, Kennedy suggests that the urge to maintain control of one's life is a natural human impulse, but also that any sense of control is only an illusion in the face of unexpected events. Throughout the story, Christine is constantly planning ahead and taking responsibility for the family's wellbeing. She has avoided putting her biopsy appointment on their calendar so that the children won't see it and fret about it, even though Al has already told them. She also tells Al that she'll leave the car at the station for him and plans to be back for dinner, but later expresses concern that she might not make it home in time, wondering if she should leave some tuna and pasta so that he can make the only dish he knows how to cook. Even though she is going to the hospital for an operation, her focus is on ensuring the day will go smoothly for the rest of the family—not for herself. When Christine sees mice in the kitchen, she immediately places mousetraps out and notes that Al will need to check them in the morning, since the children would want a funeral and burial for any dead mice, making them late for school. Once again, her train of thought reveals a thoroughly planned sequence of events in her family's best interests. After Jamie goes to bed with his school project unfinished, Christine cannot help completing the diorama for him. She stays up for several hours decorating the diorama and collecting items from around the house, despite needing to catch a train early in the morning. And later, she remembers to unset and collect the traps even with only half an hour to catch the train. Because she is such a careful planner, Christine expresses frustration when events and people do not follow her plans. She feels "a familiar mix of guilt and resentment" about how her home does not match the "grand theory of sustainability" she and Al once wanted to uphold. Instead, their lives have been "modified [for] a more prosaic reality," in which she dreams of having an electric oven, Al entertains himself by going on the Internet, and "one hour of sanctioned TV a night" keeps the children occupied. Christine is annoyed with Al when he plays with the children while bathing them, well past their scheduled dinnertime. Unlike her, he does not address responsibilities in an organized manner, instead handling them as they come. His unfinished bookshelves lie around the house, and Christine is often frustrated with how nonchalant and relaxed he is towards his responsibilities at home. Jamie also defies Christine's expectations; she fantasizes about him reading peacefully to his little sister, but this dream does not materialize. Instead, the two children fight over bath toys and scream across the house. Jamie leaves action figures strewn across the floor and Hannah demands to play with nail polish, leaving Christine anxious about their behavior and her influence on them. To add to Christine's mounting anxiety, the lump that triggered her hospital visits worries her throughout the story, even though she cannot do anything about it beyond the biopsy she has scheduled for the following morning. She thinks of her own body as no longer trustworthy, despite the lack of a certain diagnosis, and understandably considers the worst-case scenario of the tumor being cancerous. In the end, Christine accepts that her sense of control is only an illusion, and that she must trust that her family can take care of themselves without her. While she prepares to finish Jamie's diorama and catch the train, her mind wanders to a memory of Al competently shaking out the children's inside out pajamas, which reassures her that he can manage responsibilities when he needs to. Even though he only cooks one dish, that dish feeds the family, and even though his coworkers at the community center aren't quite sure how he does his work, "it all comes together in the end" somehow. Christine takes a look at both Jamie and Hannah before departing, describing them as healthy and full of life, "flawless" and "perfect" children. Despite her earlier frustrations with Jamie's forgotten homework and action figures, or Hannah's desire to do her nails like "a miniature Paris Hilton," she accepts her children as they are, and implicitly acknowledges that they don't need her micromanaging them in order to grow up successfully. At the end of the story, Christine releases the springs on all the mousetraps she set out and collects them, implying none of them were successful in catching the mice. Though the mice are pests, they are essentially out of Christine's control, and setting out traps is not guaranteed to catch any. In the same vein, her adherence to a healthy, natural lifestyle did not prevent her from developing what might be a malignant tumor, nor did her strict parenting style produce perfectly well-behaved children. By calmly picking the traps up before leaving for the hospital, she accepts that her sense of control over her environment is only an illusion; in reality, her best efforts can sometimes fail anyway. - Theme: Nature vs. Technology. Description: Throughout "Tender," Kennedy hints at Christine and Al's desire to keep their home relatively free of modern technology, even at the cost of inconvenience. Although they are still drawn to the natural way of life they once prioritized, having children has pushed Christine and Al to give in to some of the temptations provided by modern technology, such as a television and computer. The lump under Christine's arm has highlighted that compromise, sending her to the hospital for advanced medical treatments like an ultrasound and biopsy. However, Christine's experiences with the lump and with her daily family life also indicate that people cannot separate themselves totally from nature, even when they embrace modern lives. Through Christine and Al's struggle to balance natural and technological ways of life, Kennedy proposes that modern technology, though alluring and sometimes necessary, cannot truly overcome nature. Christine originally planned to live a simple lifestyle with Al, avoiding modern technology where possible. She claims that nobody could have told her "seven years ago," presumably before Hannah and Jamie were born, that she and Al would own a television or electric heaters. Although they do have these comforts now—including a computer, on which Al surfs the Internet nightly—she and Al clearly intended to do without them but changed course once they had children. She remembers arguing with Al over building their house with mud walls, in order to avoid any toxic chemicals involved in using cement or other materials. Although mud walls would have been less convenient, she and Al tried to consider "pure environments" and "every bloody thing" about sustainability when planning their future lives. To cook dinner, Christine loads wood into a firebox attached to a wood-burning oven. Although she dreams of owning an electric oven, she and Al must have committed to minimizing their electricity use when constructing the house. She also mentions solar panels installed to provide some electricity, as part of an effort to build a sustainable home. She and Al still keep mostly herbal medicines in their pantry and prefer not to go to the pharmacy or doctor for treatments. Christine is even proud of not having visited a hospital since Hannah's birth, at least until her recent appointments. However, after their children were born, Christine and Al accepted more modern technology into their lives. While they had debated mud walls when building their house, she acknowledges that this was only part of a "grand theory of sustainability" that had to be adapted to a more "prosaic reality." In other words, their idealistic dreams had to make way for the day-to-day demands of family life. And although they have solar panels, their home is now fitted with "an electric system like everyone else's" and any power from the panels is "just a booster." Christine sees herbal medicines in the pantry and scoffs at how she and Al would never have imagined giving store-bought medicine to their children, even if that medicine is still natural and homeopathic. Similarly, prior to discovering the lump in her arm, she hadn't been to the hospital since Hannah was born. Especially when medical care is involved, Christine and Al have accepted modern medicine in addition to using herbal remedies. Eventually, Al and particularly Christine learn that relying on technology doesn't actually prevent nature from running its course. Though Christine clearly values the natural world, the lump under her arm shows how nature can act in unpredictable ways. Christine turns to technology—specifically, modern medicine—to try and understand it, but even after the initial ultrasound, the doctor is unable to tell whether the lump is benign or malignant. It remains unclear at the end of the story what treatments she might need after the biopsy. The lump is naturally occurring, but that doesn't make it good; it's simply something that the family has to confront. Although the lump is an example of nature causing pain and uncertainty in Christine's life, she also experiences the persistent beauty and wonder of nature throughout the story. She describes her daughter as a "healthy, respiring" child with "cells [that are] a blur of miraculously multiply and flowering growth." Essentially, the same kind of biological process that is behind Christine's tumor is also responsible for the wonder of her children growing healthy and strong. Similarly, when Christine collects materials for Jamie's diorama from the garden, she becomes calm when she "paus[es] to inhale the deep spicy smell of the lemon-scented gum" and "feel[s] the dew drench her ankles" and compares a "little patch of bush" growing beneath the kitchen window to "a healing scar." She takes solace in the beauty of the raw wilderness and how it fights to grow and survive regardless of human intervention. At the end of the story, Christine's mousetraps do not catch any mice, even though she sets up several around the kitchen. By collecting the mousetraps and resetting them each "with a benign and harmless snap," Christine symbolically accepts that she cannot use technology to pick and choose which parts of nature to experience. In order to appreciate its beauty, she must also deal with its challenges—both small ones like pests and bigger ones like the lump under her arm. By ending the story on this note, Kennedy conveys that technology can't fully suppress nature, and that nature must be accepted as a whole, including both ugly and beautiful elements. - Theme: The Power of Love. Description: Kennedy depicts Christine as a loving mother and wife in "Tender," even while Christine struggles with the possibility of having a malignant tumor. Although her family often causes her disappointment, anxiety, and frustration with their antics, her unconditional love for them keeps her committed to caring for them. Through Christine's point of view, Kennedy demonstrates that love often stirs up negative emotions but is nevertheless powerful enough to inspire selfless action. Despite her anxiety over the lump in her arm and a biopsy in the morning, Christine's love for her family pushes her to look after their needs rather than her own. At the beginning of the story, Christine attempts to hide the appointment from her children, even at the risk of forgetting the time by not writing it down on the calendar, in order to save them worry about their mother. While Al reveals that he has already informed Hannah and Jamie, who do not seem to behave any differently, Christine's concern for even this small detail highlights how meticulously she tries to ensure a smooth day for them without her. She completes Jamie's diorama project on his behalf, working on it for several hours and staying up past midnight, before waking up early the next morning to complete her "unfinished vision" for it. Although the last-minute rush was entirely Jamie's fault for forgetting about the assignment until the night before it is due, his unhappiness at the idea of showing up to school and seeing other kids' completed projects drives Christine to go above and beyond to surprise her son with a high-quality diorama in the morning. She also sets out mousetraps and makes sure to collect them in the morning, wanting to catch the mice scurrying around the kitchen yet trying to avoid the children's clamor for a funeral if they find any dead mice. Even though she is already up late in the middle of completing Jamie's diorama, another selfless task, she immediately takes the time to address another problem as she notices it and again prioritizes her family's needs. However, Christine is often frustrated and annoyed with the rest of her family, who are not as organized or responsible as she is. Al's relaxed and absentminded personality often annoys Christine, who notes that he "can't seem to shut a drawer once he's opened it." She appreciates the "same amiable mood" he is always in but complains about his inability to complete his many half-done tasks, such as the unfinished bookshelves, the compost pile, or the unaddressed weeds. When the children are fighting in the bath, she is irritated at his delayed intervention. Even though his coworkers assure her that whatever Al does "all comes together in the end," she expresses frustration at his ignorance towards "how much organizing she has to do around him." Christine also describes Jamie as "so like Al it scares her" when he casually brings up starting his diorama project after dinner, to be completed for the next day. Like his father, Jamie is disorganized and ignorant of how much work Christine does behind the scenes to compensate for it, in this case finishing the diorama after he goes to bed. With a comparison to Al, Christine expresses much of the same disappointment and frustration towards her son as she does towards her husband. In the end, Christine gives in to her love for her family in spite of their shortcomings. At the beginning of the story, Al remembers Christine's appointment, even though it is not on the calendar, and knows which train she should take. While she is working on Jamie's diorama, Al quietly takes over washing dishes to relieve her of that responsibility. Christine takes comfort in the image of him shaking out Hannah's pajamas to turn them right side out, surprising her with how he can take care of their household despite his relaxed attitude. Although Al is generally absentminded, she knows that he is there to support Christine when it matters, and she loves him for what he does, rather than what he doesn't do. When Jamie tells Christine that the diorama needs to be done by tomorrow, she feels "the ardent rush of helpless, terrible love" drive her to help. When Jamie is not done by bedtime, the "warmth bloom[ing] briefly in her chest, tight and aching like tears" forces her to take over and finish it for him. Even though she could reasonably tell Jamie he should have started earlier or allow him to bring his unfinished work to school, she cannot help giving in to her love for her son and doing all the work for him. Kennedy's words choices in these phrases emphasize that genuine love isn't always simple or pleasant; instead, it can be "terrible" or painful in a way that makes people feel "helpless" against its power. But most importantly, the positive side of love wins out—it may not be easy to love others as much as Christine loves her family, but her ongoing devotion to them shows that it's still a worthwhile effort. - Climax: After completing the diorama, Christine unsets the mousetraps while waiting for the train. - Summary: While preparing dinner for her family, Christine dwells on a biopsy appointment she has scheduled for the next morning to examine a lump that has recently developed under her arm. Her husband, Al, enters the kitchen to confirm the time of her appointment and tells her that he's also informed their two children that she'll be getting some tests done, despite her efforts to keep the hospital visits hidden from them. Christine's thoughts wander to her daughter Hannah's past obsession with the story of the princess and the pea, in which a lump—a small pea buried under several thick mattresses—keeps the princess from falling asleep at night. Her train of thought then shifts to her son, Jamie, and how she and Al have compromised on the natural, eco-friendly, sustainable way of life they once upheld. Meanwhile, Al gives the children a bath, causing Hannah and Jamie to splash each other and fight over bath toys. Back in the kitchen, the screaming and crying irritates Christine as she anxiously recalls her previous appointment for an ultrasound on the lump. She spots a mouse running through the kitchen and sets up some mousetraps, before calling the rest of the family to dinner. While Al sorts through the basket of clean laundry for the children's pajamas, Christine grumbles to herself about her laid-back, easygoing husband, whose absentmindedness leaves much of the household chores and organizing to her. Despite her mounting concern about the biopsy, she prepares the next day's lunches and dinner for her family, in case she cannot be home in time. After dinner, Jamie nonchalantly announces that he needs to make a diorama for a school project. While explaining the assignment, he reveals that it is due the next day, prompting Christine to compare him to his similarly dreamy and forgetful father. However, Christine's love for her son overcomes her annoyance, and she helps him assemble materials from around the house and get to work on the project. When his bedtime arrives, Jamie is still working steadily, not wanting to feel embarrassed next to other students with completed dioramas—students who likely started the project long before he did. After Jamie goes to bed, Christine impulsively takes over and continues working late into the night, intending to surprise Jamie with a finished diorama in the morning. As she works, she frets anxiously about the next morning's appointment. She glances at her sleeping children while collecting materials from their rooms, taking pride in their health and development in contrast to the tumor she imagines growing in her body. Early the next morning, Christine wakes up well ahead of her scheduled train into the city, still feeling unsatisfied with the diorama. She wanders out into the garden and allows the surroundings to calm her, before gathering some branches and moss for the finishing touches on Jamie's project. The memory of Al fishing out Hannah's pajamas from the clean laundry the previous night comforts her as she waits for the train. Just before heading out, Christine retrieves and unsets all of the mousetraps she placed around the house.

- Genre: Realist Fiction - Title: Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Point of view: Third person omniscient, but generally follows Tess - Setting: Southwest England, the fictional county of Wessex - Character: Tess Durbeyfield. Description: The protagonist of the novel, an attractive young woman from the rural village of Marlott. Her family is poor, but she has been educated and seems to stand out from other girls. She has a discerning intelligence and independent spirit, and is very loyal to her family and Angel. Her misfortunes are hardly ever of her own doing, but her innocence, naivety, and unrealistic ideals sometimes increase her suffering. She is also a very tempting figure for the men of the novel, often to her detriment. Throughout the book she is portrayed as a symbol of rural innocence, closeness to Nature, and ancient paganism, but ultimately the author's sympathy is for Tess as an individual woman, not just as a representative ideal. - Character: Alec d'Urberville. Description: The principle antagonist of the novel, the handsome, libertine son of the wealthy d'Urberville-Stokes. He is fickle and impetuous by nature, but his infatuation with Tess seems more lasting than his feelings for other girls. His rape of Tess is the beginning of her misfortunes and the tragic undercurrent of the entire novel. Alec briefly takes up religion and becomes a preacher, but he discards his faith when he sees Tess again. - Character: Angel Clare. Description: The intelligent, idealistic son of the parson James Clare. He rejects his father's and brothers' profession to instead study agriculture, and remains skeptical of religion. Tess, Izz, Retty, and Marian all fall in love with him at Talbothays, but he chooses Tess. He loves an idealized, "child of nature" version of Tess, however, and is shocked to learn about her past sexual experiences (even if they were done to her rather than of her own volition). Angel cares more than he would like about the approval of his family and society, and he rejects Tess despite his own sexual transgressions in his past. - Character: John Durbeyfield. Description: Tess's father, a peddler with a bad heart condition and a love of alcohol. The novel begins with Durbeyfield learning that he is the last descendent of the ancient d'Urberville family. The news immediately goes to his head and he acts entitled for the rest of the book. He hopes to profit from his ancestry, and sends Tess off to connect with the wealthy d'Urberville-Stokes, which leads to her many misfortunes. - Character: Joan Durbeyfield. Description: Tess's mother, a housewife with many children and responsibilities. She loves to sing and is very superstitious, often consulting her book the Compleat Fortune-Teller. She likes to make matches for Tess and first proposes the visit to the d'Urberville-Stokes. Joan maintains a sense of cheerful fatalism throughout the novel and takes her family's many misfortunes in stride. - Character: Izz Huett. Description: One of the Talbothays dairymaids who befriends Tess and falls in love with Angel. She is heartbroken when Angel rejects her, but never grows bitter towards Tess. When Angel is leaving for Brazil he briefly asks Izz to accompany him. Later she and Marian write him a letter appealing on Tess's behalf. - Theme: Injustice and Fate. Description: The cruel hand of fate hangs over all the characters and actions of the novel, as Tess Durbeyfield's story is basically defined by the bad things that happen to her. Thomas Hardy himself, as the author of the novel, obviously causes the many unfair coincidences and plot twists that beset Tess, but as narrator he also manages to appear as her only advocate against an unjust world. Tess's hardships are described as mere sport for the "President of the Immortals," which contrasts with the Christian idea of a God who has a benevolent plan for everyone, and connects with the notes of paganism throughout the novel. Hardy points out and emphasizes the multiple unhappy coincidences that take place, like Tess overhearing Angel's brothers instead of meeting his father. The novel basically keeps asking the age-old question "why do bad things happen to good people?" Hardy even muses over the possibility that Tess's sufferings are a punishment for her ancestors' crimes, or else that some murderous strain is in her blood, foreshadowed by the d'Urberville coach.The "justice" meted out by the society around Tess is just as cruel as the "President of the Immortals." Both her community and Angel condemn Tess for her rape, which was not her sin but Alec's. She is seen as someone to be criticized and cast aside because of a terrible thing done to her, rather than something she did herself. Her final execution emphasizes the feeling that society, circumstance, and some external force, whether Thomas Hardy or a god, have been working against her the whole time. - Theme: Nature and Modernity. Description: Tess of the d'Urbervilles is set in both a time and place of societal transition from the agricultural to the industrial. The rural English towns and farm women often represent Hardy's idea of Nature, while machines and upper class men are associated with the modernizing forces of industrialization. Many of the descriptions and situations of the novel focus on the way that the characters and society are being separated from a more ancient lifestyle, "the ache of modernity" that Hardy felt as a loss of innocence.The plot sets Tess, who is associated with purity, fertility, unfallen Eve (i.e. Eve as she was in the Garden of Eden), and innocent paganism against the judgmental world of contemporary society. The farming machines are described with ominous imagery that contrasts sharply with the Eden-like Froom Valley. Alec and Angel, who are both well-educated and ranked socially higher than Tess, act as despoiling and condemning influences upon her rural innocence. Prince the farm horse is gored to death by a modern mail cart, and the dairy workers have to water down the milk so the townspeople can drink it without getting sick. The feeling throughout is of nostalgia for an idealized past; a kind of innocence that has been lost along with the coming of the modern age. - Theme: Social Criticism. Description: As in many of his other works, Thomas Hardy used Tess of the d'Urbervilles as a vessel for his criticisms of English Victorian society of the late 19th century. The novel's largest critique is aimed at the sexual double standard, with all the extremities and misfortunes of Tess's life highlighting the unfairness of her treatment. Society condemns her as an unclean woman because she was raped, while Angel's premarital affair is barely mentioned. Angel himself rejects Tess largely based on what his community and family would think if they discovered her past. Hardy saw many of the conventions of the Victorian age as oppressive to the individual, and to women in particular, and in Tess's case the arbitrary rules of society literally ruin her life.Even the title of the novel challenges convention. Because it was traditional at the time to see Tess as an "impure woman," the title's addendum "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented" immediately reveals the author as his protagonist's defender against condemnation. By delving so deeply into Tess's sympathetic interior life and the intricate history of her misfortunes, Hardy makes society's disapproval of her seem that much more unjust.There is also a satirical thread running through the novel's social commentary. The emphasis on ancient names is played to absurdity with John Durbeyfield's sudden pretensions upon learning of his ancestry, and the newly rich Stoke family adding "d'Urberville" to their name just to seem more magnificent. - Theme: Paganism and Christianity. Description: Thomas Hardy struggled with his own religious beliefs, and that struggle comes through in his work. He idealized the paganism of the past but was also attached to his family's Christianity, and generally he accepted some sort of supernatural being that controlled fate. Tess herself is usually portrayed as an embodiment of that pagan innocence, a sort of English Nature goddess. She first appears performing the fertility ritual of May-Day, then bedecked in flowers from Alec, whistling to Mrs. d'Urberville's birds, and mercifully killing the wounded pheasants. Angel describes her as a "new-sprung child of nature" and compares her to mythical women like Eve, Artemis, and Demeter. There is another side of Tess's "divinity" as well, however: the role of sacrificial victim, which is a figure associated with both paganism and Christianity. Like Jesus, Tess is punished for the sins of another, assuming the weight of guilt for Alec's crime. When the police finally come to arrest her for murder, she is lying asleep at Stonehenge like a sacrifice on an altar. Stonehenge was thought at Hardy's time to be a heathen temple.The Christian end of the spectrum is particularly associated with the Clare family and Alec d'Urberville. Each character seems to have a different form and expression of faith, and Hardy critiques them all with empathy from his own religious wrestling. Most of his respect goes to the intense but charitable Mr. Clare, while Alec's conversion is depicted more as a product of his fickle thrill-seeking than any deep emotion, and the conformist Clare brothers are mocked for blindly following every fashionable doctrine. Angel's skepticism and Tess's vague beliefs take the most prominence, and neither moves much past Hardy's own state of doubt. - Theme: Women. Description: Hardy muses a lot about Tess's status as a woman and the various roles women assume in society. Tess often plays the part of a passive victim, falling asleep and inadvertently killing Prince, falling asleep before her rape, and falling asleep at Stonehenge where she is arrested. She and many of the other female characters also act as symbols of fertility, nature, and purity. They are linked with the lushness of Talbothays and the bleakness of Flintomb-Ash, as well the fertility ritual of May-Day. Hardy also places a lot of emphasis on the power of men over women, in terms of both society and strength. Alec obviously dominates Tess in many terrible ways, but Angel also wields power over the women at the dairy, driving Retty and Marian to a suicide attempt and alcoholism. Tess finally assumes the role of an active agent in her own life when she writes angrily to Angel, and her final murder of Alec takes it to the extreme, underscoring Hardy's critique of the oppression of women in Victorian society. Tess is only able to actively change her life and escape her male oppressor by murdering him, which then leads to her own execution. There is no place for a woman in her position to escape.But while Tess and the other female characters represent many things in the novel, Hardy ultimately celebrates the individual woman over a symbolic whole. Tess is not an "everywoman" or a symbol of fertility, passivity, or oppression, but a unique individual. Angel's relationship with Tess shows this tension between idealized image and living reality. He falls in love with his version of Tess, which is the Nature goddess and symbol of innocence, but when the real Tess reveals her troubled humanity and becomes truly alive for him, Angel rejects her. For Hardy, however, Tess remains both a symbol of many things and an individual soul, and it is because of this that she is so successful and sympathetic as a character. - Climax: Tess murders Alec and flees with Angel - Summary: Tess Durbeyfield lives in the rural village of Marlott in southwest England. She first appears performing the May-Day dance, where she exchanges a meaningful glance with a young man named Angel Clare. Tess's family is very poor, but her father learns that he is descended from the d'Urbervilles, one of the oldest, noblest families in England. Although the d'Urbervilles have no wealth or power anymore, the Durbeyfields feel that this will improve their fortunes. When Tess mistakenly causes the death of Prince, the family's horse, she feels guilty enough to try and "claim kin" from some wealthy d'Urbervilles nearby, unaware that they aren't actually related. Alec, the libertine son of old, blind, Mrs. d'Urberville, becomes infatuated with Tess and repeatedly tries to seduce her, but she rebuffs his advances. He gives her a job tending the fowls, and Tess feels that she can't refuse for her family's sake. One night after a dance in the local town Alec tricks Tess into accepting a ride home with him. He gets lost in the woods and leaves to find the path. When he returns he finds Tess asleep, and he rapes her. Tess then returns to Marlott, and later gives birth to Alec's child. She avoids the other townspeople out of shame. Her baby soon gets sick, and Tess worries about his soul. She baptizes him herself, and names him Sorrow before he dies. After a while Tess gets worn down by her community's judgment and decides to look for work elsewhere. She becomes a milkmaid at Talbothays dairy farm, and enjoys a time of contentment. She befriends three other girls, Izz, Retty, and Marian, and discovers that the man from the May-Day dance, Angel Clare, is also working there. He is the son of a parson, but is at Talbothays to learn about farming methods. All four women soon fall in love with him, but he chooses Tess and they begin a period of courtship. Angel asks her to marry him, but Tess refuses, feeling that she is not worthy of marriage. She is afraid to tell him the details of her past. Angel returns home briefly and finds that his brothers, who are becoming parsons or deans, have grown more narrow-minded and disapproving. Strengthened in his convictions, he goes back and renews his proposal to Tess. She finally accepts, but is in constant turmoil. On their wedding night Angel admits that he had an affair with a woman in London, so Tess feels able to tell the truth about Alec. Angel is shocked and unforgiving, and he becomes distraught thinking of what his family and society would say if they found out. He gives Tess some money and leaves to clear his mind. He decides to seek his fortunes in Brazil, and asks Tess to not follow him. Tess's money soon runs out and she feels ever more guilty and depressed. She works at a bleak starveacre farm with Marian, who has started drinking since Angel rejected her. Tess randomly meets Alec d'Urberville again, but now he has become an evangelical preacher, converted by Angel's father. When he sees Tess he becomes enamored once more, and quickly gives up Christianity to try and seduce her. Tess goes home to care for her mother, but soon afterward her father dies. The family is then evicted, and Alec offers to help them if Tess will return to him. Meanwhile Angel, who has grown sick in Brazil, decides to come home and forgive Tess. When he finally finds her she is in a fancy boardinghouse, and she says it is too late for her, she has relented to Alec. Angel leaves, stricken, and Tess argues with Alec, ultimately stabbing him to death. Tess and Angel then escape together, with Angel unsure if Tess actually committed murder. They hide in an empty mansion and have a few happy days, but then move on. One night they stop at Stonehenge, and Tess falls asleep on a monolith. At dawn the police arrest her. Later Angel and Tess's sister, Liza-Lu, hold hands and watch the black flag, the sign that Tess has been executed.

- Genre: Short story - Title: Thank You, M’am - Point of view: Third person - Setting: An unnamed city at night - Character: Roger. Description: The frail, impoverished young boy who attempts to rob Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones at the start of the story in the hopes of being able to buy himself a pair of blue suede shoes. When his robbery fails, Mrs. Jones drags the frightened Roger back to her house, where she insists he clean himself up and eat some supper. Although the details of Roger's background are largely unspoken, his many silences signal that he is likely embarrassed by his home, his absent family, and his poverty. At the start of the story he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, instead struggling to escape Mrs. Jones's grasp and lying about his attempted theft. As the story progresses, however, the story implies that Mrs. Jones's kindness has a meaningful impact on Roger—who, having been treated as a human being worthy of trust and compassion, is able to reorient his life for the better. For example, he chooses follow Mrs. Jones's instructions to wash his face rather than run away when given the chance; later, when she leaves her purse within his reach, he decides he wants her to trust him and does not take it. At the end of the story, Mrs. Jones sends Roger on his way with money for his shoes—a signal of her faith in him to take his life in the right direction, and a message of encouragement that prompts his sincere gratitude. Though the story ends rather ambiguously, Roger's positive changes within a single evening of meeting Mrs. Jones suggest that he has already taken steps toward a brighter future. - Character: Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. Description: The protagonist of the story, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones is the stern yet immensely generous woman whom Roger attempts to rob. Introduced as a older, "large woman with a large purse," Mrs. Jones refuses to let Roger run off after his bungled robbery. She at first scolds him, and then—upon realizing that he likely has no family looking out for him—drags him home with her to get him cleaned up and fed. Despite her numerous last names (and implied marriages), she lives on her own in a boarding house; her comment to Roger that he "ought to be [her] son" so that she could teach him "right from wrong" quickly establishes her as a maternal figure for the young boy. Mrs. Jones treats Roger not only with kindness but also with true respect, trusting him not to run off or attempt to steal her purse again once they enter her home. This, in turn, is revealed to have a meaningful effect on the boy, who longs to become worthy of her trust. She further reveals her empathy by refusing to judge Roger's behavior, not pressing him on his clearly troubled home life nor moralizing about his attempted crime. Instead, she insists that she, too, has "done things" she's not proud of. At the end of the story Mrs. Jones gives Roger money before sending him on his way, a gesture of trust and goodwill that signals her faith in his ability to make better decisions for himself. - Theme: Empathy, Kindness, and Punishment. Description: Langston Hughes's "Thank You, M'am" tells the story of a young boy, Roger, who meets an older woman, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, while attempting to steal her purse. When Roger is initially confronted by the firm and imposing Mrs. Jones, he clearly believes he will be punished for his crime; indeed, she takes him in hand, kicks him "square in the blue-jeaned sitter," and shakes him "until his teeth rattled." Yet it quickly becomes evident that punishment is not what she has in mind for Roger. Instead, Mrs. Jones engages with the boy to teach him why what he did was wrong, to discover what his motivations were in attempting to rob her, and to recommend how he should act with honesty and good faith in the future. Roger's ultimate gratitude towards Mrs. Jones—reflected in the title of the story itself—suggests that her actions do indeed change Roger for the better. Hughes thus models how kindness differs from punishment both in method and in effect, ultimately arguing for the value of compassion and shared understanding in helping set people on the right path. Mrs. Jones's lesson in kindness begins through teaching Roger "right from wrong." Rather than simply telling Roger his actions were wrong, though, she invites him to embrace this realization on his own. First, she instructs him to return her purse, which allows Roger to make his mistake right. She next seeks to activate his conscience. Her motherly query—"Now ain't you ashamed of yourself?"—sets the stage for the rest of their conversation and forces Roger to contemplate his actions. Her line of questions also reveals Roger's desire to run away, suggesting that he does indeed feel guilty about what he's done and thus is capable of distinguishing between right and wrong on his own. Rather than simply allowing Roger to disappear into the night, shaken but otherwise undeterred, Mrs. Jones then drags him home, learns his name, makes him wash his face, and feeds him dinner. By refusing to merely dismiss Roger as a bad kid incapable of learning from his mistakes, she implicitly honors Roger's humanity and encourages him to do the same for himself—that is, to respect and listen to his conscience. The decision to choose kindness rather than punishment notably develops from a sense of empathy, or being able to genuinely understand another's feelings and desires. Rather than attributing his actions to some innate character flaw, Mrs. Jones seeks to learn the reason behind Roger's crime. At first, she suggests that hunger lay behind his thievery, but Roger corrects her mistake, explaining he had wanted "a pair of blue suede shoes." Mrs. Jones then surprises Roger by not immediately condemning his desire, saying, "I were young once and I wanted things I could not get." Because Mrs. Jones can imagine how Roger is feeling and how this drives his actions, she judges him less harshly. It's notable that Hughes doesn't fall back on tropes about poverty to explain Roger's actions; Roger is a complex character who, like any other human being, may desire certain luxuries. Mrs. Jones continues to overturn Roger's expectations for the typical order of a conversation after wrong-doing. "Um-hum! You thought I was going to say but, didn't you?" she says. "You thought I was going to say, but I didn't snatch people's pocketbooks. Well, I wasn't going to say that." She narrates the difference between judgment and kindness, explaining how most corrections (even those masked by kindness) come with "but" statements exonerating the speaker from similar wrongdoing. Instead, after a silent pause, Mrs. Jones empathizes with Roger's actions: "I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son—neither tell God, if He didn't already know. Everybody's got something in common." Mrs. Jones's empathy for Roger underscores that his impulse, though wrongly expressed, doesn't make him an inherently bad person. And again, since Mrs. Jones never suggests that something is inherently wrong with Roger, she allows him the space to learn and do better in the future. Mrs. Jones's kindness has a demonstrable effect on Roger. While in her house, Roger has multiple opportunities to run away or to steal from the woman. Yet having been shown a modicum of kindness and respect, he does "not want to be mistrusted now." This marks a dramatic shift from the beginning of the story when Roger is clearly afraid of punishment, signaled by his repetitive wish to run away from an uncomfortable situation. Hughes's story thus displays the transformational nature of kindness and empathy, which instill an invaluable sense of mutual trust. The openness that grows between Mrs. Jones and Roger further suggests that this lesson will not last for only one night. Rather, the implication is that Roger will change his behavior out of desire to be worthy of Mrs. Jones's kindness. Moreover, based on the story's likely historical context in diverse, urban New York, it's not a stretch to imagine that Hughes imagined the lessons of this story shouldn't just be limited to its two characters. Rather, it could serve as a broad call for greater understanding and empathy specifically toward black communities often singled out for crime and punishment. - Theme: Family, Community, and Home. Description: "Thank You, M'am" narrates the events of one night for Roger, a young boy, and Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, the older woman he attempts to rob. Rather than reporting Roger to the police or take other legal action, Mrs. Jones offers the boy motherly guidance and a temporary home. Her unexpected choice can be read through the historical background of the story's implied setting: Hughes was a central figure in the early twentieth century's "Harlem Renaissance," a period during which the famed New York City neighborhood was associated with innovation in the arts and with a changing urban landscape. The city's rapid growth, like many urban areas during this era, led to changes in the construction of the neighborhood, and though Hughes doesn't explicitly state where his story is set, the boarding house with many "roomers" where Mrs. Jones lives evokes the many single-family Harlem houses that were converted into multi-person dwellings at this time. Despite the implication that Mrs. Jones lacks her own family and traditional home, she nevertheless offers Roger qualities of both—and in doing so forges a meaningful connection with the "frail and willow-wild" teenaged-boy. By displaying the pain of solitude as it affects two different members of a neighborhood, Hughes underscores the importance of community. What's more, the unexpected yet comforting bond between Roger and Mrs. Jones suggests that family and home are flexible concepts, things that people may define and create for themselves. At first, Hughes's description of his characters makes it seem like they are essentially different—if Mrs. Jones is large, solid, and certain of her opinions, Roger is frail and equivocal. Yet they are both alike in that they are basically alone. Mrs. Jones's late-night job and living situation—she is one of many "roomers" in a boarding house—hints at her present lack of family. Moreover, her three surnames suggest that she has been married at least twice. Nevertheless, these missing spouses or family members are absent from the story—either by direct mention or description. Roger is also clearly on his own. For one thing, he is wandering unsupervised the streets at eleven o'clock at night when he runs into Mrs. Jones—an indication that no one is watching over him. This is confirmed when Mrs. Jones asks Roger if he's eaten and he replies, "There's nobody home at my house." Roger again answers in the negative when Mrs. Jones asks him, "Ain't you got nobody home to tell you to wash your face?" Clearly, Roger has neither a true home nor family members to care for him. However different they might appear, then, Mrs. Jones and Roger's shared lack of family ties them together. The story further implies the pain of solitude and suggests that both characters long for a sense of connection; their meeting is thus valuable not only for Roger, but also for the woman who takes him in. The narrator diagnoses Roger's likely shame about his dysfunctional home life while recapping their conversation over a meal: "the woman did not ask the boy anything about where he lived, or his folks, or anything else that would embarrass him." The fact that Mrs. Jones eagerly steps in suggests her own desire for family. After catching Roger when he first tries to steal her purse, she declares, "You ought to be my son. I would teach you right from wrong." She goes on to insist that Roger wash his face and eat his supper, things a mother would typically do for her child. This establishes her belief in her own potential as a guardian as well as the value of family to set young people on the right path in life. This seems to be an apt assumption: as Mrs. Jones essentially mothers Roger, the boy feels a desire to be helpful and trustworthy to please her. He steps into the role of child just as quickly as she steps into that of mother, creating a sense of family and home that proves powerful even if it is only temporary. Of course, the story ultimately leaves the problems of home and family as unresolved: Roger leaves after supper, instructed by Mrs. Jones simply to "behave" himself. When they separate at the end of the evening, two people, together for a short time by happenstance, are once again on their own. Yet it's clear that Roger now steps into the world better off than he was before. Clean, full, and with money for a smart pair of blue suede shoes, it is very possible that Mrs. Jones has indeed set her "child" up for a brighter future. His gratitude toward Mrs. Jones—a simple assertion that titles the story itself—suggests his transition from desperate thief to capable young man. The story thus implies that the ultimate value of family, community, and home lies, rather ironically, in preparing people to fend for themselves. - Theme: Choice vs. Circumstance. Description: "Thank You, M'am" demonstrates that individuals make better choices—and even become more upstanding, more moral people—when they are honest about their shortcomings and mistakes. A more stereotypical, less nuanced version of this story might have blamed or excused Roger's attempted theft of Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones's purse on his income, race, or class. Instead, through observing the series of decisions made by Roger and Mrs. Jones, Hughes's story presents a more complex view of morality in which neither character is painted as all good or all bad. Mrs. Jones, drawing on her own mixed circumstances and past choices, recognizes the difficulties that Roger faces. She doesn't let Roger off the hook for his attempted robbery, but creates a space for him to realize that hardship is no excuse for morally wrong behavior. Hughes thereby suggests that a nuanced understanding of circumstance and personal responsibility can provide individuals with much needed agency and autotomy. For Hughes, any circumstantial hardships Roger has experienced do not excuse his choice toward stealing other's possessions: the story clearly defines his initial choice as morally wrong behavior. To this end, it's no coincidence that Roger's specific background is never fully revealed. While it is heavily implied from the description of his appearance and his unsupervised evening activities that the young boy is poor and largely on his own, the story never provides enough detail for a reader to view him as merely the victim of his circumstances. Crucially, Mrs. Jones offers Roger the opportunity to change his pattern of choices on his own by giving him ten dollars at the end of the story with which to buy the blue suede shoes he so covets. With this gift, she includes instruction that her choice should shape his subsequent decisions. One imagines that Mrs. Jones hopes that each time Roger looks at his stylish shoes he will not only feel the pride of ownership but also remember a lesson learned: "And next time, do not make the mistake of latching onto my pocketbook nor nobody else's — because shoes got by devilish ways will burn your feet," Mrs. Jones tells him. Mrs. Jones clearly doesn't assume that simply because of their interaction Roger will never again have a desire that could get him in trouble. Rather, she offers him advice and recognizes he has to make his own decisions, mixing compassion with concern for Roger's improvement. When Mrs. Jones gives Roger money, she effectively is reminding him that he possesses agency. By giving him money rather than buying him the shoes outright (or giving him nothing at all), Mrs. Jones places his decision-making back firmly in his control—implying that, whatever his circumstances, he has the power to make better choices. Given his behavior throughout the story, it would not have been surprising had Mrs. Jones instead shown mistrust in Roger's ability to make good decisions. Indeed, the narrator describes how Roger worries about this very issue: "He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now." This phrase reveals how mistrust has characterized Roger's choices up to this point—and suggests that when individuals assume that they will always be mistrusted, they often frame their decisions with this in mind. For Roger, each use of the word "trust" is couched in the negative, revealing how he doesn't believe he can be trusted. This adds emotional weight to his behavior: if, as this seems to indicate, Roger assumes he is someone who cannot be trusted, he may simply be acting accordingly. Yet, remarkably, despite the circumstances of their meeting, Mrs. Jones does not constantly watch the boy in her apartment, nor does she supervise his behavior after leaving with her money. Mrs. Jones's actions are effective and a radical change from what Roger has experienced before, and Roger decides to prove himself worthy of her trust. Still surprised by this circumstance, places himself in Mrs. Jones's sight and resolutely decides not to flee. Roger's future remains a matter of speculation because the story ends as he leaves Mrs. Jones's home. Nevertheless, his acceptance of Mrs. Jones's money and his gratitude suggests a genuine change how he interacts with his circumstances. Initially, Roger makes reactive decisions motivated by fear of punishment, such as when he lies or wants to run away from Mrs. Jones. Being granted the dignity and agency to make his own decisions is implied to have a positive effect, however; while he's still learning this new style (as seen by his uncertainty about how to voice his gratitude), he seems to be, at the very least, moving in a more productive, healthy direction. Hughes's story honors both choice and circumstance, offering sympathy for Roger's difficult background without excusing his criminal behavior. More broadly, given the social background in which Hughes wrote, the story could be read as arguing for the importance of refusing to use the oppressive status quo as an excuse for either misbehavior or overly harsh judgment of various communities. Read in this light, this story champions the power and importance of personal responsibility while also understanding that individual actions are almost never divorced from circumstance. - Climax: Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones gives Roger ten dollars to buy a pair of shoes before sending him on his way - Summary: A large, unnamed woman is lugging her heavy purse late at night when a dirty and disheveled young boy runs up behind her and attempts to steal her bag. He fails when the purse's strap snaps, sending the boy toppling onto the sidewalk. The woman yanks the frail, frightened boy up by his shirt and scolds him. Though the boy wants nothing more than to run away, the woman insists on dragging him home with her to wash his face and feed him some supper. While explaining her decision, she declares that he will never forget his evening with Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. The boy continues to struggle but Mrs. Jones is firm in her grip as they enter her house, which he realizes must be a boarding house with other tenants. She asks his name—Roger—before finally letting go of him and directing him to wash his face in the sink. For a moment, the now free Roger looks towards the door, before looking back at Mrs. Jones and then following her instruction. He asks if she will take him to jail, which she denies and tosses him a clean towel. Mrs. Jones proposes that hunger must have driven Roger's attempted theft, but Roger denies this; he simply had his heart set on a pair of blue suede shoes. Instead of condemning this desire, Mrs. Jones surprised Roger by admitting she, too, wanted things she couldn't have when she was young and did things of which she is ashamed. Mrs. Jones proceeds to make the promised dinner. Roger, attempting to be helpful, asks if she needs him to pick up anything at the store, though she does not. They then share a simple but hearty meal, during which Mrs. Jones tells Roger about her late-night work at a hotel beauty shop and notably avoids grilling him about his family or home. After both have eaten their fill, their impromptu evening ends abruptly. Mrs. Jones surprises Roger with ten dollars for his wished-for shoes and sends him out in the night. Though he wishes to say "thank you," Roger cannot manage to even make a sound before Mrs. Jones closes her door.

- Genre: Southern Gothic - Title: That Evening Sun - Point of view: First person limited; the story is narrated by the adult Quentin Compson, who is looking back on his childhood - Setting: Jefferson, Mississippi, a fictional town in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha where Faulkner set much of his fiction - Character: Quentin Compson. Description: Quentin Compson, the narrator of "That Evening Sun," tells the story as an adult looking back on his childhood memories of the Compson family's doomed black servant, Nancy. A sensitive and observant child, Quentin is fascinated and unnerved by Nancy'sfear of her husband, Jesus. He maintains a watchful distance from Nancy, unlike his younger siblings Caddy and Jason, who constantly question Nancy. Quentin is nine when the events of the story take place and, as such, is on the cusp of understanding some of the adult subjects that Nancy, his parents, and the other servants discuss in front of the Compson children. Still, he remains naïve about much of what he witnesses. And although as a child Quentin seems on the verge of questioning his family's treatment of Nancy and race relations in his community more generally, as an adult he seems romantic and nostalgic about the south of his childhood. The adult Quentin feels that modernization has sapped the personality from Mississippi, suggesting that, however thoughtful and sympathetic towards Nancy he is as a child, he grows up to hold the same the racial prejudices he has long been surrounded by. - Character: Nancy. Description: Nancy is the Compson's black servant who works for the family while their regular servant, Dilsey, is sick. Due to her race and position in society, Nancy is very poor and is forced to work as a prostitute alongside serving the Compson's. Nancy has become terrified that her husband Jesusis waiting in the ditch outside her house and is planning to kill her. Nancy, who has been violently beaten by a white man named Mr. Stovallearlier in the story, and who is pregnant with a white man's child because of her prostitution, feels that there is nothing she can do to protect herself against Jesus. Her fear becomes more and more desperate as the story progresses. Although Nancy's situation is exacerbated by her social circumstances (the fact that she is not protected by law and her lack of status in society) Nancy comes to believe that her situation is caused by something inherent in herself and that she is doomed. Nancy verbalizes this fear when she tells Mr. Compson that what's coming to her is "hers" and that it belongs to her. She also describes herself as "hellborn," demonstrating that Nancy views herself as damned. The extent of Nancy's fear is evident in that her actions become more and more desperate throughout the story, to the point where she tries to use the Compson children as protection from Jesus. Nancy is, overall, a tragic figure who is a victim of circumstances in the place and period in which she has been born. - Character: Caddy Compson. Description: Caddy is the second eldest of the Compson children and the sister of Quentin and Jason. Caddy is portrayed as naïve and curious throughout the story. She is fascinated by Nancy and the events taking place around her, but does not fully understand the seriousness of the threat that Nancy faces from Jesus. Caddy does pick up on the fact that Nancy and Jesus are married, however, and becomes curious about whether her own mother, Mrs. Compson, is afraid of her father, and whether such fear is normal in a marriage. This suggests that Caddy, because she is a girl in a patriarchal society, has already learned to anticipate not having as many rights as her husband in her own future marriage. Caddy also frequently teases Jason about being scared and is reprimanded for doing so at the end of the story by her father, Mr. Compson. - Character: Jason Compson. Description: Jason is the youngest of the Compson children and only about four years old when the events in the story take place. Jason is just beginning to learn the rules of the society roundabout him and often looking for clarification from the adults in the story. Jason seems especially confused about and fascinated by the concept of who is "a nigger" and who isn't, not yet understanding the racial divides in the south; this underscores the story's suggestion that racism is a learned behavior, rather than something innate. The fact that the story ends with Jason riding on Mr. Compson's shoulders and announcing that he "is not a nigger" suggests that, in the future, these racial divides will remain unchallenged, and that Jason will be protected by his own status as a white man—just as his father protects him when Caddy makes fun of him and calls him a "scairy cat." - Character: Mr. Compson. Description: Mr. Compson is the father of Quentin, Caddy, and Jason. A wealthy white man, he employs Nancy and Dilsey as servants. Although Mr. Compson is relatively sympathetic towards Nancy (he lets her stay in the house one night and walks her home when she is afraid of Jesus), his attitude towards her is marked by condescension and dismissiveness. Although Mr. Compson seems to be behaving in a chivalrous way towards Nancy, he places the blame for the situation on her—claiming that Jesus would not be angry with her if only she would "leave white men alone" and not work as a prostitute. The insinuation that Nancy has led white men on demonstrates Mr. Compson's patriarchal and racially bigoted worldview. Mr. Compson also seems to take a casual and lighthearted approach to Nancy's belief that Jesus is stalking her. Although he walks her home several times, when he is reprimanded by Mrs. Compson he immediately gives up Nancy's cause and tells her to walk home alone. He also chooses to leave her alone and unprotected at the end of the story, telling Nancy that he has checked the ditch and that Jesus is not in there. When Quentin looks in the ditch, however, he sees that it is too dark to tell whether anyone is hiding there or not; this suggests that Mr. Compson has lied to placate Nancy and to save himself the task of taking responsibility for her wellbeing. - Character: Jesus. Description: Jesus, Nancy's abusive husband, is a threatening figure throughout the story. Jesus, who carries a razor, threatens to kill the man who got Nancy pregnant, and Mr. Compson has told Jesus to stay away from the Compson's property. Despite his violent nature, the reader does feel a small degree of sympathy for Jesus; it is clear that his resentment and anger comes from the fact that he is disenfranchised compared to the white characters in the story. When Jesus is talking to Nancy in the kitchen, he complains that "he can't hang around a white man's kitchen" but that a "white man can hang around his." This suggests that Jesus is bitter about his lack of rights in society and underscores the double standards that exist for white people, who can act in ways which black people cannot. - Character: Mrs. Compson. Description: Mrs. Compson is the mother of Quentin, Caddy, and Jason, and the wife of Mr. Compson. Mrs. Compson comes across as spoiled, pampered, and petulant. She is jealous and suspicious of Nancy, whom Mrs. Compson likely knows works as a prostitute. Mrs. Compson dislikes her husband walking Nancy home even though, as Mr. Compson says, Mrs. Compson has less to fear than Nancy and knows that no one is "waiting outside with a razor" for her. In Mrs. Compson's mind, even though she is not in real danger, her own comfort is more important than Nancy's genuine fear for her life. Mrs. Compson views Nancy as unimportant in comparison to herself because Nancy is black, poor, and a servant, while Mrs. Compson is a respectable white woman—and therefore more valuable in the social hierarchies of the period. - Character: Mr. Stovall. Description: Mr. Stovall is a "respectable" white man who lives in Jefferson. As a "cashier at the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church," he is held in high esteem among the community. Yet Mr. Stovall has also been using Nancy's services as a prostitute while neglecting to pay her. When Nancy publicly shames Mr. Stovall for this—shouting "when you going to pay me white man" at him in public—Mr. Stovall violently attacks Nancy and kicks out several of her teeth. Despite the fact that he has robbed and beaten her in order to protect his own reputation, it is Nancy who is arrested and imprisoned. This demonstrates that, according to the standards of the period, the blame for this dispute falls on Nancy and does not affect Mr. Stovall's reputation. White people in the town are more willing to believe—or pretend—that a black woman is lying than to condemn a "respectable" white man for visiting and cheating a black prostitute. Through Mr. Stovall, Faulker highlights the stark racial prejudice that limits Nancy's opportunities and options to protect herself. - Theme: Racism and Segregation. Description: "That Evening Sun" is set in the early 1900s in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Though slavery had been abolished in 1862, black people at the time of the story still did not have civil rights and were subject to extreme racial prejudice—often even working as servants for the same white families who had kept their grandparents as slaves. The corrosive effects of racial segregation are demonstrated through Faulkner's tragic portrayal of Nancy, a black servant who works for the white Compson family and also as a prostitute. Faulkner's story highlights how the effects of slavery lingered long after abolition, and further suggests that racial segregation is detrimental to all members of a society—including the white people whose complacency and hypocrisy help uphold such an unequal world. Faulkner emphasizes the physical segregation between the story's white and black characters, the latter of whom live in extreme poverty and labor as white people's servants. The Compson family lives in a very different part of town than the "Negro Hollow" where Nancy, Dilsey, and the other black characters reside. In contrast to the houses in the white part of the town (like the Compson's, with its library and many bedrooms) the black characters are described as living in "cabins," which suggests that these dwellings are small and that the people living there are poor. Faulkner walks the reader through this contrast by describing the journey the black servants make, carrying the laundry "from the kitchen of the white house to the blackened washpot beside a cabin door." Faulkner further emphasizes the town's physical segregation in his description of the ditch outside Nancy's house, where she thinks her husband, Jesus, is hiding. As the story progresses, Nancy's fear of Jesus becomes symbolized by this physical divide between the black and white characters. The ditch also comes to reflect the deep psychological separation between white and black characters in the story. Rather than seeing this disparity in living conditions as an injustice resulting from centuries of slavery, the white characters accept segregation as normal and natural, a stance that would have been further legitimized by the laws of the period. Under segregation laws black people were not allowed to use the same bathrooms as white people, vote, or move freely around the state. Black people were considered inferior and, although no longer slaves, were still often seen as property by their white employers. That's why, instead of understanding Nancy's circumstances, the Compsons view the danger she is in as something she has brought upon herself and something that is inconvenient for them. When Nancy is attacked by Mr. Stovall, it is clear to the reader that Mr. Stovall has been using Nancy's services as a prostitute but, because she is black, he has refused to pay her. The fact that he is violent towards her to protect his own reputation underscores the brutalizing effects of racism. Yet rather than highlight the injustice of Mr. Stovall's behavior, the narrator and the eldest Compson child, Quentin, instead refers to Mr. Stovall's position in the community as a "a deacon in the Baptist Church," highlighting the fact that, in the white community Mr. Stovall is a respectable man. Indeed, his position and skin color shield him from repercussions for knocking Nancy's teeth out, while Nancy herself is thrown in jail for brashly demanding payment from her white client. Later in the story, when Mr. Compson is walking Nancy home, he repeatedly tells Nancy that she should "let white men alone," blaming her for the violence used against her—even though she has been forced into prostitution because she is so poor. This is even more hypocritical when the reader considers that Nancy is employed by the Compsons, as it suggests how little they must pay her. Faulkner thus uses Nancy and the Compsons to suggest the hypocrisy and cyclical nature of racism: racism is upheld by white characters, who then blame black characters for being in desperate circumstances brought about by racism. Nevertheless, both black and white characters develop their sense of identity and agency, and their sense of importance within society, based on these racial divides. The black characters, like Nancy and Jesus, are aware that they are less valued and hold less authority than the white people around them. Jesus points out the hypocrisy in this when he complains that a "white man can come in my house, I can't stop him. When a white man want to come in my house, I ain't got no house." While Jesus is resentful of his situation, Nancy internalizes her lack of agency and the prejudice aimed at her, viewing it as something she cannot do anything about nor protect herself from. She repeatedly laments that she "ain't nothing but a nigger" and that it "ain't none her fault." This shows that, although Nancy is less aggressive than Jesus, she understands that her situation is hopeless as long as she is forced to rely on white people for protection and sympathy. In contrast, the white Compson children learn that their place in society is more important than that of black people. The children show little respect for Nancy, although she cooks and cleans for them. When Quentin describes summoning her to make breakfast, for example he says that they "throw rocks at her house" until she comes to the door. They do not feel that it is necessary to respect Nancy, nor her house, because in their minds it is a black woman's place to be their servant. Racial segregation defines multiple aspects of the characters' lives in "That Evening Sun," from their living situations, to their personal identities. While the Compson children grow up complacent and protected by the law within society, characters like Nancy and Jesus operate on the other side of this, separated from the white characters by both experiential, physical, and legal divides. - Theme: Naivety, Ignorance, and Nostalgia. Description: Though "That Evening Sun" is narrated from Quentin's adult point of view, much of the story deals with the impressions left on the Compson siblings as children. Faulkner uses the naive perspective of the children to suggest that racial categorization itself is childish, and to criticize the nostalgic way in which many white people, including Quentin, came to view the south as black people won more rights in society. Although Quentin is a child when the events with Nancy take place, the adult Quentin narrating the story overlooks certain moments that cast the family's treatment of Nancy in a negative light. Quentin's unwillingness to criticize his family's behavior extends into an unwillingness to criticize white society more generally, which undermines his nostalgic vision of the old south. Faulkner further rejects this vision as prejudiced and inaccurate through his use of the children's ignorant perspective as a mouthpiece for racially bigoted views. The story opens with Quentin looking back on his childhood and reminiscing about how Jefferson used to be. This comparison brings to light the modernization of the town and the changes in the status of black people in the south, which have improved since Quentin was a child. Yet it also suggests the rosy view with which Quentin views the south of his childhood, despite the stark racial divides he remembers. Quentin's use of words like "ghostly" to describe the new telegraph poles, which have replaced the trees in Jefferson, suggests that he is unhappy with this modernization and longs for the old ways of life. The old ways of life, however, are only happy and nostalgic for Quentin because he is white; the black characters, like Nancy and Jesus, did not have happy lives in the old south because of the racial prejudice they faced. That this does not trouble Quentin suggests that he still does not really comprehend his own racial bias. Describing the "city laundry," which collects the clothes in "motorcars" and has replaced the black servants who used to do laundry when he was a child, Quentin remarks that "even the Negro women" now have cars. Quentin's use of the word "even" suggests that, in Quentin's mind, black people are still not equal to white people. By connecting this new way of doing laundry to the "bloodless" appearance of the town, Quentin suggests that modernization has sapped personality from Jefferson, while the black women carrying bundles of laundry like "cotton bales" remind him positively of his childhood. The reference to "cotton bales," though a fond memory for Quentin, links directly to slavery and reminds the reader that the system that Quentin is nostalgic for was built on a history of subjugating its black citizens. Although the reader can be critical of Quentin as an adult narrator, the Compson children's perspective on the world is defined by their naivety and their inability to understand the implications of the adult events taking place around them. The children are frequently exposed to adult conversations which they do not understand, but which the reader does. For example, when Jesus says that Nancy has a "watermelon" under her dress, Caddy and Jason are confused; the reader recognizes that Jesus is referring to the fact that Nancy is pregnant. Although the children do not understand the implications of everything they hear, they are exposed to extreme racial divides and prejudices by the white adults around them and come to view this social division as normal and proper. This reflects poorly on the white adults in the story, as Faulkner implicitly connects racism with a childish and simplistic view of the world. This is reinforced when Jason, the youngest Compson child, asks their black servant Dilsey if he "is a nigger." Dilsey confirms that he is not, and, throughout the story, Jason repeatedly draws attention to the fact that he "is not a nigger" and points out the other characters who are black, emphasizing the difference between them and himself. This shows that, even from a very young age, the children are learning to segregate people into racial categories; racism is not something that a child is born with, but which they pick up from the adults and the society around them. Although the white children's attitudes can be viewed as naive, those of the adults are deliberately ignorant and irresponsible. The children's mother, for instance, acts petulantly when she wishes to dissuade her husband from walking Nancy home, even though Nancy is afraid for her life. Mrs. Compson views Nancy's situation as an inconvenience to herself and feels that her husband is simply trying to irritate her by appearing to favor Nancy. When he takes Nancy home, Mr. Compson tells her that he has checked the ditch for any sign of Jesus. When he returns to his own home with his children, however, Quentin notes that he "couldn't see much in the ditch where the shadows" were. This suggests that Mr. Compson has lied to placate Nancy, rather than making the effort to check the ditch. The fact that Quentin is aware of this lie further implies that, even as a child, he realizes there is potentially a real threat to Nancy that his family is ignoring. Quentin, who is nine when the story is set, is just on the verge of leaving behind his period of childlike naivete. He has the potential to fully recognize and admit the racial bias all around him and to acknowledge his family's complicity in Nancy's fate. Yet as an adult narrating the story, Quentin gives the reader the impression that his awakening in this sense has never come to fruition. Instead, he has never addressed his romantic view of the south nor what happened to Nancy after his family left her that night. Although Quentin cannot be held responsible for his ignorance as a child, as an adult he represents a major problem in the south: white people's refusal to acknowledge their complicity in upholding racism. - Theme: Fear and Vulnerability. Description: Nancy is portrayed as a vulnerable character in several ways throughout "That Evening Sun." Due to the lack of civil rights for black people in this period, she has no one to defend her. As a woman, she is also physically more vulnerable to threats from men and, because she is poor, she is vulnerable in that she must make a living any way that she can—even this means undertaking a dangerous profession like prostitution. There is a sense of connection between Nancy's vulnerability and that of the Compson children, who are fascinated by Nancy's fear because, to an extent, they can relate to it; children are often scared of things like monsters hiding in the dark, and they view Nancy's fear of Jesus in these terms—as though she is one of them, even though, because they are white, the Compson children can't fully comprehend the depth of Nancy's terror. Though her fear is often dismissed by other characters, the story suggests that it is entirely justified by highlighting Nancy's helplessness in a town that has no sympathy for her. Racism, sexism, and poverty, the story argues, together make black women like Nancy some of the most vulnerable members of society. The use of the name Jesus to represent a threatening character is a bit of irony by Faulkner, underscored when Nancy, terrified, calls out to "Jesus" in the middle of the night. Quentin points out that it is not her husband she is calling for but "the other Jesus"— Jesus Christ. Nancy professes that she is "hellborn," and the idea that Jesus is coming for her—and that this something she should be afraid of—suggests Nancy's belief in her own lack of salvation; Jesus coming for her is a frightening concept as he is coming to punish her, not save her. Nancy believes she is damned because this is how society has made her feel by failing to protect her. When Nancy sleeps in the children's bedroom they question her constantly about her fear of Jesus, failing to fully understand how it is different from their own fears. Caddy can see Nancy's eyes, wide with fear, in the dark and treats this like a game, asking, "can you see our eyes too Nancy?" Although the children are titillated by Nancy's fear, they are already beginning to understand that their society values patriarchal qualities like "bravery." Caddy teases Jason about being scared and at one point tells him that he is "scardier than a nigger." This accusation suggests the racial stereotype that black people are more cowardly than white people, which Caddy has obviously picked up from the adults around her. The fact that white adults think like this demonstrates the complete denial about how badly black people are treated in society, as white people don't understand why black people should be afraid of mistreatment or prejudice. The story's ending again emphasizes the different vulnerabilities of white and black characters. Nancy encourages the children to come to her cabin, the implication being that having them there will offer her some semblance of protection because their social status is higher than hers; Nancy hopes that their presence will deter Jesus, as he would not dare hurt white children because of the consequences this would have for a black man. Although Jason is scared in Nancy's house, the story ends with him riding on his father's shoulders and announcing that he is "not a nigger." When Caddy calls him a "scairy cat," Mr. Compson defends Jason. This closing image suggests that, although Jason is vulnerable as a child, his status as an adult white man (represented here by his father) will protect him in future because, in the patriarchal and racist society they live in, he will be the most powerful type of person. The story's recurring metaphor of darkness, meanwhile, ironizes white people's fear of black people, who, because of their "darkness," who were often treated as criminals and thought of as threatening. This fear is not founded on anything genuine but simply on white people's paranoia and racism. However, the fact that Nancy's fear does seem to affect the young Quentin, who has not yet fully developed into his adult complacency and prejudice, suggests that there is something corrosive and frightening under the surface of society in Jefferson. Faulkner portrays racism itself as the true horror in "That Evening Sun." The fact that Mr. Compson leaves Nancy unprotected when she is likely to be murdered suggests that white people should be afraid of the way they have treated black people. The sheer brutality and negligence shown towards Nancy in the story is part of the horror underlying southern culture and lurking, unacknowledged, on the conscience of the white people in Jefferson. - Climax: Nancy, convinced that her husband Jesus is waiting in the ditch outside her house and plans to kill her, persuades the Compson children to come home with her; the group waits anxiously in Nancy's cabin as footsteps approach outside. These footsteps belong to the Compson children's father however, who takes them home, leaving Nancy alone in her cabin. - Summary: Quentin Compson, reminisces about his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, which has changed a great deal since he was a child. The town has been modernized, with paved streets, telephone poles, and a city laundry; "even the Negro women" now have cars, which they use when they are doing the laundry for the white families in town. Fifteen years earlier, when Quentin is still a child, he and his siblings enjoy watching their black servant, Nancy, carry the bundle of laundry on her head from their house down to her own cabin in Negro Hollow. Sometimes the servant women's husbands come and collect the laundry for them, but Jesus, Nancy's husband, never does. The Compson family's regular servant, Dilsey, is sick, and as such Nancy has been working in her stead. Quentin describes an incident in which Nancy—who has also turned to prostitution—is arrested after loudly demanding payment from Mr. Stovall, a white man who works at the bank and is a respected member of the local church. Mr. Stovall kicks Nancy to silence her, knocking out her teeth. She is put in jail, where she sings and protests all day before trying to hang herself from the window bars with her dress. When the jailor finds her, he remarks that her belly is swollen "like a little balloon," suggesting that Nancy is pregnant. Later, Quentin, his sister Caddy, and his younger brother Jason also notice Nancy's swollen belly while she is cooking for them. Jesus is in the kitchen with them and tells the children that Nancy has a watermelon under her dress. When Nancy says it hasn't "come off" Jesus's "vine," Jesus responds that he can easily "cut down the vine" that it did come from, much to the children's confusion. Nancy continues to cook for the Compsons even though, after this incident, Mr. Compson tells Jesus to stay away from the house. Although everyone in the community thinks Jesus has left town, Nancy becomes afraid to walk home by herself because she thinks Jesus is back and looking for her. Mr. Compson agrees to walk Nancy home and take the children with him even though Mrs. Compson disapproves. As the group walks Nancy down a dark lane, Nancy tells Mr. Compson that she thinks that Jesus is waiting in the ditch outside her house with a razor and that he is going to kill her. The Compsons walk Nancy home every night for a period until Mrs. Compson becomes frustrated. One night they let Nancy sleep over in their kitchen, but she wakes everyone by making a strange noise that both is and is not like singing. Mr. Compson finds no one outside the house but nevertheless lets Nancy sleep in the children's bedroom. Quentin is haunted by the image of her frightened eyes. Dilsey gets better, but Nancy still comes to the kitchen in the evenings to talk about Jesus. Dilsey says that Nancy can stay with her, but Nancy says that "no nigger" will be able to stop Jesus and, instead, begs the Compson children to ask their parents if she can stay in their room again. Mrs. Compson refuses, and Mr. Compson tells Nancy to "go home and lock her door." Nancy persuades the children to walk home with her, telling them that they will have fun. When they arrive at Nancy's house, however, the children do not like the smell and are nervous about the fact that their parents do not know where they are. Jason begins to cry, and Nancy tries to placate the children by telling them stories and making popcorn. Eventually they hear footsteps outside the cabin, which turn out to be coming from Mr. Compson; he has arrived to take the children home. They leave Nancy sitting in her hut with the door open, again making the sound which is like singing but not singing, waiting for Jesus to come for her. On the way home, Quentin wonders who will do their laundry now. Mr. Compson carries Jason on his shoulders and snaps at Caddy when she teases calls her brother for being afraid of the dark.

- Genre: Coming-of-Age Novel, Semi-Autobiographical Novel - Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Point of view: First Person (Junior is the narrator) - Setting: Wellpinit, Spokane Indian Reservation, Washington, and Reardan, Washington, in 2006 - Character: Junior (Arnold Spirit, Jr.). Description: The fourteen-year-old narrator and protagonist of the novel. Junior is frequently bullied because of his "weird" physical attributes, the result of the hydrocephalus he was born with. Though he is often lonely and thinks of himself as weak, invisible, and unable to fight back physically, other characters recognize him as a "warrior," a smart, brave, and highly committed person who has been "fighting since [he was] born" to keep his hope despite the oppressive, depressing atmosphere of the reservation. Junior keeps up his hope by drawing cartoons, which to him represent both a chance to leave the reservation and a potential for universal understanding. He also loves playing basketball, discovering he has unexpected talent when he joins the Reardan team and receives the support of his coach and teammates. As his cartoons and his optimism would suggest, Junior's narrative voice is funny, upbeat, and frank, if a little prone to a teenager's extreme statements. He is good at seeing and articulating the ridiculous elements of tragic and enraging situations, a trait that allows him to tell his story without sentimentality or melodrama while increasing the impact of sad facts. - Character: Oscar. Description: Junior's dog. Junior sees Oscar as "the only living thing that I could depend on" and "a better person than any human I had ever known." When Oscar gets sick early in the novel, Junior's Dad has to kill him because there is not enough money to take him to the vet. - Character: Mom. Description: Junior's mother. An avid reader with an extraordinary memory for information, she would have gone to college if given the chance. Mom is an "ex-drunk" who has become religious since she quit drinking. In the aftermath of Grandmother's death, she suffers from depression and anxiety and sometimes needs Junior to stay home because she is scared for him to leave. Though she and Dad worry about their family splitting up, they want the best for their children and are very supportive of Junior's decision to transfer schools. - Character: Dad. Description: Junior's father, who sings when he gets drunk, treasures an old saxophone from high school, and could have been a talented musician. Dad is an alcoholic who will disappear for days to drink, often when—and because—there is very little money in the house. Unlike Rowdy's father, however, he would never hit a member of his family, and mostly becomes depressed after his drinking binges. Dad's pride in Junior is very important to him. It's Junior's dad who convinces him to try out for basketball, and also makes Junior realize the irony of celebrating Reardan's win against Wellpinit. - Character: Rowdy. Description: Junior's best friend from the reservation. Rowdy is the toughest kid on the rez and all the other kids are afraid of him, but he always protects Junior from bullies (or beats them up in return as revenge). In turn, Junior supports Rowdy as he deals with his abusive, alcoholic father. They were born within two hours of each other and are each other's only friends. Rowdy loves kids' comic books like Archie and Caspar the Friendly Ghost; secretly, he's "a big, goofy dreamer," and Junior loves to make him laugh. But when Junior leaves the reservation to attend high school in Reardan, Rowdy not only refuses to go with him, but also punches Junior, screaming that he hates him. Junior misses Rowdy desperately throughout the novel, but it isn't until the final chapter that their friendship is restored. Rowdy is introduced as a kind of character foil to Junior—he's the strongest kid on the reservation while Junior is the weakest, and he has trouble expressing any feelings other than anger, while Junior cries frequently and expresses himself easily in cartoons. In fact, though, the two boys' differences are what make them similar: they are both ostracized for their respective violence and weakness, and Rowdy, with his hot temper, is as fragile emotionally as Junior is physically. In this way, their relationship plays into the theme of overlapping opposites, and parallels Junior's sense of being a person split in two. - Character: Mary Runs Away. Description: Junior's older sister, nicknamed "Mary Runs Away" because of her unpredictability. At the beginning of the novel, she has been living alone in her parents' basement ever since she "froze" after graduating high school; Junior calls her "the prettiest and strongest and funniest person who ever spent twenty-three hours a day alone in a basement." He learns from Mr. P that she is extremely smart and once dreamed of writing romance novels—a dream she takes up again after Junior's leaving the reservation inspires her to leave as well, suddenly marrying a Flathead Indian man and moving to Montana. She is very happy there until she dies in an accidental fire started while she was drunk. - Character: Mr. P. Description: The Wellpinit geometry teacher, who advises Junior to leave the reservation. Mr. P is one of many "weird" and "lonely" characters in the novel, such as Mary, Junior, and Gordy, and is known in Wellpinit for frequently falling asleep and forgetting to come to school. Mr. P, who is white, has lived and taught on the reservation for many years, and confesses to Junior that he used to be part of a cruel education system designed to "kill the Indian to save the child," for which he now feels he needs to atone. While the fact that he knew about, and encouraged, Mary's secret hopes of becoming a writer suggests that he was once hopeful and competent enough to serve as a mentor, his other attributes as a teacher illustrate that he too has been absorbed into the reservation's culture of depression and defeat. Importantly, however, he is the first adult to tell Junior that he deserves better than what he has. - Character: Grandmother Spirit. Description: Junior's grandmother. (The text identifies her as Junior's mother's mother, although there seems to be a small discrepancy here: Grandmother's last name is Spirit, the same as Junior's, whereas his mother's maiden name is Adams.) Junior is close to his grandmother, and turns to her for advice when he believes Roger is going to attack him. To Junior, Grandmother's greatest gift is tolerance, part of an "old-time-Indian spirit" that celebrates weirdness rather than fearing it and approaches new people and experiences with a fair and open mind. She also doesn't drink, since she believes alcohol would dull her experience of the world. She is "powwow-famous," beloved by everyone who knows her, and after she dies about two thousand people, Indian and white, come to her funeral. Her last act is to ask her family to forgive Gerald, the drunk driver who killed her. - Character: Penelope. Description: Junior's "translucent semi-girlfriend," a beautiful and popular freshman at Reardan High School. Roger, a big-brother figure to her, calls her Penultimate. Penelope is the first Reardan student to speak to Junior, but generally ignores him until he discovers she is bulimic (a disorder that reminds him of his father's alcoholism) and she ends up crying on his shoulder, beginning their "friends with potential" relationship. Like Junior, Penelope has big dreams and wants to leave the place where she came from, although some of her dreams are so grandiose that Junior finds them a little silly. With blond hair, pale skin, and an all-white volleyball uniform, Penelope embodies both the hope and the unattainability that Junior associates with the color white. - Character: Roger. Description: A star basketball and football player and a popular senior at Reardan High School. Junior calls him "Roger the Giant." When Junior first arrives in Reardan, Roger calls him "Chief" and tells him a racist joke, for which Junior punches him. After that, Roger, who is also friends with Penelope, respects Junior and they eventually become friendly, with Roger lending Junior money, driving him home, and reaching out to him as he tries out for the school basketball team. - Character: Eugene. Description: Dad's best friend, who drinks constantly, rides a motorcycle, and works as an EMT for the tribal clinic. Junior implies that although Eugene is a happy drunk, he's also deeply sad. Eugene encourages Junior when he transfers to the Reardan school and always tells him "You can do it!" whenever he's playing any kind of game. Just after Grandmother dies, Eugene is also shot and killed in a drunken fight with his friend Bobby, who doesn't realize what he's done. - Character: Gordy. Description: Junior's friend and the "class genius" at the Reardan school, who loves computers and books. Described as "an eighty-year-old literature professor trapped in the body of a fifteen-year-old" white farm boy from Reardan, Gordy teaches Junior how to take books seriously and also draw joy from them. He is "an extremely weird dude" and also the smartest person Junior has ever known. - Character: Coach. Description: The coach of Junior's and Roger's basketball team at Reardan High School. Pledging to treat his team with dignity and respect, and treating Junior's tears and "yucking" (or pregame vomiting) with compassion and understanding, Coach becomes an important father figure for Junior. He admires Junior's attitude of commitment and empowers him with his belief in Junior's strength, talent, and potential. - Character: Gerald. Description: The drunk driver who strikes and kills Grandmother Spirit as she is walking home from a powwow. Through her last words to the doctor who treats her, Grandmother asks her family to forgive Gerald; he is sent to prison and moves to a reservation in California once he gets out. - Character: Ted. Description: A white billionaire who is "famous for being filthy rich and really weird." Claiming to love Indian culture and "feel Indian in his bones," he shows up at Junior's grandmother's funeral to return a powwow dance outfit that he believes once belonged to Grandmother Spirit—at which point Junior's mom explains that her mother was never a powwow dancer. - Theme: Identity, Belonging, and Coming-of-Age. Description: Junior is hyper-conscious of his place within any social group. In addition to his awareness of what it means to be white versus what it means to be Indian, he worries about how to be a man (when men can cry, when boys have to stop holding hands with their friends) and how to fit in as a "freak" who is bullied by his peers and even by some adults. Beginning his story "I was born with water on the brain" (a reference to his own disability of hydrocephalus) and identifying his tough, hot-tempered best friend Rowdy as being "born mad," Junior puts an emphasis on how people's traits at birth define their characters, suggesting the he initially holds a slightly reductive vision of identity that doesn't change much over time. However, by the time he gets to know Penelope, a girl at the Reardan high school who becomes Junior's "almost-girlfriend," he's begun to see this kind of thinking as childish, finding it a bit melodramatic when she claims she was "born with a suitcase" ready to leave her hometown. A big part of his coming of age is trying to figure out the extent to which people are defined by their birth or their origins, as opposed to by their own choices.For Junior, this dilemma is most clearly laid out in terms of his choice to leave the reservation where he was born. This decision, which some Indians on rez see as a choice to become white, calls his identity into question and leaves him with two names: on the reservation, he's Junior, but when he goes to school in Reardan, people start calling him Arnold. At one point Penelope calls him "the boy who can't figure out his own name." Metaphorically, figuring out his own name—who he is, what his goals are, the kind of man he will become—is the goal of Junior's decision to go to school in Reardan, and one of the driving forces in this coming-of-age novel. By the end, he realizes that his identity is really composed of allegiances to many tribes—"the tribe of basketball players … the tribe of cartoonists … and the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends," to name a few—and that the fact of belonging to so many different communities, even the community of lonely people, means that he is going to be okay. - Theme: Overlapping Opposites. Description: Junior often sees himself and his world in terms of strict dichotomies: white versus Indian, friends versus enemies, rich versus poor. In his double life in Reardan and on the reservation, he feels "like a magician slicing himself in half, with Junior living on the north side of the river and Arnold living on the south." Yet just as his true identity includes both Junior and Arnold, the divided extremes he describes often turn out to be blurred. Roger, the Reardan student who greets Junior in the schoolyard with a horribly racist joke, becomes a kind friend and role model; Rowdy is both Junior's best friend and his worst enemy, and hates him because he loves him so much. Things like the crumpled five-dollar bill Junior's alcoholic father gives him for Christmas are both ugly and beautiful, and the basketball game Reardan wins against Wellpinit becomes both a triumphant victory and a shameful moral loss for Junior when he realizes how many social and economic advantages his team has. Meanwhile, tragic events such as Junior's sister Mary's death have darkly comedic elements, and Junior's ability to address topics like bullying, poverty and racism with humor is a key characteristic of his voice. For Junior, not to mention his friends Rowdy and Penelope, part of growing up is recognizing that the world is more complicated than a strict division of opposites. Realizing that it's possible to be more than one thing—part of many different "tribes"—is what enables him to unify his split identity and, as someone destined to travel beyond the reservation, navigate the world both literally and figuratively. - Theme: Racism, Poverty, and Alcoholism. Description: "I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals," says Junior after losing three loved ones in alcohol-related accidents. "That's really the biggest difference between Indians and white people." For Junior, to be Indian and to live on the reservation means dealing not only with overt racism—going to a dentist who believes Indians only need half as much novocaine as white people do, or facing racist insults from his white classmates in Reardan—but also with the inherited disadvantages and forms of structural oppression that have held his community back for generations. There's the vicious cycle of poverty, in which "you start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor." There's the reservation school system, originally designed to "kill Indian culture" and now so poorly funded that students must use their parents' used and outdated textbooks. And there's "the fricking booze": the reason, according to Junior, that all Indian families are unhappy, with too many people dying young. Most of the adults in Junior's life, including his father and his father's friend Eugene, turn to alcohol as a way of dealing with the sense of despair and defeat brought on by poverty and a racist system that doesn't "pay attention to their dreams"—and become even further embedded in that system as a result. Alcohol has also been incorporated into Indian traditions such as powwows and wakes, so that ironically, even celebrating the lives of people who have died as a result of alcohol abuse can lead to further heartbreak.All of these elements contribute to what Junior portrays, and his teacher Mr. P. describes, as a culture of depression, defeat, and hopelessness on the reservation, and they are what Junior tries to escape when he leaves for Reardan. Importantly, while these obstacles shape Junior's life and circumstances, they aren't treated as opportunities for character-building—after all, "poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor." Rather, they are presented as the simple and brutal realities of Junior's life, and the lives of all the Indians around him. - Theme: Confessions, Revenge, and Forgiveness. Description: Confessions, revenge, and forgiveness are central to the plot of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Junior decides to transfer to the school in Reardan because of a conversation with Mr. P., a white teacher whose nose he has broken by throwing a textbook across the room. Mr. P. forgives Junior for breaking his nose, but asks for forgiveness in return: he has been part of a system that forced Indians to give up, and he sees encouraging Junior to free himself as a kind of atonement. Later, Junior's grandmother, in her dying words, asks her family to forgive the drunk driver who killed her. Her belief in tolerance, love, and forgiveness is presented as her "greatest gift" and a direct contrast to racist hatred; according to Junior, tolerance is a trait that Indians lost as a result of oppression by whites. Not all confessions deserve to be met with forgiveness, however: at Junior's grandmother's funeral, a white billionaire named Ted makes a "confession" that the Indians meet with ridicule. His theatrical—and patronizing—attempt to "return" a powwow outfit that was clearly made by another tribe reveals his own fetishism and cultural insensitivity much more than any real attempt to make reparations.Most importantly, one of the main conflicts in the novel is Junior's search for forgiveness from his best friend Rowdy, who feels betrayed by Junior's decision to leave the reservation and hates him as a result. Although each boy tries to get revenge on the other—Rowdy gives Junior a concussion during a basketball game, and Junior humiliates him at their next game in retaliation—their friendship is finally restored when they play together without keeping score, metaphorically supporting and forgiving each other without trying to keep track of wrongs. Junior's "absolutely true diary" can be read as his own confession, which closes with his hopes and prayers that Rowdy, his family, and his tribe "would someday forgive me for leaving them … that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them." - Theme: Hope, Dreams, and Loss. Description: It may seem contradictory to include hope, dreams, and loss in the same category, but in fact, in Junior's experience, they're very closely connected. At the beginning of the novel, Junior understands dreams and hopes primarily as lost opportunities: his mother and father, for example, "dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams." The same thing is true for his sister, Mary, who had plans and potential when she was in high school, but gave up and began living in her parents' basement—a kind of symbolic burial. To Junior, the loss of hope is part of what it means to live on the rez and be Indian.In the book, following one's dreams, finding a place where hope can thrive, means leaving the reservation. Both Junior and Mary—whose nickname, Mary Runs Away, foreshadows her decision to leave—attempt to do this, although Mary's death just after she'd begun to have hope again becomes yet another illustration of lost dreams and opportunities. Even for Penelope, who is white and thus, from Junior's point of view, has hope as part of her birthright, having dreams means wanting to leave the place she came from. But the element of loss in hope is much stronger for Junior, whose decision to leave is seen as a betrayal by his friend Rowdy and many other members of the reservation community. It's a denial of his heritage, a negation of identity almost like a death. By the end of the novel, Rowdy and others have made peace with Junior's decision to go off in search of hope like "an old-time nomad"—that is, like one of his Indian ancestors. Even so, when Junior lists the people he will "always love and miss," he includes Rowdy, his reservation, and his tribe as well as his loved ones who have died—a telling indication that in some ways, following his hopes and dreams ultimately means the loss of his friends, his family, and his home. - Theme: Drawing, Writing, and Junior's Cartoons. Description: One unique aspect of Absolutely True Diary is the way that images are incorporated into the text. Junior is an aspiring cartoonist who uses his drawings to tell his story, and the cartoons work throughout the novel in several different and important ways. Sometimes they are integrated seamlessly with the written narrative, providing dialogue or visual information that isn't shown elsewhere; for instance, the moment when Junior throws his geometry book and breaks Mr. P.'s nose is shown in a picture rather than told in a sentence, as if Junior's feelings are too strong to articulate in words. Some reveal Junior's attitude toward other characters; he takes special care in sketching his friends Rowdy, Gordy, and Penelope, and these portraits help to characterize both the artist and the subjects. Still others, like "Junior Gets to School" or "Who My Parents Would Have Been If Somebody Had Paid Attention to Their Dreams," are like self-contained diagrams or infographics; they explain what's going on in the text in a different, visual way. As Junior explains, "I draw because I want to pay attention to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me."At the beginning of the novel, Junior sees his cartoons, and his skill as an artist, as his one chance of leaving the reservation: "tiny little lifeboats" in a world of "broken dams and floods." In a similar way, his older sister Mary once dreamed of writing romance novels; Junior sees it as tragic that she gives up on those dreams after she graduates high school. Words become even more important to him after he gets to Reardan, and his new friend Gordy teaches him to read seriously and joyfully—an approach that, Junior notes, should apply both to books and life. Mary's romance novels are more complicated, though. When she suddenly gets married, moves to Montana, and begins writing a memoir, her life seems to be unfolding like something out of one of her stories—until she dies in a tragic, senseless accident, suggesting that the possibility of a better life might sometimes be just a fantasy and that the connection between books and life cannot be so straightforward. - Climax: When Reardan defeats Wellpinit (or Junior defeats Rowdy) in basketball - Summary: Fourteen-year-old Junior, a Spokane Indian boy, was "born with water on the brain" or hydrocephalus. This condition gave him a stutter, seizures, and a number of physical differences, such as a large head, that make him a frequent target for bullies on the reservation where he lives. As a result, Junior has spent a lot of his time alone, reading or drawing cartoons. He loves to draw, and thinks his cartoons pose his best chance of getting off the reservation and out of the poverty that has held his family and his tribe back for generations. He also loves spending time with his best friend, Rowdy, whose violent temper makes the other kids afraid of him. Rowdy always protects Junior, though, and the two boys share a special bond, telling each other their secrets and dreams. On his first day of high school at Wellpinit (the school on the reservation), Junior is particularly excited for geometry class. But when the teacher, Mr. P, passes out textbooks, Junior realizes that the books are at least thirty years old. Suddenly furious that the reservation school is so poorly funded that it must use old and outdated books, Junior throws the textbook across the room—accidentally hitting Mr. P in the face and breaking his nose. As a result, Junior is suspended from school. Mr. P comes to visit him and tells Junior he forgives him, but advises him that he must leave the reservation. Otherwise, the culture of defeat, depression, and alcoholism on the reservation will force him to give up his dreams, just as his older sister Mary—who, Mr. P reveals, used to want to be a romance writer, but now spends all her time alone in the family's basement—and the other adults in his life have done. Because of Mr. P's advice, Junior decides to transfer to the high school in Reardan, a wealthy white farm town twenty-two miles away. Junior's parents support his decision, but warn him that most of the tribe will see him as a traitor. In particular, when Junior tells Rowdy he is changing schools and asks him to come along, Rowdy is angry and betrayed. He punches Junior in the face, screams that he hates him, and walks away. Junior is heartbroken, realizing that his best friend has become his worst enemy. At the Reardan school, Junior is the only Indian besides the racist mascot, and he feels deeply alienated from the white students, who either ignore him or call him names. He also feels like his identity is divided between Reardan and the reservation, particularly because the white teachers call him by his given name, Arnold, instead of Junior. Gradually, though, Junior makes friends with some of his new classmates, including Gordy, a "genius" who teaches him how to really read books; Penelope, a beautiful, popular blond girl who becomes Junior's "semi-girlfriend" after he discovers her eating disorder and lets her cry on his shoulder; and Roger, a star athlete who encourages Junior to join the basketball team. Much to his surprise, Junior excels on the team, impressing Coach with his shooting skills and his commitment. In the team's first game against Wellpinit, Rowdy gives Junior a concussion, sparking a thirst for revenge that drives Junior to humiliate him in turn later in the season—only to realize, after a crushing Reardan victory, that perhaps he shouldn't be so proud given Reardan's advantages. Junior's first year at Reardan is also filled with many deaths on the rez, all of them related to alcohol. First, his beloved grandmother is killed by a drunk driver. Weeks later, his father's best friend Eugene is shot during a drunken argument. Then, right after Reardan's victory over Wellpinit, Mary dies when her trailer home burns down after a wild party. Junior is devastated, and blames himself for her death—she moved to Montana right after he decided to leave the reservation, and might never have left home if he hadn't done it first. However, the sympathy from his classmates at Reardan makes him realize that he matters to them now, just as they matter to him. Later, when Junior and his parents go to the cemetery to care for Mary, Eugene, and Grandmother's graves, he comes to a realization that he will be able to leave the reservation, and although he will be lonely, he won't be completely alone—he actually can and will always be a member of many tribes, from the tribe of cartoonists to the tribe of people who have left their homes. Shortly after the last day of school, Rowdy comes to see Junior and invites him to play basketball. Rowdy doesn't apologize for everything he's said and done, but he does tell Junior that he always knew he would leave the reservation, and that he looks forward to Junior's travels and is happy for him. Junior hopes and prays that someday Rowdy and the rest of his tribe will forgive him for leaving—and that he will someday be able to forgive himself. The novel ends as Junior and Rowdy play a one-on-one game of basketball into the night, without keeping score.

- Genre: Mystery - Title: The Adventure of the Speckled Band - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: London and Surrey, England - Character: Sherlock Holmes. Description: The eccentric hero of the story, Sherlock Holmes is a detective with hypersensitive abilities of observation and deduction. As this story comes after the publication of dozens of other popular stories starring Holmes, Doyle is assuming that the reader already has some familiarity with the biographical details of Holmes life. In this story, Doyle gives only passing hints about Holmes's life: he shares an apartment with Watson, he tends to be a late riser in the mornings, he has a sharp sense of humor, and is rather strong despite his slim build. He is also prone to reverie, as he frequently stares off into space or takes quick naps throughout his investigation. Most importantly, though, he is an excellent detective. In his chosen profession, he works more "for the love of his art than for acquirement of wealth" and he only takes cases that "tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic." His dedication to the job goes above and beyond what a typical detective might be willing to do in order to solve a murder. - Character: Dr. Watson. Description: The longtime sidekick on Sherlock Holmes's crime-solving adventures, Dr. John Watson is the narrator of these detective stories. Like with Holmes, Doyle gives very few biographical details about Watson, since Doyle assumes the reader is familiar with the previous stories in the series. In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," the reader learns that Watson and Holmes are "sharing rooms as bachelors in Baker Street" and that they have solved over seventy cases together as a working duo. - Character: Helen Stoner. Description: Helen Stoner is the twin sister of Julia Stoner, who died under mysterious circumstances two years prior. Helen enters into the story when she comes to London to seek Holmes's help in solving this case. The Stoner twins lived in adjacent bedrooms in the crumbling Stoke Moran Manor in rural Surrey, both of them in the care of their villainous stepfather, Dr. Roylott. Helen, still living there, is engaged to be married to a longtime acquaintance and is eager to leave the confines of the strange mansion. However, since her sister died just before her own wedding under mysterious circumstances, and since her physically abusive stepfather is so sinister and unhinged, Helen has begun to fear for her life. The night before she decides to visit Holmes and Watson, she hears the same low whistling sound that her sister claimed to have heard in the room shortly before she died, which is the catalyst for Helen deciding to seek the detectives' help. - Character: Dr. Grimesby Roylott. Description: Dr. Grimesby Roylott is the last descendent of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran, one of the oldest and (formerly) wealthiest Saxon families in England. However, previous generations squandered their immense family riches through wasteful lifestyles and gambling habits, leaving Roylott's father to live "the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper." Seeing that he had to make his own money, Roylott obtained a medical degree and moved to India, where he set up a large practice and eventually married the widowed mother of the young Stoner twins, Helen and Julia. After his home in Calcutta was robbed, Roylott beat his butler to death in a fit of anger, but somehow wasn't charged for the crime and returned to his native England in disgrace. He tried to set up a medical practice in London, but when Mrs. Stoner died in a train accident, he moved with his stepdaughters to his ancestral manor in Stoke Moran, living off of inheritance from his deceased wife. While there, Roylott's fits of anger worsen and much of the surrounding town fears him. He also develops a number of eccentric habits, like smoking Indian cigars, spending weeks at a time with the gypsies who live on his property and collecting an array of exotic animals. One such animal, the deadly swamp adder snake, is what Roylott uses to murder Julia Stoner, in order to prevent her from getting married and thereby obtaining a portion of his slim inheritance. - Character: Julia Stoner. Description: The murder victim in this story, Julia Stoner was the twin sister of Helen Stoner. She was killed in the middle of the night in her bedroom at the Stoke Moran Manor by a poisonous swamp adder snake. The snake was trained by her stepfather, Dr. Roylott, who lived in the neighboring bedroom. At the time of her death, Julia was engaged to be married to a major of the marines, and her marriage would have meant that she would receive a portion of the recurring annual inheritance that was set up to go to Roylott before her mother's death. Her final words—"It was the band! The speckled band!"—are what give the story both its title and its central mystery. - Theme: Exoticism. Description: In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Sherlock Holmes solves a case in which the villain and the murder weapon have ties to India. The story is set in Victorian England, a period when the British empire was expanding its colonial reach around the world, and Doyle's conflation of India with the sinister shows the anxiety of white Britons about the foreignness and otherness that came into their lives as a result of living in a more interconnected world. Many of the story's sinister elements have ties to India. For example, after living and working in India for a long stint, Dr. Roylott develops a violent temper. Although he was an angry figure before living in India, Helen Stoner believes that his temper was "intensified by his long residence in the tropics." Dr. Roylott also has a fondness for many Indian exports. He smokes Indian cigars and, most importantly, collects exotic animals. Roylott's wandering baboon and cheetah are an ambient threat that can be felt throughout the manor, and the swamp adder, "the deadliest snake in India," is proven to be the murder weapon in the case. At the end of the story, Holmes claims that he deduced that the snake was used in the killing because the idea of using such a venomous animal would obviously "occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern training," thus giving non-Western medicine and science a tinge of danger or evil. The "wandering gipsies" that are living in encampments on the forested land around the Stoke Moran Manor are another element of the sinister exotic. While the gipsies are European, Roma people are ancestrally from the Indian subcontinent, and their nomadic lifestyle has always made them outsiders in Europe. Just like the dangerous foreign animals, then, the reader is led to believe that the exotic gipsies could easily be responsible for the death of Julia Stoner. The story's titular "speckled band," a phrase which Julia utters as she dies in Helen's arms, is first presumed to refer to the band of gipsies. This confusion of the word "band," and the general unspoken racial prejudice among the characters in the story, causes Sherlock Holmes to mistakenly follow it as a lead early in the case. The sinister gipsies are also meant to reflect poorly on Roylott, as the reader learns early on that Dr. Roylott "had no friends at all save the wandering gipsies, and he would accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end." With no friends of his former social class and stature, it is implied, Roylott can only associate with this marginal community, which is meant to enhance the reader's suspicion that Roylott might be sinister and unhinged. By populating the story with a variety of exotic elements—people, animals, and objects—Doyle is trying to create a setting that is both strange and sinister. In doing this, he is largely playing off of the racial and cultural anxieties that the average white British reader of the time would likely have been feeling in relation to the country's expanding reach around the world and the potential consequences that this new globalization might have at home. - Theme: Greed, Desperation, and Decline. Description: The murder in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" takes place in a crumbling and isolated manor belonging to the once-noble Roylott family whose wealth is now gone. Although he is destitute, Dr. Roylott—the last remaining member of the Roylott family—still feels entitled to the life of an aristocrat in which he lives well without working. His greed leads him to murder one of his stepdaughters, Julia, and attempt to murder the other stepdaughter, Helen, in order to protect his claim to monthly payments from his late wife's wealth. Therefore, the Roylott family's decline in wealth and status leads directly to Dr. Roylott's moral decline into greed and murder. This shows that desperation in the face of decline—especially in the absence of meaningful social and familial ties—can lead to depraved and immoral behavior. Early in the story, when Helen Stoner first appears at the apartment of Holmes and Watson, she notes that she is living with her stepfather, who is "the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran." The Roylott family was once one of the richest families in all of England, with a series of vast estates and a massive fortune. Over the course of a century, though, a few different heirs slowly drained the family wealth with their wasteful lifestyles and gambling habits. Due to this decline in family wealth, Dr. Roylott's father was reduced to living as "an aristocratic pauper," as there was no family fortune left for him. In addition to the Roylott family's financial decline, Helen also depicts Dr. Roylott as someone who has undergone a psychological decline from the days in which his family was respectable. When Roylott and his two stepdaughters return from India to live at his family's decrepit country manor, the neighbors are excited "to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat." But rather than make himself a prominent figure in the community, as his family once did, Dr. Roylott shuts himself inside of the house and gets angry with the townspeople who cross his path. By telling Holmes and Watson all of this, Helen is trying to emphasize that the precipitous decline in this family's wealth and status could lead its last surviving member to desperation. Indeed, a combination of his financial strain (and his greed in the face of it) and his psychological disturbance leads him to commit murder so that he can keep the last of his ex-wife's funds. A physical embodiment of the Roylott family's decline in fortune and respectability, the Stoke Moran Manor itself is visibly crumbling after many years without upkeep. Only one wing of the mansion is inhabitable by the time that Helen Stoner comes to see Holmes and Watson; the other wing and central portion of the manor are in a state of near-ruin, with a caved-in roof and boarded windows. The diminishing size of the manor parallels the diminishing size of the family, while its state of ruin reflects the family's decline in wealth. The exterior of the home, too, is slowly reverting back into wilderness from its presumably once well-manicured state. Not only have the grounds been drastically reduced to only a few acres, they have also been left to grow into a shrubby expanse that conceals wandering exotic animals and a group of traveling gypsies who live in tents on the property. In a way, the mysterious and sinister grounds can be seen as a reflection of Roylott's psychological state. While it's clear for most of the story that he is a dangerous and mysterious man, it's not clear for much of the story whether he—or whether the ambient dangers of the property—are responsible for the murder. Through depicting the last descendant of a once-noble family driven to murder by greed and desperation, Doyle is showing that decline and loss can provoke violent emotions and behavior. However, Doyle offers a glimpse of hope: Helen Stoner is an orphan whose sister is dead and whose life and money are tightly controlled by her evil stepfather. Like the Roylotts, Helen's family has declined in wealth, size, and status, but Helen—unlike Dr. Roylott—does not become violent or immoral in the face of this grim reality. Instead, she hires Holmes and Watson to protect her. Doyle isn't clear about what saves Helen from moral decline, but it's noteworthy that she has meaningful social ties: a fiancé and an aunt whom she loves. Perhaps, then, family could be a redemptive force for Dr. Roylott, if only he knew how to love his stepdaughters rather than take advantage of them. - Theme: Isolation and Powerlessness. Description: "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is one of only four Sherlock Holmes stories that can be classified as a "locked-room mystery," where a crime is committed in a closed-off and seemingly impenetrable room. The apparent isolation of the crime scene mirrors the setting and the lives of the story's characters, who live together in a crumbling mansion without much contact with one another or with the outside world. However, the story distinguishes between true isolation and the belief that one is isolated. By making the Stoner sisters feel isolated, their stepfather Roylott psychologically manipulates them into feeling powerless. Their vulnerability, however, does not come from true isolation (either physical or emotional), since Julia is murdered because the locked room is not as sealed off as she believed, and Helen only saves herself from the same fate by seeking help from Holmes, which proves that she is not truly cut off from others. Therefore, Doyle emphasizes that a person who believes herself isolated becomes vulnerable, while those who are able to seek out connections between people (and recognize connections between clues) have the power to control their own destiny.  Doyle goes to great pains to establish that the circumstances of the characters' lives make them feel isolated, and the story's setting—the secluded Stoke Moran Manor—is the most isolating aspect of all, the ideal location for the elaborate murder at the story's center. For one, to leave the manor and visit Holmes and Watson in London, Helen must take a long ride on a dog-cart and then a train from Leatherhead to Waterloo Station, which shows how difficult it is to escape the manor's rural isolation and find sympathetic people who might be able to protect her from the dangers in the house. Furthermore, the mansion's slight remove from the surrounding community in the town—whose residents fear Dr. Roylott's unpredictably cruel behavior and stay out of his way whenever possible—makes it so there is no broad oversight of what develops there. In this sense, Doyle suggests that the remote setting is part of what enables Roylott to set up an elaborate murder involving a rare and poisonous swamp adder, a snake that would never be allowed in a more populated area. The architectural layout of the crumbling Stoke Moran Manor is another part of the story's general sense of isolation. As the formerly expansive mansion is in such bad decay, the inhabitable areas of the house have been reduced to only a portion of one wing, leaving all common areas and exterior space (which has both dangerous animals and supposedly fearsome gypsies wandering about) off limits. Therefore, the Stoner sisters are kept in relative seclusion from their immediate surroundings and have no interior spaces to encourage communal activities, as only bedrooms are left. Doyle also emphasizes that the bedrooms are particularly isolating: Helen tells Holmes and Watson that "[t]here is no communication between [the bedrooms]," and the sisters must keep their bedrooms shut like prison cells at night, as they are forced to shutter their windows and lock their doors to keep the wandering baboon and cheetah from entering as they sleep. The sisters are cut off from one another and from the surrounding community by the location, layout, and dangers of the mansion, but they are also kept in a deeper form of isolation within their own home: psychological isolation. Roylott limits their lives to two rooms in the manor and tries to prevent them from seeing anyone besides their aunt (he is furious, for instance, that Helen goes to see Holmes without his permission). As a result, the twins are certain that they are alone and powerless, which is key to their vulnerability: neither one of them is able to consider that Julia's bedroom might not be as isolated from the other rooms as it seems, despite abundant evidence otherwise (the smell of cigar smoke and the sound of a low whistle coming through the wall she shared with Roylott). Though they were free to come and go, Doyle shows the reader that the Stoner sisters had become mentally isolated in such a way that they became extra vulnerable to Roylott's scheming. Doyle, like his detective, is somewhat suspicious of country life and makes the inherent isolation of Surrey's rural landscape mirror the psychological isolation of the inhabitants at Stoke Moran. Separated from its surrounding community, the author seems to be saying, the crumbling mansion is the kind of place that would inevitably foster the devious behavior of a character like Roylott. Just as the isolated environment fostered Roylott's behavior, it left the Stoner twins vulnerable to his machinations, but in reaching out to Holmes and Watson to help her solve the murder, Helen breaks her physical and psychological isolation and makes her first step to regaining some sense of agency over her life. - Theme: Fate and Justice. Description: One of the overarching ideas of most Sherlock Holmes stories, including "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," is that justice and goodness must triumph over evil and injustice. Doyle's stories depict a straightforward division between good and evil, in which characters are generally not nuanced blends of both characteristics, but rather embodiments of either extreme. Through the triumph of the eminently good Holmes and Watson over the evil Dr. Roylott, Doyle suggests that justice is a natural condition of human life and that goodness or fairness will always prevail in the end. More than a mere detective solving crimes, Holmes see himself as a conduit for justice. In this particular case, his ambition is less to make sure that whoever murdered Julia Stoner is caught and taken to court than it is to personally stop an inherently evil person from doing harm again. This is clear in his constant ruminations about the nature of justice and his personal concern for Helen's safety. When Helen visits Holmes and Watson, for instance, she asks whether she can pay him at a later point for his detective services. "As to reward, my profession is its own reward," he claims. This shows that Holmes is less concerned about any financial incentives than doing good in the world. Furthermore, during Helen's explanation of her sister's mysterious death, Holmes notices five small bruises on her wrist, left by the grip of Roylott's fingers. When he tells her that she has been "cruelly used" by her stepfather, Helen tries to defend him by saying he just doesn't understand his own strength. Holmes then stares pensively into the fire and the reader can see that he feels it is imperative for him to take up this case to ensure that Roylott does no further harm. As much as Holmes' intellect and ambition to do good propel him to solve crimes, Doyle seems to suggest that evildoers being brought to justice is a matter of fate. In Doyle's cosmology, bad people are obviously bad, which contributes to the sense that they are fated for a downfall. When Dr. Roylott enters into Holmes and Watson's apartment, for instance, he is made to appear inherently foreboding. His first name, Grimesby, is almost laughably dark and his appearance—so tall and broad that he fills the door frame, his face "seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion"—makes it clear that he is the story's villain. As a threat, Roylott takes the poker from the fireplace and bends it into a curve. Once he leaves, Holmes straightens the poker back out, as if to demonstrate that he will correct whatever wrong has been committed in the case. Near the end of the story, when Roylott is killed by his own swamp adder (the murder weapon used against Julia, which he also attempted to use against Helen), Holmes is hardly surprised. "Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent," he says, "and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another." Therefore, despite Holmes' dedication, intellect, and conviction that Helen was in grave danger without his services, Holmes also seems to believe that it is inevitable that Roylott would be brought down in the course of executing his nefarious scheme. In this light, Holmes' detective work seems as though it is as much a matter of managing fate as it is an exercise in deductive reasoning Doyle's sense that evildoers are inevitably brought to justice is also reflected in Holmes' easy conscience. In the final sentence of the story, Holmes tells Watson that he isn't too concerned about his own role in the murderer's death, despite that he is generally quite concerned by those who do bad things. "I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott's death," he says, "and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience." In other words, Holmes believes that Roylott deserved this final punishment, since he brought it upon himself by hatching such an evil scheme. Unlike many detectives, who are trying to use their deductive skills in an objective way so that they can catch a criminal, Holmes is clearly concerned with the moral balance in the universe and what he can do to preserve it. Although he is known for his scientific observational skills, Holmes frequently infuses his detective work with emotional and moral weight, as when he is clearly pained by the dark bruises that Roylott left on Helen's wrist. In Doyle's telling, there is almost a cautionary element to how the story ends, as though the moral of the story is that those who do wrong will inevitably have wrong done to them. - Climax: Sherlock discovers that Dr. Roylott used a poisonous snake to kill Julia Stoner - Summary: "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" begins with Watson recounting how, of the nearly seventy cases that he and Sherlock Holmes have embarked upon together as a detective duo, the one that he is about to narrate is among the most unusual of them. Watson's telling of the narrative starts when a young woman, Helen Stoner, pays them a visit one morning, in desperate need of their help. Helen's stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, is the sole remaining descendent of an old family whose fortune has been slowly reduced to nearly nothing after generations of waste and gambling. When he was younger, Roylott embarked on a medical career in India, where he married the widowed Mrs. Stoner. Helen's mother died and Roylott moved back into his family's decaying Stoke Moran Manor, along with Helen and her twin sister Julia, all of them living in adjacent bedrooms in the building's one inhabitable wing. Mrs. Stoner had left an inheritance to Roylott, with a stipulation that should her daughters get married, they would receive an annual income from this fund. Two years ago, Helen tells Holmes and Watson, her sister got engaged. Shortly thereafter, Julia told Helen that she began to hear a low whistling sound in the middle of the night. This went on for some time, until, shortly before Julia's wedding date, Helen heard a scream coming from her sister's bedroom. Helen ran over to see what happened and Julia, in a state of shock, fell to the ground in convulsions. Julia said, "It was the band! The speckled band!" and died. The sisters were in the habit of locking their doors and shuttering their windows—Roylott keeps a wild cheetah and baboon around the property as pets—so Julia's death fully baffles Helen. By the time she comes to visit Holmes and Watson, Helen herself has become engaged. Soon after she makes the announcement, renovations begin on the exterior wall next to her bedroom, so Helen is forced to move into her sister's former room, next door to Roylott. Not long after this, Helen begins to hear the same low whistling sound that Julia had described to her. Holmes and Watson then make plans to meet her at the Stoke Moran Manor later that day so they can begin investigating the mysterious incidents. Not long after Helen leaves their apartment, a large man with a threatening demeanor enters the room. He announces himself as Dr. Roylott, Helen's stepfather. He tells Holmes and Watson that he's been tracing Helen's movements, so he knows that she has just paid them a visit and he demands to know what she told them. When Holmes refuses to say anything, Roylott tells them not to meddle in his affairs. He then grabs a fire poker, bends it as show of his strength, and leaves them. Holmes remarks that he himself is stronger than he looks and he bends the poker back into shape. Holmes and Watson journey out to Surrey later that afternoon. Meeting up with Helen, the detectives first inspect the rooms from the outside, determining that the shutters are essentially impenetrable, and then the inside, where there are a number of telling clues. Holmes examines every surface of Julia's former room and notices that the bed is bolted to the floor, that a ventilator hole leads into Roylott's bedroom next door, and that the bell-pull is fake (it's merely a rope hanging onto a hook in the ceiling). They then inspect Roylott's room, where Holmes notices a safe with a saucer of milk sitting on top of it and a leash tied and looped like a whipcord hanging from the bed. The three hatch a plan for the evening. Holmes and Watson will take a room on the second floor of the inn across the lane from the manor. Helen will tell her stepfather that she will be confining herself to her room due a headache. When she hears that Roylott has gone to bed, she will undo the shutters in Julia's former room, put a lamp in the window indicating that all is quiet in the house, and then retreat into her former room for the night. Holmes and Watson then go back to the inn and wait for Helen's signal. At eleven, they see the light and head to the manor. In Julia's former room, Holmes instructs Watson to sit silently in the dark and to not fall asleep. They quietly wait until, hours later, they see a light coming from the ventilator hole and smell burning oil, telling them that Roylott is stirring about next door. A few moments later, they hear a long hissing sound come into their room. Suddenly, Holmes gets up and begins to furiously beat at the hanging bell-pull rope with his cane. Right when they light a lantern in their room, the glare makes it so that Watson can't tell what Holmes had seen, only that the detective's face had paled and a taken on a look of terror. They then hear the expected low whistling and, shortly after, a horribly loud scream coming from Roylott's room. Once the shrieking fades, they investigate Roylott's room and see the doctor sitting on a chair with a snake curled tightly around his head. Holmes immediately remarks on the speckled bands around the snake's skin and identifies it as a swamp adder, "the deadliest snake in India." Roylott has died quickly from the snake's lethal bite. The story closes with Holmes telling Watson what he took away from the investigation, namely how important it is to have sufficient data, noting the confusing double meaning of the word "band," which initially threw him off. Only by examining the physical clues directly in front of him—the bell-pull, the bolted bed and the ventilator hole—could he accurately deduce the method of the crime. Though he knows he is at least partly responsible for Roylott's death, Holmes tells Watson, the guilt of this evil man dying will not weigh on him very heavily.

- Genre: Children's novel / satirical novel - Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Point of view: First person limited, from Huck Finn's perspective - Setting: On and around the Mississippi River in the American South - Character: Huckleberry Finn. Description: The boy-narrator of the novel, Huck is the son of a vicious town drunk who has been adopted into normal society by the Widow Douglass after the events of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In his love for freedom, Huck rebels both against his father Pap's debauchery and its seeming opposite, a sternly straight-laced but hypocritical society. Wise beyond his years, cleverly practical but nonetheless supremely humane, Huck defies societal conventions by befriending the black slave Jim while travelling with him on their raft and whom, as Huck matures, he comes to see as his equal. Huck's maturation is impeded, though, by his respectable and bright but boyishly self-indulgent friend, Tom Sawyer. - Character: Jim. Description: One of Miss Watson's slaves, Jim runs away because he is afraid of being separated from his beloved wife and daughter. Jim is superstitious, but nonetheless intelligent; he is also freedom-loving, and nobly selfless. He becomes a kind of moral guide to Huck over the course of their travels together, and, indeed, something of a spiritual father. Despite being the most morally upstanding character in the novel, Jim is ruthlessly persecuted and hunted and dehumanized. He bears his oppression with fiercely graceful resistance. - Character: Tom Sawyer. Description: Tom is Huck's childhood friend, a boy from a respectable family who is both bright and learned; he is also a seasoned prankster. As good-spirited as Tom is, he is not as morally mature as Huck, and his impracticality endangers himself and others, especially Jim. Tom is also self-indulgent, even selfish. Despite his shortcomings, however, Tom exerts a powerful influence on Huck. - Character: The duke and king. Description: The kind of people Huck and Tom might turn into were they to only act out of self-interest, the duke and king are a couple of con men that Huck and Jim travel with. The two are selfish, greedy, deceptive, and debauched, but sometimes their actions expose and exploit societal hypocrisy in a way that is somewhat attractive and also rather revealing. Though the exploits of the duke and king can be farcical and fun to watch, the two demonstrate an absolute, hideous lack of respect for human life and dignity. - Character: The Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. Description: Two elderly sisters, the Widow and Miss Watson are Huck's guardians at the beginning of the novel until Pap arrives on the scene. The two women demand that Huck conform to societal norms, which Huck resents. Miss Watson is hypocritical in holding Christian values yet cruelly keeping slaves, even separating Jim from his family. However, it would seem that she sees the light just before her death: she frees Jim in her will. - Character: Pap. Description: Huck's father, Pap is a vicious drunk and racist, demonstrably beyond reform, who wants to have Huck's fortune for himself. He resents Huck's social mobility and, when not drunk or in jail, he can usually be found harassing Huck. Infuriated by the Widow at one point, Pap kidnaps Huck and imprisons him in a cabin, where he beats Huck mercilessly, such that Huck is compelled to escape from him once and for all. Pap seems to be free from the Widow and Miss Watson's idea of society, but he is enslaved to his own wretched viciousness and alcoholism, as much a prisoner as anyone in the novel. - Character: Colonel Sherburn. Description: A cold-blooded killer, Sherburn guns down the vocal but harmless drunkard Boggs for almost no reason at all, all of which Huck witnesses in horror. When a lynch mob sets out to avenge Boggs' death, Sherburn calmly scorns the mob as being full of cowards and absolutely impotent. He is right: the mob, humiliated, disperses. - Character: The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons. Description: Two noble, pious, aristocratic families that absurdly, bloodily feud with one another despite mutual respect. Huck stays with the Grangerfords after becoming separated from Jim, but becomes embroiled in their feud after he accidentally enables a Grangerford girl to elope with a Shepherdson boy. Huck is confused by how such good, brave people could be involved in such devastating madness. - Character: Sally and Silas Phelps. Description: Tom Sawyer's aunt and uncle, respectively, who are both good people and parents, upstanding members of their community, and yet who troublingly support the institution of slavery, exemplified by their detainment of Jim. Huck and Tom trick the Phelpses when preparing for Jim's escape, much to Aunt Sally's fury and Uncle Silas's innocent befuddlement. Aunt Sally offers to adopt Huck at the end of the novel, but he refuses to be "sivilized" by anyone. - Theme: Slavery and Racism. Description: Though Mark Twain wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after the abolition of slavery in the United States, the novel itself is set before the Civil War, when slavery was still legal and the economic foundation of the American South. Many characters in Twain's novel are themselves white slaveholders, like Miss Watson, the Grangerford family, and the Phelps family, while other characters profit indirectly from slavery, as the duke and the king do in turning Miss Watson's runaway slave Jim into the Phelpses in exchange for a cash reward.While slaveholders profit from slavery, the slaves themselves are oppressed, exploited, and physically and mentally abused. Jim is inhumanely ripped away from his wife and children. However, white slaveholders rationalize the oppression, exploitation, and abuse of black slaves by ridiculously assuring themselves of a racist stereotype, that black people are mentally inferior to white people, more animal than human. Though Huck's father, Pap, is a vicious, violent man, it is the much better man, Jim, who is suspected of Huck's murder, only because Jim is black and because he ran away from slavery, in a bid for freedom, to be with his family. In this way, slaveholders and racist whites harm blacks, but they also do moral harm to themselves, by viciously misunderstanding what it is to be human, and all for the sake of profit. At the beginning of the novel, Huck himself buys into racial stereotypes, and even reprimands himself for not turning Jim in for running away, given that he has a societal and legal obligation to do so. However, as Huck comes to know Jim and befriend him, he realizes that he and Jim alike are human beings who love and hurt, who can be wise or foolish. Jim proves himself to be a better man than most other people Huck meets in his travels. By the end of the novel, Huck would rather defy his society and his religion—he'd rather go to Hell—than let his friend Jim be returned to slavery. - Theme: Society and Hypocrisy. Description: Huck lives in a society based on rules and traditions, many of which are both ridiculous and inhuman. At the beginning of the novel, Huck's guardian, the Widow Douglas, and her sister, Miss Watson, try to "sivilize" Huck by teaching him manners and Christian values, but Huck recognizes that these lessons take more stock in the dead than in living people, and they do little more than make him uncomfortable, bored, and, ironically enough, lonely. After Huck leaves the Widow Douglas's care, however, he is exposed to even darker parts of society, parts in which people do ridiculous, illogical things, often with violent consequences. Huck meets good families that bloodily, fatally feud for no reason. He witnesses a drunken man get shot down for making a petty insult.Even at the beginning of the novel, a judge ridiculously grants custody of Huck to Huck's abusive drunkard of a father, Pap. The judge claims that Pap has a legal right to custody of Huck, yet, regardless of his right, Pap proves himself to be a bad guardian, denying Huck an opportunity to educate himself, beating Huck, and imprisoning him in an isolated cabin. In such a case, fulfilling Pap's legal right ridiculously compromises Huck's welfare. Furthermore, Huck's abuse and imprisonment at the hands of Pap is implicitly compared to a more widespread and deeply engrained societal problem, namely the institutionalized enslavement of black people. Huck comes to recognize slavery as an oppressively inhuman institution, one that no truly "sivilized" society can be founded on. People like Sally Phelps, who seem good yet are racist slaveholders, are maybe the biggest hypocrites Huck meets on his travels. - Theme: Religion and Superstition. Description: There are two systems of belief represented in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: formal religion (namely, Christianity) and superstition. The educated and the "sivilized, like the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, practice Christianity, whereas the uneducated and poor, like Huck and Jim, have superstitions. Huck, despite (or maybe because of) the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson's tutelage, immediately has an aversion to Christianity on the grounds that it takes too much stock in the dead and not enough in the living, that Christian Heaven is populated by boringly rigid people like Miss Watson while Hell seems more exciting, and, finally, that Huck recognizes the uselessness of Christianity. After all, prayers are never answered in Huck's world.On the other hand, Huck and Jim's superstitions, silly though they are, are no sillier than Christianity. Huck and Jim read "bad signs" into everything, as when a spider burns in a candle, or Huck touches a snakeskin. Jim even has a magic hairball, taken from an ox's stomach, that, when given money, supposedly tells the future. Huck and Jim find so many bad signs in the natural world that, whenever anything bad happens to them, they're sure to have a sign to blame it on. However, one of the subtle jokes of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a joke with nevertheless serious implications, is that, silly as superstition is, it is a more accurate way to read the world than formal religion is.It is silly for Huck and Jim to read bad signs into everything, but it is not at all silly for them to expect bad things to be just around the corner; for they live in a world where nature is dangerous, even fatally malevolent, and where people behave irrationally, erratically, and, oftentimes, violently. In contrast, formal religion dunks its practitioners into ignorance and, worse, cruelty. By Christian values as established in the American South, Huck is condemned to Hell for doing the right thing by saving Jim from slavery. Huck, knowing that the Christian good is not the good, saves Jim anyway, thereby establishing once and for all a new moral framework in the novel, one that cannot be co-opted by society into serving immoral institutions like slavery. - Theme: Growing Up. Description: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn belongs to the genre of Bildungsroman; that is, the novel presents a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist, Huck, matures as he broadens his horizons with new experiences. Huck begins the novel as an immature boy who enjoys goofing around with his boyhood friend, Tom Sawyer, and playing tricks on others. He has a good heart but a conscience deformed by the society in which he was raised, such that he reprimands himself again and again for not turning Jim in for running away, as though turning Jim in and prolonging his separation from his family were the right thing to do.As the novel develops, however, so do Huck's notions of right and wrong. He learns that rigid codes of conduct, like Christianity, or like that which motivates the Grangerson and Shepherdson's blood feud, don't necessarily lead to good results. He also recognizes that absolute selfishness, like that exhibited by Tom Sawyer to a small extent, and that exhibited by Tom's much worse prankster-counterparts, the duke and the king, is both juvenile and shameful. Huck learns that he must follow the moral intuitions of his heart, which requires that he be flexible in responding to moral dilemmas. And, indeed, it is by following his heart that Huck makes the right decision to help Jim escape from bondage.This mature moral decision is contrasted with the immature way in which Tom goes about acting on that decision at the Phelps farm. Instead of simply helping Jim, Tom devises a childishly elaborate scheme to free Jim, which results in Tom getting shot in the leg and Jim being recaptured. By the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is morally mature and realistic, whereas Tom still has a lot of growing up to do. - Theme: Freedom. Description: Huck and Jim both yearn for freedom. Huck wants to be free of petty manners and societal values. He wants to be free of his abusive father, who goes so far as to literally imprison Huck in a cabin. Maybe more than anything, Huck wants to be free such that he can think independently and do what his heart tells him to do. Similarly, Jim wants to be free of bondage so that he can return to his wife and children, which he knows to be his natural right.The place where Huck and Jim go to seek freedom is the natural world. Though nature imposes new constraints and dangers on the two, including what Huck calls "lonesomeness," a feeling of being unprotected from the meaninglessness of death, nature also provides havens from society and even its own dangers, like the cave where Huck and Jim take refuge from a storm. In such havens, Huck and Jim are free to be themselves, and they can also appreciate from a safe distance the beauty that is inherent in the terror of freedom.That being said, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn implies that people can be so free as to be, ironically enough, imprisoned in themselves. The duke and the king, for example, foils (or contrasts) to Huck and Jim, are so free that they can become almost anybody through playacting and impersonation. However, this is only because they have no moral compass and are imprisoned in their own selfishness. Freedom is good, but only insofar as the free person binds himself to the moral intuitions of his heart. - Climax: Jim is sold back into bondage by the duke and king - Summary: Huckleberry Finn introduces himself as a character from the book prequel to his own, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He explains that at the end of that book, he and his friend Tom Sawyer discovered a robber's cache of gold and consequently became rich, but that now Huck lives with a good but mechanical woman, the Widow Douglas, and her holier-than-thou sister, Miss Watson. Huck resents the "sivilized" lifestyle that the widow imposes on him. However, Huck stays with the Widow and Miss Watson because Tom tells him that, if Huck doesn't stick with his life in straight-laced civilization, he can't join Tom's gang. So Huck does as the Widow tells him and gets to play robbers with Tom and other boys once in a while. Even as Huck grows to enjoy his lifestyle with the Widow, his debauched father Pap menacingly reappears one night in his room. Pap rebukes Huck for trying to better his life and demands that Huck give him the fortune he made after discovering the robber's gold. Huck goes about business as usual as the Widow and a local judge, Judge Thatcher, try to get custody of him so that he doesn't fall into his father's incapable and cruel hands. However, the two fail in their custody battle, and an infuriated Pap decides to kidnap his son and drag him across the Mississippi River to an isolated cabin. Huck is locked up like a prisoner in the cabin, and he is at the mercy of Pap's drunken, murderous rages, suffering many beatings from the old man. Huck resolves to escape from Pap once and for all. After some preparation, he fakes his own death. Afterwards, Huck canoes to a place called Jackson's Island, where he finds a man he knows from home, a slave named Jim who has run away from his owner, Miss Watson, because he had overheard that she planned to sell him. Having found a raft during a storm, Huck and Jim happily inhabit Jackson's Island, fishing, lazing, and even investigating a house floating down the river that contained a dead body. However, during trip into town while disguised as a girl to gather information, Huck learns that slave-hunters are out to capture Jim for a reward. He and Jim quit the island on their raft, with the free states as their destination. A few days in, a fog descends on the river such that Huck and Jim miss their route to the free states. In the aftermath of this fog, Huck struggles with the command of his conscience to turn Jim in and the cry of his heart to aid Jim in his bid for freedom. At last, Huck has his chance to turn Jim in, but he declines to do so. The night after, a steamboat ploughs into Huck and Jim's raft, separating the two. Huck washes up in front of the house of an aristocratic family, the Grangerfords, which takes Huck into its hospitality. But the Grangerfords are engaged in an absurdly pointless and devastating feud with a rival family, the Shepherdsons. When a Grangerford girl elopes with a Shepherdson boy, the feud escalates to mad bloodshed. Huck, having learned that Jim is in hiding nearby with the repaired raft, barely escapes from the carnage. He and Jim board the raft and continue to drift downriver. A few days pass before Huck and Jim find two con men on the run. Huck helps the men escape their pursuers and he and Jim host them on the raft, where one of the con men claims to be a duke and the other a king. The duke and king take advantage of Huck and Jim's hospitality, taking over their raft as they head downriver, all the while conducting scams on shore. One day, the king learns that a man nearby, Peter Wilks, has died, and that his brothers are expected to arrive. Hoping to collect the man's inheritance, the duke and king go to his house claiming to be his dear brothers. Though they ingratiate themselves with most of the townspeople, especially Peter's nieces, the duke and king are suspected by some of being frauds. Huck comes to feel so bad for Peter's nieces, though, that he resolves to expose the con men for what they are. As he puts his plan into effect, Peter's real brothers arrive, and, after the townspeople investigate, the duke and king are exposed. Huck escapes onto the raft with Jim, but despairs when the duke and king manage to do the same. Desperate for money, the duke and king sell Jim to a local farmer, Silas Phelps, claiming that Jim is a runaway and that there is a reward on his head. The duke betrays to Huck that Jim is being held at the Phelps farm. After some soul-searching, Huck decides that he would rather save Jim and go to hell than to let his friend be returned to bondage. Huck arrives at the Phelps farm where he meets Aunt Sally, whom Huck tricks into thinking that Huck is a family member she was expecting, named Tom. Soon, though, Huck learns that Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally are none other than Tom Sawyer's relatives. Indeed, Tom is the family member Aunt Sally was expecting all along. Huck intercepts Tom as he rides up to the Phelps farm, and Tom not only agrees to help Huck keep his cover by impersonating his cousin Sid, but he also agrees to help Huck in helping Jim escape from captivity. Tom confabulates an impractical, romantic plan to free Jim, which Huck and Jim reluctantly go along with. One night, Jim, Huck, and Tom make a successful break for the Mississippi River, only to learn, however, that Tom was shot in the leg by one of their pursuers. Jim sacrifices his freedom to wait with Tom while Huck fetches a doctor, who, after treating Tom with Jim's help, insists on bringing Jim back to the Phelps farm, bound. He also presents Tom to the Phelpses wounded but alive. After he recovers, Tom reveals to an anxious Aunt Sally and Huck that Miss Watson wrote in her will that Jim was to be freed after her death and that she had died two months earlier. Tom wanted to liberate Jim for the sake of self-indulgent adventure. After things are straightened out, Jim reveals to Huck that Pap is dead; his was the corpse that Jim discovered in the floating house. Huck also learns that he still has six thousand dollars in Judge Thatcher's safekeeping and is free to do what he wants. Fearful of being adopted by Aunt Sally and "sivilized" again, Huck decides that he is going to go West.

- Genre: - Title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Point of view: The novel is narrated in the omniscient third person, though it is the voice of an adult with sympathetic insight into the struggles of boyhood. - Setting: The fictional village of St. Petersburg, which is based on Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri - Character: Tom Sawyer. Description: The novel's hero, Tom is a badly behaved orphan with an attention-getting streak and a heart of gold. He's a clever trickster, leading the boys of the village in various adventures, and a dreamer with grandiose visions for himself. His misdeeds are never malicious, and by the novel's end he proves himself capable of mature decision-making and empathy, with a commitment to being a responsible community member. - Character: Huckleberry Finn. Description: As the son of the town drunkard, Huck is virtually orphaned. He's looked down upon by the adults of St. Petersburg, but is deeply admired by the local boys for living as he wants to—not bathing, sleeping outdoors, smoking, never attending school. He bonds with Tom through their mutual superstitions. Like Tom, he matures morally over the course of the novel, though to different ends. While Tom becomes a responsible community member, Huck is more wary of society's hypocrisy and desires of independence from it. - Character: Becky Thatcher. Description: Tom develops a crush on Becky as the new blond in town, and the novel charts the development of their relationship into a mature affection for one another after much tit-for-tat pettiness. As the daughter of Judge Thatcher, Becky is a privileged girl, prissy and slightly spoiled—a worthy challenger to Tom when it comes to conniving to get her way. - Character: Injun Joe. Description: The novel's villain. Injun Joe is an anti-social adult, motivated by revenge and ruthless in exacting it. He brings both realism and romanticism to the novel. On the one hand his behavior forces Tom and his friends to confront injustice and criminality. On the other his fantastic escapes and discovery of treasure serve as plot devices that move the novel along as a page-turning adventure story. He is also half Native American, and has faced discrimination in society as a result. Even so, Twain's depiction of him is unsympathetic. - Character: Joe Harper. Description: Tom's best friend aside from Huck. He runs away with them to the island after Tom finds him upset one day at having been wrongfully accused by his mother of having stolen cream. As a conventional boy—the first one to miss home—Joe serves as a foil to the self-sufficient Huck. - Character: Judge Thatcher. Description: Becky's father and the county Judge, who is based in Constantinople. He is the most revered figure in St. Petersburg. He takes a fondness to Tom after he leads Becky out of the cave, hoping he'll become a lawyer, which indicates the fallibility of the lawman, who should be more wary of mischievous Tom. - Character: Alfred Temple. Description: Tom's classroom nemesis, Alfred is a refined, slightly effeminate new boy in town, who runs home from fighting with Tom to his mother's protection. His spiteful nature is revealed when, after Becky flirts with him to get Tom's attention, he gets revenge by secretly spilling ink across Tom's spelling book so that Tom will be whipped. - Character: The Welshman. Description: Also known as Mr. Jones, he lives with his sons near the widow Douglas, and Huck turns to him to save the widow from Injun Joe's revenge. Though the Welshman is a capable hunter who succeeds in scaring off Injun Joe, he has a gossipy, sentimental side, and can't keep Huck's heroism secret. - Character: Mr. Dobbins. Description: The local teacher. Mr. Dobbins is a pompous disciplinarian with a vindictive nature. As a youth he dreamed of becoming a doctor, and keeps an anatomy book hidden in his desk. On Examination day, just before summer vacation, the schoolchildren get revenge upon him for his punishments by dropping a cat from the ceiling to swipe off his wig and reveal to their parents his bald head, painted gold while he was passed out drunk. - Character: Mr. Walters. Description: The superintendent of the Sunday school. Despite being a religious man, he is prone to vanity, and rewards Tom a Bible he hasn't rightfully earned for the sake of looking good in front of Judge Thatcher. Their shared underhandedness is revealed when Tom fails to correctly answer a basic Biblical question posed by Judge Thatcher. - Character: Dr. Robinson. Description: A compatriot of Injun Joe and Muff Potter. After he argues with the two of them and knocks out Muff Potter, Injun Joe stabs and kills Dr. Robinson and then frames the knocked-out Muff Potter for the murder. Tom and Huck witness these events, and the fact that they know Muff Potter is innocent sets in motion their conflict with Injun Joe. - Theme: Boyhood Rebellion and Growing Up. Description: Tom Sawyer is the embodiment of boyhood rebellion. He is always disappointing the adults who surround him, by breaking rules, fighting with other boys, failing to perform his chores, fibbing, stealing sweet treats from his Aunt Polly's closet, and so on. Yet Twain's stories of Tom's misdeeds are humorous and affectionate, rather than judgmental moral lessons. Tom's shenanigans, in fact, often bring delight and even unpredictable insight into a situation, with the boys' interactions as a gang often satirically mirroring the behaviors of adults in society. Tom's rebellion earns him the admiration of the other boys in town, who misbehave to lesser degrees. Huckleberry Finn is the only boy who is wilder than Tom. With the village drunkard as his single parent, Huck lives an unsupervised life that is every other boy's dream: he never goes to school or church, he smokes, he wears whatever he wants, and he sleeps outdoors each night. Rebellion is a way for boys to bond, to the exclusion of a few well-behaved boys, such as Sid, and girls, who are more reserved than boys.Breaking rules is considered unacceptable and anti-social for adults, and, accordingly, the murderer Injun Joe and drunkard Muff Potter are outcasts. Though Tom's mischievous nature is the source of the novel's many humorous anecdotes, the overall arc of the novel charts Tom's maturation into adulthood as he leaves behind his boyish ways to become a responsible member of society. Tom realizes that his actions can have serious consequences and he makes several moral, empathetic decisions over the second half of the novel, including testifying against Injun Joe and protecting Becky Thatcher from being whipped by their teacher. Additionally, Tom makes three journeys that involve his maturation. When he runs away with Joe Harper and Huck to Jackson's Island, he realizes that he misses the company of his family and society. In the several days he spends lost in the cave with Becky Thatcher, he develops an understanding of mature romantic love that involves caring for another, and that proves more fulfilling than simply courting girls for reasons of personal vanity. Finally, after Tom and Huck hunt down the treasure, Tom adopts the respect for wealth and status that the adults of St. Petersburg hold, and no longer disdains wearing suits and other respectable habits.While Twain's novel catalogs Tom's progression towards adulthood, the author does not fully embrace the changes in attitudes this transition involves, as his portrayal of Huck exemplifies. Huck also matures considerably over the novel, and he performs the most heroic act of all in saving the widow Douglas's life. Yet Huck continues to avoid the proprieties of society—having manners and attending church, for example—even after he has gained the approval of St. Petersburg's citizens. He prefers to exist as an independent character on the fringe of society, avoiding the hypocrisies that Twain has satirized throughout the novel. At the novel's end, Huck and Tom represent different aspects of adulthood, but they continue to bond through their boyish fantasies, and this capacity for friendship is a characteristic of boyhood that Twain would have his adult readers see as true wisdom. - Theme: The Hypocrisy of Adult Society. Description: The adults of quaint St. Petersburg see themselves as a law-abiding, church-going, family-based group that must police its children. The most respected figure in the novel is Judge Thatcher, who is in charge of administering the law. Virtually every villager shows up to church on Sunday, so that community is formed through an agreed upon set of moral values. The education of the village's children consists largely of learning to follow inflexible rules that are intended to protect these values. The adventures of Tom and his friends often reveal gaps in the adults' logic and inconsistencies in their behavior, with the adults saying one thing but acting otherwise. For example, Aunt Polly tries to force herself to consistently punish to Tom for his rule breaking. But she often compromises herself by administering a lesser punishment, such as tapping him on the head with her thimble when she had originally threatened to whip him with her switch. While Tom is often punished for being untrue to his word, Aunt Polly is not, but remains a moral authority. Twain uses the playful games and interactions of children to also humorously reflect hypocrisy on the broader scale of 19th-century American society and its religion, temperance movement, medical beliefs, and social snobbery. Aunt Polly's belief in "quack" medicines isn't that different from Tom's in black magic, for instance, but medical authorities support her superstitions. To take another example, when Tom briefly joins the Cadets of Temperance, he is motivated by the social status he'll gain in wearing a fancy sash rather than any conviction about the ills of substance abuse. Surely the adults involved in the temperance movement are similarly motivated.Even if Twain is cutting in his dismissive attitude toward abstract social causes that involve hypocrisy, he sees it as an inevitable and condonable aspect of life in a community. Adults fail to follow through on their word regarding the several adventures Tom undertakes that involve his leaving the village. In running away to Jackson's Island, getting lost in the cave, and tracking down Injun Joe's treasure, Tom and his friends break serious rules, yet in each case the villagers welcome the children home again without punishing them. The adults can hardly be condemned for their hypocrisy in desiring the children's safety, which underscores Twain's belief in the ultimate goodness of community. The individual who does deserve punishment in the novel is the villain Injun Joe, whose desire for revenge against both Dr. Robinson and the widow Douglas reveal that he is incapable of forgiving others, or bending the rules as a hypocrite might. Hypocrisy is a complicated issue in Twain's depiction of St. Petersburg, for the flawed logic it involves is worth noting, but hypocrisy is ultimately a very human, even necessary flaw. - Theme: Superstition, Fantasy, and Escape. Description: From the first moment of the novel, Tom is on the run, hiding out from Aunt Polly with stolen jam smeared across his face in her closet. In the face of constant scolding and ever-boring work, Tom repeatedly manages to escape. He plays hooky whenever possible, and leaves Aunt Polly's house typically to return only after his bedtime. He also metaphorically escapes from the boring routines and rules of daily life in St. Petersburg through fantasy, re-imagining the world to entertain himself. This might involve play-acting with other boys, or exaggerating his own achievements. He collects superstitious beliefs and tokens—typically everyday cast-off objects reinvented—with which to flavor his tall tales.Tom draws from books he's read about Robin Hood, pirates, and other adventurers to imagine himself as the hero of a romantic tale and thereby view his everyday woes in a more glamorous light. His maturation over the course of the novel, however, largely involves his learning to differentiate this romantic world from reality. He begins to develop this ability when he runs away with Huck Finn and Joe Harper to Jackson Island, his first "real" physical escape from St. Petersburg. The boys create an alternate reality on the island, with new names and histories for each of them. Their island adventure reveals the fun to be had in escaping through rule-breaking, as the boys leave the strictures of society behind altogether, parading around naked and even abandoning their families by allowing them to believe they've drowned. They learn, however, that no escape is permanent, feeling homesick rather than courageous on the island. Only upon returning to the warm embrace of the villagers who thought them dead do the boys come to feel heroic. At the novel's end, Tom no longer feels the same longing to escape St. Petersburg, and even chastises Huck for running away from the widow Douglas's home, insisting that he return there if he want to join Tom's new gang. Tom has matured into an adult who, like the rest of his community, takes pride in his new wealth and status, and his clever ability to manipulate others will now serve him as he assumes a leadership position as an adult in St. Petersburg (as a lawyer, if Judge Thatcher has his way).The adults of St. Petersburg are themselves susceptible to flights of fancy—consider the minister's extraordinary descriptions of the apocalypse in his church sermon. Twain's depiction of Tom's playful games are delightful to read over the course of the novel, and while he must gain a more realistic view of life as an adult, Twain suggests fantasy provides a way for people to handle the harshness of reality. - Theme: Showing Off. Description: Tom wishes at all times to be the center of attention, and is pained to share the spotlight with anyone. This desire motivates many of his actions, from picking fights with other boys, to conniving to win the honorary Bible at Sunday school, to winning Becky Thatcher's heart. At the novel's start he is frequently shortsighted in his maneuvers to gain the spotlight, which results in his ending up looking foolish, offering onlookers (and the reader) further entertainment. By its end, Tom's more mature self has become capable of greater sophistication, and he earns the spotlight through less clownish behavior. His final discovery of buried treasure, for example, makes him the envy of everyone in town, with many villagers even seeing him as a model for their own behavior as they set off to hunt for buried treasure in haunted houses. Notably, they want to be able to boast their wealth, just like him, so he is hardly alone in his vanity. At its worst, his showing off reveals a selfish strain in Tom's character. Yet Twain depicts the need for attention as just a minor vice, because it is based in a social instinct for connecting to others in the community. Even the teachers at the Sunday school yearn to be recognized as they try to impress Judge Thatcher when he visits their classroom. The only character who begrudges Tom his dramatic flair is Sid, who is mean-spirited and a loner. - Theme: Sentimentality and Realism. Description: In writing about the village of St. Petersburg, Missouri, Twain was describing a contemporary Southern American village to his original readers. Rather than glamorizing his subject matter by writing about a more well-known location or glamorous characters, he aimed towards realism in describing the daily lives of average people living on the Mississippi River, people in whom his readers might recognize themselves. His preface explains that much of the book is based on his own experiences growing up, implying that little has been reinvented. Yet, even as he sets out to tell the stories of ordinary villagers with beliefs and values that represent those of many mid-nineteenth-century Americans, Twain adds embellishments to his depiction, playing up the quaintness of village life. A more realistic view of a community would stress, for example, unresolved injustices, the disparity between rich and poor, or the life of a slave in St. Petersburg (as Twain will do in another novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). And there are elements of realism in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for example Twain's descriptions of Huck's life as a homeless boy who is looked down upon by his elders. Even so, as a novel consisting of many short stories with happy endings, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is largely a sentimental portrait of Mississippi village life, offering St. Petersburg as Twain would like to remember it. Twain does this purposefully to show the reader how building a community involves a sense of optimism. Twain structures the end of the book like a romantic tale, with Tom and Huck actually discovering treasure in a haunted house—a completely improbable plot twist. He implicates the reader in enjoying fanciful stories more than realistic ones. - Climax: Lost in MacDougal's Cave with Becky, Tom is searching the tunnels for a way out when he encounters Injun Joe, who runs away. (This is the major climax of the novel because Tom is its hero, but a secondary climax occurs at the same chronological time when Huck tells the Welshman that Injun Joe and the stranger are on their way to the widow Douglas's house to get violent revenge.) - Summary: The novel centers on the mischievous orphan Tom Sawyer, who lives in the quaint village of St. Petersburg, Missouri under the care of his kind Aunt Polly along with his ill-natured brother Sid and angelic cousin Mary. As a collection of stories, the novel is loosely structured, but follows the arc of Tom's transformation from a rebellious boy who longs to escape authority to a responsible community member committed to respectability.Tom's first adventure occurs as a result of him playing hooky, stealing snacks, sneaking in late, and various other misdeeds. As punishment, Aunt Polly tells him to whitewash her fence on a Saturday. Tom convinces his friends that whitewashing the fence is actually a privilege, and gets them to not only do the work for him but to pay him with various trinkets for the opportunity. On his way home he develops a crush on the new girl in town, Becky Thatcher.The next day he heads to Sunday school, where he trades the trinkets he tricked his friends into giving him on Saturday in exchange for tickets they earned for memorizing scripture. With these tickets Tom earns an honorary Bible. His teacher knows that Tom is being dishonest, but rewards him to show off to Judge Thatcher, who is visiting that day. Judge Thatcher then tests Tom by asking him the names of Jesus's first two disciples and Tom responds incorrectly.On the way to school Monday he runs into Huckleberry Finn and they agree to meet up in the graveyard at midnight to test a cure for warts. Tom's late for school, and forced to sit with the girls as punishment. He uses this opportunity to profess his love to Becky. Over lunch Becky spurns his marriage proposal after learning he was recently engaged to Amy Lawrence.That night, from a hidden spot in the graveyard, Tom and Huck watch a fight break out among the grave robbers Injun Joe, the drunkard Muff Potter, and Dr. Robinson. Injun Joe stabs the doctor, and then frames Muff for the crime. The boys are so scared of Injun Joe that they vow to never tell anyone.Shattered by Becky's rejection, Tom decides to run away as a pirate, recruiting Joe Harper and Huck to join him. They sneak off to Jackson's Island, a small island near town in the Mississippi River. Tom secretly returns to St. Petersburg one night to eavesdrop on his family as they mourn him, think he's drowned. He returns with his friends to interrupt their funeral ceremony. When they do they are welcomed as heroes.At school, Tom startles Becky as she is secretly peeking through their teacher Mr. Dobbins' anatomy book and she tears a page. Though she has continued to reject him, he tells Mr. Dobbins he tore the page, and is whipped, earning Becky's admiration.Tom's conscience nags him as Muff's trial approaches. When it comes, he takes the stand as a surprise witness to clear Muff's name. Injun Joe escapes through a window, however.Tom asks Huck to hunt for treasure with him. Their efforts lead them into a haunted house. They hide when they hear Injun Joe and a stranger there. The boys watch as the outlaws discover a treasure chest full of gold underneath the floor, which they take to hide at "Number Two."Tom has Huck watch for the men at the Temperance Tavern, thinking room number two may be where the treasure is. Meanwhile he goes on a picnic with Becky at MacDougal's Cave. When Injun Joe and the stranger appear, Huck tracks them, overhearing their plan to get revenge on the widow Douglas. Huck goes to the Welshman to save the widow, and a posse of men scare off the outlaws but fail to capture them.Tom and Becky are lost in the cave, fearing for their survival. Hunting for a way out, Tom encounters Injun Joe, who runs away. Eventually Tom finds an outlet and the children are welcomed home.Tom realizes "Number Two" must be in MacDougal's Cave, where he and Huck find the treasure. The get to keep the gold and are now respected throughout St. Petersburg as wealthy, courageous young men. The widow Douglas takes Huck in to take care of him and civilize him. Miserable, Huck runs away. Tom finds him and promises to let Huck join his new gang on the condition that he return to the widow's house. Huck agrees.

- Genre: Allegorical Fiction - Title: The Alchemist - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: Southern Spain and Northern Africa - Character: Santiago. Description: The novel's protagonist, a young shepherd who sets out on a quest for treasure after an encounter with a wise man named Melchizedek. Santiago learns from Melchizedek that each person has the opportunity to pursue his or her Personal Legend, and Santiago follows his from Southern Spain to the Egyptian Pyramids and back. Along the way Santiago encounters a variety of characters who teach him about life and listening to his heart. By the end of the novel, Santiago is confident in himself and in the Soul of the World, which he believes looks out for him and connects all things. - Character: The Alchemist. Description: The title character of the story, the alchemist meets Santiago in the oasis where Santiago's desert caravan stops to avoid the tribal wars. The alchemist is a mentor for Santiago, and he travels with him from the oasis nearly to the pyramids. The alchemist practices the traditional methods of alchemy, studying metals and the process of turning non-precious metal into gold, but he also shows Santiago how these lessons are applicable to all of life. He teaches the young man that all of creation is interconnected and that he can learn all he needs to know from studying any one thing, and from listening to his heart. - Character: Melchizedek (the Old Man). Description: A wise man who meets Santiago at the beginning of his quest to find his treasure. The fortune-teller has told Santiago of the treasure, but he is not convinced to pursue it until he meets Melchizedek. Melchizedek tells him that he appears to people at the moment when they are considering giving up on their Personal Legends. Melchizedek is a Biblical figure known as the King of Salem, and is venerated as a saint. - Character: Fatima. Description: Santiago's love interest, Fatima is a woman living in the desert oasis. As a desert woman, she is stoic and steadfast. The love between Santiago and Fatima is help up as ideal – a love that is sincere and true but also involves faith rather than any effort to control the beloved. Fatima believes in letting her beloved Santiago wander free, and encourages him to pursue his Personal Legend. She promises to wait for him while he does so. - Character: The Englishman. Description: a British man who has come to northern Africa in search of the alchemist. He has studied alchemy from books, but he wishes to complete the Master Work—the production of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life—and he feels that he'll be able to learn these things from the alchemist. He and Santiago develop a companionship, despite their differences. Santiago encourages the Englishman to observe the caravan and the desert more, and the Englishman encourages Santiago to read more. Once in the oasis, the Englishman overcomes his fear of failure and starts to work on the Master Work. - Character: The Camel Driver. Description: An unnamed camel driver accompanies the desert caravan and shares his life perspective with Santiago. The camel driver lives entirely in the moment, and therefore does not fear death or the possibility of dying, even though his caravan travels through the tribal wars in the desert. Santiago learns patience from the camel driver, and how to do each thing in its own time. - Character: The Crystal Merchant. Description: When Santiago first arrives in Morocco, he is robbed and at a loss for how to either continue his quest or to return to his homeland. He sees a crystal shop and asks the merchant for work. He then continues to work with the crystal merchant for several months, because the man is a fair employer. Santiago is innovative, and encourages the crystal merchant to expand his business by adding an outdoor display, and by also selling tea. The crystal merchant resists these changes, because he is content with his small business, just as he fears realizing his dream of traveling to Mecca, because he worries that he won't have anything to live for if his dream is realized. - Character: The Fortune-teller. Description: A gypsy woman whom Santiago meets at the beginning of the novel. She interprets his recurring dream about the Egyptian Pyramids as a sign that he should travel to that place and seek a great treasure. As payment, she makes Santiago promise her 1/10th of the total of his treasure. When Santiago eventually finds the treasure, he holds true to this promise. - Character: The Thief (the Young Man). Description: When Santiago arrives at the city of Tangier in Morocco, he stops at a bar where he meets a young man who speaks Spanish. Santiago wants to pay the young man to serve as a guide to take him to the pyramids, but the young man takes his money and then vanishes in the busy market plaza. - Character: The Elder Chief of Al-Fayoum. Description: The elder chief is the leader of the tribal people living in the oasis Al-Fayoum. Santiago goes to the chieftains with his vision of a future in which the oasis, a supposed neutral zone, is attacked by an enemy tribe. The elder chief makes the decision to believe Santiago and to arm his people, but he says that if the prophecy does not come true, Santiago will be killed. The prophecy is fulfilled, and the oasis people are able to hold off the potential invaders. - Character: The Enemy Chieftan. Description: As they travel toward the pyramids, Santiago and the alchemist are taken prisoner by a tribe engaged in the desert wars. The alchemist bargains for their lives by asking that they be given three days to let Santiago demonstrate that he can turn himself into the wind. As Santiago attempts this, the wind blows fiercely. While the other tribesmen beg to end the storm, the general insists that he wants to see the power of Allah, and won't give up until Santiago succeeds. Once Santiago succeeds, the general honors his promise and frees him and the alchemist. - Character: The Leader of the Refugees. Description: When Santiago is digging for his treasure near the pyramids, he is approached by a group of refugees from the tribal wars. The men beat him and steal the portion of gold he is carrying. The leader of the refugees tells Santiago that he will not find treasure in that place. Two years earlier the leader of the refugees slept on that same spot, and had a dream about an abandoned church in Spain where there was buried treasure. From this, Santiago realizes the truth of where his treasure is buried. - Character: Santiago's Heart. Description: Santiago's heart is given a voice and distinct characteristics as he learns to listen to what it says. His heart is afraid of losing his loved ones and of Santiago not finding his treasure, because the heart knows that it will suffer if these things happen. Santiago also learns from his heart how to hear the Language of the World, and to communicate with the desert, the wind, and the sun. - Character: The Desert. Description: When Santiago and the alchemist are taken prisoner by a hostile tribe, the alchemist barters for their release and uses as leverage the opportunity to see Santiago turn himself into the wind. Santiago then listens to his heart, which allows him to speak to the desert, the wind, and the sun, as he tries to learn how to transform himself. Santiago speaks to the desert about love, and the desert offers its sands to help the wind blow, but it cannot transform Santiago into the wind. - Character: The Wind. Description: When Santiago and the alchemist are taken prisoner by a hostile tribe, the alchemist barters for their release and uses as leverage the opportunity to see Santiago turn himself into the wind. Santiago then listens to his heart, which allows him to speak to the desert, the wind, and the sun, as he tries to learn how to transform himself. Santiago speaks to the wind, which resists his request. The wind is proud, but it realizes that even it cannot transform Santiago into the wind. It blows a storm of sand into the air so that Santiago can look at and speak to the sun without blinding himself. - Character: The Sun. Description: When Santiago and the alchemist are taken prisoner by a hostile tribe, the alchemist barters for their release and uses as leverage the opportunity to see Santiago turn himself into the wind. Santiago then listens to his heart, which allows him to speak to the desert, the wind, and the sun, as he tries to learn how to transform himself. Santiago speaks to the sun, and it speaks to him about the creation of everything. The sun tells him to pray to "the hand that wrote all" in order to achieve his transformation. - Character: The Merchant's Daughter. Description: The daughter of a merchant to whom Santiago sold some sheep. She is the object of Santiago's affections at the beginning of the novel, and he impresses her with his stories. Although Santiago anticipates his return to her, the merchant's daughter is forgotten when he sets out on his quest to actualize his Personal Legend. On his quest Santiago meets and falls in love with Fatima. - Character: Narcissus. Description: Narcissus appears in the brief prologue to the novel, in the context of a story read by the alchemist. As in his original Ancient Greek legend, Narcissus is so in love with his own beautiful reflection that he gazes at it in a lake until he falls into the water and drowns. - Character: The Lake. Description: The Lake appears in the brief prologue to the novel, in the context of a story read by the alchemist. In a twist on the original Greek legend, the lake mourns for Narcissus because she has lost the opportunity to see her own beautiful reflection in his eyes. The prologue functions as a cautionary tale against self-love. - Theme: The Pursuit of Your Personal Legend. Description: The most prominent theme in The Alchemist is the idea that each person has a "Personal Legend"—a type of ideal fate or destiny—and that each person can chose whether or not to pursue that legend. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist Santiago is launched on a quest for his treasure—his Personal Legend—through his encounter with Melchizedek, a wise old man. Melchizedek is a Biblical figure, but in the context of the novel, he says that he appears at critical moments when a person might be giving up on pursuing his or her Personal Legend. Melchizedek explains to Santiago that all people know their Personal Legend in their youth, but they forget this Legend as they age because they are blinded and blocked by fear, anxiety, and other worldly concerns. Sometimes even good things, such as love, get in the way of a person pursuing a Personal Legend, as almost happens to Santiago when he considers staying permanently with Fatima in the desert oasis. The novel strongly suggests that although the choice to pursue the Legend is entirely up to the individual, the outcome is always better when the Legend is achieved. Yet as Santiago realizes near the end of the novel, this life improvement comes not so much from the simple achievement of the Legend, but instead from the purpose and engagement that pursuit of the Legend gives to one's everyday life. As it turns out, Santiago was physically close to his treasure from the start, but his journey to reach the treasure was lengthy in both time and distance. Without the journey, however, Santiago would not have learned all that he did, met the people he met, or fallen in love. Santiago also realizes that to die while in pursuit of one's Personal Legend alleviates the horror of death. There is "rightness" to being on the course to one's Legend, even though the journey is not easy. The book argues that choosing to pursue one's Personal Legend is the most important choice each human gets to make. - Theme: Maktub and What is Meant to Be. Description: "Maktub" is a phrase first used by the crystal merchant who employs Santiago, and later it is adopted by other characters, including Santiago, the camel driver, and Fatima. The phrase means, "It is written," and it is used by these characters to express their conviction that some things are "meant to be." Rather than having faith in a God with a changeable will, these characters believe in a steadfast, universal plan behind all things. And yet within the novel, the idea of "Maktub" is never presented as contradictory to the free will of the individual in choosing to seek his or her Personal Legend. The concept of "Maktub" relieves several of the characters of the anxiety of decision-making and risk-taking. For example, the camel driver's trust in the ways of world, which he believes are "written," helps him to show Santiago why death need not be feared. The camel driver explains that death is simply a fact, something that is written, and its horror and dread vanishes when one lives in the moment without anxiety over what cannot be changed. Fatima also employs the term "Maktub" to explain her trust in Santiago and their love for each other. She believes that if she and Santiago are intended to be together, he will return to her. This relieves her of the anxiety of his departure, because she trusts that what is "written" will come to pass. If he does not return, it is because their love was not intended to be eternal and true. Maktub can also be a confusing concept, however, as it includes both change and permanence. Santiago foresees the future—an invasion of the oasis—and he is able to intervene and prevent this outcome. This implies that the future is not completely settled or "written" in a way that is unchangeable—but once Santiago understands that all things are "written," he is able to speak the Language of the World. This is because everything, including the future, is indeed pre-written. This knowledge helps Santiago to learn how to turn himself into the wind when he needs to impress and escape from the desert tribesmen who take him and the alchemist captive. While this ability to have complete knowledge may seem contradictory to the ability to change the future, the book argues that the world (in which all things are interconnected) is certain, as is one's destiny, and yet any individual can choose to pursue that destiny or not. The novel also suggests that when one is on that course of pursuing destiny, all knowledge is available. When one is not on that course, however, one's life is not fulfilled. One's destiny exists (in the sense that it is written and meant to be), but it is not always realized. - Theme: The Interconnectedness of All Things. Description: After Santiago arrives in the desert during his pursuit of his Personal Legend, he begins to realize that there is a universal language spoken by all humans, animals, and objects. He learns to speak to the sun and the wind by listening to the desert and by listening to his heart, which can speak the Language of the World. This Language allows him to access "The Soul of The World," which is a God-like oneness of all things. The novel's portrayal of a universal language and The Soul of The World demonstrates its theme of the interconnectedness of all things. Santiago feels a great sense of unity with other people, places, and objects he encounters on his quest, and his ability to access this feeling of unity allows him to learn about the world. For example, the alchemist challenges Santiago to find life in the desert, and Santiago realizes that he does not need advanced skills to do this. He realizes that the interconnectedness of all things allows his horse to be aware of the world, and that life attracts life. He lets his horse lead him to rocks where a snake lives. The alchemist, an unsurprisingly important figure in the novel given its title, nevertheless does not teach Santiago the literal practices of alchemy in which metals are processed and transformed into gold. But he does help Santiago see that the processes of alchemy, such as purifying and simplifying or observing something to learn from it, are applicable to all of life. For example, Santiago learns from the alchemist that studying the world will teach him everything he needs to know, just as studying the Englishman's texts might have taught him the particulars of alchemy. Because of the interconnectedness of all things, the world itself is a great teacher. Any one thing, no matter how small, allows access to the entirety of creation. A metal can access and become gold because of this oneness, and Santiago can transform himself into the wind because of this oneness. The novel portrays tapping into the interconnectedness of things as the goal of both alchemy and the pursuit of one's Personal Legend. - Theme: Alchemy and the Value of Simplicity. Description: Throughout the novel, alchemy often functions as a symbol or metaphor for lessons that Santiago learns about life and the world. At the heart of alchemy is the Emerald Tablet, an ancient artifact on which was written the instructions for creating the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, the two most important creations an alchemist can attempt to produce. The alchemist teaches Santiago that in modern times, the Stone and the Elixir are incredibly difficult to produce, because humans began to mistrust simplicity. Instead, they compiled massive amounts of information and practical knowledge about the Stone and Elixir and how to create them, and all of this information got in the way of a truth simple enough that it could be written on a single stone. Because the lessons of alchemy in the novel are more broadly applicable as life lessons, Santiago learns from the alchemist that sometimes complexity can obscure the truth, which is simple. The alchemist also highlights the value of simplicity as it connects to purity. He tells Santiago that if he finds something made of pure matter, it never spoils. As the alchemist explains this principle, Santiago realizes that it also applies to the love he shares with Fatima. Because their love is simple, and it does not involve other notions of dependency or ownership, it will not spoil. Fatima herself demonstrates the power of simplicity through her faith in Santiago's return. She does not complicate their love with other emotions or conditions, and Santiago learns the value of this type of love without ownership. The concept of the Soul of the World also implies the value of simplicity, because any one object in the world can be used to learn about and access the whole world. This places immense value on simple and small objects. As the alchemist says, a grain of sand can teach someone everything there is to know about the desert. Therefore, it is valuable to study and learn from the small things. Santiago realizes that even before he set off in pursuit of his Personal Legend, he learned some of the most important life lessons from his sheep—simple and humble creatures, which nevertheless demonstrate important qualities. The novel repeatedly presents simplicity, as opposed to complexity, as the means to accessing fundamental truths and life lessons, and often uses alchemical imagery to emphasize this point. - Theme: The Unimportance of Death and Fear. Description: The novel presents the fear of death, and fear in general, as obstacles that prevent people from living meaningful lives and achieving their Personal Legends. The crystal merchant is a perfect example of this. The crystal merchant is unwilling to pursue his Personal Legend (and the requirement of his religious faith) by traveling to Mecca, because he is afraid of what his life will be like after completing this goal. He tells himself that he is staying alive and working hard because he's holding onto the goal of Mecca—and yet he always pushes this goal into the future, keeping it as a distant dream and not something he is actively pursuing. He does this to protect himself from his fear of an uncertain future.In contrast, one of the lessons Santiago learns from the stoic and wise camel driver is to live in the present moment, rather than the future or the past. The camel driver teaches that dying one day is no different than dying on any other day, and in explaining this, he emphasizes that the only thing of importance is the present. He does not fear death because he does not look to the future, and his reward is the quality of his life in each given moment. Because Santiago comes to believe that death is not a threat, he is able follow the omens God lays out before him, and to do so without fear. He also learns how to appreciate life as it is lived, and to find and experience the happiness and joy of being alive in the present.The novel also shows how the pursuit of one's Personal Legend emphasizes the insignificance of death and fear. As Santiago ventures into the desert in pursuit of his treasure and finds himself amidst the desert wars, he realizes that if he dies, at least he will have died while in pursuit of his Personal Legend. Because the pursuit of his Personal Legend is the fullest expression of himself, Santiago recognizes that following his Legend is worth any risk, even the risk of death. The critical importance of a Personal Legend deemphasizes the horror of death—and living without a Personal Legend is a kind of death anyway, as it involves living without truly being oneself. As the alchemist puts it, fear will prevent Santiago from listening to his heart, and it will prevent him from accessing his own self, which in turn is his key to accessing the Soul of the World. And so the novel is, in a sense, an argument against all those who allow fear to dictate the direction of their lives. - Climax: Santiago does not discover his treasure at the pyramids, and is attacked by refugees of the desert wars. The leader of the refugees speaks of his dream about treasure, and the truth about Santiago's treasure is revealed to him. - Summary: In the Prologue, the alchemist reads a story about Narcissus—a youth so fascinated by his own beautiful reflection that he falls into a lake and drowns. In this version of the story, the goddess of the forest encounters the lake in which Narcissus drowned. The lake is weeping, and the goddess assumes that the lake misses Narcissus's beauty. However, the lake reveals that, actually, it's weeping because it misses being able to admire its own beautiful reflection in Narcissus's eyes. "What a lovely story," the alchemist thinks. In Part One of the novel, Santiago passes the night with his flock of sheep in an abandoned church. That night, he has a recurring dream. When he wakes, he looks forward to the village he will reach in four days where, the year before, he met a girl, the daughter of a merchant. Meeting her made him wish, for the first time in his life, that he could remain in one place. Santiago loves to travel, and became a shepherd, rather than a priest as his family had wanted, because his father told him that, among poor folk, only shepherds had the opportunity to travel. A few days before reaching the merchant's daughter's village, Santiago encounters a fortune-teller, whom he hopes will be able to interpret his recurring dream. In the dream, a child transports Santiago to the Pyramids of Egypt and promises he will find hidden treasure there, but Santiago always wakes up just as the child is about to reveal it. After making Santiago promise to give her one-tenth of the treasure as payment, the fortuneteller interprets the dream to mean that if Santiago journeys to the pyramids, he'll find hidden treasure. Annoyed that he could have come to this interpretation on his own, Santiago leaves, and soon sits down in the plaza to read his book. An old man sits down next to him and says that it's an important book, but that it contains the world's greatest lie: that we do not control what happens to us. The old man introduces himself as Melchizedek, the King of Salem, and adds that if Santiago gives him one-tenth of this sheep, he will tell Santiago how to find his treasure. Santiago wonders if the old man and the fortune-teller are working together to rob him, but gives up his suspicions when Melchizedek demonstrates knowledge of things about Santiago's life he couldn't possibly know. Melchizedek explains that Santiago has discovered his Personal Legend – the thing a person has always wanted to accomplish. Each person knows what it is when he is young, but loses track of it as he ages. Melchizedek says that he appears to people in moments when they are about to give up on their Personal Legends. The next day, Santiago meets Melchizedek and gives him six sheep. He sells his other sheep to a friend who dreamed of becoming a shepherd. Melchizedek says that to find his treasure, Santiago will have to follow the omens God reveals to him. Melchizedek gives Santiago two stones, called Urim and Thummin, which can be used for fortune telling. But he cautions Santiago also to rely on his own decisions. Santiago arrives in Morocco, but quickly gets robbed and winds up sleeping in a marketplace. Eventually, Santiago wanders into a crystal shop and asks the crystal merchant for a job in exchange for something to eat. After Santiago cleans crystal all day, the merchant gives him dinner. Santiago is crushed when he learns that he would have to work for years to earn enough money to travel to the Pyramids, but he decides to work for the merchant in order to earn money to buy some sheep. As Part Two of the novel opens, Santiago is working for the crystal merchant. He wants to build a display case to draw more attention to the store, but the merchant resists. The merchant doesn't like change, and explains that he has always been an observant Muslim, but has never made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Though he could now, finally, afford the trip, he still puts it off because he fears not having something to look forward to in his future. He doesn't want to realize his dream; he just wants to dream. But he does give Santiago permission to build the display case. Business at the shop increases. Santiago is pleased that he is working toward his goal of acquiring an even larger flock of sheep. He has also earned to recognize omens: when he sees a man out of breath after climbing the hill to the shop, he realizes they should sell tea in the crystal they are selling. The merchant knows that this will change the nature of the business, but he feels he cannot resist the inevitable, or as he says "maktub," meaning "it is written." He sees Santiago's appearance in his life as both a blessing and a curse. Santiago saved his business, but also showed him what his business was capable of, meaning he can never again be content with the simple business he had. Soon Santiago has enough money to buy a large herd of sheep, but before doing so he happens upon Urim and Thummin in his old shepherd's bag and decides instead to pursue his treasure. He suddenly feels tremendously happy, and finds a caravan crossing the desert. As he waits for the caravan to leave, Santiago meets an Englishman who tells him that there is a universal language understood by everybody. He says he is in search of that language, and hopes to find an alchemist in the desert who can teach him more. As the caravan travels to the desert oasis of Al-Fayoum, Santiago becomes friends with a camel driver who used to be a farmer before his land was flooded. The camel driver says that disaster taught him to understand that many people are afraid of losing what they have, but this fear is no longer relevant when you understand that human lives were written by the same hand that created the world. He also advises Santiago that if you can concentrate on the present, you'll be happy. Meanwhile, the Englishman tells Santiago of a common principle that connects all things – the Soul of the World – and lends Santiago some books about the Master Work of alchemy: an Emerald Tablet, on which was written the secret to creating the Philosopher's Stone, which could turn lead into gold, and the Elixir of Life, which granted mortality. The caravan arrives safely at the oasis, which is the size of a large city. The oasis is neutral in the constant wars of the surrounding tribes, and no one can carry weapons there. Santiago helps the Englishman search for the alchemist, but with little luck. At one point, Santiago approaches a young woman to ask about the alchemist and suddenly he feels the Soul of the World. Immediately he realizes that the universal language is love. He meets with the woman, Fatima, day after day, and tells her of his quest for his treasure and how it has brought him to her. Eventually, Fatima tells Santiago that she has learned about omens from his stories, and that because of this learning she wants Santiago to continue toward his goal and pursue his dream. Fatima says "maktub," and tells Santiago that if they are really meant to be together, then he'll return to her one day. One day as he walks in the desert, Santiago sees a hawk attack another and has a vision of an army attacking the oasis. Santiago goes to the tribal chieftains of the oasis to warn them. The chieftains respond that the next day the men of the oasis will break the agreement of the oasis and carry arms — if Santiago's warning proves true he will be rewarded; but if it does not, he will lose his life. Santiago leaves the chieftains' tent upset, when suddenly a strange man on horseback confronts him. Santiago embraces the possibility of his own death and is not afraid. The stranger then reveals this was a test of Santiago's courage, which is essential when one wants to understand the Language of the World. Santiago has met the alchemist. The next day, Santiago's prophecy is fulfilled and the oasis is attacked, but the inhabitants of the oasis are ready to defend themselves. Santiago receives his reward: fifty pieces of gold. Soon after, the alchemist takes Santiago out into the desert to test whether he can find life in the desert. Santiago allows his horse to lead them, and the find a snake –the alchemist agrees to guide Santiago across the desert. Santiago wants to stay at the oasis because of Fatima, but the alchemist explains that if he stays, he will be haunted by the loss of his opportunity to find his treasure. As they travel in the desert, the alchemist explains that the Emerald Tablet is a direct link to the Soul of the World. In the early times, everything about the Master Work could be written on the Emerald Tablet. But men rejected simple things. The alchemist directs Santiago back toward this simplicity, and says that Santiago should listen to his heart, because it came from the Soul of the World. Santiago practices listening to his heart, and comes to understand his heart's changes and contradictions, and that people are afraid to pursue their most important dreams because they know they will suffer if they don't succeed. Not long after, Santiago and the alchemist are taken prisoner by one of the warring tribes. Soon they are brought before the enemy chieftain, who thinks that they're spies. The alchemist responds that Santiago is an alchemist who can turn himself into the wind, and says that if Santiago has not turned himself into the wind in three days time, the chieftain can kill them. The chieftain agrees. Once they're alone, Santiago protests that he has no idea how to turn himself into the wind, but the alchemist responds that when a person is living out his Personal Legend, he has all the tools he needs—the only thing that could hold him back is the fear of failure. He adds that if Santiago does not succeed, then at least he'll die while trying to realize his Personal Legend. On the first and second days, Santiago is at a loss. On the third day, the enemy chieftain has Santiago go up to a cliff above the enemy camp. Santiago appeals to the desert, the wind, and the sun to help him, but none of them are able. The sun recommends that Santiago speak directly to the "hand that wrote all," though, and Santiago reaches through the Soul of the World and discovers the Soul of God. He sees the oneness between his own soul and the Soul of God and, because of this oneness, realizes that he has the ability to perform miracles. Santiago turns himself into the wind, creating a terrible windstorm. The tribesmen are terrified, but the alchemist is happy to have found such an ideal student, and the enemy chieftain is pleased to have witnessed the glory of Allah. The next day, Santiago and the alchemist leave the camp with an honor guard. Eventually they reach a Coptic monastery, where a monk welcomes them inside to rest. While there, the alchemist uses the Philosopher's Stone to change lead into gold. He gives a quarter of the gold to the monk for his hospitality, a quarter to Santiago to repay him for the amount taken by the enemy chieftain, and quarter for himself. The final quarter he gives to the monk, saying that it is for Santiago if he ever needs it. The alchemist tells Santiago everyone on earth plays an important role, even if he doesn't know it. Then the alchemist bids Santiago farewell. Santiago rides alone through the desert, listening to his heart, which tells him that he will find his treasure at the place where he is brought to tears. At the top of a dune, Santiago sees the Egyptian pyramids before him. He falls to his knees and cries out in thanks to God for making him follow his Personal Legend. Remembering the words of his heart, Santiago digs in the place he fell to his knees crying. As he digs, several people approach Santiago. They are desperate refugees from the tribal wars, and they beat Santiago and take the gold given to him by the alchemist. When Santiago tells them he is looking for treasure at that place, the leader of the refugees says he's being stupid. The leader adds that two years earlier he himself had a recurring dream in which he saw an abandoned church that sheltered shepherds and sheep. The dream told him that if he dug at the roots of the tree growing through the center of the church, he would find a hidden treasure. But he never went in search of the treasure, because it was just a dream. After the refugees have left, Santiago laughs aloud, because now he knows the location of his treasure. In the Epilogue, Santiago reaches the abandoned church where his story began. He thinks of the strangeness of the path that God has led him on, but is grateful for the people he has met along the way. He soon uncovers a chest of gold and jewels. The wind begins to blow, and it brings with it a familiar scent of perfume. Santiago smiles and says, "I'm coming, Fatima."

- Genre: Novel, Family drama - Title: The Art of Racing in the Rain - Point of view: First person, narrated by Enzo - Setting: Seattle, WA, over a ten-year period beginning in the mid-1990s. - Character: Enzo. Description: The canine narrator of the story; a lab mix. Enzo is owned by Denny, and later Eve and their daughter Zoë as well. Enzo believes his father was an Airedale Terrier because he believes terriers are smart and thinking dogs, and Enzo sees himself as extremely intelligent. However human he wants to be, though, he consistently remarks that he is a dog and will use that to his advantage. He is extremely loyal and does whatever he can to protect his family, including protecting them from the zebra. Through the many hours he spends watching television, Enzo learns as much as he can about humans and dedicates himself to becoming as human-like as possible. Enzo sometimes gets to accompany Denny to the racetrack, which he loves, and while they're at home, the two spend a lot of time watching old race videos of Denny as well as of past racing greats. This immersion in the world of racing leads Enzo to develop a life philosophy based around racing, which he shares with the reader throughout the novel. - Character: Denny. Description: A professional racecar driver, husband to Eve and father to Zoë. He picked Enzo out of a litter of puppies a year before he met Eve. Denny works at a specialty European car shop that services cars in the Seattle area and races or teaches driving on the weekends. He is an extremely loyal and loving husband and father; he adores Eve and Zoë and strives to provide everything he can for them. As a driver, he's very calculating and methodical about how he behaves on the track, and he's an exceptional driver in the rain. These qualities also extend to the person Denny is off the track, as he is methodical and persistent throughout his legal battles with Trish, Maxwell, and Annika. He fights tooth and nail to win custody of Zoë. - Character: Eve. Description: Denny's wife and Zoë's mother, and daughter to Maxwell and Trish. Eve is a very organized and meticulous person who works in a clothing store in Seattle, and she is the family's primary breadwinner prior to her hospitalization. Enzo can smell that Eve has brain cancer long before she begins experiencing symptoms, and even after the symptoms begin, she refuses to see a doctor. Off and on for months, she experiences nausea, migraines, and mood swings that affect her judgment and ability to function. The cancer is finally discovered when she is taken to the ER after a concussion. For her first night out of the hospital, she fears death immensely and asks Enzo to protect her. Later, on the eve of her death, Enzo says that she was living as though she stole every day from death. - Character: Zoë. Description: Denny and Eve's daughter; she is eight years old at the end of the novel. She is a bright, happy, and loving child who admires Denny greatly and strives to please Eve. She loves school and riding the school bus, and insists on going to school even the day after Eve's death. Enzo cares greatly for Zoë and spends much of his time playing with her, and he learns a lot about how she sees life through the fantasy worlds she creates with her toys. Her favorite toy is a plush zebra. - Character: Maxwell. Description: Eve's overbearing father, Zoë's grandfather and Denny's father-in-law. Enzo often refers to him and his wife, Trish, as "The Twins" due to the fact that their clothes often match and they present an extremely united front. Maxwell cares deeply for his daughter and granddaughter, and doesn't care much for Denny. He insists that Eve and Zoë stay at his home while Eve is dying of cancer, and after her death, sues Denny for custody of Zoë because he believes he and Trish can provide a better childhood for her. - Character: Trish. Description: Eve's mother, Zoë's grandmother and Denny's mother-in-law. Enzo often refers to Trish and her husband, Maxwell, as "The Twins." Trish cares only for the wellbeing of her daughter and Zoë, and believes that she and Maxwell can provide better care for them than Denny could. Throughout The Twins' legal battle with Denny, Trish is more interested in getting custody of Zoë than destroying Denny, and at times doesn't seem to believe Annika's claim that Denny assaulted her. - Character: Annika. Description: The daughter of one of Eve's cousins. She is 15 when Denny, Zoë, and Enzo first meet her and she develops a major crush on Denny. When Denny rejects her advances, she is devastated and later accuses Denny of assaulting her. She is described by Enzo as a vixen and a temptress, although extremely young and not fully aware of the damage she is causing. - Theme: What It Means to Be Human. Description: The events of The Art of Racing in the Rain are relayed to the reader by Enzo, a dog who tries his hardest to be as humanlike as possible. Through his non-human perceptions of the people and events taking place around him, we're asked to consider what it truly means to be human, and what the limits of being human might be. Enzo has a unique view on humanity, since he himself isn't human. By hearing the story from a non-human narrator, the reader is provided some distance from what they know of humanity to consider what it looks like from another perspective. First and foremost, the reader must question the truth of the story—does Enzo truly understand what's going on, since he's a dog? The reader knows, for example, that Enzo actually destroyed Zoë's toys, rather than the fantastical story that Enzo told and seems to truly believe. On the other hand, though, does Enzo understand more than a human could, since he's not human? Enzo is afforded a certain amount of privilege as a dog, as many people don't censor themselves around him and instead speak freely. Enzo learns a great deal about how Zoë forms an understanding of Eve's death by watching how she plays in the weeks leading up to it. Finally, as the reader is human, it's possible that he or she may grasp more of the true meaning or implication of the events in the book. The reader will likely understand that Denny and Eve try to conceive a second baby before Eve is hospitalized, but the "turkey baster" joke is completely lost on Enzo. The text pays particular attention to the physicality of humans, and the physical attributes that make them human. Enzo believes that the most important difference between himself and people is that he lacks opposable thumbs and a tongue capable of forming speech. While he takes great care to try and think in what he believes is a more human way, Enzo's non-human conception of what it means to be human is tied directly to these physical attributes—which, moreover, are often discussed in terms of power. Enzo doesn't have the power to speak to people or open doors, as he's just a "dumb dog," but the people around him exert their power through the acts their bodies are capable of performing, whether that be speech, sexual advances, or even holding Enzo's leash. Enzo sees human beings as being the top of the evolutionary pyramid, and he dreams of becoming a human after his life as a dog is over. However, despite Enzo's idolization of the idea of humanity and evidence of humans as good and righteous, humanity is also shown to be evil and selfish. The man who bred Enzo, for example, is described as pure evil, someone who only wants money and will go to any length to get it. We see the true extent of this evil when he refuses to pay for local anesthetic for Enzo's dewclaw removal as a puppy. With this act, the alpha man not only deprives Enzo of a physiological connection to man (as Enzo believes the dewclaw is a pre-emergent thumb), he makes it a painful, traumatizing experience. The people in opposition to Denny are also described in terms of evil: Annika is a vixen and a temptress, and at their worst Trish and Maxwell are conniving, nitrogenous life forms, out to ruin Denny and take away Zoë. While Enzo does come to the realization that good and evil are not purely black and white opposites, his understanding remains somewhat rudimentary. He finally accepts that Annika is young and not truly evil, but he doesn't understand that Maxwell and Trish are motivated primarily by familial love for their granddaughter and a desire to do right by her—exactly the same motivation as Denny, but with a completely opposite final outcome. Overall, the text presents a wide cross section of humans and a wide variety of human events and emotions to the reader, related through the lens of a narrator who is not human. The distance provided by the non-human narration allows the reader to consider if humans are truly as good or as evil as Enzo sees them to be, and to consider where their power lies. - Theme: Language and Storytelling. Description: Enzo's preoccupation with language, as well as the setup of the story as embellished memories told to the reader, situate language and storytelling as integral elements to understanding the novel as a whole. Storytelling and language are portrayed as immensely powerful, with the power to reveal one's true thoughts on a subject, to tear families apart, and even to lead individuals to their deaths. As a narrator, Enzo is very upfront about the fact that he has a flair for the dramatic. He also notes at various points that he doesn't know the full truth of what happened in the events he describes, being a dog who doesn't get to attend meetings or sit in a courtroom. Instead, he's recreated what he thinks happened for the reader. Enzo uses what he's learned from watching television to recreate events. For example, since he's watched a lot of Law and Order and other courtroom dramas, he's certain of how Denny's court cases unfolded. In this way, he uses the stories of others as source material for the story he tells. However, Enzo's admission that parts of the story may or may not be true turns him into somewhat of an unreliable narrator. Some of his untruths are obvious, as when his story verges into the supernatural with Zoë's zebra toy, but others are harder or impossible to pick out. Enzo's story is not the only one; many other characters tell stories of their own over the course of the novel. These stories, for the most part, are purpose-built to either harm or help. Annika's claim that Denny assaulted her is treated as a mean story meant to help The Twins with their custody case for Zoë. Enzo also believes that Eve died because she had no choice but to believe the stories the doctors told her in which she died of her disease. In these cases, the stories are immensely powerful. They have the power to destroy a man's life and lead a woman to her death, if they're believed. Enzo is adamant that had these stories not been told or believed, events could have turned out very differently. On the other hand, Denny uses stories to protect himself and Zoë. He refuses to accept Eve's death until he finds out she has actually died, telling himself as well as Zoë that Eve will recover and everyone will come home. Later, when a restraining order keeps him from seeing Zoë, he and Enzo write her letters from a fictional trip to Europe to avoid telling her the truth of the situation. Throughout the course of the text, Enzo implores the reader to listen, both to the nuances of spoken language and the stories of others. Since he's not capable of speech, Enzo spends his time either listening or trying to communicate via gestures or facial expressions. As speech is something unavailable to him but highly coveted, Enzo has an elevated sense of the importance of language and storytelling. This encourages the reader to read deeply into the words of the text and question not just what's being said, but what isn't being said. This emphasis on the importance of language can be expanded outwards to our own lives, as Enzo gives us tools and advice to more effectively use and engage critically with language and storytelling. - Theme: Love and Family. Description: The Art of Racing in the Rain is, at its core, a story about family and relationships. It delves into the relationships between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and parents and their adult children. It also questions what love is and what forms familial love can take. Throughout the novel, relationships are explored primarily in terms of what happens when someone or something comes between an already existing relationship. This asks the reader to question the shape and strength of familial bonds. Some characters, like Eve, first come between an existing relationship (Enzo and Denny) before being integrated into the family. Love for Denny is what causes Enzo to accept Eve into his family, albeit begrudgingly—although Enzo later tries to make it closer, their relationship is relatively standoffish because he never forgives Eve for taking the primary spot in Denny's life. Other characters, like Trish and Maxwell, do nothing but try to come between Eve and Denny and later Denny and Zoë. Despite their desire to cut Denny out of their daughter and granddaughter's lives, neither Eve nor Zoë ever waver in their love for Denny. Love, in this sense, is what allows the relationships to flourish despite adversity. When the family is separated for the first time—Denny in the hospital with Eve, Zoë with her grandparents, and Enzo with Mike and Tony—Enzo comes to the realization that despite their separation and the chance occurrences that may try to tear them apart, his family would always be together thanks to the love they share. Yet despite Enzo's touching realization about his own immediate family, the idea of family, and how families show their love to each other, is more nuanced and multifaceted when the immediate family contends with the desires of extended family. Despite Enzo's portrayal of Trish and Maxwell as pure evil, their custody suit for Zoë comes from a place of love and a desire to care for her the way they believe she should be cared for. They take offense to Denny's busy schedule and need to travel for races, and believe they could provide Zoë a better childhood with stability and a steady home life. In this way, money becomes a major factor in the way families in the novel show their love. Trish and Maxwell believe that they could better care for Zoë because they have the money to put her in a good private school and pay for her college, unlike Denny. Thus, they equate love with money and the things that money can buy. Denny's parents, absent for the majority of the text, also show their love through money. Denny lies for much of the text that his parents financed several races and trips to further his career, thereby fabricating that sense of love for the comfort of others. However, his parents come through in the end and take out a reverse mortgage on their house to pay for Denny's legal fees, which eventually reunites Denny and Zoë. The price for this help is that they get to meet Zoë, their granddaughter, for the first time. Forging an actually familial connection then becomes necessary for receiving parental love and care. Throughout the course of the novel, Enzo comes to realize that family isn't something simple and unchanging. It moves and changes, and despite wildly differing conceptions of what love means, the novel suggests that family, in whatever form that might take, will come through and act in whatever way love means to them. - Theme: Illness and Death. Description: Illness and death are immensely important forces throughout the text. The novel begins with an elderly Enzo staging a dramatic display of his declining health for Denny, with the intent of encouraging Denny to put Enzo down. Mere pages later, we learn that Eve, Denny's wife, died sometime over the course of the novel. Knowing all of this at the beginning forces the reader to consider how illness and death work within the text and how they drive and motivate at every turn. Rather than just being an abstract idea or a state of being, illness is a physical thing to Enzo, or an entity unto itself. He can smell it in Eve long before she even begins experiencing symptoms, describing her illness as a living creature, a virus, or rot. Enzo states that Eve also knows she's ill long before she receives a diagnosis, despite not knowing exactly how or why. Eve is later accepting of her fate. Denny, in contrast, sees Eve's symptoms, but after her diagnosis he refuses to fully accept her illness or impending death. Enzo notes as well that Denny also refuses to fully accept the implications of Enzo's diagnosis of hip dysplasia and misunderstands the intent behind the dramatic display. In this way, Denny's willful ignorance of death is contrasted with both Enzo and Eve's knowledge that death is unavoidable. Enzo ties this difference back to the power of storytelling—Eve buys into the narrative the doctors tell her, while Denny refuses to do so. Enzo also practices willful ignorance with his own diagnosis. He refuses to allow the knowledge of what's going to kill him get in the way of what he believes he must accomplish before he dies. The threats of illness and death are used to control and manipulate throughout the novel. Trish and Maxwell use Eve's illness and death to begin to break apart Enzo's family. It begins subtly when they ask that both Eve and Zoë stay with them at their house after Eve's release from the hospital, and culminates in their custody suit. They use death as a way to withhold love and care from Denny, whom they see as undeserving. In the same vein, Denny's parents attempted to force him into staying to take care of his mother when Denny was a teenager. When he refused and was cut out of their lives, he essentially rejected the hold that they wanted his mother's illness to have over him. Enzo, as well, does his best to ignore the illness he knows he has. He shares late in the novel that he had known since he was quite young that he had a degenerative hip condition, and he refused to let it dictate the course of his life, much like Denny refused his parents' hold on his life with his mother's blindness. After seeing a documentary on Mongolia on the National Geographic channel, Enzo believes that when they're spiritually ready, dogs are reincarnated as humans after they die. As Enzo's goal throughout the novel is to be as human as possible, death then becomes a goal, as it will finally allow him to be human. For both Eve and Enzo, death is thought of personally as freedom. In death, Eve is finally free from burdens and pain and wants, and Enzo is freed from pain and life as a dog. This conception of death as freedom works to place death in opposition to illness, which is portrayed as oppressive and controlling, rather than in opposition to life. - Theme: Destiny and Spirituality. Description: For Denny and Enzo, racing is not just a hobby or a profession—it's a way of life, and takes on spiritual meaning for Enzo especially. The strategy involved and many racing sayings are treated as a sort of holy text for Enzo, as he uses these words and concepts to form a blueprint for how he sees the world. After he first hears Denny say the phrase "that which we manifest is before us," Enzo develops a major belief in the idea of destiny and creating one's own future. Enzo applies this idea everywhere. He attempts to manifest a better relationship with Eve by choosing to spend more time with her, and he sees Eve's acceptance of her own death sentence as her manifesting her own death. He also sees this play out where it originated, as Denny experiences success on the track. In addition to this idea of manifesting one's future, Enzo also has a firm belief in what's meant to be, particularly in regards to his own death and near-death experiences. Enzo expands these ideas outward as well, and uses these opposing ideas to both make sense of the events that take place after Eve's death and flesh out Denny's character as a driver and as a person: calculating, dedicated, and in the game for the long haul. The juxtaposition of these ideas—one force that comes from within an individual, one that is an outside force—asks the reader to question how much control we have over our lives, versus how much is up to chance or fate. Spirituality is also explored through two opposing forces: Zoë's zebra toy, which symbolizes evil and the devil, and past car racing greats, Ayrton Senna in particular, which are held up by Enzo as gods of sorts. The zebra pops up whenever bad things are happening or have the potential to take place. While Enzo initially sees the zebra as the bringer of evil and the initiator of bad events, he eventually realizes that the zebra is actually symbolic of a force within all of us. This understanding that evil is something inside all of us shatters the dichotomy of good versus evil into shades of gray. The zebra becomes a personification of fear and self-destruction, and this realization allows Enzo to effectively do battle with the zebra and allow good to prevail. Enzo's journey to understand the role of the zebra, and then fight it, raises many questions about the role of evil in our lives and where it exists—and it becomes even more nuanced when one considers how different people view individuals, things, or events that may be considered evil. While Enzo sees the zebra only as evil, the zebra is Zoë's favorite toy and provides her with security and comfort. On the flip side, much of the television that Denny and Enzo watch is old race footage, so Enzo knows all about the big names in racing. He particularly admires Ayrton Senna, and works Senna into his own conception of spirituality. Enzo consistently compares Denny to Senna, which can be read in several ways. First, Enzo can be said to be manifesting Denny's Senna-like success, which culminates in the final chapter of the book when Denny has just won a prestigious race on the same track on which Senna died. Then, as Denny is portrayed as the purest good Enzo can conceive of, Denny and Senna become symbols of the good in the world. Enzo believes they are such forces for good because of the qualities that make them good drivers, such as perseverance, the ability to think ahead, and love. It's these qualities that both bring about Enzo's realization that the zebra is a force within people, and then allows him and Denny to vanquish it by not accepting a settlement offer from Trish and Maxwell that doesn't give Denny full custody of Zoë. Racing, destiny, and spirituality are brought full circle in the final pages of the novel, when Denny meets a five-year-old Italian boy named Enzo. The child Enzo is representative of a reincarnated dog Enzo, out to fulfill his destiny as a racing champion. This underscores the power and the truth of Enzo's belief system, as Enzo essentially manifested his reincarnation as a human child destined for racing greatness. - Climax: When Annika drops her assault case against Denny, allowing Denny to take full custody of Zoë - Summary: Enzo, an elderly dog, is sprawled on the kitchen floor of his owner, Denny's, apartment in a puddle of his own urine. He tells the reader that he's staging this display so that Denny, who has been through so much in the last few years, will see that it's time to let Enzo go. When Denny gets home he gives Enzo a bath, cleans up the mess, and calls Mike, his friend and coworker, and asks him to cover for him the next day so he can take Enzo to the vet. He says he's not sure it's a round trip visit, and despite having set it up, Enzo is surprised. He reaffirms though that it's for the best, and now Denny can be free. Enzo loves racing, and sprinkles racing strategy, wisdom, and stories throughout the novel. His favorite driver is Ayrton Senna, a charismatic driver who drove exceptionally well in the rain, just like Denny does. The events surrounding his death remain a mystery. Enzo goes back in time to explain the ten years of events leading up to his "display." Denny, a professional racecar driver, adopted him as a puppy and moved him to Seattle. For the first year it was just Denny and Enzo, but then Denny met Eve and quickly fell in love with her. Enzo tried to love her, but resented her for coming between himself and Denny. Denny and Eve were married within the year and Eve soon became pregnant. When the baby was born, Denny was across the country competing. After the birth, Eve asked Enzo to protect her daughter, whom they named Zoë. Denny returned the next day and shares that another driver on his team crashed their car and he never even got to drive. The next several months passed quickly and happily until Eve and Denny went back to work and Zoë was put in daycare. Enzo was left home alone. He was bored and lonely until one day Denny left the TV on by accident, and Enzo spent the entire day watching. From that time on, Denny leaves the TV on for Enzo during the day, and Enzo's education truly begins. Enzo believes himself to have a very human soul, and uses television to learn how to be more human. After seeing a documentary on Mongolia, he learns that dogs are reincarnated as men when they die, and this becomes his goal. He spends the rest of his life trying to be as human as possible to prepare for his next life as a human. After Zoë's second birthday, the family moves into a small house. Enzo can smell something wrong with Eve, although she doesn't know it yet. She begins experiencing sporadic episodes of migraines, nausea, and mood swings. One weekend, when Denny is gone for a race, Eve experiences a headache so bad she packs up Zoë and leaves for her parents' house, leaving Enzo alone for three days. Enzo rations the toilet water but can do nothing about food, and on the second night he begins to hallucinate. He sees Zoë's favorite toy, a stuffed zebra, come to life and molest all of her other toys. When Enzo goes to attack, the zebra eviscerates itself. When Denny returns to find Zoë's toys in ruin, he hits Enzo. Enzo believes the zebra framed him. The following year, Denny secures a seat in a traveling racecar for a season. It means many absences, but Eve encourages him to go. The first few races go very poorly for Denny, and when he and Eve are discussing it at dinner one night, Denny says he needs to go away the following week to practice with his crew. Eve is angry and scared, and Zoë is refusing to eat her dinner, leading to a bigger fight. Eve finally agrees to make Zoë a hot dog, but when she tries to cut open the package, the knife slices into her hand. Eve, terrified, refuses to go to the doctor and Denny agrees to bandage it at home. The season improves for Denny, and Eve's health improves for no apparent reason. In August, the family goes to the Slippery Slabs, a spot on a creek where Zoë can play. While lifting Zoë, Eve slips and falls on the rocks, hitting her head hard. Denny rushes her to the emergency room where they discover a large mass in her brain. Eve spends months in the hospital. Trish and Maxwell, Eve's parents, talk Denny into having Eve stay at their house when she's released, and to allow Zoë to stay with them as well so she can spend as much time as possible with her dying mother. Denny begrudgingly agrees. On her first night home, Eve, terrified, asks Enzo to protect her and not let her die that night. He stays awake the entire night. Several months pass. In February, Denny, Enzo, and Zoë go to the mountains with Eve's extended family so Zoë can meet them. While there, a teenage daughter of one of Eve's cousins, Annika, develops a crush on Denny. When she learns that Denny will be leaving early to beat predicted bad weather, she decides she needs to leave early as well, and Denny agrees to take her. The five-hour drive takes ten due to the weather, and Annika decides to stay with Denny that night. Denny and Enzo fall asleep, and Enzo awakes to see Annika at the foot of Denny's bed taking Denny's pants off, and Enzo tells the reader that what she did must have been without Denny's consent. Finally, Enzo barks and wakes Denny, who leaps away, horrified. Annika tells Denny she loves him, but he refuses to engage with her. She calls her father and he comes to pick her up. In the spring, Denny takes Enzo to California with him to a racetrack where he'll be driving for a television commercial, and he takes Enzo out on the track for a speed lap. Enzo loves the experience and it cements his love of racing. A month after they return to Seattle, Eve dies. Denny gets the phone call while he's at the dog park with Enzo, and overcome by emotion, Enzo runs away and kills and eats a squirrel. When Denny finds him later, they drive to Maxwell and Trish's house so Denny can say goodbye. After he does, Maxwell and Trish tell Denny that they're suing him for Zoë's custody. Denny hires Mark Fein, a lawyer whose car Denny works on at the auto shop. He tells Denny that the suit is bogus and it'll be an easy win. Later that day, however, police officers come to Denny's work to arrest him for felony rape of a child—Annika's family had decided to press charges for what happened in February. Mark pays Denny's bail, and Denny and Enzo attend Eve's funeral a few days later. Enzo is diagnosed with hip dysplasia after experiencing major hip pain from walking hours to and from the funeral. As winter arrives, Seattle gets a light dusting of snow. On a walk one night, Enzo is hit by a car. When Denny tries to pay the vet, he discovers he has no money, and Denny is embarrassed and ready to give up. A few weeks later, Denny and Enzo go to visit Mike to sign a settlement granting Denny a generous visitation schedule and settling for non-felony charges regarding Annika's case. Mike hands Denny a souvenir pen from the zoo to sign with, and Enzo sees a zebra floating in the pen. He realizes that the zebra isn't an outside demon, but rather a force within all of us, and he decides that Denny isn't going to accept the settlement. Ignoring the pain from his hips, Enzo grabs the papers off the table and leads Mike and Denny on a chase through the house, culminating in a leap out the window. In the backyard, Enzo urinates on the papers, and Denny decides he doesn't want to give up. Later that summer while Denny is teaching at the Seattle racing school, Luca Pantoni, a man who works for Ferrari, asks Denny to show him around the track. After Denny lays down some hot laps, wowing the students and Enzo, Luca offers Denny a job testing cars and teaching for Ferrari in Italy. Denny declines, saying he can't leave the state, and Luca says the job will stay open until Denny is ready. One winter evening when Denny and Enzo are out for a walk, they spot Annika sitting at an outdoor cafe. When they reach Annika, both Denny and Annika feign surprise at their meeting and Denny asks if he can sit down and speak with her for a moment. He apologizes for what happened and tells Annika that a relationship between them would never have worked. He says that the first time he saw Eve he could barely function, and he hopes that Annika finds someone someday that makes her feel like that. Finally, he says that because of her suit, he'll never be allowed to see Zoë again. When Denny is finished he and Enzo trot home, triumphant. Denny's parents, whom Enzo has never met, come to visit. Denny's mother is blind and when she meets Zoë, Zoë sits very still while her grandmother explores her face. On the final night of their visit, Denny's father explains to Denny that they took out a reverse mortgage on their house so Denny could pay his legal fees. When Mike asks the next day, Enzo learns that Denny's parents effectively disowned him when he refused to care for his mother, but he had slowly built up a relationship over the last several years. Denny's criminal trial begins soon after. Every day, Mike escorts Denny to court while Tony, Mike's partner, takes care of Enzo. On the third day, Tony receives a phone call that something is happening, and he and Enzo rush to the courthouse. They wait in the rain, and Enzo falls asleep and dreams of testifying in court using Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer. He wakes to hear Denny saying that it's over, he won. Trish and Maxwell drop their custody suit the next day. While Denny is making cookies in preparation for Zoë's return, the phone rings and it's Luca Pantoni. Denny says he'd like to accept Luca's offer, and asks Luca why he's made such a generous offer. Luca says that his own wife died, and it was the help from a mentor, his predecessor at Ferrari, that saved him, and so he wished to pass the gift on. The next day, Enzo can barely get up. He goes to the kitchen where Denny is making pancakes and collapses. Denny cradles him, and Enzo experiences visions of the fields where he was born and flashes of the documentary on Mongolia. He starts to run through the fields, still hearing Denny's voice, and dies in Denny's arms. The text jumps to a point in the future, where Denny has just won a Formula One race on the same track where Senna died. Zoë, now an adult, pulls up in a golf cart with two of Denny's fans, a father and a son. They ask for Denny's autograph, and Denny asks the boy his name. The boy replies that his name is Enzo, and he's going to be a champion. Denny gives the father his phone number and offers to teach Enzo to drive when he's old enough.

- Genre: - Title: The Awakening - Point of view: Third person. - Setting: Grand Isle and New Orleans in the late 19th century. - Character: Edna Pontellier. Description: The novel's sad heroine, a twenty-eight-year-old housewife and mother of two whose personality blurs and sharpens from minute to minute. The novel chronicles her transformation from a quiet, not entirely content housewife to a spirited, freethinking artist haunted by feelings of aimlessness and despair. Her vacation at Grand Isle precipitates the moment she calls her awakening: a combination of Mademoiselle Reisz's beautiful music, Robert's romantic attentions, and an inexplicable deepening of her self-understanding that together cause her to recognize the meaninglessness of most conventions, the deceits and injustices of family life, and the emptiness of her social attachments. With time, she acts more and more freely according to her new convictions: she neglects family responsibilities and superficial social obligations, and she seeks refuge in art and in the company of similarly minded friends. In the end, however, her unhappy love affair and her deeply conflicted desire for total freedom are more than she can bear. - Character: Robert Lebrun. Description: Edna's close friend and almost-lover, Robert Lebrun is a wealthy, charming twenty-six-year-old man without any apparent occupation besides befriending pretty married women. After spending most of the summer in each other's company, Edna and Robert develop a strong romantic attachment to one another, and in an effort to protect Edna, Robert flees to Mexico under the pretense of a business opportunity. He is absent during most of the novel except as the idealized, illicit object of Edna's love. Despite his irreverence and easy humor, Robert ultimately does not have the courage to love Edna without the sanction of marriage. - Character: Mademoiselle Reisz. Description: A rough-edged, plainspoken spinster, a gifted piano player, and Edna's closest friend. Many people in the novel dislike Mademoiselle Reisz for her harsh manner and impatience for social niceties. Edna, however, becomes deeply attached to the pianist and her music because both seem to Edna to contain the emotional depth and spiritual freedom that she has recently discovered in herself, and which she has found sorely lacking in her friends and occupations. - Character: Adèle Ratignolle. Description: Edna's close friend and temperamental opposite, Madame Ratignolle is the model of Victorian womanhood: she is pretty, fragile, warm-hearted, and completely devoted to her husband and children. She seems to find satisfaction in her motherly and wifely chores, and she urges her friend to do the same. Her tiny, placid world, with its mundane pleasures and tepid artistic efforts, is precisely the world Edna tries to leave behind. - Character: Alcée Arobin. Description: A fashionable young man notorious for his relationships with married women. He courts Edna aggressively. His mixture of coyness and sincerity both repels and fascinates her, and they become close friends. Edna is attracted to Arobin, but does not love him. It's implied that they eventually become lovers, though the book does not describe anything more explicit than a kiss. - Character: Léonce Pontellier. Description: Edna's husband, a pragmatic, sociable businessman who takes great care to keep up appearances. He expects his wife to perform her social and motherly obligations in the conventional ways, and he is quick to chastise her for any perceived oversights. He loves Edna, in his way, but he is deaf and blind to her turbulent inner life. He can't understand her personal transformation, or the unconventional lifestyle that results from it. - Theme: Convention and Individuality. Description: A person in the middle or high society of 19th century New Orleans lived by intricate systems of social rules. These largely unspoken rules governed minute details of dress and expression, and prescribed certain behaviors for different social roles: mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, virgins and spinsters all measured against their respective Victorian ideals. Of course, every society in every period has created its own unwritten laws; but The Awakening takes place in a society whose rules were particularly stringent. As a young woman, Edna assumes that she must live and die according to these rules, like all the people who surround her.From an early age, she learns to separate her murky, curious, disobedient inner life from the anonymous outer life—a quality other people perceive as reserve. But sometime during her marriage the inner life goes dark under the weight of convention, and Edna enters a sort of long sleep. Mademoiselle Reisz's music, Robert's love, and the strange beauty of the sea startle her awake. Thought, emotion, and will return to her all at once; she examines her various roles as wife, mother, and friend, and finds them all duplicitous and bizarre. Soon, she learns to ignore convention and to behave according to her idiosyncratic beliefs and impulses. But, as we know, this is much easier said than done. Edna abandons her entire worldview (which, borrowed though it was, had guided her every step) in exchange for—what? When the initial destructive thrill weakens and fades, she finds herself in an emotional wilderness. She is strong enough to denounce and reject a false code, but not quite strong enough to invent a true one. Without it, she is lost—she must live at the mercy of her emotions, which are violent with contradiction. In a way, Chopin's novel is a cautionary tale: though individuality and inwardness must struggle against convention, one cannot live by inwardness alone. - Theme: Women's Rights, Femininity, and Motherhood. Description: In the social world of New Orleans, femininity was controlled and defined with severity. At every stage of life, a young woman faced myriad rules and prescriptions; a little girl should be A, a teenage girl should be B, an engaged woman C, a young married woman D, a mother E, a widow F, and on and on and on. In 19th century America, when the women's rights movement was still quite new, conservative states like Louisiana granted women very few rights. Women could not vote, hold property, or (in most cases) file for divorce. And, in addition, there was a social world of more intangible restrictions: women should not be too warm or too cold, should not expose themselves to sun or to wind, should fear dirt, physical exertion, violence, vice, confusion and darkness of every kind; women should desire marriage above all else, but they should merely tolerate sex; the list seems never-ending. In the early chapters of the novel, it becomes apparent to Edna that society considers her a possession of her husband's and a willing, even happy, slave to her children. As the ocean and her realization of her desires through her budding love for Robert grow within her, she rejects these roles. She begins to notice some of the more intangible rules, as well. She distinguishes between two models of femininity: externalized femininity, where nothing is hidden, which is characterized by perfection, delicacy, purity; and internalized femininity, which is thoughtful, strong, contradictory, and chaotic.The eccentric Mademoiselle Reisz is an outlier to this model, because in society's eyes her spinsterhood strips her of her femininity. By the end of the novel Edna comes to doubt the harsh, moralizing oppositions of Victorian femininity. She is neither exposed nor hidden, neither shy nor outgoing, neither dirty nor clean, neither bad nor good; like Mademoiselle Reisz, she sees herself as existing outside the roles society has defined for her. And, as an outsider, she sees no role or world for herself. - Theme: Realism and Romanticism. Description: Realism is a perspective that emphasizes facts, surfaces, and life's practical aspects, and romanticism as a perspective that focuses on emotion, varieties of experience, and the inner life. In Chopin's novel, realism emerges from a conventional worldview, and romanticism emerges from an individualistic worldview. Pontellier and Madame Ratignolle, who are preoccupied almost exclusively with surfaces—the appearance of a comfortable home, the appearance of a happy family—exemplify realism. Edna and Mademoiselle Reisz, who seek out emotional and spiritual experience, exemplify romanticism. Robert, Victor, Arobin and several other characters are more ambiguous, because they switch sometimes from one perspective to the other: Robert, for example, is interested in business and respectability, but he is also sensitive to the magic of a summer night. Edna herself passes through several phases. Her memories of childhood are mostly image and emotion; but when she decides to marry Pontellier, "she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams." Her loveless, practical marriage carries her into realism – a period that coincides with what she remembers as a long sleep, a time when her feelings and thoughts lay dormant. As she awakens, she begins to see the world as through a misty lens. Romance occludes her ordinary vision and sharpens her inward vision. She shows a growing contempt of daily tasks and small pleasures, which she feels chase away some more thrilling and essential aspect of life (art and love are central to this other existence). Eventually, her sense of reality abandons her almost completely; when she can no longer see romance in the people and things that surround her, they become alien and irrelevant, and she withdraws totally into herself. - Theme: Action and Reflection. Description: Edna senses a gulf between action and thought, between "the outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions." She feels more comfortable in the inner life, which she has rediscovered very recently. As she questions her habitual actions, her thoughts often seem separate from her body. Other women in the novel are represented by their hands, which are expressive, which do things. Edna's central feature is her eyes, which are reflective. She is often looking and observing: her sight is a symptom of her new wakefulness. Action, on the other hand, is often related to artifice—the bustling mothers in the park, the dutiful but bored pianists and dancers at Madame Lebrun's soirée.But as Edna becomes more confident in her new identity, her actions express her thoughts and beliefs more faithfully. She abandons many tasks that others expect her to perform, like visiting days and household chores, and spends her time painting and visiting real friends. Her love for Robert, especially, seems to connect the outer and the inner self, but the loss of that love divides them irremediably. After Robert leaves, her love becomes a more generalized desire, and the experience of physical desire without its emotional partner shifts her focus to surfaces once again. By the end of the novel she seems trapped in a strange middle space, a limbo between the inner and the outer life, without the resolve to reenter either. - Theme: Freedom and Emptiness. Description: Freedom, for Edna, is release from the binding rules and stereotypes of convention, which the narrator compares to an ill-fitting garment. Freedom, for her, is also disengagement from obligation of any kind, including obligations to her husband and children. This desire for radical freedom is what is behind her obsession with the sea, a place of complete solitude and emptiness. As she loses her desire for a connection to others, she gets the sense that the people around her are "uncanny, half-human beings" in "an alien world." She feels loosed from her place in the world, as though she is free to be no longer human. Life itself, with its peculiar and humiliating processes, comes to seem like an obligation when she watches her friend give birth. Over the course of the novel Edna longs more and more deeply for freedom from, a negative liberty, but she has no clear idea of the freedom to, the impulse to seek satisfaction and achievement - perhaps because her small world gives her so few opportunities. In this way, desire for negative freedom becomes a desire for emptiness, for nothingness. Early on in the novel, convention had seemed to Edna like an uncomfortable outer garment; by the end, emotion itself is such a garment. Even her soul is something that another can possess, and she wants to be possessed in no way. When she dies, drowning alone in the sea, she finally feels naked, finally free. - Climax: There are several potential climaxes in the story. One could choose the night Mademoiselle Reisz's music moves Edna to tears; her first kiss with Arobin; or her last, fatal swim. - Summary: The story begins at Grand Isle, a ritzy vacation spot near New Orleans, where Edna Pontellier is summering with her husband and two children. Her husband Léonce is often away on business, so she spends most of her time with a beautiful, shallow friend named Adèle Ratignolle and a charming young man named Robert Lebrun. From the beginning, the reader perceives that all is not harmonious in the Pontellier family: Edna seems bored by her children and frustrated with Léonce, who is silly, ill-tempered, and inattentive (his lavish gifts notwithstanding). Her friendship with Robert, though, has been blossoming. They spend almost every day in each other's company, strolling on the beach and exchanging quiet jokes and observations. The third-person narrator, whose voice blends somewhat with Edna's inner voice, begins to remark on the artificiality of the other women and to question Edna's habitual obedience to her foolish husband. One night, Edna is moved to tears at a party by the music of Mademoiselle Reisz, a sharp-voiced unmarried woman who most people dislike. Later that same night, Edna conquers her fear of the sea and swims far into the ocean. That night is the culmination of her awakening, her critical, thoughtful examination of the social world and of her inner life. Her friendship with Robert becomes romantically charged. Soon, Robert leaves Grand Isle for Mexico, where he hopes to forget the illicit romance. Edna spends the rest of the summer longing for his company. In September the Pontelliers return to New Orleans. Edna begins to neglect her household and her children so that she can devote her days to painting, reading, and seeing friends. Her friendship with Madame Ratignolle disintegrates somewhat, but she goes often to see Mademoiselle Reisz, who gives Edna good advice, shows her Robert's letters (which mention his love for her), and plays beautiful pieces on the piano. Edna's concerned husband consults with Doctor Mandelet, a wise family friend, who advises him to wait it out. Edna also becomes romantically involved with Arobin, a fashionable young man with a bad reputation. She doesn't love him, but she is strongly physically attracted to him. Their relationship is a source of confusion and anxiety to her. Edna's husband leaves for a long business trip and her children go to stay with their grandmother. She loves her new freedom and decides to move to a smaller house, moving out of her current home and leaving her husband. By selling her paintings, she can become financially independent. She throws a beautiful going-away party, but is troubled throughout by feelings of blankness and despair. One day, Edna learns from Mademoiselle Reisz that Robert is due back in New Orleans. She runs into him at the pianist's apartment a few days later. He is distant and formal at first, but she convinces him to have dinner at her new house, and soon enough they begin to talk frankly and affectionately. He stays away from her for some time, in a last effort to avoid the affair, but when they run into each other again they return to Edna's house and confess their feelings openly. They're interrupted, however, by an urgent summons from Madame Ratignolle, who is about to give birth. Edna watches the difficult procedure in horror. On her way home, she talks haltingly with Doctor Mandelet about her confused desire for freedom and her aversion to marriage. When she comes home, Robert is gone. He has left a note explaining that he can't be with her. Not long after, Edna returns to Grand Isle. She says hello to Victor, Robert's brother who lives on the island year-round, and walks to the beach. She thinks with despair about her indifference to the world and longs for complete freedom. As she begins to swim, bright and lovely memories from her childhood flicker across her consciousness. In the book's final, confused moments, as she feels completely free, she drowns.

