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- Genre: Short story/Parable - Title: The Gift of the Magi - Point of view: Third person omniscient, with a focus on Della's perspective - Setting: A city, probably around the beginning of the 20th century - Character: Della. Description: The narrator, although omniscient, tells most of the story from Della's perspective. She's described as young, affectionate, selfless, and somewhat hysterical, requiring Jim to comfort her when she's upset. She cares deeply for Jim, and the story revolves around her predicament of procuring a worthy Christmas present for him when she's only saved $1.87 throughout the year. Her most prized possession at the beginning of the story is her hair, which falls below her knee, but in her selflessness, she sells this in order to buy a proper watch chain for Jim. - Character: Jim. Description: Jim, Della's husband, and "the lord of the flat," is only twenty-two and heavily burdened by the need to support the household on a low salary. Despite this burden, however, he's described as content, quiet, and good-natured. He loves Della and sells his prized watch, passed down from his grandfather, in order to buy fancy combs for Della's beautiful hair. - Character: Madame Sofronie. Description: Madame Sofronie owns the hair shop to which Della sells her hair. She's described as "large, too white, chilly," and her manner with Della is brusque and to the point. She wastes no time evaluating Della's hair and setting a price—twenty dollars. Her manner directly contrasts that of Della and Jim, who value their love and sentiment over material value. For Della, her hair is something special and prized. For Madame Sofronie, her hair is worth the dollar value she can get out of it. - Theme: Value. Description: "Gift of the Magi" revolves around a young couple, Della and Jim, who lack a lot in the way of material possessions and external amusements. The beginning of the story focuses on their poverty—the shabby couch, the lack of mirror, the eight-dollar flat, the broken doorbell. Despite this, the narrator adds that Jim always arrives home to be "greatly hugged. Which is all very good." Their poverty doesn't seem to affect their cozy home life on a daily basis, and the emotional value of having each other outweighs their lack of material wealth. The question of material vs. inner value comes up again when Della finds the chain for Jim's watch, which is "simple and chaste in design" but has value in its substance alone—Della likens this to Jim, who possesses inner value despite having a slight income. In the description of Jim's watch and Della's hair, the narrator compares them to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—an allusion that describes how much the watch and hair mean to Jim and Della, even if they aren't truly comparable to an abundance of treasures and jewels, showing that value is subjective. The chatty narrator makes this clear when he says, "Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer." - Theme: Love. Description: Della's main concern is that the money she's saved by pinching pennies isn't enough to buy Jim a worthy Christmas present. For her, the main obstacle that poverty poses to her happiness is its limitation of her expression of love.After the twist ending, Jim sits back on the couch and smiles, even after it's revealed that both their gifts are now useless. Because while the gift themselves have no purpose, the giving of the gifts means everything: they now know that each one of them would sacrifice their most prized possessions for the other. Their love triumphs over material wealth and possessions. They gave to each other not objects, but love. - Theme: Sacrifice. Description: At the beginning of the story, Della and Jim have only two prized possessions—Della's hair and Jim's watch. In order to overcome their poverty and to give a good Christmas present to the other, each sacrifices the item that they value the most. The sacrifices turn out to have been made rather uselessly, since the gifts they buy can't be used. One could argue that they ended the story in the same place they started out—minus Della's hair and Jim's gold watch—but the narrator suggests that they've added value to their relationship through generosity and sacrifice. The significance of the magi is summed up in the last paragraph, as the narrator compares Della and Jim to the magi who invented the art of gift giving, suggesting that the value of a gift lies in the intent, the level of generosity, and the sacrifice behind it, rather than its material value. - Theme: Beauty. Description: "Gift of the Magi" constantly contrasts the idea of inner beauty and value with outside appearances. The story begins, for example, with a description of bleak surroundings ("a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray background," "shabby couch") while hinting at a warm home life that brightens the exterior (Jim arrives home "to be greatly hugged"). When Della examines the watch chain, she also compares its exterior appearance and actual value to Jim's own appearance and value. Both lack ornamentation, but are remarkable and beautiful for their inner substance.Della also worries that Jim will no longer find her pretty once she sells her hair—but when he sees her and recovers from the shock of her haircut, he tells her that there's nothing in the way of "a haircut or shave or shampoo that could make me like my girl any less." If anything, Jim appreciates the generosity of Della's sacrifice, and the story ends on a satisfied note, with Jim sitting back on the couch and smiling. - Climax: Della opens her present and finds the combs - Summary: The story begins with Della despairing over the meager amount of money she's managed to save over the past few months by pinching pennies. She had been hoping to save enough to buy her husband Jim a worthy Christmas present. Della suddenly goes to gaze at her reflection in a window, letting her hair fall to its full length below her knee. Della's brown hair and Jim's gold watch that had been passed down from his grandfather are the couple's most prized possessions. Della runs to a hair shop and sells her hair for twenty dollars. Then she uses the money to buy Jim a simple platinum watch chain. The chain is described as possessing "quietness and value," like Jim. Della returns home to fix her hair into curls and make dinner. When Jim walks into the door, he freezes, staring at Della's hair. Della tells him that she did it in order to buy a proper Christmas present for him. Jim snaps out of his shock, hugs Della, and throws a package on the table. He explains that no haircut could make him love her any less, but that he was surprised because of the present that he bought for her. Della opens the package to find expensive tortoiseshell combs for her long hair. She's ecstatic for a moment before she begins crying, and Jim has to comfort her. Suddenly, Della remembers her present to Jim, and asks to see Jim's watch so that she could put the new chain on it. Jim sits back on the couch and smiles, then admits that he sold his watch in order to buy the combs. The narrator wraps up the story by describing the magi who invented the art of giving Christmas presents. He compares Della and Jim to these wise men, and concludes that of all those who give gifts, these two are the wisest.

- Genre: Short fiction - Title: The Gilded Six Bits - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: Eatonville, Florida, United States - Character: Missie May Banks. Description: Missie May is the attractive, spirited young wife of Joe Banks. Together the couple lives in Eatonville, Florida, where Missie May takes pride in maintaining their modest but beautiful home, giving attention to small details. She also delights in cooking abundant meals for them to share. She relishes her role, calling herself "a real wife, not no dress and breath." She loves Joe deeply, cherishes their playful routines, and is proud of his noble appearance. When Joe takes her to the ice cream parlor, Missie May shows her skeptical side by questioning Otis D. Slemmons' charms, but she does find his self-proclaimed wealth appealing, even musing how she and Joe might discover gold of their own. At the story's climax, Missie May sleeps with Slemmons, and when Joe discovers them, she is genuinely remorseful. She tearfully admits that Slemmons had offered her his gold piece, but that she still loves Joe. After Joe tauntingly leaves Slemmons' gold piece under her pillow, Missie May is insulted by Joe's insinuation that her love can be bought, and she plans to leave him. However, she again displays her stubborn pride when she decides to stay with Joe after seeing her mother-in-law, who has prayed for their marriage to fail. Not long after, Missie May is revealed to be pregnant. As she had predicted to Joe, she gives birth to a son who is the spitting image of him. With newfound respect, her mother-in-law calls her "strong as an ox" and expresses approval of the marriage. Not long after, Missie May joyfully reconciles with Joe. - Character: Joe Banks. Description: Joe is the husband of Missie May Banks. Together the couple lives in Eatonville, Florida, where Joe is employed by the G. and G. Fertilizer works. Joe takes delight in providing for Missie May and even buying her treats. Every Saturday afternoon, Joe comes home from work and throws silver dollars in the door for his wife to pick up and pile beside her plate at dinner. He also buys small gifts like