- Genre: Children's Novel, Mystery - Title: The Bad Beginning - Point of view: First Person - Setting: An unnamed, busy American city - Character: Violet. Description: - Character: Klaus. Description: - Character: Sunny. Description: - Character: Count Olaf. Description: - Character: Justice Strauss. Description: - Character: Lemony Snicket. Description: - Character: Mr. Poe. Description: - Character: The Hook-Handed Man. Description: - Theme: Family and Parenthood. Description: - Theme: Surveillance, Supervision, and Guardianship. Description: - Theme: Children vs. Adults. Description: - Theme: Intelligence and Ethics. Description: - Climax: The Marvelous Wedding - Summary: The Bad Beginning opens with a warning from the narrator, Lemony Snicket, that the story does not have a happy ending—readers should put the book down if they want one. The story begins with the three Baudelaire children playing on the beach. Violet, a 14-year-old girl and the eldest Baudelaire sibling is skipping rocks and thinking about what invention she will make next. Klaus, Violet's twelve-year old brother who loves to read, is studying creatures in tidepools. Sunny, the youngest, loves to bite things, and she is making unintelligible sounds such as "gack." Soon, Mr. Poe, the family banker, arrives and informs the children that their parents died in a tragic fire. Mr. Poe takes the children to stay with him temporarily. The children share a room with Mr. Poe's mean sons, Edgar and Albert, and are forced to endure Mrs. Poe's bad cooking. Still, the Baudelaires are hesitant to leave when Mr. Poe announces he is taking them to live with a distance relative of theirs, Count Olaf. He explains that Count Olaf will be their guardian until Violet comes of age, at which point she will inherit their parents' enormous fortune. When they arrive on Count Olaf's Street, the children meet Justice Strauss, Count Olaf's neighbor who the children mistake as Count Olaf's wife. Given her kindness, they are disappointed to find out she is just a neighbor. The children notice that her house is much nicer than Count Olaf's. Count Olaf meets Mr. Poe and the children at his door, which has an eye painted on it. He is tall, thin, and dirty, and his eyes look shiny, which makes him seem both hungry and angry. Mr. Poe comments on the dirtiness of the house, and Count Olaf suggests that the Baudelaire fortune be used to fix it up. Mr. Poe sternly explains that the children's fortune will not be used until Violet comes of age, and then he leaves. The children notice that there are eyes painted all over the house, and there's even an eye tattooed on Count Olaf's ankle. They feel like Count Olaf is always watching them. The Baudelaire children's bad first impression of Count Olaf is correct. Not only is he unkind, impatient, and demanding, but he makes the children share one small, dirty bedroom and bed, and he gives them difficult chores. One day, he tells the children to make a dinner for his theatre troupe. Having never cooked before, they visit Justice Strauss for help and are pleased to discover her enormous private library. She helps them select a recipe and shop for ingredients. They cook the dinner, but when Count Olaf arrives, he is mad that they did not make roast beef. In his anger, he torments Sunny and strikes Klaus across the face. The children are outraged, but they serve dinner. A troupe member tells them that Count Olaf is after their family fortune, and the children go to bed crying. Violet, Klaus and Sunny go to visit Mr. Poe to complain about Count Olaf. Mr. Poe does not take them seriously, however, telling them that, as legal guardian, Count Olaf is free to raise them how he sees fit. The children leave discouraged, but they feel better after visiting Justice Strauss' library. The next morning, Count Olaf makes breakfast for the children, but he then confronts them about their visit to Mr. Poe. He feigns regret that they feel mistreated and to make up for it, he offers to let them star in his upcoming play, The Marvelous Marriage. He explains that Sunny and Klaus will be background actors, while Violet will be the bride of Count Olaf's character. Justice Strauss will play the character officiating the marriage. Violet resists, but Count Olaf forces her to agree. The children are suspicious of his intentions and visit Justice Strauss' library to study inheritance law. The children find the law books on inheritance law boring, but Count Olaf's looming threat motivates them to keep reading. They fail to discover anything important, however, and one of Count Olaf's troupe members comes to Justice Strauss' house to return them home. He threatens Klaus, telling him that Count Olaf will kill them once he has stolen their fortune. Klaus sneaks a book into his shirt before leaving. After reading all night, Klaus discovers Count Olaf's plot and confronts him the next morning. Klaus reveals that Count Olaf is planning to marry Violet for real during the wedding, thus giving him access to their family fortune, and he threatens to expose Count Olaf. Count Olaf is a step ahead, however: he kidnapped Sunny to use as leverage. He reveals that Sunny is hanging from his tower in a birdcage and promises to harm her if Klaus and Violet try to stop the wedding. The children agree not to expose his plan. Violet builds a grappling hook to save Sunny. With it, she climbs the tower, but she finds one of Count Olaf's henchmen, the hook-handed-man, waiting for her. The man reports her to Count Olaf, and Klaus is brought up the tower and locked away with Violet and Sunny until the wedding. The children try to hatch a plan but come up with nothing. On their way to the play, Violet looks at her right hand and seems to have an idea. Violet and Klaus wait backstage as the play begins. Eventually, they are put into their costumes and run into Justice Strauss in the changing room. They try to convince her to change her lines––thereby nullifying the marriage––but Justice Strauss does not want to disappoint Count Olaf. The children also try to get help from Mr. Poe when he arrives backstage, but Count Olaf interrupts them, holding the walkie talkie that he uses to communicate with Sunny's handler. They say nothing. The wedding scene begins, and Count Olaf and Violet take center stage. Justice Strauss reads her lines from the legal book, asking Count Olaf and Violet if they will take each other as husband and wife. Both say, "I do," and Violet signs the legal document with her left hand. Count Olaf reveals his plot to the audience, explaining that he is now in control of the Baudelaire fortune. Mr. Poe is outraged and contests the claim, but Justice Strauss begrudgingly admits the marriage is legal. Violet, however, reveals that she signed the document with her non-dominant hand, and Justice Strauss determines the marriage is nullified. Count Olaf is furious, but the hook-handed man has already brought Sunny to the stage, removing Olaf's leverage. Mr. Poe arrests Count Olaf for endangering a child, and everyone celebrates. Justice Strauss offers to become the children's new guardian, which they gladly accept. One of Count Olaf's men shuts off the theatre lights, however, and Count Olaf escapes. As he does, he whispers to Violet that he will steal the Baudelaires' fortune and kill all of them. Violet turns the lights back on, and Mr. Poe tells the children they cannot live with Justice Strauss because she is not a relative. The children are upset, but they accept this explanation and leave with Mr. Poe. As they drive away from Justice Strauss, the children feel like they're headed in the wrong direction.

- Genre: Realism, Frame Story, Horror Story - Title: The Bath - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The woman's house and the cemetery by the sea (in Dunedin, New Zealand) - Character: The Woman. Description: The protagonist of "The Bath" is an elderly widow who lives alone. Each year on the anniversary of his death, she visits the grave of her late husband, John. At the story's opening, she is preparing to visit his grave the next day, so she runs herself a bath. In her struggle to get out of the bath, readers learn how desperate her situation is: her aging body will no longer cooperate, so she's trapped in the tub. She's completely alone, and nobody hears her when she calls for help, which causes her to panic, lament her loneliness, and even wish she were dead. Every day is a struggle for her, since once simple tasks (such as carrying coal buckets, hanging the laundry, and taking public transportation) now cause her a great deal of physical and psychological pain. In addition, she seems to have nobody to comfort her, as accepting help from the people in her life—especially her cruel niece—seems to humiliate her. In the second half of the story, though, the widow goes to the cemetery, where she finds peace for the only time in the story. She tends her late husband's grave and visits the graves of her parents, who are buried nearby. At home, the woman feels inept and afraid, but in the cemetery—where she finds herself capable of physical labor, like weeding her husband's plot—she finds purpose, contentment, and companionship with the dead. She longs to remain in the cemetery and seems to find death less frightening than returning home to all the tasks that torment her, particularly bathing in the tub. - Character: John (Husband). Description: The woman's late husband appears in the story only as a memory; he died 17 years before the start of the story, leaving the woman to take care of herself in her old age. He is buried in the cemetery across town, where she frequently visits him, bringing flowers with which to decorate his grave. Near the end of the story, it is revealed that he was poor compared to the woman's parents, who are buried in the same cemetery. Their spacious grave and elaborate tombstone make his seem small and simple by comparison. The widow decorates his grave with flowers but does not decorate theirs, implying that she feels the need to compensate for the simplicity of her husband's grave. - Character: The Parents. Description: The woman's parents are buried in the same cemetery as her husband. They have a large grave because they were buried back when the cemetery had more space, and their tombstone is elaborate, indicating their wealth. They are not mentioned in the story until the woman stops by their grave on her way home, but the widow feels fondly towards them and is grateful for their comfortable grave. Standing by their grave gives the woman a sensation of peace that she does not feel at any other point in the story. - Character: The Niece. Description: The woman's niece appears to be one of her only living relatives, and she visits once in a while to help the woman with her daily tasks. But the woman does not seem to find any pleasure or comfort in this. In fact, the only time the woman reflects on her niece at length, it's quite negative—she remembers feeling loathed and judged by her niece because she was not physically able to look at the beautiful clouds while they were doing laundry. This shows how being around people who don't understand her can actually make the woman feel lonelier than she was before. - Theme: Loneliness and Death. Description: In "The Bath," an elderly woman struggles to get herself out of the bathtub. As she fails to pull herself out and then panics that she'll remain trapped there, she reflects on how alone she is: her husband is dead, and when she screams for help, nobody can hear her. She can only rely on herself, even though her body is failing. The woman does have some people in her life, but they seem not to bring comfort. Her niece, for example, comes to help sometimes, but she makes insensitive comments and seems not to understand the woman's struggles. And while the woman knows that she'll soon have to hire someone to help her bathe, this thought brings no relief, only "humiliation." By contrast, after the woman finally clambers out of the bath, she travels to the cemetery to place flowers on her husband's grave and longs to stay there with him and with her parents who are buried nearby. Her only comfort seems to be sitting among the dead. In this way, the story gives the impression that life can be lonelier than death, especially at the stage of life when one's loved ones are gone. Early on, the story establishes that the woman is completely alone, a condition that pains her. As she struggles to get out of the bath, she calls for help, but there's nobody to hear her: her husband is dead, and the street outside her window is completely silent. "Where were the people, the traffic?" she wonders, despairing that "No one in the world will hear me. No one will know I'm in the bath and can't get out." Importantly, the woman's loneliest moments occur when she's most vulnerable—in times when she's unable to take care of herself. This is most significant when she's trying to get out of the bath and fears that she's trapped there. Several times during the tub scene, the story calls attention to her loneliness: "Loneliness well[s] in her" as she struggles, and even once she's gotten herself out, she is "exhausted and lonely thinking that perhaps it might be better for her to die at once." This loneliness is specifically associated with her age. After all, when she was younger, her husband was alive and could help her if she was in trouble, and when she was younger, she could also help herself, because her body was more agile. So it seems that, as the woman has gotten older and less capable of caring for herself, she has felt herself to be more and more alone. Despite the woman's loneliness, she does not seem to find solace in the company of others. This is clearest when she recalls her niece coming to help her with the laundry. It's an unpleasant memory: when the woman wasn't able to look at the beautiful clouds in the sky (because looking up would make her dizzy), her niece responded with an "incredulous almost despising look." The niece's inability to understand the woman's limitations perhaps made her feel even lonelier than she was before, and it causes the woman to remember this day "with a sense of the world narrowing and growing darker, like a tunnel." The woman also seems to feel embarrassed by the notion of asking others for help, which limits the pleasure she can find in their company. For instance, when she realizes that she will now have to hire a nurse to help her bathe, it brings her no comfort—instead, she feels that it's a "humiliation." Likewise, she seems humiliated by having to ask a neighbor to fetch items from the top shelf. And when she calls for help getting out of the bath, she does it only in desperation, once the humiliation of asking someone for help becomes preferable to the misery and terror of being trapped in the tub. In this way, the story suggests that the company of others is humiliating, not enjoyable, when it comes from necessity.   By contrast, the woman feels peace and contentment towards the end of the story—but only when sitting among the dead in the cemetery. Throughout the story, the woman's prevailing emotions have been loneliness, fear, dread, and humiliation, but her trip to the cemetery finally makes her happy. After visiting the graves of her husband and her parents, she sits in the grass and feels a "peace inside her; the nightmare of the evening before seemed far away." She doesn't say so directly, but she seems to take comfort in the presence of the dead, reminding her of a happier and less lonely period of her life. In fact, the woman seems to feel at home in the cemetery in a way she does not in her actual house. Sitting in the grass, she thinks that she doesn't want to return home—she wants to stay at the cemetery forever. Part of this is her desire to stop struggling with the obstacles and humiliations of her daily life, but part of it seems to be her desire to remain with those she loves. It seems that the woman has reached an age where her loved ones are dead, the people in her life humiliate and misunderstand her, and she's lonely when she's alone and when she's with others. Because of this consuming loneliness, it makes sense that she might prefer death. - Theme: Struggle and Old Age. Description: The woman in "The Bath" has gotten to an age where even simple things are a struggle: she has trouble reaching items on a high shelf, filling the coal bucket, looking at the sky, hanging laundry on the line, changing buses, stoking the fire, and of course, getting in and out of the bath. While her body would once obey her easily, now it's an "inner menace"; her back, shoulder, and wrists are bad, and she can no longer control them well. She thinks that it might be better to die, since the "slow progression of difficulties [is] a kind of torture" that she no longer wants to endure. While the struggle of daily life tortures the woman, she's able to briefly find some pleasure in the cemetery, where she is suddenly able to make her body work: she's able to care for her husband's grave without trouble, raking it, cleaning the jam jars, and placing beautiful flowers in them. In this context, she can finally enjoy a moment of pleasure and peace, soaking in the warm breeze and the view of the sea. This contrast between the woman's mood at the cemetery (where she feels capable) and her mood at home (where she feels vulnerable and inept) shows how the physical struggles of aging can be so difficult as to rob life of its most basic pleasures. The woman's aging, uncooperative body is both humiliating to her and dangerous, as it limits her ability to care for herself. The woman's back and shoulder are in so much pain that she has difficulty with daily tasks like keeping the fire going, showing what a struggle it is to care for herself in basic ways. With the fundamental tasks of staying alive becoming a desperate struggle, the woman's life has become overwhelming and scary. Even basic pleasures have become not only difficult but downright frightening, which is clear when she takes a bath. The woman loves the feeling of a warm bath, but she can't take them very often because it's such a struggle for her to get out. Furthermore, once she does get into the bath, she can hardly enjoy herself because she's so consumed by anxiety about what will happen when she needs to get out. Because her body is so unreliable, the woman doesn't seem to have very many pleasures left. Finally, the woman's physical pain disrupts her most important rituals. For instance, the woman visits her late husband's grave each year on the anniversary of his death, but she has come to dread this task simply because it's so physically hard for her make the journey out to the cemetery. Visiting her husband's grave seems central to the woman's life and identity, so the notion that she might become physically unable to do it shows how her aging body threatens the loss of self. Watching her body decline is so awful that the widow thinks it would be best for her to die. She first fantasizes about death after her harrowing struggle to get out of the bathtub. It was so frightening and exhausting for her to be trapped in the tub that, afterwards, she lays in bed feeling lonely and thinking that it "might be better for her to die at once." In other words, fighting with her aging body has become so horrific—she describes it as a "kind of torture"—that she would prefer the nothingness of death. On top of this, her declining body humiliates her. Her shoes have to be specially sized for her disfigured feet, she has to ask a neighbor to fetch items from the highest shelves of her cupboards, and she knows she'll soon have to hire a nurse to help her bathe. She frames aging as a progression of humiliations, thinking with dread that "there will be others, and others." It is only when the woman lets her mind stray from thoughts of her failing body and her arduous tasks that she becomes peaceful enough to sleep. Lying in bed after the incident with the bath, she thinks of the frost-white snow outside and her long-dead husband, which lulls her to sleep. This shows that sleep—and death by analogy—is her only escape from suffering. In contrast to her misery at home, the woman finds peace at the cemetery where she is suddenly able to perform physical tasks. At home, the woman struggles with tasks as basic as raking coals, so it's striking that, at the cemetery, she suddenly seems more capable. For instance, she uses a pitchfork to rake the garden at her husband's grave, seemingly without incident or exhaustion. Furthermore, after she cleans the jars that hold the flowers, she carries them back to the gravesite full of water, "balancing them carefully one in each hand" as she walks. This feat of balance is shocking for a woman who, at home, feels so at risk of tripping that she must constantly stare at the ground. And after placing the flowers on her husband's grave, she feels not exhausted or humiliated—as she does after doing any kind of chore at home—but satisfied and at peace. She is proud and purposeful, having done her duty in tending her husband's grave. This shows just how much the woman's despair has to do with her declining body; when she feels capable, she is happy, and when she feels incapable, she is miserable and longs for death. Significantly, the woman's capability at the cemetery leads her to her only moment of real pleasure in the whole story. After tending her husband's grave, she sits down in the grass and enjoys the sun and the warm breeze, seemingly at home in her body for the first time. Unfortunately, this doesn't last long, as she soon has to make the arduous trek home where she feels incapable once again. - Theme: Life, Death, and Social Class. Description: At the end of "The Bath," while the woman is at the cemetery tending her husband's grave, the story introduces a twist: the woman's parents are also buried in this cemetery, but their grave is much grander than his. Their enormous grave reveals the "elaborate station of their life"—essentially, that they were rich—while the husband's small grave reflects his humble social position. This revelation casts the woman's actions in a new light. While her yearly ritual of cleaning her husband's grave and adorning it with flowers initially seemed like a straightforward act of love, it's noteworthy that she does not similarly place flowers on her parents' grave, even though she thinks fondly of them and feels gratitude that they are so comfortably at rest. It seems, then, that cleaning and decorating her husband's grave is, at least in part, a way to compensate for his cramped quarters, an apology that he's been laid to rest without the luxury he deserves. In this way, the story bitterly suggests that human beings are not equal, even in death, and that this class inequality is an injustice that plagues the living. When the story reveals the parents' grand grave, it's a shock, since the woman herself seems not to have very much money. The difficulty of the woman's life reflects her humble status. She does not have any hired help around her house, which means that she has to do chores that are arduous for her, and she has to take the bus, since she presumably has no car. From these details, the reader can assume that she's not wealthy. Furthermore, the woman's husband was cremated and laid to rest in a tiny, unadorned plot with a simple gravestone. This suggests that he, too, was of a lower class, since all of these factors suggest that he needed to be buried without spending much money. Since the woman and her husband appear lower class, it's surprising to learn that her parents were wealthy. Their grave is spacious, elaborate, and grander than those around it, which reflects their higher social status. The woman specifically reflects that they came by these luxuries because they had "money, time, and forethought"—all markers of an upper-class life. The parents' wealth casts the woman's actions in a new light: suddenly, caring for her husband's grave is not just about love, but about class. This becomes especially clear when the woman does not tend her parents' grave like she does her husband's; she seems to believe it's sufficiently grand already and requires no extra labor to give her parents dignity. Importantly, her choice not to rake or put flowers on their grave is not neglectful or resentful; the woman makes it clear that she misses her parents and is grateful that they've been laid to rest so comfortably. It seems that she simply finds these gestures unnecessary, since they already have what they need. By contrast, the woman has made the effort to go to the cemetery every year for 17 years to rake, weed, clean, and put flowers on her husband's humble grave. Certainly, this reflects her enduring love for her husband, but it also suggests that she feels she must compensate for his humble gravesite, giving it the extra beauty of fresh flowers and a tidy plot. After the woman has tended her husband's gravesite, she feels satisfaction in a job well done. She's proud that she has put in the effort to give her husband the dignity he deserves. But significantly, when she sits by her parents' gravesite, she has a different feeling: peace and contentment. Reflecting that her parents have "extra space should they need it" allows her to relax and enjoy the warm breeze and the feeling of the grass. This subtly shows how money brings comfort to people, while poverty is inherently more anxious. The woman's proximity to her parents' luxurious grave brings her the only happiness she experiences in the whole story, while her husband's grave clearly troubles her, as she makes the effort to fix it up each year. In this way, the story bleakly shows how class inequality defines people's lives, even in death. - Climax: The woman cannot get out of the bathtub and realizes she's not self-sufficient anymore - Summary: An elderly woman is preparing to visit her late husband's grave, as tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of his death. She sets out the flowers she will bring and prepares her daily meal, which she eats in silence in her kitchen. Then, she heats the water so she can take a bath. She struggles to turn the taps to run the bathwater because her hands are old and stiff, and she feels full of dread. Lately, it has become difficult for her to take a bath, since she cannot move her body very well. Before she gets into the bath, she places a chair beside the tub in case she needs to reach for it when the time comes to get out. In the bath, the woman can hardly enjoy herself because she's so afraid of how she will get herself out. She plans to be so quick in getting out of the tub that she will take her body by surprise. But as she prepares to get out, she's overcome with helplessness and a sense of being trapped underground. Her hands continuously slip from the sides of the tub, and even the chair proves no aid to her. She starts to cry and scream for help, thrashing in the tub, but no one around can hear her. Becoming extremely lonely, she thinks of her dead husband John, and how he would save her if he were still alive. Finally, the woman succeeds in getting out of the tub. She gets into bed and lies awake, wanting to die and thinking miserably about her body, which has become "an inner menace." There was so much she used to be able to do, and so little she is capable of doing now, as she can no longer perform simple tasks without experiencing pain. Horrified and humiliated, she realizes that she'll need to accept help soon for the care of her body. Eventually, the widow falls asleep, thinking of the cold white frost outside and of the cemetery. The next morning at the cemetery, the weather is surprisingly warm. The sun shines on the grass and the sea is calm, hardly breaking into waves. The woman sets to work tending her husband's grave. She weeds it, cleans out the jars, and arranges the flowers in them. Then she stands back to admire her work, pleased with herself for always caring so well for her husband's grave. As she turns reluctantly to go, she stops before her parents' grave. In comparison to her husband's rather small grave, theirs is large and covered with an elaborate tombstone. They were wealthier than her husband during their life, which allowed them extra space in the cemetery. The woman is grateful for the luxury her parents could afford for themselves in death. She rests against their grave and feels a sense of peace come over her, although she is nagged slightly by a feeling that the world is becoming smaller. The woman wants to stay in the cemetery indefinitely where she won't have to take any buses, carry any heavy coal buckets, and struggle the way she does at home. Soon, however, she finds herself at the bus stop. She is overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle around her and tries desperately to recall the peace and satisfaction she felt while in the cemetery, looking at her husband's grave bright with flowers and her parents' spacious grave. But she can't recreate the feeling. The image of her husband grave is shrinking and shrinking, until it disappears altogether and is replaced by the image of the terrifying bathtub waiting to trap her in a moment of vulnerability.

- Genre: Realism - Title: The Bean Trees - Point of view: First Person, with two chapters of third person omniscient - Setting: Tucson, Arizona - Character: Taylor Greer (Marietta Greer). Description: Born Marietta Greer, Taylor is the main protagonist and narrator of the novel. She leaves her Kentucky home to try to create a life for herself that does not include the inevitable housewife position that awaits her in her hometown. Yet she is forced into motherhood when she is given Turtle, an abandoned Cherokee child. Taylor's intelligence, dedication and tenacious attitude help her create a life for herself and Turtle in Tucson, Arizona, where they build a community of other strong women including Lou Ann and Mattie. - Character: Turtle (April). Description: An abandoned Cherokee child, Turtle becomes Taylor Greer's daughter when she is left with Taylor at a gas station in Oklahoma. Though severely traumatized by the abuse she suffered as a young child and the death of her biological mother, Turtle is eventually able to thrive in Taylor and Lou Ann's care and even cultivates a love of gardening, growing in tough soil just like the wisteria vines she loves. Turtle becomes Taylor's legal daughter at the end of the novel - Character: Lou Ann Ruiz. Description: Though reeling from her husband Angel's abandonment at the beginning of the novel while she is pregnant, Lou Ann becomes Taylor's best friend and an important mother figure in the surrogate family that she and Taylor create for their children. Lou Ann overcomes her low self-esteem and her tendency to worry about disaster in order to provide for her son Dwayne Ray. - Character: Mattie. Description: Taylor's boss at the tire repair shop that Mattie owns in Tucson. Mattie is good with children and helps Taylor find confidence as a new mother. Taylor later finds out that Mattie is highly involved in the Sanctuary Movement that helped provide resources and shelter for Central American immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, including Estevan and Esperanza. Mattie, as a business owner and member of the Sanctuary Movement, is a powerful woman, and becomes a mentor and member of the women-centric community that Taylor becomes a part of. - Character: Estevan. Description: A Guatemalan refugee, Estevan is a highly educated man who was forced to flee his home in Guatemala when the war there led to the persecution of teachers (which he was). He and his wife, Esperanza, had their daughter Ismene taken from them in Guatemala but he remains hopeful that they can rebuild their life in the United States. Taylor falls in love with his quiet grace, though he never strays from his wife and she does not seek to get him to. He does help Taylor gain legal custody of Turtle by posing as Turtle's biological father despite the high risk of speaking to public officials due to his own undocumented status in the US. Estevan is both strong and sensitive, and seems to embody the characteristics of what the novel sees as the ideal man. - Character: Esperanza. Description: A Guatemalan refugee and Estevan's wife, Esperanza is badly shaken by the loss of her daughter Ismene during the war in Guatemalan. However, she begins to heal that wound by bonding with Turtle and eventually helps Taylor gain legal custody of Turtle by posing as Turtle's biological mother despite the high risk this put on her own undocumented status in the US. She finds the act of "giving" Turtle to Taylor to be healing, a kind of symbolic parting from her own lost daughter. - Character: Angel Ruiz. Description: Lou Ann's husband, who leaves her due to his own disappointment at losing his leg in a rodeo accident. He joins a rodeo in Montana and asks Lou Ann to come with him, but she refuses. He is often selfish and callous, and while not exactly a villain in any real way he also seems to represent a lot of what the novel sees as "toxic" masculine traits that negatively impact women. - Character: Taylor's Mother. Description: Taylor's mother, whose full name is Alice Jean Stamper Greer Elleston. She raised Taylor as a single parent and unconditionally supported Taylor throughout her life and loves Turtle for Taylor's sake. Taylor's mother gets remarried to Harland Elleston over the course of the novel, forcing Taylor to reevaluate what she thought she knew about being an independent woman. - Theme: Family and Motherhood. Description: Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees follows Taylor's attempts to raise her adopted daughter Turtle, focusing on what it takes to be a family and the alternative forms that family can take in the absence of the traditional mother-father-children family model. Taylor is fiercely protective of the small family she forms with Turtle, her best friend Lou Ann, and Lou Ann's son Dwayne Ray in Tucson, Arizona as they all help each other "through hell and high water." Taylor even figures out a way to legally adopt Turtle, not to prove that Turtle is a legitimate part of her family, but to protect the familial bond that she has already formed with Turtle from the reach of Child Protective Services. At the same time, the Guatemalan couple that poses as Turtle's biological parents to aid Taylor in her adoption, must also learn to rebuild their family after the loss of their biological daughter in the Guatemalan Civil War that forced the couple to flee to the United States. Throughout the events of the novel, Kingsolver compares these families that chose each other, that chose to be families, to Lou Ann's experience of the traditional family model, suggesting that the chosen families are actually more strongly connected through their willingness to help each other through anything. While all family bonds are significant in the novel, the most important family role is that of motherhood. Kingsolver portrays many types of mothers, birth, adoptive and surrogate, as Taylor meets many women who help her raise Turtle as her own daughter. Though Taylor, and many of the other mothers in the novel, are not perfect, the mistakes that the mothers make are largely overshadowed by Kingsolver's descriptions of the love that mothers have for their children. Both Taylor and Lou Ann must come to terms with the intense responsibility of motherhood, eventually finding the joy and fulfillment in a role they initially did not want. As the two women learn to be mothers who unconditionally love their children, the way that Taylor's own mother loves her, the novel argues that motherhood requires nothing more or less than a willingness to do anything for your child. What matters is not how a person becomes a mother, or inherits any other family role, but the commitment to keeping those relationships strong. - Theme: Feminism and Solidarity Among Women. Description: The Bean Trees, like many of Barbara Kingsolver's novels, deals in an almost exclusively female world. These strong, complex female characters drive the plot forward on their own, with little need for male characters. Indeed, the only male characters treated with sympathy are Estevan and Dwayne Ray—Estevan because he is emotionally sensitive and profoundly respectful of women and Dwayne Ray because as a baby and toddler he is too young to have internalized the male-dominated culture that Kingsolver sees in America. Taylor, raised by a single mother, sees no need for a male father figure in the makeshift family she forms for her daughter Turtle. Taylor refuses to let American society, especially the conservative sensibilities of her rural Kentucky hometown, limit what she can and can not do, working in the traditionally masculine fields of medicine and car repair in order to provide for Turtle. Further, Taylor and Lou Ann each take over aspects of traditionally masculine roles in the family, as Taylor teaches Lou Ann how to let go of the societal expectations of female bodies and the judgment passed on working mothers and helps Lou Ann become a truer version of herself in the process. Aside from exposing the cultural pressure that dictates acceptable choices for women, the novel also exposes the multiple instances of outright misogyny that women face. Taylor is often dismissed or patronized by men in the novel, as Kingsolver comments on how women are rarely treated seriously in the workforce. Even worse, Turtle suffers sexual abuse at the hands of her extended family, something that Kingsolver refers to as the unfortunate birthright of being a woman. While some characters, like Estevan, are able to overcome the toxic culture that perpetuates this suffering, others, like Angel, cannot help but carry it out. In the face of gender inequality and injustice, The Bean Trees argues that women must support each other. Taylor and Lou Ann learn to lean on each other as they raise children with a better chance at equal gender relations, teaching Turtle to stands up for herself and Dwayne Ray to respect women. - Theme: Nature. Description: Kingsolver's background as a biologist and her intense love of nature are prominent throughout the novel. Aside from the many beautiful descriptions of the landscapes around the characters, the characters themselves also love the natural world and find peace when they are in natural environments. Kingsolver continually affirms that humans are also animals, and therefore part of the environment in which they live. Taylor learns to integrate herself into the environment when she moves to Arizona. Though the flora and fauna in the desert are the polar opposite of the natural world in Taylor's original Kentucky home, Taylor is enchanted with the stark beauty of this new landscape. The animals that have adapted to the harsh desert or overcome the extra stresses that human cities put on natural resources in the desert provide inspiration for Taylor as she and Turtle learn to survive and thrive in this arid land despite the troubles they have faced. Taylor expresses Kingsolver's belief that modern human society has adversely affected natural ecosystems and begins to learn about the ways that humans have harmed the delicate balance of the desert and ways that humans can help return the earth to its natural rhythms. Kingsolver reverently describes the beauty and wonder of nature, as well as the harsh balances of life and death in the natural world, as she advocates for humans to become responsible stewards of the good and the bad in the environment.More than simply rest and relaxation, natural spaces in the novel also offer cathartic experiences that begin to heal traumatic experiences from many characters' pasts. Turtle, though shell-shocked from the tragedies of her first years, takes an interest in gardening that helps her to slowly bridge the gap between human and natural worlds. Turtle's growth matches the growth of the wisteria vines that thrive in the poor soil of the Tucson desert. Turtle's rebirth into human society takes place at a lake as Turtle reenacts the burial of her mother. At the same lake, Taylor finally realizes how to gain legal custody of Turtle. Though the natural world is far from idyllic in Kingsolver's conception, it is still more perfect than the manmade institutions that have caused Taylor and Turtle, as well as Estevan and Esperanza, so much trouble in the novel. Taylor, Turtle, and the others need to spend regular time in natural environments in order to be happy and healthy. Kingsolver writes these natural scenes with an eye towards building awareness of the majesty of nature while convincing her readers that the natural world needs people who are committed to preserving that beauty for future generations. - Theme: Disaster and Survival. Description: Though disasters and tragedies loom large in The Bean Trees, the novel also includes the ever-present hope of survival. Characters in the novel across all social, economic, and political divides struggle with all manner of disasters, ranging from the personal loss of a family member, to the failure of national institutions, to the high number of natural disasters occurring with greater frequency around the globe. Kingsolver does not blame her characters for the disasters they face, instead condemning the isolation and competition of modern American life for making these problems even worse in recent times. Given that disaster is unavoidable for all characters in The Bean Trees, Kingsolver examines the various ways that people can respond to disaster. Some characters, like Mattie and Esperanza, turn to religion as a way to make sense of a disordered world. Other survivors, like Lou Ann at points in the novel, begin to see the potential for disaster in all everyday situations, and feel hopeless or lost because of it. Still others, like Taylor, stay practical and form contingency plans to prepare for any disaster without becoming paranoid. Lou Ann's worries provide comic relief in the novel, whereas Taylor's knack for staying calm in a crisis save the family on multiple occasions. Taylor learns even more about surviving adversity from Estevan and Esperanza, while they remake their lives in America after making it out of the Guatemalan Civil War, and Turtle, who is resilient enough to bond with Taylor after the assault and abandonment she suffered at the hands of her birth family. These characters show Kingsolver's belief in the ability of people to recover from disaster and thrive, and even suggest that people who have survived disaster are more compassionate and better able to help other people who are in trouble. - Theme: Belonging and Homeland. Description: The theme of belonging and homeland works on two levels within the novel. On a small scale, the novel's plot follows Taylor's struggles to find her true home. Unhappy with the classism and sexism of her rural Kentucky hometown, Taylor searches for a place that feels more comfortable. Through this search, Kingsolver points out that the place where a person is born is not necessarily where that person belongs. When Taylor settles in Arizona, she feels that she has found her new home both because of her own affinity for the desert landscape and the community that builds with the people of Tucson. Taylor's openness to the new culture and her appreciation and respect for the previous communities of Arizona allow her to make Arizona her new homeland. On a large scale, the novel asks who truly "belongs" on American land. Though Taylor has Cherokee blood, she does not feel like she belongs on the territory that was stolen from Native American tribes, and believes that her adopted daughter Turtle, a full-blooded Cherokee child, deserves to live in America more than she does. Yet this idea of Native American connection to the land is complicated by the novel's setting in Arizona. This desert state is nothing like the ancestral Cherokee homelands in Georgia, and furthermore has a vibrant Native American culture of its own that also experienced displacement. While Turtle's ancestry may be more "American" than Taylor's, neither of them truly "belongs" in Arizona. After considering the history surrounding the acquisition of American land, Kingsolver then examines American hypocrisy regarding immigration in the 20th century. Though virtually all Americans (aside from Native American populations) are here thanks to the immigration of their ancestors, Kingsolver notes how some American citizens today feel strongly that new immigration should be stopped at all costs. Even though Estevan and Esperanza are in some ways more qualified to be American than Taylor, given Estevan's expert command of the English language as a teacher of English, their place in America is extremely tenuous. Though American settlers effectively invaded the southwest United States during the Gold Rush boom of the 1800s, the descendants of these American settlers now resent what they refer to as the "invasion" of Central Americans into the area. Kingsolver suggests that those who are against immigration to the United States should reevaluate what it means to be an American, and face up to their own family history as immigrants. - Climax: Taylor finally manages to legally adopt Turtle, a Cherokee child who was abandoned, when two Guatemalan refugees agree to pose as Turtle's birth parents. - Summary: The novel's narrator opens by describing her hometown in Pittman County, Kentucky, a place where poverty, teenage pregnancy, and a lack of education determine the life paths of all who live there. A childhood memory of Newt Hardbine's father getting thrown in the air by an exploding tire scars the narrator, and she vows to leave her hometown as soon as possible. The narrator then shares her name: Marietta. Marietta finishes high school and gets a job at the Pittman County Hospital. One day, Newt Hardbine's wife comes in with a bullet wound because Newt's father shot both her and Newt (who died). Marietta becomes even more determined to leave Pittman and saves up money for an old car. As soon as she has the funds, Marietta drives her old car west, renaming herself Taylor after the first town she reaches when she has to stop for gas. Two days later, Taylor runs into an old woman at a bar near Cherokee Nation, Oklahoma. The woman gives Taylor a baby, who she says is in danger. Not long after, Taylor's car breaks down and Taylor is stuck in Oklahoma. Taylor thinks that it's fitting that she's stuck on Cherokee land, given that her great-grandfather was Cherokee. The novel then introduces Lou Ann Ruiz, a woman from Kentucky currently living in Tucson, Arizona. Lou Ann's husband, Angel, used to work for the rodeo but lost his leg in an injury. This accident, coupled with Lou Ann's pregnancy, puts a strain on their relationship until Angel leaves Lou Ann on Halloween. Meanwhile, Taylor has been living at the Broken Arrow motel, cleaning rooms to pay for her room and board. She continues to take care of the child, a girl, whom Taylor has named Turtle because of the child's tight grip that reminds her of a mud turtle's jaw. Turtle was severely abused by her biological family, and never speaks or smiles. After the New Year, Taylor continues west and decides to settle in Arizona because she falls in love with the landscape. In Tucson, her tires give out and Taylor pulls into a shop called "Jesus Is Lord Used Tires." The owner, a woman named Mattie, welcomes Taylor to Tucson and gives her advice about how to raise Turtle. Taylor decides to stay in Tucson, even though she is unfamiliar with everything about Tucson culture. Meanwhile, Lou Ann's baby, Dwayne Ray, is now one month old, and Lou Ann's grandmother and mother are getting ready to leave after coming to Arizona to help Lou Ann with the birth. Lou Ann doesn't get along with her family, but doesn't want them to leave either. Angel agreed to move back in for the visit so that Lou Ann's family won't know that she will be a single parent, but Lou Ann's grandmother, who is prejudiced against both Mexicans and Catholics, doesn't approve of Angel. As Lou Ann's grandmother gets ready to leave, she gives Lou Ann a bottle of water from a creek near their house to baptize Dwayne Ray, but Angel pours it down the drain once Lou Ann's family is gone. Taylor gets a job at a fast food restaurant called Burger Derby, but quits because the manager forces the employees to pay to launder their own uniforms and because she doesn't think it is healthy to leave Turtle by herself in a day care all day. Taylor tries to find a new job and a new place to stay. Finally, she finds Lou Ann's ad looking for a roommate, and Taylor and Turtle move in with Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray after the two women bond over their Kentucky roots. Taylor then gets a job at Mattie's tire shop and finds out that Mattie also runs a safe house for Central American refugees. Mattie helps Taylor start to overcome her fear of tires, and shows Taylor and Turtle her garden. Lou Ann cares for the kids during the day, trying to get Turtle to come out of her shell. Taylor, meanwhile, becomes uncomfortable that she seems to be acting as a breadwinning "father" while Lou Ann is taking the role of "mother." But the two of them talk it through, and become even better friends. Taylor, Lou Ann, and the kids go on a hike with Mattie and two Guatemalan refugees, a young married couple named Estevan and Esperanza. Estevan is an English teacher from Guatemala City who charms them all with his wit and sunny disposition. Esperanza is quieter, and spends most of her time watching Turtle. Turtle continues to improve, even saying her first word, "bean." Taylor decides to have Estevan and Esperanza over for dinner to watch Mattie as she appears on a television program about Central American immigration, also inviting over the neighbors Edna and Virgie Mae. At the dinner, Virgie insults immigrants and Taylor realizes how unfair American culture is to immigrants like Estevan. Estevan takes it in stride, simply telling a fable with the moral of taking care of other people. Soon, Taylor finds out that her mother is going to get remarried, a prospect that both angers and scares her because her mother had been the biggest champion of female independence when Taylor was growing up. The day they get this news, Taylor's makeshift family goes to the park, where Lou Ann daydreams about Taylor's mother's wedding, and how she first fell in love with Angel. Meanwhile, Taylor realizes that she has fallen in love with Estevan, but says nothing. As Turtle plays in a patch of wisteria vines, Edna and Virgie Mae come by to tell Lou Ann that Angel is looking for her. Taylor worries that Lou Ann will take Angel back, forcing her and Turtle out. One day, Taylor has to take off work to take Turtle to the doctor. The doctor pronounces Turtle physically healthy now, but x-rays reveal the full awful details of the past abuse she endured, and the doctor says that Turtle is so small because after the abuse she had suffered "failure to thrive," though she seems to be doing better now. Later that same day, Taylor goes to meet Lou Ann at the zoo. Lou Ann is also crying because Angel found her to tell her that he is leaving for good to join a rodeo in Montana. During this conversation, Taylor and Lou Ann inadvertently find out Turtle's real name, April, but decide to keep calling her Turtle. Estevan comes over that night with the shocking news that Esperanza has attempted suicide. Taylor and Estevan talk about Estevan's past in Guatemala, revealing the circumstances that forced Esperanza and Estevan to leave. During one raid, Estevan reveals, Estevan and Esperanza's daughter Ismene was taken hostage and the couple has no idea where she is now. Taylor cries at all of this injustice in the world, and grapples with the more personal revelation that her crush on Estevan is not meant to be. The next morning, Estevan goes home to Esperanza, who has pulled through. Lou Ann, meanwhile, soon begins to look for a job now that Angel is gone for good. At the grocery store that afternoon, Taylor realizes that their neighbor Edna is blind, a discovery which shocks her and Lou Ann but ultimately does not change their relationship with the sweet older woman. Meanwhile, Taylor tries to help Esperanza avoid losing all hope, even as Lou Ann is losing hope because of terrible and unsuccessful experiences interviewing for jobs. In May, though, Lou Ann gets a job at a salsa factory. Edna starts watching the kids full time. One night after work, Lou Ann confesses that she has always worried about Dwayne Ray because she had a dream that he would not live past the year 2000. Taylor tries to soothe Lou Ann's fears and bolster Lou Ann's self-esteem, which has been growing ever since Lou Ann got a job. Yet in June, Angel writes a letter to Lou Ann asking her to come live with him in Montana, something that Taylor thinks will destroy all the progress Lou Ann has made. Soon enough, the first rain of summer comes. Mattie takes Taylor, Estevan, and Esperanza out to experience the storm in the desert and to smell the scent of greasewood, and Taylor feels renewed. Yet she comes home to tragedy, as Turtle was assaulted in the park while under blind Edna's care and has retreated to her old comatose self. Taylor busies herself with chasing a bird out of the house instead of talking to the social worker, unsure that she still deserves to be a mother. The social worker starts to see Taylor and Turtle weekly to talk about Turtle's troubled past, but adds a further complication when she alerts CPS that Taylor does not have legal custody of Turtle. Taylor falls into a depression at the thought that she and Turtle might be separated. Meanwhile, Estevan and Esperanza's lives are also in danger because they cannot find safe transport to a more secure sanctuary in Oklahoma. Taylor offers to drive them to Oklahoma in the hopes that she can find out more about Turtle's family there and gain legal custody of Turtle. Edna and Virgie show Taylor and Turtle a night-blooming cereus flower the night before they leave, which Taylor takes as a good omen. On the way to Oklahoma, Taylor finds out more about the hardships of Estevan's past as a Mayan Indian in Guatemala, and Esperanza bonds with Turtle. The little group returns to the bar where Taylor found Turtle, but the ownership has changed and no one knows how to contact anyone who would know Turtle's biological family. Unsure what to do next, Taylor decides to take them all on a mini-vacation to the Lake of the Cherokees. In the pristine natural environment, on Cherokee land, Taylor comes up with a plan for getting legal custody of Turtle. Estevan and Esperanza agree to pose as Turtle's biological parents, as most white people cannot tell the difference between Mayan features and Cherokee features. Taylor takes them to a public notary that the social worker recommended, and Esperanza has a cathartic experience saying goodbye to Turtle that lets her finally release her grief over losing Ismene. The public notary signs off on this falsified adoption, making Taylor the official legal guardian of Turtle. Taylor then takes Estevan and Esperanza to a new sanctuary in Oklahoma City where they can try to start their family anew. Taylor calls her mother, finally congratulating her on her marriage. and then calls Lou Ann, finding out that Lou Ann has let go of Angel and is committed to staying in Tucson with Taylor. Taylor and Turtle drive home, finally secure and happy in their roles as mother and daughter.

- Genre: Short story, Realism, Southern Ontario Gothic - Title: The Bear Came Over the Mountain - Point of view: Third-person limited; Grant's perspective - Setting: Ontario, Canada - Character: Grant. Description: Grant is a retired professor of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature and husband to Fiona, who has dementia. "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" tells the story of Fiona moving into a residential care facility from Grant's perspective, contrasted with his memories of his affairs and their shared life. Grant secured his position at the university with Fiona's father's financial assistance. The two have no children, though Grant does not seem to mourn this fact. Once women enter Grant's classes as part of larger social shifts during the 1960s and 1970s, Grant begins a series of affairs, which "dramatically increase his sense of well-being" despite the fact that he still loves Fiona and views her with a kind of awe. By contrast, Grant views his lovers, and women more broadly, with a generalized misogyny, looking down at any perceived emotionalism in their behavior or error in their academic inclinations. Grant does not, however, wish to leave Fiona, nor to risk his relationship with her. After an affair with a student goes sour, Grant is pushed out by his colleagues and chooses to retire from the university, moving with Fiona to a farmhouse property left to her by her father. When Fiona enters Meadowlake, Grant visits her frequently. Despite being distressed by her relationship with Aubrey, he does not attempt to keep them apart. In fact, after Fiona expresses consistent distress over Aubrey's departure from Meadowlake, Grant even attempts to negotiate meetings between the two via Aubrey's wife Marian. Though this attempt leads to Grant embarking on a presumed affair with Marian, he does also bring Aubrey to visit Fiona. The story makes clear his love for and commitment to his wife despite his regular trespassing of marital boundaries. - Character: Fiona. Description: Fiona, Grant's wife, grew up relatively carefree in an upper-class home yet now, in her seventies, has dementia. She is a beautiful and charismatic woman who chose Grant out of an array of suitors and proposed marriage to him when they were young. Fiona's parents were wealthy; Fiona's mother was politically active, though Fiona herself has never really cared about politics or social status. She prefers a joking, ironic mode of social interaction, which keeps her from earnestness, effusiveness, or emotionalism—a mode of behavior that Grant respects. Fiona cannot have children, and, after she learns this, adopts two Afghan wolfhounds named Boris and Natasha on whom she dotes (both of whom have died by the time Fiona enters the Meadowlake facility). Fiona does not have any mentioned career. She and Grant, after his retirement, spend their time working on the farmhouse and cross-country skiing. Grant refers to Fiona's reading and love for Iceland, where her mother is from, despite never wanting to visit the country. After entering Meadowlake, Fiona forms a romantic relationship with another resident, Aubrey, and is unable to remember Grant as her husband, treating him with polite distance. Fiona calls Aubrey "dear heart," helps him play cards, and wheels him through the conservatory and the grounds of the facility. When Aubrey leaves the home to return to his wife's care, Fiona is distraught, and refuses to eat or get out of bed. By the time Grant successfully negotiates a visit for the two, however, Fiona has forgotten Aubrey, though she remembers Grant, and thanks him for not "forsaking" her. - Character: Aubrey. Description: Aubrey is temporarily a resident at Meadowlake while his wife and primary caregiver, Marian, goes to Florida for the winter; he becomes Fiona's beloved companion at the facility. Grant describes Aubrey as maybe his age or older, with white hair and a melancholy but dignified face. Aubrey does not have dementia, but has neurological issues as the result of an illness. He used to be the local representative of a company that sold pesticides to farmers, but he was fired and accused of owing the company money; after a holiday taken during this time, he contracted an illness that resulted in a high fever, a coma, and Aubrey's present state, in which he cannot walk and struggles somewhat with talking. Aubrey has difficulty with handling cards but loves to play bridge, an activity that Fiona helps him with. Aubrey gets upset when Fiona spends time with Grant, and creates a distraction so that Fiona will return to his side. Aubrey does not have visitors, a fact later explained by his and Marian's son living in British Columbia. He calls Fiona "my love," while Fiona calls him "dear heart," and cries when he is taken out of Meadowlake and back to his home with his wife. At home, he mainly watches the sports channel, as Marian does not want to upset him with too much change or activity. - Character: Marian. Description: Marian is Aubrey's wife. Grant first sees her unfolding a wheelchair in the Meadowlake parking lot after her return from a vacation in Florida, readying herself to take Aubrey back home. Grant describes Marian as curvy, with the look of a small-town flirt. Marian does not have much contact with her and Aubrey's only son, and is Aubrey's main caretaker after his illness, predominately for practical financial reasons. She treats her house, in a lower-middle class neighborhood, with loving and fastidious attention, filling the house with accessories, matching décor, and appliances. Grant takes particular notice of the drapes in her home, thinking that Fiona would likely poke fun at them. Marian is at first hesitant to allow continued visits between Aubrey and Fiona, but the story's ending reveals that she eventually relents; it also implies that Grant begins to date Marian as a means to ensure Fiona can continue seeing Aubrey. - Character: Kristy. Description: Kristy is the main nurse with whom Grant has contact regarding Fiona's care at Meadowlake. Grant describes Kristy as young and heavy, not paying much attention to her physical appearance except for her hair, which is "blonde and voluminous." Kristy is unfazed by the variations in Fiona's health and wellbeing, nor by Fiona and Aubrey's relationship; she refers to her patients as a collective "them" or "they" with similar behaviors and preferences. - Character: Jacqui Adams. Description: Jacqui Adams is the first woman with whom Grant has an affair. She is middle-aged, already married, and enrolled in one of his courses at the university as part of a larger new wave of married women looking to "enrich their lives" through additional education. Grant remembers himself as choosing Jacqui as one option among many willing women. To his mind, Jacqui was the opposite of Fiona, in both physical appearance and personality. Their affair lasts for a year until Jacqui's husband is transferred to a different location. Jacqui shakes when saying goodbye to Grant and writes him letters after she leaves, but Grant does not write back, looking down on the letters for their histrionic tone, and quickly gets involved with a young student. - Character: The Girl. Description: This "girl," who remains unnamed throughout the story, was a student with whom Grant had an affair. After ending the affair, Grant received a letter from the girl's roommate, condemning his actions and informing him of the negative ramifications they had on her mental health. Fiona dismisses the letter as melodramatic. Nevertheless, this letter, along with the word "rat" being written on his office door and general awareness of the affair among his colleagues, results in Grant and Fiona receiving the cold shoulder from the university community of which they are a part. This reaction in turn inspires Grant to take early retirement and move, with Fiona, to her father's childhood farmhouse. - Character: Colleague. Description: Grant's colleague, who remains unnamed, is the person to whom he shows the letter from his ex-lover's roommate. While Grant recollects his colleague as "among the first to throw away their neckties and leave home to spend every night on a floor mattress with a bewitching young mistress-coming to their offices, their classes, bedraggled and smelling of dope and incense," he dreams of this colleague reprimanding him for his own affair with a student. - Character: Fiona's Father. Description: Fiona's father, who passed away many years before the events of the story, was a wealthy and important cardiologist whom Grant remembers as "subservient at home." He retires alone to the farmhouse where he grew up, "bewildered" after Fiona's mother's passing, and leaves the farmhouse, as well as a sizeable inheritance, to Grant and Fiona after his death. - Theme: Love, Fidelity, and Marriage. Description: In Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," an older married woman, Fiona, moves into a home for individuals with dementia. There, Fiona starts a romantic relationship with another resident, Aubrey, and seems to forget her husband, Grant, even though he regularly visits her. These events take place against the backdrop of Grant's memories of his own affairs during his career as a university professor. Munro thus poses the question of what it means to be faithful in a marriage; Grant may have had numerous extramarital entanglements, but he visits Fiona every day, and, despite his own discomfort over her new relationship with Aubrey, he tries to negotiate further visits for them after Aubrey's wife, Marian, removes him from the care center. These ebbs and flows in marital loyalty come to a head when Grant begins an implied affair with Aubrey's wife, partially to ensure that he can bring Aubrey to see Fiona again. Without forgiving Grant for his infidelities, Munro nevertheless shows him to be a devoted and loving husband who is willing to sacrifice his own comfort and desires for the wellbeing of his wife. Munro thus makes an argument that sexual fidelity is just one of the many ways to show love and loyalty in a marriage. While it is clear that Grant's infidelity began early in their marriage and lasted for many years, Munro depicts the duration of his and Fiona's marriage as harmonious and caring. After Fiona moves out, for example, Grant remembers many of their small and interwoven rituals. "They usually prepared supper together," Munro writes. "One of them made drinks and the other the fire, and they talked about his work [...] and about whatever Fiona was reading and what they had been thinking during their close but separate day. This was their time of liveliest intimacy." Grant's memory of this nightly ritual suggests their enduring interest in each other's lives—a sign of a great marriage. In addition to remaining emotionally close, the two maintained regular "physical sweetness" throughout their marriage. While this "did not often end up in sex," it nonetheless "reassured them that sex was not over yet." Having spent decades in a marriage that was physically close and emotionally fulfilling, Grant struggles with Meadowlake's policy that he cannot visit Fiona for the first month, calling every day to check on her wellbeing. When he does visit her, he brings flowers. It's clear to readers that he cares for her deeply and misses having her at home. Overall, Grant consistently thinks of Fiona and treats her with conscientiousness and respect, complicating the simpler view of him as an immoral person who has been unfaithful. This offers Munro's first suggestion that fidelity is more complex than mere adherence to monogamy. Grant himself seems to share Munro's view that an unfaithful marriage can also be a loving one: while he understands that his infidelity could cost him his marriage, he feels that he can make up for this by expressing his love and loyalty in other ways. After a particularly messy end to an affair with a student, for instance, Grant chooses to give up philandering altogether. He understands that his old patterns were "getting to be more trouble than it was worth. And that might eventually have cost him Fiona." Fiona is clearly his priority, and the moment that their relationship could have been threatened, he ceases his extramarital affairs. He also stresses that, even when he was sleeping with other women, he never spent a night away from his wife and he never considered leaving her. While he never seems to regret his behavior or consider that he could have made different choices, Grant finds some absolution in his otherwise kind treatment of Fiona. He wonders, "would it have been better if he had done as others had done with their wives, and left her?" Since he cared for her emotionally, sexually, and financially, he believes that his deception about his infidelities was kinder than leaving her or telling her about his cheating. Grant thus sees loyalty in marriage as the fulfillment of marital duties—financial, physical, and emotional. Perhaps this is an elaborate justification of his deception, but it does seem that they both have found their marriage fulfilling. The story's ending—however ethically and emotionally complex—seems to affirm Fiona and Grant's love and loyalty, cementing Munro's depiction of infidelity as a relatively insignificant transgression in a devoted marriage. At the story's end, Aubrey has left the facility and Fiona's health begins to rapidly decline in response. While Grant has always felt uncomfortable with Fiona's relationship with Aubrey, he shows himself to be selflessly devoted to his wife when he swallows his pride and tries to talk Marian into bringing Aubrey to visit Fiona. While Fiona and Aubrey's relationship is different from Grant's infidelity (since Fiona seems to lack awareness that she has a husband in the first place, her behavior isn't self-consciously unfaithful), Grant seems to acknowledge that, just as he fulfilled his own desires outside of his marriage for many years, it's important for him to help his wife fulfill hers. This adds a new symmetry to their behavior (even if their behavior is not morally equivalent), and shows how much Grant cares. Grant's ensuing affair with Marian also, paradoxically, shows how much he loves his wife. After Marian refuses to bring Aubrey to visit Fiona, but then invites Grant to a singles dance, Grant decides to go. He doesn't seem particularly drawn to Marian (whom he seems to find depressing and uptight), but his implicit affair with her allows him to care for Fiona—at the end of the story, he is able to bring Aubrey to visit her at last. The great irony of the story's ending is that, after the lengths to which Grant went to bring Aubrey to Fiona, Fiona seems to forget Aubrey altogether, just as she seemed to forget Grant when she first moved to the facility. However, in this final scene, Fiona does recognize Grant, even as she treats Aubrey like a stranger. This seems to affirm that, despite all the complications of Grant's affairs and Fiona's relationship with Aubrey, the two have always valued one another above everyone else. Their decades of kindness and devotion to one another are still the defining aspect of their marriage—not their various betrayals and failings. - Theme: Memory, Aging, and Identity. Description: Munro explores both aging and dementia throughout the story, and particularly the ways in which memories inform—or entirely create—one's identity. After Fiona enters Meadowlake and her recollection of her husband and even herself begin to dim, the story explores whether or not individuality can be retained as one forgets their own history. The story reveals a distinct loss of self as Fiona succumbs to dementia, yet by the end of the story Munro also demonstrates that some kernel of her identity survives. In this way, she rather paradoxically presents identity as both intimately linked to memory and divorced from it—as at once the culmination of a life's experiences a certain immutable fact of being.  Munro uses Fiona's shifting physical appearance to illustrate the change in her identity as her dementia—and thus loss of memory—worsens. When she first leaves her home with Grant for Meadowlake, for instance, Fiona wonders what she will wear at the facility. "I guess I'll be dressed up all the time," she says. "Or semi-dressed up. It'll be sort of like in a hotel." This suggests that she feels she will be in costume, in a sense no longer herself now that she's no longer in the place where she built her life with her husband. Munro also describes Fiona's outfit carefully, writing, "she put on her golden-brown, fur-collared ski jacket, over a white turtleneck sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim […] Her hair that was light as milkweed fluff […] and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done." This shows Fiona's personal sense of style and the care that she takes with her appearance—which, in turn, directly evokes her personal history by echoing that of her mother. Yet the next time Grant sees his wife—one month after her arrival at Meadowlake—the first thing he notices is her weight gain. "She looked a little puffy in the face, the flab on one cheek hiding the corner of her mouth in a way it hadn't done before," Munro writes. Having already established Fiona's outward appearance as a reflection of her inward character, this shift from her previous "trim" figure suggests the erosion of her identity as she falls deeper into her dementia. Even so, Munro's language here suggests that Fiona's true self hasn't been erased; instead it is "hiding." On another visit, Grant notices that Fiona wears "a silly wool hat and a jacket with swirls of black and purple, the sort of thing he had seen on local women at the supermarket," and that "they had cut her hair, too. They had cut away her angelic halo." When Grant asks, "why did they chop off your hair?" Fiona responds, "I never missed it." Her carefully crafted individual identity continues to disappear at Meadowlake. The fact that her hair—a connection to her former self and her mother—is gone is a particularly evocative image that suggests a sharp break with her history. Fiona's dementia thus results in the removal of the external indicators of her identity. Beyond losing her specific sense of self, dementia seems to rob Fiona of her individuality altogether. Fiona's caretakers patronize and infantilize the patients at Meadowlake, referring to residents as a collective "them" or "they." Munro uses this dialogue to demonstrate that Fiona's caretakers do not consider her an individual with personal tastes or preferences. Grant, for his part, assumes Fiona has different clothes because "they didn't bother to sort out the wardrobes of the women who were roughly the same size and counted on the women not to recognize their own clothes anyway." When Grant first takes Fiona to Meadowlake, the supervisor dismissively tells him "we find that if they're left on their own the first month they usually end up happy as clams." The nurse Kristy later explains Fiona and Aubrey's relationship to Grant in a similarly infantilizing manner, saying, "they get these attachments. That takes over for a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It's kind of a phase." Kristy is also unfazed by Fiona and Aubrey's sorrow at Aubrey leaving Meadowlake. "They have to get over these things on their own. They've got short memories, usually. That's not always so bad," Kristy says, dismissing the emotional realities of the elderly with dementia specifically because of their inability to remember things. Together, these details continue to suggest the erosion of personal identity and subsequent autonomy that occurs via the loss of memory. When Grant visits Aubrey's wife, Marian, however, he begins to notice that aging individuals can still retain a sense of who they are. By the end of the story, he is able to apply this realization to Fiona, and recognize that she retains some aspects of individuality despite her dementia. For Grant, this is still expressed through the language of personal appearance. When he visits Marian, he internally critiques her outwards signs of aging while reflecting, "Very few kept their beauty whole, though shadowy, as Fiona had done." Grant then realizes, however, that perhaps he only thinks this way about Fiona because he had known her when she was young; in other words, his vision of Fiona is invariably shaped by his own memories of the girl he fell in love with, which in a way preserve Fiona's identity for her. This revelation appears to make Grant more able to see Marian as an individual, rather than the aging woman he critically assessed when they first met; when he decides to return Marian's call inviting him to a singles dance, he thinks of her breasts and her "gemstone eyes," preserving a sense of the youthful identity of the "small-town flirt" that he sees in her. Similarly, at the end of the story Grant notes that Fiona is wearing a "seasonable but oddly short and bright dress." The ambivalence of this judgment, as opposed to the negativity and shock expressed about her appearance earlier in the story, indicates that he has become adjusted to her changed persona. Fiona seems to have settled as well; she is aware that the dress is not hers, saying, "I never wear yellow." Though much of Fiona has been lost, the story ends on a mildly hopeful note that an individual's identity can be saved via the memories of those who love them. - Theme: Gender and Power. Description: While Grant is presented in the role of the dutiful husband throughout the story—he takes Fiona to Meadowlake, frequently visits her, and brings her gifts—he still adheres to stereotypical gender norms of the mid-twentieth century setting of the story. Contrasted with Aubrey's wife Marian, for example, Grant never considers caring for Fiona at home; he turns the messy daily aspects of her care over to a facility and visits her with gifts such as expensive flowers that "make him look like the guilty husband in a cartoon," perhaps reflective of his aversion of typically feminine domestic duties. Grant is often misogynistic in his internal thoughts as well. Munro illustrates how Grant's actions are structured by his expectations of gender norms in order to highlight the limitations of these norms, implicitly suggesting that they lead to a harmful imbalance of power in relationships. Grant repeatedly makes observations that indicate his callous treatment of women. When the roommate of a girl with whom he had an affair writes him a letter referring to the girl's suicide attempt, he calls it "threatening in a whining way," unwilling to grant his former lover emotional maturity or depth. Such an attitude is reflective of sexist tropes that women are silly or vapid, in contrast to serious men. Indeed, Grant left his position after this incident, seeing himself as "pushed out" by a group he derogatorily refers to as "the feminists […] and the sad silly girl herself and his cowardly so-called friends." Despite this situation, he congratulates himself for his treatment of these women, thinking, "many times he had catered to a woman's pride, to her fragility […] all so that he could now find himself accused of wounding and exploiting and destroyed self-esteem." Again, his language expresses a distinctly sexist view of women as inherently fragile and needy. Similarly, when his and Jacqui Adams's affair ends, he notes that she "began to shake uncontrollably," remarking coldly, "it was a if she had hypothermia. When she writes to him, he critiques her tone as "overwrought" and does not respond, instead becoming "magically and unexpectedly involved with a girl who was young enough to be Jacqui's daughter." Grant is openly enchanted by his ability to sleep with younger women, and with the fact that these "young girls" do not require "the tender intimations of feeling" he needed to use with Jacqui. Grant relies on sexist tropes to dismiss the feelings of the women he sleeps with, in turn granting himself permission to use them as a vehicle for his own desires. Even though he sees Fiona as different from these women, his treatment of her is similarly shaped by his sexism. At the beginning of the story, Fiona asks about the Russian wolfhounds she adopted and "devoted herself to for the rest of their lives." While these dogs were clearly significant to Fiona, Grant cannot remember whether they got them after Fiona's mother's death or after finding out that she could not have children. Grant remembers this information flippantly, thinking, "something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus." He also downplays his affairs, thinking that he does not need to call himself a philanderer, "he who had not had half as many conquests as the man who had reproached him in his dream." Fiona, he acknowledges, was "quite willing" not to participate in the rampant affairs taking place in his academic setting. This does not, however, prevent Grant from participating. Grant's neglect of Fiona's wish to remain outside of the sexual escapades of their social group is part of his larger disrespect for her desires in favor of his own. In dismissing women's emotional interiority, Grant implicitly denies them their full humanity. This is further reflected by his almost pathological objectification of the women he meets. When women begin attending the university at which he teaches, Grant looks down upon their academic interests, telling some, "If you want to learn a pretty language go and learn Spanish. Then you can use it if you go to Mexico." He describes the interest he incites in these women in objectifying, sexual language, referring to "the great surprising bloom of their mature female compliance, their tremulous hope of approval." He sees every woman through a sexualized lens—describing Kristy, one of the nurses at Meadowlake, as having beautiful hair, for instance: "all the puffed-up luxury of a cocktail waitress's style, or a stripper's, on top of such a workaday face and body." He assesses Marian in a similar way upon first seeing her, commenting that she should not attempt to flatter her waist considering her weight, then later admiring her breasts. He continues to use objectifying language in his assessment of Marian, thinking, "the fussy way she had of shifting her buttocks on the kitchen chair, her pursed mouth […] that was what was left of the more or less innocent vulgarity of a small-town flirt." Grant is not attracted to Marian until she pursues him, which reminds him flatteringly of his past affairs. Still, he has to fantasize about her cleavage to maintain interest in returning her call. The story suggests the Grant's behavior is all based in the same regressive gender ideals, which seemingly allow him to dismiss women's feelings and internal lives. In turn, he can better objectify them and maintain his sense of masculine dominance. By the end of the story, Munro demonstrates that Grant is representative of a certain viewpoint, common for the time period of the story, which relies on misogyny to structure one's understanding of the world. In Grant's case, this misogyny actively inhibits his ability to care for the woman he loves because he refuses to undertake typically feminine duties of both emotional support and nursing, as he does not consider looking after her at home in the way Marian does for Aubrey. Without ever explicitly condemning Grant, the story thus offers an implicit critique of the limiting nature of strict, stereotypical masculinity and misogyny. - Theme: Class, Practicality, and Humor. Description: Munro contrasts Grant and Fiona's whimsy with Aubrey and Marian's practicality. Grant and Fiona, for example, have intellectual discussions over dinner, which they prepare together every night in the simple and colorful rooms of Fiona's design. Marian, on the other hand, has painstakingly filled her house with cheap design elements like drapes. Their approach to caring for their spouses is also different, as Grant predominately thinks about Fiona's (or his own) emotional state, while Marian focuses on her and Aubrey's financial realities. The encounter between Grant and Marian ultimately presents unthinking whimsy as a form of elitism; people like Grant and Fiona can behave as they do only because they are of a certain class and lack immediate financial or practical concerns that worry people like Marian. Munro's portrayal of both couples highlights how a sense of carefree spontaneity may be more a marker of social status than any innate personal quality. Grant sees Fiona's humor as the cornerstone of her personality. When he first describes Fiona's younger years, he says, "sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics." Fiona "made fun" of the men courting her, "and of Grant as well." Fiona's tendency to joke even frames Grant's memory of their engagement: when she proposed to him, Grant "thought maybe she was joking." Grant also directly contrasts Fiona with Marian (and the other women with whom he has affairs). He dreams that, when Fiona learns of the letter written by the suicidal girl, she says, "oh phooey [...] girls that age are always going around talking about how they'll kill themselves"; he later recalls that Fiona's reaction in reality (he really did receive such a letter) was not all the different from "what she said in the dream." Grant also describes Jacqui Adams, his first lover, as "the opposite of Fiona-short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony." Grant clearly bristles at serious emotions and admires his wife's ability to greet such issues with flippancy. Indeed, when visiting Marian and Aubrey's house, Grant notes "two layers of front-window curtains, both blue, one sheer and one silky." He remembers that "Fiona had a word for those sort of swooping curtains-she said it like a joke, though the women she'd pick it up from used it seriously." Fiona's nonchalance makes her superior to other women in Grant's eyes, because she doesn't take the mundanities of life seriously. Yet Munro makes clear that such an attitude is the byproduct of Fiona's financial security, which removes more pressing concerns from her life. Humor, the story suggests, is a privilege. This privilege is further evident in the fact that Grant secures his first job at a university through Fiona's father's money, and is able to take early retirement when Fiona inherits her father's property. Having never faced serious concerns about money, Grant subsequently assumes that Marian had been acting on principle when she reveals that she never considering permanently leaving Aubrey at Meadowlake. Marian is quick to correct him, outlining her situation: "I don't have the money to put him in there unless I sell the house […] next year I'll have his pension and my pension, but even so I couldn't afford to keep him there and hang on to the house." Grant finds this conversation familiar and "depressing"—it reminds him of his family and Grant's own mother, who thought about "money first." He assumes that Marian would see him as "a silly person, full of boring knowledge and protected by some fluke from the truth about life." Through this assessment, Grant acknowledges that he married into money but dismisses it as a "fluke." After this conversation he thinks that "being up against a person like that"—what he calls a "practical" person—"made him feeling hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate" because of how easily he realizes it could have been his life, if he had not married Fiona. When he decides to return Marian's call inviting him to a singles dance, he has decided that he feels an affection for Marian's "high-gloss exactness and practicality." Grant's secret, Munro reveals, is thus the fact that he sees himself as one of the "practical people," more akin to Aubrey and Marian than to the upper-class Fiona. He fears that he was picked up on "one of Fiona's eccentric whims." While he strives to be like her and her wealthy family, Munro shows, he may nevertheless identify more with lower middle-class financial practicality. On another level, this suggests that illness and aging are the great equalizers; that they affect everyone, regardless of class or social stature, and as such help Grant come down to earth, as it were. Having been faced with something very serious—something that no amount of flippancy can fix—he can perhaps better appreciate the beauty of practicality. - Climax: - Summary: Grant, a retired university professor, is taking his wife of several decades, Fiona, to a residential facility for individuals with dementia. Fiona's memory has degenerated significantly over the past year. While preparing to leave, Grant remembers when Fiona proposed to him as a young woman, asking if he thought if would be fun if they got married; at the time he'd thought she was joking for a moment. The facility, Meadowlake, has a policy that new residents cannot have visitors for one month after their arrival, in order to help them settle in. Grant anxiously awaits the end of this period, checking on Fiona via daily with phone calls to a nurse, Kristy, who keeps him updated. He learns that Fiona catches a cold—as many residents do, Kristy says, like kids starting school—but soon gets better and starts to make friends. To pass the time, Grant skis and prepares dinners alone, remembering how he and Fiona had shared this ritual in the past. One night, he dreams about showing a letter to a colleague from the roommate of a girl with whom he had an affair, informing him that she had tried to kill herself after he ended the relationship. Despite this colleague having a history of dalliances with students, in the dream he reacts sternly to Grant's news. When Grant wakes up, he goes over the dream and sorts out what really happened: the affair and the letter were real, though the conversation with the colleague was not; in reality, Fiona had had a dismissive reaction towards the girl's pain (though Grant never actually confessed that he had slept with the student). Grant bitterly recollects how he was socially ostracized by his fellow professors after this incident, leading him to promise Fiona a new life and take early retirement so the two could move to Fiona's father's farmhouse. Grant then considers his life as a philanderer, though he objects to this label. He thinks of other colleagues who had more frequent affairs, and gives credit to the emotional labor he sees himself as performing for his lovers. He rhetorically asks whether it would have been better for him to leave Fiona, stating that he continued to be a supportive husband to her both emotionally and financially. He acknowledges, however, that his early retirement and their move to the countryside was nevertheless a product of his dalliances. Grant feels some gratitude for the fact that he was forced out of his philandering, acknowledging that it was just in time to prevent the more serious ramification of him losing Fiona. Grant reaches the end of the month and prepares for his first visit to Fiona. That morning, he experiences a feeling of anticipation that he finds similar to the beginning of a new affair. On the way, he buys an expensive bouquet of flowers, ostentatious enough that the nurse, Kristy, remarks on them when he arrives. She directs Grant to Fiona's room, but Fiona isn't there. Unsurprised, Kristy shows him to the communal area, where Grant sees Fiona. Her face looks different to him, and he remarks that she has gained weight. Her long hair has also been cut, though she doesn't seem to mind. Fiona is sitting a table with a man playing bridge. When Grant approaches, she speaks to him in a friendly but distracted way, clearly eager to return to the side of the man with whom she is sitting, Aubrey. Aubrey is living at Meadowlake temporarily while his wife is on vacation. Grant asks Kristy about their relationship, and Kristy dismisses it, explaining that new residents often form such close attachments. During subsequent visits, Fiona continues to treat Grant with a distant politeness, while growing closer with Aubrey. The two frequently play cards, sit in the conservatory, or walk the halls together. Grant reflects on a turning point in his career teaching Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature, when married women started going back to school to "enrich their lives." One of these women, Jacqui Adams, was his first lover. The two were together for a year before she moved, and Grant dismissed her easily; by this point, he remembers, younger girls were also starting to attend university and were available for sex. Grant recollects how this demographic shift created drama in the university, with scandals leading to dismissals or some professors moving to more liberal universities. While Fiona was disinterested in this social scene, Grant remembers, it lead to him feeling a "gigantic increase in well-being." The next time Grant returns to Meadowlake, Fiona and Aubrey are distraught. Aubrey's wife has returned from her extended vacation in Florida and is removing him from the home. While Kristy assures Grant that Fiona will get over Aubrey's departure, Fiona does not. She stops eating and refuses to get out of bed. The nurses begin to talk about Fiona using a walker or moving to a more intensive care section of the facility. This inspires Grant to drive to visit Aubrey's wife, Marian, to discuss the situation. Marian invites him in, and the two discuss their respective marriages and caretaking roles. Grant asks why Marian does not put Aubrey in Meadowlake full time, assuming that she is doing it out of a sense of nobility. Marian quickly corrects him, laying out the way in which tending to Aubrey at home is the more responsible financial decision for their family. Marian rejects his idea of the visit, but when Grant returns home, he finds she has left him two voicemails inviting him to a singles dance. Grant is intrigued by the nerves in her voice, wondering what changed after he left that inspired her to reach out. He wonders if spending time with Marian would result a change of heart regarding visits between Aubrey and Fiona. Marian calls again, and he listens to the next voicemail, in which she asks if he had called her back as she had missed it. He decides to call her back. After some time has passed, Grant visits Fiona at Meadowlake. He has brought Aubrey, but Fiona does not remember who Aubrey is. She does, however, remember Grant, and thanks him for not abandoning her at Meadowlake. Grant responds that he would never have left her.

- Genre: Novella - Title: The Beast in the Jungle - Point of view: Third person - Setting: London - Character: John Marcher. Description: John Marcher is a seemingly ordinary member of the British upper class and a close friend of May Bartram. But while Marcher appears polite and unremarkable, he has a secret: he believes he's destined for a life-altering fate, which he refers to as a "crouching beast in the jungle" of his life. As a result, he avoids connecting with anyone around him and believes this makes him selfless, since he's trying not to "burden" anyone with his secret. But at the start of the novella, Marcher learns that about ten years earlier, he told May Bartram (then a stranger) his secret, though he can't remember doing so now. For all his claims to selflessness, Marcher is happy that May knows about his "beast" and has agreed to wait for its approach with him. As the years go by and their friendship continues, he has to remind himself that she's an individual with a life of her own. In fact, Marcher often acts selfishly around May. For instance, he won't marry May, likely out of a fear that he'll someday lose her, despite the fact that marriage would normalize their relationship in society's eyes. Even Marcher's fear of losing May is selfish, as he values her mostly because she validates his fate, even claiming that he's courageous for living with it. And when May tells Marcher that she's dying, Marcher is grieved not solely because May will suffer but because she won't be around to witness his fate. Worse, Marcher fears that his fate isn't coming at all, which he would consider a failure—he'd rather have an awful fate than no fate. However, Marcher later discovers that May knows what his fate is and that it's already happened without Marcher's knowledge. After May's death, Marcher encounters a mourner at the cemetery whose passionate grief causes him to realize that his fate was to never experience any passion, specifically love. He also realizes that May loved him, and that the "beast" emerged when he failed to reciprocate her feelings. In the end, Marcher is disturbed by his fate but not fundamentally altered: when he tries to feel the pain of his loss, he can't fully do so, since he's spent so long repressing his feelings and isolating himself. - Character: May Bartram. Description: May Bartram begins the novella as a dependent in her great-aunt's estate and later becomes a close friend of John Marcher. Ten years before the start of the novella, when Marcher and May were strangers to one another, they had met in Italy and Marcher had told her his secret, something that no one else knows: Marcher believes that he's destined for a rare, life-altering fate, which he refers to as an approaching "beast." When May and Marcher reunite, May agrees to wait for Marcher's fate alongside him, and she's able to effectively do so after her great-aunt dies and leaves her enough money to purchase her own London home. Though May's interest in Marcher's fate benefits Marcher, since May lessens Marcher's self-imposed isolation and takes him seriously, May is genuinely interested and invested in the "beast," and she and Marcher often speculate about what it will end up being. In fact, May is so invested that she often puts Marcher's needs above her own; she's the topic of society gossip due to the fact that she and Marcher are unmarried, but her primary concern is making Marcher appear normal. However, May has secrets of her own, and near the end of the novella, Marcher suspects that May knows what his fate will be and is hiding it from him. May eventually learns that she'll soon die of a blood disorder, but before she dies, she allows Marcher to guess at what his fate will be. When he can't do so, she grows cold and distant and tells him that his fate has already come to pass. As a final act of kindness to Marcher, she forbids him from trying to find out what his fate was, since he never has to know. After May dies, Marcher realizes both that May loved him and that his fate was to die without experiencing anything, including love. May was trying to bear the burden of Marcher's fate alone, proving her selflessness and devotion to her friend, but she ultimately didn't succeed. - Character: The Mourner. Description: After May Bartram dies, John Marcher habitually visits her grave and one day encounters a strange mourner at the cemetery, who is grieving for some unknown person. Marcher and the mourner, a middle-aged man, make eye contact with one another, and the mourner visibly demonstrates his deep grief to Marcher with a glance. It's not clear why he does so, though Marcher speculates that the mourner might have previously seen Marcher at the cemetery and either wants sympathy or wants to prove that his own grief is deeper than Marcher's. This short moment of contact and connection makes Marcher envious, as he realizes that he never felt as passionate about anyone as the mourner clearly feels about his lost loved one. Marcher then realizes that his fate—which he spent the novella stressing about—is to live a life without love or passion. The mourner therefore hints at the kind of emotional and fulfilled person Marcher could have been if he hadn't spent his life repressing his emotions and anticipating a distant fate. - Theme: Fate and Failure. Description: In The Beast in the Jungle, protagonist John Marcher believes he's destined for a mysterious fate that will alter his life—though he isn't sure exactly what will happen, or if this fate will be positive or negative. While he keeps his belief in his fate a secret, he later remembers that, years earlier, he told a woman named May Bartram about it. After Marcher reconnects with May at a luncheon, the two of them spend years waiting for his fate together—but as the years go on without incident, Marcher begins to worry that there is no "beast" at all. If there is no fate awaiting him, he believes it would mean that he'd failed, since he centered his life around a fate that wasn't coming. But May eventually dies, and Marcher realizes that he did have a fate: to live a life without passion or love—May loved Marcher, but Marcher didn't let himself grow close to anyone because of his belief in the "beast." With this tragic realization, the novella suggests that it's better to live a quiet, happy, and fulfilled life than to waste time anticipating some great fate. The only real failure is an unlived life. In the beginning of the novella, Marcher believes that something incredibly important is fated to happen to him, so he allows anticipation to rule his life. Most notably, Marcher's anticipation of his fate makes him emotionally detached from other people. Although he has a social life and a government job, he goes through life mimicking acceptable human behavior instead of being himself or feeling his emotions, all in an effort to keep his fate a secret from others. While Marcher doesn't think his fate will be a great achievement, he still believes that having a rare fate makes him unique, and he derides the "stupid[ity]" of others around him. Because Marcher secretly feels that others are inferior to him, he takes extra care to have good manners and act politely in society. His belief in his fate therefore limits his ability to connect with others and ensures that he's always putting on a false image in public. Eventually, Marcher is able to connect with May, since he told her his secret in Naples 10 years ago (an encounter he later forgot). However, because he believes that his fate is meant for him alone, he dismisses the possibility of marrying May, even though he enjoys her company and feels that she alone can understand him. Because Marcher doesn't want to involve a woman in his fate—both because a woman could get hurt and because his fate is meant to be a solitary adventure—Marcher avoids taking the logical next step in his relationship with May and marrying her, all because he believes that the "beast" is waiting in the wings. Years later, after Marcher learns that May will soon die of a blood disorder, he worries that there's no great fate for her to witness after all—and that as a result, Marcher's life is a failure. Marcher would actually prefer an awful fate to no fate at all: he would be fine with going bankrupt or even being hanged, because at least these fates would mean that he didn't waste his life believing in a "beast" that doesn't exist. In fact, Marcher wants a fate that's proportional to the years he spent anticipating it—so a truly gruesome fate would seem fitting. For Marcher, a simple, quiet life without a huge catastrophe would be a failure. Worse, Marcher worries that if there is no "beast," May will have been waiting for his fate with him for no reason. May has devoted most of her time to discussing Marcher's fate and dealing with society's comments about her odd relationship with Marcher, since the two of them are unmarried and yet spend most of their time together. Marcher worries that their relationship won't have meant anything if there's no huge event for May to witness before her death. In other words, he worries that his life will be a failure both because there might not be a "beast" and because his and May's relationship (which centered around the "beast") may not have meant anything. But at the end of the novella, Marcher realizes that waiting for his fate was his fate. If he failed in life, he failed not because there was no beast, but because he allowed the beast to prevent him from living his life to the fullest. Before May died, she told Marcher that she knew what his fate was and that his fate had already occurred. Later, Marcher realizes that she was referring to the fact that nothing had ever happened or would ever happen to him. He spent his whole life waiting for his "doom," but his doom ended up being the act of anticipation itself, since that anticipation kept him from connecting with others or doing anything memorable.  Marcher's anticipation of his fate also prevented him from deepening his connection with May. When Marcher thought there was no beast, he worried that May never benefitted from their relationship. But after May dies, Marcher realizes that the reason she never benefitted is that he never chose to love her—he was too focused on himself. He also realizes that she loved him and tried to save him from his fate by hinting at her romantic feelings. The "beast" emerged when he failed to grasp her hints, which would have led to a loving relationship. Marcher spent his life anticipating a great fate and then worrying that he'd be a failure if there was no fate. In this way, Marcher's fixation on his fate ultimately becomes his fate. Marcher believed that having no fate would mean that he failed in life, but his only failure was his inability to live a happy, fulfilled life with May. - Theme: Understanding and Connection. Description: John Marcher believes that he's unique, as he's convinced that he's fated to experience a life-altering event. Because he assumes that no one can understand him, he hides his authentic self in public. However, he eventually learns that he revealed his secret long ago to a woman named May Bartram. Marcher continues to believe in his own uniqueness, but he also likes that May knows his secret; in fact, he sometimes wishes that everyone could. Then, at the end of the novella, Marcher encounters a grieving man and, through him, recognizes his own repressed emotions. The two of them understand each other, which means that Marcher's experience hasn't been unique. Marcher's desire to be understood, and the fact that he was understood (both by May and by the man), ironically proves that his life wasn't unique at all. In fact, many human experiences are universal—and yearning for connection with others, as Marcher does, is a natural part of life. Before Marcher encounters May, he believes that no one can understand him. Because his fate is disturbing and potentially dangerous, he avoids sharing it with anyone, since knowing his fate would burden or endanger them. Marcher assumes that no one can understand his experience, so he keeps his feelings secret. Since Marcher is trying to avoid connecting with anyone, he has to avoid appearing as unique as he feels. He cultivates polite manners and wears a figurative "mask" in public, distancing himself from others by hiding his authentic self. Although Marcher thinks his life is unique, he has to hide any sign of uniqueness, which ensures that no one will get close enough to him to understand him. But it turns out that Marcher did want at least one person to understand him. After a run-in with May Bartram at her great-aunt's estate, Marcher learns that 10 years earlier, he told May about his fate. Interestingly, Marcher has no memory of telling her and can't explain why he did so, let alone why he forgot. The fact that he repressed this memory suggests that his divulgence was an unplanned impulse, one he maybe regretted. However, Marcher ends up enjoying the fact that May knows about his fate, which suggests that he does want someone to understand him. Marcher is able to be himself around May, and when he's with her, he feels "spared" from his lonely burden. Still, Marcher continues to believe that his experience is so unique that it has to be hidden. Part of the reason he appreciates May is that even though she knows the truth, she sees him from an outsider's perspective and can evaluate how effective his "mask" is. Even better, she affirms Marcher's uniqueness by taking his fate seriously and waiting for it alongside him. Later, readers learn that Marcher's impulse to tell May his secret may have revealed his innermost desire: even though he thinks outsiders can't understand him, he wishes that they could. As Marcher and May are guarding his secret, they still speak openly about Marcher's fate, assuming that no one can understand what they're saying. It's possible that Marcher believes his secret is best hidden in the open, but it's also possible that he subconsciously wishes someone would hear and understand his secret. Alternatively, he might speak openly to confirm his fear that no one can understand him, even if he wants them to. After May dies of a blood disorder, Marcher wishes that he could tell everyone the true nature of his friendship with May. Since he and May are unmarried, no one understands the depth of his grief. In fact, Marcher even considers telling everyone his secret. He ultimately doesn't, but his hesitation suggests that he wasn't content with having only May understand him—he wants to be understood by everyone, even though he doesn't think that's possible. Eventually, Marcher learns that his experience was never unique—both because he wanted to be understood by and connect with others (the same as anyone else would) and because he was understood. After May dies, Marcher realizes that she understood him better than he understood himself. May knew that Marcher's fate was to die without experiencing love, and she also knew that he was capable of loving her, an emotion that he'd repressed. Not only did May understand Marcher, but she shared at least part of his experience, since she waited for his fate alongside him. This means that Marcher's experience wasn't unique, and that May understood Marcher even better than he understood himself. While Marcher is mourning at May's grave, he encounters another mourner. With a glance, the mourner shows his grief to Marcher, possibly because he recognizes Marcher's sorrow and wants to prove that his is deeper. The encounter proves both that Marcher's desire to be understood is universal—the man wants a witness to his grief—and that Marcher can be understood, even by a stranger. The man recognizes that Marcher is grieving and might even recognize that Marcher never fully loved the woman he grieves, which is why the man wants to prove his devotion. Marcher's experience isn't unique, even if his fate is; the mourner understands Marcher instantly, and both Marcher and the mourner clearly crave connection with others. Marcher's desire for connection proves that he's just like everyone else. Wanting to connect with others is a common human experience—one that Marcher, May, and the mourner all share. Although Marcher's fate might be unique and unnatural, his trajectory throughout the novella is anything but: he believes that others can't understand him, he wants to be understood, and finally, he realizes that he is understood. Marcher believed strongly in his own uniqueness, but his innermost desires were standard, understandable, and even universal. - Theme: Love and Loss. Description: John Marcher has spent his whole life believing that he's fated for something significant. His friend May Bartram suggests that this fate could be love—she believes love is exciting and world-altering, just as Marcher believes that his fate will be. But May is secretly in love with Marcher, and throughout the novella, her love is quiet and selfless rather than dramatic and life-altering. Marcher, on the other hand, refuses to deepen his relationship with May or commit to her through marriage, seemingly because he's afraid of either of them getting hurt. Eventually, it's revealed that Marcher's fate is to never experience real love or passion. With this ending, the novella suggests that love isn't defined by wild passion, as May initially professes—instead, love means being vulnerable enough to care for someone and accept that losing them is inevitable. Meanwhile, a fear of being vulnerable can prevent a person from experiencing love at all. At first, Marcher and May have opposite ideas about love: May believes that love is meaningful enough to be Marcher's life-altering fate, while Marcher thinks that it's too mundane to be his fate. When Marcher tells May about his belief that he's fated for something great, May immediately assumes that his fate is love, because Marcher believes that his fate will change his life substantially. May thinks that love fits the bill, since it's a kind of "cataclysm." Marcher disagrees with May's assessment, since he believes that he's been in love before, and the experience was relatively dispassionate. It was fun and occasionally "miserable," but it wasn't earth-shattering, and it didn't change Marcher's life. Like May, Marcher believes he knows what love is, though his definition is the opposite of hers. However, the way May expresses her love for Marcher implies that the two of them are wrong about what love is. The novella suggests that being in love means supporting the other person and being vulnerable with them—the way May loves Marcher—which isn't what either one of them initially believes love is. Though May claims love is passionate and earth-shattering, she expresses her love for Marcher with quiet sacrifice. After she meets him, May gives up her relationships with others in order to support Marcher as he waits for his fate. May and Marcher are unmarried and yet spend most of their time together, which leads people to gossip about May. Marcher can escape this scrutiny, presumably because he's judged less harshly as a man, but May can never appear "ordinary" due to the odd nature of their relationship. Because May is invested in Marcher's fate and because—as readers later learn—she loves Marcher, May quietly accepts her alienation and maintains their unconventional relationship. Later, May realizes what Marcher's mysterious fate is and keeps it a secret from Marcher himself, even though it means she can never be happy. As Marcher later discovers, May deduces that Marcher's fate is to live without ever having experienced anything meaningful, specifically love. She chooses not to tell him this because it would make him unhappy, even though not telling him also makes her unhappy, since she loves Marcher and wants him to love her back. In the end, Marcher realizes that his own fear of loving selflessly and vulnerably is what fated him to miss out on experiencing love at all. Marcher's initial assumption that love is dull and dispassionate stems from his inability to allow himself to care for others—likely because he's afraid that he'll lose them. Before meeting May, Marcher never discussed his fate with others, and after he meets May, he never considers marrying her because that would mean bringing a woman into his (possibly violent) fate. Later, Marcher even wonders whether May's death is his fate. Marcher believes that his guardedness and self-imposed isolation is selfless, since no one has to be burdened with his fate. But his fixation on May's death suggests that the reason he avoids getting close to anyone—or loving them—is that he's afraid of losing the people he loves. Near the novella's end, Marcher learns that May will soon die of a blood disorder, and he's deeply grieved. However, he's selfishly upset because May will die without knowing Marcher's fate and because he'll have to live without May; he's less concerned with May's suffering. But after May dies, Marcher realizes that May loved Marcher "for himself" without any selfishness, and that she made quiet sacrifices for his benefit. Marcher realizes that his fate—the fate that May hid from him—was to live a life without love in it. For Marcher, real love would have been neither earth-shattering nor dispassionate. Instead, it would have meant bearing the burden of knowing and loving May, as she did for him, even though he'd eventually lose her. - Theme: Courage vs. Cowardice. Description: John Marcher believes that a great—and possibly violent—fate awaits him, and he refers to this fate as the "beast in the jungle." Because Marcher accepts his mysterious fate and stoically awaits it, he doesn't know whether or not he's afraid of it—and later, his friend May Bartram helps Marcher see that even if he is afraid, he's able to live with that fear, which is a kind of "courage." But although Marcher doesn't know what his fate is, his belief in it is familiar to him, and living with that belief is a passive and easy process. Eventually, Marcher learns that his fate was not something he ever prepared for: he's doomed to never experience real passion or emotion. By demonstrating that Marcher's stoic, preparative "courage" served no purpose, the novella suggests that real courage means facing the unknown, including unknown feelings. At first, both May and Marcher believe that Marcher is brave for stoically awaiting his fate, even though he might be afraid. Marcher initially doesn't know whether he's afraid of his fate or not, although May often asks him if he is. Marcher can never answer her; after all, he doesn't know what his fate is, which means he doesn't know what he would be afraid of. If he can't "name it," he can't identify his feelings about it. It's possible that he's afraid, but he awaits his fate without complaint. Later, May guesses that even if Marcher is afraid, he's learned to live with "danger" for so long that he's become "indifferent" to it. In other words, Marcher can easily ignore any fears about his fate because he's learned to stifle them and is even used to them. Marcher wonders whether this makes him a "man of courage," and May agrees that it might. Both Marcher and May believe that Marcher is courageous for waiting out his fate—even though he doesn't know what that fate is, doesn't know whether or not he should be afraid of it, and has only succeeded in stifling his feelings about it. In his later years, Marcher admits that he's afraid of not knowing his fate, since it might be "more monstrous" than he initially thought. While he has finally admitted his fear, he still thinks that this fear is something he can passively live with. In other words, imagining a "more monstrous" version of the fate he's already prepared for doesn't change how Marcher responds. Marcher is still anticipating and living with his fear, something he and May both consider courageous. However, because this fear is familiar to Marcher, Marcher can't be truly courageous, since his response to fear has been to passively accept it. Crucially, "the beast" is still an abstract hypothetical, and Marcher isn't actually facing anything. He has acclimated to his fate, but his courage hasn't been tested—both because he's comfortable with what he thinks his fate will be and because no actual beast has emerged. Eventually, Marcher and May both prove themselves to be cowardly, as they're unable to act on the things that truly frighten them. Most notably, May never tells Marcher that she loves him. It's possible that May doesn't want to interfere unnecessarily in Marcher's fate, since she secretly deduces that Marcher is doomed to never experience true passion or love. However, she does hint at her own feelings a handful of times, which means that she wants Marcher to know that she loves him—she just isn't willing to tell him directly, likely because she's afraid. In this instance, courage wouldn't mean stifling or acclimating to fear, but rather acting in spite of it. And in this way, May's choice to stifle and hide her feelings is a kind of cowardice. Similarly, Marcher never acts on any of his emotions or feelings because he's preparing to face his one big fear (the "beast"). This means that he never questions his own feelings toward May, possibly out of fear that he'll lose her—he worries that his fate could be violent, and because of this, he chooses not to bring a woman into his life. In the end, Marcher learns what May already knew: that his fate was actually to live a life without love. As such, he realizes that the only way to avoid that fate would have been to embark on a loving life with May. In the end, Marcher's "courage" was cowardice, since he never conquered his real fears and instead spent his life preparing to face the familiar unknown (the "beast") rather than the truly frightening unknown (love and emotion). Real courage—both for May and Marcher—would have meant diving into a relationship despite their fears. Instead, Marcher and May stifle those fears, and though Marcher believes that doing so is courageous, the novella suggests that it's cowardice to avoid fear altogether. - Climax: May Bartram hints at her love for John Marcher and he doesn't pick up on her hints. - Summary: John Marcher is visiting an estate with a group of friends. When he separates from the group, he runs into May Bartram. Marcher had recognized May earlier in the day, certain that he'd met her in the past. He can tell that she's a dependent in the house, maybe the owner's relative. Marcher and May end up alone in a room, where May tells him that they met in Naples 10 years ago. In Naples, Marcher told her something significant, which he now doesn't remember. To jog his memory, she asks him whether "it" has ever happened. Marcher is shocked: she's the only person he ever shared his secret with. Apparently, he told May that he's always felt destined for a rare fate. Marcher tells her that his fate hasn't happened yet. It won't be an achievement, but it will be life-altering. May wonders whether his fate is to fall in love, but Marcher has been in love, and it wasn't earth-shattering. He invites May to wait for his fate with him. She asks if he's afraid, and he doesn't know. She then agrees to wait with him. In the next year, May's great-aunt, with whom she was living, dies and leaves May enough money to buy a London home. This means that she and Marcher can spend time together. Marcher enjoys the fact that May knows his secret. He's always considered himself selfless, as he chose not to burden anyone with the knowledge of his fate. As a result, he's honed polite manners to blend in. Now, he's being selfish by spending time with May. Still, he maintains boundaries; even though he could marry her to normalize their relationship, he won't do so. His fate is his alone, a crouching "beast in the jungle" of his life, and a woman shouldn't be involved. At first, Marcher avoids discussing his fate with May. However, when he alludes to it, she responds eagerly, and he realizes that she might take his fate more seriously than he does. He thinks she likes him because he's unique, and because she alone knows why. Even better, she can view him from an outsider's perspective and evaluate how the figurative "mask" he wears in public is different from his authentic self. They grow old, and Marcher's fate becomes May's focus. But it turns out that she's also keeping secrets, even from Marcher, who doesn't notice. In society, the two of them speak openly about Marcher's fate, since everyone is too stupid to know what they're discussing. May often remarks that luckily, their relationship seems normal, as men like to spend time with "dull" women. Marcher agrees, but he wonders how May can appear normal to others, and he worries that he's selfish to involve her in his life. She asks if he's afraid of his fate now, and he says no. May thinks that if he is afraid, he's grown used to fear. Marcher wonders if this makes him brave, and May agrees that it might. Suddenly, Marcher realizes that May knows what his fate is and that she's afraid to tell him. She says that he'll never find out. The two move on from their conversation, and Marcher tries to be selfless with May by taking more of an interest in her life. One day, he again asks her what it is that makes her look normal, since she makes him look normal. She admits that society gossips about her, but her only concern is helping Marcher to blend in. Marcher begins to worry that he'll lose May someday—in fact, maybe losing her is his fate. Not long after, May tells Marcher that she has a blood disorder. He worries that she'll die before seeing his fate happen. He again wonders if watching May die will be his fate, even though this fate would be anticlimactic—in fact, he'd consider it a failure. He even worries that his fate isn't coming at all. This horrifies him; he'd rather have an awful fate than fail entirely. One day, Marcher goes to visit May and notes that she looks distant. He confronts her at last: she knows what his fate is. He's afraid of not knowing and afraid that she's abandoning him. She admits that she has an idea about what his fate is and that this fate would be the worst one she can imagine, but she hasn't abandoned him. In fact, she reassures him that he won't suffer. He's relieved, but when she remains tense, he wonders if he's right that no fate is coming at all. She assures him that his fate is coming. She walks toward him and waits expectantly, then backs away. She asks if he understands his fate now, but he doesn't. Claiming to feel ill, she sends him away. He asks her what happened, and she says he should be asking what was going to happen. May won't let Marcher visit her the next day. Eventually, she tells him that his fate has already happened, and he'll never know what it was. May begs him not to try to figure it out, and he wonders if she's dying because of his fate. May dies soon after. Marcher is frustrated that no one knows how important she was to him, since any explanation he could give about their relationship would mean revealing the beast. He toys with the idea of sharing his secret publicly, as his fate has passed, but he decides against it because he doesn't know what his fate was. May told him not to guess, but he decides to find out anyway. Marcher travels for a year, but he finds the world dull, since no one knows what he's been through and lost. He visits May's grave when he returns, reassured by the fact that May understood him. He no longer wonders what his fate was, and he visits May's grave often, as being there makes him feel alive. A year passes, and one day, Marcher encounters a mourner at the cemetery, grieving at another grave. The two men come face-to-face, and Marcher recognizes that the man is intentionally demonstrating his profound sorrow to Marcher. Maybe he wants sympathy or maybe he wants to prove that his grief is greater than Marcher's. Marcher wonders whom the man mourns so deeply, and he realizes that he's jealous—Marcher never felt that way about anyone. Suddenly, Marcher realizes that waiting for his fate was his fate. As a result, he was doomed to never experience anything at all, especially love. May had offered him a way out the day he confronted her, but he didn't understand her then. Now, he knows that the way to avoid his fate would have been to love May the way that she clearly loved him. The "beast" emerged when she walked up to him, expecting him to guess his fate, and he ignored her hints. Marcher tries to feel the full weight of his pain now, but he can't do so, which makes him realize how much damage he's done to himself by repressing his emotions. He imagines the beast jumping out at him, and he falls down onto the tomb.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Beautiful and Damned - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: New York City, 1913-1921 - Character: Anthony Patch. Description: The protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned. Anthony is the grandson of Adam Patch and the suitor and eventual husband of Gloria Gilbert. Many of the supporting characters in the novel, such as Richard Caramel and Maury Noble, are Anthony's former classmates from Harvard. Although Anthony lives the life of a socialite, treating club events and drinking as nearly a profession, he has difficulty making deep personal connections. For example, he considers Maury his best friend but falls out of touch with him for many years after marrying Gloria. Even in his marriage, Anthony frequently isolates himself from Gloria to the point that he pursues an unfulfilling extra-marital affair with Dorothy Raycroft. Anthony's tendency to isolate himself seems to be rooted in his lonely childhood, during which both his parents and his grandmother died. Anthony's aversion to risk fetters his development of any sort of career, which causes him to be financially over-reliant on the grandfather who raised him. Expecting from the age of 22 that he is soon to inherit Adam Patch's fortune, Anthony uses the majority of his income (earned through his mother's inheritance, not through any work he accomplishes) to furnish his lavish wardrobe and apartment. By the end of the novel, Anthony's extravagant spending and lack of work ethic have gotten him into deep financial trouble. Disinherited by his prohibitionist grandfather, Anthony copes with his distress by drinking to the point of dangerous alcohol dependency. Although the inheritance is finally reinstated, by the tragically young age of 33 Anthony has irreparably damaged his body and mind through his poor decisions, alcoholism, and unwillingness to exercise his talents. - Character: Gloria Gilbert. Description: Gloria meets Anthony Patch while she and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, are wintering at The Plaza in New York. The pair shortly begin dating, and within a few months they decide to marry one another. This marriage takes place much to the chagrin of Gloria's other suitors, especially the movie producer Joseph Bloeckman. Anthony initially finds himself attracted to Gloria because of the way she spends her days and nights out on the town on the dime of all these suitors. He admires that, in a sense, she is a professional beauty. In fact, Fitzgerald introduces Gloria to the novel shortly after interrupting the narrative with a dramatic scene that sets up the reincarnation of Beauty personified as a Jazz Age society girl like Gloria. Even if Gloria is not this specific society girl, she is at least an iteration of her, making her a copy of Beauty herself. Because Gloria's identity is so bound up with beauty, which is by nature ephemeral, she finds herself growing ever more anxious about her age. As opposed to Anthony, who worries about death, Gloria worries more about living without the bloom of youth. In addition to wanting her body to remain beautiful, she also insists on buying a country house and other objects to craft a beautiful image of her life with Anthony. No matter how much she buys, she is never satisfied. At 29, upon finally realizing that she is too old to be a starring actress and that she and Anthony have spent themselves into a corner, she imagines moving to Europe for a few years and then simply dying rather than finding a way to move through society on any quality other than beauty. In the final scene of the novel, Gloria is curiously absent from Anthony's side. Her disappearance from the novel recalls the scene of Beauty's Jazz Age reincarnation, in which Beauty was told that her time as a society girl would last fifteen years. At the time of the final scene, it has indeed been fifteen years since the reincarnation. Gloria is an embodiment of beauty that sweeps through Anthony's life and leaves him a ruin of his former self. - Character: Adam Patch. Description: Anthony's grandfather, who raised him after Anthony's parents died. Adam Patch fought for the Union in the Civil War and channeled his bitter energy in the wake of the war into making himself a Wall Street millionaire. After an attack of sclerosis at fifty-seven, he suddenly commits himself to combatting what he sees as the immoralities of society. These immoralities include "liquor, literature, vice art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres." When he discovers that not only is Anthony failing to build a career, but also that he has been using his allowance to host parties with large amounts of alcohol, Adam Patch disinherits his grandson. While he always seemed to recover from his grave illnesses, he finally dies almost immediately after rewriting his will. - Character: Joseph Bloeckman. Description: Gloria's most serious suitor besides Anthony. Bloeckman works in the film industry, and Gloria maintains tenuous connections to him after she is married, partly because she is interested in acting and partly because she knows it makes Anthony jealous. Anthony drunkenly tries to confront Bloeckman after Gloria finally auditions for one of his contacts and finds out she is too old to be a leading lady. The encounter ends with Bloeckman throwing Anthony out on the street. Although Bloeckman initially thinks that Gloria's choice of husband means he has lost to Anthony, this final encounter raises the question of who between them is the actual victor. - Character: Richard Caramel. Description: Attended Harvard along with Anthony Patch and Maury Noble. His friends also refer to him as Dick. Originally from Kansas City, he introduces his cousin Gloria Gilbert to Anthony and Maury when she and her parents visit New York for the winter. Dick shares his college friends' dream of becoming an author, but he has much more drive than either of them. He is sensitive to their disparaging comments about how he is always working on his novel, The Demon Lover. However, by the time they are all in their early thirties, he alone has made a name for himself as a novelist. - Character: Maury Noble. Description: Anthony Patch thinks of Maury as his best friend. They spend most of their time together drinking and making fun of their friend Richard Caramel for taking his work as a writer too seriously. For Maury, unlike Anthony, drinking the day away is a phase that he thinks of as a project he will eventually complete in favor of an actual career. Maury meets Richard's cousin Gloria Gilbert and becomes fixated on her before Anthony does, but his feeling that he is not suited to a fun love affair with a flapper prevents him from calling her. Once Anthony decides to marry Gloria, Maury becomes more and more absent from the narrative. He only appears again in the climactic sequence when Anthony must drunkenly beg him for money. His embarrassment to be seen speaking to Anthony suggests that their friendship, if it was ever real, has dissolved. - Character: Dorothy Raycroft. Description: The woman with whom Anthony has an affair while he is away training for the army. Much like his interest in Gloria, his initial obsession with Dorothy dissipates once they are involved with one another. She begins threatening suicide to keep his attention. The climax of the novel ends with Dorothy showing up at Anthony's New York apartment. He attempts to attack her with a chair but passes out. When he comes to, she is gone. - Character: Mrs. Gilbert. Description: Gloria's mother. When Anthony meets Mrs. Gilbert, he is struck by what seems to be a complacency that has developed out of decades of submission to her husband. She is most enthusiastic about Bilphism, a religion of Fitzgerald's creation that is concerned with the reincarnation of the soul. After Mrs. Gilbert dies, Gloria becomes ever more preoccupied with Bilphism. - Character: Shuttleworth. Description: Adam Patch's secretary, Shuttleworth replaces Anthony as the heir to the Wall Street tycoon's fortune. When Anthony and Gloria win their lawsuit to have the inheritance reinstated, Shuttleworth reportedly dies of suicide in a hotel room. This death echoes the death of Anthony's father, which he witnessed at age eleven, and is said to break Anthony's sanity. - Character: Tana. Description: Anthony and Gloria's Japanese servant at their country house. Given Fitzgerald's use of the novel to make social critiques, it is worth noting that Tana is one of the only people of color to speak in the novel. Fitzgerald writes the little dialogue he has as thickly accented and broken sentences. - Theme: Wealth and Waste. Description: In The Beautiful and Damned, Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert fall victim to their wealth. Born into a social class that promises unconditional financial security and the leisure to pursue fruitless projects, they conduct their lives with the expectation that their poor work ethic and imprudent financial decisions won't cost them wealth, respect, or happiness. However, when Anthony's disinheritance by his grandfather, Adam Patch, robs the couple of their financial security, they find themselves in a trap: having grown up rich, Anthony and Gloria lack the financial sense and work ethic that could repair their financial standing, leaving them to undertake an embarrassing lawsuit—one that loses them respect in their community—to restore their wealth. Fitzgerald sums up his message about wealth and ruin in the epigraph of his novel, "The victor belongs to the spoils." Anthony's total financial dependence on his grandfather makes him a financial "victor" among his peers during his youth. However, his early sense that he has won prosperity cripples his ability to develop financial independence, and he wastes the potential of his early head-start. Anthony goes to Harvard, uses his grandfather's money and mother's inheritance to travel abroad, and rents a luxurious apartment in New York on an allowance from the same sources. His privileged youth allows him to make potentially-valuable social connections with other Harvard-educated men, but since he knows that he has his allowance and inheritance to fall back upon, Anthony lacks the motivation and discipline to use his elite education or social connections. Instead of writing the book he hopes to publish, he spends his days drinking with his friend Maury, another lazy aspiring writer, and making fun of their friend Richard for working incessantly on his own novel. When Anthony's grandfather disinherits Anthony, however, Anthony has no job and no success as a writer upon which to fall back. He and Gloria have become accustomed to an expensive lifestyle that might be supported by an established career but that would be difficult to maintain on an entry-level wage. Even when Anthony attempts to work as a salesman, his drinking and lack of discipline quickly derail his success, and he only regains his stability through an immoral and embarrassingly public lawsuit against the man who inherited his grandfather's money. As Anthony and his friends move further into adulthood, their lives diverge tellingly. Anthony's descent into alcoholism and his failure as a writer contrasts with Richard's slow but steady literary success and Maury's gradual settling into a comfortable but unspectacular life. The growing contrast between Anthony and his friends emphasizes that it's Anthony's sense of entitlement that has derailed his life—after all, Richard worked hard for his success, and Maury (unlike Anthony) pulled himself out of the carousing phase of his life years ago in order to become a responsible adult. Anthony's entitlement leads him to lose the respect of his community—even strangers recognize Anthony as the infamous man who lost his mind and bodily integrity to alcoholism following the suicide of Shuttleworth, the secretary he sued for his grandfather's money—but importantly, Anthony's financial stability is restored through the lawsuit, allowing him and Gloria to live out their lives without knowing the utter ruin for which they seemed destined. Through this fate, Fitzgerald satirizes the society that allows this couple to skate by on dumb luck. The American class system endows them with spoils that hinder their development into responsible adulthood. Despite all the unhappiness they endure as a result, their victory in the lawsuit perpetuates the promise that young socialites can emerge victorious, despite wasting their potential and succumbing to foolishness and immorality. - Theme: Dreams and Reality. Description: The America Fitzgerald depicts in The Beautiful and Damned is obsessed with the dream of becoming wealthy. Those who are already wealthy dream of becoming wealthier, to the point of each standing out as the single millionaire tycoon in the crowd. Fitzgerald is uneasy about the way the wealthy, who have never had to work for anything, can so easily misread the possibility of greatness as the promise of greatness. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert exemplify the cycle of dissatisfaction created by society's normalization of constantly dreaming of a bigger and better life without making concrete plans to achieve it. Although Anthony and Gloria begin life near the top of the social ladder, they always desire more. These aspirations, however, always come at a cost. For example, Gloria tells Anthony that she envisions them living in a little gray country house, so they rent one, in addition to maintaining their apartment in the city. Though they know that they do not have the money to rent two homes, they nonetheless find themselves drunkenly renewing their second lease, placing themselves in financial jeopardy for a dream of country life that neither of them even seems to enjoy. This inability to temper desire in favor of practical reality is also apparent in Anthony and Gloria's drinking. The young couple wants to live in the thick of high society, but Anthony's grandfather, Adam Patch, has prohibitionist politics and his money is their main source of income. Despite knowing that Adam disapproves, Anthony and Gloria continue to rely on his money to host extravagant parties with copious amounts of alcohol, which leads the couple to the brink of financial ruin when Adam disinherits them. However, even after Anthony's grandfather revokes his money, Anthony and Gloria cannot conceive of a reality in which they must sacrifice any of the things they want. They continue to make extravagant purchases, banking on the hope that they will win a lawsuit for the inheritance money instead of reining in their lifestyle in accordance with their means. In addition to Anthony and Gloria's inability to make their desires match their means, they also are unable to understand that in order to achieve their ambitions, they must work hard and make sacrifices. Gloria wishes she were an actress. She hopes that by hanging on the arm of Joseph Bloeckman, a film producer, she will somehow become a movie star. Even after marrying Anthony, she continues to hope that she will achieve her dream by simple association with Bloeckman. but eight years pass before she finally attempts a screen test. Told that she is past the age of a young starlet, she gives up the dream rather than trying to realize it in a way other than how she had imagined. Likewise, aspiring writer Anthony is easily deterred when the few stories he submits for publication are rejected. Rather than rewriting them and working at improving his craft, he decides that he will have better luck as a salesman—that is, until salesmanship also fails to bring him instant success. At each of these moments, Anthony has an opportunity to use his talents and resources to build a career. However, because he sees the world as full of endless opportunity, he convinces himself that there must be an easier, more comfortable career available, if he could only stumble upon it. Consequently, he ends up with no career at all. By contrast, Richard Caramel writes daily from a young age, even through his early days of mediocre reception. His commitment to a plan, coupled with his understanding that he will not receive success as a handout, leads him to a respectable literary career that is getting underway just as Anthony and Gloria are most dejected about their own careers. Perhaps the most damning aspect of Anthony and Gloria's inability to match desire with reality is that even when they do attain what they want, they tire easily of it. They seem doomed never to enjoy or make use of the pleasures they seek, even as this pursuit ruins their lives. Immediately after their wedding, for example, Anthony and Gloria experience buyer's remorse with one another. Gloria finds Anthony cowardly for refusing to drive too fast, and Anthony finds Gloria flighty for neglecting domestic tasks like sending out the laundry. Their eagerness to attain each other as life partners without knowing one another better leads directly to their dissatisfaction in marriage. Similarly, while he's away from home for military training, Anthony fixes his attention on Dorothy as his mistress—but as soon as he forms an attachment with her, he can think only of Gloria. Dorothy's threats of suicide to maintain Anthony's attention demonstrate that after their initial encounter, his interest in her is only piqued by the idea that he might lose her. At the end of the novel another dream is achieved as Anthony and Gloria win their lawsuit. Gloria is initially gleeful, but Anthony appears alone in the final scene, physically crippled and perhaps mentally unstable. The couple does not appear to have used their newfound money to rebuild their life together. Rather, the money has funded Anthony's further spiral into alcoholism and isolation from his wife. The presence of characters such as Richard Caramel—who works hard and achieves his dream of becoming a successful writer—suggests that it is possible to navigate the society Fitzgerald is criticizing without falling prey to unrealistic expectations about dreams and reality. Still, the economic order in which Anthony and Gloria exist offers too many opportunities and too many shortcuts. If one dream fails, there is always another waiting to be taken. As a result, the couple doesn't learn from their mistakes. They remain convinced that true fulfillment of the American dream involves not a day of work, and contentment thus remains forever just out of their grasp. - Theme: Immaturity and Wisdom. Description: It is not until after Anthony Patch has reached financial ruin, cheated on his wife, and turned to alcoholism that he begins to understand the consequences of his irresponsible decision-making as a young man. By this time, he can no longer decide to save his money, remain a faithful husband, or drink responsibly, because the damage is already done. Similarly, Gloria Gilbert's naïve youth, which she already mourns at the young age of 22, leads her to reckless decisions she later regrets. The loss of youth brings both characters wisdom that would only have been useful when they were younger, a tragic irony that Fitzgerald underscores through the fact that Anthony and Gloria are only in their early 30s when they realize they have wasted their lives. Anthony and Gloria's particular inability to cope with adulthood is apparent in the lies and self-deceptions they advance about their age. Gloria, who often thinks about her impending birthdays, contradicts the narrator's initial assertion that her birthday is in August when she pushes her birthday back several months, reflecting that she "would be twenty-nine in February." Gloria and Anthony also find it incredibly insulting that Bloeckman's colleague, who conducts a screen test for Gloria, wants to cast her as a 30-year-old character when she is only 29. Following Gloria's mental gymnastics about the timing of her birthday, she may in fact be 30 after all. These petty deceptions betray Anthony and Gloria's desperation to deny even the slightest signifiers of aging, showing how central their immature desire to deny the realities of adulthood has become to their lives and psyches. Although most of the characters of the novel are young, many of them worry that time is slipping away from them. Rather than work toward goals, they stall for time in the hope that adult fulfillment will happen upon them. Soon after Anthony meets Gloria, she tells him that she does not want the responsibility of marriage or children. She says that she would like to be 18 from now on, instead of acknowledging her actual age of 22. Her request for a gum drop and her statement that, "I'm always whacking away at one – whenever my daddy's not around" suggests that by sneaking candy, she hopes to remain childlike instead of caring for her own children. Maury, too, is dismayed and befuddled by the onset of adulthood. He worries that he has not accomplished his intended goals in the intervening years since graduating from Harvard. Paralyzed by his anxiety, he spends his time discussing Dick's novel instead of rising to adulthood by working on his own writing projects. However, Maury's discomfort with his increasing age separates him from Anthony, who is unable to admit that, at 26, he should be making solid strides toward a career. Maury exits the party scene that Gloria and Anthony still inhabit, distancing himself from the youthful exploits of his friends and thereby managing to reappear later on as a composed and moderately successful man from whom a drunken Anthony must beg for money. Despite their attempts to convince themselves that they can remain forever young, Anthony and Gloria are relentlessly haunted by an unreasonable fear of death. In the direst of financial straits, Gloria tells Anthony that they should move to Italy for three years and then "just die." Her realization that their extravagant lifestyle is untenable without a steady income convinces her not that they should reduce their expenditures, but rather that their poor financial decisions have shortened their lives. Her misconception that old age has been thrust upon her ironically demonstrates that there is immaturity even in her wise realization that she and Anthony are in financial trouble. At the end of the novel, Gloria and Dick find Anthony on the bathroom floor, poring over his exotic stamp collection, which he started during childhood as a "diversion" from his worries about death. Dick's joking comment about whether Anthony is returning to childhood underscores both the absurdity and the tragedy of Anthony's preoccupation with this relic from his youth. He is so distracted by the feeling that death is near that he retreats into the past, and into his imagination of far-off places, rather than enjoying the present while he is alive. It is true that Anthony and Gloria make immature choices they cannot retract later in life. However, their preoccupation with lost time makes a self-fulfilling prophecy of their fear about premature aging. Once they realize that their lives are passing them by, they find themselves caught between nostalgia and mortality, with no room left for the adulthood that is supposed to fall between childhood and old age. - Theme: Beauty and Self-Sabotage. Description: As the title "The Beautiful and Damned" suggests, Fitzgerald takes a skeptical view of beauty. His critique of beauty follows the conventions of nineteenth-century realist authors, such as George Eliot and Gustave Flaubert, who criticized beauty for distracting from more important societal issues, like poverty. Published in 1922, The Beautiful and Damned integrates the realists' unease about beauty into a depiction of twentieth-century American high society. The socialites at the story's center become so preoccupied with the material beauty that governs the lives of Jazz-Age elites that they lose track of what it means to live moral, productive lives. By incorporating references to Plato's Symposium into the novel, Fitzgerald folds the philosophical discourse of beauty into his rendering of Anthony and Gloria's misadventures in high society. The Symposium, a classical work that has influenced many writers on the subjects of love and beauty, tells the tale of a dinner party among several great thinkers. Over the course of the evening, each thinker offers an opposing viewpoint on love and desire. Ultimately, Plato's text is ambivalent about the morals of loving beautiful objects. Fitzgerald structures his novel around this ambivalence, gradually moving from an optimistic to a pessimistic outlook on beauty. In the early days of marriage, Gloria tells Anthony uncertainly, "mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and – and in love before they're born." The idea that love is the divine reunion of two souls comes directly from Aristophanes' speech in The Symposium. Like the follow-up speeches in Plato's text, both Gloria's hesitation and the laugh with which Anthony responds undermine Gloria's suggestion that their attraction is divinely ordained. What's more, the central chapter of The Beautiful and Damned is entitled "Symposium." This chapter title not only references Plato's work, but also places it at the heart of Fitzgerald's novel. The uncertainty about beauty that characterizes The Symposium is thus central to the novel's philosophical arc. However, the ambivalence of the chapter "Symposium" contrasts with the more certainly pessimistic title of the novel as a whole. Gloria and Anthony's beauty, and their moneyed insulation from more practical concerns, "damns" them to yield to their attraction to each other and to the image of wealth. Their marriage grows ever-more unstable, both emotionally and financially, as they attempt to supplement the ugliness of their relationship with a second residence and other beautiful objects of excess. The insidiousness of beauty hinders the characters' ability to behave admirably, as both Anthony and Gloria conflate self-worth with their own ever-fading attractiveness instead of with moral goodness or societal contribution. Having failed to achieve fame as a young writer, Anthony reflects that marrying Gloria will make him feel young and more handsome than ever. However, youth and handsomeness cannot endure the way a marriage or a career must. Anthony fails to achieve a productive career or a successful marriage because he fundamentally misunderstands the moral commitment each requires. Gloria's concern for her personal beauty stunts her career, as well. Instead of pursuing her goal of acting, she spends her youth wishing she were even younger and flirting with the idea of what might have been had she married film producer Joseph Bloeckman. By the time she decides to audition for an acting role, she is already too old to play her dream role of leading lady. She begins obsessively using face creams in the hope that they will reverse the aging process, but her efforts are too little, too late. Though early on Anthony and Gloria imagine the possibility of children, Gloria comes to fear motherhood as a "menace to her beauty." Gloria's maternal ambivalence constitutes a bold statement in the context of early 20th-century America. The elite class, which allows ladies like Gloria to hold domestic roles rather than working, is diminishing in power. Gloria relishes her own beauty over motherhood, which many around her would consider not only the moral duty of all women, but also part of her social duty to conserve the American aristocracy. Her preoccupation with her beauty thus contributes to what Fitzgerald depicts as the downfall of her own social class. Gloria and Anthony's obsessive desire to be beautiful and to possess beautiful things is symptomatic of their elite position in society. Although they squander their wealth, they belong to a social class that promises them a life of beauty and leisure. The fact that they have not been conditioned to worry about more pressing issues, such as earning enough money to buy food or to pay for their education, leaves them vulnerable to the obsessiveness beauty can inspire in the onlooker. The America Fitzgerald depicts places such a premium on beauty that gifted young people spend their lives as narcissists and magpies, not only neglecting social realities, but also destroying much of what they touch. - Climax: Anthony's encounter with Dorothy in his apartment the day of the lawsuit's verdict - Summary: In 1913, Anthony Patch has accomplished very little besides graduating from Harvard. His grandfather, who raised him and who ensures Anthony's place in high society, has pressured Anthony into working on a book – or rather, into saying that he is working on a book. Anthony spends far more time dreading the writing process than actually writing. Much of this dread takes place in the tub of his luxurious bathroom, which he considers the "pride" of his apartment. Having lost both his parents at a young age, Anthony worries about death and the dangers of the outside world. The bathroom is a safe haven to which he often retreats. Anthony's former Harvard classmate Dick Caramel introduces Anthony to his cousin, Gloria Gilbert. Gloria is a society girl, spending her evenings out on the town and using her beauty to convince men to pay her way. Anthony is fascinated by her seeming ability to get by on nothing but her looks. Although it seems that a movie producer, Joseph Bloeckman, might be wooing her, Anthony strikes up a relationship with Gloria and soon discovers that she, like him, worries about her fleeting youth. He becomes obsessed with her. After a failed attempt to stay away from her, Anthony finally gives in to his desire and proposes to Gloria. She accepts immediately, rebuffing Bloeckman. Anthony begins to have second thoughts before he and Gloria even go through with the marriage. He realizes that his fixed income is already stretched thin financing his own extravagant lifestyle, and now he will need to fund Gloria's social exploits as well. He will also have to share his apartment, which he has come to consider his sanctuary. He pushes aside the anxiety, convincing himself that everything will work out somehow. One day, he expects, he is bound to stumble into riches and success, regardless of his work ethic or budgeting capabilities. Like the alcohol or expensive clothing Anthony is always buying, Gloria is a thing he wants and therefore takes. Anthony and Gloria begin to experience marital difficulties before even returning home from their honeymoon. Anthony's anxiety over death results in his overly-cautious driving, which Gloria finds cowardly. Meanwhile, Gloria neglects the domestic duties Anthony expects of her. At moments, they happily discuss their future and the children they might have, but these moments quickly sour. Back in New York, they continue to be disgruntled with one another. When Gloria wants a house in the country, Anthony gives in to renting one not because he wants the house but because he wants Gloria to stop asking for it. Because he does not want to give up his beloved city apartment, the house rental pushes their finances to the precipice. The couple's reaction to their financial uncertainty is not to take on work to supplement Anthony's fixed income, nor to downsize to one residence. Rather, they try to distract themselves from their predicament by throwing parties. The parties give the illusion that Anthony and Gloria are part of a thriving social network while in fact a rift is growing between the couple and their friends, many of whom are beginning to settle into careers. Everything comes crashing down when Anthony's grandfather, a strong proponent of prohibition shows up unannounced at the country house during one of the parties. Disgusted by Anthony's indulgence in alcohol, Adam Patch disinherits his grandson. When Adam Patch dies shortly thereafter, it is revealed that his secretary, Shuttleworth, has replaced Anthony as heir. Anthony and Gloria cannot conceive of a more moderate lifestyle and are soon sustaining themselves on cashed-in bonds. The dynamic of their marriage is frenetic, moving quickly back and forth between commiseration and irritation with one another. When Anthony goes south to an army training camp, they both feel a sense of freedom from one another. Anthony has an affair with Dorothy Raycroft while on the army base. Almost immediately after beginning the affair, however, he can only think of Gloria. The war ends before Anthony can be deployed (though he may never have been deployed anyway due to his poor performance as a soldier), and he returns to Gloria with a passion that soon settles back into its old, unhappy patterns. Gloria's discovery that she has waited too long to become an actress and is too old to play a leading lady is a devastating blow. Combined with Anthony's inability to hold a steady job or to get any short stories published for money, the sense of creeping age convinces Gloria that though she is only thirty years old, she has no future and may as well resign herself to dying. The only hope that sustains her and Anthony is that after enough appeals, perhaps their lawsuit to have Anthony's inheritance reinstated will eventually succeed. One night, after Gloria has melodramatically suggested that they move to Europe for three years and then "just die," Anthony begins naming people who might lend them more money. Bloeckman's name comes up, and Gloria tells Anthony that they can't borrow from Bloeckman because he set up the screen test at which she was told she looked too old to play a lead actress. Later that evening, Anthony gets drunk and pretends to have forgotten his wallet because he does not have the money to pay his bill. Stumbling through the street, he runs into his estranged best friend, Maury Noble. When even Maury does not allow him to ask for a loan, Anthony becomes agitated and decides to confront Bloeckman. He finds him at an elite club and gets in a fistfight with him. Eventually, Bloeckman throws him out on the street. A passerby puts him in a cab, but he is also thrown out of the cab because he has no money. Anthony stumbles home and reflects that he does not even feel drunk anymore, simply frenzied. Three weeks later, the final verdict of the lawsuit is to be announced. Gloria goes with Dick to hear it, but Anthony stays behind to await his salvation or total ruination. When the bell rings, he is astonished to see Dorothy, his mistress from the army training base. She has come to New York with the thought of seeing Anthony. Drunk as usual these days, Anthony becomes disoriented and riled up by Dorothy's sudden appearance. He tries to throw a chair at her and instead collapses, passing out. When Gloria and Dick return home with the exciting news that they have won the lawsuit and no longer have to worry about destitution, Anthony is lying incommunicative on the bathroom floor, poring over his childhood stamp collection. The final scene of the novel unfolds through the eyes of two onlookers who see Anthony alone on the dock of a ship. As they have heard it, Anthony's mind and body deteriorated following the suicide of Shuttleworth when the inheritance money was revoked from him. Anthony gets the last line, an exclamation that after a long fight with an adversary he names only as "they," he has finally been victorious.

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Beekeeper of Aleppo - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Aleppo, Syria; Turkey; Greece; England; 2015-2016 - Character: Nuri. Description: - Character: Afra. Description: - Character: Mustafa. Description: - Character: Sami. Description: - Character: Mohammed. Description: - Character: Hazim (The Moroccan Man). Description: - Character: Diomande. Description: - Character: Angeliki. Description: - Character: Lucy Fisher. Description: - Character: Nadim. Description: - Character: Mr. Fotakis. Description: - Character: The Landlady. Description: - Character: Dahab. Description: - Character: Firas. Description: - Character: Aya. Description: - Character: Nuri's Father. Description: - Theme: Home, Displacement, and the Refugee Experience. Description: - Theme: Grief, Memory, and Coping Mechanisms. Description: - Theme: Hope vs. Delusion. Description: - Theme: The Trauma of War. Description: - Theme: Dehumanization vs. Connection. Description: - Climax: Nuri realizes his mind created Mohammed as a way to fill the void Sami left behind. - Summary: The Beekeeper of Aleppo alternates between two timelines, a past and a present. The present timeline takes place in 2016 England, where Syrian refugees Nuri and Afra are staying at a bed and breakfast while attempting to claim asylum. The past timeline chronicles the years before, when civil war leads the couple to flee Syria and make the long cross-country journey to England. By switching frequently between these two timelines, the novel's non-linear structure intentionally withholds certain information from the reader to create suspense and mimic the disorienting nature of the characters' trauma. The novel begins in the present timeline, where Nuri confesses to the reader that he fears his wife Afra's eyes and the way she seems to be disappearing. Afra is blind, but her condition is recent; in Syria, she made a living as a prolific artist. While the cause of Afra's blindness is not explained at this time, it creates distance between her and Nuri, who can fully see the direness of their situation. Nuri and Afra stay at an English bed and breakfast with several other refugees, including Hazim (the Moroccan man) and Diomande, waiting to begin the process of claiming asylum in England. They meet with a social worker, Lucy Fisher, who processes their paperwork and helps them prepare for the all-important interviews with immigration. Even after their long journey to the United Kingdom, Nuri and Afra are in danger of being refused asylum and sent back to Syria. Nuri's initial flashbacks describe his life before the war as a beekeeper in the city of Aleppo. Mustafa, Nuri's cousin, teaches him about beekeeping, and together they run a successful business looking after their bees and selling honey-based products. Nuri loves his work. He and Afra have a young son, Sami, and the three of them take meals with Mustafa, his wife Dahab, and his children Firas and Aya. When the war begins, Mustafa, sensing trouble, sends Dahab and Aya to England. After vandals destroy the apiaries, Mustafa makes plans to leave Syria, but before he can do so, Firas is killed. Mustafa eventually flees to England, leaving a note for Nuri asking him to follow as soon as he can. Afra, grief-ridden after Sami's as-yet unexplained death, refuses to leave the country until soldiers threaten Nuri's life and ransack their house. In the present timeline, Nuri's days are structureless and transitory. He tries to set up a doctor's appointment for Afra for the pain behind her eyes, only to be told he does not have the proper paperwork. At this moment and others, his hands shake and he hears phantom planes and explosions that are not there. In the courtyard of the bed and breakfast, Nuri finds a flightless bee and begins to care for her with the Moroccan man's help. At night, Nuri's experiences become more surreal. He sees Mohammed, a young boy he met during his travels, in the downstairs courtyard. Mohammed tells Nuri he needs to find a key, and he turns to find trees full of them. There is a dreamlike quality to these visions, and though Nuri wakes in strange places after having them, it is not clear whether he is asleep or awake for their duration. As a result of Nuri's nighttime wanderings, the distance between him and Afra grows. Nuri's flashbacks to his journey from Syria to England are richly detailed. He and Afra escape Syria into Turkey. In a smuggler's apartment, he meets Mohammed, a young boy around Sami's age, who seems to be alone. Nuri takes the boy under his wing, comforting him during the harrowing sea crossing to Greece and pretending Mohammed is his son when interacting with local authorities. In a Greek camp, Nuri loses track of Mohammed and is forced to leave for Athens without him, a decision that haunts him for the rest of his travels. In Athens, Nuri and Afra stay in Pedion tou Areos, a public park surrounded by woods that has been turned into a sprawling refugee camp. There, they meet Angeliki, who tells them children are often stolen from the park for organs or sex. Angeliki's own baby was stolen from her, and her leaking breasts emphasize the newness of this loss. Nuri also interacts with Nadim, a talented musician from Afghanistan, though he eventually discovers Nadim is one of the men who take and exploit children from the park. When a mob beats Nadim to death, Nuri deals the fatal blow, and the guilt follows him to England. Throughout Nuri's travels, he exchanges emails with Mustafa, who has made it to England and is pursuing beekeeping once again, hoping Nuri will join him soon. Back in the present timeline, Afra finally sees a doctor. She tells him her blindness was caused by the bomb that killed Sami while he was playing in the garden. The doctor says Afra's eyes seem to be functioning normally, leading him to believe her blindness is her body's way of coping with the trauma of watching Sami die. Afra insists to the doctor that Nuri is also unwell, that he talks to people who are not there. Nuri protests, but the doctor is suspicious. Later, Lucy Fisher takes Nuri and Afra to their asylum interviews. The immigration officers ask Nuri strange questions that seem designed to catch him in a contradiction or otherwise make it difficult to claim he is in danger in his home country, and he worries he and Afra will be sent back to Syria. Nuri's final flashbacks detail his escape from Athens. To knock down the price of a trip to England, he agrees to make deliveries for a smuggler—Mr. Fotakis—for three weeks while he and Afra stay in the man's apartment. Nuri locks Afra in their room while he makes these deliveries, but on the last night, he forgets the key, and Mr. Fotakis—knowing Nuri and Afra can do nothing without jeopardizing their chance to leave Greece—rapes Afra. The guilt Nuri feels further drives a wedge between him and his wife. Back in England, Nuri returns Mustafa's latest email, telling him where he is but that he is unwell. He sees Mohammed again and follows him through a door that transports him back to Aleppo, where he submerges himself in the river. He wakes in England on a beach and then spends several days in the hospital. Speaking to Afra after his return, she reveals to Nuri that she does not know Mohammed, that the boy is a product of his own imagination. Nuri realizes this is true, that everything Mohammed did and said and feared were things that Sami did and said and feared. Nuri's grief over his son's death led him to create this other boy as a way to cope. That night, he apologizes to Afra and the two of them reminisce about Sami, beginning the long process of healing their shared grief at last. The next morning, Mustafa arrives at the bed and breakfast, and Nuri breaks down. Both men are older and have experienced so much loss and trauma, but Mustafa hopes that Nuri will come help with his new bee colonies and begin to rebuild. Afra's sight is slowly returning, enough for her to see three non-native birds take flight from the tree in the courtyard, and this final image represents the hope of finding a new home.

- Genre: Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) - Title: The Bell Jar - Point of view: First person - Setting: New York City; greater Boston area - Character: Esther Greenwood. Description: An honors student, frequent prizewinner, and talented poet, Esther Greenwood develops serious mental illness while working in New York one summer and, after attempting suicide, spends the next half year gradually working her way back to health with the help of multiple psychiatrists. Esther emerges from her illness wiser and more independent but also more skeptical of the boundary between sanity and insanity. - Theme: Mind vs. Body. Description: At its essence, The Bell Jar is an exploration of the divide between mind and body. This exploration unfolds most visibly in the development of Esther's mental illness, which she experiences as an estrangement of her mind from her body. As her illness amplifies, Esther loses control over her body, becoming unable to sleep, read, eat, or write in her own handwriting. She frequently catches her body making sounds or engaging in actions that she was not aware of having decided to do, as when she can't control her facial expression for the picture in Jay Cee's office, or when she discovers herself sobbing at her father's grave. Over time, Esther's body becomes her antagonist. At first, she simply refuses to wash it, but eventually she tries to be rid of it altogether by plotting her own suicide. She keeps track of the body's "tricks" to stay alive and is determined to "ambush" her body "with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage." After her suicide attempt, Esther has trouble even recognizing her body, thinking her mirror reflection is a picture of someone else and watching her usually skinny body grow fat with insulin injections. However, although Esther's illness widens the gap between body and mind, that gap in fact exists throughout the novel. It is not caused by mental illness—mental illness simply expands it. Mind and body are always divided, as evidenced by Esther's experiences at novel's start and her memories of herself before her illness. In the first chapter of The Bell Jar, before Esther becomes depressed, she has a dissociative experience of not recognizing her reflection in the Amazon's mirrored elevator door. Flashing back to her day on a ski slope near Buddy's sanatorium, Esther remembers being exhilarated by the experience of hurtling downhill towards the sun, as if she could transcend her flesh and become "thin and essential as the blade of a knife." Plath's prose style underscores the fundamental division between mind and body through its prodigious use of metaphor and estranging descriptions. The figurative language she uses is incredibly rich and original and feels simultaneously apt and bizarre. As it compares human body parts and human consciousness to everything from goose eggs to nooses, the novel's language subtly complicates and questions stable understandings of 'body' and 'mind.' Esther's perspective also frequently perceives parts of the human body as inanimate objects until she realizes they are feeling flesh, as when she comes round after fainting from food poisoning and sees a vague heap of cornflowers before realizing the heap is her own arm. Likewise, Esther often perceives lifeless objects as sentient beings, as when, lying beside Constantin, she sees his wristwatch as a green eye on the bed. - Theme: Purity vs. Impurity. Description: Esther remains preoccupied by questions of purity and impurity throughout the novel, framing them in different terms at different points in her development. She thinks about purity of body as well as purity of mind. Indeed, Esther often speaks of purity as a kind of spiritual transcendence that can be accessed through transcendence of the body. At novel's start, she admires the clearness of vodka and imagines that drinking it into her body will purify her spirit. Later that night, she soaks her body in a hot bath to feel spiritually cleansed. Esther also flashes back to the feeling that she might be rendered "saintly" by racing down a ski slope towards the sun. Yet even though Esther considers purity in multiple arenas of experience, she considers it most frequently in terms of sex. There, 'pure' is synonymous with 'virgin.' Esther's obsession with the sexual purity of those around her and her angst about her own virginity dominates Esther's thoughts on female sexuality. "When I was nineteen," Esther reflects, "pureness was the great issue…I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't…I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line." Contemplating losing her virginity to Constantin, Esther thinks she would wake up the next day and look in the mirror to "see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me." Through these thoughts, Esther not only uses purity and impurity to organize the world around her, but also conceives of sex as something that leaves a visible mark—an impurity—in the form of an image on a person's eye. Even as Esther is attracted to the transcendent, spiritual purity mentioned above, she is resentful of and frustrated by her sexual purity. She feels stifled by the double standard of social expectation, constantly reiterated by women like her mother and Mrs. Willard, which instructs young women to remain virgins until marriage while allowing young men to engage in sexual experimentation without seriously tarnishing their characters. After discovering that Buddy has had an affair, Esther grows furious at his hypocrisy (pretending to be 'pure' while in fact being 'impure'), which echoes the hypocritical standards of the social expectations surrounding her. Esther becomes determined to abandon her own virginity and embrace sexual freedom, which she eventually manages by buying a diaphragm and having sex with Irwin. - Theme: Women and Social Expectations. Description: The Bell Jar offers an in-depth meditation on womanhood and presents a complex, frequently disturbing portrait of what it meant to be female in 1950s America. Esther reflects often on the differences between men and women as well as on the different social roles they are expected to perform. Most of her reflections circulate around sex and career. Esther's interactions with other female characters in the novel further complicate these reflections by presenting different stances towards the idea of womanhood. As noted in the theme Purity vs. Impurity, Esther is upset by society's insistence that young women stay virgins until after marriage while allowing boys sexual freedom. Female characters like Esther's mother, Mrs. Willard, and Betsy embrace these social expectations and try to push them on Esther by sending her pro-chastity pamphlets and dispensing sexist maxims. Female characters like Doreen, Dr. Nolan, and Joan Gilling reject these expectations and introduce Esther to alternative ways of thinking. Doreen models an unmarried sexual relationship with Lenny Shepherd while Dr. Nolan assures Esther there is nothing wrong with pre-marital sex and encourages her to get fitted for a diaphragm. Through Joan's affair with DeeDee, Esther glimpses a lesbian relationship that bucks society's heterosexual norms.In addition to enforcing a double standard for women and men's sexual lives, Esther's society also imposes different expectations for male and female careers. In general, women are expected to be homemakers, wives, and mothers and to devote their energies to caring for men and children rather than pursuing their own dreams. Esther's mother, Mrs. Willard, Betsy, Dodo Conway, and many others demonstrate this conventional path and intimate that Esther should follow it too. Her mother's insistence that she learn shorthand implies her faith in a low-level, traditionally female secretarial career. At the other end of the spectrum, Jay Cee, Philomena Guinea, Dr. Nolan, and Dr. Quinn demonstrate an alternative path pursuing careers outside the domestic sphere, and encourage Esther to do so as well. Though some of the men in the novel are kind or at least harmless, many of the novel's male characters reinforce the gross gender inequality in Esther's society and treat Esther and the women around them with pronounced sexism. Buddy automatically assumes Esther is inferior-minded because she is a woman and also assumes that she will want to marry, have children, and discard all her personal ambition to become a housewife. Marco (and, to a lesser extent, Irwin) objectify Esther for their own sexual gratification. Esther refers to Marco as "a woman-hater." Indeed, he proclaims all women are alike and attempts to rape Esther. - Theme: Personal Ambition. Description: Throughout The Bell Jar, Esther struggles to determine her personal ambitions and much of her growth by novel's end owes to her clarified view of what she wants from herself and from her life. Esther has spent her life prior to novel's start winning grants, scholarships, and prizes, and excelling in academia. At the outset of the novel, amidst the first signs of Esther's developing mental illness, she begins to feel that all of these past successes are meaningless. She realizes that none of her academic achievements have brought her joy and that she has not been truly happy since she was a child running on the beach with her father. Esther begins to feel useless and helpless, recognizing that her knack for winning academic accolades does not necessarily translate into success in the world outside school. "I felt dreadfully inadequate," she reflects, "The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks…"As she confronts her own inadequacy, Esther is also paralyzed by indecision about the future. Where she was once able to rattle off a long list of plans and goals, she is now tongue-tied and doubtful, as when Jay Cee asks what her ambitions are and Esther can only reply "I don't know." She compares this paralysis in the face of choice to sitting at the crotch of a fig-tree. "From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked," Esther imagines, "I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest…"After she returns to her mother's house and descends further into mental illness, Esther loses personal ambition altogether. She considers dropping out of college and dreams of changing her name to Elly Higginbottom, running away to Chicago, and never striving towards any of her old aspirations again. She loses the refined literary ambitions she possessed at the novel's start—to write a thesis on Finnegan's Wake, to be a famous poet—and feels content taking pleasure in popular entertainment by reading tabloids with the uncultured masses.When Esther eventually regains mental health, she also regains some of her old ambitions, though she now approaches them more knowledgeably. She no longer runs on autopilot accruing successes as she used to in the past. Instead, Esther is hyper-conscious of the hard-won recuperation of sanity, of her retrieved ability to read and think clearly. She values these dearly and is freed from the malaise she felt trapped in at novel's start. At the same time, Esther is wiser to life's complexities and knows that, just like she still retains all the memories and experiences of her depression, so too is there no firm boundary cutting off 'crazy' people from 'sane' ones: "What was there about us, in Belsize, so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in the college to which I would return?" Esther muses, "These girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort." She proceeds into healthy life with caution, knowing that the bell jar of her mental illness may descend again in the future. - Theme: Medicine. Description: From Buddy's medical school laboratory to Esther's ritzy private mental asylum, The Bell Jar surveys various medical practices in 1950s America and considers their effectiveness. Buddy embodies the ideals and attitudes of modern medicine at the time. He is active, physically fit, hardworking, committed to science, dismissive of the arts (he scoffs at Esther's poetry), and rigorously unemotional (he has no qualms about manipulating new mourners into donating their loved ones' corpses to medical schools). He is also arrogant, insensitive, and naïve, as evidenced by his disastrous bravado teaching Esther to ski (which results in her broken leg) and his obliviousness towards Mrs. Tomolillo's excruciating childbirth pains. Buddy thinks only of how modern medicine's drugs will wipe Mrs. Tomolillo's memory clean of the pain she must nevertheless endure in labor. However, once Buddy contracts TB, he has to confront his own weakness and is thereby forced to mature. When Esther meets him again at novel's end, she finds that Buddy's illness has taught him the patience and humility he lacked at novel's start. Esther's own experiences showcase the state of 1950s psychiatry. As a psychiatric patient, Esther is subjected to a slew of treatments, some helpful, some not. She resents her sessions with the unsympathetic and arrogant psychiatrist Dr. Gordon and encounters many chilly, condescending doctors before being genuinely helped by talk therapy with the nurturing and perceptive Dr. Nolan. She bristles and worsens under the crudely restrictive conditions of the psychiatric ward at a city hospital, then thrives in the supportive, open environment of a private asylum. Throughout, she is haunted by her imagination of brutal tortures at the state psychiatric hospital and is glad not to have to endure them. She experiences multiple iterations of electric shock therapy, as wrongly and excruciatingly performed under Dr. Gordon, then as correctly and effectively performed under Dr. Nolan. She receives insulin and suffers a side effect of drastic weight gain before having the intended "reaction," with ephemeral results. Alongside her own treatments, Esther also hears about other contemporary psychiatric practices. Through her mother's account of doctors asking questions about Esther's "toilet training" and through Joan's chatter about "Egos and Ids," Esther encounters snippets of the theories of Sigmund Freud, a crucial foundation for psychiatry at the time. Esther remains grateful that her own psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan, practices a talk therapy free of theoretical terminology and abstraction. - Climax: Esther's suicide attempt - Summary: In the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student, wins a month to work as guest editor with eleven other girls at a New York magazine. Esther lives with the other girls at the Amazon, a woman's hotel, and attends a steady stream of events and parties hosted by the magazine. Though Esther knows she should be enjoying herself, she feels only numb and detached from the old ambitious self that her boss, editor Jay Cee, tries to motivate. Esther vacillates between wanting to be wholesome, like her friend Betsy, and wanting to break all rules, like her friend Doreen. She worries about the rigid expectations of virginity, maternity, and wifeliness that society (and her mother) holds for young women and feels paralyzed by her contradictory desires for her own future. She goes on a string of bad dates, the best of which feels anticlimactic when the Constantin, an interpreter, makes no romantic advances and the worst of which ends with the misogynistic Marco trying to rape her. Throughout her time in New York, Esther flashes back to her troubled relationship with Buddy Willard, a handsome know-it-all medical student who Esther once admired and is now disgusted by, having realized Buddy is a hypocrite for projecting a virginal public image even after he's had a sexual affair. Buddy is currently suffering from TB, but Esther plans to break up with him as soon as he gets better. On her last visit to the sanatorium, she rejected Buddy's marriage proposal and broke her leg skiing. Back at home near Boston, Esther is rejected from a writing course she had planned to spend the rest of the summer taking. Stuck at home in the suburbs, Esther's mental illness, which was nascent in New York, amplifies into suicidal depression. She stops bathing or changing her clothes. She tries and fails to write a novel and loses the ability to sleep, read, write, or eat. She lies about her identity to every stranger she meets. She sees Dr. Gordon, an unsympathetic psychiatrist who prescribes and then incorrectly administers electric shock treatment. Esther tries to kill herself in a variety of unsuccessful ways (by slitting her wrists, hanging herself, and drowning) before hiding in a crawlspace under her house and taking fifty sleeping pills. Esther is found and rescued and wakes up in a hospital. Facing her own horrific reflection in a mirror, she does not recognize herself. Esther is soon moved to the psychiatric ward of the city hospital where she is paranoid, uncooperative, and still suicidal. Eventually the wealthy novelist Philomena Guinea, who has sponsored Esther's college scholarship, decides to sponsor her move to a private asylum, where Esther is treated by the compassionate Dr. Nolan and enjoys comforts and freedoms that the city hospital lacked. The doctors arrange to cut off Esther's steady stream of judgmental visitors (including her mother) who have been exhausting Esther with their advice and inaccurate theories about depression. Joan Gilling, a college friend of Esther's, winds up at the asylum too after emulating Esther's suicide attempt. Through a combination of analysis, insulin injections, and correctly administered electric shock therapy, Esther improves and begins to contemplate reentering her old life. As her condition improves, Esther earns more freedom to come and go from the asylum and she uses these privileges to buy a diaphragm and to lose her virginity in a one-night stand with a math professor, Irwin. With the encouragement of Dr. Nolan, Esther has learned to embrace her independence as a woman and shake off the stifling social expectations she used to feel constrained by. Unfortunately, though Esther expects her loss of virginity to be a revelation, it results in painful hemorrhaging. Later, she discovers Joan having an affair with another patient, DeeDee, and thinks about lesbianism, which she has no attraction to. Soon afterwards, Joan hangs herself. Buddy visits Esther at the asylum and Esther gets closure on their relationship. Esther feels stable and prepares to return to college, though she knows the bell jar of mental illness could descend on her again at any time. The novel ends as Esther enters a last interview with the doctors before returning to college.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Bet - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: Russia - Character: The Banker. Description: Young, wealthy, and fairly reckless at the beginning of the story, the banker insists that death is preferable to life imprisonment and is the one who initially makes the titular bet with the lawyer. In his later years, his luck has faltered and his wealth dwindled, transforming him into a desperate man. Like the everyday people that the lawyer grows to despise, the banker is ruled by his need to maintain his wealth no matter the cost. He decides to kill the lawyer the night before the bet is completed because he fears that the lawyer will become rich and successful with his money while he himself becomes a beggar. Upon finding the lawyer's note and discovering what he has been through physically and psychologically, however, the banker is racked with guilt and self-hatred for making the bet in the first place. Nevertheless, he ultimately decides to protect himself from possible retribution on the part of the lawyer by hiding the letter in his safe. A complex character, the banker reveals both undesirable truths and redeemable realities of the human condition. - Character: The Lawyer. Description: Just 25 years old when he attends the banker's party at the beginning of the story, the lawyer initially asserts that life-imprisonment is far preferable to capital punishment. He proves as reckless as the banker in agreeing to the bet and foolish in lengthening his sentence for the sake of some misplaced pride. Unlike the banker, however, he is not responsible for anyone's safety but his own. He evolves as the years go by in his cell, eventually committing to reading as much as he can and sharpening his mind. By the end of his 15-year term he is a completely changed man—extremely learned yet completely dismissive of all earthly things, insisting that they are misleading mirages that blind human beings to the transience of life. He is resentful of others and sees himself as above those who have "bartered heaven for earth"—that is, who are living in sin. The banker notes that the lawyer is so emaciated by the end of his sentence that he is hard to look at, prematurely aged, and appears ill. This outward appearance contrasts with the lawyer's own belief that he has bettered himself. He ultimately renounces the bet by escaping his cell just five hours before he would be awarded his winnings. - Character: The Watchman. Description: The banker's watchman is mostly absent from the narrative, but he is there to make sure the lawyer doesn't escape. When the banker goes to sneak into the garden wing late at night before the bet is set to end, the watchman has presumably taken shelter from the bad weather and fallen asleep. Later, he runs to tell the banker that the lawyer climbed through the window and escaped. - Theme: The Meaning of Life. Description: Anton Chekhov's "The Bet" sets up a seemingly simple bet about the nature and value of life. The banker, who believes that the death penalty is more humane and moral than life imprisonment, argues that experiences, pleasures, and relationships are what make life worth living. A life spent imprisoned, according to him, is thus essentially not a life at all: it is instead a slow, constant death. In contrast, the young lawyer argues that "to live anyhow is better than not at all"—that being alive, in and of itself, is better than to die. Implied in the young lawyer's argument is the belief that if one is physically alive, one can make life worth living regardless of its conditions. When the two men agree that if the lawyer can endure imprisonment for fifteen years then the banker will give him a large sum of money, it is these stakes that they believe the bet is about. Though the banker technically wins the bet, Chekhov ultimately leaves the answer to his initial question—that is, whether life has inherent value—ambiguous. As the terms of the bet play out, the lawyer initially appears to be "winning." He reads literature, philosophy, history, theology, and the Gospels. Certainly the young lawyer struggles—at times he is described as lying all day on his bed or talking angrily to himself—but there are also moments of genuine elation, such as when he describes his "unearthly happiness" at having learned numerous languages and therefore getting even more access to the accumulated thought of "the geniuses of all ages and of all lands." What's more, day by day, the lawyer lives out his fifteen years of imprisonment without ever trying to escape. Meanwhile, the banker, who all this time has been free, is miserable. He spends recklessly on earthly pleasures and plays the stock market poorly, and the luck of his early life has fizzled by the time the fifteen-year mark approaches. His millions having dwindled, the money he'll owe if he loses the bet might ruin him. As such, he takes steps to murder the lawyer in order to invalidate the bet. Though the banker had initially appeared to value life over rubles—telling the lawyer not to give up his best years for the promise of a later fortune—he changes his mind in the face of financial ruin. Despite his complete isolation, the lawyer comes to understand the fleeting nature of pleasure that the banker has experienced first-hand in the outside world. In the letter that he writes on the final night of his imprisonment, the lawyer reveals all of the experiences and wisdom that he has gained through his reading during the prior fifteen years—and then declares all of it to be "worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage" in the face of death. He claims that everything that humankind lives for on Earth—pleasure, love, knowledge, wisdom, everything—is worthless, and that only heaven holds value. To show this belief, the lawyer renounces the two million dollars he is owed and sneaks away hours before he is to be released. What, then, to make of this ending? It seems that neither character—nor their original ideas about the meaning of life—have been entirely borne out. The banker's belief in worldly pleasures and experience has led him to misery (and likely would have led him to murder, had he not discovered the lawyer's plan to renounce the money). The lawyer, meanwhile, abandons his belief in one's ability to make life worthwhile through engagement with the knowledge, art, and wisdom of humanity, and instead proclaims that only heaven has any meaning. That "The Bet" ends on such a note leaves a new debate in the hands of the reader to ponder: a debate not about what the meaning of life is, but whether life has meaning at all. - Theme: Greed, Corruption, and Idealism. Description: However ambiguous "The Bet" may be regarding the ultimate meaning of life, it is clear in its rejection of material wealth. The lawyer is willing to give up his freedom and remain in solitary confinement for two million rubles, while the wealthy banker throws his wealth around haphazardly to manipulate the banker into a cruel bet and later participates in financial recklessness that almost ruins him, leaving him willing to do anything—including murder—to maintain his status. While the banker is more profoundly affected by wealth than the lawyer (who ultimately renounces the money the banker owes him from the bet), Chekhov is suggesting that money and wealth are inherently corrupting influences. In the immediate aftermath of the bet, Chekhov states: "The banker, spoilt and frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet." The money leveraged clearly means very little to the banker because he has so much to spare. The story suggests, then, that what seems like the banker's attempt to assert a moral conviction is actually just a stance he takes for his own enjoyment—and it is specifically his wealth that allows him such reckless frivolity. Fifteen years later, the banker seems to acknowledge as much, calling the bet "the caprice of a pampered man" and rejecting its ability to add genuine insight into the debate that spurred it: "What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two million?" he asks himself. "Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless." Even as excess wealth in the story engenders irresponsible and capricious behavior, the desire for more money breeds inarguable moral decay. The banker's "desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange" and "wild speculation" ultimately lead "to the decline of his fortune," transforming the "the proud, fearless, self-confident millionaire" into "a banker of middling rank, trembling at every rise and fall in his investments." With the lawyer poised to win the bet, the banker fears being pushed into the life of an envious beggar. The idea of no longer being rich is so offensive to the banker that he decides the only solution is to kill the lawyer. Any respect he earlier professed for the sanctity of life has been subsumed by his greed. The banker's corruption also makes him see those around him as corrupt, too. For example, as the banker admits to his own lack of ideals in making the bet, he also assumes that the lawyer similarly made the best out of "simple greed for money." Of course, the story never actually makes clear whether the lawyer made the bet out of true idealism or because, as the banker believes, he just wanted the two million. Regardless, the lawyer proves profoundly hostile toward money by the story's end. In his final letter, revealed when the banker sneaks into his prison to murder him, the lawyer renounces the money as part of proclaiming the worthlessness of all worldly things. Wealth, in his mind, is utterly incompatible with moral authority. After reading the letter, the banker's reaction, in which he kisses the lawyer on the head, does not kill him, and then feels such contempt for himself that he can't sleep, shows the power of such true ideals. That the lawyer's letter has thrust the banker's corruption into such stark relief, suggests that, just as greed and wealth invariably corrupt, idealism and ascetism heal. And yet the story doesn't end there: the lawyer then sneaks off and disappears, and the banker puts the letter into his safe so that no one will ever see it. The story, then, shows both the power of true idealism and seems to suggest that such idealism can't actually find a way to exist in the real world, dictated as it so often is by monetary concerns and an association of success with financial well-being. Those who feel true idealism, like the lawyer, feel the need to remove themselves from society. And those who experience idealism in others may be briefly affected by it, but they soon hide that away in the face of other more pragmatic, more corrupt concerns. - Theme: Imprisonment and Freedom. Description: "The Bet" creates a situation in which a young lawyer, as part of a bet, is voluntarily imprisoned in solitary confinement for fifteen years. The bet itself is spurred by a debate about the nature of imprisonment: the lawyer believes that life is still worth living even when one is completely isolated, while the bet's other party, the banker, holds that imprisonment, and the resultant loss of contact with the world, robs life of any value or meaning. The lawyer's survival of the subsequent fifteen years initially seems to suggest that he is right—that a life of strictly regulated isolation is better than no life at all. Meanwhile, the banker flounders despite his freedom, losing both his fortune and moral compass during the fifteen years he engages with a world that the lawyer is denied. This, combined with the lawyer's ultimate renunciation of all worldly society even after his imprisonment ends, raises the question as to whether anyone is ever actually free—or simply trapped in a prison of society's making. Throughout his solitary confinement the lawyer plays music, reads books on subjects across all realms of human knowledge, drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, and so on. The lawyer not only endures his imprisonment, but at times he even seems to thrive—much to the banker's dismay, it becomes clear that the lawyer will win the bet. Imprisonment, the story seems to suggest, can't snuff out a purposeful life, and perhaps that a life that lacks purpose, such as the banker's, is the actual prison. The final twist of the story changes this understanding completely, however. After the banker decides he must win the bet and sneaks into the prison-house to kill the lawyer, he finds the lawyer's final letter. In the letter, the lawyer renounces the terms of the bet and gives up his winnings, on the grounds that he has come to realize during his imprisonment that everything he valued, and everything most people value—from money, to art, to wisdom, to love—is meaningless in the face of death, and that only heaven holds any worth. Put another way, while earlier in the story it seemed possible to see the banker's immoral life as a prison and the lawyer's imprisoned life as free, what the lawyer here argues is that all life is a prison: that anything worldly that people pursue, whether immoral or noble, is a prison that blinds them to the truth of what matters (that is, heaven). The banker responds by feeling personal shame and sparing the lawyer's life, but also by locking the lawyer's letter away. This suggests that this prison, which holds all of humanity, is voluntary—any person could read the lawyer's message and reject the prison of life, but instead nearly every person instead chooses to live an imprisoned life. - Theme: Christianity. Description: The initial debate between the banker and the lawyer about the death penalty is explicitly grounded in Christian morality. In fact, everyone at the banker's party is presented as having the same general view of the death penalty: "They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States." Though the story doesn't much mention religion again, a closer look at the ending reveals that the "The Bet" has a deeper interaction with Christianity than might first appear. For one thing, when the banker sees the lawyer for the first time in fifteen years, Chekhov describes the lawyer as Christlike in ways both general ("a man unlike ordinary people") and specific ("with long curls," a "shaggy beard," "his back long and narrow," and so on). Second, the lawyer's final letter reveals his ultimate rejection of all earthly things—not simply the money he is owed from the bet, but also love, art, knowledge, and wisdom, all of which, he says, are like dust in comparison to heaven. The lawyer thus emerges from fifteen years of imprisonment with a radical religious message that is, in fact, not that different from radical interpretations of Christ's message about the relative merits of this world and the next. Of course, that is not the end of the story's exploration of Christianity. Although the banker has decided to kill the lawyer to avoid losing the bet, he is moved by the lawyer's message and he feels contempt for himself. He's not moved enough to truly respect the lawyer's teachings, however: when the lawyer sneaks away in the night and disappears, the banker locks the lawyer letter explaining his newfound wisdom in the safe to avoid "unnecessary talk." The wicked banker, in other words fails to spread the lawyer's message, while the lawyer himself, now a radical prophet, also disappears, taking his gospel with him. It's important to note that, though the lawyer reflects a certain religious asceticism (that is, the abstention from pleasure in the pursuit of spirituality), he also proves pessimistic and self-serving. The lawyer is plagued by hatred and derision towards regular people who engage with earthly life. He claims that earthly things, even natural beauty and hard-earned wisdom, are all irrelevant, silly, and false because of their ephemeral nature. For all of his reading and moralizing, he fails to embody the kindness and love that Christ preached. His dismissal of "all worldly blessings and wisdom," as well as his physically decrepit nature, indicate a perversion of religious enlightenment. The story, then, seems to suggest that the original debate about Christian morals among the well-off intellectuals at the party was a kind of sham, a conversation among people who haven't truly devoted themselves to the morals they purport to respect above all others. This is made even clearer by their belief in the merits of intellectualism and their enjoyment of their status and money (all of which the lawyer renounces when he becomes a Christ figure). And with the lawyer's disappearance into the night, and the disappearance of his message into the banker's safe, the story suggests that it will always be this way: that the radical messages of religion, and Christianity in particular, will never truly come to hold sway in the world, but rather will always end up obscured and co-opted by society. - Climax: The banker sneaks into the lawyer's room to kill him only to discover the letter he has written renouncing his right to his winnings. - Summary: On a dark autumn night, the banker paces in his study and recalls a party he hosted fifteen years before. In a flashback, he and several of his guests, many of whom are journalists and scholars, discuss whether capital punishment is more moral and humane than life imprisonment. While many, including the banker, assert that imprisonment is crueler because it kills by degrees rather than instantaneously, a young lawyer argues that life imprisonment is preferable because it is better to live somehow than not at all. The banker challenges him to be imprisoned in a cell for five years, and, not to be outdone, the lawyer insists he could do it for fifteen. The wealthy banker stakes two million rubles in exchange for the lawyer's freedom. The banker goads then the lawyer over dinner, telling him to back out while he still can, because three or four years of the lawyer's life (surely, the banker assumes, he will not stick it out any longer than that) is more valuable than money that the banker can easily afford to lose. He also reminds the lawyer that voluntary imprisonment will be much harder psychologically than that which has been enforced. The following evening, the lawyer is imprisoned in a garden wing of the banker's house. He is forbidden to leave, to interact with anyone or even hear human voices, or to receive letters or newspapers. He is allowed to write letters, read books, play the piano, drink, and smoke. As the years go by, the lawyer negotiates different stages of coping with what is essentially solitary confinement. At first, he is terribly lonely and bored, playing the piano, rejecting wine and tobacco, and reading only novels "of a light character." Then, in the second year of his imprisonment, he reads only classics. By the fifth year, he has stopped playing music and refuses to read. He writes letters but tears them up, often weeping, and often drinks and smokes. Next, he voraciously studies philosophy and languages, becoming an expert on several. Then he reads the New Testament, and, finally, in the last two years reads randomly, selecting everything from Shakespeare to the natural sciences. The day before the lawyer is to be released, the banker is desperate–his fortunes have completely reversed, and he is now so deeply in debt that he cannot afford to pay the lawyer the two million rubles. The banker decides the only solution is to kill the lawyer. He sneaks out to the garden, where it is pouring rain, and deduces that the watchman is gone from his post because of the weather. He sneaks into the lawyer's room and discovers the man asleep, completely emaciated and sickly thanks to his imprisonment, aged far beyond his forty years, and seeming like a "half-dead thing." The banker reads the note the lawyer has written and left on the table, which is a long treatise that declares how he despises "freedom, life, health and all that your books call the blessings of the world." He has learned a staggering amount from all that he has read, and feels he has traveled all over the world, seen beautiful things, been with beautiful women, learned about the wonders of nature, and become immensely clever. He finds all of that meaningless, however, because it is temporary, and is bewildered by those whom he believes "have bartered heaven for earth." As such, he renounces the two million rubles and declares that he will leave five hours early so as to lose the bet. The banker begins to weep and kisses the sleeping lawyer on the head, wracked with contempt for himself. The next morning, the watchman informs him that the lawyer has escaped. The banker goes to the garden wing to confirm the departure. He takes the note "to avoid unnecessary rumors" and locks it in his safe.

- Genre: Horror, thriller - Title: The Birds - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A quiet, coastal town in England - Character: Nat Hocken. Description: The protagonist of the story, Nat is a World War II veteran with a disability who works part-time as a farmhand. A married father of two, he appreciates solitude, order, and the satisfaction of completing simple tasks. He is the only character to take the birds' initial attack seriously, and his attempts to warn his neighbors of the impending threat are met with mockery and dismissal. Nat goes to great lengths to protect his family throughout the story, drawing from his military background and survivalist instincts to outwit the birds. Nat also repeatedly attempts to shield his family from the reality of their situation, blocking dead bodies from their view, cracking jokes over dinner, and putting on an air of ease even as he senses the increasing hopelessness of their situation. Despite his perseverance, it is unclear whether Nat is actually able to save his family at the end of the story. - Character: Mrs. Hocken / Nat's Wife. Description: Nat's wife is never named, and is highly dependent upon her husband throughout the story. She relies on Nat to clear their children's bedroom of dead birds, secure their home, and repeatedly tell her what to do next. Her actions often emphasize the mundanity and futility of human-imposed order the face of catastrophe; as it had not yet been her designated shopping day before the attacks, the family is ill-equipped to survive the siege. A generally ineffectual character, she repeatedly expresses faith that someone else will come save the family. - Character: Mr. Trigg. Description: A farmer who employs Nat, Mr. Trigg is a kind yet proud man. He drives Jill home from the bus stop to escape a flock of birds, but does not take the threat seriously himself. He gently mocks Nat's fear and offers him a gun, refuses to secure his own home, and insists he will be eating a "gull breakfast" the following morning. He also questions whether the Russians have poisoned the birds, echoing burgeoning Cold War anxieties. Mr. Trigg's hubris leads to his downfall, however, as his entire household is killed by the birds. Nat finds his body next to a dangling telephone, suggesting he was trying to call for help when he died. - Character: Mrs. Trigg. Description: Mrs. Trigg is "a good-tempered woman" who, like her husband Mr. Trigg, is foolishly nonchalant about the birds. Upon greeting Nat following his first late-night tussle with the creatures, she dismisses his story as a nightmare and suggests he write to the newspaper for an explanation. She also wonders if the cold snap is coming from Russia, further echoing Cold War fears. Nat finds her body the next day beside a broken umbrella and a pile of dead gulls. - Character: Jill Hocken. Description: Jill is Nat's daughter and older child. Birds attack her and her younger brother Johnny in their bedroom in an early event that helps their father appreciate the threat the birds pose. Nat picks Jill up from school before the birds' second attack and only makes it home with the help of Mr. Trigg's vehicle. Jill repeatedly expresses fear of the birds and looks to her parents for reassurance. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: "The Birds," a story of great flocks of birds descending into England to attack people, presents human beings in conflict with nature itself. Du Maurier uses the story of a single, rural family—the Hockens, who are trying desperately to fend off the bird attacks—to illustrate humanity's isolation within the natural world and humankind's vulnerability to nature's wrath. While the birds are the primary force of the story's violence, du Maurier is careful to situate the bird attacks in the context of general hostility from nature. The arrival of unusual numbers of birds coincides with sudden frigid temperatures, rough seas, and strong winds, creating a sense that the birds are part of a broader natural trend. Even before the birds' attacks begin, Nat imagines that "a message comes to them" with the changing of the seasons, and observes that their aggression is linked to the rise and fall of the tide. He later reasons, "There was some law the birds obeyed, and it had to do with the east wind and the tide." The birds are also united in their goal; even black-headed gulls, which Nat knows usually attack other birds and as such are typically "kept apart," appear to be leading a mixed flock. Du Maurier uses figurative language to further establish the birds as part of the natural world. Nat observes, "The smudge became a cloud; and the cloud divided again into five other clouds, spreading north, east, south, and west; and then they were not clouds at all but birds." The radio announcer echoes this statement when he later says, "the mass was so dense at ten o'clock this morning that it seemed like a vast black cloud." But while du Maurier configures the birds as a part of the natural world, she places human beings starkly outside of—and at odds with—the nature that surrounds them. For example, though the birds take their cues from the winds and the tide and they gain fury at night, Nat must battle the cold and the darkness to protect his family from the birds. Therefore, while "the cold did not affect the living birds, waiting out there in the fields" and the darkness seems to feed them, Nat and his family are being destroyed by nature. Nature proceeds to isolate human beings even from each other, as the birds disrupt communication systems and leave Nat's family entirely on its own. When Nat tries to make a phone call outside Mr. Trigg's house, the line is dead. Du Maurier heightens the Hockens' isolation by suggesting that this is a world-wide catastrophe, as Nat's wife is unable to find "anything but the crackling" of static coming from domestic and foreign radio stations alike. The radio is simply one of many technologies that fail human beings in their struggle against nature. In "The Birds," the very thing that has broken human history into ages—tools of stone, bronze, etc.—proves useless in the face of nature's rage. Because our ability to create and use sophisticated tools is one of the main ways in which human beings separate themselves from other animals, the story's rejection of technology is a rejection of human identity itself. Everything from Nat's simple hoe, to Mr. Trigg's guns, to the military's planes are useless against the birds' onslaught. Nat literally calls his hoe "useless," and deems the fighter planes a "waste of life and effort." He also believes Mr. Trigg's bombastic attempt to shoot at the birds is "crazy," asking, "What use was a gun against a sky of birds?" In the end, the birds themselves become a machine more powerful than any humans have created, as a "million years of memory" bestows them with an "instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines." This instinct differentiates the apocalypse at the story's heart from the usual narrative of natural disasters, wherein events like hurricanes and tsunamis are regarded as tragedies devoid of intent. "The Birds", meanwhile, presents nature as an explicitly malevolent force that is targeting human beings. Nat believes the birds are following specific orders about where and what to attack, and that they "know what they have to do." Additionally, though Mr. Trigg's entire household is killed, the cows and sheep in his field remain conspicuously unharmed, suggesting that the birds are discerning in their prey, and focused only on killing humans. The birds are so intent upon reaching people that hundreds of them sacrifice their bodies in the process; mere fear or hunger must not be the driving force behind their attacks if they willingly die in pursuit of their prey. Imagery of the birds blocking the sun and bringing darkness across the land echoes also biblical punishment, further positioning the birds' attack as a sort of reckoning for human sins. In this way, humanity is set as being alone in a harsh and even antagonistic universe, unable to truly master nature or, if it turns against us, even survive it. - Theme: Hubris and Humility. Description: As a fable of humility, "The Birds" condemns humanity's hubristic belief that we can control the world around us. Building on the theme of man vs. nature, Du Maurier's tale rejects the notion of humankind as the master of nature, instead suggesting that any belief in human superiority to nature is foolish and doomed. While Nat's response to the bird attacks is to take immediate, purposeful action, nearly every other character is stubbornly skeptical that the birds are a true threat. Arrogant faith in man's dominion over supposedly simple creatures like birds leads to destruction, as those who refuse to take the attacks seriously are the first to die. Nat's repeated attempts to warn those around him are met with mockery or dismissal. When he tells Mrs. Trigg about the incident in his children's bedroom, she assumes it was a nightmare and asks if he is sure they were "real birds." Jim, the cowhand, is similarly uninterested in Nat's story. Later, Mr. Trigg teases Nat about shooting the birds for a "gull breakfast" and calls the whole thing a "lot of nonsense." The entire Trigg household then dies from bird attacks that night. Even the world beyond Nat's small circle appears, at first, to dismiss the birds. The operator Nat dials upon seeing a flock of gulls hovering over the water sounds "laconic, weary," causing Nat to deduce, "She's another … She doesn't care." As Nat's family listens to the radio announcement of the attacks, the announcer sounds like he is treating "the whole business as he would an elaborate joke." Nat fears there will be many others like the announcer, and that Londoners would hold parties to get drunk and watch the birds. Blind faith in human ingenuity proves just as dangerous as personal pride. Even those who take seriously the threat of the birds assume erroneously that their salvation will come at human hands. Nat, Nat's wife, and the Triggs all put their faith in human ability to overcome any obstacle, trusting that a vague, distant "they" will come save them. This is itself a kind of hubris, a belief in the limitless power of human beings to solve problems and tame the natural world. Mrs. Trigg says to Nat after he tells her of the first attack, "You ought to write up and ask the Guardian. They'd have some answer for it," though, of course, this would be futile. Even Nat's wife says, "Someone should know of this, someone should be told." Later: "Why don't the authorities do something? Why don't they get the Army, get the machine guns?" She also asserts that America, newly-emerged as a world superpower at the time, will save them. Yet the British empire's cutting-edge military technology is no match for the birds. Though the Army does send planes to attack them, Nat hears the planes crash and sees one of them burning, as the birds have jammed up the propellers. Nat's family repeatedly huddles around the radio for news, anxiously awaiting a broadcast to tell them what is happening and give them instructions. The radio announcer calls buildings "impenetrable," yet Nat's experience has highlighted the persistence of the birds, which undercuts the authority of the people he hoped would save him. By morning, the radio has stopped broadcasting altogether, revealing the depths of human hubris as the birds have so rapidly destroyed the most basic functions of society. While Nat seems the most prepared of anyone to take on the birds, even he puts too much faith in others at first, musing, "There's one thing, the best brains in the country will be on it tonight." As time goes on, however, Nat's faith is shaken until he finally accepts that his family is on their own. Given that "The Birds" was written in the wake of World War II—a time of great decline and economic struggle for the British Empire—the story also echoes general disillusionment with humanity and government's ability to ensure stability and progress. Nat's frustration with the government grows as he senses how ill-prepared it is. He thinks, "This was not a job for the government, for the chiefs of staff—they would merely carry out the orders of the scientists." When no more aircraft come to help, Nat curses "the inefficiency of the authorities" who "always let us down. Muddle, muddle, from the start. No plan, no real organization." Nat is only able to survive as long as he does by realizing that no one is coming to help him, and staying humble and realistic about the situation and his own abilities. Yet he too stumbles in being "pleased with his handiwork" after securing his home, as soon enough the birds penetrate all his best defenses. Those around him, meanwhile, are condemned for putting too much faith in humanity's hubristic belief that we have any real control over the natural world and a fundamentally chaotic universe. - Theme: The Inhumanity of War. Description: Du Maurier's story takes place shortly after World War II, a setting emphasized by her imagery of violence and references to fighter planes, machine guns, mustard gas, and Navy ships. Not only does the birds' attack echo the horror of weapons of mass destruction and, specifically, the Blitz, but it also explores the toll of war on the human psyche. In "The Birds," fending off the birds becomes analogous to engaging in war, which strips human beings of everything that makes them human. The birds are relentless and indiscriminate in their attacks, killing men, women, and children alike. Du Maurier uses the language of battle to connect the birds to the military and machinery, presenting them as not simply a natural disaster, but an opposing army. Nat compares the feeling of the attacks to "air raids during the war" and tells his family after boarding up his home that they're "snug and tight, like an air-raid shelter." As though broadcasting from a war zone, the radio announcer warns, "The birds, in vast numbers, are attacking anyone on sight." And while the birds are initially described as looking like clouds, Nat eventually confuses their formation on the bay with the Navy, observing, "The Navy was not there. It was the gulls rising from the sea." The birds also become like weapons through du Maurier's description of their "instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines." In keeping with the idea of the birds as a military force, Nat, a disabled veteran, repeatedly thinks about military strategies to defeat them, such as firing at the birds while they rest at low tide. As he secures his family's cottage Nat is reminded of working on a shelter for his mother in the town of Plymouth, which ultimately proved useless against German air raids. Du Maurier's evocation of war also gestures towards fundamental ethical questions of combat, namely how many casualties to accept in pursuit of defeating an enemy. As Nat postulates the use of mass weapons, he assumes that authorities would "warn" the population before releasing mustard gas or shelling. He asserts "The guns couldn't shell the shore because of the population," clinging to the preservation of his small seaside town even in the midst of a world-wide catastrophe. But even as he hopes for his town's salvation, Nat professes his belief that the authorities prioritize urban citizens, positing that "we don't matter down here … The people upcountry have priority. They're using gas up there, no doubt, and all the aircraft. We've got to wait and take what comes." He also fears that the use of mustard gas, though effective in killing the birds, would contaminate the surrounding lands and animals. His thinking reflects the nuclear fallout of World War II, and the increasing tension of nuclear proliferation, when he muses, "Where the trouble's worst they'll have to risk more lives if they use gas. All the livestock, too, and the soil—all contaminated." By focusing on Nat Hocken's family as they battle the encroaching birds, du Maurier illustrates on a small scale how war reaches and transforms every aspect of life, leaving little room for many of the characteristics that make us human. The story is entirely focused on Nat's attempts to survive and save his family, as he is constantly "planning against emergency"; there is no reflection on what his family actually means to him. Nat's attempts to distract his wife and children from the hammering of the birds with special dinner treats and forced laughter ring hollow against the encroaching threat. He also doesn't have time to mourn the death of the entire Trigg family; he must immediately begin ransacking the house for supplies if he is to make it home before the birds resume their attack. Du Maurier later emphasizes the Triggs' absence as Nat watches his wife pour "the Triggs' soup, cut him a large slice of the Triggs' bread, and spread their dripping upon it." Until the end, Nat is planning next steps to secure his home and family. Only in the final moments of the story, when it appears the birds are breaking through the door and all is lost, does Nat decide to smoke his final cigarette—perhaps giving in to a final moment of pleasure and "civilization" in the face of imminent death. "The Birds" thus invokes the sheer horror and inescapability of mass violence, and the seeming futility of humanity in the face of its own destructive tendencies. - Theme: Reason vs. Chaos. Description: Du Maurier never gives any explanation for the relentless bird attacks, which is part of what makes them so chilling. Human beings pride themselves on their rational intellect—they assume that their ability to make rational inferences about the world will allow them to manage their own fates. "The Birds," however, dismantles the notion that reason has the power to dispel chaos by presenting humans as engaged in a futile battle with irrational and relentless forces. Within a single day of the birds' attacks, the intricately-constructed man-made world is brought to a halt. This highlights the fragility of these structures and the tenuousness of the order that guides society. People are so beholden to reason that things that are irrational or unexpected are fascinating and even awe-inspiring. Irrationality is shown to have a power over people, then, simply because it defies their expectations about the world. In this way, "The Birds" shows our over-reliance on reason, as the human reaction to something abnormal is to basically malfunction. Nat listens as the radio announcer describes the effect of the birds on the city: "traffic came to a standstill in many thoroughfares, work was abandoned in shops and offices." Du Maurier suggests not only the fragility of man's world, but its absurdity as well. Nat's wife only shops for the family on designated days, and her strict adherence to this completely arbitrary order has left the family with little food when the attacks begin. Table manners seem similarly ridiculous in the face of the attacks, as evidenced by Jill's admonishment of her brother to wipe gravy from his chin mere moments before it appears the birds will break down the cottage door and kill them all. By refusing to offer a clear rationale for the birds' actions, du Maurier pits meaningless violence against Nat's methodical attempts to survive. However heroic, Nat's efforts are ultimately short-sighted and futile because he cannot defeat irrationality with reason. Until the very end of the story, Nat is thinking of what concrete steps to take next to secure his family—from boarding up the windows, to gathering food, to lighting a fire in the chimney. Part of Nat's mistake is to believe that, by completely securing the house, he can convince the birds to go somewhere else. Though Nat describes the "silly, senseless thud of the suicide birds," he also believes that other, smarter birds "knew what they were doing." "They've got reasoning powers, he thought. They know it's hard to break in here. They'll try elsewhere." This logic attempts to ascribe rationality to the birds in order to predict how to defeat them. Nat cannot fathom, though, that the bird attacks are irrational and that he cannot deter them, as he would a human intruder, by making their entry difficult. The birds, of course, get inside anyway, showing a victory of irrational forces against the most concerted attempts to reason a way out. Both the birds and the human beings in du Maurier's story do things for no logical reason. Du Maurier suggests that, in his attempts to structure an ultimately meaningless world, man ironically spurs himself toward chaos. Though Nat can sense this instinct in the birds, he cannot see it in himself. Early in the story, he thinks that the birds are "like people who, apprehensive of death before their time, drive themselves to work or folly." This parallels Nat's own later actions when he encourages his wife to make tea and cocoa, rationalizing, "Keep her busy, and the children too. Move about, eat, drink; always best to be on the go." He fails (or refuses) to see the folly in his own actions as he takes step after step to secure his home. Du Maurier repeatedly invokes this notion of doing something solely for the sake of doing something as a distraction from knowledge of mortality. Nat believes that birds, like human beings, are prone to panic in the face of death, and that this loss of rationality is the real "trouble." He thinks, "As long as everyone doesn't panic. That's the trouble. People panicking, losing their heads." But if keeping busy has no deeper purpose, the work suggests, it is not any more a "rational" choice than embracing the chaos that is reality. - Climax: Nat tosses his final cigarette into the fire as hawks begin to break down the door to his home - Summary: On the third of December in a quiet, seaside town, the season shifts abruptly from autumn to winter. Nat Hocken, a war veteran and farmhand with a disability, observes that there seem to be more birds than usual clamoring restlessly over the sea. Upon finishing his work for the day, Nat tells the farmer Mr. Trigg about the birds. Mr. Trigg asserts that the weather must be causing the birds' behavior, and predicts it will be a hard winter. That evening, Nat awakens to an insistent tapping on his window. Upon opening it, half a dozen birds swarm about his face. Nat scatters them away with his arms, only to hear cries coming from his children's bedroom. He rushes to their room to find the window open and dozens of birds diving about in attack. Nat ushers the children out of the room before wrapping a blanket around himself and fighting with the birds until dawn. When day breaks, fifty birds lie dead on the floor. The next morning Nat insists to his wife that the sudden cold snap and east wind are to blame for the birds' behavior. He sees his daughter Jill onto the school bus and then visits the farm to check on the Triggs. When Nat tells Mrs. Trigg of the previous evening's battle with the birds, she is dismissive of his story, positing that it was simply the weather. Jim, a cowhand, is similarly unconcerned. Nat returns home to collect the bodies of the dead birds, but cannot bury them because the ground has frozen solid. He brings the bodies to the shore, where he sees thousands of gulls hovering over the sea. Back at his cottage, a radio announcement informs Nat and his wife that the attacks are happening across the country. Nat proceeds to board up the cottage windows and fill up its chimney bases. Hours later, another broadcast relays that an enormous flock of birds has brought London to a halt. Nat resents the announcer's lighthearted tone, and predicts that many will refuse to take the attacks seriously. Nat walks partway to the beach to find that the tide has turned and that the gulls have begun circling as if ready to attack. Alarmed, he rushes to pick up Jill from the bus stop. As the birds begin to swarm, the two run to the farm, where Nat asks Mr. Trigg to drive Jill the rest of the way home. Mr. Trigg does so but makes light of Nat's fear, insisting it is a waste of time to board up his house. The swarm of birds begin to dive at Nat as he runs home, making it inside only seconds before a gannet would have split his skull. The Hockens huddle together in their cottage as hundreds of birds hammer against the windows and roof. Nat attempts to distract his family from the peril of their situation by singing and whistling as he further secures the inside of the cottage. That evening, the radio announcer declares a state of national emergency and urges people to barricade themselves indoors. Following supper, the family hears the drone of planes and gunfire heading toward the sea. Though Nat's wife and children are heartened at the thought of military aid, Nat understands subsequent crashing noises to be the sounds of the planes falling into the water. He internally laments the "waste of life and effort." When the bird attacks finally quiet, Nat realizes that they are linked to the high tide. Reasoning that he has six hours before the next attack, he goes outside and, in the cold and darkness, fortifies the cottage windows by stuffing cracked panes with the bodies of dead birds. Only after going back to bed does he realize he forgot to light a fire to keep the birds out of the chimney; he quickly relights the fire, burning the birds already attempting to force their way down. He then smokes one of his two final cigarettes. The incessant tapping of the birds resumes, and Nat realizes that some have broken into the bedrooms upstairs. He barricades the door. The family anxiously awaits a promised 7:00 a.m. news bulletin, but when Nat's wife turns on the radio nothing comes through but static. Nat wonders how much longer the radio battery will last. At the next lull in battle, Nat and his family drive to the Triggs' farm to get much-needed food and supplies. There Nat finds that the entire Trigg household has been killed by the birds. With no time to mourn, Nat gathers what he can over the course of three trips, and loads everything into his cottage shortly before the tide turns. The radio continues to play only static, even on foreign stations, leading Nat to suggest that the attacks are happening across Europe. As Nat muses about organizing the new supplies and subsequent steps he will take to fortify the cottage, hawks hammer at the door. The wood begins to splinter and tear, and Nat tells his wife he will smoke his final cigarette. He tosses the empty packet onto the fire.

- Genre: short story - Title: The Birthmark - Point of view: third person - Setting: late eighteenth century, possibly in Europe - Character: Aylmer. Description: Aylmer is an accomplished scientist, and Georgiana's husband. Although he has achieved many impressive scientific feats, he has also often failed to accomplish what he aimed to. He becomes completely obsessed with Georgiana's birthmark and the possibility of its removal. As a result, he doesn't even consider that removing it might be a bad idea. Aylmer is often identified with godlike qualities, including his high intelligence and his ability to affect the natural world. He certainly sees himself in a position of utmost power over Georgiana, Aminadab, and nature. Aylmer exhibits a dangerous pride, or hubris, in that he cannot be content with Georgiana's near perfection and must instead attempt to change nature's creation to suit himself. This pride leads to Georgiana's death. - Character: Georgiana. Description: Georgiana is Aylmer's wife and the subject of his experimentation. Although she is very beautiful and much admired by men, she has a small, reddish, hand-shaped birthmark on her left cheek. Its visual prominence depends on the paleness or blush of the surrounding cheek at any given moment. Although she has never minded the birthmark before her marriage to Aylmer, she grows to hate it as he continually expresses his revulsion of it, and eventually begs him to remove it so that he can be happy with her. Georgiana's role in this story remains firmly within the bounds of a conventionally perfect woman and wife. She puts herself entirely under Aylmer's control, even saying that she would drink poison if he asked her to. Ultimately, she dies when the birthmark disappears because it was the only imperfect part of her, and thus her only link to the mortal world. - Character: Aminadab. Description: Aminadab is Aylmer's laboratory assistant. He is a grotesque character—physically strong, ugly, and "earthy." He does not understand any of the science behind Aylmer's experiments, but ably executes whatever tasks Aylmer sets him. Aminadab represents the natural world in human form, contrasting with Aylmer's more spiritual and abstract presence. Although Aylmer disdains Aminadab's intelligence, Aminadab's strong connection to the mortal world allows him to understand the birthmark better than Aylmer does, and he expresses his opinion that it should not be removed. However, he submits to Aylmer's control as willingly as Georgiana does, and plays his part in the experiment without protest. - Theme: Science, Nature, and Religion. Description: "The Birthmark" centers around the conflict between science and nature. Aylmer cannot accept Georgiana as nature made her, and instead feels driven to use his scientific knowledge to erase what he sees as nature's imperfection. The birthmark on Georgiana's face is, by definition, a mark that formed in the womb. It is an entirely natural occurrence, and the narrator implies that the mark exists for a reason – to keep Georgiana imperfect enough to remain an earthly being.However, Aylmer worships science and does not hesitate to use his skills to tamper with nature's creations. Even before becoming fixated on the birthmark, he changes the natural life cycle of plants and considers how to make an elixir of life, which would make the drinker immortal. Aylmer himself is aware of the tenuous relationship between science and nature – he tells Georgiana that even though he probably could create an elixir of life, he doesn't do so because it would go against nature. However, his vanity over his wife's appearance seems to blind him to this danger in his experimentation with the birthmark. Normally, Aylmer excludes all signs of nature from his laboratory, even replacing natural sunshine with chemical lamps. At the moment the birthmark disappears, however, he opens a curtain and sunlight falls on Georgiana. And it is then, in the true light of nature rather than through the limited vision of science, that it is revealed that she must die.The word "God" does not appear in the story. However, due to Hawthorne's concern with religion in many of his works, it makes sense to look for religious implications in this story as well. "Nature" implies a sense of the divine, since in a traditional Christian view, God created the natural world. In working to change nature, then, Aylmer also attempts to change God's creation.In this story's view of the world, science does not come out of natural processes, but instead works to overturn them. Aylmer's scientific intervention results in Georgiana's death, implying that scientists must not overstep their boundaries and go against what nature—and God—has willed to be a certain way. - Theme: Perfection. Description: The narrator describes Georgiana as perfect in every way except for the birthmark on her cheek. Aylmer loves Georgiana, but he cannot stand this one aspect of her that falls short of perfection. Aylmer becomes so obsessed with making Georgiana absolutely perfect that her one supposed imperfection comes to blind him to everything else good about her. While other men find ways to look fondly on the birthmark, Aylmer ruins his married life by dwelling constantly on the mark and the deeper flaw of the soul that he thinks it represents.Ironically, Aylmer's quest for perfection fails just at the moment that it succeeds. In removing the birthmark, he does manage to make Georgiana perfect. However, it's suggested that Georgiana needs to be imperfect to survive on the mortal plane. The moment the birthmark disappears and she becomes perfect, she can no longer exist as a human—humans being, by Biblical definition, imperfect—so she dies to ascend to a higher plane of existence. Although Aylmer desires nothing more than for Georgiana to lose her birthmark and become perfect, he himself is quite imperfect. When Georgiana reads Aylmer's account of all of his previous experiments, she finds that he has failed to achieve most of what he aimed to do. Admittedly, even his failures resulted in scientific advancements, but he certainly has metaphorical blemishes of his own. He thus exhibits some hypocrisy for demanding nothing less than perfection from his wife when he himself is so far from perfect.Aylmer's scientific ambition blinds him to the realities of life. Georgiana's death demonstrates that no earthly being can ever be perfect—only divine beings can attain that goal. Humans must accept their own shortfalls and those of others, because absolute perfection is impossible and striving for it will only make them miserable. - Theme: Fatal Pride. Description: Aylmer exhibits the trait known as hubris, a pride that results in his own downfall. The idea of hubris originates with Greek stage tragedies such as Oedipus Rex, but many characters since ancient times have similarly suffered from their own sense of superiority. Aylmer, for one, has complete confidence in his own scientific methods, despite the failures he has experienced in the past. Even though he has never made an elixir of life, for example, he tells Georgiana that he definitely could if he wanted to.Furthermore, Aylmer has married one of the most beautiful and good women in the world, whom many other men would have liked to marry. But he isn't content to have the best woman; instead he must have a perfect woman. In his pride, Aylmer thinks he can correct what he sees as the mistakes of nature, and thus, Hawthorne implies, of God. Such an idea requires that Aylmer assume himself superior to these entities. He essentially tries to play God by means of his scientific skills. Characters invariably come to bad ends when they step on God's toes, and Aylmer is no exception.Aylmer's hubris seems particularly extreme in contrast to the humble natures of the other two characters. Although Georgiana is admired by all men who see her, she never shows any vanity. Instead, she comes to hate her own appearance because of Aylmer's influence. Similarly, Aminadab accepts Aylmer's view of him as a dumb machine, and never tries to convince Aylmer that he understands the birthmark better than Aylmer does, even though his perspective on it turns out to be the correct one.Aylmer is blind to his own mortal shortcomings, and so he believes that he can make right what nature has made, in his eyes, wrong. Instead his hubris ends, as hubris always does, with tragedy. - Theme: Submission and Sacrifice. Description: Throughout the story, Georgiana acts in complete, unquestioning obedience to Aylmer's wishes and submits to his will even before he asks her to. Wives of Hawthorne's time were expected to obey their husbands, so Georgiana is, in a sense, the "perfect" wife, reflecting her physical perfection and the story's overall concern with perfection. She herself suggests that Aylmer remove the birthmark since it bothers him so much, and even as she comes to a fuller understanding of the potential dangers of the experiment, she continues to urge her husband to remove the mark at any cost. In fact, Georgiana tells Aylmer that if he offered her poison, she would drink it. This sort of submission shows the degree of power that husbands often expected to have over their wives—the power of life and death. Georgiana's inability to imagine anything beyond her husband's opinion of her leads to her death, which she welcomes.When it comes down to it, Georgiana would rather die than have her husband shudder to look upon her face, and so she essentially offers up her happiness and her life as a sacrifice to her husband's egotistical need to have a physically perfect wife. Her decision to do so could even be seen as a Christlike sacrifice, in that she dies for her husband's arrogance in playing God. In fact, the Bible verse 1 Peter 1:19 says that the faithful are saved from their sins by the "blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." In light of this verse, it could be argued that Aylmer's removal of the birthmark—the "blemish or spot"—makes Georgiana the perfect stand-in for Christ to save Aylmer from his sins by her sacrifice.Aminadab also submits to Aylmer's orders. He doesn't think Aylmer should remove the birthmark, but he makes no real effort to convince Aylmer not to, and instead provides the physical energy necessary to complete the experiment. Georgiana and Aminadab's acquiescence to Aylmer's will reinforces the impression that Aylmer has of himself—he is the husband, the master, the scientist, and is beyond fault. In the nineteenth-century Christian household, the male head of the family was in fact regarded as being the closest to God, and the rest of the family was supposed to accept his religious teachings when an actual clergyman was not present. Aylmer takes this a step further by attempting to act as a god, and through their submission to his will, Georgiana and Aminadab uphold Aylmer's idea of himself as such. That the story ends disastrously, of course, calls into question both unquestioning submission and the arrogance that expects it. - Theme: Mortality. Description: On one level, the birthmark stands for mortality, and Aylmer's obsession with the mark reflects his obsession with and fear of mortality itself. The birthmark, in this view, is like nature's brand on its product – Georgiana – to mark it as flawed. But while flaws are often thought of in moral terms, the flaw represented by the birthmark can also be seen as a purely mechanical one, a symbol of the fact that humans are flawed in that they are not immortal, in that they are destined to die.In Aylmer's view, it doesn't seem to matter how perfect Georgiana is—she still has that birthmark, that constant reminder that she'll die and in death will be degraded to the exact same level as all of nature's other creations. Aylmer and Georgiana discuss the elixir of life, a drink that would make its drinker immortal, multiple times. Even though Aylmer claims to believe it would be immoral to create an elixir of life because it would unbalance nature, it seems a distinct possibility that his desire to render his wife immortal is an almost unconscious one. He sees the birthmark as a mark of mortality, and wants to remove it, which would logically result in immortality. This achievement would put him at the pinnacle of science and on a level with God, a position which he does pursue even in his less ambitious attempts at changing nature.Furthermore, one exchange between Georgiana and Aylmer suggests that a poison is in fact an elixir of life, or, as Aylmer says, an "elixir of immortality." He seems to imply that death brings about some sort of immortality in itself, which corresponds to the Christian view of heaven as a place where souls will forever reside. And if a person has already died, then they are in a sense no longer mortal—at least, they can't die again.In this sense, perhaps Aylmer does achieve his goal. On a basic level, he succeeds in removing the birthmark. On a more complicated level, he does render Georgiana immortal, since he removes the only thing that makes her mortal and her soul ascends to heaven, where it will live on through eternity. Ironically, he removes the flaw of death, but the results – Georgiana's death – are essentially the same as if he hadn't. - Climax: the disappearance of the birthmark, coinciding with Georgiana's death - Summary: Aylmer, an accomplished scientist, has taken a break from his laboratory to marry a beautiful woman named Georgiana, although it's suggested that his love for her can probably never quite match his devotion to science. After their wedding, Aylmer becomes fixated on the small, hand-shaped birthmark on his wife's left cheek, the only physical imperfection of an otherwise perfect woman. Georgiana's former suitors have never minded the birthmark, and so she herself has not thought much of it. But now, Aylmer's revulsion at the birthmark disturbs all of the couple's happy times together, and Georgiana begins to dread his gaze on her cheek. One evening, Georgiana recalls to Aylmer that the night before, he had a dream that he tried to cut the birthmark out of her cheek, but it receded into her heart until he would have to cut it out of that vital organ. Distressed at her husband's hatred of her appearance, Georgiana suggests that he should, in fact, make an attempt to remove the birthmark. Aylmer agrees, eager to join his love of science to his love of Georgiana and to test his scientific abilities. The next day, Aylmer brings Georgiana to his laboratory, where she immediately faints. Aylmer's assistant, Aminadab, emerges. He is a rough, strong man who does the physical work of the lab. He remarks that if it were up to him, he wouldn't remove the birthmark. Georgiana wakes and is dazzled by the ethereal beauty of the room that Aylmer has prepared for her. He demonstrates gorgeous scientific wonders for her, but some of them fail and only make their subjects ugly. He then boasts of great scientific feats, such as creating life and making an elixir that would make the drinker immortal, that he could accomplish if only he thought it moral to try, which he doesn't. Finally, Georgiana looks through a number of books in Aylmer's library that detail the work of famous earlier scientists, as well as Aylmer's own experiments. She realizes that her husband has fallen short of many of the discoveries he hoped to accomplish. However, this only makes her admire him even more for aiming at such lofty goals. She enters the inner room of the laboratory and sees Aylmer and Aminadab working anxiously. She realizes that Aylmer is more worried about the treatment than he's let her see. He gets angry when he sees her in the lab, thinking that she doesn't trust him. She tells him that, to the contrary, she'll go through with the experiment no matter what, so he should tell her how dangerous it really is. He admits that he has already been subjecting her to treatments without her knowledge, and they haven't worked. Back in the outer room, Aylmer pours a liquid onto a diseased plant, which immediately becomes healthy again. He then has Georgiana drink the liquid. She falls asleep, and Aylmer keeps watch over her, at one point kissing the birthmark. Soon the mark begins to disappear, and Aylmer is overjoyed. Georgiana wakes and, pitying Aylmer, tells him that she is dying. While Aminadab laughs, Georgiana dies, for with the disappearance of her only flaw and mark of mortality, she has become too perfect to remain on the earthly plane.