candy kisses and hides them in his pockets for his wife to find. Joe introduces Missie May to Otis D. Slemmons' new ice cream parlor. He initially admires Slemmons' wealthy persona, but he says he is satisfied with his life because he is married to Missie May. Joe is an emotional man, sensitive to natural beauty such as the reflection of the moon on the lake, and eager to become a father. When he discovers Missie May's betrayal, he ultimately hits Slemmons and grabs his gilded watch charm, which he later leaves under his wife's pillow after they sleep together. Even while the couple is estranged, however, Joe still welcomes Missie May's care and cares for her in turn, refusing to let her chop wood when he sees that she is pregnant. After the baby is born, Joe acknowledges the child as his son and brings home candy and silver dollars for Missie May as he used to do. - Character: Otis D. Slemmons. Description: Slemmons is a newcomer to Eatonville and the owner of an ice cream parlor. His origin is uncertain; Joe says that Slemmons is "of spots and places—Memphis, Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and so on." He is primarily described through the eyes of other characters. He is said to be heavy-set with a mouth full of gold teeth, and he wears fine clothing—traits which set him apart from the other residents of Eatonville. Slemmons claims that women are attracted to him wherever he goes. He wears what appear to be a five-dollar gold piece for a stick-pin and a ten-dollar gold piece on his watch chain, which no one is allowed to touch. He walks with a "rolling swagger" and speaks in a Chicago dialect. Slemmons finds Missie May attractive and successfully pursues her with offers of gold. At the story's climax, when Joe discovers their adultery, Slemmons pleads for his life and offers more money. Joe strikes him twice and seizes the golden watch charm. Slemmons is last seen fleeing the Banks' house, though the Bankses discover that his watch charm was nothing but a gilded half dollar. He had been deceiving everyone all along. - Character: Joe's Mother. Description: Joe's mother lives nearby in Eatonville. She "prayed…nightly" for the failure of Joe and Missie May's marriage. After she helps Missie May deliver a son, she tells Joe that she had never thought well of the marriage because Missie May's mother had been promiscuous, and she feared the same would prove true of Missie May. However, she is proud of the baby, whom she says is the spitting image of Joe, and seems to revise her opinion of Missie May and the marriage. - Character: Candy Store Clerk. Description: At the end of the story, Joe chats with the unnamed candy store clerk during his shopping trip to Orlando. Although Joe hasn't visited the store for months, the clerk knows Joe by name and remembers his customary candy order. He is the first person in the story to whom Joe announces his son's birth and recounts the story of Otis Slemmons. - Theme: Domesticity and Routine. Description: "The Gilded Six-Bits" is fundamentally a story about home—specifically, the ways in which domesticity can create and sustain love. Hurston's narrative centers on the interactions between newlyweds Joe and Missie May, whose partnership is initially characterized and bolstered by various loving routines. When an outsider disrupts these routines, however, the couple's relationship is tested. By exploring how Joe and Missie May navigate and ultimately overcome such disruption, Hurston suggests that domestic customs create a feeling of kinship and comfort more powerful than the fleeting excitement of unfamiliarity. Hurston begins by describing the setting as "a Negro yard around a Negro house in a Negro settlement." The author's words immediately make clear that her story is rooted in the cultural particularities of Eatonville, a "Negro settlement" in Florida. The comfortable familiarity of this settled world provides the backdrop for the characters' relationships. Hurston evokes a strong sense of delight in the regularity and normalcy of the Banks' own home, which is initially described as a tranquil, orderly place that is lovingly cared for, with "a mess of homey flowers" that bloom "cheerily." There is "something happy about" the house, which is filled with sunshine after its weekly scouring, has its yard raked in a pattern, and even features shelf-paper trimmed with care. Against this ordinary yet lovely backdrop, the Bankses play a game wherein Joe throws silver dollars in the open door for Missie May to pick up and pile beside her plate. This game is at the heart of their domestic routine—"it was this way every Saturday afternoon," the narrator remarks—and further adds to the story's overarching sense of place and rootedness. This sense is further reinforced through the details Hurston gives about the couple's meals together—perhaps the most familiar and recurrent element of domestic life. The pleasure Joe and Missie Mae take in sharing food echoes and deepens their marital bond; Hurston writes that though there was "very little talk during" meals, that which was said "flaunted" affection. Domestic life as a whole, for the pair, "was the best part of life . . . everything was right." Hurston presents the happiness, simple beauty, and order of the Banks home and routine as a reflection of the health of its inhabitants' relationships—a reflection that, it follows, suffers when the characters' relationships suffer. The goodness of the Banks' cherished routine is eventually disrupted by an outsider. When Joe excitedly tells his wife about Eatonville's newly-opened ice cream parlor, there is immediately a certain sense of foreignness and mystery surrounding its proprietor, Otis D. Slemmons. He is "of spots and places," Joe tells Missie May, but not any place in particular. Both refer to him as a "stray," emphasizing his comparative lack of rootedness as well as the suspicion that engenders. Likewise, Slemmons' clothing, language, and manner clearly differentiate him from the other residents and hint at the ways in which their familiar world is about to be disrupted. Nevertheless, Joe is intrigued by the strange, apparently wealthy Slemmons and the different lifestyle he represents. Joe is the one to arrange the couple's first trip to the ice cream parlor, and afterward he speaks effusively of Slemmons' "Chicago talk" and the new words they learned that evening. Later, of course, Missie May will prove to have been seduced by Slemmons as well. When Joe gets off early from work and sneaks home to surprise her, the first clue that something is wrong comes when he bumps a pile of dishes and knocks something down in the dark kitchen. Things are already out of place even before Joe discovers Slemmons in their bedroom. By associating Slemmons with a sense of foreignness and disorder, Hurston suggests the intrigue and danger of succumbing to the allure of the unfamiliar. Domestic routine ultimately saves Joe and Missie May from the estrangement they feel in the wake of Missie May's infidelity. Even though Joe is "strange" to her after he discovers her betrayal, and their usual play and banter are missing, Missie May finds relief in continuing to tend to Joe's needs as she always has—cooking for him and rubbing him with lineament oil when he isn't well. As time passes and the two continue living together, Joe eventually softens towards his wife. Following the birth of their son, Joe's shopping for "all the staples" (that is, their traditional foods), buying Missie May's favorite sweets, and finally resuming the silver dollar game signal that routine is getting back to normal, and thus that healing has occurred. Things are not exactly the same—Missie May, recovering from childbirth, can't run to the door yet to collect the coins—but the familiar shape of their life together is back in place. The appearance of Slemmons certainly unsettles and disorients Joe and Missie May—near the story's end, Joe remarks to the candy store clerk that he has "been round in spots and places," a description previously applied to Slemmons. But domestic routines ultimately guide the couple back to each other by reminding them of the beauty of the life they built together. In this way, rootedness in the domestic triumphs over the strange and unfamiliar. For Hurston, cheerful homes, playful affection, and delicious meals point to the value of grounding oneself in particular places, cultures, and customs. Such grounding creates a foundational sense of loyalty that is able to withstand the damaging shakeups from outsiders who would attempt to tear down the home a couple has built together. - Theme: Appearances, Reality, and Trust. Description: Hurston contrasts deception with authenticity throughout "The Gilded Six-Bits." The title itself—which refers to coins of low value covered with a thin layer of gold leaf—invokes the notion of fakery and portends the betrayal that will test Joe and Missie May's marriage. Yet even as Hurston's story highlights the many ways in which appearances frequently contrast with reality, it ultimately suggests that genuine trust can withstand even the basest deception. Deception frames the story from its very beginning. Joe and Missie May's weekly game is a mere show of hiding, giving chase, and fighting, an elaborate play-acting they have developed together. Even so, this happy charade is used to reaffirm their love for one another. Hurston again evokes this sense of playful deception during Joe and Missie May's meals together, during which their conversations "consisted of banter that pretended to deny affection but in reality flaunted it." Through this relationship, Hurston immediately establishes the frequent difference that exists between appearances and reality. The love and tenderness behind Joe and Missie May's "joyful mischief" further contrasts it with the destructive form of mischief soon to be introduced by Otis Slemmons.  