- Genre: Short Stories - Title: The Black Ball - Point of view: Third Person ("Boy on a Train" and "In a Strange Country"); First Person ("Hymie's Bull" and "The Black Ball") - Setting: A train in Oklahoma in 1924 ("Boy on a Train"); a freight train from Chicago to Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s ("Hymie's Bull"); an apartment building in an unnamed southwestern U.S. city, likely in the 1930s ("The Black Ball"); Wales during World War II ("In a Strange Country") - Character: James. Description: James, a Black boy who is probably about four or five years old, is the protagonist of "Boy on a Train." During the story, he is traveling from Oklahoma City to the rural town of McAlester with his mother (Mama) and baby brother (Lewis). He spends most of the story looking out the window at the scenery, wondering what life will be like in his new town, remembering his father (Daddy), and comparing himself to the young white boys he sees in the farms and on the train. He wishes he could be like them, because he has a vague sense that their lives are better than his, but he doesn't fully understand why. He knows that it has something to do with race—just like John's son in "The Black Ball," he slowly learns about racism by observing how people treat him and his family differently from white people. In the second half of the story, Mama tells him that he will have to be the man of the house, now that Daddy is gone. Crying and praying, she laments how difficult it is to survive under segregation. James takes his promise to protect Mama so seriously that he decides to "kill this mean thing that made Mama feel so bad"—even though he doesn't quite know what it is. (He thinks it may be God.) Between racism and his father's death, James is forced to confront serious adult challenges and emotions at a young age. In short, he will have to grow up fast, and he will miss out on the innocent, carefree childhood that the white boys he sees around him will get to have. While it's difficult to know exactly how autobiographical "Boy on a Train" is, James certainly represents Ralph Ellison himself, as he also left Oklahoma at a young age on a train with his mother after his father's death. - Character: Lewis. Description: In "Boy on a Train," Lewis is James's baby brother. He is capable of little more than looking out the window and copying different animals' sounds. His complete innocence about the world makes him a character foil for James, who is gradually learning about the racism, hardship, and discrimination that his family has faced over the course of the story. - Character: Mama. Description: Although not the story's protagonist, James's mother is arguably the central character in "Boy on a Train." During the story, she rides in the segregated Black car of a train—which is also the baggage car—with her two sons, James and Lewis. They are heading from Oklahoma City, where she has been living for the past 14 years, to a small town called McAlester, where she has been promised work. Her husband (Daddy) has recently died, and so she is both grieving and dealing with the immense pressure of making a living as a single working Black mother in 1924. Worse still, as soon as she boarded the train, a white butcher tried to grope her—she defended herself and spat in his face, but he grew furious, and she is still resentful about the situation throughout the story. She worries deeply about her family's future, and in the story's climax, she tearfully tells James that he will have to become the man of the family and prays for God to give them all the strength they need to survive. Her experience demonstrates the personal and emotional cost of racism: it shows how much hardship and violence Black Americans—and Black women in particular—faced under Jim Crow in the early 1900s, and how this impacted them emotionally and psychologically. But she also shows how they built strength and resilience in order to confront this condition with dignity. - Character: Daddy. Description: In "Boy on a Train," James's father has recently died. James remembers him as attentive, kind, and intellectual, and Mama's stories suggest that he worked as a construction worker to provide for his family in Oklahoma. His death leaves the whole family with the sense of emptiness and desperation with which they try to cope over the course of the story. - Character: The White Butcher. Description: In "Boy on a Train," the butcher is "a big, fat white man with a red face" who frequently comes to the baggage car where James and his family are seated in order to retrieve candy and magazines, which he sells to white passengers in the other cars. Mama explains that the butcher groped her before the story began, and James hopes in vain that he will give him some candy. The butcher's behavior shows how Jim Crow gave ordinary white people power over ordinary Black people by tilting the legal and economic system in their favor. - Character: The Narrator of "Hymie's Bull". Description: The narrator of "Hymie's Bull," who never names himself in the story, is a young Black man who spends his time hopping freight trains throughout the U.S. during the Great Depression. In addition to recounting how he saw Hymie kill a railroad bull (security guard) in self-defense, he also tells the reader about how Black and white bums (freight-hoppers) often get along on their adventures, but the bulls generally target their worst violence at Black bums. His speaks in a working-class Black vernacular, and his sense of alienation and peril represents the broader Black American experience in the early 20th century. - Character: Hymie. Description: In "Hymie's Bull," Hymie is a white bum (freight-hopper) from Brooklyn whom the story's narrator watches kill a railroad bull (security guard) in self-defense atop a moving train. Hymie's actions disprove the racist stereotype that only Black bums carry weapons and reflect the widespread sense of threat and culture of violence that surrounds the freight-hopping subculture. - Character: John. Description: John, the protagonist of "The Black Ball," is an honest, hardworking Black single father living in an unnamed city in the Southwestern U.S. He began working as a janitor in an upscale apartment building a few months before the story begins, and he works tirelessly in order to please his meticulous, racist boss, Mr. Berry, who has been replacing the building's Black employees with white newcomers. During the story, a white union organizer tries to recruit John into his new multiracial building workers' union. John isn't sure what to do: he knows that his working conditions are poor and would do almost anything to improve them, but he also feels that unions are for white people and sincerely believes in the American ideal of advancing in life based on hard work alone. Indeed, his actions during the day reflect this belief: he spends his free time studying, and he tells his son that it's even better to be American than to be Black or white. After all, his driving concern in life is to provide a better life for his son. And yet the day's events show him that he may not be able to do this unless he can unite with others to change the social, economic, and political conditions of Black life in the U.S. When his son asks to play outside with his ball, John asks him to play in the back alley, instead of in front with the white kids. But his son goes to the front alley, where a white boy steals his ball and throws it into Mr. Berry's window. Mr. Berry blames John and threatens to fire him. And John takes the blame—he knows that no white person will ever believe the truth. He realizes that, even if he does everything right at work, circumstances outside his control could still cost him his job. In other words, working hard and acting respectably are not enough to overcome racism. So he decides to attend the organizer's union meeting. John's new political consciousness represents all Black people: Ellison thought that their only chance of truly improving their situation was through collective political action. - Character: John's Son. Description: In "The Black Ball," the protagonist, John, is the sole parent to his unnamed four-year-old son. John's son spends the whole day playing alone, as he is too young to go to school and he could face violence, discrimination, or other problems if he plays with white kids. In this way, racism isolates him and deprives him of many of the basic pleasures of childhood. (However, he does occasionally play with the gardener's son, Jackie.) He is intensely curious: in the morning, he asks John if he is really Black, and in the afternoon, he tells John that he wants to be a trucker when he grows up. (Trucking has long been a heavily unionized industry, so this comment makes John think seriously about joining the union for the first time.) The major conflict in the story occurs after John's son takes his ball outside to play, but a white boy steals it and throws it into the building manager Mr. Berry's window. Mr. Berry blames John and his son for the commotion, and John's son is surprised and confused when Berry predicts that John will end up "behind the black ball" (blacklisted, or fired). John's son points out that his ball is white, not black, which shows that he doesn't fully understand the situation that his father is facing. Much like James in "Boy on a Train," thanks to the events in this story, John's son starts to realize that people treat him differently from white people solely based on race—but he still doesn't fully understand the U.S.'s racial hierarchy. While what he is learning will prepare him for the rest of his life as a Black man in a deeply unequal society, it is also depriving him of the innocent, carefree childhood that Ellison suggests all people deserve. - Character: The White Union Organizer. Description: In "The Black Ball," the union organizer is a thin, red-faced Southern white man who approaches John while he is working and invites him to join a multiracial union for building service workers in the area. John is initially skeptical of the organizer's intentions—he assumes that the man wants to take his job, or that his union will only benefit white workers. But then, the organizer shows John his hands, which are badly scarred, and explains that he got the scars after he defended a Black friend who was falsely accused of rape in Alabama. A white mob attacked him, then lynched his friend. This story shows John that the man truly is fighting for racial justice, and so he seriously considers the offer. The union organizer's story and work demonstrate how white and Black people can work together for racial justice, and how white and Black working class people often share the same political interests. Indeed, the story suggests that because white people hold most power in American society, multiracial coalitions like the organizer's union are crucial to political progress for Black Americans. - Character: Mr. Berry. Description: In "The Black Ball," Mr. Berry is the strict, humorless building manager who employs John. As Berry has been systematically firing his Black employees and replacing them with white people, John works especially hard to stay on his good side. However, in the early 1900s, this simply isn't enough to counteract the effects of racism. At the end of the story, when a white boy throws John's son's ball into Mr. Berry's window, ruining one of his plants, Berry furiously blames John and threatens to fire him. Berry's actions show how racism holds Black people back, limiting their job opportunities and enabling white people to scapegoat them for any problems that arise. His behavior pushes John to join the organizer's labor union, which might be his best chance at winning back some power as a worker. - Character: Jackie. Description: In "The Black Ball," the gardener's son Jackie, who is white, is about the same age as John's son, who is Black. Jackie taunts John's son for his race and doesn't face consequences for mischievous behavior, like pulling a flower off from a bush. In contrast, Mr. Berry blames John and his son when a white boy throws John's son's ball through the window. This double standard shows how racism limits Black children's freedom and opportunities from an early age. - Character: Mr. Parker. Description: In the story "In a Strange Country," Mr. Parker is a Black American soldier who arrives in Wales during World War II. As soon as he arrives, a group of white American soldiers call him "a goddamn n[—]" and punch him in the face. But then, he receives an astonishingly warm welcome from the local Welsh people, particularly Mr. Catti. This contrast serves to highlight how deeply racism cuts off the bonds between white and Black Americans, to the point that they often struggle to view each other as fully human. In fact, Catti is the first white man who ever treats Parker as an equal, in his whole life. Even though he recognizes that the U.K. played a major role in spreading slavery, colonialism, and racism around the globe, he finds profound inspiration in Welsh people's pride for their culture and nation. In fact, he learns that their struggle for justice and recognition within the U.K. is similar to Black people's within the U.S. As a result, his night in Wales helps him imagine what a racially harmonious future would look like and better love his own country. At the end of the story, when he sings "The Star Spangled Banner" at the local Welsh singing club, he feels a sense of relief and national pride for the first time ever. - Character: Mr. Catti. Description: In the last story, "In a Strange Country," Mr. Catti is the local man who graciously welcomes the Black American soldier Mr. Parker to Wales. He drinks with Parker, tells him how much he appreciates Black Americans and their culture, and even brings him to a local singing club. Parker is so taken aback by Catti's generosity and respect that, at times, he wonders if Catti is playing an elaborate practical joke on him. But he isn't: since he hasn't grown up under the U.S.'s system of racial hierarchy, Catti simply treats Parker like any other man and doesn't harbor any prejudice toward him. In fact, he sees Welsh people and Black Americans as kindred nations because they both face similar kinds of oppression within their countries. His attitude shows Parker and the reader what it would be like to live in a racially just society. - Theme: Race, Nation, and Belonging. Description: The Black Ball collects four of Ralph Ellison's little-known early short stories. In "Boy on a Train," a young boy (James) migrates out of Oklahoma City on a segregated train after his father's death with his baby brother (Lewis) and his mother. In "Hymie's Bull," an unnamed Black narrator who lives as a bum, riding freight trains around the U.S. during the Great Depression, tells the reader about watching one of his white counterparts (Hymie) kill a railroad bull (security guard) who violently attacked him. "The Black Ball" takes the perspective of a young Black father and janitor named John, who meets a white union organizer and nearly loses his job after his manager, Mr. Berry, blames his young son for something he didn't do. Finally, "In a Strange Country" focuses on a Black soldier, Mr. Parker, who arrives in Wales and is astonished that the locals treat him as an equal (something his white American fellow soldiers have never done). The core issue in these stories is what it means for Black people to be American—or to find a sense of identity and belonging in a country that actively rejects, denigrates, and exploits them. All four of Ellison's protagonists are outsiders in white-dominated spaces (trains, workplaces, and military units), and they all recognize that they will never be treated as equals because of their race. For instance, James and his family are forced to sit with the baggage in the back of the train, while John knows that Mr. Berry will probably give his job to a white man if he can find one willing to do it. In each case, the protagonists' exclusion from such white-dominated spaces is a metaphor for Black people's overall marginalization in American political, social, and economic life. The protagonists' frustration about this exclusion mirrors Ellison's conflicting feelings about Black people's attempts to achieve equality and integration in the U.S. Ellison and his protagonists struggle to love the U.S., a country that has enslaved, segregated, and lynched their people, and whose white majority has never truly seen them as fellow citizens. At the same time, they also recognize that the U.S. is the only country they have. These complex feelings about nation and identity are clearest of all in the final story, in which the protagonist, Mr. Parker, visits a local singing club and learns how Welsh people take pride in their identity as a subjugated nation within the United Kingdom. In fact, the Welsh men he meets understand and respect Black American culture in a way white Americans never have. At the end of the story, the Welsh choir even performs "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Mr. Parker's honor. The performance causes Parker to feel "a wave of guilt […] followed by a burst of relief," because for the first time, he is being treated as a true American—and he feels proud to be one. This relief represents the sense of national belonging that Ellison hopes Black people can eventually achieve in the U.S. Thus, while the four stories in The Black Ball show how racism has long prevented Black Americans from truly feeling at home in the U.S., it also ends with a vision of the inclusive, loving, diverse national community that Ellison believed the U.S. could become in the future. - Theme: Racial Violence and Injustice. Description: All four stories in The Black Ball show how, throughout most of the 20th century, white Americans used racist violence as a tool to terrorize Black people into accepting a subservient position in society. First, Ralph Ellison shows how Black Americans live in an atmosphere of constant threat. And second, he shows how Black people adapt to this situation by learning to accept racial hierarchy, avoid confrontation, and take responsibility for injustices that white people inflict upon them. Racist violence lurks in the background of all four stories in this book. The first story starts after a white butcher gropes James's mother on the train, and the last one begins after Mr. Parker meets a group of white American fellow soldiers in Wales—and they greet him by calling him the N-word and punching him in the face. In "Hymie's Bull," the narrator explains how railroad bulls (security guards) specifically target Black bums (freight train hoppers) with sadistic violence. (Whenever anyone of any race attacks a bull, he explains, the bulls "make some black boy pay for it.") In all these cases, the protagonists are not surprised when white people attack them—they are used to it, because in 20th-century American society, white violence against Black people was simply the norm. Ellison also shows how Black people  learned to adapt to this norm and avoid conflict at all costs, because they knew that practically anyone with power—including their bosses, the police, and the government—would inevitably blame them. This is clearest of all in "The Black Ball," when the building manager Mr. Berry blames John's son for throwing a ball into his office—even though a white boy actually did it. Still, John takes the blame and resolves to work even harder in order to appease Mr. Berry and keep his job. Though John's son is too young to understand, John tells him that young Black people must eventually start "learning the rules of the game." Of course, "the game" is the way that Black people have to accept injustice and act subservient to white people in order to survive in a racist society. Playing "the game" is just a fact of Black life in the 20th century—and as John puts it, his son will have no choice but to "play until he [grows] sick of playing." - Theme: Politics and Solidarity. Description: In The Black Ball, Ralph Ellison's bleak portrait of American racism shows how racism prevents Black Americans from living free, prosperous lives and how, as individuals, they can do very little to stop it. At the same time, The Black Ball has an optimistic undercurrent: Ellison also suggests that Black people can achieve progress through political organizing, and specifically by building coalitions across racial lines. In these stories, Ellison captures Black Americans' fundamental desire to live in a just, equal society. The family at the center of "Boy on a Train" dreams of a brighter future, and at the end of "In a Strange Country," after seeing how the Welsh take pride in their unique identity and unite to fight for inclusion in the U.K. as a whole, Mr. Parker has an awe-inspiring, tear-provoking vision of how Black Americans could do the same.  Meanwhile, the other two stories hint at Ellison's vision of how Black and white Americans must work together if they want to build a diverse, prosperous nation. "Hymie's Bull" describes an interracial friendship between men facing the same dire social and economic conditions (the narrator and Hymie). And most importantly of all, the plot of "The Black Ball" focuses on a relatively poor, powerless worker—a janitor named John—deciding to join a multiracial labor union. At first, John doesn't trust the union organizer, but in the story's closing lines, he realizes that the union is his best chance at job security and decides to join it. Ellison suggests that, if John can get white faces and a major institution on his side, he will finally have the bargaining power he needs to improve his situation. John's awakening represents Ellison's belief—at least at the early point in his career when he wrote these stories—that Black people's best chance for advancement was by uniting with working-class white people through labor unions and left-wing politics. - Theme: Childhood and Innocence. Description: Two of the stories in The Black Ball—"The Black Ball" and "Boy on a Train"—feature children who begin to learn about the ugly truth of American racism while their parents struggle to decide whether and how to reveal it to them. In "Boy on a Train," young James's Daddy has died, and James's mother (Mama) has to move him and his baby brother Lewis to a rural town, which is the only place she can find work. James wonders why his family has to sit at the back of the train with the luggage, why the white boy who passes wears nice clothes, and "why […] white folks stare at you that way" when the train pulls through a station. He can tell that his world is divided by color, but he does not understand why or what it will mean for him. Later, Mama tells him that life is hard for Black people, and he will have to become his family's protector. He realizes that the color line has something to do with his Mama's distress, but he doesn't fully understand why—he still thinks that he can "kill this mean thing that made Mama feel so bad." Even though he is barely old enough to be in school, he doesn't have the luxury of a carefree childhood because he already has to confront adult problems that racism has created for his family. "The Black Ball" also shows how racism deprives Black people of a privilege that most white people take for granted: childhood innocence. Early in the story, the protagonist, John's, four-year-old son starts asking difficult questions about race, beginning with, "Daddy, am I black?" When the boy wants to play with his ball, his father tells him to play in the back alley, not in the front lawn with the white boys. But surely enough, John's son ends up in the front yard, and then a white boy steals his ball and throws it through the building manager, Mr. Berry's, window. Berry blames John's son, and John has no option but to accept the blame on his son's behalf. Telling the truth would be far too dangerous, as the white boy's family could easily get him fired, and Berry likely wouldn't believe him anyways. Like James's mother, John struggles to balance his desire to let his son play innocently, like any child should, with the practical need to teach his son about the grim reality of racism (which means that others will never see him as innocent). Racism, Ellison suggests, forces young Black people to accept injustice at an early age. It also creates a tragic dilemma for all Black parents. Namely, they must give their children the freedom to be children while also trying to prepare them children for the harsh realities of Black life in the U.S. - Climax: James decides that he will kill whatever is hurting Mama ("Boy on a Train"); Hymie kills the railroad bull in self-defense ("Hymie's Bull"); Mr. Berry wrongly blames John's son for throwing a ball into his window ("The Black Ball"); Mr. Parker sings "The Star Spangled Banner" in a Welsh singing club ("In a Strange Country") - Summary: "The Black Ball" is a posthumous collection of four little-known short stories from the early career of renowned African American novelist Ralph Ellison. Set between the 1920s and 1940s, the stories use moments of racial awakening as an entry point to explore how Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist violence shaped Black life and American national identity in Ellison's time. In the first story, "Boy on a Train," a little boy named James leaves Oklahoma City with his mother and his baby brother Lewis in 1924. They have to sit in the back of the segregated train, in the luggage compartment next to the engine. It's uncomfortably hot, but soot will fly inside if they open the window. A fat white butcher groped Mama when she first boarded the train, but she knows that she can't do anything about it: a white man's word will always count for more than a Black woman's. James and Lewis look out the window at the passing scenery: autumn leaves fall, wild horses gallop across the hills, and farmers lead their cows through cornfields. James remembers his caring, attentive, intellectual father (Daddy), who has recently passed away. Now, the family has to move to the only place where his mother can find work: the rural town of McAlester. The train stops at a different small country town, and James notices local white men staring at him through the window. He doesn't understand why white people are so hostile to his family, but he suspects it has something to do with their color. Later, he points out a passing grain silo, and Mama breaks into tears. She says she remembers passing the same silo when she and Daddy first migrated from the South to Oklahoma City to seek a better life. But now, Daddy is gone, and life is not much better than it used to be. She tells James that he will be the man of the house now, and he has to make sure the family sticks together. He promises to do so. Mama prays for God to help her family survive the hardship they will encounter. James decides that he will protect Mama by killing whatever is making her so sad, even if it's God. The next story, "Hymie's Bull," is also set on the American railroad. The story's unnamed Black narrator explains how he left home in search of work during the Great Depression, only to end up freight hopping his way around the country, like so many other unemployed young men. He explains that the railroads hire brutal security guards called "bulls" to kick bums (freight hoppers) off the trains. They specifically target Black bums, often grievously injuring or even killing them. But sometimes, bums get to the bulls first. The narrator remembers how he saw a white bum named Hymie kill one of the bulls. Hymie had spent much of the day sitting on top of a train, sick and vomiting from a bad stew. In the evening, the narrator climbed atop the train to watch the sunset. He saw Hymie go to sleep, and then a bull approach and start beating him. Hymie pulled a knife out of his pocket, stabbed the bull in the chest and throat, pushed him off the train, and disappeared into the night. The next day, the other bulls wanted to lynch a Black bum in retaliation for the bull's death. But the narrator narrowly escaped. The title story, "The Black Ball," focuses on one day in the life of a Black single father named John, who works as a janitor at a ritzy apartment building somewhere in the American southwest. In the morning, he cleans the building's lobby, then rushes to his quarters above the garage to make breakfast for his four-year-old son. His son asks if he's Black, because the gardener's son, Jackie, is making fun of him. John says that he's actually brown, but that the best thing to be is American. John returns to work, but a white stranger approaches him while he is polishing the brass door handles. John assumes that the stranger wants his job, because the manager, Mr. Berry, has been firing his few Black employees and replacing them with white people. But actually, the stranger is an organizer with a local union. He says he wants to help John and his coworkers win better wages and working conditions, but John thinks unions are only for white people. The man shows John his hands, which are covered in scars, and explains that a white mob attacked him back home in Alabama after he defended a Black friend against false rape charges. He invites John to an upcoming union meeting and leaves. On his lunch break, John eats with his son, who plays with a toy truck and says that he wants to be a truck driver. John tries to read, but ends up looking out the window and taking a nap instead. His son goes out to play with his ball, and John warns him to stay in the back alley instead of going to the front lawn, where the white kids play. But John's son doesn't listen—when John wakes up from his nap, he finds his son in the front lawn, crying because "a big white boy" took his ball and threw it into Mr. Berry's window. Then, Mr. Berry comes over, furious: the ball ruined one of his plants. He warns John that he will be "behind the black ball" (out of a job) if his son keeps playing on the lawn. Back inside, John's son asks what Mr. Berry meant—after all, the ball is white. John muses that his son will spend his whole life playing with the black ball (learning to deal with racism), and he decides to go to the union meeting. Finally, "In a Strange Country" follows Mr. Parker, a Black American soldier, on his first night in Wales during World War II. The story opens in a pub, where a Welshman named Mr. Catti brings Parker a drink. Parker is dizzy and has a black eye because, as soon as he arrived in Wales, he came across a group of white American soldiers—and they called him "a goddamn n[—]" and punched him in the face. In contrast, Catti is "genuinely and uncondescendingly polite" to Parker. He says that Welshmen love "Black Yanks," and he invites Parker to a local singing club. Parker agrees, but he wonders whether Catti is playing some kind of trick on him. At the club, the manager greets Parker warmly, and the choir sings Welsh folk songs. Parker can't understand them, but he finds them beautiful and moving. He realizes that Black Americans and the Welsh have a lot in common as subjugated peoples within larger nations (the U.S. and U.K.). He wishes that Black Americans could find the same kind of national pride and unity that the Welsh seem to have. He also realizes that white people have never treated him so well in his whole life, and he wishes he didn't have to return home to the U.S. The choir sings the Welsh national anthem, then "God Save the King," the "Internationale," and finally, in Parker's honor, "The Star Spangled Banner." Parker feels a dizzying combination of confusion, guilt, and pride, and then he starts to sing. After the song, he's completely speechless.

- Genre: Early Modern Prose Fiction, Proto-Novel, Science Fiction, Utopian Literature, Feminist Literature, Philosophical Dialogue, Metafiction - Title: The Blazing World - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The Empress's home world, the Blazing World, and the Duchess's home world - Character: The Empress. Description: The book's protagonist is a young noblewoman who gets abducted by a traveling merchant and accidentally finds herself stranded in the Blazing World. She then meets the Emperor, who believes that she is a goddess and falls in love with her. He decides to marry her, make her Empress, and give her absolute power over everything in this new world. Besides slightly changing the kingdom's religion and system of government, the Empress primarily uses this new power to learn everything that she possibly can from the Blazing World's wisest creatures. She tries to make her own contribution to the Blazing World's advanced philosophy by developing her own Cabbala, and instead she ends up forming a deep Platonic friendship with her scribe, the Duchess of Newcastle (Cavendish herself). At the end of the book, the Empress assembles an army and invades the world she originally came from in order to defend her native country and create a system of absolute monarchy under the King of ESFI. Notably, when she returns to her world, like when she first reached the Blazing World, others treat her as a goddess. Cavendish uses the Empress's eccentric life and decisions to make crucial points about knowledge, society, and power. Most importantly, the Empress reflects Cavendish's personal fantasy of ruling the world, as well as two different political fantasies: restoring the English monarchy to absolute power and creating a world in which women truly could rule over men (just as men ruled over women in Cavendish's real world). Next, the Empress's interest in science and philosophy reflects Cavendish's belief that these disciplines are the secret to understanding—and therefore controlling—the universe. Similarly, Cavendish uses the Empress's interest in Cabbala and imagination to highlight the way that she has imagined the Blazing World into existence, and to show how fantasizing about alternate worlds and lives can actually be an intellectually and personally transformative process. Thus, the Empress serves as a role model and character foil for the Duchess Cavendish—both the Duchess who wrote the book and the Duchess who appears in it. - Character: The Emperor. Description: The beloved Emperor of the Blazing World lives in the infinitely rich city of Paradise and rules firmly but generously, maintaining peace and unity throughout the entire land. When he first meets the Lady, the Emperor immediately falls in love with her, recognizes her as a goddess, and hands her complete power to rule the Blazing World as she wishes. Later, he insists on helping the Empress invade her native world, and he takes after the Duke and Duchess by learning to train horses and direct plays, respectively. Like the Duke, he embodies benevolent, wise leadership: he learns from other people's knowledge, and he refuses to let conventions about gender prevent him from fostering women's wisdom and talent. - Character: The Duchess. Description: The Duchess, a fictionalized version of the author Margaret Cavendish, becomes the Empress's trusted advisor, confidant, and Platonic friend in the second half of The Blazing World. The immaterial spirits identify the Duchess as the ideal scribe for the Empress's Cabbala because she is honest, rational, and unprejudiced. In addition to helping the Empress with her philosophy and war effort, the Duchess also gives the Empress a tour of her own native world and pleads that the goddess Fortune treat her husband, the Duke, more favorably. In addition to advancing the Empress's interests and providing her with companionship, the character of the Duchess also allows Cavendish to comment on her own worldly ambitions, including her desire to exercise the kind of power that her society ordinarily reserves for men and her hope to be taken seriously as an artist and philosopher. - Character: Margaret Cavendish. Description: The author of The Blazing World is the Duchess's real-life counterpart and the wife of the real-life Duke William Newcastle. In the book's prefatory note and epilogue, Cavendish directly addresses the reader to explain why she wrote the book and how it relates to her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. She also comments extensively on the relationship between fact and fiction by writing herself into the novel—for instance, by writing about how the Duchess invents a "celestial world" of her own and tells her friends all about her friendship with the Empress. - Character: The Duke of Newcastle. Description: The Duchess's husband, a lightly-fictionalized version of Margaret Cavendish's real husband, is a wealthy English landowner and Royalist who has lost most of his estate in the English Civil War. He is extremely virtuous, respectable, and well-mannered—in fact, he isn't even particularly affected by losing his estate. He spends most of his time training horses to dance and supporting prominent scientists and artists. Cavendish's favorable portrayal of him not only demonstrates her love for her real-life husband and commitment to the English monarchy, but also highlights the Duchess's virtue and respectability in the book. - Character: The King of ESFI. Description: The king of the Empress's native country, "ESFI" (England, Scotland, France, and Ireland), is suffering a terrible defeat in a global war at the beginning of the second half of the book. However, the loyal Empress sends in her army to fight on his side; it handily defeats ESFI's enemies and eventually forces all of them to pay tribute to ESFI's king. As a result, the political system in the Empress's native world closely resembles the Blazing World's absolute monarchy by the end of the book. - Character: The Bear-Men. Description: The bear-men are the first creatures that the Empress meets in the Blazing World. They live in their planet's snowy polar region, and while they look like massive bears, they walk upright and act like humans. They care for the Empress when she first washes on their shores: they nurse her back to health and bring her to the Emperor with help from the fox-men, bird-men, satyrs, and green people. They are experimental philosophers by trade, which explains their advanced navigation and engine technology. They proudly tell the Empress about their (often conflicting) experimental results and show her their microscopes and telescopes. Later, they use these telescopes for reconnaissance during the Empress's military campaign in her native world. - Character: The Bird-Men. Description: The bird-men, who look like large geese but walk and talk like humans, are the third species that the Empress meets in the Blazing World. Because they spend so much time navigating the skies, they are astronomers by profession, and they teach the Empress all about their world's sun, moon, stars, and atmosphere. They also tell her about fire-stone and help her drop it on her foes during her military campaign in the second half of the book. - Character: The Fish-Men. Description: The fish-men are another of the Blazing World's many hybrid races, and like the worm-men, they are natural philosophers by trade. The fish-men specialize in studying the ocean's makeup, currents, and animal life. Because they are at home both on land and in the sea, they are key to the Empress's military campaign in the second part of the book. For instance, they find the hidden passageway back to her native world and allow her to stand on their backs (so that she looks like a goddess who can walk on water). - Character: The Worm-Men. Description: The worm-men are one of the many hybrid species in the Blazing World. They are natural philosophers, like the fish-men, and they specialize in studying animals, plants, and minerals on land. They teach the Empress all about life underneath the planet's surface, help her find the immaterial spirits to settle her questions about God and the soul, and play a pivotal role in the military campaign she wages on behalf of the King of ESFI. - Character: The Satyrs. Description: The satyrs, one of the many hybrid species-groups who live in the Blazing World, are based on the part-man, part-horse (or part-goat) spirits of the same name from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. The satyrs are specialist physicians who follow the teachings of the extremely influential ancient Greek doctor, anatomist, and philosopher Galen. - Character: The Immaterial Spirits. Description: The spirits are a group of disembodied souls who visit the Empress to explain the nature of mind, body, God, and the universe to her. They also help with her Cabbala and introduce her to the Duchess. In general, their ideas reflect Cavendish's personal philosophical beliefs, including her theory that matter is made of living, self-moving particles. Because they are immaterial, or entirely non-physical, the spirits have no bodies of their own—they can occupy different bodies, rapidly teleport themselves across the planet, and even cross into other worlds, which gives them special knowledge and insight into the universe. They teach the Empress's spirit to use these same strategies to travel away from her body and expand her knowledge. - Character: Fortune. Description: The spirit of the virtue Fortune appears in the Blazing World to explain why she has long disfavored the Duchess's husband, the Duke of Newcastle. Fortune accuses the Duke of scorning and mistreating her first, but after Honesty blames Fortune for being vain and fickle, Fortune disappears in a rage. The book implies that she will never reconcile with the Duke, who will simply have to accept further misfortune for the rest of his life. - Theme: Fiction, Fancy, and Utopia. Description: In The Blazing World, which is often considered an early utopian novel and pioneering work of science fiction, Margaret Cavendish writes of a young noblewoman who gets kidnapped and brought to another, parallel world, where the inhabitants care for her and make her their Empress. But these inhabitants are not ordinary human beings: they're monstrous, fantastical, yet benevolent animal-human hybrids, like bear-men, fish-men, giants, and satyrs. Once she becomes Empress, the book's protagonist dedicates her life to learning about her new world, which allows Cavendish to describe every detail in it with scientific precision, from the way ice forms and the nature of the stars to the division between soul and body. Yet, while Cavendish deeply values rationality and scientific thinking, The Blazing World is fundamentally about the power of fancy. Specifically, Cavendish uses the Empress's Blazing World to show how fantasy—and utopian thinking and science fiction, by extension—can help people achieve insight and fulfillment by giving them total freedom to explore their identity, ambitions, and interests in an imaginary world of their own making. This is true for both writers and readers. Cavendish uses the Blazing World to indulge her fantasies of abolishing the patriarchy, ruling the world, and achieving total knowledge of everything in it. Meanwhile, the book calls her readers to imagine how the gender, class, and species hierarchies that govern their own world could be different and, in so doing, to view science fiction as a serious intellectual exercise. Halfway through The Blazing World, when the Empress decides to write her own Cabbala (a mystical interpretation of God and the Hebrew Bible), she chooses to revive a historical figure as her scribe. After she tries and fails to work with a series of ancient philosophers, she instead chooses the Duchess of Newcastle—Margaret Cavendish herself. Throughout the rest of the book, the Empress and the Duchess become deep Platonic friends, visit each of their native worlds, and invent their own fantasy worlds together. By writing herself into the Empress's life, Cavendish shows how fiction allows readers, writers, and characters to share in life-changing adventures. Just as the Duchess's and Empress's souls can travel through different worlds, Cavendish argues, everyone can do the same by imagining and reading about fictional universes. - Theme: Gender Hierarchy and Women's Freedom. Description: When she published The Blazing World in the 17th century, Margaret Cavendish was already remarkable in several ways: while most women writers modeled themselves after men, even to the point of using male pseudonyms, Cavendish insisted on writing under her own name and imagining an alternative universe where women rule with the same power and gusto as men. In fact, this is why critics often consider The Blazing World as an important precursor to modern feminist literature. The book starts as a parody of medieval romance: a traveling merchant falls in love with a young woman, and rather than wooing her, he abducts her. Then, rather than learning to submit to male authority, like she might in a contemporary romance novel, the woman instead finds her abductor frozen to death and then travels to a new world—a remarkable fantasy world without clear species distinctions or gender hierarchies. She eventually becomes the Empress of this world, which she rules in consort with her most trusted advisor—the soul of Cavendish herself. Cavendish presents the Blazing World as an alternative to the patriarchal gender roles that deeply oppressed women in the early modern period. Through this imaginary world, she shows how gender hierarchy harms everyone by preventing women from fully exercising their abilities and contributing to society as a whole. - Theme: Monarchy and Government. Description: Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World is most often praised for its dazzling depiction of an alternate world and forward-thinking ideas about gender, but Cavendish also wrote the book to explore various different approaches to politics and government. She depicts the Blazing World's Emperor as an absolutely powerful ruler, who maintains peace across his entire world and is beloved by all. Later, the Emperor hands his absolute power to the Empress, whom he and his subjects consider a goddess. But when the Empress changes laws and starts to favor some groups over others, conflict starts to emerge, and she eventually realizes that she has made a terrible mistake. She returns to the old system of "one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language," which solves the kingdom's troubles. In other words, she learns that the best way to foster peace and unity is by concentrating all power in as few hands as possible. In fact, at the end of the book, the Empress dresses up as a radiant goddess, invades the world where she originally lived, and conquers every single country in it—then hands power to her native country's king. Thus, she recreates the Blazing World's system of government in her own world. This is particularly significant because Cavendish was writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which briefly overthrew the English monarchy and forced royalists into exile—including Cavendish and her husband, the Duke of Newcastle. Clearly, the Empress's revolution, regret, and restoration of the old system are a metaphor for the English monarchy's fall and restoration in the 1650s–60s. Cavendish presents benevolent but absolute monarchy as the best system of government because she believes that the best way to foster unity and equality in a nation is by concentrating power in as few hands as possible. This might seem counterintuitive to modern readers, particularly those who view Cavendish as an early feminist icon. Modern feminists generally fight against women's oppression by appealing to broader democratic values, like the idea that all people are equal and should share power. But these ideas simply didn't exist in Cavendish's time—and if they did, she no doubt would have opposed them, as her life and marriage made her a lifelong defender of the British monarchy. In fact, The Blazing World can be seen as an aggressive anti-democratic response to the Parliamentarians, who fought the Civil War to hand power to Parliament (an assembly of wealthy landowners). Specifically, Cavendish suggests that dividing power into many hands inevitably causes factionalism, tension, and violence because, when nobody has absolute power, elites will fight to take it. - Theme: Philosophy, Science, and Religion. Description: The most eye-catching portions of The Blazing World are no doubt the Empress's fantastical journey from one world to another, descriptions of the Blazing World's remarkable nature and creatures, and magnificent military campaign to conquer the world that she originally came from. But almost half of the book also consists of her in-depth philosophical, scientific, and religious dialogues with the creatures and immaterial spirits in her new world. Each group has a specific occupation fitting its nature—for instance, the giants are architects, the bird-men are astronomers, and the immaterial spirits are philosophers who know the truth about the nature of mind, matter, and God. Through her conversations with these intellectuals, the Empress learns all sorts of fascinating truths about phenomena that are well-understood today, but totally baffled scientists in the 17th century. In fact, like in much science fiction, Cavendish contrasts her imagined world's advanced science, philosophy, religion, and technology with the real world's in order to highlight how profoundly a society's collective knowledge in these fields shapes its success. After all, the Empress has absolute power to do anything she wants in the Blazing World, yet chooses to dedicate her time to thinking about science, philosophy, and religion. This is because Cavendish thinks that understanding the nature of the universe is one of the most valuable ways that people can spend their lives, and science, philosophy, and religion are three dimensions of this project. More specifically, she shows how rigorous scientific inquiry can give people powerful technology by uncovering useful truths about the natural world, while religion gives them purpose and direction by revealing the meaning of the universe to them. Finally, philosophy brings science and religion into a greater unity by explaining the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. Tellingly, while Cavendish emphasizes that some religious questions are unanswerable, she also argues that the world is just made of "rational self-moving matter," so science is far more important than religion when it comes to understanding it. In fact, Cavendish published The Blazing World alongside another work, her Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, and in her introductory note to the book she explains that she views philosophy and fiction as two complementary halves of the same intellectual project. - Theme: Love and Friendship. Description: The plot of The Blazing World centers on the Empress's scientific, political, and military ambitions. But while the Empress structures her life and government around these interests, they aren't her greatest source of pleasure or satisfaction. Instead, even after she conquers the world and learns everything she can possibly know about it, her deepest desire is to spend time with her beloved Platonic friend, the Duchess (a fictionalized version of Margaret Cavendish herself). Ultimately, she values this relationship more than her wealth, fame, and power. So does the Duchess, whose loyalty to the Empress compares only to her treasured relationship with her husband, the Duke. By putting these deep relationships front and center in her book, Cavendish suggests that love and friendship are foundational to human flourishing. Specifically, she believes that the most powerful relationships depend on Platonic love, or loving another person for their inherent goodness and virtue. Through her depiction of the Empress and Duchess's friendship, Cavendish shows that building ethical, loving, mutual relationships like theirs is crucial to living a good life (and specifically to developing wisdom and virtue). - Climax: The Empress appears as a goddess when she and the Duchess invade the Empress's home world. - Summary: Margaret Cavendish's 17th-century tale The Blazing World follows a young Lady who becomes the all-powerful Empress of a fantastical parallel world, where everything from popular religion to the laws of nature is radically different—and better—than in our own. While frequently called utopian feminist literature, an early novel, and a work of science fiction, The Blazing World was actually published long before any of these genres formed—and it helped shape them in the first place. As Cavendish explains in her author's note, she published the fanciful Blazing World alongside her more rigorous Observations upon Experimental Philosophy in order to show how fiction can help writers and readers alike explore philosophical ideas and enjoy themselves. At the beginning of The Blazing World, a lustful merchant kidnaps the young Lady, hoping to make her marry him. As punishment, the gods blow the merchant's ship toward the North Pole, where the Lady's world meets "another Pole of another world." The merchant and his crew freeze to death, but the Lady survives. She finds herself in this other world—the Blazing World—which is full of curious hybrid creatures who have the bodies of animals but walk, talk, and act like human beings. The bear-men, who live near the Blazing World's icy North Pole, find the merchant's ship and rescue the Lady. She is as unusual to the Blazing World's inhabitants as they are to her, so they bring her to their Emperor, who lives in a palace in the gold-and-jewel-studded city of Paradise. The Emperor believes the Lady to be a goddess, and he graciously marries her and gives her "absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she please[s]." The Lady, now the Empress, uses her power to learn everything that she can about the Blazing World. She learns that the world's inhabitants all speak the same language, follow the same religion, and obey the same all-powerful Emperor. Each species group lives independently and follows a unique profession, but they coexist peacefully, without fighting over power. The gooselike bird-men, the kingdom's astronomers, tell the Empress about the Blazing World's sun, moon, and stars. The bear-men, who are experimental philosophers, use telescopes to test the bird-men's hypotheses and microscopes to show the Empress tiny objects, like a fly's eyes and a piece of charcoal. The fish-men and worm-men (natural philosophers) teach her about the Blazing World's animals, and the ape-men (chemists) explain how basic elements make up everything in nature. But other groups (like the lice- and parrot-men) humiliate themselves when they present their shoddy work, and the Empress banishes them from her palace. She blames the Blazing World's religion for their failures, so she decides to convert its people to her own. She builds two chapels, one out of the Blazing World's shining star-stone and the other of its burning fire-stone. Next, the Empress meets the immaterial spirits, who are the Blazing World's most advanced theoretical philosophers. Since they have no physical bodies, the spirits can travel anywhere in an instant and learn anything they wish. The Empress asks the spirits to explain creation and the universe to her because she wishes to write a Cabbala, or a philosophical treatise about the nature of God, the soul, and the physical world. The spirits explain that the world is made up of self-moving matter, and the soul is really just the rational part of beings' material bodies. But when the Empress asks about original sin, the spirits suddenly disappear—they get banished to the other side of the planet. The Empress reconnects with the spirits and asks if one of them can come serve as a scribe to help with her Cabbala. They agree to send a "plain and rational" woman writer, the Duchess of Newcastle—or Margaret Cavendish, who advises the Empress to write her Cabbala as a fictional allegory. The two women become dear Platonic friends, and their souls frequently visit one another's worlds. On a visit to the Blazing World, the Duchess admits that she wishes she could conquer a world for herself—but the spirits convince her that it's better to rule a fictional "celestial world" than try to conquer a real one. Later, the Empress visits the Duchess's world, where they visit a London theater, observe the English monarchy up close, and meet the Duchess Cavendish's incredibly "wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble" husband, the Duke of Newcastle, who has lost most of his vast estate in the English Civil War. The Duchess asks for the Empress's help convincing Fortune to stop disfavoring her husband. Honesty and Prudence speak on the Duke's behalf, but neither of them manages to convince Fortune, so the Duchess resolves to learn to accept Fortune's folly. After the trial, the Empress notes that she has created divisions in the Blazing World by introducing a new religion and turning the different groups against one another. She resolves to return to the old system: "one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language." In the second section of The Blazing World, the Empress learns that a war has broken out back in her native world, and her country is being devastated. The fish-men discover the icy passage between the two worlds, and the Empress decides to send an army to defend her native land. The giants, who are architects, develop a class of special golden ships that can travel underwater, and the Empress leads a fleet of them to the shores of her country, ESFI (England, Scotland, France, and Ireland). Wearing shining star-stone clothes and standing on the fish-men's backs, so that she appears to be walking on water, the Empress gives an impassioned speech in defense of her country. Her people worship her as a goddess. Her army destroys the enemy ships besieging her country's shores, then invades and burns down her enemies' cities until they all pledge loyalty to the King of ESFI. The Empress returns to the Blazing World, where she discusses riches and theater with the Duchess. Finally, the Duchess Cavendish returns to her own world, where she tells everyone she can about the splendors of the Blazing World. In her brief Epilogue, Cavendish encourages her readers to imagine glorious fantasy worlds of their own.

- Genre: Gothic fiction, magical realism, short story sequence - Title: The Bloody Chamber - Point of view: First, second, and third person varied throughout the stories - Setting: Fairy-tale version of Europe - Theme: Sexuality and Violence. Description: Angela Carter was influenced by the writings of the Marquis de Sade (the source of the word "sadism") in the writing of The Bloody Chamber, and she especially illustrates his idea that sex is often inextricably linked with violence. The most potent example of this is in the title story, "The Bloody Chamber," where the Marquis (a reference to de Sade) has a collection of violent pornography and a chamber where he tortures his wives. The virginal heroine allows herself to be corrupted by the Marquis and loses her sexual innocence, demonstrating one of Carter's more controversial ideas – that women can take part in the sexual violence that oppresses them – and in the bloody chamber the heroine gains the knowledge that her new sexual freedom will lead to her violent death.All the other stories also involve some link between sex and violence, like Figaro's master having sex with the young woman next to Signor Panteleone's body, or the wolf trying to eat Little Red Riding Hood but being seduced by her instead (next to her grandmother's body). Other than this juxtaposition of images (people having sex next to a dead body), the violence Carter associates with sex and sexual awakening often leads to objectification and manipulation as well. Even in a "happy" ending like that of "The Company of Wolves" or "The Tiger's Bride," sexual freedom only comes at the price of some kind of pain. This recurring theme results in the very gothic, sensual tone of the stories as they show how fairy tales portray the darker side of human desire. - Theme: Virginity. Description: Related to the principle theme of sexuality is the idea of virginity, and many of the heroines (and one hero) of the stories are virgins. In the world of The Bloody Chamber, virginity is both an invitation for corruption and a kind of strength or shield. In the stories that focus on sexual violence and manipulation (like "The Bloody Chamber" or "The Tiger's Bride") the virginity of the heroines is their most attractive quality to the bestial men who desire them. To the Marquis, for example, the heroine's virginity is an innocence that can be corrupted and destroyed.Though virginity inherently means a kind of innocence, in Carter's stories it has a unique strength as well. Twice she describes a character's virginity as like a "pentacle" protecting them from harm, and she illustrates the power of virginity as the power of potential, like a stone about to fall. In several stories, when the heroine loses her virginity this act also releases a kind of transformative power that is more than sexual – often a kind of metamorphosis. Throughout the book virginity is like the blank slate, the potential for sexual violence, a metamorphosis of the self, or both. - Theme: Metamorphosis. Description: Many of the characters of The Bloody Chamber are creatures who are half-human and half-beast, or else undergo some change from beast to human or vice versa. These creatures, like The Beast, the Erl-King, and the huntsman werewolf, exist in an in-between space in the world, neither fully human nor fully non-human. They are the traditional creatures of the ancient fairy tales, but Carter also links their kind of "life on the threshold" with the sexual awakening and loss of virginity that most of the stories' heroines experience. So Mr Lyon is transformed from beast to human by the heroine's love, while the heroine of "The Tiger's Bride" is transformed into a tiger. These fantastic metamorphoses as part of sexuality and virginity then lead to Carter's more subtle point – that even the women who experience no magic metamorphosis (like the young woman of "Puss-in-Boots") still live on a kind of threshold, treated as both humans and objects (of sexual desire, usually). It is only through some kind of extreme action – like the young woman colluding in Signor Panteleone's death to escape him – that the heroines can cross the threshold and become fully human. - Theme: Power and Objectification. Description: The book's sexual violence and Carter's feminist worldview create a theme of manipulative power and the objectification of women. This is part of the "latent content" that Carter tried to expose in the old fairy tales. In most of the original stories there is already a divide between a poor, virginal heroine and a wealthy, powerful man/monster, but in Carter's versions this divide also leads to sexual oppression. In "The Bloody Chamber" and "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" the heroines are indebted to bestial men for lifting them out of poverty, and so they must endure their desires.These archetypes of victim and victimizer lead many of the stories to the stark objectification of a woman, usually through a scene where the woman is naked and the man/beast is clothed. So in "The Tiger's Bride" The Beast wants to see the heroine naked, and the Erl-King strips the heroine like "skinning a rabbit." This pornographic image, like the sadistic pictures the Marquis collects in "The Bloody Chamber," is the ultimate example of the woman as object and the man as powerful manipulator. In a similar vein to the pornographic image is the Erl-King's hypnotic whistle and Signor Panteleone (of "Puss-in-Boots") viewing his young wife as another possession to hoard.While in these situations (and throughout the old versions of the fairy tales) the women seem totally objectified and powerless, in Carter's stories they can also gain an agency of their own, like the heroine killing the Erl-King and escaping his power. Instead of rejecting the old fairy tales for their objectification of women and sexual violence, Carter retells them from a female point of view, giving the stories' heroines greater agency in their fates. - Climax: The heroine's mother kills the Marquis in "The Bloody Chamber" - Summary: In "The Bloody Chamber" the heroine, a young pianist, marries a rich Marquis who had three earlier wives. The heroine moves to the Marquis' castle, where she loses her virginity and finds a collection of sadistic pornography. The Marquis then gets a business call and leaves, entrusting his keys to the heroine and only forbidding her from one room. He leaves and the heroine uses the forbidden key, which leads to a torture chamber containing the bodies of the Marquis' three previous wives. The heroine tells a young piano tuner what she saw and then the Marquis returns. The Marquis learns what the heroine did and prepares to behead her. Just as he swings his sword the heroine's mother appears and shoots the Marquis. The heroine inherits the Marquis' fortune and she, her mother, and the piano tuner live happily together. In "The Courtship of Mr Lyon," Beauty's father seeks refuge from a snowstorm at an empty mansion. On his way out he takes a white rose and then the lion-like Beast appears. The Beast makes Beauty come to dinner, where the Beast asks her to stay with him, promising that her father's fortunes will be restored. Beauty agrees, and she spends the days alone and the nights talking with the Beast. When her father grows rich she leaves, promising to return before winter ends. Beauty forgets her promise and only returns when the Beast is dying. She finds him in his bed and kisses his hands, and he turns into a man. In "The Tiger's Bride" a Russian man gambles away his daughter to a mysterious nobleman called The Beast. The Beast's valet takes the heroine to a mansion, where The Beast wants to see her naked. The heroine refuses and is put in a room with an automaton maid. The Beast then takes the heroine on a horse ride, where he disrobes and reveals himself as a tiger. The heroine takes off her own clothes in response. Later the heroine goes to the tiger's room, where he licks her and her skin comes off as she transforms into a tiger. In "Puss-in-Boots," Figaro is a clever cat whose young, promiscuous master falls in love. His desire is the young, closely-guarded wife of Signor Panteleone. Figaro cleverly unites the two lovers and he himself falls for the woman's tabby cat. Eventually the tabby trips Panteleone so he falls to his death, and Figaro's master and the young woman have sex next to Panteleone's body and then get married. In "The Erl-King," the heroine wanders into the woods and is seduced by the Erl-King, a mysterious figure who lives in harmony with nature and has many birds in cages. The heroine learns that the caged birds were once girls, and she strangles the Erl-King and sets the birds free. In "The Snow Child," a Count creates a girl out of his wishes, but she pricks herself on a rose thorn and dies. He then has sex with her body, melting it. In "The Lady of the House of Love," a young soldier is lured into the mansion of the Countess, a beautiful girl vampire. The Countess cuts herself on some glass as she prepares to seduce and kill the young man, and he kisses her wound, making her become mortal and die. He takes a rose from her and goes off to war. In "The Werewolf" a child travels through the forest to visit her grandmother. She is attacked by a wolf and cuts off its hand. When she reaches her grandmother's house she finds that her grandmother is missing a hand, so the neighbors kill the grandmother. In "The Company of Wolves" a child goes to visit her grandmother and meets a handsome huntsman on the way. The huntsman gets to the grandmother's house first, transforms into a wolf, and eats the grandmother. The child arrives and seduces the wolf before he can eat her. "Wolf-Alice" is a girl raised by wolves. Some nuns take her in but then give her to a werewolf Duke. The Duke is wounded by a bullet and then Wolf-Alice licks his wound, transforming him into a full human.

- Genre: Short story, Realistic fiction, Naturalism - Title: The Blue Hotel - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: Romper, Nebraska, around 1900 - Character: Pat Scully. Description: Pat Scully is the proprietor and owner of the Palace Hotel and the father of Johnnie Scully. He has been a resident of Romper, Nebraska for fourteen years, and is an avid and well-respected businessman; he meets his three guests—the Swede, the cowboy, and the Easterner—at the train station when they arrive and is described as being "boisterous[ly]" hospitable. Locals believe his business prowess to be reflected in his choice of flashy blue paint, which makes the Palace Hotel impossible to ignore. Though Scully is initially warm and welcoming to all his guests, he quickly becomes suspicious of the Swede when the latter begins acting strangely. Scully becomes particularly agitated and impatient when the Swede suggests that it is dangerous to stay at his hotel. Though it seems that Scully is peaceful and kind by nature, near the end of the story he urges his son Johnnie to fight the Swede. It is clear that Scully is confused and uncertain about his role in the violence that ensues when Johnnie's mother shames him for putting his own son at risk. - Character: The Swede. Description: The Swede is the most mysterious of all the hotel guests, and little is known about his background. In fact, the other characters speculate on whether he is a Swede at all; the cowboy suggests during a discussion with Scully, the Easterner, and Johnnie that the Swede's accent sounds more like a Dutchman's. The Swede arrives by train to Romper with the Easterner and the cowboy, and is described initially as "quick-eyed" and "shaky." Paranoid from the start, the Swede seems to constantly size up the other men. He becomes suddenly accusatory during a game of cards, during which he suggests someone has been murdered in the hotel's front room. Later, during a second game, he accuses Johnnie of cheating, causing a fight. The Swede's paranoia extends even to friendly Scully, whom he suspects is trying to poison him when the hotel proprietor offers him a drink of liquor. The Swede's bizarre, often aggressive behavior unsettles the other guests, and only becomes more dramatic as the story goes on. He is eventually thrown out of the hotel after beating Johnnie in a fight during the blizzard, and seems to have come to his wits end by the time he reaches the town saloon. There, his paranoia comes to fruition–he is stabbed by the gambler in a scuffle the Swede initiates, and his body is left on the floor of the bar. The Swede is treated as the antagonist for the majority of the story, though Crane reveals at the end that his role as the villain may not be as straight-forward as the other characters, and the reader, would like to believe. - Character: The Cowboy (Bill). Description: Though in moments Scully refers to him as Bill, the cowboy is most often referred to by his moniker throughout the text. The cowboy arrives by train to Romper with the Swede and the Easterner. He is on his way to the Dakota state line and appears unassuming until the men take up a game of cards, at which point he begins to whack the board enthusiastically every time he lays down his hand. This disturbs the Easterner and the Swede but pleases the competitive Johnnie. The cowboy is relatively easy-going until the men get in a brawl after the Swede accuses Johnnie of cheating at cards; during the big fight outside in the blizzard, the cowboy surprises himself by urging Johnnie to murder the Swede. The cowboy, however, is unable to accept his own part in the escalation of violence between the Swede and the other hotel guests. At the end of the story, when the Easterner makes the argument that they are all guilty in part for the death of the Swede, the cowboy asks "Well, I didn't do anything, did I?" - Character: The Easterner (Mr. Blanc). Description: The Easterner, referred to by Scully as Mr. Blanc, is a small, unassuming man. He arrives by train with the other hotel guests and is quiet and agreeable for the majority of the story. The Easterner is the one who suggests that the Swede's strange behavior might simply be due to fear, and seems to be a voice of reason throughout the story. During the brawl over the card table, for example, he asks quietly whether such violence is necessary over a game of cards. At the end of the story, the Easterner admits that his own fear stopped him from ending the conflict before the Swede's death–he knew that Johnnie had, in fact, cheated at cards yet said nothing to interfere with the fight that followed. He makes it clear that he believes that all the men are equally responsible for the death of the Swede, and that the Swede did not necessarily bring his death upon himself. The only character that shows marked growth over the course of the story, the Easterner seems to acknowledge his role as a bystander and admit his own guilt. Because he was arguably the least guilty of all the men, this admittance implicates the cowboy, Scully, and Johnnie as well. - Character: Johnnie Scully. Description: Johnnie is the hotel proprietor Scully's son, and an avid card player. After he and his friend the old farmer get into an argument about a game of cards, he challenges the Easterner, the cowboy, and the Swede to play instead. When the Swede later suggests someone has been murdered in the hotel, Johnnie comes to the hotel's defense and gets aggressive with the Swede. This begins the feud between the two men, which escalates when the Swede accuses Johnnie of cheating at cards. Johnnie becomes more and more hot-headed, and the Swede more brazen, until the two brawl over the card table, and then again in the blizzard outside the hotel. After losing the fight, Johnnie disappears into the back of the hotel to be nursed back to health by his mother–indicating that his hot-headedness is due in part to his immaturity. - Character: Johnnie's Mother. Description: Johnnie's mother remains nameless in the text, and only appears once, to scold her husband Scully and take care of her son Johnnie after he loses the fight with the Swede. She is significant nevertheless because she is the first character to question the progression of the conflict between the men–she openly denounces their violence, giving voice to the idea that the men are all guilty for allowing their disagreement to escalate. - Character: The Barkeeper (Henry). Description: Henry, the barkeeper, serves the Swede alcohol when he arrives in the saloon after leaving the Palace Hotel. When tensions rise between the Swede and the other saloon patrons, Henry is obviously on the side of his customers, including the gambler, but tries to calm everyone nonetheless. After the Gambler stabs the Swede, Henry leaves the Swede's body in the bar to find help "and company," indicating Henry's status as an insider in Romper, unlike the alienated Swede. - Character: The Gambler. Description: The gambler is a particularly strange character in the story–described as being duplicitous yet accepted by the other men in town because of his charming, gracious behavior and willingness to adapt to his place in the status quo. He is depicted both as a conman and a family man, and in the eyes of the townsfolk, his care for his family indicates his respectability despite his career as a swindler. The Swede gets angry at the gambler and his companions when they won't agree to drink with him and question the Swede's denunciation of Scully and the Palace Hotel. When the Swede then starts a brawl with the men, the gambler pulls out a knife and stabs the Swede in the gut. The gambler then leaves, asking the barkeeper Henry to send for the police. The Easterner later refers to the gambler as only "the apex of a human movement"–meaning that, while the gambler takes action in killing the Swede, he is in some ways more innocent then the men who drove the Swede to act so rashly in the first place. - Theme: Fate, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility. Description: "The Blue Hotel" tells the story of an ill-fated night at a hotel in Romper, Nebraska, which ends in the death of one of the hotel's guests. Author Stephen Crane narrates a clear but complex set of events that precede the Swede's murder. Early in the story, upon his arrival at the Palace Hotel, the Swede predicts that he will die that night; this fear produces a distinctly irritable, antagonistic sense of paranoia that ruffles those around him and plays a large part in spurring his being stabbed later that evening at a saloon. Though this appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, Crane is ambivalent about whether the Swede's death is truly fated—that is, whether his actions, and those of the men he encounters throughout the evening, were inevitable, or if they all could have made better choices that would have spared the Swede's life. Crane gives evidence for both interpretations of the story and ultimately leaves readers without an answer, suggesting that it's beyond a person's capacity to understand whether outcomes are fated or freely chosen. Throughout most of the story, Crane steers readers towards a deterministic interpretation of its events (that is, one in which the outcome is destined to happen). He does this primarily by depicting the men's actions as shaped not by free will, but rather by their surroundings and instincts. Many of the character names, for instance, suggest that the men are more products of their backgrounds than they are individuals making conscious choices. The Easterner, the Swede, the farmer, the gambler, and the cowboy are all referred to by their place of origin or their social role, suggesting that each is defined by his environment and can only act in in accordance with the way that environment has shaped him. Crane further suggests that the men are acting on instinct by frequently characterizing them in animalistic terms. After the Swede begins drinking, for example, his expression becomes a "wolfish glare." This glare accompanies his descent into violence; his tone becomes threatening and menacing and eventually leads to physical conflict with the hotel proprietor's son, Johnnie. In this moment, it seems the Swede can control his aggression no more than could a wolf. Later in the story, when men at the town saloon don't want to drink with the Swede to celebrate his victory in the fight at the Palace Hotel, the Swede's ire and pride lead him to "ruffle out his chest like a rooster." The Swede then "explode[s]" and "snarl[s]," escalating the confrontation with the gambler, who then kills him. By depicting humans as beholden to their animal instincts in key moments that lead to violence, Crane undercuts the sense that they're completely responsible for their choices. If the story had ended with the Swede's death, then it might seem a straightforward tale of the unavoidable nature of destiny. However, Crane appends a final scene in which the Easterner suggests that the Swede's death was never fated, but rather the result of a series of poor choices—leaving all of the men at the hotel morally responsible for the Swede's murder and the gambler's imprisonment. When the cowboy idly speculates that, had the Swede not accused Johnnie of cheating at cards, he would still be alive, the Easterner takes this possibility—and its moral implications—seriously. Although he, too, had seen Johnnie cheat, the Easterner didn't say anything in the moment. He later admits, "I refused to stand up and be a man. I let the Swede fight it out alone." The Easterner believes that, since the fight indirectly led to the Swede's death, and because the Easterner could have prevented the fight by corroborating the Swede's accusation that Johnnie was cheating (thereby making the fight unnecessary), the Easterner bears some moral responsibility for what happened. Furthermore, since all of the men seemed to be spoiling for a fight throughout the evening, the Easterner believes that they all bear responsibility for the death. The gambler—the man who actually killed the Swede—took all the legal blame, but the Easterner does not think this is fair. "Every sin is the result of a collaboration," he says, noting that the gambler was merely "the apex of a human movement"—the final collaborator in a death that could have been prevented had all of these men made different choices. The Swede dies looking upon a sign above the saloon's till that reads, "This registers the amount of your purchase." Though the Swede has professed a belief in the inescapability of his death that night, and as such implicitly rejected responsibility for his actions, the sign could be interpreted as in keeping with the Easterner's commentary on free will and moral responsibility—that is, an acknowledgement that people's actions determine their fate, since the price they pay is a direct result of their choices. The story ends without taking a position on whether the Easterner is right, however. Instead, the cowboy asks the Easterner indignantly, "Well, I didn't do anything, did I?" This question provides no answers about the validity of fate versus free will, but it does suggest a human aversion to assuming moral responsibility. - Theme: Vulnerability and Violence. Description: "The Blue Hotel" is set in Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century, a time when the state represented the edges of the lawless American West. It was dangerous to travel west during this period, and as such the story's main characters, each of whom is traveling alone, often hide their true feelings in order to project a sense of strength upon the strangers they meet. This false bravado, however only leads to a greater sense of mistrust and unease among the hotel proprietor Scully and his guests, leading to conflict and eventually physical violence. The protagonists' need to disguise their fear demonstrates Crane's view that masking vulnerability only creates tension and violence, while openly discussing feelings of fear or uneasiness can build trust and camaraderie. Throughout the story, Crane establishes that his characters often show one emotion in order to hide another. For example, when the passengers on the train pass through the West, they express "shame, pity, horror, in a laugh" at the sight of Scully's vibrant blue hotel against the stark Nebraska landscape, disguising their discomfort with the desolate environment through laughter and thereby avoiding being vulnerable with one another. The Swede, of course, is the character with the strongest tendency to disguise his emotions in the story. For example, at dinner with Scully and the other guests, the Swede says, "with a laugh and a wink," that "some of these Western communities were very dangerous; and after his statement he straightened his legs under the table, tilted his head, and laughed again, loudly." This moment at once evidences the Swede's fear of the West and his desire to disguise that fear behind laughter, projecting a false confidence that makes others confused and uncomfortable. Likewise, when the Swede, the cowboy, the Easterner, and Johnnie are playing cards, the Swede laughingly asserts that someone has been murdered in the room where they sit. Johnnie, his unease already growing alongside the Swede's strange behavior, takes this comment as a threat. He begins speaking to the Swede aggressively, asking, "What in the hell are you talking about?" The Swede's attempt to mask his fear with laughter backfires by making the others so uncomfortable that things escalate into a brawl. Clearly, the Swede's tendency to hide his true emotions makes others mistrust him, a dynamic that easily spills into violence. Beyond simply condemning the mistrust that false bravado breeds, Crane demonstrates the benefits of being open about fear. While the Swede hides his feelings and alienates himself, the remainder of the characters are more honest with one another, allowing them to bond. The cowboy and the Easterner, for example, are quick to express their uncertainty about the Swede to each other, as well as to their hosts. They speculate on the reasons for his strange behavior, and then bond over the revelation that his behavior stems largely from fear. By coming to this conclusion together, the men reassure each other that the Swede isn't as dangerous as they believe. They are able to comfort each other, and also to build trust through mutual understanding of the strange circumstances they find themselves in. Similarly, Johnnie makes his discomfort about the Swede clear to the other characters. He tells his father to throw the man out into the snow and states many times that he finds the Swede's abrasive behavior disturbing. Sharing this fear makes the other characters sympathetic to Johnnie, while the Swede's brazen attempts to hide his fear does the opposite. Because of this, when Johnnie is accused of cheating at cards, the men immediately assume it is the Swede who is in the wrong and come to Johnnie's defense. By sharing his vulnerability and being more transparent with the other hotel guests, Johnnie has created a support network for himself—despite the fact that he actually is the one in the wrong. The Swede, on the other hand, remains alienated and alone because of his lack of openness about his feelings. The bond that has formed between the cowboy, the Easterner, Scully and Johnnie is clearest when the Swede finally leaves the hotel, and the men are able to express their thoughts without worrying about how they will be perceived. The cowboy and Scully talk about what they would do to the Swede if they had the opportunity, and rather than seeming threatening to each other, the men seem to understand each other's feelings. While earlier outbursts might have been interpreted similarly to the Swede's strange behavior, the men have obviously shared enough of their vulnerabilities to feel comfortable being honest about their thoughts on aggression. Crane draws a clear line between a refusal to express vulnerability and eventual violence. The Swede's false bravado and inability to be honest about his fear with his companions leads the other characters to distrust him and, ultimately, to his violent death in the saloon, while the cowboy, the Easterner, Scully, and Johnnie—who are more open with each other about their fear of the Swede—build trust and eventually defend each other when suspicion escalates to physical violence. - Theme: Judgment and Deception. Description: The characters in "The Blue Hotel" are all strangers to each other when they arrive on the train, and three of them—the cowboy, the Easterner, and the Swede—are new to the small town of Romper, Nebraska altogether. Repeatedly described as tense and suspicious of their companions, the characters rely primarily on surface appearances to size each other up. By offering little to no backstory for his protagonists, Crane creates an environment of fear and unease, as characters—and the reader—are unsure of who to trust. Such ignorance and shallow judgments, the story ultimately suggests, pave the way for deception. The cowboy, the Easterner, and the Swede are immediately judgmental and suspicious of one another upon arriving at the Palace Hotel. After washing up, they sit tensely "in the silence of experienced men who tread carefully amid new people," and respond to the local farmer's attempts at small talk with only "short but adequate sentences." For his part, the paranoid Swede does not respond at all, and is instead "making furtive estimates of each man in the room." The fact that none of the three guests is properly named increases the air of mystery surrounding them and reflects that they are defined in each other's eyes by their outward appearance. That none of the men make much of an effort to share their backstories further suggests their mutual lack of trust and allows for ignorant speculation, and, ultimately, deception. Indeed, the hotel guests make frequent presumptions and talk behind each other's backs. For example, after the Swede leaves the room, Johnnie says, "'That's the doddangedest Swede I ever see," to which the cowboy "scornfully" replies, "He ein't no Swede." Crane writes, "'Well, what is he then?' cried Johnnie. 'What is he then?'" This moment makes clear that the men need to latch onto something familiar in order to understand this man—that they require some sort of backstory from which they can then extrapolate the Swede's character. Of course, as the cowboy quickly asserts, the Swede is actually Dutch. In their efforts to peg the character of their new acquaintance, the other men have ironically misidentified the only identifier they have. This points to the futility of basing judgment entirely on surface-level perceptions. The disconnect between shallow appearance and genuine character is particularly evident with the gambler, whom the townsfolk respect despite the fact that he is a violent conman. Crane writes that the gambler "was, in fact, a man so delicate in manner, when among people of fair class, and so judicious in his choice of victims, that in the strictly masculine part of the town's life he had come to be explicitly trusted and admired. People called him a thoroughbred." Crane's tone here is ironic, and it conveys the author's judgment of the people of Romper for trusting such a character based solely on his genteel outward mannerisms while ignoring his violent actions. By demonstrating the flawed logic by which the disreputable and ultimately murderous gambler is accepted by the town, Crane further underscores the danger of ignorant judgment. By the end of the story, it's clear that such ignorance leads to both misinformation and potentially wrongful alienation of characters. When the Swede eventually accuses Johnnie of cheating at cards, for instance, the other characters are quick to jump to the latter's defense; rather than consider the evidence at hand, they simply assume the Swede is in the wrong based on their prior judgments of his paranoid behavior. The Easterner reveals at the end of the story, however, that it was in fact Johnnie, and not the Swede, who was being deceitful; Johnnie really was cheating at cards. While the Swede has been perceived as a villain and Johnnie as relatively innocent for most of the story, Crane makes clear in the end the folly in relying on appearances and blurs the line between trust and deceit. By misleading the reader into trusting certain deceptive characters, Crane demonstrates how easily ignorant judgment can lead to alienation and violence. In the tale's final moments, even as the Easterner asserts that Johnnie had deceived them all, and that all men are to blame for the Swede's death, the cowboy refuses to believe any of it; instead, he insists on Johnnie's innocence, the Swede's shameful behavior, and that his hands are clean of any wrongdoing. Not only are people quick to make shallow assumptions about those around then, the story thus suggests, but they are also loath to abandon their prejudices even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary. - Climax: The Gambler stabs and kills the Swede in the town saloon - Summary: A train passes through Fort Romper, Nebraska, a small settlement on the edge of the lawless American West. The view through the train window is of the Palace Hotel, whose blue paint contrasts starkly with the lifeless green and brown landscape. Pat Scully, the hotel proprietor, waits in the cold to persuade a few unclaimed passengers to stay at his establishment for the evening. After brief introductions, the Cowboy, the Swede, and the Easterner follow Scully back to the hotel. Inside the hotel, Scully urges his son Johnnie, who is playing cards with the old farmer, to bring the guests' suitcases upstairs. The men engage in small talk over dinner, during which each seems to be sizing the other up. The Swede is quiet and hesitant, while the Cowboy and the Easterner seem agreeable, if a bit wary. At dinner, the Swede makes a mocking, seemingly jovial comment about the dangers of the traveling in the West, which the others don't know how to interpret. After dinner, Scully announces a blizzard. Johnnie, who drove away the old farmer with his hot-headedness, asks the Cowboy, the Swede, and the Easterner to join him in a game of cards. They agree, though the Swede is reluctant. The men play an intense game, which the Swede interrupts by suggesting that someone has been murdered in the front room of the hotel. Johnnie immediately becomes defensive, and the Swede tells the other men that he believes he will die in the hotel that night. The other men think the Swede is insane, and the conflict is only interrupted when Scully comes into the room and demands to know what's going on. The Swede becomes overwhelmed and fearful, and insists on leaving. He goes upstairs to pack his bags. Scully meets the Swede upstairs. The Swede is immediately suspicious of Scully, who tries to have a conversation with him about his other children by showing him photos in the spare room. The two have a drink together, and the Swede suspects that Scully is trying to poison him. Meanwhile, the Cowboy, Johnnie, and the Easterner are downstairs speculating on the Swede's character. The Cowboy reveals that he believes the Swede is actually a Dutchman, based on his accent, and while the Easterner suggests that simple fear is the cause of the Swede's perplexing behavior. The Easterner suspects that dime novels the Swede read about the West have made him believe he is in horrible danger. Scully and the Swede return downstairs, and the Swede decides to stay in the hotel after all. Scully admits to the men, when the Swede leaves the room, that the Swede is acting strangely, but he believes that the Swede is "okay now." The men continue their card game, which again becomes heated. In the middle of the game, the Swede suddenly accuses Johnnie of cheating. Johnnie finally loses his temper with the Swede, and a brawl starts over the card table. The conflict escalates, leading the men to a more violent fight outside in the blizzard. Johnnie and the Swede square off, with the Easterner as a fearful and skeptical bystander and Scully and the Cowboy urging Johnnie on. The Swede wins the fight, and makes an arrogant, haughty exit from the hotel with his suitcase. Meanwhile, a crowd of women, consisting of the hotel staff and the hotel proprietess, rush to Johnnie's aid. Johnnie's mother shames Scully for allowing his son to get so badly hurt. The other guests, Scully and Johnnie are relieved that the Swede has left. The Swede makes his way through town, catching sight of the train in the distance as he walks toward the saloon. Inside, he orders a drink from the barkeep, and demands the attention of the other patrons of the saloon, which includes the notorious Gambler. When the men refuse to drink with the Swede, the men get into a fight–during the brawl, the Gambler pulls out a knife and stabs the Swede, who dies on the floor of the bar. The story ends sometime later, when the Easterner and the Cowboy meet up after the Swede's murder trial. The Easterner reveals that the Gambler was given a light sentence for the murder, and the Cowboy blames the Swede for his aggressive behavior, suggesting it lead to his early death. The Easterner disagrees, and tells the Cowboy that Johnnie did, in fact, cheat at cards, but that he was too afraid to say anything at the time. The Easterner then says that all the men are equally guilty for the death of the Swede, not only the Gambler who stuck him with a knife.

- Genre: Coming of age, tragedy, African American literature - Title: The Bluest Eye - Point of view: First person passages narrated by Claudia MacTeer, third person omniscient. - Setting: Loraine, Ohio, in the years following the great depression, 1940-1941. - Character: Pecola Breedlove. Description: The novel's protagonist, Pecola is an eleven-year-old black girl from an abusive home. She believes she is ugly and suffers the cruelty of her parents, classmates, and other individuals in the community. She desires blue eyes, believing that they will make her beautiful—based on her unquestioning belief regarding whiteness as the sole standard of beauty—and allow her to transcend her horrible situation. - Character: Claudia MacTeer. Description: The narrator of parts of the novel, Claudia is a strong-willed and passionate nine-year-old black girl. Still young, Claudia has not experienced overt racism and violence to the extent many of the novel's other characters have. Still largely undamaged, she is compassionate toward Pecola, and rebels against the black community's worship of white beauty. - Character: Frieda MacTeer. Description: Claudia's older sister, Frieda is ten-years-old and possesses the same independence and resilience as Claudia. Frieda loves Shirley Temple and other white actresses, sharing the community's belief that whiteness is the paragon of beauty and virtue. Frieda possesses a deeper, although still limited, view of womanhood and adulthood, which Claudia envies. - Character: Cholly Breedlove. Description: Pecola's father, Cholly is a violent and severely damaged man. From a young age Cholly has been free—his mother left him on a trash heap as an infant, and his caretaker dies when he is an adolescent—but his freedom is both isolating and dangerous, allowing him to commit heinous acts without remorse. Early sexual failures and racial violence have also contributed to Cholly's vicious nature, and although Cholly is capable of love, he takes out his anger and frustration on the women in his life. He ultimately rapes Pecola, his own daughter, and then runs away. - Character: Pauline Breedlove. Description: Pecola's mother, also known as Polly and Mrs. Breedlove. Pauline has a disabled foot. She believes she is ugly, and has always blamed her foot for her ugliness and the neglect she experiences as a child. When she later loses a front tooth, her self-perceived ugliness intensifies. She views herself as a martyr because she stays with Cholly, who is verbally and physically abusive. Pauline constructs her identity based on the movies she watches, her devotion to Christianity, and her role as breadwinner of the family. She beats Pecola when she learns of Cholly's rape of her. - Character: Henry Washington. Description: Known by the Macteer girls as Mr. Henry, Henry, he is a boarder at the MacTeer residence. He has a reputation as a hard working, quiet man. He was never married, but has a lascivious side. He is friendly with the MacTeer girls, but this affability covers an underlying and perverted aspect of his personality, which focuses on young girls. - Character: Samuel Breedlove. Description: Pecola's fourteen-year-old brother, Samuel suffers the same abuse as Pecola at the hands of their parents. Samuel, in contrast to his sister, is not afraid to get involved in his parents' arguments and even uses physical force. He is known to run away from home, which he has done twenty-seven times by the age of fourteen. - Character: China, Poland, and Miss Marie. Description: These women are the local prostitutes in Loraine, Ohio. The community knows Miss Marie as the Maginot Line. The women live together in an apartment above the Breedloves. Miss Marie is overweight and kind, China is skinny and sarcastic, and Poland is taciturn. The prostitutes tease each other affectionately and treat Pecola with kindness, while the rest of the community treats her cruelly. - Character: Maureen Peal. Description: A "high yellow dream child", as Claudia calls her, Maureen is a mulatto girl from a wealthy family. She moves to Loraine in the winter, interrupting the tedium of the long winter months. She wears nice clothing and brings large, healthy lunches to school. She is treated with special kindness and respect by her peers, and feels she is superior to others. She is capable of both kindness and cruelty. - Character: Geraldine. Description: A light skinned black woman from the south, Geraldine considers herself and her family superior to other black families. She keeps her house immaculately clean and is obsessed with the physical appearance of her home and family. As a mother and wife she is cold, and feels true affection only for her cat. - Character: Louis Junior. Description: Geraldine's son, known as Junior, is an arrogant and entitled young boy. He feels ownership of the school playground across the street from his house, and forces other children to play with him. He is lonely, and his mother's coldness has caused Junior to become sadistic and cruel, especially toward her cat. - Character: Soaphead Church. Description: A light skinned West Indian man, Soaphead Church is a self-proclaimed misanthrope. After failing as a preacher, he deems himself a "Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams", and provides counsel to community members. He detests the human body, believing the human body is dirty, and only desires to touch the bodies of children, which he considers clean. - Theme: Beauty vs. Ugliness. Description: The black characters of the The Bluest Eye have been taught to believe that whiteness is the paragon of beauty. The characters are constantly subjected to images of whiteness offered through movies, books, candy, magazines, toys, and advertisements. Early in the novel, Pecola and Frieda gush over Shirley Temple's beauty, and later, Mrs. Breedlove spends her days at the movies admiring the white actresses, wishing she could access their world. The association between beauty and whiteness pushes the idea of beauty beyond the body's exterior, making it a signifier of one's value and worth. Many characters in the novel believe that their beauty (or ugliness) defines their value (or lack of value) in society, community, and family.Characters establish their sense of self-worth based on these ideas of beauty. In turn, beauty and ugliness become internalized conditions, which have devastating effects on the lives of the novel's characters. The narrator suggests that The Breedloves are fixed in poverty because they believe they are ugly, and Pecola believes she deserves the abuse and neglect she experiences at home based on her self-perceived ugliness. Contrary to the incapacitating effect of internalized ugliness, beauty endows certain characters with power. The presence of Maureen Peal's beauty, for example, has the power to stop to the violence Pecola experiences at the hands of the boys at school. The power that comes along with beauty leads Pecola to believe that possessing blue eyes, the quintessential signifier of whiteness and beauty, would allow her to transcend the misery of her situation. As her life becomes more and more brutal, her obsession with blue eyes leads her to madness—and in the isolation of that madness she comes to believe that she does in fact have blue eyes. In the end, the novel suggests that beauty and ugliness in and of themselves are not destructive or dangerous. Instead, it is the internalization of the idea of what makes beauty that holds immense destructive power. - Theme: Women and Femininity. Description: At its core, The Bluest Eye is a story about the oppression of women. The novel's women not only suffer the horrors of racial oppression, but also the tyranny and violation brought upon them by the men in their lives. The novel depicts several phases of a woman's development into womanhood. Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia, the novel's youngest female characters, possess a limited and idealistic view of what it means to be a woman, to have sex, and to be loved by a man. Mrs. Breedlove's and Geraldine's narratives depict this innocent view being shattered as they enter into the harsh realities of marriage and the oppression they experience in their homes. Although the women of The Bluest Eye experience oppression from then men in their lives, they are not completely powerless. They exercise authority over their children through physical force and verbal assault, and likewise, over other women through gossip and slander. In the same way women are oppressed by men, women turn toward those who are vulnerable and weak, directing their own forms of oppression outward. The prostitutes—China, Poland, and Miss Marie—offer the only exception to the rule of male oppression over women. They gain power over men through exploiting their femininity and sexuality. Exploiting themselves in this way, however, comes at the price of their self-respect and the respect of the women around them. In many ways, the prostitutes, through their drinking, aggression, and masculine mannerisms, resemble the men they have come to hate. The theme of women and femininity, and male oppression over women in The Bluest Eye, reaches its brutal climax during Cholly's rape of his own daughter, Pecola. This scene, which details the ultimate form of violence and oppression against women, is narrated completely through Cholly's perspective. The lack of Pecola's perspective during the rape scene demonstrates the silencing effect of male oppression over women. - Theme: Race and Racism. Description: Race and racism are complicated issues in The Bluest Eye. Unlike typical portrayals of racism, involving white hatred against blacks, The Bluest Eye primarily explores the issue of racism occurring between people of color. There are few white characters in Morrison's novel, and no major white characters, yet racism remains at the center of the text. Because the novel involves mostly black characters, "whiteness" exists on a spectrum. Race is not only defined by the color of one's skin, the shape of one's features, or the texture of one's hair, but also by one's place of origin, socioeconomic class, and educational background. "Whiteness" is associated with virtue, cleanliness, and value, while being black is associated with immorality, dirtiness, and worthlessness. These ideas of race, having to do with cleanliness, virtue, and value, become internalized to varying degrees by different characters. Internalizing these ideas of race ultimately leads to racial self-hatred among the characters of The Bluest Eye, which creates various forms of dysfunction in the characters' lives. Mrs. Macteer, for example, is unusually harsh with Claudia when she gets sick, because sickness signifies uncleanliness, which is related to being black. Likewise, Soaphead Church, who can't stand the dirtiness he associates with black women, directs his sexual desires toward children. The novel's characters use the other black individuals as reference points against which they judge their own "whiteness" and sense of self-worth. Distinctions are drawn based on the shade of one's skin, the hue of one's eyes, and the texture of one's hair, but when these markers fall short in defining one's race, characters opt for socioeconomic, educational, religious, regional, and hereditary differences to define their "whiteness". Geraldine attempts to separate herself and her family from appearing black by straightening her hair, using lotion on Junior's skin to keep it from becoming ashen, and keeping her home immaculately clean. Likewise, Soaphead Church uses his white heritage, place of origin, and educational background to define his "whiteness". Characters lacking any marker of "Whiteness" suffer the most. The theme of race, and the destructive force of racial self-hatred reach a climax during Pecola's rape. This moment offers the literal and metaphorical pinnacle of racial self-hatred. After the rape, Pecola must bear the metaphorical internalization of Cholly's racial self-hatred through the trauma she carries forward, and literally, as she carries her father's baby. - Theme: Home and Family. Description: Home in The Bluest Eye represents more than the physical structure where a family lives. In Morrison's novel, home is an idea that defines the characters' sense of self and self-worth, and likewise, informs the way they are perceived by those around them. The homes depicted in The Bluest Eye are set against an ideal image of home and family, presented in the novel's opening section written in the style of a Dick and Jane primer. This ideal serves to contrast the non-traditional homes and family compositions in which the novel's black families live. Because the idea of home is fundamental in the way black families are perceived, owning and caring for a house becomes the primary focus of most black families. Already disadvantaged because of the color of their skin, home becomes a means through which black families may establish and sustain a sense of value. Several homes are depicted in the novel, offering the degrees to which idea of home defines an individual's or family's sense of worth. The Breedloves live in an abandoned storefront and have the lowest sense of self-worth. To the contrary, The Macteers live in an old house, but it is theirs and Mrs. Macteer takes great pride in it, and Geraldine lives in a beautiful house, which allows her to feel superior to other black families. Claudia draws a sharp distinction between being without a home and being "outdoors". Most black families in the novel don't own homes, but still possess a sense of home and family. Being "outdoors", to the contrary, signifies the end of home and family, a place from which there is no return. Cholly's rape of Pecola represents the complete absence of home and family. In raping his own daughter, Cholly commits the ultimate violation of home and family. To the contrary, possessing a sense of home and family can serve as a redemptive force in one's life. Because of their home and family, Claudia and Frieda are capable of having a different perspective than characters lacking home and family. In the end, Claudia's untarnished perspective allows Morrison's narrative to unfold for the reader. - Theme: Sex and Sexuality. Description: In The Bluest Eye, sex is associated with violence, humiliation, and immorality. Instead of sex being an enjoyable act between two people, sex, like race and beauty standards, works as a form of oppression. For both men and women, sexual initiation has devastating effects on an individual's life and sense of self. The scenes of sexual initiation are particularly violent and humiliating, leaving a lasting effect on the novel's characters. Cholly's first sexual experience is paired with humiliation and hatred, as the white men force him to rape Darlene. Frieda's first sexual experience is forced upon her by Mr. Henry, and causes her to believe she has been ruined. And Pecola's sexual initiation happens through rape.Men in the story use sex as a means to oppress the women in their lives. Their sexual desires are distorted by their past sexual failures and their ideas concerning the value of women. Cholly's first sexual experience leads to his hatred of women, hatred of his own race, and his feeling of being unlovable. The combination of these things leads to the rape of his daughter. Soaphead Church's failed marriage and hatred of women leads to the direction of his repressed sexual desire toward children. For the younger characters in The Bluest Eye, sex becomes the defining element of their passage into womanhood. The adolescent girls in the story, however, lack a true understanding of the perilous nature of sex. They hold idealistic views of what sex means, associating sex with love and a sense of self worth as a woman. As an adolescent, Mrs. Breedlove fantasizes about a man coming into her life and offering redemption from the rejection she receives from her family. Geraldine represents another kind of experience. Her sense of worth as a woman still comes through her relationship with her husband. The husbands of women like Geraldine marry them because they cook, clean, and take care of the house. Although sex for her is not overtly violent, she is unable to enjoy sex because she views it as a burden she must bear for her husband. There are examples of women who escape the violence and oppression of sex. This evasion of sexual oppression, however, comes only through passing the point of being sexually desirable, or through exploiting one's sexuality as a means to gain power over men. M'Dear and other elderly women in the community experience freedom because they are no longer desired as sexual objects. These women, however, are bitter, tired, and accept the presence of pain. The Prostitutes exploit their own sexuality to gain power over men, but this method of gaining power leads to self hatred and hatred of the opposite sex. Sex stands as the primary form of oppression in the novel. Even those who escape overt sexual violence bear the consequences of oppression through sex. The climax of the story offers the primary example of this form of oppression. Pecola's rape leads to her ultimate demise. Through this experience, Pecola embodies the devastating effect of sexual violence, and the oppressive force of sex in these women's lives. - Climax: Pecola's rape by her father Cholly - Summary: Nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her ten-year-old sister, Frieda MacTeer, live in an old house in Loraine, Ohio. It is 1941, near the end of the Great Depression, and their family struggles to make ends meet. Although there is a tremendous sense of love in their home, their mother, Mrs. MacTeer, is strict and punishes them often, but out of a sense of concern and love for her children. Their father works hard to keep the family afloat. To help financially, the MacTeer's take in a boarder named Henry Washington, who the girls call Mr. Henry. They later take in a young girl named Pecola Breedlove because her father, Cholly Breedlove, burned her family's house down and ended up in jail. Claudia and Frieda like Pecola, but feel sorry for her. Pecola and Frieda love Shirley Temple because of her beauty, which stems from her white features, but Claudia disagrees with them. Eventually, Pecola moves back into the storefront apartment where her family lives, and her life continues to be hard. Her father is an abusive alcoholic, and her mother is neglectful and self-righteous. Her parents fight on a regular basis, and these altercations lead to physical violence. Pecola's brother, Samuel, copes with the violence by running away, but Pecola, being a young black girl, is unable to escape. She believes she is fated to live her sad life because she is ugly, which is confirmed by the way she is treated in the community. She prays for blue eyes because they will make her beautiful and allow her to see the world differently. The reader learns that Pecola's parents have both had tragic lives, which has led to their dysfunction as adults. Her father, Cholly Breedlove, was abandoned as a baby and later turned away by his father after searching him out. During Cholly's first sexual experience, two white men stumble upon him and the girl he was with and force him to continue the sexual act as they watch. This humiliating incident leads Cholly to develop a hatred for women. He lives a dangerously free life, and feels tied down after getting married. Pecola's mother, Mrs. Breedlove, has a lame foot and has always felt isolated and ugly. As a young woman, she loses herself in movies. The beautiful white actresses exacerbate her belief that she is ugly. After having children, she takes on the role of a martyr, believing her relationship with Cholly is a cross she must bear as a good Christian woman. She works for a white family, and spending time in their home makes her despise her own. One day during the spring of 1941, Cholly returns home drunk and finds Pecola washing dishes. He experiences a fury of emotions as he watches her. At first, he feels tenderness and hatred fueled by guilt. He knows he is unable to care for her, and hates her for loving him. He rapes Pecola, and leaves her on the kitchen floor. Afterward, Mrs. Breedlove beats Pecola when she learns of the rape. In an act of desperation, Pecola visits Soaphead Church, a local charlatan who claims he can work miracles, and asks for blue eyes. Soaphead Church tricks Pecola into poisoning a dog he has long wanted to kill, stating that if the dog acts funny it is a sign she will receive her wish. When summer arrives, Claudia and Frieda begin selling marigold seeds to save for a new bike. As they make their way around the neighborhood, they learn that Pecola has been impregnated by her father. Unlike the rest of the community, the girls want the baby to live. They sacrifice the money they have made, burying it by Pecola's house, and plant the remaining marigold seeds in their backyard. They believe that if the marigold seeds grow, their prayers have been answered and the baby will live. In the end, however, the seeds do not grow and Pecola's baby dies. Afterward, Pecola goes mad, and in in her psychosis, believes she has received blue eyes. The community disowns her, and from then on she lives isolated in her own world.

- Genre: Short Story, Naturalist Fiction, Modernist Fiction - Title: The Boarding House - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A boarding house in Dublin, Ireland - Character: Mrs. Mooney. Description: The protagonist of the story, Mrs. Mooney is Polly's mother and the owner of the boarding house. She is a formidable woman with a scheme to marry her daughter off. As a butcher's daughter who separated from her alcoholic husband after he tried to attack her with a meat cleaver, Mrs. Mooney has had to make her own way in life and be shrewd in order to survive as a single woman in 20th-century Ireland. This necessary cunning has nevertheless positioned her near the fringes of respectable society: her lodgers at the boarding house call her "the Madam," which is also the name for a female proprietor of a brothel. In her own, pragmatic way, Mrs. Mooney advocates for Polly by turning a blind eye on her flirtation with Mr. Doran, a resident of the boarding house, until she's sure she'll be able to secure a marriage proposal from him. Though, with her shrewdness and cunning, Mrs. Mooney has found a way to manipulate the strict social rules that oppress so many characters in Dubliners, she's still not free of those rules: she can't divorce her estranged husband, because divorce was illegal in Ireland at the time, and it's the limited prospects for women that force her to work so hard to marry Polly off. - Character: Mr. Doran. Description: Mr. Doran is a lodger at Mrs. Mooney's boarding house who has an affair with Mrs. Mooney's daughter, Polly. In his mid-30s, Mr. Doran has held a steady job for 13 years working for a Catholic wine merchant. Despite "sowing his wild oats" (that is, having many sexual relationships) and flirting with atheist ideas as a young man, Mr. Doran has led a respectable life for several years now. As for many characters in Dubliners, respectability is extremely restrictive for Mr. Doran: he is terrified of his family and his employer finding out about his affair with Polly, and he is near-traumatized by the agony of confessing the relationship to the priest. He doesn't have strong or passionate feelings for Polly—he's not even sure he likes her—but he's so terrified of what Mrs. Mooney might do and of being exposed that by the story's end, the strong implication is that he has agreed to marry Polly. - Character: Polly Mooney. Description: Mrs. Mooney's 19-year-old daughter, who does housework around the boarding house. A "very lively" young woman, she flirts with all the resident young men. She seems to be the driving force behind her relationship with Mr. Doran, showing him little signs of care, then finally going to his room one night in her bathrobe, under the pretense of lighting her candle. In Mr. Doran's company, Polly seems distraught that her mother has discovered the relationship, even threatening to kill herself, but as soon as she's alone she escapes into cheerful hopes and visions of the future. Though Polly manipulates Mr. Doran, she herself is a victim of a very restrictive society that offers her no real opportunity to leave the family home except through marriage. - Theme: Social Manipulation vs. Social Paralysis. Description: "The Boarding House" depicts the consequences of an affair between a man and a young woman in early 20th-century Dublin. The flirtation between Mr. Doran and young Polly Mooney takes place in the house he boards in, run by Polly's mother, the formidable Mrs. Mooney. It's a suffocating environment that serves as a microcosm of Dublin, a city in which "everyone knows everyone else's business"—and judges that business according to strict social mores and religious morality. Like so many other characters in Dubliners, Mr. Doran is paralyzed by this scrutiny. Facing the judgment of his employer, the priest, his family, and others, he feels he has only two options: to marry Polly or to run away. Mrs. Mooney, meanwhile, takes advantage of this socially induced "paralysis" (to use Joyce's word from the first paragraph of Dubliners), by turning a blind eye on the flirtation until she's satisfied that it's gone too far for Mr. Doran to respectably back out. In this way, she uses rigid social rules to entrap Mr. Doran and marry off her daughter, who turns out to be a willing participant in the ruse. The strictures of Dublin society, then, create both paralysis and opportunities for manipulation. But though it seems Mrs. Mooney will get what she wants, and Polly is pleased with her mother's intervention, the story's biting tone clearly indicates that in Joyce's view, there is no real winner when people are ruled by the rigid, arbitrary forces of social and religious morality. Though Mrs. Mooney is in some ways the story's victor, her victory is hollow. She is a great social manipulator (necessarily, after escaping her alcoholic husband who once tried to attack her with a cleaver), but the manipulation impoverishes her life. In considering her negotiation over Polly's future, Mrs. Mooney "was sure she would win. To begin with she had all the weight of social opinion on her side: she was an outraged mother." And yet she's not truly outraged, but rather scheming, even pleased about the affair. She "wins" only by acting a role, and so even while manipulating "social opinion," she still has to bend to it. And throughout the story, Mrs. Mooney concerns herself only with material gain. She considers Mr. Doran's "sit" (or job), his salary, and his savings, but not his character or her daughter's feelings. She clearly cares for her daughter, but she can express this care only through manipulation and fixation on material gain, thus suggesting that she, too, is trapped in her own way. For Mr. Doran, the prospect of marriage holds only dread. The social strictures that paralyze Joyce's Dubliners seem to have claimed his whole life. As he descends the stairs to face Mrs. Mooney and discuss the affair, "the implacable faces of his employer and of the Madam [i.e., Mrs. Mooney] stared upon his discomfiture," and he passes Polly's brother, the brutish Jack, with a memory of his violence to someone who disrespected his sister. As such, his impending engagement seems to be sealed by the threats of unemployment, social scandal, and violence. The flirtation and lust between Mr. Doran and Polly Mooney are glossed over in just two paragraphs, while many pages are devoted to the inevitable outcome of this momentary outburst of libido. Thus the story's structure reflects a world in which libido—or life force more generally—is suffocated by social strictures. Even before he hears that Mrs. Mooney wishes to speak to him of the affair, Mr. Doran vividly hears and sees the ways everyone in his life might react to the information: "He felt his heart leap warmly in his throat as he heard in his excited imagination old Mr. Leonard [his employer] calling out in his rasping voice: Send Mr. Doran here, please." And "he could imagine his friends talking of the affair and laughing." Thus even before his fate is sealed—while in a less claustrophobic world he might still be enjoying the "delirium" of the affair—he's tortured by social scrutiny. Meanwhile, Polly's behavior is presented as mercenary, but necessarily so. In Mrs. Mooney's eagerness to marry Polly off, there's an implication that in Dublin society, it's necessary for a young girl like her to be married—seen, for instance, in the hardheaded phrasing "she thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands." From here readers can deduce that women were under some pressure to marry, whether they wanted to or not. Polly seems to think little about Mr. Doran's characters or feelings, instead working in silent complicity with her mother to secure a proposal—but Joyce hints at the likely emptiness of such a match. Polly is cheery while Mr. Doran faces his fate with Mrs. Mooney: "She waited on patiently, almost cheerfully, without alarm, her memories gradually giving place to hopes and visions of the future. Her hopes and visions were so intricate that she no longer saw the white pillows on which her gaze was fixed or remembered that she was waiting for anything." And yet to readers these hopes remain blank, casting an ominous air over the marriage. Joyce further foreshadows the emotional limits of Polly's marriage by presenting Mr. Doran's misgivings about her: "She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had've known. But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?" Joyce clearly positions the match between Polly and Mr. Doran as an ultimately joyless, loveless one based on the "delirium" of early infatuation—"but delirium passes." As such, Polly will also lose out, no matter how happy she is with the way this story ends. Thus, while all three main characters dance with and around the rules of their society, Joyce demonstrates that each one is, in fact, paralyzed or impoverished by those very rules. - Theme: Female Innocence vs. Female Cunning. Description: Though the story's male characters-Jack Mooney and Mr. Doran—see Polly as innocent and in need of protection, both Mrs. Mooney and her daughter in fact turn out to be the story's most skilled social navigators. Together, they wordlessly and intuitively collaborate on a successful bid to secure a proposal from Mr. Doran. Their cunning lies precisely in impersonating female innocence to achieve their own ends. And yet, though they're presented as manipulative, and though Joyce's portrayal of female characters has often been considered misogynistic, these female characters are in fact simply wily products of Dublin society—a society that scorns single women, leaves them few opportunities to support themselves, and is riddled with religious guilt and repression around sex, which women bear the brunt of in the form of harsh treatment for any sexual indiscretion. Thus, it's not the women Joyce condemns, or even their manipulations, but rather the need for women to manipulate in order to make their way in early 20th-century Dublin. Mrs. Mooney's machinations are presented as natural and even necessary results of her life and struggles. She had to leave her alcoholic butcher husband when he "went for [her] with the cleaver one night." Now, she deals "with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat." The repeated symbolism of the cleaver here indicates that when her husband failed her, Mrs. Mooney had no choice but to become the protector of her own family, which in this story means manipulating Mr. Doran into proposing, so that her daughter will be taken care of. As a single woman and business owner, Mrs. Mooney has to be careful with her resources. This constant accounting causes her to see Polly's marriage as just another business matter, as emphasized by the listing of Polly's future as just another item she must keep under lock and key: "When the table was cleared, the broken bread collected, the sugar and butter safe under lock and key, she began to reconstruct the interview which she had had the night before with Polly." Mrs. Mooney's determination to see her daughter "married off" results from the pitiful options for young women at the time: unmarried women were either the subject of scandal (if they were known to have had love affairs), or a burden to their families (since in early 20th-century Dublin, there were few opportunities for women to make their own money). If she's to avoid being a burden, Polly's options are to find work or get married, but employment opportunities are scarce. She was previously employed outside of the household, but Mrs. Mooney withdrew her from the post when her "disreputable" father kept dropping in. But when Mrs. Mooney suspects Polly might not find a husband at the boarding house, she "began to think of sending Polly back to typewriting"—the very profession she'd removed her from previously. Thus, there seems to be only one possible job for a young woman, and Polly has already been removed from it. Meanwhile, romance is treacherous, and Mrs. Mooney is well aware of how harshly unmarried young women of the day can be judged for any sexual involvement: "It is all very well for the man: he can go his ways as if nothing had happened, having had his moment of pleasure, but the girl has to bear the brunt." For Mrs. Mooney and Polly, the only way to achieve a decent future for Polly is to impersonate the naivete expected of women—thus cementing the patronizing social structure that imprisons them. Polly exclaims to Mr. Doran, "O, Bob! Bob! What am I to do? What am I to do at all?" and even threatens to "put an end to herself." And yet as soon as Mr. Doran leaves, she's entirely calm, having clearly known what she was doing all along. It seems that Polly must act the fool in order to get what she wants, and submit to being entirely underestimated by the man she will marry, though she is far wilier than him. (The irony of Polly's "What am I to do?" is heightened by prompt repetition in Mr. Doran's voice—though when Mr. Doran asks "What am I to do?" he isn't acting a part; he's truly in despair.) Even the relationship between mother and daughter is damaged by the need to feign innocence. When they discuss Polly's relations with Mr. Doran, "Both had been somewhat awkward, of course"—and both are awkward because they don't wish to reveal that they were anything but innocent in the affair's development. Thus women control all the story's events, yet are still condescended to by the story's men. Mr. Doran is attracted to Polly's "white instep" (notable since white is a common symbol of virginity) and the way "the blood glowed warmly behind her perfumed skin"—an image of perfect purity. Later, he remembers appreciating her "thoughtfulness" in warming up his dinner and leaving tumblers of punch for him on late nights. Yet all the while, Polly is "patiently" and "cheerfully" working in pursuit of her own "hopes and visions." Meanwhile, other residents of the house "began to talk of the affair"—and talk of this kind is generally meant to punish or correct poor behavior. But Mrs. Mooney resists caving to the socially corrective force of scandal until "she judged it to be the right moment" to take advantage of the scandal. As such, Mrs. Mooney, like Polly—and by extension like all the women in this city of which the boarding house is a microcosm—cunningly twists society's expectations of women to her own advantage, though doing so provides no escape from those expectations. - Theme: Religion, Guilt, and Sin. Description: James Joyce was raised a Roman Catholic but left the church as a young man, objecting to Catholicism's oppression of individuality and the overall effect this had on Irish society. "The Boarding House" offers a scathing critique of religion in Dublin, presenting it as, by turns, a prison (its machinery of guilt and sin trapping Mr. Doran in marriage) and a charade (as demonstrated by the worshippers in the "little circus" in front of the church outside the boarding house). In depicting Christianity as both performative and imprisoning, Joyce suggests that such a debased but socially powerful form of religion is incompatible with human happiness. Religion is ever-present in "The Boarding House" as a controlling force, though empty of any healing, redemptive, or holy qualities. The sacred bond of marriage—one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church—becomes a highly unsacred battleground. It's degraded to a legal and economic bargaining tool by Mrs. Mooney's mercenary machinations to force Mr. Doran to propose as a "reparation" for his sexual sins with Polly. Meanwhile, outside the Protestant church opposite the boarding house, "worshippers, singly or in groups, traversed the little circus before the church, revealing their purpose by their self-contained demeanor no less than by the little volumes in their gloved hands." Their self-containment, their grip on material and worldly items like bound volumes, and the way they traverse a "circus" all highlight how debased and lacking in transcendence religion has become in this city. In the case of Mr. Doran, religion is actively harmful, promoting a profound guilt about sin that causes him emotional and physical suffering and forces him into a life he doesn't want. After telling the priest about his affair with Polly, Mr. Doran's "recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to him." He's left so anxious he can't shave for shaking, so guilty he's "almost thankful at being afforded a loophole of reparation"—though that "loophole" is nothing less than being committed for life to a marriage he doesn't want. Moreover, there's a suggestion that Mr. Doran (like so many characters in Dubliners) had a more rebellious spirit in his youth, and that this has since been stamped out of him by religious duty—and a suggestion, too, that those days of youthful freedom from religious constraint might turn out to the happiest in his life: "As a young man he had sown his wild oats, of course; he had boasted of his free-thinking and denied the existence of God to his companions in public-houses. But that was all passed and done with … nearly. […] he attended to his religious duties and for nine-tenths of the year lived a regular life." And now precisely because of his attempts to live a regular, Church-sanctioned life, he feels like a man condemned. Beyond oppressive and harmful, religion is presented as itself immoral or at least amoral, thus setting the tone for all the manipulation, posturing, and hypocrisy in the boarding house and the city as a whole. During Mr. Doran's confession, the priest drew out "every ridiculous detail of the affair." The ridiculousness of the details highlights that knowing them wasn't necessary to the priest's task; he might have been acting out some improper interest in sexual matters. Mrs. Mooney, meanwhile, hopes that after "hav[ing] the matter out with Mr. Doran," she'll be able to "catch short twelve at Marlborough Street"—that is, go to the shortest Mass available, favored by people recovering from Saturday night. So debased is this religion, Joyce suggests, that it can be squeezed in between life's manipulations and excesses without a second thought. In Joyce's Dublin, then, religion is a dangerous of thing: an oppressively powerful governing force with no true morality. - Climax: The cunning Mrs. Mooney demands to talk to her lodger Mr. Doran after observing his covert fling with her daughter Polly. - Summary: "The Boarding House" is a story about the fallout from an affair between a young woman, Polly, and a man, Mr. Doran, in early 20th-century Dublin. Mr. Doran is a lodger in the boarding house run by Polly's formidable mother, Mrs. Mooney. Mrs. Mooney was once married to a drinker who tried to attack her with a meat cleaver one night. After that, Mrs. Mooney got permission from the priest to separate from her husband (since divorce was still not legal in Ireland at the time). With the money she took from the marriage, Mrs. Mooney set up a boarding house, where her lodgers are mostly clerks, as well as touring musical performers who inhabit the fringes of respectable society. Her lodgers refer to her as "The Madam." Mrs. Mooney's two children also live at the boarding house: her son, Jack, a clerk who's prone to fighting and betting, and her daughter, Polly, a pretty and flirtatious girl of 19. Mrs. Mooney had sent Polly to work as a typist for a corn trader but brought her home again when her father kept bothering her at work. At the boarding house, Mrs. Mooney deliberately turns a blind eye on Polly's flirtations with the lodgers, even when one flirtation seems to go farther, developing into a secret relationship. When she's sure that the relationship has progressed too far for the man to back out, Mrs. Mooney decides to intervene, first by having a frank conversation with Polly to see how far things have gone. The next morning, a sunny Sunday, she sits alone in her breakfast room and contemplates the conversation she plans to have with Mr. Doran. She is determined to secure a marriage proposal for Polly, and she feels confident she'll succeed. She knows that Mr. Doran has a good salary and some money put aside, and she feels satisfied with herself. Meanwhile, Mr. Doran is in his bedroom, very anxious at the prospect of this conversation. He is shaking too much to shave, in agony every time he remembers confessing the affair to the priest the night before. He isn't sure whether he loves or even likes Polly, and he feels his family would look down on her, but he's terrified by the prospect of losing his job or his reputation if word of the relationship gets out. While Mr. Doran agonizes, Polly comes to his bedroom door and tells him she has told her mother all about their affair. She seems distraught, and he comforts her, and he remembers the temptations that led him to this point: her waiting up to serve him dinner and punch, and coming to his bedroom door late one night to relight her candle. The servant, Mary, comes to fetch Mr. Doran to speak to Mrs. Mooney. Mr. Doran leaves Polly crying on the bed, and on the way down the stairs he imagines his disapproving employer again, while also passing Jack Mooney, and remembering how he'd threatened violence upon another lodger for a perceived sexual comment about Polly. In the bedroom, Polly wipes away her tears and slips into happy daydreams, totally unperturbed. Soon Mrs. Mooney calls her downstairs, saying that Mr. Doran would like to talk to her.

- Genre: Realism - Title: The Boat - Point of view: First person - Setting: A harbor in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia - Character: The narrator. Description: The narrator, who isn't named in the story, is a middle-aged university professor at a Midwestern university. He is frequently haunted by memories of how he grew up, which are very different from his current life, and he temporarily escapes them by going to an all-night restaurant where he meets up with some regulars and a waitress. The narrator recalls living as a child and young man in a close-knit fishing community in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his father, mother, and older sisters, as well as his maternal uncle, who works on his family's fishing boat with his father. As a boy, he watches what the other members of his family do with fascination. He learns about the importance of "the boat," aka the Jenny Lynn, which his father takes out when he goes fishing and which is named after his mother. His parents' interest in the boat leads the narrator himself to take an interest in it. Meanwhile, the narrator also watches his sisters, who all seem to be traditional, domestic girls until they hit puberty, when they start reading their father's books, start working in a seafood restaurant on the wharf that serves tourists, and then ultimately leave the village to marry rich, sophisticated men who live in faraway cities. Once all of his sisters are out of the house and the narrator has grown into a teenager, he begins to play a more active role and must decide between his education, which his father wants him to pursue, and his family's fishing business, which his mother wants him to prioritize. Though he is eager to uphold his family's traditions, he ends up choosing to get an education and move away (even becoming a university professor). This choice is partly a result of his father's urging, but is driven in the end by his father's death during the final fishing run of the lobster season. Without his father alive, the narrator has less obligation to stay in the community and continue working on the boat. The story implies, though it never makes completely clear, that his father may have committed suicide precisely because he knew it would push the narrator to leave the town and pursue his education. As a highly educated character who used to be very devoted to his parents and his community, the narrator is a bridge between old traditions and the next generation. As such, he lives in the broader world of opportunity that his father wanted for him, and yet he also lives with the ghosts of the traditional family and communal life he has lost. - Character: The narrator's father. Description: Like the narrator and most members of his family, the narrator's father isn't named in the story. He comes from a working-class background in Cape Breton and didn't have children until later in life, not getting married to the narrator's mother until after he turned 40. The narrator's father is a fisherman descended from a long line of fisherman, and began introducing his son to the family boat, the Jenny Lynn, at an early age. When not out working on the boat, the narrator's father spends much of his time alone in his room, which is always a mess. He keeps a radio in the room as well as piles and piles of paperback books, which he reads voraciously. Although he is withdrawn at times, he spends hours talking with his daughters (the narrator's sisters) late into the night after they become interested in reading the books he has. Though he is part of a rich local fishing tradition, he (often indirectly) encourages his daughters and son to follow new paths in life, even when it means contradicting their mother who wants the family to focus on their traditional lifestyle. While he is vigorous and capable even at an advanced age, eventually his health starts to decline. The narrator's father rallies, though, when it looks like the narrator will have to quit school to help with the family business. Around this time the narrator comes to realize that his father's body, which chafed under the sun, was never suited for fishing, and that his father had always wanted to go to college but had instead taken up the responsibility of continuing the traditions of his family. The narrator respects his father more for this sacrifice, promises to help his father on the boat for as long as his father needs him, and joins his father on the boat for the lobster season. Though this summer spent with his son on the boat is joyful, eventually the waters become more treacherous. One stormy day, the father disappears from the stern of the boat. While the cause of the father falling from the boat is never made entirely clear, the story implies that he may have committed suicide because he knew his son wouldn't leave town and pursue an education while he himself was still alive. His body is discovered a week later, badly disfigured. He is still wearing chains around his hands that he wore to prevent chafing, suggesting that he was chained to his life on the boat and unable to escape it—even in death—and that, in the end, he made one last sacrifice to ensure his son wouldn't suffer the same fate. - Character: The narrator's mother. Description: Although her maiden name provides the namesake for the titular boat, the Jenny Lynn, MacLeod never reveals the narrator's mother's current last name. The narrator's mother is a tall, strong woman who comes from a long line of people who lived by and fished the sea. She was beautiful when she was younger, and was many years younger than her husband, the narrator's father, when they married. Together they had several daughters (the narrator's sisters), with the narrator being the youngest child. Her brother (the narrator's uncle) works her husband on the boat. By the time the narrator's memories begin, his mother hasn't slept in the same room as his father for a while. Perhaps more than anything else, the narrator's mother values her family's traditional life and order. She keeps her house neat and organized, with the exception of the one room she can't control: her husband's bedroom (which spills over into the common kitchen area). Initially, her daughters help her keep the house in order, but as they get older, the mother loses them almost as soon as they discover their father's books, which sets them on a path to eventually leaving home to marry wealthy men in distant cities. The narrator's mother disdains these men as effete and worthless despite their financial success, and cuts off contact with her daughters. Eventually, when the narrator's sisters all leave home, the narrator's mother pins all her hopes on him to keep alive the family tradition, even pressuring him to quit school in order to help with the boat. (She herself hasn't read a book since high school and finds them a waste of time.) The narrator wants to please her, but ultimately, he ends up leaving the community to get an education, in large part because his father's tragic death at sea leaves him nothing to uphold or continue. The mother, however, never leaves her community, continuing to live in relative poverty and resenting the narrator for leaving all the while. Throughout the story, she never changes, and MacLeod shows through her how her devotion to tradition offers strength and resilience but also a suffocating rigidity that can lead to loneliness and misery in an always changing world. - Character: The narrator's sisters. Description: Always referred to as a group, the narrator's sisters all follow a remarkably similar life path, and the narrator watches their lives with fascination. Red-haired and beautiful, they help their mother around the house when they're young. After they hit puberty, however, they discover their father's collection of paperback books and begin to disdain traditional housework, to the disappointment of their mother. As they read and have long talks with their father about the books, they all decide to work at an American-owned seafood restaurant in town that caters to tourists. During the summers where they work these jobs, they meet young men who are rich and sophisticated in ways that their parents will never be. Eventually, they leave town to marry these men—despite the fact that their mother disapproves of them—and move to distant, cosmopolitan cities like Boston, Montreal, and New York. They continue to send their father gifts of books and their mother pictures of their children, which their mother refuses to look at. The fate of the sisters in the story is a bit of a paradox: they form a new tradition out of breaking old traditions. Ultimately, they represent the inevitability of change, showing how a whole generation can become wealthier and better educated than the one before it, at the cost of losing the old traditions. - Character: Tourists. Description: In addition to being an active fishing village—in fact it is implied because it is a picturesque and active fishing village—the Cape Breton community where the narrator grows up is also a tourist definition. The tourists rent cabins that overlook the village from a high hill, and often frequent the American-owned seafood restaurant in the harbor where the narrator's sisters go to work. The tourists are always referred to as a group. One particular group of tourists asks the narrator's father to take them out on a boat voyage, which he does. Later, they invite him back to their rented cabins, where he gets drunk and sings old sea shanties and the war songs of his ancestors. The tourists pay him and record his songs (although the narrator's mother won't touch the payment). That winter, they send the narrator's father a postcard where they call him "Our Ernest Hemingway" with "Our" underlined. In their interactions with the village and with the narrator's father the tourists come to represent the complicated relationship between the modern outside world and the traditional world: how the outside world craves the "authenticity" of tradition and seeks to experience it through tourism, but in doing so objectifies, claims ownership over, and condescends to those traditions; how the traditions of the fishing village attract outside attention (and money from tourists), but in doing so lead to change that undermines the tradition, underscored by the fact that the sisters end up marrying some of the tourists. - Character: Commercial fishing interests. Description: Late in the story, the narrator notes that big commercial fishing boats have attempted to come into the traditional fishing waters of the village, but are unable to make inroads because they find their traps lost or destroyed and leave the area. The clear implication is that the residents of the village are sneaking out in boats at night and sabotaging the commercial traps. This back and forth captures another side of the battle between the outside modern world and the local traditions of the village. In this case, the villagers success in rebuffing the outside fishing ships suggests that despite their greater wealth and resources, outsiders to the community will never be able to claim what isn't theirs. But, at the same time, the story of the narrator's family suggests that the fishing village may slowly lose its fisherman, and a temporary setback for the commercial fishing interests doesn't mean that they won't return. Further, the story's reference to the Scottish Highland clearances, which involved wealthier interests evicting tenant farmers in order to consolidate grazing lands, indicate that what is happening follows a longstanding pattern in which the forces of money and change usually, eventually win out. - Character: The narrator's uncle. Description: The brother of the narrator's mother and the fishing partner of his father, the narrator's uncle isn't mentioned until later in the story, even though he has presumably been part of the family fishing business for a long time. He acts as an assistant to the narrator's father until he decides to work on a larger vessel, which will earn him enough money to buy a boat for his own family. The departure of the narrator's uncle makes it necessary for the narrator to step into the role of helping his father. The uncle's presence in the story reinforces how close-knit the family fishing operation is, while also showing how things can change with each generation. - Character: Waitress. Description: When, as an adult teaching at a Midwestern university, the narrator goes out to an all-night restaurant, he usually sees the same waitress and has the same conversation. She comments it must be cold out because he has tears in his eyes. The waitress provides an outside perspective, pointing out that the narrator is crying but not realizing that it's because he's getting emotional about his memories. The waitress also echoes his sisters, who worked as waitresses themselves when they were young. - Theme: Cultural Heritage, Tradition, and Change. Description: When the narrator wakes up at the beginning of Alistair MacLeod's "The Boat," he is confused and feels as if he is transported to an earlier time, back when he was young and living in a fishing village on Cape Breton. Sometimes characters fin the story eel the pull of an even more distant past: when the narrator's father sings for tourists, he channels "scattered Highland ancestors he had never seen," bringing the "savage melancholy of three hundred years" down to the harbor. The fishing community where the narrator lives is steeped in tradition. By positioning the narrator as both an insider to this tradition and also as someone who breaks away from it, the story explores tradition and the forces of change, and the enduring tension between the two. The story furthers this exploration through the conflict between the narrator's mother, who is utterly devoted to her cultural traditions, and his father, who has seen his own dreams stifled by these same traditions. "The Boat" captures the tension between tradition and change, the ways that both tradition and change can offer benefits and costs, and how the tension between tradition and change can tear families and communities apart. The narrator's father and mother share similar traditions that give them purpose and identity as a fisherman and fisherman's wife, but they view the costs and benefits of those traditional in very different ways. The narrator's mother, who is described as "of the sea, as were all her people," is the family member most resistant to change and devoted to her family's traditional way of life. She is devoted to her familial role (the same role her mother presumably held before her), dedicated to teaching her daughter's how to fill that same role, and mistrustful and dismissive of anything that doesn't fit into that scope, including books, education, or the wealthy outsiders who eventually marry her daughters. She cares so completely about maintaining her family traditions that she basically disowns any of her children who leave the community. While the narrator's father is a capable fisherman and a master of old traditional songs, he is more open to the outside world. He reads constantly and listens to the radio, and is willing to sing traditional songs to tourists and perform his heritage for them. Most significantly, he encourages his children to read and go to school, even as he knows this will lead them to leave the community. In fact, as the story progresses and the father, it is implied, commits suicide to ensure his son won't keep working on the boat, it becomes clear that the father acts as he does precisely because he desperately wants his children to escape what he sees as the restrictive traditions of the community—a desire borne out of his own experience of the way that his obligation to his family traditions thwarted his dreams of going to a university. Tradition binds the narrator's family together, defining each of their roles in ways that are inherited from previous definitions, but his parents' opposite orientations toward those traditions tear them apart. The narrator seeks to bridge his parents' different ideas about tradition, but as he grows up it becomes apparent that this isn't possible. The narrator's conflict between choosing tradition or modernity is most prominent when he has to decide between helping with the boat or continuing to go to school. The narrator's mother pushes him to leave school and join his father on the boat. His father, in response, urges the narrator to go back to school. The fact that the school year and lobster season fall at exactly the same time symbolically shows how the narrator can't fulfill both wishes of his parents. He has to choose one, and the story presents the choice between choosing tradition and embracing change as mutually exclusive. In addition to portraying how individual characters view the tensions between tradition and change, the story also explores the interaction between change and tradition more generally. The family's journey, in which the youngest generation moves away from the family tradition due to personal desires for new experiences and opportunities is the most obvious aspect of this exploration. But the story also shows how the town is changing. Through its portrayal of the tourists who vacation in cottages that overlook the town and love it when the narrator's father sings old fishing songs, the story shows how the traditions of the residents of the town are attractive to outsiders, such that the outsiders come to experience them, and in doing so change the town. The story also shows how, as the outside world encroaches, so do outside commercial interests. The narrator mentions at one point that local fishermen have twice fought off large fishing companies' attempts to move into local waters. But the implication is that the big companies can't be held off forever; an implication given more weight by the fact that the narrator's family's ancestors experienced the 18th-century Scotland Highland Clearances, a forced eviction of small farmers by wealthy interests focused on developing large-scale sheep farming. Put another way: the bigger money always comes eventually, and always brings change, often at the expense of those who were there before. Ultimately, the narrator, his father, and his mother all pay a price for their connection to their heritage and tradition. The mother ends up alone and in poverty, the father ends up dead after sacrificing himself to ensure his son won't end up chained to the family tradition as he himself was, and the narrator ends up fulfilling his father's dream of being a university professor but remains haunted by the memories of what he lost. Still, there is also something noble about the characters' struggle: about the narrator's ability to achieve what wasn't possible for his parents, about the mother's refusal to bend to the forces of familial or societal change, and about the father's self-sacrifice to work vigorously in a life he never wanted in the name of tradition and then his final sacrifice to save his son from the same fate. In "The Boat," MacLeod shows the complexities of tradition in an always changing world, how it both sustains and constricts, how it gives meaning but can also dictate one's lot in life, using the narrator's family as a focal point to explore changes in an entire regional community. - Theme: Generational Differences and Inheritances. Description: As a college professor at a Midwestern university in the United States, the narrator of "The Boat" has a very different life than his parents did at his age. While the narrator's mother and father have dissimilar personalities, they share many life experiences because of when and where they were born. They have lived by the sea their whole lives—something none of their children will ever do. The narrator's sisters marry men from outside the tight-knit Cape Breton fishing community and leave to live in big cities around the world. Unlike them, the narrator makes an effort to bridge the gap between generations, attempting to learn the ways of the fishing boat that plays such a massive role in his parents' lives. While the narrator is successful in some ways at emulating the older generation and winning their approval, his ultimate choice to leave the community suggests that some changes between generations are inevitable. While the story focuses on one family in a specific community, his story explores broader generational differences, showing what is inherited and lost throughout history and how such generational shifts have always been happening. "The Boat" is a story about generational differences, and it explores the various ways that members of a family might relate to such change. The narrator's mother fights change tooth and nail. Her meticulously ordered house is her way of preventing change from entering it and affecting her children. The narrator's father actively (if subtly, at first) encourages his children to be different from him. Although he reads the same books his children do, they are experiencing them at an earlier age and with his tacit support. This early exposure to culture gives them the impetus to leave the community, through marriage or through education. The narrator's sisters seem to simply melt into the tides of change. By presenting the girls as a group, always referred to simply as the sisters, the story portrays them as having little individual choice—they are portrayed as simply shifting with the times, which take them away from the village where their parents have always lived. The narrator tries to be a bridge. He attempts to quit school and become the kind of fisherman that his father is (and that his mother would approve of). But ultimately, he follows his father's wishes and chooses to get an education and leave his town behind. Still, even as a university professor in a distant city, he remains connected to his parents through memories that haunt him. Even "The Boat" portrays the massive shifts across a single generation of a family, the story makes a concerted effort to show that much is nonetheless inherited from parents to children, ancestors to descendants. Some of this inheritance is physical. For example, according to the narrator, his sisters resemble their parents: "They were tall and willowy like my mother and had her fine facial features set off by the reddish copper-coloured hair that had apparently once been my father's before it turned to white." Other inheritance involves habits, good and bad. On the positive side, the father passes on to his children a love of books and the worldly curiosity they represent. On the negative side, the father passes on his habit of smoking in bed to his son. That the narrator describes the cigarette butts that remain from this habit as "grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray," suggests that the father may also have passed along his melancholy and tendency toward self-destruction. Finally, there is the inheritance of culture. Though the narrator's father never met his ancestors, he sings Gaelic songs beautifully. The narrator does not sing the songs himself, but they live on prominently in his memory, showing how ancient culture survives but takes on new significance for new generations. "The Boat" makes clear that, even though it focuses on a very specific community at a moment of significant generational changes, such changes have always been happening in history. Though the narrator's Cape Breton community has existed for a long time, it was initially a community of immigrants, driven from their homelands by different generational changes, such as the conflict and famine in Ireland and the Highland clearances in Scotland. In fact, the tight-knit community at Cape Breton was originally made up of people from very different backgrounds. The story notes that some are Catholic and others are Protestant—two groups that have historically been at odds with each other. The unity of the community during the narrator's parents' generation was itself a departure from previous generations, when the inhabitants would have been recent immigrants with their own separate traditions. The story, then, explores the interplay between what changes and what is preserved across generations, and portrays how these two processes are always happening at the same time. Further, "The Boat" itself can be seen as embodying this same dynamic. The story is most immediately notable for its narrative of a family torn apart by change. At the same time, in telling the story the narrator preserves the lost past, ensuring that it won't be lost. The story itself functions as a document of both change and inheritance. - Theme: Duty and Sacrifice. Description: It is a general axiom of society that duty and sacrifice are heroic and necessary. "The Boat," in which the parents in a family conflict about what they feel they do or don't owe to their traditional fishing lifestyle, makes clear that the deeper truth is more complicated. More specifically, the story shows that two people can—for good reason—feel a duty to radically different things. Further, the story captures how seemingly heroic sacrifice can have monstrous consequences—the mother and the father in the story each sacrifice for what they see as the requirements of their family, and those sacrifices end up destroying the family completely. "The Boat," then, is a story about the complexity of duty and sacrifice, about how people are defined and changed by what they feel they owe and what they are willing to sacrifice, and about the complicated legacies of such sacrifices. When he's younger, the narrator is dutiful and willing to sacrifice himself for the good of his family. But it isn't always clear who or what he should be dutiful towards. The narrator grows up in a house that's literally divided: between the cleanliness of his mother and the mess of his father. As he watches his sisters grow up, he learns that it often isn't possible to be dutiful to both parents. The sisters please their mother when they're younger, only to frustrate her when they're older. Meanwhile, they initially want to clean up their father's mess, only to get caught up in the books strewn around his room and, from there, to fulfill his dreams for them to find a way out of the village. Like his sisters, the narrator himself will find himself caught between the expectations of his parents, unable to please them both. He tries to devote himself to the boat, which seems to be the one thing that unites both parents, but this starts a chain of events that ultimately leads to his father's death at sea. Sacrifice changes the characters, in ways big and small, and it defines the Cape Breton fishing community where the narrator grew up. To give just one of many examples, the narrator's father sacrificed his chance at a university education in order to remain a part of the community and support a family. It isn't clear how much choice the narrator's father had about his sacrifice—if a university education was even an option for him. Sacrifice was not just an expectation but a necessity for him. This idea of sacrifice as an obligation rather than a choice is reinforced by the ending of the story, where the narrator's father is discovered dead with the chains that he used to protect his forearms still around his wrists. In a different way, the narrator's mother also sacrifices her life for her community. Even after the death of her husband and the departure of her children, she remains alone in Cape Breton, living in near-poverty. Her sacrifice allows her to hold on to her identity and her love of the sea, but it also almost completely cuts her off from her own children. The fact that she is so involved in the community—and that she still has more distant relatives that continue taking out boats even as the narrator is in middle age—suggests that this sacrifice is a central feature of life in the community. While duty and sacrifice are often considered positive qualities, the narrator's complicated memories show that in reality, the results of these sacrifices are mixed. In many ways, the narrator's mother and father seem to engage in a kind of war of sacrifice, in which each tries to out-sacrifice the other to achieve what they want. The narrator's mother sacrifices her relationship with her family in order to try to force her children not to leave their village, and then to feel the sadness of having abandoned it after they did leave. The narrator's father, meanwhile, goes even further. After the narrator promises that he will help his father with the boat for as long as his father lives, his father—the story strongly implies—commits suicide by allowing himself to be swept off the boat during a storm. The father sacrifices his life in this way to ensure that his wife will still be supported—barely—by his life insurance policy, while also giving his son no reason to stay in the village.  While both the father and mother sacrifice everything for their children, the story does not present these sacrifices as heroic. The mother is left alone, furtively glancing at photos of her grandchildren when no one is looking. And the sorry state of the narrator's father's dead body when it is found undercuts the idea that there was anything noble about his sacrifice of his life. His shredded body, and particularly the chains that remain around his wrists, suggest that he was destroyed by his work and could not escape being "chained" to it, even in death. Ultimately, the narrator's story is only possible because of his father's sacrifice—if not for his death, the narrator might still be in Cape Breton working on the same boat as his father, instead of teaching at a Midwestern university. But it is unclear if this is a positive outcome: even as a professor, the narrator sleeps fitfully and, lost in memories of his childhood village, finds himself on the verge of tears. "The Boat," beautifully captures how sacrifice can be sustaining and life-defining, while simultaneously showing how it can be useless or even self-destructive. - Theme: Time, Loss, Memory. Description: In "The Boat," a middle-aged college professor tells the story of his childhood and teenage years as the youngest child in a Nova Scotian fishing family. "The Boat" is a frame story, in which the narrator tells the story from two points of view—as the boy and teenager experiencing the events of the story for the first time, and as the older man looking back and commenting on those events and on their repercussions. With such a structure—in which the narrator is both looking forward to his coming life and looking back on past events— "The Boat" naturally takes the passing of time as one of its themes. In addition, the narrator's story describes not just his own transformation over time, but also the slow dissolution of his family's traditional Nova Scotia fishing lifestyle as modern society slowly seeps into the world of his family and community, and the way that time catches up to his fisherman father. The story, then, becomes a meditation on the passing of time, on what is lost, and what endures. The story's frame structure creates a clear definition between past and present, between the narrator as he was then and is now, but at the same time emphasizes the way that memory connects the grown-up narrator to his past self. The story's first paragraph, where the narrator is half asleep and is momentarily unable to differentiate between his past and his present, establishes the interplay between time and memory in the story. This interplay continues throughout the narrative, as the narrator occasionally interrupts his story to comment about how his memories distort the actual chronology of events. For example, after describing his family's boat in great detail he says, "I say this now as if I knew it all then… I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough." By telling the story in this way, MacLeod emphasizes not just the passage of time, but how the narrator experiences time through memory—the way that the narrator's past informs who he is, but also the way that who he is now impacts his memories of that past. The passing of time in the story is frequently connected to loss, whether it's the loss of innocence, the loss of a lifestyle, or even the loss of life itself. From the opening scene of the story, the "grey corpses" in the narrator's ashtray indicate that "The Boat" will be a story about death, both literal and metaphorical. Much of the loss in the story has to do with families. The narrator's sisters leave the house and community one by one as they move off into the wider world, in a pattern so regular that it feels inevitable. Sometimes the loss in the story is more metaphorical. For example, the narrator loses some of his innocence when he overhears a heated argument between his parents and begins to see them both in a different light. As the story progresses, the losses become larger, culminating with the death of the narrator's father and the implied eventual death of his fishing community's whole way of life. As the story within the frame passes from the narrator's childhood to his early adulthood, the passing years are threaded through with an increasing sense of loss, emphasizing how loss is inevitable and only increases over time. All of the losses that the narrator witnesses in the story, however, become memories. What endures over time are memory, culture, and the natural world—things that stretch beyond the lifespan of any one individual. The story ends with an image of physical destruction—the narrator recalls finding his father's body and notes, "There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair." This stark image highlights the fragility of the human body, particularly since in the narrator's earlier memories, his father was strong and vigorous. Notably, the father's body is destroyed by waves, cliffs, fish, and gulls, and his hair is being replaced with seaweed. This transformation suggests a truth about the natural world: how death and loss fits into a larger natural cycle of renewal. The story presents a single human life as full of inevitable change leading to death, but the natural world absorbs that death and continues on. Meanwhile, the Cape Breton community where the narrator used to live also experiences significant changes over the course of the story, but some aspects of its culture endure. Though big fishing boats owned by outsiders try to come in and exploit the area, they find "their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed." As one visiting official notes: "No one can own the sea." The harbor residents keep some of their culture even as time passes, because it's bigger than any one person and because it's connected to the more enduring natural world. Ultimately, "The Boat" is clear-eyed that no single human can resist the passage of time. Change and death will eventually come for all. But it does hold out hope for tradition and culture to endure beyond the lifespan of individuals, just as the narrator's own father carried in him the songs and spirit of his Gaelic ancestors whom he had never met. "The Boat" itself plays into this dynamic, as the story the narrator tells keeps alive the memory of his father, of his torn-apart family, of the village he has seemingly forever left behind. The story is itself a kind of boat, preserving the past into the future. - Climax: The narrator realizes that his father has disappeared from their boat during a severe winter storm at sea - Summary: The narrator of the story, a middle-aged professor at a Midwestern university in the United States, recalls how he often wakes up at 4 a.m., afraid that he has overslept and that his father will be waiting for him with a crowd of other men, and that they will all have to head down to the harbor. After realizing it was only a dream, the narrator then walks in the cold to an all-night restaurant, where he makes small-talk with the regulars and drinks bitter coffee. He knows the memories that wake him up at night are only "echoes and shadows." Jumping back in time, the narrator recalls his first memories of his family's boat, the Jenny Lynn. He remembers his father in big rubber boats, taking him out on his first trip on the boat. He also remembers how everyone in his family was always asking questions that ended with the words "the boat," like "Well, how did things go in the boat today?" This is the first question the narrator himself remembers asking. The narrator also recalls his mother, who was a tall, energetic woman and who came from a long line of people who had lived by the sea. The narrator goes on to recall his old house. Most of it was kept spotless and organized by his mother, but his father's bedroom was a mess, and some of this mess spilled into the kitchen, which everyone used. Out of all the junk the father owns, perhaps most interesting to the narrator is his large collection of paperback books, which range from pulp novels to literary classics. When he isn't out fishing, the narrator's father spends most of his time alone in his room, reading books and listening to the radio. The narrator also has many older sisters who, when they are young, help his mother around the house. But shortly after each one hits puberty, they discover their father's books. This starts a chain of events that leads to them getting jobs in a local restaurant that serves tourists. There they meet young men from out of town, and ultimately, despite their mother's disapproval, they move away to big cities to get married. One time, the father takes some tourists out on a boat ride, then afterwards visits with the tourists at their rented cabins, gets drunk, and sings old sea shanties and cultural songs for them. The narrator has mixed feelings about the way the tourists view his father. Eventually, all of his sisters move away, and the narrator lives alone in the house with his mother and father. The narrator's sometimes send gifts of books for his father, and pictures of their kids for their mother, which she refuses to look at. When his father begins to get older and lay around in bed all day, the narrator must help to get the boat ready for lobster season. This leads to him deciding to quit school in order to help his family with the fishing business. His father, however, tells him he must go back to school at once. Ultimately, the narrator listens to his father, much to his mother's anger. Shortly afterwards, his father makes a seemingly miraculous recovery and the season goes well. During the summer, when the narrator is out of school, his maternal uncle (also his father's fishing partner) leaves to work on a big commercial boat as he works to save up for his own boat. The narrator has come to realize that his father never much liked the fishing life, and would have preferred to have gone to college—he respects his father even more for making the sacrifices he has. The narrator steps into his uncle's role, and promises his father he'll stay and help with the fishing business for as long as his father lives. His father replies, "I hope you will remember what you've said." At first, the fishing is successful, and the narrator's father acts like he's young again. But as the year progresses, the fishing becomes more hazardous. On a particularly stormy November 21st, on what may be the last outing of the fishing season, the narrator loses track of his father during a winter squall. His father has apparently gone overboard, and there's no way to rescue him, particularly because, like many men of his generation on the wharf, he doesn't know how to swim. Jumping back to the present, the narrator comments that the lobster beds off Cape Breton are still as vibrant as they ever were. He notes however, that big commercial fishing boats have tried but failed to move into the area, because they keep finding "their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed." Official investigations into the incidents meet resistance from the locals, and eventually the outsiders go away. The narrator feels uneasy knowing that his mother lives alone off his father's meager life insurance policy. She's too proud to ask for help and resents the narrator for leaving his home and the traditional lifestyle that goes with it. She remains devoted to the sea, as she always has been. Finally, the narrator jumps back to November 28th, a week after his father's disappearance, when his father's body was discovered ten miles north of the wharf. The body is badly disfigured, with part of it missing, including his father's rubber boots. Around his father's wrists are brass chains that he wore when he was working in order to prevent his skin from chafing, and his hair is full of seaweed.

- Genre: Middle Grade Novel, Issue Novel, Magical Realism - Title: The Bone Sparrow - Point of view: First person, told from Subhi and Jimmie's perspectives - Setting: An Australian detention center - Character: Subhi. Description: - Character: Queeny. Description: - Character: Maá. Description: - Character: Eli. Description: - Character: Ba. Description: - Character: Harvey. Description: - Character: Beaver. Description: - Character: Jimmie. Description: - Character: Jimmie's Mum. Description: - Character: Jimmie's Dad. Description: - Character: Jonah. Description: - Character: Nasir. Description: - Character: Oto. Description: - Character: Anka. Description: - Character: Mirka. Description: - Character: Iliya. Description: - Character: Guntis. Description: - Theme: Dehumanization, Invisibility, and Refugee Camps. Description: - Theme: Childhood. Description: - Theme: Family and Friendship. Description: - Theme: Storytelling, Escapism, and Hope. Description: - Climax: Subhi witnesses Beaver murder Eli. - Summary: Young Subhi sometimes hears the magical Night Sea—he's the only one who hears and sees it flood the refugee camp in the middle of the night. The waves bring him treasures, which Subhi believes are messages from his ba. Subhi believes his father on his way to join Maá, Subhi's older sister Queeny, and Subhi. Subhi was born at the refugee camp, so he's never met his father. It's scorching hot the next day, so the kind Jacket (guard) Harvey brings in a kiddie pool and some pool toys. Subhi hears a rubber duck talk to him, so he takes it. When he returns to the tent later, there's a sparrow on his pillow. Terrified, Queeny tells Subhi that this is a sign of death. Following this, Subhi begins to see sparrows everywhere, including when he and his best friend Eli are walking the fences later. Eli and Subhi run a "package delivery" business, distributing supplies all over the camp. Though Eli is adamant that Subhi can't run packages when the mean and violent Jacket Beaver is working, Beaver surprises Subhi while Subhi is delivering a T-shirt and throws Subhi against a wall. Subhi is so traumatized from the incident with Beaver that he sleeps from afternoon until the middle of the night—and when he wakes, he realizes that for the first time ever, he forgot to ask Maá to tell him a story. That night, everything changes for Subhi when he walks out of the tent to see a girl in the camp who clearly doesn't belong there. She has a book and asks if Subhi can read. He nods, and she disappears. The girl, Jimmie, lives up the hill from the detention center. Her mum died three years ago and left her a Bone Sparrow necklace upon her death. Jimmie also kept the book, which was her mum's, as it contains a story that Jimmie's mum used to read to Jimmie. But Jimmie can't read. She snuck down to the detention center and slipped through a weak spot in the fence because she was curious—a classmate said the kids there had new bikes. The next day, the Jackets move Eli to Alpha Compound. This is a huge blow to Subhi: the bullies in the Family compound steal Subhi's shoes and force him to kill a baby rat, knowing that Subhi considers the rats his friends. Subhi turns to the rubber duck for companionship, as well as to Jimmie. Jimmie begins visiting regularly in the middle of the night. During her visits, she brings Subhi hot chocolate and a flashlight so they can signal to each other. Subhi begins to read the story in the book aloud for Jimmie, reading a little bit each night. The story is about Jimmie's great-great-great grandparents, Oto and Anka, who are separated soon after Anka becomes pregnant when a war sweeps through their country. Mirka, a wise old woman, sends Oto to look for Anka with the Bone Sparrow necklace—which has a coin in it—to guide him. Oto seeks out Iliya, a healer in the mountains, to help him on his journey, but the two are separated when Iliya steps on a land mine. Oto retains the Bone Sparrow necklace, which lost the coin in the explosion, and ultimately finds Anka on a ship bound for another country. He believes Iliya died, but Iliya actually survived, became a renowned healer, and married a Rohingya woman. He passed the coin from the Bone Sparrow necklace to his children, not realizing the suffering the Rohingya people would endure generations down the line. Subhi comes to rely more on more on Jimmie's friendship. Maá now sleeps almost all the time, and Eli and Queeny are plotting something—Queeny has a camera that can upload pictures directly to the internet. The men in Eli's new compound are staging a hunger strike, and several men sew their mouths shut. Tensions rise in the camp as the spoiled food gives refugees food poisoning and as more people join the hunger strike. And then, Eli learns that the camp is moving 50 men from his compound to another country. This news terrifies Eli, who fears he'll be moved, too, and will have to leave his friends and family behind. Soon after this, Jimmie and her dad see a picture of the refugees with their mouths sewn shut in the newspaper. One night, Jimmie brings Subhi a feast. Since he was born in the camp, Subhi has never had food that's not just unidentifiable brown mush. It puts him in a good mood that lasts until the next day, when Queeny accuses Subhi of telling Harvey about her camera. She tears up Subhi's sketchbook of drawings, and Subhi goes for a walk to calm down. He sits in the corner where he and Jimmie usually sit, and he finds a big, sharp knife buried in the soft dirt. Believing that nobody will get hurt if he hides it, Subhi takes the knife and buries it behind the toilets. He still believes something awful is going to happen, however. Jimmie, meanwhile, feels like she's finally found peace after her feast with Subhi. She was so happy when she got home afterward that she went to the attic to look through her mum's things, though she cut herself on the ladder when she came back down. Now, she's sick. Though her dad makes her feel better when he reveals that he got a job as a groundskeeper at her school, he still has one more shift at his current job and will be away for a few days. When he leaves, Jimmie begins to believe that something terrible is going to happen. When Jimmie visits Subhi the next night, she's clearly sick: the cut on her arm is infected, she has a fever, and she's delirious. They don't read from her mum's story—Subhi tells her one of Maá's instead—and when she stumbles back through the fences, Jimmie drops the book. Subhi rescues it. When Jimmie gets back to her house, she realizes she's locked out. She flashes her flashlight down the hill for help, but nobody comes. She falls asleep outside her front door. Subhi sees Jimmie's signal, but before he can go to help her, all the lights come on: the men in Alpha have barricaded themselves in. By morning, Subhi is distraught. Seeing the Jackets putting on riot gear, Queeny tells Subhi to wait in the tent. However, since the Jackets are so focused on the men in Alpha, Subhi takes the opportunity to sneak out unnoticed. He finds Jimmie, breaks into her house, and calls an ambulance for her. He reads her the end of Oto and Anka's story while they wait for the ambulance, but he hides when the first responders arrive. He then starts back toward the detention center—and he sees it's on fire. But realizing he wants to be with his friends and family, Subhi returns anyway. Subhi takes cover by a tent and notices Eli running toward the downed fences with other refugees. But then Eli turns and runs the other way—and Subhi realizes he's running away from Beaver. Beaver grabs Eli just as Eli is about to shimmy under the fence and beats him almost to death. Eli can't fight back because Subhi moved the knife, which was Eli's. Harvey appears and yells at Beaver to leave Eli alone, but when Beaver sees Eli's hand move, Beaver murders Eli with a heavy rock. Harvey does nothing. Eli stays in his hiding spot, in shock, until Queeny and Harvey find Subhi the next day. After the doctors check Subhi over and declare that he's fine, Harvey carries Subhi to the kitchens and asks what Subhi saw. Subhi can't speak, but he can tell Harvey knows he saw Beaver murder Eli—and that Harvey didn't stop Beaver. For the next few days, Subhi moves in and out of sleep. Maá wakes up and sings to him, and Harvey again asks Subhi what he saw. Subhi realizes now that Queeny was right to say that the refugees are treated like rats. He considers telling someone what he saw, but when he and the rubber duck consult about this, Subhi becomes angry and upset and throws the duck across the compound. When Subhi wakes up later that night, the Night Sea has arrived. Subhi goes outside, cries with a giant whale that Eli used to describe in stories, and realizes he has to tell the truth. In the morning, Queeny reveals that she's been leaving the Night Sea treasures for Subhi. They're all from Ba, who is dead and won't ever return to them. The final treasure is a book of his poems. The following night, Subhi wakes up to Jimmie standing over him. She gives him the Bone Sparrow necklace and insists that sparrows symbolize change, not death. Later, when "Outside people" come, Subhi agrees to tell a woman named Sarah about Eli's death, and Harvey seems to give his permission. Sometime later, Maá receives a letter that she won't show to Subhi, but that makes her very happy. Everything is going to change in five days, and Subhi is happy.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Book Thief - Point of view: First person omniscient, with Death as the narrator - Setting: Fictional town of Molching, Germany, 1939-1943 - Character: Liesel Meminger. Description: The protagonist of the novel, a young girl who comes to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann, her foster parents. Liesel's real parents, who were communists, were probably killed by the Nazis, and her brother Werner dies in the story's first scene. Liesel experiences great suffering in the novel, but through learning to read, stealing a series of different books, and her developing relationship with her foster parents, her friend Rudy, and a Jewish young man named Max whom the Hubermanns hide in their basement for a time, she grows from a troubled girl into a compassionate, creative young adult. - Character: Death. Description: The narrator of the novel, the mysterious figure who collects human souls when they die. Death enjoys noticing colors, particularly in the sky, and he is mystified by the contradictory nature of humans—both beautiful and ugly. As World War II continues and he must collect so many souls, he grows weary with his work. - Character: Hans Hubermann. Description: Liesel's foster father, a silvery-eyed house painter and accordion player. Hans is exceedingly kind and gentle, and has a quiet strength and courage. He follows his own moral compass even when it puts him in harm's way, and is no fan of the Nazi's. Liesel grows closer to Hans than to anyone else, and it is he who teaches her to read. - Character: Max Vandenburg. Description: A Jewish fist fighter who comes to the hide in the Hubermanns' basement. Max arrives sick and emaciated, but he soon joins the family and keeps himself alive through a strong hatred of Hitler. Max is also an artist and writer, and he and Liesel bond through sharing both their nightmares and their words. - Character: Rudy Steiner. Description: Liesel's neighbor and best friend, Rudy loves Liesel from the start and is always asking her for a kiss. Rudy seems like Hitler's "Aryan ideal" – he is blonde, blue-eyed, and an exceptional student and athlete, but Rudy hates the Hitler Youth and ultimately Hitler himself. He becomes Liesel's partner in their adventures of both crime and charity. - Character: Ilsa Hermann. Description: The mayor's wife in the town where the Hubermanns live and one of Rosa's washing customers, Ilsa subjects herself to cold weather as a punishment for living when her son has died (even though his death was no fault of her own). She introduces Liesel to her library, and both gives Liesel books and allows Liesel to steal them from her. Ilsa starts out hardly able to speak, but by the novel's end she encourages Liesel to write and then takes her in after the bombing. - Character: Adolf Hitler. Description: The Führer (leader) of Nazi Germany and antagonist of the novel. Hitler never physically appears in the story, but he stands as a symbol for all the evil caused by the Nazis and the War. Hitler's use of language and propaganda to cause suffering shows an abuse of the power of words, and his book Mein Kampf plays a major role in the plot. - Theme: Death. Description: Death himself is the narrator of The Book Thief, and the setting is Nazi Germany during World War II, so there is a constant feeling of danger and suspense in the story. The narrator also reveals the fates of most of the characters beforehand, particularly the details of their deaths. This creates a different kind of suspense, where the reader knows some of the story's end but still wants to know how the characters arrive there.Most of the characters deal with the death of a loved one, and they then struggle with survivor's guilt. Liesel's brother dies at the start of the story and his death haunts her throughout. Hans Hubermann helps Max Vandenburg because of his debt to Max's dead father, Ilsa Hermann grieves for years for her dead son, and Michael Holtzapfel commits suicide over guilt for surviving the war when his brother did not. In the end the many deaths of the novel become overwhelming and the reader is given a glimpse into the mind of Death, who is weary of working, horrified by war, and "haunted by humans." - Theme: Words and Language. Description: Markus Zusak constantly reminds the reader of the importance of language through his writing style. The disjointed narration, postmodern style (the starred, bold-faced interjections), and poetic phrasing emphasize the words used to tell the story, to the point that the reader is never allowed to sink unconsciously into the plot. There are also many reminders of language within the novel's action – Liesel and Hans write on the back of sandpaper, the newspaper becomes imprinted against Hans's skin, and Liesel, Hans, and Max paint words in the basement. In the end Zusak gives language itself (like Death) as much physicality and agency as any character.Like many novels about oppressive regimes, much of the story's evil comes in the form of propaganda and the suppression of free language, like the book burnings of the Nazis. Max Vandenburg's story The Word Shaker condenses Zusak's ideas about the power of words – in the story Hitler is someone who uses language for evil purposes, while Liesel, who loves language purely, is able to resist Hitler through reading and writing her own words. With them she creates a shelter for herself and Max to protect them from the cruel world. The last lines of Liesel's own book (The Book Thief) sum it up – "I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right." She must take the language of the Führer and turn it to good. - Theme: Books. Description: Related to words and language is the theme of books, which begins even in the novel's title. Books as objects play major roles in the plot, and the story itself is divided among the different books Liesel steals or is given. The Nazi book-burning is a central plot point, and represents the suppression of free speech but also an acknowledgement of the power of books themselves – Hitler fears books that contradict his propaganda. Liesel is able to fight Hitler in a small way by stealing a book from the flames. Ilsa Hermann's library later becomes a haven for Liesel because of the many books it holds.Books are almost quasi-characters in the novel as well. The Grave Digger's Handbook starts Liesel's journey, The Shoulder Shrug burns against her chest, and Liesel rips up some of Frau Hermann's books in her despair. Mein Kampf (The book written by Hitler) is a destructive book because of its Nazi propaganda, but Max Vandenburg's copy contains the identification card that saves his life. Later Max is able to paint over the pages of Mein Kampf and write a story for Liesel, and in this way he is able to get some revenge on Hitler by writing over the evil words with his own creative, compassionate language. Liesel's own book, The Book Thief, saves her life both literally and figuratively. It keeps her in the basement during the final bombing, and writing it gives her a way to process all the suffering she has seen and experienced. By trying to make her language "right" she is able to gain a little bit of control over her terrifying world. - Theme: Stealing and Giving. Description: In the setting of Nazi Germany, the idea of criminality is turned upside down – Hitler's laws require citizens to commit crimes against humanity, and when Liesel or Hans show kindness to Max (or any other Jew) they are harshly punished. The thievery of the novel's title also seems like less of a crime in the context of the story. When Liesel and Rudy steal books and food it is a small way of defying Hitler, empowering themselves, and building their identities. This is particularly true for Liesel, as the books she steals help form her own story, but for both children stealing becomes a way of taking some control over a world gone mad.Rudy has his own unique relationship with stealing and giving. He wants to be a thief, and stealing things cheers him up when something bad has happened, but he ends up being better at leaving things behind. At first it is Liesel's shoes, but then he purposefully leaves the teddy bear for the dying pilot and bread for the starving Jews. Ilsa Hermann's books also symbolize the complicated nature of this theme. First she offers Liesel her books, but then when Liesel gets angry that Ilsa fired her mother, Liesel steals the same books she was offered before. She keeps stealing books until she realizes that Ilsa is actually giving them to her by letting Liesel steal them. Traditional ideas of property are useless in such a setting, and the characters must act according to their own moral compass. - Theme: Color, Beauty, and Ugliness. Description: When he takes a soul, Death remembers the color of the sky to distract himself from his grim work. He begins the story with the colors of his three meetings with Liesel, the book thief – white, black, and red – and combines these to form the Nazi flag, which hangs over the story like the colors of the sky. Later Liesel acts similarly to Death in describing the sky to Max when he is trapped inside.Death sees the full spectrum of colors in the sky, which he connects to beauty and ugliness, and the extremes of humanity. He cannot decide if mankind is truly good or evil, beautiful or ugly, and in the end he finally accepts that it can be both at once. The book Mein Kampf represents this self-contradictory nature. It is a book of ultimate hatred and ugliness, but Max paints over it and makes a beautiful story about his friendship with Liesel. By the novel's end Liesel begins to see the spectrum of humanity as well, just as she so uniquely described to sky the Max. When Death finally takes her in her old age, he wants to explain the beauty and ugliness of people to Liesel, but then he realizes that she already knows. - Climax: The fire-bombing of Molching - Summary: Death introduces himself as the narrator and describes the three times he saw "the book thief." The story begins with Liesel, her mother, and her brother Werner riding on a train. Werner dies and Liesel and her mother disembark to bury him. At the funeral Liesel finds a book called The Grave Digger's Handbook in the snow, but she doesn't know how to read. Liesel's mother drops her off in Molching, where Liesel moves in with foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann. Rosa is loud and insulting, but Hans wins Liesel's trust through his gentleness and support. Liesel has nightmares of her dead brother nightly, but Hans sits with her and comforts her. She meets a boy named Rudy Steiner who idolizes the athlete Jesse Owens, and they become best friends. Rudy constantly asks Liesel to kiss him, but she always refuses. Hans discovers Liesel's book and starts giving her reading lessons in the basement. Meanwhile World War II begins, and Molching has a book-burning to celebrate Hitler's birthday. Liesel steals a book from the fire. She is sure the mayor's wife sees her steal it. Rosa does the laundry for a number of wealthy townspeople, including the Mayor. On a day soon after the book burning, Liesel has to deliver the laundry to the mayor's wife, Ilsa Hermann. Ilsa invites Liesel into her library and Liesel is amazed at the books. She returns many times to read. Meanwhile, a young Jewish boxer named Max Vandenburg hides in a storage room for weeks. A friend brings him an identity card hidden in a copy of Mein Kampf, Hitler's book. Max travels to Molching and finds the Hubermanns. Death explains that Max's father Erik saved Hans's life in World War I, and Hans promised to help Max's mother should she ever need it. The Hubermanns let Max in and hide him in the basement, where he starts to imagine boxing with Hitler. Max and Liesel share nightmares and soon become friends. Max paints over the pages of Mein Kampf and writes a book called The Standover Man for Liesel. Ilsa Hermann quits the laundry service, and Liesel insults her. Later Liesel returns with Rudy and they start stealing books from Ilsa's library. Max gets sick and falls into a coma, but he finally recovers to the joy of the household. Nazi Party members check the basement for its ability to serve as a bomb shelter, but don't notice Max hiding there. Ilsa Hermann, meanwhile, leaves Liesel a note in one of the stolen books and Liesel realizes that Ilsa is letting her steal the books. The war escalates and there is an air raid in Molching, and the Hubermanns have to leave Max in the basement. At the next raid Liesel reads out loud to the others in the shelter. Soldiers parade Jewish prisoners through Molching on their way to a concentration camp. Hans, moved to pity, gives an old Jewish man a piece of bread and gets whipped. Max leaves that night, not wanting to get the family in any more trouble. The Gestapo come to recruit Rudy for an elite Nazi school, but Alex Steiner refuses to let him go. Soon, both Hans and Alex are drafted into the army. Rudy and Liesel leave bread on the street for the next parade of Jews. Rosa gives Liesel Max's sketchbook, which includes a story called The Word Shaker, about the power of words and Max's friendship with Liesel. In the army, Hans is assigned to a squad that cleans up after bombings, but his bus crashes. Hans breaks his leg, and he is allowed to return home to heal. An Allied pilot crashes during another raid and Liesel and Rudy watch the pilot die. There are more parades of Jews, and one day Liesel sees Max among them. They find each other and both are whipped. Liesel goes to the mayor's library and rips up books in her frustration. Ilsa Hermann gives Liesel a notebook so she can write her own story. Liesel starts writing a book called The Book Thief in the basement. Just after she finishes, but while she is still reading it in the basement of her house, the neighborhood is bombed. Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and the other residents of Himmel Street all die. Workers rescue Liesel and she finds Hans's accordion and then her parents' bodies. She kisses Rudy's corpse. Death rescues The Book Thief from a garbage truck. Liesel goes home with Ilsa Hermann and is later reunited with Max. Liesel moves to Australia and grows to be an old woman with a family. Death comes for her soul and shows her The Book Thief, and tells her that humans haunt him.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Rural, southeastern Kentucky in the late 1930s - Character: Cussy Mary Carter. Description: Cussy Mary Carter is a 19-year-old librarian with the Pack Horse Library project in rural eastern Kentucky; her job is to bring books to far-flung patrons in the mountains. She also happens to have noticeably blue skin, thanks to hereditary methemoglobinemia that she inherited from her parents, both of whom were "Blues." Cussy's great-grandfather immigrated to the United States from Cussy, France, after which she is named. She lives with just her Pa (Elijah Carter), since her mother died of influenza several years before the events in the book. She is briefly married to Charlie Frazier, becoming his widow when he dies of a heart attack on their wedding night. From him, she inherits her faithful mule, Junia. As a Pack Horse librarian, she works with Eula Foster, Harriet Hardin, Birdie, and Queenie Johnson. Cussy's blue skin marks her as different in her primarily white community. To Doc, she is a medical curiosity to be studied, while to Pastor Vester Frazier she is a devil to be feared. Others, like Sheriff Davies Kimbo, Mr. Moffit, and Mr. and Mrs. Evans tolerate Cussy, despite their discomfort over her difference. Cussy is caring, intelligent, and (thanks to her mother) very well read. She has a strong independent streak, which can be seen in her desire to keep her library route and to avoid marriage. And, despite the bigotry and isolation she faces in town, Cussy has many friends from her library route, including Angeline Moffit, Winnie Parker, and young Timmy Flynn. She eventually makes her own family with Jackson Lovett and Honey, the little orphaned girl she adopts. - Character: Pa (Elijah Carter). Description: Pa (Elijah Carter) and his daughter Cussy Mary Carter are the last of the Kentucky "Blue" Carters. Pa is a loving, sensible man, who cares deeply for Cussy and her safety. He does what he can to protect her, such as clearing the briars and overgrowth from the mountain paths she rides on her library route. His love and concern also animate his desire to see her married before he succumbs to an early death in the mines, either by accident or because of his coal-diseased lungs. After Cussy's disastrous but mercifully brief marriage to the sadistic and abusive Charlie Frazier, Pa refuses to entertain any more suitors, even ones as eligible as Jackson Lovett, for a long time. Pa, like Cussy, faces discrimination and bigotry thanks to his skin color; he and his relatives have faced violence in the past. Yet, he cares deeply about his fellow miners, and he helps them where he can (taking extra shifts for a miner whose wife is having a baby, helping with the most dangerous jobs) as well as being their representative in secret and dangerous unionization talks. Thus, he earns the respect of men like fellow miner Howard Moore and even Sheriff Davies Kimbo. He's also proud, despite (or perhaps because of) the traumas and abuses he's endured: he refuses to entertain Cussy's suspicion that his fellow miners have elected him their representative because he's expendable (unlike white miners), and he's unwilling to take work with the WPA because he would have to take an oath of poverty, admitting that he couldn't support himself or his family otherwise. At the end of the novel, Pa dies when a mine collapses. - Character: Jackson Lovett. Description: Jackson Lovett is Troublesome Creek's most eligible bachelor, having recently returned to Kentucky from a stint out west where he helped to build the Hoover Dam. Jackson is thoughtful and well-read; unlike most of Cussy Mary Carter's male patrons, he prefers Pulitzer Prize winners to local color authors. Also unlike most of Cussy's patrons—and most of the people in Troublesome Creek—Jackson doesn't regard her with fear or disgust. He's immediately able to look past her skin color to see her good heart and her keen intelligence. Jackson has also known trauma and tragedy: his mother and brothers died of illness when he was young, and his father died shortly thereafter of alcoholism. Thus, although he is still a fairly young man, he has serious, somewhat sad eyes and a fierce determination. This can be seen when he makes six attempts to ask Pa for permission to court Cussy Mary. He also cares deeply about justice, and right and wrong. This manifests in his unwillingness to help thieves like Mr. Moffit as well as his steadfast unwillingness to recognize unfair and cruel laws, like the anti-miscegenation statutes under which Sheriff Davies Kimbo arrests him for marrying Cussy Mary. Nevertheless, he is kind and conscientious, supporting Cussy Mary in her decision to adopt and raise Honey, and burying Angeline and Mr. Moffit with care and respect. He is so kind that he's even able to befriend Junia, Cussy's ornery and misanthropic mule. But as much as he cares about justice, Jackson doesn't care very much for what other people think of him. He is unabashed in his affection for Cussy Mary. - Character: Angeline Moffit. Description: 16-year-old Angeline Moffit lives with her husband, Mr. Moffit, on a remote homestead on Cussy Mary Carter's library route. She is sweet, kind, and friendly; like Winnie Parker and Miss Loretta Adams, she doesn't care about the color of Cussy Mary's skin even if her husband does. And she always has a generous gift of food for Junia the mule, taken from her meager garden. Angeline doesn't have any kin left, and so she is left to fend for herself when Mr. Moffit is shot stealing a chicken and when she gives birth to her daughter, Honey. She's grateful for Cussy Mary's friendship and help, whether it's in teaching her to read or in procuring the medicines necessary to nurse Mr. Moffit back to health. Angeline hemorrhages during Honey's birth and subsequently dies; she asks Cussy Mary to raise her daughter for her. - Character: Mr. Moffit (Willie). Description: Mr. Willie Moffit is Angeline Moffit's husband and Honey's father. Like his wife, he doesn't have any kin: he was an illegitimate child unrecognized by his father and abandoned by his mother. His life is so hard that he resorts to stealing chickens and is shot for his theft. He tolerates Cussy Mary's presence in his home because she can read articles to him that are still too complicated for Angeline's literacy level (he himself is completely illiterate), but he is visibly uncomfortable because of her skin color. When she tries to help Angeline nurse him after his gunshot wound, he fears that she will somehow contaminate or infect him with her blueness. Yet, it's eventually revealed that Mr. Moffit himself carries the recessive gene for blue skin, as his daughter Honey is born with blue skin. Mr. Moffit hangs himself upon discovering this. - Character: Queenie Johnson. Description: Queenie Johnson is the only Black Pack Horse librarian. Like Cussy Mary, she had to get the job from the regional office, since she faces racism and bigotry from library supervisors Eula Foster and Harriet Hardin. Afraid to be "contaminated" by Queenie's race, Harriet leaves Cussy Mary to train her, and the two outsider women become friends. Queenie dreams of a better life for herself and her three sons, and she ultimately moves to Philadelphia, where she goes to school for a librarian degree. - Character: Harriet Hardin. Description: Harriet Hardin is the assistant supervisor of the Troublesome Creek Pack Horse library project, working under Eula Foster. Although she loves books and reading, she is a cruel, harsh bigot who treats both Cussy Mary and Queenie Johnson poorly. She is a religious zealot who refuses to listen to jazz music because it is "heathen," and she subscribes to the extreme views of Vester Frazier that people who are different are inferior and dangerous, if not outright evil. She's also a hypocrite: although she believes that Cussy's blue skin is an indication of inbreeding, she herself is sweet on her own cousin. - Character: Sheriff Davies Kimbo. Description: Sheriff Davies Kimbo is the lawman of Troublesome Creek. He tolerates Cussy Mary Carter and her Pa, despite his feelings that they are inferior because of their blue skin, because Pa is a good miner and stands up for the rights of the white miners in town. He's also supportive of the Pack Horse library project. He is related by marriage to Vester Frazier, and although the two men have a bad relationship, he still leads the search when Vester goes missing. With Harriet Hardin, Sheriff Kimbo reveals himself to be an inveterate racist and bigot when he arrests Jackson Lovett for breaking the anti-miscegenation laws by marrying Cussy. - Character: Vester Frazier. Description: Vester Frazier is a local pastor the Troublesome Creek area who is related to both Charlie Frazier (Cussy Mary's short-lived husband) and Sheriff Davies Kimbo. His followers include Harriet Hardin. Vester has a reputation in the community for his extreme religious views, particularly that anyone who is different—whether because they have blue skin, or are a little person, or happen to have been born triplets—is bad, demonic, and must be removed from the community. His baptisms of these people are traumatic, if not fatal. After Charlie Frazier's death, Vester stalks Cussy Mary on her route, intending to "save" her by raping and torturing her until the devil releases his hold on her. - Character: Doc. Description: Doc is the well-respected physician of Troublesome Creek. He has long been fascinated with the Carter family; after Cussy Mary Carter's mother died, he showed up at the family home to ask if he could take samples from her corpse. Eventually, he's able to blackmail Cussy Mary into participating in his medical research into her condition, and he discovers that she can be "cured" with a daily dose of a medicine that turns her skin white. Although he works with a Black colleague on Cussy's case (Dr. Randall Mills), stands up for Cussy's whiteness when she and Jackson Lovett are accused of breaking anti-miscegenation laws, and takes care of Jackson after his beating, Doc prefers Cussy white, demonstrating his own inherent racism and bigotry. During the time he's conducing his research and caring for her, he's kind and solicitous, giving her generous gifts of food and other luxuries. But when she stops taking the drug, he loses interest in her. - Character: Winnie Parker. Description: Winnie Parker teaches at the mountain school outside of Troublesome Creek. Her husband left the area to find work in Detroit, and she is waiting to be reunited with him. She is a friend of Cussy Mary Carter's and has the distinction of being the only person who visited Cussy while she recuperated from her brief, violent marriage to Charlie Frazier. Like Angeline and Miss Loretta Adams, she doesn't seem to be bothered by Cussy's blue skin. - Character: Henry Marshall. Description: Henry Marshall is Winnie Parker's star student at the mountain school. He's hungry for knowledge and books, and he wins the school's spelling bee. He's also generous—he shares his prize with Cussy Mary Carter—and loving towards his large family of siblings. Henry wants to grow up to be a Pack Horse librarian himself, although his family's extreme poverty means that he suffers from extreme malnutrition and pellagra as a result. - Character: Devil John. Description: Devil John Smith is a local moonshiner who lives with his wife, Martha Hannah, and their pack of children in the mountains around Troublesome Creek. Although he complains to Cussy Mary Carter that her books distract his family from their chores and responsibilities, he has a soft spot for reading and can be convinced to continue to accept library materials that are useful. He also seems to be keeping a protective eye on Cussy Mary while she rides along her route, and he stands up for her when she and Jackson Lovett run afoul of the anti-miscegenation laws. - Character: Miss Loretta Adams. Description: Miss Loretta Adams is one of Cussy Mary Carter's library patrons. She's old and nearly blind, although she has a reputation as being one of the best seamstresses in the area. She appreciates Cussy Mary's visits but doesn't want library books; the only thing she wants to hear or read is the Bible. When Cussy Mary adopts Honey, Loretta babysits the child during the week so that Cussy can continue to work her route. Like Angeline Moffit and Winnie Parker, Loretta loves Cussy and doesn't care about the color of her skin. - Character: R.C. Cole. Description: R.C. Cole is a 17-year-old patron on Cussy Mary Carter's Pack Horse library route. R.C. has followed his family into the business of fire-watching and he lives alone in a tower, keeping an eye out for wildfires. He wants to use the library materials to teach himself enough to be promoted to forest ranger someday. He is in love with Ruth Beck, and he fights for the right to marry her when her father initially refuses his proposal. - Character: Oren Taft. Description: Oren Taft is a middle-aged man who lives in an extremely isolated community, called Tobacco Top, miles outside of Troublesome Creek. Despite the hardship of his and his family's existence, he is a kind and happy man, who takes deep pleasure in food and in his community. He fondly refers to Cussy Mary Carter as his "bonny Picasso," after a painting he saw in one of the library magazines that features a blue-skinned woman. When Queenie Johnson leaves for Philadelphia, Cussy Mary suggests that he take on her route. This provides him a job and income, neither of which he has had for years. - Character: Martha Hannah. Description: Martha Hannah Smith is the wife of Devil John, the moonshiner. She has taught her brood of children how to read using the family bible and the reading materials that Cussy Mary Carter brings to them. Her husband complains to Cussy that Martha Hannah and their children are too interested in reading to pay proper attention to their chores and responsibilities. - Character: Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Description: Mr. and Mrs. Evans are patrons on Cussy Mary Carter's Pack Horse library route. Their son has moved to Nebraska where he is raising cattle, and occasionally Cussy Mary helps read his letters to Mrs. Evans, who is not literate. Although the Evanses are uncomfortable with the blue-skinned Cussy Mary, they appreciate her services as a librarian. - Character: Timmy Flynn. Description: Timmy Flynn is only 11 years old, but he's a faithful patron on Cussy Mary Carter's Pack Horse library route. His mother won't tolerate books from the government coming into her home, so Cussy and Timmy come up with a system that allows her to leave the books safely at the end of the family property. - Character: Charlie Frazier. Description: Charlie Frazier is the only person who Pa can find to marry Cussy Mary Carter, since she is a "Blue" and is therefore reviled in their bigoted community. At 62, he's older than Cussy and her father. He's also filthy, foul, and abusive to his mule (whom Cussy later takes and names Junia) and to Cussy. He beats her so severely on their wedding night that he suffers a heart attack and dies. - Character: Eula Foster. Description: Eula Foster is the head supervisor of the Pack Horse library project in Troublesome Creek. She joins Harriet Hardin in segregating Cussy Mary Carter and Queenie Johnson from the rest of the (white) librarians, but she is less harsh and judgmental; after Harriet succeeds in getting Jackson Lovett arrested for breaking the anti-miscegenation laws, Eula seems to realize the error of her bigotry. She becomes kinder to Cussy Mary and removes the "no coloreds" sign from the center's bathroom. - Character: Constance Poole. Description: Constance Poole is the head of the Troublesome Creek Sewing Bee club. She's a snappy, stylish woman who likes to stop by the center to gossip with Eula Foster and Harriet Hardin. She dislikes Cussy Mary Carter and ostracizes her from the community Fourth of July celebration, even though Cussy is at the time white-skinned thanks to a medical intervention. - Character: Birdie. Description: At just 18 years old, Birdie is the youngest Pack Horse librarian. Birdie is married, but her husband has gone to a distant city to find factory work. Although technically the librarians are only supposed to be unmarried, some (like Birdie) claim that they've been abandoned by husbands to support their families while they wait for their men to return. - Character: Aletha. Description: Aletha is Doc's Jamaican housekeeper; she is the only other Black person in Troublesome Creek besides Queenie Johnson and her small family. She displays the same amount of distrust and bigotry as many of the white residents of the town, however, when she refuses to let Cussy Mary Carter into her former mistress's home because of her blue skin. She has a thick accent that Cussy finds nearly unintelligible. - Theme: Kind, Kindness, and Discrimination. Description: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek follows 19-year-old Cussy Mary Carter, a Pack Horse librarian in rural Kentucky in the 1930s. She and her Pa are the last members of their "kind," a family with a rare genetic blood disorder that tinges their skin blue. Cussy faces discrimination and abuse for her blue skin. Her place and time are deeply segregated; she and her colleague, Queenie Johnson, are labeled "colored" and treated poorly by some because of it. Their supervisors, Harriet and Eula, have a "no coloreds" sign on the bathroom, avoid physical contact with them, and insult their intelligence. And Cussy faces more discrimination. Only desperate men can be lured to court her, and her short-lived first husband, Charlie Frazier, spends their wedding night beating her and calling her a "blue devil." Harriet calls her an "inbred" and a "pig." When Doc discovers a medicine that will turn Cussy's skin white, she thinks she will finally be accepted in Troublesome Creek. But when she tries to attend the town's Fourth of July celebration, she learns that, although her difference is only skin deep, discrimination runs deeper. After all, most people in the community discriminate against Mr. Moffit for being a chicken thief, even though he is white (and he turned to theft out of desperation). But although Cussy may be the last of her kind, her kindness—her ability to treat people with help and sympathy no matter what—shows the way beyond discrimination. People who can see Cussy as a fellow human being—like Angeline, who is just as lonely and isolated as Cussy; Miss Loretta, who is nearly blind but who can feel Cussy's fine heart; and Jackson Lovett, for whom books have also opened a larger world—appreciate her for who she is, not caring about the color of her skin. Cussy even treats Harriet with kindness, finding a way to relate to the cruel woman through their shared love of books. Kindness can't erase discrimination; when Cussy and Jackson marry, he is promptly arrested by the Sheriff for breaking the anti-miscegenation laws that prohibit marriages between white and "colored" people. Yet, it points the way towards a kinder future world, where people will be judged by their hearts, not the color of their skins. - Theme: The Power of Books. Description: Cussy Mary Carter, the Book Woman of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, is a 19-year-old Pack Horse librarian. The Pack Horse library program, funded and administered by the WPA, brought books to extremely rural and impoverished Kentuckians. In providing a window into the lives of Cussy and her patrons, the novel celebrates the power of books and reading to improve people's lives, expand their minds, and help them make sense of the world around them. Not everyone is convinced that the books are a good thing. As Pa reminds Cussy early on, books can't put the food that most people desperately need on their tables. There is also lingering suspicion about the potentially "dirty" content of some of the books. Yet, most of Cussy's patrons are indeed hungry for what she brings them. Angeline is proud of her growing reading skills, and R. C. Cole plans to use what he learns in his library loans to work up to a job as a forest ranger. There are a few exceptions: Timmy Flynn's mother refuses the books and Devil John complains that his wife and children are skipping their chores to read. But when Cussy figures out the correct books to win each over (a helpful collection of recipes, home remedies, and mountain wisdom for Mrs. Flynn; Boy Scout books with hunting and fishing tips for Devil John), they both become dedicated patrons and stalwart friends. And the books help to make sense of the sometimes-difficult lives Cussy and her patrons live. Henry faces his untimely death bravely through the idea of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, and Cussy copes with her father's matchmaking attempts through fairy tales. And books allow their readers to imagine other worlds, from the somewhat familiar experiences of peasant farmers in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth to the futuristic world of George Orwell's Brave New World. This is especially important for Cussy's patrons, who mostly lack the money and time to travel even as far as Lexington. In all these ways, the books are a shining light for people who live in dark times and hard places. - Theme: Hardship and Humanity. Description: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is set in extremely rural Kentucky during the final years of the Great Depression. The lives of Cussy Mary Carter and most of the patrons on her Pack Horse library route are characterized by extreme poverty, need, and hardship. The area's primary employers are the WPA, which requires workers to take a Paupers' Oath and prove their poverty, and the mine Company, which dehumanizes its labor force, allows dangerous working conditions, and overcharges everyone for goods at the Company Store until it's exhausted the coal seam and moves on to another town. Most people scratch out a subsistence living from the hard, rugged landscape, growing small gardens and hunting for game, like Angeline and Pa, or foraging for wild plants like Cussy and Comfort Marshall. Poor mountainfolk can't afford to have Doc tend their wounds, safely deliver their babies, or treat their illnesses. And even those who are relatively well off, like Doc and Jackson Lovett, have been touched by pain and loss: Doc's wife passed a few years before the events in the book, and Jackson lost his entire family to illness and alcoholism when he was a child. Yet despite the grinding poverty of their hardscrabble lives, the people who live in and around Troublesome Creek share a strong sense of humanity. They are generous and they try to help each other out. Angeline and Jackson always have a treat for Cussy Mary's mule, Junia; Cussy and Queenie Johnson share food when their library routes cross; when one miner dies, the rest chip in to pay for his coffin and make sure that he is buried properly. In this way, the book shows the irrepressible human spirit and celebrates the courage and generosity of the kinds of people who lived—and suffered—through the hard time of the historical period it depicts. - Theme: Change and Modernization. Description: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is set at a time when many things were changing in America. Cussy Mary and her patrons are aware that they live in a time of technological and scientific revolution. Patrons want Popular Mechanics magazines to read about new equipment and farming practices; women are trading their mountain home remedies for the latest cures described in Woman's Home Companion. Yet, their lives don't look very modern. Most people in and around Troublesome ride horses or mules and use wagons. No one has electricity or running water in their homes. Cussy and Angeline know what an airplane is, but neither of them can imagine being in one; Cussy can barely bring herself to get into Doc's car. When she sees Lexington for the first time, she's surprised by the noise and smell of all the cars on the road. Some people, like Vester Frazier, want to cling to their old-fashioned and superstitious ways. Although Cussy's blue skin is a genetic condition which can be treated by modern medicine, he persists in his belief that it's a sign of the Devil. Modern progress in the novel is represented by the books, the government project that distributes them, and a shift from superstition and discrimination towards science and acceptance. While many people have doubts about this progress, those who are unwilling to embrace change (or at least the possibility of it) are increasingly sidelined. Vester Frazier is killed; Cussy Mary and Jackson Lovett defy the segregationist opinions of the Sheriff and Harriet; the WPA builds a new school to educate more of the local children. Change will come whether people are ready for it or not, the book points out, and those that are the most open-minded will be the best positioned to benefit from it when it does. - Theme: Autonomy and Interdependence. Description: The people who populate the rural Kentucky mountainsides in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek must be fiercely independent to eke an existence from the harsh environment and to survive the hardships of the Great Depression. Autonomy—being in charge of one's life and oneself—is highly valued in this community. Miss Loretta lives alone despite being nearly blind (although she accepts Cussy Mary's companionship and help once a week); Devil John refuses to send his kids to school; and R. C. Cole takes his life into his hands to fight for the right to marry his girlfriend, Ruth. The people in and around Troublesome Creek shun anything they think compromises their autonomy. Some refuse Cussy's books, distrusting anything provided by the federal government; others refuse to work for the WPA because they think that if a person can't make do on their own, they should go without rather than accept charity. Cussy herself frequently refuses the food people offer her, and she can make her own gifts of food only under the cover of darkness or with subterfuge. Yet, autonomy isn't isolation. The community at Tobacco Top demonstrates the importance of relying on others, and when Oren Taft presents Cussy with a gift of ramps (wild onions), it shows how interdependence—the mutual reliance of people in a community—can enrich everyone. In another example, the mine workers band together in a union to fight for their safety and rights. And even the fiercely independent thinker Jackson Lovett has a network of relationships, both business and personal, in the community. Thus, while autonomy, self-determination, and the ability to take care of oneself are highly prized in this world, the book also demonstrates the ways in which even the most independent people still need mutually supportive relationships to thrive. - Climax: Cussy Mary Carter promises to raise Honey after finding Honey's father dead and her mother dying. - Summary: In January of 1936, 19-year-old Cussy Mary Carter's father is trying very hard to find a suitable husband for his daughter. Cussy's mother died of influenza and Pa—a Kentucky coal miner—is sick himself with black lung. Cussy doesn't want to get married; she has a job with the WPA's Pack Horse Library project, delivering books to people in remote communities and homesteads in the hinterlands around Troublesome Creek. She's also afraid of the kind of man who would want to marry one of the "Kentucky Blue People." Cussy and several generations of her ancestors have a rare genetic condition that turns their skin blue, and although they are otherwise healthy and normal, they are treated with fear and bigotry. The only reason Cussy has any suitors at all is because Pa has offered 10 acres of land for her dowry. He finally gets a taker, an old man named Charlie Frazier. Charlie mercilessly beats Cussy on their wedding night, then fortunately dies of a heart attack. Cussy, now in possession of Charlie's abused mule, Junia, returns to her work as a Pack Horse Librarian. Cussy brings books to far-flung homesteaders—including Mr. Moffit and his wife, Angeline; Martha Hanna and "Devil John" Smith; Miss Loretta Adams; and Oren Taft—and to the mountain school run by Winnie Parker. And although she faces some bigotry from her patrons—Mr. Moffit doesn't like to look at her blue face—overall, Cussy's patrons like her. Some, especially Angeline, Winnie, and Miss Loretta, consider her a friend and don't care about the color of her skin. And when she meets her newest patron, Jackson Lovett, she quickly earns his respect and regard. The same isn't true of her supervisors, Eula Foster and Harriet Hardin, who treat Cussy and the only Black librarian, Queenie Johnson, as unintelligent, disease-ridden pariahs because they are "colored." After Cussy returns to her library route, her dead husband's cousin, Pastor Vester Frazier, begins to stalk her. Vester is well-liked by many in the community, but he has a long history of harassing, harming, and killing people who are different (twins, a little person, and the Blues) because he believes they are the result of demonic forces. Vester claims that Cussy is a "blue witch," and that she's responsible for Charlie's death. One day, he attacks Cussy in the woods and tries to rape her, but Junia manages to chase him off just in time. Soon after, he tries to sneak onto the Carter property while Pa is at work, but Junia breaks free from her stall and tramples him to death. The only people who know about what happened to Vester are Cussy, Pa, and Doc, whom Cussy and Pa called to treat his injuries before he died. Doc uses this opportunity to blackmail Pa and Cussy into participating in medical research, since he has long been curious about the family's blue skin. In exchange for his silence, he wants to take Cussy into Lexington once a month to the hospital, where he performs traumatizing and degrading tests on her. Once he realizes the root cause of her skin coloring, Doc offers her a drug that's capable of turning her skin white, at least temporarily. Cussy jumps at the opportunity to become "normal," and accepts the horrific side effects of the medication for the chance to be accepted in her community. But when Cussy tries to attend Troublesome Creek's Fourth of July celebration as a "white" woman for the first time in her life, the townsfolk still shun her. Following this embarrassing fiasco, she resolves to live as herself, even if that means she stays Blue and continues to face discrimination and difficulty. Cussy's friend and patron, 16-year-old Angeline, is pregnant with her first child. Angeline and her husband Mr. Moffit live alone, as neither of them have any kin left in the area. She's excited about having a baby, and she's convinced it will be a girl. She plans to name it Honey. But when Honey is born, the baby is Blue. Mr. Moffit, it seems, is the illegitimate child of one of Cussy's great-uncles; somehow, Angeline must also carry the recessive gene. Horrified by his child, Mr. Moffit hangs himself in the front yard on the day that Honey is born. Cussy finds him there while on her library route, and she rushes inside to find Angeline dying of a hemorrhage after giving birth. As she lies dying, she begs Cussy to raise Honey for her. At first, Pa worries that being a single mother will just make Cussy more vulnerable, but he eventually warms to the baby and understands why Cussy—who knows so well the pain and trauma of growing up Blue—wants to care for her. Shortly after Honey's birth, he tells Cussy to expect a new suitor, since Honey needs a father. But Cussy would never have expected that suitor to be Jackson Lovett, who has been in love with her since he first laid eyes on her in the spring. They share a love of books and an understanding of pain and trauma. The night Cussy accepts his proposal is the night that Pa dies in a mine collapse; he dies without knowing that Cussy will be taken care of in the way he wanted her to be. In October, Jackson and Cussy get married in the Troublesome Creek courthouse. They leave the ceremony and are greeted by a crowd of Cussy's patrons, who have come to wish them well. But then, Jackson is arrested by Sheriff Davies Kimbo for breaking the anti-miscegenation laws that prohibit white people from marrying "colored" people. Although Doc attests that Cussy is a white person with a medical condition, Sheriff ignores him and gives Jackson a vicious beating for his failure to comply. A growing crowd looks on, some supporting Cussy and Jackson, others supporting Harriet and the Sheriff in their bigoted attack. Four years later, Cussy Mary writes a letter to Queenie Johnson, who has moved to Philadelphia and is going to school to become a proper librarian. Jackson was eventually released from jail and recovered from his injuries. He has been living in Tennessee and visiting Cussy secretly while he sold off his land and they prepared to move to Ohio, where they can live together openly. Honey loves her parents and is learning to read. She is eager to become a book woman herself one day.

- Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction - Title: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - Point of view: Third person omniscient, mostly from the perspective of Bruno, a nine-year-old boy. - Setting: Berlin, Germany and Auschwitz, Poland - Character: Bruno. Description: The protagonist and narrator, at the start of the novel Bruno is a nine-year-old boy living in Berlin during World War II. His Father, a Nazi officer, then moves the family to Auschwitz, Poland. As Bruno is young and cannot pronounce certain words, throughout the novel Hitler is referred to as "the Fury" (the Führer) and Auschwitz is referred to as "Out-With." Bruno is very sheltered and naïve, and though he develops a close friendship with Shmuel, a Jewish boy in the concentration camp, Bruno has a difficult time grasping exactly how hard life is on the other side of the fence. Bruno is very interested in art and books, and loves exploring. He wants to become a soldier like his father, and though his parents never explain to him what is happening in the war, he has been indoctrinated from a young age to believe that Germany, the "Fatherland," is superior to all other nations. Bruno is small for his age, and is very sensitive to people like Lieutenant Kotler calling him "little man." Ultimately Bruno never gets the chance to outgrow his ignorance and innocence, as his natural empathy and friendship for Shmuel lead him to cross the fence and be killed in a gas chamber. - Character: Gretel. Description: Gretel is Bruno's twelve-year-old sister, whom Bruno refers to as a "Hopeless Case." She feels that she is much wiser and more mature than Bruno, and often taunts him. She is at first mostly interested in her dolls, but after her lessons from the children's tutor Herr Liszt, Gretel becomes obsessed with the changing politics of World War II, and begins to track the German army's progress via pushpins in maps on her wall in "Out-With." She becomes much more indoctrinated with anti-Semitic rhetoric than Bruno does, and tells Bruno that they are the "opposite" of the Jews on the other side of the fence. Gretel develops a crush on Lieutenant Kotler, and is "inconsolable" when he is transferred away. - Character: Mother. Description: Bruno's mother is married to Father, a Commandant in the German army. Mother is very loving towards Gretel and Bruno, but becomes stern whenever they ask too many questions or complain about moving to "Out-With." She refuses to speak with Bruno about the war, and says it is no topic for proper conversation. At Out-With, Mother develops a friendship (and likely an affair) with Lieutenant Kotler—seemingly an act of rebellion against Father, who essentially controls her life. Eventually, Mother convinces Father to let the family move back to Berlin, though she stays for a time to see if Bruno will return. - Character: Father. Description: Ralf, Bruno's father, was a soldier in the Great War (World War I), and is promoted to Commandant in the German Army by Hitler during World War II. He moves the family to Auschwitz, where he is in charge of the camp. Father is strict and intimidating, but expresses tenderness towards his family. He eventually consents to letting the family move back to Berlin, though he remains at Auschwitz to continue his duties for Hitler. A year after Bruno disappears, he figures out what happened to his son, and is destroyed by the realization. When the Allied soldiers come to take him away for punishment, Father submits to their demands, as he no longer has the will to live. - Character: Shmuel. Description: The titular "boy in the striped pajamas," Shmuel is Bruno's Jewish friend who is kept prisoner at Auschwitz. Born on the same day as Bruno, he and Bruno become good friends, though Bruno never quite understands the horrors that Shmuel lives through in the camp. Shmuel is described as being very thin, and eagerly gobbles up the food that Bruno brings him. He understands much more about his situation and the war than Bruno does, but often does not retaliate to Bruno's blasé remarks about his comparatively luxurious life, in order to not start arguments. The two boys ultimately die together in a gas chamber when Bruno crawls under the fence to help Shmuel look for his father, who has gone missing (and was likely killed by the German soldiers). - Character: Lieutenant Kotler. Description: Kurt Kotler is a nineteen-year-old German soldier at Auschwitz who frequents Bruno's home. He is well-dressed, over-cologned, and has striking blond hair—seemingly the ideal "Aryan" of Nazi ideology. Gretel develops a crush on him, and Mother strikes up a friendship (and likely an affair) with the young handsome soldier. He is cruel to the prisoners, and taunts Bruno by calling him "little man," something the boy despises. Kotler is eventually transferred away from Auschwitz when Father discovers that Kotler's father, a literature professor, fled from Germany in 1938 at the start of the war. - Character: Grandmother. Description: Nathalie, Bruno's grandmother and Father's mother, was a singer in her youth, before she married Grandfather. She is very dramatic, and still loves to sing. Each Christmas, she devises a play for herself and the children, to be performed at their holiday party. Grandmother opposes the Nazi party, and gets into a huge fight with Father when he accepts the new post at Auschwitz. They do not make up, and she dies while the family is away at Auschwitz. - Character: Pavel. Description: Pavel is the old Jewish man who works in the family's house in Auschwitz. He was a doctor before he was sent to the concentration camp, and he patches up Bruno's knee when Bruno cuts it falling off a swing. Pavel becomes thinner and frailer by the day, and is beaten (likely to death) by Kotler when he accidentally drops a wine bottle in Kotler's lap at dinner. - Character: Eva Braun. Description: Adolf Hitler's lifelong partner and girlfriend. She is never referred to by name in the novel, and is only described as a "beautiful woman" whom Hitler brings to dinner at Bruno's house. Eva is kind to the children, even when Hitler is, as Bruno believes, "the rudest man he has ever met." - Theme: Innocence and Ignorance. Description: Bruno, the main character of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is a nine-year-old boy who is the son of a German Commandant (Father) during World War II. Father has been rising in the ranks of the Nazi army, and Bruno has lived a sheltered life in Berlin with his Mother, sister Gretel, maid Maria, and butler Lars. The story, which is a fictional "fable" of the Holocaust, features Bruno as the narrator. Though he attends school, Bruno is mostly ignorant of the political situation at the time. He refers to Hitler, who visits their home with "a beautiful blond woman" (Eva Braun) for dinner, as "the Fury," the young boy's incorrect pronunciation for "the Führer." When the family is moved to Auschwitz (which is only ever referred to as "Out-With" by Bruno, another mispronunciation), Bruno continues to be left in the dark as to why they had to leave Berlin to be near the camp full of people in "striped pajamas"—the Jews and other prisoners brought to the camp to work or be killed. Though Bruno and his sister Gretel, three years his elder, have a private tutor, Bruno has little to no idea as to what is going on in the camp, or in Germany as a whole. He thinks that Shmuel, the identically-aged Jewish boy whom he befriends through the fence to the concentration camp, lives there with his family voluntarily, and Bruno never understands exactly why Shmuel is there, or why he is so thin. Bruno's enduring innocence, and his sense that perhaps there are some questions best left unasked, is a prevailing theme throughout the novel. Bruno's Mother and Father, as well as his sister Gretel, continually answer his questions about what is happening in Berlin and "Out-With" with overgeneralizations and euphemisms. When Bruno asks Gretel who the people on the other side of the fence are, she tells him that they are Jews, and are simply the "opposite" of what she and Bruno are. When he asks, over and over again, why the family must leave Berlin, his Mother tells him that Hitler has "big plans" for his father, but never explains what those plans are. The nature of what Bruno's father is (a Commandant in the SS, and a director of the concentration camp Auschwitz) and why people are scared of him is never explained in the novel either. Presumably, Bruno is left in the dark about so much of what his family does and why they do it in order to preserve his innocence. However, this innocence is entirely based on ignorance, and it ultimately leads to his death. Many critics have claimed that the novel is unrealistic and oversimplified in its portrayal of the Holocaust, but it mostly functions as a "fable"—almost an allegory. Thus Bruno's ignorance of what is happening in Germany during the 1940s comes to represent the German soldiers and citizens who, for whatever reason, complied with, did not interfere with, or otherwise stopped themselves from even thinking about the realities of the Nazi Party's actions. The innocence enforced on Bruno becomes a damning echo of the ignorance that so many others enforced on themselves. - Theme: Boundaries. Description: Bruno's world in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is filled with places he is not allowed to go, and the reasons for these boundaries are rarely explained to him. He is never allowed into his Father's office, "with no exceptions," and he and his sister Gretel are often shooed away from dinner parties and important conversations behind closed doors. Bruno, as a nine-year-old boy, loves nothing more than to explore, and this is how he comes to meet Shmuel through the fence of the concentration camp. Despite the barrier between them, the boys develop a relationship based on conversation, rather than the rough-and-tumble games that Bruno enjoyed with his three best friends back in Berlin. The boundaries in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas—whether they are social boundaries, such as the inability to ask certain questions, or physical ones, such as a closed door or a fence—all lead to dire consequences. Because Bruno does not feel that he can ask his family who the people in the "striped pajamas" on the other side of the fence are, and his parents and sister do not feel that he deserves an adequate response, Bruno has no idea what the outcome may be when he follows Shmuel in the "march" inside the death camp. The only time the imposed boundaries within the world of the book are broken down are when Bruno crawls under the fence and blends in with the rest of the prisoners, an act of curiosity and bravery that leads to his death and Shmuel's. However, one small comfort of the bleak ending is that Shmuel, for all of his terror in the concentration camp, dies in the company of a good friend who has supported him throughout the last year of his life. As is the case for much of the text, the idea of boundaries acts as an allegory for one aspect of the horrors of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that decades now separate the carnage and terror of camps such as Auschwitz from the world today, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas shows how dangerously easy it can be to get caught up in such acts when people are forcibly divided, and when people are unable to openly discuss the consequences of current affairs. Human rights violations aren't often that far away—just on the other side of a fence. - Theme: Family and Friendship. Description: Family and friendship are both important themes for Bruno, as he struggles to determine what role he plays in his household, and how to approach his friendship with Shmuel. Bruno has not been indoctrinated with a hatred for Jews, despite the fact that his father is high-ranking Nazi officer, but his parents do stress that he is not allowed to go near the fence, and his father refers to the people in the "striped pajamas" as "not really people at all." Bruno then feels a tension between what his family has told him about staying away from the fence, and the bond he feels with Shmuel, the skinny boy on the other side of the fence. Though Bruno knows very little about why Shmuel is in the camp or why he is not supposed to talk to him, Bruno ultimately allows his friendship to supersede his obedience to his parents and Gretel. While Bruno feels respect for his Mother and Father, he understands that all is not well in the family dynamic. Mother is very unhappy when they move away from Berlin, and Father becomes even more secretive and commanding around the household. Bruno is horrified when Pavel, an old man who seems to live in the camp at night but do work in the household during the day, is harshly reprimanded for spilling wine. Pavel was once very kind to Bruno when he fell off a swing, bandaging Bruno's knee and telling Bruno that he used to be a doctor. Bruno is thus torn between his positive experiences with the prisoners as very kind but sad people, and his parents' descriptions of them as subhuman, and somehow the "opposite" of Bruno. This tension ultimately serves as an allegory for the pseudoscience and indoctrination spread by the Nazi Party during World War II, claiming the Germans to be greater than all other nationalities, particularly in respect to the "Jewish problem" in Europe. At the end of the story, with his head shaven, Bruno can find very few differences between himself and his new best friend. Despite Father's exalted rank within the German army, his son dies the same death as the people he puts into the concentration camp. Thus the book's "moral" ultimately declares that despite differences of nationality, race, gender, or religion, at a basic level we all desire compassion and companionship, and deserve the same level of dignity and human rights. - Theme: Nationalism. Description: During World War II, the Nazi Party, which gained control of Germany, operated on the idea that ethnic Germans were superior to the rest of the world, particularly the Jewish population in Europe at the time. Nazi rhetoric and propaganda operated heavily on the idea of the "other"—emphasizing an "us vs. them" division, and demonizing and dehumanizing "them." In practice this meant attempting to prove, using pseudoscience, the Bible, nationalism, and scare tactics, that Jews were an inferior race that needed to be "exterminated" to solve Germany's problems. Adolf Hitler's government created concentration camps in which to ruthlessly kill Jews, resulting in the death of over six million people. The Nazis also imprisoned and killed up to five million others—including Romani people, gay people, the mentally disabled, and other minorities—all in the pursuit of creating a nation of idealized "Aryan Germans," the most perfect of which were believed to be blond-haired, blue-eyed Christians by faith and by blood.Though Bruno, due to his age and isolation, understands very little about the political situation of Germany when his family moves from Berlin to "Out-With," his tutor and his Father have still indoctrinated him to an extent to believe in the superiority of Germany and its right to rule. When Shmuel tells Bruno that he is from Poland, Bruno's immediate response is that Germany is superior to Poland, simply because Germany is better than any other country in the world. Lieutenant Kotler, with his striking blond hair, good looks, and cruelty towards Jews, is meant to represent Hitler's ideal Aryan man. However, when it is revealed that Kotler's father fled for Switzerland, which was "neutral" territory during World War II, Father dismisses Kotler from his roles at Auschwitz. This represents the instability inherent in the philosophy of the Nazis—when anyone can become the "other" and be demonized as unpatriotic or even subhuman, people will eventually turn on each other with paranoia and a mob mentality. The Nazi Party ultimately collapsed and was defeated at the end of World War II. The nationalism displayed by Bruno's father and his sister Gretel is not universal to all the Germans in the book. Father's militant nationalism creates a rift in his family before they leave Berlin—his mother, Bruno's Grandmother, objects to Father's new position as head of Auschwitz, and denounces his role in the Nazi Party. She then dies while the family is still in Poland, before she and her son have a chance to be reconciled. Later in the novel, Mother also refuses to stay at "Out-With," saying the assignment is Father's and not hers. Even Maria expresses her distaste for what Father orchestrates at the camp, but she still expresses gratitude for her job and the fact that Father took her in after her mother died, as Maria's mother had worked closely with Bruno's Grandmother for many years. Bruno has a difficult time understanding exactly what his father does, and why it is so important to "correct" the history of Germany. He, like some other characters, also has a difficult time reconciling how men such as Father and Lieutenant Kotler act in their personal, day-to-day lives, and the horrors they inflict on the prisoners in the name of Germany and the "Fury." Bruno cannot yet comprehend that the militant and unequivocal idea of German superiority allows the soldiers and other members of the army to separate their own families and lives from those of the Jews, and thus carry out atrocities while still conducting their own personal lives as normal. The novel also shows how German nationalism under the Nazi regime began to fail as the war dragged on. This is played out on a personal level through the dysfunction of Bruno's family (Mother's affair with Kotler) and the disloyalty of Kotler's father, who fled to Switzerland. Father himself was first brought to Auschwitz to "correct" the failings of the previous Commandant, showing how unstable policies and beliefs could be within the party itself. When Father realizes that Bruno was killed in a gas chamber in the camp that he commanded, he loses all national pride and even the will to live, and submits himself to punishment (likely a trial, and then execution) when he is arrested by Allied soldiers. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: The perpetuation of traditional gender roles is present throughout the novel, and contributes to much of the misinformation and miscommunication between the characters. Father is the definitive patriarch of the family, and he is in charge of what the entire family does and where they go. Bruno aspires to be as big and strong as his father, but also feels conflicted in his relationship with his father because of how he appears to treat Mother, the maid, Maria, and Grandmother, who vehemently abhors Father's role in the Nazi army. Mother often disagrees with Father's choices, but as the woman in the relationship, when Father makes a decision, she knows she must follow it. She has taken to passive-aggressively complaining about "some people" in the household when she is upset, a moniker that Bruno has come to realize means "Father." When she is unhappy at Auschwitz, Mother takes many "naps" and drinks "medicinal sherries," showing that she is attempting to sedate herself to escape her misery, as she has no real agency or power of her own. Though it is never explicitly stated, it is insinuated that Mother engages in an affair with nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Kotler, an act of subversion towards Father, and one of the only ways in which Mother is able to exercise her will. Eventually, Father consents to letting the family move back to Berlin, but only after what has been almost a year of convincing, and likely a product of his problematic relationship with Mother: Father is to remain at Auschwitz while Mother takes the children back to Berlin. Maria, the maid, feels conflicted regarding Father's character, as she knows of the horrors he orchestrates at Auschwitz, but cannot forget the kindness he has shown towards her and her late mother. As a servant, she knows she cannot express her feelings without being thrown out of the house, and she only reveals them to Bruno when no one else is listening, in an attempt to make him understand the nuances of his Father's nature. Grandmother, on the other hand, has no difficulty making it known how atrocious she thinks Father's new role as Commandant is. She proclaims that she would rather "tear her eyes from her head" than look at Father in his new uniform. Grandfather berates her for speaking her mind, and Father continually counters her arguments against Hitler and the Nazi regime. Grandmother dies before she can reconcile with her son, and her disapproval seems to have no effect on his life choices.The adult women in the novel, bound by their traditional gender roles, each have their own negative opinions regarding Father's role at Auschwitz, but they are disregarded due to their secondary status to men. This lack of regard leads to a breakdown of communication—Mother does not discuss what Father does with Bruno, or why they are truly moving to Auschwitz, likely because she is too depressed about her inability to have a say in the matter. Grandmother's opinions are dismissed as well, and this fact is never discussed or explained to Bruno. Most of the women are therefore completely silent in their opposition to Auschwitz and the Nazi agenda as a whole. This sexism does not excuse their complicity, but it does show how the Nazi philosophy of prejudice and hatred extended in many directions at once, so that even "pure Aryan" women were made to be submissive and act out traditional gender roles, having little to no say in real decision-making. Within the novel, this leads to a lack of communication that keeps Bruno ignorant, and ultimately causes his death when he has no idea what he is getting himself into when he crawls under the fence. - Theme: Complicity. Description: Though most of the characters in the novel are not explicit members or supporters of the Nazi party, many of them end up complying with the regime's ideals and goals out of a sense of duty, fear, or apathy. Mother, though she is not thrilled with Father's new job as a director of the concentration camp Auschwitz, does not actively fight his decision to move the family. This seems to stem from a sense of obligation towards her husband and country, and also due to her status as a woman in a patriarchal society. Indeed, her dislike of Auschwitz relates more to its bleakness and isolation than its role as a concentration camp, showing that she has no real disagreement with the Nazi belief that Jews and other minorities are less than human.Likewise Bruno, though he is still very young and "innocent," is also instilled with a belief that Germans, as a people and as a nation, are superior to every other country and culture in the world—even though he doesn't truly understand what this means. Herr Liszt, the children's tutor, teaches the children a biased account of history that glorifies Germany and likely the Nazi party as well. Though Lizst is not actively a soldier, this kind of complicity perpetuates the anti-Semitism and German nationalism that were hallmarks of the Nazi party's ideology. Gretel, then, is a more active example of indoctrination at work—though she is a typical twelve-year-old girl at the beginning of the novel—her main preoccupation the rearranging of her collection of dolls—by the novel's end she has become obsessed with following Germany's expansion across Europe via pushpins in maps her father has given her. While most of these characters (besides Father and Herr Liszt) don't take an active role in perpetuating the Nazi's regime of terror and genocide, complying with demands or turning a blind eye to these kinds of activities was ultimately a major factor in the party's rise to power in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. Women and people in subservient roles (such as Mother and Maria) often felt that they had no choice but to comply with the Party's demands, especially after it became the ruling force in Germany. Likewise many soldiers, even those who carried out horrific executions in the concentration camps, claimed that they were "just following orders" in the wake of Nazi defeat in 1945. Because of the party's fear tactics and ruthless militarism, going against the Nazis could mean danger to one's life or family, but this also involved turning a blind eye to or complying with crimes against humanity. One of the more frightening lessons of the Holocaust, then, was how far the apathy and inaction of "normal" people can go in allowing for the perpetuation of horrors—as long as these horrors are themselves normalized and encouraged. - Climax: When Bruno, who seeks to understand the world on the other side of the fence in which his friend Shmuel lives, changes into a pair of the "striped pajamas" and climbs under the fence. - Summary: Bruno, a nine-year-old boy living in Berlin, Germany in 1943, comes home one day to find his family's maid, Maria, packing all of his things away in boxes. Bruno's Mother explains that the family is moving away due to the demands of his father's new job. "The Fury," as Bruno calls Adolf Hitler, had come to dinner at Bruno's home the previous week, and has promoted Bruno's Father. Father is a Commandant in the German army. He is a stern and imposing figure, but still expresses his care for his children. Bruno is unhappy to be leaving his best friends, grandparents, and the hustle and bustle of Berlin, but is presented with no other choice than to go with his family. Before they go, Father gets into a fight with Bruno's Grandmother, a former singing star, at their Christmas celebration. Grandmother is furious that Father would accept his new job from the Fury, but Father counters that it is a great honor for himself and for the Fatherland. The family packs up all of their belongings and soon head out on a train to reach their new home. The new house on a hill is the only house in a very desolate area. Bruno is sad to be away from Berlin, and bored to have only his twelve-year-old sister Gretel, whom he does not get along with, for company. Their maid Maria and butler Lars staff the house, but there are also new waiters that Bruno has not met before. One of them, Pavel, is an old, stooped man who cleans up Bruno's cut knee one day when he falls from a tire swing. Pavel tells Bruno that he has been a doctor in a past life, and Bruno is confused as to why a doctor would be working as a waiter in his house. Bruno comes to learn that Pavel lives on the other side of a fence that runs near their house. On the other side of the fence, as Bruno can see from his bedroom window, are thousands of people living in a sandy, fenced-in camp, all wearing "striped pajamas." Bruno cannot properly pronounce the name of their new home, but calls it "Out-With" (Auschwitz). As Bruno settles into life at Out-With, he comes to dislike Lieutenant Kotler, a soldier who hangs around their house and whom Gretel has a crush on. Kotler is harsh and calls Bruno "little man." Mother takes a liking to Lieutenant Kotler, though everyone is horrified when he beats Pavel one day for spilling a glass of wine. Bruno is given lessons in history by a tutor named Herr Liszt, who tells him that Bruno's father and his family are at Out-With in order to correct the "great wrongs" that have been done to him. Gretel becomes very involved with history and politics, and takes to tracking the events of the news via pushpins in maps on her wall. Bruno misses the exploring he so enjoyed in Berlin, and one day he walks along the length of the fence, despite the fact that he has been forbidden to do so. He meets a boy who lives on the other side of the fence named Shmuel. Shmuel wears the striped pajamas that Bruno has seen from his window, and he is extraordinarily thin. The two boys strike up a friendship, and Bruno begins to visit Shmuel nearly every day. Shmuel tells him how he was taken by soldiers from his home in Cracow, Poland, to the camp, which Bruno comes to realize is also in Poland. Bruno struggles to understand exactly what life is like on Shmuel's side of the fence, but complies when Shmuel asks him to bring him food. Bruno begins to like life at Out-With a lot more as his friendship with Shmuel develops. One day he is shocked to find Shmuel inside his house—Lieutenant Kotler had brought him there to shine the family's tiny glasses, a job for someone with small hands. Bruno nonchalantly gives his friend a piece of leftover chicken. Kotler catches them, and demands to know if Bruno is friends with Shmuel. Terrified, Bruno denies knowing the boy, and Kotler later beats Shmuel. Kotler is later transferred away from Out-With—due to the fact that he reveals to Father that his own father fled from Germany to Switzerland in 1938, at the onset of World War II. Eventually, Mother convinces Father to move the family back to Berlin. He consents, though he himself will remain at Out-With due to obligations to his job and the Fury. Bruno is saddened to leave Shmuel behind. When he goes to say goodbye, the boys agree that Bruno will dress up in striped pajamas the following day, in order to explore Shmuel's side of the camp and to help Shmuel search for his father, whom he has not seen for several days. The next day, Bruno dresses up in pajamas Shmuel has brought him, and climbs under the fence. Inside he finds people sick and thin, with soldiers yelling at them. Scared, he wants to leave, but Shmuel asks him to help him find his father. Though they find nothing, the soldiers round up prisoners for a march before Bruno can sneak back under the fence. Scared, the two boys comply, and end up in a dark room together. They hold hands as the soldiers shut the doors, and everything goes dark. Bruno is never heard from again. His mother and sister eventually return to Berlin, and his father becomes hated by the soldiers for his merciless orders. Bruno's clothes and boots are found where he left them outside the fence when he changed, and one day Bruno's father pieces together what must have happened to his son. He collapses from the weight of his realization, and months later, different soldiers arrive at the camp. Father complies with all of their demands, as he no longer cares what happens to him after realizing his son's grim fate.