Slemmons literally embodies fakery. The first detail given about him is his "mouth full of gold teethes," and he constantly flaunts his supposed wealth: "a five-dollar gold piece for a stick-pin and…a ten-dollar gold piece on his watch." While Joe asserts that this makes Slemmons seem like a rich white man and wishes he could emulate this look, Missie May, far more skeptical of the ice cream proprietor, tells Joe, "Ford and Rockefeller and dis Slemmons…kin be as many-gutted as dey please, Ah'm satisfied wid you jes lak you is, baby." When Joe insists that what he is saying about Slemmons is true because "he tole us so hisself," Missie May responds, "Dat don't make it so. His mouf is cut cross-ways, ain't it? Well, he kin lie jes' lak anybody else." Having already established a world in which appearances frequently contrast with reality, Hurston's initial introduction of Slemmons forebodes his trickery. He pretends to be worldly and wealthy, but—much like Joe and Missie May's games—his looks are deceiving. Slemmons' deception seduces Missie May, and, in turn, ultimately strips her marriage of pretense. Following Missie May's infidelity—itself yet another form of deceit—she and Joe stop playing their coin-toss game. As it had been an early symbol of their playfulness and devotion, the disappearance of this game is one of the most devastating effects of Slemmons' interference in their lives. When Missie May gives birth to a child, however, Joe ultimately takes Missie May at her word and accepts the newborn baby as his own, even though Hurston leaves the question of paternity somewhat ambiguous. Joe's acceptance of the baby is an affirmation of his love for and forgiveness of Missie May. Deceit and betrayal have laid bare the truth of their marriage and revealed genuine love at its heart, whereas Slemmons, like his fake gold piece, promises much while ultimately proving to be worthless. Throughout the story, Hurston plays with the differences between appearances and reality, finally using this device—symbolized by the gilded coin—to reveal the truth of Joe and Missie May's marriage. The ultimate resumption of the coin-toss game upon Joe's forgiving his wife is the surest signal that the effects of Slemmons' deceit have been overcome; ironically, only when mutual trust has been re-established can the couple playfully deceive each other once again. The charade that opens the story, however—marked by the "furious…energy" of the tussling pair—contrasts with the more muted version at the end of the story, where a weakened Missie May "crept…as quickly as she could" to claim Joe's coins. This shows that their newlywed innocence, while strained by deceit, has given way to a more weathered yet wiser love founded on trust and forgiveness. Their love is not simply a cheap commodity with a pretty veneer, but an enduring force that can withstand the ugliness of betrayal. - Theme: Money, Class, and Power. Description: Hurston initially introduces her characters as happy despite limited resources. When Slemmons appears, however, Joe and Missie May begin to imagine possessing traits, status, and means they do not have. Subsequent discontent leads Missie May to be unfaithful to Joe, threatening their relationship and disrupting its simple pleasures. Hurston argues that while having enough money for basic comforts is important, the desire for excess wealth or status is a corrosive force ultimately at odds with genuine happiness. Although the Bankses are content, Hurston makes clear from the opening of the story that money is nevertheless an ever-present concern in their lives. They, along with the rest of Eatonville, rely on "the payroll of the G. and G. Fertilizer works" for their continued sustenance. This reveals Eatonville to be a solidly working-class town, and immediately establishes the Banks family's financial status as somewhat precarious, in that it is entirely reliant on an outside company. Nevertheless, the Bankses have enough money for simple material pleasures that provide some of the core delights of their marriage. On payday, for example, Joe fills his pockets with treasures for his wife to find—small indulgences like gum, sweet soap, and candy kisses, all of which are prizes in his weekly game of tossing silver dollars to Missie May.  