- Genre: Short story, Western, Naturalistic, Realistic - Title: The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky - Point of view: Third person - Setting: The train and Yellow Sky, Texas - Character: Jack Potter. Description: Jack Potter is the story's protagonist and the bride's new husband. He As the marshal of the West Texas town of Yellow Sky, Potter functions as the story's hero and the antagonist of the drunken, gun-slinging frontier outlaw, Scratchy Wilson. The town residents respect Marshal Potter because he is cool-headed, refined, and dedicated to upholding the law, and Potter in turn, is dedicated to the town. At the beginning of the story, Potter is riding in a Pullman passenger car on a westbound train back to Yellow Sky after getting married in San Antonio. He is happy about his new marriage, but he is also apprehensive because he didn't tell anyone in Yellow Sky that he planned to wed. During his visit to San Antonio, Potter transforms himself from a Wild-West lawman into a refined married man, though he is still adjusting to this change. His worries about how the town will react to his marriage suggests that Potter is not fully comfortable with his new status as a respectable married man and that his loyalty to the town is deeply rooted. Nonetheless, Potter looks forward to a quiet life at home in Yellow Sky, making him a symbol of change. - Character: The Porter. Description: The porter is a black man who waits on Jack Potter and the bride on the Pullman car en route to Yellow Sky. The porter enjoys observing the couple's obvious unfamiliarity with traveling in luxury and their nervousness as newlyweds. The porter's unspoken mockery of Potter and the bride reveals the latter two characters' inexperience with the middle-class married lifestyle they have adopted. - Character: The Drummer. Description: The drummer is a young patron at the Weary Gentleman saloon in Yellow Sky. He is a newcomer to the town who sits in the bar regaling other patrons with stories. Through the drummer's questions to the barkeeper about the danger Scratchy Wilson poses, readers learn more about Wilson, his role as the town's feared outlaw, and his relationship to Jack Potter. - Theme: Frontier vs. Civilization. Description: Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a story about the conquest of America's Western frontier by the refinery and civilization of the East. The story's only two named characters, the domesticated Marshall Jack Potter and the untamed outlaw, Scratchy Wilson, embody the dichotomies of the East and West, the new and the old, civilization and the frontier. First published in McClure's Magazine in 1898, Crane's tale came five years after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner published his influential "Frontier Thesis," in which he argued that the Western frontier fueled the dynamic growth of American democracy. Westward expansion into the untamed frontier forged the essential American character traits of rugged individualism, entrepreneurship, and colonial conquest over the frontier's "savage" native tribes. Thus, when the 1890 census declared that white Americans had effectively settled the frontier out of existence, Turner argued that the first great phase of U.S. history had come to an end. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" encapsulates the closing of the frontier through the allegorical account of the newly married Jack Potter, traveling west across the Texas plains in the lap of industrial luxury back to the dusty town of Yellow Sky, which still retains trappings of the Old West. There, Potter vanquishes his old nemesis, Scratchy Wilson not with violence, but with evidence that Scratchy is a walking anachronism — that is, a relic of the West's wild frontier past. Throughout the story, Potter's refinement contrasts with Wilson's Wild West abandon.  Everything, from the clothes Potter and the bride wear, to the furnished Pullman car surroundings, suggests the luxury that civilized capitalism provides. Potter wears "new black clothes" while the bride wears "a dress of blue cashmere." Their coach contains "dazzling fittings" of "sea-greened figured velvet" and "shining brass, silver, and glass." Potter and his bride are the new American bourgeois. In contrast to Potter, whose calm manners match his dapper appearance, Scratchy Wilson appears as an untamed rowdy drunk, whose belligerence poses a mortal threat to patrons at the Weary Gentleman saloon. The barkeeper describes Scratchy as a living Wild-West anachronism — a violent, impulsive figure from another time. Scratchy is "a wonder with a gun [...] on the war trail" and "the last one of the old gang," a status about which he is entirely unaware. Crane further emphasizes the dichotomy of civilization and the frontier by contrasting Scratchy Wilson's relative isolation with Jack Potter's role as a pillar of Yellow Sky society. Scratchy drunkenly stalks Yellow Sky's street at night, but his cries are met only with "walls of silence." Potter, however, is intimately connected to the residents of Yellow Sky—so much so that he worries that getting married without the town's consent might damage his status as "a prominent person." Scratchy's status as a forgotten relic of the conquered frontier leaves him whooping and hollering alone in the night, while Potter's role as the civilized keeper of law and order makes his return to Yellow Sky an anticipated event. Scratchy Wilson's near total ignorance of his irrelevance in a newly tamed Wild West leads to a harsh awakening that the civilized East has conquered his rough-and-tumble world. In the story's anticlimactic ending, Potter faces Scratchy is what seems like a classic Wild-West showdown, but rather than draw arms, Potter defeats Scratchy by revealing how the new America has passed him by. The sight of his old adversary in chivalrous, married bliss leaves Scratchy "a simple child of the earlier plains" who cannot appreciate the scope of his defeat. Potter does not need a gun because the fight is already over. Potter's refined masculinity triumphs over Scratchy's outdated frontiersman, and civilization has tamed the last wild frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner characterized the conquest of the West as the East's attempt to "check and guide" the frontier. Fittingly, Potter manages to "check and guide" Scratchy rather than merely kill him, and Scratchy's defeat is notably devoid of violence even as bloodshed forged the old frontier world he embodies. Crane, however, imbues his ending with a fatalism that suggests a level of ambiguity over the triumph of civilization. The enduring, romanticized popularity of Wilson's "Wild West" frontier in the decades following Crane's story indicates that Jack Potter's civilization left something to be desired in the American cultural framework. - Theme: Domesticity, Gender, and Feminine Authority. Description: Throughout "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," the bride is the sole female presence who serves as a symbol of the nineteenth-century "cult of domesticity." In this ideal, industrial production relieved families of the burden of producing goods for home use. This development consequently relegated the genders into "separate spheres" in which men worked outside the home (the public sphere), while women tended to home and children (the domestic sphere). The home became the cherished site of family bonding and marital bliss—a retreat from the harsh outside world of work and politics. Although "separate spheres" was more an ideal than a reality, it nonetheless reflected a growing sense that the domestic environment—characterized by mass-produced goods (especially luxury items), designated gender roles, and middle-class values—represented a morally superior, female-dominated alternative to the male-dominated outside world. As a symbol of the cult of domesticity, the bride possesses a distinctly feminine moral authority that empowers her to offer an alternative setting, centered on marriage and children, to the male-dominated world of Scratchy Wilson and Jack Potter, which centers on reciprocal masculine conflict. In "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," the titular bride plays a subordinate role to her husband, Jack Potter, reflecting the strict gender roles and standards of behavior that the cult of domesticity fostered. Nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, women's journals, and pamphlets all promoted the cult of domesticity by encouraging middle- and upper-class women to set respectable moral standards of behavior, dress, and literary tastes, as well as promote the appropriately bourgeois consumption of mass-produced luxury goods. This plays out in the story, as the bride rarely speaks, and she acts with a "wifely amiability" while displaying a flush on her face that "seemed quite permanent." Like many women in the late-Victorian era, the bride becomes an extension of her husband's life. Similarly, when Scratchy Wilson confronts Potter and the bride in the story's climax, the bride fulfills the role of the stereotypically weak and frightened female. Her face turns "as yellow as old cloth," leaving her a helpless "slave to hideous rites"—that is, the rites of male conflict in the form of a shootout. Yet the bride also possesses enormous power despite her gendered weakness. The cult of domesticity's elevation of middle-class women to social pillars of "moral strength and virtue" imbued them with power and influence both inside and outside of the household, even as it paradoxically characterized women as delicate, prone to fainting and hysterics, and physically and psychologically weaker than men.  Through their marriage, the bride induces Potter to alter his entire lifestyle by transitioning from a rough-and-tumble, small-town marshal to a domesticated married man who wears "new black clothes." Later in the story, the mere sight of the bride—a symbol of the cult of domesticity—leaves Scratchy "like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world," meaning the female-led domestic sphere. Just as she transforms Potter's world, so does the bride render Wilson "a simple child of the earlier plains" whom the "foreign condition" of marriage and domesticity overpowers. The cult of domesticity also intimately linked women to the consumption and display of fineries and other luxury items, which the bride's appearance and behavior on the train reflects. As keepers of the household, women were encouraged to purchase and collect luxury goods in order to transform households into warm, tender, aesthetically luxurious spaces. The bride fulfills this role when she displays with pride the new silver watch she purchased in San Antonio. Indeed, so connected were women to material luxury that women themselves served as ornamental luxuries, which men displayed to enhance their own status. The bride, though "not pretty" nor "very young" still presents herself in a blue cashmere dress with velvet trim, puffy sleeves, and steel buttons. She is an ornament for Potter to display both on the train, where she draws stares from the other passengers, as well as in the town of Yellow Sky, where Potter thinks that her arrival would warrant an appearance from the town's brass band. The bride's importance as a symbol of feminine moral authority and ornamentation dovetails with her status as a harbinger of how the female-led domestic sphere is rapidly replacing spaces heretofore characterized by masculine conflict. At the beginning of the story, the train pulls the "Great Pullman" in which Potter and the bride travel. The Chicago-based Pullman Company manufactured luxurious sleeping cars known as "Pullmans" to bring the domestic comforts of home to train travelers. The "dazzling fittings" of the Pullman coach at which Potter marvels literally transports the luxurious domestic sphere—along with the woman who runs it—across the Texas plains. Even before the bride's arrival in Yellow Sky, the feminine space has ironically already touched the town through Scratchy Wilson's clothes. He wears a "maroon-colored flannel shirt" made by women in New York City and boots with "red tops" and "gilded imprints" favored by "sledding boys" in New England. In West Texas, the last desperado, a symbol of the roughness and conflict of the male-dominated sphere, is clothed in a garment made by women, the safe keepers of domestic bliss. He also wears boots worn by children, women's domestic wards. The material fruits of mass-consumption that fueled the growth of the domestic sphere literally cover over Scratchy, the symbol of the old male-dominated Wild West. This powerful juxtaposition suggests the growing importance of feminine space and influence even in the most heretofore male-dominated settings. - Theme: Change vs. Stasis. Description: "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" highlights the conflict between change and stasis (a state of stability). Crane believed that humans were constant victims of powerful forces beyond their control.  In "Yellow Sky," he depicts change as an invasive force that disrupts the lives of the story's main characters, as well as the environments they inhabit: the town of Yellow Sky specifically and the Western frontier more generally. Capitalist market forces disrupt the frontier remoteness of Yellow Sky by making it more settled like the East. Yet, Scratchy Wilson and Jack Potter each express ambivalence about the meaning of change, a point that reflects the more general air of ambiguity that Crane casts in his story. Change is as disruptive and inevitable as stasis is familiar, which makes it difficult for both Wilson and Potter to embrace fully. The train, a powerful agent of change, sweeps across the Texas plains. The speed and power with which the machine travels indicate the unstoppable nature of the changes it brings to the frontier. The elements of the Texas countryside, mesquite and cactus, frame houses and trees, "were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the horizon, a precipice." The unstoppable power of the locomotive allows the East to devour the West. Like the locomotive, Potter himself has clearly chosen to disrupt the stasis of his life by getting married in San Antonio, but this brings lingering anxieties. Indeed, he feels that his decision to get married might not have been his at all, but instead "part of an unspoken form which does not control men in these matters." In Potter, Crane examines change as a force that men cannot really control. Even more so than Potter, Scratchy Wilson prefers the familiarity of stasis to the threatening uncertainty of change. Wilson's character arc is of a man deeply committed to preserving the stasis in which he has a guaranteed role to play as Potter's chief antagonist—only to be overwhelmed by the inevitability of change. Ironically, given his discomfort with change, Scratchy, like Jack Potter, is himself an agent of change. Like the train barreling through the countryside, Wilson utterly disrupts the quiet stasis of Yellow Sky. Scratchy's liquor-fueled evening blustering in the town's main street is a demonstrative act of self-preservation. His performance is a public reminder of his role as the devil in Little Sky's paradise, a role he aims to keep playing. Fittingly, the name "Scratchy" derives from the phrase "Old Scratch," a longstanding nickname for the devil. The fact that Scratchy receives "no offer of fight" from anyone only drives him to reinforce his role as the devil to Jack Potter's lawman angel. This attempt to regain the stability of the two men's antagonistic relationship that ultimately changes Scratchy's life forever. When Scratchy Wilson arrives at Jack Potter's house, he hopes to rekindle the familiar conflict that has defined the two men's lives in Yellow Sky. Potter's mind, however, is on change. "Somewhere in the back of his mind a vision of the Pullman floated [...] all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate." Potter is there to make a profound change as a civilized man who must confront his past in order to accept his "new estate." Scratchy calls off the shootout because he realizes that without Jack Potter playing his traditional role as antagonist, Wilson's role as an outlaw no longer exists. While Scratchy embodies the devil himself, Jack stands in for an avenging angel. Jack's last name, Potter, references a potter's field, a graveyard for the indignant, the unknown, and criminals. Potter symbolically sends Scratchy to a potter's field by relegating his old nemesis to an afterthought in a world that has passed him by. Lacking a defined role on the conquered frontier, Scratchy Wilson's fate is to be a forgotten victim of vast changes beyond his control. Throughout the story, both Jack Potter and Scratchy Wilson undergo changes that reflect their respective roles as symbols of the old and new order, the conqueror and the conquered. Although Potter remains somewhat wary of change, his getting married suggests that he does welcome change to some extent and will be able to adapt to it. Meanwhile, Scratchy seems to fade into obscurity, as he is unable to accept change, slinking away from the showdown upon realizing that his beloved antagonistic relationship has changed with the introduction of the bride. Crane, however, permeates the triumph of change over stasis with an ambiguous, even satirical undertone. Scratchy is really only the devil when he's drunk, a fact that downplays the overall threat he poses to the town. Potter might be an avenging angel, but it is only the presence of the bride, not Potter himself, that convinces Scratchy to lay down his arms. Change in Yellow Sky comes not with the bang of a gun, but with a placid resignation. - Climax: Jack Potter narrowly avoids a gunfight with Scratchy Wilson - Summary: A train heads west from San Antonio across the Texas plains to the small frontier town of Yellow Sky. Traveling in one of the train's Pullman passenger cars is Jack Potter, the marshal of Yellow Sky, along with his bride, whom he recently married in San Antonio. Both Potter and the bride are happy but nervous about their new status as a married couple. The bride is wearing a cashmere and velvet dress, and she worries that such pretty clothing is unbecoming of a rather common woman who is used to domestic duties such as cooking. Potter is also uncomfortable in his new black clothes, which contrast sharply with his weathered hands and modest status as a small-town lawman. Despite the couple's anxieties, they enjoy traveling in the luxurious Pullman passenger car, and Potter in particular calls attention to the car's velvet, silver, glass, and burnished wood fittings. He also marvels at the train's ability to traverse across the vast Texas expanse in such a short amount of time. The train so enraptures Potter and the bride that they do not know that the black porter who is attending to them is mocking their provincial behavior as they gawk at their surroundings. Even as they enjoy the train ride, Potter worries that the townspeople in Yellow Sky might take offense to his decision to get married in San Antonio without first informing them about his plans. He is therefore eager to arrive in Yellow Sky quietly and without any welcoming fanfare, so that he and his bride can slip unnoticed to their new home and reveal their marriage later. Meanwhile, at Yellow Sky's Weary Gentleman saloon, three Texans—a drummer and two Mexican sheepherders—sit at the bar. The barkeeper tends to the patrons while the rest of the town rests quietly as evening sets in. The drummer regales the other patrons with stories until he is interrupted by a young man who enters the saloon to exclaim that Scratchy Wilson—the town desperado and the last remaining member of the local outlaw gang—is drunkenly prowling the streets with two loaded guns. Upon hearing this news, the bar patrons grow silent and fearful, and the barkeeper swiftly bars the saloon's door and windows. The drummer asks who Scratchy Wilson is and why he inspires such fear. The patrons explain that Scratchy might shoot someone, and the only man who can stop him is Marshal Jack Potter, Wilson's long-time nemesis, who is away in San Antonio. The barkeeper tells the drummer that although Wilson is perfectly pleasant when sober, when drunk he poses a mortal threat to anyone who crosses his path because he is a "perfect wonder" with a gun. As the men hole up in the barricaded saloon, Scratchy Wilson walks down Yellow Sky's main street. He wears a maroon flannel shirt and decorated boots, all made in New York. Fueled by too much whiskey, Wilson whoops and hollers into the night while brandishing his two revolvers, but the sleepy town responds to his belligerence with silence. He bangs on the Weary Gentleman's door and demands more drink, but he is unable to break in. Furious, Wilson decides that only his old nemesis, Jack Potter, will give him the fight he craves, so he heads to Potter's house. When Wilson arrives at Potter's house, he is dismayed to find that his rival is not home. As Wilson hollers drunkenly, the marshal and his new bride walk towards Potter's house. When they arrive, they are surprised to find Scratchy Wilson waiting there. Wilson accuses Potter of trying to sneak up on him. He draws his guns on Potter and demands a shootout, but Potter tells the outlaw that he is unarmed. Wilson refuses to believe that Potter is unarmed, but Potter tells the outlaw that if he wants a shootout, he will have to shoot first. Still flustered, Wilson asks Potter why he is not carrying a gun. Potter informs Wilson that he is unarmed because he just returned from San Antonio with his new bride. When he introduces Wilson to the bride, Wilson is dumbfounded. Unable to process the fact that his long-time nemesis is now married, a deflated Wilson puts his revolvers back into their holsters and slinks away, his boots leaving funnel-shaped prints in the soft sand.

- Genre: Contemporary Fiction - Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Point of view: First Person Narrator - Setting: Paterson, New Jersey; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – 1944-1997 - Character: Oscar de León (Oscar Wao). Description: Oscar, a Dominican American man growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, is the main subject of the novel and the "Oscar Wao" of the title. He is the son of Beli, the brother of Lola, and perhaps the most "cursed" of all of his family members. His kind heart and intelligent mind are hidden beneath an "ugly" exterior that others are quick to judge. He struggles with depression and attempts to find peace with his racial and cultural heritage, as well as prove himself as a writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres he loves. Yunior, his college roommate, tries to help him find more socially acceptable love in romantic relationships, but Oscar stays true to himself and eventually falls in love with Ybón, a Dominican prostitute. Oscar dies for that love, but leaves behind a legacy of writings for Yunior to compile. - Character: Yunior (The Narrator). Description: The novel's narrator as well as a character in its plot, Yunior starts as Oscar's college roommate and reluctantly becomes his best friend. Yunior initially tries to help Oscar as a way to impress Lola, whom he would like to date. Though Lola and Yunior eventually break up due to Yunior's inability to stay faithful, Yunior remains obsessed with the entire de León family. He writes the novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" to both memorialize Oscar's life and come to terms with the Dominican heritage that links them both. Also a writer, Yunior acts as a semi auto-biographical character for author Junot Díaz. - Character: Lola de León. Description: A strong, extremely intelligent woman, Lola is Oscar's sister and the "one who got away" who captures Yunior's heart. Lola has big dreams of escaping her small hometown and seeing more of the world, but her love for her family and her sense of duty, despite her strained relationship with her mother Beli, pull her back to Paterson and Santo Domingo each time family tragedy strikes. However, she knows enough about herself and the harsh realities of the world not to fall for a player like Yunior. Lola ultimately makes a new life for herself in Miami, where she marries a Cuban man and has a daughter, Isis. - Character: Beli (Hypatia Belicia) Cabral. Description: Known as Beli for most of her story, she is the mother of Oscar and Lola and the first member of the Cabral family to leave Santo Domingo and make a new life in Paterson, New Jersey. Due to the family curse, which her father Abelard brought on the Cabral family, Beli grew up in poverty but always kept the attitude of Dominican royalty. Her incredible beauty draws the attention of the wrong men and earns her a life-threatening beating by members of Trujillo's government. She leaves Santo Domingo in disgrace and grows embittered at the hardships of immigrant life in the United States. She is very strict with her children, but is also extremely proud of them. Her fight against breast cancer further strains her relationship with her children, but she eventually reconnects with her daughter Lola in the wake of Oscar's death. - Character: Abelard Cabral. Description: Oscar's grandfather, and the reason that the Cabral line is cursed, Abelard was a doctor and a scholar during the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. He was too cowardly to protest Trujillo's dictatorship, but brave enough not to let Trujillo take his oldest daughter Jacquelyn. Either this affront to Trujillo's pride, or a secret book about the evil supernatural roots of Trujillo's rise to power, brought Abelard to the attention of the Trujillato and led to his imprisonment and death. He was never able to meet his third daughter, Beli, but Abelard's legacy lives on in Oscar and his interest in writing. - Character: Trujillo. Description: A real historical figure, the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until he was assassinated in 1961, Rafael Trujillo is also an important character in the novel. His actions cause much of the heartache throughout the book, either directly, as when his thugs beat Beli and Oscar, or indirectly, as his censorship prevents the other characters from being honest about their pasts or their heritage. Yunior, who calls him "The Failed Cattle Thief," depicts Trujillo as the worst villain of every fantasy novel, complete with a narcissistic complex and a preoccupation with sexy women. The novel points out the many flaws in the Trujillo regime, and each character works in his or her own way to overcome the damages that his administration did to the Dominican people. - Character: La Inca. Description: Beli's aunt and Oscar's great-aunt, La Inca took care of Beli after the death and imprisonment of her parents. La Inca owns a chain of bakeries in the Dominican Republic, and believes that Beli is worth the best education the island can offer. She offers a safe haven and support to her grandchildren Lola and Oscar when they visit, but also tries to ensure that they act like a proper Dominican family. - Character: Ybón. Description: An older Dominican woman who has made her living as a prostitute escorting powerful men from the Dominican Republic and countries all over Europe, Ybón lives next door to La Inca in Santo Domingo. Oscar falls in love with Ybón, and she thrives on his attention. Oscar chooses to die at the hands of Ybón's boyfriend, the Capitán, rather than renounce her love. - Character: The Gangster. Description: Beli's second love and the husband of Trujillo's sister. He is wealthy due to his services as a hit man for Trujillo, and offers Beli a world of luxury that he really cannot deliver. Though he can be gentle to Beli, his vanity and insecurity prevent him from understanding true love. When Beli gets pregnant, the Gangster leaves her to the punishment of his wife. - Character: Juan Then. Description: A Chinese immigrant in the DR who owns the Chinese restaurant where Beli works. He has a head for business, and allows the Trujillato to do whatever they wish as long as they leave him alone. Though stoic, he cares for Beli and saves her after the Trujillato beat her in the cane field. - Character: Max Sánchez. Description: Lola's boyfriend when she lives in the DR. He works for a theater, running film reels between locations on his motorcycle. He loves her and dreams of living in the US, but is killed in a motorcycle accident before he can leave. His death pushes Lola to leave the DR. - Theme: Identity and the Dominican Experience in America. Description: In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, almost every character questions his or her own identity, struggling and experimenting with who they are and who they want to be. The novel also shows how such experimentation is driven and affected not just by internal factors but also by external communities. The characters struggle, in other words, not only with how to become the self they want to be, but also with how to do that while remaining true to, and fitting in with, their Dominican or Latino heritage.On the level of the individual, the novel explores how its characters try to both be themselves and fit in with others. For many of the characters, this means developing vastly different public and private lives. Díaz shows this through the nicknames of his two main characters, Oscar and Yunior. Oscar's nickname symbolizes his inability to fit in with other Latinos as himself, while Yunior's nickname shows his desire to display the ideal Dominican man rather than risk rejection by showing his true personality. Though this separation of public and private lives is supposed to help Oscar and Yunior fit into their Latino community, it only makes it more difficult for the two to mature and lead fulfilling lives. In general, Diaz shows how many people are not just internally complex but even intrinsically contradictory, and thus it is a constant struggle for them to embrace their full identities while at the same time presenting particular identities to the world. As in many coming-of-age novels, the characters must try to find themselves while also navigating their place in the world. Oscar Wao not only examines individual identity, but also investigates collective identity—particularly that of Dominicans and other Latinos, both in their home countries and in the US. These Latino communities offer support to the characters as a source of pride in the face of racism and oppression, but also impose false restraints on the individual identities of the characters. All of the Latino characters have nuances – a love of genre fiction, a goth style of dress, or a monogamous attitude towards romance, for example – that refute the stereotypes about "typical" Dominicans or other Latinos. The characters, then, are all shown to be more than their Dominican stereotypes—they are human, and thus complex, contradictory, and unable to be pigeonholed—but ultimately Díaz shows that these nuances do not make them any less Dominican. Identity, in turn, is presented in the novel as being both complex and fluid. It changes depending on the physical location of the characters (in the DR or New Jersey), as well as on their emotional maturity from adolescence to adulthood. By simply depicting such Dominican and Latino characters, he also shows how the Dominican and Latino cultures as a whole will be richer for accepting the many identities and idiosyncrasies of all those who belong to the nation. And, further, by writing the novel about these characters and their experiences and lives in America – lives that are usually invisible or ignored within American popular culture or history – he humanizes people that are often treated as a single minority group, a single foreign "other," and asserts that the tapestry of America is all the richer for their presence. - Theme: Art, Life, and Latinos in America. Description: While telling the story of Oscar de León, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also references many of the books or movies that the characters have read. Díaz responds to these works and explores the influence that artistic works can have on the real world. These fictional connections then point to the ways that people use the frameworks of fantasy and art as tools to understand their own lives.Genre fiction features prominently in the novel as an escape for characters who do not want to face some aspect of their real world. Oscar and Yunior use science fiction and fantasy novels to ease their insecurities, while Beli looks to romance novels for the love that she cannot find in the Dominican Republic. Yet, though Oscar Wao acknowledges that literature can provide comfort, it also asserts that it is necessary to maintain a sense of the real world. Oscar and Beli are bitterly disappointed when their fantasies do not come true, while Yunior is able to find contentment with his life only after letting go of the desire to reshape reality. The novel argues that art can supplement life, but that it cannot replace the responsibility of dealing with one's true circumstances. Navigating fantasy and reality is further complicated for the characters of Oscar Wao, however, because they often cannot find real role models that display their identities in the fiction that they love. Díaz argues that the fantasy worlds his characters have chosen for themselves are not fully satisfying because these worlds have no room for characters who look and act Dominican. Oscar and Beli only see people who look like them—that is, with darker skin—playing villains in the genres that they love, and Oscar points out that literature created by white authors often upholds racial hierarchies that benefit white people. With Oscar Wao, then, Díaz challenges these hierarchies, both by creating fully three-dimensional Dominican characters, and by using the tropes of historically white genres, like sci-fi and fantasy, in a Dominican story. Díaz explores the ways that fantasy can make reality easier to handle by imbuing bleak struggles with moral significance and tying together hard experiences into a larger story where good triumphs over evil. However, he also points out how fantasy can make life more difficult for people of color when the stories they enjoy do not include characters like themselves, or lead them to unrealistic or harmful worldviews. Diaz's solution is not to firmly reject the influence of fantasy on people's real lives, but to advocate for more diversity in art and literature. With Oscar Wao, Díaz gives an example of the type of fiction he wants, writing a novel in which white people and people of color can all be villains or heroes. - Theme: Free Will and Destiny. Description: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao deals with the question of free will, especially as it plays with the Dominican perspective on destiny. In Dominican culture, as portrayed by the novel, humans have very little control over their own lives. Instead, the opposing forces of fukú (curse) and zafa (counter spell) dictate the events in a person's life. Mankind can only hope to avoid angering fukú, thereby bringing more misfortune, and attempt to lay a zafa to protect themselves and their loved ones. The de León family, Oscar especially, experience the extremes of both of these forces, suffering many incidents of fukú but also experiencing the blessing of zafa over the course of their lives. Díaz shows both the benefits and the drawbacks of this outlook on free will and destiny, letting the readers form their own opinion. On the one hand, characters who face difficulties, either in the DR or in the United States, are not held responsible for their hardships. On the other hand, the deterministic perspective promotes apathy and resignation in some characters, and a dangerous tendency to lash out in others. Díaz also portrays a range of attitudes concerning fukú, from La Inca—who firmly believes that Trujillo used fukú to harm the Dominican people—to Lola—who tries to live as though her own merits and hard work will be enough to find success. Yunior holds the most complex opinion on fukú, refusing to believe in the supernatural elements of this worldview, but trying to give respect to these forces just in case they are real. Díaz does not argue that the Dominican belief is either wrong or right, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether fukú and zafa are really to blame for all of the events that befall Oscar and his family, or the DR in general. Though the novel does not argue either for or against belief in destiny, it does maintain that there are good and bad ways to respond to a lack of free will. The novel suggests that the worst choice is to try to become resigned or abusive, because this creates more pain for everyone. It argues that the best path is to accept pain if that is one's destiny, but choose to hope for blessings even in the difficult times. - Theme: Story, History, and Writing. Description: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as a biography about the fictional Oscar de León, is a novel about history. But instead of giving a straight biography, the novel goes on to challenge preconceived assumptions about what history is and what it can do.One of the primary projects of the novel is teasing apart story and history. The "official history" of the Dominican Republic reverberates through the lives of the characters, both directly with characters that lived through atrocities of Trujillo's reign, and indirectly with future generations that must deal with the fallout from those events. However, the novel argues that personal stories are more important, prioritizing personal stories in the pages and relegating official history to footnotes, as well as asserting that official history is more interesting when it includes the personal stories of real people. Regardless of their relative importance, both story and history are subject to the whims of the authors who write them. Yunior's opinions of different characters and historical figures bleed into the text, and he freely admits that his own biases affect how he relates certain sections of history. Furthermore, even the starting and ending points of history become arbitrary, as Yunior jumps around from decade to decade to serve the story he wants to tell. The reader must question the accuracy of all of Yunior's information, especially when he contradicts the "official" record. The novel thus suggests that all history is really personal story, dependent on the humans who choose to write it down. Yet despite the impossibility of writing a full and accurate history, Díaz still supports the writing of history and stories – arguing that they are necessary for people to come to terms with their pasts and move forward as more fulfilled individuals. Oscar and Lola repeat the mistakes of their family's past in part because they do not know them, and both Oscar and Yunior write as a way to heal the wounds they have experienced in the past. Yunior writes the entire biography of Oscar as a way to finally understand the cultural heritage he originally rejected. By writing stories and histories, the characters can begin to give order to the events of their lives, and pass on some of that knowledge to future generations. - Theme: Dominican American Culture, Colonialism, and Racism. Description: While The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a widely applicable coming-of-age story, it is also firmly rooted in a specific Latino experience. The entire novel is steeped in Díaz's experience of Dominican American culture, from the language that Yunior uses to the cultural traditions, family dynamics, and historical information that Díaz includes in the novel. Díaz starts by educating readers about the Dominican American experience, reaching all the way back into the colonial roots of the Dominican nation, to tell a modern day story of Dominican American life.Díaz builds in a crash course of Dominican history for his readers, as he does not assume that his English-speaking readers will already be familiar with it. He laments the "two seconds" spent on the history of the entire island in most World History classes in America. Though the history of the island is well-known and incredibly important to the characters, Díaz recognizes that the Dominican Republic is not usually deemed significant enough to be common knowledge for the average American. Díaz includes this history, then, both because of its great emotional significance to the protagonists of the novel, and to comment on the lack of attention paid to the histories of people of color in American culture. The novel also deals with the tensions inherent to growing up as a Dominican American child of immigrants in the 20th century. Second-generation characters like Lola and Yunior try to appear Dominican enough, yet not too Dominican. Other characters, like Oscar, have that choice made for them. As Oscar has very dark skin but also enjoys intellectual and genre fiction, he is deemed "too black" to fit in with his white peers and "too white" to fit in with his Latino peers.Racial hierarchies are no easier to avoid in the Dominican Republic. When they are on the island, the de Leóns must deal with the reality of their privilege in living in America, even if they are treated as second-class citizens there. Díaz also points to the racial divide between Dominicans and Haitians, calling out Trujillo for the genocide committed against Haitians, the erasure of Haitian-Dominicans from official government records, and the hatred of the dark "Haitian" skin color. By comparing and contrasting the racial prejudices Oscar faces as a black-skinned man in America to the racial prejudices Haitians face in the DR, Díaz exposes colonialist mindsets in which oppressed groups of people lash out to oppress others, and he ties his novel to activist measures for improving Haitian-Dominican relations in the real world. As Díaz himself is Dominican American, his novel offers an inside look at a specific minority experience to a wider American audience and fleshes out the racial difficulties faced by people of colonial or Dominican descent. According to interviews with the author, one of Díaz's main projects in writing Oscar Wao was to start dismantling colonial hierarchies so that people of color can stop equating skin color and self-worth, as Díaz sees many Dominican Americans still do today. Though Díaz points out the ways that he sees racism embedded in popular culture, he does not offer many solutions to the racism that his characters face. By spending so much time focusing on the racial dynamics and prejudices in his novel, he instead argues that awareness of racism and fighting internalized racism is the first step towards changing these ideas. He uses Oscar Wao to offer hope towards a post-colonial future where cultural hybridity and diversity are celebrated rather than erased. - Theme: Love and Loss. Description: While the novel follows many threads in Oscar's life, it is primarily concerned with love in all its varied forms. Like many coming-of-age novels, Oscar's search for maturity takes the form of a search for romantic love, but the themes of love also go further than that in the novel. Oscar's definition of love and his methods of finding it are shaped by the cultural expectations surrounding love and sex in the Dominican environment of the novel. According to Yunior, Dominicans detrimentally confuse sexual love and true intimacy. Due to this, some characters look for love their entire lives without finding it. Yunior expects love to be easy and to fix his insecurities, ignoring the real work and care that a healthy, intimate relationship requires on behalf of both himself and his partner. Even worse, many Dominican men use romantic love as a way to exercise power or show status, as in Trujillo's "culocracy," the tendency towards domestic abuse, and Yunior's casual use of women. As a response to these harmful sexual norms, Oscar's relationship with a prostitute – the lowest of the low on the Dominican social spectrum – is shown to be the truest expression of love in the novel. Yet while these romantic relationships drive the plot, other types of love, such as friendship or family, form the foundation of the novel. Both Oscar and Lola offer Yunior a crucial alternative to romantic love, and the friendship between Oscar and Yunior proves to be the most important bond of the novel. Likewise, Oscar and Beli call upon the strength of their love for their family when the loss of romantic love leaves them near death. The more passionate displays of romantic love may receive more attention, but the quiet power of family and friendship helps the characters face hardship and tragedy.The novel shows that loving someone also means inviting the possibility of losing them, but it also declares that the beauty of love is well worth the pain of loss. These two universal human experiences unite mankind despite any cultural differences, and offer hope to the characters despite the many harsh scenes of the novel. In a fitting end to the novel, Oscar's last letters to the States proclaim "The beauty! The beauty!" of love rather than focusing on all the pain and loss Oscar has seen throughout his life. - Climax: Oscar's final return to the Dominican Republic, where he consummates his relationship with Ybón. Oscar is then killed for his love of Ybón, a prostitute with ties to the old Trujillo regime. - Summary: The book shares the story of Oscar Wao (whose real name is Oscar de León), a Dominican American who never fits in with his communities, as he tries to assert his own identity and find love in the process. Told by Oscar's college roommate, Yunior, the book also includes flashbacks into the lives of Oscar's mother and his grandfather, as they suffered during the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and finally came to America. Interweaved throughout, Yunior also tries to explain and understand his own failed relationship with Oscar's sister, Lola, and the Dominican heritage that binds them all together. Yunior also adds footnotes throughout the book with humorous asides, stories of Dominican history, or quotes from other books that help illuminate Oscar's life. The book starts by introducing Yunior, the fictional author of Oscar Wao's biography, and the curse that has shaped the events of Oscar's life. Yunior describes Oscar's childhood as a Dominican American boy in Paterson, New Jersey, and the struggles that Oscar faces as he fails to fit in with the Latino community or get a girlfriend. Oscar pursues girls, but eventually retreats into science fiction, fantasy, and role-playing games. When he and his sister Lola spend summers with their great-aunt in the Dominican Republic (DR), Oscar realizes that he wants to become an author. Back in Paterson, Oscar becomes obsessed with a girl named Ana, threatening her abusive boyfriend with a gun. Lola calms him down, and Oscar decides to wait until college to find a new love. The novel then switches to Lola's perspective. Lola's strained relationship with her mother causes her to act out. The situation worsens when her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer and Lola decides to run away with her latest boyfriend. However, living in a trailer with her boyfriend and his father is not the escape from her mother's toxicity and illness that Lola imagined. She gets back in touch with Oscar, planning to meet him at a café, but their mother catches her there. Lola is sent to the DR to attend school and live with her great-aunt. She adapts to life as a real "dominicana" and starts to come to terms with her tangled family history. From there, the novel goes further back in time to describe the adolescence of Lola and Oscar's mother, Beli. Beli lives with her aunt, La Inca, in Baní, a fairly poor neighborhood of Santo Domingo. With her dark skin and headstrong manner, Beli does not fit in at her prestigious private school. As she grows into a great and "terrible beauty," boy-crazy Beli begins to catch the eye of the wrong type of men. Her greatest love, known as the Gangster, works for the dictator Trujillo, and Beli soon finds herself in way over her head when she gets pregnant. The gangster reveals that he is actually married to Trujillo's sister, and that Beli will have to get rid of the child and disappear. Beli refuses, and the Gangster's wife has Beli beaten and left for dead. Beli miraculously recovers with the help of a magical mongoose, but loses the baby. She leaves for America in disgrace and meets the future father of Oscar and Lola on the plane to New York. The novel then comes back to Oscar's life, during his college years when Yunior himself enters the story. While Oscar studies creative writing at Rutgers University, Yunior becomes his roommate in order to get closer to Lola, with whom he is infatuated. Yunior attempts to reform Oscar in the image of the Dominican American "player," but Oscar resists this transformation. Yunior and his friends give Oscar the nickname "Oscar Wao" and tease him mercilessly. Disregarding these barbs, Oscar strikes up an unlikely friendship with a beautiful girl on campus, but is shattered when she continues to see other guys. Oscar falls into a deep depression and attempts suicide on the last day of the school year. He survives, and Yunior tries to help Lola pick up the pieces of her life, but mostly struggles to maintain the large network of girls he is sleeping with. Still, Yunior proves his friendship by coming back to room with Oscar for another year. The novel returns to Lola's perspective, as she prepares to come back to the States from her year in Santo Domingo. Though Lola desperately wishes to stay in the Dominican Republic and avoid her overbearing mother a bit longer, the death of a boy she was seeing convinces her to do what is best for her family. She gives all of her savings to the boy's family and meets her mother at the airport. Reaching back further in history, the novel brings in Abelard Cabral, Beli's father and Oscar and Lola's grandfather. A doctor and a scholar, and heir to one of the more well-off Dominican families, Abelard wants nothing to do with Trujillo. He supports the regime in order to keep his family safe, but runs out of luck when Trujillo decides he wants to seduce Abelard's beautiful oldest daughter Jacquelyn. Abelard is taken by the Trujillato (Trujillo's police) and thrown into prison for resisting Trujillo's request, though rumors say that Abelard's true crime was writing secret, slanderous books about Trujillo's connection with the "fukú" curse. Meanwhile, Abelard's wife gives birth to their third daughter but commits suicide soon after. Abelard remains in prison for the rest of his life. The three Cabral girls are split up and the older two die tragically young. The third daughter, Beli, is sold as a maid to cover family debts. In 1955, La Inca finds her and gives her a new life in Baní. Back in the 1990s again, Oscar has graduated college but moves back with his mother in Paterson and teaches high school English rather than achieving his dream of being a writer. Depression weighs heavily on him, and his lack of social confidence keeps him more isolated than ever. Three years later, Oscar goes again to visit Santo Domingo and meets Ybón, a prostitute who lives next door to La Inca. Oscar falls hopelessly in love, despite his family's disapproval. Ybón's biggest client, the Capitán, starts to take notice of how much time Oscar and Ybón spend together, and he threatens them with violence. Oscar takes no notice and receives a harsh beating when the Capitán sees Ybón and Oscar kiss. Like his mother years before, Oscar survives and goes back to the States to heal. However, Oscar is not done with Ybón or Santo Domingo. Rather than return to teaching high school, Oscar asks Yunior for money. Yunior gives it to him as a peace offering to Lola, with whom he is fighting again, but does not know that Oscar will use it to go back to Ybón. No one finds out about Oscar's plan until he is on the plane to the DR. Oscar stays for a month at La Inca's house before he sees Ybón again. He writes letters back to the States, but no one can persuade him to give up his obsession with Ybón. Oscar and Ybón finally spend one weekend together, where Oscar loses his virginity and finds true intimacy with her. That peace is cruelly destroyed when the Capitán finds out that Oscar is back and shoots him in a canefield. The book ends as Yunior, Lola, and Beli mourn Oscar. Yunior receives more letters that Oscar sent back from the DR before his death, and starts to compile Oscar's letters into a book. Lola marries a Cuban man and moves to Miami. She has a daughter, Isis, and keeps in contact with Yunior in honor of Oscar's memory. Yunior researches Oscar's life and family, revealing that the entire book was written so that Yunior could piece together his own thoughts about the Dominican American experience. Yunior decides to give the book to Lola's daughter once she is old enough to wonder about her uncle and her own Dominican heritage.

- Genre: Children's Historical Novel - Title: The Bronze Bow - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: Ancient Palestine (Roman-occupied Galilee) - Character: Daniel bar Jamin. Description: The protagonist of the novel, Daniel is an 18-year-old Galilean living in Palestine under Roman rule. He grew up in the village of Ketzah, outside the city of Capernaum. When Daniel was eight, his father and uncle were crucified by the Romans, and his mother died soon after. Because of this, he and his sister, Leah, were raised by their grandmother. Daniel has hated the Romans ever since his parents' deaths, and he dedicates his life to getting revenge on them by winning Israel's freedom from occupation. Because of this obsession, he can have a surly and suspicious temperament, but he's capable of caring about others, too. Daniel once served as blacksmith Amalek's apprentice, but he fled Amalek's abuse by joining Rosh, a Zealot rebel on the mountain overlooking Ketzah. There he continues blacksmithing and trains to fight the Romans someday. After Daniel's grandmother dies and he's forced to move back to Ketzah to care for Leah, he feels torn between his passion to fight Romans and his obligation to provide for Leah. At this time, he takes over Simon the Zealot's smithy and becomes a respected artisan in the village. He also begins listening to Jesus's sermons in neighboring Capernaum. At the same time, Daniel gathers and trains a band of village boys, including his friend Joel, to resist the Romans. However, Daniel finally breaks with Rosh when he recognizes that Rosh only sees people as tools to do his bidding; he doesn't care about human beings or about Israel's cause, only about himself. He also becomes disillusioned with the cause after his group narrowly succeeds in rescuing Joel from Roman imprisonment, and only his friend Samson's intervention spares their lives. Jesus then tells Daniel that his hatred for the Romans won't bring freedom, and that the only thing stronger than hatred is love. Daniel resists this message until Leah becomes deathly ill and Jesus miraculously spares her life. At this point, Daniel gives up his vow to hate the Romans and his personal resistance to Jesus. He also opens his heart to Joel's sister Malthace, whom he's loved throughout the book, and he forgives Marcus, the Roman soldier whom Leah has befriended behind his back. - Character: Leah. Description: Leah is Daniel's younger sister. In the story, she is 15 years old, a graceful girl with long blond hair. (In appearance, she takes after their mother, who was half Greek.) However, she is childlike and afraid; having witnessed her father's crucifixion when she was five, she's never left her grandmother's house. Because Leah is withdrawn, timid, and given to fits of terror, most people think she is demon-possessed. However, Leah is also loving and gentle with an appreciation for beauty. She loves and trusts Daniel to care for her, a loyalty he reciprocates, though he often feels trapped by Leah's dependence when he'd rather be fighting the Romans. Though she is too sickly to provide for herself, Leah is a skilled weaver whose cloth fetches high prices in surrounding villages. Thacia becomes Leah's first friend and, behind Daniel's back, Leah also befriends a homesick Roman soldier named Marcus because she's too innocent to fear the Romans. Leah is hungry for stories of Jesus and she presses Daniel for details about his teaching and healing, though she won't go to him herself. After Daniel forces Leah to stop seeing Marcus, Leah falls into a deadly fever, but Jesus heals her and saves her life. - Character: Jesus. Description: Jesus is a carpenter's son and traveling preacher from the Galilean town of Nazareth. Daniel first hears Jesus speak when Simon takes him to the Ketzah synagogue where Jesus is a guest. While there's nothing striking about Jesus's physical appearance, he has a quiet, calm intensity that draws people to him. At first, Daniel doesn't know what to make of Jesus, but he is disappointed that Jesus doesn't call the people to arms against their Roman oppressors. Indeed, Jesus often preaches to ordinary people on the streets, and he spends much time with the sick and disabled, as well as with children. He seems to view all of these supposedly inferior groups as inherently worthwhile and precious to God, capable of entering God's kingdom. Jesus's regard for people as human beings makes his leadership style a stark alternative to Rosh, who views people simply as tools to be used for his own benefit. Jesus's indifference to Jewish priestly tradition also makes him a targeted enemy of the religious authorities. When Daniel finally speaks with Jesus in private, Jesus tells him that hatred can never bring freedom, and that to become his follower, Daniel must be willing to love his enemies. Though Daniel resists this message, he changes his mind after Jesus heals Leah. - Character: Joel bar Hezron. Description: Joel is Daniel's former classmate at the synagogue school in Ketzah. He becomes Daniel's first and closest friend. Malthace is his twin sister. Their father, Hezron, is a wealthy, scholarly rabbi. When Joel meets Rosh by chance, he decides to join Rosh's movement to fight the Romans. With Daniel, he also takes a vow to dedicate his life to God's kingdom. Over time, he becomes a shrewd spy for Rosh in the city of Capernaum. When he gets caught by the Romans and sentenced to labor in the galleys, Daniel's band of rebel fighters saves his life. Soon after, Joel decides he can better serve God's kingdom by studying to become a rabbi in Jerusalem. - Character: Malthace (Thacia). Description: Malthace is Joel bar Hezron's twin sister. She is called Thace or Thacia for short. Thacia is a spirited, loyal, kindhearted girl with a gift for seeing the potential in others; she even becomes Leah's first friend. Thacia puts others at ease and seems at home in any environment, whether it's her father Hezron's splendid house or Daniel's humble shop. She is also spiritually discerning, seeming to understand Jesus's message before the boys do. After helping Joel nurse Daniel back to health, Thacia eagerly pledges along with the boys to fight for God's Victory. When Rosh sends Joel on a job, she even disguises herself as Joel in order to distract attention from his spy work. Daniel is attracted to Thacia early in their friendship and admits his feelings at the Day of Atonement festival, but he believes that his vow to fight the Romans prohibits him from marriage. After Daniel decides to follow Jesus, however, Daniel and Thacia make an unspoken vow to one another, implicitly agreeing to marry after all. - Character: Rosh. Description: Rosh is a Galilean Jewish freedom fighter who has dedicated his life to resisting the Roman occupation. He lives with his band of rebels in a mountain cave overlooking Ketzah. After Daniel ran away from the abusive Amalek, Rosh saved Daniel's life and gave him a purpose. At the beginning of the book, Daniel is fiercely loyal to Rosh, whom he idealizes as a leader and warrior. In fact, Daniel believes that Rosh is likely the messiah. As Daniel spends more time with ordinary people and also gets to know Jesus, however, he begins to question Rosh's attitudes. For example, he notices that Rosh looks at people as if they're objects to be used and discarded, unlike Jesus, who sees them as human beings precious to God. When Rosh starts plundering Jewish villagers and later refuses to help rescue Joel from the Romans, Daniel breaks from Rosh entirely, realizing that Rosh doesn't even care about Israel's cause; he mainly looks out for himself. - Character: Samson. Description: Samson is an enslaved man whom Rosh's group steals from a passing caravan. Daniel is placed in charge of him. Samson doesn't appear to understand Daniel's language, but after Daniel removes Samson's chains, Samson becomes deeply attached and loyal to him. Samson is immensely strong, which is the only thing most people value about him, but Daniel takes the time to talk to Samson and grows fond of him. When Daniel leads a raid to rescue Joel, Samson leaps into the action at the last moment and saves Daniel's life. He is fatally wounded in the fray. - Character: Grandmother. Description: Besides Leah, their grandmother is Daniel's only living relative. After Daniel and Leah were orphaned, their grandmother cared for them. When she could no longer afford to feed the three of them, she sold Daniel into Amalek's keeping as an apprentice. When Daniel returns to Ketzah from Rosh's cave hideout, he finds his grandmother very old and frail, spending most of her time sleeping. She dies not long after. - Character: Simon the Zealot. Description: Simon, like Daniel, was once Amalek's apprentice. Since then, he's opened his own blacksmith shop. After Simon encounters Jesus and decides to follow him, he closes his shop, and after Daniel's grandmother dies, he offers the shop and adjoining house to Daniel. Simon is a kind, gentle man who knows how to extend charity to others without making them feel ashamed. He ends up believing that Jesus is the Messiah. (In the Bible, Simon the Zealot is one of Jesus's Twelve Apostles.) - Character: Rabbi Hezron. Description: Rabbi Hezron is Joel's and Malthace's father. He is a Pharisee, a devout Jew and religious scholar who is scrupulously observant of traditional priestly laws as well as the biblical Law.Hezron forbids Joel from seeing Daniel because he doesn't want Joel to be influenced by Zealot violence. He believes that Jews must wait patiently for the Messiah. After Daniel saves Joel's life from the Romans, however, Hezron welcomes Daniel into his home. - Character: Marcus. Description: Marcus is a blond Roman soldier who often visits Daniel's blacksmith shop, to Daniel's chagrin. Unbeknownst to Daniel, Marcus has befriended Leah and visits her when Daniel isn't home. Marcus is from a German warrior tribe, he is homesick, and he has no particular loyalty to the Romans; he serves in the army so that he'll get citizenship one day. He begins talking to Leah in halting Aramaic over the garden wall, and they grow fond of one another. When Daniel finds out, he furiously forbids them from seeing each other. However, after he becomes Jesus's follower, Daniel gives up his hatred of the Romans and invites Marcus to see Leah once last time before he leaves for a different army posting. - Theme: Love vs. Vengeance. Description: In The Bronze Bow, Daniel bar Jamin, a first-century Jewish Galilean, lives under oppressive Roman occupation. Daniel has a black-and-white view of the situation in Palestine: Romans are enemies to be fought, and Jews are victims to be avenged. However, because of his inflexible outlook, Daniel fails to see either Romans or Jews as human beings; instead, they become just symbols of occupation and subjugation in his mind. This symbolic view blinds Daniel to concrete realities of life in Palestine, including the harmful consequences of his vengeful perspective. But when Daniel gets to know a strange traveling teacher named Jesus, his vengeful outlook is challenged and eventually shattered. Through Daniel's encounter with Jesus, The Bronze Bow suggests that revenge is a dead end, and that loving real people, instead of fighting for abstract vengeance, is the only way to peace. A fighter for Israel's freedom from Rome, Daniel's life revolves around revenge—meaning that both the Romans and, ultimately, their Jewish victims become mere objects in his eyes. Other Jews don't always share Daniel's sharply polarized view of the Romans. When Daniel sees city dwellers going about their everyday lives, the people's apparent indifference to Roman oppression upsets him: "Everywhere, the Jews went about their business, paying no attention. The boy who had lived for five years in the solitude of the mountain, nursing his hatred and keeping it ever fresh, could not credit his own eyes. […] Where was their pride? Had they forgotten altogether?" For years, Daniel has thought of nothing but vengeance against the Romans. Therefore, when he sees his fellow Jews living alongside their oppressors, he's infuriated. After living with freedom fighters for years, isolated from ordinary life in Palestine, Daniel doesn't understand either the Romans or the Jewish people he wants to avenge. Daniel gathers a group of village boys around him, and they carry out raids for rebel leader Rosh, often harassing and robbing wealthier Jews. "For none of these victims did the boys feel the slightest pity. Any traitor who sold his goods to the Romans did so at his own risk. Those who flaunted their wealth or patronized a Roman theater were fair prey. And every cruse of oil, every silver talent" would support a future army of Israel. The boys don't see their victims primarily as human beings; they see them as symbols of Rome's oppression and therefore fair game. Perceiving this, Daniel begins to feel misgivings about what, if anything, revenge really accomplishes. Jesus teaches Daniel that abstract revenge is a dead end because it locks people into a cycle of violence, and the only way out is to love real people. Daniel leads an ambush to rescue his friend Joel, who has been captured by the Romans. Rattled after the ambush only narrowly succeeds, Daniel reflects, "'They who live by the sword will perish by the sword.' At first he could not recall where he had heard these words. […] Then he remembered. Jesus had spoken them […] To live by the sword was the best life he knew […] But something he had not reckoned on had happened. […] [His friends'] deaths were on his head. And freedom was farther away than before." Because Daniel has based his life on fighting for Israel's political freedom, he's never questioned the connection between revenge and freedom. But Jesus's words, and the loss of people Daniel loves, make him question whether revenge is leading him anywhere, much less to freedom from Rome. When Daniel speaks with Jesus alone, Jesus directly refutes Daniel's past commitment to killing by arguing that love is the only alternative to revenge. Daniel asks Jesus, "'Should I love the Romans who killed [his friend Samson]?' […] Jesus smiled. […] 'Can't you see, Daniel, it is hate that is the enemy? Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love.'" Jesus argues that hate only generates more killing, which generates more hate—a never-ending cycle. Though Daniel can't imagine loving a Roman enemy, Jesus teaches that such concrete love is the only thing that can overcome the cycle of hate. In the end, overcoming hate is the only thing that leads to lasting freedom—fighting can't achieve that. At the very end of the book, after Jesus heals Daniel's sister Leah from her illness, a Roman soldier lingers worriedly outside Daniel's house. Daniel hates this Roman, who had secretly befriended Leah, and until now has forbidden them to see each other. After long hesitation, Daniel finally approaches the soldier and invites him into his house to see Leah. After witnessing Jesus's love for others firsthand and being a beneficiary of it, he feels able to offer love in place of hatred. This outreach to the individual solder suggests that Daniel's hatred for Romans as a whole will soften, too. - Theme: Trust, Dependence, and Friendship. Description: Daniel's early life is marked by independence. After his parents are killed by the Romans, Daniel is apprenticed to an abusive blacksmith and finally runs away. Rosh, leader of a group of Galilean rebels, grants Daniel a new life as one of his fighters. When Daniel grows used to this free and relatively secure life, he balks at returning to his home village and his younger sister, Leah. But after their grandmother dies, Daniel must care for Leah himself, and this burden threatens to entangle him in the village life he'd hoped to leave behind. In the process, he makes friends for the first time—like siblings Joel and Thacia—and realizes the goodness of connecting with and finding support from others instead of avoiding them. Over the course of the book, Daniel's growing friendships make him realize the importance of relationships—even caring for and depending on others— for a truly meaningful life. For years, Daniel has lived with a group of anti-Roman rebels on a nearby mountain—a life of relative freedom. Because of this, Daniel fears being tied down by others, especially having to support them. When Daniel was at his lowest point, Rosh gave him a home and something to live for. At the beginning of the book, as his old schoolmates Joel and Thacia question him about his life on the mountain, Daniel remembers "how Rosh had reached out a hand, nor to strike him but to help him to his feet […] had picked him up and carried him like a baby all the way to the cave." Up till then, Daniel's life had been marked by orphanhood and abuse. So Rosh's rescue—and then getting to live on the mountain and fight for Rosh—felt like a kind of rebirth, even a rejection of conventional family commitment. Because his life now revolves around Rosh's cause, Daniel sees his family—namely his troubled younger sister, Leah—as a threat to his independence. When he visits Leah for the first time in years and sees how desperately she needs him, Daniel sees his sister's dependence on him as a fearful trap: "Suddenly he was afraid again. He looked away, trying to shut out the sight of her [...] Everything he cared about and worked for was threatened by that small helpless figure." Daniel knows that supporting Leah will hamper his ability to fight for Israel's future with Rosh, the only commitment he cares about. After Daniel returns from the mountain to the village and takes up blacksmithing in order to support Leah, he feels imprisoned by his sister's demands on him. One day he arrives home to find that Leah "had not combed her hair or bothered to get herself breakfast. With irritation he saw that the water jar was empty and that he would have to stand in line at the well with the snickering women. […] [T]he bars of his cage slid into place around him." Not only is Leah helplessly needy, but her needs feel emasculating to Daniel, the antithesis of the rebellious role he'd rather fill. Instead of living an unfettered life on the mountain and fighting for a higher cause, he's bound to his sister. Caring for Leah feels like a trap ("the bars of his cage"). But when he experiences the benefits of friendship for himself, Daniel realizes that connection between people is indispensable for a meaningful life, not a trap to be feared. After getting injured in Capernaum and being secretly nursed back to health by his friend Joel, Daniel realizes he's been missing something without even knowing it: "He had never admitted to himself that he was lonely here on the mountain. […] But the few days in Joel's passageway had shown him a new world. He had found someone to talk to, someone who had shared his own thoughts, and who had instantly taken Daniel's burden as his own." Before, Daniel has shared common goals with fellow rebels, but he's never had a real friend—someone who genuinely cares about Daniel and is even willing to put Daniel's needs first. As Daniel continues to let Joel and his sister Thacia into his life—even at the cost of becoming more tied to village life—Daniel also sees the benefits of friendship for Leah. Sheltered all her life, Leah blossoms when others finally see her as valuable, a reflection of what Daniel himself is experiencing through friendship. Thacia tells Daniel, "Every time I come, Leah has changed […] It's like watching a flower opening very slowly. From week to week I can hardly wait to see how it has opened since I saw her last." Daniel tells Thacia that Leah has never had a friend before, so her blossoming is Thacia's doing. Friendship—being really recognized and cared for by another person—is indispensable for a fulfilled life. Daniel's experiences of trusting friends and serving his family prepare him for what the novel presents as the ultimate step of trust and dependence—trust in Jesus. When Jesus comes to Daniel's house to heal Leah, Daniel finally gives up his resistance to Jesus: "Suddenly, with a longing that was more than he could bear, he wanted to stop fighting against this man. He knew that he would give everything he possessed in life to follow Jesus. […] To know Jesus would be enough." Giving up his vow to fight the Romans—the thing that's given shape and meaning to Daniel's life—no longer seems like a sacrifice, as it did before. Even though he doesn't yet know what following Jesus will mean for his past dreams, just knowing Jesus—having a relationship with him—is portrayed as worthwhile in and of itself. - Theme: Leadership: Power vs. Service. Description: In the first half of the book, Daniel idolizes Rosh, leader of the rebel band that took him in after he was orphaned. In Daniel, Rosh sees a potential champion for Israel, and Daniel comes to see Rosh as the ideal kind of leader. After Daniel meets Jesus, however, his view of what constitutes good leadership is challenged and finally overturned. The difference between Rosh and Jesus is their contrasting ways of seeing other people. In short, Jesus sees other people—even insignificant people—as inherently valuable. Rosh, on the other hand, sees people as valuable only as far as they benefit his cause. In other words, Jesus sees people as people, and Rosh sees people as tools to be used for his own ends. By contrasting Rosh's and Jesus's leadership in Daniel's eyes, the book suggests that true leaders seek the good in others, especially the weak, instead of seeking to dominate them. Daniel initially sees leadership as aggressive and dominating, as exemplified by Rosh. "He's like a lion!" Daniel tells a friend, "[T]he men obey him without question. […] Rosh would drive every cursed Roman back into the sea!" To Daniel, Rosh is an admirable leader because of the way he fearlessly commands obedience and dominates his enemies. But Daniel's first encounter with Jesus baffles him because Jesus's leadership is different from anything he's seen before. He hears Jesus say to a crowd of wretched, suffering people, "Do not be afraid […] For you are the children of God. And does not a father understand the sorrow of his children, and know their need? For I tell you, nor even a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father seeing, and you are of more value than many sparrows." To himself, Daniel wonders, "What good would it do to speak of a kingdom to these miserable wretches […] when not one of them could lift a hand to fight for it?" Having served Rosh for years, Daniel thinks of leadership as something that makes demands of followers. In contrast, Jesus sees his followers as worthy of God's attention and care, and he serves them accordingly. Later, when Daniel tells his sister, Leah, about Jesus healing a little girl, he recalls that Jesus welcomed children; he even saw children as uniquely worth his time. He tells Leah, "He won't even let them send the children away when they're a nuisance. He insists on talking to them, and finding out their names, and listening to their foolishness. It makes some of the men furious—as though he thought children were important." With this, Daniel implies that most people don't regard children as important or even worthy of notice. Jesus stands out because, in spite of the huge crowds he attracts, he specifically takes time to focus on those whom the rest of society ignores. After seeing Jesus's caring example of leadership, Daniel recognizes that Rosh looks at people as objects to be used. At one point, Rosh criticizes Daniel for showing mercy to an old man whom Rosh had ordered him to rob. Daniel then realizes the difference between Rosh and Jesus: "Suddenly words were echoing in his mind. 'For each one of you is precious in His sight.' Not scripture, but the words of the carpenter. […] Rosh looked at a man and saw a thing to be used, like a tool or a weapon. Jesus looked and saw a child of God." The two men, Daniel realizes, view human beings in totally different ways. While Jesus sees people as intrinsically precious because they belong to God, Rosh sees them as means to his own goals and therefore expendable. When Rosh refuses to help Daniel, Daniel finally recognizes Rosh for who he is. Daniel's friend Joel is captured by the Romans while doing an errand for Rosh, and Rosh refuses to spare any of his men to rescue Joel. When he confronts Rosh, however, Rosh sees something in Daniel as well: "'I've warned you before,' [Rosh] said, his voice ugly. 'There's a soft streak in you. Till you get rid of it you're no good to the cause.' The red mist of anger cleared suddenly from Daniel's mind. […] He saw the hard mouth, the calculating little eyes. He saw a man he had never really looked at before." Rosh sees Daniel's concern for another person as "softness" that compromises Daniel's loyalty to Rosh's cause. At the same time, Daniel is confirmed in the belief that Rosh doesn't see inherent value in people; he sees them as objects to be used. And anyone who values others—as Daniel now does—is useless to him. By the end of the book, Daniel's friend Simon sums up Daniel's new view of leadership. Simon explains why he has accepted that Jesus will never lead Israel in rebellion against the Romans, as both he and Daniel once dreamed of: "you've seen [Jesus] caring for those people—the ones so low that no one […] cared what happened to them. When I see that, I know that the God of Israel has not forgotten us. […] I'm a poor man, and ignorant, but I know now that with a God like that I am safe." A real leader, Simon recognizes, is not someone who charges into conflict no matter the cost to others, but someone who cares for those who have seemingly nothing to offer. - Theme: Earthly Hopes vs. Heavenly Values. Description: In The Bronze Bow, the people of Galilee are both enthralled and puzzled by Jesus. For centuries, the Jewish people have longed for a leader who will rise up against their oppressors—most recently the Romans. When Jesus begins preaching in the synagogues, offering hope to the poor, and healing the sick, many hope that he is the long-expected messiah who will deliver them from Roman bondage. But the more Daniel and his friends hear of Jesus's message, the more Jesus disappoints their hopes. Jesus rejects violence as the means to freedom, and he even seems to prize a different kind of freedom altogether: spiritual freedom, rather than physical freedom. Over time, Daniel and others who are drawn to Jesus begin to see that he preaches a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. By tracing Daniel's and others' changing views of Jesus, the book suggests that the hope Jesus offers is ultimately rooted in heavenly realities and not in the earthly ones that people typically value. Daniel and his fellow Galileans hope that Jesus will be a revolutionary leader who will rise up against the Romans, but Jesus undercuts these hopes. Fighting with Rosh's rebels, Daniel expects an uprising rivaling ancient biblical battles. He tells his friend Joel, "Joshua, Gideon, David, all of them fought on the soil of Galilee. […] It will be so again." Joel agrees, "'God will send us another David.' His eyes glistened, as though he too could see the shadow of a vast army moving on the distant plain." Both boys believe that Israel's deliverance will resemble past episodes of deliverance in Jewish history. Similarly, when Jesus speaks in the village synagogue, Daniel and others look for a revolutionary who will lead them in resisting Roman oppression. Jesus tells the congregants, "'I say to you, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe.' Now! Daniel leaned forward. Tell us that the moment has come! Tell us what we are to do! […] But Jesus went on speaking quietly. […] Others too waited for the word that was not spoken." In contrast to the people's eager expectations, Jesus is quiet and restrained, not fiery, and he calls them to faith, not revolution. The more Daniel and his friends get to know Jesus, however, the more they suspect that the hope he offers won't align with their expectations. It becomes apparent while they're doing a job for Rosh. The task requires them to carry out a deceptive plot. Feeling troubled about these measures, Thacia suggests that Jesus wouldn't agree with them that ends justify means. Daniel argues that Jesus surely understands that in war, lies are sometimes a necessary weapon. Thacia replies, "Daniel, what makes you and Joel so sure that Jesus means to make war?" When Daniel reminds her that Jesus claims that God's kingdom is near, Thacia continues, "Did you ever think he might mean that the kingdom will come some other way? Without any fighting?" Daniel suspects that Thacia might be right, but he can't yet fathom what it means to wait for a heavenly kingdom instead of fighting for an earthly one. Indeed, Jesus's views of healing and freedom point to heavenly realities, not worldly ones. Even physical healing does not primarily have to do with what the world sees as valuable. Discussing Jesus's healing ministry, Daniel muses to Thacia, "Haven't you ever wondered […] what good it is for them to be healed, those people that Jesus cures? […] What does a blind man think, when he has wanted for years to see, and then looks at his wife in rags and his children covered with sores?" In other words, Daniel wonders if these miraculous cures really do much good for poor people whose lives don't seem worthwhile to begin with. In turn, Thacia wonders if this is why many of those who flock to Jesus for healing don't end up choosing to be cured by him. Their discussion suggests that when Jesus chooses to heal someone, he sees a heart that's hungering for something even deeper than physical healing. According to Simon, Jesus "says that the only chains that matter are fear and hate, because they chain our souls. If we do not hate anyone and do not fear anyone, then we are free." Appalled by this notion of freedom, Daniel retorts that "you know what [the Romans] could do to you! How could you possibly not be afraid?" "I don't say I am not afraid," said Simon. "But Jesus is not." By choosing to follow Jesus, Simon chooses a kind of freedom that transcends mere physical safety. Even though this "freedom" looks absurd to those who don't embrace it, that doesn't make it less real to those who believe in Jesus. Throughout the book, the contrast between fighting versus waiting, and earthly solutions versus heavenly hope, reveals the novel's belief that Jesus's teachings weren't primarily oriented toward fixing the present world, but toward the promise of a better one. At the end of the book, Jesus relieves Leah's illness, but this healing is overshadowed by her joy in meeting the Messiah. Seeing this, even a hardened rebel like Daniel accepts that Jesus's heavenly kingdom is better than an earthly one. After a lifetime of fighting for earthly hopes, Daniel shifts his loyalty to eternal ones. - Climax: Jesus heals Leah. - Summary: Daniel bar Jamin is an 18-year-old Galilean living under the Roman occupation of Palestine. A Zealot (or fighter for Galilean Jewish freedom), he lives with a rebel band in a cave overlooking his home village of Ketzah. One day he encounters Joel bar Hezron, a former classmate from synagogue school, and Joel's twin sister, Malthace (or Thacia), sightseeing on the mountain. Awkward, yet anxious for news of his grandmother and younger sister Leah back home, he approaches the twins. They recognize him as the runaway apprentice of the village blacksmith Amalek. The twins don't know much about Daniel's family, but they invite him to share their lunch. Though wary, Daniel slowly relaxes enough to tell them his story. After suffering much abuse, he fled Amalek five years ago. Since then, he's worked for the outlaw Zealot, Rosh, who is training a band of men to fight and overthrow the occupiers. The boys talk about their shared hatred of the Romans and their hope that the Messiah will soon arrive to liberate the Jewish people. As Daniel escorts his new friends down the mountain, he's summoned to join Rosh's men in seizing an enslaved man from a passing caravan. Joel jumps into the action, too, and tells Rosh he'd like to work for him. Rosh says he'll send for Joel in due time. Back in Rosh's cave, Daniel is given the job of filing the chains off the former slave Samson's wrists. Though Samson does not seem to talk or fully understand Daniel, he bows in gratitude after Daniel frees him. He quickly grows attached and loyal to Daniel. A few weeks later, a fellow former apprentice, Simon the Zealot, brings Daniel the message that their old master Amalek is dead, freeing Daniel to visit the village. Daniel reluctantly goes to his grandmother's house. He is grieved to find his grandmother bent and frail, and Leah, who has been allegedly demon-possessed since childhood, remains weak and fearful, never leaving the house. The next morning, Simon stops by and invites Daniel to attend the synagogue service with him. The visiting preacher, Jesus, is intriguing, but his message is baffling—he tells the people to repent because God's kingdom is near, but he says nothing about overthrowing the Romans. That night, Daniel retreats to the mountain again. Weeks later Daniel, restless, travels to the city of Capernaum, where Joel's family has moved, to visit them. He feels out of place in Joel's and Thacia's wealthy villa, and their father, Hezron, kicks Daniel out for his violent Zealot sympathies. Before he can leave Capernaum, Daniel gets into an altercation with a Roman soldier and is badly injured. He flees back to Joel's house, where the twins conceal him in an obscure passageway and nurse him back to health. While Daniel heals, Joel reads him passages from the Bible and the story of the Maccabees. On Thacia's urging, Daniel also tells the story of his father's death at Roman hands, crucified with several others who tried to rebel. Therefore, ever since childhood, Daniel has vowed to avenge his father by fighting and killing Romans. Leah, too, has been traumatized ever since. Joel and Thacia, moved by Daniel's story, vow to join him in fighting for "God's Victory." They decide that a bronze bow, an image from one of the Psalms, will be the symbol of their bond and pledge. The next time Daniel visits Capernaum, Simon introduces him and Joel to Jesus. Daniel sees Jesus heal some sick people and hears him tell a crowd of the poor that they belong to God's kingdom. Daniel can't understand how this could be true, since these miserable people cannot fight the Romans. Not long after, Daniel's grandmother dies. Simon, who has decided to follow Jesus as a disciple, asks Daniel to take over his blacksmith shop. He and Leah can move into the adjoining house; that way, Daniel can both provide for Leah and keep an eye on her. Though he feels trapped, Daniel agrees. Now that he has a proper shop with real tools, Daniel soon gains a reputation for his fine work. He reconciles himself to serving the occasional Roman customer, though he resents a certain blond soldier who gazes curiously at Leah. In the village, Daniel begins gathering and leading recruits—mostly raw, untested young men—to support Rosh and prepare to fight the Romans. "The bronze bow" is their password, and they begin meeting in an abandoned watchtower. Meanwhile, Thacia befriends Leah, who blossoms with newfound confidence. Daniel also begins going to Capernaum almost daily to hear Jesus's teachings. Leah loves to hear about Jesus, especially the story of Jesus restoring a dead little girl to life, but she still refuses to leave the house. Daniel's band of recruits begins doing jobs for Rosh, but it's mostly petty raiding and stealing, which disappoints Daniel. But one day, Joel, who's been spying for Rosh, is taken prisoner by the Romans. Rosh refuses to help, causing Daniel to see his former mentor's self-serving nature. He decides to lead the boys in a raid to rescue Joel themselves. The group conceals themselves on a mountainside and throws rocks on the detachment of Roman soldiers who are leading the prisoners past. Just as they're about to be overpowered by the Romans, Samson appears, saving Daniel's life and breaking Joel's chains with his bare hands. In the process, Samson is fatally wounded, and another of Daniel's recruits, Nathan, is killed. Heartbroken, Daniel is totally disillusioned with Rosh's cause. Joel moves to Jerusalem to study to be a rabbi. Before he goes, he tells Daniel to warn Jesus that synagogue leaders see him as a threat and are conspiring against him. But when Daniel speaks to Jesus alone, he ends up confessing his guilt over Samson's death and his desire to avenge his friend. Jesus tells Daniel that Samson's love can't be repaid by hatred—after all, killing only causes hate to multiply. Jesus asks Daniel to follow him by loving others, but Daniel declines, feeling constrained by his vow to fight. A few days later, Daniel watches Thacia dance at the Day of Atonement festival and admits his love for her. However, he tells her that because his loyalty is to God's victory, he can't marry her. When he gets home, he learns that Leah has befriended the blond Roman soldier, Marcus, in secret. He flies into a rage, and Leah retreats into silent depression once again. When Daniel goes to Capernaum to seek Jesus's help for Leah, Simon tells him he is convinced that Jesus is the Messiah, but he also believes that Jesus will never march against the Romans. Instead, Jesus offers his followers peace in their hearts right now, if they refuse to let hatred and fear rule them. Daniel is disgusted and returns home. Eventually, Leah falls sick with a delirious fever. Even when she is dying, Daniel refuses to let Marcus, who's hovering outside the house, visit her. Instead he sends a message to Thacia that Leah is dying. When Thacia shows up, she brings Jesus with her. Jesus prays at Leah's bedside, and she is soon restored to health. Seeing this, Daniel also surrenders to Jesus at last. He realizes that even though he doesn't understand Jesus's mission for God's kingdom, he trusts Jesus and wants to give up his hatred in order to be part of that mission. Now that Daniel is freed from a life of fighting, he and Thacia make a wordless vow to one another to get married. Then, as Daniel steps outside to thank Jesus, he sees Marcus standing there. He remembers Jesus's words of love and invites Marcus to come inside.

- Genre: Short story, Western - Title: The Californian’s Tale - Point of view: Third person - Setting: The Stanislaus River region, California - Character: The Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator of "The Californian's Tale" is a gold prospector who recounts his experiences thirty-five years prior, when he searched for gold in the region near California's Stanislaus River. The narrator's background is a mystery: the reader learns nothing about his own personal history beyond his status as a former gold prospector. His observational skills are his most prominent trait. He acts as a guide for readers, who, through the narrator's descriptions, learn about the people and environment around the Stanislaus. Unlike the other characters in the story, the narrator is keenly aware that he must leave the desolate region, lest the destruction wrought by the boom and bust economy drive him to depression and madness. Throughout the story, the narrator describes in vivid detail the scarred landscape and the hopeless existence of the broken men who still call it home. The narrator is a stark voice of reason in contrast to the delusional Henry. Although Henry's cottage appears idyllic and his marriage downright blissful, the narrator's penchant for observation tells him that all is not right in Henry's world. Thus, the narrator becomes the window through which the reader gradually views Henry's unfolding madness. By the end of the story, the narrator is the only character who escapes the tragic pull of Manifest Destiny. - Character: Henry. Description: The narrator first meets Henry when he comes across his well-maintained cottage. Henry is jovial and overflowing with love for his wife, who delicately decorated their cozy cottage retreat, over which he has immense pride. Henry initially appears—to both the narrator and readers—as a lone symbol of human joyfulness in an otherwise grim and depressed environment. However, Twain soon reveals that Henry's joy is actually a delusion, for he has retreated into his own memories in order to cope with the loss of his beloved wife to an Indian attack nineteen years earlier. Not only is Henry held captive by his own madness, he also represents the helplessness that takes hold of men left to tend to a woman's sphere without a woman's actual presence. Although he is a character in the story, Henry functions also as a symbol of madness, as well as of the isolating nature of the male sphere when devoid of feminine influence. Henry is a classically tragic figure in his descent into madness, as well as an archetypical symbol in Naturalistic fiction who is beholden to circumstances beyond his control. Through no real fault of his own, Henry cannot withstand the harshness of his scarred environment, the cutthroat nature of capitalist individualism, and the loss of his wife at the whims of the latter two forces. - Character: Henry's Wife. Description: Though she never appears in the story, the presence of Henry's wife is reflected in the feminine touches that have transformed his cottage into a lovely and inviting space. Henry insists his wife is soon to return and that the narrator stick around to meet her, though Joe reveals at the end of the story that the young woman had in fact disappeared in an Indian raid nineteen years prior. - Character: Tom. Description: One of the grizzled miners still living on the Stanislaus. Alongside Charley and Joe, Tom plays along with Henry's delusion that his wife will soon return in order to spare their friend from going "wild." Following the narrator, who stays with Henry expecting to meet his returning wife, Tom arrives at Henry's cottage and acts thrilled to hear the letter she penned, in which she gives Tom warm greetings. - Theme: Manifest Destiny vs. Reality. Description: Mark Twain's "The Californian's Tale" is a story about the harsh realities that too often befell Americans who, lured by the nineteenth-century notion of Manifest Destiny, headed West to seek uncertain fortune. The journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" in 1845. As the philosophical justification for westward expansion, Manifest Destiny held that the Christian God sanctioned Americans to expand their dominion—with its twin attributes of capitalism and individualism—all the way across the frontier to the Pacific. In his story, Twain uses the California Gold Rush, which began in 1848, as the frontier setting where Manifest Destiny's greed and individualism created not great riches, but great suffering. The story's unnamed narrator is a gold prospector on the Stanislaus River, who recounts how the men who failed to make it rich on the Stanislaus—embodied in the story's miners, especially Henry—degenerated into isolated, hollowed-out human beings. Manifest Destiny touted a culture of rugged individualism, which emphasized self-reliance over interdependence and prioritized self-interest over communal concerns. For those who braved the frontier, however, this romanticized notion of the individual neglected the importance of familial and social connections and offered no sympathy for those who did not get rich. Thus, when Henry fails to strike it rich and loses his wife in an attack by Native Americans, Manifest Destiny has left him (and others like him) with only the harsh realities of suffering and madness. At the beginning of the story, Twain juxtaposes imagery from the early days of the Gold Rush with imagery from the narrator's perspective thirty-five years later. Whereas the idea of Manifest Destiny lured people to California with the promise of finding gold, and therefore, living out the American dream, the reality for most was desolation and loneliness. Decay and solitude now mark the former "charming paradise" on the Stanislaus. A vast expanse of green turf is all that remains of a once-bustling town, and the vine-choked remains of formerly "snug and cozy" family cottages dot the surrounding countryside neighborhood. The "defeated and disappointed families" have all left the area, while those pioneers who came to California alone and built "solitary" log cabins are among the few that remain. In stark contrast to Manifest Destiny's promise of a wealthy American empire that stretched from East to West, the Stanislaus region is now a monument to capitalism's destructive tendencies. Beyond the landscape itself, even the remaining pioneers exist as living reminders of Manifest Destiny's failed promise of endless riches. A lonely pioneer still lives on the Stanislaus because "he had lost his wealth," and, unable to bear the humiliation of failing at the American Dream, "chose to sever all communication" with his friends and relatives. Many other prospectors headed Manifest Destiny's call, enchanted by its myth of the fearless, rugged pioneer individual who hacked through the western wilderness to pave the way for American civilization. The miners who remain, however, exist as cruel parodies of rugged individualism: beset by failure and regret, their bodies and minds grizzled, rugged individualism has relegated them to "living dead men" haunted by their "wasted lives." Manifest Destiny also claims the American family among its casualties. Twain often highlighted the endangered family in his writing. His own brother, Henry, was burned to death in a boiler explosion aboard a steamship in 1858, and the loss haunted Twain for the rest of his life. His writings abound with orphan children, families torn apart by internal and external conflict, and deadbeat relatives of all sorts. In "The Californian's Tale," Twain emphasizes early how the siren call of Manifest Destiny destroyed families on the Stanislaus. When the Gold Rush dried up, the loss of wealth created "defeated and disappointed families" who deserted their homes. As a result, the men who remain—Tom, Joe, Charley, the narrator, and especially Henry—live isolated lives without traditional family connections. They therefore compensate by acting as a surrogate family for Henry by perpetuating his delusion that his long-vanished wife will return in order to spare him from confronting the unbearable truth of her loss. Despite the men's best efforts to find community in their shared circumstances, Twain makes clear that the men have been severely damaged by the loss of community and family that came with the area's descent into a mining ghost town. "The Californian's Tale" is almost entirely devoid of the wry, cutting humor that accompanies so much of Twain's writing. Instead, a somber feeling of loss and regret hangs over the scarred land and men who follow Manifest Destiny's call to California but end up broke and isolated. In the 1845 editorial in which he coined the phrase, John O'Sullivan claimed that Manifest Destiny allotted for "the free development of [America's] multiplying millions." He predicted that rugged individuals would soon take California from Mexico and dot it with new homes "conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and genders." As a renowned satirist and Naturalist writer who delighted in skewering cherished mythologies, Twain uses this short story to explore the potentially devastating aftermath of an American destiny that, for many prospectors, never manifested into reality. Instead of a new American civilization, the miners in "The Californian's Tale" came to dig their own graves. - Theme: Masculine vs. Feminine Space. Description: Throughout the story, Twain emphasizes the dichotomy between masculine and feminine space. Importantly, he wrote in the nineteenth century, when the notion of gendered space for men and women created an ideology of "separate spheres." Men dominated outside the home in the harsh, competitive public sphere of work, politics, and violence. Women, by contrast, tended to the domestic sphere of household management, child-rearing, and moral guidance. Under the control of a nurturing female presence, the home served as a refuge from the harsh male realm. In "The Californian's Tale," Twain characterizes the public sphere—that of gold prospecting and community—as decayed, abandoned, isolated, depressed, and poverty-ridden. The people who remain on the Stanislaus are men, and, not coincidentally, the same grim characteristics that define their space define their minds and bodies. In contrast to the male-dominated outside world, the story's only female space (Henry's cottage, once tended by his wife) is one of beauty, elegance, color, happiness, softness, and nurturement. The male-dominated space of territorial conquest and capitalist expansion has brought utter ruin. The female space of the home offers the only reprieve from life on the Stanislaus. Twain, however, is too adroit a thinker that the female realm is superior to that of men. Instead, he indicates the contributions both spaces make to create healthy environments for men and women. Twain begins the story by comparing the cabins built by men to cottages tended to by women. Thought the latter are now abandoned, they are nonetheless the "prettiest little cottage homes" that are "snug and cozy." In contrast to the pretty cottages, the miners' log cabins are "solitary" spaces that lack a welcoming female touch. Henry's cottage, for example, looks "lived in and petted for and cared for" on the outside, while the inside is "a nest which had aspects to rest the tired eye" and find "nourishment." A miner's cabin, by comparison, is a space of "hard cheerless, materialistic desolation" that implies "a dirt floor, never-made beds, tin plates and cups, bacon and beans, and black coffee." Cottages under women's control are ornate, welcoming retreats from the outside sphere of male activity, whereas miners' cabins are mere extensions of that very sphere. As functional spaces to get food and shelter, miners' cabins exist to further the work of prospecting and wealth accumulation, not as spaces to escape from that work. The ornate decoration inside of Henry's cottage further attests to the clear separation between male and female space in the story. Twain emphasizes that a woman's touch alone can transform a dwelling into a comforting retreat. It is not that men are unwilling to create attender home environment, rather, they are in incapable of doing so. The narrator attest to this fact shortly after he enters Henry's cottage. He marvels at the ornamentation—colorful wallpapers, tidies and lamp mats, framed pictures, seashells, etc. These constitute "the score of little unclassifiable tricks and touches that a woman's hand distributes about a home," and which a man can "see without knowing he sees them," but "would miss in a moment if they were taken away." Henry tells the narrator that the beautiful decoration in his home is "All her work." Men are lucky enough to appreciate these hallmarks of feminine space, if not create them for themselves. "You can't tell just what it lacks," Henry says, "you can see it yourself after it's done, but that is all you know; you can't find out the law of it." The "law" to which Henry refers is the power a woman holds over her domestic space. This feeling of comfort in a home is what the men on the Stanislaus miss, but cannot hope to replicate themselves. As Henry quips, "she knows the why and the how," but "men only know the how." The sharp contrast between male and female spaces in "The Californian's Tale" underscores how the two environments complement each other. The removal of the feminine space from the male prospectors' lives has profoundly negative implications for the way they experience their daily lives. Left without women in a world of work and business, the miners have no retreat from the harshness of their own existence. The closest thing that he prospectors have to a feminine space is Henry's cottage, a home decorated by a woman who has been absent for nineteen years. Henry can only upkeep, not improve upon, this space. The combination of Manifest Destiny's carnage and the loss of reciprocal balance between male and female spheres creates the conditions by which the story's third theme, madness, flourishes. - Theme: Madness. Description: Twain's story is ultimately a tale about how desolation and loneliness can lead to madness. Despite its promise to bring vast wealth to Americans who conquered the West, Manifest Destiny instead unleashes the depravity of greed and ruin both on the land surrounding the Stanislaus and on the men who came to mine that land. Their land scarred, their fortunes lost, their wives and families gone, and their futures bleak, the miners retreat into a state of living death. Any sense of "hope" has been replaced by a grim desire "to be out of the struggle and done with it all." In introducing Henry, Twain initially seems to hint that one small ray of hope—Henry's home-decorating wife—remains to soothe the prospectors' mental anguish. This is, however, a false hope, as Twain eventfully reveals that Henry went mad following his wife's disappearance nearly twenty years earlier. Twain also suggest that madness is a social contagion. Tom, Charley, and Joe mean well by helping to perpetuate Henry's delusion that his wife will return. In doing so, however, they themselves come under the sway of Henry's madness, as they find comfort in a woman who has not only vanished, but also is likely deceased. The latter development suggests that the miners truly are dead inside, even if they give the appearance of clinging to life. Twain depicts madness through Henry as an especially sinister malaise, because it masks Henry's profound suffering with a cheery outward façade that rubs off on the narrator. When the narrator first meets Henry, he appears a beacon of happiness thanks to his apparently loving relationship with his wife, who decorated his beautiful cottage. Henry's apparent happiness seduces the narrator, so much so that he intends to delay his departure from the area just to meet Henry's wife. Yet, while the narrator feels "a strong longing to see her," he also suspects that something is not right with Henry's situation, and he vows "to go straight away from this place, for my piece of mind's sake." Here, Twain insinuates that not all is what it seems, and that Henry's happiness may be too unbelievable in the context of such a desolate place. Nonetheless, the narrator ultimately decides to "stay and take the risk," foreshadowing a potential revelation that is anything but happy. Just as Henry's happiness seduces the narrator, the idea of his wife's presence similarly entrances the other miners. The grizzled old miner, Tom, for example, sheds tears of bittersweet joy when Henry reads him a letter from his wife that includes "affectionate regards" to the other miners. The letter's "loving messages also make Joe and Charley tearfully happy. As the miners gather in wait for Henry's wife to return, they begin to play music and offer Henry drinks to calm "the torture of his mental distress." When Joe rebukes the narrator for trying to drink a glass poured specifically for Henry, the stage is set for a reveal about the nature of madness. After Henry gets drunk and falls asleep, the miners tell the narrator that Henry's wife vanished nineteen years ago, which caused him to go mad. Although Henry is the most obvious victim of madness, all of the men have been sucked into Henry's delusion by helping to perpetuate it. The story's twist ending speaks to the contagious nature of madness: it does not affect the other men in the same way it affects Henry, but it nonetheless binds them to his whims. Like Henry, Joe, Tom, and Charley have attached their last semblance of happiness to a woman who no longer exists. Here, Twain also demonstrates the malleability of madness: rather than move on from the desolated Stanislaus, the men choose to stay for Henry's sake. Henry's madness has become their annual ritual and thus, their own sad, isolating fate. "The Californian's Tale" begins and ends in bleakness, as Twain presents a desolated former gold-mining community full of broken men who are waiting to die. Madness, however, also stalks the prospectors, and it directly contributes to their status as "living dead men." Henry's descent into madness following news of his wife's disappearance is the core of the story, but his fate is not an isolated event. Twain implies that madness is one of many responses to the human experience: it is a function of the miners' depraved environment, and, therefore, becomes their new reality. Without any remaining family or community connections, Joe, Tom, and Charley become caretakers for Henry's delusion. Thus, madness becomes the last tie that binds together the broken men who remain on the Stanislaus. - Climax: The narrator learns that Henry went mad following the disappearance of his wife and believes she will still return. - Summary: An unnamed narrator, recounts his experiences thirty-five years earlier mining for gold in the Stanislaus River region of California. The Stanislaus region was once lush and temperate, with balmy woodlands and a thriving populace sustained by the riches of the Gold Rush. The local town once boomed with a bank, a courthouse, newspapers, and a firehouse—all of the trappings of civilization. The town also sustained several charming country communities on its outskirts, characterized by cozy cottages whose owners tended to with great care. However, when the Gold Rush went bust, and the ground ceased to yield its valuable metals, the civilization that it sustained withered and died. Now the region around the Stanislaus is a hollowed-out shell of its former glory. The once-thriving town is now deserted, and the charming cottages that dot the country neighborhoods where families lived are now in complete disrepair: covered in cobwebs and vines, they stand in silent testament to the lives they once sheltered. Now the only occupied dwellings on the Stanislaus are dank log cabins, the homes of grizzled, beaten-down gold miners, whose failure to strike it rich on the Gold Rush has left them financially destitute and cost them their families. They are tortured by the regret of broken dreams and economic failure. As the narrator describes the isolated state of the Stanislaus, he comes across a man in his mid-forties who, in contrast to the other depressed residents, appears joyful and lively. The man's name is Henry, and he cheerfully tends to a country cottage that appears lived-in and cared-for, with a lovely garden full of flowers. Henry's cabin is a stark contrast to the other dilapidated cottages the narrator has observed. Seeing the narrator approach, Henry invites him in. The narrator is overcome with delight over the furnished decoration inside Henry's home. In contrast to the cold, masculine functionality of miners' cabins—all dirt floors, bean cans, ruffled beds, and drab ornamentation—Henry's cabin is decorated by the careful grace of a woman's touch. The myriad comforting bits of decor that fill Henry's cottage soothe the narrator's soul. Henry explains that his nineteen-year-old wife decorated the cabin with a loving precision that lies beyond a man's capabilities. Women, Henry explains, intuitively know how to turn a mere dwelling into a welcoming home. Henry beams with delight as the narrator discovers a picture of Henry's wife in the washroom. He tells the narrator that she is visiting friends some forty miles away and will return in three days. It is Wednesday, and although the narrator plans to leave the Stanislaus before she is set to arrive at nine o'clock on Saturday evening, Henry implores him to stay. The narrator senses that there is something peculiar about Henry, but he spends the night talking with him, and ultimately decides to wait there to meet Henry's wife upon her return. After a few days pass, another miner named Tom arrives and asks about Henry's wife. Henry retrieves a letter she wrote and offers to read it to Tom, who responds enthusiastically. The letter contains warm salutations that bring Tom to the brink of tears. He tells Henry he will be there on Saturday to welcome his wife home. As Friday afternoon sets in, another miner, Joe, arrives at Henry's cottage and offers to throw a welcoming party for the young woman, provided she is not too weary from her journey. Finally, Saturday arrives, and the hours pass with no sign of Henry's wife. The narrator becomes noticeably impatient, and Henry becomes increasingly uneasy. The narrator chides Henry for his excessive worrying, causing Henry to back away in shame. As Henry and the narrator continue to wait, a miner named Charley arrives. He assuages Henry's nerves by reassuring him that his wife is merely running late, and then he commences decorating for her welcoming party by adorning Henry's cottage with flowers. As nine o'clock approaches, Tom and Joe return. The men play music while Henry stands in his cottage doorway, staring at the road. They then start drinking to the safe return of Henry's wife. One of the miners tells a now-drunk Henry that his wife's horse is lame and that she will be there in another half-hour. The men then tuck Henry into bed and prepare to leave. The narrator asks them to stay so that the young woman will not meet a stranger upon her arrival. Joe tells the narrator that Henry's wife went missing in an Indian raid nineteen years ago. Henry lost his mind over her disappearance, and each year since, the other miners have come to Henry's cottage three days before her expected return to keep Henry from descending into total insanity.

- Genre: Adventure novel - Title: The Call of the Wild - Point of view: Third-person limited narrator, who narrates from Buck's perspective - Setting: The late 1890s in Santa Clara, CA, briefly; then Alaska and the Canadian Klondike during the gold rush. - Character: Buck. Description: A one hundred and forty pound, half St. Bernard, half Scotch shepherd mix, Buck is a proud, strong, and intelligent creature. After being kidnapped from his home in Santa Clara, California, he becomes a powerful sled dog in the Canadian Klondike. As Buck goes deeper into the wilderness, he transforms from a pampered pet into a fierce animal, who ultimately masters the ways of the wild and his own fate. - Character: John Thornton. Description: An experienced gold miner and outdoorsmen, John Thornton is Buck's final owner and his ideal master. Thornton takes ownership of Buck when he saves him from Hal's brutal beating at White River. Thornton takes Buck deep into the uncharted Yukon in search of gold. They develop a deep and loving companionship. - Character: François. Description: An experienced and "swarthy" French-Canadian "half-breed," François is a courier for the Canadian government, who teaches Buck to become a working dog. François and his sledding partner, Perrault, are wise and just masters. Not only are they skillful sledsmen, they handle their dogs with respect—disciplining, feeding, and protecting them according to the circumstances of the wild. François' speech is heavily accented, which London denotes in the phonetic spelling of his dialogue. - Character: Hal. Description: An American settler, Hal comes to the Klondike in search of gold and adventure with his sister, Mercedes, and her husband, Charles. Along with his relatives, he acquires Buck's sled dog team and adds six dogs to create a massive sled dog team of fourteen. Hal is an incompetent and cruel master who harshly beats his animals with clubs and whips, treating them like slaves. - Character: Dave. Description: A dog and an "experienced wheeler" on the mail run sled dog team, he instructs Buck in how to be a sled dog. Dave has an unaggressive, solitary, and brooding manner, but his main characteristic is his unwavering devotion to his work in the traces. He becomes ill on the trail to Dawson and is shot out of mercy by the Scotch half-breed. - Character: The man in the red sweater. Description: This dog trader and trainer beats Buck into submission following his release from a cage-like crate. By continually beating Buck with a club until he is subdued, the man in the red sweater teaches Buck to obey his masters, but not to "conciliate" to them. He is associated with the power of the club. - Theme: The Man-Dog relationship. Description: In the harsh Klondike, man and sled dog develop intense bonds, coming to depend on each other in symbiotic ways in order to survive. For instance, sled dogs, like Buck provide transportation and labor to couriers like François and Perrault, who in turn care for their animals with food and protection. London portrays such bonds by demonstrating how Buck's owners shape his character and educate him in the ways of mastery. At Judge Miller's insular estate Buck is a prized and pampered pet, allowed to have the run of the place as a glorified guard dog, who ceremoniously lies by the Judge's feet and accompanies his grandchildren on little hunting trips. Under François and Perrault's just and wise care, Buck becomes an exemplary working dog and fierce leader. Through John Thornton's love and respect, Buck transforms into a loyal companion. That Buck changes so thoroughly under these human owners highlights not only the diversity of man-dog relationships, but also its evolutionary nature. For London, the kinship between man and dog is ever-changing, but also primeval, stretching back to the ancient times when caveman first hunted with wild wolves. It is also a relationship fraught by a deep-seated struggle "to master, or be mastered." While men seek to domesticate Buck by shaping his identity, Buck struggles to reconcile his inner instincts with his devotion for his "ideal master," John Thornton. This struggle for dominance is, for London, the crux of the man-dog relationship. It is a kinship that can be "ideal" through mutual love, respect, and justness, but because it has evolved into various symbiotic partnerships, it can hardly ever live up to its primeval legacy in which man and beast walk as co-dependent, but also autonomous equals. - Theme: The Pursuit of Mastery. Description: The dog eat dog world of the Klondike awakens within Buck a "dominant primordial beast" that drives him to "master, or be mastered." Buck chooses "to master" by overthrowing Spitz and asserting his rightful place as lead dog on François and Perrault's team. Domination is Buck's aim and he achieves it. Mastery, however, is not just a relentless struggle for power and dominance. London describes Buck's pursuit "to master" as a learning process. Buck "masters," or comes to dominate his fellow dogs by learning, or mastering, survival skills. He "receives instruction" from the other sled dogs about how to work in the traces and learns "lessons," like burying himself in the snow to keep warm, or deferring to man's authority when that man wields a heavy club.The pursuit of mastery is not just limited to the canine world; it's active in the human one, as well. Buck's human owners parallel Buck's drive to dominate through their attempts to tame the wild, both animals and nature, alike. Buck's various owners exert mastery over canines by exchanging these animals like commodities, disciplining them and charting their course across the Klondike. Meanwhile, miners, such as John Thornton, carve through the earth so that they can harvest gold, while pioneers such as Hal, Charles, and Mercedes try to settle the Klondike by imposing their worldly possessions upon it. Man's will "to master" nature stifles Buck's own innate drive to dominate. While Buck masters other dogs, man masters him. Buck is not able to fully assert his mastery until he flagrantly defies the law of club and fang by attacking the Yeehats. In doing so, Buck willfully overturns man's dominance over dog, but also gains autonomy. Free from man's mastery, he is able to roam nature freely as the leader of a wild wolf pack. Buck has not only mastered the ways of the wild, but his own fate. - Theme: Wild Law and Order. Description: When Jack London embarked to the Klondike in search of gold, he brought two seminal works with him, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. The latter's influence is evidenced by the ways in which nature administers the law. When Buck attacks a man to defend John Thornton, the miners set up a mock court to settle this dispute on the frontier. That they set up their own councils demonstrates a different kind of justice at work in the Northland. While "moral consideration" and reason operate in the Judge's courthouse in the Southland, Darwinian tenets, such as "survival of the fittest," natural selection, and adaptation are actively enforced in London's Klondike. For example, most deaths in The Call of the Wild occur because the victim could not adapt to his/her environment. The dogs that Hal, Charles, and Mercedes acquire for their sled dog team are ill suited for work in the traces and for the Klondike's harsh environment, so they die. Similarly, Hal, Charles, and Mercedes perish because they cannot adapt to life in the Northland. Mercedes cannot part from her possessions, while Hal and Charles do not have the wherewithal to execute a successful trip across the Yukon, nor do they listen to the advice of experienced settlers, who warn them against traveling on thin ice. Consequently, Hal's ignorance leads his team to a treacherous patch of thin ice, while Mercedes' heavy articles weigh down the sled, causing the ice to cave beneath them. Because they do not adapt to nature's ways, they are neither fit, nor selected to survive. In contrast, Buck excels and survives in the wild because he follows his instincts. Such distinctions underline the harsh and brutal character of nature's laws, which are codified in the law of club and fang—wild justice is served when the most adaptive survive, the strong thrive, the weak die, and those who disrespect nature's laws suffer nature's wrath. This order is reflected in the way that the sled dog team operates, like an organism within an ecosystem. The sled dog team is healthy and thrives in the wild under the direction of respectful owners like François and Perrault, but suffers under poor masters like Hal, Charles, and Mercedes. Similarly, the dogs work best in the traces when every dog knows his place within the natural order, but falls into some disorder when Buck upsets this balance by overthrowing Spitz. However, Buck is able to restore order on the team when he takes over because he knows how to play by nature's rules. - Theme: Domestication to Devolution. Description: While Buck is deeply influenced by his human masters, The Call of the Wild is ultimately about Buck's transformation from a domesticated dog to a wild wolf. London's Darwinian influences are at work in Buck's "development," or rather his gradual "retrogression" into a primeval beast. Like an evolving organism, Buck sheds characteristics ill-suited to his environment and takes advantage of traits that help him thrive. He tunes in to his latent, feral instincts, becoming less pet-like and more wolf-like—his soft paws toughen for icy conditions, his body strengthens for work in the traces, he gains endurance against the pain of the club and the lash of the whip, and his bloodlust for live prey increases. As Buck physically devolves, his memory recedes into a primordial past, where he actively envisions hunting and scavenging with a caveman. This primeval vision is realized when Buck satisfies his deep desire to kill a bull moose on his own. In this way, Buck not only acts like a wolf, but thinks like a wolf, as well. Buck's devolution completes itself when he joins with his timber wolf "brethren" at the novel's conclusion. He not only becomes their leader, but fathers many wolves, who bear his traits, thereby cementing his place in the wild wolves' lineage. - Climax: Buck killing the Yeehats to avenge John Thornton's murder. - Summary: Buck, a proud and strong St. Bernard mix, lives a princely existence on Judge Miller's estate in Santa Clara. Living an insular life, he has no idea that the discovery of gold in the Klondike has created a demand for dogs like him. Manuel, a gardener on the estate desperate for money, kidnaps Buck, selling him to a dog trader. The man throws Buck into a crate on a train headed north. Four day's later Buck's crate is unloaded from the train. At first chance, he leaps out, attacking a man in a red sweater. The man stuns Buck with his club, beating him into submission, until Buck learns to obey. Buck spends his days watching other dogs suffer the same treatment, until two Canadian couriers, François and Perrault, purchase him, Curly, Dave, and Spitz for their sled dog team. They sail on The Narwhal to Dyea, Alaska, where Buck encounters snow for the first time. Within hours of making landfall, Buck sees Curly attacked by a husky, then trampled by the rest of the sled dogs. Her death teaches Buck a valuable lesson about the law of club and fang. He learns to always strive for his survival by never letting his guard down. Buck's lessons continue on the trail, where François harnesses him to the traces for the first time. Under the tutelage of Perrault and the dogs Spitz and Dave, Buck transforms into a working sled dog. He learns not only from their experience, but also from the wild instincts awakening within him. Mastering his ability to scavenge, steal, and fight, Buck's desire to dominate the sled dog team increases, and his rivalry with the lead dog, Spitz, intensifies. Yet conditions on the trail postpone their imminent showdown. A pack of mad huskies attack the camp, Dolly subsequently goes mad from rabies, and the team struggles crossing treacherous stretches of thin ice. Buck also instigates a mutiny among the weaker dogs. One night, while Buck leads the team on a rabbit hunt, Spitz makes his attack. The rivals spar for supremacy of the pack, but Buck manages to break Spitz's leg, claiming victory. Buck becomes a masterful leader, making record runs across the Klondike. Yet demands for more mail force François and Perrault to hand over Buck and his team to a Scottish courier, who wears them down with heavy mail loads. On the trail, Dave falls ill, compelling the Scotsman to shoot him out of mercy. Exhausted from this journey, the team is handed over to Hal, Charles, and Mercedes, American fortune seekers, who mistreat Buck and his team terribly. They force them to toil under dense loads, starve them, and beat them incessantly. Barely alive, Buck's team arrives at White River, where the ice is starting to melt. A local camper, John Thornton warns Hal against crossing, but Hal belligerently beats his animals into moving forward. Buck, sensing danger, refuses to rise. Hal, incensed, beats Buck with his club. Thornton tackles Hal and cuts Buck out of the traces, saving him from the brink of death. Hal, humiliated, proceeds towards the riverbank, while Buck and Thornton watch the sled fade into the distance and suddenly drop beneath the ice. As Buck recuperates under Thornton's care, he develops a deep affection and loyalty for his "ideal master." Buck demonstrates his devotion for Thornton many times over, defending him in a bar fight, saving him from drowning, and winning a $1600 bet for him by pulling a sled loaded with one thousand pounds. With the winnings, Thornton takes Buck deeper into the Klondike in search of a lost mine. While Thornton pans for gold, Buck, haunted by visions of a caveman and the wild's beckoning call, explores the forest. He runs with a timber wolf and hunts prey on his own, but returns to Thornton's campsite when he senses that a catastrophe has occurred. Seeing the Yeehats dance over the ruins of the camp confirms Buck's suspicions that they have murdered Thornton. Driven by rage, he launches into an attack, killing the chief and overturning the law of club and fang. Buck answers the call when a wolf pack initiates him into their ranks. He runs with them, eventually becoming their leader and a legend.

- Genre: Gothic - Title: The Castle of Otranto - Point of view: Third-person subjective, occasionally with free indirect discourse - Setting: The castle of Otranto (somewhere near Naples, Italy), and the nearby church of St. Nicholas - Character: Manfred. Description: The story's antagonist, Manfred is the ruler of Otranto, the grandson of the man who usurped Otranto from its former rulers. He is husband to Hippolita, and father to Matilda and Conrad. Quick to anger, clumsily manipulative, and at times illogical, he constantly prioritizes his lust for both power and Isabella over any faith or morals he may have. The story presents his overwhelming desire for power as indicative of both his, and his entire familial line's, unsuitability for rulership. Fearing an ancient prophecy about the end of his reign, seeks first to secure his family's rulership of Otranto by marrying his son Conrad to his ward Isabella, who through her father has a rightful claim. After Conrad dies, Manfred hunts for Isabella throughout the castle in order to produce a new heir who would have a rightful claim to rule. Despite his existing marriage to Hippolita, the fact that Isabella is his own ward, and Father Jerome's admonitions, he seeks a divorce and almost manages to secure Isabella's hand in marriage from her father Frederic. When his plans fail and he attempts to murder Isabella, he accidentally kills his own daughter. In shock at having murdered Matilda, he undergoes a drastic personal change: he repents, reveals that he is not the rightful ruler of Otranto, and retires to a convent as a monk. - Character: Theodore. Description: The hero of the story, Theodore is first presented as the peasant whom Manfred wrongfully imprisons for an offhand observation. Well-spoken, noble, and brave, he bears a striking resemblance to the statue of Alfonso the Good. After he helps Isabella escape, he is again imprisoned and sentenced to death until Matilda, with whom he falls in love, helps him escape. Near the end of the novel, Theodore reveals his backstory — that he was enslaved by pirates, only to be freed by Christians many years later, and has been working as a farmer in Otranto for the past two years. Father Jerome reveals that Theodore is not only his son but also a direct descendant of Alfonso and the rightful ruler of Otranto. After Matilda's death, Theodore takes over Otranto and marries Isabella as its rightful ruler – the rightness of his rulership is supported both by his bloodline and by his always-noble behavior. - Character: Isabella. Description: A princess and the daughter of Frederic, the Marquis of Vincenza, at the beginning of the novel Isabella is Conrad's fiancé and the ward and de facto daughter of Hippolita and Manfred. Like Matilda, Isabella is beautiful, pious, and a model of filial devotion. Despite her personal reluctance, she agrees to marriage with Conrad because she believes it to be arranged by her long-lost father (later the narrator reveals that Manfred actually bribed her guardians). When Manfred attempts to rape her, Isabella protects her virtue by fleeing the castle with the help of Theodore and escapes to a cave where she meets Frederic, her long-lost father. After Manfred's failed attempt to kill her, Isabella mourns the loss of Matilda with Theodore and eventually marries him. - Character: Father Jerome. Description: Father Jerome is a devout, intelligent, and kind-hearted friar in one of Otranto's two convents. As Manfred's foil, he constantly urges the prince to renounce his thirst for worldly power and to take up faith. Jerome sees through Manfred's attempts to manipulate him and attempts to deceive Manfred to protect Isabella. When this results in Theodore's death sentence, it sets in a motion a series of events in which Jerome sees a mark on Theodore's shoulder, realizes that Theodore is his long lost son, and reveals his own past identity as the Count of Falconara. After Manfred kills Matilda, Jerome reveals that Theodore has a stronger claim to the throne than Frederic, because Jerome's wife (Theodore's mother) was Alfonso's daughter. Throughout the story, Jerome acts as a true man of faith and goodness, working to protect others and counseling against greed and lust. - Character: Frederic. Description: Frederic is the Marquis of Vincenza and Isabella's father. Throughout most of the novel, he is known as the closest male blood relative to Alfonso with the strongest claim to ruling Otranto, but has been missing for years. After his wife died in childbirth, Frederic joins the Crusades and is captured by infidels. After a vision shows him Isabella is in danger, he meets a hermit who instructs him to dig up a giant sword upon which is a mysterious prophecy. Seeking to free Isabella and to become ruler of Otranto, he brings the sword and a host of men to Otranto, where he falls in love with Matilda and almost trades daughters with Manfred until the ghost of the hermit reminds him of his quest. Upon learning of Theodore's true identity, he relinquishes his claim to Otranto and offers Isabella's hand in marriage to Theodore. Frederic is an interesting character, and a kind of middle-ground between Manfred and Theodore: never as power- or lust-hungry as Manfred, but more susceptible to corruption than Theodore. - Character: Matilda. Description: Matilda is the beautiful 18-year-old daughter of Manfred and Hippolita, and Conrad's sister. Matilda is intelligent, pious, and completely devoted to her mother. Though she originally intended to become a nun rather than marry, she falls in love with Theodore and helps him escape her father. Seeing her in a church with Theodore, Manfred thinks she is Isabella and accidentally kills her. She dies as an innocent, and her death transforms her father who immediately repents of all of his actions. - Character: Hippolita. Description: The princess of Otranto and Manfred's wife, Hippolita is the mother of Matilda and Conrad. Though she is pious and kind, her complete devotion and submission to her husband make her his key enabler. Despite her own wishes, her belief that divorce goes against her Christian faith, and her knowledge that Isabella will be forced into an unwanted marriage, she passively agrees to a divorce from Manfred when he seeks to solidify his power by marrying Isabella. After Manfred abdicates, Hippolita becomes a nun at one of the nearby convents. - Character: Alfonso. Description: Also known as Alfonso the Good, Alfonso is the heroic past ruler of Otranto and Theodore's grandfather. Though the story's characters presume that he has no heirs, it is later revealed that he had met and married a woman in Sicily, Victoria, on his way to join the Crusades. Meaning to return to her and their unborn child, Alfonso sailed for the Holy Land, only to be poisoned by his chamberlain Ricardo, Manfred's grandfather, who usurped the throne. Alfonso's daughter later married Jerome and gave birth to Theodore. When giant pieces of armor mysteriously appear around the castle, Alfonso's statue in Otranto's church are said to be missing those same pieces of armor, suggesting that Alfonso's ghost is not yet at rest and fulfilling the prophecy made by St. Nicholas — that when the rightful ruler grows too large for the castle (just as the armor is too large for any mortal), Ricardo's line will end. - Character: Hermit. Description: The hermit, who lives in the woods near Joppa, uses his lasts breaths to tell Frederic a secret from St. Nicholas about where to dig up a giant sword upon which is written a prophecy. Later, when Frederic is close to betraying his quest to follow the prophecy in his desire to marry Matilda, the hermit's ghost appears to him in Hippolita's oratory, reminding him to reject his passion and to follow heaven's command. - Character: Ricardo. Description: Alfonso's chamberlain, usurper of Otranto, father of Manuel, grandfather of Manfred, and great-grandfather of Matilda and Conrad. In the Holy Land during the Crusades, Ricardo poisons his lord Alfonso and forges a will saying that he, Ricardo, should inherit Otranto. On his way back to Otranto, Ricardo was shipwrecked and made a deal with St. Nicholas in order to survive. He would build a church and two convents in Otranto in return for rulership of Otranto "until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the castle, and as long as issue male from Ricardo's loins should remain to enjoy it." The punishment for Ricardo's sin, then, is only delayed, and is eventually visited upon Manfred. Ricardo's own portrait on the wall of Otranto seems to symbolize this, as when Manfred first searches for Isabella after her escape, Ricardo's image leaves his portrait and leads Manfred down a path that dead ends when a door slams in front of him. - Character: Bianca. Description: A servant and confidante of Hippolita, Matilda, and Isabella. Silly, nosy, and superstitious, Bianca often gossips and shows that she is willing to be deceitful when she tries to pry into Theodore's life and when she agrees to be Manfred's spy. On her way to spy on Isabella, Bianca witnesses a giant hand in armor that scares her and causes her to inadvertently reveal Manfred's bribe to Frederic. She often provides comic relief in an otherwise melodramatic story. - Character: St. Nicholas. Description: The saint to whom Otranto's church is dedicated and to whom all of Otranto pray. After Ricardo was shipwrecked and prayed to St. Nicholas for his survival in return for a church and two convents, St. Nicholas agreed, provided that Nicholas's family's reign end when the rightful ruler grew too large for the castle and when Ricardo no longer had any male heirs. St. Nicholas also shows the hermit where to find the giant sword and tells him to reveal the secret only on his deathbed. - Theme: Humor, the Gothic, and the Supernatural. Description: Much of what characterizes Gothic literature has to do with setting. As what might be described as the "grandfather" of Gothic literature, Walpole's The Castle of Otranto displays many of the features that would become stereotypically Gothic. For example, the story takes place in a foreign country, in a medieval castle with towers and secret passageways. The castle is eerie and ominous, plagued by creaking hinges, trap doors clanging shut, the wailing of the wind, and the life-like quality of people in paintings. Supernatural elements like ghosts, visions, mysterious suits of armor, and prophecies run through the novel. Though Walpole is often credited as the first Gothic novelist, such fanciful elements were in fact drawn from medieval romance, heroic tales in which knights often encountered marvels or supernatural phenomena on their adventures. Though the Gothic novel was always considered lowbrow literature even during the height of its popularity, before Walpole, "gothic" was looked down upon even more, and associated with barbarism. Walpole's novel helped to change that, and his unfettered enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was extraordinary. One of many accomplishments he is well known for is Strawberry Hill, a faux-medieval castle Walpole built for himself and on which he based The Castle of Otranto. Though many of the literary devices found in Otranto are now recognized as archetypically "Gothic," Walpole's novel indulged in humor in a way that later Gothic works such as Dracula and Frankenstein did not. Part of this is achieved merely by his presentation of Gothic and supernatural elements. For example, Conrad's death by giant helmet, while tragic to the story's characters, is completely absurd. The setting itself, often merely eerie in later Gothic works, is also occasionally humorous. The castle's "deep and hollow groan" is "the effect of pent-up vapours" — in other words, the castle is farting.Another aspect of Walpole's humor is the way he claims that the story, in fact, was written by a 16th century Catholic priest and then was translated by a man named "William Marshal, Gent." This claim about the origin of the text is fairly obviously false, and funny in its own right. At the same time, it allows Walpole in his first preface to the novel to masquerade self-praise as self-deprecation, and includes tongue-in-cheek hints at the novel's true authorship. More generally, Walpole seems to revel in the story's "Gothicness" while also poking fun at it in the first preface. In the first preface, Walpole claims the novel is merely entertainment while in his preface to the second edition, he claims that it was "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern," that is, to find a happy medium between the fanciful character of medieval romance and the realism of the modern novel. The apparently contradictory aims professed by Walpole have made readers question to what extend the book should be interpreted at face value or as a spoof of medieval literature. - Theme: The Divine vs. The Mundane. Description: The balance between spiritual belief and worldly desires is a struggle many of the novel's characters face. Manfred, the usurping prince of Otranto, is the most extreme example of this, as he succumbs to worldly temptation both politically and romantically. For example, after the death of his only male heir, Manfred attempts to preserve his lineage and political rule by committing various sins: seeking a divorce from his wife Hippolita; nearly murdering Hippolita; attempting to rape and marry his would-be daughter-in-law Isabella; and wrongfully imprisoning and sentencing a man to death. Despite Father Jerome's many rebukes and warnings against such misdeeds, Manfred repeatedly refuses to recognize any authority that Heaven, Hell, or the likes of a friar might claim over him. Though Manfred's pursuit of Isabella is largely motivated by his hunger for power, it also demonstrates the failure of the little piety he has to overcome his passion. Passion, in the sense of both lust and rage often overpower Manfred's ability to reason and to choose right over wrong. For example, when he makes sexual advances on Isabella, both his lust for her and his anger over her escape motivate him to hunt for her throughout the castle. When Theodore remarks on the similarity between the helmet that kills Conrad and that of Alfonso's statue, Manfred charges him with treason, unaware that his accusation is unreasonable and illogical. Only at the end of the novel, after Manfred mistakes Matilda for Isabella and kills his own daughter, does he repent his sins and commit himself to faith by becoming a monk.Like Manfred, the other characters of the novel struggle to place their faith above their worldly desires. Despite Father Jerome's warnings about Manfred's cursed lineage, Theodore is unable to forget Matilda, with whom he has fallen in love, even after he marries Isabella. Matilda, who had long ago committed herself to piety, forgets her former desire to become a nun in favor of her newfound love, Theodore. By the end of the novel, however, she reverts to her former state of absolute filial piety, ignoring Theodore's pleas to marry her and focusing entirely on her parents. Frederic, Isabella's long-lost father, travels to Otranto to free his daughter but is tempted both by Manfred's offer of Matilda and by the thought of controlling Otranto. Only when he is visited by the ghost of a hermit and when the ghost of Alfonso appears does he suppress his passion for Matilda and renounce his desire to rule Otranto. Hippolita, Manfred's devoted wife, finds herself agreeing to divorce in order to fulfill Manfred's wishes, despite Father Jerome's insistence that to do so would be against heaven. Ultimately, however, Hippolita is not forced to divorce Manfred, but her devotion to him, which she once privileged over her piety, is finally overcome when she becomes a nun in a local convent. In each of these instances, Walpole sets up a binary between spiritual and worldly desires. That every character's worldly desire is in some way thwarted by forces attributed to heaven, points to the sense in the novel that the divine should hold sway over the mundane and the human. - Theme: Lineage and Leadership. Description: The Castle of Otranto is deeply concerned with paternity and its relation to political rule. The novel presents three major revelations about lineage, the consequences of which drive the plot forward. The first revelation is that of Theodore's paternity. Shortly before Theodore is to be executed, Jerome recognizes him as his son and thus as a member of the noble house of Falconara. Not only does this new information determine many of Jerome's decisions regarding Isabella and Manfred but it also legitmizes the noble qualities of speech, piety, bravery, and heroism that Theodore possesses. Frederic, who has been posing as a knight, reveals himself as Isabella's father and the only known blood relative (and thus, legitimate heir) of Alfonso the Good. It is Isabella's connection to Alfonso, and thus her claim over Otranto, that first motivates Manfred to arrange a marriage between Isabella and Conrad, and it is Frederic's distant relation to Alfonso and attraction to Matilda that almost precipitates a marriage between Manfred and Isabella. At the end of the novel, it is Jerome's revelation that Theodore's grandfather is Alfonso that causes Otranto to be passed into the hands of its rightful ruler.In the preface to the first edition of the novel, Walpole comments upon the relative uselessness of the story's supposed moral: a quote from the Bible that claims "the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation." This moral proves literally true for Manfred's family: Though Ricardo's sin of poisoning Alfonso for power does not result in the punishment of either Ricardo or his son Manuel, the third and fourth generations of Ricardo's line meet disaster: Manfred kills his daughter and is himself forced to abdicate, Conrad is crushed to death by a giant helmet, and Matilda is murdered by her father.In fact, Walpole's criticism that the story does not have a "more useful" moral may actually be an ironic hint that it does have a more useful moral, one concerned with bloodlines and rulership. The novel's intense occupation with the will of heaven, in conjunction with its concern with lineage, emphasize the importance of "rightful" rulership — rulership determined by blood and endorsed by heaven. Though Theodore was for most of his life a slave and a peasant, his noble lineage renders him fit to reign in the eyes of God, or in the novel's case, St. Nicholas. This privileging of certain bloodlines both suggests class distinctions between nobility and peasantry, and recalls a justification rulers traditionally used to defend their power, that of the divine right of kings, a political doctrine in which monarchs claimed that their rule was ordained by God. However, as Horace Walpole was a Whig, and as Whigs generally did not support absolute monarchy or the divine right of kings, the story's endorsement of these ideas likely belong to Walpole's fictional Catholic priest, Onuphrio Muralto. Walpole's speculation about Muralto's agenda in the first preface is perhaps a veiled criticism of Muralto's belief in the divine right of kings. - Theme: Class, Comedy, and Tragedy. Description: In the second preface to The Castle of Otranto, Walpole acknowledges his authorship of the work and defends his use of both comedy and tragedy, elements that are tied to the story's two classes of people. Modeling his mixture of comedy and tragedy on that of Shakespeare's plays, the lower class characters are associated with comedy and the upper class characters with tragedy.The peasants, such as Bianca and Diego, are often portrayed as naïve, inarticulate, morally inferior, and prone to superstition, while the nobles, such as Hippolita and Frederic, are portrayed as dignified, articulate, intelligent, moral, and level-headed. One example of this behavioral distinction occurs when Manfred charges Theodore with treason and accuses him of witchcraft, after Theodore notices a similarity between the giant helmet that kills Conrad and the helmet formerly on Alfonso's statue. While Manfred's friends (i.e. the nobles) urge him against such an unfounded punishment, the peasants form a mob and wholeheartedly cheer his accusations, believing that Manfred's decision is just.The roles and behaviors of Theodore and Manfred suggest a blood distinction between the nobility and the peasantry. Though Theodore is originally presented as a peasant, his remarkable bravery, articulation, and conviction to do good distinguish him as a noble, a fact that is later confirmed when Jerome reveals his true parentage. Similarly, though Manfred is originally presented as a noble, his rage, evil machinations, and frequently inarticulate speech betray his claim to nobility, in particular his claim that he is the rightful ruler of Otranto (and in fact, of course, Manfred is the grandson of a non-noble man who rose to the throne only through murder and treachery).Ironically, the peasants often stumble upon truths often dismissed by the novel's noblemen and noblewomen. For example, when Bianca gossips to Matilda about the young peasant Theodore, she guesses (correctly) that he is a prince in disguise, while Matilda scorns the silliness of Bianca's imagination. Similarly, all the servants believe (correctly) that Manfred's desire to see Conrad married is motivated by his fear of a prophecy, while the nobles believe he is anxious for his son's health. However, it is worth remembering Walpole's, or rather "William Marshal's" sly suggestion that the story was written by an "artful" priest looking to "confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions." Though the fictional translator's commentary on the ideological-motivation of the fictional author Muralto might undermine a worldview of class distinctions, Walpole's second preface also reinforces this class distinction, as he perhaps exploits the peasants' comic quality to make the nobles' storylines and characters all the more attractive and engaging. - Theme: Gender and Marriage. Description: A recurring element in The Castle of Otranto is the female characters' absolute devotion to their husbands and fathers. For example, despite her husband's temper and repeated rejections of her, Hippolita is entirely devoted to Manfred. Even when presented with Manfred's sins, betrayals, and intention to marry their ward and former daughter-in-law-to-be Isabella, Hippolita passively agrees to Manfred's demand for a divorce and refuses to acknowledge Manfred's wrongdoing. Both Matilda and Isabella are instilled with a "dreadful obedience" to her parents. Though she is in love with Theodore, Matilda is nearly forced into a marriage with Isabella's father, while Isabella unhappily agrees to a marriage with Conrad because she believes her father arranged the engagement. However, when Isabella begins to pray to heaven to avoid marriage with Manfred, Hippolita stops her, claiming that her father should have the final say. By doing so, Hippolita, though extremely pious, implicitly assumes that a woman's prayers to divinity are not or should not be as important as the commands of one's father or husband. Hippolita even goes so far as to claim, "It is not ours to make election for ourselves: heaven, our fathers, and our husbands, must decide for us." Hippolita's belief in such a male-dominated worldview suggests that women have no agency of their own; all of their decisions must be decided by men or God. That Hippolita groups "fathers" and "husbands" with "heaven" suggests that men have a claim to female obedience equal to that of God. Further, this patriarchal viewpoint oppresses women even more profoundly than is at first evident, as it also implies that women are unable to become as close to God as men. While the women of the novel adore, respect, and obey the men in their lives, the men view the women as little more than objects that will unquestioningly fulfill their desires. For example, once Hippolita is unable to produce another male heir, Manfred decides to discard her and nearly murders her, as she is no longer useful to him as a reproductive tool. Matilda is objectified both by her father and by her potential suitor. Despite her original intention to become a nun, Manfred decides to marry her off to Frederic without consulting her in order to maintain his control over Otranto. Frederic, too, objectifies Matilda by discussing the engagement without her consent and by using his own daughter as currency to obtain Matilda.In the time in which the story is set and in which Walpole wrote, this objectification of women was also economic. Women were regarded as property, and their key selling point was their marriageability — that is, their virginity and their ability to reproduce. Consequently, noblewomen's bodies were often pawns used by their families to forge alliances and gain property and power. - Climax: Matilda dies, part of the castle falls down, and a giant image of Alfonso declares Theodore his true heir. - Summary: Manfred, the ruler of Otranto, is impatiently waiting for the marriage between his son Conrad and the princess Isabella, the daughter of Frederic the Marquis of Vincenza. Rumors fly about Manfred's impatience for the wedding, and the people believe that the marriage is in some way related to an ancient prophecy: "that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it." However, on the day of the wedding, Conrad is mysteriously crushed to death by a giant helmet falling from the sky. Realizing his only heir is dead and unable to produce more sons with his own wife, Hippolita, Manfred decides to continue his line by marrying his son's fiancé Isabella. Intending to divorce or kill Hippolita, Manfred approaches Isabella alone, proclaiming his intention to produce several sons with her. Despite her horrified protests, he grabs her, intending to rape her, but Isabella escapes, as Manfred is distracted first by the swaying feathers of the giant helmet, then by the moving portrait of his grandfather, then by his servants' reports of the appearance of a giant leg in armor. With the help of Theodore, a peasant, Isabella escapes the castle through a secret underground passageway to seek sanctuary at the church of St. Nicholas, where she is under the protection of Father Jerome. Matilda, Manfred's daughter, is talking with her servant Bianca about the disappearance of Isabella when a servant informs them that Isabella has taken sanctuary. Meanwhile, Father Jerome is telling Hippolita and Manfred the same thing, with Jerome insinuating but not fully disclosing Manfred's crimes. However, after Hippolita dismisses herself from the conversation, Father Jerome more frankly accuses Manfred of his crimes and urges him to repent and turn to the church. Manfred, however, repeatedly refuses, and tries to convince Jerome to grant him a divorce. Fearful of the consequences of saying no, Jerome plays along. However, much to Jerome's dismay, his granting of the divorce inadvertently results in Manfred declaring a death sentence on Theodore, whom Jerome recognizes in that moment is his long-lost son. Manfred promises Jerome his son's life only in return for Isabella, and Jerome is caught in a moral quandary. However, before he can make a decision, they are interrupted by a host of knights who carry a giant sword and who seek in the name of Frederic (Isabella's father, and the closest known relative of Alonso, the former lord of Otranto before Manfred's grandfather took power), both Isabella and rulership of Otranto. Manfred ineptly attempts to win them over, but the knights discover that Isabella is missing and race against Manfred's men to find her. Having recognized Theodore's resemblance to Otranto's past hero and ruler Alfonso, Matilda frees Theodore from her father's imprisonment, and they fall in love. In order to escape Manfred's wrath and to search for adventure, Theodore decides to protect Isabella and finds her in a cave, where he defends her from a knight. Yet the knight, whom Theodore wounds, turns out to be Isabella's father Frederic. Theodore, Frederic, and Isabella return to the castle, where Frederic recovers and falls in love with Matilda. Frederic explains how he came to be in Otranto: after being captured by infidels in the Crusades, he had a vision warning him that his daughter was in danger. The vision led him to a forest in Joppa, where he met a hermit who led him to a giant sword buried in the earth. Inscribed onto the sword is a prophecy stating that Isabella can be saved only by Alfonso's blood where the giant sabre's matching helmet is found. After Frederic finishes his story, Manfred arrives and suddenly notices the remarkable resemblance between Theodore and Alfonso. After questioning Theodore's origins, Theodore reveals how he too came to be in Otranto: at a young age, he was kidnapped and enslaved by pirates, left only with a document from his mother proving that Jerome, the Count of Falconara, is his father. After being freed by Christians two years earlier, he searched unsuccessfully for his father and wandered into Otranto, where he worked as a farmhand. The next day, Manfred tries to secure Isabella's hand in marriage by leveraging Frederic's attraction to Matilda. He proposes a double marriage, in which Frederic and Manfred will marry each other's daughters. Frederic is greatly tempted both by the possibility of having Matilda and Otranto, and the only obstacle is securing Hippolita's consent to divorce, which Manfred easily obtains. However, when the ghost of the hermit haunts Frederic for forgetting his mission and for choosing lust over heavenly will, Frederic, though still sorely tempted, decides not to go through with the double marriage. Manfred, enraged at Frederic's change of heart, becomes even angrier when one of his spies informs him that Theodore is meeting a lady in Alfonso's tomb. Believing that Isabella is having an affair with Theodore, Manfred sneaks into the tomb and stabs her, only to discover that it is Matilda, his daughter, whom he has fatally wounded. Despite her impending death, Matilda is deeply devoted to both her mother and father until the end. Parts of the castle walls fall down behind Manfred, and a great image of Alfonso appears, declaring that Theodore is his true heir. Manfred, struck with sorrow and remorse, reveals that his grandfather had usurped the throne from Alfonso, and Jerome reveals that Theodore is Alfonso's grandson. After Manfred abdicates, he and Hippolita retire to become a monk and a nun in nearby convents. Frederic renounces his claim to Otranto and offers Isabella's hand in marriage to Theodore.

- Genre: Young Adult Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Cay - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Curaçao and an unnamed island in the southwest Caribbean - Character: Phillip Enright. Description: - Character: Timothy. Description: - Character: Phillip's Mother. Description: - Theme: Protection, Self-Sufficiency, and Maturity. Description: - Theme: Sight and Insight. Description: - Theme: Racism and Shared Humanity. Description: - Theme: Education vs. Experience. Description: - Climax: Phillip and Timothy fight for their lives against a hurricane on their tiny island. - Summary: In the middle of February 1942, German submarines attack and blockade the strategic oil refineries on the island of Curaçao, where Phillip Enright lives with his mother and father. At first, this seems like an exciting development to the 12-year-old boy, who heads to the harbor with his friend Henrik to try to see the submarines. But his parents' hushed arguments hint at the gravity of the situation, and soon the blockade causes stores of food and fresh water on the island to run low. Phillip's mother decides that she and Phillip will return to their home in Virginia. His father will remain in his job on Curaçao. But only a few days into their voyage home, German submarines torpedo the ship on which they travel. As they climb into a lifeboat, the ship lurches, sending Phillip and his mother into the sea. Something hits Phillip on the head and he loses consciousness. A few hours later, Phillip wakes with an aching head to find himself on a life raft with one of the ship's Black sailors, an old man named Timothy. Phillip, who is white and whose mother taught him to share her racist distrust and dislike of Black people, instantly finds Timothy disturbing. But he needs the man's help to survive, especially when his injury makes him blind. After a few days of floating at sea, Timothy spots a tiny island in the distance, where he decides he and Phillip will wait for rescue. Over the next weeks and months, Timothy and Phillip fall into the routines of survival. They build a shelter and find food; they spell out H-E-L-P with stones in case an airplane flies overhead; they prepare a signal fire. Timothy makes a cane for Phillip, who learns to navigate the island despite his blindness. Phillip nurses Timothy through a bout of malaria. Timothy teaches Phillip to fish, and with his newfound self-confidence, Phillip finally summons the courage to shimmy up one of the cay's tall palm trees, adding fresh coconuts into their limited diet. After three months on the island, Timothy and Phillip have found a nice routine. But the arrival of a deadly hurricane interrupts this routine. As the storm barrels down on the tiny, low-lying cay, Timothy secures the pair's gear and attaches a rope to one of the palm trees. He and Phillip must withstand the direct fury of the tempest with nothing more than this to protect them. By placing his body between the wind and Phillip, Timothy saves the boy from certain death. But in doing so, he sacrifices his own life. After the storm, he succumbs to his injuries and dies. Phillip buries him on the island. A few weeks later, Phillip finally succeeds in attracting the attention of a nearby United States Navy ship, which rescues him from the island. He's soon reunited with his parents, and, a few months later, regains his sight after a series of operations. He returns to Curaçao with a newfound maturity. He hopes that someday he can locate the cay again and return to visit—and, for the first time, see—the grave of his friend Timothy.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - Point of view: First person and third person - Setting: A tavern in a mining town called Angel's Camp in California - Character: Jim Smiley. Description: Simon Wheeler tells the unnamed narrator about Jim Smiley, an enthusiastic gambler who once lived in the mining town of Angel's Camp in California. An honest and hardworking man, Smiley never cheats in his bets and instead spends his efforts training his weak-looking animals—including his mare, his bulldog named Andrew Jackson, and his frog named Dan'l Webster—to be unlikely champions. Although he presumably makes his living betting with his neighbors and others who pass through town, Smiley's integrity allows him to be an accepted member of the community. However, Smiley's integrity eventually leads to his downfall. When a stranger passes through town, Smiley is eager to challenge the man to a frog-jumping competition. The stranger accepts, but when Smiley isn't looking, he fills Webster with quail-shot to weigh him down, causing Webster to lose the competition and thereby earning the stranger Smiley's 40 dollars. - Character: Simon Wheeler. Description: Simon Wheeler is a simple old man who lives in a small mining town in the West called Angel's Camp. Wheeler tells the bulk of the story, as later transcribed by the unnamed narrator. The narrator, an out-of-towner from the East who has been sent to ask Wheeler about a supposed acquaintance by the name of Leonidas W. Smiley, is instead forced to listen to Wheeler's rambling story about a different man named Jim Smiley. Wheeler speaks with a heavy Western accent and spins a strange tall tale about Smiley and his pet frog, Dan'l Webster. Wheel loves talking, and at the end of the story, he attempts to launch into another tale about Jim Smiley's one-eyed, stump-tailed, and yellow cow. However, the narrator declines to listen to another story and instead hurries away from the tavern. - Character: Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator, a man visiting from the East, recounts Simon Wheeler's tall tale about Jim Smiley. He visits the small mining town called Angel Camp at the request of a friend, who told the narrator to locate a man named Simon Wheeler and ask him about Leonidas W. Smiley. When the narrator does so, Wheeler embarks on an entirely unrelated tale about a similarly named man called Jim Smiley. The narrator finds this tale painfully boring, but his commitment to preserving Wheeler's story as authentically as possible—he even phonetically spells out Wheeler's accent—shows his interest in capturing the distinctively Western mode of storytelling. The juxtaposition of the stuffy, highly educated narrator and the coarse, unrefined Wheeler emphasizes the regional differences between the Eastern and Western United States. - Character: The Stranger. Description: The stranger in Wheeler's story comes to the mining town of Angel's Camp and strikes up a conversation with Jim Smiley. When Smiley boasts that his frog, Dan'l Webster, can out-jump any frog in Calaveras County, the stranger responds sadly that he would accept the 40-dollar bet, if only he had a frog. Smiley promptly entrusts the stranger with Webster and goes to the swamp to catch another frog for his new acquaintance. While Smiley is gone, the stranger fills Webster with quail-shot so that he can't jump. This enables the stranger to win the competition and take off with Smiley's 40 dollars. - Character: The Mare. Description: Like many of Jim Smiley's animals, his mare looks weak and unhealthy. Its appearance is deceiving, however, because it often wins races. Smiley has trained the horse to hold back in the race until the very end so that it can suddenly pull ahead of the other horses and unexpectedly win. This allows Smiley to up his bets with people who don't think his mare will win, consequently making Smiley more money. - Character: Leonidas W. Smiley. Description: The unnamed narrator originally sought out Simon Wheeler in order to ask him about a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. A friend of the narrator's had reportedly been a childhood friend with this "young minister of the Gospel," who had lived in Angel's Camp at one point. However, Wheeler instead launches into a wholly unrelated story about a similarly named man called Jim Smiley. - Theme: Regional Differences. Description: Throughout Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain emphasizes regional differences. In the story, an unnamed narrator from the East visits a small mining town in the West, where he gets roped into hearing a long, rambling story from an old man named Simon Wheeler about a gambler named Jim Smiley and his pet frog, Dan'l Webster. Through portrayals of foreign identity and differing communication styles, the story recognizes the cultural differences between the East and West but seeks to preserve and celebrate them both. By emphasizing the differences between the regions, the story presents the East and West as being culturally distinct and irreconcilable. The very premise of the interaction between the unnamed narrator and the storyteller, Simon Wheeler, is based on an Easterner's introduction to the West. At the beginning of the story, the reader learns that the narrator has been instructed by his friend "from the East" to visit Simon Wheeler at Angel's Camp, Calaveras County, in Northern California, to hear a story. One of the characters in Wheeler's tall tale, the stranger, is a named outsider. This man cheats Smiley by filling Smiley's frog with gunshot so that it can't jump, causing Smiley to lose his forty-dollar bet. In doing so, the stranger goes against the grain of the mining community's small-town values, emphasizing that he doesn't belong. The man's dishonesty highlights the validity of retaining skepticism of strangers and underscores the cultural divide that exists between regional areas. Like the man in Wheeler's story, self-described as "only a stranger here," who broke the unstated local code of morality by cheating, the narrator is also labeled as a "stranger," one who is unused to the rules and methods of living in the West and is considered an outsider. Although the story presents these cultural differences between the East and West as being wholly distinct and irreconcilable, the story asserts that such differences should be celebrated and preserved. Even though the narrator finds Wheeler's story to be agonizingly off-topic and largely uninteresting, the narrator still takes the time to write down the entire story. In this way, he views the interaction almost as an anthropological endeavor, studying the accent and delivery of the Western storyteller, and consequently implying that these cultural differences are worth recording. The narrator writes his own secondary commentary in grammatically correct, academic English, reflecting his sophisticated Eastern education and scholarly approach to recording stories. In contrast, his depictions of Simon Wheeler include phonetic quotes of Wheeler's Western dialect. For instance, the narrator records Wheeler as saying, "Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and—." By clearly illustrating the differences in their respective pronunciations, the narrative further emphasizes their lived cultural divide between the East and West. However, by preserving Wheeler's thoughts and the style of his delivery, the narrator also seeks to preserve Wheeler's distinctively Western style of storytelling, deeming it different but inherently valuable. The story ends with the narrator cutting off the storyteller, Simon Wheeler, from launching into another story about Jim Smiley because the narrator lacks the desire to sit through another long, "monotonous" story. Once again, the regional differences between the East and West are presented as being irreconcilable—there's no sense that Wheeler will suddenly pepper his stories with lofty and academic words, while the narrator won't suddenly find himself captivated by jumping frogs and unrefined tall tales. However, although the narrator finds the content of the story lacking, he is interested enough in Wheeler's delivery to transcribe it for future readers, which is an effort to preserve the purity of the Western storytelling tradition. The story highlights the sharp cultural contrast between the East and West in the hopes of celebrating, preserving, and advocating for distinct cultural identities in the United States. Even while emphasizing and honoring these differences, the story also gives some sense that such differences shouldn't keep the country from being united. Readers simply have to look to Jim Smiley's pet names to see as much. Smiley's pet frog is named Dan'l Webster, named after the conservative senator from the East, Daniel Webster, who led the opposition to Andrew Jackson's policies. Meanwhile, Smiley's bulldog is named Andrew Jackson, after the southern U.S. President. By welcoming his own versions of those powerful politicians into his family, Smiley symbolically unites the regional divides in the country within the confines of his own backyard. - Theme: Integrity and Community. Description: In Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," an old man named Simon Wheeler tells the unnamed narrator, an out-of-towner, a long and boring story about a man named Jim Smiley and his pet frog, Dan'l Webster. Wheeler depicts Smiley as a passionate gambler who is willing to place a bet on anything—once, he even openly bet money that the local parson's wife would die from her illness. Although Jim Smiley is not particularly well-educated (or, in the case of the parson's wife, not particularly tactful), he approaches his profession as a gambler with integrity, as seen through the way he trains his animals and conducts his bets. Although Smiley's strong moral compass makes him easy to take advantage of—as the stranger does at the end of the story—his integrity is ultimately rewarding, as it earns him continued acceptance in the community and, presumably, continued business from his peers. Meanwhile, the stranger's utter lack of integrity bars him from joining the community, permanently deeming him an outsider. Smiley's hard work and integrity allow him to be a successful member of his community, despite his unusual profession as a gambler, earning his money from the losses of those around him. While Smiley's animals are deceptive in appearance because they don't look like they could win, Smiley is an honest man and simply trains his animals effectively. For example, his bulldog, Andrew Jackson, looks unassuming and weak, but he's incredibly well trained: "to look at him you'd think he wan's worth a cent […] But as soon as money was up on him, he was a different dog; his underjaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover, and shine savage like the furnaces." Likewise, Smiley's frog, Dan'l Webster, also seems "modest," but Smiley is dedicated to training it so that it's truly the best jumper. Wheeler explains, "[Smiley] ketched a frog one day, and took him home, and said he cal'klated to edercate him; and so he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a good start." Even though Smiley is a gambler, he's not a cheat, and he's genuinely dedicated to training his animals so that they will win in a competition—and consequently win Smiley money. Prior to the stranger's visit, Smiley's integrity is not a hindrance, because everyone in his town seems to adhere to the same unspoken moral code. It's only when an outsider comes into town, standing outside of the town's value system, that Smiley's integrity makes him vulnerable. When he goes down to the swap to find the stranger a frog of his own (so the two can have a frog-jumping competition), Smiley entrusts his precious frog with the stranger, never dreaming that the other man would harm his pet. A firm believer in a fair competition, Smiley is aghast when the outsider stuffs Smiley's frog full of "quail-shot" so that it can't jump—and consequently, so that Smiley loses the bet. Smiley is also appalled with the stranger runs away with Smiley's losing bet of forty dollars, which the stranger clearly did not win fair and square. While Smiley never assumed that the stranger would break the unspoken code of honorable morality practiced in the area, the other man did not feel himself beholden to honesty in an area in which he would face no consequences. By nature of just passing through, the man stands outside of the moral code. This naivety allows Smiley to be taken advantage of when he fails to predict the stranger's wrongdoing. Although Smiley loses the bet with the stranger, he maintains his honesty and membership in his community. In contrast, the stranger earns forty dollars but must flee before the consequences of his actions catch up him, thereby isolating himself from the possibility of belonging to a community. It's clear that the stranger runs away immediately after collecting the money from Smiley, because as soon as Smiley realizes that the stranger cheated, "he was the maddest man he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketchd him." In contrast, by maintaining his honesty, Smiley is able to stay in the town and benefit from a stationary lifestyle. Rather than running from the law like the stranger, Smiley presumably is able to continue placing bet after bet in his town and be "lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner." Because he refuses to cheat in his bets, Smiley leads a popular and prosperous life in his town, even though he continually wins money away from his fellow townspeople. Even though Smiley may not be the quintessential role model, the story sings his praises, illustrating to the reader the value of living honestly no matter what. - Theme: Appearances vs. Reality. Description: When the unnamed narrator visits a small mining town in the West, he meets with an old man named Simon Wheeler to ask after a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. However, Wheeler launches into an unrelated story about a similarly named Jim Smiley, whose pet animals are unlikely heroes. Smiley trains his animals for various competitions, which other people bet upon. Because Smiley's animals appear weak and unable to win, people are willing to bet against them. By investing his time and gambling-money in creatures that look frail but are actually incredibly capable, Smiley proves himself to be a clever businessman and illustrates how appearances can be deceiving. Other people judge Smiley's animals based on their underwhelming appearances, assuming that the feeble-looking animals will consequently lose their races, fights, and competitions. In fact, Smiley's mare is "so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind." Since the horse appears to be sluggish and even sickly, people understandably assume that it doesn't have the adequate strength or energy to win a race. At one point, Smiley also owns a small bulldog puppy named Andrew Jackson "that to look at him you'd think he warn't worth a cent." To those placing bets, the dog just looks "ornery" and up to no good, as if it's looking "for a chance to steal something." In addition, at the beginning of each fight, the bulldog even lets its competition "tackle him, and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him over his shoulder two or three times." This seems to validate people's judgement that the dog is going to lose. Smiley understands the human impulse to make judgments based on appearances, and he uses this bias to his advantage. In the case of Smiley's animals, appearances are misleading, as all of the animals have extensive training, which makes them formidable opponents. Smiley trains his sickly horse to hold back in the race until the very end, thereby increasing bets against him throughout the event because people thought that he would lose. When the mare nears the end of a race, she gets "excited and desperate like, and come cavorting and straddling up." The description of her sloppy racing technique makes her seem undignified in comparison to the image of a sleek, galloping racing horse. Only at the finish line does Smiley's horse pick up her pace and thus barely manage to beat the other horses at the last possible second. In this way, Smiley reinforces people's appearance-based judgments until the very last moment, consequently earning himself more money. This racing technique also signifies a preservation of energy contained until absolutely necessary—the horse doesn't put in her maximum effort to run until the last possible moment. Her training and intelligence help her be a successful, if surprising, racehorse, illustrating that appearances are misleading. Similarly, Smiley trains his small bulldog, Andrew Jackson, to be a victorious fighter. Although he appears unassuming, the dog has a fierce spirit and an unbeatable grip once he bites his opponent's back leg—his surprising and characteristic move. Like the horse, the dog has been trained to allow himself to be beaten throughout his competition, only to emerge as a shocking victor when there's a lot of money on the line. He doesn't fight back as the other dog attacks him in the ring, and instead watches "the bets being doubled and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up." Only then does Smiley's dog bite his opponent's back leg and hold on until the fight is over, again revealing that appearances can't always be trusted. By training scruffy animals to withhold their strength until the very end of the battle, Smiley plays into people's deep-rooted habit of judging based on appearances. Although this technique speaks to Smiley's business prowess, Smiley himself learns this lesson the hard way at the end of the story. When a stranger comes into town, Smiley assumes the man is harmless and challenges him to a frog-jumping competition. The stranger answers in a "kinder sad" voice, saying, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you." Believing that the stranger is as downtrodden as he seems, Smiley quickly goes to the creek to catch a frog for the man, leaving his own frog unattended in the process. This allows the stranger to stuff the frog with "quail-shot" so that it can't jump, and so Smiley will lose the bet. In this way, Twain encourages his readers to stay on their guard and always remember that appearances can be misleading. - Climax: The stranger cheats in a frog-jumping contest by filling the protagonist's frog full of heavy quail-shot and consequently runs off with Jim Smiley's money. - Summary: In "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," an unnamed narrator tracks down a man named Simon Wheeler in a tavern in a small mining town in California called Angel's Camp. The narrator has been advised by his friend in the East to seek out Wheeler in order to ask him about a man named Leonidas W. Smiley. However, instead of telling him about Leonidas, Wheeler launches into a "monotonous" story about a different but similarly named man called Jim Smiley. The narrator begins to think that his friend tricked him into sitting through a long, rambling story. Jim Smiley is a prolific gambler who is willing to bet on absolutely anything—including whether or not the Parson's wife will survive her illness. Smiley owns many feeble-looking animals and trains them to be fierce fighters and racers. For instance, he trains his sickly looking mare to hold back in races and save all her energy for the final stretch so that she can barely win the race as an unexpected champion. This practice, combined with the horse's dreadful appearance, causes many people to bet against her, consequently winning Smiley more money. Smiley also owns a bulldog puppy named Andrew Jackson, who, like the mare, doesn't look like he would be able to win a competition. Indeed, he lets other dogs attack him without fighting back while the bets are being raised. When all the money is on the table, Jackson clamps onto the back leg of his opponent and holds on until the fight is over. One day, a stranger came to town. Smiley had spent the last three months training his frog, Dan'l Webster, how to jump high, and was thus eager to bet on the frog's jumping abilities. While speaking with the stranger, Smiley bet him 40 dollars that Webster could out-jump any frog in Calaveras County. The stranger replies sadly that he doesn't have a frog, but if he did, he would accept the bet. Smiley hastily leaves for the swamp to catch another frog for the stranger, leaving Webster with the stranger in the process. While Smiley is gone, the stranger quickly fills Webster with heavy quail-shot. The shot weighs Webster down so that he can't jump. When Smiley returns with another frog for the stranger, the two men place their bets and encourage their frogs to jump. Much to Smiley's dismay, Dan'l Webster won't jump, and the stranger wins the bet. He promptly flees the town with Smiley's 40 dollars. Upon discovering that the stranger cheated, Smiley is enraged but fails to catch the stranger or recovery his money. Back in the present, when someone calls Wheeler's name and interrupts his story, the narrator takes the opportunity to slip away; just as he reaches the door, Wheeler intercepts him and launches into another rambling tale about Jim Smiley's "yaller one-eyed" cow that had a stump for a tail. However, "lacking both time and inclination" for another one of Wheeler's stories, the narrator leaves.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Cellist of Sarajevo - Point of view: 3rd person omniscient - Setting: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Character: Arrow (Alisa). Description: A sniper for the Sarajevan Defense Corps, Arrow has "turned herself into a weapon" by taking a new name and focusing only on her mission to kill as many of the men attacking Sarajevo as possible. Under the command of Nermin Filipovic, Arrow is allowed to choose her own targets to ensure that she only kills men who she feels deserve to die. Arrow does not want to add to the hatred and violence of the war, but she cannot help but lash out against the men who she feels have taken everything from her. When Arrow is assigned to protect the cellist while he plays for the city, Arrow rediscovers her love for her city and the humanity of the other side. Arrow wants to stay relatively innocent in this conflict, refusing to shoot civilians and eventually leaving the Sarajevo Defense Corps when she is reassigned to Colonel Karaman and stripped of her ability to choose her targets. Through Arrow's defection, Galloway wrestles with the crimes committed by both sides of the Bosnian War, as all the soldiers must choose which lines they will and will not cross. - Character: Kenan. Description: A middle-aged father who attempts to protect his family during the siege, Kenan's mission during the novel is to get water for his household and for his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Ristovski. Kenan does not see himself as a hero, as he has avoided becoming a soldier in the Sarajevan army and only wants to make sure that his family makes it through this crisis. Yet Galloway asserts that Kenan is heroic in his own way, doing the hard work of braving the dangerous city to make sure that others have the resources they need. Kenan works to maintain a brave face for his wife, Amila, and their children. He dreams of rebuilding Sarajevo after the war into a place where his children can thrive. Kenan decides that the only way to be worthy of rebuilding Sarajevo after the war is to keep struggling through these hard days. - Character: Dragan. Description: An elderly bakery worker, Dragan has become emotionally closed-off as a way of protecting himself from the trauma of war. After sending his wife, Raza, and son, Davor, to live safely in Italy, Dragan isolates himself in the city. He reawakens to his own emotions after running into his old friend Emina. Galloway points out that the harsh circumstances of the war have forced people to put up walls, but that a successful end to the war requires that people continue to connect with one another. Dragan hopes to be part of the group that rebuilds Sarajevo after the war. During the war, Dragan hopes to show a better image of Sarajevo to the world, acknowledging that the world should know of the atrocities that are happening in this city, but insisting that Sarajevo is not an abandoned wasteland with no chance of returning to its former state of tolerance and peace. - Character: Emina. Description: Emina is an old friend of Dragan's, who sees Dragan in the street and forces him to remember how life was in Sarajevo before the war. Emina has somehow remained optimistic during the siege, doing her best to help other people. Emina gets shot by a sniper, showing Dragan how hard it is to behave heroically, as he is unable to do anything to protect or help her. - Character: Mrs. Ristovski. Description: Kenan's elderly neighbor, a prickly woman who lived through World War II. Kenan realizes that her difficult demeanor is the result of the loss and grief of war, though he still struggles to sympathize with her, since she seems so ungrateful for his help. Mrs. Ristovski is determined to survive this next conflict, though Kenan sees that part of Mrs. Ristovski – her innocence and optimism – has already died. - Theme: War, Civilians, and Humanity. Description: The Cellist of Sarajevo depicts three weeks during the Siege of Sarajevo, which occurred during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Rather than primarily portraying soldiers, the novel focuses on civilians. In doing so, Galloway shows that war affects everyone—even those who aren't directly participating. War upends what people prioritize, how they act and behave, and it alters the most fundamental aspects of how they think. The most obvious way in which the war changes the lives of the citizens of Sarajevo is by forcing them into a constant struggle for survival, through both the immediate threat of being shot by the army in the surrounding mountains, and through the longer term threat of limited food and water. The novel's three main characters have different ways of enduring and reacting to these constant threats: Arrow works in the Sarajevo militia as a sniper to try to protect her city, Dragan makes his way through the dangerous streets to get a hot meal, and Kenan travels miles to get clean water for his family and neighbor. Even the most quotidian of these tasks exposes them to mortal danger, as Kenan is nearly hit by an exploding shell when seeking water, and Dragan is standing right near two people who are killed by enemy snipers while crossing a street. In addition to the physical danger, the novel shows the psychological and emotional damage of the war. Arrow gives up her old identity to become a "weapon" for the Sarajevo militia, going so far as to renounce her old name in order to make a clean break from her previously carefree self. With her father dead, she cares for nothing now but doing as much as she can to hurt the snipers on the hill. Kenan is consumed by worry for his children, and he is terrified that his family will be in danger if they ever leave the house, even though he resents that his children cannot go outside and have normal childhood experiences. Kenan's instinct is to care for his family at all costs, but the dangers outside nearly cause him to lose his generosity: in his mission to get water, Kenan recognizes how much easier it would be if he only had to carry water for his own family, and not for an elderly neighbor whom he naively promised to take care of when the war started. Dragan, meanwhile, sent his family to Italy so that they would be safe from the war. He has since isolated himself from all his old friends and he tries not to engage with anyone because in his hopelessness he can't bear to remember what was normal in the streets before the siege began. Ultimately, the novel portrays the journey of each character to prioritize emotional health over physical safety, since ensuring physical safety is impossible. Instead, the characters choose to reclaim and maintain their humanity despite the terrors of the war. After witnessing an old friend get wounded by a sniper, Dragan begins to reconnect to others. Likewise, instead of giving in to his impulse to close his heart to anyone but blood relations, Kenan forces himself to continue to get water for his neighbor and stay hopeful for his family. Arrow, meanwhile, leaves the Sarajevo militia when she is ordered to kill civilians instead of soldiers, despite knowing that she herself could be killed for desertion. The contrast between Arrow's moral compass and the utilitarian mindset of the other militia members suggests that the civilians' battle to maintain their humanity is more important than any aspect of the physical war. The Sarajevo militia, after all, has gotten to the point of engaging in immoral acts because it has lost its humanity. While war is a conflict between opposing sides, Galloway suggests that it is also an attack upon people's sense of individual and communal humanity. And so, the novel suggests that once the war eventually ends, it is only the civilians with their humanity intact who can have any hope of rebuilding Sarajevo. - Theme: Hatred and the Other. Description: Despite the immense damage done to the city in the war, Galloway argues that the primary cost of war is that it makes people hate each other. Galloway is curiously inattentive to the racial and religious differences that underpinned the war in Yugoslavia, ignoring altogether the particular animosity that many Serbs and Croats had towards Bosnian Muslims. Instead, the hatred on which Galloway focuses is between opposing armies. He argues (somewhat simplistically) that the primary force that drove the Bosnian war to such an extreme was soldiers unthinkingly hating whomever their superiors told them to hate. Galloway uses the Bosnian War, which was a civil war between peoples who had previously lived together in peace, to show how hatred destroys the humanity of both those who are hated and those who hate. Galloway does not include much information about the political, legal, or international events that led to the start of the Bosnian War, choosing instead to focus on how Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians began to feel about each other. Galloway suggests that the war started because each side felt that others hated them and therefore assumed that the "other" side was going to hurt them. They then preemptively lashed out to protect themselves, which escalated minor conflict into full-blown war, even though Sarajevo had previously been a place of tolerance among the many cultures and ethnicities that thrived there. The relationship between "othering" and violence is illustrated through Arrow, a sniper for the forces defending Sarajevo. Though Arrow had never wanted to be a soldier (and she even resisted becoming a part of the militia because her father had not wanted her to be involved in killing), she eventually rationalizes being part of the war by telling herself that she is only killing people who deserve it. For Arrow, the atrocities that the opposing soldiers have committed give her license to kill them in return, but by dehumanizing these soldiers in order to justify killing them, Arrow recognizes that she herself has been transformed from a human into a weapon. Arrow's refusal to recognize the humanity of the other side culminates when she sees an opposing sniper enjoying the music of the cellist, and shoots the sniper anyway. However, the emotional journey of the novel's main characters suggests that there are ways to interrupt the cycle of hatred. Dragan remembers a time when Sarajevo was a place of peace and tolerance for the many cultures who called it home. He wishes the city could return to that point and, though he is unsure whether it's possible after the horrors of the war, by the end of the novel he has begun to act in ways that insist on the humanity of others. Arrow, for her part, ultimately refuses her commander's orders to shoot Bosnians she knows are non-soldiers, which is itself a refusal to allow her militia to turn all Bosnians into "others" that do not deserve to live. She wishes that her army could remember that the Bosnian Serbs are not "rabid animals," but also people with "mothers and fathers and sisters" who love them and want them to be safe and happy. Though her refusal to shoot ends up costing Arrow either her freedom or her life (it's never made clear which), it also allows her to remember her own humanity and reassert her given name Alisa. In doing so, Alisa interrupts the cycle of hatred, and suggests that there can be a future after the destruction of the war. - Theme: Art, Culture, and Civilization. Description: In The Cellist of Sarajevo, Galloway portrays art and culture as the core of civilization. He treats them not as luxuries, but as necessities that offer access to a universal humanity that both makes life worth living and combats the hatred exacerbated by war. Galloway is explicit his assessment that the loss of culture profoundly damaged the citizens of Sarajevo during the war. For instance, he describes the burning of the city's main library and how that damage was worse for the Sarajevans than the loss of so many other buildings, since destroying the library metaphorically destroyed culture and learning in the city. The most powerful symbol of art and culture in the novel is the cellist after whom the novel is named. In deciding to play his instrument in a public square for twenty-two days to honor Sarajevan citizens killed in a mortar attack, the cellist asserts the necessity and power of art at the risk of his own life. The cellist galvanizes the citizens to travel from across the city—braving possible sniper attacks at every street corner—to listen to his music. This suggests that the music is just as necessary to their survival as the food and water they traverse the treacherous city to obtain. The citizens seem to see the music as a statement of who they are, and as a symbol of the civilization and culture they had before the war. In addition to its emotional and interpersonal value, culture is shown to be strategically important to the war effort. Nermin, Arrow's first commander, suggests that the cellist bolsters the Sarajevan cause, since the music reminds Sarajevans why the city is worth defending. If the Sarajevo militia forgets the humanity and soul of the city, he argues, they will be less motivated to defend it—as such, the cellist's music gives purpose and strength to the city's defense. Because of this, the cellist is a threat to the Bosnian Serb forces trying to seize the city, since they know that the city will be easier to take if its people are demoralized, and the cellist is giving Sarajevans a renewed sense of hope and community. Therefore, Arrow gets assigned to protect the cellist from Bosnian snipers, and she ends up in a game of cat and mouse with a Bosnian sniper sent to kill the cellist. This circumstance allows Galloway to highlight another important aspect of art and culture: not only does it bolster the war effort, but it points to moral possibilities beyond the war As Arrow listens to the cellist from the place where she's staking out the other sniper, she is reminded of her emotions. She thinks of her own humanity, as well as the humanity of the enemy Bosnian Serbs who have families and loved ones, just like she does. Furthermore, Arrow notices that the opposing sniper has become so enraptured by the cellist's music that he has put up his gun—he's so moved by art that he has, for now, set aside his mission to kill. In its ability to bridge the gap between Arrow and the opposing sniper, to connect them both through the beauty of music, the novel portrays art and music as offering a route out of the hatred of the war. However, Arrow rejects this bridge and kills the other sniper, which marks Arrow's descent into a moral abyss. This is apparent in Nermin's decision to relieve her of her duties, since he knows now that her willingness to take advantage of the sniper's vulnerable moment would lead her to other immoral acts. Further, just after she kills the opposing sniper, Arrow looks down from her location at the cellist, hoping the cellist will look up and acknowledge how she has protected him. The cellist does not look up, showing that whether the cellist is aware or not of what Arrow has done is unimportant. The lack of acknowledgement from the cellist indicates that art and culture can't be defended through violence. Rather, by showing people from every walk of life in Sarajevo (even a Bosnian Serb soldier) enjoying the cellist's music, Galloway suggests that music and culture are uniting forces; they're the best antidote to the hatred of war. - Theme: Heroism. Description: As is typical for a war novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo portrays acts of heroism. However, Galloway uses his focus on civilians to expand the definition of war heroism from soldiers' physical bravery under threat to the more quotidian activities of living life amid violence. Galloway begins his exploration of heroism by showing the way that his characters fail to meet the traditional ideals of heroism. Dragan, an older man who has lived his entire life in this city, is filled with such hopelessness that he struggles to even speak to those around him, much less react bravely when he sees an old acquaintance, Emina, get shot in the elbow on the street. Kenan, a middle-aged Sarajevan father, also finds himself helpless in the face of violence, standing in shock when a shell explodes at the brewery where Kenan collects water. Though he wishes he could be one of the people helping the injured in the aftermath, Kenan finds himself able to do nothing but stand and look at the wreckage and the dead, and then collect his water. Arrow, a former civilian who has joined the militia defending Sarajevo as a sniper, is the most conventionally heroic character in the novel. Yet Galloway complicates Arrow's heroism when she is assigned to protect the cellist and Arrow finds herself questioning if it is really heroic to kill other human beings who seem to appreciate the cellist's music as much as the Sarajevans do. Over the course of the novel, as Galloway continues the stories of his seemingly unheroic characters, he begins to portray a different kind of heroism. After Emina gets shot on her way to see the cellist, Dragan decides to go himself to see the cellist so he can then tell Emina about it. Though Dragan has spent the war avoiding contact with others, he decides to put himself in danger of sniper fire in order to help his injured friend connect with the world. Kenan, for his part, decides to go back to the shelled brewery and get water for his crotchety elderly neighbor, even though it will be difficult for him. He decides to put his responsibility to care for others above his own personal safety and comfort. Meanwhile, Galloway portrays Arrow's act of conventional war heroism—her assassination of the enemy sniper—as a moral failure, rather than heroic. Since she kills the opposing sniper while he is enjoying the cellist's music, the novel depicts Arrow's act not as protecting the cellist, but as betraying the ideals for which the cellist is playing. Instead, the novel suggests that Arrow's moment of heroism is when she refuses to shoot at innocent civilians in defiance of her orders. Ultimately, Galloway portrays the cellist, who puts himself in danger to memorialize victims of an attack, as the most heroic of all. Kenan, Dragan, and Arrow all praise the cellist for his brave effort to restore a small bit of beauty to the devastated city. Further, the cellist inspires the other citizens of Sarajevo to see beyond mere struggles for survival and reconnect with the higher ideals of humanity that will eventually help Sarajevo recover. In other words, the cellist reminds citizens that true heroism comes with empathy. - Theme: Reality, Image, and Memory. Description: As the characters in The Cellist of Sarajevo make their way through their devastated city, they are beset by memories of the city as it was before the siege. They find these memories of the old, beautiful city difficult to reconcile with the war-torn city in which they currently live. Even worse, they are faced with the possibility that their city will never return to the way it was before the war, which forces them to ask which vision of Sarajevo is the "true" Sarajevo. The novel presents such thoughts not just as key to the psychology of the citizens of Sarajevo, but as the key to the future of Sarajevo itself. Through the beginning and middle of the novel, Dragan, Kenan, and Arrow have, each in their own way, accepted the "war-torn" Sarajevo as reality. Dagan has given up on human interaction, while Kenan is focused solely on the survival of his family. Most dramatically, Arrow has transformed herself into a weapon and is focused on killing as many enemy soldiers as possible. But as each character is affected by their own experiences (particularly by hearing the cellist), each of their views shifts and they begin to see the city as being a place worth saving and a place capable of being saved. The novel then suggests that by acting as if the city is both worth saving, they create that reality: Dragan, for instance, makes this image of a better Sarajevo a reality by refusing to let a foreign camera crew film a man who has been killed by a sniper. Dragan refuses to let Sarajevo be seen by the world as a city in which dead bodies are commonly on the street, even if that is the reality during much of the siege. In addition, he desperately wants to be one of the men "worthy of rebuilding Sarajevo" after the war, and he believes that only those who hold on to hope will be able to do that. Kenan also refuses to let the war make him into "a ghost while… alive," or somebody who has no hope for the future. He protects his children's innocence, continues to support his neighbor even though it is an added burden, and jokes with his wife about going out to get the ingredients for a cake. That these characters maintain empathy and try to keep their lives enjoyable makes the city a place of life rather than death. The novel portrays the citizens of the city as existing in a kind of war against hopelessness, and it suggests that the primary weapon in that war is to create a different reality—one full of life, and dignity, and hope. At the same time, however, even as they refuse to bend to the hopeless reality of the war, the characters of the novel also hope that the terrible reality of the siege of Sarajevo is not forgotten. Even as Dragan stops the camera crews from filming the street with the dead bodies, he wants the camera crews to continue recording some aspects of the siege so that the world will witness the destruction in Sarajevo and not let such a thing happen again. Despite these hopes for remembrance, though, the novel puts the Bosnian War into a broader context that suggests that memories of the war are unlikely to have a positive effect. Kenan's elderly neighbor Mrs. Ristovski lived through WWII, after all, and now similar events are happening again. The novel itself, then, can be seen as a kind of call to avoid such atrocities in the future. Just as the characters work to maintain hope in the face of the despair of the war, the novel works to maintain hope in the ability of humanity to see the horrors of hatred and war and refuse to bow to them. - Climax: Arrow decides to defect from the Sarajevo militia, Dragan drags a man's body out of the street to protect the dignity of the dead and preserve the image of Sarajevo, and Kenan decides to go back into a risky part of town to help his neighbor get water—all inspired by the cellist's music. - Summary: A cellist in Sarajevo plays a piece called Albinoni's Adagio to help himself stay hopeful in the midst of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. As he is playing, a shell hits the bakery outside the cellist's apartment building, killing 22 people who were in line to buy bread. Meanwhile, a sniper who calls herself Arrow targets soldiers who are attacking Sarajevo. She never wanted to be a soldier and isn't comfortable with killing, but her hatred of what the men on the hill have done to Sarajevo fuels her rage. Changing her name to Arrow during the war allows her to distance herself from her old aversion to killing enough to make herself a weapon so she can defend her city. She shoots a soldier, for no reason other than that he is a solider on the other side. On the other side of town, Kenan, a middle-aged Sarajevan father, wakes up and gets ready for the dangerous trip to get his family water at a brewery. He doesn't want to go out into the streets, but he knows he has to so that his family can survive. Furthermore, he has promised Mrs. Ristovski, his elderly neighbor, that he would help her make it through the war. Out on the streets of Sarajevo, an older man named Dragan remembers the peace and happiness of the old Sarajevo as he walks to the bakery to get bread. He wishes they could all return to that past, but he suspects that the perfect Sarajevo he remembers never actually existed. His wife, Raza, and teenage son, Davor, escaped to Italy when the war began. Now Dragan lives with his sister and isolates himself from everyone in his old life. Dragan stops at an intersection and hides behind some boxcars as he waits for the right moment to go out into the street where snipers might shoot him. Kenan tries to pretend that he is going for a normal walk to work in his old life. He greets an old friend Ismet, who has become a solider for the Sarajevo militia. Kenan is ashamed that he has avoided the draft so far, but he truly wants nothing to do with death and killing. Kenan then passes the old Music Academy and the tram station, thinking of all the civilized things that the war has destroyed. He reaches the Miljacka River that runs through Sarajevo and decides to walk down to the Princip Bridge instead of braving the Cumurija Bridge that has been reduced to steel girders after multiple mortars. But the Princip Bridge is currently being targeted by snipers and Kenan has to walk all the way down to the Seher Cehaja Bridge. Arrow goes to report to her commander, Nermin Filipovic. When Arrow first started as a sniper, Nermin promised that Arrow would be able to pick her own targets. But now Nermin has a special assignment for Arrow: protecting a cellist who has decided to play an Adagio for 22 days to memorialize the victims of a recent shelling attack. Dragan remains stuck at the intersection, after seeing a couple get shot at as they crossed. He sees an old friend of his wife's, a woman named Emina. Emina strikes up a conversation though Dragan tries to stay distant. After chatting for a while, they wish together that the world would pay attention to what is happening in Sarajevo and that people could be kind and caring again. Dragan eventually decides to try to cross the street, but gets shot at before he makes it halfway. He runs back to the side where Emina is still waiting. Back with the cellist, Arrow stakes out the area where the cellist plays in the street. She decides that the enemy sniper will likely hide in a building to the east, so she chooses an abandoned apartment in the southwest where she can counter if the sniper tries to shoot. She sets up a decoy apartment for the sniper to shoot at first, hoping to get the sniper to reveal his position before he targets the cellist. At four in the afternoon, the cellist comes out to play. Arrow thinks she sees the sniper in one of the apartments across the square, but the sniper never shoots. On his way to the lower bridge, Kenan passes the burned National Library and mourns the loss of culture and civilization in the city. He reaches the bridge and runs across erratically, hoping to confuse any potential sniper. At the other side, Kenan drops Mrs. Ristovski's bottles, making him think again how much he resents having to help this woman who has always been mean to him and his family. Dragan and Emina continue to talk, sharing their deep fears of being wounded or killed as they walk through their city. Emina tells Dragan about a cellist who is playing in the streets, doing what he can to keep hope alive in Sarajevo even if he can't accomplish anything to truly end the war. After watching a dog walk across the street safely, Emina decides to try to cross. As she does, a man with a hat crosses from the other side. A sniper shoots Emina in the arm, and man with the hat does not stop to help Emina. Dragan stays stuck on the side of the road while another young man leaps into the line of fire to carry Emina to safety. Emina and the young man make it back to the boxcar but the man with the hat gets shot in the stomach. The sniper then hits the man with the hat in the head, blowing the man's hat over to Dragan's feet. Arrow goes back to the cellist's street the next morning. She sees a flowers placed on the street as a memorial to victims of the bakery attack and wonders when she stopped feeling anything for the dead. Arrow glances up at her decoy apartment and her hiding place, then realizes that the sniper is watching her. She hurries away, hoping the sniper hasn't figured out her plan. By four o'clock, Arrow is again hidden in the apartment waiting for the sniper to shoot at the decoy so she can kill him. The cellist comes out and begins to play again. Unfortunately, the sniper is hiding in the decoy apartment and shoots into Arrow's hiding spot before she can react. Arrow doges the bullet, then waits for the second shot that will kill the cellist. Yet the sniper still doesn't shoot the cellist. Arrow reports to Nermin, who warns her that the Sarajevo militia will soon try to take control of Arrow's talents and use them for their own purposes. The next day, Arrow goes back to her hiding place and waits for the sniper to show himself again; he shows himself as soon as the cellist comes out to play. Arrow plans to shoot him, but stops when she sees that the sniper is genuinely listening to the cellist's music. Arrow struggles with the ethical dilemma of shooting this man, then sends a bullet into the sniper's head just as the cellist finishes. Arrow wishes the cellist would acknowledge what she just did for him, but the cellist goes inside without looking up at Arrow at all. Kenan makes it to the brewery and waits to fill up his containers. As he gets to the front of the line, the brewery is hit by mortars. Kenan is shocked by the violence and suffering surrounding him, and he cannot move even to help the injured. All he can do is finish filling up his bottles and start the long journey toward home. With the lower bridges under attack from the shelling, Kenan is forced up to the precarious Cumurija Bridge. Finding it too hard to cross while carrying Mrs. Ristovski's bottles as well as his own, Kenan leaves Mrs. Ristovski's bottles behind. At Dragan's intersection, people help Emina into a car to go to the hospital for her arm. All Dragan can do is hold her blue coat, cursing himself for not helping Emina get to safety and noticing how the color of the coat contrasts with the gray of the city. As the car drives away, Dragan thinks about how he gave up on Sarajevo in the hopelessness of war. Though dreaming of escaping to Italy to be with his family, Dragan decides he will stay in Sarajevo and try to remake the home he once had here. Arrow has another meeting with Nermin to tell him she killed the sniper even though the sniper never shot. Nermin tells Arrow to disappear so that the Sarajevo militia will not force her to compromise her morals any further. Nermin himself is leaving the army now that the people in power are so focused on winning the war that they are destroying everything that Sarajevo once stood for. As Arrow leaves the office, Nermin's office building explodes from the inside. In her own apartment that night, three soldiers appear and force Arrow to report to Colonel Karaman. The colonel assigns Arrow to a new mission where she will not be allowed to choose her targets. Kenan makes it through the city back to the market where he sees Ismet once again. As Ismet goes to barter for food, Kenan sees a well-fed man with a Mercedes accepting a shipment of water to sell on the black market. Kenan is so angry that people like this take advantage of the starving and trapped Sarajevans that he goes to confront this man. Kenan is then distracted by the sound of a cellist playing in the street. The music helps Kenan remember the old Sarajevo. He promises to himself that he won't let the war make him bitter, so that he can help restore Sarajevo after the war. Kenan decides to go back for Mrs. Ristovski's water bottles. Arrow is taken to the bombed out Parliament Building, where a soldier named Hasan becomes her spotter. Hasan orders Arrow to shoot a civilian walking through enemy controlled territory in Sarajevo. Arrow wrestles with her conscience, feeling her rage at the enemy and her pain at all she has lost. But Arrow decides not to shoot the civilian and runs from the Parliament Building, though she knows this makes her a defector. Meanwhile, at his intersection Dragan sees a journalist setting up a camera to record the dead body of the man who tried to cross. Dragan suddenly realizes that he does not want this image of destruction to be what the world sees of Sarajevo. Before the journalist finishes, Dragan risks sniper fire to drag the body out of the street. He gets the body behind the boxcars and returns the man's hat. Four days after Kenan got water, it is time for the journey to the brewery again. After hearing the cellist for the last four days, Kenan is far more hopeful. He faces the journey for water with new bravery as a way to keep Sarajevo alive. Dragan also decides to do what he can to restore the spirit of the old Sarajevo. He calmly walks across the street so that he can go hear the cellist play, and commits himself to connecting with the people around him, greeting people on the street instead of hiding. That night, Arrow waits in her apartment for the soldiers to come get her. She has protected the cellist through his 22 day memorial. She now reclaims her old name – Alisa – and accepts death rather than continuing to kill out of hatred.

- Genre: Interpretive Literature - Title: The Child by Tiger - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Post-Civil War Southern United States - Character: Narrator. Description: The narrator is an unnamed adult reflecting back to his boyhood 25 years ago, possibly around the age of 12, in a small, presumably southern U.S. town. He plays often with three friends, Randy Shepperton, Nebraska Crane, and Augustus Potterham. When the flashback begins, the narrator is very trusting and seeks an older man's example. He finds this in Dick Prosser, Mr. Shepperton's new hired man. Dick is very gentle towards him and his friends, treating them as an older brother would. Dick can throw a football perfectly and can fire a pistol with perfect aim, both actions which inspire awe in the narrator, and he teaches him how to box with his friends, light a fire, and other skills. At the same time, the narrator has a strong feeling of uneasiness around Dick Prosser, but at first, he cannot understand it. He continues to trust Dick even though Dick's deep religiosity strikes him as eerie, and even though Dick sometimes seems to creep up on the boys like a shadow. When the boys find Dick's gun, they keep its existence secret from everyone. Later on, after Dick's killing spree, the narrator feels guilty that he didn't reveal his knowledge of Dick's weapon. When Dick's maliciousness becomes evident with his crime, the narrator feels sick and afraid. He can sense darkness in all of humanity that he wasn't aware of before and still can't understand. When he finally sees Dick's mangled body hanging in the town square, he no longer recognizes the innocence he once trusted in Dick. Looking back on these events as an adult, the narrator is now certain that Dick came from darkness and represents the darkness of all human beings. Throughout the story, the narrator experiences a jarring coming of age in which he changes from trusting a seemingly kind older man to distrusting the potential evil in everyone. - Character: Dick Prosser. Description: Dick Prosser is Mr. Shepperton's new hired man. He is described by Mr. Shepperton as "the smartest [Black person] that he'd ever known," an example of the various expressions of racism Dick encounters when he comes to live in this small town. Little is known about Dick's past except that he claims to have served in the Army. Dick impresses everyone with his skills at shooting, stacking kindling, and lighting fires, among other things. He is particularly kind and gentle towards the narrator and his friends, teaching them how to do things and caring for their safety. There is something mysterious and unsettling about Dick, however. The boys feel like he sneaks up on them, and they sense a shadow when he is nearby. Dick is also deeply religious and spends a lot of time reading his Bible—one of his only possessions—which makes his eyes red from weeping. He loves to sing hymns and sometimes chants biblical phrases that foretell apocalyptic events, unnerving the boys. Dick encounters explicit racism throughout the story, such as when Lon Everett punches him unprovoked. Up to this point, however, he conceals his rage and violence with gentleness and passivity: when the boys find his gun, he pretends he bought it to surprise them, and they believe him. When Dick goes on an unexpected killing spree, his skills, which were initially impressive and used for good, become means for terrorizing the whole town. Although the story implies that Dick's experiences of racism help provoke his explosion, his violence appears to be indiscriminate: he kills everyone he encounters, including Pansy Harris' husband and another Black man who simply looks out a window. After a long chase, a town mob traps Dick in the woods, where he appears to surrender just before being shot to death. The mob continues shooting his dead body and later displays his mutilated corpse in the town square. For the narrator, Dick becomes a symbol of the potential violence in all people, and years later, the narrator associates Dick with the mysterious "tyger" in the poem by William Blake, concluding that he is both dark like a tiger and innocent like a child. - Character: Randy Shepperton. Description: Randy is the narrator's closest friend and the son of Mr. Shepperton, Dick Prosser's employer. He is with the narrator during most of the scenes in the story and shares the narrator's major changes of perspective, first idolizing Dick and later feeling guilty for not telling anyone about the gun. Like the narrator, he feels nauseous and afraid when he looks at Dick's corpse. - Character: Nebraska Crane. Description: Nebraska Crane is one of the narrator's friends who plays ball with him when the story begins. Along with the other boys, he idolizes Dick Prosser and trusts him enough to keep his secret about the gun in the basement. However, when Dick's crime comes to light, Nebraska is excited by the angry mob, unlike his fearful friends. When he sees Dick's body hanging in the square, he is triumphant, and his eyes have a savage look in them. - Character: Mr. Shepperton. Description: Mr. Shepperton is Randy Shepperton's father and Dick Prosser's employer. Mr. Shepperton is very impressed with Dick's work. Later, he brings the boys and Mr. Crane into town when he hears about Dick's shooting spree. After Dick's death, he brings the boys downstairs into Dick's basement room and reads from the Bible where Dick had left off reading. When they leave, he locks the door so that no one can ever go in Dick's room again. - Character: Pansy Harris. Description: Pansy is Mr. Shepperton's family cook. Though known to be cheerful, she becomes very sullen when the Shepperton hire Dick Prosser and mysteriously quits her job soon after. Dick visits her the night of his shooting spree, and her husband finds them there. After the men get into a fight, Dick shoots and kills Pansy's husband. - Theme: Violence, Darkness, and Growing Up. Description: In "The Child by Tiger," the young narrator and his friends are fascinated by the Sheppertons' new hired man, Dick Prosser. They look up to him as someone powerful and skilled, able to split kindling and shoot a rifle with perfect precision. They also trust him because of his gentle, patient instruction, like when he teaches them how to box without hurting each other. And yet they're often afraid of him, too: sometimes he suddenly comes upon them like a shadow, and they find his deep religiosity "dark and strange." Despite those moments when Dick seems menacing, the narrator and his friends are too young to understand the uneasy feeling they have about him. They continue to trust him, even when they find his rifle in the basement. When Dick unexpectedly murders six people, however, the boys are changed for good: Nebraska Crane gets swept up in the mob's savage revenge; the narrator can no longer believe he once thought Dick was gentle and innocent. Through the boys' changing view of Dick Prosser, the story suggests that part of growing up is coming to recognize the darkness of life—even the potential violence in people—in a way that children cannot. The story first presents Dick's power and skill as impressive and wondrous to the young narrator and his friends, leading them to innocently admire and trust him. Dick treats the boys in such a way that they aspire to be like him when they're older. Dick assures them that one day they'll be able to hold a football as well as him. The boys love when Dick calls them "Mr. Crane" and "Cap'n Shepperton" because it makes them feel a sense of "mature importance and authority." On top of this, the boys are ignorant of the potential violence in everything Dick teaches them. While all the things Dick shows them—boxing, shooting, even splitting kindling— could be used for harm in a different context, the boys admire the sheer impressiveness of Dick's ability to "[put] twelve holes through a space one-inch square" with a gun. It doesn't occur to them that this skill could just as easily be used to kill a human being. While the boys are ignorant of the violence these skills could be used for, Dick also conceals their potential violence with his gentleness. It is significant that Dick never boxes with the boys and is mindful that they don't hurt one another. This restraint conceals his violent potential and naturally leads the boys to trust him. As the story develops, several ambiguous signs point to Dick's untrustworthiness, but they are too strange for the boys to understand at first. First, the uneasy feeling the boys get around Dick seems unfounded. They think he sneaks up on them like a cat or a shadow, and they imagine it's him when they hear the house creaking at night. At this point, these superstitions have no grounding in reality, so they seem like the nightmares a typical young boy might have. Furthermore, Dick's religiosity confuses the boys. Dick gets deeply emotional over his Bible reading, and he chants biblical phrases to them which hint at his desire for social upheaval, but the boys don't understand his references. Rather than recognizing a darker potential in Dick, they are mostly just mystified by his religious faith, and their trust in him remains intact. Even the sight of the gun in Dick's basement—a clear hint of violence— is not enough to fully change their view of Dick. Dick asks them to keep the gun a secret from "the other white fokes," and they eagerly vow secrecy. The boys seem to view this as an instance of Dick trusting them with grown-up information, which makes them feel proud and honored instead of prompting them to suspect anything sinister. In contrast, after Dick's crime, the narrator and his friends can no longer see innocence anywhere, even in themselves. First, Dick is transfigured in the narrator's eyes. When the narrator and Randy see his mangled corpse hanging in the square, they cannot believe that "once this thing had spoken to [them] gently." They call Dick "a thing" because his corpse no longer resembles a human being, much less the kind person they once trusted. The darkness Dick reveals appears in many other characters as well. Nebraska Crane expresses a newfound potential for violence. He is excited when the mob rallies its forces to hunt down Dick and is triumphant when they succeed in taking down "a big one." Dick's crime and its aftermath expose Nebraska to his society's capacity for violent, racist behavior, and they stir a similar darkness in Nebraska himself. Also, the townspeople appear changed to the narrator when they gather to gape at Dick's body. Even though they are so familiar to him, his neighbors appear to him now as "the mongrel conquerors of earth," and the narrator realizes there is something "hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men." Dick's crime has brought something to the surface that the narrator never recognized in them before. Even the narrator and Randy, although they are appalled and sickened by the crime, are no longer innocent. They confront their own guilt as if "the burden of the crime was on [their] own shoulders," because they had known about the gun in the basement and hadn't told anyone. Even though the boys' view of Dick changes and he ceases to be innocent in their eyes, they continue to see in him something they will inevitably become. When they are young at the beginning of the story, they look forward to when they'll be able to hold a football as well as him, and they are immeasurably proud when he draws them into his confidence. After the crime, they think of their own partial responsibility for it, and they recognize their own potential darkness as well as his. Thus their own innocence goes away along with their ability to recognize innocence in others. - Theme: Evil and Innocence. Description: Throughout "The Child by Tiger," the narrator witnesses innocence and evil. He believes at first that Dick Prosser is an innocent person: Dick is nice to him and his friends, teaching them things an older brother would and being careful that they never hurt one another. The narrator's opinion of Dick's goodness changes when Dick kills several people in town, but not in a straightforward way. Rather, the narrator is now aware of something dark in human life more broadly that he doesn't completely understand. This darkness is "something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of men." He sees it in everyone and not just in Dick: ordinary townspeople display unprecedented rage and violence when they seek to capture and kill Dick, and the narrator even feels his own guilt because he'd known about the gun Dick used to commit his crimes, but he didn't tell anyone. In this way, Dick's crime does not just change the narrator's opinion of Dick but changes his opinion of humanity as a whole. What is more, Dick becomes "a symbol of man's evil innocence" to the narrator. This oxymoron expresses the narrator's inability to categorize Dick as either innocent or evil after having seen him be both gentle and violent. Through the narrator's changing perspective on Dick, himself, and others, the story suggests that evil and innocence are not always distinguishable in life, and that, in fact, they coexist within everyone. When the narrator first hears of Dick's crime, his view of Dick does not change straightforwardly from innocent to evil. The narrator's complicated view of Dick is evident in how he neither participates in the mob's rage and hatred towards Dick nor ignores it altogether. While the town is awake in a feverish state of alarm and rage, pursuing Dick through the square and retelling the story of his crimes, the narrator feels nausea and fear. He is unable to join in his neighbors' hatred of Dick, yet he can no longer regard Dick as a friend, either. Furthermore, his new feeling is not the result of a transformation of Dick's character but rather something new and alien that seems to have entered life as a whole. When the narrator gazes at Dick's body hanging in the square, he cannot believe that he once admired and respected the person this used to be. He remarks that "something had come into our lives we could not understand"—suggesting that Dick's crime and brutal death have unsettled his understanding of good and evil altogether. This new darkness does not apply just to Dick but to everyone. The narrator sees Dick's evil as "something hateful and unspeakable in the souls of all men." In fact, even the narrator and his friends are not free from blame for Dick's crime. The narrator and Randy feel fearful and guilty "as if somehow the crime lay on [their] shoulders," because they had known about the gun Dick was keeping in his basement, and they hadn't told anyone. The townspeople, in a general sense, are also not blameless. While they did not do anything to enable Dick's crime, they show that they are capable of the same violence as Dick. They smash the windows of the hardware store and take guns and ammunition, and they set a pack of bloodthirsty dogs on his trail. To drive this point further home, the mob shoots Dick over 200 times, hangs him to a tree, and then puts his bloody, mangled body up for display in the town square. In so doing, they seem not to expose Dick's violence but rather their own. The narrator struggles to put together the innocence and evil he has witnessed over the course of the story. In particular, the narrator is bewildered by his gentle memories of Dick in light of Dick's recent vengeance. When Mr. Shepperton reads aloud from the Bible Dick left behind, the narrator is baffled because the Psalm sounds so holy: "he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness." The Psalm seems to represent an innocence the narrator no longer believes in. However, he is puzzled because Dick himself seemed to have believed in it, and this doesn't fit with Dick's violent actions. Contrary to what the Psalm suggests, the narrator thinks that Dick comes from an incomprehensible source of darkness. He reflects on a poem that seems to fit Dick more appropriately—a William Blake poem that asks how a frightful, menacing tiger could have been created. This unsettling poem expresses the menace that lurked in Dick and the incomprehensible darkness from which he seemed to come. It seems that the narrator believes Dick was particularly menacing because he so mysteriously combined innocence and evil. The obscure place of darkness from which Dick seems to come is terrifying precisely because it is dark—within it, signs and reasons are invisible, misleading, and contradictory. The narrator is forced to recognize the paradox that Dick was both innocent and evil and that the same paradox exists within himself. In the end, he decides that Dick is both "a tiger and a child," a phrase that captures both the darkness and innocence within all human beings. - Theme: Racism and Violence. Description: Racial tension is present throughout "The Child by Tiger." As a Black man, Dick Prosser is treated differently: Mr. Shepperton is especially impressed with him because he's "the smartest darky that he'd ever known," implying that Shepperton finds a Black person's intelligence unusual or surprising. More explicitly, racial prejudice is shown when Lon Everett strikes Dick savagely without provocation. Though Dick himself doesn't speak of racism directly, he sometimes drops enigmatic hints, such as when he warns the boys that one day "[God will] put de sheep upon de right hand and de goats upon de left," hinting that segregation will not just be overcome someday, but dramatically reversed. Such statements suggest that Dick's eventual violence is a reaction to his society's racial injustice—a reaction that's been building for a long time. After his shooting spree, the town rises up against him with mob violence, hunting him, killing him, and hanging his body from a tree, gesturing to the lynchings of the post-Civil War south. Wolfe, in harking back to this history of racism in describing Dick's crimes, draws attention to the potential violence of every character, not just Dick. In doing so, Wolfe suggests that violence is an extreme manifestation of the harm that deeply embedded racism does to individuals and societies across racial lines. Dick Prosser seems to have been angry about racism for a long time, and this anger apparently contributes to his eventual crime. The full potential of Dick's rage is seen when Lon Everett crashes into Dick's car and then punches him in the face, even though the accident is Lon's fault. Though he doesn't retaliate, Dick is extremely aggravated: his eyes get red and his hands twitch with rage at the sheer injustice of Lon's action. The depth of Dick's rage against racial injustice is further suggested by the mysterious biblical language he uses. Once, Dick says ominously to the boys "de day is comin' when […] [God will] put de sheep upon de right hand and de goats upon de left." Although he's not openly saying that racism infuriates him, he's heavily implying it. It seems that Dick uses this biblical phrase as an illustration of reverse segregation—something he apparently hopes for as revenge for the injustice he's received. Taking all this into account, it is not completely surprising when Dick's rage explodes in a spree of violence. Dick's crime is disproportionately atrocious to his provocations, but nonetheless, the story presents his trial with racism as constant, ongoing, and even dehumanizing. Similarly, the crowd's response to Dick's crime is clearly the manifestation of fear and rage that have lain dormant for a long time. The townspeople's fervor for revenge is tremendous. They band together, amassing bloodthirsty hounds, breaking into the hardware store, and equipping themselves with guns and ammunition. When the people all rage in unison, Nebraska Crane whispers, "they mean business this time," hinting that in the past, the town has stopped short of explicit violence, but the hatred was always there. Their all-too-ready eagerness to seek revenge against Dick suggests the magnitude of the racial hatred they've been suppressing. Their explosion is so great, in fact, that they undo whatever negligible progress the town has made towards restraining racist violence. Hugh McNair, trying to placate them, shouts "this is no case for lynch law!" But the crowd shouts back, "We've waited long enough! We're going to get [Dick]," suggesting that the mob isn't interested in hearing reason. Indeed, they show every indication of wanting to lynch Dick: they hunt him with dogs, brutally murder him, and hang his body in the square for everyone to see. This shows that racism has, at best, lain dormant within their town and that the townspeople were only waiting for the opportunity to feel justified in expressing it. In the cases of both Dick's and the mob's violence, the reaction far exceeds the bounds of what provokes it. Dick's violent rampage is an extreme reaction which doesn't aim to dismantle racism, but rather seems to uphold a kind of racial supremacy. In his strange, biblical murmurings, Dick confesses that he wants "Armageddon day:" a day when racial segregation will not just be eradicated but reversed, with Black people at the top of society. It is also significant that Dick's first murder is of another Black man. In this instance, Dick is not only at fault for being the one visiting Pansy Harris, another man's wife, but he also unleashes his unjust attack on a man who's been on the same side of racial injustice as him all along, showing how his violence has missed its initial mark. The mob shows the same excessive and off-target violence. When they capture Dick and execute him, they don't just shoot him once but 287 times, as Ben Pounders triumphantly boasts. Obviously, one shot would've been sufficient to take down the murderer, but the mob was carried away by their own violence. These instances suggest that a history of racism creates out-of-control violence in everyone alike. Throughout the events of the story, it is difficult to identify the antagonist, and this seems intentional on the author's part. While Dick's actions are clearly atrocious, society and other individuals in the story are simultaneously exposed and charged for their crimes of racial violence. By showing the history of racism rearing its head when Dick commits his crime, Wolfe ensures that we cannot condemn Dick without condemning the people who oppressed and segregated him in the first place. Moreover, Wolfe shows how extreme violence comes out of a long history of racism. In this story, violence occurs across the lines of race, suggesting that in a racist society, everyone can play a role in perpetuating violence, and everyone suffers harm as a result. - Climax: Dick Prosser is killed. - Summary: Twenty-five years ago, the narrator and his friends Randy Shepperton, Nebraska Crane, and Augustus Potterham are throwing a football around. One of them misses the ball, and Dick Prosser, Mr. Shepperton's new hired man, comes along and catches it, tossing it back. The boys are in awe of Dick's skills and his gentleness. He can shoot a gun with perfect aim and has taught them how to throw a football and how to box without hurting one another. They think there is nothing Dick Prosser cannot do. However, the boys also fear Dick. Sometimes he comes up on them stealthily like a cat, and when they hear creaking noises at night, they think it might be him. Dick is deeply religious; he is always humming hymns, and sometimes, when he speaks, he seems to chant, muttering biblical phrases such as "Armageddon day's a comin'." After reading his Bible—the only object in his room—he emerges with eyes red from weeping. Once, Lon Everett, driving drunk, crashed into Dick's car, then punched Dick in the face, even though the accident had been his fault. Even though Dick didn't retaliate, his eyes got red and his teeth bared. Also, around the time when Dick was hired, the Sheppertons' cook, Pansy Harris, became very sulky and quit her job shortly thereafter. Earlier on the day Pansy quits, the boys are playing in the Sheppertons' basement, and they peek inside Dick's room. They see a gun lying on the table next to the Bible. Suddenly, Dick is there, baring his teeth, and the boys are terrified. Then Dick laughs and explains that, as an Army man, he can't do without his gun. He says he wanted to surprise them on Christmas morning and teach them how to shoot the gun. He asks them to keep his secret from the other "white fokes," and they give him their word. That night, it snows heavily. The narrator awakens suddenly when the town's alarm bell clangs. Everyone in town runs into the streets, asking what's happening. The narrator hears "it's that nigger of Shepperton's" and "they say he's killed four people." He and Randy think about the gun in Dick's room and feel guilty because they didn't tell anyone. The narrator gets in Mr. Shepperton's car with his friends, and they head towards town. A mob of townspeople has gathered outside the hardware store. The mob gets more and more excited, and, without waiting for Cash Eager to come unlock the door, they smash the window and break inside. They grab guns and ammunition and stream out of the store in pursuit of Dick. The narrator hears the terrifying sound of howling hounds approaching the town square. He and Randy feel sick and afraid, but Nebraska Crane seems excited, and there's a savage glimmer in his eyes. The boys stay behind, but the mob sets out, following the trail the hounds are picking up from Dick's scent. Back at the square, the narrator listens and pieces together the story of what happened. Earlier that night, Pansy Harris' husband had come home to find Dick with Pansy. They began to fight, and Dick shot Harris as he tried to run from the house. Dick grabbed Pansy, hid in the house, and waited. Policemen Willis and John Grady came to the shack looking for him, but Dick shot them both, then made his way towards town, swinging his gun left and right. John Chapman, a well-loved police officer, stationed himself behind a telephone pole and fired at Dick as he approached, missing. Dick shot and killed him, then left town. The mob of townspeople and policemen trails Dick for several days as he hides out in the woods. Dick kills several deputies before the mob eventually corners him at the river. There, Dick drops his gun, but then he does something strange: he unlaces his boots, takes them off, and stands in his bare feet facing the mob. They shoot him through with bullets, then hang his body to a tree and empty their guns on the corpse. They take his body back to town and hang it up in the square for everyone to see, and Ben Pounders brags about having fired the first shot. The narrator and Randy feel nauseous when they see the hanging body, but Nebraska Crane is triumphant. The narrator is aware of a darkness he can now see in all of humanity. A few days later, the boys go down to Dick Prosser's room with Mr. Shepperton. Mr. Shepperton picks up the Bible that still sits on Dick's table and reads from the place where Dick had been reading, "The Lord is my shepherd." Years later, the narrator thinks the poem "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night," seems much more fitting for Dick than the biblical Psalm. After the crime, the town speculates as to where Dick came from, but no one can figure it out. In the present, the narrator thinks he knows the answer: Dick came from darkness, and he is a symbol of man's "evil innocence."

- Genre: Short Story, Historical Fiction - Title: The Chinese Statue - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Peking, China and London, England - Character: Narrator. Description: - Character: Sir Alexander Heathcote. Description: - Character: Yung Lee (the Craftsman). Description: - Character: Alex Heathcote. Description: - Theme: Appearance vs. Reality. Description: - Theme: Exoticism and Colonialism. Description: - Theme: Family Legacy and the Passage of Time. Description: - Theme: Cultural Differences. Description: - Climax: Alex Heathcote sells his great-great-grandfather's beloved Chinese statue at Sotheby's. - Summary: "The Chinese Statue" opens at an auction at Sotheby's in London during the 1970s. The narrator, who is in attendance, sees the Chinese statue in the auction catalog. The statue, which the catalog says was purchased in Ha Li Chuan in 1871, piques the narrator's interest, so he decides to research its history. The story then switches to the narrative of the statue's journey, presumably showing the findings of the narrator's research. This narrative begins with Sir Alexander Heathcote, a diplomat in Queen Victoria's government. Sir Alexander, who has had an already illustrious career and who happens to have an interest in Chinese Ming dynasty art, begins an appointment as a diplomat in Peking, China. On one expedition outside of Peking, Sir Alexander (accompanied by a mandarin) comes upon the workshop of an old craftsman in the village of Ha Li Chuan. Upon communicating with Sir Alexander through the translator about his appreciation for the work and love for Ming dynasty art, the craftsman shows him what he says is an original piece of Ming art that has been passed down through his family for generations. Sir Alexander is taken by the statue and expresses his wish to own it. However, in the next moment, he realizes his mistake: in his excitement, he forgot that it is the craftsman's custom to give an honored guest anything they ask for. Sir Alexander tries to backtrack, but the craftsman sadly insists on fulfilling this custom and gives him the statue. As the statue does not have a base, the craftsman selects one. Though it does not match the statue aesthetically and its origins are unknown, the craftsman assures Sir Alexander that the base he selects is of a high quality. Upon returning to Peking, Sir Alexander is determined to make it up to the craftsman. After researching the value of the statue, he sends home to England for the money. He seeks out information about the craftsman, learning that his name is Yung Lee and that his family does indeed have a long history of craftsmanship. Sir Alexander also learns that Yung Li hopes to retire to the hills above his village—with this information, Sir Alexander knows how to repay the craftsman. Having received special permission from the Empress of China to give a gift to Yung Lee (it is forbidden at the time for artisans to accept gifts from foreigners), Sir Alexander sets out for Ha Li Chuan once again. He tells Yung Lee that he has come to repay his debt and, despite Yung Lee's protests that Sir Alexander owes him no debt, leads the craftsman on a two-hour journey into the mountains. Once they reach their destination, Sir Alexander presents Yung Lee with a beautiful house in a hilltop village. Yung Lee tries to refuse, but once the mandarin explains that Sir Alexander received special permission to give this gift, the craftsman is happy. When Sir Alexander's appointment in Peking ends, he retires in England. Before his peaceful death, Sir Alexander leaves the statue to his eldest son and specifies that the statue shall be passed on through the eldest Heathcote sons indefinitely unless the family is at risk of losing their honor. Sir Alexander's eldest son, James, is a major in the Queen's army. When he receives the statue, he is serving in the Boer War. As he continues to rise through the ranks to become a colonel, he displays the statue for his fellow soldiers to see. Like his father, he retires to the family home in Yorkshire, taking the statue with him. He also includes the same instructions about the future of the statue in his will before dying peacefully in his sleep. The statue is passed down several more generations, ending up in the possession of Alex Heathcote, the great-great-grandson of Sir Alexander. He is described as a spoiled brat and, once he grows up, is unable to hold a job. After the death of his mother, Alex becomes addicted to gambling and takes on massive amounts of debt, knowing that he can always sell the statue as a last resort. When Alex's debts reach a breaking point, he must sell the statue. He decides to put up the statue for auction at Sotheby's, where the Head of the Oriental Department tells Alex that he is confident about the statue's authenticity. However, once the experts value the statue, the Head of the Department tells him that the piece is a copy and is worth, at most, 800 pounds. However, the base of the statue, though the Heathcote family never valued it nearly as much as the statue, is an original and exceptional work from the 15th century and is worth much more than the statue itself. The narrative returns to scene with which it began, at Sotheby's auction house. The narrator buys the statue for 720 guineas, and the base sells for 22,000 guineas to an unspecified famous American.

- Genre: A Bildungsroman, or coming of age story, focusing on two young men: Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders. - Title: The Chosen - Point of view: First person through Reuven Saunders. - Setting: Williamsburg, Brooklyn during and after WWII. - Character: Reuven Malter. Description: The novel's narrator and protagonist, Reuven grows up over the course of the novel, starting as fifteen year old and ending as a college graduate. He is an Orthodox Jew living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with his father, David Malter, and a housekeeper, Manya. He is a smart, athletic, popular and thoughtful young man and spends much of his time and energy on academic and religious study. He is especially talented at mathematics, but wants to be a rabbi when he grows up. The Chosen follows Reuven's friendship with Danny Saunders. They meet when Danny hits a softball in Reuven's eye nearly blinding him, and they hate each other at first, but soon come to realize that they were meant to be fast friends. The rest of the novel follows this pair from Reuven's perspective as they both negotiate their relationship to Judaism, tradition, and the modern world within the complicated setting of World War II, the horrifying news of the Holocaust, and the founding of a Jewish state is Israel. - Character: Danny Saunders. Description: Danny is the other protagonist of the novel and Reuven's best friend. They despise each other at the start, but quickly become close confidants. Danny desperately needs a friend like Reuven as he has a particularly difficult adolescence. Danny is the eldest son of a Hasidic Jewish tzaddic (religious leader) and as such is expected to take over his position. Danny is incredibly brilliant and does not want to remain in the closed, traditional world of Hasidism. He finds escape in academic study and hopes to become a psychologist one day. During the length of the novel he has to learn how to communicate this radical choice to his traditional and deeply religious father, Reb Saunders. - Character: David Malter. Description: Reuven's father and an Orthodox Jew, Mr. Malter teaches Jewish studies and writes academic papers on the subject. He has created an educated and religious home for his son and teaches him from early on how to be caring, thoughtful and honest. After World War II Mr. Malter also becomes a supporter and leader of the Zionist movement. His work in this cause as well as his controversial religious papers make him hated by the Hasidic community, but for most of the novel Reb Saunders greatly respects Mr. Malter and his work. Mr. Malter also acts as a father figure to Danny, introducing him to secular authors and providing guidance in lieu of his actual, silent father. Mr. Malter is also sickly from the beginning of the novel, and only becomes more ill as he works himself to the bone trying accomplish what he believes is his life cause: to create a Jewish state is Israel. - Character: Reb Isaac Saunders. Description: The religious leader, or tzaddic, of his Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Reb Saunders feels a great weight on his shoulders for the entirety of the novel. He is a very strict Hasid, who puts great faith in the value of his culture and traditions. He brings up his son, Danny, in a very strict and traditional manner as well, which involves almost absolute silence. He only speaks to his son when they are studying the Talmud. Reb Saunders has had a very difficult life. He is from Russia and was there during the anti-Semitic Cossack raids during which his first wife and child were killed in front of his eyes. After this he took his entire Jewish community through Europe to America to start a new life. As a leader of his community he believes that he has to take on the suffering of his followers. When the Holocaust happens this becomes an even greater burden. - Character: Mr. Galanter. Description: Reuven's softball coach, who is of fighting age but mysteriously not a soldier. He makes frequent allusions to battle and war during their game, calling his players "soldiers," which only brings more attention to his suspicious lack of uniform. He takes Reuven to the hospital after he injures his eye in a softball game. - Character: Rav Gershenson. Description: An Orthodox rabbi and the professor of the highest-level Talmud course at Hirsch College. He teaches both Reuven and Danny and is a formidable and intimidating presence at the school. Reuven comes to learn that Gershenson is not as traditional as he seems but must repress some of his more radical ideas to teach at this highly conservative college. - Character: Professor Nathan Appleman. Description: Danny's psychology teacher at Hirsch College, Appleman teaches his students the value of experimental psychology, which must be backed up by data and tests. Danny hates this at first, but after he talks with Appleman comes to realize that he is a kind and smart man. Danny learns about the value of modern scientific reasoning, which greatly differs from his traditional upbringing and original affinity to Freud, through Appleman. - Character: Billy Merrit. Description: The blonde, angelic and blind boy in the bed next to Reuven's in the hospital. Billy is eternally hopeful and sweet and talks about how he is going to receive a new surgery to regain his sight. He became blind when in a car accident that also killed his mother. After Reuven leaves the hospital he finds out that Billy's operation was unsuccessful. - Theme: Judaism and Tradition. Description: The Chosen takes place in an Orthodox community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that is shaped by Jewish faith and customs. Chaim Potok highlights the influence of Judaism on his characters by filling his novel with references to and quotes from the Talmud (a book of Jewish laws and lessons) and the Torah. Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, although they are teenage boys, think more about complex interpretations of Jewish texts than they do about girls, sports, or general adolescent preoccupations. They are both shaped by the expectations and values of their families and neighbors in their isolated yet highly educated community.The Chosen is not simply a Jewish book for Jewish readers, although it was the first widely read and popular book of its time to depict such a world. The people in this community are clearly separated from the rest of America, but Potok takes care to demonstrate that many of their struggles are the same. Danny fights against his family's expectations in order to follow his own dream for his own life. As Danny works to find his place in the world he has to struggle with distant treatment from his father (based on Hasidic tradition) and the knowledge of the complex and often conflicted history of the Hasidic sect. In other words he has a complicated relationship with his dad and a complex cultural past, which he learns about as he ages. Taken out of a Jewish context, his path is like that of many other smart ambitious Americans, or any Faulkner novel. The Chosen also focuses on the thin line between different sorts of Jewish faith, and between piousness and fanaticism in both religion and life. Hasidic Judaism, with its strict rules based on hundreds of years of tradition, demonstrates how close piety can be to fanaticism. Reb Saunders and his family and followers are deeply devout but there are costs to their religious and cultural inflexibility. Danny has to live through years of silence from his father because of a Hasidic tradition, and Reb Saunders breaks apart Danny and Reuven's friendship for two years again because of his religious beliefs. David Malter, orthodox but not Hasidic, provides an example of an equally pious yet more open-minded father figure, yet he also nearly works himself to death because of a fanatical obsession with Zionism (the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine). The Chosen's geographically and culturally narrow focus on Jews in Brooklyn leads the reader towards larger questions about a blind obsession with the rules of tradition and religion. - Theme: Choosing and Being Chosen. Description: The title, The Chosen, introduces this theme immediately into the novel. First of all, in a novel about Jewish people and culture the term carries a religious meaning: the idea written in the Torah that Jews are the people chosen by God. This means that practicing Jews believe that they have a specific and exclusive order to follow and obey God. "Chosenness," as it is called, is seen in the way that Danny and Reuven's fathers teach them the responsibility that they have towards God and Jewish laws and customs. The novel then brings up the question of responsibility among chosen people: is there free will within this structure, or must the characters only follow the path given to them as chosen people? This conflict of choice plays out in the relationship between Danny Saunders and his father, Reb Saunders. Danny is supposed to follow in his father's footsteps as the next tzaddic (leader of the Hasidic community). His family has passed this role down through six generations, and Reb Saunders has been preparing his son since he was a small child. Danny, on the other hand, is interested in psychology and Freud, and does not want to become a rabbi. Much of the novel focuses on Danny's guilt and confusion over whether he should follow his dreams or his familial and religious responsibility. His choice to veer from what seems to be his fate, and his father's acceptance of his new secular life path, demonstrates the value of individual choice within the novel. In a world of so much tradition and religious responsibility, Potok argues for the value of individual choice. Danny and Reuven's friendship shows a combination of both choosing and being chosen. They seem almost thrown together by fate in the dramatic softball game that starts the novel. Yet although it seems like they should hate each other after Danny injures and nearly blinds Reuven, David Malter encourages them to choose to become friends. Events often seem to be set in motion by a higher power in The Chosen, but the characters must choose to take action on them. David Malter says this himself when he argues for the importance of making something of one's life: "A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life." - Theme: Fathers, Sons, and Rebellion. Description: The Chosen revolves around male relationships and the most important of these is that between a father and a son. Both Danny and Reuven are deeply influenced by their fathers. Both of their relationships are based on education, but they differ in every other way. Reb Saunders only speaks with his son when they are studying the Talmud because of Hasidic tradition and, as we learn later in the novel, a belief in the importance of silence as a tool for developing compassion. For much of the novel this silence seems irrational and cruel, demonstrating the confusion and mystery that can be a part of father-son relationships. What seems to be cruel treatment is a sacrifice for Reb Saunders as well. He chooses to act this way because he believes that he is saving his son's soul. His methods are questionable but we come to learn the great love that he has for his son. David Malter also teaches his son how to read the Talmud using close reading and careful thought. Reuven is greatly influenced by his father, and he eventually proves his intellectual maturity and prowess by using his fathers reading techniques in his college Talmudic course with his respected and difficult teacher, Rav Gershenson. David Malter also extends this teaching to other parts of life, encouraging Reuven to become friends with Danny, and to look closely at and take care with this friendship once he has it. David Malter is the prime example of a careful and thoughtful father and he also provides guidance to Danny when he cannot turn to his real father. Rebellion is also an important aspect of the father son relationships in The Chosen. Danny directly rebels against his father by not becoming a tzaddic, and this choice of rebellion plagues him for the entire novel. His long path towards this decision is reflected in his growing interest in Freud. Although Freud's concept of the Oedipal Complex (which includes rebellion of the son against the father) is never directly mentioned, his interest in and struggle with Freud points towards the importance of this fraught relationship with his father.With all of this focus on fathers it is also necessary to mention the lack of mothers, and female figures in general, in The Chosen. Reuven's mother died when he was very young and is only briefly discussed. Danny's mother is alive, and presented as warm and loving, but she is also sick and frail. Danny's sister is only briefly married and has an arranged marriage with a man who leaves a bad taste in Reuven's mouth. Overall women are powerless and only ever seen on the fringes. Men are victims of a set culture and deep traditions, but they have their intellectual pursuits to occupy their minds and set them free if they truly want to. Women, on the other hand, are stuck. This marginalization of women is present in Hasidic societies, and Potok does critique it in some ways, but The Chosen is also largely uninterested in the role of women in this culture. - Theme: Friendship. Description: The first sentence in the book starts with a mention of Danny Saunders, the narrator Reuven Malter's future best friend. This sets up what will be the most important relationship in the book: friendship. They meet as enemies during a brutal softball game in which Danny injures and nearly blinds Reuven, but they become fast friends when Danny comes to visit Reuven in the hospital for the second time.The origin of this relationship demonstrates that friendship is not simply a fun, casual thing. It is also a serious and deep bond. David Malter tells Reuven the importance of friendship early on in the novel, "You know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul." He also reminds Reuven of a saying from the Talmud that a person should "choose a friend." This reference to the title in demonstrates that in a world where so much is determined at birth, friendship is a choice that one can use to shape a life. Through their friendship Danny and Reuven are introduced to new world and gain a new perspective on their own lives. Danny learns about his father through Reuven because Reb Saunders communicates with Danny through his friend. Reb Saunders, by his own choice, cannot speak with his son, so he talks to Reuven about Danny while Danny is in the room. He does this because he knows that Reuven is an important, kind and intelligent figure in his son's life. This again demonstrates the great influence that friendship can have, the way that it can open an individual to new perspectives. Through the ability to discuss life with a peer, friendship provides an outlet for these boys. In the end they almost switch roles: Danny who is supposed to be a rabbi chooses to become a clinical psychologist, and Reuven who is supposed to be a mathematician chooses to become a rabbi. The ending leaves open the possibility that their friendship is waning as they enter new stages of their lives, but Danny and Reuven have clearly had a permanent impact on each other. - Theme: World War II and War. Description: The Chosen starts with a battle, or a near battle, in the form of a softball game between Reuven Malter's school team and Danny Saunders's infamously brutal Hasidic team. The Hasidic team plays with such brutality because they have been told that the only way that they will be allowed to have a team is if they make it their religious duty to beat the "apikorsim" (Jews who do not believe in god, or in this case are not Hasidic). This immediately introduces the idea of cultural or religious differences as a reason for battle or war. They are also playing softball because of America's entry into war. Jews felt the need to "show the gentile world that Yeshiva students were as physically fit, despite their long hours of study, as other American students." During the game Reuven Malter's coach, Mr. Galanter, calls him and his teammates "soldiers," especially as the game becomes more violent, ending in Reuven's injury. Although this is the last mention of softball in the book, war continues to serve as the background for almost the entire novel. Reuven and his father follow the battles of World War II, first on the radio in the hospital and then aided by maps cut out from the newspaper and hung all over their home.After the actual battles end, the news of the Holocaust has an even greater impact on their lives. The pain and horror caused by the atrocities of the Holocaust brings David Malter out of his isolated community and into the wider world. David Malter becomes an important leader in the Zionist movement (a push for a Jewish state in Palestine) and the first mention of Manhattan (or any area that the family has been to outside Brooklyn) comes when he attends a Zionist movement at Madison Square Garden. His son does not go, further highlighting that this is a great distance for the Malters. WWII and its aftermath brought this small Brooklyn community into global affairs. The discussion of a Jewish homeland also creates conflict in Williamsburg, highlighting the differences between the different sects that live so close together. The Hasidic Jews are violently against Zionism because they fear the possibility of a secular Jewish state, other Jews in the community believe that it is important to take action now that 6 million of their people have been killed, and that Jews need a country that they can make safe for their people, whether or not they are deeply devout.Through the fights and arguments that break out on the streets and in school, The Chosen demonstrates different perspectives on how to deal with suffering. The Hasidic view is to take on the suffering of others and deal with it through silence, prayer and study of God, all while continuing to wait for the coming of the Messiah. Other Orthodox Jews, like David Malter, believe that action must be taken to save the Jewish community--in this case a Jewish state. He believes that they can wait no longer and so in spite of his orthodox views he works to bring even non-practicing Jews over to his cause. WWII endangers the future of Judaism and The Chosen depicts how different Jewish Americans separate from yet affected by Holocaust can to react. - Climax: The climax of the novel comes in the last chapter when Reb Saunders reveals to his son that he accepts his choice to break with tradition and lets him go. - Summary: Reuven Malter, the narrator, starts The Chosen by describing his native Williamsburg: a neighborhood of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, who almost never mix or interact. After establishing the setting, the action begins with a softball game. Reuven's team is playing a Hasidic team on which Danny Saunders is a key player. During a rough game, Danny ends up hitting a softball directly into Reuven's eye, causing his glasses to shatter, and sending him to Brooklyn Memorial Hospital. After a surgery Reuven seems to be healing well but there is a chance that he will be blind in one eye.Danny comes to the hospital to apologize and Reuven refuses to speak with him. Finally, with Mr. Malter's urging, Danny and Reuven do speak and feel a great connection to each other. Reuven's eye heals well and Danny and Reuven become best friends. The rest of the novel depicts Reuven and Danny's navigation of adolescent life, but they do not have the typical concerns of teenage boys. They are growing up during WWII in different but both very religious Jewish communities and most of their time is spent discussing academics, religion, Jewish culture and tradition as shown by their nearly constant study of the Talmud. Danny's father, Reb Saunders, is the tzaddic (religious leader) of his Hasidic community and Danny is supposed to eventually take his place. This position has been passed down through his family for generations but Danny does not want to become a rabbi. He wants to be a psychologist. On top of this, Reb Saunders believes in bringing up his son in complete silence, so Danny feels utterly alone, and truly needs his friendship with Reuven. Reuven and his father help Danny through his difficult choice to break with tradition and possibly form a life outside of the only culture he knows.Reuven and Danny go to Hirsch College together and Danny delves even deeper into psychology as his major. Then disaster strikes for Reuven and Danny's friendship when Reb Saunders forbids his son to speak with Reuven because of Danny's father's Zionist activities. Danny's father has been working to support the creation of a Jewish state in Israel as a response to the horrors of the Holocaust. He believes that it is the responsibility of American Jews to maintain the Jewish faith after such destruction. Reb Saunders believes that this is blasphemous; he disagrees with the idea of a secular Jewish state. In Reb Saunders' mind a Jewish home in Israel should only exist after the coming of the Messiah. He believes that Jews must accept the horrors that have happened as God's will and continue to wait for the Messiah. These radically different religious responses to Jewish suffering break apart Reuven and Danny's friendship for two years. When Israel becomes a reality, and more Jews (including a Hirsch College alum) are dying to defend the state, Reb Saunders finally gives in. Danny and Reuven begin speaking again but Reuven now hates Reb Saunders. Reb Saunders keeps asking to see Reuven, but Reuven continues to make excuses. Finally Mr. Malter tells his son that Reb Saunders clearly wants to tell him something and that he should never refuse to listen to another person. Reuven agrees to go to the Saunders home. Reb Saunders tells Reuven, while Danny is still in the room, that he knows that Danny wants to become a psychologist. He goes on to explain why he used silence to bring up his son: he saw from an early age that his son was brilliant, but also saw that he had no soul. He wanted to teach Danny about suffering and pain through silence. Reb Saunders says that even if his son would not become a tzaddic, he wants him to have the soul of a tzaddic. Reb Saunders then speaks to his son about something other than the Talmud for the first time since he was a small child. Danny promises to keep the Ten Commandments and soon after Reb Saunders shares the news that Danny will not be following him as tzaddic with his congregation. They eventually are able accept that Danny's little brother Levi will become the next tzaddic. Danny goes to Columbia to study psychology and says goodbye to Danny and Mr. Malter, promising to come see them soon.

- Genre: Science fiction - Title: The Chrysalids - Point of view: First person, from David's perspective (sometimes retrospectively and sometimes in the moment of the event) - Setting: Waknuk, Labrador (which likely correlates with present-day Wabush, Canada) in the distant future - Character: David Strorm. Description: David is the main character and narrator of the novel. His ability to communicate telepathically, or through "thought pictures," with others makes him abnormal within the town of Waknuk, where he lives. As a result, David and the other telepathic Waknukians he meets must flee Waknuk – which sterilizes and banishes anyone who is different – when their secret ability is discovered. Throughout the novel, David refuses to adhere to the traditional and prejudiced beliefs supported by the Waknukian religion and government. He befriends and cares for people based on their character, rather than whether they adhere to The Definition of Man. - Character: Petra Strorm. Description: Petra is David's youngest sister. She is thought to be a normal child, until she endangers the other telepathic Waknukians with her extraordinarily strong telepathic powers. The Zealand woman suspects that Petra is the most powerful telepath in the world, and she comes to rescue David, Rosalind, and Petra from the Fringes of Waknuk because of Petra's powers. - Character: Rosalind Morton. Description: Rosalind is David's half cousin, and later his girlfriend. Uncle Axel finds out about David's secret ability when he hears him having a conversation with Rosalind, who can also communicate telepathically. Rosalind's ability is exposed when she and David run toward Petra's silent calls for help, and she escapes with David and Petra when they are forced to flee Waknuk. She is kind, thoughtful, and a good planner. - Character: Uncle Axel. Description: David's Uncle Axel, the husband of his mother's late sister, is his primary confidant until he flees Waknuk and is no longer able to communicate with him. Unlike David's parents, Uncle Axel does not see David as a Mutant because of his abilities and spends a great deal of the book questioning the traditional beliefs of the Waknukians. Uncle Axel used to be a sailor until he went on a voyage that resulted in the death of his wife and left him a cripple. He tells David as much as he knows about the world beyond the town. He is particularly concerned with epistemology, or how we know what we know. He warns David to keep his ability secret and protects the group of Waknukian telepaths whenever possible. - Character: Sophie Wender. Description: Sophie was born with six toes on each foot—a mutation that classifies her as a Blasphemy in Waknuk. David meets Sophie as a young child, and does not understand why Sophie would want to hide her feet. Later, when Alan sees her six-toed footprint, Sophie and her parents are forced to flee Waknuk. When David leaves Waknuk years later, Sophie helps Petra and Rosalind escape from Gordon's camp, and provides them and David with shelter in her cave. She loves Gordon and dies while fleeing with him from the battle between the Waknukians and the Fringe people. - Character: Joseph Strorm. Description: Joseph is David's father and a strict believer in the Waknukian faith. He ruthlessly beats David when he lies about Sophie's mutation, and he persecutes and targets anyone in town who he believes is not behaving morally. Joseph and the Inspector have a tense relationship, and Joseph uses his position as a preacher to speak out against the Inspector's decisions. He banishes Aunt Harriet when she asks for help, and joins the hunt for David, Petra, and Rosalind when he learns of his children's deviations. He is killed in battle by is outcast brother, Gordon. - Character: Michael. Description: Michael also has the ability to communicate telepathically. He argues with Anne about her decision to get married to the non-telepath Alan, and goes to great lengths to protect his fellow telepaths. When David, Rosalind, and Petra are discovered, Michael joins an army looking for them so he can keep them up-to-date and plant false information about their whereabouts. When the Zealander woman offers to take him back to Zealand, he decides to return to Waknuk to rescue Rachel so that the two of them can find their way to Zealand together. - Character: Woman from Zealand. Description: The woman from Zealand (which David and Rosalind call "Sealand") discovers the group in Waknuk when she hears Petra's thoughts. In Zealand, everyone can communicate through thought images, but Petra has the largest known range of any telepath, so the Zealander woman organizes a ship to come and rescue Petra, Rosalind, and David. The woman believes strongly in the power of communal thought and a cyclical version of history in which a lower class overthrows a higher class, only to be overthrown by another class. These beliefs are very similar to those held in the real world by Marxists. The woman shows no remorse in killing an entire battlefield of people in order to save Petra, Rosalind, and David because she feels that the people who died are of an inferior species. - Character: The Inspector. Description: The Inspector is in charge of granting Certificates of Normalcy to newborn Waknukians and determining what is and is not made in the Image of God. He and Joseph Strorm disagree about whether great-horses should be classified as Mutations. The Inspector is not as uncompromising in his beliefs as is Joseph, and, unlike Joseph, he is kind to David when he finds out that David has concealed Sophie's mutation. He grants Petra a Certificate of Normalcy because she looks like a normal child. - Character: Gordon Strorm. Description: Gordon resembles his brother, Joseph, except that Gordon has extremely long arms and legs. At one point he is described as "the spidery man." As a result, he was banished from Waknuk and cast out into the Fringes. Gordon believes that, as the first-born Strorm, he should be in charge of Waknuk instead of Joseph. David first meets Gordon as a young child, when Gordon is taken hostage in a Fringe attack on Waknuk. Later, when David escapes to the Fringes, Gordon captures David, Rosalind, and Petra, and holds them hostage to provoke an attack by the Waknukians. Gordon wants to have children with Rosalind, but he is in a relationship with Sophie. Gordon is extremely vengeful and bitter and kills his own brother in battle. - Character: Aunt Harriet. Description: David's Aunt Harriet comes to David's house to plead for help from her sister, Emily Strorm. Harriet's child has a mutation, and she wants Emily to lend her Petra for a few days so that she can pretend Petra is her daughter and obtain a Certificate of Normalcy. Harriet has given birth to two other Blasphemies, and she fears that her husband will throw her out of the house when he finds out about the third. Emily and Joseph refuse to help Harriet and kick her out of their home. The next day, Harriet's body is found floating in the river. David is unable to forget Aunt Harriet's suicide, and her death helps motivate him to flee Waknuk. - Character: Anne. Description: Anne is a member of the group of Waknukians that can communicate telepathically. She realizes that there are an unequal number of girls and boys in the group, and that some of the girls will have to marry outside of the group, or not marry at all. Despite the protests of the other group members, she falls in love with and decides to marry Alan. To make the marriage easier, she cuts off all communication with the group. But when it becomes clear that Anne told Alan about her and the other's telepathy, Uncle Axel kills Alan. When Alan is found dead, Anne kills herself, leaving behind a note that exposes and blames the rest of the group. - Character: Alan. Description: Alan, a boy with whom David goes to school, sees Sophie's six-toed footprint and reports her to the authorities, an act that forces Sophie and her family to flee their home. Later in the novel, he marries Anne. Uncle Axel kills Alan when he learns that Alan knows about David and the other telepath's abilities. - Character: Rachel. Description: Rachel is Anne's sister, and another telepath. When an illiterate neighbor finds Anne's suicide note, which is addressed to the Inspector, Rachel lies and says that it is meant for her so that she can destroy the note and protect the others in the group. Petra reads from Rachel's thoughts that she is in love with Michael, who eventually goes back to rescue Rachel and take her to Zealand. - Character: Emily Strorm. Description: Emily Strorm is David and Petra's mother and Joseph's wife. Like Joseph, she believes strongly in the Waknukian faith, and she decorates her homes with sayings from the holy book Repentences. She turns her sister, Harriet, away when Harriet asks for help hiding her abnormal-looking baby, but cries once Harriet leaves. - Character: John Wender. Description: John Wender is Sophie's father. He is a kind man, but he initially does not trust David to keep his daughter's secret. Once he sees the strength of David and Sophie's friendship, however, he grows fond of David. He entrusts David to stay at their home while they escape to give them extra time. - Character: Sally. Description: Sally, another telepath, responds to Petra's cry for help in the forest, and is captured by government officials who torture her into confirming that Rosalind, David, and Petra are Blasphemies. She feels a great deal of guilt because of this, but manages to protect the identities of Rachel, Michael, and Mark. The group fears that Sally may have gone insane as a result of the torture inflicted upon her. - Theme: Words. Description: Words and language are at the heart of The Chrysalids because it is David's ability to communicate wordlessly that makes him a Blasphemy. This ability frightens the leaders of Waknuk not only because David might be able to plan a secret uprising against them, but also because David's existence challenges the authority of the words on which the leaders' power is based. By classifying David as a Blasphemy, however, the leaders of Waknuk contradict the very words that they so strongly espouse. Up until this point, a Blasphemy was described as someone who did not look like the Image of God and differed from the Definition of Man. David, on the other hand, fits perfectly within the Definition, as his telepathic powers don't affect how he looks and are unmentioned in the Definition. His existence proves that the words contained within Repentences are not perfect or all-encompassing, and that the ideas promoted within them are opinions rather than facts. The adages from the Repentences that fill the houses of Waknukians are meant to be powerful statements of the importance of conformity, but Uncle Axel points out that they are not powerful because they are not backed up by any sort of introspection. Waknukians memorize and repeat these proverbs, but they hear them so often that they never think about what they actually mean. Indeed, David often points out that even though he knows these maxims by heart, he has not internalized their meaning. David generally finds words to be much less effective tools for communication than thought-images, which are more immediate and nuanced units of communication. While the novel clearly questions the power of language by contrasting it with telepathy, it also suggests that there are benefits to language that thought-images cannot claim. Indeed, the physical and aural manifestations of language keep David safe in situations that invisible and inaudible thought-images could not, like when Rachel saves the group by destroying the words of her sister. Further, Wyndham, the novelist, must himself rely on words to communicate his story to his readers. Although he imagines many benefits of collective thinking and telepathy, it is not at all clear from his novel that this is truly a superior way of operating. - Theme: Ways of Knowing. Description: The citizens of Waknuk rely mostly on tradition and religious texts as sources of knowledge about the world. Myths about the dangers of the Fringes and the Badlands proliferate, but Uncle Axel tells David that when explorers went to these areas, they found that these myths were not always true. Unlike most people in Waknuk, Uncle Axel frequently questions statements that are presented as fact. He points out that there is no way of being certain about the way the Old People lived or what the true Image of God really is because Repentences was written many years after the Tribulation. The correctness of the Definition of Man is not something that people in Waknuk challenge, but Uncle Axel encourages David to think not only about what is correct, but also about how one knows what is correct.While the fact that Waknukians are living in the Image of God is widely taken for granted by the Waknukians, David learns that this fact might actually be an opinion when he meets other people, the Zealanders, who also consider themselves to be a superior race. He becomes increasingly skeptical of traditional sources of knowledge over the course of the novel, and is particularly wary of taking images and the words of authority figures as absolute truths. Rather than accepting things at face value, he comes to depend on personal experience as the only incontrovertible source of information. He also trusts the thoughts and feelings of his friends because he has experienced those thoughts and emotions. Wyndham questions the primacy of vision and the statements of authority by creating characters, like Sophie, who look deviant, but are in fact much better people than many who look like the Image. Further, he challenges the credibility of appearances through David, who looks normal but is in fact very different from most people around him. The book clearly argues that there is a great deal of difference between appearance and reality. Wyndham also suggests that individual thought and experience is the only true source of knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of questioning authority and tradition. - Theme: Time and Progress. Description: The title of Wyndham's book introduces time as an important theme in the novel because the word "chrysalid" implies a specific sense of time. The word can either mean "a shell that has been discarded" or "a preparatory or transitional state"—it is either something in the past or something preparing for the future. Because Wyndham never uses the word anywhere in the text of the novel, however, it is not clear precisely to what or whom "the chrysalids" refers.In Waknuk, people believe that time progresses in a linear fashion toward a better and more moral future. The Waknukians' goal is to rebuild the society that was lost in the Tribulation and live according to God's Word by ridding society of any mutations. The forward motion of time is very important to the Waknukians, and only those who align with the Definition are allowed to contribute to this progression. Reproduction is encouraged and valued among those who fit the Definition, while those deemed Blasphemies are sterilized before being cast out into the Fringes. The people in the Fringes, on the other hand, as well as those from Zealand, believe in a more cyclical version of time in which history constantly repeats itself. People from both places believe that "life is change," and they are not nearly as concerned with moving forward down a direct path to perfection. The Chrysalids calls into question the idea that society can be manipulated into moving in a certain direction. Instead, it suggests, or perhaps even warms, that history repeats itself. Indeed, although the Waknukians conceive of time as moving forward, they want to move forward by replicating the past. The title, then, expresses the repetitive and cyclical nature of time through its two definitions. If David and the others who can think-together are "chrysalids" transitioning into a new society, they are also leaving a chrysalid of their previous society behind. Meanwhile, the supremacist ideas expressed by the Zealanders suggest that even though David and the group are transitioning to a new place and future, this society, too, will turn into an empty shell of the past. - Theme: Morality. Description: While Wyndham's novel is not necessarily optimistic about the future of this post-apocalyptic world, the book does not take an entirely negative stance on the future of society. Instead, the book argues that even within societies that are morally corrupt, individuals have the power and responsibility to make their own moral choices. Indeed, while the actions of the Waknukians and Zealanders are morally reprehensible due to their racist and violent nature, certain people within these societies are able to behave differently, despite having been taught to conform. The group of friends to which David belongs, for example, decides not to kill Anne even though she puts all of their lives in danger by getting married, and Michael gives up the opportunity to go to Zealand because he does not want to leave Rachel alone in Waknuk. In many ways, the morals of the group separate them from Waknuk much more than does any physical or mental difference. The fact that David, Petra, Rosalind, Michael, and Sophie are much better people than the typical Waknukian, yet are all classified as mutants, shows the hypocrisy of the moral code prescribed by the Repentences, and by repressive and totalitarian societies more generally. - Theme: Racism and Fear of the Unknown. Description: Waknuk operates under a set of laws and beliefs that discriminates against anyone or anything that does not look "normal." Those who appear different in any way from the Image of God as prescribed by the Definition of Man are segregated from society and sterilized, so that they cannot produce more Deviations. The Chrysalids exposes the hypocrisy and ludicrousness of any society that kills its members in an attempt to be more pure and moral. This is, of course, a morally reprehensible act, and a deeply misguided one. The people who are the targets of this moralistic racism prove to be those with the highest moral standards, and the novel makes a clear statement about the impossibility of determining someone's character from their appearance. While much of the racism in the novel is driven by religious doctrine, this doctrine is fueled by a fear of the unknown. Rather than explore the world, the Waknukians isolate themselves to an extreme extent—so much so that they will go to extraordinary lengths to keep out the rest of the world. The Zealanders show a greater willingness to travel and explore, but they exhibit supremacist and xenophobic (a fear of foreigners) tendencies as well. Although the Waknukians actively seek out Offenses, while the Zealanders are more tolerant of difference, the Zealanders also show no compunction over killing those who they deem to be racially and intellectually inferior. The fact that Waknukians would classify Zealanders as Deviations, while Zealanders consider Waknukians to be an inferior race deserving of death because they lack the ability to telepathically think-together, demonstrates the highly arbitrary nature of racism. This discrimination has nothing to do with truth, but rather is based on characteristics that are detested in one culture, but valued in another. Wyndham also forces the reader to think about this racism in a critical and personal way. Like the Waknukians killed by the Zealanders, the reader is not capable of think-together, and thus must wonder how he or she would fare in this world. - Theme: Real World Allegory. Description: Wyndham wrote The Chrysalids in the 1950s, after the atrocities of World War II and in the midst of the Cold War, and the ideologies espoused by the Waknukians and the Zealanders are similar to those of real-world groups at that time. The Waknukian's insistence on racial purity is similar to that of the Nazis, while the decision to segregate Blasphemies into a specific area is reminiscent of both Nazi concentration camps and the racially-driven segregation occurring in the American South at the time. Indeed, like the sterilization of Blasphemies by the Waknukians, the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South was largely based on the physical appearance of those who were attacked. David and the others with the ability to think-together, however, are persecuted for their thoughts and beliefs—an oppression similar to that suffered by the Jews during the Holocaust. Wyndham's novel is a clear denunciation of this kind of persecution; the mindset it cultivates leads the Waknukians to try to kill the best and kindest members of their society.While The Chrysalids clearly condemns the atrocities of the past, it also provides a warning for the future. Although the Zealanders may not actively seek out people to kill and do not discriminate against people based on their physical appearance, they show no remorse in killing a large group of people with "inferior" abilities in order to promote their own world view. The beliefs of the Zealanders can be read as an allegory for Soviet ideologies. For example, their promotion of think-together and belief that history is a series of struggles in which one group overthrows another have strongly Marxist undertones. At the same time, within the context of the Cold War, one could also interpret the Zealanders as a stand-in for the United States, which was ready to bomb the Soviet Union in order to promote democratic ideals. Ultimately, The Chrysalids warns against the blind espousal of any rigid belief, no matter how innocent it might seem. The novel is a testament to the importance of thinking critically and independently and evaluating ones own beliefs and actions, rather than thoughtlessly conforming to the norm. - Climax: The convergence of the group in the forest after Petra's call - Summary: The Chrysalids begins with a conversation between David and his sister Mary Strorm about David's dream of a city he has never seen before. Mary warns him not to tell anyone about the dream because in Waknuk, the town where they live, it is best not to stand out. This proves to be good advice when David meets Sophie, who has six toes. According to the Waknukian religion, anyone whose body does not comply with the Definition of Man is a Blasphemy, and must be sterilized and banished from the community. This belief is based on the idea that God makes man in the image of himself, and God does not make mistakes, so anyone who does not look like the Image of God must not be a man, and consequently, must be the work of the devil. While David has been taught this definition, he has not internalized it, and he sees no problem with the fact that Sophie has six toes. He does his best to protect her, but eventually a boy named Alan sees her six-toed footprint and reports it to the authorities. Sophie and her family are forced to flee, and David learns to take deviations from the norm seriously. Although David is physically normal, he, too, is a Blasphemy. David, along with a group of eight other people, has the ability to communicate telepathically, or through "thought-pictures." When David is young, he is not aware of how dangerous this ability could be, but conversations with his Uncle Axel reveal that David would be persecuted for this gift. Uncle Axel is a kind and reasonable man who disagrees with many aspects of the Waknukian religion and supports David, even though it is illegal to do so. David's father, Joseph, on the other hand, is an orthodox believer and is very willing to persecute anyone, family included, who deviates from the norm. Years later, David's mother, Emily, gives birth to a daughter, Petra, who is granted a Certificate of Normalcy. Her sister, Harriet, gives birth around the same time, but her child has a mutation. When Harriet asks Emily if she could switch her child with Petra for a few days in order to obtain a Certificate, Emily and Joseph refuse and throw her out of their home. She commits suicide the next day. As David and the other telepaths grow older, they learn each others names and develop relationships with another. David and his half-cousin, Rosalind, are involved romantically. Another in their group, Anne, decides that she wants to marry Alan, a non-telepath and the same person who turned Sophie in for her deviation. Much to the protestations of the group, Anne goes through with the marriage. When Uncle Axel realizes that she has told Alan about the ability of everyone in the group, he kills Alan to stop him from telling anyone else. Anne kills herself when she hears the news of her husband's death. These two deaths make David nervous about his ability, but he is only forced to take action to protect himself because of his sister, Petra. Petra has extraordinarily powerful telepathic capabilities, but she is too young to be able to control them or even use them consciously. One day, Petra rides her pony into the forest and is attacked by a wild animal. She unknowingly sends incredibly strong distress signals to everyone in the group and forces them to come running to her. The group knows that it is a bad idea to be seen together, but before they can disperse, a man named Jerome Skinner catches David, Rosalind, Katherine, and Sally surrounding Petra. He becomes suspicious about how they all could have known she was hurt. Soon after, Katherine and Sally are captured by the government, and David, Rosalind, and Petra are forced to flee to the Fringes, the area outside of Waknuk where Blasphemies and Deviations are allowed to live. Michael, Mark, and Rachel, three more telepaths who have not been identified by the government, stay back to pass information on to the fugitives to help them escape. Petra, who has an extraordinary range, makes contact with a woman who is very far away in a land called Zealand (sometimes Sealand). She tells them that she is coming to rescue them, and that Petra must be kept safe at all costs. As Rosalind, David, and Petra venture deeper into the Fringes, they are captured by a group of men who bring them to their leader, Gordon. Gordon turns out to be Joseph Strorm's brother and David's uncle. He is bitter over having been exiled for his overly-long limbs, and wants revenge on Joseph and on Waknuk. Fortunately, Sophie, whom David has not seen in years, is in a relationship with Gordon and helps Rosalind, David, and Petra escape from his camp. Sophie lets the fugitives stay in her cave and hide from the Waknukian forces that are pursuing them. Eventually, the Waknukians and the Fringe people, led by Gordon, meet in battle. Gordon kills Joseph Strorm. He and Sophie are both then killed in battle. As the battle unfolds, the woman from Zealand arrives in a spaceship that casts thin strands of plastic onto the battlefield below. These strands contract when resisted against, and freeze everyone on the ground in place. The Zealander woman frees Rosalind, David, Petra, and Michael, who has come to help, from the plastic, but allows it to suffocate everyone else on the battlefield. She explains to the group that it is natural for one species to rise up and overpower another, and that she does not feel guilty for killing these people because change is the nature of life. Michael decides to return to Waknuk to find Rachel, and the woman takes Rosalind, David, and Petra back to Zealand, where as it turns out everyone can communicate telepathically.

- Genre: Fiction, Short Story - Title: The Chrysanthemums - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: Salinas Valley, California - Character: Elisa Allen. Description: The protagonist of "The Chrysanthemums," Elisa is a farmer's wife living in California's Salinas Valley in the 1930's. When first introduced, Elisa is depicted as a strong and capable woman of thirty-five, hard at work in her chrysanthemum garden. It evident that she and her husband, Henry, have a cordial yet passionless marriage, and that Elisa's time, energy, and considerable skill is occupied by meticulously tending to both the couple's home and her small yet impressive garden. As Elisa works to ensure the next season's blooms, it becomes clear that she is capable of much more than flowers and aesthetic beauty. Her dedication and natural ease with plants suggests that she could contribute to their farm in a more direct and practical way, such as growing apples in the orchard, but her status as a woman limits the scope of her world to caregiving and homemaking. Nevertheless, Elisa clearly aches for a life in which she is permitted to do and be more. Elisa's unhappiness fuels her curious and sexually-charged interaction with the tinker, a traveling repairman who feigns interest in Elisa and her chrysanthemums in an attempt to secure work. By the end of the story, any hopes that Elisa has of defining her own existence are dashed when the tinker discards her cherished chrysanthemums on the side of the road and she is left feeling like a weak, old woman. Steinbeck's portrayal of Elisa illustrates the damaging effects of American patriarchy while also exposing the ridiculousness of excluding a strong and productive member of society simply on the basis of her gender. - Character: Henry Allen. Description: The husband of Elisa Allen, Henry is a farmer living in the Salinas Valley of California during the 1930's. Henry provides Elisa with a comfortable life (his farming business seems to do well, as he negotiates the sale of thirty head of cattle with representatives from the Western Meat Company at the start of the story) and he appears to be a kind, if traditionally-minded, husband; nevertheless, Elisa is clearly unhappy in their marriage. Unlike Elisa, Henry is content with society's prescribed gender roles and expects nothing from his wife outside of her responsibilities as a homemaker. In addition to ignoring Elisa's professional capabilities, Henry also neglects Elisa emotionally and sexually, evident by their childless marriage and Elisa's immediate attraction to the tinker as soon as he expresses the slightest attention to her personal interests and desires. In many ways, Henry's character serves as a personification of the American patriarchy—he believes very little in Elisa and expects even less. Ironically, despite being her husband, Henry knows little about Elisa, including who she is and what she is capable of. - Character: The Tinker. Description: A traveling repairman who journeys the west coast from Seattle to San Diego and back each year in a covered wagon, mending household items, such as saucepans and scissors, and chasing the pleasant weather. When the tinker arrives on Elisa Allen's farm in search of work, it is clear that she longs for the freedom that the tinker's job affords him and the excitement of travel. Steinbeck describes the tinker as a large man, who, despite his grey beard and hair, does not appear old. He is dirty and wrinkled, and his eyes reveal a darkness that is vaguely threatening and not all together honest. Indeed, the tinker dupes Elisa into believing that he is interested in her and her chrysanthemums to secure work for himself. He claims that another customer is in search of good chrysanthemums for her own garden, and Elisa's prize flowers are the best around. Elisa, immediately drawn to the man's positive attention, supplies him with a pot of fresh chrysanthemum sprouts—after coming on to him in an overtly sexual manner, leaving them both uncomfortable and self-conscious. Of course, the fixer doesn't really care about Elisa or her sprouts, and he throws the chrysanthemums unto the side of the road as soon as he leaves the Allens' farm. Overall, Steinbeck's representation of the tinker underscores the unfairness of America's sexist society. The tinker is willing to lie and manipulate people in order to get what he wants. Still, as a man, he is permitted to define his own existence and profession, to live his life as he desires. This contrasts with Elisa, who, despite being a good and capable person, is denied the same freedom and opportunity simply because she is a woman. - Theme: Gender, Power, and Ambition. Description: John Steinbeck's 1937 story "The Chrysanthemums" depicts the strict gender roles that govern the life of Elisa Allen, a farmer's wife living in the Salinas Valley during the early 20th-century. Elisa and her husband, Henry, live a modest life on their California land, and as the story opens, Elisa meticulously tends to her small chrysanthemum garden while Henry is engaged in business matters, brokering a cattle deal with a large meat company. Their gender roles dictate the types of work they do, and the respect others give them, but Elisa is not satisfied with this—she finds herself disillusioned by her life and is unable to find a proper outlet for her skill and ambition. Steinbeck's depiction of Elisa's struggles against society's expectations of her underscores the damaging effects of gender inequality in American society and challenges the misconception that women are the weaker sex. From the outset, Steinbeck depicts a society in which men's work is considered more important than women's work. This division of labor is clearest in the chores Henry and Elisa do on the farm: Elisa works in the garden maintaining an impressive display of chrysanthemums, while her husband tends cattle and negotiates livestock sales with men in business suits. Significantly, the chrysanthemums have no practical purpose (they are simply beautiful), while Henry's cattle help sustain the family. This immediately places a greater value on Henry's work than Elisa's—something they both seem aware of when Elisa tells Henry that her that her chrysanthemums will be "strong" this year, and Henry replies, "You've got a gift with things […] I wish you'd work out in the orchard and raise some apples that big." Here, he subtly belittles her skills, implying that they would be more impressive if she used them in the orchard, where she might grow something that actually contributes to the family. Making this worse, when Elisa grows excited at the prospect of working in the orchard (thereby becoming more involved with the core aspects of the farm), Henry reveals that his comment was disingenuous—he has no intention of letting her work in the orchard, which he shows by redirecting the conversation. It's obvious, then, that Henry does not want to change the dynamics of their life—he prefers to throw subtle barbs at Elisa's uselessness over finding a way to make her feel challenged and fulfilled. While Henry seems perfectly satisfied with the status quo, Elisa's actions and appearance imply that she is out of place in a traditionally-female role. Elisa's surprising masculinity is first apparent in her clothes. She wears "a man's black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes, [and] a print dress almost completely covered by a big corduroy apron." The black hat obscures her physical identity as a woman, while her bulky shoes and coarse apron hide any trace of femininity that might be reflected in her dress. Instead of presenting herself in a ladylike fashion (as would have been the norm), Elisa seems most comfortable in clothing that is functional. Furthermore, Elisa is interested in traditionally-masculine roles and activities. For instance, she demonstrates in the story's final moments that she has been reading about the violence of prize fights, evidencing her curiosity about an activity that Henry seems to think isn't the proper place for a woman. Most significantly, Elisa shows that she dreams of an entirely different life. When the tinker arrives on the Allens' farm in search of work mending pots or sharpening scissors, Elisa expresses an explicit longing for the tinker's nomadic life of fixing household items for money—a life that he says "ain't the right kind of life for a woman." As she watches his wagon leave, she surprises herself by whispering aloud, "That's a bright direction. There's a glowing there." Clearly, Elisa wants more than her lot has provided—and perhaps her surprise at her own words shows that she wants this more than she even knows. While Elisa's unfulfilled dreams are tragic enough, Steinbeck deliberately suggests that they would be within her grasp were she not a woman. After all, her curiosity is met with an energy, ambition, and capability that would seem to equip her for whatever life she wants. Steinbeck suggests early on that her current life cannot accommodate such capability and ambition: while gardening, Elisa is "over-eager" and "over-powerful," and the chrysanthemum stems are "too small and easy for her energy." This suggests that her "planters' hands" (her gift with gardening) would make her a real asset to the orchard, if only Henry would allow her to become more involved in the farm. Furthermore, her curiosity about the tinker's life isn't idle—she shares his skill set and could therefore presumably do his job. "I can beat the dents out of little pots," she says. "I could show you what a woman might do." However, despite Elisa's skill and ambition—her skill in the garden and her vocal desire to work in the orchard or live as the tinker does—Steinbeck ends the story pessimistic about the ability of even the strongest woman to transcend society's expectations of her. When Elisa shares her knowledge of gardening with the tinker, she feels empowered and useful. Someone has treated her like an expert at something, rather than simply belittling her skills, and it changes her manner. However, Elisa's new confidence—her appearance of being "strong and happy"—dissolves as she sees the chrysanthemums on the road, an indication that not only did the tinker not actually want her gardening expertise, but he also used it to manipulate her. On this day, Elisa has glimpsed a life in which her ambitions are possible, and she believes for a moment that things might change. But the tinker's manipulation of her desires leaves her devastated, making her an old and weak woman—the very destiny she hoped to avoid. - Theme: Sex and Sexuality. Description: While Elisa's husband, Henry, is cordial and provides her with a comfortable life, their marriage is devoid of any romantic spark. Their verbal exchanges are short and formal, and they never seem to make eye contact or linger over an intimate touch. What's more, Elisa becomes sexually attracted to the tinker the moment that he shows the slightest interest in her cherished chrysanthemums. Elisa's immediate attraction to this stranger suggests that she is sexually neglected by Henry and hungry for any sort of attention directed toward her personal interests or desires. Elisa's strength and ability as a gardener are also closely tied to her sexuality, and Henry's indifference to her work leaves her feeling powerless and undesired. The tinker's interest in Elisa's chrysanthemums, then, serves as an affirmation of her entire being, including her work and her sexuality. With Elisa's explicit display of longing, Steinbeck implies that sexuality is about more than just being desired by another person. For Elisa, a large part of feeling desired is being seen how she wants to be seen—as a strong, capable, and sexual woman. As Elisa and Henry interact at the beginning of the story, they display little in terms of attraction or affection. In fact, they both appear to merely tolerate one another. As Henry approaches Elisa in her garden, for instance, she is startled by his presence. Elisa's surprise perhaps implies that Henry rarely ventures into her garden, indicating a lack of attention to her personal interests. Furthermore, they exchange only basic information about their days, and when Henry proposes that they go into Salinas to celebrate his cattle sale, Elisa is hardly excited about the date. Henry teases Elisa, implying that she might like to attend the prize fights after dinner. While Elisa becomes "breathless" at the mention of the fights, Henry glosses over her interest, taking her comment that she "wouldn't like" the fights at face value and noting that he was just "fooling" in suggesting it. When he suggests going to a movie after dinner instead, Elisa's response could be read sarcastically: "Of course I'll like it. It's good to eat away from home." This whole exchange shows how poorly they communicate and how deeply Henry misunderstands his wife—no wonder their marriage is sexless. The lack of chemistry between Elisa and Henry becomes more apparent when Elisa finds herself quickly attracted to the travelling tinker. This attraction—evidenced by her sudden wit and her quick search for "fugitive hairs" under the brim of her hat— is clearly about more than the man's physical presence, since Steinbeck describes the tinker as a large, greying man whose clothing is "wrinkled and spotted with grease" and whose laughter "disappeared from his face and eyes the moment his laughing voice ceased." The tinker's unattractiveness and his inauthentic demeanor contribute to a sense that Elisa's attraction is misplaced—her sexuality in this moment seems less about who he is and more about her own general dissatisfaction and desire for something new. This becomes only more apparent as their interaction progresses. Elisa begins to grow frustrated with the tinker, who wants her to pay him for work she can do herself, and it's only when the tinker asks her about her chrysanthemums that her "irritation and resistance" dissipates. As she gathers sprouts for him (allegedly to take to another customer who has expressed interest in chrysanthemums), she removes her gloves and the men's hat that she is wearing, shakes out her pretty hair, and begins to dig in the dirt with her bare hands. She kneels on the ground near the tinker's foot, and her face becomes "tight with eagerness" while her breast "swelled passionately." Clearly, the tinker's interest in her—in particular, his interest in her skill and passion—has ignited her sexuality. The implication here is that Elisa has felt so unseen and overlooked in her marriage that curiosity about her skill alone is enough to make her feel sexually desired. Elisa is thoroughly unfulfilled—emotionally, professionally, and sexually. Her passion for the chrysanthemums speaks to all three—she is someone whose interests are considered frivolous, whose skills are underused and unappreciated, and who (despite her association with fertility via the sprouts) is in a sexless marriage, as suggested by her lack of children. Therefore, when the tinker asks her to teach him about the sprouts, all the neglected aspects of her being come to life. She is suddenly an authority on something—an equal of a man—which makes her feel powerful and valuable. Furthermore, the emotional intimacy she feels by sharing her passion for gardening transitions seamlessly, for her, into sexual intimacy, as her description of the intuitive feeling of picking buds becomes a description of what sounds like an orgasm: "When the night is dark—why, the stars are sharp-pointed, and there's quiet. Why, you rise up and up! Every pointed star gets driven into your body. It's like that. Hot and sharp and—lovely." Elisa's sexuality, then, seems contingent on feeling that she can express her deepest self: the passions, skills, and interests that her husband ignores. This suggests that sexuality is not about physical desire alone, but rather about creating conditions of broad fulfillment in which a person can feel powerful and known. Of course, while Elisa feels empowered by her interaction with the tinker, the tinker has simply manipulated her by using her pride and loneliness to convince her to give him work. Before she realizes this, though, she seems changed: the tinker has awakened a part of her that has lain dormant for so long—in particular, a hope that she might be seen for who she is. After he leaves, Elisa scrubs herself clean, examines herself naked in the mirror, and puts on her nicest clothes, including a dress that is the "symbol of her prettiness." Before they leave for Salinas, Henry tells her she looks "strong and happy," but she presses further, asking "What do you mean 'strong'?" It seems as though she is asking him to see her as she sees herself—to recognize her in the way she believes that the tinker did—and when he affirms her strength again, she seems satisfied. However, moments later, when she realizes that the moment of intimacy between her and the tinker had been a sham, it seems to break her. She cries (privately, behind her collar) "like an old woman," which implies that her sexuality has been lost, and with it any possibility of being truly known. - Theme: Desolation and Fertility. Description: In "The Chrysanthemums," Steinbeck draws a clear parallel between Elisa and the Salinas Valley where she lives. The farm is far away from the nearest town, which emphasizes Elisa's own isolation and loneliness. Furthermore, the Valley has entered a period of winter dormancy in which the usual crops are not growing, which mirrors Elisa and Henry's childless marriage. However, even in the face of this obvious desolation, there is a sense of latent beauty and fertility in the language Steinbeck uses to describe the Valley and in Elisa's gift with the chrysanthemum sprouts, which suggests both her potential for fertility and for a rich and fulfilling life. The cyclical nature of the Valley's crops and the imagery of chrysanthemums, which thrive only after they are pruned with scissors, suggest some hope to Elisa's otherwise bleak ending. If the Valley will come back to life from its current dormancy, then perhaps Elisa will, too. At the story's start, the Valley has entered a period "of quiet and of waiting" in which there is "little work to be done." The hay has been cut and the orchards have been harvested, lending a sense of emptiness to the Allens' farm. While farming usually conjures images of life and vitality, the winter landscape of the valley appears barren and cold. The Valley is also incredibly isolated. Steinbeck writes of the winter fog "closing off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world." He further adds to the remoteness of this image by describing the fog as "a lid on the mountains" making the valley feel like a "closed pot." All of these details echo Elisa's own secluded existence, as well as the fact that she is utterly alone on the dormant farm.  Although Elisa is described as thirty-five and healthy (evident by her "lean and strong" face and eyes that are "as clear as water"), there is no evidence to suggest that Elisa has any children. Her childless state is emphasized by her obvious loneliness, and Henry's neglect and the indifference with which he regards Elisa and their marriage reinforces the seclusion of the Salinas Valley. Despite Steinbeck's dismal description of the Valley, there remains evidence of obvious beauty and fertility, subtly indicating the land's potential to produce and sustain life. For example, although Steinbeck notes that "fog and rain do not go together," a light wind from the southwest makes the farmers "mildly hopeful of a good rain before long" and the orchards are plowed and ready to "receive the rain deeply when it should come." Even in the bleakness of winter, then, there is a sense of optimism that rain is coming, and that the fields will continue to grow and produce. Furthermore, though it is December and there is no sunshine in the valley, Steinbeck writes that the "stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine." The willows have "sharp and positive yellow leaves" that, under the contrast of the heavy grey fog, "seemed a thin band of sunshine." Much like the rain, sunshine is felt in the Salinas Valley even when it is absent. The warmth of this "sunlight" diminishes the harshness of winter and reminds readers of the upcoming growing season and the potential for new life. Likewise, Steinbeck describes Elisa—even in her frustration, barrenness, and isolation—as full of potential. Although she does not have children and is stuck in a sexless marriage, Elisa is still explicitly associated with fertility through her "planters' hands." Elisa has a special connection to the soil and, just like her mother, she can "stick anything in the ground and make it grow." Therefore, even though Steinbeck portrays Elisa as childless, she still has the inherent ability to create and nurture life.  Furthermore, while early in the story Elisa is described as "blocked and heavy" in her frumpy and masculine gardening costume, this description gives way to beauty after her interaction with the tinker. As Elisa readies herself for her date with Henry, she works "carefully on her hair" and accents her eyebrows and lips with makeup. She puts on the dress which is "the symbol of her prettiness" and is suddenly transformed from drab and plain to lovely. While Henry is surprised by her appearance, it's clear that Elisa has always had the potential for this beauty, much as the farm always has potential for new life. Finally, Elisa clearly has the potential to do challenging work on the farm. While she tends the chrysanthemums with pride and care, Steinbeck describes them as being "too small and easy for her energy." This—and her curiosity and capability throughout the story—suggests that she is not yet living up to the full potential of her life, but that someday she might. The story's ending, however, seems pessimistic for Elisa: she does not renew her connection with her husband, he dismisses her curiosity about the prize fights (which reiterates the limitations on her as a woman), and—worst of all—she learns that the tinker never admired or respected her skill with the sprouts. The final image of Elisa weeping into her collar on the way to Salinas suggests a desolate fate for her: the wasting of her potential leading to an unfulfilling life. However, the parallel between Elisa and the Salinas Valley complicates this tragic ending. After all, the landscape is also desolate and barren in this moment, but readers are sure that the crops will return come springtime, and Elisa's chrysanthemums—which she has pruned, much as the tinker metaphorically cut Elisa down by dumping the sprouts on the road—will come back stronger as a result of being cut. Perhaps, then, there is reason for optimism; maybe this setback will leave Elisa stronger and better prepared to one day seize the life she wants. - Theme: Deception and Authenticity. Description: In "The Chrysanthemums," Steinbeck contrasts Elisa—a character desperate for authenticity—with the tinker, who uses deception to get what he wants. In order to manipulate Elisa into giving him work, the tinker pretends to be interested in Elisa's expertise with the chrysanthemums, a feigned admiration that nonetheless makes Elisa feel seen for who she is. Being seen as her authentic self (someone capable, smart, and ambitious) is Elisa's most profound desire, as she is constantly belittled, ignored, and misunderstood because of her gender. Throughout the story, Elisa bravely asks to be seen for who she is and is thwarted by both her husband, Henry, and the tinker, while the tinker's deception gets him exactly what he wants at no cost. This bitter injustice of deception reaping rewards for men while women are punished for authenticity emphasizes the obstacles facing women as they try to fulfill themselves. Elisa is determined to be true to who she is, even if that means she is out of place within her marriage and society.  For example, Elisa is strong and sturdy, not dainty and feminine as society would have her, and she is too powerful for the delicate work of gardening, as the chrysanthemum stems are "too small and easy for her energy." Elisa is clearly capable of more challenging work, and she offers to take her gardening skill to the orchard, which would let her contribute food (and not just beautiful flowers) to the household. However, Henry rejects this possibility, emphasizing that the social norm is for her to be reliant on her husband (and showing, perversely, that she must ask permission to contribute to the family outside of the domestic sphere). Elisa also asserts her competence in conversation with the tinker, noting that she has no work for him—and she might one day become his professional rival—because she can fix pots and pans as well as any man. Despite this capability, the tinker insists that Elisa could not do his job, as it "ain't the right kind of life for a woman." Finally, Elisa is openly sexual, not reserved or restricted her society would expect. When the tinker first arrives on the Allens' farm, Elisa quickly transitions from warmly welcoming the stranger to delivering overt sexual innuendos, and both the tinker and Elisa become uncomfortable after the exchange. Sensing his discomfort, Elisa stands up "very straight," and her face is described as "ashamed." The uneasiness between the tinker and Elisa after her sexual expression underscores the widespread opinion that, as a woman, Elisa should be more restrained sexually rather than true to her feelings. While Elisa is committed to being her authentic self, the tinker embraces deception and attempts to be someone he is not. The tinker is extremely friendly when he pulls up to the farm and even jokes with Elisa over the sad condition of his horse and donkey, but his eyes tell a different story. Steinbeck writes, "The laugher had disappeared from his face and eyes the moment his laughing voice ceased. His eyes were dark, and they were full of the brooding that gets in the eyes of teamsters and sailors." The tinker is vaguely menacing, despite his attempts to be warm, implying that he isn't really as friendly as he acts. Worse, the tinker pretends to be interested in Elisa's chrysanthemums only after it becomes clear that she does not intend to give him any work. Since Elisa is open about her passion for the sprouts, the tinker can use her authenticity against her, manipulating her clear desire to be respected for her skill in order to convince her to give him work. This tactic succeeds—Elisa is carried away with her own passion once he asks her to explain how she grows such large flowers—and her subsequent embarrassment leads her to relent and hire him to do work that she could do herself. The tinker's obvious duplicity (evident throughout their conversation by slips in his act, such as his observation that chrysanthemums "smell kind of nasty till you get used to them") becomes clear to Elisa only when she sees that he has dumped her chrysanthemum sprouts on the road outside the farm. In this moment, she understands that he never saw her for who she was—a capable and ambitious woman—or respected her skill, but rather he used her passion against her, reducing her to a weak and silly woman made vulnerable by emotion. That the tinker "wins" this interaction, getting exactly what he wants through deception and effectively punishing Elisa for her authenticity, suggests Steinbeck's cynicism about human interaction and gender roles. Even though Elisa is strong, capable, and genuine, she is left unfulfilled and wanting, more devastated and broken than she was before. Meanwhile, a dishonest man easily reaps the benefits of a sexist society. Steinbeck's story does not offer any solutions to this issue—he does not suggest that a continued commitment to authenticity will eventually allow Elisa to prevail. Instead, readers are left to consider that the interaction might have ended differently if Elisa had been less herself and more what society expected her to be: reserved, unambitious, and unwilling to ask a man to treat her as his equal. - Climax: Elisa discovers that the tinker has thrown her chrysanthemum sprouts onto the side of the road. - Summary: The "high grey-flannel fog of winter" has settled over California's Salinas Valley, sealing it like a "closed pot." The cut hay fields appear to retain the absent sunlight of summer, conveying a sense of optimism even in December. The valley, home to Elisa and Henry Allen's farm, has entered a period of dormancy. From her flower garden Elisa watches Henry negotiate with two businessmen in the distance. At thirty-five, Elisa is strong and has eyes "as clear as water." Her appearance is surprisingly masculine, and her dress reflects her hard work in the dirt, where she uses a pair of scissors to cut down the old year's chrysanthemum stalks. Her work is "over-eager" and "over-powerful," and the small stems seem "too small and easy for her energy." Her experienced hands quickly rid the flowers of unwanted insects and other pests. She is so focused on her work that Henry's sudden appearance startles her. Henry acknowledges Elisa gift with the chrysanthemums, but wishes she'd focus her efforts on growing apples in the orchard. Elisa asserts her prowess, saying she has "planters' hands," and asks Henry what he was discussing with the men in business suits. Henry says he sold thirty head of cattle and suggests that they go into town that evening to celebrate. He also jokes that maybe Elisa would enjoy the local fights, though Elisa quickly rebuffs the idea. She agrees to dinner, and Henry departs to bring the cattle down from the mountain. As Elisa continues working in her garden, a dilapidated wagon approaches the farm, advertising "Pots, pans, knives, sisors, lawn mores, Fixed." A dirty and disheveled man drives the wagon, which is pulled by an exhausted horse and a listless donkey. Elisa warmly welcomes the tinker with witty jokes about the state of his pulling team. The tinker informs Elisa that he is lost, having left the usual route that he follows yearly from Seattle to San Diego, fixing household items along the way. Elisa is immediately drawn to the freedom and intrigue of the tinker's traveling existence, even though she claims to have nothing for him to fix, and she becomes increasingly agitated with him as he continues to attempt to sell his services. Elisa's hardened response begins to soften, however, as the tinker expresses an interest in her cherished chrysanthemums. The tinker claims to know a woman on his usual route who has long been searching for good chrysanthemum seeds, and Elisa agrees to provide him with some sprouts to give to his customer. She kneels to dig up the chrysanthemums, her voice taking on a "husky" tone and her breast swelling "passionately" as she explains her connection to the plants. Elisa's speech takes on a distinctly sexual overtone as she progresses from talking about flowers to fervently asserting that while she's never lived as the tinker has, she knows the feeling of looking at up at a quiet night sky full of stars that "get driven into your body […] hot and sharp and—lovely." Kneeling at the tinker's feet "like a fawning dog," she almost touches the cloth of his pants. Elisa and the tinker are both embarrassed at Elisa's display, and she quickly agrees to give him some work in the form of a damaged saucepan after digging up the sprouts and offering them to him in a red flower pot. Elisa again expresses the desire to live a free and exciting life like the tinker does, even going so far as to say that she shares his skillset in fixing household items. The tinker quickly reminds Elisa that his life of work and travel would be lonesome and frightening "for a woman," and he is then on his way, nearly forgetting the chrysanthemum sprouts in the process. Elisa hurries to the house to take a hot bath, during which she scrubs her entire body until her skin is red. Upon drying, she observes her naked body in the mirror, before carefully applying makeup and selecting her most beautiful dress, "the symbol of her prettiness." When Henry returns home, he tells his wife that she looks "strong and happy." As Elisa and Henry head into Salinas for their date, Elisa sees a dark speck in the distance, and realizes that the tinker has thrown her chrysanthemum sprouts out onto the side of the road. Elisa turns her head, "crying weakly—like an old woman."

- Genre: Science fiction / speculative fiction / dystopian fiction - Title: The Circle - Point of view: Third person limited (Mae Holland's point of view) - Setting: The San Francisco Bay Area, Northern California, USA - Character: Mae Holland. Description: The protagonist of The Circle, Mae Holland is a bright young woman whose friend, Annie Allerton, gets her a job at the Circle. Over the course of the novel, Mae goes from being politely skeptical of the Circle's policies (especially its insistence on active social networking) to becoming an enthusiastic advocate for these policies. Little by little, Mae comes to accept that privacy is immoral, that human beings have an obligation to socialize with millions of other human beings via the Internet, and that the Circle is building a global utopia. She becomes distant from her family and old friends, effectively trading a couple dozen "real people" for millions of virtual friends worldwide. As Mae becomes increasingly loyal to the Circle, it becomes increasingly obvious to readers that Mae is a pawn: the Circle's executives are using her as a poster child for their company and a tool with which to manipulate the world's population into accepting the Circle. In the novel's final pages, Mae betrays Ty Gospodinov—the founder of the Circle, who has come to question his company's ethics—which signifies that she has surrendered to the Circle's corrupt agenda. - Character: Annie Allerton. Description: Annie Allerton is a high-ranking member of the Circle (one of the so-called "Gang of 40"), but it's never made clear what, precisely, she does. Annie is an old friend of Mae Holland's, and she pulls strings to ensure that the Circle hires her. For the first half of the book, Annie seems to be an enthusiastic advocate of the Circle's culture and beliefs: Annie encourages Mae to post online about her experiences, and she expresses shock and anxiety when Mae ignores her messages for even fifteen minutes. However, in the second half of the novel, as Mae becomes increasingly enamored with the Circle and its philosophy of transparency, Annie becomes increasingly uneasy and stressed out. Seemingly jealous of Mae's new success, Annie begins ignoring her old friend and eventually has a nervous breakdown, which places her in a coma. The breakdown in Annie's friendship with Mae is one of the most tragic aspects of The Circle, and the arc of their relationship is an argument that social networking pushes people further apart instead of bringing them closer together. - Character: Ty Gospodinov / Kalden. Description: Ty Gospodinov, an introverted computer genius, is the founder of the Circle and the creator of TruYou, the online identity system at the core of the Circle's success. In creating TruYou, Ty thought that he was creating a digital utopia, but he becomes uneasy with the Circle's rapidly growing power. Although he's one of the three "Wise Men" who run the company, he is sidelined by the others after he calls for privacy protections. Throughout The Circle, Ty is a mysterious character, seen only via webcam at the occasional company meeting (although it's hinted that those webcasts are not what they appear and Ty may have suffered a sinister fate). At the end of the novel, it's revealed that Ty is actually Kalden—the mysterious Circle employee who has been having an occasional affair with Mae Holland. Kalden, trying to act on his ethical qualms with the Circle, enlists Mae to help him undermine the Circle's plans, but Mae betrays Ty to the other two Wise Men, who seemingly place Ty under arrest (or, it's implied, have him murdered). - Character: Tom Stenton. Description: Tom Stenton is one of the Three Wise Men who run the Circle. Of the three, he's the most stereotypically corporate—aggressive, dangerously charismatic, and ethically lax. Throughout the novel, Stenton seems to play a minor role in the company, at least from the perspective of Mae Holland and her fellow Circle employees. Only toward the end of the book does it become clear that Stenton is the most powerful of the Wise Men, and the one whose vision of ruthless, totalitarian control will prove most influential. As Eggers implies, Stenton is a "shark": he devours everything in his presence and always gets his way. - Character: Eamon Bailey. Description: Eamon Bailey is one of the Three Wise Men who run the Circle. Of the three, he is the most charismatic and—at least according to Ty Gospodinov—sincere. Bailey is a folksy speaker, a pious Christian, and the father of a child, Gunner, who has cerebral palsy. He is passionately devoted to the notion that human beings should share their experiences with one another, and every Friday he makes speeches to his adoring employees about the Circle's utopian mission to eliminate secrecy and unite the world electronically. In a way, Eamon is the most dangerous of the Three Wise Men, since he seems to be the only one to sincerely believe in the ethics of total transparency (Ty rejects transparency as totalitarian, while Tom Stenton welcomes it because it's totalitarian). As we see, Eamon is instrumental in persuading the employees of the Circle, including Mae Holland, to surrender their privacy to the company, which bolsters an ideological program that threatens to engulf the entire planet. - Character: Francis Garaventa. Description: Francis Garaventa is a Circle employee who dates Mae Holland on and off for most of the book. Francis could also be considered Eggers's portrait of (or, if you prefer, his nasty caricature of) the typical Bay Area "tech nerd"—even his first name suggests his symbolic connection with San Francisco. Francis is a shy, awkward man. He suffers from premature ejaculations, which means that he and Mae have many erotic encounters but they never have sex. In spite of Francis's awkwardness and sexual difficulties, Mae finds him to be adorable and deeply sympathetic. In part, his allure has to do with his difficult childhood: more than one of Francis's siblings were killed while he was still a child, and, as a result, he is passionately working to design a program for tracking down kidnapped children. Francis is, one could argue, the archetypal "shy boy" who some people find sexy—he's quiet and awkward, but his awkwardness makes him strangely alluring. - Character: Mercer Medeiros. Description: Mercer Medeiros, Mae Holland's old boyfriend, embodies the analog way of living and the last gasp of resistance to the Circle's unethical philosophy of transparency. He's everything that Circle employees aren't: confident, outspoken, good with his hands, overweight, poorly dressed, unkempt, and committed to the importance of face-to-face contact. Mercer is the only character in the novel who offers an eloquent response to the Circle's worldview: he insists that the Circle has reduced human connection to a shadow of what it once was, trading rich and nuanced relationships (which, he maintains, can only exist when people interact face-to-face) for shallow, meaningless social networking "friendships." Toward the end of the novel, as the Circle prepares to flood the entire industrialized world with cameras, Mercer writes Mae a letter insisting that he's going to live as a hermit. When Mae sends a fleet of drones after Mercer to harass him, he commits suicide by driving his car into a gorge. He'd rather die, it's suggested, than live in under the Circle's totalitarian regime. - Character: Vinnie Holland (Mae's father). Description: Vinnie Holland, Mae's father, is a loving parent who suffers from MS and is unable to get good healthcare. To help her father, Mae arranges for him to receive high-end healthcare from the Circle. However, Vinnie quickly becomes exasperated with the constant surveillance that the Circle demands in exchange for healthcare. As the novel goes on, Vinnie becomes an increasingly minor character, reflecting Mae's alienation from her family and friends, and her growing commitment to the Circle's mission. - Character: Mae's mother. Description: Mae's mother is proud of Mae when she gets a job at the Circle; she's even prouder when Mae arranges for the Circle to provide healthcare for Vinnie Holland (her husband). However, Mae's mother quickly becomes skeptical of the Circle's commitment to creating total transparency. When the Circle installs cameras in her house, she covers the cameras with cloth to protect her privacy. This rebellion against the Circle leads to a rift between Mae and her mother, which eventually causes them not to speak anymore at all. - Character: Dr. Villalobos. Description: Dr. Villalobos is Mae's doctor at the Circle. She is beautiful and she loves being on camera, but her medical knowledge and ethics become suspect as she treats Mae based on comments from Mae's watchers and she constantly violates doctor-patient confidentiality by offering up Mae's medical information while livestreaming to Mae's viewers. - Character: Julian Assange. Description: Controversial, real-life Internet activist and founder of Wikileaks, a website that leaks government secrets. In The Circle, Eamon Bailey offers Julian Assange as an example of a great man who is committed to the idea that secrets are immoral. (Notably, Bailey claims that Assange's leaks haven't resulted in any deaths—a statement that has been hotly debated in real life.) - Theme: Social Networking and the Internet. Description: In The Circle, Dave Eggers satirizes the cultures and values that have emerged in the age of the Internet. In particular, he criticizes the culture of social networking, in which the vast majority of personal interactions don't occur face-to-face, and often occur between people who have never met in person. Written at a time when more and more people communicate predominately through social networking sites, The Circle shows some of the frightening moral and psychological implications of online life. As Eggers sees it, there are many problems with the shallow and disposable human relationships that are mediated by social networking. Because it's so easy to accumulate thousands, or even millions, of online friends, social networking encourages people to value their online friendships—taken together—more highly than their older, firmer friendships. Over the course of the novel, we see Mae becoming more loyal to her millions of Internet followers, or "watchers," than to her longtime close friend Annie Allerton. Even though Mae has never met any of her watchers and she knows almost nothing about them, the aggregate weight of their friendship outweighs her feelings of closeness and intimacy with Annie. As a result, she increasingly neglects Annie and they drift apart. Moreover, because social networking relationships are shallow, they train human beings to think of all relationships—virtual or face-to-face—in shallow, superficial terms. The Circle exposes the shallowness of interpersonal connection via the romance between Mae and Francis Garaventa. After one date with Francis, Mae senses that she's halfway in love with him. Over the course of the novel, Mae learns astonishingly little about the man she claims to care for, and the book implies that this is due to the fact that social networking has trained her not to probe too deeply into her relationships. Finally, social networking trains people to feel an irrational need for constant attention. By providing an endless stream of virtual friends, social networking enables people with Internet access to communicate with someone at literally any time. As a result, Mae and her friends cannot stand even the shortest moments of loneliness; when Mae is alone, for instance, she feels a deep "tear" in her soul, a sign of the feelings of alienation that social networking has created within her. Some readers have attacked Eggers for being too hysterical in his denunciation of the Internet and social networking, but Eggers isn't striving for social realism. Rather, his goal is to use satire and hyperbole to draw attention to the serious problems that social networking is creating in modern society. - Theme: Surveillance and Transparency. Description: Surveillance is another important aspect of contemporary culture that The Circle explores. Over the course of the novel, the Circle rolls out a series of programs that cause virtually the entire industrialized world to be placed under surveillance. At the same time that the Circle places the world under surveillance, the Circle's executives, especially Eamon Bailey, promote the philosophy that surveillance is an inherent good, and that allowing oneself to be watched at all times (or "going transparent") leads to enlightenment. In reality, Bailey's doctrine of transparency is just a thinly-veiled version of the familiar totalitarian mantra, "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." In sharp contrast to Bailey's ideas, The Circle shows how surveillance and the culture of transparency interfere with human freedom and human nature. The premise of The Circle's critique of surveillance culture is simple: the book shows how surveillance destroys the nuance and beauty of human interaction. Surveillance damages human behavior by encouraging (and later forcing) people to perform for their watchers rather than allowing them to live without worrying what other people will think. In addition, Eggers suggests that the beauty of face-to-face interaction is that it's spontaneous, instinctive, and meant specifically for the other person. However, when two people "go transparent" (i.e., when they speak face-to-face, but with millions of people watching), they tailor their behavior to fit with the expectations of their audience. The novel shows, for example, how Mae Holland loses her connection to Annie Allerton, one of her oldest friends, after she goes transparent. The friendship between the two women becomes strained and distant, since it is mediated by Mae's watchers at all times. In addition to showing how surveillance homogenizes human behavior, the novel shows how surveillance, despite seeming harmless to begin with, ultimately violates human freedom. Perhaps the greatest danger of surveillance is that it's pleasurable. By glamorizing the culture of transparency, the Circle tricks its users and employees into surrendering their old ways of life voluntarily and embracing a shallow, unsatisfying replacement. In a sense, Mae is like a drug addict—at first, she freely chooses to try surveillance, but she quickly becomes a slave to her own desire. The analogy isn't as inappropriate as it might sound: when Mae is deprived of her watchers for even a minute, she goes through clear symptoms of withdrawal. The novel shows how the Circle uses Mae's addiction to manipulate her into carrying out the company's unethical agenda. In other words, what began as Mae's voluntary decision to be watched at all times devolves into her complete loss of freedom—even the ability to think for herself. This is all the more frightening because Mae believes that she's acting voluntarily, even though she's being manipulated into doing what the Circle wants. It's never entirely clear what the Circle intends to do with its surveillance power, but Eggers hints that the Circle will become a tyrannical and dangerous organization, since it can watch anyone in the world. Even without knowing the Circle's endgame, though, the danger becomes clear by the end of the book. For instance, a Circle-sponsored surveillance program sends a bloodthirsty mob after a suspected murderer, and another Circle-sponsored program promises to blacklist all people with a high likelihood of committing a crime. Perhaps most tellingly, Eggers makes it clear that, for all their emphasis on transparency and surveillance, the Circle's executives refuse to reveal anything about their own intentions for the company's future, and are therefore—according to their own arguments—lying and evil. In the end, however, The Circle's most important insight about surveillance is that it's a slippery slope: at first it seems harmless and even pleasurable; later on, when it's too late to fight back, it becomes clear how dangerous surveillance really is. - Theme: Privacy. Description: The counterpoint to The Circle's satire of surveillance is its celebration of privacy. At various points, the Circle's leaders tell Mae Holland that privacy is dangerous and selfish: as Eamon Bailey says, "Secrets are lies." In refuting Bailey's statement, The Circle not only connects surveillance with totalitarianism and abuse, but it also shows that privacy is an important part of the human experience. Private moments are necessary because they can be meaningful and restorative. Without privacy, human beings are reduced to anxious, insecure wrecks. The Circle argues that privacy—understood as the ability to have information, experiences, or emotions that are not shared with other people—has an intangible and unquantifiable power. Privacy is restorative: being alone with one's thoughts and feelings builds strength and self-reliance. When Mae kayaks alone, for instance, it is the only time that she is allowed to be physically isolated from the rest of the world, and it helps her to relax, clear her head, and build her confidence. After Circle employees find out about Mae's "rogue kayaking," they pressure her to post videos and statuses about kayaking, which effectively ends her private, individual relationship with the activity. Not coincidentally, Mae becomes increasingly insecure and unstable after she surrenders her private time to the Circle. Without the benefit of private time, she's forced to be "on" at all times, and, since this makes her completely reliant on other people for validation and support, she becomes weaker and more emotionally needy. The novel further suggests that, contrary to Bailey's extravagant claims, two people can only engage in mature, stable relationships when they have some privacy from each other. Conversely, when two people have total information about one another, it's very difficult for them to have a mature relationship of any kind. For example, Annie Allerton volunteers for a program that publicizes her complete family history, and, to her horror, the program reveals difficult information about her parents (for example, that years ago, they witnessed a man drown and did nothing to help him). Afterwards, it becomes almost impossible for Annie to think of her parents as parents: cursed with perfect information, she begins to think of them more distantly, and, after a time, she seems not to think about them at all. Annie's experience suggests that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the beauty and dignity in other people when one is bombarded with information about them. Perhaps, then, there are some aspects of the human experience that can only be savored with the benefit of privacy. Total information, The Circle suggests, is overrated: in order to remain sane, humans also need illusions, dreams, and moments alone with their own thoughts. - Theme: Totalitarianism and Indoctrination. Description: The French writer Luc Moullet once wrote, "On fascism, only the point of view of someone who has been tempted is of any interest." These wise words apply to totalitarianism in general, and, in the spirit of Moullet, The Circle depicts a totalitarian organization from the point of view of someone who is slowly being pulled into its orbit. Because The Circle is told from Mae's perspective, we learn relatively little about how, exactly, the Circle is going to take over the world—as is so often the case in totalitarianism, Mae (a mere foot soldier) is kept in the dark. However, by focusing so exclusively on Mae, the novel explores one of the key aspects of any totalitarian organization: how powerful people indoctrinate their underlings into obedience, using a mixture of peer pressure, persuasion, and outright brainwashing. Perhaps the novel's key insight into indoctrination is that it has to be gradual. Like the proverbial frog in a pot of water, Mae is slowly pulled into the radical ideology of the Circle. As the novel begins, she is enthusiastic about the basic premise of the Circle—accountability on the Internet—but skeptical of some of the company's more ambitious ideas. Instead of live-blogging her life and posting online at all times, she spends time with her parents and kayaks alone. As the novel moves along, however, Mae's colleagues and superiors cajole her into spending less time with her family, posting online more frequently, and cutting her ties to the world outside the Circle. At first, the arguments Mae hears in favor of transparency seem to be somewhat justifiable. For example, Mae learns about the Circle's plan to implant tracking chips into human bone, but she doesn't question it because it's intended to protect young children from kidnapping. Much later, when it becomes clear that the Circle is going to use the chips to track all human beings in order to control them, Mae still does not object—the moral groundwork for this totalitarian project has been laid already, and Mae has invested too much in her life at the company to change her mind once she begins to understand the truth. It has been argued that, had Adolf Hitler proposed the murder of the Jews in the early days of his regime, the German population would have opposed or ignored him. However, by gradually proposing increasingly extreme measures, Hitler was able to seduce his people into supporting his genocidal plan. Much the same is true of the totalitarian Circle: if Mae had heard on her first day that the Circle wanted to track all aspects of human life, she might have quit. But because the Circle slowly nudges her into obedience, she comes to support all of its endeavors. Another important point about indoctrination is that it's often a collective process in which the psychology of the group can convince individuals to conform. Central to this is the Circle's emphasis on isolating employees: the Circle campus is a self-contained world that employees are encouraged never to leave, which means that they spend very little time with non-employees. This isolation amplifies the effectiveness of indoctrination in several ways. First, it minimizes the number of dissenting voices who might dissuade Mae and her friends from embracing the Circle's ideology. Second, it pressures Mae and other new employees to fit in with the group at all costs, since this is their only community. Third, it creates a spirit of competitiveness, in which Mae and the other employees all want the same things (the same romantic partners, the same accolades from their superiors, and the same promotions). This instills loyalty to the company over loyalty to one another. The Circle's indoctrination techniques are, in sum, taken straight out of the totalitarian playbook. By examining the psychology of a lower-level employee who gradually comes to believe the company's twisted ideology, the novel provides valuable insight into how even independent and intelligent people can be seduced into supporting practices that, when viewed objectively, are clearly immoral. - Theme: Utopianism and Perfection. Description: From the beginning of The Circle, it's clear that the Circle's operations stretch far beyond those of the typical tech company: it's working on plans to map the entire world, end corruption in politics, fight crime, increase political awareness, and more. The Circle professes to be, and is widely regarded as, a utopian company, committed to making the world perfect in every way: both by wiping out societal problems like crime and, on a personal level, by pressuring people to be honest, pleasant, and respectful at all times. However, as the novel goes on, we gradually realize that the Circle is nothing of the kind: while many people at the company sincerely believe that they're making the world perfect, the CEO, Tom Stenton, is a ruthless businessman who uses claims of utopianism as a smokescreen for his own greed. In this way, The Circle suggests that utopianism is a kind of alibi that tech companies like the Circle use to hide their unethical behavior. Furthermore, the novel suggests that the very notion of utopianism—total, around-the-clock perfection—is inherently flawed. Throughout the novel, there are glimpses of how the Circle uses glib, facile claims of utopianism to hide the fact that it's a dangerous company. For one thing, the company's lofty rhetoric of honesty, openness, and transparency helps convince people to surrender their privacy and personal information to the company. For instance, Mae Holland gradually gives up more and more privacy to the company, eventually wearing a camera on her body. Mae does so for two distinct reasons: first, because she sincerely comes to believe that surrendering privacy is the morally right thing to do; second, because she's certain that the Circle is a benevolent company that would never do anything to hurt her. Similarly, the Circle flaunts its utopian ambitions in order to distract people from the fact that it's slowly becoming a police state. For example, the Circle warms its employees and users up to the idea of human tracking devices by framing their surveillance program (that is intended ultimately to track all people at all times) as an attempt to protect children from kidnapping by microchipping their bones. While some Circle executives, such as Eamon Bailey, seem sincere in their utopianism, it is clear by the end of the book that the real power-holders in the company are corrupt, greedy people like Tom Stenton, who are now poised to control the entire world. In effect, the Circle—perhaps like any powerful institution that claims to be building a perfect world—has used utopianism to trick people into trusting its authority. Without these utopian claims, people might be more skeptical of placing so much power in a few people's hands. While Stenton is clearly corrupt, it's crucial to realize that, even before he consolidates power, the Circle has already created a nightmarish world: though the characters have deluded themselves into thinking that their lives are perfect, they've become neurotic, depressed, and cruel. The Circle has destroyed human happiness by pushing people to adopt the same utopian standard of sociability and morality. In one sense, the Circle's utopian worldview (enforced by constant surveillance) compels ordinary human beings to try to be perfect at all times. The Circle's social networking websites, phones, and other electronic gadgets connect Circle users to other users around the world. This creates a de facto surveillance system, in which everyone is always being watched by everyone else. Circle executives celebrate themselves for creating a system in which nobody can get away with being anything less than nice. In doing so, however, they take the vivacity and sincerity out of human relationships. The Circle's commitment to perfection—understood in the sense of constant human happiness—results in a bland, dull society, in which no one is ever entirely sad or happy. Similarly, the Circle pressures its user to be honest and law-abiding at all times. While obeying the law may sound like an unqualified good, the novel suggests that, sometimes, human beings need the freedom to break the law and bend a few rules. For example, when Mae "steals" a kayak after dark and takes it out on the water—a totally victimless crime that brings her peace and happiness—the police come to arrest her, thanks to Circle surveillance. The Circle helps enforce the rules, but, it's suggested, it also limits human freedom and happiness. In general, the novel suggests that true happiness is only possible when people also experience natural amounts of sadness, uncertainty, frustration, and even illegality in their lives. Thus, because the Circle tries to bring about total happiness, perfection, and legality, it ends up creating exactly the opposite world: an unethical police state in which everyone pretends to be happy, but, in fact, is miserable. In the end, then, The Circle's attack on utopianism is two-pronged. Utopianism can be a convincing alibi for unethical forms of control and domination, as it is for Tom Stenton. But even when utopianism is meant sincerely—for example, by Eamon Bailey—it can take all the joy, surprise, and humanity out of life in favor of bland perfection. - Climax: Kalden begs Mae Holland to denounce the Circle - Summary: A young woman named Mae Holland arrives at the campus of a company called the Circle, one of the most highly praised and innovative tech companies in the world. Mae has been recruited to work at the company, thanks to the help of her close friend and college roommate, Annie Allerton, who is one of the Circle's highest-ranking employees. Annie welcomes Mae warmly and gives her a tour of the facilities, which are beautiful and cutting-edge. Everyone Mae meets is extremely gracious and enthusiastic about Mae joining the company. During the course of the tour, Annie tells Mae about the Circle. It's run by three people who are known as the Three Wise Men. Ty Gospodinov, the founder and most tech-savvy of the Wise Men, is a recluse and he almost never appears in public anymore. Tom Stenton, the most aggressive and money-hungry of the Wise Men, is in charge of the company's "dirty work." Finally, Eamon Bailey, the most charismatic and beloved of the Wise Men, is responsible for realizing the company's vision of global interconnectedness. Mae begins working for the Circle in the Customer Experience department. There, she spends her time interacting with customers who have questions about Circle products. Her job seems to be generally superficial and it's not clear how it fits in with the company's mission overall. Mae quickly finds that the Circle throws parties and social events near-constantly. At one party, she meets a quirky employee named Francis Garaventa. Mae quickly learns that Francis is an orphan, and several of his siblings were kidnapped and killed when he was a small child. As a result, Francis is working on a project for the Circle designed to track abducted children. Mae also attends presentations led by Eamon Bailey. At one, Eamon introduces a program called SeeChange—a system of cameras that allow Circle users to watch any point on Earth at any time. Although Mae is impressed with the utopian spirit of the Circle, she doesn't spend as much time on campus as her coworkers do because she likes to visit her parents. Her father is suffering from MS and he needs constant care; unfortunately, his healthcare doesn't provide him with the painkillers that he needs to feel comfortable. At work, Mae is encouraged to spend much more time participating in social life at the Circle. She is supposed to attend parties and gatherings, and, much more importantly, she is urged to post online about her activity. Sensing that this is important to her job, Mae throws herself into the task of building an online presence: she stays up late at night posting statuses, liking other people's videos, etc. Around the same time, Mae meets a mysterious man named Kalden. Kalden asks Mae questions about herself and about her work, but he refuses to answer many questions about his own life—he doesn't even give Mae his last name. Mae tries to find Kalden online, but she can't find anyone with his name. Later, Mae goes on a date with Francis, and they kiss. The day after their date, Francis helps give a presentation about a new dating website called LuvLuv; during the presentation, he demonstrates the website by displaying Mae's personal information. Mae is furious with Francis and she refuses to talk to him. Soon afterwards, she learns that her father's health is declining rapidly. She goes home to visit her father, and, during her visit, she argues with her old boyfriend, Mercer Medeiros. Mercer expresses his skepticism about Mae's new employer and he suggests that constant texting and social networking are destroying Mae's relationships with her friends and family. Around the same time, Mae meets Kalden at a Circle party, and they have sex in a secret room. At work, Mae learns that she can put her parents on her company's health insurance plan; with Annie's help, she does so. Meanwhile, the Circle begins to push the idea of becoming totally transparent (requiring its users to share all their personal information and experiences with other users). The Circle installs cameras almost everywhere on its campus. In secret, Kalden and Mae meet up in the bathroom (one of the only places without cameras) and have sex. One night after seeing Mercer and her parents for dinner, Mae goes out to the beach and sees an unreturned kayak near her favorite kayak shop. She decides to take it out and then return it, planning to leave it just as she found it. When she returns to land, however, she's surprised to find police officers waiting to arrest her. Mae is forced to call the owner of the kayak store, a woman named Marion. Although she's ultimately not arrested, the experience frightens Mae. The next day, Mae learns that Circle users reported Mae after they saw her "stealing" the kayak on a hidden camera installed near the beach. Mae goes to meet with Eamon Bailey, who persuades her that "secrets are lies" and that human beings have a moral obligation to share their experiences with other people. Afterwards, Mae posts online near-constantly, sharing every detail of her life with other people. The novel jumps forward almost a year. The Circle has grown to handle virtually all of the world's information flow, and Mae has gone transparent and has been promoted to being a virtual tour guide for the company. As part of being transparent (which is inextricably linked to her job as a guide), Mae wears a lens around her chest at all times that allows anyone in the world to see what she sees and hear her voice. Mae savors her transparency, noting that it keeps her honest and energetic at all times: she always has to be "on" for her millions of watchers. Mae revives her relationship with Francis, but is unable to have sex with him, since he suffers from premature ejaculation. Mae also finds herself growing increasingly distant from Annie, who seems overworked and envious of Mae's burgeoning popularity at the company and with its users. Mae learns that her family has been "disrespecting the Circle." After her parents accepted the company's health insurance, the Circle installed cameras in their home, which Mae's parents then covered with cloth to block their view. Furious, Mae begs her parents to uncover the cameras. Mercer tells Mae that her parents deserve privacy—a suggestion that Mae dismisses as absurd. At work, Mae proposes a new idea: to require all Circle users to vote online through an interface controlled by the Circle. Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton like this idea, and they further propose that the company require all Circle users to pay their taxes through the Circle, test their children through the Circle, etc. The resulting program, called "Demoxie" allows anyone in the world to vote on any topic. Mae gets several phone calls from Kalden, in which he urges Mae to speak out against the Circle because it is becoming dangerous and totalitarian. Mae ignores Kalden. She stays up late at night posting online, and she becomes paranoid and anxious about the smallest problems. The Circle proposes projects that would allow police officers to target people who might become criminals, though they have not yet committed any crimes. Meanwhile, Mae realizes that Annie is suffering from crippling anxiety. Annie has signed up as a guinea pig for a new Circle program that tracks people's ancestry and family history. Through this program, Annie has discovered that some of her ancestors were slave owners, and as a result, her online followers are sending her cruel messages. Mae tries to help Annie by telling her own watchers—millions of them—to be supportive of Annie and overlook her family's crimes. Mae gets a letter from Mercer explaining that he's going to become a hermit in order to escape the surveillance of the Circle. Shortly afterwards, Mae demonstrates a new Circle program that is designed to track down fugitives. She chooses to demonstrate the program on Mercer, and she sends a team of drones flying after him. In the middle of her demonstration, Mercer drives his car into a gorge in order to escape the drones (and, perhaps, to escape the surveillance culture that the Circle has enshrined more generally). He dies—it's an apparent suicide. Mae is distraught, but Eamon Bailey convinces her that Mercer was a disturbed young man and that she played no role in his death. Mae is finally introduced to Ty Gospodinov, the third and most reclusive of the Wise Men. She's amazed to see that Ty is actually Kalden. In private, Ty explains that he's been trying to destroy his own company for years: he never wanted the Circle to destroy peoples' privacy, and believes that Tom Stenton is going to turn the Circle into a tyrannical monopoly. He begs Mae to use her influence to denounce the company. In the brief, final part of the novel, Mae has chosen not to denounce the company, but rather to inform Eamon Bailey and Tom Stenton of Ty's subversive plans. Stenton and Bailey then placed Ty under arrest (or potentially murdered him), and Mae hasn't seen Ty since. Mae visits Annie, who had a nervous breakdown following her participation in the genealogy project and is now in a coma. She looks at the screens showing Annie's brain waves, and resolves to propose a project for listening to other people's thoughts. The novel concludes, "The world deserved nothing less and would not wait."

- Genre: Epistolary novel; the 20th-century African-American novel; 20th-century feminist writing - Title: The Color Purple - Point of view: first-person (epistolary, or a novel-in-letters) - Setting: Georgia and coastal Africa, roughly 1920-1950 - Character: Celie. Description: The novel's protagonist, at the beginning of the novel Celie is quiet, passive, and able to express herself only through letters to God. As a teenager she is repeatedly raped by her father (later revealed to be her stepfather), Pa, and gives birth to two children, Olivia and Adam, whom her stepfather gives away and who are raised by a missionary couple. Celie is then married off to Mr. _____, who wants her only for her work ethic and regularly beats her. Celie tries to protect her sister, Nettie, and helps her to run away first from Pa and then from Mr. ____ when both try to rape her, too, at different times. Celie's attempts to get free of the men in her life, to discover her sexuality and to learn to love (both primarily through the female singer Shug Avery), to gain both her social and emotional independence, to find spiritual satisfaction and connection to God, and to find Nettie form the drama of the book, which is constructed as a series of letters between Celie and God, and between Celie and Nettie. - Character: Nettie. Description: Celie's more attractive younger sister. Forced to leave first her own home when Pa turns his sexual attention to her and then Mr. _____'s house after he makes sexual advances toward her, Nettie ends up helping out in the household of Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine. The three of them, and the couple's adopted children Adam and Olivia (who are Celie's biological children), travel to Africa to serve as missionaries to the Olinka people. There, Nettie becomes educated and gains a new spiritual understanding of the world that mirrors Celie's own, and later marries Samuel after Corrine dies of disease. Nettie is later reunited with her sister, and she, as step-mother to Adam and Olivia, introduces the children to their biological mother at the novel's end. - Character: Mr. _____ (Albert). Description: An abusive husband who emotionally and physically abuses Celie in order to control her. He carries on a relationship with the singer Shug throughout much of their marriage. He has multiple children by multiple women, but his overriding love is for Shug. After both Shug and Celie leave him, Mr. _____ realizes how much he depended on them and how cruelly he acted toward Celie in particular. He "finds religion" and apologizes to Celie, and they close out the novel as friends; Mr. gives Celie a purple frog to symbolize their new friendship. - Character: Shug Avery. Description: A singer who is considered a "nasty woman" by those in the community, because she has relationships with numerous men, Shug becomes friends (and, later, lovers) with Celie, teaching Celie about sexuality, love, and spirituality in the process. She also carries on a long-standing relationship with Mr. _____, who is married to Celie for much of that time. After leaving Celie, with whom she was living in Memphis, for "one last fling" with a young man named Germaine, Shug returns to Celie and lives in her home in Georgia. - Character: Sofia. Description: A strong-minded and physically strong woman, and first wife of Harpo. She does not brook any discrimination from white people or physical or other efforts to control her by men, Sofia is sent to prison for fighting the (white) mayor and his wife. She later serves as maid in the mayor's house for almost twelve years, helping to raise his children. Sofia then returns to Celie's home, where her own children with Harpo no longer recognize her. - Character: Harpo. Description: Mr. _____'s oldest son, who is raised by Celie. Harpo is an essentially good man, but he drives Sofia, his first wife, away by trying to get her to "mind" (or obey) him. Harpo later marries a woman named Squeak, or Mary Agnes, and opens a jukejoint (bar) on his property in Georgia. - Character: Squeak. Description: Harpo's second wife, Squeak begins the novel as a physically weak and unimposing woman, who comes into her own over the course of the novel. She later leaves Harpo to run off with Grady, Shug's husband, in order to have a singing career. Squeak then returns to Celie's home just before the novel's end. - Character: Eleanor Jane, Stanley Earl, and Reynolds. Description: Eleanor Jane, the mayor's daughter, becomes close to Sofia, the woman who raised her. Sofia is civil to Eleanor's husband Stanley Earl, but Sofia refuses to gush and dote upon Reynolds, their son, explaining to Eleanor that she (Sofia) has already been made to care for a white family that is not hers, at the expense of caring for her own family. - Character: Samuel. Description: A reverend, married to Corrine. Kind and good, Samuel adopts two children, Olivia and Adam, who are given to him by Pa (and who turn out to be Celie's children). He and his wife also take in Nettie after she flees from Mr. _____'s house, not realizing that she is the children's aunt. He travels with his wife, two children, and Nettie, to Africa, where he serves as a missionary to the Olinka. After his wife's death, Samuel marries Nettie, and the entire family travels back to Georgia to reunite with Celie. - Character: Corrine. Description: Samuel's wife, Corrine doubts, until just before her death, that Samuel is telling the truth about the children—Corrine believes that Samuel and Nettie had an affair, and that Olivia and Adam are therefore Samuel and Nettie's biological children. Corrine finally believes Nettie, however, before she succumbs to her illness and dies among the Olinka. - Character: Adam. Description: Nettie's stepson and Celie's son, Adam grows up in Africa, raised by Nettie, Samuel, and Corrine. After the Olinka woman he loves, Tashi, undergoes the ritual facial scarring of her tribe, and then is ashamed of having done so, he undergoes the same scarring. He marries Tashi before moving back to the United States with his family. - Character: Celie and Nettie's mother. Description: After the death of her husband who is lynched by a gang of white men, Celie and Nettie's mother falls into a deep depression. She eventually marries Pa, and never tells the girls that Pa is not their actual father. As she lies depressed in bed, Pa rapes Celie. She dies early in the story. - Theme: God and Spirituality. Description: The first words written by Celie, the novel's protagonist, are "Dear God," and the novel ends with a letter, the salutation of which reads, "Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God." This encapsulates The Color Purple's relationship to religion and spirituality: a transition from a belief in a single God, an old white man in a long beard, to a God that exists all around, and is a part of human happiness. Celie begins writing letters to God in order to survive the her father's sexual abuse; she later comes to view God as an outgrowth of nature's beauty, after Shug convinces her that God is more than what white people say, and what church teachings confirm. Although Shug is not typically religious, she believes strongly that God wants people to be happy, and that God, too, wants to be loved, just as people do. Nettie serves as a missionary to the Olinka people, intending to spread Christianity, but realizes, like her sister, that God is more pervasive, more bound up in nature than some Christian teaching suggests. Even Mr. _____ comes to realize that he behaved evilly as a young man, and his growing belief in the "wonder" of God's creation makes him a better person, and a friend to Celie. Nettie's return to Celie, at the novel's end, confirms that the beauty of family togetherness is one manifestation of God's power on earth. - Theme: Race and Racism. Description: The novel takes place in two distinct settings—rural Georgia and a remote African village—both suffused with problems of race and racism. Celie believes herself to be ugly in part because of her very dark skin. Sofia, after fighting back against the genteel racism of the mayor and his wife, ends up serving as maid to that family, and as surrogate mother to Eleanor, who does not initially recognize the sacrifices Sofia has been forced to make. In general, very few career paths are open to the African Americans in the novel: for the men, farming is the main occupation, although Harpo manages to open a bar. For women, it seems only possible to serve as a mother, or to perform for a living, to sing as Squeak and Shug Avery do. In Africa, the situation Nettie, Samuel, Corrine, Adam, Tashi, and Olivia experience is not that much different. Nettie recalls that the ancestors of the Olinka, with whom she lives, sold her ancestors into slavery in America. The Olinka view African Americans with indifference. Meanwhile the English rubber workers, who build roads through the village and displace the Olinka from their ancient land, have very little concern for that people's history in Africa. The British feel that, because they are developing the land, they "own" it, and the African people who have lived there for centuries are merely "backward" natives. It is only at the very end of the novel, after Samuel, Nettie, and their family have returned from Africa, to Celie's home in Georgia, that Celie and Nettie's entire family is able to come together and dine—a small gift, and something that would be considered completely normal for the white families of that time period, whose lives had not been ripped apart by the legacy of slavery and poverty. - Theme: Men, Women, and Gender Roles. Description: The novel is also an extended meditation on the nature of men, women, and their expected gender roles. In the beginning, Celie is expected to serve her abusive father, and, later, her husband Mr. _____, and Nettie, not wanting to do either, runs away. But Nettie sacrifices the job generally reserved for women—motherhood—in order to educate herself and work for Samuel and Corrine during their missionary labors in Africa. Celie, meanwhile, has two children, whom Nettie then raises in Africa, coincidentally—Celie only leaves behind the drudgery of housework when Shug comes to live with her and Mr. _____ and begins to teach Celie about her body and about other ways of living, outside the control of men. Celie and Squeak, Harpo's second wife, end up living with Shug in Memphis, and Celie is able to start her pants-making company.The men in the novel, however, experience a different trajectory. It is expected that black men of this time, especially in the South, work in the fields, and that women obey them absolutely. But after Shug and then Celie leave him behind, Mr. _____ realizes just how much he took for granted and how much he, and his son Harpo, have relied on the work of women throughout their lives. Similarly, in Africa, Nettie manages both to achieve the gender role initially expected of her (by marrying the widower Samuel), and keeps working and forging her own path in life, eventually spending over twenty years as a missionary in Africa. The end of the novel, then, celebrates both the continuity of family, populated both by strong female characters and repentant male ones, and the fact that "families," and the roles within them, are fluid, often overlapping, and part of a long arc toward equality and greater understanding, even if that arc is often dotted with tragedy, abuse, and neglect. - Theme: Violence and Suffering. Description: Violence and suffering in The Color Purple are typically depicted as part of a greater cycle of tragedy taking place both on the family level and on a broader social scale. Celie is raped by her stepfather and beaten for many years by her husband, only to have Shug Avery intervene on her behalf. Sofia is nearly beaten to death by white police officers after pushing a white family; she nearly dies in prison. Nettie is almost raped by her stepfather and by Mr. _____, and must run away in order to protect herself. Harpo tries, unsuccessfully, to beat and control Sofia, his first wife, and he beats Squeak until she leaves him for Grady (though Squeak returns to Celie's home at the end of the novel). These cycles of violence are repeated across the South: Celie's biological father and uncles were lynched by whites jealous of their business success, and there is always the threat that, if black people agitate too much for their rights, they will be struck down by the white people who control the local and state government.In Africa, too, this violence occurs within the local culture and in the relation between whites and blacks. Men in the Olinka village have absolute control over their wives, and a scarring ritual takes place for all women going through permanently, leaving their faces permanently marked. The white British rubber dealers who take over the Olinka land end up killing a great many in the village, without concern for the humanity or customs of the Olinka, who have lived there for many years. But despite all this violence and suffering, there is a core of hope in the novel: the hope that Celie and Nettie might be reunited. It is this hope that, eventually, stops the cycle of violence, at least within Celie's family, and enables the reunion of many of the family members in Georgia at the novel's end. - Theme: Self-Discovery. Description: The novel is, ultimately, a journey of self-discovery for Celie, and for other characters. Celie begins the novel as a passive, quiet young girl, perplexed by her own pregnancy, by her rape at the hands of Pa, and her ill-treatment by Mr. _____. Slowly, after meeting Shug and seeing her sister run away, Celie develops practical skills: she is a hard worker in the fields, she learns how to manage a house and raise children, and she meets other inspiring women, including Sofia, who has always had to fight the men in her life. Further, she discovers her own sexuality and capacity to love through her developing romance with Shug. Eventually, Celie discovers that her sister Nettie has been writing to her all along, and this, coupled with Shug's support, allows Celie to confront Mr. _____, to move to Memphis with Shug, to begin her own pants company, and, eventually, to make enough money to be independent. Celie's luck begins to change: she inherits her biological father's estate, allowing her greater financial freedom, and she manages to repair her relationship with Mr. _____ (he. gives her a purple frog as a symbol of his recognition of his earlier bad behavior), and create a kind of family with Mr. _____ Shug, Harpo, Sofia, Squeak, Nettie, and her own children. Nettie's arc is also one of self-discovery. Nettie received more years of schooling than did Celie, and Nettie has seen the world, working as a missionary in Africa, and eventually marrying a kind and intelligent man. But Nettie also realizes that she can balance her independence, and her desire to work, with a loving married life that also includes two stepchildren—Celie's children, Olivia and Adam. Indeed, it is the arrival of this extended family on Celie's land at the end of the novel that signals the last stage in both Celie's and Nettie's journey of self-discovery. The sisters have found themselves, and now, as the novel closes, they have found each other. - Climax: Nettie and Celie are reunited, just before the novel's end, back in Georgia - Summary: Celie, a young girl who lives with her abusive father, her sick mother, and her younger sister Nettie, begins writing letters to God. In her first letters, she details how her father has been sexually abusing her. Celie becomes pregnant twice, and each time her father gives away the children. A man named Mr. _____ begins courting Nettie. Celie encourages Nettie's marriage to Mr. _____ because Celie fears her father (Pa) will soon turn his sexual attentions toward Nettie. But Pa does not permit Nettie to marry Mr. _____, instead insisting that Mr. _____ marry Celie, since she is older and a hard-worker. Mr. _____ believes Celie to be ugly, but eventually is convinced to marry her, because he has several children by his previous wife (who was murdered), and Mr. _____ needs someone to take care of them. Celie marries Mr. _____ and moves in with him. Nettie later escapes Pa and lives with Celie and Mr. _____ for a brief period. But Mr. _____ still has designs on Nettie, and Nettie flees to town, staying with the Reverend Samuel and his wife Corrine, whom Celie once met, briefly. By coincidence, Samuel and Corrine have adopted Olivia and Adam, Celie's two children. Celie believed she recognized Olivia, when she saw her with Corrine in a shop. Nettie promises Celie she will write to her from her new home, but these letters never arrive. Celie takes care of Mr. _____'s children, whom she considers "rotten" save for Harpo, the oldest, who marries a strong, hard-working woman named Sofia. Harpo becomes upset that he cannot get Sofia to obey him; both Mr. _____ and Celie (at first) recommend that Harpo beat Sofia. But when Celie sees how Harpo's attempts at beating have hurt both Harpo and Sofia, Celie apologizes to Sofia, and the two become friends. Shug Avery, a lover from Mr. _____'s past, comes to town, sick, and stays with Mr. _____. They strike up their affair once more, with Celie's knowledge. Celie has been fixated on Shug since seeing a picture of her, on a playbill, when Celie was a girl. Celie and Shug become friends and confidantes, and, later, lovers. Shug begins to sing at a bar Harpo has built behind his shack, after Sofia leaves him (she is tired of being beaten and ordered around by Harpo). Celie tells Shug about her father's sexual abuse, and about Mr. _____'s beatings. Shug promises to protect Celie. Shug and Celie discover that Mr. _____ has been hiding, for years, the letters Nettie has been sending to Celie. Celie reads the letters and discovers that Nettie, upon moving in with Samuel and Corrine, and their two children Olivia and Adam, began studying to be a missionary in Africa. Nettie then traveled with the family to Harlem, in New York City, on to England, and to various cities in Africa, observing the culture and traditions of the people there, before settling in a village of the Olinka people. Nettie works for Samuel and Corrine, aids in the education of Olivia and Adam, and comes to know a girl named Tashi, whose mother, Catherine, does not approve of Tashi being educated in the Western manner. Celie begins writing letters to Nettie rather than to God. Corrine, it is revealed, believes that Samuel has had an affair with Nettie back in Georgia, and that Adam and Olivia are actually Nettie's children. This is why, Corrine thinks, Olivia and Adam so resemble Nettie. Nettie swears to Corrine that the two children are her sister Celie's, and Samuel corroborates her story, adding that Celie and Nettie's "Pa" is really their stepfather, and that their biological father was lynched, after his dry-goods store became too successful in the eyes of his white neighbors in Georgia. Back in Georgia, Celie, spurred on by Shug, confronts Mr. _____ for withholding Nettie's letters for so many years. Celie, Shug, Shug's husband Grady (whom she has married in the interim), and Squeak, Harpo's second wife, move to Memphis, where Shug continues her singing career (Shug already has a house there). Celie begins making pants, a business she will continue for the remainder of the novel, and Squeak and Grady fall in love and move away. Sofia, who was arrested years back for attacking the mayor and his wife after they acted disrespectfully to her, has been serving as the mayor's family maid for twelve years. She is finally released to Celie's home toward the end of the novel. Her children, raised by Harpo and Squeak, no longer recognize her. Meanwhile, the Olinka village is destroyed by British rubber companies, who plow over the Olinkas crops and hunting land, and charge the Olinka rent and a water tax. Dispirited by their inability to save the village, Samuel, Nettie, and the children return to England after Corrine dies of illness. In England, Samuel and Nettie realize that they are in love, and marry; they tell Olivia and Adam that their biological mother is Celie, and vow to reunite the families in Georgia. After one last trip to Africa, in which Tashi and Adam are married, Tashi, Adam, Olivia, Nettie, and Samuel arrive at Celie's house in Georgia—the house she inherited from her biological father after her stepfather's death—and find Celie's family in good order. Shug, who had run away for a time with a young man name Germaine for a last fling, has come back to live with Celie and be reconciled with Mr. _____; Mr. _____ himself has found religion and apologized to Celie for mistreating her (he has even carved Celie a purple frog, as a form of apology) and Squeak, Sofia, Harpo, and the remainder of the family realize that, although a great deal has happened over the past thirty years, they, as a family, feel younger and more energetic than ever before.

- Genre: Fiction, short story - Title: The Cop and the Anthem - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: New York City, NY - Character: Soapy. Description: The protagonist of "The Cop and the Anthem," Soapy is a homeless, street-smart man who is trying to escape the harsh New York City winter by getting arrested and taken to Blackwell's Island, where he will be given a warm bed. His efforts to do so, however—by scamming a restaurant, insulting a police officer, harassing a window-shopper, and stealing an umbrella—all prove futile. O. Henry's languages suggests that Soapy is an intelligent man of refined tastes. He is further defined by his savvy and confidence when it comes to navigating crime and homelessness in New York City, but these same traits ultimately fail him in his effort to get arrested. These failures, in turn, reveal Soapy's vulnerability, which is also what makes him an earnest, sympathetic character by the end of "The Cop and the Anthem." When he hears a church organ playing an uplifting anthem, Soapy is moved to change his life and re-enter society as the man he once was. This ability to change, and his failure to achieve this change on his own terms, make Soapy both a comic and a tragic figure within the story. O. Henry uses Soapy's story to highlight discrepancies in the American Dream and critique rigid class prejudice. - Character: The Police. Description: Soapy encounters police officers more than any other members of New York City society in "The Cop and the Anthem." Though they are never given names, the police officers in the story act as social gatekeepers and form a collective antagonist for Soapy, as he needs them to arrest him in order to make it to Blackwell's Island. The police refuse to do so until the very end of the story, when Soapy ironically no longer desires to be arrested at all after hearing the anthem at the church. Throughout the story, police officers repeatedly misidentify Soapy, ignore his crimes, and mischaracterize his place within society. In many ways, the police in O. Henry's story symbolize American society's relationship to its homeless and criminal populations. When Soapy shatters a storefront window with a brick in an attempt to get arrested, one police officer "refuse[s] to accept Soapy even as a clue," suggesting that Soapy is invisible to the police at times and he is only a criminal when the police see him as such. When Soapy shouts at a police officer and tries to get arrested for disorderly conduct, another policeman misidentifies him as a Yale student, once again determining how Soapy is viewed by the rest of the characters in the story. When Soapy does earnestly change his hopes and dreams at the end of the story and vow to turn his life around, the police once again fail to recognize their stake in derailing Soapy's aspirations. - Character: The Waiters. Description: At the second, less expensive restaurant where Soapy attempts to get arrested, he is tossed out on the street by two waiters who refuse to call the police on him when he can't pay for his meal. Though they are less powerful than the police officers throughout the story, the waiters likewise blockade Soapy from his goal by refusing to recognize him as a criminal. - Character: The Window Shopper. Description: When Soapy assumes the role of a "masher" and begins harassing a window shopper on the street, he fails to recognize that this woman is a prostitute. This woman likewise fails to recognize that Soapy is not a potential customer, despite the fact that the two characters, of everyone Soapy speaks to in the story, are the most similar in their social status. - Character: The Umbrella Man. Description: When Soapy attempts to steal an anonymous man's umbrella in a cigar shop, convinced this will get him arrested and taken to jail, this same man is at first irate and defensive, but backs down the more that Soapy pushes him, slowly revealing that he is in fact an umbrella thief himself. - Theme: Poverty, Homelessness, and Crime. Description: Essential to "The Cop and the Anthem," O. Henry's story of a homeless man's ill-fated attempts to get arrested in order to avoid sleeping in the cold, is an examination of the cruelties and inescapable realities faced by underclass citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. Soapy, the story's protagonist, intentionally commits a string of crimes in order to be taken to the "insular haven" of jail on Blackwell's Island, where he can survive through the winter. To this end, Soapy adopts various criminal personas; even as he personally considers himself a "gentleman," he plays the role of the deadbeat diner who can't pay his bill, the vandal who smashes a storefront window with a brick, a "masher" who harasses a window-shopping woman, a belligerent engaging in disorderly conduct, and a thief. That he must lean into such delinquent behavior in order to obtain the basic necessity of shelter suggests the cyclical nature of homelessness, poverty, and crime. O. Henry, who himself spent time in jail for embezzlement and understood the immense difficulty of re-entering society after any sort of conviction, further uses this story to condemn indifferent or prejudicial treatment of the poor, which itself only serves to thrust vulnerable individuals deeper into the dire circumstances they wish to escape. However eloquent and light-hearted his tone, O. Henry immediately establishes the harsh realities of living in on the street. Soapy, along with many others, sleeps on a park bench. Such accommodations are far from comfortable; the night before his criminal adventures begin, for instance, Soapy had slept under three newspapers, "distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles and over his lap," which "had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square." This image helps readers sympathize with Soapy's plight and understand the urgent motivation behind his subsequent misdeeds. The notion of people shivering under discarded newspapers in this opulent, "ancient" square further creates the sense that the city—however grand—has failed many of its vulnerable residents. To be sure, Soapy's "hibernatorial ambitions" are modest enough: where "his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter," Soapy just wants a warm bed. O. Henry's language here humanizes Soapy, establishing that he, too, is a New Yorker, and is just less fortunate—rather than less deserving—than others. The stark contrast between tropical getaways and Soapy's dream of spending the winter in the local jail subtly rebukes the extravagance of the wealthy, and underscores that, in comparison, Soapy's wish should be easily achieved; if some New Yorkers are flying to islands across the globe for fun, this man should at least be able to find local shelter from the cold. Having established the simplicity of Soapy's desires, the difficulty of fulfilling them becomes all the more frustrating. O. Henry wrings ironic humor out of the increasingly ridiculous situations in which Soapy finds himself as he attempts to get arrested, yet these moments inherently reflect the unending insecurity and instability of Soapy's life—characteristics that surely make it all the more difficult to rise above his circumstances. Soapy not even being allowed to enter a nice restaurant further highlights the prejudicial treatment of those in poverty, whom polite society would apparently prefer to render invisible. Though Soapy presents himself at the restaurant as best he can—clean-shaven, with a "decent" suit jacket and tie—the head waiter conveys him "in silence and haste to the sidewalk" the moment he spots Soapy's "frayed trousers." Of course, Soapy had been hoping to enter the restaurant in order to swindle them out of a free meal and subsequently get sent to the "haven" of Blackwell Island. Yet that jail is a ''haven" evokes an even more explicit connection between poverty and essentially forced criminality; denied more honest avenues to success or financial stability, Soapy resorts to crime, thus further entrenching himself in the cycle that landed him in this situation in the first place. Soapy's ultimate ambition to reform his life, however noble, thus seems decidedly unlikely; how is he to find a job if he cannot even enter a restaurant, or procure a bed? Again, the story suggests this is not due to personal failings so much as a society that would prefer to ignore, hide, and/or punish the realities of homelessness. Indeed, that Soapy is eventually arrested for loitering appears to be the ultimate assertion that he is forever stuck in this lifestyle not entirely of his own accord, and in part because the rest of the world refuses to lend a hand to those in situations like his. Standing outside a church and imagining taking charge of his destiny, Soapy seems poised to finally lift himself from poverty and become a contributing member of society. Yet it is in this moment that a police officer approaches Soapy and asks what he's doing; when Soapy responds, "Nothin'", the officer arrests him. A man with nowhere to go has been arrested for doing nothing—that is, the only thing he really can do. Men like Soapy cannot extract themselves from the cycle poverty, homelessness, and crime, the story thus ultimately suggests, because they are criminalized simply by virtue of their existence. - Theme: The American Dream. Description: Several of the words that Soapy uses to describe Blackwell's Island, including "refuge" and "haven," are reminiscent of the language that inspired waves of poor and homeless individuals to seek out the United States in the hope of a better life. Yet even as the "American Dream" promises prosperity to all who work hard, Soapy's experiences point to the American Dream as being far more selective and undemocratic than it pretends to be. Even if one shows determination and initiative toward life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these opportunities are neither guaranteed nor equally available to everyone. The story thus highlights the inherent hypocrisy of a society that preaches opportunity for all yet only offers it to a few. Rather than succumb to the cold like the dead leaf that falls into his lap at the beginning of the story, Soapy leaves his park bench to pursue the seemingly simple goal of staying alive. Yet his freedom to do so is, ironically, also what stands in his way of pursuing this basic tenet of the American Dream. The geese seen in the opening paragraph of the story offer a metaphor for Soapy's own version of liberty: they possess the freedom of flight but must migrate to find a new home every winter. Likewise, Soapy's life is not encumbered by a mortgage or a job, yet within that relative freedom O. Henry writes that Soapy is "doomed to liberty." This suggests that liberty without opportunity is not really freedom at all; rather, Soapy has no chance to take his life into his own hands and better his circumstances as the American Dream would suggest, and, however "free," remains at the mercy of the world around him. Nevertheless, Soapy's dogged determination to get arrested and find shelter remains the driving force behind "The Cop and the Anthem." That Soapy's hard work is repeatedly rebuffed, however, further illustrates the illusory nature of the American Dream. Several of Soapy's interactions—sneaking a meal at a restaurant, assuming the role of a "masher," and performing disorderly conduct in front of a police officer—can be read as parables of the workplace. Soapy is shaven and wearing a neat black coat when he enters the restaurant, as though he's entering a job interview. Soapy demonstrates his value as a role player willing to perform "despicable and execrated" work when committing street harassment. And he even code-switches when insulting a police officer—a person who, in this instance, might be considered his colleague—in order to achieve his objective of being arrested. The story would be radically different if Soapy decided to give up after he's thrown out of his first restaurant. Instead, he refuses to be dissuaded by failure and digs deeper into his playbook, drawing upon his talents in order to pull himself up by his proverbial bootstraps and land himself in jail. It's easy to imagine how the determination Soapy displays might be praised if it were the story of an entrepreneur, but in Soapy's case the rules of the American success story apparently do not apply. This makes Soapy's decision at the end of the story, upon hearing an organ "anthem" emanate from a church, to seize control of his life and "find work" all the more poignant: no matter how inspiring this emblem of the American Dream, that dream is out of reach for men like Soapy. It's crucial to "The Cop and the Anthem" that O. Henry calls the song Soapy hears within the church an "anthem." This implicitly links the song with "The Star-Spangled Banner," the national anthem of the United States and the piece of music most closely associated with the American Dream. All of the language O. Henry uses in this scene is deliberate and telling, in fact. For instance, the church anthem causes "a revolution" in Soapy and inspires him to "do battle with his desperate fate." It's possible to read this as a re-telling of the American origin story itself, in which the Revolutionary War created the conditions out of which the American Dream arose. That Soapy is on the outside looking in during this scene, barred from the church by an iron fence, can further be read as an analogue of homeless and underclass experience in the United States. Indeed, the church—a place of refuge and salvation—might be seen as a stand-in for the American Dream itself. Though it presents itself as an equal-opportunity endeavor, the American Dream of "The Cop and the Anthem" is selective, brutal, and can't be achieved in equal measure by all members of society. The painful irony of O. Henry's story is that Soapy does achieve his original dream of being taken to Blackwell's Island, but it's only after he becomes determined to pursue new dreams altogether and has taken the initiative to change his life. This portrayal of the American Dream reveals its hypocrisy and shows the extent to which homeless individuals are often caught in a brutal relationship with the bedrock concepts of American culture. - Theme: Society, Power, and Class. Description: The fact that it's nearly impossible to judge characters based on class indicators in O. Henry's story suggests that these indicators are both flawed and arbitrary. As in much of O. Henry's work, markers of social status are often misread and can prove misleading. For instance, Soapy mistakes a prostitute for a well-to-do young woman and finds himself confused for a rowdy Yale student. Soapy also seems to speak and think eloquently, and the language O. Henry uses to describe him is distinctly elevated—affording a certain empathy to this member of the lower class and also suggesting a similarity (or, at least, lack of meaningful difference) between Soapy and the higher class people he runs into. What's more, many members of this "upper class" prove no better or more refined than Soapy, which makes the story inherently critical of prejudicial snobbery. Social status in "The Cop and the Anthem" is frequently determined by appearance, which in turn is shown to be deceptive. In the first restaurant he tries to enter, for example, Soapy's "telltale trousers" identify him as being of a lower-class than the other patrons, and he is accordingly kicked out. Not long after, however, he is misidentified by the police as both a drunken "Yale lad" and a football player. Soapy himself misidentifies people based on appearance. In his encounter with the prostitute, for example, he believes the window-shopping woman to be "of a modest and pleasing guise," while the woman believes Soapy to be a potential customer. This dual misidentification happens again later in the story, when Soapy sees a "well-dressed" man with a silk umbrella, and he and Soapy both misidentify each other as people belonging to higher rungs of society. Soapy is surprised, then, to learn that the supposed gentlemen had in fact stolen the umbrella—just as Soapy himself intends to. In each of these cases, appearance is easily manipulated and clearly a faulty method of determining social status. O. Henry goes further in his critique of class hierarchy by pointing out the meaningless of that status in the first place. Despite "The Cop and the Anthem" being a story about a homeless man with no money to his name, the distinction between Soapy and more privileged members of society is actually rather blurry. The narrator uses learned, dandy-like vocabulary ("soporific," "eleemosynary"), which elevates Soapy to a certain status within the story. However, it also underscores the foppish, jaunty tone of the story, and stands in contrast to the fact that it's about a homeless man's struggle to survive. When Soapy speaks, he often uses a street-smart tone that indicates he understands both grammar and metaphor ("Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?"), an indicator of education and power. By contrast, when characters in positions of power above Soapy use dialogue, they often use grammatically incorrect slang. "Where's the man that done that," says one cop. "No cop for youse," says a waiter. "Lave them be," says another police officer. One of the ironies of Soapy's desire to be lodged at Blackwell's Island is that it lines up with the migratory vacation fantasies of the rich. Fortunate New Yorkers head off to Palm Beach and the Riviera, and Soapy heads off to his own island getaway at Blackwell's. For a man with no money, Soapy displays a surprising knowledge of food and wine. He enters his first restaurant with plans to order roasted duck, Chablis, Camembert, a demi-tasse, and a cigar, and it's only his clothing that differentiates him from the rich—not his knowledge of fine food and drink. Yet even as O. Henry points to indicators of social class as shallow, he nevertheless reveals how class insulates certain members of society from facing repercussions for their actions—underscoring the essential injustice of class prejudice and suggesting the specific means by which class heirarchy maintains itself. Soapy receives a different reaction from the waiters in the first restaurant he'd attempted to infiltrate. In the first, fancier restaurant, upon his being found out, "Strong and ready hands turned [Soapy] about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk […]." The restaurant notably wants to avoid a scene, and his treatment is rude by relatively civil. By contrast, in the second, less swanky establishment, "Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiter pitched Soapy." When Soapy is later misidentified as both a drunken "Yale lad" and a football player, he isn't arrested because the police have instructions from their higher-ups to "leave them"—i.e. presumably upper-class Ivy League students—"be." This in turn points to the differential standards of treatment in either societal tier—tiers that, the story insists, are arbitrary, yet it's clear nevertheless have a direct impact on an individual's experience of the world. There is a strong element of randomness to "The Cop and the Anthem," a story that portrays indicators of social status as murky, misleading, and often so arbitrary as to be meaningless. This is what ultimately what paints Soapy in such a heartbreaking and empathetic light, as it suggests that wealth and power are not obtained through hard work and determination, but rather they are randomly doled out in large doses for some and meager doses for others. - Theme: Community and Home. Description: The central conflict of "The Cop and the Anthem" is the fact that Soapy will die if he is unable to find a home. He is not alone in this conflict, as he is one of the "regular denizens of Madison Square" who must depart every year and find a new place to lay his head. In fact, "The Cop and the Anthem" is a story in which almost every character seems to be in search of a shared experience with other human beings. This suggests that community and home are vital yet often elusive parts of everyday life in the United States.  "The Cop and the Anthem" begins with a fracturing of Soapy's homeless community, which sets him off in search of a new home for the winter. Jack Frost is personified in this opening scene in order to show that he is kind to the homeless population of Madison Square and gives them fair warning about the coming winter so. that they can prepare themselves to seek shelter. This suggest a certain sense of communion between these people forced to live outside and the natural world. The wild geese honking overhead are both a parallel of this search and a stark reminder of Soapy's struggle: though the geese must also pack up and fly south, they do so by traveling as a community. Much in the same way that Soapy looks forward to assured board and bed and congenial company on Blackwell's Island, his "fortunate fellow New Yorkers" are sauntering off to lavish vacations and "drifting in the Vesuvian Bay." There is a hint of restlessness in this description, suggesting even the privileged are in search of a place where they can belong—or at least find relief from the tedium of everyday life. "The Cop and the Anthem" also contains a remarkable number of moments in which its nameless characters seek out human intimacy and community on the smallest scale. O. Henry's story appears to take place between Thanksgiving and Christmas, two holidays defined by communal interaction. It is telling that Soapy's first attempts at getting arrested both involve infiltrating spaces where New Yorkers are dining together in groups.  Moments of intimacy are rare in "The Cop and the Anthem," but they are exemplary of a roaming desire for community when they do occur. Take for example the women who grow "kind to their husbands" when the winter draws near, or the prostitute who simply wants to share a beer with Soapy. For much of the story, however, Soapy tries and fails to engage with his fellow New Yorkers as a community, whether this means dining together at a restaurant or interacting with strangers in the street. For instance, when he enters a district where he finds the "lightest streets, hearts, vows, and librettos," Soapy is incapable of interacting with his community and is instead seized by fear and flees. Yet when Soapy hears the anthem coming out of the church, he finally arrives at a sense of community within New York, and he shows signs for the first time of wanting to find a home within his environment. Notably, this sense of communion is accompanied by the desire to improve his lot in life. Soapy vows that he will go "into the roaring downtown district" and find work. He even cites a fur importer who once offered him a position and vows to ask for the job outright instead of resorting to crime. No sooner does this community revelation occur to Soapy than it is ripped away from him, ironically via the touch of a police officer's "hand laid on his arm," the interaction through which he had hoped to arrive at home at the beginning of the story. This suggests the elusive, bitter nature of searching for home: often it vanishes the moment one defines it. As a nation composed of immigrants and refugees who came looking for a new home, America's literature is often defined by a sense of restlessness, wandering, and desire to find home within a community. If "The Cop and the Anthem" feels hopeless at times, it is because so many of its characters are trying and failing to share the slightest moments of human intimacy, a fact which sheds light on one of the darkest truths of O. Henry's story: one does not have to be homeless to be in search of a home. - Climax: While listening to music coming from a church, Soapy decides to turn his life around - Summary: "The Cop and the Anthem" begins with the arrival of winter in New York City. Soapy decides he must leave his bench in Madison Square Park and get himself arrested so he will be taken to Blackwell's Island, where he will be given a warm place to sleep during the winter. Soapy's first effort at getting arrested finds him entering an expensive restaurant with hopes of ordering a decadent meal and being arrested for "insolvency." When a waiter spots his frayed trousers, however, he is thrown off the premises before he can even sit down. When he then smashes a storefront window with a cobblestone, the responding police officer refuses to recognize Soapy as the culprit. Throughout the story, Soapy fails to get arrested not because he can't commit a crime, but because other individuals refuse to identify him correctly. A second attempt at scamming a restaurant finds Soapy thrown out on the street once again by two waiters, and his efforts to harass a window-shopping woman on the street also prove futile when the woman, suggested to be a prostitute, happily responds to his advances. After trying and failing to get arrested for publicly insulting a police officer—who mistakes Soapy for a drunken Yale student—Soapy attempts to steal an umbrella from a well-dressed man in a cigar store only to discover that the man had in fact stolen the umbrella himself. Discouraged, Soapy sulks off and finds himself outside the gate of a church. There, Soapy hears a beautiful anthem being played within the church, and after listening to this song he resolves to turn his life around and become a functioning member of society once again. However, as soon as he makes this resolution, a police officer arrests him for loitering and he is sentenced to jail time on Blackwell's Island the following day.

- Genre: Young Adult Novel; Verse Novel - Title: The Crossover - Point of view: First-person - Setting: An unnamed town in the U.S. - Character: Josh. Description: Josh is the twelve-year-old protagonist of the novel. He's nearly six feet tall and has a twin, JB. Both are skilled basketball players. Though Josh loves JB and being a twin, he also craves individuality. At the beginning of the novel he achieves this by wearing his hair in locks and reminding the reader several times that he's the only player on the team who can dunk. His love of English and language shines through in his narration, as he often uses vocabulary words from his English homework and some of the novel's poems read like music. Things begin to go downhill for Josh when he loses a bet to JB and JB accidentally cuts off five of Josh's locks instead of one. With this one identity marker gone, Josh feels unmoored and even more importantly, less forgiving towards JB as JB embarks on a romance with a girl Josh calls Miss Sweet Tea. At the same time, Josh starts to notice that Dad isn't in good health. Josh grows progressively angrier as JB spends more and more time with Miss Sweet Tea, and this culminates in Josh deciding to act alone during a game. However, Josh's attempt is unsuccessful and his pass to JB is so hard and violent, he makes JB's nose bleed. During Josh's weeks of forced solitude after this, he remains angry and unmoored, and he becomes progressively more worried about Dad's health. When Dad finally ends up in the hospital, Josh's anger hits a peak: he believes that Dad is keeping him from playing in the championship game. Though Dad is still in the hospital when the championship game rolls around, Josh chooses to take Dad's permission to play in the game and isn't around when Dad dies. Following Dad's death, JB gives Josh Dad's championship ring, which Dad always told the boys they could wear when they became "Da Man," which was his nickname. Though this suggests that Josh becomes "Da Man" after Dad's death, Josh's discomfort with receiving the ring speaks to his new understanding of Dad as a person who didn't properly care for his health. - Character: Dad. Description: Josh and JB's dad. As a young man, Dad was known as "Da Man" and played professional basketball in Europe. At some point in his career, he received a championship ring, which the boys covet in the present. Dad, however, insists that the boys can only have it when they themselves become "Da Man," or follow in his footsteps as basketball stars. To this end, Dad supports his sons in basketball and doles out wisdom to Josh, which Josh then relates to the reader. Dad does his best to make sure the boys understand that their natural aptitude for the sport is something they inherited from him, while also impressing on them the importance of practice and constantly trying to get better. While Josh is looking through his parents' closet for a box for his locks, he and JB begin to make discoveries about Dad's medical history that complicate their reading of their dad. They learn that Dad refused to get surgery for patellar tendinitis and therefore, wasn't allowed to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. Josh also discovers that Dad has hypertension, which makes Dad's fainting episodes and bloody noses start to make more sense. Because Dad's dad, Josh and JB's grandfather, died in the hospital of hypertension, however, Dad distrusts doctors. This is why he refused surgery for patellar tendinitis and why, in the present, he refuses to see a doctor until he ends up in the hospital after suffering a major heart attack. After about a week in a coma, Dad wakes up around Christmas. In his last few days, he tries to encourage Josh and JB to abandon their beef and reaffirm their support of each other. He also encourages Josh to keep playing basketball and continue to practice. While Dad is in the hospital, Josh refers to him as the backboard of the family, suggesting that Dad is the one who keeps the family in line. Dad dies of another heart attack during Josh's final championship game. He leaves his championship ring to Josh, suggesting that Josh is now "Da Man." - Character: JB. Description: JB is Josh's twin. Like Josh, he's good at basketball, and to differentiate himself from his twin, he wears his hair shaved. He describes himself as the cool one, and he's especially good at free throws. JB begins to mature before Josh does, which causes a number of problems for Josh. His growing maturity means that JB chooses his activities based on whether or not he'll get to hang out with girls, not on whether or not he'll get to hang out with his twin. However, JB continues to play basketball and shines on the court. Especially when the boys play together, they're an unstoppable team. JB often steps into the role of the all-knowing brother; he answers Josh's questions matter-of-factly and doesn't consider anything more than the most obvious answers. Not long before Thanksgiving, the new girl, whom Josh calls Miss Sweet Tea, takes an interest in JB. In her presence, JB becomes goofy and starts to ignore Josh in favor of her. Because Josh's narration doesn't offer any insight into JB's thoughts, it's unclear if JB understands how he's making his brother feel by spending so much time with Miss Sweet Tea. JB also loves to bet and will bet on anything. One of these bets has disastrous consequences: he accidentally cuts off five of Josh's locks instead of the agreed-upon one, thereby depriving Josh of an important identity marker. JB, however, doesn't appear sorry enough for Josh's liking. All of this comes to head when Josh throws a ball at JB and nearly breaks his nose. JB goes on to hold a grudge against Josh for most of the rest of the novel, though he begins to relent not long before Dad's health takes a turn for the worse. Once Dad ends up in the hospital, JB is understandably beside himself and refuses to play basketball until Dad comes home. This means that JB is with Dad when Dad dies instead of playing in the championship game with Josh. After Dad's funeral, the boys begin to make up and JB does as Dad asked by giving Dad's championship ring to Josh. - Character: Mom. Description: Josh and JB's mom; she's the assistant principal at their middle school. Mom is a fun, supportive, and loving parent. She encourages the boys to play basketball, gives hard-hitting pep talks when necessary, and supports them in academics. Josh eventually realizes that Mom also does her best to control Dad's diet, as she's aware that the boys' grandfather died of a stroke caused by hypertension and knows that Dad also suffers from the disease. This begins with simply trying to control where her family eats out, but as Dad starts to experience more symptoms that something is wrong, she cuts fried food out of the family's dinner lineup in favor of veggie-heavy offerings. Both Mom and Dad do what they can to encourage Josh and JB in individual pursuits, and Mom in particular tries to impress upon Josh that he and JB are individuals, not the same person. Though she and Dad fight often about his health and his unwillingness to see a doctor, they're still very much in love and, as far as Josh can tell, have sex regularly. Mom does her best to make sure that Josh and JB don't worry too much after Dad is hospitalized for a heart attack, and she doesn't try to stop Josh from playing in the final championship game. - Character: Miss Sweet Tea/Alexis. Description: Miss Sweet Tea is a new girl at Josh and JB's school. She's beautiful and often wears pink Reeboks. All the boys are taken with her, but she's especially interested in JB. At first, Miss Sweet Tea is nice to Josh as well but after Josh throws the ball at JB and nearly breaks his nose, she starts treating him with disdain and disgust. Though Josh remains attracted to her throughout the novel, he refers to her at this point as "the girl who stole my brother" and blames her exclusively for the fact that JB won't forgive him. Josh's narration implies that he thinks of Miss Sweet Tea as more of an object of attraction than a full human in her own right; he doesn't mention her given name, Alexis, until a passage that implies that she's the one speaking her name. This begins to change when Josh learns that Miss Sweet Tea also loves basketball and, most importantly, has a sister who attends Duke, the college that Josh would like to attend one day. They make up in the end when Josh accepts her invitation to a college basketball game and simultaneously accepts that she's an important part of JB's life. - Character: Vondie. Description: One of Josh and JB's teammates and friends. Like Josh and JB, he's very interested in talking about basketball, though he's not as inclined to practice as much; Josh implies that Vondie tries his best to win at wind sprints so that he doesn't have to practice. As Dad's health begins to decline, Vondie texts Josh to keep him updated on the team's status in the championship games and to ask after Dad. - Theme: Inheritance and Genetics. Description: The Crossover follows twelve-year-old Josh Bell, a star basketball player better known by his nickname Filthy McNasty, and his twin and teammate, Jordan ("JB") over what at first appears will be a normal fall and winter basketball season. In addition to their successful middle school careers on the basketball court, the boys enjoy a healthy and happy home life compromised only by the fact that Mom is the assistant principal of their school and has an annoying habit of policing the kind of foods that Dad eats. However, as Josh and JB start to learn more about their family history, specifically Dad's family's struggles with heart disease and his distrust of doctors, Josh is forced to start thinking more critically about what Mom is actually trying to do, and what Dad might be dealing with. In doing so, Josh begins to question what inheritance means, what traits are actually inheritable, and how both he and Dad fit into the story of their family as told by genetics. When Josh talks about Dad in the beginning chapters of the novel, he talks mostly about the main reasons he admires Dad: as a young man, Dad was a basketball legend, a master at dunking, and played in Europe. Josh's narration also suggests that there was never any chance that he and JB would ever not play basketball and follow in their dad's footsteps. Notably, in a story that Dad tells, he implies that a natural aptitude for the game is something that's hereditary. He makes his sons listen to him talk about how, at three years old, he took them to a neighborhood basketball court to shoot free throws for the first time. A man offered to lower the hoop to accommodate normal three-year-old motor skills, but Dad refused his offer and both boys were able to make a basket with no coaching or assistance. Though Josh and JB tire of hearing this story and imply that Dad is obnoxiously insistent on telling it as often as possible, this story is a purposeful attempt on Dad's part to remind his sons that their talent is something they got from him, thereby casting basketball talent as something that can be inherited like height or eye color. Even more important, however, is that Dad focuses his efforts on pushing this positive story of inheritable traits. While this seems at first to be a perfectly normal case of fatherly pride, it starts to take on a more urgent meaning when Josh and JB discover that not everything they stand to inherit from Dad is positive. When Josh overhears Mom and Dad fighting about Dad's refusal to go to the doctor for hypertension, Josh makes a shocking realization: hypertension runs in families, and he suspects that his grandfather died of hypertension given that he died in his forties. Given Mom's anger and the fact that she brings it up constantly, this leads Josh to deduce that Dad is also at risk. This starts to make some of Mom's seeming eccentricities make more sense to Josh: she's banned them from the local barbeque joint and removes salt from the table, and she does her best to keep Dad from getting angry and belligerent during the boys' basketball games. While this leads Josh to humanize Mom more, it also encourages him to think differently about Dad. Dad seemed like a god to Josh prior to his discovery about the family history of hypertension. After this discovery, however, Josh starts to notice his dad's bloody noses, fainting spells, and episodes of vomiting--all of which make Dad look less like a god and more like a very sick man. In other words, Josh's understanding of hypertension and what it's doing to his dad's body starts to become more important than Dad's preferred vision of family history that focuses entirely on basketball. Tragically for the Bell family, Josh and JB's journey towards humanizing their dad and merging the narratives of basketball and genetics starts and ends quickly: Dad dies not long after Christmas, after suffering several heart attacks. Following his death, Josh chooses to honor Dad and feel close to him by shooting free throws with JB, indicating that the boys are still more comfortable with the version of Dad that Dad himself presented to the world: that of a basketball legend. However, it's also important to keep in mind that, as Josh and JB get older, it's likely that they'll have to contend with the same health issues--as well as the same basketball fame, given the way that Dad and Coach talk about their potential--as Dad and their grandfather did. With this, the novel offers some hope that, because Josh and JB witnessed firsthand the consequences of not seeking medical attention for the condition, they might have a better opportunity to respect both of those narratives by following in his footsteps on the court, while also proactively managing their health so their careers and their lives aren't cut short like Dad's were. - Theme: Brotherhood and Growing Up. Description: At one point, Josh tells the reader "identical twins / are no different / from everyone else, / except we look and / sometimes sound / exactly alike." The novel is peppered with Josh's observations like this that indicate that while he and JB are technically different people, the two of them share a connection that makes it seem at times as though they are almost the same person. While Josh doesn't see a problem with this at first, this does start to become an issue as JB falls in love with Miss Sweet Tea and Josh's jealousy takes over. Given the role that Miss Sweet Tea plays in the boys' lives--she's JB's first foray into the more adult world of romance, and Josh blames her for stealing his brother--it suggests that as the boys grow up, their normal teenage shift in the direction of independence will be complicated by the fact that, as twins, their senses of self are more entwined than they might be otherwise. While Josh's direct observations about his brother in the first half of the book focus on and celebrate the ways in which they're a team, other observations suggest that Mom and Dad have actually done a lot to encourage their sons to develop individually. Josh's main concern about being a twin is that he doesn't want to be mistaken for JB; to this end, he wears his hair in locks while JB keeps his shaved. However, he also notes that over the summer he attended three basketball camps, while JB attended Bible camp instead. Though Josh sees this as a slight--he understands that JB's interest in Bible camp has little to do with the Bible and everything to do with getting to hang out with girls--it's telling that Mom and Dad are willing and able to honor the fact that their sons are very different people by enrolling them in activities that speak to their individual interests. Taken together, these facts suggest that the identity that the boys share is something that's gradually changing as they get older, and that each boy thinks about it differently. While Josh's need for individuality extends only to his desire to not be mistaken for his brother, JB takes this a step further by distancing himself from the things the boys both love in favor of individual pursuits. When Miss Sweet Tea comes on the scene, it becomes clear to Josh that she's going to come between him and his brother: JB seems suddenly less interested in basketball, and Josh starts spending long stretches of time alone while JB is with Miss Sweet Tea. For Josh, this is offensive on two levels. It first throws the boys' differing maturity and popularity levels into sharp relief, as Josh feels left out that he's the only one of his friends not dating. Then, and even more hurtful, there is the fact that JB seems to not have time for Josh anymore, thereby forcing a change in their years-long, close relationship. This forced independence proves very difficult for Josh and the pain of feeling abandoned by his brother bleeds over into his ability to effectively play basketball--at one fateful game, Josh passes the ball to JB with such force that JB can't catch it and it hits him in the face. Following this incident, JB ignores Josh for weeks while Josh continues to grapple with watching his brother grow up and move away from him right before his eyes. Much of Josh's narration after this game focuses on JB and the loneliness that Josh feels. This suggests that Josh is much more concerned with how his brother is growing and changing and how JB's changes affect him. What he misses, however, are all the ways in which he too is growing and changing during this time. Because of his forced isolation, Josh becomes far more introspective and more concerned about Dad, whose rapid decline in health begins about the same time that JB is injured. Though Josh doesn't understand in the moment, the fact that his separation from JB refocuses his attention on someone else offers him a roadmap for how to deal with these changes after Dad's death. When Miss Sweet Tea (whom Josh finally begins to call by her real name, Alexis) invites Josh to accompany her and JB to a college basketball game, he eagerly accepts. He understands that if he wants to spend time with his brother, he needs to accept that JB has other people in his life who are important. With this, the novel ultimately positions Josh and JB's budding independence less in terms of separating from each other, and more in terms of learning to be accepting and welcoming to others aside from the two of them. - Theme: Success, Work, and Choice. Description: Josh and JB represent a second generation of basketball stardom in their family: as a young man, Dad played basketball in Italy, was a star college player, and was even asked to play for the Los Angeles Lakers. As Josh learns more about his dad's early successes and also experiences his own basketball failures, he begins to think more critically about stardom and how much control a person has to dictate the terms of their success through hard work and practice. For Josh and JB, their eventual stardom seems assured: Dad makes it clear to them that basketball runs in their veins, while also making sure they understand the value of practice. He makes them practice their free throws every evening and both parents encourage their sons' goal of playing in college. The combination of telling Josh and JB that their skills on the court are the product of genes and practice suggests that both boys are raised to understand that while they may have natural aptitude, that aptitude does little if they don't work hard to develop it. Josh in particular is dedicated to practice. He tells the reader how, when Coach offers to let the first teammate who finishes wind sprints to sit out of practice, Josh gives up his lead on purpose--he understands that the only way he can effectively follow in Dad's footsteps is to work as hard as he can. While the way that Josh and JB are raised and spoken to about basketball suggests a simple if-then relationship between work and success, they soon discover information that complicates this reading. One afternoon, when Josh is given permission to look for something in his parents' closet and decides to secretly look in Dad's special box of old basketball memorabilia, he and JB make a shocking revelation: as a young man, Dad was asked to play for the Los Angeles Lakers, but the offer was rescinded when he refused to undergo surgery for patellar tendinitis. It's important to note that patellar tendinitis, or jumper's knee, is inflammation that develops due to overuse--in other words, it suggests that Dad's hard work on the court actually led him to develop an injury that, in turn, prevented him from being able to continue his rise to stardom. However, it's also worth noting that Dad refused to seek treatment for his jumper's knee. Though Dad's fear of doctors makes this decision more understandable, it also impresses upon Josh and JB that, when it comes to treatable things like this that might jeopardize their ability to play, they do have the power to fix it. Essentially, just as they can choose to practice daily to hone their natural aptitude, they can also choose to fix problems like this when they arise rather than letting them end their career. Ultimately, The Crossover suggests that the relationship between success and work is a matter of choice: though not everyone is gifted or has the natural aptitude for basketball like Dad, Josh, and JB do, everyone has the choice to work hard--though the rest of the boys' teammates (who, aside from Vondie, Josh doesn't name) aren't spoken of as being stars like JB and Josh are, they're nonetheless valued members of the team. However, by complicating this with Dad's choices regarding his patellar tendinitis, the novel insists that success is about more than choosing to practice. Success instead becomes a reflection of aptitude, practice, and, most importantly, the choice to care for one's health; without health, the other elements hardly matter. - Theme: Identity and Language. Description: As a novel written in verse, the text of The Crossover is able to play with rhythm, visuals, and language in a way that a novel written in prose cannot. Josh's narration makes use of changes in font size, line breaks, and rhyme to guide the reader through the novel, slowing down or speeding up the action according to how the text is arranged on the page. This speaks to Josh's immersion in music culture--the first several chapters are comprised of conversations between Dad and Josh about jazz, and Josh makes several references to his favorite rappers and hip-hop artists. With this, Josh's narration is able to pull from the music, the art, and the wisdom of others as he uses it to shape his budding adult identity and find a voice that's uniquely his. One of the first conversations that Josh relates with Dad is one that took place several years ago, when Josh got his nickname Filthy McNasty. Dad made Josh listen to his favorite album by the jazz artist Horace Silver, whom Josh says is "okay, I guess." Dad, aghast and convinced his son needs to learn to appreciate Horace Silver, dedicates the next song, "Filthy McNasty," to Josh, and the name sticks. Josh explains that at first he didn't like his nickname since kids made fun of it. However, as he began to excel in middle school basketball and as Dad praised him using the nickname, he also began to grow into it and, by the start of the novel, he uses the nickname to describe how he plays. Josh does much the same thing with his hair as he does with his nickname. At the beginning of the novel, Josh wears his hair in locks. While he notes that one of the best parts of wearing his hair like this is that people can tell him apart from JB, he spends more time explaining how his locks allow him to connect with both Dad and his favorite rappers who wear locks. Specifically, Josh mentions an old photo of Dad dunking in which it looks like Dad's locks are wings, lifting him towards the hoop. Because of the way that Josh interprets this photo, his hair can be read as an even more successful merger across musical styles and generations than his nickname is. All of this works together to suggest that a person's identity, especially at such a young age, is something that's formed when a young person chooses to emulate certain things around them, both visually and through language or art. Tragedy strikes early in the novel when, thanks to a bet that Josh never expected to lose, JB earns the right to cut off one of Josh's locks. JB misses, however, and ends up cutting off five, which leads Mom to decide that Josh needs to shave the rest of his locks off to correct his appearance. For Josh, this represents a major loss of identity and coincides with the beginning of his struggles with basketball. Dunking suddenly becomes more difficult without his "wings" and that connection to Dad, while his anger with JB means that he's much less willing to cut his brother slack when JB starts spending more time with Miss Sweet Tea. At the same time, Josh also begins to ask Dad to call him by his real name, not Filthy McNasty. With this, Josh begins to assert control over the identity he presents to others in the only way he believes he can: by dictating the language that others use to speak about him. Dad's honest attempts to comply with Josh's request show that Dad understands Josh's need to discover an identity that truly fits, especially in the absence of his locks. Because the novel ends right after Dad's funeral, when Josh and JB are still consumed by grief, Josh never comes to any solid conclusions regarding his identity, his name, or who he wants to be going forward. However, it's also important to keep in mind that, at twelve years old and with his entire adolescence in front of him, Josh is at the very beginning of his journey. His willingness to make the best of his forced experimentation over the course of the novel, coupled with the exposure he has to role models and music, suggests that he will continue to draw from a variety of sources to create his identity as he moves towards adulthood and independence. - Climax: Dad dies during the championship game - Summary: Josh narrates a play-by play as he plays in a basketball game. He then introduces himself more fully: his name is Josh Bell, but people call him Filthy McNasty. He's tall, has long hair, and wants to be a basketball star. Josh got his nickname from one of Dad's favorite jazz artists, Horace Silver. When Josh expressed uninterest in Silver's work, Dad dedicated the next song, "Filthy McNasty," to Josh. At first Josh wasn't keen on the name, as others made fun of him for it. However, as he began to excel on the basketball court and as Dad praised him using that name, he started to like it. Josh also has a twin named Jordan who goes by the nickname JB. JB loves betting and Michael Jordan. Josh loves his locks more than anything. They differentiate him from JB, make him feel cool like his favorite rappers, and most importantly, Dad used to have them when he was a professional player. Dad's locks looked like wings. Sometimes, Josh asks Dad if he misses playing basketball and suggests that Dad could play again. Dad, however, insists that he's happy "coaching" the family. When Josh asks about Dad's championship ring, Dad tells Josh that when he becomes "Da Man," then he can wear the ring. Right before a game, JB tries to dunk the ball. Josh laughs and, to show off, dunks. During halftime, JB asks to bet. The terms of his bet have many variables, but if JB wins, he wants to cut off one of Josh's locks. Josh initially declines, but then agrees, believing the bet is too specific for JB to win. His head starts to hurt as he watches every variable fall into place. After the game, the team cheers and chants as JB grabs Coach's scissors and starts to cut. Vondie yells, "OH SNAP," and Josh realizes something is wrong: JB cut five locks. Mom refers to this as a calamity and insists that Josh cut off the rest of his locks. The family goes out for dinner a week later. At the Chinese restaurant, Mom removes the salt from the table while JB grabs Josh duck sauce and wonton soup. Though Josh didn't say anything, JB knew exactly what food what Josh wanted. Following his haircut, Josh mourns his locks. He eventually asks Mom for a box to put them in and she allows him to go into her and Dad's closet for a hatbox. Josh decides to open Dad's box of basketball memorabilia and JB joins him. The boys try on Dad's championship ring, flip through old articles, and then they find a folder containing two letters. One invites Dad to try out for the Los Angeles Lakers, while the other says that if Dad doesn't agree to surgery for patellar tendinitis, he won't play again. Josh wonders why Dad never got surgery. At school, kids joke that they won't be able to tell Josh and JB apart now that their hair is similar. A new girl, whom Josh calls Miss Sweet Tea, asks the boys if twins know what each other are thinking. Josh tells her that, given the look on JB's face, a person doesn't need to be a twin to know what he's thinking. JB and Vondie discuss how beautiful Miss Sweet Tea is after she leaves. Josh, who's trying to do his vocabulary homework, refers to her as "pulchritudinous." He also wonders why Miss Sweet Tea is interested in JB. After dinner, Dad takes the boys to the rec center to practice shooting. They play a game with some local college guys who ask Dad for autographs and win the game. Dad takes them to Krispy Kreme after, insists that Mom doesn't have to know, and then tells the boys his favorite story of teaching them to play basketball. He tells them how, at three years old, the boys could shoot free throws like they were naturals. After the next game, Miss Sweet Tea compliments Josh on his performance and then gives JB some sweet iced tea. Because Josh missed free throws during the game, Dad makes him shoot fifteen in a row when they get home. Mom rescues Josh from this exercise to read before bed. JB reads while listening to music, so he doesn't hear Mom and Dad's fight in the next room, but Josh does hear. Mom wants Dad to see the doctor for hypertension, but Dad refuses. Josh realizes that this is why Mom watches Dad's salt intake and thinks that his grandfather must've died of hypertension. The week after Thanksgiving, JB asks Josh to pass Miss Sweet Tea a note for him during a test. The teacher catches Josh in the act and Josh chooses to take the fall for JB. At the office, Mom reprimands Josh and reminds him that he won't get into college if he cheats. Josh doesn't have the opportunity to explain himself. To make matters worse, gym class later is about CPR, not sports. Josh is forced to assist the teacher and jealously watches JB and Miss Sweet Tea pass notes. Josh tries to talk to JB about basketball, but JB looks like he's barely listening. Josh knows he's too caught up thinking about Miss Sweet Tea. He takes his problem to Dad, but Dad just laughs and suggests that they get donuts. At the game later, Josh starts to refer to JB as a showoff. The team wins and later that evening, Mom calls Josh into the kitchen. She explains that they're going to have pita and hummus for dinner since Dad has hypertension and they need to eat better. Josh understands that this is important, but he feels victimized nonetheless. However, when Dad suggests he, Josh, and JB get barbecue after the next game, Josh lies that he's already eaten dinner. A few days later, Josh and JB are shooting free throws when Dad suddenly bends over. JB sprays him with the hose, which revives him, but Josh is worried. JB refuses to accept there's anything wrong, but Josh thinks he understands why Dad is afraid of hospitals: Dad's dad died there. Miss Sweet Tea calls and asks for Jordan. Josh tries to give JB the phone, but JB runs away and asks Josh to speak for him. Josh is able to pull off the feat and successfully agrees on JB's behalf to be Miss Sweet Tea's boyfriend. JB is ecstatic. The next day at lunch, JB and Miss Sweet Tea walk up to Josh's table. JB calls Josh "Filthy," but suddenly, it seems like a dirty joke. At practice after school, Josh and JB have a strange experience where it seems like they both see a ghost at the same time, but they don't discuss it. JB hangs out with Miss Sweet Tea after school, so Josh goes to the library alone to do homework. He feels sorry for himself and to make matters worse, he discovers JB and Miss Sweet Tea kissing. While Dad drives Josh to a basketball game, he gets pulled over. He doesn't have his license, so he and Josh are late to the game. Because Josh is late, Coach makes him sit out the first half. Rather than be a team player, however, Josh tries to act alone. When this doesn't work out, he throws the ball at JB so hard, he nearly breaks JB's nose. When Mom talks to Josh about his behavior later, Josh admits that he's afraid that JB doesn't love him anymore. Mom suspends him from the basketball team, so Josh spends the next week trying to make up for what he did. JB, however, ignores him. Josh watches games from the top of the bleachers with Mom and Dad and watches Dad yell at the ref. Inexplicably, Dad's nose starts to bleed after he yells. The next day, Mom threatens Dad if he doesn't go to the doctor. Not long after, the local paper names Josh their Most Valuable Player. Though most of Josh's classmates are happy for him, Miss Sweet Tea and JB aren't. JB continues to ignore Josh and finally, Josh writes a letter to his brother, explaining that he feels lost and alone now that they're not speaking. Josh feels even lonelier when Vondie gets a girlfriend too. While Josh and Vondie are on the phone, Josh hears strange panting in his parents' room. He finds Dad there, cleaning up vomit and holding his chest. Dad brushes off Josh's concerns and shows him an offer of a coaching job. Josh is worried, but Dad insists that he and JB will be fine. During this conversation, Josh also asks Dad to call him "Josh," not "Filthy." Mom notices the look on Dad's face and looks panicked. They fight again and Dad continues to refuse to see the doctor. Soon after, Miss Sweet Tea comes for dinner. Josh decides to call her "the girl who stole my brother." She likes Mom's veggie lasagna and she also has a sister who attends Duke, the college Josh wants to attend. After dinner, Josh asks Mom if he can go with them to Dad's doctor's appointment the following week. For the next game, Josh sits with the team and suddenly notices that Mom and Dad aren't in the bleachers. He and JB meet each other's eyes and look like they've seen ghosts, but Mom texts Josh assuring him that things are fine. In the final week before the holiday break, Josh offers JB his list of vocabulary words to help him study, and JB thanks him for the help. At lunch the next day, Coach encourages Josh to make up with JB and shares that Mom will allow Josh to play in the championship game. Josh is ecstatic, but unsure how to make up with JB. He's not looking forward to the tournament he's supposed to be playing with Dad and JB, since he and JB are still feuding. However, the day before the tournament, JB starts to acknowledge Josh and laugh with him. Before the tournament, Josh and Dad play a warm-up game. Dad steals the ball from Josh's crossover and then collapses from a heart attack. Josh performs CPR. The doctor tries to comfort Josh, JB, and Mom as he explains that Dad has a myocardial infarction and is in a coma. He encourages them to talk to Dad, but Josh is angry and doesn't want to talk when it's unclear if Dad can hear him. Josh tells Mom all the reasons he's angry, which include Dad's promise to be here forever, Miss Sweet Tea's existence, and his missing locks. Dad finally wakes up on Christmas Eve. After a Christmas spent in the hospital with relatives, Dad tells his sons that they need to always love and look out for each other. Then, he and Josh speak privately. Dad mostly refuses to answer Josh's questions; he wants to know if Josh is going to play in the championship game. Just before the championship game, Mom gets the call that Dad had another heart attack and she leaves for the hospital. JB follows Mom on his bike, while Josh rides to the game with Vondie. In the last seconds of the game, Josh notices JB and Miss Sweet Tea sitting on the bench. JB is crying as Josh makes his final basket, winning the game. Dad's obituary in the paper offers the highlights of his career and says he died at age 39. Josh feels unmoored at the funeral without any rules or basketball rituals. At home afterwards, Josh takes a phone call from Miss Sweet Tea. She apologizes and invites him to attend a college basketball game with her and JB. Then, Josh heads outside to shoot free throws. Soon, he's making them with his eyes closed. As he gets close to Dad's record of 50 in a row, he thinks he hears Dad's voice. It's actually JB. JB gives Josh Dad's championship ring and says that he must be Da Man now. Josh cries; he doesn't want the ring or the title. He gives the ball to JB to make the fiftieth free throw.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Baltimore between 1860 and roughly 1930 - Character: Benjamin Button. Description: Benjamin Button is a man born with a rare condition that causes him to age backwards. His personality changes significantly throughout the story, illustrating the idea that identity is directly tied to whatever developmental stage a person is going through. His birth astounds nurses and doctors, since his body and mind are that of a 70-year-old man. The nurse orders his father, Roger Button, to take him home, since news of his condition could ruin the hospital's reputation. Even Mr. Button worries about his own reputation, but he nonetheless takes Benjamin home and raises him. The first years of his life are marked by his father's insistence that he act like a young boy. A naturally accommodating person, Benjamin does try to meet his father's expectations, but this isn't really possible until he gets a little older and starts to look younger. When he turns 20 (and looks 50), he joins Mr. Button's hardware business, helping the company succeed. He meets his future wife, Hildegarde, at a dance during this period—and though their apparent age difference causes a scandal, they get married and have a son named Roscoe. Benjamin is happy with family life for a while, but he grows restless as he gets younger, so he joins the army and fights in the Spanish-American War. Upon his return, he continues to seek out excitement by going dancing with younger women. This bothers Hildegarde, but Benjamin doesn't show her much compassion, too preoccupied with the life of a thrill-seeking young man. When he looks like a 20-year-old, he attends Harvard, and by the time he graduates, Hildegarde has moved to Italy. With nowhere else to go, Benjamin moves in with Roscoe, who hires a nurse named Nana to care for him. He spends his final years in ignorant bliss, passing the time as a content child until everything—tastes, sounds, sights—simply fades away. - Character: Hildegarde Moncrief. Description: Hildegarde Moncrief falls in love with and marries Benjamin Button. The daughter of General Moncrief, one of the most important figures in Baltimore's high society, Hildegarde is an attractive woman who appreciates the "mellowness" of middle-aged men. For this reason, Benjamin decides not to tell her that he only looks like he's 50, though in reality he's actually 20. They get married soon after they meet and have a son named Roscoe, and the couple's apparent age difference prompts gossip. In fact, there are so many scandalous tales about Benjamin that Hildegarde decides to ignore not just the lies about his condition, but also the true version of his story—which she inevitably finds out about as Benjamin gets younger as she gets older. Because she was originally attracted to Benjamin's maturity, she resents him for getting younger. Her unwillingness to accept Benjamin as he ages backwards demonstrates just how tightly people hold to certain ideas about age and identity. Hildegarde married him because she coveted his identity as an older, refined gentleman. Once he becomes a young man, though, she no longer loves him, illustrating that people often romanticize whatever they think a person represents (maturity, in this case), leaving very little room for their lover to change or evolve. This—along with Benjamin's lack of interest in Hildegarde as time goes on—leads to the dissolution of their marriage. Hildegarde eventually moves to Italy on her own when Benjamin attends Harvard University. - Character: Roger Button. Description: Roger Button is Benjamin's father. A member of Baltimore's high society and the owner of a wholesale hardware store, he cares about his reputation more than anything—including Benjamin. When he first learns about Benjamin's condition (which causes him to age backwards), he's so mortified that he can hardly concentrate on caring for his son, instead worrying about how this will affect his status in society. This response illustrates the extent to which an obsession with reputation can keep people from showing kindness and compassion, especially since Mr. Button largely fails to give Benjamin the fatherly support that he needs. Throughout Benjamin's childhood, Mr. Button forces him to act like his numerical age, refusing to accept his son for the person he is. It isn't until Benjamin is 20 and looks the exact same age as his father that Mr. Button finally grows accustomed to his son's condition, allowing him to join him in the family business. Over the next 15 years, Mr. Button hands the entire company over to Benjamin, finally feeling proud of the man his son has become—an indication that, at least in the society of the story, success matters more than anything else. - Character: Roscoe Button. Description: Roscoe Button is Benjamin and Hildegarde's son. Just like Benjamin, he joins the family hardware business when he comes of age, eventually taking it over when Benjamin loses interest in the company. When Benjamin later becomes a teenager, Roscoe lets his father come live with him—Benjamin, after all, has nowhere else to go. He is embarrassed about his father's condition, however; when Benjamin eventually becomes a young boy, Roscoe says that he must refer to him as "Uncle" in the presence of guests. Instead of kindly caring for his father, then, Roscoe focuses more on his own reputation, becoming yet another person in Benjamin's life who fails to give him genuine love and support. And this, in turn, leads Benjamin to a very lonely end, since Roscoe—the only family member left to comfort him as he nears death—shies away from connecting with him. Instead, he hires a professional nurse, Nana, to take care of Benjamin. - Character: General Moncrief. Description: General Moncrief is Hildegarde's father, making him Benjamin's father-in-law. General Moncrief is powerful and widely respected in Baltimore, so it's a big deal when he doesn't approve of Hildegarde and Benjamin's engagement. For Moncrief, it's unthinkable that a woman as beautiful and desirable as his daughter would marry a man like Benjamin, who looks roughly 30 years older than her. However, Moncrief's opinion of Benjamin changes in the years following the wedding, when Benjamin becomes a prominent and successful figure in society himself. It also helps that Benjamin gives General Moncrief the money to self-publish a book he wrote that was previously rejected by a large number of publishers. From this point on, Moncrief approves of his son-in-law. - Character: Doctor Keene. Description: Doctor Keene is the doctor who delivers Benjamin. Although he has been the Buttons' family doctor for many years, he angrily tells Roger Button that he never wants to see anyone from his family again, fearing that Benjamin's birth—and, more specifically, his strange medical condition—might ruin his reputation as a doctor. - Character: The Registrar. Description: The registrar is a man who works at Yale University; his job is to enroll accepted students in the classes they want to take. When Benjamin meets with the registrar in order to do this, though, the registrar refuses to believe he's 18. Calling him a "dangerous lunatic" because he thinks Benjamin is a middle-aged man posing as a college freshman, the registrar kicks Benjamin out of his office and makes it clear that he's not welcome at Yale. - Theme: Age, Development, and Identity. Description: As Benjamin Button ages backwards due to a mysterious condition, his developmental stages have a huge impact on his identity—his entire personality seems to change with each new season of life. For example, he has the body of an old man when he's at the beginning of his life, and he behaves accordingly by exhibiting the kind of calm reserve that's often associated with older people. Then, as he approaches middle age, he becomes more engaged with life, leaving behind his slower personality. By the time he has the body and mind of a man in his twenties (though he's actually lived for 50 years), he's desperate to find excitement in life, acting like a fun-loving young person. And when he nears the end of his life and finally becomes a little boy, he leads the carefree existence of an innocent child. This all means that Benjamin doesn't just change physically, but also mentally. His transformation throughout the story suggests that while age is an arbitrary number that doesn't necessarily impact a person's identity, actual developmental stages do profoundly affect the way a person moves through the world. Benjamin's entire personality depends not on his numerical age, but on his body and mind's current developmental state. This is especially apparent just hours after his birth, when he complains to his father about the hospital in the same cranky way an old man might gripe about something unsatisfactory. "This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes," he chirps. "With all this yelling and howling, I haven't been able to get a wink of sleep." Complaining about noise is the kind of thing a stereotypically grumpy old man might do, so Benjamin essentially becomes a caricature of old age in this moment. At the same time, though, this moment also reminds readers that Benjamin is a "youngster" himself—a newborn, to be more precise. And yet, neither his body nor his mind are babyish; he even wishes that the hospital would provide him with a rocking chair to sit in. It's quite clear, then, that he has the conventional sensibilities and preferences of an old man despite only being a few hours old. Regardless of his age, it's obvious that he's in an advanced developmental stage—and this, not his numerical age, is what dictates his identity. In keeping with this, Benjamin's identity is so affected by his developmental stage that it seems inauthentic when he tries to act his numerical age. When he's a child, for instance, he tries to satisfy his father by breaking something every day, since his father likes it when he behaves like a mischievous child. And yet, this doesn't do much to change Benjamin's overall personality, given that what he really wants to do is sit around, smoke cigars, and pass the day in idle conversation with his grandfather—pastimes normally enjoyed by elderly people. But when Benjamin does become a little boy at the end of his life, he comes to genuinely enjoy the exact things a young child would enjoy. Despite technically being elderly in terms of how many years he's lived, his body and mind have developed backwards to those of a toddler. He doesn't want to smoke cigars anymore, nor does he have the ambition that defined his middle-aged years, when he sought out the thrills of romance and war. Instead, he spends his time during this period jumping on the bed, repeating satisfying words like "elephant," and taking comfort in the soothing presence of his Nana. And Benjamin doesn't do these things as a way of taking on the childish identity everyone that around him thinks he should have—rather, he genuinely becomes a child through and through, even though his numerical age reflects otherwise. Although Benjamin's transformation is unique in a sense, it represents a core truth about humans: that in each phase of a person's age-related development, their whole identity tends to drastically shift. Of course, everyone naturally changes as they go through life. But the fact that the changes to Benjamin's identity happens in reverse calls special attention to the influence of each developmental stage. If Benjamin aged regularly, it would be easy to overlook just how much the different phases of his life affect his personality—but flipping the process around makes these changes difficult to ignore, since Benjamin's development doesn't line up with his numerical age. Instead, his progress through life seems strange and novel, adding a fresh perspective on the many changes people undergo as they move through each chapter of life. Although the story has an unconventional premise, then, it actually helps readers see something fairly straightforward about the developmental process: namely, that every stage of life has the power to reshape a person's identity. - Theme: Reputation, Gossip, and Scandal. Description: In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, society is obsessed with gossip and scandal. So, when Mr. Button's son Benjamin is born with a condition that makes him age backwards, Mr. Button spends more time worrying that this will destroy the family reputation than actually caring for his son. Even the doctors and nurses who delivered Benjamin fret that the hospital's reputation will suffer because he was born there, and they treat Mr. Button and Benjamin terribly. This reaction validates Mr. Button's fear that Benjamin will bring dishonor to the family, indicating that society really does ostracize people who are different—this, apparently, isn't just an irrational fear of Mr. Button's. Indeed, as Benjamin grows up, people continuously spread salacious gossip about him because of his condition. And though this undoubtedly makes his life harder, there's one saving grace: nobody ever remembers the gossip for very long. Instead, the rumors always go away after a while, lying dormant until something else comes along and kicks up a new scandal. In fact, by the end of the story, only Benjamin's immediate family seems to know about his peculiar condition. This suggests that although gossip can be deeply hurtful and can tarnish a person's reputation in the short term, it isn't worth worrying about in the long term, because it's bound to fade away. In the world of the story, the idea of losing face in society leads to a kind of hysterical fear, as people act like nothing could be worse than tarnishing their reputation. Benjamin's birth brings out this intense fear about reputation and status, since nobody wants to be associated with his condition. Doctor Keene barely lets himself stop to talk to Mr. Button outside the hospital, clearly afraid that being seen in public with him will jeopardize his own good name as a physician. Similarly, the nurse who takes Mr. Button to see his son treats him poorly, saying the hospital will no longer have even the "ghost of a reputation" after Benjamin's birth. For Mr. Button, who has yet to meet his newborn son, this treatment is jarring and nerve-wracking. Mr. Button doesn't even know about Benjamin's condition yet, but the nurse shows him no compassion at all—she not only keeps him in an excruciating state of anticipation, but also makes him feel unwelcome at the hospital.  This suggests that society's obsession with reputation is so powerful that it keeps people from empathizing with one another. Most doctors and nurses make a point of comforting patients and their loved ones, not chastising them and making them feel worse. But Doctor Keene and the nurse don't comfort or reassure Mr. Button at all, since they're more concerned with maintaining their reputation than with being kind to other people. Unfortunately for Benjamin, this obsession with status runs deep in Baltimorean society—so deep that even Mr. Button seems to care more about his reputation than about his own son. Faced with having to walk Benjamin home from the hospital, Mr. Button is terrified that important people will see them together, finding the very idea "grotesque" and "appalling." In the same way that this obsession with reputation overshadows any empathy that Doctor Keene or the nurse might otherwise have for the Buttons' situation, Mr. Button's own fixation on status keeps him from fully loving and supporting Benjamin. Of course, there's a reason that so many characters in this story are protective of their reputations: the society they live in is hungry for gossip. Benjamin's birth becomes a huge "sensation" in Baltimore, and the only reason it doesn't severely "cost the Buttons and their kinsfolk socially" is that the Civil War begins, drawing attention away from the scandal. But gossip about Benjamin's condition resurfaces when, years later, he and Hildegarde announce their engagement. Because Hildegarde is the daughter of one of the most widely respected figures in Baltimore, everyone suddenly remembers the "almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth." To make matters worse, people circulate the story in salacious, scandalous ways, embellishing it to make it even more ridiculous but also more intriguing. People even talk about him as if he's some sort of demon. The main effect of this gossip is that it turns Benjamin's future father-in-law against him. Just like seemingly everyone else in the story, General Moncrief apparently cares more about his family's reputation than about his daughter's happiness, since he tries to convince Hildegarde not to follow her heart by marrying Benjamin. Once again, then, an obsession with reputation negatively impacts Benjamin's life. At the same time, though, the gossip about Benjamin doesn't completely derail his life. The rumors about Benjamin do have some negative effects at first, but the gossip and mistreatment never last very long. This is made evident by the fact that nobody really talks about his condition between the time of his birth and when he marries Hildegarde. And although his marriage stirs up some gossip, the stories quickly fade away again. In fact, by the time Benjamin leads the life of a young man, nobody remembers his condition. People gossip about the age difference between him and Hildegarde, but not about his process of reverse aging. Society has, in other words moved on—not necessarily because people don't care, but because society as a whole doesn't remember. When Benjamin goes out dancing with young women, for example, people gossip about his marriage with Hildegarde, not knowing that their own parents also used to gossip about Benjamin and Hildegarde, but for entirely different reasons. This highlights the passing nature of gossip and scandal. Everyone fixates on reputation, relishing any kind of slander that might dismantle a person's status, but the story implies that none of this really matters. And although this hurts Benjamin throughout his life, only a small handful of people even recall Benjamin's strange condition at the time of his death. This suggests that no matter how much people obsess over things like status and reputation, "people inevitably forget" even the juiciest gossip. - Theme: Expectations and Acceptance. Description: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button demonstrates how hard it can be to face other people's assumptions and expectations. For Benjamin Button, who's born with a condition that causes him to age backwards, this means constantly having to behave the way other people think he should. His father, for one, wants him to play the part of a dutiful firstborn son. Meanwhile, the rest of society wants him to act in accordance with his physical appearance, which is often out of step with his actual age. As Benjamin tries to navigate these different expectations, he ends up with very little room to live the way he wants, at least without disappointing certain people in his life. No matter what he does, it seems that he'll inevitably fail to live up to some expectations, even as he simultaneously fulfills others. By highlighting this double-bind, the story implies that people shouldn't focus too much on what others expect of them, since doing so is ultimately futile. Instead, people ought to live life on their own terms. From the beginning of his life, Benjamin is pressured to live up to his father's expectations. These expectations exist for Benjamin before he even meets his father. Mr. Button fantasizes about Benjamin's future as he makes his way to the hospital to see him for the first time, hoping that his son will eventually go to Yale University (just like Mr. Button himself). Given that his father already harbors these aspirations for his son, it's clear that Benjamin—with his unique reverse-aging condition—will have an uphill battle when it comes to pleasing his father. The problem that Benjamin encounters, though, isn't just that his father has high hopes for him—it's that Mr. Button's expectations basically ignore reality, since he wants Benjamin to act in ways that are completely out of touch with who he is. Benjamin's condition, after all, is both physical and mental—meaning that he doesn't just look like an old man but also thinks and feels like one. The fact that his father insists that he act like a little boy thus forces him to be someone he's not. This is this the case when Mr. Button brings home a baby rattle one day and orders Benjamin to "play with it"—a demand that seems ridiculous given that what Benjamin actually wants to do is sit around smoking cigars and reading an encyclopedia. Later, Mr. Button makes Benjamin play with children his own (numerical) age, and when Benjamin accidentally breaks a window one day, his father is happy about it because he sees this as the behavior of a stereotypical little boy. From this point on, Benjamin purposely breaks something every day, but he only does this because it's "expected of him." It's clear, then, that he's eager to please his father, but this means sacrificing the existence that he—Benjamin—wants to lead. Of course, Mr. Button isn't the only one to force certain expectations on Benjamin—society as a whole also assumes that he'll act a certain way, and this conflicts with Benjamin's desire to please his father. Specifically, strangers take it for granted that he'll behave like whatever age he appears to be. On the whole, this shouldn't be much of a problem, since Benjamin genuinely feels however old he looks. But he often finds himself torn between expectations, since his father wants him to act his numerical age while everyone else wants him to act his physical age. This is a difficult dynamic to navigate, and it illustrates that it's impossible to please everybody at once. This inability to live up to conflicting expectations is especially pronounced when Benjamin finally fulfills his father's wish that he attend Yale University. Having managed to please his father, he's suddenly forced to face the fact that nobody outside his immediate family sees him as an 18-year-old, because he doesn't look 18. The registrar, for one, refuses to believe Benjamin's true age, calling him a "dangerous lunatic" for trying to infiltrate a freshman class as a middle-aged man. The registrar yells at him to leave, at which point an angry mob of students chase Benjamin away while shouting insults. By simply trying to satisfy his father, then, Benjamin is forced into a humiliating and degrading situation—one in which he has to confront the fact that his father's expectations of him are at odds with everyone else's. Because trying to straddle multiple sets of expectations at the same time is so difficult, Benjamin seems most happy in the rare moments when he can just exist on his own terms. This happens in the middle of his life, when his outward appearance more or less matches up with his actual age—a period when nobody expects anything unreasonable of him. Unfortunately, though, this only lasts so long. His wife, Hildegarde, married him because of his maturity, so the fact that he gradually loses this maturity means that he increasingly fails to be the person she expects him to be. As a result, their marriage gradually falls apart—meaning that yet another one of Benjamin's relationships suffers due to his inability to live up to another person's expectations. It isn't until Benjamin becomes a very young child that he regains the kind of unbothered happiness he enjoyed in the middle of his life, when everyone simply accepted him for who he was. This is because he stops trying to be something he's not; by the time he looks and acts like a toddler, nobody tries to force him into being anything other than a mere child. And this is fine with him, because he can't even remember that he is, in reality, quite old. The fact that this is seemingly the happiest period of Benjamin's life tragically illustrates how pointless it is to try to conform to society's many expectations—an endeavor that is at best impossible and at worst detrimental to a person's overall happiness and well-being. - Theme: Support and Caretaking. Description: Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Benjamin Button's life is that nobody supports or cares for him in meaningful ways. From the moment he's born, the very people who one might expect to comfort him and ease him into the world—people like his parents and the nurses at the hospital—focus solely on his condition (which causes him to age backwards) and how it might impact their lives. And although Benjamin's father, Mr. Button, eventually takes care of him, Mr. Button doesn't necessarily give Benjamin the kind of unconditional love and support that one might expect from a parent. The same lack of support is evident in Benjamin's eventual relationship with his wife, Hildegarde, who abandons him later in life because she can't accept that he gets younger as she gets older. And as the years go by, Benjamin needs more and more support because he loses (rather than gains) maturity, but he lacks caring relationships with family or friends. By the time he lives the life of a little boy, for example, he has nobody to turn to except his own son, Roscoe—and even he fails to give Benjamin the emotional support he needs. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is thus a story about how lonely it is to live without the supporting relationships that normally help people through life. As a child, Benjamin does receive support from his parents, but it's tainted by their hesitancy to come to terms with his reverse-aging condition. Although they provide him with food, shelter, clothing, and financial stability, they don't necessarily nurture him or give him legitimate emotional support. This is evident very early in Benjamin's life, when he grabs hold of his father's hand (instead of the other way around) on the walk home from the hospital and asks what his name will be. In this moment, it's clear that Benjamin yearns for the kind of parental guidance and care that most people automatically give their children. Later, even though Benjamin has been living at home for several years, his father keeps accidentally addressing him as "Mr." and is "always somewhat in awe of him," almost as if he's not his son at all. In other words, Mr. Button is so preoccupied with Benjamin's unique medical condition that there's a very clear emotional distance between him and his son—ultimately depriving Benjamin of a fully engaged father figure. Fortunately for Benjamin, he's able to find emotional support when he experiences genuine love in his relationship with Hildegarde—but she, too, eventually fails to support him. This is so gratifying to him that it's as if he's "blind with enchantment," feeling as if his life is "just beginning"—a testament to just how badly he yearned for true love and affection. But these feelings fade as Benjamin continues to age backwards, a process that reveals that Hildegarde isn't actually someone who will give him unconditional support and love. Rather, she resents him for getting younger, chastising him for continuing to age in reverse, despite the obvious fact that he can't do anything to stop this process. To be fair, by this point in his life, Benjamin isn't a particularly good spouse, either. He becomes less and less interested in Hildegarde as he gets younger, and in keeping with this, also stops considering how his actions will make her feel. All the same, though, the fact remains that Hildegarde refuses to stand by Benjamin, failing to be there for him as he worries about what will happen if his reverse aging process continues at such a rapid pace. Once again, then, he finds himself having to go through hardship without any meaningful emotional support. Eventually, Benjamin experiences a role reversal when his own son, Roscoe, becomes his caretaker—but Roscoe shirks this duty, leaving Benjamin without any meaningful relationships toward the end of his life. This happens after Roscoe has become a successful businessman and Benjamin has become a young boy. But Roscoe doesn't want to take care of his father, meaning that he's yet another one of Benjamin's loved ones who fails to give him the unconditional affection that he needs. This reversal of the caretaking role resembles something that actually happens quite frequently in real life. Many adult children find that they're the ones who have to take care of their elderly parents, some of whom need the same kind of attention as helpless children. In this way, Benjamin's story invites readers to reflect on the way that caretaking roles can come full-circle. In Benjamin's case, though, Roscoe doesn't necessarily return the favor by showing his father the support Benjamin presumably showed him as a child. Instead, he hires a nurse to care for his father at the end of Benjamin's life, pawning off the responsibility on a stranger. In doing so, he ruins the possibility that Benjamin will finally be able to enjoy a genuinely loving, caring relationship before he dies. Given that nobody in Benjamin's life ever provides him with true support, it's fitting that he ends up dying without anyone other than a hired nurse, Nana, to comfort him on his passage out of the world. And though he isn't aware of this because he has the undeveloped mind of a baby, it's clear that his life was defined by a profound lack of loving support—a lack that ultimately led him to a very lonely end. - Climax: Benjamin becomes an infant and dies. - Summary: It's 1860, and Roger Button's wife has just given birth to their first child. The Buttons are respected members of Baltimore society, so it's surprising that their family doctor, Doctor Keene, brushes off Mr. Button when the men run into each other outside the hospital. He storms away and says that his reputation as a doctor has nearly been ruined. Inside the hospital, Mr. Button encounters the same hostility from the nurses, and he soon sees why: his newborn son looks and acts like a 70-year-old man. The nurse orders Mr. Button to take his son home as soon as possible, since the baby's unusual condition could threaten the hospital's reputation. Mortified by the idea of being seen in public with Benjamin, Mr. Button rushes out to a clothing store to buy baby clothes for his son, though Benjamin looks ridiculous in them. The Buttons eventually decide to name their son Benjamin. Mr. Button dyes Benjamin's hair, trims his beard, and tries to force Benjamin to live like an average child. Still, all Benjamin wants to do is read an encyclopedia, smoke cigars, and chat with his grandfather. He does make a point of breaking something in the house each day, knowing that it pleases Mr. Button to see his son acting like a little boy. By the time Benjamin turns 18, he doesn't look quite so old, though he still needs to dye his hair. He runs out of hair dye shortly after arriving at Yale University, where he has been admitted as a freshman. The registrar thinks he's a strange older man posing as a college freshman, so he runs him out of his office. As Benjamin leaves, students follow him and shout insults, telling him to go try this crazy stunt at Harvard. Boarding a train for Baltimore, he decides that he will go to Harvard someday. Back at home, Benjamin joins his father's hardware business, becomes wildly successful over the next few years. When Benjamin is 20, he looks strikingly like his father. As wealthy business partners, they attend prestigious dances together. At one of these high-society events, Benjamin meets Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief, one of the most powerful men in town. As Benjamin and Hildegarde dance, she tells him how much she likes older, more mature men—men like Benjamin. According to her, 50 is the ideal age. Benjamin doesn't tell her about his condition, instead enjoying her affection. Not long after this, they announce their engagement. With news of Benjamin and Hildegarde's marriage, Baltimore erupts in gossip about Benjamin's condition. This time, though, people spread false rumors about him. General Moncrief hates the idea of Hildegarde marrying Benjamin, but he eventually gets used to it, largely because Benjamin is a successful businessman. Within 15 years, Benjamin is not only the head of the company, but also has the body and mind of a handsome young man. All the gossip about him goes away. The only problem, though, is that Benjamin is no longer attracted to Hildegarde, who is now 35. Together, she and Benjamin have a son named Roscoe, but Benjamin dislikes their boring family life. Seeking a thrill, he joins the army and goes off to fight in the Spanish-American War, where he serves as a high-ranking official. After sustaining a small injury, he returns to Baltimore as a decorated and celebrated veteran. Home from the war, Benjamin clashes with Hildegarde over his reverse aging and his growing interest in pretty young women. Meanwhile, Roscoe grows up and starts to look the same age as his father, and Benjamin hands the business over to him. Then, when Benjamin looks 20 years old, he attends Harvard University, where he becomes the star of the football team. But his athletic prowess doesn't last long, since he becomes weaker by the year. By the time he's a senior, he can't even make the team. Still, Benjamin graduates from Harvard. He then returns to Baltimore and moves in with Roscoe, since Hildegarde has moved to Italy. Roscoe is ashamed that his father looks like a teenager, so he tells Benjamin to start referring to him as "Uncle" when other people are around. Benjamin continues to grow younger, and he goes to kindergarten at the same time as Roscoe's young son. But when Roscoe's son moves on to first grade, Benjamin stays behind. Before long, Benjamin can't even keep up with the other kindergarteners, so he stays home with a caretaker he calls Nana. Soon, Benjamin only registers simple sensory details; memories of his adult life never occur to him. There's only Nana's presence, food, the bright sun, and darkness. Finally, even these things fade away.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Point of view: First person - Setting: Swindon, in Wiltshire, England, and London, in the late twentieth century - Character: Christopher John Francis Boone. Description: Christopher is the fifteen-year-old narrator of the novel, which he is writing for school. Although it's not mentioned in the book, it's likely that Christopher has Asperger's Syndrome, which is a condition on the autism spectrum. As a result, he experiences and deals with the world in a different way than most people. For example, he notices and remembers everything he sees, which makes new places extremely overwhelming. He doesn't like being around people because he has trouble understanding body language and facial expressions, as well as figures of speech. He prefers to be alone in small spaces, and he loves math, logic, and the universe. He excels in math and science, so he plans to take the Maths A level exam, go to university, and become a scientist. Over the course of the book, as Christopher faces changes in his life and has to reevaluate his relationships with his parents, he faces a number of situations that he wouldn't have imagined facing at the beginning, and he navigates them with eventual success. As a result, Christopher grows quite a bit over the course of the novel, and at the end he feels much more equipped to face his future adult life than he did at the beginning. - Character: Ed Boone (Christopher's father). Description: Ed, Christopher's father, runs a heating maintenance and boiler repair business. Although Judy thinks of him as being very even-tempered with Christopher, he does kill Wellington out of anger and gets angry with Christopher quite often as Christopher investigates the murder. Ed hopes to start a life with Mrs. Shears after Judy and Mr. Shears run away together, but this does not work out, which makes him bitter. He advocates for Christopher to be able to take the Maths A level, and he tries hard to let Christopher live his life in whatever way works for Christopher. For example, he lets Christopher eat what he wants, since Christopher will otherwise stop eating altogether. Ed tries to do his best for Christopher, but he fails him particularly in dealing with Judy's departure. Ed lies to Christopher, telling him that Judy has died, and hiding her letters to him. Ed later heartily regrets this decision, but he has already lost Christopher's hard-earned trust. At the end of the book, he works to regain this trust, and begins to succeed by giving Christopher a dog. - Character: Judy Boone (Christopher's mother). Description: Judy is Christopher's mother, who works as a secretary. Christopher believes her dead for two years before finding her letters to him hidden in his father's cupboard. In fact, Judy couldn't handle the stress of having Christopher as her son, and thought that Ed was taking better care of him, so she left to live in London with Mr. Shears. She feels terribly guilty about this decision, as she expresses in her letters. When Christopher shows up at her London flat, she's shocked to find that he believed her dead and realizes that she needs to take a more active part in her son's life. She brings Christopher back to Swindon and rents a house there. - Character: Siobhan. Description: Christopher's main teacher. Siobhan is one of the few people whom Christopher completely trusts. She helps him understand the way other people act, and she seems to understand more than almost anyone how his mind works. She also guides his writing, assigning him a writing task initially and then giving him advice on his book as he goes. - Character: Mrs. Alexander. Description: Mrs. Alexander is a kind neighbor of Christopher's. He first meets her when he's asking his neighbors for information about Wellington's death, and she expresses interest in his life and invites him in for tea, showing an easy willingness to see the world from his point of view. Later, Christopher runs into her and her dog at the corner store. He's wary of trusting her, but he asks her what she knows about Mr. Shears. Mrs. Alexander realizes that Christopher thinks his mother is dead, and ends up telling him about his mother's affair with Mr. Shears. - Character: Roger Shears. Description: Christopher's mother, Judy, fell in love with Roger Shears and ran away to London with him. For a while, Christopher suspects that Mr. Shears killed Wellington due to bad feeling between him and Mrs. Shears. When Christopher arrives at his mother's apartment in London, Mr. Shears doesn't want him to stay, so Judy breaks up with him and she and Christopher return to Swindon. - Theme: Growing Up. Description: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time can be read as a bildungsroman, a German term that means a coming-of-age story. In bildungsromans, the main character, who is often an adolescent, grows and learns about life over the course of the story, so that they're more adult at the end than they were at the beginning. At the beginning of the book, Christopher is very much still a child, largely due to a lack of knowledge about life and the world. Although he's constantly thinking about math and the universe, his view of his own life is somewhat limited. He believes that his mother has died, and never questions his father's relationship with Mrs. Shears or his mother's relationship with Mr. Shears.Over the course of the story, Christopher's illusions are shattered. He finds out that his father has lied to him on many occasions, his mother is in fact alive, and both of his parents have had relationships with the Shearses. These revelations force Christopher into a more complicated understanding of his own life and the people around him, as he must question the value of truth and the meaning of love. By the end, he sees that both of his parents are deeply flawed, but is well on his way to having workable relationships with both of them.Furthermore, Christopher faces numerous fears throughout the story, building his confidence in his own abilities. Because Christopher probably has Asperger's, an autism spectrum condition, he struggles to move through the world in the way that most other people do. He doesn't like loud noises or being in large crowds, and he sometimes hits people when they try to touch him. However, when he finds out that his mother is alive and his father has killed Wellington the dog, he decides to travel to London despite having little idea how to get there and knowing that he'll surely encounter situations that will frighten him. In order to successfully reach his mother's apartment, Christopher has to become very resourceful, talking to strangers, figuring out how to travel on the London Underground, and buying a map to find the apartment in London. The trip seems to be almost entirely terrifying for Christopher, and he often remains stuck in one place for a while because he simply can't face his surroundings.Yet Christopher manages to meet all of the challenges that come his way on this trip, and also writes his whole story down. Additionally, he gets an A on his Maths A level exam, which puts him on the path to attending university. Thus, by the end of the book he feels that if he has succeeded in all of these difficult tasks, he can also succeed in life, and go to university and become a scientist as he has always dreamed. Having gained knowledge about the people around him and about how the world works, he feels much more prepared to meet the challenges of adult life than he did at the beginning. - Theme: Trust. Description: Christopher has trouble understanding other people, so he usually fails to perceive nuances in people's personalities, instead categorizing them in a certain way that dictates how he interacts with them. These categorizations often influence whether or not Christopher feels that he can trust certain people, and his social interactions depend almost entirely on whether or not he trusts the other person.Whenever Christopher meets someone new, he assumes they're untrustworthy until he can see some proof to the contrary. Even the school environment, where most people take for granted that teachers are essentially good people, does not reassure Christopher—he refuses to interact with new teachers until he has observed them for a few weeks to be sure it's safe for him to trust them. Christopher is very cautious whenever he meets anyone he doesn't know. Mrs. Alexander makes gestures of friendship which Christopher returns very warily, believing that at any moment she might lead him into danger. Christopher's judgments of people are often different from general social attitudes, so the fact that Mrs. Alexander is an elderly woman makes her no less automatically trustworthy in his eyes.For Christopher, trust is completely black and white. Either someone is trustworthy or they're not, in which case he thinks they're entirely unpredictable and might hurt him. When Christopher's father admits that he lied about Christopher's mother dying and that he killed Wellington, Christopher decides that he can no longer trust Ed. Because of Christopher's worldview, losing trust in his father means not only that he can't believe what Ed tells him, but that if Ed could kill a dog, he's quite likely to kill Christopher, too.At first, Christopher seems overcautious about whether or not people can be trusted, such as when he leaves Mrs. Alexander's yard because she's taking too long to bring out the cookies she's promised, and he thinks she might be calling the police on him. However, it becomes evident that in fact, his black-and-white view of trustworthiness has blinded him to the deceptions of those closest to him, whom he trusts most—his parents. Christopher's parents inflict quite a bit of emotional pain on him—his mother leaves him without saying goodbye and his father lies about her death. Thus Christopher's complete mistrust of others is not so much unnecessary as it is misdirected; at the beginning of the book, he trusts his parents just as blindly as he refuses to trust anyone new, and this prevents him from imagining that his parents might be capable of hurting him and from guessing that his mother's story might be different from what he's been told. Christopher does not regard humans as inherently untrustworthy; rather, he thinks he has to figure out which ones are trustworthy and which aren't. However, the betrayals of his parents, whom he long ago classified as trustworthy, demonstrate that no one can be completely trusted. Even generally trustworthy people with good intentions are governed in the end by emotions, which might lead them to act in harmful ways.Christopher himself intends to be entirely trustworthy, constantly reminding those around him that he always tells the truth. However, as Ed tries to keep him from his investigations, Christopher becomes less trustworthy, even while telling himself that he's doing nothing wrong. He disobeys Ed because Ed's instructions were too vague, and he tells only part of the truth about where he's been when he goes out. Thus, Christopher himself also proves that people can never entirely be trusted. - Theme: Truth, Love, and Safety. Description: Christopher sees truth as an anchoring principle of the world, and values it almost the way other people might value right over wrong. If someone tells the truth, he can trust them, and if they lie, he fears them. However, Christopher also finds out that the truth can hurt as much as a lie. While he is constantly aware of his physical safety, carrying his knife in case someone tries to attack him and taking comfort in the knowledge that he can hit people hard, Christopher doesn't know how to protect himself emotionally. In fact, he sometimes responds to emotional harm with physical defense, such as when he physically fights his father when Ed confronts him about having learned of his mother's affair. Christopher believes the truth will keep him safe from emotional harm, but he finds that this isn't necessarily the case.Christopher doesn't understand why anyone would want to believe something that isn't true, such as that fairies exist. He wants to know the truth about everything, which is partly the basis of the plot: Christopher sets out to discover the truth about who killed Wellington. He also insists on telling the truth in his account of events and in his everyday life, often reminding those around him that he never lies. Christopher dedicates himself so thoroughly to truth that he even thinks of it as a white lie to not give every small detail of his desired day when asked, "What do you want to do today?" He eventually finds himself having to stretch the truth and tell white lies in order to do his detective work, particularly when his father forbids him from seeking Wellington's killer. This is one of the ways that Christopher changes over the course of the story, interacting on a more complex level with the world around him.Because Christopher initially orders his life by truth and falsehood, however, he resists imagining situations other than those that actually exist. He doesn't like for people to wonder how those who are dead might react to current situations, because deceased people can't actually think anything about a world that goes on after their death. By living in the moment like this, Christopher manages to protect himself from distressing thoughts of his dead mother or of how things might have been if she were still around.Furthermore, Christopher sees telling the truth as a sign of love, especially in his father. However, the truth about his mother ends up hurting him. Ed finds the truth of his wife's desertion too painful to deal with, and thinks that a lie will protect Christopher. Lying about Judy's death protects his father from dealing with his own emotions, but he also might think that a lie is the loving choice in this situation; that it is better for Christopher to think his mother dead than to think that she has abandoned him. Because of Christopher's dedication to truth, though, he can't see that his father might have had good intentions in lying to him, even if it was fundamentally wrong. Even so, he does feel the pain of the truth, which in this situation has betrayed him as much as his parents have, putting him into emotional danger rather than keeping him safe.Although the truth hurts Christopher, he can't become an adult without facing it. He must accept multiple conflicting truths at once. His father lied and hurt him, but still loves him. As much as Christopher hates lies, they can feel safer, and he himself sometimes must stretch the truth. He is forced to soften his concrete association not only between truth and safety, but also between truth and love. - Theme: Logic vs. Emotion. Description: Christopher, who is probably on the autism spectrum, struggles in interactions that depend on emotion or personality. Rather than sensing that someone is sad because of the tone of their voice, he often only perceives this emotion when the person starts crying and he can see physical evidence of their sadness.Christopher best understands situations that he can explain logically rather than emotionally. He tries to be like the detective Sherlock Holmes, because Holmes approaches mysteries from a logical perspective and seeks an explainable truth. Furthermore, Holmes doesn't believe in supernatural explanations for odd happenings. Like Holmes, Christopher thinks that all odd happenings can be illuminated through use of logic, and Christopher takes this approach in his investigation of Wellington's death.Christopher loves math in part because it's logical. He particularly likes prime numbers, and even uses them to number his chapters—a decision that might seem illogical to other people, since chapter five, for example, is actually the third chapter. He thinks that prime numbers are similar to life in that their existence is based on logic, but it's impossible to find rules to define them. While many people might relate to this perspective, it is especially applicable to Christopher's situation, since he struggles to understand the unspoken social rules that most people don't have to think about. Whenever Christopher feels overwhelmed by the world around him, he turns to logic for help to understand it and to reason out his next steps. For him, logic is the path to truth.Christopher expresses his emotions in a limited way. He rarely narrates what he's feeling in a given situation beyond being happy or being overwhelmed and confused. He expresses most negative emotions by groaning or hitting people. He also struggles to understand when people around him act based on their emotions, rather than based on logic. For example, Ed lies to Christopher about Judy's death because he can't handle his own emotions about the situation, and doesn't want to hurt Christopher by telling him his mother left him. He also kills Wellington out of extreme emotions towards Mrs. Shears. Because these actions are based on emotion, Christopher simply can't understand them, and all he takes from them is that his father can't be trusted.Despite Christopher's love of and need for logic, he himself sometimes acts in ways that others see as illogical, just as others act in ways that he sees as illogical. For example, Christopher figures out whether he's going to have a good day or a bad day—what emotions he'll experience—by the colors of the cars that he sees on his way to school. This seems illogical, since car colors have nothing to do with the events of his life. However, he points out that people who work in offices often feel that they'll have a bad day simply because it's raining, even though the rain has no actual effect on their life in an office. Christopher's logical explanations for his actions often make sense even when it seems like they shouldn't, suggesting that personal logic itself may not always be logical, but instead based on each person's subjective point of view and ability to think in new ways. - Theme: Perspective and the Absurdity of the World. Description: The actions of people on the autism spectrum often seem difficult to comprehend for people who are not autistic. However, telling the story from Christopher's perspective helps the reader understand his worldview and question the generally accepted rules of society.Christopher sees society from a somewhat removed perspective. He doesn't instinctively understand why people act in certain ways or why certain things are expected of him. As a result, he notices aspects of everyday life that are somewhat absurd, but that most people accept as perfectly normal without thinking about them. For example, Christopher hates the colors yellow and brown and tries to stay away from them, particularly not eating anything in these colors. He acknowledges that this is somewhat foolish, but he also points out that people decide what they're going to order at a restaurant depending on which foods they generally like, even if they've never eaten any of the dishes on the menu, and avoiding yellow foods isn't much different from avoiding bitter foods. Christopher also has trouble understanding many figures of speech, such as "I laughed my socks off" or "He was the apple of my eye." People often use phrases like this without thinking about what they're literally saying, but only thinking about what they generally mean. Christopher's confusion about them forces the reader to actually consider the absurdity of some of these phrases, and the distance between what they describe literally and what they're meant to convey. Finally, Christopher's perspective emphasizes the amount of sensory stimulation that people are constantly receiving. Most people are so used to it that they hardly notice, but Christopher experiences the world differently and can't ignore the excess information that his brain receives. His narration portrays the overstimulation of the modern world and the absurdity of urban life that includes gigantic trains traveling through tunnels and advertisements that sound ridiculous when described in Christopher's logical detail.Christopher's narration forces the reader to reevaluate what most people consider "normal" and consider that the entire concept of normality is subjective, based on individual experience rather than indisputable fact. - Climax: Christopher realizing that his mother is alive, and his father admitting he killed Wellington. - Summary: The novel opens with the young narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone, discovering his neighbor's dog dead in her yard, murdered with a pitchfork. Mrs. Shears, the neighbor who owns the dog, calls the police. When they arrive, they overwhelm Christopher with their questions, and when a policeman touches him roughly, Christopher responds by hitting him. The policeman arrests him and brings him to the station. Christopher makes it clear to his reader that he experiences the world differently than other people, and doesn't understand human interaction very well. At the police station, Christopher is put in a cell. The police call his father, Ed, who arrives angry at the police, but not at Christopher. An inspector questions Christopher and gives him a caution, which means that he'll receive a punishment if he gets into trouble again. On the drive home, Christopher decides that he's going to figure out who killed the dog, Wellington. Ed gets angry and tells him not to pursue Wellington's death. Later that night, Christopher finds his father crying in the kitchen. The next day, Christopher's teacher, Siobhan, has him write a story, so he begins to write the story that becomes the novel. Although his father has told him to stay out of other people's business, Christopher decides to disobey because Ed's instructions are too vague. That evening, he goes to Mrs. Shears's house and asks if she knows who killed Wellington, but she shuts the door in his face. He snoops in her garden shed and sees a pitchfork that looks like the one that killed Wellington. The following day, Christopher decides to interrogate the other neighbors on his street, even though he doesn't like talking to strangers. The first few people he talks to don't have any information for him and advise him to discontinue his investigation. Finally, he approaches Mrs. Alexander, an older woman with a dog. She engages him in conversation and offers him refreshments, but when she goes inside to get them, Christopher decides she might actually be calling the police, so he leaves. He then reasons that Mr. Shears should be his prime suspect in the murder, because he left his wife, so he probably hated Mrs. Shears and killed Wellington in revenge. When Christopher returns home, Ed is very angry with him for continuing to investigate Wellington's death, and he makes Christopher promise to stop. In chapters alternating with those that cover the central action, the reader learns more about Christopher. He struggles to understand other people, but he loves math and science and is very good at them, so he plans to take the Maths A level exam to qualify for university. Furthermore, he always tells the truth, and he has a photographic memory. He hates brown and yellow, but he enjoys Sherlock Holmes stories, and models his own detective work on that of Holmes. His parents used to argue a lot, often about him. His mother, Judy, died two years earlier of an unexpected heart attack. After her death, Mrs. Shears helped his father out a lot around the house. A few days later, Christopher runs into Mrs. Alexander at the corner store. She engages him in conversation, and he begins to ask questions about Mr. Shears. Eventually, Mrs. Alexander realizes that Christopher has illusions about his mother, and tells him gently that his mother was having an affair with Mr. Shears. Christopher writes everything down in his book. A few days later, he accidentally leaves the book lying around, and his father reads it. He gets terribly angry with Christopher for continuing to snoop around, and when he grabs Christopher's arm, the two get into a physical fight. Ed ends by throwing the book into the trash. The next day, Ed takes Christopher to the zoo in apology. After school on the following day, Christopher searches the yard and the house for the book, in case Ed decided to take it out of the trash. He finally finds it in his father's room, where he also discovers a number of envelopes addressed to him. He takes an envelope just as Ed gets home from work. When he reads it in private, he discovers that the letter is from his mother, but it was postmarked eighteen months after his mother supposedly died. Christopher sees this as another mystery to solve. A few days later, Christopher returns to Ed's bedroom and finds forty-three more letters addressed to him. He begins to read them. They're full of his mother reminiscing about Christopher's childhood and giving him updates about her life in London. In one, she explains that she left because she felt like she couldn't be a good mother to Christopher, and she was in love with Mr. Shears. After a while, Christopher gets sick and blacks out. When he wakes up, his father comes in and realizes what has happened. Ed cries and apologizes for lying to Christopher, saying that he didn't know how to deal with Judy leaving. He gives Christopher a bath, but Christopher won't speak or eat. Ed has learned that lying only causes more pain in the long run, so he decides to be brutally honest. He admits that he was the one who killed Wellington, because he was angry with Mrs. Shears for not wanting a relationship with him. Christopher becomes terrified of his father, thinking that if he killed Wellington, he might attack Christopher, too. Christopher waits until late at night, then sneaks outside and hides behind the garden shed. The next morning, Ed looks for him but doesn't find him. That morning, Christopher seeks help from Mrs. Shears and Mrs. Alexander, but eventually decides that he has to go to London to live with his mother, because he's no longer safe with Ed. He takes Ed's bank card and his own pet rat, Toby, and walks to school to ask Siobhan how to get to the train station. When he sees his father's van in the school parking lot, he instead gets directions from a stranger on the street. He gets lost on the way to the station, but eventually finds it by walking the streets in a spiral. The train station is very overwhelming for Christopher, but he makes it to a table at a café, where he sits and does mental math to stay calm. A couple hours later, he looks up to find a policeman asking what he's doing there. The policeman helps him get money with Ed's bank card, and directs him to the ticket office. Christopher purchases a ticket and finds his way to the train. Just before the train leaves, the policeman shows up on board, this time with orders to bring Christopher back to his father. Before he can do so, however, the train begins to move. The policeman arranges for a car to pick them up at the next station. Christopher has to go to the bathroom, and then he hides on a luggage rack, because small spaces make him feel safe from the crowds on the train. The policeman can't find him and leaves the train. The train stops in London, and Christopher gets off. He's overwhelmed by the number of signs in the station, but he finds his way to the information desk and asks how to get to his mother's address. He's directed to the London Underground, or the tube. In the tube station, he observes other people to figure out how everything works. He makes it to the platform of the train he needs to take, but when the train actually comes, he's terrified by the noise. He sits on a bench for hours in a panic as the trains continue to roar in and out of the tunnel. When Christopher's fear lessens, he discovers that Toby has escaped. He sees him by the rails, and climbs down. A train comes just as he catches the rat, and a man on the platform has to pull Christopher to safety. Finally, Christopher boards a train and gets off at his mother's stop. He buys a street atlas from a shop in the station to find his way to his mother's flat. When he gets there, Judy and Mr. Shears are shocked to see him. Christopher reveals that Ed told him Judy was dead, and that he never received her letters, which greatly distresses her. That night, Ed shows up in pursuit of Christopher. Christopher refuses to talk to him, and Mr. Shears calls a policeman to escort Ed out of the flat. Life in London is not ideal for Christopher. His mother tries to take him shopping for clothes, but he can't deal with the crowds. There's no yard, and he can't see the stars. When he remembers that he's supposed to take his Maths A level the next week, Judy tells him he'll have to wait until the next year. Furthermore, it's clear that Mr. Shears doesn't want him around. When tensions with Mr. Shears heighten, Judy takes his car and drives Christopher back to Ed's house. Ed is angry with Judy, but allows them to stay in the house temporarily while he lives with a friend. Christopher doesn't eat or sleep, because he's upset about not being able to take his A level. At school the next day, Siobhan and the school principal (Mrs. Gascoyne) decide he should still be able to take the exam, so he takes the first portion that very afternoon. He struggles because he hasn't slept and can't think properly. Over the next two days, he takes the rest of the exam, and feels better about it. Meanwhile, Ed tries to get Christopher to forgive him, but Christopher is still scared of him. Judy finds a house of her own. Christopher lives with her, but he doesn't like the house. He goes to Ed's house for short periods of time, but still refuses to speak to him. Finally, he allows Ed to talk to him for just five minutes. Ed tells him that they need to make it a joint project to repair their relationship, and as a gesture of goodwill, he gives Christopher a golden retriever puppy. The dog, Sandy, lives at Ed's house, where Christopher takes care of it and begins to interact with his father again. Christopher receives an A on his exam, and he begins to study for the next A level. He plans to bring Sandy to university and become a scientist. He feels confident about his future because of all the challenges he has overcome in going to London and solving Wellington's murder.