This game further speaks to Joe's status as provider, as Missie May stacks the silver dollars next to her plate while the couple shares a simple yet bountiful meal together. Hurston takes care to describe the meal in concrete detail, mentioning the "big pitcher of buttermilk…ham hock atop a mound of string beans and new potatoes, and…a pone of spicy potato pudding," over which the couple playfully fights for seconds. These images suggest abundance and signal shared pride in what Joe can provide amidst humble circumstances. Though they are not wealthy, there is no initial suggestion of lack in the Banks' day-to-day lives. Moreover, Joe and Missie May have enough "money put away" that they can afford to have children soon. Hurston thus establishes that money is not in itself a corrosive influence; on the contrary, it makes possible some of the central joys of married life. When Missie May and Joe begin to covet things they don't have, however, their relationship is imperiled. When Joe initially describes Slemmons, he is fixated on aspects of the ice cream proprietor's appearance, which he associates with wealth and status. Responding to Missie May's skeptical reaction, Joe says, "He ain't puzzle-gutted, honey. He jes' got a corperation…All rich mens is got some belly on 'em." These physical markers of affluence have clear racial overtones: "Dat make 'm look lak a rich white man," Joe notes, adding, "he tole us how de white womens in Chicago give 'im all dat gold money"—a sign that they are also associated with sexual desirability. Joe envies these traits, trying to imitate Slemmons' paunch and swagger while Missie May is out of the room. Even as Joe covets the external markers of Slemmons' supposed wealth, however, he appears to remain content with what he has, telling his wife, "Don't be so wishful 'bout me. Ah'm satisfied de way Ah is. So long as Ah be yo' husband, Ah don't keer 'bout nothin' else." Missie May, in contrast, ponders how they might stumble upon lost money, musing, "if we wuz to find it, you could wear some 'thout havin' no gang of womens." Eventually, Missie May proves so enticed by wealth that she chooses to sleep with Slemmons for his gold, tearfully defending herself with the argument that Slemmons "said he wuz gointer give me dat gold money…" After Joe discovers his wife's adultery, the pattern of their life changes: "There were no more Saturday romps. No ringing silver dollars to stack beside her plate. No pockets to rifle." Missie May's act has struck at Joe's status as provider, as well as at the affirming household customs that celebrated and were sustained by that status. In keeping with that shift, Joe's pocket now contains a relatively worthless coin taken from Slemmons, symbolizing the potential loss of the genuine goodness within their marriage. "In fact," the narrator notes, "the yellow coin in his trousers was like a monster hiding in the cave of his pockets to destroy [Missie May]." After the couple finally sleeps together again, Joe taunts Missie May about her superficial desire by leaving the gilded coin under her pillow. Only then does Missie May realize she has been tricked by the allure of fake gold. She is also humiliated by Joe's rebuke, thinking he has offered fifty cents "as if she were any woman in the long house." Hurston shows that because Missie May coveted wealth—or, rather, its trappings—she lost sight of money's healthy function within the Banks' life. Where having enough money once facilitated happiness and thriving, now the desire for excess money has produced betrayal and estrangement. Joe ultimately "redeems" the gilded coin by using it to purchase a large amount of Missie May's favorite candy. His presentation of fifteen half-dollars at the end of the story likewise signals the restoration of their relationship—their Saturday romps have regained their place at the heart of the marriage—while also reasserting his role as the one who can truly provide for his wife. When Missie May turns away from covetous desires and recognizes anew the goodness of what they already have, money is restored to its proper role within the household, and the couple is likewise restored to one another. Money in "The Gilded Six-Bits" helps secure wellbeing and makes ordinary family joys possible. But when characters confuse wealth with wellbeing, the effects are disastrous. Only when Missie May recognizes the emptiness of excess riches can her relationship with Joe be restored. In this way, Hurston argues that while money is important, coveting wealth tends to threaten the very bonds that money is meant to serve. - Theme: Sexuality and Marriage. Description: Sexuality within Joe and Missie May's relationship is a lively, creative force, reflected in the beauty of their home, the playfulness of their interactions, and in Joe's desire for parenthood. At the same time, Hurston portrays sexuality as