- Genre: Farce, Short Story - Title: The Custody of the Pumpkin - Point of view: Third-Person Omniscient - Setting: Blandings Castle - Character: Clarence Threepwood, Ninth Earl of Emsworth. Description: Lord Emsworth is Freddie's father and the protagonist of the story. An English aristocrat and owner of the Blandings estate, Emsworth is an amiable but absentminded man, described as being "capable of but one thought at a time." With little else to do around the castle, Emsworth primarily concerns himself with trivial and simplistic pastimes, such as playing with gadgets or fretting over his prize pumpkin. Emsworth's aimlessness and lack of meaningful responsibilities suggests that the 20th century nobility have become somewhat irrelevant in modern times. However, a traditionalist at heart, Emsworth continues to take great pride in his heritage, and as such he is furious to discover his son's engagement to Aggie, the cousin of the estate's head gardener, McAllister. Emsworth views Aggie as unworthy of his son due to her humble parentage, but his attempt to force McAllister to break up the couple results in the gardener's resignation, jeopardizing the health of Lord Emsworth's prize pumpkin. Emsworth's inability to control either his son or his employee imply that as well as having less relevance, modern earls no longer command automatic respect from their subjects. Emsworth eventually meets Aggie's father, wealthy businessman Mr Donaldson, whose success exposes Emsworth's prejudiced assumptions as old fashioned and incompatible with modern reality. In the end, Emsworth puts aside his pride in order to undo the damage done while trying to sabotage the relationship. This newfound humility is what ultimately revives Emsworth's beloved vegetable and allows him to win first prize at the Shrewsbury Show. - Character: The Honourable Frederick Threepwood ("Freddie"). Description: A flighty and somewhat reckless young man, Freddie is Lord Emsworth's son and the primary source of his father's problems. Freddie is less traditional than Emsworth, and he cares little for agricultural pursuits—he is uncomfortable in the supposed "paradise" of Blandings Castle and openly mocks Emsworth's attachment to his pumpkin (which Freddie flippantly dubs "Percy"). Instead, Freddie finds himself much more at home in London, a city his father openly despises. Throughout the story, Freddie defies his father's wishes at every turn: though Emsworth has banned Freddie from visiting London due to his habit of amassing debt, he continues to do so, and he marries Aggie without approval. However, Freddie's love of the city and refusal to comply with the Earl's demands ultimately ends positively for both of them when Mr Donaldson offers his new son-in-law a lucrative career abroad. Freddie's attitude towards his father's interests and ultimate rejection of Blandings implies a cultural division between the older and younger generations. Whereas Emsworth cares deeply about his inherited land and familial responsibilities, Freddie views his royal heritage as unimportant, and, like many young men of the era, he instead turns to business in order to find success. - Character: Angus McAllister. Description: McAllister is Lord Emsworth's head gardener, having worked at the estate for over 10 years. In contrast to his bumbling, upper-class employer, McAllister is an intelligent and dignified working-class man, if "a bit short on sweetness and light." Despite his lower placement in the social hierarchy, McAllister is entirely unafraid of standing up to Emsworth's more irrational demands, and he refuses to follow orders unless given good reason to. McAllister's principles are so strong, that when he is asked to banish his own cousin, he simply resigns from his position and refuses to return until given adequate incentive to do so. McAllister is an exceptionally talented gardener, and it seems that he is singlehandedly responsible for the success of Lord Emsworth's pumpkin at the Shrewsbury Show. - Character: Mr Donaldson. Description: An American businessman and Aggie Donaldson's father. Due to Donaldson's nationality and lack of a noble title, Lord Emsworth assumes that the Donaldson family is poor, and feels superiority over them as a result. However, it later becomes apparent that unlike Emsworth, who was born into his status, Mr Donaldson is a self-made millionaire whose wealth and power outweighs Emsworth's by a significant degree. Mr Donaldson's success highlights not only Emsworth's outdated prejudices, but also the shifting social tide of the 20th century. Whereas in the past it was almost impossible for members of the working classes to improve their social circumstances, the industrial revolution has allowed men like Mr Donaldson to achieve greatness—so much so that they have surpassed the aristocracy themselves. Much to Emsworth's surprise, Mr Donaldson speaks highly of his new son-in-law, Freddie, and intends to put him to work in Long Island City. - Character: Niagara "Aggie" Donaldson. Description: Freddie's fiancée and, later in the story, wife. Lord Emsworth disapproves of Aggie due to his prejudiced assumption that she cannot financially support his son, given that she's cousins with the head gardener, McAllister. However, as Emsworth later discovers, Aggie is the daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Mr Donaldson, which proves this assumption false. - Theme: Aristocracy and Power. Description: "The Custody of the Pumpkin" begins when the story's protagonist, Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth, discovers his son's "entanglement" with the daughter of his estate's head gardener, Angus McAllister. Incensed by the relationship, Emsworth takes on the "forthright truculence of a large land owner in the early Normal period ticking off a serf" and attempts to have McAllister banish the girl. In response, McAllister simply resigns, and in his absence the Lord's prize pumpkin (which he had hoped to win first place at the Shrewsbury Agricultural Show) begins to wilt. The rest of the story concerns Emsworth's efforts to either reinstate McAllister or find a suitable replacement. Wodehouse's narrative portrays Emsworth as a bumbling and ineffective character, described as being akin to an "elderly leopard" and shown frequently being defied by his supposed subordinates. This could be seen as a reflection of the declining power of the English aristocracy at the time of the story's publication in early 20th-century England. Due to factors such as the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the middle classes, and financial pressure in the wake of the First World War, during this period the British landed gentry held less control than ever before, and Lord Emsworth's repeated (and failed) attempts to assert himself seems to parallel this. Overall, the story suggests that the aristocracy of old can no longer continue to act as they once did without being met with resistance, and it portrays an exchange of power occurring between nobility and the working class. Throughout the story, the concerns of the upper classes are shown to be entirely trivial, which emphasizes their dwindling social influence. Emsworth's pumpkin represents this point, acting as a symbol of aristocratic power. Early on, the omniscient narrator notes that Emsworth views the vegetable as his contribution to his family's "scroll of honour." This attitude serves to highlight the diminished jurisdiction of Emsworth's lordly title. Whereas his ancestors had "sent out from Blandings Castle statesmen and warriors, governors and leaders of the people," Emsworth's ultimate goal is merely to earn first prize for best pumpkin at the Shrewsbury Show. However, despite his ambitions being far less grand than that of his predecessors, Emsworth views his task with equal (if not greater) importance, a fact illustrated by a dream sequence in which the King himself is furious over his inability to cultivate the vegetable. Emsworth's genuine anxiety over the pumpkin's success and fear of sovereign disappointment further demonstrates how insignificant the concerns of the British nobility have become. However, while the role of the modern upper classes is shown to be far less substantial, members of the English aristocracy continue to act as if they hold the same authority as before, but this pretension is not without consequences. Emsworth, in particular, is punished by the narrative for attempting to invoke his lordly title in order to get his way. This is demonstrated at the story's beginning, when Emsworth makes unreasonable demands of McAllister despite knowing that "modern earls must think twice before pulling the feudal stuff on their employees." As a direct result of this action, McAllister resigns. This causes Emsworth's pumpkin—his sole noble responsibility—to wilt, and later in Kensington Gardens a crowd mocks the Lord and strips him of his rank. This scene is compared (albeit lightheartedly) to the French Revolution, a period of political upheaval in the late 18th century in which French citizens uprooted a centuries old feudal system and executed the country's monarchy. Despite his title, it is not Lord Emsworth who is portrayed as having control, but his supposed subordinates, which speaks to the turning social tide in 20th-century England. McAllister represents this point best: when Emsworth attempts to exert authority over his head-gardener, McAllister simply chooses to hand in his notice. Wodehouse draws a humorous comparison between this action and the First War of Scottish Independence, in which the Scottish fought and succeeded against English rule. McAllister's action is thus framed as an act of rebellion and reclamation of control, and it represents the shifting attitude of the lower classes towards the monarchy. Additionally, while Emsworth views the pumpkin as his own noble duty, the success of the vegetable is ultimately McAllister's decision. It is not until Emsworth acts with humility and doubles McAllister's salary that the gardener elects to return, at which point he restores the health of the pumpkin and Emsworth is able to fulfill his goal by winning first prize the Shrewsbury Show. Ultimately, it seems that Wodehouse's portrayal of Emsworth as being obsessed with the trivial and lacking in any real authority is a comment upon on the waning social influence of the era's nobility, and as such McAllister's resistance—symbolic of lower-class rebellion—appears to be a positive. This point is highlighted at the story's conclusion, where Emsworth receives credit for the pumpkin's success by his peers, while McAllister stands by as a silent witness. While Wodehouse emphasizes that the pair stand at one another's sides, implying a newfound equality between them, the audience is left to consider for themselves which of the two men is truly more deserving of the pumpkin and, by extension, the power. - Theme: Nature vs. Modernization. Description: "The Custody of the Pumpkin" takes place in two primary settings: the rural Blandings Castle (a recurring fictional location in Wodehouse's works) and London. Wodehouse initially establishes a strong contrast between these two locales, presenting Blandings as an idyllic countryside paradise and London as a loud, crowded, and "hopeless" town rife with materialistic opportunists. This contrast is further emphasized by the rift between the story's protagonist, Lord Emsworth (a traditionalist who views nature as a retreat), and his son Freddie (who is prone to piling up debts when left to his own devices in the city). Given this, the story may at first appear to be a criticism of the modern world, and a call to return to more traditional roots. However, at the story's end, Wodehouse subverts this established contrast entirely, with Emsworth accosted by an angry mob in the park, and Freddie seeing financial gain by moving to Long Island City. By setting up this divide between nature and the modern world only to later subvert it altogether, Wodehouse seems to suggest that modernization, although initially intimidating, need not necessarily be feared. Blandings—and, by extension, nature itself—is deliberately portrayed at the story's beginning as a place of beauty and respite from the modern world, as well as being synonymous with tradition. From the very first paragraph, Wodehouse frames the estate as a picture of pastoral bliss, describing the morning sunshine as it lights the "green lawns and wide terraces […] noble trees and bright flowerbeds." With this opening statement, Wodehouse both emphasizes the charm of the countryside, while at the same time inextricably tying Blandings Castle to the natural world. Continuing from this, Lord Emsworth is repeatedly shown to have a deep affection for nature—so much so that the "main interest of his life" is his garden —and, most notably, owns the estate itself. In associating an aristocratic character like Emsworth with such positive portrayals of nature, there is an implication of traditionalism. Historically, the English aristocracy earned their keep through agriculture, and with this in mind, it seems that Wodehouse is deliberately harkening back to these days and choosing to portray them in an idealized light.   Meanwhile, in a sharp contrast to the calm and traditional "paradise" of Blandings, the story portrays London as the fast-paced, modern, and altogether less desirable epicenter of what Wodehouse describes as the "age of rush and hurry." This thematic distinction between the two locations is established in the city's introduction, in which Emsworth decries the "miserable town" for "its crowds, its smells, its noises: its omnibuses, its taxis, its hard pavements." This short list, depicting a flurry of senses and movement in quick succession, lends the city a frantic and impersonal air, particularly when contrasted with the altogether slower and more scenic introduction of Blandings and its inhabitants. In addition to this atmosphere of overwhelming haste and detachment, the city is also associated with financial ruin and frivolousness. The character of Freddie demonstrates this point; his "spirited escapades" in London have frequently left him in debt (so much so that he has been forbidden from visiting altogether), and his father describes him as the product of a "crass and materialistic world". With these negative aspects so clearly defined, the reader might sympathize with Lord Emsworth's assertion that only an "imbecile should want to come to London when he could be at Blandings," as well as his desire to retreat back to nature and his traditional roots when feeling overwhelmed by the modern world. However, these two directly opposing themes, despite being so firmly established by the narrative, are directly subverted in the story's final pages. This sudden contrast implies that while rapid industrialization might at first seem intimidating, and traditionalists such as Emsworth may feel a desire to retreat back into nature, in truth the modern world is not necessarily a threat. After a confrontation with Freddie in London that leaves Emsworth "profoundly stirred," an "imperative need for flowers and green trees" overtakes him, and he retreats to Kensington gardens. Given Wodehouse's previous portrayal of nature in the story, the reader might assume that the gardens will be a place of positivity. However, it is here that the largest conflict of the novel occurs, wherein Emsworth illegally picks some flowers and is accosted by a park-keeper, a constable, and a crowd of spectators. This is a hectic scene far removed from the natural tranquility portrayed thus far. Meanwhile, despite the city having been established as the root of Freddie's financial woes and a source of anxiety for Lord Emsworth (who, in addition to loathing the town, has frequently been forced to foot the bills for his son's "mischief"), in the end both men's problems are solved when Freddie's father-in-law, Mr Donaldson, a wealthy American businessman, offers his son-in-law a "steady and possibly lucrative job" in Long Island City. In the end, Lord Emsworth's view of nature as an implicitly safe space is exposed as an unrealistic ideal, while the modern world he so despises provides Freddie with the opportunity to make a name for himself—an opportunity that, by Emsworth's own admission, he never expected the boy to have. By deliberately establishing a strong dichotomy between the natural world and the modern, only to later defy these established themes altogether, it seems that Wodehouse is directly addressing 20th-century anxieties over modernization. Through Emsworth, Wodehouse highlights these fears and lends validity to those with an idealized perception of nature. However, by having the story ultimately resolved by Mr Donaldson—a millionaire who has undoubtedly benefited from the Industrial Revolution—Wodehouse seems to imply that while these anxieties may not be entirely unfounded, it is certainly possible to find positivity in progress. - Theme: Subversion of Social Class. Description: Throughout "The Custody of the Pumpkin," Wodehouse subverts the expectations of both his audience and his characters in order to satirize preconceived notions of nationality and social class. Wodehouse does this for comedic purposes, and also to question existing traditions and social hierarchies. The assumptions the characters make about one another (for instance, Lord Emsworth's assumption that his son's new girlfriend must be from a poorer background) are repeatedly demonstrated to be false and illustrate the shallow and ridiculous nature of the British class system at that time. Through this use of satire, Wodehouse invites his readers to re-evaluate their own biases and instead aim to judge others based upon their personal merits as opposed to arbitrary and outdated titles. Throughout the story, Wodehouse's characters are shown making false assumptions about the social class of others and are demonstrated to be foolish for doing so. Indeed, the events of the story itself are triggered when Lord Emsworth, after discovering his son's relationship with the head gardener's cousin, Niagara, assumes her to be of a lower social standing and therefore unable to meet his expectations (his one hope being that Freddie will find a girl "belonging to a good family, and possessing a bit of money of her own"). This assumption that Niagara's social status must match that of her cousin immediately exposes the character's outdated views of class and social mobility. While prior to the 18th century there were very few opportunities for lower class families to elevate their status, the Industrial Revolution altered this dynamic entirely, providing individuals with the means to improve their socioeconomic circumstances through manufacturing and business acumen. In presuming that all members of a single family must belong to the same class, Emsworth fails to recognize over a century of social progress. This ignorance is exposed to humorous effect at the end of the story when Emsworth meets with Niagara's father, Mr Donaldson, a self-made American businessman. During their conversation, it quickly comes apparent that despite lacking formal titles, the Donaldson family hold power far greater than Emsworth's own, Donaldson apologetically professing that he only has "so much as ten million dollars in the world." This interaction reveals that had Emsworth simply refrained from making a snap judgment about Niagara's socioeconomic status from the beginning, he could have avoided the events of the story altogether. However, despite these presumptions about class being proven incorrect by the narrative, the characters continue to treat one another based upon their social status as opposed to their actions, ultimately perpetuating an arbitrary and ineffective system. The most obvious example of this social hypocrisy occurs in Kensington Gardens, where Lord Emsworth illegally picks some flowers, attracting the attention of the park-keeper, a constable, and a crowd of onlookers. In his "badly fitting tweed suit," Emsworth does not meet the public's preconceived expectations of nobility, and therefore when he claims to be an Earl he is met with derision. With no knowledge of his true title, the spectators judge Emsworth for his actions alone; the park keeper labels him as "the blackest type of evil doer," the constable questions him as he would an average citizen, and the crowd views Emsworth as being rightfully "put through it for pinching flowers." However, once Lord Emsworth is able to prove his noble status, he is no longer judged by his actions; instead, the constable, described as a "staunch admirer of the aristocracy," gains a sudden and inexplicable respect for the Earl, and dismisses him without consequence. In portraying a figure of legal authority excusing Emsworth's crime (even a crime as benign as flower picking) Wodehouse demonstrates the preferential treatment afforded to the British nobility based upon title alone, and exposes the unfairness of the social class system.  Wodehouse reaffirms the existence of outdated social hierarchies in the real world by exploiting the assumptions of the readers themselves. In doing so, he invites his audience to readjust their own perceptions of class. Throughout the story, Wodehouse uses his audience's preconceptions in order to subvert expectations and generate humor. This is demonstrated in the novel's very first scene, in which Lord Emsworth is shown with his eye to a "powerful telescope." At first, a 20th-century reader might assume Emsworth is a figure of dignity and intelligence, given his noble title and depiction with a scientific instrument. However, these assumptions are quickly proven false when Emsworth fails to remove the cap from the telescope before looking through it. In peppering these comical subversions throughout the story, Wodehouse highlights the similarities between the readers and the characters he portrays, demonstrating that his audience is culpable of the same biases as Lord Emsworth himself. Because the Lord is depicted as a foolish man who is narratively punished for his prejudices, in drawing this comparison Wodehouse asks his readers whether it is truly wise to emulate the character's behavior. Overall, "The Custody of the Pumpkin" suggests that the class system is an absurd and outdated mode of judgment which leads people to treat one another with unfairness. By exposing people's propensity to stereotype others, Wodehouse invites his readers to reconsider their prejudices surrounding class, and to instead aim to make judgments based upon individual actions as opposed to first impressions and arbitrary titles. - Climax: Lord Emsworth is almost arrested in Kensington Gardens after illegally picking tulips. - Summary: As the morning sunshine descends upon Blandings Castle, the estate's owner, Lord Emsworth, is playing with his new telescope and uses it to spy on his son, Freddie, who is in the embrace of a strange young woman. This revelation devastates Emsworth, who'd hoped his son would someday find an eligible girl belonging to a good family. After ambushing his son on the terrace, Freddie identifies her as Niagara "Aggie" Donaldson. She's American, and a "sort of cousin" of the estate's head gardener, Angus McAllister. Also, she's his fiancée. These details outrage Lord Emsworth even further, and he rushes to confront McAllister himself. Emsworth tells the gardener that if he does not send the girl away, he will lose his position at the estate. McAllister responds to this threat by calmly handing in his notice. Lord Emsworth, who rarely considers the consequences of his actions, is initially pleased with this result, but later has a realization: without McAllister, who will take care of Lord Emsworth's pumpkin? The titular pumpkin is of great importance to Lord Emsworth, as it is the one vegetable his family has yet to win first prize for at the Shrewsbury Agricultural Show. Emsworth feels this "blot" on his family's record deeply, and when his winning vegetable begins to droop, he realizes the gravity of his mistake. Emsworth sends a telegram instructing McAllister to return at once. McAllister responds that he will not. Emsworth, who had never considered the possibility that McAllister might refuse, reluctantly decides that he must go to London—a city he despises—to find a suitable replacement. Lord Emsworth's trip to the city, however, proves to be both unpleasant and fruitless, as he is unable to find even one candidate who matches his requirements. On the third day of his visit, he coincidentally bumps into Freddie, whom Emsworth had previously banned from London due to his habit of racking up tremendous amounts of debt. In an effort to avoid conflict, Freddie hands his father a note and quickly leaves. The note reveals that he and Aggie are now married. Lord Emsworth, delirious with shock, is overtaken by an urge to be among nature, and hails a cab to Kensington Gardens. Once at the park, the well-set-out flowerbeds affect Emsworth something "like a drug." The Lord enters a trance-like state and, believing himself to be back at Blandings, proceeds to commit a crime of unspeakable proportions: he steps over the railings and begins to pick flowers. This flagrant criminal act attracts the attentions of the park-keeper, followed shortly by a crowd of spectators and a police constable. When Emsworth claims to be an Earl, the crowd—who see him as nothing more than a strange man in an ill-fitting suit—deride him. Emsworth is eventually spared from this ordeal by the fortuitous arrival of McAllister and Mr Donaldson, the former of whom affirms the Lord's identity. The onlookers disperse, and Mr Donaldson introduces himself as Aggie's father. Despite Emsworth's previous concerns that Aggie was not from a "good family," it turns out that Mr Donaldson is an extremely wealthy industrialist. Not only this, he sees great potential in Freddie and intends to put the boy to work in Long Island City. Thrilled by this development, Emsworth tells Donaldson to inform Frederick that he has his father's best wishes, and that there's no need to hurry home. Emsworth then turns his attentions to McAllister, who he begs to return to the castle. McAllister agrees—though only once Emsworth doubles his salary. At the Shrewsbury Show, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Emsworth's rival, offers his congratulations to the Lord, while McAllister silently observes. The pumpkin sits in one of the largest packing-crates Shrewsbury has ever seen. The note attached reads, "PUMPKINS. FIRST PRIZE."

- Genre: Novel, Comedy of Manners, Tragicomedy - Title: The Custom of the Country - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: New York City and France - Character: Undine Spragg. Description: Undine Spragg is the daughter of Mr. Spragg and Mrs. Spragg, and while she originally comes from Apex in the Midwest, her dream is to eventually become a member of the Fifth Avenue society in New York City. Over the course of the story, she marries and divorces several men, including Elmer Moffatt, Ralph Marvell, Raymond de Chelles, and then Elmer Moffatt again, having her son Paul Marvell with Ralph. Undine's defining characteristic is her desire to climb up the social ranks. She constantly measures herself against the people around her and almost always reaches the conclusion that she could be doing more. At the beginning of the novel, she feels shame about her party dresses that sit in her wardrobe unused, and throughout the rest of the novel, she does whatever she can to make sure that she is always surrounded by people—ideally people who will notice and admire her. As a result of this, many of Undine's friendships are based on competition, such as her rivalry with Indiana Frusk, who always seemed to live in Undine's shadow in Apex but who surprises Undine later in the novel with her social conquests, including a marriage to Representative James J. Rolliver. Because of her endless ambition, Undine feels little satisfaction in achieving her goals and often finds herself haunted by her failures, such as her inability to make Peter Van Degen propose to her. By the end of the novel, Undine has obtained everything she ever wanted—including a marriage to Elmer Moffatt, who has become so wealthy that Undine will never have to worry about money again—but she remains unsatisfied. She imagines what it would be like to be the wife of an ambassador (which she can likely never become because of her history of divorces). While elements of Undine's character are sympathetic, she ultimately represents the dangers of greed and of unchecked ambition, showing how materialism can make it impossible to ever be satisfied. - Character: Ralph Marvell. Description: Ralph Marvell is Undine Spragg's second husband and the father of her only child, Paul Marvell. The Marvell family is related to the Dagonet family, and these families both have long, illustrious histories in New York City but also don't have as much money as their reputations might suggest. Despite his family's dwindling funds, Ralph still grows up in privilege, primarily living off an allowance from his grandfather, Mr. Dagonet, while making very small amounts of money off his poetry. While Ralph imagines that he likes to live a simple life, his marriage to the extravagant Undine Spragg forces him to learn the value of money, even taking up an office job in real estate. Ralph is not ambitious or a social climber, making him a bad fit for Undine; ultimately, she abandons both him and Paul, and then divorces him. Ralph's trusting attitude causes him to be careless during the divorce, and this gives Undine the opportunity to use her custody over Paul to try to get more money out of Ralph. In order to pay Undine off and keep Paul, Ralph goes to Elmer Moffatt and takes a risky business deal. At a low moment, when it seems like he'll lose Paul and the deal will fail, Ralph commits suicide, only for the deal to go through three months later. Ralph illustrates how the naïve and the unambitious can flounder in a cut-throat society. His death is tragicomic, since three months might have made all the difference, illustrating the dangers of short-term thinking and the need for instant gratification. - Character: Elmer Moffatt. Description: Elmer Moffatt is Undine Spragg's first husband; many years after the divorce, he marries her again to become her fourth husband. Like Mr. Spragg and Mrs. Spragg, as well as like Undine herself, Elmer Moffatt is shaped by his background in the Midwestern town of Apex. Apex is small enough that when Elmer elopes with Undine, it causes a scandal and seriously damages Elmer's reputation. New York offers a new start for Elmer. Compared to the upper-class members of New York society like Ralph Marvell, Elmer is more mercenary and willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This trait serves him well, and despite several setbacks and reversals, Elmer ultimately establishes himself as a successful player on Wall Street. In many ways, Elmer is the male counterpart to Undine, showing how sometimes it's possible to climb the social ladder through sheer, undisguised ambition. Unlike Undine, however, there's nothing particularly tragic or cautionary about Elmer's story, and so Elmer represents how New York high society rewards ambition and having flexible morals. - Character: Raymond de Chelles. Description: Raymond de Chelles is a French marquis and of Undine Spragg's third husband. Although his significant wealth and European background seem to differentiate him from Undine's previous husbands, he ultimately disappoints her just as her previous husbands did. Partly, this is because Undine is the type of person who's never satisfied, but it's also because Raymond fails to live up to her romantic notions of European nobility. Even compared to the old-money families of New York, Raymond is traditional, since European history goes back even further. Raymond's Catholic faith (which forbids divorce) has ancient roots and contrasts with the more recent Protestant faith of most of the American characters from New York. Raymond also has an old-fashioned devotion to preserving his family's rural chateau, which contrasts with the more contemporary urban style of the wealthy American characters. All of this bores Undine, who prefers the bustle of urban life, yet the strength of Raymond's belief in tradition leaves her feeling powerless to oppose him. Raymond demonstrates how there are different kinds of wealth outside of New York high society and how in spite of old money's glamor, it often comes with traditions that trap new generations in their ancestors' shadows. - Character: Peter Van Degen. Description: Peter Van Degen is Clare Van Degen's husband. He has a reputation for womanizing and later becomes Undine Spragg's admirer, though Undine is at that point already married to Ralph Marvell. Although in the end Peter and Undine barely even kiss, Undine believes that Peter is on the verge of divorcing his wife to marry her. As Ralph notes at one point, what Peter really offers for Undine isn't sex but admiration (as well as money). Unlike the Dagonets, who are respectable but no longer truly wealthy, Peter is the sort of man who never has to worry about money. As far as Undine is concerned, this makes him ideal, as she constantly feels inadequate and tries to compensate by spending money. Ultimately, however, Peter rejects Undine. His character represents how fickle the wealthy can be, as he cycles between his wife and various mistresses as it pleases him. - Character: Clare Van Degen. Description: Clare Van Degen is one of the most important members of New York high society, being part of the Dagonet family by birth and the Van Degen family through her marriage to Peter Van Degen. Although Clare was once in love with her cousin Ralph Marvell and still holds some feelings for him, she rarely acts on them, and he doesn't either. Clare is too devoted to tradition to consider divorcing Peter, even as Peter earns himself a reputation as a playboy. Clare and Peter's marriage reflects how many members of upper-class New York society lived with open secrets, showing how these secrets could drive spouses apart. Clare shows how tradition and custom can trap people in ways that no amount of wealth or privilege can overcome. - Character: Mr. Abner E. Spragg. Description: Mr. Abner E. Spragg Undine Spragg's father; he's married to Mrs. Leota B. Spragg. He is wealthy by Apex standards, but he is not quite so wealthy by New York standards. But although Mr. Spragg frequently complains of bills and his own bad financial situation, he almost never turns down his daughter when she asks for something. Mr. Spragg's new money contrasts with established New York families like the Dagonets—Mr. Spragg lived humbly until he became part of a legally dubious scheme involving Representative James J. Rolliver and water purification in Apex. Mr. Spragg's defining trait is his gently ironic sense of humor. As an outsider in wealthy society, he remains amused by the new world he inhabits, and his attitude seems to be that it's easier to go along with things rather than trying to change them. - Character: Paul Marvell. Description: Paul Marvell is Ralph Marvell and Undine Spragg's son. Although Paul is charming and generally impresses all of the adults who meet him, he struggles to win his mother's affection. Although Undine occasionally feels sympathy toward Paul, she generally puts her own needs and wants above his. In fact, she even weaponizes her custody of Paul as an attempt to get money out of Ralph, which ultimately leads to Ralph's suicide. In the story, Paul plays the role of the innocent victim, showing the dark side and the dire consequences of Undine's selfishness. - Character: Claud Walsingham Popple. Description: Claud Popple is a portrait painter who is a member of New York high society, albeit not one of the most respected members. Undine Spragg takes an early interest in him but loses interest when Mrs. Heeny advises her that Ralph Marvell is even better. While Ralph has idealistic ideas about art (but doesn't actually produce much of it), Claud represents the exact opposite, taking a utilitarian approach to his art that at times even borders on sloppy. Claud gives people what they expect from portraits, nothing less, nothing more. While some characters look down on Claud, he shows how it's possible to hold onto a position in high society by doing the bare minimum to flatter people's expectations. - Character: Mrs. Heeny. Description: Mrs. Heeny is a masseuse who in many ways acts as a surrogate parental figure to Undine Spragg in New York City, since Undine's mother, Mrs. Spragg, doesn't understand the nuances of Fifth Avenue high society. While Mrs. Heeny is herself more of an observer than a member of high society, her obsession with saving newspaper clippings (especially from the society pages) gives her a solid understanding of how the New York social world moves. She kickstarts Undine's social ambitions, encouraging her to try to improve her status. Mrs. Heeny lives out her own fantasies of social climbing vicariously through Undine. - Character: Representative James J. Rolliver. Description: Representative James J. Rolliver is a major figure in a minor subplot about corrupt business dealings in the Midwestern town Apex. These shady dealings help both Mr. Spragg and Elmer Moffatt become wealthy, as well as enriching the reputation of Representative Rolliver himself. James J. Rolliver's presence in the novel helps highlight how many wealthy people built their fortunes on shaky moral ground and how rather than fighting corruption, many politicians used it to their advantage. - Character: Princess Lili Estradina. Description: Princess Lili Estradina is Raymond de Chelles's cousin and one of Undine Spragg's friends Like Raymond, the Princess represents the glamor of European aristocracy, but she also highlights how European nobles often fail to live up to their lofty titles. She is older than she looks, and her unglamorous outfits frequently clash with her title, suggesting that a title alone is not enough to transform a person and that the old aristocratic traditions are becoming obsolete in the modern world. - Character: Indiana Frusk. Description: Indiana Frusk is Undine Spragg's old friend and rival from back when they both lived in Apex. Although Indiana lived in Undine's shadow during their younger days, even marrying a man that Undine had already cast off, Indiana leapfrogs to a higher social position when she marries Representative James J. Rolliver. Indiana highlights the volatile nature of social status and how success or failure in one part of life doesn't necessarily guarantee the same results later. - Character: Mr. Dagonet. Description: Mr. Dagonet is the patriarch of the venerable New York Dagonet family; he's also Ralph Marvell and Laura Fairford's grandfather. Despite her reverence for the members of New York high society, Undine Spragg finds Mr. Dagonet unimpressive, and indeed, his family isn't nearly as wealthy as it once was. Mr. Dagonet even has to ask Mr. Spragg for help supporting Ralph when Ralph is set to marry Undine. Although Mr. Dagonet embodies the influence of tradition, he also shows how tradition alone isn't enough and how even the most venerable families face losing their reputation once the money starts to run out. - Character: Laura Fairford. Description: Laura Fairford is Ralph Marvell's sister. She sets into motion all the events of the novel by inviting Undine Spragg to a dinner party on Ralph's behalf. Laura always tries to be the perfect hostess, always doing whatever she can to include everyone in conversation and to smooth over any potential unpleasantness. While Laura's wealth and manners make her the epitome of New York high society, Undine still finds her unimpressive, suggesting that for all Laura's accomplishments, she lives in an insular world that doesn't always make sense to outsiders. - Character: Mabel Lipscomb. Description: Mabel Lipscomb is originally from New York, but she met Undine Spragg at a boarding school in the Midwest. Undine constantly measures herself against the people around her and tries to outdo them, and her ambitions in New York are motivated in part by a desire to prove that she can do better than Mabel. - Character: Celeste. Description: Celeste is Undine Spragg's French maid. She hints at how upper-class New York life is only possible due to the largely unseen work performed by servants, and her foreign background also represents how globalized the world was becoming—at least for the wealthy who could afford easy trips between the U.S. and Europe. - Theme: Marriage and Divorce. Description: Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country is a novel full of marriages and divorces. Over the course of the book, the main character, Undine Spragg, gets divorced three times and married four times, and along the way, she considers even more marriage options. While Undine is perhaps an extreme example when it comes to quick marriages and divorces (her first marriage lasted just two weeks), her character illustrates how the conventions of marriage transformed rapidly in the early-20th century, even while other marriage traditions remained relevant. Undine, along with her friends like Indiana Rusk and Mabel Lipscomb, is a modern woman who puts more emphasis on her own happiness than on meekly submitting to her husband. But while the novel shows how divorce offers new freedoms, particularly to women, it also comes with consequences, restrictions, and exceptions. For example, the novel shows the potential consequences of a messy divorce when Undine manipulates marriage law for selfish reasons, using her custody over her son (Paul Marvell) to try to extort money from her ex-husband's (Ralph Marvell) family. But even with Undine's freedom to get out of marriages quickly with divorce, she still finds herself catering to the whims of male characters. For instance, she spends months trying to get a proposal out of Peter Van Degen, only for him to abruptly drop and forget her. Undine's move to Europe introduces her to yet another set of attitudes and customs surrounding marriage and divorce; there, she's forced to follow the more traditional, Catholic beliefs of her second husband, Raymond de Chelles, whose old-fashioned ways can make even Undine defer to him. The many marriages and divorces of The Custom of the Country explore how despite the conventional idea that marriage is based on love, it often functions more as  a business transaction, a means of social climbing, or a way to control people. - Theme: Materialism and Ambition. Description: On the surface, Undine Spragg, the main character of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country, seems unrelentingly selfish. She has an endless appetite for buying new things, and she quickly burns through the money of any other character foolish enough to give it to her. But behind Undine's selfishness is the insecurity that she's never doing enough to keep up with the people around her. While Undine's father (Mr. Spragg) is well off, he's not extremely wealthy by New York City standards. So, in order to keep up her lavish lifestyle, Undine's only option if she wants to move from the Stentorian to Fifth Avenue is to improve her social status by meeting people richer than her (and perhaps marrying one of them). In this way, Undine's materialism and her ambition to improve her social status go hand in hand, with her heavy spending helping her keep up social appearances with the Fifth Avenue crowd and her social connections helping to fund her heavy spending. By the end of the novel, the ambitious Undine Spragg has everything she wanted at the beginning of the novel. She is securely married to Elmer Moffatt, the man she wanted to marry in the first place, and he is wealthy enough to support her lavish lifestyle. But Undine's ending isn't triumphant: despite her many successes, Undine is dissatisfied to learn that she'll never be an ambassador's wife (because of her previous divorces). Even after achieving all her goals, she finds new ones to chase. The character of Undine Spragg is tragic because her potentially admirable ambition gets twisted by the materialistic world she lives in, where selfishness is expected and even rewarded. Undine demonstrates how social climbing isn't about achieving a specific goal but rather about always striving for more and how getting caught up in this endless cycle of greed and ambition ultimately leads to misery. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: The characters in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country live in a society that adheres to a gender binary where men and women fulfill different roles and face different expectations. While Undine Spragg is willful and impulsive, she still lives in a patriarchal world where men hold most of the positions of authority in business, political, and religious matters. Because of this, men play a similarly authoritative role in her own life. Particularly in the upper-class circles that Undine wants to infiltrate, women rarely work, and so in order to fund her lifestyle, Undine needs to find male patrons, whether it's her father (Mr. Spragg) or one of her past, present, or future husbands. But while the gender binary often tips the scale against Undine, she also finds ways to use it to her advantage and even to manipulate the people around her. Undine's ignorance of business, which other character accept because she's a woman, allows her to spend money freely while letting other people sort out the consequences. Undine also flips "traditional" ideas of motherhood, largely ignoring her first child, Paul Marvell, and leaving his care to his father, Ralph, and then later, to her other husbands. Despite the novel's feminist themes, Undine herself is no role model. On the other side of the gender binary, Ralph resists the "traditional" male role of providing income for his family. He takes on more of a caregiver role for Paul and only goes to work at an office when he has no other options to pay Undine's high bills. These exceptions to standard gender roles hint at how fragile and perhaps arbitrary the roles can be, but as the title of the novel alludes, social "customs" are difficult to escape, regardless of their origins. The Custom of the Country demonstrates how all the characters wrestle with expectations that gender roles impose on them while also illustrating how it's sometimes possible to contradict or transcend these expectations. In so doing, it depicts both the enduring power of tradition and the possibility for change. - Theme: Corruption. Description: In addition to being a time of significant social change, the early 20th century (when The Custom of the Country was published and takes place) was also a time of widespread political and business corruption, and this corruption is a constant backdrop throughout the novel. Many of the wealthy characters in the novel, particularly "new money" characters like Mr. Spragg and Elmer Moffatt (who originally come from humbler backgrounds), appear respectable on the surface by going to operas and hosting banquets, but they obtained their wealth through legally dubious means. Although throughout the novel characters obsess over their social reputations, many of them seem to have surprisingly lenient attitudes toward corruption and financial scandal. For example, the many insider deals of Apex politician Representative James J. Rolliver are an open secret, but if anything, the money and power that he obtains through his shady dealings only earn him more respect, improving his reputation and furthering his political career. Similarly, despite his well-known shady dealings, which make the local newspapers, Elmer Moffatt manages to reinvent himself as an upright member of society, becoming a successful Wall Street businessman and a world-traveling art collector. The novel's protagonist, Undine Spragg, has little interest in backroom dealings, and so many of the conspiracies and rackets in the novel get only brief mentions, reflecting how little Undine herself cares about the specifics of dubious business practices. Undine is willing to overlook just about anything in a person who'll give her money, and her indifference toward corruption perhaps reflects how, on a broader level, many people ignore tricky ethical questions in situations where they stand to personally benefit. Undine and other characters maintain their ignorance so that they can continue to live their own lavish lifestyles without guilt. The corrupt dealings in The Custom of the Country reveal the hypocrisy at the heart of high society, showing how behind their refined and polite exteriors, many people are willing to put aside their morals for the sake of money. - Climax: Undine realizes she wants to marry Elmer Moffatt again. - Summary: Undine Spragg lives with her parents, Mr. Spragg and Mrs. Spragg, at a hotel in New York City called the Stentorian. It has a view of Fifth Avenue, but it isn't quite part of that fashionable area. Her family is originally from Apex, a city in the Midwest where Mr. Spragg recently made his fortune. In her first two years in the city, Undine has not been successful in meeting members of New York's high society, but one day she gets an invitation to a dinner party hosted by Laura Fairford, the sister of Ralph Marvell. Along with the Dagonets, the Marvells are one of the most fashionable families in New York, and Undine tries to make connections. Eventually, Ralph takes a liking to Undine and proposes to her. Before they can get married, however, Elmer Moffatt shows up in New York. Elmer is originally from Apex, and he was Undine's first husband. If news got out that Undine was already divorced, it would be a major scandal that could end her engagement with Ralph. Elmer agrees to stay silent, as long as Undine introduces him to any useful business partners she happens to meet through her marriage. So at last, Ralph and Undine get married. During their honeymoon in Europe, Ralph realizes that he'll have a hard time finding enough money to pay for all of Undine's extravagant desires. Even in the most scenic parts of Europe, Undine gets bored whenever there isn't a crowd of people around her. Eventually, the couple has to return home when Undine realizes that she is pregnant with a son, Paul Marvell. Back in New York, Ralph and Undine's marriage dissolves over the course of several years. Undine begins spending time with Peter Van Degen (the husband of Ralph's cousin Clare Van Degen), who in spite of being married, has a reputation as a notorious playboy. One turning point is when Undine forgets to pick up Paul to bring him to his own birthday party. Undine gets the idea that she would be happier in Europe, so using the excuse that it's for her own health, she leaves Ralph and Paul to go to France. In France, Undine makes plans to divorce Ralph and marry Peter, who is richer and so who would better be able to pay for Undine's lifestyle. Although Peter initially seems willing to leave his wife, when the two of them go back to the United States to finalize their divorces and meet up again, Peter dumps Undine. Without a husband, Undine goes back to Paris, where she attracts the attention of the French marquis Raymond de Chelles. Raymond comes from a wealthy, traditional family of French Catholics, which means that they don't believe in divorce, at least without an official annulment. Running low on money as she tries to figure out how to procure an annulment, Undine happens to run into Elmer Moffatt again, and he gives her an unusual suggestion: to use her custody over Paul to get money from Ralph. Ralph and his family have been raising Paul in Undine's absence, but in order to avoid a scandal, he carelessly signed all the divorce papers without looking at what they said. After speaking with his cousin Clare, Ralph realizes that Undine is only enforcing her custody over Paul as a way to raise money, and so he borrows a lot of money from his family and takes it to Elmer Moffatt for a legally dubious business deal that will take place in Apex. The deal doesn't go through in time to meet Undine's lawyers' deadline, and in the process, Ralph learns about Undine's first marriage to Elmer. Ralph commits suicide, which allows Undine to marry Raymond. The funds that Ralph invested make a profit three months later. Undine marries Raymond and takes Paul to France with her. Though she is happy for a short time, she comes to resent Raymond, who makes her spend long months in an isolated chateau at Saint Desert rather than Paris, where she'd prefer to be. For a while, even the willful Undine feels trapped by the force of Raymond's old traditions. But one day, she happens to run into her ex-husband Elmer Moffatt, who has become extremely wealthy and who just so happens to be looking at tapestries owned by Raymond's family. Elmer and Undine begin spending more time together, and eventually, Elmer suggests that if she divorces Raymond, he'd be willing to marry her. After some persuading, Undine agrees. A couple years later, Undine has everything she ever wanted at the beginning of the novel—Elmer is the first husband who can afford even her most expensive wishes. Paul, however, is left alone to wander through a big, empty hotel while his parents are off traveling the world. Just as Undine is about to host a triumphant dinner party, she begins to imagine what it would be like to be the wife of an ambassador—something that will never happen because of Undine's many divorces.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Daughters of the Late Colonel - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: An apartment in an unidentified English town - Character: Josephine Pinner. Description: Also known as "Jug," Josephine is the older sister in the Pinner family. Though initially tempestuous and disagreeable with Constantia, with whom she frequently quarrels, Josephine begins to feel nervous about their father's memory after his death—exclaiming to Constantia that "Father will never forgive us" for burying him—and is too anxious to clear out his belongings from his room, prompting Constantia to lead her away from the room, leaving it unorganized. She is pale, blonde, and shorter than Constantia (a quirk that she usually "wouldn't have owned to for the world"). She is also somewhat harsher and more mercurial than her sister, since she often speaks "sharply" to Constantia despite her own sensitivity about their father's death (Josephine cried "twenty-three times" while writing her father's death notice). Though short-tempered with her sister, she is polite with Nurse Andrews, their houseguest, and their maid Kate, since she seems to take a more active role in household administration than Constantia. At the end of the story, Josephine wistfully recollects on their life without a mother or prospects for marriage, but ultimately seems incapable of translating her desire for a fuller life into action. - Character: Constantia Pinner. Description: Constantia or "Con" is Josephine Pinner's younger sister. She is softer and less turbulent than her sister—she sympathizes with a mouse in their room who is searching for crumbs—but ultimately helps Josephine leave their father's room when her sister is overcome with emotion, demonstrating a kind of authority that she seems initially to lack. Though she is often dreamy and out of touch with reality—frequently drifting off into vague and wondering tangents, often about exotic destinations with "camels" in the desert—Constantia is also deeply suspicious, both of the native "runners" who deliver parcels in Ceylon and of Kate, who she believes rummages through her and Josephine's belongings when they are gone. It is also mentioned that Constantia once pushed her brother Benny into "the round pond," suggesting that she has a cruel streak (one disguised, perhaps, by her daydreaming). Constantia feels that the life she led while her father was alive was unreal, a kind of nightmare, but she cannot figure out what she wants from life now that she and Josephine have been freed from his command. - Character: The Colonel. Description: The Colonel is the patriarch of the Pinner family and father to Constantia, Josephine, and Benny. Tyrannical, imposing, and cruel, the colonel retired from work as a colonial administrator in Ceylon and lived out his final years with his adult daughters. Since his wife died when his children were young, it is suggested that the colonel raised his children mostly on his own and that he treated them with varying degrees of severity—especially Josephine and Constantia, who were often subject to his demands (for errands and for silence in the apartment) and objects of his criticism (about their spending habits especially). In his old age, the colonel became senile and cranky around his daughters and his grandson, Cyril, and he does not seek forgiveness for his actions during his last moments alive—instead glaring at his daughters with one eye open. Though respected in the community (by Mr. Farolles and Nurse Andrews especially), the colonel's behavior has torn his family apart, since his son and grandson have virtually abandoned their female relatives. - Character: Cyril Pinner. Description: Cyril is the colonel's grandson and Constantia and Josephine's nephew. Polite but somewhat awkward, Cyril works in London and rarely visits his aunts: it is implied that he declined to attend his grandfather's funeral ("What a blow his sweet, sympathetic little note had been!"). During one visit to Constantia and Josephine, depicted in a flashback, Cyril feels uncomfortable around his relatives and attempts to make a quick exit (likely lying about his business plans in order to leave his aunts). It is revealed that he knows very little about his father, Benny, and that they have not seen each other in a long time. He also has a prickly encounter with his senile, nearly deaf grandfather—which seems to be the reason that he did not attend the funeral. Cyril is the product of his family's dysfunction, and he appears eager to avoid his family members at all costs. He is also the recipient of his grandfather's timepiece. - Character: Kate. Description: Kate is Constantia and Josephine's difficult, flighty maid, a fixture of the Pinner household who has been with the women and their father for many years. Though she is often rude and unhelpful—refusing to fetch food or take orders from her employers—Josephine and Constantia treat her with respect and cautious politeness, afraid to offend or trouble her (likely because they do not wish to terrorize her in the same way that their father terrorized them). Constantia realizes that Kate may "spy" in their belongings when they are away, and the two sisters discuss firing her, since they believe that her service is no longer needed after their father's death. Yet they cannot make up their minds about Kate's trustworthiness, suggesting that they are utterly dependent on her, though she is hardly maternal or supportive: unlike Kate, they cannot cook or run a household themselves. - Character: Nurse Andrews. Description: Nurse Andrews helped to take care of the colonel as he neared death, and Constantia and Josephine agree to let her stay on in the apartment after his funeral, though only reluctantly: she is a poor houseguest, since she is fond of overeating and complaining about "butter." It is suggested that she works for upper-class families (she notes that she was with a "Lady Tukes") and that she puts on a sophisticated affect (her accent is pointed and exaggerated). Yet the sisters cannot fault her entirely, since she was kind to the colonel—a difficult feat, given his challenging behavior. - Character: Mr. Farolles. Description: Mr. Farolles is a clergyman at the local church (St. John's) and an old friend of the colonel who visits Constantia and Josephine to offer help for the funeral, including a "little Communion"—an offer the sisters seem reluctant to accept, since they feel that their apartment is ill-suited for the Communion ritual. Mr. Farolles clearly respected Grandfather Pinner, since he begins to sit in the colonel's chair when he arrives at the apartment before quickly correcting his mistake, as if mindful of the colonel's status even after his death. - Character: Benny Pinner. Description: Benny is Constantia and Josephine's brother and Cyril's father. He works in Ceylon, like his father, the colonel, and has the habit of shaking his right hand "up and down, as father's did when he was impatient." His sisters debate sending their father's old timepiece to him, but ultimately decide to send it to Cyril. Benny has not seen his son recently and is not close with him—nor is he close with his sisters. - Character: Constantia, Josephine, and Benny's Mother/The Colonel's wife. Description: The colonel's wife died when Constantia and Josephine were very young, likely when the family lived in Ceylon for the colonel's work. As a child, Josephine told Constantia that their mother was killed by a snake (prompted by an image of their mother in a snake-like "feather boa" and "earrings shaped like tiny pagodas" that hung over the piano in their apartment). It is unclear whether this is true, but their mother's absence has clearly left a gap in Josephine and Constantia's life, since they lack maternal support; Josephine wonders whether she and Constantia would have married if their mother had lived. - Character: The Porter. Description: Constantia and Josephine debate gifting their father's "top-hat" to the porter, a servant in their apartment, but ultimately decide not to, ostensibly because the image of a servant in a luxurious hat seems ridiculous to them (Josephine "nearly" giggles to think of her father's hat on the porter's head). The sisters note that the porter was kind to the colonel, but this does not seem to justify the gift. - Character: Aunt Florence. Description: After their mother died, Constantia and Josephine lived with their Aunt Florence until they left school. It is unknown whether this aunt was related to their mother or father, but she does not seem to have been a particularly nurturing or positive presence in their lives, since Josephine does not reflect at all on her influence. - Character: The Man at the Boarding-House. Description: Although Constantia and Josephine have never had suitors, they were once pursued by a mysterious man at a boarding-house in Eastbourne who left a note outside of their bedroom door. They were unable to read the note and never reunited with the man; thus, this enigmatic figure represents their faded prospects for marriage and independent lives outside of their family home. - Theme: Patriarchy and Oppression. Description: In "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," Constantia and Josephine, the adult daughters of a recently deceased colonel, must fend for themselves in a world without their father—their only beneficiary as well as the individual for whom they have provided for many years. After the colonel's death, Constantia and Josephine's lives are exposed as stunted and meaningless, since their sole purpose was to care for their elderly father: they have been forced to sacrifice their own futures for his wellbeing, and as women, they have not been chosen to carry on his business work. Even after his death, the colonel—an imposing, tyrannical man—continues to forcefully influence his daughters, since Constantia and Josephine imagine his continued presence in their home. As a symbol of patriarchy, the colonel both oppresses his daughters and provokes their fear, uncertainty, and passivity.  After the colonel's death Constantia and Josephine imagine that their father still holds power over them, suggesting the profound impact the colonel, and more broadly, the patriarchy, have on the sisters and their lives. Constantia and Josephine worry that their father will disapprove of their funeral arrangements, since "neither of them could possibly believe that father was never coming back"—imagining instead that he "will never forgive" them for burying, and thus disempowering, him. Indeed, much of the narrative is consumed by the daughters' fretting over the administration of their father's death. Constantia and Josephine nervously discuss donating and organizing their father's possessions, for instance, fearful that donating his timepiece and top-hat to family and staff members would displease him. Though nonsensical—since he is dead, the colonel cannot be displeased by his daughters' actions—this apprehension reveals Constantia and Josephine's feelings of confinement and powerlessness in their own household, where their father's memory continues to reign supreme. The daughters are even unable to clear out their father's chest of drawers, since Josephine imagines that he is trapped in the wardrobe, "hidden away […] ready to spring." Instead, Constantia and Josephine decide to "be weak" and abstain from settling the colonel's belongings, thereby maintaining his spiritual presence in their apartment. The sisters are unable to take charge of the future and revert back to passivity, allowing their father to continue to manipulate them. As the male leader of the Pinner family, the colonel determines his daughter's lives, influencing their behavior and emotions long after his own death. Mansfield thus suggests the far-reaching authority and impact of patriarchy. In general, Constantia and Josephine are unable to discover a better standard of living after their father's death, since as his female heirs—and as subjects in a patriarchal world—they have been overlooked and marginalized. While the colonel was living, his daughters cared obsessively for him, preparing the household and suffering through his violent fits of complaints: "there had been this other life, running out, bringing things home in bags, getting things on approval, discussing them with Jug […] arranging father's trays and trying not to annoy father." Yet without the colonel, his daughters feel empty and purposeless, grasping for a better life that they are ill-equipped to obtain. Neither daughter has ever married, though they imagine that they might have had their mother lived; ostensibly, they have remained single to their father's advantage, since they helped him in his old age. In this patriarchal world, where women are both expected to provide for men and assume secondary roles, their prospects for richer, more independent lives without husbands are slim. Nor have the sisters pursued employment, while their brother Benny has carried on the family business in Ceylon, and his son Cyril works in London. As women who lack practical experience with the outside world—they are unable to cook for themselves or keep up the house without the help of waitstaff—Constantia and Josephine have not been offered such opportunities. While Constantia and Josephine wonder vaguely about a future without the colonel, they can't imagine a world outside of their apartment and continue to concern themselves with the same domestic frivolities in which they participated while their father was alive. The daughters lack guidance: their only possible maternal stand-ins, the absent-minded, neurotic Nurse Andrews and their resentful maid Kate, are hardly nurturing. Instead, Constantia and Josephine are forced to submit to their father's influence even after his death, fixating on the way that his "one eye" "glared at them a moment" before he died—as if to guarantee their perpetual submission to his will. Despite a moment of near-revelation at the end of the story, where the daughters seemed poised to begin a new life, they cannot move forward. Misguided, ignorant of the outside world, and crippled by anxiety—a direct result of their father's patriarchal influence—Constantia and Josephine decide to remain in their apartment, unable to understand what it is they want in life or what sorts of futures they might be able to create. "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" can therefore be read as a cautionary tale about the lasting, toxic influence of the patriarchy. Though no patriarchal figures directly interfere with the sisters' day-to-day lives after the colonel's death, their entire identities have been constructed and crystalized around male demands and male superiority. In this narrative, Mansfield seems to suggest that even when patriarchal figures fall away—when they die or depart, as Constantia and Josephine's male relatives have—the result is confused, ineffectual, and feeble women who cannot understand their own roles in society or envision a future without men. Though they recognize that a vibrant world exists outside of their own chaotic, disorganized home, Constantia and Josephine are unable to access this world and the fulfillment it might bring, forced instead to wallow in passivity and fear. Mansfield's story responds to an era in which women—though faced with prospects of independence and fading male authority—continued to face difficulty in constructing identities and lifestyles free of patriarchal influence. - Theme: Ambivalence and Dependency. Description: Constantia and Josephine are in charge of their household and must assume positions of leadership after the colonel's death, yet they are utterly dependent on each other and the assistance of their cook, Kate. Even though Kate is both rude and potentially spying on her bosses, Constantia and Josephine feel unable to fire her and cannot decide whether she is valuable to them or not. Indeed, the sisters seem unable to make sound judgments about other people in their lives and their own actions toward these people in general. They regard their surroundings with ambivalence, as if incapable of independently forming their own opinions. Constantia and Josephine are crippled by overthinking, contributing to the story's anticlimactic mood and circular structure: by the end of the story, the sisters seem as paralyzed and helpless as they were at the beginning.  Mansfield begins the narrative by describing Constantia and Josephine's indecisiveness after their father's funeral: "even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking things over, wondering, deciding, trying to remember where…" By trailing off mid-sentence, Mansfield mirrors the sisters' own confused thoughts and habits. From the outset, Constantia and Josephine seem more capable of overthinking and ruminating about situations than acting on them. The sisters choose to wait until the next day to decide the recipient of their father's top-hat ("'We can decide to-morrow," [Josephine] sighed'"), and they cannot bring themselves to ask Nurse Andrews—the nurse who helped their father before his death—to leave, though her presence becomes a "bother." Josephine and Constantine also debate about firing Kate, insisting that they are not as dependent on her as they were before their father's death. Yet Constantia admits that she has "never been able to quite make up [her] mind" about Kate's trustworthiness. She has laid traps for their maid before in order to catch her stealing, yet Constantia has been unable to decide whether any displaced items she ever found were actually Kate's fault. Josephine, too, feels ambivalent about Kate's culpability, and Constantia's own suspicions feed into Josephine's: "Now you've put the doubt into my mind, Con, I'm sure I can't tell myself." Kate continues to prove instrumental to the household, since neither woman can fend for herself; thus, their judgments about her are tempered by their reliance on the skills she provides. In general, the sisters are conflicted and equivocal about their decisions regarding the household and family affairs. They constantly postpone necessary actions instead of confronting them directly, and their dependency on Kate and each other—they make no choices without involving the other and constantly share opinions—contribute to their shared stasis in the household. At the story's pivotal moment, in which Constantia and Josephine decide to "settle" their father's things in his room, both sisters are unable to face the challenge, creating an anticlimax. Here, tension builds and goes unresolved. In spite of their timidity about their father's belongings, Constantia and Josephine enter his room and attempt to clear it. Yet the sisters cannot open their father's wardrobe, and Constantia decides instead to lock the closet, preventing either of them from opening it and organizing his possessions. Though this action is "one of the amazingly bold things that she'd done about twice before in their lives"—since Constantia locks in their father's ghost, which Josephine imagines residing in the closet—it also prevents the sisters from coming to any resolution about their father's death or gaining any closure by settling his possessions. In the end, Constantia and Josephine decide to be "weak": "Let's be weak—be weak, Jug. It's much nicer to be weak than to be strong." The sisters allow themselves to be given over to paralysis, unable to act with conviction in a situation that demands boldness and concerted effort. Though Josephine initially seems determined to work through their father's possessions, Constantia convinces her otherwise; they continue to depend on each other's mindsets, inhibiting their own propensity for decision-making. By the end of the story, however, both women seem to be close to overcoming ambivalence, since they begin to reflect on their own desires and feelings, suggesting a potential for independent action. "What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to? Now? Now?" Constantia asks herself, lost in thought about her life before their father's death and considering a more independent future. She begins to address her feelings with Josephine—"Don't you think perhaps—"—but is cut off by Josephine's own address: "'I was wondering if now—' she murmured." The sisters seem to have discovered an ability to think independently, free of each other's influence. By vocalizing their thoughts, they appear to be one step closer to acting decisively—leaving their home behind, perhaps, or altering their own lives in some other way. Yet both sisters forget what it is they were going to say, ending the story on another anticlimactic note and implying that neither woman has changed since the beginning of the narrative: they are trapped helplessly in states of doubt, irresolution, and inactivity. Mansfield's characters often face challenges that they cannot confront directly, failing to undergo profound changes they seem primed for. Constantia and Josephine are no exception, since they cannot break free from anxiety to perform actions that will improve their household—and their future lives. Hesitant and unfailingly ambivalent, they continue to interpret their surroundings without confidence, creating a narrative that depicts indecision as a never-ending cycle. - Theme: Family, Instability, and Fragmentation. Description: Flashbacks in the narrative suggest that Constantia and Josephine's relationship to their brother, nephew, and deceased mother are as complicated as their relationship to the colonel: Mansfield depicts a fractured family, torn apart by death, money, and conflicting desires. Written in the recent wake of the Victorian era, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" explores family structures that no longer adhere to the traditional model of stable Victorian living. Instead, the Pinners are dysfunctional, detached, and fragmented—qualities Mansfield mimics in the structure of the story, which features abrupt shifts in time and space. The Pinners' own lack of stability also mirrors the overall instability of the burgeoning modernist era, a period characterized by war, economic disruption, and severe sociocultural shifts. Though Constantia and Josephine are clearly grief-stricken by their father's death (Josephine insists that she "couldn't have put" on her grief while writing replies to condolence letters), they are also reminded of his tyranny, cruelty, and weakness as a father. In this post-Victorian family, paternalistic love is neither a given nor a stabilizing force. Constantia, Josephine, and Cyril, their nephew, receive no support or kindness from the colonel during his lifetime, who treats all of them with disdain—especially Cyril, whom he harangues in a flashback to a scene before his death. It is strongly implied that Cyril finds his family disruptive and overly complicated, since he attempts to leave his aunts and grandfather early, prioritizing business over family ties: "I say, Auntie Con, isn't your clock a bit slow? I've got to meet a man at—at Paddington just after five. I'm afraid I shan't be able to stay very long with grandfather."   Neither does Cyril have a positive relationship with his own father, Benny. When Constantia asks him if his father enjoys meringues, Cyril is unable to answer. "Don't know a thing like that about your own father, Cyril?" asks Josephine, and Cyril is forced to pretend that he knows his father's preferences—though Benny works overseas and is clearly absent from his son's life. Furthermore, neither Benny nor Cyril attend the colonel's funeral, emphasizing that their connections to fatherhood are tenuous at best. With no stable matriarchal figures—for Constantia and Josephine are hardly forceful—and no nurturing patriarchs, the Pinner family is devoid of leadership and characterized by stiff, uncomfortable relationships. Benny's wife, Hilda, "the unknown sister-in-law," is remembered as "not in the least interested," and Benny is barely mentioned in the narrative. Like Cyril, he is ostensibly more concerned with his work in the colonies than with his immediate family, and it is suggested that Constantia and Josephine are the only relatives who have maintained a close connection—since they live together in the same apartment. Whereas Benny, Cyril, and the colonel have pursued profit and business, Constantia and Josephine have pursued nothing: they have little in common with their other relatives, and their family is neither supportive nor loving. The Pinners are as unstable as they are separated, defying the model of the Victorian-era family as a structured unit focused on child-rearing and domestic unity. The story's private family tensions reflect sociopolitical ones; "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" is a wholly modernist story whose unconventional structure and techniques reflect the changing sociopolitical landscape of the modernist era. As tradition and hierarchy became subject to revision and revolution—provoked by war and other extreme disruptions to the social fabric of Europe—modernist writers sought to address the deterioration of commonly held social values in their work. By moving fluidly between past and present, interior memory and dialogue, and different focalizing presences, Mansfield creates a narrative as disjointed as the family at its heart. The Pinners might function as a microcosm of the broader social fragmentation seen in this era. Mansfield's story itself performs this fragmentation, emphasizing the sense of instability and turmoil central to modernist writing. Though tradition is ever-present in "The Daughters of the Late Colonel"—traditions of mourning, of female domesticity, and of male dominance—the family depicted in this narrative is far from traditional, reflecting the shifting social landscape of early twentieth-century Europe. Mansfield's own modernist style simultaneously highlights the Pinners' unconventionality and fractured qualities, speaks to literary modernist aesthetics, and demonstrates the overall atmosphere of chaos and abrupt social transformations she witnessed as a modernist writer. - Climax: Constantia and Josephine fail to open their father's wardrobe and go through his belongings. - Summary: Constantia and Josephine Pinner have spent a week making arrangements after their father's death. Lying in their beds in the same room, Constantia asks Josephine if they should donate their father's top-hat to the porter. Josephine disagrees, imagining their father's hat on the porter's head. The sisters discuss dying their dressing-gowns black and sending letters with the death notice to Ceylon, where their father worked. Constantia frets over a mouse that has entered their bedroom. Earlier, the sisters discussed allowing Nurse Andrews, who took care of their father, to stay with them for the rest of the week, though they worry that she might expect to be paid for staying on. Constantia and Josephine are anxious about mealtimes with Nurse Andrews, who is "fearful about butter" and lacks table manners. Their maid, Kate, is ill-tempered and difficult, and they dislike ordering her around. Constantia and Josephine reflect on their father's last moments alive. He had opened one eye and "glared at them" disapprovingly, which disturbed them. When Mr. Farolles, a clergyman, arrived and asked if "the end was quite peaceful," the sisters agreed—though they were certain it wasn't peaceful. Further, the sisters were "terrified" by the idea that Mr. Farolles proposed: "a little Communion," which they felt they couldn't undertake in their apartment (which lacks an altar and space for such a ritual). Constantia and Josephine also feel anxious about their father's burial, which they believe they have done "without asking his permission." Josephine weeps, exclaiming that "Father will never forgive us for this—never!" Finally, the sisters decide to try and organize their father's things, but they are put off by their father's room, which is cold and white, its furniture covered. Josephine begins to feel that her father is hiding in the chest of the drawers, "hidden away […] ready to spring," and she becomes panicked and anxious. In the end, Constantia insists that they "be weak" for once and leave his belongings behind without going through them. Later on, the sisters discuss sending their father's broken timepiece to their brother Benny, who works in Ceylon, though this would involve sending it through a "runner"—a native who delivers parcels. They remember Benny on a "verandah," dressed in colonial garb and positioned next to his wife Hilda, "the unknown sister-in-law." Josephine decides that it might be "more usual" for their nephew Cyril, Benny's son, to take the watch. The two remember one of Cyril's visits before their father's death. Cyril was impatient to leave, but Constantia and Josephine insisted that he visit with his grandfather, who—clearly senile at that point—harassed his grandson. Back in the present, Constantia and Josephine wonder whether they should fire Kate or not, speculating that they will no longer need her assistance now that their father is not around to cook for. The sisters know little about cooking, but they are uncertain about trusting Kate: Constantia suspects that Kate looks through their things while they are gone. The sisters hear a barrel-organ on the street outside, a regular fixture in the neighborhood that used to irritate their father (who would "thump" his walking stick incessantly, to make them rush to ask the organ-grinder to leave). Josephine reflects on their mother, who died when they were young, leaving them with their Aunt Florence, and wonders whether she and Constantia would have married had their mother lived. Yet there had been no suitors, except for a mysterious man at Eastbourne—where they stayed in a boarding-house—who left a note outside of their bedroom that neither sister could decipher. Constantia thinks back on the life that she and Josephine have spent serving their father, but it feels unreal to her—as it had "happened in a kind of tunnel." She cannot decide what she wants from the future, and as she begins to express this sentiment to Josephine, her sister interrupts her. Ultimately, however, neither can remember what they wanted to say.

- Genre: Short Fiction - Title: The Dead - Point of view: - Setting: 20th Century Dublin - Character: Gabriel Conroy. Description: The story's protagonist, a middle-aged Dublin teacher and writer. Gabriel's name, which means "man of God" in Hebrew, carries Biblical significance, as it is the name of the angel who announces the coming of the Messiah to the Virgin Mary. He is Kate andJulia's favorite nephew, and the son of their sister, Ellen, who has died. Gabriel seeks validation from the women in his life. His aunts continually praise him and he runs small errands for them in return. However, he allows his male pride and desire for female validation to distract him from having meaningful interactions with women, and he often fails to see how his words and actions affect the female characters. Additionally Gabriel is distracted by nostalgia, and fails to find passion in the present. He is very interested in England and the continent, and generally detests Dublin life. At the end of the story Gabriel comes to the realization that he has failed to find true love or passion in his life, and that he is on track to live a meaningless life and die a meaningless death. - Character: Gretta Conroy. Description: Gabriel'swife, a good-natured and kind woman. She does not hate Dublin as Gabriel does, and finds his interest in things like galoshes to be ridiculous. She reveals the story of her first love, Michael Furey, to Gabriel on the night of the party. Gretta believes that Michael died for her sake, and for this reason, she is also distracted by the past and unable to focus on finding love and passion in the present. - Character: Lily. Description: The caretaker's daughter who helps attend to the party guests. She seems to have known the family since she was a child, since Gabriel remembers when she was little and "used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll." Lily has a good relationship with Kate, Julia, and Mary Jane as she rarely makes mistakes. She becomes bitter when Gabriel makes a comment about her being of the age to marry. - Character: Kate Morkan (Aunt Kate). Description: Gabriel's aunt, who lives and is hosting the dinner party with her sister Julia, and niece, Mary Jane. She is a musician who gives piano lessons in their home, since she is "too feeble to go about much." As far as physical appearance goes, Kate seems to be the most lively of Gabriel's aunts, with a face like a "red apple" and a long braid of a "ripe nut color." Kate feels strongly about the Catholic Church's decision to ban women from church choirs, but she is conflicted because she also believes the pope is infallible. She downplays her own opinions about this to avoid offending others, even though she feels passionately about the issue. - Character: Julia Morkan (Aunt Julia). Description: Gabriel's other aunt, who is also hosting the annual Christmas party along with Kate and Mary Jane. She works as the leading soprano in Adam and Eve's, which is a popular Dublin name for the Church of the Immaculate Conception. According to the text she has "not aged well" and is described as having gray hair and a gray face, further emphasizing her age. She has trouble understanding Gabriel's speech and is often confused. Towards the end of the text, Gabriel imagines her funeral, which he believes will happen soon in the very same house. - Character: Mary Jane. Description: Kate and Julia's niece. Her father Pat died and her aunts took her into their care around thirty years ago. Now she plays the organ at Haddington Road. She acts as a peace keeper throughout the night, diffusing tension when the discussion turns too controversial. She is the third of the "Three Graces" Gabriel describes in his speech, along with his two aunts. - Theme: Jealousy and Male Pride. Description: Throughout "The Dead," the protagonist Gabriel is strongly influenced by his interactions with women, which often spur jealousy and injure his pride. He places a great deal of emphasis on how women react to him, regardless of whether they are a romantic interest or not. His pride is also nurtured by his strong adherence to his role as a man and his desire to "master" his wife. Gabriel seems to take a lot of pride in his masculinity, but when he seeks validation from female characters, he is often let down. What he does not realize is that these interactions often leave the female characters just as wounded. In the opening scene, Gabriel seeks female validation in his interaction with Lily, the caretaker's daughter whom he has known since she was a girl. On this night, he suddenly notices her physique and complexion, realizing she is no longer the child he knew her as. Gabriel makes a comment about her being of the age to marry, and is immediately hurt when she responds with a bitter remark about men. Gabriel is hurt by "the girl's bitter and sudden retort" and continues to linger in the "gloom" it has cast over him. Instead of leaving her alone, Gabriel tries to tip her to make himself feel better. Lily wants to reject his tip as she rejected what he intended as a compliment, but this time Gabriel insists that she take it. After he forces his tip on her, she has no choice but to thank him, suddenly changing the dynamic: Lily can no longer be offended, but feels obligated to express gratitude instead. Soon after, Gabriel's brief conversation with his colleague, Miss Ivors, leaves him with an unpleasant feeling and a desire for revenge. He seems to believe she was maliciously trying to "make him look ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit's eyes." In reality, it seems that Gabriel is the one who has upset Miss Ivors, as she leaves the party before dinner and refuses to let anyone walk her home. Gabriel is blinded by his pride and is unable to see how these interactions affect the women involved. His comment about marriage clearly conjured up some negative experiences for Lily, spurring her bitter remark about men, and his interaction with Miss Ivors causes her to leave the party in a rush. Gabriel's pride is also affected by his ability to fulfill his masculine role. Throughout the evening it appears that Gabriel feels most comfortable when he is finally seated at the head of the table, serving meat to the guests, as he "liked nothing better than to find himself at the head of a well-laden table." This highlights Gabriel's need to fulfill a typical male role, and his resulting insecurity when this doesn't happen. Part of Gabriel's desire for female approval stems from his relationships with his aunts, who flatter him endlessly and reinforce his role as the man of the family. His aunts are the ones who put him at the head of the table to serve the meat. In return, Gabriel seems to cater to his aunts, helping when they ask him to. Later in the text, after Gabriel realizes his wife was thinking of another man, he becomes ashamed, and begins to see himself as a "ludicrous figure, acting as a penny boy for his aunts." Suddenly Gabriel sees running simple errands for his aunts as an assault to his masculinity, and he finds shame in even this commonplace action. Gabriel's almost irrepressible lust for Gretta marks their interactions in the second half of the text, and also spurs his jealousy and anger at her feelings for her first love. While he is thinking about how much he wants to overpower her, she is overcome with sadness, lamenting the loss of her former lover, Michael Furey. Gabriel's jealousy is driven completely by his lust for his wife, and his desire to "master" her. Initially, when Gabriel finds out she is thinking of her former lover, he is angry and jealous rather than sad or disappointed. Gabriel's feelings toward his wife are complicated, and he definitely feels genuine tenderness towards her—however, the text implies that he does not truly "love" her, or at least not in the way that Michael Furey loved her. Gabriel "had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love." If Gabriel loved his wife or if he didn't let his feelings of pride, lust, and anger get in the way of his feelings for her, his jealousy could perhaps be justified as a byproduct of unrequited love. Instead, Gabriel's jealousy is a result of his selfish desire to control Gretta, his own insecurity, and his fear of competition. Gabriel has to finally get past his jealousy and lust in order to have the realization that he has not experienced love in the same way his wife has with her previous lover. Gabriel's reaction when his wife says the she thinks Michael Furey died for her is "terror," which only serves to highlight his insecurity. He feels threatened by this dead man, as though "some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." Once Gabriel allows his initial terror and jealousy to fade, however, he reaches his epiphany and is no longer filled with anger and lust, but sadness. He looks at his wife "unresentfully" while she sleeps and realizes "how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life." Gabriel's epiphany is similar to that of the narrator in "Araby," as they both come to the realization that they are experiencing feelings that are more commonplace and shallow than what they had first imagined. Gabriel's strong desire for his wife was lust, a common occurrence, but the real pain in his epiphany comes from the fact that his wife has already experienced a deeper connection to a man other than himself. Once Gabriel is able to get past his male pride and jealousy, he is able to see that he was too distracted by his pride and desire for female approval and submission and so he never sought out or experienced real love. - Theme: Nostalgia and the Past vs. the Present. Description: As with many of the other characters in Dubliners, both Gabriel and Gretta often find themselves paralyzed and unable to take control over their lives. In this case, much of their resulting inaction is due to distraction from the present by their overpowering nostalgic feelings about the past. Gretta allows her past feelings for Michael Furey to distract her from her current relationship with Gabriel on the night of the party. Meanwhile, as Gabriel is looking back nostalgically on his relationship with Gretta, Gretta is thinking of someone else from an even more distant past. Instead of living in the moment and trying to nurture her current relationship, she is still caught up in her idealistic memories of her former lover. Gabriel's views of the past become clear in his speech when he talks about the value of "cherishing the memory of" these good old days during gatherings like the dinner. He focuses on the past – basically highlighting the importance of remembering the good and forgetting the bad. At the end, Gabriel vows not to dwell on the past, but he is really only talking about the "gloomy" part of the past. This means that he wants to focus on only the good things from the past, which is what propels these feelings of nostalgia and Gabriel and Gretta's idealization of the past, and in effect of the dead. Gabriel, Gretta, and many of the other characters in "Dubliners" allow their preoccupations with the past to distract them from the present. Joyce thus exemplifies the dangers of idealizing the past, but the same time makes a more subtle point, highlighting the fact that nostalgia is a very individual feeling, and the past often includes events that other people will never fully understand. In this case, Gabriel is feeling nostalgic for the beginning of his relationship with Gretta—but meanwhile she is pining for a past love that was even more powerful. Nostalgia is a very personal feeling, and each individual has their own relationship to the past that others may never fully understand. - Theme: Death. Description: "The Dead" deals with both literal and metaphorical death. Additionally, these perceptions of those who have died are often tainted by nostalgia, making it hard for the characters to forget about their glorified memories of the past and begin living in the present. Much of "The Dead" quite fittingly revolves around dead people and the legacies they leave behind. For both Gabriel and Gretta, the dead have a power greater than those living. The most obvious example is Gretta's ex-lover, Michael Furey, whom she believes died as a martyr for her love. Regardless of how briefly they knew each other, and how long ago it was, she seems to believe that this was the purest form of love she has ever received. Gabriel, in turn, is terrified of Michael – since he is already dead, his reputation cannot be changed. Gabriel seems to see Michael Furey as having some sort of otherworldly power over his wife that he could not possibly compete with. When Gabriel's wife confesses that she thinks Michael died for her, Gabriel is struck with terror and the feeling that "some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." Of course Michael Furey does not physically pose a threat, but instead he holds a power over Gretta's emotions and that is what Gabriel fears. Gabriel also thinks of his dead mother, who seems to have contributed greatly to her sons' successes, including Gabriel's degree from Royal University. However, Gabriel is also able to think of some sour memories of her, namely her disapproval of his marriage to Gretta. In the end Gabriel lets this go, however, choosing to focus on his more positive memories, and again succumbing to nostalgia and idealization of the dead. A crucial part of Gabriel's final "epiphany" concerns death as well—the acceptance that death is universal and constantly approaching. Just as the snow falls everywhere in Ireland, death will too. It does not see class or religion or race. Gabriel starts to experience these feelings after Gretta is asleep, and he begins to think of his Aunt Julia, and how she will "soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse." Gabriel realizes that they are all equal in a way, and that death will come for Julia, just as it came for their father. Gabriel then imagines her funeral. Gabriel's realization that death is universal, or as he puts it: "One by one they were all becoming shades," coincides with his realization that his life has been passionless and empty of meaning. Gabriel realizes that he envies Michael Furey not because of his power over Gretta's emotions, but instead because he experienced passion and love that he was willing to die for. Gabriel sums it up by saying "Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion than fade and wither dismally with age." His grand realization is that he is currently on the latter path, living a meaningless life until he will die a meaningless death. - Theme: Ireland, Anti-Nationalism, and the Foreign. Description: Gabriel is not happy to be in Dublin, and is taken with the rest of the UK and continental Europe in every way – from the fashion trends to the literature to the vacation destinations. It seems as though Gabriel would seek an escape, like many of the other characters in Dubliners, but he also seems to be in denial about his own dissatisfaction with his life. Instead, his desire for an escape is shown more through his lack of patriotism and his obsession with all things foreign. Gabriel seems to see everywhere outside of Ireland as a bit exotic, and generally superior in every way. Gabriel's admiration for everything foreign emphasizes his discontent with Ireland. His interest in continental Europe manifests itself in everything from his choice to wear galoshes, which are popular on the continent, to his choice to quote English poet Robert Browning, to his choice to vacation in Belgium and France rather than exploring other parts of Ireland. This glorification of all things foreign also also comes up in the conversation between Mr. Browne and Mr. Bartell D'Arcy, when they are talking about where all the good singers have gone. Mr. Bartell D'Arcy speculates that they are in London, Paris, or Milan. Gabriel is not the only one who feels that Dublin is not exactly the place where great talent chooses to be. While Gabriel does not really seem to be conscious of his desire for an escape, it is implicit in his anti-nationalist sentiments towards Ireland. He has a condescending attitude toward Dublin and Dubliners, and seems to think everyone there is a bit stupid. He wonders if they will understand the Robert Browning quote he has chosen to include in his speech, as though anything from outside of Ireland would be much too obscure and complicated for his simple Dublin family members. He imagines Shakespeare or the more comprehensible Irish melodies of Thomas Moore would have been more accessible for them. Miss Ivors also criticizes Gabriel for writing a column in "The Daily Express," an anti-nationalist newspaper, but he does not see any problems with this. She teases him, calling him a "West Briton," which is someone who sympathizes with England. Gabriel denies this teasing accusation, but it seems to align with his sentiments toward England and his distaste for Ireland. The difference between Gabriel and many of the other characters in Dubliners seems to be that Gabriel is in denial, or at least cannot quite explain or justify his need to escape Dublin, although he does not refute this desire. He exclaims that he's "sick" of his own country during his conversation with Miss Ivors, but when she asks him why, he does not answer her. Just as many of Joyce's other characters in Dubliners get caught up in an idealized version of exotic lands they actually know nothing about, Gabriel gets caught up in an idealized version of the rest of Europe. While Gabriel's desire for an escape and obsession with the "exotic" is much less obvious than in many of the other Dubliners stories, it greatly influences Gabriel's attitude towards Dublin, his life, and his sense of superiority to other Dubliners. Unlike the other stories in Dubliners, Joyce is using "The Dead" as less of a critique of Dublin life, but more so a critique of Gabriel's idealization of everything foreign and his condescending attitude toward Dublin and Dubliners. - Theme: Women and Society. Description: While this story is written from a male perspective, women play a large role in highlighting the injustices of Dublin society as well as Gabriel's reliance on the gender roles imposed by society. The most obvious way that Joyce critiques the role of women in 19th-century Dublin is in his critique of the Catholic Church. Aunt Kate expresses her anger towards the Church and pope for banning women from participating in church choirs. She calls it "not at all honorable," which seems to be an understatement for how she actually feels. Aunt Kate is unable to reconcile her outrage at the pope's decision with her belief that both the pope and the Church are infallible, and in the end she ends up dismissing her previous anger by saying she's only a "stupid old woman" and of course she would never question the pope. Because she is a woman in Dublin society, Aunt Kate must refrain from making too strong of a statement, especially when she is accused of offending a man, in this case Mr. Browne. Joyce uses this interaction to expose the hypocrisy of Catholics who must accept every decision the Church makes since it is supposedly infallible, even if they really disagree with it. He also draws attention to women's role in society by showing that Aunt Kate is unable to fully express herself or make a strong statement since women are expected to behave mildly and keep the peace, especially in social settings. Most of Joyce's statements about women's roles in society are made through how the male characters, namely Gabriel, see and interact with the female characters. Gabriel feels proud of Gretta's "grace and wifely carriage." He likes that she sticks to her role as a wife and does not try to challenge his authority like the other women he interacts with. He seems to be attracted to her frailty and he longs "to defend her against something." These observations indicate that women were expected to act frail and helpless and that these were attractive qualities to men. To Gabriel, gender roles seem to be centered completely around power. He desires his wife primarily because he desires to "overmaster" her. "To take her as she was would be brutal. … he longed to be the master of her strange mood." Gabriel also uses Gretta's sudden display of affection (when she surprises him by kissing him once they are back at the hotel) to boost his confidence, wondering why he had been so "diffident" in the first place. Joyce includes Gabriel's internal dialogue to show that he, much like society, only sees women as something to dominate and that he can use to gage his own prowess and boost his confidence. While at first glance "The Dead" does not seem to be centered around women, the female characters play a large role and Gabriel's attitudes toward them reflect society's attitudes. Gabriel's epiphany at the end of the story comes when he realizes that his marriage has been based on superficial feelings and vague attraction. He has only sought affirmation from women—he has never sought true love like Gretta once had. He also begins to realize that Gretta has had a past of her own, and that he will never truly understand it. She has had her own individual experiences independent of her experiences with him. This realization, that Gretta is an individual, highlights the fact that women are often seen as objects more than subjects—people who might be idealized and beloved, but who are mostly there to be used by men. It's implied that many men, as Gabriel, never think about the fact that their wives are people separate from themselves, with their own agency and complicated and vast experiences outside of how they relate to men. - Climax: Gabriel learns of his wife's lingering feelings for her first love, whom she believes to have died for her, and comes to several devastating realizations about mortality, passion, and love - Summary: The story begins with Lily, Julia, Mary Jane, and Kate welcoming guests to their annual Christmas party in Dublin. Lily is taking the men's coats, while Julia and Kate are attending to the female party guests. It is already after ten o'clock when Gabriel—the protagonist and nephew of Julia and Kate—and his wife Gretta finally arrive. When Lily takes Gabriel's coat, he notices that she has matured into an attractive young woman and remarks that she is approaching the age for marriage, but Lily snaps at his remark. Gabriel offers her a tip, which he insists she accept in the Christmas spirit. She awkwardly thanks him as he heads upstairs to the party, still brooding over her bitter retort. As he joins the party, Gabriel glances at the notes for the speech he is to make later on that night, wondering whether quoting Robert Browning will be too obscure and complicated for his audience. Gretta and Gabriel's aunts come out of the dressing room and greet Gabriel, who is their favorite nephew. Gretta tells Kate and Julia of Gabriel's strange preference for galoshes, and he explains that they're very popular on the continent. Freddy Malins arrives and the conversation dissolves. Aunt Kate asks Gabriel to keep an eye on Freddy, as he is known to show up intoxicated. As the waltz finishes, another man, Mr. Browne, takes three younger women into the back room and serves them all strong drinks, flirting until the women lose interest. Kate and another party guest enter the room and announce it is time to pair up for the next waltz. As Mary Jane is finishing her piano performance, Gabriel's mind drifts to his dead mother to whom he attributes many of his accomplishments but also resented because of her disapproval of Gretta. The next dance begins and Gabriel finds himself paired with his colleague, Miss Ivors. He notices that she is wearing a Celtic knot broach and she almost immediately brings up the fact that she has seen Gabriel's column in The Daily Express, a publication known for its unionist and conservative leanings. She jokingly calls him a "West Briton" and scolds him for his anti-nationalist sentiments. Then, quickly trying to lighten the mood, Miss Ivors invites Gabriel and his wife to come along on a summer trip to the Aran Isles in the west of Ireland. Gabriel declines, informing her of his plans to go on a cycling trip somewhere on the continent, and Miss Ivors accuses him of a lack of interest in his own country. Gabriel grows agitated and snaps back that he is sick of Ireland. The exchange leaves him in a bitter mood, as he believes Miss Ivors was trying to humiliate him. Gabriel tells Gretta about Miss Ivors' invitation and Gretta is disappointed at his refusal. Gretta leaves to socialize and Gabriel resolves to get revenge on Miss Ivors by subtly insulting her in his speech. Aunt Julia sings a song, which leads to a discussion about the pope's decision to ban women from the Church's choirs. Aunt Kate passionately criticizes the decision but is clearly hesitant to critique the pope, while Mary Jane tries to defuse the tension from Aunt Kate's passionate outburst by declaring it time for dinner. As the guests head to the dining room, Gabriel catches sight of Miss Ivors collecting her coat while Gretta and Mary Jane try to persuade her to stay. Miss Ivors insists on leaving, so Gabriel offers to walk her home, but she definitively declines and hurries out the door. He wonders if their unpleasant interaction is what caused her to leave. Aunt Kate calls Gabriel in to carve the goose, which puts his mind at ease, as he feels very comfortable at the head of the table. The guests discuss opera, but Gabriel does not participate in the conversation, and he is the only guest to pass up the brown pudding that Aunt Julia has prepared. After the guests finish eating, dessert is served and drinks are replenished in preparation for Gabriel's speech. In his speech he praises his aunts and the values of their generation, emphasizing the importance of maintaining traditional values like hospitality. The speech ends with a toast, and the guests sing "For he's a jolly good fellow." The guests gather in the hall to say goodbye. Gabriel tells a story about his grandfather Patrick Morkan, who was a glue-boiler, and who once took his horse, Johnny, out to the park. The horse began walking in circles around the statue of King Billy incessantly, as though he were back in the mill or had fallen in love with the stone horse King Billy was riding. The guests laugh at the story and then start to say goodbye. As the guests leave, Gabriel notices a woman on the stairs whose face is hidden in the shadows and soon realizes it's his wife, listening to piano music drifting down the stairs. The music stops and the remaining guests head out into the cold, dark night to find a cab together. Gabriel watches Gretta walking next to Mr. Bartell D'Arcy up ahead and feels a sudden tenderness towards her. He is struck with nostalgia, and is flooded with all of their earliest memories together. He wishes they could escape from their dull present-day life and go back to these early times together. The group catches a cab and rides mostly in silence until Gretta and Gabriel get out. As Gretta leans on Gabriel, he is suddenly overcome by lust. They approach the entry to the hotel where they are staying, and Gabriel feels as though they are escaping from their dull lives. The porter lights a candle and leads them to their room, which is mostly dark except for a "ghostly light" coming through the window. Gabriel can see that Gretta is preoccupied by something, and so he momentarily suppresses his feelings of lust and asks her what she is thinking about. Gretta unexpectedly bursts into tears and admits that she was thinking of the song she was listening to on the stairs. She tells Gabriel it reminds her of her childhood love, Michael Furey. Gabriel is angered by the idea that Gretta was thinking of another man while he had been thinking of no one but her. He asks if she had wanted to join Miss Ivors on the summer trip to Galway in order to visit this boy, and Gretta tells Gabriel the boy is dead. She says that Michael was employed in the gasworks, and that he died from visiting her in the rain while he was ill – he died for her. Gabriel is filled with terror by the idea that another man loved his wife enough to die for her. Gretta falls asleep and as Gabriel watches her, he suddenly realizes that he has never experienced a passion worth dying for, and that his wife is an individual with her own past experiences, and he has played a relatively small role in her life. Gabriel suddenly senses the world of the dead, and sees his own life fading, meaningless, into this "grey impalpable world." He hears the snow falling outside, indiscriminately covering all things living and dead.

- Genre: short story, gothic - Title: The Demon Lover - Point of view: close third person - Setting: London during The Second World War - Character: Kathleen Drover. Description: Mrs. Drover is the protagonist of the story, a forty-four year old woman who has returned to her house in London during the Second World War to retrieve items for her family who are living in the English countryside. She prides herself on her dependability as a wife and mother, and when she first enters the house she seems practical and relatively well-adjusted. As the story unfolds, however, it becomes apparent that she is of a nervous dispositions and has experienced a substantial amount of trauma in her lifetime. She was previously engaged to an unnamed man, her former fiancé, during the First World War, and this man treated her badly. Following his presumed death, she experienced a long period of immense loneliness, during which time she struggled to attract other suitors, a necessity for women at the time. Though she did eventually get married at the age of 32, she continues to suffer on account of her past. When she reads a letter she believes has been sent by her former fiancé, her unresolved issues cause her to experience intense feelings of detachment and anxiety, believing that she is perhaps being haunted by the ghost of her former fiancé in fulfillment of some unnamed promise she made him many years before. By the end of the story, Mrs. Drover is quite unhinged and she gets in a taxi to return to her family, but it seems that the taxi is driven by someone she is afraid of, making her fate uncertain. - Character: The Former Fiancé. Description: Mrs. Drover's first fiancé was a soldier during the First World War. Readers never encounter him directly (only in Mrs. Drover's flashback), but in her memory, he was cold, cruel, and mysterious. She never saw his face directly, he scarred her hand cutting it with his button, and she always felt uncomfortable and even frightened by him. Though Bowen never makes this entirely clear, it seems he is also the sender of the letter, signed with a "K", and the demon lover of the story's title. If this is the case, he has returned twenty-five years later to make Mrs. Drover keep an unspecified promise that she presumably made during the First World War. He provokes a breakdown of sorts in Mrs. Drover, causing her to act in an irrational way in the present. Throughout the story, he is consistently sinister, but as the plot develops there's a suggestion he has somehow, at least in Mrs. Drover's mind, transformed into a supernatural figure. At the end of the story, when Mrs. Drover gets into a taxi and reacts in horror upon seeing the driver's face, the implication is perhaps that she has come face to face with her old lover and he has come to deliver a horrible fate. - Theme: Reality, Illusion, and Trauma. Description: Twenty-five years ago, Mrs. Drover was engaged to a soldier—an unkind and mysterious man—who then died in the First World War. Somewhat relieved by his death, she married someone else and created a life. However, after fleeing London during the Second World War, she returns to her house to collect some belongings and finds a letter, signed "K," reminding her that today is "the day we said." Immediately, she thinks of her old fiancé and an "unnatural promise" she made a quarter century before. While Mrs. Drover believes that her demon lover is about to arrive with sinister intentions, Bowen remains ambiguous about whether the demon lover actually exists. At various moments throughout the story, it seems possible that he is indeed real, and at others equally possible that he is imagined. In maintaining this ambiguity, Bowen seems to suggest that each alternative poses an equally urgent threat: in one scenario, an unnatural and evil demon is coming for Mrs. Drover, and in another, her psychological trauma from her old relationship and from the wars has led her to anguish. Bowen presents compelling evidence that the demon lover is real by showing his apparent physical presence in the world. The best evidence for this is the letter, which Mrs. Drover seems certain is from her old fiancé. It is dated with that day's date, and it suggests that the sender has been watching Mrs. Drover for a long time, which echoes something he said before leaving for war: "I shall be with you…sooner or later. You won't forget that. You need do nothing but wait." Furthermore, after she has read the letter and reflected on how best to get out of the house, the disturbed air of the basement rises up the stairs to meet her, suggesting that someone has opened a door or window through which to exit the house themselves. These physical disturbances to Mrs. Drover's home suggest concretely that there is a real, tangible presence in the house. However, the significance of these details depends entirely on Mrs. Drover's reliability as a narrator (after all, readers have to trust her that the letter is from a dead man and that the basement air did, in fact, behave unusually), and Bowen undercuts Mrs. Drover's credibility by portraying her as confused and vulnerable. First of all, Mrs. Drover's emotional state seems fragile. The simple appearance of the letter leads her to believe she is being watched by "someone contemptuous of her ways," and reading the letter and recalling her old fiancé sends her into "a crisis." Following this, when she believes herself in danger, she continues to act in a neurotic way—for example, she fails to even recognize herself in the mirror, and she makes a somewhat illogical commitment to being out of the house before the clock strikes the next hour, just in case that brings the demon lover to her. Furthermore, it is objectively highly unlikely that Mrs. Drover's former fiancé is not only alive, but has been observing her for twenty-five years, gathering information about her life. The amount of time that has passed since her fiancé went missing, combined with the unlikely coincidence of Mrs. Drover being at the house alone on their "anniversary," makes a strong case for the demon lover being imagined. In this way, Bowen creates tension by introducing the threat of the demon lover, and then heightens the tension by making the reader question if the demon lover is in fact real or imagined. It's possible, however, that what Mrs. Drover is experiencing is—in a sense—both real and imagined: Bowen explicitly suggests the demon lover might be a manifestation of Mrs. Drover's psychological trauma from her frightening relationship with her old fiancé and from the violence of living through two World Wars. One of the basic characteristics of psychological trauma is that it confuses a previous event with the present moment with such intensity that the traumatized individual feels they are living the past all over again. This seems to occur when the clock strikes the hour and the story flashes back to Mrs. Drover's final meeting with her fiancé, as though she is fully re-living the moment in the present. It seems as though the stroke of the clock has triggered this memory (traumatic recollections are often induced by loud noises), and she is unable to resist the power it holds over her. Furthermore, when she returns to the present moment, she is just as agitated as she was in the moment she remembered, underscoring the trope of a traumatic episode allowing previous emotions and responses to play out again in the present. Perhaps, then, Bowen is using the ambiguity of the demon lover's existence to mirror the feeling of psychological trauma, in which a person truly believes that a past event is recurring and behaves as such, even if that thing is safely in the past. While it's possible that the demon lover is real, Bowen never says for sure. Depending on the reader's interpretation of the story, Mrs. Drover's behavior is either typical of a woman trying to escape a real and urgent threat, or symptomatic of a deep-seated trauma. In maintaining this uncertainty, Bowen's narration mirrors the psychology of someone suffering in the aftermath of trauma: events unfold in a confused middle-ground between past and present, and the person is unable to determine what's real or unreal. This suggests that violence is often most debilitating once its physical threat has passed, and emphasizes how trauma renders even one's immediate surroundings disorienting and opaque. - Theme: Love and War. Description: One reason that this story is so unnerving is that it turns the familiar cliché of wartime romance on its head. Rather than a romantic relationship between a woman and a soldier who must leave his home to protect his country, Bowen portrays Mrs. Drover's former fiancé in a suspicious and sinister light and suggests that Mrs. Drover is with him not out of love, but fear. The man seems infected by wartime, taking on the characteristics of war: he wounds Mrs. Drover, surveilles her, and comes to haunt her domestic life many years later, in tandem with (and even seemingly as part of) another war. Indeed, Mrs. Drover is eager to escape her old fiancé both in the past and in the present, explicitly associating his presence with harm and discomfort. In this way, Bowen suggests that that soldiers are not necessarily good romantic partners, since they can take on the violence of wartime and bring it into the home. Bowen explicitly associates Mrs. Drover's fiancé with wartime violence. She does this most clearly through making him a soldier in WWI who reappears in Mrs. Drover's life during WWII. In addition to his presence being associated with both wars, he takes on the violent characteristics of war. For example, during WWI he physically wounds Mrs. Drover—perhaps deliberately—by continually pressing her palm into his brass button until it cuts into her flesh. As Mrs. Drover registers this hurt, she intuits that he is capable of hurting her further. In addition to this physical discomfort, he surveilles her like an enemy, promising her in a threatening way that he will return sooner or later, and then leaving her the letter, which suggests that he has been observing her movements for the past 25 years. Much like war, the effects of Mrs. Drover's fiancé haunt her for years to come. The scar from his sharp button is still on her hand, and she still fears that her fiancé might arrive at any moment, bringing violence and terror to her life. Clearly, then, her fiancé and the war are conjoined presences, and his association with war makes him an unsuitable and violent partner. By contradicting the notion that soldiers are all romantic heroes who deserve to come home to their eagerly-awaiting partners, Bowen raises the issue of female loyalty. The story's title is drawn from an old ballad that warned women against infidelity while their husbands or fiancés were away at war, but Bowen seems to turn this message on its head. While Mrs. Drover did indeed marry someone else after her fiancé went missing in the war and was presumed dead, Bowen does not share the ballad's perspective that Mrs. Drover should have been more loyal. Since Mrs. Drover's fiancé was cold, mysterious, and threatening, both she and her family had few regrets when he disappeared. Bowen's sinister depiction of the demon lover justifies Mrs. Drover's attitude. Furthermore, while the ballad warns against adultery, Mrs. Drover is not an adulterer: she did not meet her husband for many years after her fiancé disappeared, and in those intervening years, she did not connect with or attract other men, so there is no possibility that her relief at her old fiancé's disappearance is rooted in adulterous desire. Rather, it's clear that Mrs. Drover would prefer to be alone than to be with this sinister man. By depicting the former fiancé as violent and sinister, and by contradicting the trope of frivolous and adulterous women, Bowen extends empathy to the spouses and partners of soldiers and critiques the sentimental melding of love and war. Instead of being obligated to wait for men (who might be made cruel by the violence in which they are participating), Bowen suggests that these women should make their own moral choices about whether their relationships are fulfilling. - Theme: Identity and Alienation. Description: Throughout the story, Mrs. Drover is sometimes uncertain of both the identity of her former fiancé and her own identity, stating that she cannot recall—and perhaps has never seen—her former fiancé's face, and failing to recognize her own face in the mirror. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Mrs. Drover's dislocation of self began during the First World War (perhaps because of the trauma of wartime living, and certainly because of the emotional strain of being in a bad relationship). Furthermore, his dislocation of self is exacerbated whenever she has to think of this period of her life. As Mrs. Drover's memories are forcibly returned to the trauma of WWI and her former relationship, her struggles with uncertainty and detachment magnify and she finds herself unable to engage with her present day surroundings, even to the extent that it puts her in physical danger. Bowen thereby suggests that not only is identity capable of being compromised through trauma, but also—perversely—that a strong sense of self is necessary in order to cope with trauma. The face is the clearest representation of a person's identity—it shows who a person is and gives clues as to what they think or feel. A major way in which Bowen troubles identity, then, is by hiding people's faces, making it seem as though their identity is inaccessible or even absent. For example, Mrs. Drover cannot remember her fiancé's face, and in her recollection of the last time she saw him, she notes that she had "not ever completely seen his face" at all. This detail raises the issue of whether Mrs. Drover has ever clearly seen his true self—his personality or character—and it suggests that, even though they are engaged, their relationship is not a close one. Furthermore, after Mrs. Drover reads the letter, she is disturbed to the extent that she feels "a change in her own face." She goes to look at herself in the mirror, presumably to reassure herself, but she sees herself as though she were a stranger, feeling "confronted by a woman" of forty-four years. Her inability to identify with this full, clear view of herself suggests that something sinister has happened—she has lost herself, almost as though she has been possessed. The possibility that the demon lover makes Mrs. Drover lose her identity is also present in her recollections of him. Of the time during and directly following their engagement, Mrs. Drover recalls that she experienced "a complete dislocation from everything," and that "I was not myself—they all told me so at the time." While the possibility that the demon lover saps Mrs. Drover of her identity is sinister enough, another (perhaps worse) interpretive possibility is that the demon lover is Mrs. Drover. After all, the letter is signed simply with "K" (Mrs. Drover's first name is Kathleen), and after reading the letter, her first reaction is not a memory of her fiancé, but rather a sense of her own identity shifting. Furthermore, she is the only character to come into contact with her former fiancé, and even then she never sees his face, insinuating that perhaps he does not have an identity separate from her own. Moreover, since she loses herself any time he is evoked (she describes the "complete suspension of her existence" during the time she spent with him) it could be that only one of them can exist at a given time. In this interpretation, the demon lover's supernatural presence seems less supernatural—instead of lurking in her house, he is simply lurking in her psyche (perhaps a play on a person's "demons" haunting them). Regardless of whether the demon lover is real or imagined, this uncertainty around identity produces a sharp sense of alienation: the inability to meaningfully connect with others, to clearly express one's feelings or understand the feelings of other people. Bowen poses this alienation as somewhat inevitable during wartime. Not only does the nature of war cause people to spend long periods of time apart, it also results in traumatic experiences for soldiers, which in turn makes it difficult for them to interact meaningfully with friends and family once they return home. This alienation is clearly evidenced in the young Mrs. Drover, who, having learned that her fiancé is missing and presumed dead, experienced "a complete dislocation from everything." Bowen suggests that this dislocation never completely went away by presenting Mrs. Drover as disconnected and disengaged from her surroundings in the present. This is clear when Mrs. Drover enters the house; Bowen describes her as "more perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw" and when she looks in the mirror she describes herself in the third person. This suggests that she's unable to see things as they really are, and unable to look at herself too closely, perhaps for fear of what she'll see. An emotional distance is also obvious during Mrs. Drover's final goodbye with her fiancé, as Bowen repeatedly draws attention to a lack of affection and physical contact. She describes that he treats her "without very much kindness," and does not kiss her but rather draws away from her. It seems that he is unable or unwilling to engage meaningfully and give her the affection expected of a romantic relationship. This suggests that each character is experiencing alienation and, in their way, is trying to subconsciously maintain a certain distance, perhaps in order to keep certain illusions about themselves in place, or keep parts of themselves hidden or secret, both from themselves and others. By destabilizing the reader's view of Mrs. Drover, and Mrs. Drover's views of her fiancé and of herself, Bowen makes it impossible for Mrs. Drover and the reader to fully grasp Mrs. Drover's thoughts and intentions. It is clear that both Mrs. Drover and her fiancé have undergone experiences that cause them to lose a sense of self, either fighting in the war or experiencing a hostile and unsuitable romantic relationship. This in turn produces a powerful a sense of estrangement from other people and dislocation from the present moment and their surroundings. - Theme: Promises and Punishment. Description: At the heart of this story is an unkept promise, and the question of whether Mrs. Drover should be held accountable for her apparent failure to keep it. While the letter states a promise has been made, its exact terms are unclear: is the promise that Mrs. Drover would marry her fiancé, whom she believed died at war? Is the promise to meet on this day as the letter describes, which is a promise Mrs. Drover claims not to remember making? Or, is it something more sinister and terrible that she cannot quite express, a more unusual kind of pact with a figure now coming to claim what's owed to him? Bowen suggests that, whatever the terms, this is a promise Mrs. Drover shouldn't be held to keeping. Furthermore, she seems to suggest that women are often held to an unfairly high standard where romantic relationships and promises are concerned. According to the letter, Mrs. Drover has made a promise that includes meeting the sender on this particular day and at a pre-arranged time: "You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said… In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise." Regardless of whether or not Mrs. Drover did indeed enter into the promise or pact the letter alludes to, Bowen presents the agreement as morally untenable. During the flashback to the time in which the promise was allegedly made, Mrs. Drover is presented as a vulnerable teenager who is obviously uncertain of what her fiancé expects of her. Furthermore, when he tells her that he isn't going away as far as she thinks, she clearly states she doesn't understand what he means, and he replies that she doesn't have to, which makes his threat/promise to remain in her life seem one-sided and menacing, rather than mutually desired and agreed upon. As the story develops, the reader witnesses the painful deterioration of Mrs. Drover's mental health once she learns that she's expected to meet "K." She becomes upset that the letter has caused painful memories to resurface, the effects of which threaten her present day role as a wife and mother: "her married London home's whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away." She is also confused as to the boundary between past and present, looking to her palm to see if the wound caused by her former fiancé's button is still there. Through these details, Bowen seems to suggest that, whatever the nature of the promise, it is placing her emotional wellbeing in jeopardy. Bowen suggests that, given the toll it is taking on her, Mrs. Drover should not be held to a promise she did not understand when she was a teenager, and furthermore that the wellbeing of women within such arrangements should be taken into greater account. The story ends with Mrs. Drover's abduction, and so ultimately she is indeed punished for her failure to keep her promise: after all, she has married another man and made a life for herself, and she is determined to leave the house before the promised meeting can occur. However, Bowen's sympathy for Mrs. Drover's actions—regardless of whether they are breaking a promise—gives the story's ending a troubling implication: Mrs. Drover's undeserved punishment seems to be a commentary on the unfair punishment of women at large. It is again relevant that the story takes its title from an old ballad, whose lesson was that women should not forget their lovers while they're away at war. Rather than make judgements about the behaviour of women in wartime relationships, Bowen offers her empathy for Mrs. Drover, suggesting that her plight is unfair. - Theme: Time and Repression. Description: Mrs. Drover's relationship to time governs her actions in the story. She is consistently trying to evade the past, she becomes uncomfortable and disturbed within the present moment, and she is always looking to the immediate future as a place of safety. Though she initially enters her house with the intention to retrieve items from her past to use in her present life (she and her family are living in the country in an attempt to avoid bombings in London), her return to the house allows the past to overwhelm her and even, apparently, consume her life. In both the form of the demon lover and the threatening captivity of the house, Bowen suggests that the effects of the past are beyond a person's control. At the very beginning of the story, Mrs. Drover is relatively at ease in the present moment; she moves through the house, making concrete observations about its appearance. Once Mrs. Drover reads the letter, however, she remembers something with "such dreadful acuteness that the twenty five years since then dissolved like smoke" and it becomes evident that the past has taken hold of her present. Furthermore, she suggests that certain memories are powerful enough to affect a person's behaviour in the present and even cause them harm. Once she has read the letter and experienced her flashback, Mrs. Drover's behaviour becomes increasingly irrational. She is eager to leave the house, but is too absorbed by recollections of how her fiancé treated her poorly to focus on the present. Mrs. Drover also either simply notes or instructs herself that "Under no conditions could she remember his face," suggesting that to do so would give the specter of her former fiancé greater power or solidity in the present. In this way, Bowen seems to suggest that the past is an explicitly harmful, volatile entity that can't be controlled or held at bay. In contrast to the past, which is dangerous and ever-present, Bowen presents the immediate future as a source of comfort for Mrs. Drover—a constantly deferred time in which she believes she will be safe. When Mrs. Drover is in the garden with her fiancé, for example, she feels deeply uncomfortable in the present and she looks to the house, imagining that in a few moments she will return to it and be embraced by her mother and sister. Once she departs from her fiancé, she runs to the house—but the scene ends before she reaches her family, so it's never clear whether she finds the safety she desires there. Likewise, while Mrs. Drover is frightened inside her house in London, she sustains herself by thinking that she will be safe once a taxi driver comes to get her. However, this near future does not bring the safety she imagined: when she finally manages to exit the house and find a taxi, she is struck with terror at the sight of the driver. Though Bowen doesn't explicitly describe the driver, by Mrs. Drover's response it seems plausible that she has recognized him as her old fiancé, now somehow transformed into the demon lover. Once more her attempt to escape to a place she thought was emblematic of safety has failed, this time with greater drama as she continues screaming and beating at the windows. That the future safety Mrs. Drover imagined turns into terror seems to be Bowen's way of insinuating that time cannot be expected to follow one's wishes—it is dangerous and unpredictable. In portraying the past as an active force that Mrs. Drover cannot avoid or bury, Bowen also seems to be making a point about the futility of repression. The flashback overwhelms Mrs. Drover entirely as she recalls, in detail, sensations and verbal exchanges with her fiancé, which suggests that this memory is alert and active beneath the surface. While Mrs. Drover may have avoided thinking about this final meeting for many years, its memory has not faded—it is still as fresh and vibrant as it was the day it occurred. Having referred to the clock marking the specific hour throughout the story, Bowen includes the word "eternity" in the final paragraph. It seems that now, after her attempts to control time and keep a clear boundary between the past and the present, time has taken over completely and any efforts to control it are now irrelevant. Indeed, the pointlessness of attempts to control time is underscored by the plot being an almost literal return to the past, suggesting that no matter how many years go by, the past remains potent, forcing people return to it to work through unresolved issues. Mrs. Drover ardently resists this return but ultimately fails to prevent it: her old fiancé is waiting for her to pick up where they left off, behaving as though the quarter century since they last met is of no importance, and once she has read the letter Mrs. Drover is overcome by the anxiety and concerns she experienced as a young woman. Though twenty-five years have come and gone, the past still has a strong hold on her, and the issues she faced as a teenager have not been resolved. Ultimately, Bowen leaves the reader with a troubling message regarding the past: it is simultaneously unavoidable and dangerous, and while it must be confronted, it is capable of overwhelming and destroying an individual entirely. - Climax: Mrs. Drover's abduction by the demon lover - Summary: It is late August during the Second World War, and Kathleen Drover has returned to her house in London. She has come to collect items she will bring back to her family, who are currently living in the countryside to avoid bombings in the city. Inside, Mrs. Drover marvels at how deteriorated the house has become and how strange the once familiar setting now feels to her. As she makes her way upstairs, she sees a letter addressed to her on the hall table. She is confused and irritated by the letter, and lists the reasons its being there doesn't make sense. The letter's sender informs Mrs. Drover that today is "our anniversary," and refers to their imminent meeting "at the hour arranged." Mrs. Drover becomes visibly shaken and goes to the mirror to study her own reflection, presumably in an attempt to calm herself, and then makes further attempts to ignore the letter and its effect on her by busying herself with the chest and its contents. These attempts, however, prove fruitless: as the clock begins to strike the hour, Mrs. Drover wonders if this is the hour the letter refers to. An intense flashback follows, during which the reader sees Mrs. Drover as a girl in the garden of her family home during the First World War. She is with a man who is older than her, and the reader realizes that this is her former fiancé, on leave from fighting in France. A key aspect of the flashback is Mrs. Drover's desire to leave the company of her fiancé and run back toward the house and the safety of her mother and sister. The reader also learns that Mrs. Drover "behaved well" when her fiancé was later reported missing and presumed dead, but that she struggled to enter into relationships with other men and felt disconnected from everything for some time afterwards. Returning to the present moment, Mrs. Drover has drawn some sinister conclusions from the appearance of the letter, specifically that it was somehow sent by her former fiancé, who believes she has made a promise to meet him at her home on this very day. As such, the house now poses an immediate threat: she is trapped inside while her old fiancé presumably looms ever closer. From this point in the story, Mrs. Drover becomes entirely fixated on escape, but her efforts are continually compromised by her inability to stay focused in the present moment. Eventually, she makes a plan to exit the house and find a taxi whose driver can return to the house with her to help her collect her belongings. Feeling emboldened, she goes to the top of the stairs and feels a draft coming up from the basement, as though someone has just left the house from that area, and she now dares to leave the house herself. Outside, Mrs. Drover makes her way to the taxi rank, where she climbs into a taxi as the clock strikes seven. For a few moments, she believes herself safe. This initial belief is quickly upturned, however, as she realizes the driver has started driving without her telling him where she's going. She tries to get his attention, and he responds by abruptly braking the car and turning around to face her. Mrs. Drover's terrified response upon seeing his face suggests that she recognizes the man as her former fiancé, perhaps under some kind of supernatural influence. The reader understands that she is in jeopardy once more, a realization made all the more potent as she had believed herself safe at last. The story closes dramatically with Mrs. Drover screaming and beating on the windows of the taxi as she is abducted into London's deserted streets.

- Genre: short story - Title: The Destructors - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: London in the 1950s - Character: Trevor, or "T.". Description: T. is a brooding, unhappy, rebellious adolescent and the newest member of the Wormsley Common Gang. He comes from a wealthier background than the other boys, but his parents have lost their place in society and moved to the neighborhood. This, and the sense that T. is more caught up in his own thoughts than he is in the way he is seen by others, sets him apart from the other boys. When T. first joins the gang, he is generally silent, but the way he carries himself impresses the other boys. He learns from his father that Mr. Thomas's house was built by a famous architect and becomes the leader of the group by suggesting the audacious plan to destroy the house. Although T. is determined to destroy Mr. Thomas's house, it is not out of malice towards the old man, but because of a desire to rebel against the older generation's materialism and belief in the superiority of the upper classes. - Character: Blackie. Description: Blackie is a fifteen-year-old boy who leads the Wormsley Common Gang up to and after T.'s brief time as leader. Blackie takes his leadership responsibilities seriously and wants the best for the gang. Blackie's character evolves as his relationship with T. does. At first he sees promise in T.'s way of carrying himself, but has his reservations as to whether T. will share the group's values despite his upper class roots. Later, Blackie is briefly jealous of T. after T. takes over leadership of the gang, but quickly comes to see that T.'s vision for destroying the house promises to bring the gang more prestige than any of his schemes would have because it reflects an even more profound rebellion against ideas of class. This realization inspires his respect for T., and ensures his loyalty at the moment when the rest of the gang turns on T. - Character: Mr. Thomas, or "Old Misery". Description: Mr. Thomas is an old man who worked as a decorator and builder when he was younger, before World War 2. He lives in a beautiful old house that survived the bombing of the war, and is deeply proud of it. He believes in the social fabric that existed before the war, in which order ruled according to a strict social hierarchy of class and privilege. He believes in this world view despite the fact that the world from which it came was destroyed by the war, and never understands the hostility which other character hold toward that old world. The boys call Mr. Thomas "Old Misery," and indeed he seems like a sad and lonely figure. While he is too much of a miser to fix his plumbing, he does show generosity in once giving the boys chocolates (an action the boys mistrust as a possible bribe). Old Misery looks at the boys over his garden wall and reminisces on his long-gone boyhood, never realizing that the boys he fondly patronizes look upon him with derision. He is a pathetic figure, symbolizing a world that is too old and stuck in its ways to reinvent itself in the wake of destruction. - Character: The lorry driver. Description: A driver who keeps his lorry in the lot near Mr. Thomas's house. He unwittingly pulls down Old Misery's house, after the boys tie one of the wooden struts propping the house up to the back of his lorry. After Mr. Thomas cries out in dismay at the destruction of his house, the lorry driver can't stop himself from laughing, despite Old Misery's obvious distress. The lorry driver's laughter suggests that the boy's hostility to the old pre-war world of strict social class, and their affinity for destruction, is shared more broadly by the community of people around them as well. - Character: Mike. Description: Mike is one of the youngest members of the group. Mike's frequent moments of surprise show the difficulty of mastering the group's code and moving from childhood into adolescence. Mike is eager to contribute and wants to be taken seriously. He is proud when he manages to warn the gang that Old Misery is coming and dutifully follows instructions to play his part in trapping Old Misery in the outdoor lavatory. - Character: Summers. Description: A thin, sallow boy who goes by his last name. Summers is practical and sees playing pranks as a way to have fun, so long as they can get away with it and not end up caught by the police. He is outspoken, and the other boys whose names we never learn seem to follow his example. He pragmatically withdraws his support for T.'s plan when Old Misery is on his way back, but Blackie pushes Summers and loyally stands up for T. before the other boys have time to follow Summers's lead. - Theme: Class and a Changing World. Description: "The Destructors" is set in London, England in the early 1950s. World War II has ended less than a decade earlier, and the city and country are slowly emerging from the destruction of the war. England is not emerging unscathed or unchanged, however. The country is scarred by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its soldiers and the destruction incurred during the unprecedented German bombing campaign on British cities. England after the war is also witnessing drastic changes to its social and political orders as a result of the war. Before the massive upheaval of the two World Wars, England's social hierarchy was extremely rigid. The upper classes were held to be superior, and class was inherited, making it unusual for those lower on the social ladder to move up. At the time when the story is set, the chaos and destruction of the war have reduced the fortunes of many in the upper and upper middle class, while also allowing for greater mobility among those in the lower classes.The boys in the Wormsley Common Gang do not remember the class world that existed before the war, but they seek to fight against any return to outdated assumptions about the superiority of the upper classes and place their faith in the survival of the new, more meritocratic society then emerging. This stance on the old class order is reflected in the inner workings of the gang, and especially in the way the gang determines the hierarchy among its members. For instance, when the gang learns that the new recruit's name is Trevor, they recognize this name as one that is only given either to members of the upper class or the ambitious upper middle class eager to be accepted among members of the true upper class. Because they have no respect for these class norms, the boys know that calling T. by his full name is a surefire way to undermine him.Resentment towards the idea of upper class superiority also helps to motivate the boys in their destruction of Mr. Thomas's house. T.'s father tells him that Mr. Thomas's house was designed by Christopher Wren, an architect who lived from 1632 until 1723 and built palaces for the royal family as well as the landmark St. Paul's Cathedral. This pedigree makes Mr. Thomas's house a relic of the pre-war era, when class distinctions were of huge importance, and it makes the boys' destruction of the house a symbolic strike against that old social order. Yet the story is not simply a tale of how a rough new social order is sweeping away an older, more genteel one. Indeed, the story deliberately portrays that old order as obsolete and ridiculous, as deserving to be wiped away, despite some sadness that goes along with that destruction. At the end of the story, when the lorry driver, who is clearly a member of the lower class, cannot help but laugh at the destruction of Old Misery's home, we see that glee at the destruction of the old class order is not only an adolescent emotion, but shared by adults as well. Mr. Thomas's professional history shows that he comes from a time when a different, more rigid class order reigned. Mr. Thomas has the training of a decorator and builder, so he can take care of most parts of his house, but does not know how to fix the plumbing. Plumbers were drawn from a lower class than builders and decorators, and so this lack of practical knowledge is a sign of Mr. Thomas's class pretensions. The fact that he refuses to spend money to fix his indoor plumbing and must, therefore, use an outdoor lavatory symbolizes all the concrete disadvantages that pretensions to being above manual labor has brought members of the upper class, along with the financial failure that has left him to pinch and scrimp. When the boys lock Mr. Thomas in his lavatory, it is the final sign that his ineffectual worldview has brought about his downfall. - Theme: Codes of Behavior. Description: "The Destructors" not only depicts class difference and conflict between the Wormsley Common Gang and Mr. Thomas, but also probes deeper to examine the codes of behavior that drive the way the boys of the gang and Mr. Thomas think and act. Mr. Thomas believes in a world of rigid hierarchies, in which the lower class should naturally show deference to their "betters" in the upper class, and the upper class should, in turn, patronize the lower class and show it a certain amount of (condescending) kindness. He also sees the young as bound to treat their elders with respect. He believes in a world of tradition, order, and propriety, in which the social niceties are followed. He sums up his way of seeing the world when he explains to T. that he wants the boys to respectfully ask him before entering his property, saying, "sometimes I like company. Only it's got to be regular. One of you asks leave and I say Yes." The boys' code of behavior differs in a variety of ways from Mr. Thomas's. The boys value strength and courage and constantly assess whether each other's actions embody these traits. Their code is also hostile to tradition and disapproves of any statement that could be construed as showing respect as to a superior. They are especially interested in finding new ways to challenge the old order, which is why T.'s plan to destroy Mr. Thomas's house establishes him as their leader. The gang is also focused on success, power, and reputation, considering their actions based on how they will impact their own individual status within the gang and their gang's ability to earn fame and the respect of other gangs. This code of behavior seems derived from the experience of growing up in the aftermath of the war, a time in London when scarcity and chaos forced competition and struggle, and when relying on the codes established before the war would have left one without the skills needed to survive.The interactions between the gang and Mr. Thomas, then, present a clash of codes, or pre-war and post-war ways of seeing the world. In some cases, this clash produces humorous misunderstandings, as when Mr. Thomas sees himself as benevolently giving some young lower-class boys a treat, but they interpret his gift of chocolates as a bribe. The story also shows, however, how Mr. Thomas's code makes him obsolete and blind to reality. For instance, when T. asks to see Mr. Thomas's house, the old man obliges, never suspecting that the boy could be motivated by anything but respectful curiosity. Mr. Thomas's blindness to the attributes needed to survive in the reshaped post-war world, founded on his now-obsolete code, is what allows the boys to destroy his home. When the lorry driver laughs at Mr. Thomas at the story's end, we see that he shares the gang's ethos and its belief that those with out of date codes deserve to have their connections to the past swept away. - Theme: Money and the Value of Things. Description: "The Destructors" focuses particularly on the clash between the pre-war and post-war generations in their relationships to money and material possessions. Perhaps in part because the boys of the gang have grown up during a time of shortage, they have little respect for money or things. They avoid stealing because they think it will end with them going to jail, but also because they see it as beneath them to obsess over and covet material things. They would rather sneak rides on public transportation than shoplift, for instance. This is because of their sense that material objects are corrupting, and can be used by the powerful to control the less powerful. And so, when Mr. Thomas offers them chocolates, they interpret it not as a gift but as a bribe. Mr. Thomas, by contrast, cares deeply about his possessions and has a penchant for hoarding his money. He prizes his house, but cares too deeply about saving money to fix its plumbing and must, therefore, use an outdoor lavatory. This demonstrates that he is more concerned with what money and possessions symbolize than with their functional purposes. He would rather have a home that symbolizes his class affiliation than a comfortable and functional home in which to live. T., though, takes the boys' irreverence for material objects to a different level. Rather than ignore the world of material things, T. seeks to destroy it. The story implies that the strength of T.'s antipathy for things arises from his family situation. T.'s family has fallen on hard times. His father, who used to be an architect, has had to take a far less prestigious job as a clerk and, presumably, to move his family into the working-class neighborhood where the boys in the gang live and where T.'s mother feels out of place. When T. tells Blackie that hate and love are "soft" and "hooey" and that there are "only things," the story suggests that conflict over the loss of possessions and wealth may make T.'s family life unhappy, leading him to believe that there is no such thing as love between people. When he finds Mr. Thomas's money, he responds with disdain to Blackie's inquiry as to whether he intends to steal it. For T., burning the money is a celebratory act that allows him to feel liberated from the fixation on material possessions that dominates his home life. The focus the other boys bring to the task of destroying the house indicates that, perhaps without their even knowing it, they share T.'s deep-seated disgust for material things. Similarly, the lorry driver's uncontrolled laughter in response to the home's destruction reflects a wider societal resentment for material things. Although the destruction of the war has swept away many of the distinctions between the classes, so long as people like Mr. Thomas have and treasure their beautiful, old relics, pre-war class divisions and codes of behavior still have some hold on the present. - Theme: Adolescence, Age, and Rebellion. Description: The members of the Wormsley Common Gang are boys ranging in age from nine to fifteen years old. Mike is still a child, while T. and Blackie are just a few years into their teens. As such, there is little surprise in the boys' rebellious antics. They have little respect for the world around them – a world blown apart by a war that shaped their society but which they don't remember – and so in search of fun and fame from rival gangs they pull pranks such as stealing rides on buses. The boys' rebellions are general and undirected and, for a young boy like Mike, even the destruction of Mr. Thomas's house is just another prank to carry out with gusto.In the character of T., though, the story explores a different, more pointed sort of rebellion. In the past, both T.'s father and Mr. Thomas worked to build houses – T.'s father as an architect, and Mr. Thomas in the slightly less prestigious profession of builder and decorator. By destroying the house, T. rebels against his father, who pointed its architectural importance out to T., and against what his father holds to be important. Although destroying an old man's home and possessions is a cruel act, T. is not motivated by cruelty, as is made clear when he thinks of Mr. Thomas's comfort after locking him in the lavatory and brings him food and a blanket. Instead the story ties the plan to destroy the house directly to T.'s upbringing, describing it as having "been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty." This strengthens the impression that T. sees destroying the house as an act of rebellion against the world of his family.The connection between rebellion, adolescence, and aging is clearly drawn in the scene when T. and Blackie burn Mr. Thomas's life savings and "the grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age." This image ties the burning of the money directly to the gray-haired elders whose values T. seeks to flout. And yet it also implies that this act of rebellion will have an impact on the boys themselves. Although it happens outside the confines of the story, Blackie, T. and the rest of the gang are also, inevitably, growing older themselves. There may come a day when they realize the monstrousness of their act towards a weak, elderly man. There may even come a day when they themselves are old, and the things that they have built or cherished are dismissed and destroyed by a younger generation. The story also employs shifts in perspective to deepen its portrayal of youthful rebellion. When Mr. Thomas is locked in the lavatory, the story is told from his perspective. He feels "dithery and confused and old," sitting on the lavatory "loo" and contemplating his situation "with the wisdom of age." The image of Mr. Thomas sitting on the toilet seems to mock the "the wisdom of age" as nothing more than the realization that one can do little to change the world (or even to escape a locked lavatory). Simultaneously though, the image shows us how cruel what the boys are doing to Mr. Thomas is. With the energy of youth, they cannot fathom Mr. Thomas's discomfort as he sits in a damp, cold lavatory, nor do they consider the horrible injury they are doing him by destroying all that he has left in the world. Yet in its final scene the story shifts to track the actions of the adult lorry driver, who inadvertently pulls down Mr. Thomas's house and then laughs despite Mr. Thomas's obvious distress. This cruel laughter is shocking, but also shows that the British society portrayed in the story is itself going through a kind of adolescence, moving away from the rules that governed it in the past, but still lacking a clear moral compass and sense of right and wrong. - Theme: Destruction and Creation. Description: The idea that destruction is a form of creation is drawn from the section of the story describing the end of the boys' first day destroying Mr. Thomas's house. The mood of the narration becomes distinctly philosophical in its description of the boys: "they worked with the seriousness of creators – and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become." The creative elements of destruction are expressed in several ways throughout the story.First, the story points out that the sounds of destruction closely resemble the sounds of creation. While he is trapped in the lavatory, Mr. Thomas, who used to work supervising the building of homes, mistakes the sounds coming from his house for those produced by carpenters at work building a home.Outside of the action taking place on Mr. Thomas's property, the story is set on an empty parking lot created when bombs destroyed the houses that stood there prior to the war. The destruction of Mr. Thomas's house expands the lot in which the boys meet daily, creating a larger gathering space for public use in a space where a private residence stood before.Similarly, the social environment of the story was created through the destruction of the war. All the boys, but especially T., is a product of the new kinds of thinking that replaced the old social and political frameworks after the war. The boys operate democratically and, under T.'s influence, organize themselves so that their labor is as powerful and efficient as possible. These priorities reflect the political climate in England after war, when the Labour Party won an election for the first time on a platform appealing to common people and workers. The boys' language, then, reflects the destruction of old class definitions and the political struggle then going on. England as a whole, and the Wormsley Common Gang in particular, hopes that the destruction wrought by the war will pave the way for new groups to assert their political rights for the first time. Yet the story leaves it entirely to the reader's imagination how the boys' destruction of Mr. Thomas's house will impact each character's future. T., for instance, has allowed himself to be seen by Mr. Thomas so that he could lead him to the lavatory and trap him there. It seems likely, then, that T. will be caught and punished, entailing that this act of destruction creates a new reputation for him that will change the way the world sees him, and perhaps the way he sees himself. As the other boys grow up, they will need to think of new ways to understand the cruel act that they committed when still boys. It is Mr. Thomas's fate which may be the exception that proves the rule. It seems likely that the destruction of his home, all his possessions and his life savings may prove to be a disaster that he cannot weather. Far from creating the next chapter in his life, this destruction may very well prove to be the blow that destroys him entirely. Destruction can be a force of creation in that it creates a blank slate upon which new things – whether parking lots or political movements – can grow. Yet destruction becomes an act of creation only for individuals and societies young and innovative enough to move forward and build something new out of the rubble. - Climax: Mr. Thomas is returning to the house and T. must convince the other boys to bring the destruction of the house to completion. - Summary: The story begins by introducing us to the Wormsley Common Gang, a group of boys ranging from nine to fifteen years of age, who live in a tough area of London and spend their summer holiday pulling pranks. They gather daily in an empty lot created when bombs dropped on England during World War 2 destroyed the houses that used to stand there. One beautiful old house still stands on the edge of the lot, although it was damaged during the war and is propped up by wooden struts. This house is owned by Mr. Thomas, an elderly, solitary man who used to be a builder and a decorator, and whom the boys derisively call "Old Misery." The bombing destroyed the house's plumbing, so Mr. Thomas uses an outdoor lavatory. The leader of the gang is a boy named Blackie who concerns himself with fairness and with the gang's reputation. A boy named Trevor, who comes from a more affluent background, but whose parents have fallen on hard times, is the gang's newest member. Usually the boys would make fun of the name Trevor, but the menacing way he carries himself inspires their respect. They call the new boy "T." and allow him to enter the group without a humiliating ritual induction. Other members of the group include the young and easily surprised Mike, and the more practical and outspoken Summers. One day, T. surprises everyone by arriving late to the lot. Blackie interrogates T. about where he has been and it slowly comes out that T. has visited Old Misery and toured around the old man's home. At first it seems to Blackie that this is unbefitting for a member of the gang, especially because T. describes the home as "beautiful." But T. reveals that he has planned a prank that will surpass all the gang's past exploits in daring: he wants to destroy Old Misery's house while the old man is out of town for the three-day weekend. Blackie raises objections to this plan, but the gang puts T.'s idea to a vote and decides to carry it out. Blackie is hurt at first to see that T. has replaced him as the leader of the gang, but realizes the exploit would burnish the gang's reputation around London. He decides to support T. Meanwhile T., who is suddenly imbued with confidence and leadership skill, instructs the boys to bring tools for the destruction, and they promise to meet the next day. When Blackie arrives the next day, he can hear the destruction already going on inside. Walking through the house, he notices how methodically the boys are destroying everything from the floors to the banisters, while leaving the walls intact. T. is sitting and listening to the sounds of destruction. He instructs Blackie to smash up the bathroom and says that he is looking for something special to do. After the other boys leave at the end of the day, T. shows Blackie the special thing he has found: seventy one-pound notes, Mr. Thomas's life savings. When Blackie asks if T. means to steal the money, T. responds with anger. He says, instead, that the two of them should burn the money as a celebration. Blackie struggles to understand T.'s motivations, asking whether he hates Old Misery, but T. says that hate and love aren't real, and all that matters are things. After they have burnt the notes one by one, Blackie and T. race each other home. The next day the boys continue the destruction. After removing each of the floors of the house, they turn on the water, which pours through the hollow house. At that moment, Mike rushes in with news that Old Misery is returning early from his holiday due to the rain. Summers says they ought to run away before they get caught, but T. is adamant that they finish destroying the house. Summers continues to resist and mocks T. by using his full name, "Trevor." Before the gang has time to laugh, though, Blackie shoves Summers and throws his support behind T. T. tells Mike to go out and stand near Old Misery's outdoor lavatory and yell for help. Even though T. is giving the commands, Blackie is the leader once again. As Old Misery approaches his house, a boy runs up to him and tells him another boy is trapped in the outdoor lavatory. Mr. Thomas is indignant that the boys have broken onto his property, but he hears the yells of the boy supposedly locked in the toilet and allows himself to be hurried along by T., even climbing over his own garden wall. When Mr. Thomas open the lavatory door to free the boy, he finds himself pushed into the lavatory, with the door is locked behind him. He pleads to be set free, but the boy tells him to keep quiet. He realizes no one is around to hear his cries. From the lavatory he can hear sounds that resemble carpenters at work coming from his house. The boys finish by hacking away at the walls of the house until the structure balances on just a thin strip of mortar. Next they tie the wooden struts supporting the house to the back of a truck parked in the lot. T. brings Mr. Thomas a blanket and some sandwiches, telling him they don't want him to be uncomfortable overnight, but also adding, much to Mr. Thomas's confusion, that Mr. Thomas would no longer be comfortable in his house. Early the next morning, the lorry driver comes to get his truck. As he pulls out of the lot, he feels something tugging on the back fender. Then there is enormous crash and debris rains down. He hears Mr. Thomas yelling from within the lavatory and frees him. Mr. Thomas cries out when he sees that his house has been torn down, but the lorry driver can't stop himself from laughing at the spectacle.

- Genre: Short story; morality tale - Title: The Devil and Tom Walker - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: In and around Boston, Massachusetts - Character: Tom Walker. Description: A "meagre miserly fellow," Tom Walker is first and foremost outrageously, self-destructively greedy. He despises his miserly, abusive wife and has nothing to live for but the satisfaction of his desire for owning things. One evening, he meets the devil Old Scratch in a Massachusetts swamp, who offers Tom the long-dead Captain Kidd's long-buried treasure in exchange for Tom's immortal soul. After some indecision and his wife's death at the hands of Old Scratch—a fate which foreshadows her husband's own—Tom at last resolves, Faust-like, to seal the deal: so, in exchange for pirate treasure, he sells his soul, and, in accordance with the devil's conditions, also becomes an exploitative usurer, or moneylender, in Boston. As the years pass, Tom becomes rich and respected, but he also begins to regret having paid for his worldly success with an eternity among hellfire and brimstone. To protect himself, he becomes zealously and hypocritically religious and always carries a bible with him. But the devil gets his due nevertheless: while Tom is predatorily foreclosing the land jobber's mortgage one morning, Old Scratch knocks at Tom's door and whisks him onto a black horse, which gallops away back to the swamp and Tom's damnation. - Character: Old Scratch. Description: Also called the Wild Huntsman, the Black Miner, and, in New England, the Black Woodsman, Old Scratch is the devil himself, pure black as if covered in soot and with a shock of coarse black hair. It is said he guards Captain Kidd's treasure, for he guards all treasure, especially that which is acquired immorally. He claims to own the swamp near which Tom Walker and his wife live, where Tom meets him one evening surrounded by trees into which are carved the names of the living damned, soon to die and serve as fuel for hell's fire. Old Scratch is a cunning devil who knows when he's got people right where he wants them, and he drives a hard bargain. His ideal world seems to be one filled to a large extent by slave traders, but usurers will also do in a pinch. By story's end, Old Scratch wins the souls of Absalom Crowninshield, Tom's wife, and Tom himself. - Character: Tom Walker's Wife. Description: Tom's stereotypical nagging, scolding wife is even more miserly than her husband; when she's not hoarding valuables from him, she's verbally, maybe even physically abusing him. After Tom initially declines to accept Old Scratch's offer to sell his soul for riches, Tom's wife fearlessly resolves to accept it herself, bearing in her apron the household's silver out into the swamp to bargain with the devil. She's never heard from again (characteristically, Tom misses the silver more than he does his wife). Some say she just got lost; others say she ran off with the silver to another province. However, another, more probable story holds that Tom found evidence that the devil just dragged his wife down to hell: a bundle tied in an apron that held a heart and a liver. Tom, of course, pities Old Scratch in all this: the devil must have had a tough time of wrestling and dragging Tom's ferocious wife down to her damnation. - Character: Captain Kidd. Description: The pirate who, before the action of the story begins in 1727, buried treasure in the swamp near which Tom Walker and his wife live. Kidd never enjoyed the fruits of his evil labors, however; shortly after burying his treasure, he was arrested in Boston, sent to England, and hanged for his crimes of piracy. His black fate anticipates those of all the ruthlessly greedy characters in the story. - Character: Deacon Peabody. Description: The earthly owner of the swamp where Tom Walker meets Old Scratch, Deacon Peabody is more truly the devil's property himself, hypocritically scrutinizing his neighbors' sins and overlooking his own as he does. Old Scratch points out a tree in the swamp into which Peabody's name is carved: like Peabody himself, it is thriving on the outside (Peabody made his riches trading shrewdly with the Native Americans) but rotten on the inside. - Character: Absalom Crowninshield. Description: Like Deacon Peabody, Absalom Crowninshield is an embodiment of earthly success and spiritual failure: he is ostentatiously rich from exploitative buccaneering, respected in Boston as a pious man, but doomed to damnation for his sins nonetheless. Tom Walker sits on a fallen tree bearing Crowninshield's last name in the swamp while conversing with Old Scratch, and learns from his wife soon thereafter that Absalom is dead, presumably to fuel the devil's forge and fire. Crowninshield's fiery fate foreshadows Tom's own. - Character: The Land Jobber. Description: Under Governor Belcher's administration in Massachusetts, the land jobber was, like many others, interested in getting rich quick, by buying and selling land on speculation, in his case. However, the economy consequently collapsed, and people are going through hard times by the time Tom Walker sets up his counting house in Boston as a usurer, the land jobber included. Indeed, many need loans to stay afloat, and are lining up at Tom's doors. Although Tom professes to be the land jobber's friend, he characteristically decides to foreclose the land jobber's mortgage for personal gain; but Old Scratch interrupts Tom before he can complete this act of antisocial hypocrisy and exploitation: the devil decides it's time to claim Tom's soul. The devil at his door, Tom can't defend himself with his Bible any longer, because his copy is ironically buried under the land jobber's mortgage, suggesting just what Tom's topsy-turvy priorities are. - Theme: Greed. Description: "The Devil and Tom Walker" is full of characters grotesquely pledged to little more than pursuing their insatiable greed: the long-dead pirate Captain Kidd, the socially powerful but nonetheless hell-damned buccaneer Absalom Crowninshield, and, of course, the miserly Tom Walker and his even more miserly wife. In the background of these characters, and their logical end in Irving's story, stands the figure of the slave trader, who takes greed to the extreme by sacrificing conscience in exchange for profit and treating people like nothing more than property.It is especially through the characters of Tom and his wife, however, that Irving depicts the moral harms of greed, which sours, corrupts, and ruins the lives of the greedy themselves, and creates strife in the lives of those around them. Tom and his wife love nothing so much as riches, not even themselves; both would rather sell their souls to Old Scratch—the devil—and burn in everlasting hellfire, than miss out on an opportunity to profit. In a revealing irony, Tom and his wife are so greedy that they can't bear to spend the riches they have. Tom's life as a rich man is essentially indistinguishable from his life as a poor man: his houses, whether hovel-like when he was poor or vastly ostentatious when he was rich, are neglected and have about them "an air of starvation"; and his horses are little more than skeletons. At the end of the story, Tom's riches are revealed for what they truly are from a cosmic perspective: cinders, wood shavings, and bones. This echoes the fate of Captain Kidd, who dies poorly, nastily, and brutishly before he can ever enjoy his ill-gotten treasure. And in the process the story shows how the satisfaction of greed only makes greed hungrier, starving all quality of life in turn. And just as the greedy are incapable of caring for themselves, so too are they incapable of caring for, and living harmoniously with, others. Captain Kidd so trespasses against human society that he is hanged for his crimes of piracy, and Absalom Crowninshield likewise made his fortune through anti-social acts of predation. Tom and his wife make of their domestic life a parody of hell, cheating, quarrelling, abusing and deceiving one another as they do, for no reason other than that they overvalue the external world of stuff at the expense of the inner world of the human soul. The story is unambiguous in portraying the just punishment for greed: the lives of the greedy are not worth living, and upon death are damned to fuel the devil's forge and fire. - Theme: Usury. Description: Irving targets in "The Devil and Tom Walker" a particular institutionalization of greed that does, from the story's perspective, large-scale social harm: namely, usury, or the practice of lending money at interest, especially at excessive or illegal rates Just as greed breeds greed, so does usury permit money to breed money in turn without need of labor or the creation of new value. Tom Walker himself becomes a usurer in the second half of the story, a respected man who employs in his counting house many clerks. It is of course ironic that the usurer, whom Old Scratch judges to be second only to the slave trader in terms of social and moral destructiveness, should be permitted to operate in society at all, much less be respected by society as Tom is. For one thing, usury enables people to act more easily on their greed, taking out loans for various enterprises as so many speculators do in the story, with disastrous economic consequences in their case. Second, usurers like Tom tend to have as their clientele desperate people—indeed, Tom lends money to people in a community foundering on economic depression. And, because desperate people are generally more willing to take desperate measures, usurers can charge them outrageously high interests rates and, ultimately, bleed them dry, as Tom does with the land jobber. (It's worth noting that the modern world financial system rests on the practice of lending money at interest—on usury—but in earlier times it was considered sinful, especially among Christians – see The Merchant of Venice. That Tom could be a socially respected person while openly practicing usury, and being damned for it, captures the tension as the economy shifts toward our modern system even as Christian religious qualms about money-lending still held some sway.)However, it is not Tom but Old Scratch himself who imposes the highest interest rates on his loans: in exchange for Captain Kidd's treasure, he expects something infinitely more valuable in return: Tom's immortal soul. Just like the hard-up people he loans money to later, Tom is so desperate to sate his greed that he takes the devil's abominable offer, blinded to the afterlife of the soul by mortal passion and mere gold. From this perspective, usury becomes a larger metaphor in the story for how sinners must, at last, pay for their sins with their souls, and only do so because they are so fatally limited in their vision of the divine scheme of virtue, vice, and salvation. Of course, the Devil, as the world's ultimate usurer, is just as doomed as Tom, for he can never repay the infinite debt of his rebellion from God, whereas men and women can attain to salvation in the story's world, if only they first escape from the prison of their own bad desires. - Theme: Wealth, Religion, and Hypocrisy. Description: In the swamp, Old Scratch directs Tom's attention to the nearby trees, flourishing on the outside but rotten on the inside, and we later learn that these trees represent the men whose names are carved into their trunks, one name per tree. It is implied, moreover, that the men who are named on the trees—men like Deacon Peabody, who made a fortune trading shrewdly with the Native Americans, and Absalom Crowninshield, who made his fortune buccaneering—are all corrupt sinners, soon to be axed from life by Old Scratch and used as kindling in hell. It is one of the story's most insistent ironies that those named on the trees also happen to be some of the wealthiest, most powerful, most respected men in the colony. The irony is twofold: first, that to achieve worldly success seems to require spiritual failure, that prospering in this life means damnation in the next; and second, that common people blindly worship wealth such as Tom gains from the devil without ever thinking about its likely sinful origins or its social harms—harms that usually effect common people most intensely. Might doesn't make right, the story implies, and regularly leads to damnation—but you wouldn't know that based on how Bostonians esteem the Peabodies and Crowninshields and Tom Walkers of the world.In the story, people respect the wealthy and powerful in part because it is precisely the wealthy and powerful who are most conspicuous in religious life, albeit hypocritically. Deacon Peabody, as his title suggests, is no less than a Puritan official. Similarly when Tom gets older and feels his death near, even he becomes a militant Christian, loud in prayer in proportion to his sinfulness, sternly and magisterially judgmental of his neighbors, and zealous in persecuting so-called heretics like the Quakers and Anabaptists. But as much as Tom feigns genuine contrition for his sins and faith in God, he never really changes his ways. He reads the Bible one minute, only to violate the spirit of religion the next by carrying out some usurious transaction. He thinks that by merely overcompensating for his sinfulness with prayers and having a Bible at hand, he can cheat Old Scratch—but his worldly depravity never leaves him, as is exemplified by his habit of thinking about salvation as a matter of credits, debts, and loans, terms relevant to the usurer but certainly not to the good Christian. Of course, Tom's hypocrisies fool no one but Tom, and the devil takes what's his.A question remains: who in this world of getting and spending isn't hypocritical in religious observance? There are in Tom's congregation a few quiet, inconspicuous Christians traveling steadfastly "Zionward," that is, toward heaven. But there are also the story's Indians, who Irving portrays as living violent war-mad lives and sacrificing white men to "the evil spirit" of human viciousness, Old Scratch himself. Of course, these Indians' practices have a great deal less to do with the historical Native Americans than with the racist stereotype of Native Americans held by New Englanders in Irving's time, but their presence in the story also reveals the extent of white Christian hypocrisy: at least Irving's Indians are honest about the fact that they worship Old scratch; the whites in the story on the other hand claim to worship the Christian God, but their greedy, predatory actions suggest that Old Scratch is more truly their spiritual guide. As the Indians sacrifice white men to Old Scratch, so too do whites like Tom sacrifice themselves by selling their souls to him not only eagerly but willingly. - Theme: Storytelling as Moral Instruction. Description: The narrator of "The Devil and Tom Walker" is clear in his purpose: this is a cautionary tale, meant to wake up predators and usurers like Tom to the harms that their activities wreak on human society, and also to the dire consequences the greedy and miserly face not only in this life but in the next. For this reason, we know that this is a didactic story, that is, a story which has as one of its central purposes the moral instruction of its reader. But Irving's didacticism is more sophisticated than mere sermonizing. This is especially clear in those points in the story when the narrator interrupts himself to provide multiple, mutually exclusive accounts of the same event, tending in these cases also to select the account he finds most probable. Two patterns emerge: the narrator favors accounts that underscore the moral of his story, but also accounts that are darkly humorous and entertaining. For example, when Tom's wife disappears into the swamp, the narrator entertains four versions of the story: 1) that Tom's wife got physically lost in the swamp; 2) that she ran off with the Walker household's silver to some other province; 3) that Old Scratch tricked her into a boggy part of the swamp into which she sank; and 4) that Old Scratch won the wife's soul only after quarreling and fighting and wrestling with her, suffering some pulled-out hair himself. The first version ignores the otherworldly, spiritual implications of the wife's greed, and the second doesn't match the story's moral of the costs of greed. However, the third and fourth versions do underscore the story's moral in terms of the life of the human soul—so how does the narrator decide which is most probable, as he says? It seems that he simply picks the most entertaining account: a devilish trick is considerably less fun to imagine than a nagging woman picking a fight with the devil himself. Indeed, even though the narrator dismisses as an old wives' tale the story that old Tom buried his horse upside down so as to ride away from the devil on it come Judgment Day, it is included in the narrator's story nonetheless, first and foremost because it calls to mind a darkly humorous and absurd image of a monstrously misguided attempt to save one's soul. Irving seems to be implying in such moments that moral instruction and entertainment are not mutually exclusive in a work of art, but prompt and promote one another.Finally, it should be added that the narrator provides many accounts or versions of the same event in his story also to suggest to his reader that he is not making up what he's recounting in his story, but serving more as a historian, whose function it is to consider legends and rumors as matters of historical fact, to weigh them against one another to determine which seems more true. This historian's tone in turn makes the uncontested events of the story—like Tom making a deal with the devil and becoming a usurer—seem all the more real to us as readers. If the devil is as much a part of our world in reality as he is in Tom's, the ethical stakes of living by the story's moral of resisting greed and leading an honest, God-fearing life, become all the higher. - Climax: Old Scratch whisks Tom Walker onto the back of a black horse, which gallops away with Tom to his damnation - Summary: Before the story of Tom Walker begins, the narrator sets the scene by telling us about the pirate Captain Kidd, who long ago buried his ill-gotten treasure in a dismal swamp not far from Boston, Massachusetts. Old stories have it that the devil himself, known as Old Scratch, guards the money, as he always does with buried treasure that's been immorally acquired. Kidd never enjoyed his wealth, however, for he was arrested in Boston soon after burying it and later executed in England for his crimes. The story proper opens in 1727. Tom Walker is a miserly, outrageously greedy man, who lives near the swamp with his nagging, scolding, just as greedy, and abusive wife. Their house is forlorn, dilapidated, and has about it "an air of starvation," as does their horrifically skinny horse. One evening Tom is taking a shortcut home through the swamp when he comes to the ruins of an old Indian fort. There he decides to rest, but as he idly pokes with his staff into the earth he finds an old skull, which he kicks to shake the dirt from it. "'Let that skull alone,'" says a voice—which belongs to none other than the devil Old Scratch, who has a pure black face—as if covered in soot—and carries around an axe. Old Scratch explains that this swampland isn't the property, as Tom supposes, of Deacon Peabody—a respected religious official in Boston—but rather belongs to Old Scratch himself. To prove it, he shows Tom a tree on which the Deacon's name is carved—the tree appears to be thriving on the outside but is rotten within, just as Peabody is successful in the eyes of the world but morally rotten and doomed to damnation. All the nearby trees are similarly marked with the names of great men from the colony, including the one Tom is sitting on, which bears the name of Crowninshield, a mighty man rich from buccaneering who, the devil tells Tom, is ready to burn. Tom and Old Scratch walk toward Tom's house together and converse in earnest about Captain Kidd's pirate treasure as well as a business deal, presumably that Tom sell his soul to the devil in exchange for Kidd's treasure. Tom needs time to think about it; when he asks for proof that what the devil says is true, Old Scratch puts his finger to Tom's forehead and leaves his signature: a black irremovable fingerprint. At home, Tom's wife tells her husband that Absalom Crowninshield was just announced dead, which confirms to his mind the truth of what the devil told him. Moreover, burdened by his secret of having met Old Scratch in person, Tom at last tells his wife what happened in the swamp. The prospect of Kidd's gold excites the greed of Tom's wife, and she urges her husband to accept the devil's offer. Merely to spite her, however, Tom decides against it. Consequently, his wife decides to strike up a bargain with Old Scratch herself, and so she fearlessly treks to the old Indian fort one evening—only to return late that night sullen and unsuccessful. She decides that in her second attempt she needs to make the devil an offering, and so she gathers up the household's silver into her apron without Tom's knowledge and heads out into the swamp again. This time, she never returns (Tom misses the silver more than his wife). The most probable story as to her fate holds that when Tom went to search for her in the swamp some days later, he found only her apron bundled into which were a heart and liver, as well as evidence that his wife and Old Scratch had physically fought before the devil bested her. Tom consoles himself for the loss of his silver with the happier fact of the loss of his wife, and even feels grateful to the devil for wrestling her down to death and damnation. He decides that now's the time to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for Captain's Kidd treasure, and after several failed attempts to rendezvous with Old Scratch, Tom at last meets him one night on the edge of the swamp. Slowly but surely, the two begin to haggle over the terms of their deal, the devil now adding new conditions, such as that Tom not only sell his soul but also become a slave trader. Although Tom's conscience cannot permit him to enter this profession, he agrees eagerly to become a usurer (someone who lends out money at interest) instead in accordance with the devil's terms, and the two strike a bargain. A few days' time finds Tom sitting at his desk in a counting house in Boston. He quickly develops a reputation for lending out money, which people more and more require, because the local economy under Governor Belcher's administration has recently collapsed and many get-rich-quick schemes and wild real estate ventures have come to nothing, leaving money scarce and people desperate. Indeed, Tom's door is "soon thronged by customers," whom Tom exploits by charging high interest rates and also by securing debts mercilessly. He soon becomes a rich man, building an ostentatiously vast home he never finishes or even furnishes out of tightfistedness. He also buys a carriage and two horses, all of which he lets fall into poor condition. As Tom grows older, however, he becomes anxious about having sold his soul into damnation in exchange for merely worldly success. He begins, therefore, to take measures to cheat the devil of his due: he becomes a churchgoer zealous in proportion to his sinfulness, he judges his neighbors severely, and he revives discussion of persecuting the Quakers and Anabaptists as heretics. He also carries Bibles with him at all times—one in his coat pocket, one on his counting house desk—to ward off Old Scratch. More crazily, Tom also has his horse buried fully equipped and upside-down so that on Judgment Day, when the world turns topsy-turvy, he can outrun the devil's clutches. One hot afternoon, Tom, wearing a silk morning gown, is in the counting house foreclosing the mortgage of the land jobber, a ruined investor in land, who begs for a few more months more to pay Tom back. The land jobber reminds Tom that he has already made much money out of him, but Tom just impatiently and impiously replies, "'The devil take me…if I have made a farthing!'" Right on cue, the devil, with a great black horse in his company, knocks at Tom's door; Tom answers. "'Tom, you're come for,'" the devil says, and though Tom attempts to escape his Bible is buried on his desk under the mortgage that he was just foreclosing on. So the devil whisks Tom onto the back of his black horse, which gallops away in the midst of a thunderstorm. Tom Walker never returned to foreclose the land jobber's mortgage. One story holds that the horse galloped with him back to the old Indian fortress, where the two disappeared in a bolt of lightning. After Tom's disappearance, the Bostonians who are given the task of taking care of his abandoned estate find that there's nothing, in fact, to care for: his bonds and mortgages are reduced to cinders; his gold and silver have turned to wood "chips and filings"; his horses have turned to skeletons; and the very next day even his vast house goes up in flames. Such is the end of Tom Walker and his ill-gotten wealth, though it is said to this day that he continues to haunt on horseback the old Indian fort in the swamp, still wearing his morning gown.

- Genre: Middle-Grade Novel, Historical Fiction, Bildungsroman, Time Slip - Title: The Devil’s Arithmetic - Point of view: Third-person limited - Setting: Poland in 1942 and New Rochelle in the late 20th century - Character: Hannah/Chaya. Description: - Character: Rivka/Aunt Eva. Description: - Character: Gitl. Description: - Character: Shmuel. Description: - Character: Yitzchak. Description: - Character: Fayge. Description: - Character: Grandpa Will. Description: - Character: Mother. Description: - Character: The Blokova. Description: - Character: The Commandant. Description: - Character: The Badchan. Description: - Theme: Memory. Description: - Theme: Sacrifice. Description: - Theme: Jewish Culture and Identity. Description: - Theme: Hope. Description: - Climax: Hannah walks to her death into Lilith's Cave. - Summary: In the late 20th century, Hannah Stern is a 12-year-old Jewish girl headed from her home in New Rochelle, New York, to visit her relatives in the Bronx for a Passover Seder. Hannah views her family's Jewish traditions as a boring obligation, and she is afraid of her Grandpa Will, who has fits where he seems to be back in the past. He also has a tattoo from his time in a concentration camp. But everything changes for Hannah when, in the middle of the Seder, she opens the door of the apartment and walks through it to a Polish shtetl in 1942, right in the middle of World War II and the Holocaust. In the past, everyone believes that Hannah is Chaya, a girl whose parents recently died of disease back when she lived in Lublin. Shmuel and Gitl are siblings who have taken Chaya (now Hannah) in to raise her as their own child. Shmuel is about to marry his true love, a local woman named Fayge, but Gitl has rejected all marriage advances, including those from a local butcher named Yitzchak. Shmuel and Fayge's wedding festivities are suddenly interrupted when a group of Nazis comes to the shtetl and orders all of the Jewish people there to board some trucks so that they can go be "resettled" at a concentration camp. Hannah tries to warn everyone about the Holocaust, but they dismiss her, believing she is still delirious and confused after her recent illness in Lublin. The journey by truck and train to the concentration camp is brutal, with many people—including Hannah's new friend Rachel—dying along the way. When Hannah finally makes it to the concentration camp, she learns that the Nazis are forcing the Jewish people to perform hard labor for them. It takes Hannah a few days to get used to life in the concentration camp. During that time, one of her most important allies is Rivka, a girl who is younger than Hannah but who knows all about concentration camp life. Rivka learned various tricks to survive the hard way, after almost every member of her family died. Hannah and the other members of her shtetl learn that the true purpose of the concentration camp isn't work but death, with the most vulnerable Jewish people who can't work anymore being marked for death and burned up in furnaces connected to big chimneys. Rivka teaches Hannah that the best way to avoid being chosen for death is to follow the rules and avoid attracting attention. In particular, Hannah tries to avoid the camp commandant and a fellow non-Jewish prisoner called the blokova, who is missing two fingers and who cruelly rules over the other prisoners. But no matter what Hannah does, she continues to witness death around her, with Yitzchak's young children Tzipporah and Reuven both dying in the camp. His children's deaths motivate Yitzchak to start forming an escape plan for himself, Shmuel, Gitl, and eventually Hannah. But when the plan goes wrong, Gitl and Hannah barely manage to make it back to their barracks without getting caught. Yitzchak manages to escape, but a firing squad kills Shmuel, and Fayge joins him and dies, too. One day, a new guard approaches Hannah, Rivka, and two of their friends, and he accuses them of not working. He is responsible for choosing people to die and says he has to fill three more spaces. Although Hannah initially avoids being picked, she decides to secretly change places with Rivka. She figures that Rivka only has one life to live, but Hannah still has her other life back in present-day America. Hannah tells her two friends about her future life in America as they all go to their presumed death in a dark room under the chimneys, which they call the Cave of Lilith. But just as Hannah's eyes adjust to the darkness in the Cave of Lilith, she realizes that she is back in her grandparents' apartment at the Seder. With a much better understanding of Jewish history, Hannah realizes that her favorite older relative, Aunt Eva, is in fact her friend Rivka, since they have the same identification number tattoo from the concentration camp. After her experience in the past, Hannah now better understands what it means to be Jewish. Later, Aunt Eva tells Hannah about the few concentration camp prisoners who survived and how, after the war, both Gitl and Yitzchak moved to the new country of Israel, where they lived to old age and had fulfilling lives.

- Genre: Fairytale, Satire - Title: The Devoted Friend - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Pond (frame story), Countryside (central story) - Character: Little Hans. Description: Hans is the protagonist in the Linnet's tale. He is an innocent, good-natured peasant who believes himself to be the Miller's best friend. He is a peasant belonging to the working class—he lives in a tiny cottage and spends all his time working in his garden, growing beautiful flowers that he can sell at the market. Hans is generous and naïve: he works tirelessly for the Miller and fails to realize that his so-called best friend is exploiting him. Wilde also shows Hans is also very eager to learn: "So little Hans worked away for the Miller, and the Miller said all kinds of beautiful things about friendship, which Hans took down in a notebook, and used to read over at night, for he was a very good scholar." This innocence and eagerness renders Hans as a childlike figure. Hans does not change over the course of the fairytale and dies as innocent as he was at the beginning of the story. Through Hans's story, Wilde demonstrates the dangers of being too innocent in a less-than-innocent world. Hans receives neither reward for his good nature nor justice for the exploitation he experienced under the Miller, making his death all the more tragic. - Character: Hugh the Miller. Description: The Miller is the antagonist in the Linnet's tale. He is a rich, exploitative merchant who manipulates Hans into performing labor in the name of friendship. The Miller is an incredibly wealthy man—"he had a hundred sacks of flour stored away in his mill, and six milch cows, and a large flock of woolly sheep"—but he doesn't share his wealth with his so-called friend. While little Hans suffers through the winter with very little to eat, the Miller stays in his comfortable home with his wife and son, with a pinewood fire and plenty of food and drink. The Miller not only freely takes flowers and produce from Hans's garden, but also requests Hans to perform difficult chores for him throughout the story. And though he offers Hans a broken wheelbarrow—openly applauding himself for his generosity—this object never manifests in the story. The Miller's requests grow more and more unreasonable as the story progresses, showing there is no limit to how much he is willing to exploit little Hans. The Miller's final request is for Hans to fetch the doctor for the Miller's son during a storm in the middle of the night. Despite the already preposterous nature of this request, the Miller refuses to give Hans his lantern for guidance during the storm, indirectly causing Hans's death. - Theme: Innocence and Friendship. Description: In Oscar Wilde's "The Devoted Friend," a bird called a Linnet tells a story to an unagreeable, self-righteous Water-rat. The story the Linnet spins is a satirical fairytale in which the rich and self-important Hugh the Miller convinces the poor, innocent little Hans to perform various chores for him in the name of devoted friendship. Oscar Wilde wrote during the Victorian era, a time when innocence was generally portrayed as a redemptive, desirable trait. In line with this, Little Hans, the very picture of sweetness and selflessness, is delighted to do all sorts of errands and chores to help his so-called best friend and is oblivious to the fact that the Miller never does anything for him in return. Throughout the story, though, little Hans's childlike innocence allows the Miller to exploit him again and again, and ultimately leads to the young boy's miserable death. Through little Hans's tragic end, Wilde demonstrates that naivety, while charming, can be dangerous, and that true friendship is built on reciprocity—not exploitation. The so-called friendship between the Miller and little Hans is extremely lopsided: the Miller continuously hoodwinks Hans into giving things or performing chores in the name of friendship, and Hans—wanting desperately to be a good and loyal friend—remains gullible through each deception. At one point in the story, to explain for taking so much from Hans's garden, the Miller tells the young boy that "real friends should have everything in common." Hans simply accepts this with a smile and feels proud of "having a friend with such noble ideas." At one point, Hans politely declines the Miller's request to carry a sack of flour to the market, declaring regretfully that he is far too busy to help. The Miller responds by saying, "considering that I am going to give you my wheelbarrow it is rather unfriendly of you to refuse." The horrified little Hans declares "I wouldn't be unfriendly for the whole world!" before eagerly departing for the market with the Miller's flour. Wilde notes that "the neighbours thought it strange that the rich Miller never gave little Hans anything in return," yet little Hans himself remains oblivious to this. He only feels the innocent happiness of sharing with a friend and doesn't realize that his friend isn't sharing the fruits of his own labor. Despite little Hans's innocent and generous nature, he dies a terrible death. In other words, his innocence was more than for naught—it was dangerous. There is no justice for Hans in the end. Towards the end of the tale, the Miller asks Hans to fetch the doctor for his injured son. Hans proclaims, "I take it quite as a compliment your coming to me, and I will start off at once." He even agrees to go without a lantern. Hans, in his steadfast innocence, has yet to notice the Miller's deception despite all that has happened to him before this final request. He dies as innocent and as eager to please as he was in the beginning. Hans dies trudging back home in the vicious storm: "At last he lost his way, and wandered off on the moor, which was a very dangerous place, as it was full of deep holes, and there poor little Hans was drowned. His body was found the next day by some goatherds, floating in a great pool of water, and was brought back by them to the village." His death goes unnoticed by his "friend," the Miller. He dies cold, alone, and, for all his generosity, forgotten. His innocence is unrewarded. At Hans's funeral, the Miller ironically serves as chief mourner. The Miller feels no remorse and continues to be as selfish as before. At the funeral, he states that "as I was his best friend […] it is only fair that I should have the best place." At the inn after the funeral, the Miller enjoys spiced wine and sweetcakes while talking about how he doesn't know what to do with his wheelbarrow now—the one he had said he was going to give to Hans but never did—lamenting that "one certainly suffers for being generous." He does not mention all that Hans has done for him. Indeed, it seems he does not even remember. Hans's innocence and generosity has come to nothing, as he never had a true friendship with the Miller. In "The Devoted Friend," innocence coupled with an unbalanced friendship leads to injustice and suffering. With each reiteration of the Miller's exploitation of Hans, the reader grows more wary of Hans's innocence. Indeed, it seems that in this fairytale, innocence can be equated with foolishness. In the "friendship" between the Miller and Hans, readers may find the Miller's selfishness frustrating, but Hans's innocence proves equally disappointing. Wilde does not reward Hans for his innocence; rather, Hans is punished. It is not that innocence per se is a negative personality trait, but that in a less-than-innocent world, innocence can often lead to disastrous consequences. - Theme: Storytelling, Language, and Morality. Description: When the Linnet concludes its story about Hans and the Miller, the Water-rat is outraged at the idea that the story contained a moral—even though the Water-rat doesn't know what, exactly, that moral was, he is still furious at the mere thought of it. After the Water-rat storms away, the Linnet declares, "I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him […] The face is that I told him a story with a moral." Voicing the story's overarching message, the Duck replies, "Ah! That is always a very dangerous thing to do." The narrator also chimes in, noting, "And I quite agreed with her." This passage gestures to the role that lessons and morals play in the story more broadly. In fact, "The Devoted Friend" is brimming with moral guidance, either spread straightforwardly through the spoken word or couched in a story. Ultimately, "The Devoted Friend" demonstrates that though storytelling and language can be used to convey morals, such morals are not necessarily correct and should not be blindly accepted or rejected. The inner story of "The Devoted Friend" is peppered with moral teachings, most of which are spread by the self-righteous Miller, who frequently makes grand, sweeping statements about everything from laziness to friendship. The most conspicuous moralizer in the story, the Miller makes many moralizing comments to little Hans, from "real friends should have everything in common" to "friendship never forgets." He constantly teaches little Hans not to be selfish: at one point in the story, when Hans says he is too busy to help the Miller with his chores, the Miller tells him "that considering I am going to give you my wheelbarrow it is rather unfriendly of you to refuse." Although the Miller never gives little Hans anything and doesn't practice the unselfishness that he advocates, he is still a wellspring for moral teachings. The Miller's most devoted listener is little Hans. He clings to the Miller's every word and accepts all of his moral teachings as truth—which eventually proves fatal. Through the character of Hans, Wilde teaches readers to beware of blindly accepting morals. When the Miller tells little Hans, "I should have thought that friendship, true friendship, was quite free from selfishness of any kind," little Hans enthusiastically accepts this statement with "My dear friend, my best friend […] you are welcome to all the flowers in my garden. I would much sooner have your good opinion than my silver buttons, any day." Hans maintain this attitude of blind acceptance throughout the story: "So little Hans worked away for the Miller, and the Miller said all kinds of beautiful things about friendship, which Hans took down in a notebook, and used to read over at night, for he was a very good scholar." He tries his best to practice what the Miller teaches, without realizing the Miller's hypocritical tendencies. Little Hans dies an unfortunate death, due to his blind devotion to the Miller. When the Miller's son falls and hurts himself, the Miller tells Hans to fetch the doctor, despite the vicious storm brewing outside. Furthermore, the Miller refuses to give Hans his lantern. This causes Hans to lose his way, fall into a hole on the moor, and drown. Through this, Wilde demonstrates that blind acceptance of seemingly beautiful morals can have disastrous consequences. The outer story—that of the Linnet and the Water-rat—speaks to the way that storytelling is a more subtle vehicle for moral teaching. However, while Hans's character arc showed the dangers of accepting moral guidance unflinchingly, the Water-rat's shows that rejecting moral teachings can be just as bad. When the Water-rat pompously declares that he defines friendship as someone being wholly devoted to him, the Linnet resolves to tell the Water-rat a story to highlight the dangers of this line of thinking: "'Let me tell you a story on the subject,' said the Linnet. 'Is the story about me?' asked the Water-rat. […] 'It is applicable to you,' answered the Linnet." The Linnet's response here points to the way that stories can act as vehicles for moral teachings. Knowing that the Water-rat is unagreeable and obtuse—and wouldn't be receptive to direct criticism or moral guidance—the Linnet couches a moral (that friendship based on one-sided devotion is dangerous) inside a story. While the Water-rat doesn't give in to the dangers of blindly accepting moral teachings, he responds in an equally unhelpful way. After the Linnet has concluded the story and admitted that it did, in fact, have a moral underpinning it, the Water-rat grows furious. "I think you should have told me that before you began," he says. "If you had done so, I certainly would not have listened to you." As the Water-rat is clearly an unlikable, unsavory character, it seems fitting that he refuses to engage very deeply in a discussion about morals. Although the Linnet hasn't even told him what the moral is, the Water-rat is willing to reject that moral teaching outright, refusing to change his ways or see things differently. Thus, while blindly accepting morals is dangerous, blindly rejecting them can be just as harmful. Fairytales and fables are known for having a moral of sorts and children are often encouraged to accept them. Wilde warns against this acceptance through the moral of his own story: do not blindly accept the morals that others preach. However, the outer story of the animals reveals that simply rejecting the morals that other people teach won't do, either. In charting the dangers of these two extremes, Wilde seems to be advocating for another approach: thinking critically and thoughtfully about morals in order to adopt only those which a person feels are truly right. - Theme: Class and Exploitation. Description: There is a clear socioeconomic gap between little Hans and the Miller: little Hans is a poor villager, while the Miller is a rich tradesman. Despite his wealth, the Miller remains greedy and continues to take from Hans and extract the poor man's labor, even though Hans has close to nothing. Furthermore, the Miller demonstrates no qualms about his exploitation of Hans, nor is he punished for it. Through this narrative of exploitation, Wilde demonstrates that the rich are often able to successfully capitalize on the poor without facing any backlash for their actions. Wilde makes it clear that the Miller is much wealthier than little Hans and that they belong to different classes. When the Linnet begins his tale, he tells the Water-rat, "I don't think [little Hans] was distinguished at all, except for his kind heart, and his funny, round, good-humoured face." Little Hans "lived in a tiny cottage all by himself, and every day he worked in his garden." On the other hand, the Miller "had a hundred sacks of flour stored away in his mill, and six milch cows, and a large flock of woolly sheep." In terms of commercial value, the Miller's assets far surpass the beautiful flowers in little Hans's garden. The winter months are "a very bad time" for little Hans; having "no money at all to buy bread with," Hans is forced to sell the silver buttons from his Sunday coat, his silver chain, his big pipe, and his wheelbarrow. In contrast to little Hans, the Miller spends his winter conversing with his son and wife, who "sat in her comfortable armchair by the big pinewood fire" with her "large glass of warm ale." While the Miller enjoys these amenities, little Hans "suffer[s] a good deal from cold and hunger, and often ha[s] to go to bed without any supper but a few dried pears or some hard nuts." From this, readers see that little Hans earns his bread from day to day, while the Miller is wealthy enough to enjoy periods of leisure. The Miller, despite his wealth, still manipulates the poor Hans into giving up property and labor, and Hans receives no compensation for his efforts. At the beginning of the fairytale, the Miller takes freely from Hans's garden: "Indeed, so devoted was the Miller to little Hans, that he would never go by his garden without leaning over the wall and plucking a large nosegay, or a handful of sweet herbs, or filling his pockets with plums and cherries if it was the fruit season." Later on, the Miller takes a plank from Hans to repair the roof of the Miller's own barn as well as a basketful of flowers that Hans was going to sell at the market. The Miller, despite his many possessions, always wants more. His greediness leads him to take even from those who are much less fortunate than he is. The Miller also manipulates Hans into giving free labor throughout the course of the fairytale. Hans takes the Miller's sack of flour to the market, mends his barn-roof, drives his sheep to the mountain, and, quite fatally, fetches the doctor for his son during a storm. The Miller "was always coming round and sending [Hans] off on long errands, or getting him to help at the mill," so little Hans never has time to look after his flowers. The Miller promises Hans a broken wheelbarrow as payment—a useless form of compensation, considering that he took the plank of wood Hans would need to repair the wheelbarrow—but the Miller never follows through on this meager act of generosity. The Miller is not punished for his unjust treatment of Hans. Through this, Wilde shows that those belonging to the upper classes can often manipulate the lower classes for their own benefit and remain at ease about their actions. Although the Miller's actions lead to the death of little Hans, he still serves the honorable role of chief mourner at Hans's funeral. He even declares, "As I was [Hans's] best friend […] it is only fair that I should have the best place." No one in the village appears to dispute this claim. The Miller also evades punishment on an emotional level, as he shows no guilt regarding Hans's death. Indeed, there is even a sentiment of blame in the Miller's last words in the fairytale. When the Blacksmith remarks that "Little Hans is certainly a great loss to everyone," the Miller makes a heartless reply: "A great loss to me at any rate […] why, I had as good as given him my wheelbarrow, and now I really don't know what to do with it. It is very much in my way at home, and it is in such bad repair that I could not get anything for it if I sold it. I will certainly take care not to give away anything again. One certainly suffers for being generous." It is as if the Miller blames Hans for dying and not taking the unwanted wheelbarrow. There is no hint of a guilty conscience anywhere in his words—the Miller has not the vaguest inclination of towards remorse. Ultimately, the fairytale stands as a matter-of-fact portrayal of how the upper classes (represented by the Miller) can manipulate the lower classes (represented by Hans), with neither party aware of the exploitation that is happening. The story ends on a bleak note, as Wilde resists from providing any sort of solution. There is neither guilt nor punishment for the rich manipulator—such is the way things are in this world. - Climax: Little Hans drowns while doing yet another favor for the Miller. - Summary: "The Devoted Friend" is a fairytale that operates as a story within a story. In the frame story, a Linnet, a Duck, and a Water-rat gather around a pond. The Water-rat declares of knowing "nothing in the world that is either nobler or rarer than a devoted friendship." When asked what this kind of friendship consists of, the Water-rat explains that it involves his friends being wholeheartedly devoted to him. The Linnet asks what the Water-rat would do for his friends in return, but the Water-rat doesn't understand what the Linnet is talking about. Thus, the Linnet decides to tell a story on the subject of friendship. The interior story, told by the Linnet, depicts the relationship between a poor, innocent peasant named Hans and a rich tradesman named the Miller. At the beginning of the story, the reader learns that the Miller claims to be Hans's devoted friend, and continually visits and takes flowers from Hans's garden. When winter descends, the Miller does not visit Hans, choosing to sit in the comfort of his home with his wife and son while Hans suffers greatly and sells various personal possessions for bread. When spring comes, the Miller visits Hans again and begins to exploit Hans in various ways. Although the Miller claims that he will very generously give Hans his wheelbarrow, he admits that the wheelbarrow is extremely damaged, and the reader never actually sees this wheelbarrow pass into Hans's hands. When Hans exclaims that he has a single piece of wood he could use to repair said wheelbarrow, the Miller selfishly takes the wood for himself, declaring that it was just the thing he's been needing to patch his roof. Later, the Miller convinces Hans to carry a sack flour to the market, mend his barn-roof, and drive his sheep to the mountain. All the while, the Miller espouses beautiful, wise-sounding things about the nature of friendship and generosity. During this period of working for the Miller, Hans is prevented from tending his garden. Hans simply consoles himself with "the reflection that the Miller was his best friend," and continues to work away for the Miller. One night, the Miller's son falls off a ladder and hurts himself. The Miller asks Hans to fetch the doctor, despite a storm that rages outside, and refuses to give Hans his lantern. Hans successfully fetches the doctor, but on the way back, loses his way on the moor and drowns in a hole. Hans's body is found the next day. At Hans's funeral, the Miller serves as chief mourner and shows no remorse for his actions, and instead laments that there is not one to take his broken wheelbarrow. Back in the frame story, the Water-rat is upset that the Linnet does not tell what became of the Miller. The Linnet responds that it is evident the Water-rat did not understand the moral of the story, and the Water-rat, appalled that the story had a moral at all, huffily returns his hole. Both the Duck and the narrator affirm that telling a story with a moral is "dangerous."

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Diary of a Madman - Point of view: First person - Setting: The story takes place in a section of the city of St. Petersburg. After Poprishchin descends into insanity, he believes he is living in Spain; he is actually in an unnamed insane asylum. - Character: Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin. Description: Poprishchin, the protagonist of "Diary of a Madman," is a low-level civil servant with an uninspiring career who is obsessed with social class and status. He is resentful and envious of his superiors, and dismissive of strangers he considers low-class, but never expresses his acidic thoughts aloud. Instead, he expresses his true feelings in the form of angry, judgmental diary entries. Poprishchin is also in love with Sophie, the daughter of his boss, but his poetic thoughts and feelings for her never translate into actual conversations. Poprishchin's inability to truly communicate with anyone, combined with his fixation on social status, puts him in a state of total isolation. Eventually, he loses his sanity. Throughout the story, Poprishchin is unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality: he believes that two dogs are talking in human language, for instance, and that he is a long-lost king of Spain. Poprishchin is eventually taken to an insane asylum, where he spends his days in a paranoid state or absorbed by delusions of grandeur. Poprishchin eventually, briefly, realizes how isolated he has become and ends the story with an awareness that he is all alone in the world, with no true connection to tether him to other people. - Character: Sophie. Description: Sophie, an upper-class woman, is the daughter of Poprishchin's boss and is Poprishchin's love interest. Poprishchin is infatuated with Sophie, and often writes poetic phrases and verses in his diary about her looks despite the fact that she barely notices or interacts with him. She is also the owner of a lapdog, Medji, whom Poprishchin believes writes letters to another dog in the neighborhood. Some of Medji's letters, which are likely hallucinated by Poprishchin in his insanity, contain information about Sophie's life. Sophie is in love with a kammerjunkera gentleman of low, but imperial, rankand Poprishchin is angered to learn she will likely marry him. Medji's letter also indicates that Sophie thinks Poprishchin is unattractive, a fact that further infuriates him. - Character: Medji and Fidèle. Description: Medji and Fidèle are two dogs in Poprishchin's neighborhood. Medji is the lapdog of Sophie, who is the daughter of Poprishchin's boss. Fidèle's owner lives in a building owned by a man called Zverkov, whom Poprishchin scorns for having low-class tenants. When Poprishchin encounters Medji and Fidèle while he is out in town, he believes the two dogs are speaking to each other in human language. Medji and Fidèle discuss the letters they have sent to one another, and Poprishchin is intrigued by these letters' contents. He eventually goes to both Medji's and Fidèle's homes to steal the letters, which reveal details about the lives of the dogs' owners. Poprishchin does not realize that hearing Medji and Fidèle speak with human voices indicates serious mental disturbance; he is convinced that such things are normal. Poprishchin's interactions with Medji and Fidèle, therefore, illustrate the beginnings of his insanity. - Character: The Section Chief. Description: The section chief is one of Poprishchin's managers. The section chief is critical of Poprishchin's behavior and professionalism, pointing out Poprishchin's lack of career advancement despite being forty years old. The section chief is also off put by Poprishchin's infatuation with the boss's daughter, Sophie, and brings attention to the class disparity between them. The section's chief criticism of Poprishchin's behavior is one of the only external insights into Poprishchin's character. His descriptions illustrate Poprishchin's professional failures, indicating that despite Poprishchin's lofty opinion of himself, he is actually an unproductive and inept worker. - Character: The Director. Description: The director is Poprishchin's boss and the father of Sophie, Poprishchin's love interest. Poprishchin believes the director is a very educated man because his office contains many books with foreign titles. The director barely speaks to Poprishchin, only occasionally making small talk about the weather; nevertheless, Poprishchin wishes he could start up a conversation with him. Poprishchin's interactions with the director illustrate the difference between his internal thoughtsverbose, analytical, and oftentimes judgmentaland his meek behavior. - Character: Teplov. Description: The love interest of Sophie, the director's daughter. Teplov is only described through the letters of Medji and Fidèle, so it unclear whether his existence is real, or only part of Poprishchin's hallucinations. Teplov is of a higher class than Poprishchin, which infuriates him, as it reinforces his belief that only the rich get rewarded in society. - Theme: Social Class and Status. Description: In Nikolai Gogol's "Diary of a Madman," the middling civil servant Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin gradually loses his sanity, resulting in his imprisonment at an asylum. Poprishchin's insanity is exacerbated by his fixation on social class and statushe spends much of the story resenting his peers for their positions in society. In fact, Poprishchin constantly comments on others' social status, even when he is merely traveling through town or doing errands. In Gogol's story, this constant stream of commentary turns into mania, leading to the swift deterioration of Poprishchin's mental state. Gogol's story thus warns readers that fixation on others' social class and status can lead to dangerous obsession, and even insanity. Throughout the story, Gogol provides multiple examples of Poprishchin's fixation on his own class. In on scene, Poprishchin has an interaction with his section chief, a manager at his job, who points out that Poprishchin is "over forty" and that it's about time he "got smart" about his career. He tells Poprishchin to "take a look" at himself, as he is "a zero, nothing more." Poprishchin, unable to take this criticism of his status, instead believes the section chief is "envious," as Poprishchin sits in the "director's study." Due to his obsession with status, Poprishchin can only filter his manager's valid critique through the lens of status. The section chief's questioning frustrates Poprishchin, and he mentally criticizes the section chief's face and hairstyle. Poprishchin is unable to deal with the section chief's questions in a levelheaded way, and instead assumes the section chief is "jealous" of him. He believes his manager perceives "the signs of benevolence" that are "preferentially bestowed" on him. Poprishchin seems to think his innate, imagined social status makes him better than his manager. Poprishchin then continues to obsess over the section chief's comments, and writes out a litany in his diary, asking, "Am I some sort of nobody?" Poprishchin goes on to claim he is "a nobleman" and "can earn rank." He continues to rage against the section chief's criticism in his diary and claims his "reputation" can become "even better" than his manager's reputation. Poprishchin's obsession with social class and status is pervasive, extending beyond himself and his peers. Multiple scenes in the story emphasize how Poprishchin continuously judges and assesses everyone and everything around him through the lens of class. For example, when Poprishchin goes for a walk, his descriptions of the people around him are solely based on their social status. He emphasizes that he sees "only peasant women," "Russian merchants," and "messenger boys." He also points out that he only sees one person from "the gentry," who is a "fellow clerk." Even in casual encounters, Poprishchin focuses on strangers' status and constantly compares those strangers with himself. In another mundane scene, Poprishchin continues to fixate on class and comment judgmentally on everything around him. When he goes on an errand that requires him to walk through a particular neighborhood, he points out that he "can't stand cabbage," a common food whose smell "comes pouring out" from the shops. Moreover, he claims there is a "whiff of hell" coming from "each house" that smells so foul that he has to hold his nose and run past. He also emphasizes that the "vile artisans" in the city produce "so much soot" that it is "impossible" for a "gentleman" to "walk there." Workers and strangers of every class, from artisans to cooks, draw his scorn. Poprishchin not only comments on those he considers below his own status, but also fixates on the class and status of his superiors. He emphasizes the grace and intelligence of his director, pointing out how the director's books contain "learning" that Poprishchin's "kind" cannot "come close to." Poprishchin does wish, in fact, that he could learn more from those with more social clout—he wants to see "what they do in their circle," to better inform his own behavior. Poprishchin's obsession with social class, which dominates his work life and his casual encounters, eventually becomes an all-consuming mania. After reading a news article about a missing king in Spain, Poprishchin's preoccupation with status—and his unhappiness with his own social class—leads him to fantasize about cases of mistaken identity. Poprishchin's begins to wish that he was "some sort of count," and claims there are many examples "in history" of men being "revealed" as a person of higher class. In his diary, he writes down his dream of being "promoted" to a role such as "governor general." Poprishchin's fixation on social status is so thorough that it leads him to imagine various scenarios where his true, higher social status is hidden, even from himself. Amidst these dreams of mistaken identity, Poprishchin reads the newspaper and writes in his diary that there are "strange doings" in Spain, as Spain's "throne is vacant." In Poprishchin's perspective, which is dominated by class hierarchy, this vacancy is illogical and contrary to the natural order of things. The abnormality of Spain's missing king, combined with Poprishchin's obsession with class, eventually leads Poprishchin to believe that he is the lost heir, and he names himself Ferdinand VIII. He realizes in a "flash of lightning" that he is not a lowly "councillor," but instead a true nobleman. Poprishchin's inner torment over his middling social status has consumed him so thoroughly that he must make up cases of mistaken identity to remedy his unhappiness. Throughout the story, Gogol reveals how thoroughly class and social status infiltrates Poprishchin's thoughts. Poprishchin's obsession expands from a self-directed fixation, eventually permeating his entire life and affecting both his career and his wellbeing. Ultimately, Poprishchin's unhappiness about his civil servant status leads him to spin a fantasy where he is a long-lost king, and it becomes clear that Poprishchin's obsession has driven him insane. Gogol seems to warn readers that constant comparison, judgment, and anxiety over one's status can lead to drastic consequences. - Theme: Writing, Escapism, and Fantasy. Description: Civil servant Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin spends his personal time writing in his diary, where he is able to express his true feelings. By contrast, his daily interactions, oftentimes brief and dull, do not accurately reflect his thoughts and aspirations. Despite providing a more accurate view of his internal state, however, Poprishchin's writing also presents a decidedly fantasized version of himself at odds with reality. In fact, writing allows Poprishchin to explore multiple fantasies: he imagines that two dogs are capable of writing letters to each other, and he writes many diary entries claiming that he is a forgotten heir to the Spanish throne. Gogol's story illustrates how writing offers an escape and a space for fantasythough these fantasies are sometimes misleading, grandiose, or damagingfor characters like Poprishchin, who live unhappy lives. Gogol's story is written in the form of diary entries, a formatting choice that emphasizes how important writing is in Poprishchin's life. These entries, a form of escape for Poprishchin, reveal his inner monologue to be more judgmental and verbose than his day-to-day speech. For example, Poprishchin's behavior at work is markedly different from his internal thoughts. Poprishchin holds little authority in his job, but he is often dismissive of his superiors when he writes about them in his diary. He describes his section chief as a "cursed stork," and claims that the treasurer is a miserly and dictatorial colleague, even though in the treasurer's home "his own cook slaps him" and rejects his authority. Poprishchin never verbalizes this scornful commentary, however—he only expresses these thoughts in writing. This mismatch in Poprishchin's written and spoken language continues with other figures in his life. Besides using his diary for secret expression of his scorn, Poprishchin also uses his entries to express hidden, happier emotions. He is infatuated with the director's daughter, Sophie, and writes about her with fond, poetic language—noting, for instance, that she descends from her carriage "like a little bird" and comparing "her glance" to "the sun." When Sophie talks directly to him, however, Poprishchin is monosyllabic in response. In another scene illustrating Popishchin's sheepishness, he is unable to talk to the director at his job. Poprishchin insists that he has "several times" intended "to strike up a conversation" with the director, a man he considers "a real statesman." He writes in his diary that he wishes he could learn the "equivocations and courtly tricks" of men like the director. These written entries reveal Poprishchin's true thoughts, illustrating his high-class aspirations and his belief that he can learn what elite men "do in their circle." The self-assurance, sense of superiority, and keen observations depicted in Poprishchin's diary are complete fabrications, however; in reality, Poprishchin is barely able to speak to the director, and does not, despite his wishes, ever. attempt to start a conversation on noble etiquette. Gogol continues to populate the story with scenes showing writing to be a form of both genuine expression and fantasy. In one encounter, Poprishchin runs an errand and sees Sophie, who has left her lapdog Medji outside while she conducts her trip. Poprishchin believes he hears Medji "speak in human language" to another dog, Fidèle. Medji claims she has written a letter to Fidèle, revealing that, even in Poprishchin's unrealistic fantasy, he focuses on writing as a form of self-expression. In Poprishchin's world—where writing is a vehicle for expressing true thoughts—dogs that behave like humans must also write like humans. Poprishchin later travels to Fidèle's home and steals some "little papers" from the dog. He believes these papers will "reveal everything," such as "political relations" and the true feelings of Sophie, his beloved. Poprishchin's hope that the letters will disclose secret information is an escapist fantasy; the letters' made-up contents are not likely to enlighten him. In fact, the letters only reveal Poprishchin's paranoia; they depict an obsession with class and status, indicating that he likely hallucinated their existence in the first place. One of the dog's letters discusses Poprishchin's physical qualities scornfully, and he thinks it is the work of his envious coworkers. Another letter reveals Sophie's infatuation with another man, who belongs to a higher class than Poprishchin. Even in Poprishchin's fantasies, expressed through these made-up letters, his fixation on status and reputation leads to overt paranoia. Like his diary entries, then, the dogs' letters allow Poprishchin to spin fantasies and express his hidden mania. To distract himself from the letters, Poprishchin reads a story in the newspaper which discusses how Spain's "throne is vacant" and how "a queen" will "ascend" if no heir is found. In his diary, he begins to fixate on this state of affairs, as a kingdom must have a king. Eventually, Poprishchin is so obsessed with the mystery of the missing king that he starts claiming he is "that king." Poprishchin's fantasy is so thorough that he even imagines it is a day in the distant future and dates his entry to the "year 2000." Poprishchin's entries become an escape route for him, allowing him to fantasize that he is not living life as a miserable "councillor," but as a lost heir to a distant throne. The headlines, too, provide Poprishchin an escape from his life, and an outlet through which to express his madness. After Poprishchin concludes that he is Spain's lost king, he gains the courage to act rebellious at his office. Poprishchin's fantasy has kept him away from work for "three weeks," and he returns only "as a joke." When documents are "placed in front" of him, he merely signs them "Ferdinand VIII." Through this signature—fittingly, an act of writing—Poprishchin finally expresses the hidden sense of superiority he feels for his coworkers. In Gogol's story, writing is vital to Poprishchin inner life and his only true form of expression. Poprishchin's diary entries allow him to express criticism and social commentary that he is too timid to say aloud. His writing also allows him to create a fantasized version of himself, who can interact gracefully with his superiors and learn their ways through observation. While this fantasized version of Poprishchin never translates off the pages of his diary, he nevertheless feels a sense of self-assurance and superiority via its imagining. Poprishchin's final diary entries allow him to live out his fondest wish: to be a highborn citizen, greater and more respected than his peers. Although Poprishchin's writing is mainly fantastical and tinged with madness, it nevertheless allows him to escape from his lowly circumstances. - Theme: Insanity. Description: In "Diary of a Madman," Gogol chronicles how Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin slowly descends into madness and is imprisoned in an insane asylum. Poprishchin begins the story seeming relatively ordinary, but his insanity soon manifests in multiple forms. For example, he believes that dogs can speak in human language and that they are capable of writing letters. Eventually, he suffers delusions of grandeur, and begins to believe he is a lost king of Spain. Gogol juxtaposes Poprishchin's insanity—which results from common feelings like inferiority and envy—with moments of rationality, illustrating how imperceptible the line between madness and normalcy can be. Gogol provides readers with various scenes that illustrate Poprishchin's sanity, emphasizing his commonplace dissatisfaction with his career and station in life. Initially, Poprishchin is portrayed as a common workingman, a low-level clerk who mentally insults his colleagues and shirks his responsibilities. He admits to not wanting to go "to the office at all," and thinks his coworkers are "envious" because he sits in the "director's study." Poprishchin's inner monologue is petty but commonplace and does not reveal anything other than an overinflated sense of self-importance. In fact, Poprishchin's commentary often reads like innocuous gossip. He discusses how in the "provincial government," the buildings are dirty but the workers can rent a "country house" or wear a "beaver coat." He admits that if it was not for the "nobility of the work" he would have "quit" his job a while ago. These observations and concerns, while indicative of Poprishchin's unhappiness, do not reveal an inner madness or mania. Gogol then slowly introduces scenes that illustrate Poprishchin's insanity, juxtaposting them with other scenes of normality to show how subtle these shifts in Poprishchin's perspective can seem. When Poprishchin runs an errand in town, he believes he hears one dog, named Medji, speaking with another dog, Fidèle. At first, Poprishchin is "very surprised" to hear the dog speak in "human language," but he soon loses his sense of astonishment. Instead, he claims there have been "many such examples" of animals speaking in human languages. This sudden change in opinion begins to illustrate how quickly his thoughts go from rational to irrational. Poprishchin then reveals that he has "begun" to "hear and see things" that "no one" else has experienced before. A few days after believing he has heard Medji and Fidèle speaking to one another, he convinces himself to "get hold" of the letters "exchanged" by the dogs. Eventually, Poprishchin retrieves the letters and begins to read them to himself. He admits there is "something doggy" in the letters, as they discuss ideas such as food and being petted. While the premise of the letters is clearly fantastical, these details lend them a sense of realism. Poprishchin's ability to highlight unrealistic versus believable details blurs the boundary between reality and madness. Poprishchin's ability to discern reality from fantasy weakens further as the story continues. Poprishchin reads of "strange doings" in Spain, where the "throne is vacant" and there are rumors that a queen will ascend if an heir is not found. Poprishchin is unusually disturbed by this news and writes in his diary that "it cannot be" that Spain has "no king." Poprishchin's fixation on social status and hierarchy begins to reveal the mania that shapes his thoughts. Poprishchin eventually begins to have delusions of grandeur, believing that he is the lost king of Spain; he names his royal alter ego Ferdinand VIII. He dresses himself up in tattered robes and announces his royal status to his housekeeper. This rapid descent into insanity leads him to lose his job, and he is taken away to the "Spanish border"—which is actually an insane asylum—by people he believes are "Spanish deputies." Poprishchin can no longer separate reality from fantasy, indicating the depth of his insanity. Poprishchin's condition continues to deteriorate, but his belief in his royal status skews his rationality. When the staff of the asylum shaves his head and drips "cold water" on his head, he believes he is the victim of an unusual type of popular ritual, or "court etiquette." His writing, paradoxically, reveals the truth of his miserable situation while maintaining his fantasy. Poprishchin understands that his treatment is unfair, but his fantasy of kingship keeps him from realizing why he is being treated poorly. Poprishchin inevitably fails to make sense of his surroundings, even though the truth of those surroundings is clear in his writing. He is ultimately unable to tell that his fantasies are false, a mark of his madness. In Gogol's story, the protagonist Poprishchin slowly loses his grasp of reality. While his commentary initially sounds like the complaints of an everyday worker, he eventually reveals how he hears voices and believes himself to be royalty. Gogol lists various scenes from Poprishchin's perspective that are both realistic and fantastical to illustrate how quickly a character's thoughts can shift between normality and madness. - Theme: Isolation. Description: Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin, an embittered and judgmental clerk, dislikes many of his coworkers and fixates on his low social status. Despite his verbose and critical inner monologue, which he records in his diary, Poprishchin's outward persona is quiet and reserved. Poprishchin's inability to talk to his peers and his judgmental stance prevent him from truly connecting with anyone. This total isolation leads to the rapid deterioration of his sanity, and he starts to imagine he is the lost king of Spain; his imagined royalty, in turn, helps him justify his separation from other people. Isolation, in Gogol's story, is a powerful force that, if unchecked, can push people more deeply into the life of the mind for better or for worse, encouraging the creation of fantasy worlds as a means to find a sense of connection and belonging. Gogol provides readers with many examples of Poprishchin's dismissive internal commentary, emphasizing his inability to relate to his coworkers or peers. Initially, Poprishchin is introduced to readers a low-level clerk who scorns his colleagues. He describes his section chief as a "cursed stork," and dismisses the treasurer as stingy and authoritarian. Poprishchin's commentary lacks a single positive thought for his peers and extends to total strangers, indicating that even remote passersby are not exempt from his judgmental worldview. He has only pessimistic views of the clerks in the provincial government, and comments on their "vile" clothes and how they act "goody-goody." When he meets a "fellow clerk" at an intersection, he judges the clerk for "ogling" a woman, insinuating the clerk is a superficial flirt. Poprishchin has no thoughts of sympathy or understanding for anyone, regardless of their relation to him. Gogol then illustrates how Poprishchin's inner commentary, which is sarcastic and scornful, does not actually align with his outwardly shy behavior. When Poprishchin's boss, the director, tries to make small talk about the weather, Poprishchin's response is short and dull, despite the in-depth observations he makes in his diary about his boss's character. He admits he has tried "several times" to start a conversation with the director, but his "tongue wouldn't obey" him. Poprishchin is also unable to share his amorous feelings with Sophie, the object of his affection. Poprishchin writes about his feelings with poetic language and eloquence, yet when Sophie asks him a question directly he only responds, "No, ma'am." This incongruity between his private thoughts and his public actions reveals how little of his true personality Poprishchin reveals to others; he has completely hidden his feelings from the world, only revealing them through writing. Such a discrepancy keeps Poprishchin's real character from being revealed to others, isolating him further. Poprishchin, who is completely isolated from his peers, is then driven mad by his fixation on social status; he begins to believe he is Spain's lost king, Ferdinand VIII. Poprishchin's alienation from society is so thorough, it seems, that his hallucinations become his only means of interpreting his surroundings. He is taken to an insane asylum, imagining that "Spanish deputies" have come to retrieve him. He is then beaten but justifies this treatment by imagining it is a "knightly custom." When the asylum's workers shave off his hair and begin "dripping cold water" on his head, he assumes he "fallen into the hands" of the "Inquistion." The staff's actions further alienate and isolate Poprishchin, leading him to believe—mistakenly—that he is being persecuted as part of a historical plot. This treatment eventually does begis to torment Poprishchin. His isolation is so thorough that he asks to be carried "out of this world." He then imagines that he sees his mother "sitting" by a window and exclaims that there is "no place for him." Poprishchin's fantasy of royal blood, which temporarily protected him from recognizing his miserable fate, eventually fades. As a result, Poprishchin momentarily becomes aware of his total isolation from society. Poprishchin's brief acknowledgment that he is utterly alone thereby provides a moment of deep self-realization amidst his delusion and mania. In "Diary of a Madman," the split between Poprishchin's inner thoughts and outward behavior isolates him from other people. Eventually, this lack of connection—combined with his fixation on status—leads him into madness. Gogol highlights how madness at first protects Poprishchin from realizing his isolation. Eventually, however, Poprishchin's sense of alienation is so thorough that it breaks through his fantasy of mistaken identity. He ultimately begins to realize there is "no place" for him "in the world." Isolation, a powerful force, has brought Poprishchin to the depths of insanity, but has also provided him a moment of true clarity about his miserable life. - Climax: Poprishchin begins to believe he is Spain's long-lost king and is taken away to an insane asylum. - Summary: Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin is a middle-aged, low-level clerk who is fixated on social rank and status. He pores over the details of his life in diary entries, which often illustrate his frustration and anger. One day, he arrives late at his office, and decides to go for a walk through town. While walking, he runs into Sophie, the daughter of his boss, the director. Sophie is out doing errands at a local shop; her lapdog, Medji, waits for her owner outside. Poprishchin suddenly hears a "voice" and realizes that Medji, the lapdog, is talking to Fidèle, another neighborhood dog. Poprishchin is at first "very surprised" to hear the dogs speak in "human language," but then claims that there have been "many examples" of this type of animal behavior "in the world." Poprishchin eavesdrops further on the dogs' conversation, and hears that Medji has written Fidèle a letter. He ends that day's diary entry by making a "note" of where Fidèle lives, and claims he will visit soon. In the next day's diary entry, Poprishchin recalls scenes from his office. He recounts how his boss's study is filled with books with foreign titles, indicating that the director is an educated man. When Sophie walks into the office, Poprishchin is struck dumb by her appearance. In his head, he fantasizes about impressing her with well-worded phrases. In reality, however, Sophie drops her handkerchief and Poprishchin nearly trips over his feet to retrieve it for her; she then leaves, with the two of them having exchanged barely any words. A lackey comes in and tells Poprishchin to go home for the day. The next few entries in Poprishchin's diary describe mundane scenes from his life. He has an interaction with the section chief, one of his managers, about his unimpressive career trajectory. Instead of taking the criticism seriously, Poprishchin believes the section chief is envious of him for his innate social status. Poprishchin's diary eventually returns to the subject of the dogs' letters. He admits to seeing Medji in town, and writes about how he asked her to reveal details about Sophie's life. He then describes going to Fidèle's home and stealing a "bundle" of "little papers." Poprishchin believes the letters will help him "finally learn" about the "affairs" of his neighborhood, as dogs know "all the political relations." Poprishchin does not seem shocked at his own behavior, and is fully convinced that the dogs are capable of writing each other letters about political intrigue. Poprishchin reads the letters, which sometimes contain digressions about food and being petted by the dogs' owners but also reveal the director's political ambitions, as well as Sophie's love interest, a low-ranking nobleman named Teplov. Poprishchin is infuriated by this news, and writes angrily in his diary about how richer men get "all that's best in the world." Poprishchin continues to express anger and frustration in his diary entries, railing against what he believes to be an unjust world. He writes, somewhat hopefully, that he might be "some sort of count or general," and that maybe his role as "councillor" is a mistake. He begins to think he may not know who he really is. He then recounts reading a story in the newspaper, where there are "strange doings" in Spain. He reads that the "throne is vacant" and that Spain's officials are trying to select "an heir." Poprishchin expresses disbelief, claiming that a state cannot "be without a king." He starts to believe that the king is merely somewhere "unknown," or hiding due to mysterious circumstances. Suddenly, Poprishchin's diary entries change tone. He writes that it is the "Year 2000" and that Spain's king "has been found." He claims that he, in fact, is Spain's long-lost king, and cannot fathom how he ever thought he was a mere "councillor." Poprishchin's diary entries continue to become more nonsensical. He writes in an entry dated the "86th of Martober" that he has not been to work for "three weeks." When he finally shows up to the office, having been scolded by his manager, he signs papers as "Ferdinand VIII," the name he has given himself as Spain's lost king. He then begins a long, written litany against women, claiming that they are all "in love with the devil." Poprishchin eventually writes that "Spanish deputies" have taken him to Spain, but his descriptions make it clear that he is actually being imprisoned in an asylum. At this point, Poprishchin's entries are devoid of any semblance of reality; he believes that "China and Spain" are "one and the same," and is worried about a phenomenon where "the earth" sits on "the moon." When he announces his worries to the other patients at the asylum, a staff member beats him with a stick. Poprishchin's fantasy persists, and he believes the various corporal punishments he receives are forms of "court etiquette" in Spain. This fantasy initially keeps him from realizing the bleakness of his situation, though he admits the "cursed stick" is "extremely painful." Eventually, however, this physical torture begins to take away the shine of Poprishchin's royal delusion and he becomes aware of his total isolation. He claims his "head is burning," and asks to be saved and carried "out of" the "world." He imagines a scene with his mother in which he cries out for her to save him, her "sick child." With this cry for help, Poprishchin briefly acknowledges his alienation from the world. He then adds, nonsensically, that the "Dey of Algiers," a royal figure, has a "bump" under "his nose," indicating that his insanity has returned.

- Genre: Short story, modernism - Title: The Doll’s House - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: A small, countryside village - Character: Kezia Burnell. Description: The youngest Burnell sister, Kezia is more independent and thoughtful than both Isabel and Lottie. Her favorite part of the doll's house is its small lamp, which she believes fits inside of it perfectly. When Isabel is telling the other girls at school about the house, Kezia reminds her not to forget the lamp, though no one else seems to care about it. Though everyone else ignores or mocks Lil and Else Kelvey, Kezia wants to invite them to see the house. Her mother, Mrs. Burnell, has forbidden her from doing so. Nevertheless, when Kezia sees the Kelveys passing by one afternoon while she is swinging on the white gates of her family's home, she decides to invite them inside. She ignores the rules of class that the adults in her life have tried to impress upon her, instead offering kindness and friendship to the Kelveys. - Character: Isabel Burnell. Description: The older sister of Lottie and Kezia, Isabel is bossy and wants to be the first to brag about the doll's house to the other girls at school. Isabel cares about what others think of her and is careful to seem mysterious and important before she shares the news of the house with the other girls. As the oldest Burnell sister, Isabel gets to choose which of the girls can come see the house, and revels in being the center of attention as the others try to prove their loyalty and friendship in order to be invited. - Character: Lil Kelvey. Description: The older sister of Else and the daughter of the village's "spry washerwoman," Lil is often mocked by the other girls at school. She is "a stout, plain child, with big freckles," and wears a dress made from pieces of material her mother collected while cleaning homes—including a green tablecloth that used to belong to the Burnells and red sleeves from the Logan's old curtains. She also wears a hat that used to belong to the postmistress, which is far too big and looks ridiculous on her. She does not join in when the other girls chat and play at school, choosing instead to stay off to the side with her sister. Lil rarely speaks, instead responding to the other girls' taunts with a "silly, shamefaced smile." When Kezia invites Lil and Else into the courtyard to see the doll's house, Lil at first refuses out of a sense of shame and fear, knowing that it would be out of line for her and her sister to enter the Burnell's home. - Character: Else Kelvey. Description: The younger sister of Lil, Else is a shy, quiet, and mysterious child. She wears a long white dress that is too big for her and a pair of old boys' boots. A "tiny wishbone of a child," she has cropped hair and "enormous solemn eyes." She rarely speaks, not even to her sister. Instead, when she wants to communicate, she tugs on the hem of Lil's dress, which she is almost always holding onto. Else is a good listener, noting when Isabel describes the doll's house to the other girls that Kezia loved the little lamp. Though Lil resists when Kezia invites them into the courtyard, Else encourages her sister to go inside to see the doll's house. She notices the lamp when she finally sees the house, emphasizing her similarity to the wealthier Kezia. - Character: Aunt Beryl. Description: The aunt of Isabel, Lottie, and Kezia Burnell, Aunt Beryl is the sister of Mrs. Burnell and lives with the family in their country home. This implies that she is unmarried and needs to depend on the family financially. Aunt Beryl criticizes the doll's house when it first arrives, thinking that it smells so strongly of paint that it could make someone ill. Later, she catches Kezia showing the dollhouse to Lil and Else Kelvey and scolds them cruelly, shooing the Kelveys away and slamming the doll's house closed. She is in some kind of relationship with Willie Brent, which she wants to keep a secret. - Character: Lena Logan. Description: A friend of Isabel's and one of the first two girls invited to see the doll's house. When the girls are gossiping one day at school, Lena has the idea to embarrass the Kelveys by going up to them and asking Lil if she will be a servant one day. When she does this, Lil and Else do not respond but rather stare back at her silently. Lena decides to kick it up a notch, and screams, "Yah, yer father's in prison!" at them, parroting the gossip she has heard adults in the village spread about the Kelveys' father. - Character: Emmie Cole. Description: Another friend of Isabel's who is invited with Lena Logan to see the doll's house first. She starts the cruel whisper about Lil Kelvey at lunch one day, whispering to Isabel, "Lil Kelvey's going to be a servant when she grows up." This leads to Lena approaching the Kelveys and hissing, "Yah, yer father's in prison!" to insult them. - Character: Lottie Burnell. Description: The middle Burnell daughter and sister to Isabel and Kezia. When Isabel instructs Lottie and Kezia to let her tell the other girls about the doll's house first, she does not resist, but understands, along with Kezia, "the powers that went with being the eldest." Lottie follows what her older sister does. When guests come to visit at the end of the story, for example, Lottie goes to change into a fresh pinafore with Isabel, though Kezia does not. - Character: Willie Brent. Description: Willie Brent writes a letter to Aunt Beryl threatening to come to her front door if she doesn't meet him in Pullman's Bush later that night. He is likely a past or current lover of Aunt Beryl, and probably of a lower class. His threat to come to the front door would embarrass Aunt Beryl, who likely does not want anyone to know she is in any way associated with Willie. - Theme: Insiders, Outsiders, and Class. Description: Katherine Mansfield's The Doll's House is primarily a tale about how class shapes life in small village. The story revolves around the daughters of two families, the wealthy Burnells and the lower-class Kelveys. As rich insiders, the Burnells do not associate with poor outsiders like the Kelveys. As such, when the young Burnell sisters receive a doll's house, all the little girls at their school are invited to see it except for the Kelvey sisters, who know better than to expect an invitation. The narrator continually emphasizes barriers both physical and metaphorical between who is "in" and who is "out" to highlight and critique such harsh classism. Mansfield ultimately suggests that class boundaries need not be as rigid as they are and can even be overcome with empathy and kindness. The characters in The Doll's House are clearly divided into two groups: the popular, wealthier insiders who are free to associate with one another, and the poor outsiders who are shunned by the rest of society. The Burnells and their friends are definitely "in": they wear the right clothes, eat the right sandwiches at lunch, and have the right parents. The richest girls in school, the Burnell sisters are at the center of its social life. Since they "set the fashion in all matters of behaviour," the other girls copy what they do. And because the Burnells are told by their parents not to speak with the Kelveys, all the other little girls avoid them too. Even the school's teacher follows the Burnells' lead, using a "special voice"—implied to be condescending or patronizing—to address Lil Kelvey when she brings her "common-looking flowers." The impoverished Kelvey sisters, meanwhile, are clearly "out." They dress in odd scraps and hand-me-downs from the homes of the other girls. Lil wears a dress made from an old green tablecloth from the Burnell house with "red plush sleeves" from the Logans' curtains." Her younger sister, Else, wears a dress that is too big for her and a pair of boys' boots. While the other girls sit together at lunchtime with "thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter," the Kelveys sit apart and eat plain jam sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. Mansfield highlights these class indicators both to demonstrate the triviality of such differences and also to show how they nevertheless make the Kelvey sisters outsiders among their peers. The story also grammatically separates the Burnells from the Kelveys by referring to the latter using more colloquial, intimate language. Nearly every time Mansfield describes Else, for example, she uses the pronoun "our": "her little sister, our Else, wore a long white dress," she writes, and also, "Where Lil went our Else followed." This encourages the reader to empathize with the sisters and to feel some kind of claim to Else, in particular, as one of their own. Meanwhile, "them" or "their" are often used to describe the Burnells and the other girls, effectively distancing them from the reader. Through language, then, Mansfield simultaneously points out class differences and asks the reader to see past them. The story further unravels class-based prejudice through Kezia, the youngest Burnell sister who opens the big white gates of her family's home to allow the Kelveys inside to see the doll's house. The gates are a symbol of the Burnell's class superiority, physically separating them from poor outsiders. By opening them, Kezia demonstrates how a strict boundary can be easily broken with a simple act of kindness. Kezia's opening of the gates is made all the more powerful by the fact that even acceptable girls are only allowed to enter the courtyard in pairs to see the doll's house, and not "to come traipsing through the house." Kezia is the only Burnell to reject such classist thinking. She enjoys swinging on her family's gates, physically teetering between the inside and the outside of her home—between what she wants to do and what she has been told to do. By showing empathy for the lower class Kelveys, Kezia overcomes the harshness of her peers and society. Notably, when the Kelveys eventually do see the doll's house, their experience of it proves no different than that of the other little girls. They gaze on it with the same wonder, and little Else even notices the small lamp that Kezia, too, admires. The story up to this point has depicted how class differences have serious consequences about who gets to experience beauty and friendship, and who does not. Through these final moments, however, Mansfield argues that class distinctions are ultimately petty, unfair, and meaningless. - Theme: Innocence and Cruelty. Description: While The Doll's House mostly focuses on the interactions between young girls with one another, it is not simply a story about how children behave. These girls are, in many ways, simply representations of the society in which they are being raised, and their behavior reflects what their parents and elders have taught them. Tellingly, the older characters prove more rigid in their upholding of society's rules. In contrast, the youngest characters are the only ones willing to disregard harsh dictates of social etiquette. Mansfield suggests, then, that class-consciousness and prejudice are not innate but rather passed down from one generation to the next. When the popular girls do their worst to mock the Kelveys, they are often simply imitating parents who gossip about the lower-class family. For example, at lunch one day the popular Emmie Cole whispers to Isabel Burnell and looks sideways at the Kelveys in a way directly copied from her mother. Emmie whispers, "Lil Kelvey's going to be a servant when she grows up" before "swallow[ing] in a very meaning way and nod[ing] to Isabel as she'd seen her mother do on those occasions." Of course, the negative influence of prejudiced parents is most evident in the fact that the Burnells are forbidden from speaking to the Kelveys. This suggests that the hatred the popular girls express toward the Kelveys is not a mark of inherent cruelty, but rather a posturing toward the cold, judgmental adulthood surrounding them. The Kelveys similarly have inherited a learned sense of submission and shamefulness from their own mother, the "spry washerwoman" of the village. As a washerwoman, the Kelveys' mother likely needs to do her job as inconspicuously a possible, careful not to disturb the families living in the homes she cleans. The Kelvey girls are similarly quiet, and do not try to join in when the other girls are talking. Later, when the Burnell sisters' Aunt Beryl catches the Kelveys in the courtyard and shoos them away, they scamper off, "burning with shame, shrinking together, Lil huddling along like her mother." Mansfield further highlights how quickly such lessons in classism and prejudice can be absorbed, and, it follows, how easily the accepting nature of innocence can be corrupted. The older girls have already fully conformed to the rules set by society. As the eldest Burnell sister, Isabel gets to choose which of the local girls will be allowed to view the doll's house first. The Kelveys know they do not stand a chance at being chosen by Isabel, who rigidly refuses to speak to them. Likewise, Lil, as the elder Kelvey sister, does not wish to shake the status quo. Lil never interrupts the other girls or talks to them out of place, instead offering only her "silly, shamefaced smile" when they scoff at her and Else. When Kezia offers to let the Kelvey sisters see the doll's house, it is Lil who refuses, knowing it is a breach of social etiquette. "Lil turned red and shook her head quickly," Mansfield writes, continuing, "Lil gasped, then she said, 'Your ma told our ma you wasn't to speak to us.'" The younger girls, however, display less class-consciousness as well as more consideration and kindness. Kezia, the youngest Burnell, does not yet have a fully-formed sense of what is acceptable behavior according to her elders. She wants to invite the Kelveys to see the doll's house but is discouraged by her mother, Mrs. Burnell, and told that she ought to know better. Similarly, the young Else Kelvey does not hesitate when Kezia invites her and her sister to see the doll's house. She wants to take Kezia up on the offer and urges her older sister to do the same by tugging at Lil's skirt and looking at her with "big, imploring eyes." Kezia is not only less aware of class prejudice, but also proves more sympathetic than her sisters. From the beginning of the story, her love of the small, seemingly insignificant lamp in the doll's house indicates her sensitive nature. When Isabel is relating the details of the house to the other girls at school, Kezia has to remind her to mention the lamp, but the others don't pay any attention to this detail. After the Kelveys see the doll's house, however, the narrator reveals that at least one of the little girls was listening when Kezia gushed about the lamp: Else. In the only line she speaks, and the final line of dialogue in the story, Else smiles and says, "I seen the little lamp," clearly caring about it as much as Kezia did. That both of the youngest characters take care to notice the small lamp connects them in their innocence and thoughtfulness. The lamp, like the rest of the doll's house, however, is not real. Though it may be a symbol of hope, it is one that cannot actually be lit. Mansfield might be suggesting, then, that it is only a matter of time before even Kezia and Else conform to the strict and cruel class distinctions by which the village abides. - Theme: Provincialism and Pretense. Description: Based on Mansfield's own childhood experiences of moving from the New Zealand town of Wellington to the rural village of Karori, The Doll's House is a critique of small-town vanity. Beyond emphasizing the arbitrary nature of class division, the story also mocks the narrow-minded provincialism of the Burnells—the most distinguished family in a tiny village, outside a small town, on a far-off island in the British Empire. The Doll's House ultimately points to the desire to appear fashionable and sophisticated—and the pretense and conformity that desire engenders—as the root of much prejudice and cruelty. This is represented most clearly in the descriptions of the doll's house itself, which mirrors the Burnell's country home and social position in their village. The Burnell sisters gain much prestige when they are given the house. All the other little girls cannot stop talking about it and are dying to see it. The doll's house itself, however, isn't actually all that impressive. It is "a dark, oily, spinach green" and has "a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge." While the house does have some extravagant features, it also smells, according to Aunt Beryl, so strongly of paint that it could make someone sick. It is put in the courtyard, "propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room"—not exactly demanding a place of honor in the family's home. It might be the most wonderful doll's house in the small village, but, Mansfield implies, to the rest of the world it is an average toy at best. Similarly, the Burnells may be the richest family around, yet they are ultimately just big fish in a relatively small pond. That the Burnells are not as fashionable and rich as they might like to believe is indicated by the fact that the Burnell sisters must attend school with all the other children in the village, "not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen." The narrator describes how "the Judge's little girls, the doctor's daughters, the storekeeper's children, the milkman's, were forced to mix together" at school, even if the Burnells would rather their daughters have a more elite education. These other children, in turn, try to seem as much like the Burnells as possible by emphasizing the otherness of the Kelveys. Indeed, the popular girls appear closest and most alike when they are being cruel to Else and Lil. When one of these girls, Lena Logan, insults the Kelveys by screaming "Yah, yer father's in prison!" at them, the others are so united by this act of meanness that they lose any sense of individuality: "the little girls rushed away in a body, deeply, deeply excited, wild with joy," Mansfield writes. The need to feel superior engenders an unthinking mob mentality at odds with genuine sophistication. The girls are, in fact, simply conforming to a backwards, decidedly unfashionable mode of thinking. Mansfield is strongest in her critique of vanity at the end of the story, when Aunt Beryl cruelly shoos the Kelveys away from the doll's house, treating them "as if they were chickens." Aunt Beryl yells at them with a voice that is "cold and proud," yet this action is, in part, to relieve her own stress and anxiety about her relations with a lower-class man called Willie Brent. The narrator does not say much about Willie Brent, or what, in particular, his relation to Aunt Beryl is, though it is likely that he is her lover. Willie writes Aunt Beryl a note that she finds "terrifying," threatening to come knock on the door if she doesn't meet him in Pullman's Bush later that night. That Aunt Beryl finds this notion terrifying suggests her shame in being associated with Willie. She takes out her anger on the Kelveys, which makes "her heart [feel] lighter. The ghastly pressure was gone." Like the little girls of the town, Aunt Beryl uses her prejudice against the Kelveys to make herself feel better. Through her vain hypocrisy, Mansfield argues that those allegedly more sophisticated or worldly citizens are no better than the lower-classes they define themselves against. On the contrary, the desire to prove one's social clout is a mark of small-minded vanity. - Theme: Talking vs. Silence. Description: Much of the communication in The Doll's House is nonverbal. The Kelvey sisters, in particular, barely speak in the story, instead communicating mostly through gestures and glances. It's clear, however, that though Lil and Else rarely talk, they easily understand each other. In contrast, the Burnells and their friends are almost constantly yapping, gossiping, or boasting about the doll's house. Unlike the Kelveys, their chatter often proves shallow and frivolous. By exploring these very different methods of communication, Mansfield seems to suggest that silence can often reveal more truth than speech. Mansfield explores communication and silence throughout the story by associating talking with casting judgment or spreading untruthful gossip, while linking silence with a sense of caring and attention. With Isabel Burnell at the helm, the popular girls are always chatting and gossiping with one another. Isabel tries to be in control of what is said, forbidding her younger sisters from telling the details of the doll's house to any of the girls since she ought to be the first one to brag: "'I'm to tell,' said Isabel, 'because I'm the eldest. And you two can join in after. But I'm to tell first.'" Her sisters Lottie and Kezia do not chafe at this rule, but comply, understanding that Isabel has the right to speak before them. Speaking not only has arbitrary rules, but also the potential for dangerous consequences. That the village does not know much about the Kelvey family allows cruel speculation about them to spread. Though no one knows where the Kelveys' father is, they suspect he is in prison. When taunting the Kelveys, Lena Logan shouts, "Yah, yer father's in prison!" as if it's true, and the other girls are practically beside themselves with excitement that Lena has shouted what everyone's been thinking. The narrator never confirms or denies whether the Kelveys' father is in prison, but it doesn't make a difference to the villagers—that the gossip has spread is enough evidence for the Kelveys to be shunned and despised. This points to the often destructive and deceptive power of language.  While most of the village is gossiping throughout The Doll's House, the Kelvey sisters almost never talk, not even to each another. Instead, they have a system of communication that does not need words: Else follows Lil around and communicates by holding onto the edge of her older sister's dress and tugging at it when she wants something. From the tug alone, Lil knows what Else means. Their communication, though silent and nonverbal, is more accurate than the jabbering of the rest of the village; "The Kelveys never failed to understand each other," Mansfield writes. The Kelveys are not just listening to one another, but to the other girls as well. When all of the girls gather to hear what Isabel is saying about the doll's house, the Kelveys stay away, knowing that they are not supposed to talk with the others. "Many of the children, including the Burnells, were not allowed to even speak to them," Mansfield notes. Though Else and her sister do not gather around Isabel's court in the schoolyard, they listen from the sidelines—so well, in fact, that little Else remembers to look for the small lamp Kezia has mentioned when she finally sees the doll's house. "I seen the little lamp," Else says to her sister in the only moment she talks in the story. Mansfield seems to suggest that listening and caring for one another is a more effective and true means of communication than constant talk or gossip, which only results in untruths and harsh judgments. - Climax: In a moment of cruelty and excitement, Lena Logan screams, "Yah, yer father's in prison!" at the Kelvey sisters in the schoolyard. - Summary: A doll's house arrives at the Burnell home as a gift. The dollhouse smells so strongly of paint that Aunt Beryl thinks it could make someone sick. Isabel, Lottie, and Kezia, the Burnell's three daughters, do not mind the smell, however, and couldn't be more delighted by the house. Kezia, the youngest sister, notices a small lamp, which she thinks it the best part of it. The next morning, the Burnells are excited to boast to the other girls at school. Isabel, the oldest, forbids her sisters from saying anything before she's had a chance to describe the doll's house to the others. She also reminds Lottie and Kezia that she is allowed to choose which two girls will visit first to see the house. At playtime, all the little girls gather around to hear Isabel's talk about the house except for Lil and Else Kelvey—the daughters of the village washerwoman and the poorest girls at school. Everyone in the village gossips about the Kelveys, saying that their father is in prison, and many children, the Burnells included, aren't allowed to talk to them. As such, the Kelveys can only eavesdrop as Isabel proudly describes the doll's house. Kezia reminds her sister to mention the lamp, though no one else seems to care about it. Isabel chooses Emmie Cole and Lena Logan as the first two girls to come see the house. Kezia asks her mother if she can invite the Kelveys to see the doll's house, but Mrs. Burnell refuses and tells Kezia she knows why. More days pass, and by now everyone has seen the house except the Kelveys. At school the other girls cruelly taunt the sisters, who react only with silence. Later that afternoon, Kezia is at home swinging on the big white gates of her family's courtyard. When she spots the Kelveys walking down the road, she decides to swing the gates open and invite them inside. Lil shakes her head and reminds Kezia that they aren't supposed to talk to one another. Kezia assures Lil that it doesn't matter. Lil still doesn't want to go, but Else, standing behind her, tugs on her dress and looks at her pleadingly. Kezia leads the Kelveys inside. While she is showing the Kelveys the doll's house, Aunt Beryl spots them and shouts furiously at Kezia. She shoos the Kelveys away and slams the doll's house shut. It is revealed that earlier that afternoon Aunt Beryl had received a letter from Willie Brent. In the note, Willie had threatened to come knock on the door if Aunt Beryl didn't meet him that night in Pullman's Bush. Aunt Beryl is terrified by the idea of Willie coming to the door. After yelling at the girls, however, she feels better, and hums as she walks back into the house. The Kelveys, meanwhile, run off and sit by the side of the road. Else inches closer to her sister and smiles. She speaks for the first time in the story, saying, "I seen the lamp."

- Genre: Short story, science fiction, fantasy - Title: The Door in the Wall - Point of view: First person through the narrator Redmond - Setting: London - Character: Lionel Wallace. Description: The protagonist of "The Door in the Wall," Lionel Wallace is a successful politician. He is distracted from his career, however, by his preoccupation with the door in the wall, which he explains to Redmond, the narrator, one night after dinner. As a child, Wallace discovered a green door in a white wall which led to a magical garden where he experienced happiness, peace, and human connection. Young Wallace is desperate to return to the garden but is forbidden from speaking about it by his strict father, who believes he is too imaginative. The garden appears to Wallace again one day on his way to school, but he passes it by in order to keep his perfect punctuality record. Wallace learns that the door is not always in the same place and that he cannot bring others to it; when he is pressured by his schoolfellows to lead them to the door, he is unable to find it. Over the years, the door appears to Wallace only when he is on the way to important events for his education, career, or life. Every time he sees the door, despite felling a desire to go inside, he chooses the practicalities of everyday life over the otherworldly garden. By the time of his conversation with Redmond, he bitterly regrets these choices, having concluded that the success he so desperately sought and has now achieved in his career is ultimately meaningless. Wallace is distraught by his belief that he will never be able to return to the garden; he neglects his work by day and wanders the streets in grief by night. Ultimately, Wallace dies by falling into a pit at a construction site. Redmond realizes that Wallace thought a door in the fence was the door to the garden, and went through, falling to his death. Redmond finishes the story by stating that some people might think that the door in the wall betrayed Wallace and led him to his death. But Redmond comments that Wallace, a dreamer and a man of vision, would not think the same, implying that perhaps Wallace, even if it led to his death in this world, may have found his way back to the garden after all. - Character: Redmond. Description: Redmond, the narrator of "The Door in the Wall," is the practical and sympathetic friend of the main character Lionel Wallace. No slacker himself, Redmond nonetheless makes clear that Wallace has far surpassed him in terms of career success. While sharing a private dinner one night, Wallace reveals to Redmond the story of the door in the wall which leads to a magic garden. Redmond is a trusting and careful listener. It is only the morning after the conversation that he thinks to question his immediate belief in Wallace's story, though he ultimately comes to believe, at least, that Wallace himself fully believes the story. Redmond is later dismayed when Wallace's dead body is found in a railway shaft behind a door in a wall, and realizes that Wallace went through a door in the fence around the construction, thinking it was the door in the wall, and fell to his death. Though never certain whether the door in the wall was itself real or some kind of hallucination, Redmond comes to believe that Wallace himself wouldn't have thought of himself as being "tricked" or "betrayed" by the door, that instead Wallace was the type of special person to experience something miraculous. - Character: Wallace's Father. Description: A stern, remote, and career-focused lawyer, Wallace's father expected great things of Wallace from a young age. When Wallace was five years old, he found the door in the wall and told his father about his experience, but Wallace's father thrashed him for telling lies. Wallace describes his father, who punishes him for his imaginative nature, as "old school." In later years, Wallace pursues a prestigious education and career path, as his father wanted for him, and receives his father's rare praise. At the end of his father's life, Wallace encounters the door, but chooses to be at his deathbed rather than take the opportunity to enter the garden. - Theme: Reality, Fantasy, Dreams, and Visions. Description: In H. G. Wells' "The Door in the Wall," the narrator Redmond relates the story of his friend Lionel Wallace's encounters with a green door in a white wall, and the fantastical garden of otherworldly peace, beauty, and happiness that lies behind the door. Wallace first comes upon the door and garden at five years old. The door then appears to him multiple times over the course of his life, but in each case, for various reasons, he doesn't go through it. Over time, though, he becomes increasingly regretful about his repeated choices to not return to the garden. A few months after his conversation with Redmond, he is found dead, having fallen into a deep hole after apparently mistaking a door to a railway construction site for the door to the magic garden. In the world of the story, it's never made clear whether Wallace's fantastical door and garden was real—a real magical entrance to a real magical garden—or merely a dream, hallucination, or product of a powerful imagination. While the story initially sets up this question of the reality of the door and garden as key, the fact that the story never answers the question suggests that the story's actual concerns rest elsewhere, and that in fact such a binary true/false view misunderstands the nature of these "dreamers, these men of vision" who experience visions such as the garden, and their potential impact on the "real" world. "The Door in the Wall" immediately establishes the question of the truth of Wallace's story as being key. Before the narrator, Redmond, explains the content of Wallace's story in any way, he raises the question of its believability. Redmond then goes into great detail about why he initially believed it, came to doubt it, and then ultimately concluded that, while he wasn't sure what to believe, he believed that Wallace himself believed the story he was telling to be true. Redmond comments that "the reader must judge for himself." By casting the reader as the judge of this question, the narrator implies that answering this question—getting to the truth—will be the thrust of the story. Throughout the story, details provided can then be seen as supporting or casting doubt on the story about the door in the wall. For instance, the fact that Wallace's memories of the garden from his childhood visit are somewhat hazy, or that Wallace speculates that in thinking about the garden after first visiting it he may have inadvertently changed details, or that no one else—neither his father nor other kids at school—ever believes him when he tells them of the garden, all seem to suggest that the garden may be imaginary. At the same time, the fact that Wallace is immensely successful—he was a star in school and now is about to become a government cabinet minister—implies that what he describes can be generally taken with confidence as being accurate and true. In its final section, though, the story takes a turn. Redmond reveals that shortly after Wallace told him about the door in the wall, Wallace was found dead, a result of stepping through a temporary door in the boarded fence around a construction site and falling to his death in a dark pit. Initially it seems as if this outcome will answer the question posed at the beginning of the story. If Wallace would do something so silly as to get himself killed by mistaking a wall in a construction fence for his magical door, and then fall to his death in a dark pit, surely his entire vision of the garden must have been little more than a hallucination. And that hallucination, moreover, led Wallace first to a deep regret about choosing his successful life over the promise of the garden, and then to his death. Some version of this story might in the end suggest that the inability to realize what is and isn't fantasy is ultimately self-destructive. And, in fact, Redmond himself says that "there are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of… a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination." Yet Redmond doesn't stop there, and instead notes that "I am more than half-convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift… that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet… into another and altogether more beautiful world." And then Redmond contests that this "outlet" betrayed Wallace in the end. Redmond argues that while "we see our world fair and common" such that we only see the boarded-up fence and the dark pit, that, in contrast, "these dreamers, these men of vision" such as Wallace might see things entirely differently. In this way, after at first charging the reader with serving as a judge of the truth of Wallace's story, Redmond now pulls the rug out from under the reader's feet and suggests that whether the door or garden are "real" is beside the point, and that focusing on that question misunderstands a deeper truth within Wallace's experiences that transcends whether or not the door or garden are "real." By connecting Wallace with "dreamers" and "men of vision," Redmond implicitly connects Wallace to prophets, shamans, or other past visionaries. Through this connection, Redmond suggests that Wallace's door and garden are similar to the spiritual visions of these past dreamers—it should not be taken as a coincidence, for instance, that Wallace's garden bears a resemblance to the biblical Garden of Eden. This is not to say that the story is suggesting that Wallace definitively experienced a vision of heaven. Rather, the story seems instead to imply that the mystery it originally describes—is the door real or not—is unknowable, is a realm not of logic but of faith. And, further, that it is within this unknowability and faith that the power of such visions—and of the visionaries who have them and as a result of having them no longer fit in the normal world—reside. - Theme: Ambition and Material Success vs Contentment and Joy. Description: H. G. Wells' "The Door in the Wall" relates the story of Lionel Wallace, who, throughout his life, was precocious and successful. He learned to speak at a young age, was responsible beyond his years, excelled first in school and then in his career, and by the age of thirty-nine was about to move into the upper echelons of government. He is successful in a way that would make anyone—including Redmond, the narrator of the story—envious and amazed. Yet Wallace's childhood memories of the magic garden he encountered beyond the green door make him aware of a different possibility in life that stands in opposition to material or competitive success. In his brief time in the garden, he experiences peace, contentment, purely collaborative play (as opposed to competition), and human connection. After that first encounter with the door, every subsequent time Wallace comes upon it occurs during a critical moment that could affect his success in normal life, which leads him to choose not to open it. In consistently setting the contentment of the garden against Wallace's pursuit of success in the world, the story implies that contentment and success stand in opposition to and are irreconcilable with each other. Expectations of great material success are placed on Wallace from a young age, first by his father and later by himself. The achievement of success in school and his career, however, does not bring him contentment or real joy. From the outset of the story, Wells establishes Wallace as a highly competent and "extremely successful" person. When he applies himself, he excels in school and achieves increasingly important positions of power in the government. He exceeds his goals and receives his stern father's praise. However, when distracted by the reverie of his past contentment in the garden, Wallace fails to achieve the material success he is otherwise capable of. For instance, after the door appears to him in his school days and he passes it by in order to preserve his perfect attendance record for punctuality, he later becomes despondent and receives bad reports for two terms. Similarly, after passing the door by in order to continue an important conversation to advance his career, he later neglects his work. Even the thought of the contentment of the garden reduces his ambition and prevents him from achieving material success. In addition, when Wallace does apply himself and achieve his goals, as he reveals to Redmond, his extraordinary accomplishments do not bring him joy. He is "sorrowful and bitter," engaging in work he finds "toilsome" and unrewarding. His labors and his repeated rejection of the door have made him an impressive and prominent politician, but his lack of satisfaction with his life—as well as his deep despair compared with to the comfortable freedom of his early childhood—implies that ambition cannot coexist with joy. Wells presents the garden and its perfect contentment as the natural opposite of Wallace's competitive world of grades, accomplishments, and government positions. One of Wallace's first perceptions of the door as a child is that his father—"who gave him little attention and expected great things of him"—would be angry with him if he went through it, portraying the door as the enemy of his father's pragmatic worldview of the importance of career accomplishment and material success. When Wallace does go through the door, the very air of the garden on the other side makes Wallace forget the "discipline and obedience of home." Just as Wallace struggles to achieve material success while occupied with thinking about the garden in his real life, he is unable to conceive of ambition while inside the garden. The joy of the garden is all-consuming—ambition cannot exist within it. The story constantly amplifies the tension between the contentment offered by the garden and the promise of success in the "real world" such that there is no middle ground: the choice for one always involves giving up the other entirely. Wallace describes himself as both "passionately" desiring the garden and feeling a "gravitational pull" towards the opportunities for success afforded by work and school. The force of these two opposing desires creates the primary conflict of Wallace's life, which he is never able to resolve. After his first encounter with the door as a child, the door only appears to Wallace during important life moments that will materially affect his success, such as when he is rushing to be on time to school or is in the middle of a key meeting. Similarly, it is impossible for him to locate the door during quiet times. He is not given the option to both experience the contentment of the garden and maintain the success of his illustrious career, implying that the combination of contentment and success is not possible at all. The door presents itself only as an exchange, and one that Wallace understands as a permanent one: if he goes into the garden, he will "go and never return," trading his ambitious life for a content one. And, near the end of the story, he becomes certain that having chosen not to go into the garden on each occasion when he's had the chance, he'll now never get the chance again. At the beginning of his career, when he had experienced only a little success, Wallace valued ambition and success far more, understanding them to be things "that merited sacrifice." Near the end of his life, though, having actually experienced power and success, he wonders whether achieving his ambitions was indeed worth the sacrifice of a life with contentment. After repeatedly choosing to pass the door by and attempting to find joy in a life of prominence and political success, he comes to believe that success, the thing he has sought all his life and finally achieved, is "vulgar, tawdry, irksome," and ultimately unworthy of its necessary sacrifice of contentment. The pursuit of success is indeed a sacrifice, as is the pursuit of contentment. For Wallace, and perhaps, the story implies, for everyone, to have one is to sacrifice the other. - Theme: The Lost Golden Past. Description: "The Door in the Wall" tells the story of a man, Wallace, who in his long-ago youth stepped through a magical door and experienced a brief, hazy moment of golden perfection—love, harmony, and pure connection. The story never makes clear if that moment was or was not imaginary, but in some sense it hardly matters. What matters instead is that Wallace consistently has the feeling that he can go back to that time—the door appears to him at times in his life—but he is never in fact quite able to step back through the door. His current life and concerns always intervene, whether the need to get to school, or visit his father's death bed, or continue an important meeting for his career. In this way the garden functions for Wallace like a kind of "lost golden past"—an idealized vision of a better, purer, more innocent, and yet inaccessible time that both defines Wallace's life but also isolates him from the meaning, people, and even reality of his current life. The garden, emblematic of the golden past, is ultimately inaccessible to Wallace despite the door's repeated appearance in his life. The door is present and visible, yet always just out of reach. The garden, a place of "peace," "delight," "beauty," and "kindness," is a brief refuge for Wallace from his dull and joyless childhood. The possibility of a return to it continues to act as a sustaining dream for him throughout boyhood and adult life. Its repeated appearance during important moments revives his longing for the golden past of the garden. However, the garden is consistently inaccessible to Wallace after the first time due to the obligations and demands of his present adult life. For example, the last time he encounters the door, he chooses to continue a conversation important to furthering his career rather than entering and returning to the idyllic childhood dream-world of the garden. In addition, when Wallace does attempt to enter what he thinks is the door to the garden and return to the lost golden past, he ends up falling to his death in a deep pit in a railway construction site. While the story leaves open the possibility that Wallace, in death, actually does find the garden again, what's just as clear is that while he's alive, the idealized past is unattainable, and his belief in its accessibility only destroys the opportunities of his present. Wallace's proximity to the lost golden past of the garden—in his mind and memory and in his sightings of the door—alienates him from adult life and adult relationships. Wallace's longing for the idealized and innocent golden past prevents him from fully experiencing and enjoying the realities of his life. Though immensely successful, he fails to find satisfaction in his career and personal life. His preoccupation with his lost golden past also damages his relationships and isolates him from others. For example, his father and schoolfellows both punish him for his belief in the garden. In addition, his distraction and lack of interest in his life has harmed at least one failed romantic relationship. Redmond, the narrator, recalls that a woman who once loved Wallace spoke of his "detachment" from the world and his forgetfulness of other people. The lost golden past, in the form of the garden and its door which haunt Wallace through his life, prevents him from connecting emotionally with his life. He clings to an inaccessible ideal—perfect happiness with perfectly loving friends in the garden—rather than devoting himself to the lesser connections of his real life, adult relationships, and a satisfactory career. Finally, the golden past isolates Wallace because his perception of reality is different from that shared by others like Redmond. Though the story leaves the actual existence of the door open to interpretation, it is possible that it is only a dream or hallucination, in which case Wallace's connection to his lost past separates him from his very reality. Wallace, while seeking advancement in his career, is at the same time constantly looking back. He is prevented from entering the door to the lost golden past of the garden because of his pursuit of success. However, he is also prevented from entering the door because, as the story implies, though it might feel imminently accessible, Wallace cannot actually live in the past. Seen in this light, the garden acts for Wallace as a coping mechanism for the disappointing realities of the present: one that is both a comforting dream and a harmful delusion. The more Wallace interacts with the world, as he does early in his career, vain and vulgar though it might be, the brighter that real world appears. It is only when he sinks into the reverie of the golden past that the present looks so dull. The "Door in the Wall" captures the way that such nostalgia for a lost past—a past that, being past, may in fact be entirely imaginary—can provide a person with both a sense of meaning, but also define or warp that person's present. The fact that the "lost golden past" of the story is a garden from which Wallace was evicted and then can't return also clearly evokes the Garden of Eden, and in so doing the story can also be read as portraying the way that a religion or ideology can be animated by the idea of a "lost golden past," which offers meaning but also creates tension with the world of the present. - Climax: Wallace falls to his death in a railway construction site - Summary: "The Door in the Wall" is narrated by a man named Redmond who considers the fantastical story of the door in the wall, told him by his ordinarily reserved friend Lionel Wallace. One evening at dinner, Wallace confesses the reason for his long-standing distraction from work and relationships. Redmond is unsure of whether the story itself is true, but he is convinced that Wallace believes it. When Wallace was five years old, he came across a green door set in a white wall that seemed to call to him while walking the streets of London. He knew that the door would be unlocked but hesitated to enter because he felt his strict father would be angry with him if he did. In a burst of emotion, he rushed through the door and found an otherworldly garden that filled him with immediate peace and happiness. The garden is difficult for Wallace to describe, and he admits that he may have altered some of its details in his mind over the years, but he emphasizes the feelings it gave him: exhilaration, lightness, goodness, and well-being. In the garden, he met two tame panthers and a beautiful girl who led him by the hand to other children who played games with him. Eventually, a somber woman took him into a room and showed him a book that contained the story of his past. When it reached the page with Wallace standing outside the green door, however, and Wallace urged the woman to go on, he found himself once again on the London sidewalk where he had been before going through the door. Wallace felt deeply sad at being ejected from the garden. He also attempted to tell his father what he saw, but his father punished him for lying and forbid him from speaking of the garden. Years later, on his way to school, Wallace accidentally encountered the door again. He felt the same draw to go through it, but passed it by in order to get to school on time. He made the mistake of telling another boy about the door but was unable to find it when pressured into leading his schoolmates there, and was mocked mercilessly by the other schoolboys. He saw the door again on his way to receive a scholarship from Oxford, and, again, chose to pass it by. For years, the door appeared to him only while he was on his way to important meetings, and he never went in. Now middle-aged and a successful politician, Wallace is nonetheless dissatisfied with his life. He swore to himself that if he saw the door again, he would go through. However, it has appeared to him three times in the past year—during an important vote, on his way to his father's deathbed, and in the middle of a promotion—and he has passed it by every time. Depressed and regretful, Wallace tells Redmond that he has missed his chance to return through the door. He wanders the streets at night searching for the door. Redmond reveals that three months after that conversation, Wallace was killed by a fall into a pit in a railway construction site. The pit was just inside a door in a makeshift fence surrounding the pit, which had been left unlocked by mistake. Redmond considers how, in the electric lights, the door must have looked like Wallace's green door. It seems to Redmond that, regardless of whether the green door was ever real or just some kind of hallucination, some might think the door betrayed Wallace in the end. But Redmond wonders, whether Wallace—a dreamer and a man of vision—would have seen it that way.

- Genre: Realism - Title: The Dream House - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa - Character: Patricia Wiley. Description: Patricia Wiley, one of The Dream House's three main characters, is a humorous, self-centered, elderly white woman living with her husband Richard Wiley on a farm in post-apartheid South Africa. She met Richard after her father hired him to manage the family's farm. Having only married Richard because he impregnated her, Patricia grew unhappy in her marriage due to her daughter Rachel's stillbirth and Richard's repeated affairs. Later, Patricia became emotionally invested in Looksmart, a Black child born on the farm, and arranged for his education—which is how she met John Ford, then an English teacher, with whom she began a long-term affair. Patricia's passionate attachments to Rachel and Looksmart contrast with her relative coolness to Richard and John, showing how Patricia feels maternal love much more strongly than romantic love. Looksmart left the farm and cut off contact with Patricia when he was 19, a decision Patricia fails to understand. When the novel begins, Looksmart returns and confronts Patricia with the claim that during apartheid, Richard raped and murdered a Black dairy worker named Grace, who was the sister of Patricia's domestic employee Beauty. Patricia's lack of suspicion about Grace's death—she thought it was an accident—shows how the racial and economic privilege she had under apartheid blinded her to reality and destroyed her relationship with Looksmart. When Patricia questions Beauty about Grace, however, Beauty tells a slightly different story: Richard killed Grace not because she resisted his sexual assault, but because she was pregnant with his child after paid consensual sex and refused an abortion. Patricia's thwarted desire for the whole, unambiguous truth about the past shows how, in the novel, fallible memories and lies make the truth hard to access. Moreover, Patricia's failure at the novel's end to rekindle her relationship with Looksmart shows that the world of the novel believes that new beginnings can't exist because the past always impinges on the present. - Character: Looksmart (Phiwayinkosi Ndlovu). Description: Looksmart, another of The Dream House's three main characters, is an intelligent, tormented Black man who lives in Johannesburg with his wife, daughters, and elderly mother. During apartheid, his mother moved to Patricia Wiley's farm while pregnant with him. As a child, Looksmart skipped so many grades that a teacher suggested he transfer to a better school. Patricia arranged the transfer and began treating him like a son. As a teenager, Looksmart fell in love with Grace, a Black dairy worker, and wanted to marry her—but then Richard Wiley set a dog on her, killing her. Knowing white Richard wouldn't face justice for killing Black Grace, Looksmart left the farm. After apartheid ended, he became economically successful, married, and had two daughters—but though he loves his daughters, he doesn't love his wife and remains haunted by Grace. After Patricia puts her farm up for sale, he goes to confront her and reveal what he believes to be the truth about Grace's death: Richard killed Grace because she ran away while he was raping her. Oddly, Looksmart seems less interested in holding Richard accountable for having killed Grace than in holding Patricia accountable for having hesitated before letting Looksmart drive Grace to the hospital in her new car. Patricia's hesitation destroyed Looksmart's confidence in Patricia's love; his focus on this, not the murder, suggests the loss of Patricia's maternal love traumatized him more than the loss of Grace. Together with Looksmart's love for his own daughters, his fixation on Patricia shows that parent-child love matters more to him than romance. Looksmart leaves the farm convinced he has forced Patricia to confront the whole truth. The next day, however, Beauty tells Patricia Grace never intended to marry Looksmart and was having sex with Richard for money—and that Richard killed Grace because she was pregnant and refused to have an abortion. Looksmart's and Beauty's conflicting stories suggest not only that truth about the past is difficult to access but that Looksmart's male privilege and educational privilege may have blinded him to who Grace was: a working-class person with a life and desires independent from his. - Character: Beauty (Togo). Description: Beauty, the third of The Dream House's main characters, is a plain-looking Black South African woman in her late thirties who works for Patricia Wiley and Richard Wiley. Her family lives on the Wileys' farm, where she grew up. Her older, prettier sister Grace died after Richard's dog mauled her when Beauty was a child. Beauty, who knows Richard set the dog on Grace, fears him. Yet she also cares for him as he descends into dementia and tries to protect him by hiding him from Grace's former suitor Looksmart when Looksmart returns to the farm after a long absence. Beauty is in love with Bheki, Patricia's driver. Though she knows he doesn't love her back, she isn't interested in a romantic relationship with anyone else and has reconciled herself to being alone. When Looksmart reappears the night before the Wileys are supposed to move away from the farm, both he and Patricia demand Beauty recount what she knows about Grace's death. Looksmart—whom Beauty dislikes and finds arrogant—takes the fragmented, ambiguous story Beauty tells as confirmation of his own belief that Richard killed Grace because she ran away while he was raping her. When Patricia asks Beauty for the whole truth after Looksmart has left, however, Beauty says Grace had been having consensual sex with Richard for money and Richard killed her because she was pregnant and refused to have an abortion. When Patricia asks why Beauty didn't leave the farm after Richard killed Grace, Beauty replies that her family lived on the farm and her job there was good. Since Beauty's account of Grace's murder is the last word on the subject, the novel seems to suggest that Beauty, who lacks all social privilege due to her race, gender, and socioeconomic status, can see the truth more clearly than Patricia and Looksmart, whose privileges blind them. At the novel's end, Beauty moves with the Wileys to continue working for them in their retirement. - Character: Richard Wiley. Description: Richard Wiley is Patricia Wiley's husband, Beauty and Bheki's employer, and stillborn Rachel's father. He emigrated to South Africa from Yorkshire, England, got a job managing Patricia's father's farm, and began a sexual relationship with Patricia. Though Patricia found Richard attractive at the time—he was blond, blue-eyed, and adept at flattering women—they had little in common, and she only married him because he impregnated her. During their marriage, he pursued a series of young Englishwomen whom he hired to work in the farm's stables. Patricia knew about these affairs; though initially Richard's infidelity hurt her, she later used it to justify her affair with John Ford. Due to Richard's overt anti-Black racism, Patricia did not suspect he was also pursuing one of the farm's Black dairy workers, Beauty's older sister Grace. Toward apartheid's end, Richard set a dog on Grace that killed her. Looksmart—a Black man who grew up on the farm and loved Grace—believes Richard killed Grace because she escaped while he was raping her. Beauty, however, tells Patricia that Richard killed Grace because she became pregnant from consensual, paid sex and wouldn't have an abortion. By the time Patricia learns that Richard killed Grace, he can no longer tell her why—he's suffering from dementia and spends most of the novel instinctively attempting to dig up his baby Rachel's bones. Richard's memory loss highlights the novel's theme that memory is fallible and, making it difficult to know the truth about the past. His occasional incoherent comments about "two dead children" on the farm, however, do imply that he knew Grace was pregnant when he killed her. If, as Beauty claims, Richard killed Grace because she was pregnant and not because she resisted his advances, that motive reinforces the novel's repeated suggestions that, deep down, people care more about parent-child relationships than they do about romance. At the novel's end, Patricia tells Beauty that she is going to put Richard in a home, implicitly as punishment for his murder of Grace. - Character: Bheki. Description: Bheki, Patricia Wiley's driver and gardener, is a taciturn, late-middle-aged Black man who wears "impeccable blue overalls." According to Patricia, she offered to get him a good education while he was growing up on the Wileys' farm but, when he showed more interest in cars than school, taught him to drive instead. Bheki knows that the Wileys' domestic employee Beauty has been in love with him for a long time, and though he finds her adoration gratifying, he's not at all attracted to her and has never returned her affection. Late in life he married a woman named Phumelele, with whom he has a young disabled son, Bongani. At the novel's beginning, he is planning to move away to the city Durban with the Wileys, because he believes he'll be able to get help for Bongani in an urban area that isn't available near the Wileys' farm. Though successful, educated Looksmart holds Bheki in contempt for serving Patricia all his life, Looksmart nevertheless offers to help Bheki get a new job and help for Bongani on the farm so he doesn't have to keep working for the Wileys. Bheki is convinced by Looksmart's argument that Black South Africans should support each other rather than accept white people's charity. At the novel's end, Bheki drives the Wileys to Durban, though he plans to quit and return to the farm, where Looksmart will get him a job. - Character: Grace (Noma). Description: Grace was a young Black dairy worker on Patricia Wiley's farm during the apartheid era. She was Beauty's sister and Looksmart's first love. Toward apartheid's end, Patricia's husband Richard Wiley killed her by unchaining a dog that mauled her. About 25 years later, Looksmart returns to the Wileys' farm to confront Patricia about Grace's death. Looksmart claims that as Grace was dying, she told him Richard murdered her because she escaped while he was raping her. Later, however, Beauty tells Patricia that Grace was accepting money from Richard in exchange for sex and that Richard murdered her because she wouldn't get an abortion after discovering she was pregnant. Patricia's longstanding ignorance about Grace's death, which she believed was an accident until Looksmart revealed otherwise, shows how Patricia's undeserved racial and economic privilege blind her to ugly realities. Meanwhile, Patricia's inability to discover exactly why Richard murdered Grace—Richard, suffering from dementia, won't or can't explain his past actions, while Looksmart's and Beauty's stories conflict—show how fallible human memories and people's tendency to lie make it difficult to discover objective truths about the past. - Character: John Ford. Description: John Ford is an elderly white South African man, a retired former schoolteacher and headmaster, and the long-term adulterous lover of Patricia Wiley. They met and experienced an immediate attraction when Patricia brought Looksmart, a highly intelligent Black boy growing up on her farm, to interview with John in preparation for transferring to John's school. Shortly afterward, they began their affair and never really ended it, though they stopped having sex about 15 years in. Good-looking, well-read, and ostentatiously religious, John is also racist, hypocritical, and emotionally withholding. He hit and humiliated Looksmart during Looksmart's schoolyears to "put him in his place." He mocks Patricia's husband Richard Wiley to Patricia while keeping the topic of his own wife, who died during their affair, off-limits between them. When Patricia is preparing to move away, he gives her a letter but tells her not to open it until she's reached her destination—hiding from her that he's dying of cancer and plans to die by suicide. The morning Patricia intends to move, John's former secretary Mrs. Bell calls and tells Patricia that the police want to talk to her because John mentioned her in his suicide note. After answering the police's questions and viewing the body, Patricia reads John's letter—and ends up finding its false sentimentality and evasiveness infuriating. It may be John's avoidance of the truth, even in death, that motivates Patricia to demand the truth about Grace's death from Beauty one final time. - Character: Looksmart's Mother. Description: Looksmart's mother moved to Patricia Wiley's farm while pregnant with Looksmart. The other farm workers believed Looksmart's father was in prison for some heinous crime. When Looksmart's mother went into labor, Patricia helped midwife the birth. Afterward, Patricia came to visit baby Looksmart in Looksmart's mother's hut every day for weeks. Patricia stopped visiting because she sensed the visits, which "went against the way things were done" between Black and white South Africans during apartheid, made Looksmart's mother uncomfortable. Yet after Looksmart's teacher told his mother that Looksmart was too smart for his current school, Looksmart's mother asked for Patricia's help in arranging a better education for him. Looksmart never told his mother about his plans to marry Grace because he thought his mother would object to his marrying a mere dairy worker after all his education, especially at such a young age. When Looksmart fled the farm after Grace's death, however, Patricia believed Looksmart's mother knew his reasons and intentionally avoided answering Patricia's questions about them. Looksmart's mother herself left the Wileys' farm around 2000. During the novel's present, she lives in a cottage on Looksmart's house's property in Johannesburg. - Character: Patricia's Father. Description: Though dead for about half a century when the novel begins, Patricia's father remains a positive, emotional memory for Patricia Wiley. She believes him to have been a good, hardworking, friendly man, though his generous love toward her may have left her naïve and unprepared for life's cruel realities. He hired Richard Wiley to manage his farm but disapproved of Richard's marriage to Patricia, agreeing to it only when he learned Patricia was pregnant. He gave Patricia the farm where she and Richard have spent their marriage as a wedding present. - Character: Mrs. Bell. Description: Mrs. Bell was John Ford's secretary when he was headmaster at the fancy school Looksmart attended. She knows about John and Patricia Wiley's long-term affair. After John's suicide, Mrs. Bell calls Patricia to inform her that the police want to speak with her because John mentioned her in his suicide note. Due to Mrs. Bell's nosiness and pleasure at Patricia's discomfort, Patricia wonders whether Mrs. Bell may have loved John or even had an affair with him herself. - Character: Rachel. Description: Rachel is Patricia Wiley and Richard Wiley's only child, born dead at seven months. They buried her near a stand of trees on their farm. Richard, suffering from dementia, spends much of the novel trying to locate Rachel's grave and dig up her bones—an obsessive quest that hints at his grief and guilt over Rachel herself and, possibly, over his murder of Grace while she was pregnant with his child. Toward the novel's end, Patricia asks Beauty and Bheki to disinter Rachel's coffin so that she can rebury Rachel where the Wileys are moving. - Theme: Privilege, Understanding, and Historical Change. Description: In The Dream House, the more privilege characters have, the less perspective they seem to have on life. Patricia Wiley, for example, has lived a life of privilege: she inherited a farm and, despite the farm's lack of success, employs Black workers to attend to her and her husband Richard. She believes that the death of one employee, Black dairy worker Grace, was an accident and that the departure of Looksmart (a young Black man who grew up on the farm and whose education Patricia paid for) is an unrelated mystery. However, Looksmart returns one day when Patricia is in debt and has sold her house. He tells her that Grace's death was not an accident: Richard was raping Grace when she got away, so Richard sicced a dog on her. Looksmart loved Grace and planned to marry her but knew he couldn't get justice for her against a white man, which is why he left. Notably, Grace's murder occurred during apartheid, South Africa's period of legally enforced segregation and white supremacy, but Looksmart doesn't tell Patricia about the murder until after apartheid has ended. It's therefore only after Patricia has lost some undeserved racial privilege due to apartheid's end (and economic privilege due to debt) that she's finally able to see that she has overlooked her husband's violence. Yet Looksmart may not know the whole truth, either. His privilege as an educated man may have blinded him to what really happened to Grace. Looksmart dismisses Grace's sister Beauty because she's less pretty than Grace and because she continued working for the Wileys after Grace's death. He does not consider that she had fewer opportunities for outside employment than he did, as no one paid to have her educated. After Looksmart leaves, Beauty tells Patricia that Richard didn't rape Grace—he was paying Grace, who was poor and uninterested in marrying Looksmart, for a sexual relationship. He set the dog on her only after discovering she was pregnant. Beauty's version of events is the final version the novel offers, ultimately suggesting that Beauty—the least privileged character—is the only one capable of fully recognizing and understanding the ugly truth about what happened to her sister. In turn, the novel suggests that sometimes a sense of privilege or advantage can enable people to tell themselves narratives that serve their own purposes, thus conveniently deluding themselves as a way of avoiding difficult realities. - Theme: Truth, Accountability, and Memory. Description: In The Dream House, characters can only hold themselves and each other accountable once they know the truth about the past. However, the characters can only make subjective judgments about what happened in the past, since memory often fails and—to complicate matters—people often lie. From the beginning, the novel makes clear that its characters' memories fail: aging white South African Patricia Wiley can't remember certain facts about her farm, while her husband Richard is losing his memory entirely. When Patricia receives a visit from Looksmart, a Black South African who grew up on the farm, they fight—and lie to each other—about their differing memories: whether Patricia took Looksmart fishing and what they did with the fish; what name Looksmart's mother gave him when he was born; and, most importantly, what happened the day a farm worker named Grace died. Looksmart says that Grace, whom he planned to marry, told him while dying that Richard set a dog on her after she escaped his sexual assault. Years later, Looksmart wants to hold Patricia accountable for hesitating to let him drive Grace to the hospital in her car because she didn't want blood on the seats. Patricia admits that she can't remember what she was thinking after Grace's attack—and since Looksmart is only inferring from his memories of Patricia's behavior that she didn't want Grace's blood in her car, neither of them knows for certain how accountable Patricia is for the delay in getting Grace to the hospital, which may have contributed to her death. Meanwhile, Grace's sister Beauty tells Patricia that Richard didn't sexually assault Grace: they were having consensual sex, for which Richard was paying Grace. Richard set the dog on Grace not because she escaped him, but because she was pregnant and said she wouldn't get an abortion. Beauty's account confirms that Richard is accountable for Grace's death but suggests that Looksmart misunderstood Grace, failing to see the truth because he desired her. When Patricia asks Beauty why Patricia should believe her story over Looksmart's, Beauty says Patricia "must find the truth for" herself. Patricia has to decide how to judge herself and Looksmart based on partial memories and conflicting accounts. In the end, the novel suggests that certain objective truths about the past do exist—since Grace really died and Richard really loosed the dog that killed her—but also that individuals have to make subjective judgments about what happened, which often leads to confusion and interpersonal conflict. - Theme: Parental Love vs. Romantic Love. Description: The Dream House compares and contrasts parental love with romantic love, ultimately characterizing the former as substantial and meaningful and the latter as fickle and illusory. The primary relationship in the novel is between Patricia, an elderly white South African farm owner, and Looksmart, a Black South African man who grew up on Patricia's farm. Patricia only married her husband, Richard, because she was pregnant; after their baby Rachel was stillborn, she experienced no happiness with Richard until Looksmart was born to one of the farm workers, at which point Patricia found joy in arranging for his education and treating him like her son. Though Patricia has a long marriage with Richard and an affair with John Ford, her feelings for them are relatively cool—only in her grief for her dead baby and her maternal affection for Looksmart does she experience strong emotions. Initially, it seems that—by contrast—Looksmart has experienced life-changing romantic love, since he wanted to marry a Black farm worker, Grace, and ultimately fled the farm after her death. But Grace's sister, Beauty, contends that Looksmart and Grace's love was illusory—though Looksmart believed they were devoted to one another, Grace wasn't particularly interested in Looksmart. Interestingly, when Looksmart returns to the farm, he seems less interested in holding Richard accountable for killing Grace than he is in holding Patricia accountable for hesitating to let him drive Grace to the hospital in her car—a hesitation that hints at her anti-Black racism and thus destroyed his ability to believe in her unconditional maternal love for him. What has truly wounded Looksmart and fundamentally changed his inner life, the novel suggests, is not the death of his romantic love, Grace, but his betrayal by his mother-figure, Patricia. The rest of Looksmart's life likewise suggests that he privileges parent-child love over romantic love; he has never really loved his wife and is cheating on her, but he's passionately devoted to his two daughters. By centering the quasi-adoptive mother-son relationship between Patricia and Looksmart, then, the novel suggests that love between parents and children is primary and enduring and that, by contrast, romantic love can be fleeting. - Theme: Rebirth and New Beginnings. Description: The Dream House examines the idea of "rebirth," ultimately questioning whether or not new beginnings truly exist. Early in the novel, Richard—the elderly husband of white South African Patricia—asks her whether they're already dead. The question shows Richard's dementia, but it also suggests that Richard and Patricia are dead in a metaphorical sense—emotionally, spiritually, or otherwise—and thus might be reborn. Indeed, as Richard loses his memories, he becomes more and more infantile: he calls Beauty (his employee) his mother, Beauty at one point mistakes him for a lost child, and he hallucinates that he is moving back in time to a period in which nobody has been born yet and everyone has "their whole lives ahead of them." Like Richard, Patricia flirts with the possibility of rebirth—in her case, through having children. When her baby was born dead, Patricia failed to find happiness in anything until she took on a maternal role toward Looksmart, a Black South African child whose mother worked on Patricia's farm. Patricia sees Rachel's death as her own figurative death and Looksmart as her figurative rebirth. Yet both Richard's regression to childhood and Patricia's informal adoption of Looksmart are false rebirths: their past lives continue to impinge on their present after the "rebirth" occurs. Even as his memory disintegrates, Richard can't help but recall how he murdered dairy worker Grace while she was pregnant with his baby. His two dead children, by Patricia and by Grace, still haunt him. Meanwhile, Patricia's attempt to make Looksmart her son cannot survive either South Africa's white supremacist history or her own personal history, since she alienated herself from him by failing to help Grace—the woman he loved—get to the hospital in time to save her life. Thus, the novel implies that new beginnings are inherently hard to come by, since everything in life is impacted by the past. In the world of the novel, then, the idea of "rebirth" is little more than a false sense of hope for an impossibly blank slate. - Theme: Humor, Ignorance, and Denial. Description: Characters in The Dream House use humor to connect with one another but also to silence, deflect, or deny painful realities. Ultimately, therefore, the novel suggests that humor should not be one's only mode of interacting with other people; to face reality, one has to be serious sometimes. Two of the novel's central characters are the white South African farm owner Patricia Wiley and the Black South African man Looksmart, whose education Patricia paid for while he was growing up on her farm. Looksmart grew up during apartheid, a period of racial segregation and legally enforced white supremacy in South Africa. During Looksmart's childhood, strict laws and social mores surrounding racial hierarchies shaped how Patricia and Looksmart could interact. Patricia used humor and "teasing" to demonstrate her quasi-maternal love for Looksmart in place of overt affection, which was disallowed between white and non-white people. In turn, Looksmart learned to tease her back. Humor thus enabled them to connect with each other, but it also helped Patricia ignore how racism affected their relationship. Similarly, Patricia uses humor to "silence" her husband Richard, which helps her cope with his unpleasantness but also blinds her to how horrible he truly is. Patricia doesn't know that Richard murdered Grace, the girl that Looksmart loved—an event leading Looksmart to flee the farm. It is only after Looksmart returns many years later and has a serious conversation with Patricia about Grace—a conversation in which they laugh painfully or cynically at each other but never at each other's jokes—that Patricia can finally recognize the realities that shaped and ultimately ended her quasi-maternal relationship with Looksmart. - Climax: Beauty tells Patricia that Richard set his dog on Grace because Grace was pregnant with his child. - Summary: Patricia Wiley, an elderly white South African woman, has sold the farm where she lives with her husband Richard (who suffers from dementia) to developers. The day before they're supposed to move, Patricia asks her Black servant Beauty to inform her driver, Bheki, that Patricia wants to visit John Ford. Bheki drives Patricia to John's in her car, an ancient Mercedes. While chatting with John, a retired headmaster, Patricia recalls how she first met and began an affair him when she brought a Black boy from the farm, Looksmart, for a school interview. John gives Patricia a letter and asks her not to read it until she leaves town. Back home, Patricia sees Richard headed outside with a spade and worries he'll dig up Rachel's grave. Looksmart, now an adult, works for the developers who have bought the Wileys' farm. Driving to visit the farm, he wonders whether he's going there to see the Wileys or Grace and whether he has enough hatred left for the encounter he's planning with Patricia. In the evening, Patricia hears the house's back door open. Looksmart enters and is surprised to see that the Wileys still have the dog. Patricia, not recognizing him, asks which dog. When he says Chloe, Patricia tells him Chloe's dead—their current dog is no relation. Looksmart replies "it's still the same dog" and tells Patricia who he is. She cries out in happiness. Later, Beauty enters. After Looksmart begins talking to her, she admits she recognizes him—but she thinks that he, like the memory of her sister Grace, sickens her. She thinks if either he or Patricia would really look at her, they might see secret knowledge in her eyes—but they don't look. Beauty leaves to find Richard. Looksmart says he knows the Wileys are moving and asks whether Richard is sad. Patricia tells Looksmart that Richard is losing his mind. Looksmart points out that though Patricia makes the Wileys' situation sound gloomy, they must have made money from the farm. Patricia says they're in debt—Richard was a bad farmer—and asks why Looksmart cares anymore. Looksmart asks whether Patricia thinks the past matters and. Then, noting how angry he is that Beauty still works for the Wileys after what happened, he asks whether Patricia remembers Grace. Patricia says Grace was a girl who died on the farm. Looksmart says Grace was murdered. The day she died, she was planning to ask the Wileys for time off work so she could get married. That afternoon, on the veranda, Looksmart and Patricia heard a scream and saw Richard's dog Chloe chasing Grace. When Patricia asks Looksmart whether he was the person Grace planned to marry, he runs outside and vomits. Bheki approaches, asking whether Looksmart is okay. Looksmart—who feels secret contempt for Bheki's position as Patricia's servant—chats with him. When Bheki explains he's moving with the Wileys because he can't find help for his disabled son near the farm, Looksmart reveals he works for the developers who bought the farm and offers to help Bheki's son if Bheki takes a job with his company. Looksmart sees Patricia has come out onto the veranda in a wheelchair. After wheeling her back inside, he says he can't forgive her because she didn't want Grace's blood getting on her Mercedes, which delayed getting Grace to the hospital. He reveals that as Grace was dying, she told him Richard set the dog on her after raping her in the dairy. Beauty witnessed it. Patricia denies she was worried about her car. When Looksmart insists Patricia's behavior toward Grace proves she never valued Looksmart, Patricia admits she doesn't remember what she was thinking the day Grace died. When Beauty reenters the house, Patricia demands the whole truth about Grace's death. Haltingly, Beauty explains that she saw Richard and Grace on the dairy floor, Grace running away, and Richard unchaining the dog. Looksmart asks leading questions and adds his own embellishments to Beauty's story. Once she finishes, Patricia promises her she won't have to talk about Grace's death again. In the kitchen of the Wileys' house, Beauty opens the door to find Richard standing there. She leads him away and hides him. In the sitting room, Patricia asks Looksmart what he wants now. He says he wants her to remember Grace's death and not just retire happily. Patricia says she may understand Looksmart's grief. She married Richard because he'd impregnated her; she wasn't happy during her marriage until she started seeing to Looksmart's education and he began spending time around the farm. When Looksmart demands to know what happened to Patricia's son, Patricia—taken aback—says she had a daughter, Rachel, who was born dead. Patricia never had living children, yet Looksmart was like her son. She invites him to come visit her during her seaside retirement. Somewhat sadly, he says their odd, quasi-parent-child relationship shouldn't exist in the new South Africa. Richard, remembering his goal of digging up Rachel, flees Beauty. He tries to unearth Rachel but can't find her. Later, he walks into the Wileys' house, finds Patricia and Looksmart, and tells a disturbing joke about his uncle raping his daughter. When Looksmart says he's glad never to meet this uncle, Richard says, once upon a time, he could have had Looksmart whipped. Rather than retaliate, Looksmart says goodbye to Patricia. She asks whether he'll visit her in retirement; he lies and says he will. Then he leaves. Patricia, furious, demands Richard say Rachel's and Grace's names and confess what he did to Grace. Richard says "she" lied and "it" didn't have a name. When Patricia tries to determine what he means, he calls her a slur. She yells at him to go. The next morning, Patricia asks Beauty and Bheki to dig up Rachel's coffin and pack it so she can reinter it at a church. Bheki, disgusted at the task, is glad he's decided to take Looksmart up on his offer to get Bheki a new job. The same morning, Patricia receives a phone call asking her to go to John's—he killed himself and mentioned her in his note. At John's, Patricia talks to a policewoman, views the body, and leaves. In his letter to Patricia, John wrote he regrets many things in his life, but not their affair, which seemed to him a truthful experience. Pondering the letter at home while Bheki loads the car, Patricia gets angry: her affair with John was not truthful, and he chose to be insincere in his final letter. When Beauty comes out onto the veranda, Patricia begs her to tell the whole truth. Beauty admits Grace never loved Looksmart and repeatedly had sex with Richard for money; Richard murdered her because he'd impregnated her and she wouldn't abort. Patricia asks why she should believe Beauty's version of events and not Looksmart's. Beauty replies that Patricia will have to decide for herself. As Bheki drives Patricia, Richard, and Beauty away from the farm, they pass Looksmart's car in the driveway. The cars stop and roll down their windows. Patricia gives the house keys to Bheki, who tosses them to Looksmart; then the cars drive their separate ways.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Drover’s Wife - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: The Australian outback - Character: The Bushwoman. Description: The unnamed bushwoman is the main character in "The Drover's Wife," and the story centers around the challenges she faces raising a family largely on her own in the Australian bush. She has four children—Tommy, Jacky, and two daughters—with the drover, who is often away for many months at a time. The bushwoman has grown extremely self-sufficient over the years, though she still clings to various trappings of more "civilized" life—reading the Young Ladies' Journal and dressing up to go for a walk with her children every Sunday, for example. As a girl she dreamt of a comfortable life and she enjoyed being pampered by her husband early in their marriage by buggy rides and fancy hotel stays. After the drover's finances were devastated by a drought, however, both were forced to trade their creature comforts for a demanding, solitary existence in the outback. The bushwoman has since come to accept the inescapability of her fate and the harshness of life in the bush, which has robbed her of her more "womanly" nature (symbolized by her wearing trousers, which both amuses and frightens her children). In addition to depicting her struggle to protect her family from a snake that invades their home, the story enumerates the many threats that she has faced over the course of her life in the bush, which range from natural phenomena—fires, floods, and wild animals—to lascivious men who, realizing no husband is at home, occasionally come to her door. By the end of the story, the reader has a clear understanding of just how tough these many challenges have forced the bushwoman to become, both physically and emotionally, in order to ensure the survival of her family. That she remains unnamed throughout the story suggests that she symbolizes a generation who helped establish the foundations of white settlement deep in the Australian continent. - Character: Tommy. Description: At 11, Tommy is eldest of the bushwoman's children, and he shows a great deal of bravery throughout the story. When the snake first appears, for instance, he grabs a stick and goes after the creature despite his mother's protests (accidentally whacking Alligator's nose in the process). Tommy also swears a great deal, eliciting further scolds from the bushwoman, and bickers with his little brother, Jacky. In many ways, it appears he is attempting to fulfill the role of "man of the house" in his father's absence. This is complicated at the end of the story, however: once the snake has been killed and its remains thrown into the fire, Tommy embraces his mother and tells her that he will never go droving like his father. This suggests that Tommy represents a better future for the next generation. He hopes to earn a living without leaving his family for long stretches, but notably will have an easier time surviving in the bush thanks to the foundation laid by people like his parents. - Character: Alligator. Description: Alligator, the family "snake-dog," attempts to kill the snake at the beginning of the story but is unable to catch it; as he attempts to burrow under house in pursuit of the reptile, the bushwoman restrains him because she knows that they "cannot afford to lose him." The family's reliance on Alligator reflects humankind's broader reliance on the natural world even as it seeks to dominate it. At the same time, however, the fact that Alligator is domesticated and seeks to protect his human owners could suggest the breadth of humanity's power to control nature. Indeed, the dog successfully catches and kills the snake at the end of the story, thereby saving the family. - Character: The Drover. Description: The drover never appears in the story, but his existence shapes much of the action that does take place. The bushwoman is notably defined in the title of the story as the drover's wife, reflecting the fact that her life consists mostly in waiting for him and raising his children in his absence. Despite these long absences, the bushwoman appreciates the drover, saying that "he is careless, but he is a good enough husband" who provides for his family: "if he has a good cheque when he comes back he will give most of it to her." Before losing everything in a drought years before the story takes place, the drover spoiled his wife with trips into the city, featuring buggy rides and hotel stays. He has a brother who lives on the main road, neatly twenty miles from his home in the bush, and his brother brings the bushwoman provisions "about once a month." - Character: King Jimmy. Description: An Aboriginal man who gets his wife, Black Mary, to help the bushwoman give birth in the bush. He is one of just two named indigenous characters in the story; the third indigenous character remains unnamed and is deemed untrustworthy by the bushwoman. Jimmy is described with direct reference to his "black face," underscoring his perceived otherness from the story's white characters. Though very likely not the author's intention, these details reflect the racism and prejudice that were common at the time of Lawson's writing. - Theme: Humankind vs. Nature. Description: The central problem facing the main characters in Australian Henry Lawson's 1892 short story "The Drover's Wife" is the presence of a snake in the floorboards of their shack in the Australian outback. The story begins when the snake first enters the house and ends when the mother of the family, a "bushwoman," finally kills the snake with the help of her dog, Alligator, thereby preventing it from hurting her four young children. With the bushwoman's final killing and disposal of the snake, Lawson illustrates the tenacity of white settlers when confronted with natural hazards in the Australian outback. By stretching the struggle with the snake out to the span of the entire story, as well as interrupting the narrative with stories of other difficult struggles against nature that the bushwoman has faced, he illustrates how all-consuming the fight against the forces of nature was for early white settlers in the Australian outback (the story is notably devoid of meaningful discussion of indigenous peoples). Even as Lawson details the power of nature, the bushwoman's victory suggests an ultimate assertion of humankind's inevitable dominion over the natural world. The struggle to protect her family against constant threats to their lives takes up the majority of the bushwoman's time. Lawson recounts several stories that illustrate the ways that the woman has fought against nature: she has beaten a bush-fire, disease, a bull, and vicious birds. All of these short accounts involve a terrible struggle, but the bushwoman always wins in the end through a combination of wit and willpower. Though she does have an old shot-gun, her greatest weapon is often her "cunning"—which she employs, for instance, to scare crows away from her chickens. By asserting that crows may be cunning "but a woman's cunning is greater," Lawson implicitly raises human beings above other inhabitants of natural world by virtue of their intelligence. Importantly, however, Lawson also partially attributes the success of the bushwoman—and thus to settlers writ large—in beating nature's threats to her ability to be in harmony with and make careful use of elements of nature. In the end, she is able to kill the snake only with the help of Alligator, who is described without sentimentality: Lawson says that Alligator "hates snakes and has killed many, but he will be bitten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way." Although Alligator is depicted as just one among many snake-dogs, significant only in that he is useful, it is only through allying herself with this non-human creature that the bushwoman is able to protect her family. The bushwoman also notably shelters her children on a wooden "man-made table" beyond the snake's reach and at one point must go to gather more firewood, further illustrating her reliance on certain aspects of the natural world to survive. Together these details reveal that the bushwoman has not segregated herself from nature but rather sublimated elements of nature to suit her own needs—again suggesting a certain primacy of humankind. Of course, Lawson is not suggesting that the fight against nature in the outback consists of constant victories. "There are things that a bushwoman cannot do," Lawson writes, noting how she was unable to prevent a flood from destroying a dam that had taken her husband, the drover, "years of labour" to construct. Following this failure in the face of nature's wrath, the bushwoman cried. Lawson includes this anecdote not to diminish humankind's power, but rather to underscore the immense power they are up against in establishing lives in the outback. This, in turn, makes human beings' eventual success all the more impressive, and again speaks to what the story perceives as the natural dominance of humanity. The bushwoman's struggle to protect her family from the snake symbolizes the struggle of early white settlers in the Australian outback against nature. Lawson makes clear that spending their lives beating nature comes at a dear cost to the drover and his wife; at the same time, Lawson suggests that through their sacrifices, they are laying the groundwork so that the next generation can live more comfortably. This is reflected in the fact that both the drover and his wife are never given names, though their two older sons are named frequently ("Tommy" and "Jacky"). Though the generation of the drover's wife is likely doomed to live in obscurity, their work in the outback will create a on which the next generation of colonists will build—ensuring the continued dominance of humankind over the natural world. - Theme: Gender. Description: As a woman taking care of her household in the unforgiving outback while her husband, the drover, is away, the bushwoman is left in a strange position. She tries to maintain certain aspects of femininity that only have real importance in a societal context, like getting dressed up to push a perambulator through the outback every Sunday and reading the Young Ladies' Journal. At the same time, she is often forced to take on the role of a man to care for her family. Her circumstances push her into a much more ambiguous gender role than she would regularly occupy, as "her surroundings," Lawson tells the reader, "are not favourable to the development of the 'womanly' or sentimental side of nature." By depicting the traditionally masculine endeavors the bushwoman handily undertakes, Lawson implicitly rejects rigid stereotypes that would underestimate his protagonist on the basis of gender. Because she lives in a harsh natural setting, the bushwoman must constantly do things that are not in line with traditional gender roles. When her house catches fire, for instance, she is forced to put on her husband's pants to fight it properly. The "sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy," Lawson writes, "who worked like a little hero by her side, but the terrified baby howled lustily for his 'mummy.'" The children's reactions highlight how the drover's wife must ironically become nearly unrecognizable as a woman in order to be a good mother and protect her family. Though "she loves her children," she also "has no time to show" tenderness towards them. This suggests that beyond donning the outward trappings of masculinity, she is forced to reject stereotypically feminine sentimentality because of the harshness of her surroundings. Simply surviving takes priority over behaving in a way that society would deem proper for a woman. Even as the ways that the bushwoman deviates from traditional female gender roles, however, Lawson emphasizes the power of such roles by showing how strongly people cling to them even when far removed from society. One of the bushwoman's "few pleasures" consists of dressing up herself and her children to take long walks with a stroller every Sunday, taking as "much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city." This implicitly presents gender as a performance, one that entails putting on a costume of sorts and flaunting it before an audience. Even without "a soul to meet" in the wilderness, the bushwoman seeks to remind herself of her femininity. This, coupled with the fact that the bushwoman occasionally cries after particularly draining experiences trying to protect her family, complicates the story's rejection of gender roles by suggesting that there perhaps is something innate about femininity or masculinity; on the other hand, the complicated character of the bushwoman might suggest that neither role in rigid isolation can entirely encompass the human experience. Ultimately Lawson highlights the artificial nature of gender roles while also making clear that, however socially constructed, gender stereotypes still have the power to shape behavior—and can have concrete consequences for women. Despite the clear absurdity of adhering to gender expectations in the outback, the bushwoman is still limited in certain ways as to what she can do and what she can expect from her life because she is a woman. While her husband goes off for months at a time and "may forget sometimes that he is married," she is stuck in the house with the children—because of her sex, her freedom is automatically restricted. She also faces certain dangers because of her gender that women face regardless of whether they live in cities or in complete isolation: sometimes a dangerous man will come by her house and, to protect herself from potential intrusion or assault, she has to lie that "that her husband and two sons are at work below the dam." Lawson's portrayal of gender is complex, as he makes clear that life in the Australian outback forced early white European settlers into situations that they would never encounter in towns or cities. By showing how the bushwoman defies traditional gender expectations, as well as depicting how out of place certain performative practices of gender seem in the outback, Lawson illustrates the socially constructed nature of gender and highlights women's potential when freed from restrictive stereotypes. At the same time, the bushwoman's interest in the Young Ladies' Journal, her Sunday walks, and relative sentimentality suggest her interest in maintaining femininity. Her tears at the end of the story could suggest the stress of being forced into a more masculine role; that Tommy, upon seeing his mother cry, promises never to be a drover could also suggest the importance of moving to a more equitable distribution of labor regardless of gender in the future. - Theme: Colonialism and Racism. Description: "The Drover's Wife" takes place in a colonial context, where white settlers are starting to move into new frontier territory formerly occupied only by Aboriginal people. Though the bushwoman is of European descent and thus represents the colonizers in the context of the story, Lawson also says that "her husband is an Australian, and so is she," implying that their families have been in Australia long enough that they feel a distinct claim to the territory. What's more, in the story, the bushwoman interacts with Aboriginal people only twice—and in both instances these people are portrayed as tricky or unserious. This, coupled with the fact that the white settlers are portrayed as fighting (and winning) a noble battle against nature, suggests that Lawson views Aboriginal people as lacking a legitimate prior claim to the land and further sees the white settlers as gaining such a claim by taming a barren natural landscape—a common, if ultimately racist and harmful, viewpoint at the time of Lawson's writing. Lawson portrays the few Aboriginal characters who appear in the story as deceptive, untrustworthy, and silly. He also calls them "blackfellows," employing many negative racial stereotypes in their description. The first Aboriginal man to appear in the story is "King Jimmy." When the bushwoman is giving birth and "ill with fever," King Jimmy puts his "black face round the door post" and "cheerfully" offers to fetch his "old woman." Although King Jimmy is ultimately helpful, he is portrayed as unserious, and Lawson takes care to emphasize the darkness of his skin—thereby establishing his difference from (and, given the time period of the story, subordination to) the bushwoman. The second and last time that an Aboriginal character appears in the story, the bushwoman asks a "stray blackfellow" to build a woodpile for her, a task for which she gives him an "extra fig of tobacco" and praises "him for not being lazy." However, she later learns that he has cheated her by building a hollow woodpile, and "tears spring to her eyes." Thus, the only other Aboriginal man in the story does something so deceitful that it reduces the bushwoman, who is portrayed as a resilient character, to tears. Lawson also calls the man who builds the woodpile a "stray," bringing to mind a dog and thus suggesting a similarity between Aboriginal people and animals. Together, these details create a decidedly prejudiced image of Aboriginals as less noble—and, in turn, less worthy of their land—than the white settlers. Notably, however, there aren't many Aboriginal characters in the story at all, despite the fact that many lived in the Australian bush at the time. This absence itself underscores their secondary importance in the white settlers' minds and suggests that the land in the outback is free for the taking. What's more, with the exception of King Jimmy and his wife, all of the victories and positive events in the story involve only white European settlers; positive portrayals of Aboriginal people are absent from the narrative. Lawson says that the drover and his wife "started squatting [where they live] when they were married," implying with the use of the word "squatting" that they were not legally given or sold the land but rather took it without seeking permission for its use. This paired with the heroic depiction of the bushwoman's victories over nature suggests that Lawson is legitimizing the bushwoman's use of the land. In this way, he implies that cultivation of the land creates a legitimate claim to it. The attitude toward native Australians evident in this story was widespread during the colonial period in Australia and is in fact still widespread there today. Moreover, centuries of mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Australia has led to a situation where such people occupy a much lower social class on average than descendants of white European settlers, and often live separated from the rest of the Australian population. Taken in this historical context, the depiction of aboriginal people in "The Drover's Wife" gives the reader insight into the colonial and racist dynamics that existed in Australia a century ago, and therefore provides insight into how things came to be the way there are in the Australia of today—chiefly, the negative ways that aboriginal people are depicted in the story exemplify the racist attitudes that shaped land rights policy at the time, which subsequently shaped the legal and demographic patterns that still exist in Australia. - Theme: Isolation and Vulnerability. Description: The bushwoman and her children are constantly made vulnerable to danger for many reasons, chief among them their extreme geographical isolation. Lawson depicts the many ways that isolation can pose a threat to one's livelihood, health, and general wellbeing, and his illustration of the dangers that the family faces in the bush also underscores the extent to which life in society is full of comforts and resources that are easy to take for granted until one knows their absence. Moreover, Lawson seems to suggest that in the state of nature, represented by the bushwoman and her family, a person is forced to become especially strong because they are constantly close to death and fighting against it; the only way to survive in the face of this, suggests Lawson, is to grow a very thick skin. The woman and her children live far from the rest of society, "nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization—a shanty on the main road." This means that the bushwoman is forced to deal with most of the problems that arise for her family completely by herself. At times she receives help—she puts out the fire around her house with the help of bushmen, for instance, but this is only because they are there by chance. She is left to fight a flood on her property on her own, which results in her being overwhelmed by it; as Lawson writes, "There are things that a bushwoman cannot do." Part of her isolation has to do with mobility. Her husband, the drover, is always on the move, but because she has to take care of her children and has no access to transportation, she is not only located far from the rest of society but is also stuck in the bush with no way to leave. This compounds her vulnerability further still, as she is unable to reliably flee any sort of threats that might overwhelm her in this isolated location. Such threats are numerous. The bushwoman nearly dies while giving birth, for example, as she is "alone on this occasion, and very weak." She gets through this experience not because of professional medical help but because of help from an Aboriginal woman, an occurrence the bushwoman frames as luck or as a divine reply to her prayer for "God to send her assistance." Her survival is framed as largely due to chance, and it is suggested that it could easily have gone quite differently. Additionally, the bushwoman has to kill many animals to protect her family, and thus her isolation inevitably breeds a certain comfort around or acceptance of death. When a "mad bullock" attacks her house, she is not only able to kill it to save her family, but also "skin[s] him and [gets] seventeen-and-sixpence for the hide." When she kills the snake and throws it in the fire, she watches it burn quite calmly. In starkest example of her exposure to death, following the death of one of her children, "she rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child" as she searched for help—at once underscoring the tragedy of her isolation and the strength she has subsequently developed. She is able to face death stoically because, for her, it is simply a fact of life. She has grown comfortable with death in a way that may be unfamiliar to a city-dweller—suggesting that isolation brings one closer to danger, but also can make one more equipped to survive on their own. Thus even as the bushwoman and her family are exposed to dangers that would be much easier to deal with if they had access to the standard resources available in a city, her isolation and resulting vulnerability actually ends up making her stronger. Because she cannot rely on others, she has to become someone who can (with the few exceptions of receiving sporadic help from other bushmen and Aboriginal people) rely entirely on herself. Therefore, Lawson suggests that isolation does not only create vulnerability, but also creates strength. - Theme: Thwarted Desire and Poverty. Description: As a young woman, the bushwoman dreamed of living a comfortable and exciting life. Lawson says that "as a girl she built the usual castles in the air." Now, however, "all her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead." Having been through countless hardships in the bush, she has become used to a life devoid of the dreams of her youth, and has accepted the difficulty and instability of an existence so far removed from society. The contrast between the bushwoman's early desires and current harsh reality suggests that she still longs for the comfort and propriety she once imagined for herself, yet also that such desires are ultimately trivial and impossible when one has to spend all their time fighting for survival. The bushwoman has little time to seek higher joy or meaning in her life, and even as the story implicitly presents such desires as nothing more than fantasy, there is a sense of noble pathos to the fact that the bushwoman sacrifices her own comfort in order to push the boundaries of society for future generations. Importantly, the destruction of her dreams is also directly related to her extreme poverty, as access to wealth would have freed her from the immediate burdens that prevent her from fulfilling her childhood desires. Lawsons's story thus contrasts youthful flights of fancy with the often harsh, unforgiving reality of impoverished and practical adult life. The bushwoman's girlhood "castles in the air" have primarily been destroyed because her isolated location, exposure to natural threats, and responsibilities as an effectively single mother. Yet despite Lawson saying that her "girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead," certain actions suggest that she is keeping some of these aspirations alive. For example, by walking through the empty landscape every Sunday with a baby carriage, wearing her best clothing, she reveals her continued desire to be a part of polite society; however, as long as she is remains isolated in the outback, these remnants of her childhood aspirations are nothing more than fantasy. She attempts to maintain a connection to society, but the story emphasizes that there is no one around to see her efforts, and, as such, they are ultimately a rather pathetic imitation of the world she once dreamed of belong to. Furthermore, the bushwoman is ultimately—and understandably—too preoccupied with staying alive to have much time for anything else. This subtly suggests the shallowness and futility of certain social proprieties, even as the bushwoman continues to cling to them. Though the harshness that characterizes the bushwoman's life results largely from her isolation, it is exacerbated by her poverty. Because she lives in such a humble dwelling, described as "built of round timber, slabs, and stringy-bark, and floored with split slabs," the snake is able to enter this dwelling quite easily. This puts her family in a more vulnerable position than if they had a tightly-built, luxurious house. In this way, the bushwoman's poverty exacerbates her vulnerability. Through brief flashbacks Lawson illustrates that the few times in her life that the bushwoman had access to money, she was indeed able to both be comfortable and experience luxury. Lawson says that "when [her husband] had money he took her to the city several times—hired a railway sleeping compartment, and put up at the best hotels. He also bought her a buggy, but they had to sacrifice that along with all the rest." Thus, during this period of relative wealth, her husband was able to provide her with security and comfort that freed her from having to focus on survival and brought her closer to her girlhood dreams. Once this period of time was over, she was forced back into a life focused on survival. However, Lawson suggests that even though many desire lives of comfort, people are adaptable. Over time, the bushwoman came to feel more comfortable with her current circumstances than she would feel with a more luxurious life: Lawson says that "as a girl-wife she hated it, but now she would feel strange away from it." Lawson is therefore suggesting that one can grow used to anything if one has to, to the point where one would "feel strange away from" adverse circumstances, and that choosing to accept one's lot in life and move forward, instead of giving up and abandoning one's family and responsibilities, is an alternative way to imbue life with meaning. The life of the bushwoman illustrates quite starkly how isolation and harsh natural conditions in the Australian outback precluded the possibility of comfort for settlers there in the late nineteenth century. However, the position of the bushwoman as a settler on the Australian frontier also indicates that Lawson is suggesting that it is the poor who create the infrastructure necessary for comfort, not the rich. The bushwoman's toiling away in poverty is building a new frontier for the colonial nation and new opportunities for her children, who may grow up in a town: indeed, the drover "intends to move his family into the nearest town when he comes back" from tending his livestock. The bushwoman has perhaps sacrificed her own childhood dreams in service of the dreams of a growing nation. - Climax: The drover's wife successfully kills the snake that has been threatening her family - Summary: The bushwoman is alerted to the fact that a snake has just entered her small, ramshackle house deep in the Australian outback by her eldest son, Tommy. Tommy goes after the snake with a stick, and the family dog, Alligator, follows suit. Both are unable to catch the snake, however, which slips under the floorboards of the house. Aware that a snake bite so far from help would be deadly, the bushwoman unsuccessfully attempts to lure the snake out. With the sun setting and a thunderstorm on the horizon, she sets up a bed on the kitchen table for her children, where they will be out of the snake's reach. The bushwoman once dreamt of a more comfortable life and enjoyed being pampered by her husband, a drover. Ever since he lost everything in a drought, however, she has grown used to being alone and working tirelessly to ensure her family's survival. Although she does not see her husband very often, he treats her well. However, because he is gone for long periods of time, she is left to take care of the family on her own and protect them from the various threats they face in the bush. She once nearly died in childbirth, and only survived with the help of a local Aboriginal couple. When one of her children died, she rode nearly 20 miles with the child's body in search of help. She also once fought a bush-fire that nearly consumed the house, managing to put it out with the help of four bushmen who arrived at the last minute. She has not always won against the assaults of nature: she cried after a flood broke through the dam her husband had built, and she lost two her two best cows to illness. But she has successfully fought off many wild animals, and also held her own against men who have come to the door while her husband is away. She has few pleasures in the outback, though she makes time to read the Young Ladies' Journal is sure to dress herself and her children up every Sunday and go for long walks through the bush with her baby carriage. The bushwoman realizes that her candle is about to go out, so she goes to get some wood from the woodpile. When she does so, the woodpile collapses, causing her to realize that the Aboriginal man who constructed it must have deceived her by building it hollow. She begins to cry, but soon calms down. Alligator suddenly approaches the partition between the kitchen and the rest of the house, and the bushwoman realizes that the snake must be emerging. She grabs her stick, but Alligator gets there first. The dog grabs the snake with his mouth and shakes it until it dies. The woman then throws the snake's remains into the fire. Tommy embraces his mother and promises that he will never be a drover like his father.

- Genre: Dystopian fiction; Science fiction - Title: The Drowned World - Point of view: Third person - Setting: London, 2145 - Character: Dr. Robert Kerans. Description: Kerans is the protagonist of The Drowned World. He's about 40 years old with a bleached white beard and tan skin that's sunken because of malaria. He was born and raised at Camp Byrd, a city in the Arctic Circle, and doesn't remember a time when the cities of the world were inhabited by humans. He began conducting ecological surveys of the changing planet in his early 30s. He works primarily with Dr. Bodkin to chart the evolutionary changes of plants and animals in Europe's cities, though he understands that doing so is somewhat useless since they're just confirming the predictions of 20 years ago. Throughout his three years in London, Kerans has been involved in a romantic relationship with Beatrice. Kerans is one of the last characters to begin experiencing the dreams that his colleagues have been experiencing, in which vivid scenes of prehistoric earth transport the dreamer back to a distant evolutionary past. Kerans ultimately decides to stay behind in London because of the dreams, which seem to make him wholly uninterested in the enterprise of human civilization. As the dreams become more intense, Kerans isolates himself more and more. Strangeman's arrival in the lagoon disrupts Kerans' inward journey, and Kerans dislikes him from the start though he often humors his invitations to dinner. When Strangeman gives Kerans the opportunity to dive and explore the underwater planetarium, Kerans almost dies when his air is cut off, and afterwards he struggles to understand whether it was a suicide attempt or not. Kerans is aghast when Strangeman drains the lagoon, as he finds the city obscene—a symbol of a past to which he knows it is impossible to return. After flooding the lagoon, he escapes and travels south along the system of lagoons. It's implied that he dies soon after the end of the novel from an infected bullet wound he sustained as he fled London. Kerans's overall character arc is one of gradual disenchantment with the project of dominating nature in order to re-civilize the planet, culminating in his escape southward—which, although suicidal in nature, is not characterized by feelings of self-loathing or dread, but rather by a seemingly instinctive desire to submit to the natural progression of evolution and a knowledge that resisting such an unstoppable process is futile. - Character: Strangeman. Description: Strangeman is a pirate and a looter who travels through the drowned European cities collecting lost treasures. Because he's albino, he amasses a cult-like following of African crewmembers who worship him because they believe he's dead. Strangeman magnifies his unsettling image by wearing white much of the time. He also seems to have a peculiar control over a large posse of giant alligators who follow his hydroplane but never harm him. Strangeman develops a way to drain the lagoons that have covered the old cities by using and a system of dams. Draining the cities allows him to loot on foot and collect all manner of treasures. Kerans instinctively dislikes Strangeman. He finds him untrustworthy and believes him to be dangerous. Strangeman is fond of throwing parties during the cool nights in the hopes of attracting Beatrice, but cancels them when Beatrice refuses to come. He doesn't understand why Beatrice, Bodkin, and Kerans give into the dreams, as he says he's far more interested in the 20th century than he is in what happened millions of years ago. He proves himself violent and dangerous when he shoots Bodkin for attempting to re-flood London. After this he captures and holds Beatrice captive, and ties Kerans to a throne while he encourages his crew to torture him. When Colonel Riggs returns to London, he says that Strangeman technically did nothing wrong and can't even be prosecuted for killing Dr. Bodkin. Riggs insists that the UN will certainly grant him a reward for draining the cities. After learning this, Kerans blows up the dam. The ensuing flood kills Strangeman and his crew. If Kerans and his friends represent the supreme and undeniable power of nature, Strangeman represents blind human ambition, as he clings to power by propagating a myth about himself (i.e., that he is dead) and attaches value to the artifacts he loots, suggesting he believes in the possibility of a future for mankind on earth. - Character: Dr. Alan Bodkin. Description: Dr. Bodkin is one of the senior biologists in the unit in London. At 65, he's one of the last people on Earth who remembers living in the cities that are now flooded, and he spends much of his free time paddling around alone and looking for remembered landmarks. He develops the theory of neuronics, which seeks to explain the disturbing dreams people experience by suggesting that people instinctively remember the entire evolution of the world. Now that the world is in a similar state that it was in during the Triassic period, humans subconsciously remember what the world was like at that point. He decides to stay behind in London with Kerans and Beatrice. When Strangeman arrives and drains London, Bodkin is at first awed by this feat and takes advantage of being able to revisit his memories on foot. However, he soon becomes disturbed by the possibility that Strangeman is going to try to return to the world to the way it was in the 20th century and tries to destroy one of the dams. Strangeman and his crew kill him before he succeeds. - Character: Beatrice Dahl. Description: Beatrice Dahl is the only woman living in London. She lives at the top of an apartment building where her rich grandfather used to live. There, she lives a life of luxury, drinking, spending her days by the pool, and seeing Kerans romantically. She refuses to leave London when Colonel Riggs and the unit receive orders to leave, choosing instead to stay behind with Kerans and Dr. Bodkin. During this time, she continues to maintain her doll-like appearance, though she seldom sees Kerans or Bodkin. When Strangeman arrives in London, she becomes an object of great desire, though she generally declines his advances. After Strangeman kills Bodkin and takes Beatrice captive, Kerans is able to rescue Beatrice from Strangeman's private quarters in his boat. Despite Beatrice's desire to not head north for Camp Byrd, she ends up going north with Colonel Riggs after Kerans escapes and heads south. Just as other characters remain attached to relics from life before the floods, Beatrice's obsession with maintaining her image—as well as her obsession with the jewels Strangeman gives her—are symbolic of her inability to accept the fact that human civilization as she knows it is over. - Character: Colonel Riggs. Description: Colonel Riggs is one of the military men leading the biological testing station through Europe, though his job also includes rescuing people who are still trying to live in the drowned cities. He's kind and jovial. Although he admits that their work of mapping the changing water and landmasses is somewhat futile, he speaks as though he truly believes that humans will someday recolonize the flooded cities. He doesn't experience the dreams and thus finds it very hard to understand or empathize with Beatrice, Kerans, and Dr. Bodkin when they choose to stay behind, or with Lieutenant Hardman when he disappears to head south. He insists that Strangeman be rewarded for draining the lagoon, as that was part of the government's plan for the next ten years. - Character: Lieutenant Hardman. Description: Lieutenant Hardman is Colonel Riggs' primary helicopter pilot. He was once very tall and strong, though the reader never sees him this way because he has become bedridden by the beginning of the novel. He's one of the first characters to experience the disturbing dreams, and in the views of his companions, the dreams drive Hardman crazy. After spending several weeks ill, supposedly with malaria, in the sick bay, he makes a desperate escape to run south the day before Riggs and his crew are scheduled to leave for Camp Byrd. When it becomes apparent that Hardman will not allow himself to be forced to go quietly north, Riggs lets him go. Kerans finds him months later when he makes his own journey south. By then, Hardman is blind from looking at the sun, has cancer in his eyes, and doesn't recognize Kerans. He continues his journey alone after Kerans gives him water and tends to his eyes, but surely dies soon afterwards. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: At its heart, The Drowned World is a story about humans fighting to survive in a wild and dangerous landscape. The story takes place on a planet that is rapidly changing and will soon no longer be able to support human life, both because of increasing global temperatures and the rapid evolution of massive lizards that prey on humans when given the chance. Although some of the main conflicts of the novel stem from characters doing battle with each other, the overarching conflict concerns the various ways in which the characters are forced to battle against an increasingly hostile environment. Throughout The Drowned World, Ballard describes the natural environment as though it were a character in its own right, with its own consciousness and agency. When characters describe the "humped backs" of silt deposits, covered in a "fur" of giant bamboo, the earth itself takes on the characteristics of an animal. In the Ritz Hotel, where Kerans takes up residence, molds and fungi become living parts of the elaborate and rich furnishings, while the ever-present iguanas watch the platoon from the windows of abandoned buildings. In this way, the environment seems to conspire to defeat the novel's human characters and the man-made world. It's worth keeping in mind that although The Drowned World is a book about climate change, it was published in 1962, before the emergence of modern day climate science showed that human activity would be the single greatest driver of climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries. Unlike the climate change the earth is experiencing today, the dramatic increase in global temperatures that Ballard writes about wasn't brought about by human activity. Rather, the changes began with solar storms that destroyed the earth's barrier against solar radiation, something decidedly beyond human control. In this way, the novel portrays humans as the helpless victims of a changing climate as they attempt to adapt to the new landscape. This idea that nature is beyond the control of humankind is reinforced in the way the characters talk about the science they conduct. Rather than attempting to change or reverse what's happening, Dr. Bodkin and Kerans are supposed to simply observe the many changes that are occurring as a result of the changing climate. Further, when Kerans hears that the officials at Camp Byrd have issued an order for the platoon to leave London and move north permanently, it represents a concession on the part of humans to the natural world, as it means that mankind has effectively been forced to surrender the city. All of this culminates in an overwhelming sense that humans have little control over their environment in the novel. They are at the mercy of nature and can only hope to survive its changes. The characters' sense that they lack control over nature is challenged when Strangeman arrives in London. Interestingly, Strangeman doesn't appear to be plagued by the dreams that Kerans, Dr. Bodkin, and Beatrice experience, in which humans are no longer the dominant species on the planet. Rather, he seems to be unaffected by the dramatic changes that have taken place in the physical environment. Strangeman, then, represents the only character who truly confronts nature and believes himself capable of altering it. By draining the lagoon over part of London, Strangeman shows that he can actively shape the natural world to be the way he wants it to be. When Strangeman drains the lagoon, he returns London to a state in which man-made structures and buildings dominate the landscape. For the relatively short time that the lagoon remains empty, the characters have the opportunity to experience what the world was like 75-100 years ago, when humans ruled the world. However, this state is soon challenged by both Dr. Bodkin and Kerans: Dr. Bodkin unsuccessfully attempts to blast open one of Strangeman's dams, and Kerans later completes Dr. Bodkin's attempt. For Dr. Bodkin and Kerans, the only way to exist in the new world is to accept the superiority of nature over humans. Draining the cities is a direct threat to the future they see in their dreams, which is one where humans accept their subordinate position in the kingdom of life. By re-flooding the lagoon, killing Strangeman, and heading south, Kerans insists that things progress according to nature's laws, not those of humankind, suggesting that the idea that humans could ever hope to truly exercise control over nature is extremely misguided. Rather, humans must accept their inferiority and understand that the very idea of "man versus nature" is a farce from the very beginning, since nature will triumph in the end with little regard for any life form, humans included, that can't keep up. - Theme: Memory vs. The Future. Description: The novel introduces the reader to a world where civilization as we now know it is merely a memory: global water levels have risen and all cities south of the Arctic Circle are underwater. The year is 2145 and few people remember what the world was like when humans lived in the cities of Europe and America. However, Dr. Bodkin suggests that all humans share a biological or evolutionary memory, which is encased in the human spine. He theorizes that the entire history of the world and of human evolution is instinctively "remembered" by all humans. Bodkin therefore believes that as the earth effectively returns to the way it was during the Triassic period, humans will also regress as memories surface of a time when they weren't the dominant species. The novel creates an opposition between this idea of a shared evolutionary memory and the vastly different worldview of characters like Colonel Riggs, who seeks to protect the supremacy of human beings and ensure a future in which humans continue to rule the earth. The platoon in London is there for a very specific reason: to observe the changing plant and animal life, as well as changes to the various bodies of water that now occupy London, so that humans have the necessary information to later recolonize the cities. This represents a hopeful view of the future, as it shows that the governing bodies believe that humans will indeed be able to conquer the changing environment and remain the dominant species on earth. Dr. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin appear to share some of this hope, at least initially: their field notes from their early days in London are dense and detailed, showing their dedication to their project. However, their belief in a human-centric future is challenged when they begin experiencing dreams of the very distant past, when lizards ruled the world and mammals, including humans, weren't the dominant life forms. Dr. Bodkin theorizes that these dreams are triggered by the intense heat of the new climate, which is similar to the earth's climate during the Triassic period. Furthermore, he believes that the dreams are not simply dreams, but are instead actual memories of a very distant evolutionary history. The dreams are horrifying at first, but after a few nights of experiencing them, the dreamers become entranced by, and ultimately accepting of, these ancient memories. This shift causes Kerans, Dr. Bodkin, and Beatrice to decide to stay in London rather than return to Camp Byrd, and even brings about a mental breakdown for Lieutenant Hardman. Most importantly, the dream memories create a desire in those who experience them to move south, and in doing so, to return to the very distant past they experience in their dreams. The dreamers become disenchanted with the possibility of a civilized future and instead, give themselves over to their "biological memories." The conflict between memory and the future comes to a head when Colonel Riggs returns to London to save Kerans and Beatrice from Strangeman, the mysterious looter. The narrator states that looters and pirates are common in the drowned cities, but Strangeman takes the act of looting to another level: rather than just dive for treasure, he actually drains one of the lagoons that covers London, exposing the city and allowing him to loot on foot. It's important to note that draining the drowned cities represents both a return to the past as well as a vision of the future. Exposing the city allows Dr. Bodkin, who grew up in London, to visit landmarks from his past. Although it initially transfixes him, he soon joins Beatrice and Kerans in their horror that the world as they see it in their dreams is being returned to a civilized state. For them, the ancient memories they experience in their dreams have become so powerful that they can't stand the idea of the world returning to its recent past. When Colonel Riggs insists to Kerans that Strangeman will be honored for draining London, Kerans understands that there's no way to bridge the gap in understanding between those who experience the dreams (such as himself) and those who don't (like Colonel Riggs). For Kerans, re-flooding London and heading south is a final testament to the power of the biological memories he experiences. By accepting what they see in their dreams as both past and the inevitable future, Kerans and the other dreamers show that the history of the world isn't linear: it's cyclical. Thus, the novel shows that the only way for the characters to truly move forward is to accept that, for humans, the future might resemble a return to the past. - Theme: Science and Psychology. Description: The characters in The Drowned World have a highly scientific way of thinking about the world around them. The story follows Dr. Bodkin, a biologist, and Dr. Kerans, a biologist and sometimes-medical doctor who are stationed at a military base in London. Their job is to map the changing landmasses and waterways, as well as to observe the new lifeforms of plants and animals that thrive in the newly tropical climate of London, with the hope that humans will be able to recolonize the drowned cities in the next ten years. However, both Kerans and Bodkin begin to question the role science can and should play in the new world as they're confronted with psychological problems and questions that science simply can't answer, as well as the overwhelming sense that the hope of recolonizing the cities is at best far-fetched—and at worst impossible. The novel is quick to reveal that both Dr. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin aren't convinced that the fieldwork they conduct is at all useful. Ballard describes the doctors' scientific notes on the walls of their testing station as having been dense and detailed at the beginning of their three years in London, but in the present, the notes are few and lazily scrawled. Kerans explains the reason for this: the world simply did exactly what scientists predicted it would do twenty years before the present. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin's job for the three years prior to the start of the novel was, in essence, to confirm that prior hypotheses about global climate change were indeed correct. This instills the sense in both doctors that at this point in the world's history, science has become useless. They see that there's nothing they can do to stop what's happening or plan appropriately for a human-centric future, and thus they see little use in trying to document or make sense of the present. Once the characters accept that the natural world is beyond their control and isn't worth attempting to understand scientifically, they turn their attentions inward. The characters focus on the more pressing psychological issues that plague the base—namely, the terrifying, recurring, and exhausting nightmares of a watery landscape filled with massive reptiles. Dr. Bodkin develops a new field of psychology to explain these dreams, which he terms "neuronics." Dr. Bodkin insists that evolution is somewhat reversible, and this becomes the central tenet of his theory of neuronics. He proposes that the dreams are triggered by "innate releasing mechanisms" that cause a person to instinctively remember a time when the world last looked like it does now. The dreams are then indicative of a return to the "archaeo-psychic past," and by allowing the dreams to take over the mind, the person will re-experience each moment in human evolution. Initially, Dr. Bodkin attempts to make neuronics empirical and scientific: he conducts experiments with Lieutenant Hardman, who is nearly driven mad by the intensity of his dreams. Once again, however, simply naming and understanding what's happening isn't enough to actually change what the characters experience. Dr. Bodkin doesn't propose a way to stop the dreams; rather, he simply tries to make it easier for Hardman to accept the reality of his dreams. When Hardman allows the dreams to take over his mind, he finds a sense of peace with the world and the change it's undergoing, but this ultimately leads to him fleeing London to go south, the logic behind which eludes nearly all of the people posted in London. Hardman's escape—and later, Kerans' escape—both represent a rejection of the future that the government hopes for (i.e. mankind's return to the cities, facilitated by science). Going south alone symbolizes an acceptance that the future predicted in the dreams isn't something that can be changed or altered, it's just an inevitable reality that can either be accepted or ignored. In this way, the novel shows the characters rejecting the idea of science as a human-centric framework for understanding the world. Instead, they embrace science and psychology as tools for helping them understand and accept that humans aren't at the center of the new world order, and act accordingly. - Theme: Birth, Renewal, and Doom. Description: The characters of The Drowned World find themselves at a crossroads in human history. Some characters, such as Strangeman and Colonel Riggs, believe that human civilization will go on in much the same way that it used to, but in cities north of the Arctic Circle. Other characters, however, believe that human civilization in this new world is doomed. Kerans and Dr. Bodkin have a decidedly fatalist view of the future of the world, as they see the human birthrate dropping and the temperatures rising too fast for humans to expect to survive. This opposition between the possibilities of renewal and doom fuels much of the novel's central conflict, as many of the characters fight against annihilation, but also fight to discover what birth and renewal might truly mean for the human race in light of the circumstances. The conflict between birth and doom is frequently represented through references to Biblical imagery: at one point Kerans laughs to himself that soon, a new Adam and Eve will find themselves in a new and horrific Garden of Eden; at another point, Strangeman's African followers "crucify" Kerans (though Kerans survives the ordeal). The imagery of Adam and Eve in the new Garden of Eden is extremely fatalist, as it implies that this Adam and Eve will be the last people on earth, not the ones who will be responsible for reinvigorating the population. As Beatrice is the last woman in London, she becomes an Eve-like figure, while Kerans (as her romantic and sexual partner) becomes her Adam. The fatalist symbolism of these new Adam and Eve figures is confirmed by the fact that even after an implied three-year-long sexual relationship, the two haven't conceived a child. The novel explores ideas of birth and renewal through symbols of femininity. This includes the character Beatrice, as well as the language that Dr. Bodkin and Kerans use to describe the water in the lagoons. For them, the water is "amniotic" and certain buildings—particularly the submerged planetarium—are "womb-like." By referring to the water as amniotic, Dr. Bodkin recasts the role that water plays in the earth's changing landscape. He chooses to see it as a life-giving entity, rather than the thing that's responsible for destroying human civilization. This suggests that this period of change for the globe and its various species is not so much a death as a gestation period that will eventually give rise to a new chapter for life on earth. In this way, the book suggests that humans are still evolving, and indeed, that all life is embryonic and constantly evolving, with the world itself acting as a womb. In short, Dr. Bodkin chooses to apply hopeful and generative language to a situation that appears doomed. Rather than mourn the end of the human race, Dr. Bodkin, Kerans, and Beatrice choose to view the world's changes as a process of rebirth and regeneration which may or may not have anything to do with the human race. Although Bodkin portrays it as a form of rebirth, accepting the instinctual desire to move south is as much a decision to embrace an evolutionary renewal as it is to embrace one's own death. Thus, the novel portrays death and birth as inextricably linked events in the larger cycle of evolution—and in this way, what some characters see as doom becomes, for others, a process of rebirth. - Climax: Kerans destroys Strangeman's dam, re-flooding London - Summary: Dr. Kerans stands on the balcony of the Ritz Hotel and watches the sun, which is an ellipse, rise. It's already hot and he's spent the morning dawdling instead of working. He wonders if he should contact his commander, Colonel Riggs, but remembers that his radio's battery is dead. Finally, Kerans hears Riggs approaching. He dresses and runs down to the dock where Riggs invites himself up for a drink. As they drink, Riggs tells Kerans that the unit has received a command to move north to Camp Byrd permanently. Kerans is shocked. Riggs asks for help convincing Beatrice to leave the city and asks Kerans how he's been sleeping. Kerans says he slept fine. As Kerans and Riggs float through the lagoons that cover the city, Kerans watches the giant iguanas in the windows. Kerans is uninterested in the contents or the history of the cities. His fellow biologist, Dr. Bodkin, is old enough to remember living in the cities. Seventy years before the present, solar storms damaged the earth's atmosphere, leaving is vulnerable to solar radiation. The planet warmed rapidly, and plants and animals mutated due to the radiation. Bodies of water expanded as the ice caps and glaciers melted, entirely altering the landscape of the globe. Now, people only inhabit the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Kerans and Riggs take the elevator up to Beatrice's top floor apartment, where she's lounging by the pool. She brushes off Riggs and Kerans's attempts to convince her to leave. When Riggs leaves, Kerans remains for the afternoon. He studies paintings by Delvaux and Max Ernst and tells Beatrice that if they stay, they stay for good. Later, Kerans returns to the base and sneaks into the armory. He studies the weapons and explosive gas but steals only a broken compass. He leaves the armory for the sick bay, where Dr. Bodkin and the bedridden Lieutenant Hardman are in a private room. Bodkin is running a heater and Hardman is listening to drumming on a set of headphones. Finally, Bodkin stops the record player and turns the heater off. He tells Hardman how to operate a set of alarm clocks and Hardman insists that he has begun dreaming even when he's awake. Kerans lets slip that they're leaving in three days, which makes him feel like he's losing control of his motives. Kerans and Bodkin paddle to the testing station. In their lab, the doctors sit and Bodkin explains his theory of neuronics to Kerans: that the entire world, humans included, are following a backwards journey, and the terrifying dreams that many are now experiencing are actually ancient biological memories that mean a person is moving backwards in evolutionary time. Kerans thinks it's a valid theory. He pulls out the compass and thinks about the idea of "south." Lieutenant Hardman disappears the next day. Kerans acts as though he's going to leave with Riggs, though he hasn't fully decided what he'll do. He goes to see Beatrice first thing and finds her in her very hot apartment. He fixes her air conditioner and tries to make her pour her drink out, but she insists she needs the drink after dreaming. Riggs's helicopter arrives and signals to Kerans that Hardman escaped. Kerans boards the helicopter and joins the search team, and eventually tells Daley, the pilot, that they should look south. Riggs agrees, and Kerans spots footprints leading to an apartment building in a southern lagoon. The men search the building, where Kerans stumbles upon Hardman. Hardman jumps out the window and tries to move his makeshift raft back into the water and seems unaware that he's surrounded. When he finally realizes he is surrounded, he shoots Wilson, one of his orderlies. The group follows Hardman to a town square above the water level, where Riggs allows Hardman to escape south. That night, Kerans has his first dream: the sun makes a drumming sound, and the lagoon is filled with snakes and eels. Giant lizards roar at the sun, and Kerans feels like he's part of the lagoon. When he wakes, he finds Bodkin in the testing station gallery. Bodkin explains that about half the men experience the dreams. Riggs arrives to discuss departure plans, and when he leaves, Kerans and Bodkin discuss staying. That night, Kerans and Bodkin sink their testing station into the water and go to Beatrice's apartment. The next morning, Riggs arrives in the helicopter and tries to talk to them, but they don't listen. Riggs and the crew leave later that day, and Kerans realizes that he, Bodkin, and Beatrice will drift apart as their dreams consume their minds. Six weeks later, Kerans wakes to see a man speeding around in a white hydroplane. Kerans gets in his catamaran and paddles closer. He climbs on top of a building and watches as three boats follow the hydroplane, along with several thousand alligators. Kerans tries to go back to his catamaran, but finds that the alligators destroyed it. He struggles on foot to Beatrice's apartment, where the two watch from her windows as Bodkin flags down the visitors. Kerans insists they have nothing to fear from these looters and goes to wave down the hydroplane. Strangeman hosts Kerans, Bodkin, and Beatrice on his ship. He's perplexed that they want to stay in London and immerse themselves in their dreams. Kerans notices that Strangeman is albino, while his entire crew is black. Strangeman introduces them to the Admiral, his second-in-command, and offers to show them his treasure ship. The storerooms are filled with art and statuary. Kerans says that the treasures are like bones, and Strangeman rudely sends his guests away. Over the next two weeks, Kerans sees Strangeman often. Bodkin spends his time paddling the waterways looking for places he remembers from childhood, and Strangeman becomes convinced that he knows where there's hidden treasure. Strangeman hosts a diving party in the hopes of finding this treasure. He sends crewmembers down to the submerged planetarium, and then sends Kerans down. Kerans is entranced by the womb-like auditorium and the "stars" in the dome created by light shining through holes, but passes out when his air supply is cut off. He wakes on the deck, where Strangeman insists that Kerans tried to commit suicide. A while later, Strangeman invites everyone to a party where there will be a surprise, and insists that it'll stop Kerans's "crazy time machine" (referring to the dreams). On the deck, Strangeman has a lavishly set table, in front of a Renaissance painting of Esther and King Xerxes. Kerans assumes that Strangeman intends for Beatrice to recognize herself in Esther. After dinner, Kerans asks about the surprise and Strangeman insists he's missing it. Kerans notices that the water level is going down: Strangeman has dammed the lagoon and is pumping the water out. Kerans and Beatrice are horrified, but Bodkin is entranced. When the water is gone, Strangeman's crew sets off looting and Kerans, Beatrice, and Bodkin walk the streets. They find the planetarium, which Kerans thinks looks like a sewer now that the water is gone. Kerans remains close to Strangeman for the next few days as he senses that Strangeman is becoming more dangerous. Bodkin tells Kerans to leave with Beatrice and soon disappears, but Kerans thinks he himself can't leave. Strangeman's crew has little success finding treasures in London. One night, Strangeman tells Kerans that his crew thinks he' (Strangeman) is dead because he's albino. Big Caesar sings for Kerans, but Strangeman interrupts him when he sees that Dr. Bodkin is trying to blow up the dam. Strangeman's crew chases after Bodkin, throws the bombs into the neighboring lagoon, and shoots Bodkin, killing him. When they return to Kerans and Beatrice, the crew seizes Kerans. Strangeman's crew ties Kerans to a throne and tortures him for two nights. They leave him in the sun during the day and he barely survives. On the third night, they put the throne in a cart and wildly parade Kerans around the city. The cart rolls out of control and dumps Kerans facedown in the street. Sure that Kerans is dead, Strangeman and the crew leave. Kerans frees himself from the throne and manages to escape. Kerans hides in a building for a day before returning to the Ritz. The suite is destroyed, but Strangeman's men didn't find Kerans's gun in the safe. That night, Kerans sneaks onto Strangeman's ship and finds Beatrice in Strangeman's private chambers. Beatrice tries to make Kerans leave without her, but Big Caesar interrupts their fight. Kerans shoots him, and pulls Beatrice down the gangway and off the ship. They try to hide, but realize that Strangeman has them cornered. As Kerans is about to give himself up, Colonel Riggs and the army suddenly appear with machine guns. Kerans speaks with Riggs the next day. Riggs insists that technically, Strangeman did nothing wrong and will likely be honored by the UN for draining the lagoon. When Kerans asks Riggs to re-flood the lagoon, Riggs acts as though Kerans is crazy and insists that all of them except for Strangeman and his crew are going to Camp Byrd tomorrow. The next day, Riggs and Strangeman make peace and Strangeman throws a party. Kerans attends but leaves early. When he sees that Riggs and Beatrice are leaving the party, Kerans plants bombs on one of the dams. Sergeant Macready sees Kerans do this and shoots Kerans in the leg. Kerans yells for Macready to get out of the way, but he dies in the explosion. The water rushes into the lagoon, sweeps over Strangeman, and upturns his boat. Beatrice runs to Kerans and tells him to leave. Riggs and Sergeant Daley chase Kerans, but Kerans escapes into the next lagoon on a raft. The helicopter searches for him the next day, but Kerans successfully hides. When it finally leaves, Kerans reaches an inland sea that will take him south. Kerans travels south for several days as his gunshot wound gets worse and more infected. When he reaches the end of the sea, he tries to disassemble his raft and reassemble it, but cannot find more water to follow. He enters the jungle on foot and travels through the rain. Finally, he reaches a narrow valley with a rundown church in it. He discovers Lieutenant Hardman sitting at the altar, looking at the sun as it sets. Hardman is emaciated, blind, and doesn't recognize Kerans. Kerans cares for Hardman for three days and on the third morning finds that Hardman is gone. Kerans waits for several more days before moving on. He comes to another lagoon and stays there, in an apartment building, for a day. He thinks about his past and remembers Beatrice. Before he leaves, he scratches a note in the wall that he's okay. He knows nobody will read it. He heads south, and the narrator deems him a second Adam looking for forgotten paradises.

- Genre: Comic realism - Title: The Drunkard - Point of view: First person - Setting: Cork in the first quarter of the 20th century - Character: Mick Delaney. Description: Mick is the father of the story's narrator, Larry. A hard-drinking laborer with a tendency to squander his family's money on alcohol, Mick is in a period of sobriety at the beginning of the story. This threatens to crumble after his friend Mr. Dooley dies and Mick insists on going to the funeral—an event that his wife, Mrs. Delaney, knows will inspire him to drink. Mrs. Delaney sends Larry with Mick, thinking that the presence of his young son will stop Mick from drinking; Mick, however, is vain and irresponsible and he can't resist going to the bar to hold forth in front of the other mourners, mingling with Mr. Dooley's high-status friends and telling stories that make himself seem knowledgeable and important. While trying to impress this crowd, Mick neglects Larry, who gets bored and drinks his father's pint before Mick can even taste it. When Mick realizes that Larry is falling-down drunk, he's humiliated and furious that Larry has brought an end to his fun, and he drags Larry home along the road, where all the neighbors stand outside laughing and gossiping about this spectacle. Throughout the story, Mick is shown to be reckless and even cruel with Larry: he scolds Larry for drinking (even though it's his own fault), refuses to help when Larry is vomiting (lest it spoil his good suit), and pities himself relentlessly for the public humiliation of Larry's drunkenness, unwilling to take responsibility for his role in the matter. Mick is depicted as a man of poor character who is always at risk of spiraling into drunkenness, prone to blaming his own defects on others, and cruel to his wife and son. While Larry successfully spares his father from lapsing into drunkenness this time, the story is pessimistic about Mick's future: this shocking episode does not inspire Mick to reflect on his behavior, which suggests that his self-destructive tendencies have not changed, and he has initiated young Larry into drinking at far too young an age, demonstrating Mick's terrible influence. - Character: Larry Delaney. Description: Larry is the young son of Mick and Mrs. Delaney. His relationship with his parents is far from ideal: at the beginning of the story, his mother gives him the (near-impossible) responsibility of keeping his father sober during Mr. Dooley's funeral. Larry understands why this is important, since he implies that he has often had to drag his drunken father home in front of their mocking, gossiping neighbors, and he understands that when his father drinks, it leads to marital strife and financial destitution. Larry, in other words, is already taking responsibility for caring for his family, even at an age where he himself needs lots of care. While Larry is mature enough to understand this reality, his actions show him to be, in some ways, still innocent and naïve. At the bar following the funeral, for instance, Larry drinks Mick's pint out of curiosity, and the beer tastes so bad that he assumes his father only drinks it because he's never tried lemonade. That Larry is still so naïve and impressionable gives the story its dark cast: while he tries to behave as he thinks an adult would, the adults around him are neglectful and abusive, allowing him to get drunk and then scolding him for humiliating them, even though this is essentially their fault. O'Connor makes it clear that Larry is a highly perceptive child who, like his father, appreciates the importance of constructing a favorable image of oneself: on the way back home from the pub, he refuses Mick's offer of being carried back home for fear that this would only humiliate him further in front of all the watching townspeople. Larry is generally funny and caring and observant, and it's heartbreaking to see him lose his innocence piece by piece. - Character: Mrs. Delaney. Description: Mrs. Delaney is Mick's nameless, long-suffering wife and Larry's mother. A victim of Mick's carousing, she has to clean up his messes when he drinks, making excuses for him at work when he's hung over and pawning household items to make up for the money he's squandered. The reader is never told how she feels about her husband, but she hasn't left him, so it seems that she has somewhat resigned herself to his antics. That said, she screams furiously at Mick when he brings Larry home drunk, which suggests that she isn't taking all of it lying down. Mrs. Delaney clearly loves Larry and cares about him deeply, but she inadvertently puts him in danger by insisting that he accompany Mick to Mr. Dooley's funeral in order to act as a "brake" on Mick's drinking. Not only does this unfairly burden Larry by making him responsible for the family's wellbeing, but it also sets him up for failure; Larry has never succeeded in preventing his father from drinking before, and he only succeeds this time by getting drunk himself. While Mrs. Delaney thanks Larry profusely for keeping Mick from drinking, this episode corrupts Larry's innocence and humiliates him in front of the neighbors—both huge prices for a child to pay. Much like her husband and son, Mrs. Delaney has an eye on the opinions of "the road"—their acquaintances and neighbors—and she is mortified that so many people have witnessed Larry's drunkenness and Mick's cruelty. - Character: Mr. Dooley. Description: Mr. Dooley is a local traveling salesman and insatiable gossip who is a friend of Mick's (despite having much higher social status than the Delaney family). At the beginning of the story, Mr. Dooley has just died, and his funeral promises to be an important social event. Mick wants to be seen at Mr. Dooley's funeral because Dooley was well-liked in town, and Mick wants to be well-liked by proxy. He looks forward to mingling with Dooley's high-up friends, thereby reinforcing his own sense of self-worth. - Character: Peter Crowley. Description: Peter Crowley is a friend of Mick's, a "mean man" who "only went to funerals for the free drinks." When Larry sees Peter Crowley at Mr. Dooley's funeral, he interprets it as a "danger signal" for Mick, as he knows Peter Crowley will encourage Mick's worst behavior. Ultimately, Peter Crowley helps Mick bring the drunken Larry back home, although Crowley is no kinder to Larry than Mick is. He is an embodiment of some of the worst aspects of Mick's own personality: an excessive liking for drink, an inability to take any responsibility, and a tendency towards cruelty. - Theme: Familial Influence. Description: At the heart of "The Drunkard" is the relationship between Larry and his hard-drinking father, Mick. When their neighbor dies, Larry's mother knows that Mick is likely to use the funeral as an excuse to drink, so she sends young Larry with his father, hoping his presence will deter Mick from drinking. Afterwards, though, Mick simply brings Larry to the bar, where Larry winds up drinking his father's pint before Mick can have a drop. In this way, Larry does keep Mick sober (though not how his mother expected); Mick, after all, is too busy taking care of his drunk child to do any drinking himself. Despite Larry's success in keeping Mick sober, the spectre of Mick's influence on Larry looms over the story's somewhat happy ending. Even though Mick's sobriety is intact, Larry has been introduced to drinking at a shockingly young age, and it's clear that his father's influence might be leading him down a disastrous path. One of Mick's central character traits is his lackluster parenting. On the day of the funeral, he bribes Larry with lemonade so he can go to the bar and drink, tries to get Larry to play out in the road unsupervised, and, when this attempt to ditch Larry fails, Mick ignores Larry in order to talk to his friends, which pushes Larry to drink. There's also evidence that this kind of behavior (and worse) is normal for Mick. Larry shows himself to be wary of his father's conduct: he knows the lemonade is a bribe, presumably because he's been bribed in similar fashion before. More significantly, he also knows he "might have to bring [Mick] home, blind drunk, down Blarney Lane." Once again, readers must presume that Larry knows this because something similar has happened before. Given Larry's young age, the fact that Mick puts Larry in the position of having to take care of him when he's drunk demonstrates how inept and reckless he is when it comes to parenting. It's no wonder, then, that Larry instinctively distrusts Mick's motives. While Mick sets bad examples for Larry, Larry's drunkenness might be an opportunity for Mick to change. After all, by embarrassing Mick and behaving badly, Larry is inadvertently holding up a mirror to Mick's own behavior, which might allow Mick to see himself for who he is. Once drunk, Larry becomes the unmanageable embarrassment his father has always been, and he seems to experience the entire spectrum of possible drunken states, from self-pity to animosity and everything in between. Mick, sober for once, struggles to maintain control over the situation—a taste of his own medicine that might make him reflect on his past behaviour. However, Mick seems to squander this moment, since he's too caught up in self-pity and vanity to change his ways. When he realizes that Larry is drunk, he continues to behave poorly, refusing to help Larry when he's vomiting because it might spoil his suit, and scolding Larry for being drunk, even thought it was Mick's neglect that allowed Larry to drink in the first place. In addition to blaming Larry for Mick's own irresponsibility, Mick blames his wife, snarling that women should be at home to "look after their children themselves"—implying that it's his wife's responsibility to watch Larry, even though he was explicitly in charge. Mick's refusal to take responsibility for his own negligence becomes absurd as he repeatedly bemoans the "misfortune" of his child has ruining his opportunity to have fun. It seems that, instead of feeling ashamed of his own negligent parenting, he feels entitled to the pity of others. This attitude lasts through the end of the story, when he tells Mrs. Delaney not to be mad at him for getting Larry drunk, since he deserves her pity for having his day ruined. It seems he has learned nothing from this episode. Even though his sobriety is intact and he's able to go to work as normal (a boon to his family), his inability to acknowledge his bad behavior is not promising for the future. O'Connor uses the story to make a serious (if largely implicit) point about the way alcohol abuse tends to run in families, and, more generally, about how fathers can condition their sons to adopt harmful habits. Mick may be the "drunkard" of the story's title, but the suggestion is that Larry—a natural mimic of his father's behaviors—could go on to become an alcoholic himself. O'Connor subtly drives home the idea of destructive mimicry by having the drunken Larry belt out "The Boys of Wexford," an Irish ballad with the lyric "'Twas the drink that brought us down." Should this reference be lost on the reader, Mrs. Delaney subsequently makes the same point in much more explicit fashion: "God forgive you, wasting our hard-earned few ha'pence on drink, and bringing up your child to be a drunken corner-boy like yourself." So, while this story's ending is somewhat happy—Mick stays sober and takes care of Larry—its undertone is unmistakably bleak. Mick's influence on Larry has already led Larry to dangerous behavior, and nobody is confident that he has changed. - Theme: Judgment, Gossip, and Reputation. Description: In the small town in which "The Drunkard" is set, everyone knows each other's business. Friends, neighbors, and acquaintances gossip incessantly and judge their peers, taking pleasure in feeling superior to others. Mick Delaney is no exception; he constantly gossips with his neighbor Mr. Dooley, he passes hypocritical judgments on local drinkers, and when his irresponsible parenting leads his young son to get drunk, he is concerned for his own reputation, not Larry's suffering. While O'Connor is clear that the town's atmosphere of rampant gossip encourages Mick's vanity, it's no excuse for his behavior. Larry getting drunk was Mick's fault; nonetheless, Mick feels only self-pity and embarrassment that this happened in public, and he's cruel to Larry as a result. By juxtaposing Mick's desire for admiration with his deplorable behavior, O'Connor mocks Mick's obsession with reputation, suggesting that pursuing public admiration can lead one to behave inadmirably. From the opening of the story, O'Connor depicts a town soaked in gossip. The story begins with the death of Mr. Dooley, a beloved local man who knew almost everything about "what went on in town" and who came often to the Delaney house to tell Mick the "news behind the news." Mr. Dooley's high social status and his penchant for gossip are intertwined; he knows gossip because he's so well-connected in town, but he's well-connected in part because he loves to gossip (it's through gossip that he's friends with Mick, after all). From this, O'Connor implies the high value this community places on gossip. When Mr. Dooley dies and Mick plans to attend the funeral, Mick's wife protests because Mick is an alcoholic and she knows he might drink after the service. Mick defends his decision by appealing to what others would think if he skipped the funeral; "I wouldn't give it to say to them," he says, showing how much he cares about what others say behind his back, and revealing the power of gossip to lead him to make poor choices. O'Connor takes this a step further by drawing an explicit link between the town's vain obsession with reputation and Mick's temptation to drink. In his bouts of sobriety, Mick mocks his peers who waste their money at the pub, becoming so "stuffed up with spiritual pride" at believing himself to be "better than his neighbors" that he inevitably decides to celebrate his virtue with a drink. Then, after realizing he's "made a fool of himself," he drinks more to forget. Clearly, living in an environment in which gossip and judgment are so pervasive distorts Mick's sense of self and leads him to behave poorly. At the bar after the service, Mick's desire to impress his peers contrasts with his irresponsible behavior. When they arrive at the bar, Mick orders a drink but doesn't touch it; he's too busy "holding forth […] in great style," making himself sound important to his peers while they listen "reverently." It's clear how much Mick loves to drink, so impressing his peers must be incredibly important to him for it to take priority over his pint. Not coincidentally, it's Mick's vain need to show off for others that leads Larry to trouble. While Mick is holding forth, Larry gets thirsty and drinks his father's whole pint. This is a stark illustration of the dangers of burnishing one's image; Mick is so beholden to his vanity that he doesn't notice his child get drunk. O'Connor drives this point home when Larry starts vomiting and Mick, instead of showing concern for his sick child, moves away from Larry because he's worried that the vomit might ruin his suit. It's absurd to think of a man so concerned with how he appears to others that he can't help his son in a moment of crisis—especially since this crisis is his fault. O'Connor's strongest condemnation of the town's obsession with appearances comes as Mick walks Larry home from the bar and the townspeople gather on the road to mock them. Even in his drunken state, Larry is aware of his neighbors' scorn: he sees that "every woman old and young in Blarney Lane was leaning over her half-door or sitting on her doorstep. They all stopped gabbling to gape at the strange spectacle" of a father dragging home a drunk child. Later on, they openly laugh, but nobody tries to help. In some ways, this cruelty explains Mick's obsession with appearing respectable to the townspeople (who wouldn't want to avoid their relentless cruelty by putting on a good public face?), but O'Connor still judges Mick's reaction: while Larry suffers, Mick isn't focused on taking care of him. Instead, Mick indulges his "neighborly need to explain that it wasn't his fault" (even though it clearly is his fault), he threatens and scolds bleeding Larry, and pities himself that he'll be the subject of endless gossip. Rather than taking responsibility for his actions and showing compassion for his son, Mick frets about other people's opinions and tries to "work up a smile" for a neighbor, showing again that putting on a good face for others comes at the expense of his son. In the end, all of this is for naught; Mick is, of course, the subject of vicious gossip. In fact, the neighbors falsely assume the worst—they tell Larry's mother that Mick deliberately got Larry drunk simply for amusement, even though it was actually an accident. While Mick is humiliated and pities himself for his loss of reputation, his wife will have none of it; "everyone knows what you are now," she says. And she's right. Even if the neighbors have distorted the details, Mick behaved abominably—the irony is that his terrible behavior (from his irresponsibility at the bar, to his cruelty with Larry as they walked home) was all meant to impress them. - Theme: Innocence and Experience. Description: Through Larry Delaney, O'Connor explores the interrelationship between innocence and experience. The story is essentially a tragedy told as a farce; the reader is invited to laugh at the "hilarious" behavior of the drunken Larry, an innocent who's just had his first taste of alcohol. At the same time, however, the reader is also invited to remember that Larry's innocence has been exploited by his mother, who has (unfairly) burdened him with the responsibility of preventing Mick from drinking, and disregarded by Mick, who takes him to the pub even though he's underage. By emphasizing Larry's comedic, naive misperceptions, O'Connor underscores the tragedy at the story's heart: that Larry is a child thrust into a disturbing situation that he's not mature enough to understand, making him lose his innocence too young. The story's comedy comes primarily from Larry's outrageous misperceptions of the world, which demonstrate that he's still fundamentally a child. When Larry takes a sip of Mick's pint while Mick is ignoring him, he's "astonished that [Mick] could even drink such stuff. It looked as if he had never tried lemonade." What's comically obvious to readers is that Larry perceives his father as the naïve one when—of course—Mick knows how lemonade tastes, and Larry clearly doesn't get that his father drinks beer not for its taste but for its effects. The scene culminates when Mick and Peter Crowley steer Larry out of the pub and attempt to reassure him that he's going to be all right, leading Larry to think, as a dry aside to the reader, that he "never met two men who knew less about the effects of drink." Again, Larry believes the extent of his knowledge to be far greater than it really is: if anyone knows about the effects of drink, it's these two! In a textbook example of dramatic irony, the reader is encouraged to smile at the child's naivety. While Larry's naivety is amusing, O'Connor also presents it as tragic, since Larry's innocence is imperiled at far too young an age. Larry shouldn't know the effects of drink at this stage in his life, and while his commentary on his own drunkenness is funny, it's also devastating to see him losing the very innocence that makes his brash, inaccurate observations so charming. Furthermore, even before the story begins Larry is clearly already too familiar with adult realities. "Mother and I," Larry recalls, "knew all the phases and dreaded all the dangers [of Mick's drinking]," including the financial troubles it inevitably creates for the family. And O'Connor gestures towards related traumatic experiences in Larry's past. For example, Larry fears he might have to bring his father home drunk after the funeral, strongly suggesting that this isn't the first time he's been put in this situation. Strengthening this implication, Larry's mother is the one who sent Larry with Mick in the first place, encouraging the boy to act as a "brake" on his father's drinking. When Larry reflects that, "As a brake I had never achieved anything," it becomes clear that his mother has put him in charge of his father's sobriety before. This is an unfair responsibility to place on a child, and one that has clearly led Larry to see his father behave in disturbing ways (behavior that Larry might believe is his fault, since he was in charge of preventing it). Seeing a child thrown into a complicated situation that he only sort-of understands results in some funny moments, but mostly it's horrifying—particularly due to the danger that this premature exposure to alcohol will make Larry more likely to follow in his father's footsteps. O'Connor handles the twin themes of innocence and experience with considerable subtlety, teasing out both the humorous and serious aspects of Larry's predicament. "The Drunkard" is simultaneously a farce-like comedy of a role reversal between father and son, and a serious comment on the irresponsible and despicable corruption of an innocent. The comedic elements of the story heighten its underlying tragedy. - Climax: A drunken Larry humiliates Mick in front of the townspeople - Summary: When Mr. Dooley, a traveling salesman with high-up connections, passes away, his friend Mick Delaney intends to attend the funeral. Mick's wife, Mrs. Delaney, doesn't like the sound of this—not because she has anything against Mr. Dooley, but because Mick, a hard-drinking laborer, is in a period of sobriety. She worries that the temptation to drink after the funeral might break Mick's sobriety, leading to the strife and destitution that come when Mick is drinking. Mrs. Delaney insists that Larry, their preadolescent son, accompany Mick to the funeral so he can be a "brake" on Mick's drinking. Larry reflects that, while this has never worked before, his mother has great faith in him. At the funeral, Mick enjoys himself. It's a fine social occasion full of fancy cars and important people. He mingles with these folks, showing off in front of them and looking forward to drinking later. Once the funeral is over, he ignores Larry's pleas to go home and entices him into the pub with a bribe of lemonade. His back turned to Larry, he proceeds to hold forth ostentatiously in front of the other mourners, listing all the other important funerals he's attended in the past. Larry, meanwhile, gets bored and thirsty, so he drinks his father's pint which is still untouched at the bar. With Mick distracted by making himself seem important, Larry drinks without his father noticing. Though he's initially disappointed by the taste, he soon finds himself "pleasantly elevated"—quickly, though, this lapses into depression, an inability to control his motions properly, and nausea. By the time Mick realizes what's going on, Larry is about to vomit. Mick is cruel to Larry while he vomits; he refuses to hold his son for fear of ruining his best suit, he scolds Larry for making a fool of himself, and he dismisses Larry's pain when he walks into a wall and cuts his eye. Mick takes Larry home with the help of another mourner and fellow drunkard, Peter Crowley. On the way home, Larry seems to experience the entire spectrum of possible drunken states, from maudlin self-pity to short-tempered animosity. Much to Mick's dismay, various townswomen are observing "the strange spectacle of two sober, middle-aged men bringing home a drunken small boy"— and laughing mockingly. The trio eventually arrive home and Peter Crowley, fearing Mrs. Delaney's wrath, quickly takes off. Mick, meanwhile, undresses Larry and puts him to bed. Mrs. Delaney, who has been out, presently returns home and berates her husband for "filling your unfortunate innocent child with drink" and for creating a disgraceful scene for the whole town to see. Mick haplessly protests that he's not to blame. The next morning, after Mick leaves sheepishly for work, Mrs. Delaney throws herself happily at the still bedridden Larry and calls him "Mick's guardian angel"—after all, thanks to Larry, Mick didn't drink a drop.

- Genre: Mystery Novel - Title: The Dry - Point of view: Third Person Omniscient - Setting: Kiewarra, a fictional rural community in Victoria, Australia - Character: Falk. Description: Aaron Falk, the book's protagonist, is a Melbourne police officer who investigates financial crimes. Aaron and his father, Erik Falk, had to leave Kiewarra, their rural hometown, when Falk was 16, after residents of the town suspected their involvement in the murder of a local girl named Ellie who drowned in a river and left behind a note that said "Falk" on it. Falk continued to sporadically keep in touch with his Kiewarra friend Luke, until one day when Luke and his family are found dead (locals suspect that Luke killed his family before turning the gun on himself). Luke's father Gerry tells Falk to come to the funeral and help investigate the death. Over the course of the novel, Falk struggles with wanting to find out the truth about his old friend but feeling like an outsider in his old hometown, with some residents like Dow and Deacon even threatening violence at Falk after what he supposedly did to Ellie 20 years ago. Two of Falk's local allies are Gretchen (an old friend of Falk's who was also friends with Luke and Ellie) and Sergeant Raco (a local police officer who helps Falk investigate the murders while he himself is off duty). As Falk reacquaints himself with his old hometown, he sees how a drought has devastated the local economy, leaving many of the residents in a desperate financial situation. Despite Falk's initial eagerness to return to Melbourne, he also feels guilty about his old friends and acquaintances who had to stay behind in Kiewarra. Ultimately, Falk's investigation helps him discover the real killer: a local school principal named Whitlam who killed Luke's wife Karen to cover up an embezzlement scheme and who then killed Luke and Billy to hide his intentions. Falk's investigation helps him make peace with his old hometown, giving him the closure he needs to leave Kiewarra and return to Melbourne—an escape that's not so easily available to many of Kiewarra's struggling farmers. - Character: Luke. Description: Luke Hadler is a farmer in Kiewarra. He and his wife, Karen, are parents to Billy and Charlotte. He and Aaron Falk were close friends in high school and kept in touch after Falk moved away. The novel centers opens shortly after Luke and his family are found dead at their farm. Many in Kiewarra believe that Luke killed his whole family, although Sergeant Raco and Falk have doubts based on some of the clues left behind. On the one hand, Falk remembers that when Luke was a kid, he sometimes acted out in unusual ways, like when he faked his own death on a rocky outcropping or when he seemingly killed a trapped rabbit. Falk and Luke shared an important bond because they both lied to the authorities, claiming that each was the other's alibi during the murder investigation of their mutual friend Ellie. But their lie haunted them through the years, causing each to distrust the other and perhaps even suspect the other of murder. Luke in many ways represents the opposite of Falk, providing a glimpse of what might have happened if Falk himself had stayed behind in Kiewarra. On the one hand, Luke built a family and managed to be part of a community, in contrast to the solitary Falk. But Luke's story also ended in tragedy, showing the difficulties of trying to survive in a rural community with few economic opportunities. Ultimately, Falk's investigation reveals that Luke is innocent of killing his family and that the real murderer was Whitlam, a principal who recently moved to the area from the city and who only killed Luke and his family to cover up his own embezzlement. Luke's death represents the conflict between urban and rural and how some urban dwellers treat rural residents as expendable. - Character: Sergeant Raco. Description: Sergeant Raco is the head of the police station in the small town of Kiewarra and the husband of Rita. He and Falk form a friendship based on their shared belief that there is something strange about the murder of the Hadler family and that the police investigators from the bigger neighboring town of Clyde did a sloppy job. Raco and Falk become investigation partners, with Raco offering his police resources and Falk providing his insider knowledge of Kiewarra's past as well as investigating financial crimes. Unlike the police investigators from Clyde, Raco is invested in the case and willing to go above and beyond what his job requires in order to help bring the Hadler family's killer to justice. - Character: Whitlam. Description: Scott Whitlam is originally from Melbourne, but he becomes the school principal in the rural town of Kiewarra. Despite his prominent position in the local community, he is a gambling addict who embezzles $50,000 from the school. To conceal his crime, he murders Luke, Karen, and Billy (Karen, Whitman's employee, discovers Whitlam's crimes and confronts him about them). Falk and Sergeant Raco eventually discover the truth about Whitlam, leading to a standoff where Whitlam threatens to burn the whole town down. While there is some context for Whitlam's violent actions (he embezzled the money to protect his family from black market money-lenders), he is overall a monstrous character who fails to recognize the humanity of anyone other than himself and his family. He represents the arrogance many urban dwellers have toward rural life as well as the deadly effect greed can have on a person. - Character: Karen. Description: Karen Hadler is the wife of Luke and the mother of Charlotte and Billy. She is close to her in-laws Gerry and Barb because she has no other family in town. One of her main traits is that she is a meticulous bookkeeper. This becomes her downfall when she discovers that Whitlam, the principal at the local school where she works, has embezzled a $50,000 grant meant for the school. She confronts Whitlam about the embezzled funds and intends to contact the authorities about it, but before she can tell anyone else about what she found, Whitlam murders her, Luke, and Billy to conceal his crimes. - Character: Ellie. Description: Ellie was a friend of Falk, Luke, and Gretchen when they were all 16, and her death by drowning caused a major rift in the community that continues to fester 20 years later. She had dark hair and eyes. Although everyone in Kiewarra suspected for years that she was either murdered by one of the Falks (the novel's protagonist Aaron Falk or his father, Erik Falk) or that she died by suicide, in fact, her own father, Deacon, murdered her while her cousin Dow was nearby to witness the crime. Falk only realizes in hindsight that Ellie's erratic behavior and heavy drinking were signs that Deacon had been abusing her. Ellie's death represents the dark underbelly of rural Kiewarra. - Character: Gerry. Description: Gerry Hadler is the husband of Barb and the father of Luke. After Luke dies of a shotgun wound, seemingly turning the gun on himself after killing his wife (Karen) and son (Billy), Gerry calls Falk to come to Kiewarra and investigate. Although Gerry seems menacing at first, it turns out that he is just a grieving father who wants to know the truth about his son. Gerry fears the worst: that Luke not only killed his family but also killed Ellie, who drowned mysteriously 20 years ago. Ultimately, Falk puts all of Gerry's fears to rest, clearing Luke's name on all counts. Nevertheless, Gerry's worries about his son's reputation show how gossip spreads in a small town. - Character: Deacon. Description: Mal Deacon is the father of Ellie, the uncle of Dow, and a neighbor of the Hadlers. Deacon's wife left him when Ellie was still relatively young. In the story's present, Deacon is an ornery, temperamental man who has held a grudge against Aaron Falk and Erik Falk for 20 years, seemingly because he believes they're the most likely murderers of Ellie. As it turns out, however, Deacon himself drowned Ellie and then planted the Falk note to redirect suspicion away from himself. - Character: Gretchen. Description: Gretchen is a Kiewarra resident in her 30s who has a young son named Lachie. She was best friends with Falk, Luke, and Ellie until Ellie's mysterious death 20 years ago tore the group apart. Gretchen is one of the few people in Kiewarra who welcomes Falk back to town, defending him against people like Mandy who spread rumors about him and helping to understand all the ways his hometown has changed—and stayed the same—over the past 20 years. Falk and Gretchen soon start a romantic relationship. While the novel drops a couple red herrings to suggest that Gretchen could be the killer (she owns a shotgun and dislikes Karen because Luke chose Karen over Gretchen years before), ultimately, she is just an innocent bystander. - Character: Dow. Description: Grant Dow is the loud-mouthed nephew of Deacon and the cousin of Ellie. He witnesses Deacon abuse Ellie and then murder her with his bare hands, but he agrees to act as an accomplice after Deacon promises that Dow will inherit the family farm when Deacon dies. Of course, Dow's reward turns out to be more of a liability than an asset when a long drought causes Kiewarra's farms to suffer. Dow is a constant enemy to Falk as Falk investigates the Hadler murder, acting similar to how Deacon himself acted 20 years ago following Ellie's death. Dow's failure to tell authorities the truth about Ellie's murder shows how deeply ingrained violence and abuse are in Kiewarra. - Character: Barb. Description: Barb Hadler is the wife of Gerry, the mother of Luke, and eventually a new mother figure for Charlotte after the deaths of Luke and Karen. Unlike Gerry, Barb can't imagine that Luke did anything to hurt his family, and she wants Falk to clear Luke's name. Barb and Gerry represent two different ways of dealing with grief: while Gerry tries to be pragmatic and expect the worst, Barb maintains hope even when things are difficult. - Character: Sullivan. Description: Jamie Sullivan is the last witness to see Luke alive—the two of them were culling rabbits together on the day of the murders. Falk and Sergeant Raco initially suspect that Sullivan committed the murders, particularly after surveillance footage reveals that he lied about his alibi. However, they later learn that Sullivan was only lying to conceal his homosexuality and ongoing relationship with Dr. Leigh. Sullivan's secrecy about his romantic life suggests how prejudiced and judgmental people can be in rural Kiewarra. - Character: Billy. Description: Billy Hadler is the young son of Karen and Luke. When local school principal Whitlam goes to murder Karen to prevent her from revealing that he stole money from the school, Billy is there and witnesses the murder. As a result, Whitlam has to chase and kill Billy. Seeing the room where Billy died particularly affects Sergeant Raco, whose wife (Rita) is pregnant with his first child. - Character: Dr. Leigh. Description: Dr. Leigh is the local doctor. He's one of the first people to view the scene of the crime after the Hadler family murders. Although at first it seems like he might be hiding something related to the case, Falk later discovers that Dr. Leigh is only hiding his relationship with Sullivan due to homophobia of many residents of Kiewarra. - Theme: The Human Cost of Climate Change. Description: Although Jane Harper's The Dry doesn't explicitly mention climate change, it is an important context for the novel, where a new, drier climate causes mass poverty in the rural Australian town of Kiewarra. The novel doesn't make scientific arguments and only indirectly references politics. Instead, it focuses on how a hotter, drier climate directly affects humans, showing how the drought destroys the local economy, tearing the small community of Kiewarra apart. What unites the characters in Kiewarra is that many of them have money problems, particularly struggling farmers like Luke, Dow, and Sullivan. The drier climate means that the lifestyle that the previous generation of farmers like Gerry and Barb enjoyed is no longer feasible. Perhaps the clearest sign of this change is the local river: though it once flowed strong and was an important local landmark, it has since dried up. At the end of the novel, school principal Whitlam, (who readers have just learned is guilty of the murders around which the plot centers) threatens to throw down a lighter, which would potentially spark a blaze that would engulf the whole town. This scene shows how precarious life has become in Kiewarra, where just one lighter could destroy the whole town. While Whitlam's own money problems relate more to his gambling addiction than the drought, his extreme actions, including embezzlement and a triple homicide, seem to be related to the atmosphere in Kiewarra, where the desperate economic situation drives some people to act rashly. The constant references to farmers culling rabbits that eat their crops show how the community has devolved into something like a warzone, where people compete with animals for the scarce remaining resources. Like most mystery novels, The Dry builds intrigue through unexpected connections, but the novel takes an ecological approach to this genre convention, illustrating how a seemingly small change like hotter, drier weather can lead to a breakdown in society, destroying the economic backbone of small communities and leading to violence. - Theme: Justice. Description: Like most detective stories, The Dry explores the concept of justice, examining how institutions like law enforcement both succeed and fail in carrying out justice. Protagonist Falk is both an insider and an outsider to conventional justice: though he is a police officer, he finds himself investigating a case outside his usual field of work and off the record after the original police investigative team make serious errors. Falk's position as an unofficial investigator sometimes leaves him at a disadvantage, as he lacks the resources of a larger police department, and it occasionally puts him at the mercy of violent local men like Dow and Deacon who would use force to silence Falk. Additionally, Falk is rarely truly outside the system, due to his close partnership with the head of the local police station, Sergeant Raco. Nevertheless, Falk's main advantage as an unofficial detective is that it allows him to cut through bureaucracy and red tape. Unlike the Clyde police, Falk doesn't have to worry about justifying his investigation to any superiors—instead, he can do whatever it takes to search for the truth. While the novel suggests that Falk and Raco's more independent methods of investigation are superior to bureaucracy-laden official police work, particularly in a small community like Kiewarra, the novel also shows how injustice can persist in a community even with the dedicated work of people like Falk. While Falk succeeds in apprehending the murderer of Luke, Karen, and Billy, the ending of the novel leaves it ambiguous as to what happens to Deacon, who murdered Falk's childhood friend Ellie 20 years ago and also got away with violently abusing her for several years. And so, despite The Dry's depictions of the shortcomings of traditional institutions of justice, it nevertheless shows how motivated people can work with an existing system to attain justice, if not for all then at least for some. - Theme: Urban vs. Rural. Description: Jane Harper's The Dry is all about the clash between rural and urban, with big-city Melbourne resident Falk coming back to his old rural hometown of Kiewarra and struggling to fit in with the local culture. The dozens of local utes ("utility vehicles," similar to pickup trucks) in town hint at how important manual labor is in rural Kiewarra. At first the novel may seem to focus predominantly on the negatives of rural life. The prologue, which describes flies feeding on Luke's corpse, immediately establishes Kiewarra as a pace haunted by death. Violence—whether from gun violence, pub fights, or domestic abuse—seems common, and people seem to think with a mob mentality. This leads many in Kiewarra to falsely believe for 20 years that Falk murdered Ellie, and it also leads to situations where Dr. Leigh and Sullivan have to hide their 18-month romantic relationship because they feel that local residents won't accept homosexuality. By the end, the novel doesn't contradict any of these flaws of rural life, but Falk does come away with a better understanding of it, respecting people like Gretchen and Barb and Gerry who try to support their community and make the best of it. By contrast, urban life comes with more opportunity in The Dry—particularly economically—but it also has its own flaws. As the large grant for Kiewarra's park shows, rich people in cities wield their influence over rural towns in arbitrary ways, sometimes bestowing generosity and other times withholding it. This seemingly unearned feeling of superiority manifests itself in particular in Whitlam, the Kiewarra school principal who is originally from a big city. Whitlam seems to look down on the local community, living outside it and complaining about it to Falk. Ultimately, Whitlam's biases lead him to underestimate the intelligence of his employee Karen, a longtime Kiewarra resident who discovers when Whitlam is embezzling the school. While The Dry paints a bleak picture of rural life in Australia, it doesn't suggest that urban life is the antidote, showing how the better economic prospects in cities may nevertheless come with their own costs. - Theme: Friendship. Description: In Jane Harper's The Dry, the actions of one teenage friend group continue to have an effect on a rural Australian community 20 years later. While Falk, Luke, Gretchen, and Ellie are inseparable in their youth, their friendship dissolves soon after the death of Ellie, when Falk leaves town and has limited contact with Luke and none with Gretchen. On the one hand, the novel depicts how friendships change and perhaps get more difficult to maintain with age, as Falk and Luke struggle to keep up anything more than a surface-level relationship, even up until 20 years later on the day Luke himself dies. As some of the later flashbacks show, Falk's friend group always had cracks in it, even from the beginning. When he was 16, Falk didn't realize that Luke had a crush on Ellie or that Ellie drank so much because she was being abused, suggesting that perhaps Falk's childhood innocence was an important factor in being able to keep up his friendships, which he naively believed would last forever. Still, despite having a broken friend group at its center, the novel also explores the benefits of friendship. In the novel's present, long after losing touch with his friends, Falk strikes up new friendships in Kiewarra, including ones with Sergeant Raco and the local bartender McMurdo. These new relationships, which are largely based on sharing similar values and ideas about justice, help Falk survive in the otherwise hostile Kiewarra. Similarly, Falk also starts a new romantic relationship with Gretchen, illustrating how even seemingly broken or dormant relationships can suddenly rekindle. While Harper's The Dry depicts the difficulties and limitations of friendship, in the end, it argues that friendship is beneficial and perhaps even necessary to surviving in a harsh environment like Kiewarra. - Climax: The investigators Falk and Sergeant Raco confront the killer, Whitlam. - Summary: Australian financial crimes police officer Aaron Falk travels from Melbourne back to his original hometown of Kiewarra, a small farming community suffering from a prolonged drought. Falk's childhood friend Luke Hadler has just died, along with his wife (Karen) and son (Billy), although his infant daughter (Charlotte) survived. Most people in town believe that Luke shot his family with a shotgun and then killed himself while sitting on the edge of the cargo bed of his ute. Luke's parents, Gerry and Barb, want to know the truth about Luke's death, and this is why Falk has returned to Kiewarra: Gerry called Falk and sent a note requesting him to come to Luke's funeral. After the funeral, Gerry and Barb convince Falk to stay in town for a few days to investigate the murder. Falk finds himself unwelcome in his old hometown because many people still believe he played a role in the murder of Ellie, a girl who drowned in the river under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago. Falk, Luke, Ellie, and Gretchen were all close friends back when they were 16 years old. When Ellie died, investigators found a note on it that said "Falk" on it in her room, along with the date of her death, leading many to believe that she had met up with Falk just before her untimely death. This caused Ellie's father, Deacon, to make threats against Falk and his father Erik Falk, physically chasing the two of them out of Kiewarra. In the present, when Falk comes back to Kiewarra to investigate the Hadler family murders, Deacon still holds a grudge but has become older and frailer. Deacon's nephew Dow, however, is physically fit and threatens Falk to try to get him to leave. Still, Falk does find some allies in Kiewarra, including Sergeant Raco, the new head of the police station who senses something unusual about the Hadler case and goes above and beyond his job duties to try to find the answer, in part because seeing the room where Luke's young son Billy died deeply affected him. Falk also reconnects with his old friend Gretchen, and the two of them start a romantic relationship. While investigating the Hadler case, Sergeant Raco and Falk go to the murder scene, talk to witnesses, and look into other leads around Kiewarra. One of the first clues Raco shows Falk is that the shotgun shells used to kill the Hadlers were Remingtons—but Luke only kept Winchesters on his farm, meaning the shells must have come from somewhere else. The farm's surveillance footage only seems to show Luke's ute approaching the farm in the timeframe during which the murder took place, without any other vehicles coming in or out. Falk and Raco search other surveillance footage around town, including at the local school where Karen worked. Principal Whitlam shows them around, and they see how rundown the school has become as a result of the drought and the hard years before it. While watching security footage, Falk and Raco happen to see Jamie Sullivan—the last man to see Luke alive—in a location that contradicts his alibi. Sullivan and Luke were culling rabbits shortly before Luke died, but Sullivan claimed he was at home with his Gran for the rest of the evening. But as Falk and Raco investigate this lead, they ultimately learn that Sullivan was having a secret relationship with the local doctor, Dr. Leigh, and that neither was involved with the murder. As Falk continues his investigation, an unknown person vandalizes his car and threatens to hurt him. He discovers a note in one of Karen's old library books that has the word "Grant" on it, along with Falk's number, suggesting perhaps that Karen wanted to contact him about Grant Dow. He also discovers while visiting Gretchen that a photograph seems to imply that Luke was the father of Gretchen's young son Lachie. Gretchen admits that she is hurt that Luke chose Karen over her, but she angrily denies that Luke is Lachie's father or that she had anything to do with the murder, then she kicks Falk out. Ultimately, Falk has a breakthrough when he learns from the local bartender, McMurdo, that the local principal Whitlam has a heavy gambling problem. He realizes that the "Grant" Karen wrote about on her note wasn't referring to a person. In fact, "grant" was referring to a grant the school had received—from which Whitlam was embezzling money. Falk and Raco coordinate with a larger police department in the nearby town of Clyde to arrest Whitlam, but Whitlam someone in the department accidentally tips off Whitman, and he makes a run for it. Falk and Raco search the town before eventually finding Whitlam in a dry wooded area. Whitlam has a lighter and some alcohol and threatens to use them to start a wildfire that could take the whole town down. After trying and failing to convince Whitlam with words, Whitlam starts a fire. Falk and Raco charge Whitlam and try to put the fire out with their jackets. Falk, Raco, and Whitlam all end up with serious burns but survive. By the time Falk feels better, most people have forgotten their negative opinions about him. Falk makes amends with Gretchen, but their relationship seems to be over. Before returning to Melbourne, Falk returns to an old hiding place he remembers from his youth and finds that Ellie left her diary there. In her diary, she confirms what some people suspected: that her father Deacon was abusing her. A flashback reveals that Deacon murdered Ellie when he found out she planned to leave and that Dow witnessed the murder. Falk sits in silence with the diary for a while, then he heads back to town.

- Genre: Short story, magical realism - Title: The Elephant Vanishes - Point of view: First person singular - Setting: 1980s suburban Tokyo - Character: The Narrator. Description: The protagonist of the story, the unnamed narrator is a 31-year-old man living in an affluent Tokyo suburb who works for the public relations department of an electrical appliance manufacturer. He has an ongoing interest in the elephant and with the remarkable friendship it shares with its keeper. This interest deepens into an obsession after the narrator becomes the last person to see the animal and its keeper before they mysteriously disappear. The narrator is the only character in the story who witnesses a bizarre shift in the size difference between the elephant and the zookeeper on the night before the disappearance. He concludes that either the elephant shrunk, the keeper grew, or both changed simultaneously. The narrator is subsequently thrown into a state of imbalance by this magical occurrence and is alienated from the townspeople in his belief that the elephant did not escape, but rather vanished completely. The narrator is also fixated on the idea of order in both his personal and professional life, maintaining strict routines (such as waking up at exactly 6:13 and reading the newspaper straight through from beginning to end) and espousing the benefits of unity in design and in life. He is completely possessed by the elephant's disappearance and confesses what he witnessed in the elephant house to a young woman he meets at a business party in hopes of finding a sympathetic ear. But the narrator is only misunderstood, further alienated, and thrown into an internal sense of disarray after their conversation. Unlike the other characters who quickly forget about the vanishing elephant, the narrator is fundamentally and irreparably changed by the strange circumstances of the event. - Character: The Elephant. Description: The titular animal of "The Elephant Vanishes." The elephant was displaced from its native habitat in East Africa twenty-two years before the story takes place and comes to live at the zoo in a Tokyo suburb. By the 1980s, the elephant is elderly, feeble, and lonely, spending months isolated in the town's abandoned zoo after it closes due to financial problems. The mayor of the town agrees to take ownership of the elephant despite the townspeople's general view of the animal as a financial burden and safety liability, which they refer to as "the elephant problem." The elephant does not seem to truly belong anywhere and is generally ignored and mistreated by the townspeople. It is kept shackled in a repurposed school gymnasium and fed leftover lunch scraps. Though alienated, the elephant has a deep friendship with old the zookeeper, Noboru Watanabe, who looked after the animal for many years at the zoo and continues to live alongside it and care for it at the elephant house. The two bear a striking physical resemblance to each other and share an elusive method of communication in private. The elephant is also greatly admired by the narrator, who often comes to the elephant house to watch the animal and its keeper interact. As the story's title suggests, the elephant mysteriously vanishes along with Watanabe. Beyond the narrator's observation of the size imbalance between the elephant and its keeper on the night before the disappearance and his speculation that the animal vanished (rather than escaped), there is no conclusive evidence of what happened to the elephant. - Character: The Keeper/Noboru Watanabe. Description: An elderly zookeeper who took care of the elephant for many years at the zoo and continues to live with and care for the animal after it is transferred to the town's makeshift elephant house. Having worked with mammals for decades, he is "abundantly knowledgeable" about elephants and has a "warm sincere personality." Watanabe vanishes along with the elephant yet is not mentioned in the title; despite this, he is the only character in the story whose full name, Noboru Watanabe, is ever referenced. The zookeeper bears an uncanny resemblance to the decrepit elephant under his care—he possesses the same leathery skin, protruding ears, small eyes, and short, bristly hair. Also like the elephant, the keeper is generally ignored and ostracized by the townspeople. He is a withdrawn, lonely man who, like the narrator, does not form close relationships with other members of the community. The zookeeper's only close friend is the elephant, with whom he shares a complex system of communication based on taps, commands, and nonverbal cues. Before the elephant and keeper vanish, the narrator is mesmerized by this bond between the two and enjoys watching the warm affection between the pair in private. - Character: The Woman at the Party. Description: An attractive young woman whom the narrator meets at a business party. Like most other characters in the story, the woman is unnamed, only referred to as "her" and "she" by the narrator. The woman is a twenty-six-year-old editor of a women's magazine and attends an advertising campaign launch party thrown by the narrator's company to gather information for an article. The narrator and the woman hit it off and retire to the hotel cocktail lounge after the party to continue their conversation. The woman is the only person to whom the narrator confesses his unique perspective on the disappearance of the elephant because she seems to be a good listener and interested in the topic. The woman is confused and unsettled by the narrator's description of the change in size he witnessed between the elephant and its keeper as well as by the narrator's conviction that the elephant vanished into thin air. Although the woman only appears briefly in the story and the narrator never sees her again after the night they meet, she is the one who solidifies the narrator's belief that the shift in his perception caused by the elephant's disappearance is permanent and will continue to prevent him from deeply connecting with other people. - Character: The Mayor. Description: The mayor of the town in which the story takes place. After the town's zoo closes and the story's titular elephant is left abandoned, the mayor agrees that the town will take ownership of the animal in a deal negotiated with the zoo's former owners and the developers who purchased the zoo's land. Though the mayor ostensibly cares more for the elephant's wellbeing than the townspeople (particularly the opposition party who would just as soon have the elephant euthanized), he is primarily interested in using the homeless elephant as the town's symbol and projecting an altruistic and politically favorable image. - Character: The Townspeople. Description: The inhabitants of the suburban community where the displaced elephant comes to live. The townspeople are generally opposed to the mayor's decision for the town to take over the care of the defunct zoo's elephant. They are indifferent toward the animal and its keeper once they come to live in the town's makeshift elephant house, prioritizing finances, progress, and urbanization over any concerns about the elephant's wellbeing. In the aftermath of the elephant and keeper's disappearance, the narrator feels alienated from the townspeople as he believes the pair vanished, while the townspeople believe the media's narrative that the elephant escaped or was stolen. - Theme: Alienation, Connection, and Unity. Description: In "The Elephant Vanishes," Murakami recounts how a Tokyo suburb deals with the improbable disappearance of an old elephant that has been left in the town's care. Through the narrator—the last person to see the animal before its strange disappearance—as well as the elderly zookeeper and the elephant itself, Murakami spins a story of isolation and meaningful connection. The central conflict in "The Elephant Vanishes" lies in its characters' inability to form deep bonds with one another. Despite the mayor's attempt to unite the community around the elephant, the townspeople ultimately ostracize the elephant and its keeper even before they vanish. The narrator's obsession with the pair's disappearance isolates him from the outside world and hinders his relationship with his romantic interest. This seemingly contagious sense of alienation that affects various characters throughout story serves to highlight the mystery and intangibility of the genuine unity that the narrator observes between the elephant and its keeper. The story takes place in a suburb plagued by social unrest and disharmony, as the townspeople are suspicious of the mayor's political motivations and unaccepting of the elephant and the zookeeper. This distinct lack of unity contrasts with the deep connection shared between the elephant and its keeper. When the town's zoo closes and the land is sold to a high-rise developer, both neighboring zoos and the townspeople view the elephant as a liability and economic burden. An "opposition party" rises up to protest the town's adoption of the elephant, reflecting the underlying social dissonance of the community. The mayor's effort to make the elephant into the town's symbol fails to foster a sense of unity, as the narrator recalls that the empty platitudes (such as a poem dedication) given during the elephant house dedication ceremony are "virtually meaningless." The elephant, bound by a shackle on its ankle, remains listless and indifferent to the townspeople's contrived displays of appreciation. The narrator's analysis of the dedication ceremony proves to be accurate, as the town quickly forgets about the elephant and zookeeper, relegating them to a secluded life in the elephant house. The mayor's attempts to unite the town around the elephant's presence fail, and the animal and its keeper are left to cultivate a friendship in lieu of the community that shuns them. The alienation of the elephant and the keeper by the townspeople paradoxically makes them the only two characters in the story to find true companionship, as the pair's mutual ostracization fosters a connection between them. Their bond reinforces the notion that meaningful relationships are organic and effortless, and that attempting to force unity only results in further alienation. The townspeople generally perceive the elephant and its keeper as old and feeble, and the pair are largely forgotten by the community. The elephant is shackled inside the old school gym and subsists on leftover scraps of school lunches, while the keeper is a "reticent, lonely-looking old man" who the town's children "never really warmed to." In spite of how the town treats the elephant and its keeper, the pair are able to find solace in each other's company. At one point, the narrator observes that the elephant and keeper are completely in sync and have the ability to communicate nonverbally. The pair are so fully integrated with one another that the narrator even notices uncanny physical similarities between the two, pointing out the large ears and leathery skin that they share. The narrator finds a spot from which he can see into the elephant house and becomes captivated by their tight-knit relationship. On the night before the disappearance, the narrator looks into the house to see that the physical size difference between the elephant and keeper has inexplicably diminished. The narrator is left to believe that either the elephant shrunk, or the zookeeper grew until the pair were the same size. This seemingly magical event can be interpreted as a physical manifestation of the emotional intimacy between the elephant and its keeper, as their mysterious bond subverts what natural laws and human perception deem possible. In the aftermath of the elephant and keeper's vanishing, the narrator's fixation on their mysterious relationship and the circumstances of their disappearance leads to alienation in his personal life. His inability to find a kindred spirit in his recollection of the event reflects the stark contrast between forced social connection and the true unity that he observed between the elephant and its keeper. The narrator becomes possessed by the disappearance, saving every article he can find on the event in scrapbooks. He identifies with the alienation that the elephant and keeper faced and becomes isolated in his obsession, as he was likely the sole witness of the private bond they shared and the last one to see the pair before they vanished. Later, when the narrator meets an attractive, single woman at a business event, he attempts to move beyond their superficial conversation by confiding in her about seeing the diminished size difference between the elephant and the keeper on the night before their disappearance. The narrator regrets this, however, when the woman reacts with confusion and silence. He realizes, "I never should have told her about the elephant. It was not the kind of story you could tell freely to anyone." This moment of misunderstanding extinguishes the blossoming relationship between the narrator and the woman entirely—the two awkwardly wrap up their conversation, go their separate ways after the party, and never meet again. The narrator's sense of regret suggests the inherent complexity of human connections and the futility of trying to force depth and trust in social connections. After this encounter, the narrator realizes that everyone else has forgotten about the elephant and that no one, including himself, will ever fully comprehend his uniquely intimate experience of the event. He is isolated by a lack of understanding, and by his own distrust of his memories and perceptions. Unable to foster a similar sense of intimacy in his own personal life, the narrator is haunted by the unanswerable nature of the elephant's relationship with the keeper. Murakami uses the alienation of the pair from the town, and later that of the narrator from the world around him, to emphasize the intrinsic value and mysterious nature of the deep camaraderie that the narrator observes between the elephant and its keeper. - Theme: Order, Perception, and Imbalance. Description: As in other works of magical realist literature, "The Elephant Vanishes" features surreal situations that seem to disrupt the fundamental natural order. The titular elephant, already a wild animal at odds with its surroundings in a suburb of Tokyo, appears to physically shrink in relation to its keeper just before the two vanish. Witnessing this surreal shift in balance has a profound effect on the narrator, who feels that his own life has been irrevocably disrupted in the wake of the pair's disappearance. The imbalance of the elephant and its keeper directly parallels the narrator's internal imbalance, highlighting the conflict between humanity's gravitation toward order versus the unreliability of perception and reality. Prior to the elephant and its keeper mysteriously vanishing, the narrator centers his life around routine and order. The narrator is rigidly tied to his daily rituals, noting that his alarm clock wakes him up at the exact minute of 6:13, and that "I'm one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order." The narrator's routines are implied to be an anchor of balance and meaning in a life that is otherwise empty—his career is "not the kind of work that takes a great deal of intelligence," and he is seemingly alienated from those around him. The narrator is also fixated on the notion of balance within his public relations job, espousing the necessary role of equilibrium and cohesion in modern life. He asserts that "Even the most beautifully designed item dies if it is out of balance with its surroundings." This conviction reflects an intrinsic human inclination toward order as a way to cope with the tumultuousness of modern life. The narrator's artificially constructed sense of stability and dependability is disrupted when he experiences the elephant's inexplicable shift in size and subsequent disappearance, forcing him to grapple with the tenuous nature of balance and the chaos of reality. The night before the elephant and its keeper disappear, the narrator peers into the elephant house from a nearby cliff and is shocked to see that the elephant has somehow shrunk down to the zookeeper's size, wondering whether "my eyes were playing tricks on me" or if "town might have got hold a of a new smaller elephant." But the elephant's mannerisms are exactly the same, and the narrator can only assume that the elephant has somehow shrunk (or perhaps the keeper grew) despite the absurdity and surrealism of this realization. Witnessing this moment of imbalance has a profound impact on the narrator, who until this point has been fully routinized into the natural order of his surroundings and usual rhythms of everyday life. He feels that "a different, chilling kind of time was flowing through the elephant house—but nowhere else," and that the elephant and the keeper willingly "[gave] themselves over to this new order" of reality. The narrator's life is thrown into imbalance by the incident of the elephant vanishing, as he is forced to grapple with the fact that reality is subjective and memory untrustworthy. His repeated use of the qualifier "probably" when recounting the diminished size difference between the elephant and its keeper suggests the narrator's self-doubt and reluctance to accept the "new order" of reality that was ushered into being by this physical shift. Though the rest of the townspeople quickly moves on from the disappearance, the event leaves a lasting sense of disorder and unease that affects the narrator long after the events take place. The imbalance is pronounced enough to take on a contagious quality as the narrator tries to explain his version of the mysterious circumstances to an attractive woman he meets at a business party. The woman is taken aback, telling the narrator that "You were carrying on a perfectly normal conversation […] until the subject of the elephant came up. Then something funny happened. I can't understand you anymore. Something's wrong." The woman's discomfort in the context of their conversation about the elephant mirrors the overwhelming paradigm shift the narrator experiences in the wake of the disappearance. She cannot reconcile the narrator's seemingly impossible conviction that the elephant and keeper magically vanished with her previously-formed perceptions of him as a potential mate, and their budding relationship is stunted as a result. On a similar but grander scale, the narrator feels that "things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me." After the elephant and keeper disappear, he is left adrift in a lingering blur of confusion and instability in which he lives "based on afterimages of memories I retain" from before the event. Reality has shattered the narrator's dependence on order, and his life has been irreparably unsettled by the inexplicable magic he witnessed in the elephant-house. The randomness of the disappearance and the ease with which the imbalance of the elephant and the keeper disrupts the narrator's life reflects the fragility of the order and certainty that serve as the framework for human perception. In creating this domino effect of imbalance within the story's plot, Murakami shatters the façade of stability that people cling to in the wake of the underlying chaotic, entropic nature of the universe. - Theme: Modernity. Description: The progression toward modernity serves as the catalyst behind the general state of disorder and meaninglessness that abounds in "The Elephant Vanishes." The story takes place in 1980s suburban Tokyo, where towns were still in the midst of the economic boom and technological advancements that characterized post-WWII societies. The consequences of modernity are evident in the expansion of the story's town as well as in the public relations career of the narrator. Murakami's focus on progress, urbanization, and consumerism throughout the story reflects modern life's tendency to create a sense of meaninglessness both in society and within the individual. Whereas Japan is a nation that has historically held a strong sense of tradition and group identity, the townspeople in "The Elephant Vanishes" lack a stable sense of community. The increasing modernization of the town and its values lead its people to prioritize economic gain and pragmatic motivations over emotional concerns such as empathy for the elephant and zookeeper. The narrator comments that before the town took ownership of the elephant, an opposition group was starkly opposed to the idea, citing the financial and security costs of housing the animal. He believes that the elephant was only saved from euthanasia because its death would have been "too hard to cover up." This prioritization of economic concerns over empathy toward an elderly creature in need indicates a shift in values brought on by modernization. The zoo in town was forced to close and was bought out by a high-rise developer, suggesting a contemporary mindset that values commodification and expansion over traditional pastimes. The townspeople are concerned with urban development above all else and lack connection with the ethos of their community and the elephant's status as its proposed symbol. The townspeople are also quick to forget about the elephant's disappearance despite the initial hysteria toward the situation. The narrator notices that "people seem to have forgotten that their town once owned an elephant," reflecting the increasingly distracted, unsentimental attitude of modern society. Modernity's negative impact on human life also appears in the story through the business world. Like the collective community's economic concerns, the narrator is preoccupied with money in terms of how much product he can sell—a lucrative but ultimately unsatisfying pursuit. The narrator openly acknowledges the fact that "things you can't sell don't count for much." This directly parallels the community's attitude toward the elephant, as the animal is largely resented, alienated, and ignored due to its lack of "merit" or lucrative potential. The narrator is also plain about the fact that his distinctively modern public relations career (a relatively new field in the twentieth century) is shallow in nature. After making the empty claim that the world is "pragmatic" in conversation, he admits that you can "play games" with language and manipulate expression in order to sell product. This skepticism toward modern consumeristic culture deepens the narrator's feelings of discontent in his personal life. As in his advertising work, he falls back on superficial platitudes, unable to truly connect with anyone or find meaning in his experiences. Beyond the corporate sphere of the narrator's career, modernity also influences how the media operates in the wake of the elephant and keeper's disappearance. As Japan became increasingly modernized and less insular during the twentieth century, local and mass media usurped word of mouth as the means by which people acquired information. This context has a direct influence on how the narrator navigates the mystery of the disappearance, as he is socially disconnected from his community and can only hope to glean more information from the speculative secondhand accounts of journalists. Society, as the narrator notes, has become more pragmatic and less emotionally invested over time. As a result, the journalists cover the event superficially and neglect to investigate the surrounding circumstance and deeper meaning behind the disappearance. The narrator admits that he meticulously reads and saves every newspaper article and cartoon about the elephant he can find, but reflects that "despite their enormous volume, the clippings contained not one fat of the kind that I was looking for." The narrator goes on to remark that reports of the disappearance were "either pointless or off the mark" and that coverage of the event fizzled out almost entirely after a week. According to the narrator, the newspapers and readers in the town "shove the elephant case into the large category of 'unsolvable mysteries'" that are unimportant and have no impact on society. He reflects that "the earth would continue its monotonous rotations" and that the mundanity of everyday life would continue on as if the event had not taken place. Amidst the fast-paced flurry of modern life, even the seemingly miraculous nature of the elephant's disappearance is largely irrelevant. This nonchalant coverage and dismissal of the "elephant case" by the media reflects the impact of modernization of the town's values. Whereas the narrator's unique proximity to the elephant and keeper's disappearance causes him to become emotionally invested in the events, the disconnected community fails to unite their interest around the elephant and the story fades into obscurity. Through his cynical portrayal of various intersecting spheres of the community in "The Elephant Vanishes," Murakami examines the challenges of modernity and downfalls of contemporary culture, arguing that the progress and prosperity of modern life have ultimately robbed society of meaning and left individuals discontented and disconnected from one another. - Theme: Humans vs. Animals. Description: In "The Elephant Vanishes," the titular elephant is a displaced animal who is largely misunderstood and mistreated by the community in which it is forced to integrate. As a captive zoo animal, the elephant has no agency over its life—its whereabouts, housing, diet, and care are all placed under the control of a town that largely regards the elephant as a waste of practical resources. Rather than being treated with respect and proper care, the elephant's primary role for the community is to advance the mayor's political agenda upon its arrival and serve as a brief distraction after it vanishes. The only human to fully understand and care for the elephant is its keeper, who disappears along with it. Murakami contrasts the community's indifference and disdain for the elephant with the zookeeper's deep, loving relationship with the animal in order to criticize humankind's tendency to control and manipulate animals for their own gain. The elephant's journey from the zoo to being adopted by the town is one that is motivated by political gain rather than genuine concern for the animal. The mayor aims to use the elephant's presence in order to boost the town's reputation, exemplifying the human instinct to exert control over animals for their own benefit. The elephant is taken in by the town under the pretext that its home (the town's zoo) has closed and been taken over by high-rise developers. This reality in and of itself reflects the community's indifference toward animals, as the zoo failed to thrive financially and most of the town is in favor of the urban development usurping it. The elephant "stayed alone in the decaying zoo for nearly four months with nothing to do—not that it had had anything to do before," exemplifying the tragedy and emptiness of its life spent in captivity for human entertainment. Before the elephant's arrival, the mayor spins its presence into somewhat of a political platform. He argues that the elephant could "become the town's symbol" and that "the adoption of a homeless elephant was a move that people could look upon favorably." Despite this attempted exploitation, the townspeople view the elephant as a burden and soon forget about the animal after giving it a cursory welcome at the elephant-house dedication ceremony. After the elephant vanishes, the mystery of the event serves as a short-lived scandal in the town before quickly fading into irrelevancy. Neither the media nor the townspeople show genuine concern for the elephant's whereabouts and wellbeing, suggesting that its significance in the town was more aligned with that of an inanimate attraction and less with a living creature. By contrast, the elephant's relationship with the keeper is one based on mutual respect and a deep valuation of one another. The close friendship that the narrator witnesses between the pair is a stark contrast to how the elephant is treated by outside society, suggesting that humanity's inclination to either overlook or control animals is anything but natural. From a vantage point on a nearby cliff, the narrator is able to see into the elephant-house and observe the tight-knit bond that the elephant and its creatures share. Both are elderly and ostracized away from the community, with the keeper possessing the same "darkly ruddy, sunburned look" and ears that "stuck out on either side with disturbing prominence" as the elephant. This parallel between the two old creatures positions them as equals. Despite being housed haphazardly in an appropriated school gymnasium, held captive by a shackle bolted to a concrete slab, and fed a meager diet of leftover school lunch scraps, the elephant is well cared for by the zookeeper. Beyond physical similarities, there is a deep understanding between the two—the narrator notes that "you could sense their closeness in every gesture and look." This close relationship is the antithesis of how the elephant is regarded by the mayor, townspeople, and media—outsiders seemingly only concerned with the positive benefits the animal could reap for them and the entertaining, short-lived drama of its disappearance. As the story unspools, Murakami uplifts the zookeeper as a role model of sorts, praising his quiet humility,  genuine care, and affection toward the elephant, which exemplifies a mutual sense of respect between different species. Murakami juxtaposes this intimate companionship between the elephant and its keeper with the town's mistreatment and neglect of the elephant in order to demonstrate how the inclination of humanity to control animals is inherently immoral and motivated by political power, financial gain, and entertainment value. - Climax: The narrator reveals to the woman at the business party that he was the last person to see the elephant and its keeper on the night before the two vanished. - Summary: "The Elephant Vanishes" is the story of an elderly zoo elephant who mysteriously vanishes after being taken in by a suburban Japanese community when the town's zoo closes, as well as this event's lasting effects on the story's narrator. The narrative shifts back in forth in time between the present (post-disappearance) and the past (pre-disappearance). Before the elephant vanishes, the mayor's initial decision to take ownership of the animal is met with opposition from the townspeople due to financial and safety concerns. After moving into the makeshift elephant house in town, the elephant is largely ignored by the community. The elephant leads a lonely existence shackled to a concrete slab, its only solace being the close friendship it shares with the old zookeeper who cares for the animal. The narrator is fascinated by the mysterious bond and system of communication that the elephant and its keeper share, and often peers into the elephant house to observe how the pair interacts in private. One day, the narrator reads the morning paper and finds that the elephant and keeper have inexplicably vanished from the elephant house without warning. He realizes that he was likely the last person to see the pair before they disappeared, as he had been watching them from outside the elephant house the night before. The narrator becomes obsessed with the disappearance and, due to the lack of evidence suggesting a break-in or an escape, believes that the elephant must have vanished into thin air. This troubling conclusion frustrates the narrator and alienates him from his community, which believes the media's narrative that it was, in fact, an escape. The townspeople soon forget about the elephant, but the narrator remains fixated on the mystifying event. A few months later, the narrator meets a woman at a business party to whom he confesses his perspective on the elephant's disappearance. He admits that he believes the elephant and keeper vanished, and that he was probably the last one to have seen them. The narrator also reveals a bizarre moment that he witnessed: on the night before the disappearance, he looked into the elephant house and saw that the size difference between the elephant and the keeper had somehow diminished. The narrator recalls feeling an unsettling shift in reality in that moment. The woman is confused and put off by the narrator's strange account, and the two never meet again. The narrator continues to be consumed by the inexplicable change in size between the elephant and the keeper, as well as by their strange disappearance. Although everyone else seems to have easily forgotten about the case, the narrator feels that his own perceptions can no longer be trusted. A sense of chaotic imbalance has disrupted the natural order and overtaken his sense of normality in the wake of the elephant who vanished.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Enemy - Point of view: First Person - Setting: A plantation and nearby house in Cunupia, Trinidad; then, Port-of-Spain (the capital of Trinidad) - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is an unnamed young Indo-Trinidadian boy who struggles to assert himself in his relationship with his mother. The narrator is initially closer to his father than his mother, and when his parents split up, he chooses to stay with his father, causing a rift between him and his mother. In fact, he sees his mother as the story's titular "enemy." The narrator emotionally connects with this father while they live together, but when his father dies and he moves back with his mother, he starts to think of himself as a "boy who had no father." He even becomes "grateful" for his father's death because it has, as he sees it, saved him from a potentially dominating relationship. However, the narrator has a troubled relationship with his mother, who beats and insults him, although the narrator also acknowledges that she shows him occasional "glimpses of kindness." At school, the narrator shows some talent for writing, as when he receives a high grade on an essay about his experience of nearly drowning. Meanwhile, he yearns to grow up and escape from his mother and often acts out against her authority. However, at the end of the story, the narrator finally recognizes his mother's love for him when he sees how worried she is after he injures himself. "The Enemy" is a kind of coming-of-age story for the narrator as he struggles to form his own identity in opposition to both his father and his mother. Yet he plays a largely passive role in the story, seemingly caught between the stronger wills of his two parents. Toward the end of the story, however, the narrator starts to take on a more active role, first through his attempts to assert his will against his mother's, and then in his final epiphany of his mother's love for him. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: "The Enemy" is fundamentally about the relationship between the narrator and his mother. According to the narrator, his mother has always hated his father, and she disapproves of her only son because she sees him as her husband's child, not her own. The mother resists the family's move to the wooden house because she knows how dangerous it will be, and although she shows some bravery in facing down a man who comes to threaten the family, she ultimately cannot put up with her husband's apparent indifference towards her and her son's safety. Once her husband becomes more abusive, screaming and throwing things at her, she decides to return to her mother's house. She tries to convince her son to go with her, but he insists on staying with his father, causing a rift between the mother and son. When her son starts living with her again following her husband's death, she starts out trying to rid him of his father's influence over him, but she soon gives up on this, resorting to simply beating her son from time to time. She compares her own son unfavorably to other boys in the neighborhood and berates him for his incompetence, although she also occasionally shows him kindness. Her underlying love for her son comes to the surface at the end of the story, when she cries from worry over her son's injury. Because the reader only ever experiences the mother from her son's point of view, it is difficult to fully understand the mother's feelings and motivations. However, it is clear that she feels wronged by her husband, who has acted abusively towards her, as well as hurt that her only child seems to prefer her husband to her. This may be the cause of her subsequent erratic behavior toward her son, vacillating between strictness, abuse, indifference, kindness, and love. Her son, too young to really understand his mother's feelings, sees her, until the very end of the story, as simply his "enemy," without ever suspecting that it may be himself, rather than his mother, who is truly "misunderstand[ing]" the other person. - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The narrator's father is a complicated figure in "The Enemy": he's at once authoritative and abusive yet also tender toward his son and fearful of the very people he oversees. The narrator's father is a driver on a sugar plantation who mistreats the laborers, as if they were enslaved, and he also treats his wife (the narrator's mother) harshly. He insists on moving from the barracks of the plantation to a nearby house, where mysterious voices outside (implied to belong to the vengeful laborers he's wronged) threaten the family at night. The narrator's father ignores his wife's pleas to leave the house, apparently caring neither for her nor his son's safety. He eventually becomes so abusive toward his wife, shouting and throwing things at her, that she leaves him. At first, the narrator's father copes with the terror of living in the house by aid of an eclectic spirituality, mixing together Hinduism, Christianity, and his own imagination. As he falls ill, he becomes closer to his son, teaching him about God, gravity, and the mixing of colors. He ultimately succumbs to his fears one night during a massive thunderstorm. Imagining that the laborers he has wronged will be able to do anything to him and his son under the cover of darkness and the noise of the storm, insisting that he can hear their voices even when his son can hear nothing, he dies from what his son assumes to be fear. Whereas the narrator's father begins as an authority figure over his workers and family members, at the end of his life he is portrayed as a weak and pathetic figure, dying of fright at the imagined voices of the people he has wronged. The narrator initially identifies and allies himself with his father and the authority he represents while rejecting his mother. But later, after his father's death, he recognizes his relationship with his father as one of potential domination and is grateful for his death. - Character: Hat. Description: Hat is the narrator and his mother's neighbor in Port-of-Spain. At one point he saves the narrator from drowning, an experience that the narrator writes about in an essay for school. The pivotal ending scene of the story, when the narrator is injured and falls unconscious, occurs at Hat's house, when he is tearing down his old latrine. Hat is a minor character is this story and does not actually appear directly in any of the scenes, but he is a more significant character in many of V. S. Naipaul's other interconnected stories, serving as a mentor figure for the narrator. - Theme: Familial Love and Conflict. Description: Fundamentally, "The Enemy" is about the narrator's relationship with his mother. This relationship is characterized by conflict, even hatred, yet also by an underlying love. At the start of the story, the narrator explains that his mother hates his father, and she also resents the narrator for choosing his father over her when his parents separate. She calls him "your father child […] not mine." The narrator bonds with his father during the short time they live together without the narrator's mother, but after his father's death, the narrator soon "forgets" his father and thinks of himself as a "boy who had no father." He even becomes grateful that his father has died when he and his mother move from the countryside to Port-of-Spain (Trinidad's capital city), and he discovers that the "normal relationship between father and son" is "nothing more than the relationship between the beater and the beaten." With this, the narrator expresses his painful recognition that family relationships can be characterized by conflict and antagonism just as much as by love. And indeed, the narrator's relationship with his mother soon becomes a constant struggle between "the beater" (his mother) and "the beaten" (the narrator). The narrator sees his mother as an "enemy" who misunderstands and disapproves of him. She beats him and criticizes him, and in turn the narrator develops a disobedient streak and looks forward to "escaping" from her when he grows up. But at the end of the story, when the narrator gets hurt in an accident, his mother rushes to the scene, crying. For the first time, the narrator discovers that his mother can be "worried and anxious" about him—in other words, he discovers that his mother, the woman he has considered his "enemy," truly loves him. Through this ending, the story suggests that even the most fraught familial relationships often conceal an underlying love, even if neither person realizes that this love exists until loss, or the fear of loss, causes it to come out into the open. - Theme: Fear. Description: Fear is a powerful force in "The Enemy," transforming the characters' relationships with one another—sometimes driving them apart, sometimes drawing them together, sometimes even deciding matters of life and death. The first episode of fear occurs soon after the family moves from the barracks of the sugar plantation to a nearby house, when a man comes to the house and threatens them. After this, the family lives in constant terror, keeping weapons nearby. At night, they start hearing voices—most likely the voices of workers that the narrator's father has wronged, trying to lure them out and kill them. However, because the narrator never explains this explicitly, there is an almost supernatural element to the voices, as if they're the voices of ghosts coming to haunt the family. The threat of violence that the voices represent becomes terrifyingly clear when the family wakes up to find that their dog has been killed and cut to pieces on their steps. The constant fear of living in the house eventually drives the narrator's mother to leave, and soon his father's life is engulfed by this fear. One night, during a massive thunderstorm, his father becomes convinced that the voices have returned and will try to murder them that night. The narrator can't hear the voices and tries to assure his father that they will be able to protect themselves with weapons, but his father is so terrified that he eventually dies of fright. Through these various episodes that the family experiences, the story suggests that fear can control people, drive them insane, and even quite literally kill them—even when the threat itself is entirely imagined. But the final episode of "The Enemy" demonstrates that fear can have a different kind of power, as well. When the narrator wakes up after injuring himself, he learns that his mother has been worried about him, and he sees tears in her eyes. This is a transformative moment in an otherwise troubled relationship. The narrator's mother perhaps needed to feel afraid for her son's safety and life to understand how much she truly loves him, and it is her visible fear for her son's life that leads him to realize that his mother cares. Whereas fear initially drove them apart, now it brings the mother and son together again quite unexpectedly, reminding them both of feelings they were not even fully aware they had. - Theme: Shame and Dishonor. Description: At many points in the story, the narrator is motivated by a desire to escape from shame and dishonor. As he grows older, he becomes more attuned to social approval and disapproval. He is aware, for instance, that there is something shameful about his father dying (apparently of fright) during a thunderstorm, reflecting that "it appeared that for the rest of my life I would have to bear the cross of a father who died from fright." Then, after his father's death, the narrator's relationship with his mother is marked by shame: in his view, she sees him as an unintelligent "freak," comparing him unfavorably to other boys in the neighborhood and beating him frequently. His mother's disapproval colors his view of himself, and so he develops a sense of shame about his own perceived incompetence—his inability to peel an orange or tie his own shoes, for instance. He becomes afraid of "dishonoring" himself by taking other people's orders, especially his mother's, so he begins to have "odd fits" where he acts out and disobeys adults. The narrator perhaps feels a need to assert his own independence in order to make up for the shame he feels because of his mother's humiliating treatment of him and the accompanying sense of his own inadequacy. The story thus suggests that while seeking independence from one's parents is a normal aspect of growing up, a child may become more rebellious and stubborn if their parents make them feel ashamed, since the child will then feel the need to distance themselves from shame and dishonor. - Theme: Colonialism, Power, and Revolt. Description: "The Enemy" is filled with instances of disobedience or revolt against authority figures, both within the narrator's family and within colonial Trinidadian society more broadly. The story takes place in the 1940s in Trinidad, when the country was still a British colony. Throughout the colonial period, Trinidad's economy was fueled by sugar plantations. Although both slavery and indentured servitude had ended by the period when "The Enemy" is set, even "free" labor on these plantations was characterized by low wages and exploitation. The narrator's father, in terms of social position, theoretically has the most authority of any character in the story: he wields power both in his family and in the plantation system as a driver who physically forces laborers to work faster. And yet the narrator's father is ultimately a powerless and emasculated figure. For one, he's terrified and helpless when people (implied to be the laborers he's tasked with keeping in line) begin harassing the family outside their house at night. He's also unable to keep his wife (the narrator's mother) from leaving him, and eventually, he's literally frightened to death by imagined dangers during a thunderstorm. The father's weak authority perhaps indicates the fragile and illusory nature of his power in a society where he, too, is ultimately a colonized subject. After the narrator's father's death, the narrator's mother becomes the major authority figure in his life. And as the narrator grows older, he begins to revolt against his mother just as she earlier revolted against her husband by leaving him. The narrator starts having "crazy fits" in which he can't bring himself to obey adults, especially his mother, feeling that he would "dishonor [himself] for life if I took anybody's orders." This urge to avoid "dishonoring" himself through obedience ultimately leads to fierce "struggle[s] between two wills," his own and his mother's, over seemingly trivial matters. But just as the laborers' revolt against his father was seemingly a consequence of his father's brutality toward them, and just as his mother's revolt against his father was a consequence of his father's violence and negligence toward her, so too is the narrator's seemingly inexplicable urge to disobey his mother a predictable response to how she beats and humiliates him. In this way, the story uses the power dynamics in the narrator's family and community to critique the broader context of Great Britain's colonial rule over Trinidad, suggesting that violence only breeds more violence, and that abuses of authority inevitably lead to revolts against that authority. - Climax: After an impulsive decision, the narrator is knocked unconscious and breaks his hand. When he wakes up, he learns that his mother has been worried about him and realizes that she truly loves him. - Summary: "The Enemy" is a coming-of-age story about a young Trinidadian boy (who's the story's narrator) and his relationship with his father and mother. His mother hates his father and considers the narrator his father's child, and the narrator thinks of her as his enemy. His father is a driver on a sugar plantation who mistreats the laborers. One day, his father decides to move the family out of the barracks and into a nearby wooden house. His mother doesn't want to move, fearing that living in the house will not be safe. Soon after they move in, a man shows up at the house and threatens to wait for the narrator's father, presumably to attack him. After this incident, the family lives in terror, keeping weapons nearby. They start to hear threatening voices whispering outside their house at night. After getting a dog that they keep outside, they wake up one morning to find him dead, cut to pieces on their front steps. The narrator's mother, unable to keep living in this constant fear, tells her family that she is going to leave and tries to bring the narrator along with her. But his father has promised him a box of crayons if he stays with him, so the narrator decides to stay, causing a rift between him and his mother. Soon, the narrator's father becomes ill and spends most of his time in bed, and the narrator spends a great deal of time talking with him. His father teaches him about God, shows him tricks to demonstrate the force of gravity, and shows him how to mix two colors together to create a different color. One night, during a severe thunderstorm, his father becomes terrified because he believes the threatening voices will be able to do anything to them in the darkness and noise of the storm. His father dies that night from the fear. The narrator, who's embarrassed that his father died of fright, goes back to living with his mother, and they move to Port-of-Spain. Here, he sees other father-son relationships, most of which are abusive, and feels grateful that his own father is dead. The relationship between the narrator and his mother, meanwhile, becomes more antagonistic. His mother increasingly criticizes him and beats him. The narrator, in turn, becomes disobedient towards his mother, often engaging in fierce struggles of will with her over seemingly trivial matters. The narrator considers his mother "the enemy," looking forward to escaping from her as soon as he grows up. One day, a neighbor named Hat is tearing down his old latrine to replace with a new lavatory, and the narrator impulsively rushes out in front of a falling wall and is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, his hand broken, he hears that his mother has been worried about him and sees the tears in her eyes. For the first time, he realizes that his mother truly loves him. He wishes that he were a Hindu god with two hundred arms, just so all of them could be broken and he could see his mother's tears again.

- Genre: Fiction, sentimental fiction - Title: The Enemy - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: The Japanese coast - Character: Dr. Sadao Hoki. Description: Dr. Sadao Hoki is the protagonist of the story and Hana's husband. A skilled surgeon educated in America, Sadao is wholly responsible for saving the life of Tom, an American prisoner of war who washes up on the beach alongside Sadao and Hana's isolated home on the Japanese coast. Sadao is an emotionally complex character who struggles to come to terms with his inexplicable impulse to save the life of an American, who is supposedly his enemy, and his staunch Japanese patriotism (which increasingly reads as outright nationalism and racial prejudice). Sadao's arc is anti-epiphanic, ending with his deeply prejudiced thoughts about all the Americans he's known throughout his lifetime. However, the story suggests that the reason he helped the prisoner of war—putting his and his household's safety on the line in doing so—is because of the latent human impulse to be good and kind. Alongside his nationalism, Sadao is also a proponent of traditional Japanese gender roles, requiring his wife to be a meek, subservient housewife who tends to the servants and follows Sadao's orders unflinchingly. Even though the couple met at college in America, Hana generally conforms to this role gladly and seems to value Japanese customs. Despite upholding strict gender roles—with Sadao often coming across as cold and domineering—the couple appears to genuinely and tenderly love one another, even if those feelings are largely unspoken. Many of the decisions Sadao makes about how to deal with Tom stem from Sadao wanting to alleviate his wife's severe anxiety at housing the prisoner. - Character: Hana. Description: Hana is Dr. Sadao Hoki's wife. The couple met at a university in America, but "waited to fall in love" until their parents back in Japan could properly approve of and arrange the marriage. Hana shows a deep love for Japanese customs and the old way of living, seen through her traditional house (peppered with patios and courtyards) and her role as a subservient housewife. She largely bends to Sadao's will, often without resentment, and upholds him as the head of the household. Hana's main task is overseeing the servants—who, in turn, tend to her household and children—and ensuring that her husband is always fed first and taken care of. Although she appears less overtly racist than her husband, she too distains Tom for being white and American. She is also more afraid of going against the cultural grain by dangerously housing and saving the white man, who is clearly a prisoner of war. Tom makes her uncomfortable and anxious, both because of his Americanness and because his presence poses a severe threat to her and Sadao's safety, given that aiding a prisoner of war and political enemy is against the law. Nonetheless, she finds herself taking care of the American even though she doesn't really want to, washing him tenderly while thinking racist thoughts. Hana, like Sadao, demonstrates the human impulse to be altruistic and take care of fellow humans, but also shows how racial prejudice and nationalism cloud such thinking. - Character: Tom / The American. Description: Tom is a teenage American prisoner of war who was captured and tortured by the Japanese but somehow escaped. He washes up on the beach near Dr. Sadao Hoki and Hana's isolated house, and they discern that he's a prisoner of war from his recent bullet wound (reopened by one of the rocks out at sea), his blonde hair, and his U.S. navy cap. Even though Tom is unconscious or sleeping for much of his time with Sadao and Hana, his mere presence forces them to grapple with their conflicting impulses to help a fellow human and to be loyal to one's country. When he is conscious, Tom is scared of Sadao but also deeply grateful to the surgeon for saving his life—praise that Sadao coldly shrugs off. After saving Tom's life through surgery, Sadao knows that he can't allow the American to stay, but nor can he turn the American over to the authorities—the boy will surely die a torturous death. Sadao arranges for the General, an influential patient of his, to have a few assassins come to Sadao's house in the middle of the night to silently kill Tom and do away with his body. When the assassins fail to show up night after night, Sadao decides to take matters into his own hands by helping Tom escape by boat to a nearby island, where he's bound to be saved by a Korean fishing boat. The plan works, and Sadao is ultimately baffled as to why he couldn't just kill Tom, given that Americans are his enemies and he hates all white people. In the story, Tom is the catalyst for human kindness, forcing Sadao and Hana to consider the universality of humankind and the inherent human impulse to be kind. - Character: The General. Description: The General is a sickly man in the Japanese military who suffers from some sort of physical condition that Dr. Sadao Hoki treats. According to Sadao, the General will only be able to survive one more "attack"—he suffers from something that has to do with his gallbladder. Because Sadao can keep the General reasonably healthy and can tend to him so expertly, the General feels indebted to Sadao and is willing to help—and keep quiet—about Tom. The General promises to send a few assassins to Sadao's house to silently kill Tom and do away with his body, releasing Sadao of the burden of having to figure out what to do with the prisoner. Ultimately, the General doesn't follow through with the deal and sheepishly admits to forgetting about the situation altogether. This claim is treated as somewhat suspect in the story, leaving open the possibility that the General, too, didn't want the American to die because he saw him as a fellow human rather than an enemy. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the General, like Sadao, went to college in America, and perhaps his Princeton education and connection to America forced him to see people of other races and nationalities as fellow humans rather than political enemies or objects of racial prejudice. However, it's possible that the sickly General—whose very position implies fierce patriotism and a generally pro-war sensibility—truly did forget to send the assassins and did consider Tom an enemy. The General is possibly the same person as General Takima, though the story doesn't confirm this. - Character: The Gardener. Description: The elderly gardener is one of the servants who works for Dr. Sadao Hoki and Hana. Like the cook, he's been an instrumental part of the household ever since Sadao was just a boy. He is fiercely loyal to Sadao's father, who is dead at the outset of the story. The gardener is especially skilled with flowers and moss; in his younger years, he created "one of the finest moss gardens in Japan" for Sadao's father. He refers to Sadao's father as "my old master" and Sadao as "my old master's son," demonstrating his lopsided loyalty to Sadao's father over Sadao. This, coupled with his old age, suggests that the gardener clings to traditions, superstitions, and mindsets of the past. Even though Sadao and Hana are fairly traditional, the gardener aligns himself with Sadao's father's belief in racial purity, Japanese superiority, and the "old Japanese way" of doing things. Like the other servants, the gardener resents Sadao for saving Tom—besides his racist reasons for believing Tom should die, he also superstitiously believes that saving Tom from the sea will make the sea take revenge on Sadao and his family. The gardener eventually cuts ties with the family and leaves the household because of Tom. However, like the other servants, the gardener returns once Tom is gone, suggesting that the gardener was too engrained in the household—and too devoted to the memory Sadao's father—to truly leave. - Character: Yumi. Description: Yumi is one of the servants at Dr. Sadao Hoki and Hana's house. She largely tends to the children and is seen with them far more than Hana herself is. Like the gardener, she is openly prejudiced against Tom and speaks critically of Sadao and Hana for saving a white man. She is so frightened by Sadao and Hana's lawbreaking and shocking empathy for the enemy that she stubbornly refuses to follow orders and eventually leaves the household altogether with the gardener and the cook. Her tear-soaked departure comes as an emotional blow for Hana (who is in charge of the servants) and for Yumi herself, who cares for the two children as if they are her own. She is distraught at the thought of what would happen to the children if their father was found out as a "traitor." When Tom escapes, Yumi quickly returns to her post and resumes taking care of the children. However, Yumi insists on burning Sulphur in the guest room, where Tom had been staying, "to get the white man's smell out of it." - Character: The Cook. Description: The cook is one of Dr. Sadao Hoki and Hana's servants. She is critical of her "young master," implying that she is more loyal to Sadao's father, even though he is dead. Like the gardener, the cook has worked in the household since Sadao was a little boy. She believes Sadao to be arrogant and undiscerning in the way he employs his talents, "so proud of his skill to save life that he saves any life." Besides their unflinching loyalty to Sadao's father, the cook and the gardener are also linked in their loyalty to the "old Japanese way" of doing things—seen, for instance, through the way that the cook kills a live fowl for dinner and carefully saves the blood for the gardener to use, since "Blood is the best of fertilisers." Condemning Sadao and Hana's decision to save Tom and nurse the white man back to health, the cook tearfully quits and leaves the household with Yumi and the gardener. The servants swiftly return once Tom is gone, however, suggesting that they are deeply rooted to the household. - Character: Sadao's Father. Description: Dr. Sadao Hoki's father is dead from the outset of the story, but his presence lingers throughout the story due to Sadao's reflections and the servants' loyalty to their "old master." At the start of the story, Sadao thinks about how his harsh, domineering father, "who never joked or played with him," pushed Sadao toward the best education possible, even if that meant sending him to a university in America. In life, Sadao's father was a Japanese nationalist who believed firmly in racial purity—Sadao could only marry Hana if she was purely Japanese. He cleaved to the "old Japanese way" of doing things, seen by the way he properly arranged Sadao and Hana's marriage (even though they met in college in America) and ensured that his bedroom was outfitted in a traditional Japanese fashion and contained only Japanese-made furniture and goods. The cook and the gardener both worked for Sadao's father when Sadao was just a little boy, and as such they are far more loyal to their "old master" than the "young master." When Tom enters into the picture, it is this loyalty to Sadao's father (plus an understandable dose of fear of being seen as traitors by the authorities) that lead the gardener and the cook to quit and leave the household after several decades of working there. When Tom "escapes" (that is, when Sadao helps him steal away to a nearby island where he's bound to be picked up by a Korean fishing boat), the servants return, suggesting that their roots in the household and their devotion to Sadao's father's memory was far too deep to sever permanently. - Character: Sadao's Anatomy Professor. Description: As he's performing an emergency surgery on Tom to remove the bullet lodged near his kidney, Dr. Sadao Hoki thinks back fondly on his strict anatomy professor from college in America. The professor was adamant that his students understand every minute detail of the human body—performing surgery without this intimate knowledge is "murder," the professor said. Sadao implies that his success as a surgeon largely stems from this one anatomy professor's teaching and influence, and this man is also the only American that Sadao doesn't outright despise in the story. The professor believed fervently in "mercy with the knife," gesturing to the undertones of human compassion and altruism that run throughout the story. Although Sadao seems to genuinely respect his anatomy professor, at the end of the story, Sadao lumps him in with all of the "white and repulsive" faces he's known throughout his life. Thus, Sadao's anatomy professor challenges Sadao's narrow prejudices, but his influence, though profound professionally, doesn't overturn Sadao's way of thinking. - Character: The American Landlady. Description: When Dr. Sadao Hoki moved to the United States for college, he struggled to find housing because he was Japanese. Only one landlady—"fat and slatternly"—welcomed him into her home. Instead of feeling grateful for her open-mindedness and generous spirit, Sadao "had despised the ignorant and dirty old woman" who "house[d] him in her miserable home." Sadao implies that the woman was somewhat hesitant to accept Sadao as a tenant—she "at last consented" to welcome him into her home, which suggests racism on her end. However, his further reflections paint her as a kindly woman who was willing to help him when no one else would. Sadao reflects that "he had once tried to be grateful to her" when he fell sick with the flu and she kindly nursed him back to health—"but it was difficult, for she was no less repulsive to him in her kindness." This reflection comes in the closing lines of the story, leaving readers with the unsettling and unsatisfying realization that Sadao hasn't really changed. He thinks to himself that "Americans were full of prejudice and it had been bitter to live in it, knowing himself their superior." Sadao meets racism with racism; although he's given into the human impulse to help a fellow human by saving Tom (whose face, Sadao still thinks, is "white and repulsive"), his deep-rooted prejudices and nationalist sentiments are still intact. - Character: General Takima. Description: General Takima is a famed Japanese war hero. While observing Tom's peculiar wounds—which indicate that he's endured some type of torture at the hands of the Japanese—Hana reflects on how General Takima "beat his wife cruelly" in the privacy of their own home, but how "no one mentioned it now that he had fought so victorious a battle in Manchuria." Hana wonders, "If a man like that could be so cruel to a woman in his power, would he not be cruel to one like this for instance?" Although Hana desperately wants to believe that Tom hasn't been tortured, she knows that he has. This makes her doubt the media's claims "that wherever the Japanese armies went the people received them gladly, with cries of joy at their liberation." Thinking of General Takima's disparate public and private personas forces Hana to consider that the Japanese authorities might not be wholly good, perfect, and heroic as nationalist sentiments may lead her to believe. This moment of doubt is fairly fleeting for Hana, though the relative lengthiness of her reflection in relation to the rest of the narrative suggests that the moment is a significant one for her. General Takima's abuse of his wife—which seems widely known, given that "no one mentioned it now"—also emphasizes the way that strict gender roles can be abused, and suggests that Hana and Dr. Sadao Hoki's marriage, though traditional, is a positive one. - Theme: Decisions and Duty. Description: In "The Enemy," set in Japan during World War II, a severely injured American prisoner of war named Tom washes up on the beach alongside the secluded home of a Japanese doctor named Dr. Sadao Hoki and his wife, Hana. For the bulk of the story, Sadao struggles to reconcile his duty as a surgeon, which goes directly against the grain of his duty as a loyal Japanese citizen. His occupation as a surgeon, and an extremely talented one at that, compels him to save a life whenever possible, even if it belongs to a white enemy. Meanwhile, his Japanese citizenship and heritage requires him to unflinchingly turn the white man over to the authorities, even though the man will surely die a painful, torturous death at their hands. Alongside this primary conflict, Sadao also grapples with his duty as the head of the household to tend to his wife, children, and servants. All of these responsibilities pull Sadao in conflicting directions, challenging his deep-rooted beliefs about his identity and role in his household, his country, and the wider world. Ultimately, Pearl S. Buck suggests that though the duty to one's country and family is great, the duty to one's self—like Sadao's convictions as a surgeon—is greater. Sadao's duty to his country is a dangerous undercurrent in the story. If Sadao doesn't perform his duty as a surgeon, Tom will die, but if Sadao instead performs the surgery and betrays his duty as a Japanese citizen, Sadao (and probably his whole family) will die at the hands of the authorities. Early on in the story, Sadao parrots an antagonistic, wartime ideology that neatly shelves all white people as Japan's enemies: "I care nothing for him. He is my enemy. All Americans are my enemy." His short, staccato sentences imply that he's reciting an ideology that's been repeatedly drilled into him. Hana too, makes a similar observation. Even though she and Sadao both went to college in the United States and had American classmates and teachers, "[Tom] was the first [white man] she had seen since she left America and now he seemed to have nothing to do with those whom she had known there. Here he was her enemy, a menace, living or dead." Hana's specification of the word "Here," meaning Japan, emphasizes her country's role in vilifying Americans, and how accepting that ideology is part of being a patriotic citizen. Sadao explicitly references his country's unforgiving stance at helping an enemy: "If we sheltered a white man in our house we should be arrested and if we turned him over as a prisoner, he would certainly die." Even the General—Sadao's most influential and powerful patient—reaffirms that Sadao would surely be arrested and even sentenced to death if news of his traitorous actions got out. Alongside his duty as a Japanese citizen, Sadao's responsibility as the head of the household also pulls him in different directions, as it requires him to be a good son, husband, father, and employer, which are sometimes at odds. Much of Sadao's concerns about sheltering Tom stem from Hana's own anxieties about the situation. As a husband in a traditional Japanese marriage, Sadao should be protecting Hana—not a random white prisoner of war. Even when they first stumble across Tom, Hana says to Sadao with surprising firmness, "We must simply tell [the servants] that we intend to give him over to the police—as indeed we must, Sadao. We must think of the children and your position. It would endanger all of us if we did not give this man over as a prisoner of war." In this moment, Sadao agrees with Hana's conviction, declaring, "Certainly […] I would not think of doing anything else." Of course, Sadao does think of other ways to handle the situation and fails to hand Tom over to the police, showing the strength of his convictions as a surgeon. Sadao's status as an acclaimed surgeon is at the forefront of the story, as much of the plot centers around Sadao skillfully tending to Tom's wounds and nursing him back to health, albeit ambivalently. Sadao's unparalleled talent as a surgeon, and the fact that he loses sight of all else during an operation, suggests that surgery and medicine are an inherent part of Sadao's self; his duty as a surgeon to preserve lives is also a duty to himself. This is why Sadao eventually bends to this duty and skirts the others—and why the story lauds him even in his imperfections. Even as Sadao wonders aloud to Hana what they should do with the white man, "his trained hands seemed of their own will to be doing what they could to stanch the fearful bleeding." Likewise, as he skillfully packs sea moss into the man's bullet wound—clearly trying to keep the man from bleeding to death—Sadao thinks and talks of the man as if he wants him to die, claiming that he's just going to throw the man back into the sea or turn him over to the police. In a moment of emotional transparency, Sadao admits to his wife why he's so torn about what to do with Tom: "The strange thing is […] if the man were whole I could turn him over to the police without difficulty. I care nothing for him. He is my enemy. All Americans are my enemy. And he is only a common fellow. You see how foolish his face is. But since he is wounded…" The surgeon trails off, implying he has a duty to himself and to other people to save lives. When Sadao declares that Tom will surely die unless he is operated on, Hana is aghast, exclaiming, "Don't try to save him! What if he should live!" Sadao sharply replies, "What if he should die?" Sadao's responsibility to save lives eclipses all other concerns—even the towering threat of being seen as a traitor by his country and endangering his wife and children. Throughout the story, Sadao struggles to come to terms with his conflicting responsibilities and identities. However, the story resists a tidy, feel-good ending. Tom has survived his injuries and has made it to safety all thanks to Sadao, but the protagonist remains cold and prejudiced. Though perhaps disappointing for the reader, Sadao's lingering loyalty to his country is understandable—he's long internalized his own superiority to people of other races and nationalities, and helping anyone who is categorized as an enemy is a death sentence for him and his family. However, the fact that Sadao does choose to prioritize his duty as a surgeon—and by extension, his duty to himself—reveals the necessity of following one's own convictions first and foremost. - Theme: Humanization, Kindness, and Antagonism. Description: Throughout the course of "The Enemy," Dr. Sadao Hoki struggles to come to terms with his conflicting impulses to see Tom—an American prisoner of war who has washed up on the beach alongside Sadao's house—as an inhuman enemy and as a fellow man. The story is set in Japan in the thick of World War II, making it understandable that Sadao, a loyal Japanese citizen, would perceive Tom as an enemy. Even as Sadao embraces this belief, he finds himself treating Tom with a reluctant sort of kindness that reveals Sadao's competing, compassionate impulse to view Tom as a human instead of an enemy. As Sadao and Tom's brief but complicated relationship unfolds, Pearl S. Buck suggests that all humans have the inherent desire to be a loyal global citizen, committed to helping a fellow human regardless of race, nationality, religion, or social standing. Broadening her concern with racism and nationalism, Buck suggests that the human impulse toward kindness is clouded by politics more generally, as it often spurs an antagonistic "us versus them" dynamic. Sadao initially deems Tom an enemy because of his status as an outsider (due to Tom's white skin and his ties to the United States). In other words, it is racism, nationalism, and the tense wartime climate (all manmade ideas and circumstances) that cloud Sadao's human impulse to treat Tom as a brother and friend. When examining the unconscious Tom on the beach, Sadao muses that the man—who is really a boy, no more than seventeen years old—looks American. He examines the boy's cap more closely and sees the faint letters spelling out "U.S. Navy." Immediately, Sadao declares that this boy is "from an American warship" and is "a prisoner of war." Tom's Americanness compounds Sadao's already profound dislike of the man due to his white skin. Upon confirming that Tom is, in fact, American, Sadao's words take a sharp, political turn, painting the injured, unconscious young boy as a fierce enemy tied to the larger political foe that is the United States. Tying the boy back to politics allows Sadao to dehumanize him and care less for him. Even as Sadao's country tells him to hate the white man as a whole entity, Sadao (and Hana to a lesser extent) feels a twinge of compassion for the sole white man who washes up on the beach. The fact that Sadao comes in contact with one white man is significant, because it transforms the faceless and nameless white enemy into a helpless, bleeding seventeen-year-old boy named Tom who is frightened, in pain, and deeply grateful for his unexpected hosts, aloof as they are. Sadao voices this sentiment when he tells his wife, "The strange thing is […] if the man were whole I could turn him over to the police without difficulty. I care nothing for him. He is my enemy. All Americans are my enemy. And he is only a common fellow. You see how foolish his face is. But since he is wounded…" Sadao trails off, leaving readers with the sense that his so-called enemy has been made human by a "foolish" face and pools of blood. Though terrified and disdainful of the white man, Hana does not want to turn him over to the authorities, where he's bound to die a torturous death. She declares to her husband, "The kindest thing would be to put him back into the sea." Even though Tom is her enemy on two fronts—he is white and American—Hana's first impulse is to consider what "The kindest thing" to do would be in this situation. Furthermore, she and her husband go on to do an even kinder thing by bringing the bleeding enemy into their home and nursing him back to health—even though they're not quite sure why they're doing so. Operating on the unconscious Tom, Sadao mindlessly whispers to him, "[The bullet] is not quite at the kidney, my friend." The narrative points out that "it was [Sadao's] habit to murmur to the patient when he forgot himself in an operation. 'My friend,' he always called his patients and so now he did, forgetting that this was his enemy." Significantly, Sadao's profound act of human kindness—saving the enemy's life through surgery and housing him illegally—actually helps Sadao momentarily forget that Tom is, in fact, supposed to be an enemy. In this moment, Tom is simply a friend. Later, as Tom recovers, Hana kneels at his bedside and feeds him: "'Now you will soon be strong,' she said, not liking him and yet moved to comfort him." This inexplicable pull to gently care for and comfort an enemy is one of the central strands of the story, emphasizing humankind's universality, goodness, and capacity to take care of one another. In the story, Sadao acts on this impulse to be kind to a fellow human in two major ways, first by saving Tom's life through surgery, and then by saving Tom's life from the assassins and authorities by helping him slip away in the night to a nearby island. However, Sadao's altruism is ultimately unsatisfying. As gazes out toward the island, Sadao thinks to himself "although without reason" about all the "other white faces he had known." His thoughts are far from compassionate, as he thinks bitterly about Americans like the "ignorant and dirty," "fat and slatternly landlady" who took care of him when he had the flu in college. These recollections of other white people he's known come to him "without reason," revealing that Sadao's arc is anti-epiphanic. Although Sadao's impulse to perceive an enemy as a fellow human has risen to the surface several times throughout the story, he stuffs it back down, reverting to ideological antagonism. However, hope is not lost—as the story has repeatedly demonstrated, Sadao does harbor these feelings of compassion for all humans, which can rise to the surface again. - Theme: Racism and Nationalism. Description: Set in Japan during World War II, "The Enemy" follows renowned surgeon Dr. Sadao Hoki and his wife, Hana, as they struggle to decide what to do with an American prisoner of war who has washed up on the beach alongside their house. The prisoner, a white teenager named Tom, is badly injured due to a fresh gunshot wound—evidence of his recent (and narrow) escape from Japanese authorities—and Sadao feels compelled as a surgeon to save the boy's life. However, Tom's presence in the household is largely unwelcome, on account of his whiteness and Americanness, two things that squarely mark him as an enemy. As the story unfolds, Tom challenges, but doesn't overturn, Sadao's deeply engrained prejudice toward Americans and his conviction of his own superiority as a Japanese man. Throughout the story, Sadao and other characters make claims of Japanese ethnocentrism and authority, depicting the Japanese as the pinnacle of humankind. Initially, this appears as benign or even positive patriotism. In a flashback from Sadao's childhood at the beginning of the story, Sadao's father gazes at the islands in the distance while on vacation in the South Seas and tells his son, "Those islands yonder, they are the stepping stones to the future for Japan." Young Sadao asks his father, "Where shall we step from them?" to which his father replies, "Who knows? […] Who can limit our future?" This seemingly healthy optimism and belief in greatness for the future of Japan soon shifts into poisonous territory. At the very end of the story, thinking back to his time in college at an American university, Sadao thinks about how "Americans were full of prejudice and it had been bitter to live in it, knowing himself their superior." In this way, the story begins and ends with a statement of Japanese greatness and superiority, revealing nationalism as one of the story's principal concerns. The story's intervening moments also reveal the characters' dangerously narrow and arrogant mindsets, steeped in nationalistic ideology. As Sadao and Hana carry Tom into the guest bedroom—which used to belong to Sadao's father and has not been used since his death—the narrative provides further insight into Sadao's father's attitude toward Japan versus the rest of the world: "Everything here [in the bedroom] had been Japanese to please the old man, who would never in his own home sit on a chair or sleep in a foreign bed." Although Sadao's father has since died, his memory—and his staunch nationalism—lives on in his aging, loyal servants, the cook and the gardener. They, too, espouse racist and nationalistic sentiments, refusing to call Tom by his name and instead only calling him "the white man." They also declare that because Hana and Sadao attended college in America, they have been defiled and are no longer capable of putting their own country first. To add insult to injury, just before they quit, the servants accuse Sadao and Hana of actually liking Americans, which comes as a severe emotional blow for the couple. Despite these frequent, loud declarations of nationalism and racism, there a few moments throughout the story that quietly, albeit significantly, challenge Sadao and Hana's belief in their own superiority. One of the most crucial images in the story is that of Hana reluctantly tending to Tom's injuries even though she's reticent to even touch a white person. As she brings the anesthetic up to Tom's nose, she crouches close to Tom's sleeping face, which is "piteously thin." She can tell by his "twisted" lips that the unconscious man is "suffering whether he knew it or not." This observation leads her to think about the rumors she's heard about the horrifyingly inhumane way that Japanese authorities treat their prisoners of war. For some inexplicable reason (he's the enemy, after all), Hana "hope[s] anxiously that this man had not been tortured." Just then, she notices ugly, crimson scars laced on the American's neck, just under his ears, and knows that the rumors must be true. In this moment, Hana elevates her wish for Tom's safety over her belief in her country and its methods, which is a brief but powerful rejection of the racism and nationalism she's clung to thus far. Likewise, Sadao helps Tom several times throughout the course of the story—first by bringing him into the house, then by performing emergency surgery on him, and finally by helping him escape to a nearby island—though he never understands why he's helping the American. At the end of the story, Sadao looks out at the island he's helped Tom escape to (where Tom would then hitch a ride with a Korean fishing boat and be brought to safety). When he sees that the island is completely dark—there's no sign of Tom or the flashlight Sadao had begrudgingly gifted him—Sadao is relieved to realize that Tom is finally safe. Although this reflection seems like Sadao has finally changed his racist ways, his thoughts immediately turn to hostile recollections of the all the Americans he's ever known. As he thinks bitterly of their "white faces" one by one, his mind's eye then rests on the face of his white prisoner, "white and repulsive." Sadao simply thinks to himself, "Strange, […] I wonder why I could not kill him?" In the story's anti-epiphanic ending, Sadao is perhaps as prejudiced as ever, but his inability to kill Tom—and his confusion as to why he couldn't manage to do so—reveals a small but significant hope for a world unmarred by racism and nationalism. - Climax: Dr. Sadao saves Tom from the assassins and the authorities by helping him escape to a nearby island. - Summary: While gazing out at his secluded property on the coast of Japan, Dr. Sadao Hoki notices a strange shape crawling out from the ocean. Realizing it's a man, Sadao and his wife, Hana, rush out to the beach to help. They are shocked to realize that the man, who is covered with blood and is now unconscious, is white and looks no older than seventeen. From the gunshot wound in the boy's back, the ominous red scars on his neck, and his U.S. Navy hat, they deduce that he is a prisoner of war who has recently escaped from the Japanese authorities. Sadao, a famously skilled surgeon, can't help but pack the man's wounds with sea moss to stop his bleeding, even while proclaiming his hatred for Americans. Sadao and Hana can't bear to turn the man over to the authorities, as they will surely kill him, but they can't leave him stranded out at sea either. They know that bringing the man into their house is illegal and dangerous, an act that could deem them traitors and lead to their own arrests. After much deliberation, the couple decides to bring the wounded American into their home despite the risks. After properly examining the man, Sadao decides that he's surely going to die unless he undergoes surgery immediately. Sadao quickly loses himself in the operation, talking to his patient and calling him "my friend" as Sadao removes the bullet lodged in the boy's side. The surgery is messy, and Hana is forced to act as her husband's assistant. When she politely excuses herself to throw up, her husband is cold and unsympathetic, forgetting that she's never witnessed an operation before. The surgery is a success, and over the course of several days, the boy—who introduces himself as Tom—improves dramatically. He's warm and grateful, showering the surgeon and his wife with praise for saving his life. Sadao and Hana always respond coldly, implying that they're still going to turn him over to the authorities. The servants are shocked at Sadao and Hana's decision to help a white man—their "old master," Sadao's father, would have never done such a thing. After a week, all of the servants quit—even though two of them, the cook and the gardener, have been an instrumental part of the household since Sadao was just a little boy. Sadao pays a visit to one of his most powerful patients, the General, who struggles with a critical health problem. The General is fiercely loyal to Sadao, believing him to be the best doctor in Japan. Because of this bond the men share, Sadao confides in him about Tom. Like Sadao and Hana, the General also attended college in the United States, so he understands Sadao's impulse to help the American even though he is an enemy. The General is mostly concerned that Sadao will be sentenced to death and thus be unable to operate on the General in the future. The General comes up with a plan: he will send his private assassins to Sadao's house sometime in the next week. Sadao is to leave the door to Tom's room unlocked; in the middle of the night the assassins will silently kill the white man and dispose of the body, lifting the burden from Sadao's shoulders. Several days pass, and the assassins never show up. Tired of waiting, Sadao sends Tom to a nearby island in the middle of the night, where he is bound to be picked up by a Korean fishing boat. He tells Tom to flash his flashlight at dusk if he runs out of food before being picked up. A few days later, Sadao tells the General that Tom has escaped. The General guiltily realizes that he forgot to send the assassins in the first place—he had been so wrapped up in his own fragile health that he forgot to help Sadao. The General hastily makes sure that Sadao doesn't think him any less patriotic or dutiful for forgetting to have the white man killed. The two men both promise to keep quiet about the whole situation. Things return to normal in Sadao's household, and even the servants come back. At dusk, Sadao looks out over the sea. There are no flashes from a flashlight; Sadao knows Tom has fled to safety. Sadao thinks bitterly about all the "other white faces" he's known in his lifetime and wonders why he couldn't kill Tom.