corrupting when expressed outside of appropriate channels—namely, marriage. Marriage, Hurston suggests, provides an environment within which sexuality is healthy rather than a source of temptation. Above all, Hurston argues that sexuality is at once a creative and destructive act, one that is natural and beautiful when expressed within the bond of a meaningful relationship yet deeply destructive when treated as a transactional exchange. Hurston paints a vivid picture of marital love and desire expressed through everyday life. She opens the story by describing a light-filled, orderly, and appealing home environment. Immediately thereafter, she introduces Missie May as a sexually attractive, fertile young woman, whose "breasts thrust forward aggressively" as she bathes. Hurston ties Missie May's youthful beauty to the loveliness of the home she and Joe have built together, setting the tone for the positive role of sexuality within the Banks' marriage. Hurston further characterizes the dynamic between husband and wife as "a furious mass of male and female energy." The mood of their marriage is one of joyful, mischievous teasing, laden with sexual tension. Their affection continues to be expressed within the context of happy domestic routines and a cheerful give-and-take. A delicious dinner is marked by "banter that…flaunted" mutual affection, and their shared physical attraction is repeatedly affirmed as Joe "[toys] with Missie May's ear" and the couple exchanges kisses at the table. At the midpoint of the story, as Joe walks home from work, the sight of the moon "made him yearn painfully for Missie May," and he dreams of children; in fact, "creation obsessed him." Joe's attentiveness to natural beauty and desire to have a baby underscores the healthy potential of sexuality. Hurston thus initially portrays sexuality as a vibrant force that both nourishes the marital bond and is nourished by it. It can also lead to new life, both literally and within struggling relationships. At the same time, Hurston suggests that, wrongly acted upon, sexuality has the potential to cause great harm. Slemmons embodies a sexual mystique of his own. The stranger first notices Missie May's beauty, passing and tipping his hat to her while she scours steps. Relating this to Joe, Missie May comments, "Ah thought Ah never seen him befo'." Already, Slemmons is characterized by a sense of intrigue. Joe seems to recognize this. When he describes Slemmons to his wife, he can't let go of the subject of Slemmons' prowess with women, even when Missie May interjects with kisses and spirited arguments. Parading Missie May at Slemmons' parlor becomes a fixed part of the couple's weekly routine. This public display of his wife's beauty brings Joe great satisfaction—it helps make up "the best part of life." Yet Hurston follows Joe's reflections with the revelation of Missie May's adultery, suggesting that the weekly "parading" has helped undermine the very possessiveness Joe prizes. Joe's longings for his wife and for procreation are then abruptly thrown off course when he arrives home and discovers Missie May's adultery. The threat posed by extramarital sexuality becomes explicit, as Joe strikes Slemmons in fury and Slemmons flees in disgrace. When Joe and Missie May later sleep together for the first time since the latter's infidelity, the marital act is impersonally described (the narrator states simply that "youth triumphed") and is punctuated by the coldness of Joe's gesture when he leaves the gilded coin, the symbol of Missie May's transgression, in "payment"—thereby likening his wife to a prostitute. After months of little to no sexual contact, however, procreation opens a path to the restoration of the Banks' troubled marriage. Missie May becomes pregnant, and despite Joe's unspoken doubts about the child's paternity, he ultimately acknowledges the baby as his son. Furthermore, his mother's approving comments—that Missie May is "gointer have plenty mo' [children]"—signal not only her newfound respect for Missie May, but of hope for their marriage going forward. Hurston paints a complex picture of sexual desire in "The Gilded Six-Bits." It nourishes the most beautiful aspects of the Banks' relationship and bears the potential for children, yet proves dangerous when flaunted outside of marriage. Joe's insecurity leads him to show off his wife's beauty in public, which in turn leads to Missie May's betrayal of her husband—leaving them with "not the substance of marriage [but] the outside show." Even when the couple reunites sexually, sex alone is not sufficient to heal this breach; it must be wedded to the "substance"—restored trust and enduring affection—in order to fulfill the life-giving potential Hurston celebrates. - Climax: Joe's