- Genre: Short story, Domestic Gothic - Title: The Enormous Radio - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: An apartment building in Sutton Place, a neighborhood of New York City. - Character: Irene Westcott. Description: Irene Westcott, the protagonist of the story, is a stay-at-home mother of two who lives a seemingly comfortable, middle-class life in New York City. Like her husband, Jim Westcott, Irene is a secret lover of music, and often listens to a radio at home; when Jim buys a new radio to replace their malfunctioning, older model, Irene quickly realizes that the radio is capable of tuning into the neighbors' apartments. She eagerly uses the radio to eavesdrop on the conversations of the building's other tenants, and is equally shocked and elated to discover the secrets being concealed by her otherwise respectable neighbors. At first, Irene uses the radio's revelations to reinforce her belief in her family's superiority; she believes that, unlike her neighbors, her family is financially comfortable, respectful, and loving. Gradually, however, she becomes mistrustful and despondent as she realizes that her peers are concerned with maintaining appearances and preserving their fabricated respectability. Irene is not initially aware that she, too, possesses similarly shallow priorities. Eventually, however, Irene's despondency triggers a confrontation with Jim, and he highlights her hypocrisy: he enumerates the various cruelties she has committed and kept hidden to preserve her respectable façade, and reveals how her sense of superiority is unearned. Equally shaken by Jim's condemnation and the fear that the neighbors might overhear their fight, Irene feels ashamed: she turns to the radio for solace, but ultimately remains acutely self-aware of her ill-gotten social respectability. Though Irene momentarily attempts to break through the barriers of social decorum when she hears Mr. Osborne beating his wife through the radio, she demurs when Jim simply shuts the radio off. She thus ultimately bows to the societal pressure to maintain appearances and avoids confrontation at the cost of her empathy. - Character: Jim Westcott. Description: Jim Westcott, the husband of Irene Westcott, is an avid music lover and the sole breadwinner of the Westcott family. His attire, mannerisms, and cultivated naivety allow him to appear and act younger than his years. Jim purchases a new $400 radio for the apartment, and is initially skeptical when Irene insists that the radio is broadcasting their neighbors' conversations. Eventually, however, Jim and Irene are captivated by the radio's eavesdropping abilities, and listen to their peers' quarrels and conversations with delight and self-satisfaction. Still, Jim is less susceptible to the radio than Irene, as he spends much of his time at work; he is therefore not privy to the pervasiveness of his neighbors' fakery. As Irene grows progressively more mistrustful of her peers, Jim tells her to stop listening to the radio, which would allow her to remain ignorant of the neighbors' struggles and their attempts to preserve their reputations. Instead, Irene continues to use the neighbors' secrets and quarrels to justify her sense of self-righteousness, which leads Jim to confront Irene with both her past sins and their family's financial instability. Jim, unwilling to remain complicit in Irene's self-deceptive fantasies, therefore forces Irene to acknowledge her misguided, hypocritical attempts at maintaining appearances. Just like the new radio, Jim acts as a catalyst for Irene's self-awareness and lost innocence. When, after hearing Mr. Osborne beating his wife through the radio, Irene begs Jim to intervene, Jim refuses; instead, he turns off the radio, illustrating his desire to remain ignorant of the problems around him and his unwillingness to engage in confrontation, even when doing so would help someone in need. - Character: Mr. Osborn. Description: Mr. Osborn, who lives in apartment 16-C, is a neighbor of Jim and Irene Westcott. When Irene uses the radio to eavesdrop on the apartment, she realizes that Mr. Osborn is abusing his wife. Overhearing Mr. Osborn's assault on his wife prompts Irene into action; for the first time, Irene wishes to break the tacit societal code of privacy in order to intervene on her neighbor's behalf. Ultimately, however, Irene chooses to leave Mr. Osborn's domestic abuse unreported. Irene's aborted response to Mr. Osborn's behavior demonstrates her priorities: she prizes social respectability over decency, and is unwilling to draw attention to problems in her community. - Character: The Hutchinsons. Description: The Hutchinsons are Jim and Irene Westcott's neighbors. Mrs. Hutchinson, the wife, has a sick mother who cannot receive proper medical treatment due to insufficient funds. Irene uses the Hutchinsons' financial strife to reinforce her belief in her family's superiority; unlike the Hutchinsons, Irene feels that her family does not need to worry about money. - Character: Irene's Friend. Description: Irene's interaction with her friend, who remains unnamed, illustrates Irene's increasing awareness of the world and her realization that everyone is concerned with maintaining appearances. As Irene listens to the radio and becomes more knowledgeable about the secrets left unspoken amongst her social circle, she starts to realize how highly other people value their reputation and their respectability. - Theme: Appearances, Reality, and Social Respectability. Description: In Cheever's "The Enormous Radio," Jim and Irene Westcott are a middle class married whose new radio unexpectedly allows them to eavesdrop on their neighbors' interactions. The radio reveals that the Westcotts' seemingly well-to-do neighbors are hiding numerous secrets, and Irene begins to recognize that many people around her, including her friends, wish to preserve their social standing above all else. As a result of this realization, Irene becomes distrustful. Eventually Irene attempts to break this tacit code of secrecy by interfering in her neighbors' lives; ultimately, however, even Irene yields to the pressure of maintaining the status quo. Cheever's portrait of a community obsessed with appearances illustrates how peoples' outward behavior is often  deeply at odds with reality—and how the pressure to adhere to unspoken rules of social respectability can triumph over truth. From the beginning, the story's characters actively attempt to present an air of normalcy. The Westcotts' display secrecy even in innocuous circumstances in order to preserve their reputation. They are introduced as a decidedly average couple, an image they are clearly concerned with upholding. They differ from those around them "only in an interest they shared in serious music," yet the narrator points out that they "seldom mention" this passion to their friends or neighbors. Although the Westcotts' love of music does not harm anyone, Jim and Irene specifically choose not to reveal it; they seem unwilling to draw any attention to themselves whatsoever. Like the Westcotts, other characters are also hiding secrets. When the Westcotts begin to use their new radio to eavesdrop on their neighbors, they overhear, among other things, "a monologue on salmon fishing" and "a bitter family quarrel" about money. These various revelations indicate how everyone in their community keeps some subjects to themselves, whether these are merely personal interests or serious problems. The range of these secrets illustrates the community's widespread aversion to rocking the societal boat in the slightest. By prioritizing appearances, everyone in the apartment building, including the Westcotts, becomes incapable of genuinely knowing those around them. What's more, as Irene becomes more aware of secrecy's ubiquity, she becomes increasingly distraught. She uses the radio to listen in on "demonstrations" of "carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair." As she is a "simple and sheltered" woman, these overheard revelations "shock" her. She feels "troubled" and "astonished," indicating that the breadth of her neighbors' secrecy feels overwhelming to her. Inevitably, Irene's turmoil begins to manifest as mistrust: for example, when she gets into her building's elevator, she looks at the women assembled and notes their "impassive faces," and wonders "which one" had "overdrawn her bank account." Irene then has lunch with her friend, and wonders about the "secrets" this friend might be keeping. Irene now realizes that even the people closest to her—such as her friend—maintain appearances to appear untroubled. Ironically, Irene does not rebel against societal norms despite her growing awareness of her peers' fixation on social standing. For example, when Irene and Jim go out to dinner, she does not mention the neighbors' secrets; instead, she merely seems "sad and vague," and comments that the street musicians are "so much nicer" than everyone else. In this way, she chooses to leave her concerns unvoiced despite her deepening cynicism. She avoids telling Jim the truth directly, and thus maintains the status quo: she chooses to leave difficult truths unspoken in order to keep her family's life—and her husband's understanding of others—uncomplicated. Eventually, however, the constant secrecy overwhelms Irene. When she overhears one of her neighbors, Mr. Osborn, assaulting his wife, she asks her husband to "go up there and stop him," beseeching him to break the bounds of social decorum to reveal Mr. Osborn's cruelty. For a moment, Irene becomes willing to overlook society's tacit code of silence in order to protect a neighbor—thereby valuing, if momentarily, truth over appearances. In response, however, Jim turns off the radio and tells her she does not "have to listen." By switching off the radio, Jim offers Irene the option to maintain the status quo. Irene, realizing that ignorance is easier than action, takes this easy choice and switches the topic: she asks Jim not to "quarrel with" her and starts "sobbing." In taking Jim's suggestion, Irene chooses to ignore the dark secrets in her community, and maintain a false equilibrium among her neighbors. Ultimately, it seems, Irene finds it easier to pretend everything is normal than to stir up controversy. The Westcotts, who are unwilling to tarnish others' good opinion of them, therefore choose to maintain a façade of respectability. Cheever's story thus illustrates how preserving one's social standing often prevails over truth and empathy. - Theme: Self-Deception and Hypocrisy. Description: In "The Enormous Radio," Jim and Irene Westcott own a radio that allows them to eavesdrop on their neighbors' various exploits. The Westcotts themselves seem to be an average family, content and untroubled; as the story continues, however, it becomes evident that Jim and Irene often deceive themselves and each other by pretending that they do not share any of the struggles of their peers. Despite believing, erroneously, that they are better than those around them, Irene and Jim are revealed to be perilously self-delusional. Cheever's story thus illustrates not only the danger of maintaining false appearances to deflect others' prying eyes, but the perils of lying to oneself. The story ultimately suggests that individuals who practice such self-deception are often deeply flawed and must actively fool themselves in order to maintain their hypocritical belief in their social superiority. From the beginning of the story, there are hints that the Westcotts lie to themselves in order to feel superior to those around them. At first, Irene and Jim seem to be the quintessential middle-class family: they "seem to strike" a "satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability." The details of their life together are presented like the "statistical reports in college alumni bulletins," a description that emphasizes the superficial nature of their happiness. Yet Jim is then revealed to be someone who is "intentionally naïve," and who, despite his older appearance, still feels "younger" than his age. His wife Irene wears "a coat of fitch," which is "dyed to resemble mink." The Westcotts are thus presented as willfully self-deceptive: Jim actively cultivates an air of innocence to feel younger, and Irene dyes her clothing to look more expensive and feel richer. This tendency to be dishonest is reflected when the Westcotts realize that their new radio lets them overhear their neighbors' conversations. They initially lie to themselves about what they are hearing: Jim believes it is "impossible" for the radio to broadcast such conversations. As the Westcotts eavesdrop on their neighbors' problems, however, their pride in their carefree life overrides their skepticism. They become "weak with laughter," implying that they not only listen to but in fact revel in their neighbors' struggles. Despite the seeming impossibility of a magical radio, the broadcasts fuel the Westcotts' fantasy of superiority and good fortune, and they begin to rejoice in the seeming confirmation that they're better than everyone else. Gleeful and smug, Irene deliberately seeks out more of the neighbors' quarrels, which allows her to judge her their dysfunctional lifestyles. She then insists that the Westcotts' lifestyle is picturesque in comparison, and uses the radio to justify this self-deception. For example, Irene tells Jim that their neighbors have been "quarrelling all day." She points out that everyone is "worried about money," and calls one of her neighbors—who replays a recording of the Missouri Waltz during her trysts—a "whore." The radio, which has exposed Irene to unsavory scenarios from her neighbors' lives, has provided Irene with a basis of comparison by which to measure and overrate her own lifestyle. Unable to resist comparing herself to others, Irene then says that the Westcotts have "never been like" their neighbors, and insists that they are "good and decent." She asks Jim to confirm that they are not "hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest." Irene reinforces her romanticized perspective by comparing it to what she has overheard; Irene believes her family, unlike others, is free from worry and marital strife. Irene's self-delusion is, however, eventually challenged by accusations from Jim. Despite Jim and Irene's overinflated sense of self-worth, Jim's confrontation reveals how the Westcotts' behavior is just as flawed—and their problems just as sordid—as anyone else's. Jim eventually confesses that the radio cost "a good deal more" money than the Westcotts can afford; he then accuses Irene of lying about paying her "clothing bills." Irene, unwilling to admit to the deception, claims she did not tell him because she did not want to "worry" him. Irene has so thoroughly bought into her fantasy of financial security that she avoids the truth: she claims her lie is meant to protect Jim, when in actuality her bills are unpaid because her family is in dire financial straits.  Additionally, Jim admits that he has not "done as well" as he had "hoped to do." He claims that he worries "about money a great deal" and says he is "not at all sure of the future." In admitting this, Jim breaks any illusion of the Westcotts' superiority: the Westcotts, despite dismissing their neighbors' financial quarrels, also fight about money. Their problems are exacerbated, however, by their ongoing deflection. By believing that they are more stable than their neighbors—and lying to each other to maintain this fantasy—the Westcotts have, in fact, worsened their financial situation. Jim then lashes out at Irene and lists her disreputable actions, which include stealing her "mother's jewelry" and financially abandoning her sister. Jim reveals how Irene's behavior is disgraceful, thereby eroding Irene's ability to lie to herself about her "virtue." She can no longer compare herself to her neighbors, as she has committed cruel and despicable acts, and is not the virtuous woman she believes herself to be. The radio, then, serves as a tool to reveal the Westcotts' deep hypocrisy. This gradual revelation illustrates how self-deception is often used to reinforce a sense of unearned superiority. Moreover, the story also demonstrates that self-delusion is, ultimately, an untenable way to maintain self-worth: eventually, the fantasy of superiority will butt up against reality, and will shatter. - Theme: Innocence, Ignorance, and Knowledge. Description: Irene and Jim Westcott are a sheltered couple who have constructed picturesque lives by choosing to remain ignorant of certain harsh truths. A new radio, however, reveals secrets about their neighbors and exposes the Westcotts' to the stark realities and moral dilemmas of others'—and, eventually, their own—lives. Ultimately, the radio forces the Westcotts to end their constructed sense of innocence: it catalyzes a fight that reveals their own unspoken, terrible secrets. In Cheever's story, knowledge forces individuals to abandon their willful ignorance and to become irrevocably self-aware. What's more, once innocence and ignorance are lost, they can never be regained. From the beginning of the story, Cheever contrasts the the radio, a symbol of knowledge and communication, with the Westcotts' deliberate obliviousness. Irene Westcott has a "forehead upon which nothing at all had been written," a description that emphasizes her guilelessness: she is seemingly unaware of—and unmarred by—stress. Jim is described as an "earnest" man who wears "the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover," a boarding school. Jim deliberately dresses like a schoolboy, as a way of playing up his childlike qualities. The Westcotts have cultivated their appearance to seem innocent, in order to emphasize their unawareness of the world and its pressures. When the Westcotts purchase a new radio, however, the machine acts as a corrective to the Westcotts' calculated naivety. It "stands among [their] intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder," illustrating how the radio interferes with the Westcotts "carefully" curated image. Irene then adds that "violent forces" seem "snared" in the radio; her portrayal hints further at how the radio is a disturbance to the Westcotts' peace. The radio's description implies its ability to disrupt the cultivated tranquility of the Westcotts' life and home. Additional descriptions of the radio emphasize its omniscience and power. The radio seems to possess a "sensitivity to discord," indicating that it perceives and thrives on the chaos of the outside world. Furthermore, the radio is described as something that cannot be mastered; this description illustrates how the radio, again a means of communication and awareness, is an inescapable transmitter of knowledge and "discord." Irene's "life" before the radio is purposefully "simple and sheltered," but when the radio exposes the problems faced by her neighbors, her outlook changes. She hears "brutal language," which "astonishe[s] and trouble[s] her." Moreover, the radio makes Irene increasingly mistrustful: when she has lunch with a friend, she wonders about her friend's hidden secrets. Irene's innocence, however cultivated, has been erased by her exposure to the radio. Even her most personal relationships, which she had not questioned previously, have become doubt-ridden. Eventually, Irene overhears her neighbor Mr. Osborn "beating his wife." She exclaims that "life is too terrible, too sordid," illustrating how the radio has destroyed her carefree worldview. She attempts to cling to her prior ignorance, and begs Jim to confirm that, unlike their neighbors, they are "good and decent and loving." Despite Jim's reassurance, however, Irene has become inescapably aware of her peers' cruelty. As a result of this newfound knowledge, Irene begins to change her behavior. Jim notes how Irene acts "sad and vague," and highlights her unfamiliar "look of radiant melancholy." Irene's sadness demonstrates how her purposefully "simple" life has changed; the radio has erased her willful ignorance, and introduced her to the quagmire of others' lives. The awareness Irene has gained from the radio is ultimately a burden. It prompts Irene to think not only about her neighbors' lives, but also her own. Unfortunately for Irene, this introspection is inescapable; nevertheless, she attempts to return to her previous, oblivious behavior. For example, Irene asks Jim to confirm that, unlike her troubled neighbors, they are "happy." Moreover, when she is given the opportunity to relinquish the radio's power, she takes it gladly: a handyman fixes the radio, and Irene is "happy" to hear the radio playing "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony." The radio's repair provides a false sense of reprieve: it frees Irene from hearing about her neighbors, but cannot entirely return her to a state of ignorance. This momentary respite does not last. Jim, angered by Irene's behavior, starts a fight, and it is revealed that Irene's obliviousness is an act cultivated to hide her past behavior. After telling Irene that he cannot maintain their lavish lifestyle, Jim confronts her about her supposed "virtue," and claims he will "never forget" how she withheld money from her sister and stole her mother's jewelry. The radio has forced Irene into a confrontation with Jim that destroys her pretense of innocence, and prevents her return to an easygoing state of unawareness. In this way, Cheever complicates the dynamic between knowledge, innocence, and ignorance: cognizance of others' pain forces an individual to become less ignorant of the world, but ultimately, it is self-awareness that erases one's innocence for good. Distraught by this new self-awareness, Irene attempts—and fails—to reclaim her prior naivety one last time: she listens to the radio "hoping" it will "speak to her kindly." Instead, the radio announces that a "railroad disaster in Tokyo" killed "twenty-nine people," offering another dark view of the world. The radio then refuses to offer her respite, symbolizing the inexorable end of her innocence. In Cheever's story, then, the Westcotts are initially portrayed as characters who have cultivated an unwitting, protected worldview. Eventually, their new radio exposes the Westcotts to their neighbors' struggles, and forces a confrontation between Irene and Jim that reveals Irene's ruthlessness. Cheever's story thus illustrates how willful innocence and ignorance cannot be maintained in the face of dawning knowledge and self-awareness. - Climax: Irene, having overheard her neighbor beating his wife via the radio, begs Jim to intervene. In response, Jim turns off the radio—and act to which Irene ultimately does not object. - Summary: Jim and Irene Westcott are a very average middle-class couple with two young children in New York City. They are unique only in their shared love music, though they choose to keep their interest a secret from their acquaintances. After the couple's old radio breaks down, they replace it with an expensive model that looks aggressively out of place in Irene's carefully designed living room. Irene tries to get used to this new radio's presence, but its "malevolent" appearance forces her to hide it behind a sofa. Irene attempts to listen to the radio, but hears "doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors," and other domestic sounds. She realizes that the radio is transmitting sound from other apartments in the building instead of playing music. When Jim attempts to use the radio, the same thing happens; he hears a conversation, ringing telephones, and other forms of "interference." He tells Irene he will call a repairman to fix their new radio. The next morning, after the radio has been repaired, Irene turns it on to hear a recording of the "Missouri Waltz" playing over and over again. Jim comes home later that night, and he and Irene listen to the radio during dinner. Suddenly, a man's voice interrupts the music, and the Westcotts overhear a fight between a man and a woman named Kathy; Kathy's piano playing annoys the man, especially after a long day at work. Jim believes the interaction is simply a radio play, but Irene asks him to turn the radio to another station; another conversation is transmitted through the loudspeaker. Jim changes stations twice more, and two other conversations are broadcasted through the Westcotts' living room. Jim still believes that it is "impossible" for the radio to transmit their neighbors' conversations, but Irene eventually recognizes multiple voices. She asks him to deliberately search for one set of neighbors, and they begin to make a game of it; in the process, they overhear many private conversations, including a "bitter family quarrel" over finances. Due to this new insight into their peers' shortcomings, the Westcotts go to bed self-satisfied, smug, and "weak with laughter." The next day, Irene deliberately eavesdrops on her neighbors, and overhears scenes of "carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair." As Irene is seemingly a "simple and sheltered" woman, the radio's revelations distress her. When she gets into her building's elevator with some neighbors, she is suddenly mistrustful: she looks into her neighbors' faces and wonders what secrets they are hiding. When Irene's friend meets her for lunch, Irene even questions whether her friend is concealing something in order to appear normal. Irene comes home to eavesdrop further, and "the intensity" of the overheard conversations increases; eventually, by the time Jim returns from work, Irene has become thoroughly disenchanted by her neighbors' constant secrecy and deception. While on a walk with Jim later that night, she tells Jim that the street musicians seem "so much nicer" than the people in the Westcotts' social circle. The next night, Jim enters the apartment to find Irene in tears; Irene, who is inconsolable, reveals that their neighbor, Mr. Osborn, is beating his wife. She begs Jim to confront Mr. Osborne over the abuse, as she is unable to stomach society's tacit code of silence. Instead of intervening, however, Jim turns the radio off—offering Irene the choice to stop listening and thereby feign ignorance of Mr. Osborn's cruelty. Despite Irene's initial desire to save Ms. Osborn from danger, she ultimately acquiesces to Jim's suggestion and lets the radio remain turned off. She then recounts a litany of their neighbors' problems: she highlights how the Hutchinsons, another set of neighbors, cannot afford hospital treatments for a relative, and lists the various affairs, quarrels, and anxieties of the building's other tenants. Irene then asks Jim to confirm that their family, in comparison, is "good and decent and loving." Jim answers that the Westcott family is happy. The next day, another repairman fixes the radio. Irene turns it on, and is relieved that the neighbors' discussions are no longer being broadcast. When Jim returns home, however, he looks distressed and announces that the radio is actually more than the family can afford. He then asks why Irene has lied to him about her unpaid "clothing bills." He claims that he "worries about money a great deal," and feels as if his life's efforts are "wasted." Irene, distressed that the neighbors will overhear their fight, wants him to speak quietly; Jim, however, becomes fed up with her behavior, and asks why she is acting so self-righteously. He lists numerous cruel things Irene has done, including stealing her mother's jewelry, withholding money from her sister, and visiting an "abortionist." As Jim continues to shout, Irene clings to the radio's dial, hoping to hear something comforting. Instead, a voice on the radio broadcasts a news bulletin, repeats statistics about a railroad disaster, and describes the weather.

- Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Coming of Age - Title: The Fault in Our Stars - Point of view: First Person narrative told from Hazel's point of view - Setting: Indianapolis, Indiana - Character: Hazel Grace Lancaster. Description: The novel's narrator and protagonist, Hazel is a 16-year-old girl living with a terminal form of thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. Because of her cancer she is forced to carry an oxygen tank. A precocious and conscientious girl, Hazel thinks deeply about her life and death, deciding to keep those around her at a distance because she believes her death will damage them. Through falling in love with Augustus, however, she develops a new perspective on life and death, and comes to terms with her impermanence and the effect it will have on others. - Character: Augustus Waters. Description: Hazel's boyfriend, Augustus is a seventeen-year-old who has lost his leg due to a form of bone cancer called, osteosarcoma. August falls for Hazel immediately, and is drawn to her after she comments in support group about dying. August, like Hazel, is concerned with life and death, but his concern stems from fading into oblivion after he dies. Because of this fear, Augustus is obsessed with doing something heroic. Augustus is able to complete his heroic act through his relationship with Hazel, and in the end their relationship prevents him to fading into oblivion. - Character: Isaac. Description: is Hazel and Augustus' mutual friend. A rare form of eye cancer blinds Isaac, and his situation leads him to cynicism and anger. After being blinded, his girlfriend, Monica, leaves him, which is a devastating event in Isaac's life. His character shows the way in which typical coming of age experiences, like the end of a young relationship, is particularly difficult for the young characters living with cancer. Isaac's name also carries a religious connotation, as the biblical character Isaac also goes blind. - Character: Mrs. Lancaster. Description: Hazel's mother, Mrs. Lancaster is dedicated and loving. She exerts most of her energy caring for Hazel and learning everything she can about Hazel's cancer. Mrs. Lancaster wants her daughter to have a normal teenage life, but is also protective and at times overbearing. Hazel fears that her death will have a devastating effect on her mother, but is relieved once she finds out that her mother has been secretly studying to become a social worker. - Character: Augustus's parents. Description: Augustus' parents are kind and hopeful people. They find hope in the platitudinous sayings they have embroidered and hung all over their house and have trust in God. Hazel watches them cope with Augustus' death, which gives her hope that her family will survive her own passing. The family comes together after Augustus' dies, and although Hazel feels as if she is not fully a part of the family after Augustus passes, his father tells Hazel that he is glad she was part of Augustus' life, which means a lot to her. - Character: Peter Van Houten. Description: The author of An Imperial Affliction, a novel Hazel becomes obsessed with. Hazel and Augustus believe that Van Houten can give them insight into what will happen to their families after they succumb to their cancers. Upon meeting Van Houten, Hazel and August learn that he is a nihilistic and aggressive alcoholic who treats them with cruelty when they visit. In the end, it is revealed that Van Houten has lost a child from cancer, and has fallen into alcoholism since her passing. His interactions with Hazel seem to imply that he may find a way out of his alcoholism and to write again. - Character: Dr. Maria. Description: Hazel's primary cancer doctor, Dr. Maria works with Hazel and her family through her treatment. She is firm when she makes suggestions about Hazel's treatment, but she wants Hazel to experience her life despite her cancer. Eventually, after much deliberation, she convinces Hazel's parents to allow her to travel to Amsterdam. - Character: Kaitlyn. Description: Hazel's friend and schoolmate, Kaitlyn is the stereotypical teenage girl. She is obsessed with shopping, boys, and juicy gossip. Kaitlyn's presence in Hazel's life shows the way in which Hazel's cancer has separated her from the world of normal teenagers. Although they are good friends, Kaitlyn's character highlights the way in which health challenges create a disconnection between those who are healthy and those who are sick. - Character: Caroline Mathers. Description: Augustus's former girlfriend, Caroline Mathers died from brain cancer. Although Caroline does not appear in the novel, Augustus tells Hazel about Caroline's decline and eventual passing. The details of her death shows the realities of cancer, working against the misrepresentation of those who are diagnosed with cancer as more heroic, spiritual, and noble than normal people. As she died, Caroline became selfish, impulsive, and cruel, showing the true and horrific nature of cancer. - Character: Anna. Description: The protagonist of An Imperial Affliction, which tells the story of Anna's passing from cancer. Hazel identifies with Anna's experience, and appreciates the honesty with which Anna talks about her illness. Hazel believes that by understanding Anna's experience and what happened to her family will provide insight into her own death and what will happen to her family afterward. - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: The Fault in Our Stars contains all of the traditional elements of a coming of age narrative. Centering on the experience of two teenage characters, Hazel and Augustus, the novel follows their passage from childhood into adulthood. As typical of coming of age narratives, Hazel and Augustus begin to discover the adult world in all if its complexity, they begin to experience their bodies and sexualities in new ways, and they rebel against and come to terms with society, family, rules, and religion. Their passage into adulthood, however, is complicated by the fact that they are living with and dying from cancer. Having cancer changes the way in which the characters of The Fault in Our Stars approach their passage into adulthood. They are constantly facing the fact of their own impermanence, which leads the characters to walk a line between moving into adulthood and holding onto their youth. Their youths were a time in which they were healthy, so they are afraid to let them go, and their passage into adulthood is threatened by their cancer, so the characters are determined to pass into adulthood before it is too late. For both Hazel and Augustus, their cancer is paired with their passage toward adulthood, and the story unfolds as they grapple with coming of age in the face of their diagnoses. Hazel's diagnosis is determined three months after her first period, and Augustus receives his diagnosis and loses his leg just as he begins to think existentially about basketball, realizing his childhood love of the sport is fading. Their cancers make each of the difficult passages into adulthood even more complicated than usual, as they are fraught with meaning and nuances that healthy teenagers are never forced to confront. For example, they do not experience relationships, romantic or otherwise, in the same ways typical teenagers do because their futures are not promised, they don't get to experiment with alcohol and substances the way typical teenagers do, as their cancers have forced them to become acquainted with powerful painkillers from an early age, but most importantly, their relationship with their sick bodies makes this passage particularly challenging. The passage into adulthood necessitates new relationships with one's body and sexuality, but the characters of The Fault in Our Stars are coming of age with bodies that are abnormal. Augustus is missing a leg, Hazel must carry an oxygen tanks and has poor lungs, and Isaac loses his eyes. Hazel and Augustus, however, find common ground based on their experiences with cancer, and develop a deep love for one another. Because they are both living with cancer, they are able to see past the deficits of the other's body, and their ability to see past the external (the oxygen tanks, puffy cheeks, and prosthetics) allows them to realize their sexuality, come to terms with their bodies, and lose their virginity to one another. Although their coming of age is not typical, Hazel and Augustus do experience a passage into physical, emotional, and mental maturity, surpassing that of their peers. In this way, their cancer becomes a force that drives them to mature and develop deep understandings of life, death, love, and relationships that their healthy peers will not attain for many years to come. - Theme: Life and Death. Description: The young people in The Fault in Our Stars confront the issue of dying on a daily basis. Although the characters try to live by their support group mantra, "Living our best lives today", every action, relationship, and experience is cast in the shadow of their impending mortalities. The theme of life and death unfolds through Hazel's relationship with Augustus. It is no mistake that Hazel first forms a bond with Augustus through a dialog about death and oblivion during their support group. Both Hazel and Augustus are particularly sensitive when it comes to their own mortalities. They are forced to confront questions that most young people do not have to face, but their concerns revolve around common existential dilemmas, for example, how do you find meaning in life and death? How do you leave behind a legacy? How does one's death affect others? Is there an afterlife, and if not, what is there? Their development as characters occurs through the exploration of these questions.Their personal concerns around death develop along different trajectories. Augustus is afraid of fading into oblivion after he dies, that his life will be meaningless, and nobody will remember him once he is gone. After bringing this fear up in the support group, Hazel responds by intellectualizing the fact of her impermanence. She states that everything will die, that there was a time before consciousness and there will be a time after it. Despite her intellectualization, however, she is still deeply conflicted around the issue of her own looming mortality. Unlike Augustus' self-centered fear of fading into oblivion, Hazel views her approaching death as an event that will severely damage those around her—like she is a grenade waiting to explode. She is primarily concerned with protecting those around her from the pain of her death. This concern causes her to distance herself from her peers and family, which limits her desire to do the things normal teenagers do. Her fear of hurting others through her passing leads to her obsession with the fictional novel, An Imperial Affliction. She identifies with the book because it presents an accurate portrayal of death and dying, but Hazel becomes obsessed by what happens after the novel's abrupt ending. Hazel longs to know the fate of the family in An Imperial Affliction after the main character passes, believing this knowledge will give her insight into the impact her death will have on her family.Hazel and Augustus come to terms with their impermanence through their relationship. Augustus is able to realize his one act of heroism by sacrificing his wish from "The Genie Foundation" to take Hazel to Amsterdam. In a meta-textual sense, this act allows him to survive after death, as his story is told in the novel and will continue being accessed by readers of The Fault in Our Stars. Within the text, however, his legacy lives on with Hazel and her parents. Hazel also develops new understandings of life and death through her relationship with Augustus. Through their relationship, she is able to step out of her isolation and live her life for the first time, even in the face of her impending death. When Augustus' cancer comes out of remission and he passes away, she is able to experience what it is like to lose someone you love and work through it, which allows her to come to terms with the fact that her family will be able to make it through her own death. Hazel also comes to understand that death is an event that allows us to value life. She demonstrates this understanding during Augustus' eulogy when she says, "without pain, we would not know joy," she understands that death is an event that allows us to live and love to the fullest. In the end, it becomes clear that life is defined by our relationships with others, and the importance and meaning of these relationships is demonstrated through the pain felt when a loved one dies. - Theme: Family. Description: The Fault in Our Stars not only explores the ways in which cancer affects those who are diagnosed, but also shows the ways in which their families and friends react to their diagnoses. The parents of the young people living with cancer react to the loss of their children in different ways. The reactions of Hazel's parents shows the way in which a cancer diagnosis places parents in a difficult situation as they attempt to parent a teenage child. They want her to be a normal teenage, which is why they recommend she go to the cancer support group and meet other young people, but at the same time, they are protective and overbearing. As they urge her to mature into an adult, they continue to cling to her youth, the time in which she was healthy, as shown by their continued goading that she sleep with "Bluie", her childhood teddy bear, and the celebration of her "half birthdays". Augustus' parents react differently, attempting to battle the cancer by staying positive. They plaster their house with platitudinous sayings that are a constant reminder for them to stay hopeful. Both Hazel and Augustus find their parents annoying, but ultimately understand that their parents just love them and are coping with their situations to the best of their ability. Hazel, however, feels a great sense of guilt because of the way her condition affects her parents. She knows that her very existence causes her parents immense pain, stating that, "They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents' suffering". She also feels immense guilt over her parent's lack of money and the time they sacrifice to make sure she is safe and cared for. Hazel also fears that her death will tear the family apart. This fear is another factor in her obsession with the novel An Imperial Affliction. For Hazel, the novel's characters come to represent her own experience. In An Imperial Affliction, the main character, a young girl named Anna dies because of her cancer. The novel ends suddenly with Anna's death, which leads Hazel to seek out answers about what happens to Anna's mother and her mother's partner, the tulip man, after the novel's end. She believes that gaining insight into Anna's experience will allow her to know what will happen to her parents after she passes. Hazel and Augustus go to Amsterdam to find out what happens to Anna's parents after she dies, but their hopes are crushed after then the novel's author, Peter Van Houten, drunkenly tells them that nothing exists after the novel ends. This answer becomes a great concern for Hazel, leading her to believe that after her own death, nothing, including her parents and family, will exist. This belief, however, is replaced by the end of the novel in several ways. First, Hazel experiences Augustus' death, and watches his family come together and work through it. Secondly, she learns that Peter Van Houten had written An Imperial Affliction about his own daughter who had died of cancer, suggesting that even though the novel ends with Anna's death, Van Houten has continued to exist, even though her death has pushed him over the edge into alcoholism and fierce resentment. Finally, Hazel learns that her mother is studying to become a cancer counselor for young people, which allows her to know that even after she dies, her mother will continue to love her through loving other children fated in the way she was, and that her parents will not falter in the way Peter Van Houten has. - Theme: Being Different. Description: Although the teenagers of The Fault in Our Stars are in many ways normal teenagers who are obsessed with music, videogames, popular culture, and dating, they are constantly reminded that they are different than their healthy peers. Their physical differences—prosthetics, oxygen tanks, puffy cheeks—are glaring signifiers of their difference, but in a more subtle way, their illnesses often make other people feel uncomfortable and alienated, creating separations between those with the illness and those without it. This separation shows through while Hazel is shopping with her friend, Kaitlyn. While shopping, Kaitlyn nonchalantly says she would "die" if she had to walk in a pair of heels she has found on the shelf. She stops and looks as if she wants to apologize, as if it is wrong to mention death in front of the dying. Hazel is not offended by her comment, but the fact of her cancer makes Kaitlyn unable to talk in the way she would with a healthy peer. Later a young girl asks Hazel why she has to carry an oxygen tank. The little girl's mother is mortified by her daughter's question, but Hazel simply explains her situation to the girl, limiting the distance between them. This otherness is not just projected on those who are ill from those who are healthy. Often, people with cancer begin to define themselves based on their experience with cancer. This self-definition through one's cancer is one that the sick characters fear, as shown through Augustus' question to Hazel whether she is, "One of those people who become their disease." While Hazel does not define herself by her cancer, she also works to break down cancer stereotypes, constantly pushing back against the clichés that make people dying of cancer different than normal people. She speaks to the way in which healthy people often hold ideas about those living with cancer that make them seem heroic or overtly tragic. The novel depicts those living with cancer in ways that limit such cancer. The depictions in the novel make the argument that the young people with cancer are not any more noble, valiant, or spiritual than other kids—they are just normal kids living with an illness. Augustus becomes a clear example of the reality of young people who are living with and dying from cancer. After his cancer reemerges, Augustus, the high-spirited, funny, confident, and attractive boy is reduced to a frail, terrified, and humiliated individual. The honesty with which Hazel depicts the end of his life does not allow his illness to place him in any special category of person, and therefore limits the difference between him and any other normal person who is dying. Through their shared experience of being different, however, Augustus and Hazel form an unbreakable bond. They understand what it is like to be pitied, gawked at, showered with cancer perks ("make a wish" type gifts given to dying children), and just simply misunderstood. They quickly move past the thing that makes them different from others and begin to form bonds based on their identities beyond their illness, the appreciation of the other's intelligence, beauty, and personality. In this way, Hazel's narrative depicts the way in which difference can lead to companionship, but ultimately it is the person that exists beyond the illness—who is no different than anyone else—that allows them to develop a deep bond with one another. This perspective allows Hazel to limit the thing that causes their difference, and allows them to move closer to the normalcy that is denied by common misunderstanding that creates separation. - Theme: Religion and Philosophy. Description: In facing the terrible realities of living with and dying from cancer, those affected—the teenagers, their families, and friends—are left looking for answers, meaning, and comfort for the situations they find themselves in. Many characters in the novel turn to religion to provide answers for their fates. This idea is established from the start of the novel as Hazel attends the support group, which is held in the basement of a church. The church is shaped like a cross and the room is positioned where Jesus' heart would have been during his crucifixion. Hazel, Isaac, and Augustus joke that the group takes place in the "Literal Heart of Jesus", but in a figurative sense, the position of the group alludes to the beliefs of some people—that the sick hold a special place in Jesus' heart. Religion provides easy answers for the affliction and provides a sense of hope that the fate of the characters is resting in the hands of some higher power. For many of the characters, however, including Hazel and Augustus, religion or God is not sufficient in explaining their situation. Hazel, August, and other characters turn toward different philosophical explanations to find meaning in their lives and deaths. These philosophical notions span from existentialism, as in Augustus' search for meaning in his life, to nihilism, as in the philosophical leanings of Peter Van Houten. It is along these philosophical lines that Hazel's character experiences the greatest transformation. At the beginning of the novel, Hazel responds to Augustus' fear of oblivion by stating that everything will die, that there was a time before consciousness and there will be a time after it. She fears that her own death will only hurt others and that after she dies nothing of her will be left behind. Because of this fear, she turns to An Imperial Affliction in hopes of finding answers to her fears. She is seeking to understand what happens after the end of the novel, as she feels it will reveal something about what will happen to her after her life ends, answering the looming existential questions the burden her. Through her relationship with Augustus, however, her philosophical standpoint changes. She realizes that after death people live on through their relationships with their loved ones and the impacts they make on the lives of other people. In this way, the nihilistic philosophy she upholds at the beginning of the book transforms, and she develops a new philosophy about life and death that provides her some hope and comfort about her fate. - Climax: The meeting in Amsterdam with Van Houten - Summary: Hazel Grace Lancaster is a seventeen-year-old living with cancer. At the request of her mother, who believes she is depressed, Hazel attends a cancer support group in the basement of a church. Hazel does not like the support group, but goes to make her mother happy. One day upon arriving at the support group, however, Hazel is delighted to see a handsome new boy in attendance. During the discussion, the attendees introduce themselves, and Hazel learns the boy's name is Augustus Waters. Augustus has lost one of his legs to a form of cancer called osteosarcoma, but his cancer is now in remission. He is there to support his friend, Isaac who has lost an eye to a rare form of eye cancer and now must get the other eye removed. After the meeting, August approaches Hazel and tells her she looks like Natalie Portman from V for Vendetta. Hazel does not believe him because she carries an oxygen tank and her cancer treatment has made her cheeks red and puffy, but they continue to flirt. Augustus asks her to come over to his house to watch the movie with him. Hazel agrees and after arriving at Augustus' house, he introduces her to his parents. Their house is loaded with sayings embroidered on different objects. While hanging out, Hazel tells Augustus that she has thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs, but she has been spared some time through a cutting edge treatment that has not been effective with many other people. Before leaving, Hazel tells him about a book she is obsessed with called An Imperial Affliction. She tells that the novel is about a young girl with cancer. She loves the book because of its honesty regarding the realities of dying. The novel ends midsentence, which Hazel thinks is genius, as it portrays the realities of death. She tells Augustus about her desire to contact the novels author, Peter Van Houten, to find out what happens after the book ends. Augustus agrees to read An Imperial Affliction if Hazel will read his favorite book The Price of Dawn. Hazel tells Augustus they can talk again after she has finished The Price of Dawn. After reading, The Price of Dawn, which is particularly violent, but somehow enjoyable, Hazel calls Augustus. He is consoling Isaac who was recently dumped by his girlfriend, Monica. Hazel visits and watches them play video games until Isaac suddenly breaks down and begins punching pillows. Eventually, Augustus tells him to break his basketball trophies. After Hazel leaves, she does not talk to Augustus for a week. When Augustus finally calls, they discuss An Imperial Affliction, and Augustus nonchalantly says that he has contacted Van Houten through his assistant, Lidewij Vliegenthart. Hazel cannot believe he was able to contact the reclusive author. Augustus shares their conversation and tells Hazel his email address. Hazel begins developing a list of questions to ask Van Houten, mostly dealing with the novel's sudden ending. She desperately wants to know what happens to the main character's family after she dies, as she believes it will provide some insight unto what will happen to her own family after she dies. A few days after sending her email to Van Houten, he replies telling her that he can only answer her questions in person. His reply saddens Hazel, as she thinks she will never be able to make it to Amsterdam where Van Houten lives. Shortly after hearing from Van Houten, Augustus invites Hazel to join him for a picnic. As they venture out into the park and take a seat before a giant skeleton sculpture, Hazel begins to realize the picnic is strangely Dutch-themed, including the presence of the statue, which was created by a Dutch artist. During the picnic, August reveals that he wants to use his "wish", a gift from the "Genie Foundation" (comparable to the Make a Wish Foundation), to take Hazel to Amsterdam. Hazel is ecstatic to hear this, but when Augustus reaches out to touch her face, she pulls away. She reveals that she is afraid to get close to people because she feels like a grenade—that her death will harm everyone close to her. As Hazel contemplates what to do with Augustus' offer, she grows ill and is forced to go to the hospital. She ends up in the ICU for a few days. She later learns that Augustus stayed in the hospital the whole time; even though she would not let him in the room for fear he would see her in such a state. After Augustus shows her another letter from Van Houten, Hazel becomes determined to go to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, Hazel's parents and the team of doctors who care for her determine she is not able to travel such a long distance. Eventually, however, her favorite doctor, Dr. Maria, convinces her parents to let her go. Augustus, Hazel, and Hazel's mother, Mrs. Lancaster, fly to Amsterdam. After checking into their hotel, Hazel learns that Lidewij has made a reservation for Augustus and her at a fancy restaurant called Oranjee. During dinner, they talk about life and death and Augustus shares that he fears he will die without having done anything extraordinary. Hazel is offended by the idea that only extraordinary lives are meaningful. Augustus then tells Hazel about his ex-girlfriend who died of cancer. He laments the fact that people idealize kids who die of cancer, and explains that his ex's personality changed due to her brain cancer, making her progressively more vicious toward Augustus until she died. The next day they visit Van Houten. Hazel is elated to finally get the answers she has been waiting for about the end of An Imperial Affliction. Her dreams are shattered, however, after they find out that Van Houten is a miserable, mean spirited alcoholic. He claims he cannot give Hazel the answers she seeks, and rants about his nihilistic views of life and death. Eventually he insults Hazel, telling her she is dependent upon pity and that she, as a cancer survivor, is a side effect of evolution. Hazel slaps a glass of scotch out of Van Houten's hand and leaves with Augustus. Lidewij accompanies them out, feeling sorry for the way Van Houten acted. Together, they visit the Anne Frank house. In the attic space of the Anne Frank house, August and Hazel kiss, and to Hazel's surprise the other visitors applaud the young couple. After leaving the Ann Frank house, they head back to the hotel. In Augustus' hotel room, Hazel tells Augustus that she loves him and they make love. The next day, Augustus confesses to Hazel that his cancer has returned and has spread throughout his body. Upon returning to the United States, Augustus' condition continues to worsen. Hazel watches as Augustus changes from a confident, humorous, beautiful young man to a vulnerable, frightened, and decimated shell of his former self. Despite his condition, Hazel continues to love him, and begins calling him Gus instead of Augustus, as his parents do. Through the process of Augustus' decline, Hazel realizes that Augustus has become the grenade she feared she would be. In the final days before his passing, Augustus arranges a pre-funeral in the church basement where they met. Isaac and Hazel attend, and both deliver eulogies for Augustus. Hazel uses a line from An Imperial Affliction, which states that there are infinite numbers between zero and one, and an even larger infinity between zero and two. She follows this thought by stating that she is grateful for each little infinity she was able to spend with Augustus. Eight days after the pre-funeral, Augustus dies. Augustus' mother contacts Hazel late one night to tell her the news, and her parents stay by her side that night. His funeral happens a few days later in the same church where the support group is held. Hazel is frustrated when the pastor's talk about Augustus uses cancer clichés, saying how brave he was and what an inspiration he was to everyone. Just then she is startled by a voice that whispers the pastors message is a bunch of "horse crap". She realizes it is Van Houten sitting behind her. The funeral continues and Hazel reads her eulogy, which is different than the one she read at his pre-funeral. She begins with a quote that hangs in Augustus' house: "Without pain, we couldn't know joy." After the funeral, Van Houten asks Hazel and her parents for a ride. He explains that Augustus stayed in contact with him, and that he demanded Van Houten make up for ruining their trip. He attempts to reveal the fate of Anna's mother, but Hazel is uninterested—she has her answers to what happens after death, as she is living through it with Augustus' passing. A few days after the funeral, Hazel finds out from Isaac that Augustus was writing a sequel to An Imperial Affliction for her. As Hazel attempts to go to Augustus' house to find the writing, Van Houten, who is sitting in the back seat of the car, once again startles her. He claims he wants to apologize, and tell Hazel she reminds him of his daughter, Anna, who died of cancer when she was eight. Hazel tells Van Houten to get sober and continue writing. Eventually, Hazel finds out that Augustus had torn the written pages out of his notebook and mailed them to Van Houten so he could use them to compose a eulogy about Hazel. Van Houten sends the pages back to Hazel. The novel concludes with Augustus' words. Hazel reads the letter, which states that getting hurt is inevitable, but we have a choice in who we allow to hurt us. His letter concludes by stating that he was happy with his choice, and he hopes Hazel likes her choice too. In the final line of the story, Hazel says she does.

- Genre: Fairytale - Title: The Fisherman and His Soul - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: An unnamed coastal village - Character: The Fisherman. Description: The protagonist of the story, the titular Fisherman accidentally catches the Mermaid in his net while fishing one evening. He is reluctant to let her go, only doing so on the condition that she return every day to sing for him in order to help him catch fish. Following this arrangement, it doesn't take long for the Fisherman to fall in love with the Mermaid. Indeed, his love for her is so strong he is willing to give up his Soul in order to be with her, and he goes to great lengths to make this sacrifice. After he has managed to send away his Soul so that he can live with the Sea-folk, his Soul returns once a year and tries to tempt him with wisdom and riches, both of which the Fisherman resists. Ultimately, however, when the Soul describes a veiled girl dancing in bare feet in a nearby town, the Fisherman falls prey to carnal temptation. Having left the Mermaid to travel to see the dancing girl, he performs evil and cruel acts under instruction from his Soul. Unable to detach from his Soul a second time, he cannot return to the Mermaid. Though Wilde doesn't state the Fisherman's age, he is described as young and often behaves in an innocent or naïve way, as when he readily accepts that he must give up his soul, when he is tricked by the Witch into taking part in a Satanic ritual, and when commits the evil acts the Soul tells him to, only questioning them afterwards. However, he seems to finally realize the repercussions of his actions when the Sea-folk bring him the dead body of the Mermaid. The Fisherman drowns while clutching her corpse in despair. The end of the story suggests he has been forgiven and has been reunited with his love in death, as strange and beautiful flowers grow out of their unmarked grave. - Character: The Soul. Description: After the Witch has told The Fisherman how to send away his soul so that he can be with the Mermaid, the Soul becomes a character in his own right. When the Soul first begins to speak to the Fisherman, it is to beg the Fisherman not to send him away. When the Fisherman refuses and insists on separating himself from his Soul, his Soul than implores the Fisherman to at least not send him away without a heart. This the Fisherman also refuses. Nonetheless, the Soul is hopeful that he will one day be rejoined with his master and insists that on returning to see the Fisherman at the end of each year. When he does so, he attempts to convince the Fisherman to leave the Mermaid by tempting him with wisdom and riches. When he eventually succeeds, and the Fisherman agrees to temporarily reunite with him, the Soul instructs the Fisherman to commit cruel acts, including murder. In this way, the reader learns that, having travelled around the world without a heart, the Soul has become "an evil soul." Up until the end of the story, the Soul is desperate to be permanently reunited with the Fisherman, and continually tries tempt him with good and evil deeds alike. Although the Soul ultimately does manage to re-enter the Fisherman's heart, this only occurs in the few moments before the Fisherman drowns, shortly after his heart has broken following the death of the Mermaid. - Character: The Mermaid. Description: The unnamed Mermaid is the object of the Fisherman's affections, and though she is absent for most of the story she is integral to its development. When the Fisherman asks the Mermaid to marry him, she tells him she can only be with him if he gives up his Soul, and on account of his love for he readily decides to do so. Following this, for three years they live happily together in the sea. When the Fisherman is eventually tempted by his Soul to go back into the world, however, he commits a series of evil acts and finds he can no longer separate himself from his Soul, which prevent him from later returning to the Mermaid. The Mermaid subsequently dies, perhaps of heartbreak, and her body is brought up out of the sea by the Sea-folk. As the Fisherman clutches her dead body in despair he drowns, and both of their bodies are placed in an unmarked grave. - Character: The Priest. Description: For the majority of the story the Priest is an aggressive and stern character, whose devotion to God prevents him from appreciating love in all its forms and from embracing all of God's creatures on earth. He refuses to help the Fisherman to send away his Soul so that he can be with the Mermaid, instead vehemently declaring romantic love "vile." By the end of the story, however, he undergoes a kind of spiritual transformation after encountering the flowers that have grown out of the Fisherman and the Mermaid's grave, and blesses "all the thing's in God's world." - Character: The Witch. Description: Once the Fisherman realizes the Priest will not help him send away his Soul so that he can be with the Mermaid, he goes to the Witch and asks for her help. At first it seems that the Witch will deceive the Fisherman, as she tries to trick him into partaking in a ritual involving the devil. Although she is reluctant to do so, it is ultimately the Witch who tells the Fisherman how to get rid of his soul. - Theme: The Power of Love. Description: Love drives the titular protagonist's actions throughout Oscar Wilde's "The Fisherman and His Soul," the story of a young Fisherman who falls in love with a Mermaid. Upon asking her to marry him, the Mermaid replies that if the Fisherman is to live with her in the sea he must first rid himself of his Soul, as the Sea-folk are themselves soulless. Notably, then, romantic love is immediately depicted as something that requires immense sacrifice. This ambivalence regarding romantic love continues to develop as the story unfolds; though the Fisherman rejects wisdom and riches in favor of being with the Mermaid, he also is so consumed by his love for her that he rejects opportunities to help the needy or even let his own Soul back into his heart. Interwoven with repeated claims regarding love's strength are also suggestions that love does not always result in positive outcomes, and can indeed have disastrous, tragic consequences. At the same time, however, love is shown to be a transformative force with the potential to engender acceptance and destroy judgmental cruelty. Wilde's story thus ultimately presents love as a powerful, all-consuming force—for better and for worse. The first hint of some uncertainty around the trustworthiness of romantic love comes early in the story, when, after the Fisherman professes his feelings to the Mermaid, she tells him, "If only thou wouldst send away thy human soul, then I could love thee."  Immediately, it seems the Mermaid's love is not unconditional; instead, it requires a disproportionate sacrifice on the Fisherman's part. Notably, this is an inversion of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," the famous fairytale that inspired Wilde's story, in which a young female mermaid is forced to give up her voice for the love of a human man. In either case, intense love results in a distinct loss of self. Of course, this also results in a loss of selfishness—or at least, a loss of desire for anything apart from that love. On the one hand, this can be positive. For instance, the Fisherman repeatedly rejects offers of wealth and power in the name of love. Having sought out the Witch, she makes clear that she can give him anything he might desire, offering him an abundance of fish and treasure, the attention of the Queen, and the ability to conquer his enemies. The Fisherman, however, is entirely consumed with love for the Mermaid and finds no allure in these artificial temptations. This resilience to temptation is repeatedly accentuated when, after he has separated from his Soul and united with the Mermaid, his Soul visits him and relays lengthy, sumptuous descriptions of the treasures he could possess if only he were willing to leave his love behind. The sensuous quality of the language the Soul employs in relaying the Mirror of Wisdom and the Ring of Riches implicitly suggests opulence and plentitude, and makes love seem all the more powerful as the Fisherman is completely unmoved. He remains certain that his love for the Mermaid trumps anything the Soul has to offer. This series of refusals emphasizes love's ability to overwhelm other desires and temptations, with the Fisherman dedicating himself entirely to pursuing this one goal. The Fisherman's intense love, however, borders on blinding obsession. When the Soul, upon being separated from the Fisherman, begs to be given a heart, the Fisherman replies, "With what should I love my love if I gave thee my heart?" So consumed is the Fisherman by his focused, romantic love that he cannot spare any of his heart for his own Soul. As a direct result, the Soul becomes evil, explaining that because he has been out in the world without a heart, he has "learned to do all these things and love them." Later, after having been rejoined with the Fisherman, the Soul asks to be let into his master's heart; the Fisherman agrees, yet his heart remains so full of love for the Mermaid that here is no space for the Soul—and without a heart, the Soul cannot be redeemed. It is only at the end of the story, after the Mermaid dies and the Fisherman's heart subsequently breaks, that the Soul can re-enter the heart and "be one with him as before." This suggest the danger inherent to love, while also—somewhat paradoxically—underscoring that it is needed for basic acts of decency and kindness. Wilde seems to suggest that the Fisherman's decision to prioritize his narrow, romantic love for the Mermaid has resulted in evil and cruel acts and even death, and so—while the importance of romantic love is ultimately upheld—the story questions the extent to which it should be prioritized. At the end of the story, however, it is clear that love—specifically the romantic love between the Fisherman and the Mermaid—can indeed wield a positive power. After the Fisherman the Mermaid have both died, the white flowers that have grown out of their unmarked graves have a spiritually transformative effect on the Priest; he no longer wishes to speak "of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love." Wilde seems to suggest that the romantic love between the Fisherman and the Mermaid has had a powerful impact on the Priest, whose change of heart causes him to embrace not only humans but all of God's creatures. Wilde seems here to be making a comment that the notion of God as depicted in the Old Testament—a vengeful god who expects unfaltering love and loyalty—should perhaps be reconsidered in favor of God as he is represented in the New Testament—that is, as immensely loving and benevolent. In this way, love is depicted in various guises, and as having both negative and positive outcomes. While Wilde's treatment of romantic love remains ambivalent throughout, ultimately love endures and is celebrated beyond all else. By using the format of the fairytale, Wilde presents a partly celebratory and partly cautionary story; the Fisherman is with the Mermaid and love has won the day, but not in the way the Fisherman intended. While he hoped he and the Mermaid would be together, their lasting unison has proven possible only in death. Love has indeed conquered all, but not with tragedy. - Theme: Temptation, Corruption, and Evil. Description: After the Fisherman separates himself from his Soul so that he can live with the Mermaid, once a year for three years the Soul returns from traveling the world to try and tempt him to leave his love. The first two times, the Soul does this with very long and highly detailed stories of wisdom and riches, and each time the Fisherman is unmoved and happily returns to the Mermaid. It doesn't take long, however, for the Fisherman to be tempted by the image of a woman dancing barefoot, and he agrees to travel to see her dancing with the Soul. Following this, the Soul instructs the Fisherman to perform evil acts. Wilde here presents an interesting version of corruption; once the Fisherman has been rejoined with his Soul, his behavior doesn't improve as one might expect. Rather, the Fisherman commits cruel deeds he would never have considered before. Furthermore, because he has rejoined with his Soul and the Witch's spell won't work a second time, he is unable to return to the Mermaid. In this way, his Soul has corrupted the Fisherman's relationship with the Mermaid, and acts as a barrier between the Fisherman and his heart's desires. Even once the Fisherman has realized the consequences of his actions, namely that he and the Mermaid can no longer be together, he proves impervious to further temptation. The Soul, now unable to tempt the Fisherman with evil deeds, tries to tempt him with good ones. By not only showing the Soul as a source of corruption but also demonstrating the multitude of forms temptation can take, Wilde presents evil as a pervasive presence in the world. Interestingly, Wilde pushes this suggestion further; not only is evil somewhat inevitable, it also contributes to an overall sense of balance and harmony. The Soul first attempts to tempt the Fisherman with objectively appealing things: wisdom and wealth. Having first returned to the seashore after a year away, the Soul tells the Fisherman of his journey to the East, to "the city of Illel" where he obtained the Mirror of Wisdom. He tells the Fisherman that "they who possess this mirror know everything" and that he has hidden it in a cave. The Fisherman, however, simply replies "Love is better than Wisdom […] and the little Mermaid loves me." When the soul returns at the second year, he relays an equally long story regarding his travels to the South to the city of "Ashter" where he obtained the Ring of Riches. Again, he tells the Fisherman that he has hidden it "in a cave that is but a day's journey from this place," and that "he who has this Ring is richer than all the kings of the world." Again, however, the Fisherman simply states, "Love is better than riches." Wilde seems to be making a comment on the strength of the Fisherman's love by demonstrating that he's impervious to temptation. The extreme length and detail of the Soul's descriptions also underline how difficult it will be to lure the Fisherman away from the Mermaid. When the Soul returns after the third year is over, however, he describes a girl dancing barefoot, whose feet "moved over the carpet like little white pigeons," and it doesn't take long for the Fisherman to be overwhelmed by "a great desire." Given the extreme nature of the Soul's previous attempts, it seems implausible that the Fisherman would be so easily tempted by a dancing woman. However, this particular description seems to tempt the Fisherman so effectively because "the little Mermaid had no feet and could not dance." In this way, Wilde seems to suggest that it is a specifically carnal temptation that has convinced the Fisherman to venture away from the Mermaid. Indeed, of all the temptations the Fisherman is faced with—intellectual, material, and carnal—it seems a temptation of the flesh is the only one to have any effect, echoing the Priest's earlier statement that "the love of the body is vile," as it is carnal temptation that he is ultimately vulnerable to. Having finally successfully tempted the Fisherman to leave the Mermaid, the Soul now sets about corrupting him by instructing him to commit three increasingly evil acts. The Soul first bids the Fisherman to steal a silver cup, then to "smite" a child, and then, finally, to kill a merchant who invites the Fisherman to stay in his home. Each time the Fisherman asks the Soul why he has instructed him to do an evil thing, and eventually the Soul replies, "When thou didst send me forth into the world thou gavest me no heart, so I learned to do all these things and love them." In this way, Wilde suggests that as the Soul was corrupted by the world, he has now corrupted the Fisherman. This further implies that evil is not an inherent trait but rather a learned behavior, and that even a symbol of purity such as the human soul can become evil and accustomed to sin. When the Fisherman and his Soul return to the sea shore, it becomes clear that the Soul, in tricking the Fisherman into permanently rejoining with him has succeeded in separating the Fisherman because he cannot now return to the Sea-folk. Again, Wilde seems to present the Soul as a corruptive influence. Even now, the Soul continues to tempt the Fisherman, reflecting, "I have tempted my master with evil, and his love is stronger than I am. I will tempt him now with good…" Following this, the Soul describes scenes of poverty and suffering that he and the Fisherman might "go forth and mend" together. This inclusion underscores how desperate the Soul is to tempt the Fisherman, and that temptation does not always signify evil behavior. Interestingly, however, Wilde suggests that the Soul's corruptive acts ultimately result in a degree of harmony.  After the Fisherman and the Mermaid have been apart for some years, the Sea-folk bring the Mermaid's corpse to the shore and the Fisherman drowns while clutching her corpse. From their unmarked grave there grow white flowers that are used to decorate the altar, and that have a powerful effect on the Priest, who now blesses "All the things in God's world," which in turn causes the people to become "filled with joy and wonder." The concept of a positive outcome stemming from an act of sin pertains to the Latin phrase felix culpa; felix meaning "happy," "lucky," or "blessed," and culpa meaning "fault" or "fall." In a Catholic context, this phrase refers to the series of unfortunate events that eventually led to the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden—essentially a negative event that had a positive outcome, namely Christian redemption. In this way, Wilde makes a very particular claim regarding the role of temptation and corruption in the story, as while evil acts have been committed a kind of balance has been achieved. By presenting temptation in various guises and positioning the Soul as the ultimate source of corruption, Wilde seems to suggest evil and temptation are inevitable, if not necessary, as such acts can ultimately result in positive outcomes and contribute to an overall sense of balance and order in the world. The story also demonstrates that corruption can often come from within. Ultimately, although the story doesn't deliver an explicit moral message, it rejects easy definitions of temptation, corruption, and sin, and presents an expanded, nuanced version of how these things function in the world. - Theme: Transformation and the Doppelganger. Description: Once the Fisherman has fallen in love with the Mermaid and has agreed to do away with his Soul in order to be with her, supernatural and spiritual changes take place within multiple characters. Following the Fisherman's separation from his Soul, he can now live in the sea with the Sea-folk, and the Soul himself becomes a separate entity independent of his master, eventually taking on the role of a doppelganger; he is a mirror image of the Fisherman and pursues a different set of desires. On a subtler level, a spiritual transformation takes place within the Priest at the end of the story, as he seems to accept and even celebrate the love between the Fisherman and the Mermaid. In this way, instances of literal, metaphorical, and spiritual transformation abound over the course of the fairy tale. These changes demonstrate the complexity of the human condition, as various characters in the story prove capable of both good and evil, cruelty and kindness. Through these stark transformations, Wilde ultimately suggests that all human beings are susceptible to radical, unpredictable transformation, whether it happens gradually or all at once. At first, it seems the most startling transformation to take place within the story will be the Fisherman's decision to separate himself from his soul and live with the Sea-folk in the ocean. This physical, bodily change isn't described in any literal way, but once the Fisherman has cut away his Soul, the Sea-folk come to the seashore to greet him, and the Fisherman sinks "into the depths of the sea." As such, it is clear that the Fisherman has undergone some kind of change so that he can live underwater. The Fisherman, however, does not demonstrate any other notable changes; he remains loyal to the Mermaid and entirely fixated on his love for her. Indeed, far more dramatic and startling is Wilde's treatment of the Soul's slow transformation into an evil, corrupt soul. By the end of the story, the Soul has come to represent malicious intent so fully that he functions as a kind of doppelganger. This transformation proves especially powerful as it subverts the traditional notion of the human soul as a symbol of purity and kindness. Importantly, this metamorphosis does not take place immediately. Once separated from the Fisherman, the Soul becomes an entirely separate character within the story who can travel around the world, harboring desires and intentions that are completely at odds with those of the Fisherman. It is only after three years spent out in the world without a heart that the Soul becomes an "evil soul," an alteration that becomes evident when he instructs the Fisherman to commit three cruel acts. In this way, the Soul becomes a doppelganger, a figure traditionally understood as a malicious "double" who signals bad luck. The Soul now represents not only the Fisherman's shadow self but the darker side of human nature. Wilde thus makes a powerful suggestion that even the human soul is susceptible to negative transformation, underscoring no matter how fully a character seems to embody one set of values, they can often, given the right conditions, come to represent their exact opposite. (The doppelganger theme is also a key element of Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Importantly, however, in this novel it is Dorian Gray's actions that corrupt his soul, whereas in "The Fisherman and His Soul," it is the Soul who manages to corrupt the Fisherman.) In this way, Wilde seems to suggest not only that these characters hold the potential to be both good and evil, but that extreme and irrevocable change can occur in slow and unspectacular ways. As the story comes to a close, the spiritual transformation experienced by the Priest is in some ways both the most powerful and also the subtlest, affirming both the potential for extreme transformation and exploring the ways in which it takes hold. At the beginning of the story, the Priest is disgusted by the Fisherman's love for the Mermaid: he tells the Fisherman that the love of the body is vile, and that supernatural creatures such as the Sea-folk are "accursed." So heated is his disdain for the love between the Fisherman and the Mermaid, that when the Priest sees them both lying dead in the surf, he refuses to "bless the sea nor anything that is in it," and gives instructions that they be buried in the corner of a field with "no mark above them." Three years later, however, he enters the chapel and find strange flowers covering the altar. These flowers have such an effect on him that "he spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love," before learning that the flowers have grown out of the Fisherman and Mermaid's unmarked grave. The following morning, he "blessed the sea, and all the wild things that are in it." Wilde thus depicts a positive, transformative effect on the Priest, who now worships "the God whose name is love" and has come to extol the virtues he scorned at the beginning of the story, namely an unconditional love for all creatures. Given Wilde's interest in Christian morality, it seems plausible that the Priest's transformative change of heart is a metaphor for a change from the Old to New Testament, as Christians believe the New Testament supersedes and fulfills Old Testament. Specifically, the transformation from the Old to New Testament is the change from a God of wrath to a God of mercy. The image of the flowers that grow up out of the unmarked grave could also be interpreted as a direct metaphor for transformation, as the bodies of the Fisherman and the Mermaid seem to have literally seeded these white flowers. Over the course of the story, transformation occurs at various times and on different levels. The development of the Soul into a separate character and then into a kind of doppelganger emphasizes that transformation can occur in detrimental and potentially harmful ways. Ultimately, Wilde makes clear that no character is insusceptible to change, and indeed can undergo a kind of metamorphosis that changes their relationship with the world. Regardless of whether these transformations are positive or negative, they result in lasting, uncontrollable, and unforeseen repercussions. - Theme: Christianity, Morality, and the Soul. Description: Upon falling in love with the Mermaid and learning that he must give up his Soul in order to be with her, the Fisherman visits the Priest to seek his advice. The Priest, however, is completely appalled by his decision and responds aggressively to his suggestion that he give up his soul. Furthermore, he is disgusted by the fact that the Fisherman has fallen in love with the Mermaid because she is an "ungodly" creature. By portraying the Priest as critical not only of the Fisherman's desire to separate from his soul but also the love he feels for the Mermaid, Wilde introduces notions of Christian values and morality early on in the story. Indeed, the Priest's admonishing and tempestuous behavior seems to be a comment on the moral standards upheld by the Old Testament, which call for blind loyalty and devotion to God. While not necessarily written to encourage faith or advocate any specific interpretation of Christianity, there are strong biblical undertones to "The Fisherman and His Soul" and an ongoing concern with what constitutes moral behavior. It is evident from the outset of the story that "The Fisherman and His Soul" is underpinned by Christian concepts. The style of the story itself is highly reminiscent of the Bible; the language is archaic, there is repetition of phrases and events, the events themselves have a mystic quality, and things often occur in threes or over a period of three years. Over the course of the story, moral and immoral behavior are debated in a way similar to how such questions are presented in Christian scripture, namely through prolonged anecdotes or parables. Nonetheless, Wilde creates a complex portrait of amoral behavior not entirely in keeping with Christian teachings. Most notably, over the course of the story the Soul become increasingly immoral. Indeed, Wilde describes him as transforming into an "evil soul." The human soul, of course, is one of the core aspects of Christianity; it is the immortal part of a person that goes to heaven after death, to be reunited with God. Wilde's decision to upturn the conventional understanding of the human soul as an emblem of purity and goodness, instead depicting the Soul as susceptible to corruption and capable of evil acts, is one of the key ways in which he avoids drawing a clear line between moral and immoral behavior. In this way, Wilde demonstrates that immorality can come in unexpected forms, and that even the most traditional understandings of such behavior should be questioned. Wilde didn't agree with how Christianity treated homosexuals during his lifetime, and this can perhaps be connected to his reluctance to unquestioningly accept the tenets of Christian doctrine. This suggestion is underscored by the tragic deaths of the Fisherman and the Mermaid, which seem linked to the lack of acceptance they have experienced as lovers, and their love being unfairly considered sinful. Although Wilde is critical of some elements of Christin morality, the story closes with the message that the Christian tenets of forgiveness and mercy are valuable and worthy. The white flowers that grow out of the unmarked grave of the Fisherman and the Mermaid are placed on the local chapel's altar, suggesting that the Fisherman has been forgiven and embraced by God. As it's the Fisherman's sin and subsequent suffering that ultimately brings him back to God, Wilde seems to be making a comparison between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. It's generally understood that the Old Testament focuses on the wrath of God against sinners, while the New Testament emphasizes the grace of God toward sinners. For Christians, the New Testament supersedes and fulfills Old Testament, and, given Wilde's interest in Christian morality, it seems plausible he is arguing for a development from Old Testament values toward New Testament values, as can be seen in the Priest's speaking the word of wrath to one of love. Following his coming into contact with the flowers, the Priest gives mass and finds he cannot speak to the people of the wrath of God. Rather, he speaks "of the God whose name is love" and moves both himself and the congregation to tears. This suggestion that there has been a shift in the Priest's moral compass compounded by his decision to bless "All the things in God's world," which also seems to be an explicit rejection of a judgmental version of Christianity that excludes "ungodly" creatures. This rejection signals a belief that the New Testament morals of unconditional love and acceptance are more compatible with human relationships and happiness than those of the Old Testament, namely judgement and vengeance. In this way, Wilde closes the story with positive references to the Christian principle of mercy, an aspect especially valued by the New Testament. Ultimately, "The Fisherman and His Soul", emphasizing the importance the Christian tenets of mercy, forgiveness and acceptance, and asserts moral behavior as rooted in decency and compassion. - Climax: Realizing that the Mermaid has died of heartbreak, the Fisherman clings to her corpse and drowns in the sea, at which point the Soul re-enters his heart - Summary: Every evening the Fisherman goes out to sea and throws his nets into the water. One evening, he accidentally catches a sleeping Mermaid, and refuses to let her go unless she promises to return whenever he calls so that she can sing for him and help him catch fish. The Mermaid agrees, and every evening she returns to sing. Soon the Fisherman falls in love with the Mermaid and asks her to marry him. The Mermaid, however, replies that she can only be with him if he sends away his soul, as the Sea-folk are soulless. The Fisherman seeks guidance on how to rid himself of his soul from the Priest, who is appalled and tells him the "love of the body is vile," adamantly refusing to help him. The Fisherman then goes to the Witch, who is similarly aghast at the idea. Nonetheless, after attempting to make the Fisherman take part in a strange Satanic ritual, she reluctantly tells him how to cut away his shadow, which is in fact the body of his soul. As the Fisherman makes his way to the shore to perform the spell the Witch has described, his Soul begins to call out to him, begging not to be sent away. When it becomes clear that the Fisherman is determined to be with the Mermaid at whatever cost, the Soul then begs not to be sent out into the world without a heart. The Fisherman also denies him this. The Soul, however, says they must meet again, and that he will return to the same place every year. After the first year is over, the Soul returns and calls the Fisherman up out of the sea. The Soul describes at length his journeys to the East where he obtained the Mirror of Wisdom, telling the Fisherman how he then hid in a valley "but a day's journey from this place" and suggesting that the Fisherman come and take the mirror so that he "shalt be wiser than all the wise men." The Fisherman, however, is unmoved, simply saying, "Love is better than Wisdom." After the second year, the Soul again returns and recounts his travels, this time to the South where he obtained the Ring of Riches which he has also hidden in the valley. Again, he says the Fisherman should come and take the ring so that "the world's riches shall be thine." Once more the Fisherman is not to be tempted, replying, "Love is better than Riches." After the third year when the Soul returns, he describes an inn in a city where a veiled girl dances in bare feet. This causes the Fisherman to reflect on how the Mermaid has no feet and cannot dance, following which he feels "a great desire." He decides to temporarily reunite with his Soul so that he can go and see the dancing girl. The Fisherman and his Soul set out together, and after two days travelling they come to a city, where the Soul tells the Fisherman to take and hide a silver cup. On the evening of the third day they come to a city where the Soul tells the Fisherman to strike a child, and finally in the third city the Soul instructs the Fisherman to kill a merchant. Each time, the Fisherman does what the Soul tells him, and afterwards asks why the Soul instructed him to do an evil thing. Eventually, the Soul explains that because he was sent out into the world without a heart, he has learned to do and love evil things. The Fisherman now tries to send his Soul away again but finds that he's unable to do so. The next day, the Fisherman is determined to go back to the sea and confess his sins to the Mermaid. When they reach the shore, however, the Mermaid won't respond to the Fisherman's calls. Nonetheless, the Fisherman builds a house and for a year goes out every day calls to her. All the while, the Soul tries to tempt him with both evil and good deeds. After the second year, the Sea-folk bring the dead body of the Mermaid up onto the shore. The distraught Fisherman clings to her body, and at the moment his heart breaks the Soul manages to get back inside. The Fisherman drowns soon after. The following morning the Priest comes to bless the sea but refuses to do so when he sees the bodies of the Mermaid and the Fisherman lying together. He remains adamant that their love is cursed and tells the people to bury them in an unmarked grave in the corner of the Field of the Fullers. On a holy day three years later, the Priest enters the chapel and sees strange flowers covering the altar. Overcome by their curious beauty and smell, he finds he no longer wants to speak of the wrath of God, but "of the God whose name is Love." After giving mass, he learns that the strange flowers have grown out of the Fisherman and the Mermaid's grave. The next morning, he goes out and blesses all "the things in God's world," so that "the people were filled with joy and wonder."

- Genre: Religious Fiction, Philosophical Fiction - Title: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: Fictional seaside amusement park in an unnamed town - Character: Eddie. Description: The novel's protagonist, a lonely, elderly man who has spent his life working in maintenance at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by the ocean. Eddie is from a working-class family of Romanian origin, and he is tough, hardworking, and concerned about the well-being of others. Abused by his father throughout his youth, Eddie learns to keep his emotions inside. As a young man, he works at Ruby Pier with his father to save up to study engineering elsewhere. When WWII begins, however, Eddie enlists to prove his masculinity, and is sent to an island in the Philippines. When he returns, he marries his sweetheart, Marguerite. After the war, Eddie spends the rest of his life fighting depression. His depression worsens as everyone he loves dies before him. At the beginning of the novel, Eddie dies and begins a journey through heaven, where he travels through endless colors, and meets five important people who will each teach him a lesson. - Character: Eddie's Father. Description: Eddie's father (whose name is never given) is the darkest character in the novel. A violent, misogynistic alcoholic who works a low-paying job as the head of maintenance at Ruby Pier, he neglects and physically abuses Eddie and his brother Joe throughout their childhoods. As a child, Eddie tries to win over his love, but his attempts are never met with anything but a total lack of affection from his father. The only times Eddie's father shows any interest in his son is when Eddie wins fights, baseball games, or fixes equipment at the maintenance shop. Eddie's father dies from pneumonia, which he caught while saving his friend Mickey Shea during an ocean storm. He represents extreme male aggression and toughness. - Character: Eddie's Mother. Description: A gentle, comforting, stay-at-home mother devoted to her children and to Eddie's father. She often tries to stop her husband and other men from violent and destructive behavior, but is usually helpless against it. She is always interested in Eddie's life, and especially in his courtship with Marguerite. She refuses to leave her husband's bedside during his illness. When he dies, she becomes delusional and continues to believe he is alive. Eddie's mother has only loving and positive traits, and thereby represents an angelic female ideal, opposite to her husband. - Character: Marguerite. Description: Eddie's only love interest, a sunny and energetic woman. Like Eddie's mother, she is kind and gentle, and preoccupied mainly with her husband and having children. However, in contrast with Eddie's mother, Marguerite exerts her wishes somewhat more freely. While Eddie dreams of greatness away from Ruby Pier, Marguerite makes the best of their situation in the present. Her primary goal is to have children, but she is infertile. Her attempt to arrange an adoption fails when she gets into a car accident that drains their financial resources. Marguerite is the central source of Eddie's happiness, and his life plunges when she dies of brain cancer at the age of 47. In heaven, she takes Eddie to a heaven full of weddings, where she teaches him that true love never dies. - Character: Joe. Description: Eddie's older brother. During their childhood, Eddie has to fight bullies for him because Joe doesn't like to fight. As teenagers, Joe resists their father's pressure to work at Ruby Pier, and instead works at the town swimming pool. Joe is a disappointment to their father, who thinks of him as unmanly. Joe mostly fades from the story after he and Eddie grow up, except for rare visits and calls that leave Eddie feeling jealous. Joe becomes a salesman and makes good money. He buys a condo in Florida and plans to retire, but then dies from a heart attack. - Character: Mickey Shea. Description: An alcoholic Irishman, the longtime close friend of Eddies' mother and father. Mickey is impulsive, festive, and lonely. Mickey helps Eddie's father get his job at Ruby Pier, and when Eddie is born, he gives his parents money for their financial struggles. He is affectionate with Eddie, though often too rough. Mickey's lowest point is when he loses his job, gets drunk, and tries to rape Eddie's mother. Eddie's father chases him down to kill him, but when he sees Mickey falling into the ocean and drowning, he saves him instead. Mickey dies alone and drunk, overwhelmed by guilt for his actions. - Character: Dominguez. Description: A young, cheerful man who works with Eddie in maintenance at Ruby Pier. He and his wife's families are from Mexico, where many of their relatives still live. Eddie and Dominguez have a warm relationship, and after Eddie dies, he is the only person there to take care of Eddie's arrangements. Dominguez becomes the new Head of Maintenance in Eddie's place. - Character: "Amy or Annie". Description: A little girl whom Eddie has spoken to a few times at Ruby Pier, and who calls him "Eddie Maint'nance." Eddie dies saving this little girl, whose name he can't remember. When he sees her under the collapsing ride, he runs to push her out of the way. All through heaven, Eddie asks everyone if he succeeding in saving her. After Eddie's journey through heaven, he waits in heaven to become one of the five people who will one day teach "Amy or Annie" a lesson about her life. - Character: Nicky. Description: Mentioned only briefly, a teenage boy who frequently visits Ruby Pier. Nicky turns out to be the grandson of Ruby, for whom the amusement park was named. Nicky loses his car key on the ride "Freddy's Free Fall" a few weeks before Eddie dies. It is the key that falls into the gears and causes the ride to break, setting off the series of events that leads to Eddie's death. Nicky never learns about this connection. - Character: The Blue Man. Description: A member of the human "freak show" at Ruby Pier during Eddie's childhood, and one of the five people Eddie meets in heaven. He is an anxious, lonely, and forgiving man. Born Joseph Corvelzchik, his first memory is his mother lifting him over the ocean as they emigrated from Poland. As a small child, his parents forced him to work in a sweatshop out of economic desperation. He was then given silver nitrate for his nerves, which turned his skin the color blue. Shunned by society, he was invited to join a traveling circus. After years of traveling, he settled permanently at Ruby Pier, where he found community and a sense of home. He died from a heart attack, caused by the shock from a young Eddie running into the street after a lost ball on his birthday. The Blue Man teaches Eddie that all lives are connected, even strangers. - Character: The Captain. Description: The leader of Eddie's unit in the Philippines during WWII. Born into a military family during wartime, battle is at the center of the Captain's life. The Captain is intelligent and sensible, and does everything he can to keep his unit alive during the war. While escaping captivity, the Captain shoots Eddie in the leg because he believes it is the only way he can get Eddie to leave with them. During the escape the Captain is trying to clear a path for his unit to get out, and he is killed by a landmine. In heaven, the Captain teaches Eddie that sacrifice isn't the same as loss, but rather that it connects humans to one another and gives meaning to life. - Character: Rabozzo. Description: One of the men in Eddie's unit during the war. After the members of the unit are kidnapped by the enemy and forced to work in a coalmine, Rabozzo "keeps a poker face" during the days of their captivity, but screams at night. He catches a fever while working in the mine, and when he falls out of weakness, Crazy Two shoots him in front of everyone. To Eddie, Rabozzo's death signifies the meaninglessness and darkness of the war. - Character: Crazies One, Two, Three and Four. Description: The neurotic, desperate Filipino soldiers who kidnap Eddie and his unit during the war. As malnourished as Eddie and his men, the "Crazies" keep the unit for several months, eventually planning to work them to death in the mines. "Crazy Two" pitilessly kills the feverish Rabozzo in front of the rest of the unit. By distracting the "Crazies" with a game of juggling coal, Eddie leads his unit in a plot to kill all of their captors and escape. - Character: Ruby. Description: The third person Eddie meets in heaven, the woman for whom the first version of Ruby Pier was named. She is graceful, competent, and smart. Like the other women in the novel, she dedicates herself to caring for others: her husband Emile, her children, and in heaven, the souls of all the people hurt at Ruby Pier. Born years before Eddie, Ruby was the prettiest daughter in a working-class family. She was a young waitress at a diner by the ocean, where she became engaged to the rich Emile. Emile gave Ruby an extravagant life, and built Ruby Pier in dedication to her. After a fire destroyed the park and their wealth, they led a difficult life. Ruby's husband was later hospitalized in the same room as Eddie's dying father, allowing Ruby to witness Eddie's father's dying words of regret. In heaven, Ruby tells Eddie the true story of how his father died saving Mickey, and teaches him the lesson of forgiveness. - Character: Emile. Description: Ruby's husband, a young, handsome, risk-taking entrepreneur whose endeavors bring him great wealth. He is enthralled with glamour, money, the ocean, and Ruby herself. He pours his energy and money into building and maintaining Ruby Pier in dedication to his love for his young wife. When the first Ruby Pier burns to the ground, he is left crippled, financially ruined, and depressed. For the rest of his life, he is in and out of the hospital, and Ruby spends her life caring for him. - Character: Noel. Description: Eddie's friend during his thirties, Noel runs a laundry business. Noel is obsessed with the racetrack, and frequently influences Eddie to indulge with him in their shared gambling habit. Noel is with Eddie at the racetrack on the birthday when Marguerite gets into a car accident. From then on, Eddie gradually stops seeing Noel, as Noel becomes a reminder of Eddie's fault in causing Marguerite's accident. - Character: Tala. Description: Eddie's fifth person in heaven, a little Filipino girl who Eddie unknowingly kills while he and his unit are escaping captivity during the war. Tala is affectionate, trusting, and wise. Following her mother's instructions, Tala hides from Eddie and his men in one of the abandoned village huts. Thinking the huts are empty, Eddie and his unit set the village on fire to send for a rescue signal. Standing before one of the flaming huts, Eddie thinks he sees a small shadow move, but his unit forces him out before he can be sure. All his life, Eddie feels consumed by a darkness, and tries to convince himself nobody was in the hut. In heaven, Eddie is overcome with guilt to realize that the shadow he saw was Tala. Tala then teaches Eddie that he was supposed to be at Ruby Pier all along, keeping children safe to redeem himself for killing Tala. - Character: God. Description: God is only mentioned in four instances in the book. The first is when the Blue Man tells Eddie that the Five People in heaven are a gift from God to understand one's life on earth. The second is in reference to Eddie praying during the war, and ceasing to pray after Rabozzo is killed. The third when Eddie asks Marguerite if God knows he is in heaven, and Marguerite tells him, "of course." Finally, at the end of the novel, when Eddie travels peacefully through the sky to a Ferris wheel where Marguerite awaits him, he hears God saying, "Home." Though not directly mentioned through most of the novel, God's existence is implied in the design of heaven's colors and various rules. Tala's lesson that Eddie was "supposed to be there" at Ruby Pier also implies that God takes an active role in giving people opportunities for redemption. - Character: Narrator. Description: The novel is written from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Though the narrator is not a character in any of the stories, and never speaks in the first person, his (presumably the narrator is male because the author is, but this is never stated) frequent commentary about human nature and frequent interpretations of the actions of the characters give the narrator a strong, reflective voice. - Theme: Redemption and Forgiveness. Description: Throughout the novel, Eddie's encounters with the five people he meets in heaven teach him about the surprising ways in which life and death offer opportunities for redemption. He learns about the full extent of his own and others' transgressions, and consequently moves through anger, regret and forgiveness on his way to finding peace. The harm Eddie causes others is often unintentional, as his actions are full of unintended consequences. As a child, he unknowingly causes the Blue Man's death by carelessly running into the street to catch a lost ball. While escaping captivity as a soldier in the Philippines during World War II, Eddie unknowingly kills Tala, a little girl hiding in one of the huts that he and his men have set on fire. Later, Eddie spends his birthday gambling—against his wife's wishes—and on her way to stop him, Marguerite gets into a severe car accident, which drains their finances and her health. Consequently, Eddie and Marguerite are forced to cancel their plans to adopt a child—destroying Marguerite's chances of being a mother. In heaven, however, Eddie finds the opportunity to redeem himself for all of his transgressions against others, including those he didn't know he committed. Yet the novel also shows that many of Eddie's "sins" are just a part of being human, as everyone will hurt someone at some point. There aren't any real "good guys" and "bad guys"—Eddie has caused a lot of pain, yet he was also a hero. He took care of his sick mother and all the children at Ruby Pier, and his dying act was to save a little girl. Other characters, primarily male, also show this capability for both good and bad. Mickey O'Shea, the friend of Eddie's parents, was a loving and helpful part of Eddie's life in all of Eddie's memories. In heaven, however, Eddie learns that Mickey drunkenly tried to rape Eddie's mother, an act that led Eddie's father and Mickey into the fight that caused Eddie's father's death—while he was saving Mickey from an ocean storm. In heaven, Eddie meets Ruby, who explains the story of Eddie's father and Mickey. She urges Eddie to forgive Mickey, as well as to see his father's dying act of saving Mickey as evidence that he was capable of good. This is difficult, as Eddie's memory of his father is of the callous and violent man who abused him as a child and neglected him during his adulthood. Redemption can often come indirectly as well, the novel concludes. When Eddie meets Tala in heaven, she explains to him that by spending his life protecting the children on the rides at Ruby Pier, Eddie earned Tala's forgiveness. Tala shows her forgiveness by choosing to be the person who brings Eddie to heaven. Eddie's father, on the other hand, never apologizes to Eddie for his abusive, neglectful behavior—yet from Ruby's perspective, Eddie's father sought redemption in the end by saving Mickey, as well as calling out for Eddie on his deathbed. Ultimately Albom seems to conclude that sin and suffering are an inevitable part of life and human nature, and therefore the ability to redeem oneself and forgive others is both necessary and vital. - Theme: The Connection Between All Humans. Description: All the characters within the novel are connected in unexpected ways, even when their lives are separate and they don't ever meet on earth. Eddie barely remembers the Blue Man, and yet he caused his death and became a memorable part of the Blue Man's understanding of his own life on Earth. Eddie's time in the war was marked forever by his haunting memory of a shadow in the village fire he started, which he hoped wasn't a human. Yet in death, when he learns that the shadow was a little girl named Tala, and that he did kill her, he also learns that she was the one who saved him and brought him to heaven. Eddie never met Ruby during his life, as she was much older and they weren't directly related, but the amusement park where Eddie works all his life, Ruby Pier, was built for Ruby by her husband. Ruby feels connected to Eddie, as she was present in the shared hospital room when Eddie's father died. After Ruby died, she watched Eddie from heaven, and feels connected to the pain Eddie and others experienced at Ruby Pier, as she feels responsible for the park's existence. Another important thing Eddie learns about human connection is that connections made in life remain after death, through memory as well as the connection between heaven and earth. Eddie feels alone after the death of his wife, Marguerite, but when he meets her in heaven she compels him to see that their connection wasn't severed after death—only transformed. "Lost love," she tells him, "is still love." While Eddie's memories of his father's abuse haunt him throughout his life, his memories of his mother's love and warmth stay with him as well. Indeed, Eddie's memories of those he loves keep him company even after those loved ones have died. In this context, connections that seem insignificant take on great meaning. Eddie's relationship with his co-worker Dominguez may seem professional, but after Eddie's death, Dominguez is the person who best keeps Eddie's memory alive on Earth.An important part of the interconnectedness of human life is, Eddie learns, the necessity of sacrifice. If everyone is connected, then almost any action can cause suffering to someone else, but one's own suffering is also often a necessary part of helping someone else. The Blue Man doesn't lament that he died after trying to avoid crashing into Eddie, who ran in front of the Blue Man's car as a child. Rather, the Blue Man sees his death as a sacrifice that allowed Eddie to live. Similarly, the Captain doesn't regret dying while saving his unit from captivity, and he tells Eddie not to feel sorry for himself for losing his leg in the war. He tells him, "Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else." The Captain chooses to make his heaven the peaceful rejuvenation of the jungle battleground—as if heaven means knowing that his earthly sacrifices led to peace and new life for others. Making a sacrifice for someone else thus more deeply entwines the fate of the giver with the receiver, creating a special connection that survives even after death. - Theme: The Cycle of Life and Death. Description: Life and death are a continuous cycle, making birth and death different ends of the same spectrum of existence. Eddie's life story is told in intertwining vignettes, in which the beginning and end of his life melt together as if they were always happening at the same time. In heaven, the agelessness of characters like Marguerite, the Captain, Ruby, and Tala implies that birth and death are all happening at once from the viewpoint of eternity.In Albom's novel death isn't the end, but another kind of beginning. As the Captain explains to Eddie, people naively think that death is the end in the same way that the first man, Adam, may have thought that he was dying on the first night he went to sleep. Because existence on earth is all that people know, they fail to realize that death is a kind of sleep that ushers them into a new experience, a "tomorrow." The point of heaven, the Captain explains, is to have a place in which to deeply explore "your yesterday." In heaven, every character who has died experiences a new kind of existence. Highlighting that death is a mirror of life, Eddie goes through the same physical and emotional changes he experienced throughout his life on earth. When Eddie first arrives in heaven, he feels nimble like a child. Yet as he moves through the stages and meets the five people, he physically feels his body changing, as if it were aging again. He sees the skies changing color as he falls through each part of heaven, and he feels a whirl of emotions—sadness, love, peace, fear, joy—as he sees the colors change. At the end of the novel, he realizes these colors are all the emotions of his life.'Loss, represented by death, is an essential part of life that is pervasive throughout the novel. The pain of loss gives meaning to the things and people lost, highlighting how without death there is no shape to life. Eddie deeply mourns the loss of his leg, of his joy, and later of Marguerite. Yet his losses also give meaning to the things he has felt and had. By losing Marguerite, Eddie feels fully the weight of the love he had for her. And just as death is not really the end, neither is loss permanent—in heaven, Eddie regains his mobility, his joy, and Marguerite. - Theme: The Value in Ordinary Life. Description: Throughout the novel, Eddie struggles to see value in his life, which he sees as ordinary and filled with unmet dreams and plans. Having never left Ruby Pier to study engineering or make a life for himself elsewhere, he believes his life was devoid of accomplishment and therefore meaningless. But the novel, by describing the nuance and detail of every period of Eddie's life, shows the beauty inherent in all of the moments and relationships that make up that life, even those that appear mundane. The characters Eddie meets in heaven then teach him that his life had meaning and value from the moment he was born. Throughout the novel, human connection is the primary source of life's meaning. Eddie's love for his mother, his brother, and especially Marguerite animate him and give him a sense of connection. Every moment he shares with these characters stays with him as a treasured memory, creating beauty in his life. Even difficult memories and pain connect Eddie to others, as well as to his own sense of humanity. Routines, though they may seem boring or ordinary, can also give life shape and allow relationships to grow. Eddie's routine with Marguerite gives meaning to their life, and allows their love to heal back together after Marguerite's accident. Eddie's routine life working at Ruby Pier may bore him, but there is meaning in his routines. He becomes known as someone others can trust—both among children who visit the park and the men he works with, who miss him terribly when he dies.The novel also conveys the idea that all lives have value, even those that are unrecognized by others. Society often cruelly dehumanizes some of its members, and the existence of "circus freaks," like the Blue Man, highlights this tendency. Yet it is the Blue Man who teaches Eddie that "No life is a waste." From the outside, it might appear that the Blue Man's life was of little value, but on Ruby Pier the Blue Man found a sense of home and belonging, as he formed a community with other members of the circus and the recurring visitors.Sacrifice, Eddie learns from the Captain, is another element that gives life meaning. The Blue Man unintentionally sacrifices his life for Eddie when he swerves his car to avoid hitting Eddie. He tells Eddie that dying by sparing another's life is a worthy way to die. The Captain tells Eddie that Eddie's lost leg was a necessary sacrifice for saving his country. Rather than feeling embittered by the loss, he should be glad because sacrifice is worthy and important. Overall, Albom emphasizes the fact that even those parts of life that seem the most mundane or unpleasant do, in fact, have great value in the overarching scheme of things. - Theme: Time. Description: Time is used to mark significant moments and periods in Eddie's life, as well as to show the fluidity between life and death. Time is always moving forward, and yet by telling the story in out-of-order episodes, Albom creates the sense that time is not necessarily linear—particularly from the point of view of eternity and heaven.In between stories of Eddie's encounters with the five people in heaven, there are short snapshots from Eddie's life. Beginning with his birth, each of these sections is titled: "Today is Eddie's Birthday." By marking Eddie's birthdays in this way, the novel more clearly defines the changes in Eddie's life as he moves through time. The final chapter then strings together all of Eddie's birthdays after Marguerite's death to show how after losing his wife, Eddie's birthdays become increasingly lonely, and eventually he stops marking them at all. With all his loved ones gone, his life no longer feels differentiated, or worth taking note of as it progresses. Thus relationships appear to define time in some sense—without human connection, time becomes a more amorphous and incomprehensible.On earth (in the novel), there is the sense that time is always running out. The book begins by describing the hours before Eddie's death at the amusement park. Each new section of the first chapter begins by stating how many more minutes Eddie has to live: "Sixteen minutes left to live, Eddie…." or "Fourteen minutes before his death." When Eddie tries to save the little girl from the falling ride, he feels he is fighting against time, calculating minutes and seconds in his mind to see if he can make it. Yet in heaven, characters do not experience time. They wait for each other to join them in different parts of heaven without counting the time, and experiencing a kind of eternity—in which time is not linear, but exists all at once, similar to how Eddie is detached from time after death and can perceive the arc of his life as a whole. Without aging, night, day, or an external rhythm (no place to "be"), the characters experience their existence through memories and emotions in a dreamlike state. At the end of his journey through heaven, Eddie himself enters into this state, and eventually gets the endless time with Marguerite that he has always wanted. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: While gender roles are not directly discussed in the novel, strong differences exist between Albom's depictions of female and male characters, to the point that gender roles become an important theme. The primary difference in the portrayal of men and women is that the novel's female characters are nearly all defined by their relationships to male characters, while male characters are defined by their goals, occupations, and actions. Several male characters are mentioned as not having wives (like the Blue Man and Mickey Shea) or their potential wives or children are hardly mentioned (like with the Captain and Dominguez), whereas every adult female in the novel is described as some man's wife or mother (Marguerite, Eddie's mother, Ruby). To Marguerite, happiness is defined by her role as wife and bride, so much so that she chooses a heaven full of endless weddings around the world. Every depicted memory of Marguerite's life is in relation to her hopes and disappointments with Eddie, her husband. While Eddie's life contains many relationships and internal struggles that aren't associated with Marguerite, it appears that Marguerite's central defining relationship is with Eddie, and both her joys and struggles center around him. Female characters in the novel also exhibit similar traits—they tend to be nurturing, caring towards others, and preoccupied with children and husbands. Male characters, meanwhile, are more often preoccupied with achievements and actions. Eddie spends his life trying to leave Ruby Pier to make more of himself as an engineer, while his wife spends her life focusing on taking care of Eddie and trying, in vain, to bear children. In heaven, the Captain remembers battle and dedicating his life in service to his country, while the Blue Man remembers his struggle to escape poverty and find his place in society. Both Ruby and Marguerite, however, remember their struggles to find peace with their husbands. Another part of this gendered dichotomy is that females in the novel tend to be the victims of danger or violence, while males are the source of danger and violence. Eddie's mother comforted and loved him, whereas his father beat him and withheld affection. There are no instances of female characters causing pain or violence to other characters. Tala is the ultimate bystander of violence, as a female child killed in a war in which all the fighters are male. Marguerite gets into a terrible car accident while driving to save Eddie from his gambling addiction, and this accident is caused directly by teenage boys throwing glass bottles off a bridge, and indirectly by Eddie's reckless behavior. Mickey O'Shea attempts to rape Eddie's mother, and when Eddie's father walks in, he blames his wife and adds to her experience of violence by jerking her around. In heaven, Ruby tells Eddie the story of Mickey's attempted rape, but explains that Mickey deserved to be forgiven because he had done many good things to help Eddie's family. Ruby also encourages Eddie to forgive his father for physically and mentally abusing him as a child, as she shows Eddie that his father was capable of kindness. The principal female characters, however—Eddie's mother and Marguerite—don't need to seek redemption, as they never commit seriously hurtful or violent acts. Men are thus the only characters depicted as capable of both good and evil. Because of all this, it could be argued that Albom only truly humanizes his male characters, while his female characters remain flat, idealized, and locked into gender roles. - Climax: When Eddie realizes that the shadow he saw in the flaming hut during the war really was the little girl, Tala, and that he killed her. - Summary: The novel begins with a countdown to the death of Eddie, a crippled, elderly man who works in maintenance at Ruby Pier, a seaside amusement park. Eddie has always wanted to leave Ruby Pier to make a life for himself elsewhere, but has never been able to. While making his ordinary rounds one day, Eddie sees a cart on a ride called "Freddy's Free Fall" hanging and threating to dump out the ride-goers. Eddie quickly helps other workers get the people out, but then he notices that the cart is still falling—while a little girl, "Amy or Annie," stands below. Eddie goes to save her, and dies when the cart falls on him. Eddie goes to heaven, where he travels through many shifting colors until he meets the Blue Man, who was one of the "circus freaks" at Ruby Pier long ago. The Blue Man tells Eddie that in heaven, he will meet five important people who will each teach him a lesson about his life. The Blue Man explains that he turned blue as a child from medicinal silver nitrate, and led a lonely life thereafter. He explains that he died because of Eddie: when Eddie was a child, he once ran into the road after a lost ball, and the Blue Man had a heart attack after swerving to avoid hitting him. The Blue Man teaches Eddie the lesson of human connection—that all lives are connected, even those of strangers. Eddie again travels through the colors, and then arrives in a familiar jungle battleground. There, he meets the Captain. The novel flashes back to Eddie's youth, when he decides to enlist in World War II to prove his bravery. Stationed in the Philippines, Eddie and his unit are taken captive by enemy. Months later, they plan and execute an escape. While setting the village on fire, Eddie thinks he sees a small shadow moving in one of the huts, and tries to save the person. He is then shot in the leg and knocked unconscious. He comes home permanently crippled and bitter. In heaven, the Captain reveals that it was he who shot Eddie, trying to get him out of the fire. He also reveals that he died during the escape while trying to get his men out. Before leaving him, the Captain teaches Eddie that sacrifice is vital to life, and should be sought after rather than lamented. Eddie travels again, and lands outside of a diner in the mountains, where he sees his father in the window. The novel flashes back to Eddie's childhood, during which he grows up trying to win the love of his physically abusive, emotionally neglectful father. In heaven, a woman named Ruby appears, and tells Eddie that her husband, Emile, built Ruby Pier in her honor long ago. The first Ruby Pier burned down, ruining Emile's spirit and wealth. Emile was then in the hospital next to Eddie's father, who was dying. Ruby explains that Eddie's father died saving his friend Mickey Shea from drowning in an ocean storm, even though he had just caught Mickey trying to rape Eddie's mother. Ruby teaches Eddie the lesson of forgiveness, and Eddie lets go of his anger toward his father. Next, Eddie finds himself in a world of weddings, where he finds his wife, Marguerite. The novel flashes back to Eddie's life with Marguerite, from their courtship at Ruby Pier, to their humble wedding, to their attempts to have children. Eddie ruined their chances of adopting a child, after Marguerite got into a devastating car accident while trying to stop Eddie from gambling away all their money on his birthday. Margeurite eventually forgave him, but soon afterward she died from a brain tumor. Eddie is left feeling empty, as Marguerite had always been the primary source of his happiness in life, and she had given him the strength to fight through the darkness that consumed him after the war. In heaven, Marguerite spends a long time with Eddie. She teaches him that love transcends death. The novel flashes back through Eddie's birthdays after Marguerite dies, all of which are lonely and uneventful. Eddie spends his last years missing Marguerite and regretting that he never left Ruby Pier to make a life for himself elsewhere. He believes that his life was meaningless. In heaven, the last person Eddie meets is a little girl named Tala. She reveals that she was killed at Eddie's hands during the war—she was the small shadow Eddie saw moving in the flaming hut. Eddie falls into a deep despair, now believing that he deserved the darkness he felt all of his life. Tala then explains to Eddie that he redeemed himself, by keeping children safe through his maintenance job at Ruby Pier. Eddie finds peace, and travels through heaven until he reaches a Ferris wheel in the sky, where Marguerite awaits him.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Fly - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A London office, some time after the end of World War I - Character: The Boss. Description: The unnamed protagonist referred to exclusively as "the boss" is a successful London businessman and the former employer of Mr. Woodifield. The boss initially appears to be a man of action who has aged well, retaining a youthful countenance. He commands respect from all those around him, including Woodifield and the boss's loyal clerk, Macey. As the story unfolds, it is clear that the boss lost his son six years ago in World War I. Woodifield's reference to each of their son's graves unnerves the boss, as he is deeply affected by the memory of his beloved boy. After Woodifield's departure from the office, the boss reflects on his crushing loss but strangely finds himself unable to cry, even though the mere thought of his son would make him weep in years past. He quickly grows distracted by a fly floating in his ink pot and decides to torture it repeatedly until it dies, all the while barking at it to "look sharp" and be resilient. At the story's conclusion, the boss suddenly transforms into a nervous and forgetful character who echoes Woodifield's frailties. - Character: Woodifield. Description: The elderly Mr. Woodifield visits his former employer, the boss, every Tuesday in London for company. Having retired following a stroke, Woodifield is a trembling, forgetful, dim-eyed and shrunken man who spends most of his days stuck in the house and being bossed around by his wife and daughters. He admires how the boss, who is five years his senior, has somehow maintained his youthful vigor despite his age. The boss gains great satisfaction from Woodifield's weekly visit, as his unreliable memory means the boss can regularly boast of his new office furnishings. However, on this occasion, Woodifield's unexpected declaration that his daughters were recently in Belgium to visit his son Reggie's grave unsettles the boss. Woodifield's ramblings trigger internal conflict for the boss, as Woodifield's reference to the boss's son's own well-kept grave forces the boss to grapple with the painful repercussions of the war six years later. - Character: The Boss's Son. Description: The boss's only child and heir to the business. The boy's death during World War I results in the boss's loss of assured business succession—something the boss centered his whole life purpose around. Beyond considering the boy's death, the boss does not share many details about his son, except that he undertook a year-long apprenticeship at the office where he was popular with the boss's employees. The boss's son's grave is in Belgium near that of Woodifield's son, Reggie. - Theme: Consequences of War. Description: Katherine Mansfield presents numerous consequences of war in "The Fly," especially touching on loss, grief and change as resulting experiences. In 1922, when Katherine Mansfield wrote the story, Britain was recovering from its involvement in the brutal horrors of World War I. The narrative itself takes place in a London office about six years after the war, where the unnamed protagonist, the boss, speaks with his former employee, the elderly Mr. Woodifield. Both men lost their sons in combat, and Woodifield's reference to their sons' well-kept graves forces the boss to grapple with the painful repercussions of the war six years later. The theme of warfare and its lasting repercussions impacts Mansfield's narrative at personal and societal levels: the boss's memory of his deceased son highlights his anxieties around business succession and mortality, while also commenting on Britain's transformed gender dynamics in post-World War I Britain and critiquing national authorities' decisions to send their youth into armed conflict. The brutalities of World War I intrude into the boss's orderly London office through multiple channels, including a physical photograph, vividly haunting memories, and Mansfield's use of militaristic language. In this way, Mansfield presents the effects of war as being inescapable, even six years later. A photograph in the office of "a grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers' parks with photographers' storm-clouds behind him" sharply reminds the boss of his familial loss. The photograph's physical materiality contrasts with the son's absence, signaled by ghostly adjectives such as "spectral" and "grave-looking." The aftermath of war also intrudes into the boss's professional life through Woodifield's unexpected declaration that his daughters "were in Belgium last week having a look at poor Reggie's grave, and they happened to come across your boy's. They're quite near each other, it seems." This well-meaning comment triggers a landslide of memories for the boss, who isolates himself in his workspace to reflect on his grief during the months and years following his son's death. Mansfield also signals the lasting impact of warfare through the militant language peppered throughout the story, which suggests that the effects of the war are inescapable for both the reader and the boss. Office phrases such as "charged her" and "dodged in and out of his cubbyhole" are suggestive of soldiers' movements in the field. The boss "at the helm" of his business issuing directives to his staff (and snapping at them to "look sharp about it") evokes naval military leadership. The boss also describes terrible news as "crashing about his head," gesturing to the unpredictable risk and chaos of warfare. Mansfield also references the violent capabilities of a sword or bayonet when the boss kills a fly in his office with a letter opener: the boss "flipped the Financial Times with a paper knife," "cocked an eye," "plunged his pen back into the ink" and "lifted the corpse [of the fly] on the end of the paper-knife and flung it into the waste-paper basket," as if it were a casualty of war. The boss's anxieties regarding his business's legacy and his own mortality demonstrate impacts of war at a personal level. In losing his only son to war, the boss also loses the heir to his business. The boss claims that his son and the assured succession of his business were the precious driving forces in his life. The boss's encounters with death (as he reflects on his son before torturing a fly in his office) cause him to experience a "grinding feeling of wretchedness." Realities of the casualties of war and bodily decomposition also disturb his psyche. The thought of Woodifield's daughters peering down into his son's grave is particularly painful for the boss; imagining the grave from Woodifield's daughters' perspective somehow makes the boss confront the morbid reality of his son's state, overriding previous sugar-coated sentiments of his son lying "unblemished" and peacefully "asleep forever." The boss's discomfort furthermore highlights his deep anxieties surrounding mortality and impermanence. The boss's personal struggles with his legacy and mortality, alongside his cruel treatment of a fly that happens to fall into his inkpot, also point more broadly to the devastating consequences of war at a societal level. The boss's drowning of a fly in ink on his blotting paper suggests the sadism and brutality of warfare. Mansfield's personification of the fly with its "little front legs" "waving" in a "cry for help" suggests the enormity of Britain's terrible loss of its sons. The fly's drawn-out suffering additionally speaks to the lasting psychological consequences of warfare for survivors and their loved ones. Many war veterans suffer psychological responses to their experiences of intense traumatic events, the most common of which is now defined as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (a term that became widely used after the Vietnam War). The fly's ongoing encounters with intense distress parallels soldiers' experiences of the stressful conditions of war, followed by psychological responses that society struggled to understand after World War I. Woodifield's deteriorating mental and physical health, perhaps a response to his son's death, further echoes this issue of trauma. Meanwhile, Britain's post-World War I workforce dynamics shifted, as a generation of missing male youth disturbed traditional gender roles. Female control of the infirm Woodifield's daily schedule signifies these changes. Mansfield also challenges patriarchal authority through the boss's and Woodifield's physical and mental frailties. Mansfield characterizes Woodifield as a trembling, dim-eyed, shrunken man with a "chill old brain" who regularly experiences memory loss. By the story's conclusion, she comparably describes the boss as nervous and sweating at his own memory's failures. "The Fly" can therefore be read as a moralistic story that questions the ethics of warfare at personal and societal levels. Mansfield exposes the cruelties and brutalities of war on its participants, through a focus on the consequences back home where personal grief and a crisis of gender identities threaten to overwhelm social order. Mansfield injects warfare into a London office to perhaps suggest that war is a type of business transaction. She thereby critiques national authorities' seemingly callous decisions to involve their citizens in armed conflict. - Theme: Performances of Masculinity. Description: "The Fly's" unnamed protagonist, the boss, commands respect and obedience from the story's small cast of characters. Despite the loss of his only son (and heir to the company) to the recent World War I, the boss heads up a successful business in London and projects a traditionally masculine image of a family man and strong business leader of commendable character. By the story's conclusion, however, Katherine Mansfield suggests that the boss is actually an objectionable individual driven by the desperate desire for power and masculine superiority. A sudden reminder of his late son destabilizes the boss's behavior, leading him to sadistically torture the story's titular fly in his office. This contrast between the boss's initial and concluding characterizations—and the fact that a mention of his son spurs this dramatic shift—implies that the boss performs a masculine identity in order to avoid the extreme emotional toll of his son's death. Initially, the boss seems to be a family man and a strong, fair leader worthy of respect. The boss perceives himself as a superior man of action, likened to a ship's captain "still going strong, still at the helm" of his company. Macey, the clerk, demonstrates the way the boss commands respect; he obliges the boss's every request, respectfully referring to him as "sir." The boss's elderly former employee, Mr. Woodifield, also appears to greatly respect the boss and admire his strong leadership—especially considering the boss is five years his senior. The boss also has a portrait of his late son in his office, which has earned a spot on the table for six straight years, suggesting that the boss is a loyal and loving father. However, as the story unfolds, the boss increasingly appears to be a hyper-masculine man whose power hinges on demonstrating his power and superiority to others. For instance, the boss constantly names his former employee "old Woodifield" despite Woodifield being five years younger than him. He also repeatedly refers to his current employee, Macey, as a "dog" who is eager to follow his master's bidding. The boss even refers to a fly in his office as a "little beggar," displaying classism in response to the fly's call for help as it drowns in ink. The boss also revels in a ritualistic show of wealth to the elderly and forgetful Woodifield as a means to assert his superiority and power. Each week, the boss points out the changes in his office that symbolize luxury and power. New furnishings including the "massive bookcase," "bright red carpet with a pattern of large white rings" and "table with legs like twisted treacle" are impressive in their grandeur. The boss boasts rare post-war food items such as sausages and whiskey, and Mansfield employs adjectives such as "pearly" and "glowing" to enrich office objects with treasure-like status. The boss enjoys showing off these treasures; he gains social standing by demonstrating wealth and providing rare goods to his chosen beneficiaries, consequently buying their loyalty, obedience, and respect. Rather than resulting from strength of character, the boss puts on a performance of masculinity as a way to avoid his son's death and regain control in his life. The boss's constant verbal directives and physical control of all other characters demonstrates his desperate need to feel a sense of command. The boss refrains from sentimental thoughts about his son throughout the story, offering no detail about the boy except for his business apprenticeship and death at war. To consider more tender family bonds goes against traditional masculine expectations and could be deemed weak and effeminate. Furthermore, the boss desperately tries control all reminders of his son on his terms, which is why Woodifield's remarks about their sons' graves shocks him so greatly. At the startling reminder of his son's death, the boss clears his calendar for half an hour, as "he wanted, he intended, he had arranged to weep…." The boss's inability to weep—and demand for total privacy just in case he does cry—cleaves to the strong and unemotional image of masculinity. It allows the boss to remove himself from the intense feeling of his son's loss, which appears to have not lessened with time. Instead of giving into sadness, the boss is compelled to establish absolute power over his immediate environment, even down to the minute detail of an insect (the titular fly) in his domain. In repeatedly dosing the fly in ink, the boss attempts to resume his performance of masculinity, where he is unemotional (he yells at the fly to "Stay sharp!" once it starts looking weak) and wholly superior and dominant (he has the power to decide if the fly lives or dies and ultimately kills it). In "The Fly," Mansfield thereby reveals the boss as a power-hungry individual who performs displays of masculine superiority. Mansfield forces the reader to consider the decidedly strong and unemotional masculinity that British society in 1922 expected of successful fathers and businessmen. The boss's cruel torture of the fly exposes his weak character to readers. Readers can view this collapse of character as a direct result of war's extreme trauma; Mansfield additionally reveals the impossibility of post-war society's expectations of masculinity. - Theme: Memory. Description: "The Fly," set about six years after World War I, opens with a man named Woodifield who returns to a London office for his weekly social visit with his former employer, the boss. During the visit, Woodifield—an elderly, frail, and forgetful man—becomes increasingly frustrated that he cannot remember a key detail he wants to share with the boss. Mansfield plays Woodifield's infirmity against the boss's youthful vigor as he commands attention in the office. However, after Woodifield finally remembers what he wanted to say—that their sons' graves are near each other—the boss increasingly appears to be a vulnerable individual who also struggles with memory loss. As the story unfolds, Mansfield suggests that the boss and Woodifield intentionally and subconsciously use forgetfulness to cope with the deaths of their sons at war—a tactic that is ultimately unsatisfying for the both of them. Intentional forgetfulness and avoidance allows the boss to largely escape the emotional burden of his son's death. The boss attempts to control the grief of remembering his son; although he's kept a portrait of his son in his office for the past six years, the boss steers other people away from addressing his son's death in order to remember on his terms only. For instance, when pointing out significant furnishings in the office on one of their Tuesday get-togethers, the boss "did not draw old Woodifield's attention to the photograph over the table of a grave-looking boy in uniform." Later, the boss's sudden horror at killing a fly—thereby recognizing the cruel realities of his son's death—produces an almost deliberate experience of amnesia. After Woodifield makes a well-meaning but unwelcome comment about their sons' deaths, the boss tortures a fly to death and disposes of its body in a wastepaper basket, upon which "such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt positively frightened." He rings for Macey, the clerk, to bring him fresh blotting paper to remove all evidence of drowning the fly in ink on his desk. Immediately after this instruction, the boss nervously mops himself with his handkerchief and "fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it?" It is unclear whether he feigns forgetfulness or is truly at a loss to remember that he was just thinking about his son's death; regardless, this moment allows the boss to sidestep his grief. Woodifield and the boss's struggles with memory loss show that life without memory—even painful memories—is empty and unsatisfying. The story opens with Woodifield's failure to remember something he wanted to tell the boss (that their sons' graves are near each other) and closes with the boss's lapse of memory as he forgets what was just troubling him (thoughts about his late son). This mirroring effect sets up the idea that both men's forgetfulness is a means of escaping the horror of their sons' deaths. Woodifield's limited memory, resulting from a stroke (perhaps induced by his son Reggie's untimely death), makes him feel trapped at home where his wife and daughters fuss over him and dictate his day-to-day life. Because of his memory loss, Woodifield also loses his independence and connection with the outside world, which leads to an unsatisfying existence. The story's concluding lines relate the boss's own sudden amnesia. The boss tries to recall the reason for his anxiety previous to instructing Macey to bring fresh blotting paper to his office, but it turns out that "for the life of him he could not remember." The statement poses a bigger question for readers: what is life without memory? For the boss, life becomes insubstantial without meaningful memories of his son. He attempts to fill this void by placing superficial value on his business success and his material possessions (which he points out proudly to visitors), simultaneously keeping grief at arm's length. In "The Fly," Mansfield calls attention to functioning memory as a crucial foundation for a meaningful life. The boss's and Woodifield's avoidance of painful memories alongside genuine forgetfulness protects them from the overwhelming grief of their sons' unnatural deaths, but simultaneously empties their lives of meaning and satisfaction. Particularly leaning on the boss's failures of memory after killing the titular fly, Mansfield ultimately suggests that it is worth dealing with painful memories in order to lead a fulfilling life. - Climax: Upon killing a fly in his office, the boss experiences a moment of crushing misery that frightens him. - Summary: Two elderly men, the boss and Mr. Woodifield, are in the midst of their regular Tuesday social catch up at the boss's office in London. Having retired after a stroke, Woodifield enjoys visiting his former workplace to converse with the boss; this is the one activity in which his well-meaning wife and daughters still allow him independence. As with most of these weekly visits, the boss takes great satisfaction in pointing out his luxurious new office furnishings to the forgetful Woodifield. Woodifield meanwhile greatly admires the youthful vigor of the boss, who is five years his senior but as energetic as ever. As the men chat, Woodifield struggles to remember a specific detail that he wanted to tell the boss. The boss pities "old Woodifield's" frailties and offers him whiskey to cheer him up. Woodifield finally remembers that he wanted to tell the boss about his daughters' recent trip to Belgium, where they came across the boss's son's grave when visiting their brother Reggie's resting place. This reference to his son's death six years prior in World War I terribly shocks the boss, although he does not let on to Woodifield. After Woodifield departs, the boss locks himself in his office after instructing his elderly clerk, Macey, that he is not to be disturbed for the next half hour. He plans to weep for his son, but is disturbed to find that he can no longer shed tears of grief as he did in previous years. The boss spends some time recalling how he developed a successful business for his son to inherit, but these succession plans were destroyed upon his son's premature death. The boss becomes further unsettled by the strangeness of his son's face when he considers his likeness in a photograph. A fly drowning in his inkpot distracts the boss from his thoughts. Using a pen to rescue the fly, the boss shakes it onto a piece of blotting paper and watches it diligently clean the ink from its wings and face. Before it can take to the air, the boss drops a heavy blot of ink onto the fly to see how it will react. The boss is impressed by the fly's courage in dragging itself through the laborious task of re-cleaning itself. The boss then proceeds to continue torturing the fly, repeatedly submerging it in ink until it drowns on his desk, all the while yelling at it to "look sharp" and stay strong in the face of adversity. The boss disposes of the fly's body in a waste paper basket, upon which he feels such a moment of deep misery that he becomes frightened. Quickly ringing a bell for Macey, the boss demands the clerk bring him fresh blotting-paper at once. When Macey leaves, the boss suddenly cannot remember what topic he was thinking about prior to ringing for Macey. He nervously mops himself with his handkerchief, unable to remember what had just been bothering him so much.

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: The Fun They Had - Point of view: Third-Person Limited - Setting: The year 2155 at Margie's house - Character: Margie. Description: Margie is the 11-year-old protagonist of the story and a friend of Tommy's. The third-person-limited point of view is filtered through her childlike innocence and curiosity. Margie is a curious girl who is constantly asking questions and wanting to be around other people. This personality may account for her recent poor performance in her fact-based and passive geography lessons; Margie seems to crave an education that is interactive, engaging, and involved other people, but this vision is incompatible with her computerized and individualized model of education. In particular, she longs to be around other children her age—hence her constantly hanging around Tommy and dreaming of how fun it would have been to attend school with a whole neighborhood of children—but instead she's forced to sit alone in the schoolroom in her house, day after day, watching a computer screen talk at her. Margie is also a highly imaginative child, as evidenced by her ability to picture historical scenes from Tommy's old book about schools from many centuries ago. After reading through the ancient book and learning about the ways of the past, Margie loses herself in her imagination, envisioning what it would be like to be a student hundreds of years ago and dreaming of "the fun they had." - Character: Tommy. Description: Tommy is Margie's 13-year-old friend who finds an extremely old book in his attic, complete with wrinkly, yellowing pages. Although Tommy shares the book with Margie and helps her understand how the schools of the past functioned, he finds Margie's extreme enthusiasm and constant questions annoying and naïve. He frequently condescends to her, sometimes going to far as laughing in her face and calling her stupid for not knowing as much as he does about the world. He's also arrogant: when Margie remarks that a human man couldn't possibly be a teacher and know as much as their mechanical teachers, Tommy haughtily declares that his father knows "almost as much." As he's two years older, he also tries to act nonchalant in front of Margie—like noncommittally answering "Maybe" when Margie asks if they can read together after school—which is a sharp contrast from Margie's unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm. - Character: County Inspector. Description: The County Inspector is a mechanic who fixes Margie's mechanical teacher when the lessons are too difficult for her. He is described as a "round little man with a red face and whole box of tools with dials and wires." Although he is just the repairman, he has a level of empathy and understanding that the mechanical teacher does not and actually seems to be exactly what Margie needs in an educator. He understands that the lesson is too difficult for Margie and adjusts it accordingly to the appropriate level, making sure to still encourage Margie so that she doesn't feel like a failure. He also has an emotional warmth that Margie's computerized teacher lacks. While the mechanical teacher—which is a "large and black and ugly" screen—just bombards Margie with test after test, the County Inspector smiles pleasantly, pats Margie on the head, and communicates with both Margie and her mother about Margie's work in the classroom. Besides showing the drawbacks of technological progress on a social and emotional level, the role of the County Inspector also suggests that even though the story's futuristic society relies on computers, these machines are not autonomous and are still maintained by humans. - Character: Margie's Mother / Mrs. Jones. Description: Mrs. Jones is Margie's mother. She expects Margie to succeed in her education and is disappointed when Margie has difficulties with her geography lessons. From the "sorrowful" look on her face, it seems that Mrs. Jones sees calling the County Inspector to reprogram the mechanical teacher as a mark of Margie's failure as a student. Mrs. Jones strongly believes in the mechanical teacher's ability to teach each child individually and keeps Margie to a strict school schedule. - Theme: Technological Progress and Education. Description: In "The Fun They Had," Asimov constructs a futuristic world in the year 2155, in which traditional school has been replaced with a computerized homeschooling system. The story follows an 11-year-old girl named Margie who is mystified by the "very old book" about school that her friend Tommy found. With young and curious Margie as the story's protagonist, Asimov allows questions of technological progress to be filtered through a lens of innocence. Although treated with naiveté and frankness, Asimov's story is a warning about the power of technological progress. In detailing this futuristic, computerized, and highly individualized educational system, the story suggests that technological progress can have major drawbacks, especially in the realm of education and social development: such a system is impersonal and minimizes human connection, which can be isolating and unproductive for students. For Margie and Tommy, going to school means sitting alone in a room in their respective houses while staring at a television screen that mechanically transmits information at a computer-set pace—a system that is meant to be individualized and efficient. However, by contrasting human teachers with computers and artificial intelligence, Asimov suggests that such high-tech learning isn't so efficient after all. In the story, students are taught individually by machines that can be adjusted by a human mechanic to meet each child's specific learning needs. However, while the computers are individualized, they aren't very personal; the robotic teachers lack human emotion and the ability to connect and support the student on a personal level. Instead, they're just "big screen[s] on which all the lessons [are] shown and the questions [are] asked." For instance, when Margie begins "doing worse and worse" in geography, the mechanical teacher can't sit down with her and talk candidly about what she's specifically struggling with or what other learning techniques might be helpful for her. Instead, it just gives her "test after test," all of which she does poorly on. It gets so bad that Margie's mother has to call the County Inspector, who is the mechanic that manually reprograms mechanical teachers and sets their pace for each individual student. Although Asimov constructs futuristic education as being based on artificial intelligence, it is paradoxical that a human must come and fix Margie's computerized teacher. Because the technology itself—the mechanical computer—doesn't have the ability to personalize itself to each student in the way that the human Inspector can, it seems that technological progress doesn't necessarily lead to the more efficient and individualized education it strives to create. However, when talking to Tommy about the kind of old-fashioned education that's detailed in Tommy's "very old book," Margie expresses disbelief that a human could ever effectively teach students, saying bluntly, "A man can't know as much as a [mechanical] teacher." This is an important part of the point that Asimov is making: although it is true that a human being could never store and be able to recall as much raw data as a computer, a mechanical teacher lacks the ability to interact with students in the way that someone like the County Inspector can. With this, Asimov is providing an early but now familiar critique of the computer age: in exchange for a wealth of knowledge, society has traded more familiar and nourishing forms of human engagement. The old book about school also pinpoints the lack human connection in computerized education when it comes to relationships among students. In contrasting the way students used to engage with one another versus the way they do in the story's futuristic setting, Asimov emphasizes how technological progress can isolate humans from social interaction and replace fun and curiosity with efficiency and detachment. In the story, Margie's interaction with other children is limited to occasionally playing with her friend Tommy. While discussing Tommy's old book, Margie finds it difficult to believe that there could have been a time where children were taught in groups, because this contrasts so heavily with the individualized learning, she is familiar with. Asimov is suggesting here that although computers can present more information more quickly, such an approach perhaps deprives children of the important social experience of school. At the end of the story, Margie daydreams of the fun that her grandfather's grandfather had when he was a boy, back when "all the kids from the whole neighborhood" flocked to the schoolyard every day, "laughing and shouting"—a situation that couldn't be more different from the lonely way in which Margie learns. In this old-fashioned education, children "learned the same things, so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it." Even though school in the old days is not individualized, students had the ability to learn from each other, which is another—perhaps richer—layer to education that Margie's current system lacks. On the surface, "The Fun They Had" is a simplistic, children's story, yet Asimov also provides a serious warning that technological progress is not always social progress. The story clearly indicates the problems with computerized educational systems, including the lack of social interaction with other children, impersonal teachers and learning environments, and the inability for artificial intelligence to actively engage students in the learning process. Although the reader might imagine computerized learning to be more fun than traditional school, Asimov's story critiques this notion by illustrating the downsides of such an approach. - Theme: Books and Preservation of the Past. Description: Even though "The Fun They Had" takes place in a futuristic world where computerized technology is the basis of education and society, Asimov's story also expresses the importance of the preservation of the past. The "very old book" that the children find is not simply a book, but a valuable historical document or archival object; the book is both a primary source and record of times gone by. Through the children's fascination with the old book that Tommy finds in his attic—plus the fact that the book is still intact hundreds of years after the switch to digital books—the author argues that traditional paper-bound books are powerful because of the way they incite curiosity and preserve former times. Asimov asserts that the preservation of the past is an important key to knowledge and curiosity, suggesting that learning about history also enhances understanding of the present. The story centers around the idea of preservation; the ancient book contains some sort of story or information about old-fashioned schools (present-day schools for the reader), while the book's form—a traditional book with paper pages and inked words—preserves a slice of history in a time where books have all gone digital. Tommy and Margie's description of the book reflects its age and how different it is from their computerized book. The book is a remnant of the past with its "yellow and crinkly" pages with "words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to—on a screen." The children cannot comprehend why the words within a print book are stationary. Perhaps, Asimov is asserting the durable quality of print to preserve not only the words on the page, but also the stories and lessons from the past. It's also fitting that Tommy finds the book in his attic. The attic is a space of preservation—where Tommy's family has stored relics of the past so that those objects can be dusted off and revisited again someday. Even though the children claim to find the book strange, they also find it incredibly intriguing and valuable, pointing to the idea that the preservation of the past and the printed word both have a unique ability to incite curiosity. The children are enthralled by the book, and although they find past education "funny," they want to continue to read and learn about the past. When Margie's mom tells her that it is time for school, Margie responds "not yet" with haste and asks Tommy if she can continue reading the book after school. Margie's curiosity grows as she continues to think about the book and the history of education, leading her to daydream and even be distracted from her math lesson. Because of the contents of the book, Margie's now longs for the schools of the past where children learn and play together: "she was thinking about the old schools [...] all the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day." Meanwhile, the mechanical teacher drones on about fractions, unaware that Margie's attention has been captivated by something else. Margie's daydream, evoked by the book and history, stands in direct contrast to the computer's stale math lesson that fails to engage Margie, spark her imagination, or encourage her to think critically. Thus, the book's evocation of the past speaks to the power of the preservation of history and the printed word to lead to wonder, curiosity, and a longing for times gone by. Although the book is the most notable historical document in the story, oral tales and stories passed on by family members from generation to generation also play a role in preserving the past. The book belongs to Tommy's family and has likely been passed on from one generation to another for centuries. Through this handoff, the story implies that family is important for preserving the past, as Tommy wouldn't have had access to the "very old book" without many generations before him preserving a piece of history for him later discover. Orality also plays a role in "The Fun They Had," as Margie's family has passed down verbal stories of the past: "Margie's grandfather once said that when he was a little boy, his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper." With this, Asimov asserts that family plays a special role in passing down stories in order to preserve the past and nurture awareness and imagination. Asimov's story itself preserves the past, enfolding into its pages the spirit of the 1950s. The story encapsulates the burgeoning technological developments of the time and the growing awareness of a possible future that is dominated by technology—a future that could replace the printed word and the importance of preserving the past, history, and the stories that humankind tells. Although the computer technology in the story is outdated from the computers that contemporary readers are familiar with, "The Fun They Had" is a warning that as the future increasingly relies on technological progress and becomes more digitized, it is extremely important to preserve the past to cultivate imagination and curiosity and to continue to learn from history. - Theme: Gratitude and Wanting. Description: The central arc of "The Fun They Had" focuses on Margie learning about the schools and education of the past, leading to her wishing for a school in which she could learn and have fun with other children. Through Margie's longing to experience school the way her ancestors did many years ago, Asimov suggests that it's natural for people to want what they don't have, but that people should try to be grateful for all of the things that are good about their situation and actively work to change what's not. By reading the book about old education systems, Margie becomes acutely aware of all her computerized school lacks. She takes up a "grass is greener" mentality, assuming that school in the old days was much better than the kind of computerized learning she's subjected to now. At the beginning of the story, Margie is adamant that she hates school. Once she learns about old-fashioned schools from Tommy's "very old book," she becomes sensitized to all the things her school is missing, which are contributing to her hatred of it. She wishes she could have a school system with a real teacher and play with "all the kids from the whole neighborhood" and learn "sitting together in the schoolroom"—a situation that contrasts sharply with Margie's solo learning in front of a computer screen. Another reason that Margie hates her mechanical school is because of the computer's inability to engage her emotionally and understand when she is struggling: "Margie always hated school, but now she hated it more than ever. The mechanical teacher had been giving her test after test in geography and she had been doing worse and worse." She despises the mechanical, information-driven system that she is accustomed to and yearns for the comradery of human teachers and peers, which she learns about through the old book, to help her. Through Margie's growing contempt for her current situation, Asimov not only suggests that it is natural for people to want what they do not have, but also natural for people to dream and imagine what seems to be missing and of what is an essential part of society and education—in the case of the story, social development, emotional engagement, and human interaction. Although Margie is adamant in her hatred towards computerized education and yearns for the schools of the past, Tommy and Margie also remain grateful for the benefits of their schooling system and work in small ways to change what they don't like, whether they realize it or not. Margie and Tommy are well aware of the benefit of abundance produced by their computers and televisions. Tommy in particular is grateful that is television can hold "a million books" and that "it's good for plenty more." Even though they are fascinated by the "very old book" and the old-fashioned schools it speaks of, the kids are able to find bright spots in their own situations. Furthermore, even though Margie and Tommy do not get to learn with other children and do not usually learn from real books, the two children pore over the ancient book and spend time together to infuse some elements of old-school learning into their lives. This is a small way for the two kids to actively change their situation and align it more closely with the type of engaged, communal education that Margie in particular longs for. The moral of Asimov's story is neatly summed up in the age-old adage "the grass is always greener on the other side," suggesting that it is human nature to both desire what one doesn't have and be grateful for what one does. And while Asimov indicates that no education system is completely perfect—and thus that Margie has a right to wish her situation was different—he also shows the value in being appreciative for what one does have. Indeed, Margie's hatred for school will perhaps resonate with some readers, but her longing for the education system of days gone by—that is, the type of school modern readers are familiar with—may remind readers that they perhaps have things better than they realize. - Climax: - Summary: "The Fun They Had" takes place in the year 2155 where traditional school has been replaced by individualized, mechanical teachers and computerized learning. Children learn and read on television and computer screens and print books are seemingly absent and unfamiliar to this futuristic society. In her diary, 11-year-old Margie writes that her 13-year-old friend Tommy found a real book. Margie feels extremely excited and shocked by the prospect of reading a real, old-fashioned book and quickly becomes intrigued by this peculiar, ancient object. Tommy shares the book with Margie and the two children read and examine the very old book together. Margie remembers that her grandfather once told her about how his grandfather would read books printed on paper, just like this one. The book's pages are still intact after many years but are yellow and crinkly. The children are accustomed to computers that scroll through text and hold many different eBooks, so the immobile words within the printed book are baffling to them. They wonder if the printed book is supposed to be thrown away once it has been read. Tommy tells Margie that he found the book in his attic, and that it's about school. At first, Margie doesn't understand why anyone would write about school because she hates it so much: her mechanical teacher is too difficult for her, and she hates doing her homework in punch code. One time when her geography lesson was too challenging for her, the County Inspector had to come and reprogram her teacher. Margie's mother was disheartened that her daughter was doing so poorly in school, but the County Inspector was compassionate and understanding, and explained that sometimes the computers are geared to be too quick. Margie asks Tommy why anyone would want to write about school. Tommy believes Margie is too naïve and explains to her that school from many centuries ago was extremely different that their computerized school. Margie is shocked to learn that in the old schools, the teacher was a human and not a computer. The children question if a human knows enough to be a teacher, but Tommy concludes that his father knows just as much as any teacher. Continuing to read the book, the children also discover that in the olden days, all children went to a special building to learn and learned the same thing if they were the same age. At first, Margie doesn't understand because her mother always says that education has to be individualized for each boy and girl; however, Margie and Tommy realize that the fun of the old schools was that students got to learn together, and that education wasn't just about learning facts, but also social interaction and human connection. Margie's mother interrupts the children before they're done with the book because it's time for school. Margie asks Tommy if she can read the book with him later, and he responds nonchalantly with a maybe. Margie goes into her schoolroom, but she is still thinking about the book, filled with curiosity, daydreaming about all the kids playing and laughing in the schoolyard, sitting together in the classroom, going home with each other after school to play and help each other with their homework, and the teacher who is a real, live human. The mechanical teacher begins to drone on about fractions while Margie descends further into her imagination, fantasizing how in the old days, kids must have loved school, and she wonders about all the fun the students used to have.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Furnished Room - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Lower West Side, New York City - Character: Young Man. Description: The young man is a steadfast and hopeful newcomer to New York. He is deeply in love with Eloise Vashner, a girl from his hometown, and he has come to New York City in hopes of finding her. As the story begins, the young man has spent five months searching New York for Eloise. He knows Eloise dreams of being in show business, so he has visited every theatre he can to find her, from famous venues to sketchy, rundown music halls. His search for Eloise has led him throughout New York without a stable home, so he rents furnished rooms as he moves around the city. He continues his search despite five months without success, and when he moves into a new furnished room in the Lower West Side, he asks the housekeeper if Eloise ever rented a room there. When the housekeeper tells him no, the young man rests in his room, observing the traces of past tenants scattered around him. The many sounds and smells of the city distract him, and his thoughts are aimless until he smells the herb mignonette, which is Eloise's favorite perfume. The young man reacts to the smell as if Eloise has called out to him, and he becomes convinced that she has been in the room before him. He searches the room for something of hers, but finds nothing. Still hopeful, the young man runs to the housekeeper and asks again if Eloise has ever stayed in the house. When the housekeeper again tells him no, his excitement vanishes. He returns to the room, where the smell of mignonette has been replaced with the smell of rotting furniture, and this final blow to his hope kills the young man's last bit of faith in finding Eloise. He blocks up the windows and doors, turns off the light, and turns up the gas of the lamp to kill himself. - Character: Housekeeper. Description: The housekeeper, who is named Mrs. Purdy, is the landlady of the house where the young man rents his room. The young man dislikes the housekeeper as soon as he meets her, reflecting that she resembles a worm that has hollowed out her home and seeks to devour the lodgers she lures inside. This impression is not altogether inaccurate: the housekeeper sees her residents as sources of income rather than as people. She discusses Eloise Vashner's suicide in the furnished room as a threat to her business instead of a personal tragedy, and she refuses to reveal Eloise's past presence in the house to the young man because it might cause him to reject the room. Even when the young man asks about Eloise, she conceals the truth and diverts the conversation to present her house as respectable. She frequently interrupts conversations to emphasize that a couple who stayed in one room had a marriage certificate, and to boast of the famous vaudeville stars who have rented from her. The housekeeper acts throughout the story as a representative of urban capitalism, acting solely to benefit her business of letting rooms. At the end of the story, her friend Mrs. McCool asserts that renting rooms is how women like the housekeeper stay alive, suggesting that the housekeeper is controlled by the same capitalist systems that cause her selfishness. - Character: Eloise Vashner. Description: Eloise Vashner is an aspiring performer whom the young man has come to New York City to search for. She never appears in person, but her influence is felt as the young man tries to find her, and the housekeeper of the furnished room tries to conceal the fact that Eloise committed suicide the week before the story takes place. She died in the same room the young man is renting, and he senses her presence like a ghost when he smells mignonette, her favorite herb. The scent comes on a wind so strong it seems like a living guest, and the narration implies Eloise is in some way guiding the young man as he searches the room for something of hers. - Theme: Hope vs. Hopelessness. Description: The protagonist of "The Furnished Room," an unnamed young man, has been searching for his lost love Eloise Vashner for five months with no success. Only his hope that he will one day find her keeps him going. The young man's hope is reflected in the presence of light throughout the story. When he first enters the house of rental rooms, hopeful there might be some clue to Eloise, the shadows of the halls are "mitigated" by "a faint light from no particular source," just as the man's despair is kept at bay by his unfounded faith in finding Eloise. Later, the young man smells Eloise's perfume in the furnished room, and he believes he might have found her. He rushes to the housekeeper, who is behind "a door that showed a crack of light." The narrow light mirrors the young man's last sliver of hope. The housekeeper, though, crushes the young man's hope that Eloise had stayed in the furnished room. When he returns to the room, the young man sees it as "dead" and empty of "the essence that had vivified it." Through this language of death and defeat, the story paints the loss of hope as a loss of life––a connection that is strengthened when the young man's hopelessness ultimately drives him to suicide. After the smell of the perfume disappears, "the ebbing of his hope drain[s] his faith." The final death of the young man's last piece of hope is the tipping point for his will to live. After this moment of "draining," he submits "gratefully" to his death. He extinguishes the light that had symbolized his hope and uses the gas from the darkened lamps to end his life. - Theme: Urbanization and City Life. Description: "The Furnished Room" is set in New York City's Lower West Side, and the turn-of-the-century setting shapes the story. The late 19th century was a period of rapid urbanization, and New York City is presented as unnaturally crowded and yet isolating. Much of the story is dedicated to describing the furnished room itself, which is crowded with old decorations and the remnants of previous guests much in the way the city is run down and crowded with people. The children who left fingerprints on the wall are described as "little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air," positioning the furnished room (and, by extension, all of New York City) as an urban prison distanced from nature. The city also features buildings and furniture of different ages, yet all of them are equally decrepit. These descriptions, especially the reference to "musty effluvium" from the underground vaults mixing with the smells of linoleum and mildew, strengthen the idea that New York City has many layers, and all of them are rotting. The story also shows how city life cheapens and commodifies the relationships between people. Mrs. Purdy, the housekeeper, does not tell the young man about Eloise's death in the furnished room because renting rooms is how she makes a living. She contributes to the young man's sense of isolation for her own profit, and though she does this to maintain her livelihood, the narrative is not sympathetic to her. The young man compares her to a "worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers," which emphasizes how in big cities, individuals become nothing more than fodder for landlords and other community members who profit from their neighbors. - Theme: Homelessness and Transience. Description: "The Furnished Room" begins not with its protagonist, but with the "restless, shifting, fugacious" transients of the Lower West Side. The significance of impermanence, specifically as it pertains to housing, carries throughout the story. The housekeeper implicitly links a person's housing status with their identity when she remarks, "Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms." The narrative ties a lack of permanent housing to a lack of personal stability, but it does not cast blame on New York's homeless population for their lack of stability. The city itself makes a solid sense of security impossible; it is "like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation." This lack of foundation is felt by all the characters in the story. The housekeeper and Mrs. McCool are constantly renting rooms to rapidly-changing guests in order to stay alive, and the protagonist has been wandering for five months in search of the woman he loves. The theme of transience continues within the furnished room itself. The narrator suggests the room's past guests could treat it so poorly because it is only their home temporarily. In fact, the narrator suggests, perhaps it is the impermanence of their residence that incites "the cheated home instinct…, the resentful rage at false household gods." In one's own home, a person "can sweep and adorn and cherish," but being forced to rent a cheap room reminds the residents of their own transience. Transience, then, becomes a state of emotional turmoil as well as physical discomfort. The emotional impacts of a life without stability are seen at the end of the story, when the young man takes his own life. Through the untimely death of its protagonist, the story depicts life itself as temporary and transient. - Theme: Individual Stories and Memory. Description: "The Furnished Room" takes place in the Lower West Side of New York City at the turn of the 20th century. This part of the city is so old and so crowded that thousands of people have lived in its houses; the story pauses on this fact and extrapolates that each house "should have a thousand stories to tell." The narrator acknowledges that many of these stories would not be interesting, but that does not make them unimportant. He likens these stories to ghosts, which speaks to their significance: even if a ghost can't be seen, it refuses to be forgotten. The language of ghosts resonates with the later description of the furnished room as "haunted"––and if stories are ghosts, the furnished room is full of them. Each guest who stayed in the furnished room has left a mark, from the children who left fingerprints on the wall to the person who carved the name Marie across the mirror. The narrator grants time and attention to the remnants—effectively, the memories—of each tenant; in this way, the lengthy and detailed description of the furnished room can be taken as a sign of respect for all the previous residents the description takes into account. - Climax: The young man commits suicide in the furnished room. - Summary: In the Lower West Side of New York City, the homeless population wanders like ghosts between crumbling buildings. The owners of these buildings rent out furnished rooms to provide temporary housing. One evening, a young man rents a furnished room from a housekeeper. He asks the housekeeper if she has seen a young woman named Eloise Vashner, who left home several months ago to pursue a career in show business. The young man is in love with Eloise and has come to New York to find her. He has been searching for five months without success. To his disappointment, the housekeeper tells him she has not seen Eloise. She then brings him to his room, which is decrepit, musty, and full of moldy furniture. Various stains and marks around the room reveal hints about previous tenants who have stayed there. The young man wonders if the lack of stable housing stirs some resentment in people that causes them to take poor care of their living space. The young man sits in his room, listening to the many sounds of the city, until the smell of mignonette (an herb used for perfume) breaks through the room's rotting odor. The young man cries out as if the smell has spoken to him, since mignonette is Eloise's favorite scent. He searches the room for something that might have belonged to her, but finds nothing. Grasping for hope, the young man runs to the housekeeper and asks who lived in the room before him. The housekeeper lists many people, but Eloise is not among them. The defeated young man returns to his room, where the smell of mignonette is gone. With his last hope gone, he uses the furnished room's gas lamp to gas himself to death. Downstairs, the housekeeper discusses the young man with her friend Mrs. McCool, revealing that Eloise had stayed in the young man's room only last week. The housekeeper did not tell the young man because Eloise committed suicide in the furnished room, and the housekeeper worried that the news would make the young man take his business elsewhere.

- Genre: Short story, modernism, literary impressionism - Title: The Garden Party - Point of view: Third-person omniscient narrator, free indirect discourse involving Laura's point of view - Setting: The Sheridans' house, the neighborhood down the hill, the Scotts' house - Character: Laura Sheridan. Description: The story's curious and free-spirited protagonist, Laura is Mr. and Mrs. Sheridan's teenage daughter and sister to Laurie, Jose and Meg. As she begins to come of age, Laura starts to realize the pitfalls of her privileged upbringing, especially the restrictions it places on socializing. She is disappointed, for example, by the "silly boys" courting her rather than "extraordinarily nice" men from the lower classes, like the workmen who put up the marquee. Laura's mother calls her "the artistic one" and sends her to do various odd jobs in preparation for the garden party that afternoon, but as Laura increasingly realizes that working-class people in her community must work tirelessly and endure poverty in order for her family to maintain their extravagant lifestyle, she becomes increasingly torn between the leisurely gentility of her upbringing and her sympathy for the workers her parents and siblings barely acknowledge. When Laura overhears that Scott has died in a horrible accident, she urges the rest of her family to cancel the party, but her protests fall on deaf ears and she decides to go on with the party once she sees herself in the mirror wearing her mother's extravagant daisy-trim hat. Later, Laura's mother sends her to deliver a basket of leftover food to the cart-driver's family. When she arrives, Laura is unsettled by the cottages' squalid conditions and overwhelmed with anxiety about her own wealth, especially the hat and clothes that make her class status obvious. Upon seeing Scott's body, Laura has an epiphany about life, death, wealth and poverty (although the reader never quite learns what exactly she has figured out). - Character: Mrs. Sheridan. Description: Laura's domineering and passive-aggressive socialite mother, Mrs. Sheridan obsessively plans the garden-party with her children's help even as she insists that all the preparations are up to them. Her authority and tendency to speak in leading questions make Laura feel unable to express the disagreements she feels with her mother. This creates conflict after Scott's death, since Mrs. Sheridan ceases to care as soon as she realizes the accident didn't happen in her garden. Mrs. Sheridan, like Jose, becomes angry with Laura for proposing that they cancel the party and later even teases her for suggesting it. When her husband Mr. Sheridan mentions the accident, Mrs. Sheridan considers it "tactless," but decides to feign sympathy by sending Laura to take leftovers from the party to the Scotts. - Character: Meg Sheridan. Description: Another of Laura's siblings, Meg is a relatively minor character and does not speak in the story. Like the rest of her family, Meg is depicted as living a leisurely life: she drinks coffee with her hair wrapped in a green towel, which makes her too busy to supervise the workmen, and she later plays the piano while Jose sings. - Character: Jose Sheridan. Description: Jose is Laura's forceful, practical, and confident sister who enjoys ordering around her siblings and the family's servants. The way Jose talks to her mother suggests that she is younger than Laura, and she is happy to act as her mother's enforcer, encouraging Laura to stop worrying about Scott's death and "pacifying" the cook, of whom Mrs. Sheridan is "terrified." Before the party, Jose insists on practicing the song "This Life is Weary" to Meg's piano accompaniment. Instead of matching its elegiac tone, she sings the song about heartbreak, death, and needless suffering with a wide smile and asks for her mother's approval. Laura's conflict with Jose symbolizes her increasing (but incomplete) independence from her family's social position and her mother's way of thinking. - Character: Laurie Sheridan. Description: Laurie is Laura's brother, confidant, and character foil. He is close to Laura in age but behaves in an exceedingly formal way, like a caricature of British gentry. While he is a comforting and understanding presence for Laura in his first two appearances (when they hug and Laura realizes how excited she is for the party, and later when he complements her hat and she decides not to mention Scott's death), in his final appearance at the end of the story, Laurie embraces the crying Laura and assumes he understands the reason for her tears but really does not. He responds to Laura's half-sentence "Isn't life—" with the story's final line, "isn't it, darling?" Although the narrator suggests that Laurie believes he understands what Laura means to say, he clearly does not, and their miscommunication evinces the growing gulf between Laura and her family. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator of "The Garden Party" is third-person and omniscient, but far from objective. In general, Mansfield's narrator parrots the Sheridan family's condescension toward the poor and their obsession with showing off all the beautiful things they can buy. When Laura interacts with working-class characters, the narrative voice tends to satirize Laura's privilege by pretending she has transcended class or that she remains in control of situations in which she plays no significant role. When the other Sheridans try to persuade Laura not to think about Scott's death, the narrator takes their side and suggests that Laura's concern for the poor is childish and unnecessary. - Character: Hans. Description: "Good little" Hans is a servant in the Sheridan house and does not speak in the story. He helps Jose and Meg move the piano in the drawing-room and listens to Godber's man recount Scott's death with his face "screwed up in the effort to understand." Hans's character is a good example of the invisible labor that goes into preparing the garden-party. - Character: Cook. Description: Occasionally capitalized but usually referenced in lowercase, the Sheridans' cook has a much more forceful presence than the other servants. On the morning of the garden-party, Mrs. Sheridan insists she is "terrified" of cook and sends Jose to "pacify" her; later, even though it seems improper to the children, cook gives Jose and Laura cream puffs just after breakfast. Later, cook is the one who first tells Laura about Scott's death (although she lets Godber's man finish the story). Cook's unassuming warmth and Mrs. Sheridan's authoritarian directives offer competing maternal presences in the Sheridan household. Nevertheless, the fact that the Sheridans refer to cook by her job title rather than her actual name emphasizes the social hierarchy in the Sheridan household and the family's general disregard for the humanity of working-class characters. - Character: Kitty Maitland. Description: Kitty Maitland is the only named guest who attends the garden party, but the story doesn't include any information about who she is or how she knows the Sheridans. She is clearly also a member of the colonial social elite; she calls at breakfast time and Laura adopts her mother's refined English on the phone. Later, Maitland compares the green-clothed band to frogs as they set up in the garden's tennis court. Her character largely serves to underscore and satirize the Sheridans' class background. - Character: The Workmen. Description: The four workmen who arrive with their tools to set up the marquee in the Sheridans' yard instigate the story's first encounter between Laura and characters of another class background. Laura is impressed by their straightforward dialect and unassuming kindness, which contrast with her family's Queen's English and snobbishness toward people unlike themselves. Laura is particularly struck when she sees one of them bend down to sniff a lavender sprig, which makes her wish she could spend time with "men like these" rather than the "silly boys" of other rich families. She imagines herself as a "work-girl" while she watches them go about their business. The workmen largely serve to introduce Laura's differences from her family—namely, her dissatisfaction with class divisions and sympathy for workers. - Character: The Band. Description: A "green-coated" band arrives in the afternoon and plays at the garden-party. The Sheridans' ability to hire a band reflects their class status, and Laura worries about this repeatedly. When one of the workmen asks, Laura emphasizes that it is a "very small band" so as to not offend. Later, she worries that the Scotts might hear the band while they grieve and asks her father whether the band can have a drink. - Character: Godber's Man. Description: The deliveryman for Godber's famous cream puff shop is the one who first tells Sadie, Hans, and the Sheridan family about Mr. Scott's accidental death. He is a peculiar character because, although he is a worker and speaks a lower-class dialect, he "relish[es]" the opportunity to tell the Sheridans' servants about Scott's death rather than feeling sympathetic for the deceased's family. In this sense, he is a mirror image to Laura: a poor man who takes on the attitudes and class interests of the rich. - Character: Em Scott. Description: Em is Mr. Scott's wife and mother to their five children. After his death, she is left without a livelihood. Laura encounters Em sitting by the fireplace at her house, her face swollen from crying, and thanks Laura for visiting despite seemingly not understanding why she would ever do such a thing. Em's condition represents the pain that the rest of the Sheridans refuse to acknowledge—both the acute pain of Scott's death and the ongoing pain of poverty in the cottages. - Character: Em Scott's Sister. Description: Em's unnamed sister greets Laura upon her arrival at Scott's house. Laura is terrified, both of the poor people who live in the cottages but also of how out-of-place she looks in her party clothes, but Em's sister nevertheless insists that she come in. Even though Laura insists she wants to leave, Em's sister brings her to Em and then to Scott's body. Her leading questions recall Mrs. Sheridan's, but her hospitality and comforting lines to Laura draw out the contrast between Mrs. Sheridan's maternal style and the lower-class warmth that cook and Em's sister exemplify. - Theme: Work and Leisure. Description: "The Garden Party" emphasizes the stark division between working-class people and economic elites in a deeply unequal society—in this case, early 20th century New Zealand. As she follows the wealthy Sheridan family on the day of their extravagant party, Mansfield critiques this society's division between elites who get the privilege of leisure time and the disposable laborers whose work makes leisure possible. All the characters in the story belong unambiguously to one or the other class; as they set up for the party, the Sheridans' "work" (if it can be called that) merely consists of telling actual laborers what to do. The family has a gardener who manicures the property all morning and three domestic servants who fulfill the Sheridans' every demand. A florist and a fancy cream-puff shop send delivery men with their goods, and a band comes to perform at the party. The Sheridans are surrounded by workers they pay to set up their party, but readers have no indication of where their own money comes from. Laughably, the Sheridans insist on micromanaging the workers' every move, even while they lack the expertise and energy to do so effectively. One Sheridan sister, Meg, "could not possibly go and supervise the men" setting up the marquee because she is too busy relaxing, drinking coffee, and waiting for her hair to dry. Furthermore, despite that the Sheridans do very little to prepare for the party, they delegate their tasks to others and then take all the credit for the party's success. For instance, when Sadie asks Mrs. Sheridan whether she has the name-flags for the fifteen different kinds of sandwiches cook has prepared, Mrs. Sheridan lies that she does have them and then asks Laura to write them; meanwhile, Laura's sister Jose "congratulate[s]" the cook for making fifteen different kinds of "exquisite" sandwiches, as though doing so is an accomplishment rather than her job. Later, when Mr. Sheridan takes a sandwich, he thanks Laura. This is the only thank-you that any Sheridan utters in the entire story, and it is entirely misattributed. The guests laud the Sheridans as they leave the party—"'Never a more delightful garden-party…' 'The greatest success…' 'Quite the most…'" (the most what scarcely matters)—but the domestic servants, hired workmen and delivery people who are actually responsible for the party's success get no credit. The Sheridans' disregard for their own workers echoes their indifference about Mr. Scott's death. The story is set around the turn of the 20th century, and Scott is said to have died when his horse "shied at a traction-engine" and threw him out of his cart—in other words, Scott is killed when the march of technological progress makes his kind of work outmoded, when the horse sees the technology that makes its work obsolete. The death of Mr. Scott's job precipitates his actual death. Mrs. Sheridan sees his death as natural and unremarkable: she suggests that, "if some one had died there normally," the party would go on without a hitch. Mrs. Sheridan has no sympathy for working people whose death she does not hear about; she interprets Laura's sympathy as a response to the way Scott dies rather than the horrific circumstances in which his family is left. Despite the mutual dependence between the Sheridan family and their servants—the Sheridans need the servants because they are incapable of caring for themselves and the servants need wages from the Sheridans in order to survive—Mrs. Sheridan, since she does not work, can forget that labor is embedded in broader social relations and, unlike Laura, does not even begin to think about her own power to mitigate the family's suffering. Curiously, Laura's father, who goes "to the office" with Laurie earlier on in the story, does pity the Scotts; his reaction is surprisingly similar to that of Sadie, Hans and the cook, who clearly understand the indignation workers face on a daily basis and can empathize with the horrific injustice of Scott's death. But Laura is also not immune to her family's prioritization of wealth over work: when she sees Scott's body, she thinks, "this is just as it should be." This echoes her mother's indifference to Scott's death, not because Laura is herself indifferent, but rather because she sees his death as reflecting the proper order of things. As in virtually every colonial and contemporary society, the poor die poor, unrewarded for a life of labor at the feet of wealthy capitalists who own, do not work, and imagine themselves inherently superior to working people in order to sustain the indifference toward human life that in turn sustains the institution of labor in the first place. - Theme: Empathy, Understanding, and Class Consciousness. Description: Mansfield's story is as much about class division as it is about characters' awareness of that division. While "The Garden Party" demonstrates how elite prejudice against working-class people helps sustain an unequal society, it also shows how encounters across class lines can change (at least some) people's social understanding. In other words, meeting people from other classes can help people develop a consciousness of class difference and, therefore, empathy for those of different classes. However, the story is not particularly optimistic: in it, Mansfield also shows how class prejudice can limit understanding even when the privileged are well-intentioned, and that their identification with and empathy for the disadvantaged are often insufficient to meaningfully affect the material conditions that structure class differences. Mansfield emphasizes and parodies the sharp social divide between rich and poor by depicting the Sheridans' often absurd prejudice against working-class people and their inability to imagine the perspective of lower-class people. After learning of the death of the cart-driver Mr. Scott, one of the Sheridan daughters, Jose, accuses Scott of being drunk during the accident. She suggests that he must be responsible for his own death and, therefore, that the Sheridans should not concern themselves with it. It is clear as Jose makes this argument that her primarily goal is to get to enjoy her family's party, rather than have it stopped by the "inconvenience" of some poor person's death. Mrs. Sheridan similarly argues that the Sheridans should not stop the party because "people like that don't expect sacrifices from us." In fact, she is "amused" when Laura suggests putting off the party out of concern for the Scotts. Mrs. Sheridan, like Jose, cares only about the garden party, not about Scott's death. When Mr. Sheridan mentions the tragedy, she considers him "tactless" and complains that it "nearly ruined" the Sheridans' plans. The omniscient third-person narrator also reinforces the Sheridans' prejudices, even as Laura begins to move past them. The narrative voice can be seen as carrying the force of social convention, butting in to remind the reader whenever anyone behaves "improperly." When a deliveryman arrives with cream puffs from Godber's, for example, the narrator is the one who explains their significance: "Godber's were famous for their cream puffs. Nobody ever thought of making them at home." When the cook offers some to Jose and Laura, the narrator interjects, "Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder." Mansfield makes the Sheridans' social codes explicit through the narrative voice, and these codes extend to the family's views of the poor. It is the narrator who first condescendingly describes the cottages where the Scotts live, explaining that the structures sit "far too near" to the Sheridans' house and are "the greatest possible eyesore" because they are "disgusting and sordid." The narrator sides with the neighborhood and against the cottages on the grounds that the cottages "don't fit" and are in fact intrusions on the neighborhood, which ought to stay wealthy. The Sheridans and the narrator alike take working-class residents as an unsightly imposition, feeling disgust rather than pity. The Sheridans—and society at large—ultimately do not see the poor as people. The omniscient narrator's alignment with the Sheridans demonstrates just how powerful social conventions can be, particularly when it comes to blaming the poor for their own plight. The narrator also reflects Laura's tacit understanding of the expectations and attitudes she wishes to escape, as well as the social forces that will align against her should she ever truly try to escape them. However, unlike the rest of her family, over the course of the story and due in part to the jolt of Mr. Scott's death, Laura begins to develop an awareness of her privilege and tries to consider the world from working-class characters' perspectives. Her transformation starts when she watches four workmen put up the marquee.  She is struck by how directly and informally they speak, and when she sees one of the workmen bend down to smell a lavender plant, Laura starts to "wonder for him caring for things like that" and decides that "she would get on much better with men like these" than the "silly boys" of her own class background. Laura recognizes that wealthy New Zealanders keep things, like the garden, for show and not for experience; she appreciates the way that the workers seem to live in, experience, and enjoy the real world, rather than holding it as property for status's stake. Laura laments the "absurd class distinctions" and "despises" the "stupid conventions" that block her from spending time with people like the workmen; despite recognizing the restrictions class divisions put on her, she paradoxically decides that "she didn't feel them. Not a bit, not an atom…" But the main development in Laura's class consciousness is, of course, her response to Scott's death: she insists that the Sheridans cancel the party to respect the Scott family's mourning process. She recognizes the Scotts as "nearly neighbours," which contrasts with the narrator's suggestion that such a poor family is not welcome in the neighborhood at all. At the end of the story, when Laura visits the Scotts' house, she again becomes caught between her actual class status and her sympathy for the less fortunate families that live down the hill. She is incredibly self-conscious about her trip, worrying that her expensive clothes betray her class status and hoping that she can leave as soon as possible because she believes her appearance might offend them. Like her realization that the workmen appreciate beauty, Laura's realization that "garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks" could not possibly matter to the dead Mr. Scott demonstrates her understanding that certain human experiences transcend class lines. Death figures as a great equalizer, one that lets her imagine she is no longer bound by the frivolities of her class. However, while Laura tries to identify with working-class people's perspective, the story portrays her as ultimately unable to overcome the blinders of her class position. In part due to the workmen's comfortingly informal speech, Laura literally does not understand them, even as she begins to identify with the working class: one of the workmen says that "you want to put it somewhere where it'll give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me" and Laura thinks instead that the man is referring to the bangs in her hair. When they respond that she should choose a more "conspicuous" spot, she completely ignores their advice and suggests putting it in the corner of the tennis court, near the band. Laura stutters when interacting with the workmen and the Scotts—she literally cannot communicate with them, which suggests her inability to understand their experience. When she visits the Scotts' house, Laura's predominant feeling is guilt, not sympathy; she only felt the latter from the comfort of her home. Her ecstasy at seeing Scott's body is only followed later by a recognition that, next to the deceased's wife and sister-in-law, "all the same you had to cry," and Laura nevertheless speaks out of guilt rather than empathy: "forgive my hat." And yet, in addition to failing to build a mutual understanding with the Scotts, the awareness that Laura does gain causes her to lose connection with her own family—she ends up caught in the middle, unable to communicate with either side. At the end of the story, Laura and her brother Laurie, who speaks with the caricatured formality of English gentry, have their own misunderstanding. Laura stutters here, too, asking "isn't life—" and, before she can complete the idea, Laurie interjects "Isn't it, darling?" Laurie believes he understands what Laura is thinking and preempts her words, but the implication that they are not actually thinking the same thing suggests a growing gulf between the two siblings. Laura believes she understands life for the Scotts but does not; Laurie believes he understands Laura's epiphany but he also does not. - Theme: Beauty, Refinement and Detachment. Description: "The Garden Party" suggests that beauty is a double-edged sword: it is as much a worthwhile source of pleasure as a way for the privileged Sheridans and their associates to detach themselves from the suffering that surrounds them. In this story, social elites become so focused on the surface appearance of things that they seem to lose a normal range of human emotion; they position themselves as viewers of, rather than participants in, the world. The Sheridans, for instance, carefully cultivate their garden as an aesthetic space; from the start, the reader is told that the conditions are "ideal" for a garden-party. The weather, flowers, and lawn are divine, the sky is "veiled with a haze of light gold," the roses apparently know their impressiveness, and "the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels." This contrasts with the cottages' gardens, which have "nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens, and tomato cans." For the poor, a garden is for growing food, a way to eke out a living, whereas for the Sheridans a garden is about consolidating and packaging beauty for the sake of social recognition. But beauty, although a luxury, still has a strong hold over the Sheridans and other characters of their class. It is provocative and distracting; they respond to it instinctively, with involuntary physical outbursts and mental associations rather than deliberate contemplation or analysis. When the florist's man delivers a ridiculous amount of canna lilies, for instance, Laura feels their beauty physically: "she crouched down as if to warm herself at that blaze of lilies; she felt they were in her fingers, on her lips, growing in her breast." Likewise, when Laura catches a glimpse of her own beauty in her bedroom mirror, her sympathy for the Scotts begins to fade and she gives into the temptation to prioritize the immediate pleasure of the garden-party over her conscience. But, two paragraphs later, when she sees Laurie still in work clothes, she recalls the world outside the party and suddenly thinks of Scott's death; Laurie's own sudden and forceful reaction to Laura's beautiful hat, however, leads her to immediately forget Scott again. Mansfield's description of the party itself is entirely a series of disjointed surface details: strolling couples look at the garden, people compliment Laura's appearance, and the guests' happiness is a contrived performance rather than genuine feeling: "what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes." One of the Sheridans' guests, Kitty Maitland, sees the band and "trills" her only line, "aren't they too like frogs for words? You ought to have arranged them round the pond with the conductor in the middle on a leaf." While she is a minor character, Maitland is also the only named guest in the story and, accordingly, the reader's only window into the Sheridans' social circle. Her concern with the band focuses on their appearance—and how they ought to be arranged for the most striking visual effect—even though they are there to play music (which is never described). Whereas Laura worries whether the band needs a drink, for Maitland the band is purely a thing to look at and their beauty deprives them of humanity. But Laura is not immune to this pattern of aestheticizing the poor: when she sees Mr. Scott's body, Laura does not see him as dead, but rather perceives "a young man, fast asleep" whose expression says "Happy… happy… all is well." She thinks his body is "wonderful, beautiful," and the tranquility of his lifeless body prevents Laura from feeling the sense of tragedy and injustice that she ought to at his death. She blurts out "forgive my hat" because she remains so distracted by the fact that she looks out of place in the cottages that she forgets the deep sense of tragedy she originally felt when she heard about his accident. She sees the poor worker's body as a kind of art, the same way her family sees their garden. At the end of the story, it is unclear whether Laura has returned to an appreciation of the tragedy; when she says "isn't life—" to her brother as she leaves the Scotts' cottage, her inability to express her thought suggests that life, death, and the struggle to survive poverty are far more consequential than the cultivated surface beauty of the Sheridan family's lives and garden. The other Sheridans' indifference to death suggests that Laura has learned something they might never experience. Jose and Mrs. Sheridan are unable to conceive Scott's death as a real tragedy that happened to a real person and affects a real family. Analogously, when Jose sings the song "This Life is Weary," because everyone is so preoccupied with the quality of her voice, nobody seems to notice that the song is actually about death and suffering. Jose sings with "a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile," and the song's last lines ("This Life is Wee-ary / Hope comes to Die / A Dream—a Wa-kening") foreshadow the story's conclusion, where Laura sees Scott's death as a dream and then experiences her own sort of awakening. It also emphasizes the way that the rest of the Sheridans never awaken from this dream. Their inability to see past superficial beauty makes them monstrous and leads them to miss out on real, spontaneous experiences that are valuable in themselves rather than orchestrated for show. For instance, Mrs. Sheridan tries to send Laura to the Scotts' house with arum-lilies because she thinks it will impress them—she tries to send beauty instead of sympathy or condolences. (Jose then suggests that the flower stems might damage Laura's clothes, so Mrs. Sheridan decides not to send them at all because preserving her daughter's beauty is more important.) The beauty of surface appearances repeatedly seduces the Sheridans, distracting them from the reality of death. - Theme: Childhood, Family and Independence. Description: "The Garden Party" is also a coming of age story: Mansfield depicts Laura's struggle between, on the one hand, her sense of duty to her family and her instinct to follow her mother and, on the other, her growing dissatisfaction with her sheltered upbringing and desire to explore a broader world. Mansfield treats adolescence as a half-step to independence: Laura begins to question the circumstances and expectations into which she is born, even as she remains completely dependent on them. Her ambivalence about her upbringing—and her mother in particular—grows throughout the story and reflects both the privileges and the limitations of the structure that a nuclear family can provide. In particular, Mrs. Sheridan's passive-aggressive style lets her pretend that the children are acting independently while she continues to influence them. Because she recognizes that her children are getting older, Mrs. Sheridan pretends to relinquish responsibility for the party: she insists throughout that the party is her children's idea, even as she seems to do all the planning. She asks to be treated not as a host but "as an honoured guest," pretending to defer to her children even as she effectively plans the whole party. After the party, she exclaims, "why will you children insist on giving parties!" Mrs. Sheridan tends to talk to her children in leading questions like "don't you agree?" and "we should still be having our party, shouldn't we?"; Laura strongly feels that she should not openly disagree with her mother, so Mrs. Sheridan gets to pretend that her ideas are her children's while nevertheless making her children do her bidding. While Mrs. Sheridan's decisions covertly control most of the action in this story, this does not mean her only function is to retrench Laura's dependence on her family. Even though Laura was the one who originally wanted the Sheridans to reach out to the Scotts, she only goes when her mother has "one of her brilliant ideas" and decides to send her with a basket of leftovers. Without her mother's idea, Laura simply would never have gone. And, just before Laura departs down the hill, her mother calls out, "don't on any account—" but decides not to finish her sentence. Presumably, her order would have had something to do with viewing Scott's body, and readers are left to wonder whether Laura would have done so had Mrs. Sheridan finished her thought. Laura's dependence on her mother extends beyond the obvious situations where Mrs. Sheridan compels agreement, as Laura also tends to imitate her mother when dealing with adults. When she meets the workmen, she tries to "copy her mother's voice" and "look severe and even a little bit short-sighted." Likewise, on the phone with Kitty Maitland, Laura's overly-formal, ornamented speech is indistinguishable from her mother's. Even when she inadvertently copies her mother—namely, when she accidentally sees herself wearing her mother's hat—she falls back in line with the family consensus. Laura had never before "imagined she could look like that," which reflects her burgeoning maturity: she is on the brink of womanhood. Laura's dinners with the "silly boys" of other wealthy colonial families and ecstatic reaction to the beautiful canna-lilies suggest that she is also undergoing a subtle sexual awakening around this time in her adolescence. Despite all Mrs. Sheridan's covert influence over Laura's behavior, the reader's window into Laura's thought process reveals that she clearly begins to think beyond the constraints of her family's conspicuous and limited lifestyle. If the force that binds Laura to her family's way of thinking is her mother's subtle manipulation, the force that leads Laura to think independently is her own curiosity. She begins to think for herself primarily by noticing things that she is not necessarily meant to see or hear; her own curiosity leads Laura to places and perspectives the rest of her family does not reach. This starts well before the day the story recounts: even though the cottages are "disgusting and sordid," Laura and Laurie cannot resist sometimes exploring them "on their prowls." Their curiosity consumes them despite their class instincts: "one must go everywhere; one must see everything." In this vein, Laura learns about Scott's death when she accidentally runs into the cream puff deliveryman telling the Sheridans' domestic servants about it; she is the first in the family to find out. At the end of the story, Laura ends up visiting the Scotts' house and viewing Mr. Scott's dead body not because she wants to see the dead man's body, but rather because she enters the wrong room in an attempt to flee the Scotts' house. Once she sees his body, she is transfixed by its tranquility and reaches an epiphany that, unlike her earlier expeditions into the cottages, she can no longer share with Laurie. For Laura, growing up in the Sheridan family also, to some extent, means growing out of the Sheridan family. - Climax: Laura anxiously visits Mr. Scott's house with flowers, sees his body, and is overcome with wonder - Summary: Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" follows Laura, a teenaged daughter of the wealthy New Zealand Sheridan family, as her family throws a garden-party at their estate. The early summer day could be no more perfect, and neither could the family garden; after the story's opening paragraphs assert this in the formal register of English nobility, Laura's mother sends Laura, "the artistic one," to tell four workmen where to set up the marquee (a large outdoor tent). Laura takes her breakfast outside and is astonished to find four polite, strapping men who speak with an urgency and directness unlike anyone from her own social class. They negotiate about the marquee's location, the workmen begin setting it up, and Laura complains about the "absurd class distinctions" that keep her from socializing with such "extraordinary nice" men like these. The telephone rings and Laura runs inside to answer it, briefly encountering her father and her brother Laurie on the way. She answers it, invites a family friend to lunch, and hears the piano being moved in the other room. Sadie, one of the Sheridans' domestic servants, tells Laura that the florist's deliveryman has arrived. They meet him at the front door and see trays upon trays of beautiful pink canna lilies, which Mrs. Sheridan ordered on a whim the day before when she saw them in a shop window. Laura complains that her mother promised the children control over the party this year, but Mrs. Sheridan convinces her daughter to overlook her interference. The story jumps to the drawing-room, where another Sheridan daughter, Jose, sings the mournful song "This Life is Weary" with a "brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile" while the third, Meg, accompanies her on the piano. Again, Sadie interrupts the narrative to announce another working character's request: the cook wants the name flags for the sandwiches she has made. Mrs. Sheridan has not written the flags yet but tells Sadie that she has them before ordering Laura to write the names. She accuses the children of hiding the envelope where the guest list is written, but finds it behind the dining-room clock. Laura writes the flags and brings them to the kitchen where Sadie has another announcement: the cream puff deliveryman has arrived from Godber's. The cook tells Laura and Jose to have a cream puff each, and they scarf them down even though they find it improper to eat sweets so soon after breakfast. Laura heads back to the garden but first encounters Godber's man telling the horrified servants about the death of Scott, a cart-driver, in an accident that morning. She decides that it would be inconsiderate to continue the party because Scott lives in a row of decrepit cottages just downhill from the Sheridans' estate. She tells this to her sister Jose, who accuses Scott of drinking on the job and finds Laura's concern for the poor ridiculous. Laura then approaches her mother, who cares even less: Mrs. Sheridan is amused and irritated at Laura's concern once she realizes the death didn't happen in their garden. Mrs. Sheridan gives Laura her hat to distract her; once Laura sees herself in her bedroom mirror, she suddenly starts to see Scott's death as "blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper." Laura changes her mind about the party and goes to lunch. After lunch, Laurie returns from the office and Laura goes to ask his opinion on stopping the party. After her brother compliments her hat, Laura decides not to bring up the accident after all and goes to the party, which Mansfield recounts in scarcely half a page. After it ends, the Sheridans convene in the marquee and Mr. Sheridan mentions Scott's accident. Mrs. Sheridan, irritated that her husband also wants to ruin their fun, makes fun of Laura and then suddenly has an idea: they should send their leftovers to the Scotts. Laura finds this presumptuous but agrees to take the basket herself. Laura heads down to the cottages, where she is horrified at the unsightly residents and ashamed at her own expensive clothes. She decides to turn back but realizes she has already reached the Scott house; she knocks and tells Em's sister, who answers the door, that she simply wants to leave the basket and go. But Em's sister brings her inside nonetheless and introduces her to the man's crying widow, Em Scott, who thanks Laura for coming but does not understand why she would visit at all. Laura tries to run out the front door but instead walks through the door of Scott's room, where his body lies under a sheet. Em's sister assumes that Laura must want to see him and draws down the sheet. To her surprise, Laura finds the body peaceful and marvelous; she sees the man as dreaming, far removed from the suffocating constraints of social convention. But she does recognize the tragedy in his death and exclaims "forgive my hat" before running out of the house and meeting her brother Laurie on the road outside. He embraces and comforts her as she cries but does not understand that hers are tears of joy; Laura starts to explain what she has realized but cannot finish her sentence. "Isn't life—" she says, and the story ends with the narrator's insistence that Laurie "quite understood" and his entirely empty response: "Isn't it, darling?"

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Gardener - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Rural England and Normandy in France - Character: Helen Turrell. Description: Helen is Michael's mother and the central protagonist. She gives birth to her illegitimate son, Michael, in secret and raises him as her "nephew" to conform with the standards of propriety in British Edwardian society. Helen is a conventional, upper class woman. The fact that she chooses to raise Michael as her nephew—passing him off as the son of her dead brother, George—suggests that Helen cares about upholding cultural norms and retaining an outward appearance of respectability. This also suggests that she believes she has committed a sin by having a child out of wedlock and wishes to be redeemed in the eyes of society; the invented story about Michael's birth achieves this, since everyone quietly intuits that Michael is really Helen's son but calls Helen noble anyways for choosing to raise the boy. Helen is a strong willed and determined character. Her decision to raise Michael, and to hide his illegitimacy, suggests that she has a large amount of self-control. She only allows Michael to call her "mummy" at bedtime even though this clearly hurts him. Years later, when Michael goes missing in World War I, Helen does not allow herself to be comforted by platitudes and privately accepts Michael's death, even though she maintains a public façade of hope for his return. When Helen goes to visit Michael's grave after the war, she begins to lose some of this control while on her desperate search for his grave among the "chaos" of the cemetery. The climax of the story revolves around Helen's interaction with the gardener in the graveyard, who symbolically acknowledges Michael's illegitimacy and shows Helen compassion despite this by leading her to where Michael is buried. - Character: Michael Turrell. Description: Michael is Helen Turrell's son, whom she raises as her "nephew" to hide his illegitimacy and sidestep the scandal it would certainly cause. From a young age, Michael is anxious about the fact that he is not from a traditional family. Helen has told him that she is his "aunt," and that his "parents"— Helen's dead brother, George, and a lower-class girl—were not married. When Michael is a child, he questions Helen about why he is not allowed to call her "mummy," and he becomes upset when Helen talks openly about with her friends about allowing Michael to call her "mummy" only at bedtime. This gives the reader the impression that Michael is already learning to be ashamed of his origins from the society around him. He grows up to be "as accepted" as Helen herself by society. However, the reader gets the impression that his social status still haunts him. Kipling suggests that Michael is treated differently at school because his "parents" were not married and because Edwardian society perceived illegitimate children to be naturally inferior. Like his biological mother, Michael is quite a proud character and tries to brush off his concerns about his background. However, when he is ill, his true concerns come to the surface; in his fevered delirium, he "talks of nothing else." The reader learns that Michael is "valiant" in his eagerness to serve in World War I and comes across as a brave character. Even though he believes that the war will be long and difficult to conclude, he still demonstrates that he believes it is necessary and honorable to fight for his country, mirroring Kipling's own views about patriotism and the necessity of World War I. - Character: Mrs. Scarsworth. Description: Mrs. Scarsworth is a woman who Helen meets on the train to Hagenzeele when she is on her way to visit Michael's grave. Mrs. Scarsworth tells Helen that she is traveling to the cemetery for the ninth time, as she takes commissions from grieving families who cannot make the journey themselves and photographs the graves of their loved ones for them. At first Helen is horrified by this seemingly callous approach to death. Mrs. Scarsworth is talkative and outgoing and attempts to ingratiate herself to Helen. Even though Helen finds the woman overbearing and bothersome, the reader learns that Mrs. Scarsworth and Helen are actually quite similar. Mrs. Scarsworth has had to construct this elaborate story about commissions to cover her real motives for visiting the graveyard so often—she was in love with a man who has been killed in the war. Their relationship was not respectable, because Mrs. Scarsworth is married to someone else, and she has had to keep it a secret and cannot openly grieve or visit his grave. Her confession to Helen is a desperate attempt to communicate her pain and to be understood; the reader gains the impression that Mrs. Scarsworth has been extremely controlled in her public presentation of herself, just like Helen. Unlike Helen, though, Mrs. Scarsworth has reached her breaking point and is overcome by the need to show her real feelings, even if this confession risks her losing her outward appearance of respectability. Shrewdly, Mrs. Scarsworth chooses a stranger, Helen, to confess to, as this will not have any consequences in her everyday life. Kipling implies that, like Helen, Mrs. Scarsworth is a victim of a restrictive society that expects unrealistic levels of emotional control and propriety from people. - Character: George Turrell. Description: George Turrell is Helen's brother, who at the outset of the story, has recently died in India of a fall from a horse. Helen concocts the story of Michael's illegitimate birth around George, suggesting that Michael is actually the son of George's lower-class mistress in India, and that George has always been a person who acts in unconventional and unrespectable ways. - Theme: Propriety, Performance, and Secrecy. Description: "The Gardener" is a short story about a woman named Helen Turrell, who keeps the birth of her illegitimate child a secret and raises the boy, Michael, as though she is his aunt and he is the son of her dead brother, George. Helen leaves India when she becomes pregnant (under the pretense of going away to the South of France for her health) and brings the boy to England in order to avoid the scandal, which Michael's illegitimate status would cause in both Anglo-Indian and British society in the early 1900s. The rigid moral conventions of British Edwardian society make it impossible for Helen to speak openly about her experience. According to these moral conventions, Helen is doing the "noble" and "honorable" thing by raising Michael herself while maintaining an image of propriety by calling herself his aunt. However, these same moral conventions make it necessary for Helen to engage in behaviors that would be considered immoral, such as lying and slandering her dead brother. The importance of conforming to moral conventions in British Edwardian society is conveyed by the lengths that Helen is willing to go to in order to align herself with the society's standard of behavior. According to the moral conventions of British society, Helen is behaving correctly by denying the true nature of her relationship with Michael and inventing a story around his birth. Kipling opens "The Gardener" by stating that "everyone in the village knew that Helen Turrell did her duty by all her world," and then gives an account of the story of Michael's birth, which Helen has concocted. This suggests that the villagers quietly realize that Michael is Helen's son but are willing to play along with this fake origin story for the sake of propriety. The community's acceptance allows Helen to maintain a false (and ironic) image of herself as an altruistic woman who is "as open as the day" and has nothing to hide. The irony of this is that it implies that people in British society would rather be complicit in a lie than deviate from their strict moral conventions or tolerate someone who has gone against the grain of proper behavior. The fact that "everyone in the village" knows Helen's story suggests that almost everyone around her is willing to ignore the truth and to say one thing while doing another for the sake of propriety and appearance. Although she portrays herself as someone who values honesty, Helen is being blatantly dishonest about Michael. The outward respectability, which Helen is required to put on in order to maintain her place in society, has a negative impact on her ability to be a "moral" person in other ways. Helen's need to create a believable story about Michael's birth leads her to slander her dead brother, George. By implying that George had "many fresh starts given and thrown away," Helen paints a picture of her brother as a careless and ungrateful person who did not care for his own or his family's reputation. Helen's invention of George's lover, "the daughter of a retired non-commissioned officer," also supports Helen's image of British conventional propriety. Claiming that Michael's mother has sold the baby to her, Helen states that "people of that class would do almost anything for money." This puts a distance between Helen, who is upper class and wants to be seen as respectable, and "people of that class," who are evidently from a poorer background. It is convenient for Helen to blame her own mistake on someone from a lower-class background, as she knows that this story will be widely accepted. It removes responsibility from Helen, and from her own class more generally, as the birth of illegitimate children in the early 1900s was something associated with poorer, less "respectable" members of society. Helen's dishonesty not only contrasts with her ability to be a "moral" person, but also seems to conflict with her underlying personality and emotions. Despite being outwardly dishonest, Helen is honest with herself internally. For example, Helen allows Michael to call her "mummy" at bedtime. This demonstrates that Helen feels a conflict between her external portrayal of herself as Michael's aunt and her close maternal bond with him, which flourishes in private. Many years later, when Michael goes missing during World War I, Helen is surrounded by people who "preach hope" that he might still be alive and "tell her tales" of missing relatives who have been "miraculously restored." Rather than deluding herself in this way, Helen privately acknowledges that "missing always means dead." Externally however, Helen plays along with the social etiquette of having hope and sending out letters to try and recover Michael. These socially acceptable "rituals" maintain a sense of propriety throughout the war, rather than allowing people to give in to grief and despair, which would perhaps have been considered improper and unpatriotic. The introduction of Mrs. Scarsworth, towards the end of the story, provides a mirror through which both Helen and the reader can re-evaluate Helen's experience, as well as the effects that restrictive social conventions have had on her life. Mrs. Scarsworth's confession that, when she isn't telling lies, she "has to act 'em" and "to think 'em always" demonstrates the control with which Helen has also had to manage her delicate situation in society, both in her experience of raising Michael and in dealing with his death. As "The Gardener" comes to a close, Kipling demonstrates the wider social implications of restrictive social conventions in British society. The introduction of Mrs. Scarsworth towards the end of the story suggests that many people are secretly in the same position as Helen and are forced to keep parts of their lives a secret in order to maintain a façade of propriety and hide the fact that they have transgressed the boundaries of societal convention. - Theme: Christianity and Compassion. Description: While searching for Michael's grave in a "merciless sea of black crosses" in the graveyard at Hagenzeele, Helen meets a man she assumes to be the gardener, tending to the war graves. The gardener, who represents Christ, offers to show Helen "where her son lies." The fact that this man helps Helen in her moment of need, and that he immediately knows Michael is her son even though she has carefully introduced herself as the boy's aunt, point to the compassion Christ shows to humanity. Furthering the story's biblical underpinnings, Helen is associated with the figure of Mary Magdalene because she is a woman who has lived a sinful life (according to the conventions of the time) by having sex out of wedlock, but who has been redeemed through her "honorable" decision to raise Michael as her nephew. The closing message of forgiveness and compassion in "The Gardener" suggests that British society's rigid restrictions on behavior are impossible to live up to, and that transgressions should be forgiven. Rather than holding people to such high standards, and judging them when they fail, the ending of "The Gardener" seems to suggest that it is kinder, and more Christian, to forgive people and allow them to be honest, rather than to ignore them when they run into difficulties. In Kipling's story, the gardener is strongly associated with the restoration of order and with new life, thus linking him with the figure of Christ. In preparing to visit Michael's grave, Helen has been told "how easy and how little it interfered with life to go and see one's grave" (meaning the war grave of a relative who has been killed). However, when she arrives at the graveyard, it is far from easy. She can "distinguish no order or arrangement" among the graves and becomes lost and confused until she meets a man who is "evidently the gardener." The fact that the gardener helps Helen makes sense of the chaos within the graveyard, leading her to the place she is looking for, is suggestive of Christ's ability to provide clarity in life and represents the biblical idea that God created the world out of chaos. The contrast between the "merciless" mass of graves and the "infinite compassion" with which the gardener looks at Helen represents the climax of the story. The fact that the man is a "gardener," and that Helen sees him "bending over the young plants," is representative of the Christian message of resurrection, redemption, and new life, even after the terrible losses of World War I, which the graveyard consequently represents. The images of "young plants" and "fresh-sown grass" also reflect the cycles of nature and the seasons, as life and death follow on from each other, with life renewing in the spring after winter. The fact that the gardener instantly understands Helen's secret suggests that nothing is hidden from Christ. The gardener, standing in for Christ, is associated with "mercy" and relief in the story, as the reader knows that Helen has been carrying this secret "burden" alone for a long time. Kipling opens "The Gardener" with an excerpt from his poem "The Burden," which appears in full at the end of the story. The poem references the story of Christ's Resurrection, through its repetition of the line "rolled the stone away." This refers to the tomb in which Jesus's body was laid after the Crucifixion—a tomb that was found empty, with the stone rolled away from the entrance, after his Resurrection. The poem also associates the heavy "stone" with the heavy "burden" of suffering and grief, which the poem suggests God can relieve just as he "rolled the stone away" from Christ's tomb. The poem is emblematic of the events in "The Gardener" as Helen is relieved of the burden of her secret through her interaction with the gardener. Just as the gardener stands in for Christ, Helen is associated with the figure of Mary Magdalene throughout the story, both in her dealings with conventional society and in her interaction with the gardener. By giving birth to an illegitimate son, Helen would have been given the status of a fallen woman—a woman who had transgressed the conventions of British society. The fact that she "nobly" chooses to raise Michael, and the esteem this wins her among the community, gestures to Mary Magdalene's redemption and return to respectability in her transformation from a prostitute to one of Jesus's disciples. Helen's transgression does not affect only herself but also Michael, who is born illegitimate and, therefore, considered socially inferior. Helen is redeemed through her love for Michael, whom she is devoted to even though their relationship is looked down upon by society, just as Mary Magdalene is redeemed by her genuine devotion to Jesus. Helen has compromised herself morally, by lying, because of her love for Michael. When the gardener addresses her secret, he recognizes this and acknowledges, for the first time, her sacrifice and her love for her son rather than the shame of the boy's existence. Helen's real redemption comes not from society calling her "noble," but in her interaction with the gardener at the end of the story. While she has been tolerated by her community, the gardener immediately knows her secret and, in his display of "compassion," is able to relieve her of the burden of her secret and the shame that she has felt as a result of society's unforgiving moral code. Helen's interaction with the gardener also mirrors Mary Magdalene's interaction with Jesus after his Resurrection in the Book of John 20:10-18. Finding Jesus's tomb empty, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus and mistakes him for the gardener. She asks him to help her find Jesus's body, mirroring Helen's search for Michael's grave in "The Gardener." Like Mary Magdalene, Helen's redemption throughout the story is signified, not only by her renewed respectability from society's point of view, but, more importantly, in her redemption through Christian faith and in the recognition of her acts of love and sacrifice. The fact that the gardener immediately knows Helen's secret is representative of the fact that, although Helen has tried to hide the truth from the people around her, her secret is known to and forgiven by God. The story's closing image of the gardener tending the young plants in the graveyard leaves readers with the Christian message of hope and renewal and encourages them to emulate the gardener's compassion and tenderness. - Theme: World War I. Description: The bulk of Kipling's "The Gardener" follows Helen Turrell as she deals with the fallout of her son Michael's death in the wake of World War I. A staunch patriot, Kipling wrote propaganda for the British government in support of World War I. He had a reputation as an enthusiastic supporter of British Imperialism, expressed strong political opposition to German expansion, and encouraged his own son, John, to sign up for the forces. However, like many Europeans, Kipling was surprised by the scale of the war, the extent of the destruction, and the heavy loss of life that it caused. Though not opposed to war in general, he believed that World War I was poorly executed. After his son was killed, Kipling joined the Imperial War Grave Commission, organizing the burial and commemoration of young men killed on the battlefield. The climax of "The Gardener" takes place at a war graveyard, imbuing the story with Kipling's own grief for his son and for Britain's sons more generally. Despite the palpable heartache for Britain's fallen soldiers, "The Gardener" ultimately takes a nuanced approach to the war. Kipling criticizes Britain for its poor execution and the resulting loss of life, while still elevating the war as necessary and honorable. Michael's decision to enlist at the outbreak of WWI is treated ambiguously in the story, echoing Kipling's own nuanced opinion of the war. At times, Kipling seems to regret that the war has been necessary. He notes that Michael is "no fool" and that "the war took him just before what was likely to have been a most promising career," squarely placing the blame of Michael's death on the war itself. The use of the phrase "took him" suggests an unstoppable force, pointing to the war's magnitude and the extreme loss of life which, in Kipling's view, could have been avoided if the war had been fought more effectively or if Britain had been better prepared for its scale. Similarly, the fact that Kipling uses the term "holocaust," meaning mass destruction, to describe the "public school boys who threw themselves into the First Line" is also suggestive of the enormous losses that WWI produced. Using the term "holocaust" frames the war as a slaughter, rather than a fair fight, from which these young men had little chance of returning. This demonstrates Kipling's critical stance on the tactics that were employed during the war, such as trench warfare which was notorious for gaining little ground but for causing high casualties. This critical tone however, is undercut when Kipling describes Michael talking "valiantly" about enlisting, suggesting that it is noble to want to fight for and defend one's country. This moment provides a characteristic expression of patriotism for the writer, depicting the war as necessary and the sacrifice of British soldiers as honorable. Before Michael enlists, Helen is blasé about the war and says that "it couldn't possibly last beyond Christmas." Michael knows better and tells Helen that they will have "no such luck." This supports Kipling's description of Michael as "valiant" and demonstrates Kipling's respect for the soldiers and his attitude of support for the war. Although Michael hopes that the war will be over soon, he is realistic enough to know that men like him need to fight so that Britain can be protected from German invasion. Although Kipling had previously penned propaganda emphasizing the glory of war, "The Gardener" frames WWI in a more mundane and realistic way, reflecting the everyday experience of soldiers. Michael's battalion is used for necessary manual labor, digging trenches on various parts of the line. When Michael is killed in Loos, his death is not one the reader associates with "valiant" warfare. Instead, Michael is killed in an impersonal way, by a shell, while he is posted somewhere with "nothing special doing." This demonstrates Kipling's observation of the actual experience of WWI, from the perspective of a soldier's relative, as opposed to the glorious descriptions of combat in war propaganda. The mundane approach that Kipling takes to Michael's death is mirrored in Helen's plodding and mechanical experience of grief. Helen connects her grief to the manufactured item—the shell—which has killed Michael and remembers a time when he "had taken her over to a munition factory." Like the shell that Helen sees being made, which is described as a "wretched thing," Helen feels that she is being "manufactured" into a "bereaved relative," just as the shell has been "manufactured" into an instrument that creates bereaved relatives. Helen also remarks upon the mechanical form her grief takes and the fact that, "moving at a great immense distance, she sat on various relief committees and held strong views—she heard herself delivering them—about the site of the proposed village War Memorial." This description of Helen "at an immense distance," and the disassociated idea that she "heard herself" delivering speeches, suggests the shock of grief and the difficulty in resuming normal life after suffering a deep loss. The fact that almost everyone in the village has lost someone, and that they are "old in experience of war" by the time Michael is killed, demonstrates the magnitude of losses in the war. These losses led to the development of a new social etiquette around grief after WWI, which involved remaining hopeful and patriotic, and it is this which Helen feels pushed on her by society after Michael's death. Although Kipling had previously written propaganda supporting World War I and encouraging young men to enlist, the reality of the war was bleak for everyone involved. New weapons technology meant that the loss of life was much higher than expected, and the anonymous nature of death for many of the soldiers, like Michael in the story, led to the necessity to build new "ritual" around this. This is reflected in the cemeteries full of unmarked graves created to deal with the numbers of men whose bodies were never found, which Kipling describes in "The Gardener." Although Kipling's views on WWI are somewhat complicated, the story does suggest that the end of the war is a "relief," even though, in Kipling's view, Britain's entry into the war was very necessary. The Armistice is described in terms of a dawn that "broke over" Helen; this metaphorical sunrise points to renewed life and mercy, connecting the end of the war to the image of Christ as the gardener and the mercy that he shows to Helen. - Climax: Helen Turrell tells the gardener that she's looking for the grave of her "nephew" (who is actually her illegitimate son, Michael), and the gardener says he will show her where her "son" is buried, immediately intuiting Helen and Michael's true relationship. - Summary: "The Gardener" tells the story of Helen Turrell, who, at the end of the nineteenth century becomes pregnant with an illegitimate child. Helen lives in India, which is under British colonial rule. She travels to the South of France, where she gives birth to a son, Michael, in secret and then takes him to live in England. In order to maintain her place in British society, Helen invents a story surrounding Michael's birth to hide the fact that she has scandalously had a child out of wedlock. Helen's story is that Michael is really the son of her brother George, who has recently died. It is implied that "everyone in the village" understands that this is not a true story but, because Helen has "nobly" taken on the responsibility of raising Michael, and because she has created a story which fits in with British society's moral conventions, she is accepted among the community. Michael, like Helen, is accepted into British society and grows up believing that Helen is his aunt, not his mother. When he is a young child, he asks Helen why he cannot call her "mummy," and Helen tells him that she is his aunt but that he may call her "mummy" at bedtime. Michael is pleased with this arrangement but becomes upset when he finds out that Helen has told her friends about their discussion. He threatens to hurt Helen by dying young, foreshadowing his early death in World War I. Just as Michael is about to start at Oxford University, World War I breaks out in Europe. After enlisting, Michael is sent to Norfolk and then to Normandy with his unit. Michael writes to Helen that "nothing much" is happening where he is, and that his unit has mainly been used for digging trenches and doing maintenance work on the line. In 1915, one year into the war, Michael is killed by a shell. Helen is first informed that Michael is missing; she privately believes that "missing always mean dead," but she is encouraged by the community to keep up hope and to send letters to organizations that search for missing men and prisoners of war. When the war ends, Helen finally receives confirmation that Michael is dead and journeys to Normandy to visit Michael's grave. On the train to her hotel, Helen meets Mrs. Scarsworth. The woman tells Helen that this is her ninth visit to the cemetery; she takes photographs of the graves as commissions for grieving relatives who cannot make the trip themselves. Helen is horrified by Mrs. Scarsworth's open and seemingly callous attitude towards death and is pleased to escape from her in the hotel. Mrs. Scarsworth however, bursts into Helen's room and confesses that her story about the commissions is not true. She has, in fact, been in love with a man who has been killed in the war but, because she is married to someone else, she cannot openly grieve for him. Mrs. Scarsworth rushes off and Helen does not see her again. The next morning, Helen goes to visit Michael's grave and is given a row number to help her find his headstone. However, when she enters the graveyard, she finds that it is vast and confusing, and she becomes lost. She happens upon a man who is "evidently a gardener" and asks him for help to find her nephew. The gardener, looking at Helen with "infinite compassion," tells her that he will "show her where her son lies," instantly intuiting the true relationship between them. The story closes with Helen looking back at the "gardener," who is "bending over his young plants," as she leaves the graveyard.