discovery of Missie May's infidelity - Summary: At a meticulously tidy, cheerful-looking home, Missie May is bathing after spending Saturday cleaning the house. As she dresses, she hears her husband Joe tossing silver dollars in the open doorway, heralding his arrival home from work. Missie May runs to the door and searches the yard in mock anger, then chases Joe and wrestles playfully with him until she claims candy and other gifts from his pockets. This affectionate game symbolizes the happiness of their marriage. Over dinner, Joe tells Missie May he is taking her to the town's new ice cream parlor, owned by Otis D. Slemmons, a newcomer from Chicago. Slemmons is a heavy-set, well-dressed man bedecked with gold, who brags of his popularity with rich women. After their visit to the ice cream parlor, the couple discusses Slemmons. Joe is impressed by Slemmons and wishes he could emulate his swaggering style. Missie May is more skeptical of Slemmons' claims, but finds his wealth appealing and wonders how she and Joe might find gold money for themselves. Parading Missie May at Slemmons' parlor becomes part of the Banks' Saturday routine, along with the coin-toss game. One night, Joe is walking home from work early, reflecting on the happiness of his marriage and his hopes for children. He sneaks into the house to surprise Missie May, then hears noises and is stunned to discover Slemmons half-dressed in their bedroom. Begging for his life, Slemmons offers gold money. Joe strikes Slemmons twice, and, after Slemmons flees, Joe finds that he is clutching the man's golden watch charm. Missie May is disconsolate, telling Joe that she still loves him but that Slemmons had promised her his gold. The couple continues to live together, though their routine has been disrupted by Missie May's infidelity. Their mealtime banter is silenced, and their Saturday afternoon romps cease. One night Joe comes home complaining of back pain and asks Missie May to rub him with lineament oil. They end up sleeping together again, and Missie May is overjoyed, until she discovers that Joe has slipped Slemmons' gold piece under her pillow. She realizes the gold piece is merely a gilded half dollar. She returns the coin to Joe's pocket. Some time later, it is apparent that Missie May is pregnant. She tells Joe that it will be a little boy, the spitting image of him, but Joe expresses doubt. After the baby is born, Joe's mother, who had disapproved of their marriage, praises the baby's likeness to Joe. Joe keeps his distance for a few days, then goes to Orlando to buy the family's groceries, something he has not done for a long time. He uses the gilded half dollar to buy candy for Missie May, telling the store clerk how he had bested Slemmons and that he now has a little boy at home. The coin, the symbol of the breach in their relationship, has been exchanged for candy kisses, Joe's customary gift for Missie May. When he gets back to Eatonville, Joe tosses silver dollars in the doorway once again, marking the healing of their marriage.

- Genre: Dystopian novel - Title: The Giver - Point of view: Third-person limited, through Jonas's eyes - Setting: A managed community in a futuristic society. The community is cut off from the outside world, which is referred to as "elsewhere." - Character: Jonas. Description: The protagonist of the novel, Jonas is thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive, and compassionate. He feels confused by some of the rules of the community, although he obeys them, and longs for human touch even before he understands it. Set apart from his friends by his pale eyes and his ability to see color, he is selected to be the next Receiver when he turns 12. When he discovers beauty, pain, love and death under the tutelage of The Giver, he becomes frustrated with the community's ignorance and convinces The Giver to help him change it. In order to become truly wise, Jonas must learn completely selfless love for Gabriel and his community and be willing to sacrifice his own life for the sake of another's. - Character: The Giver. Description: Known as the Receiver until Jonas becomes his trainee, The Giver is a kind, elderly man whose breadth of experience through memory makes him look and seem older than he actually is. Although he lives in luxurious quarters and does not have a very active life, he is weighted down by the memories he carries and is often subjected to crippling pain. He is wise and patient with Jonas, and grows to love him as he loved his previous trainee, Rosemary. His grief and sense of hopelessness after Rosemary's death is later transformed into enthusiasm for Jonas's idea for escape. The Giver demonstrates total selflessness by offering to remain behind in order to help the community cope with the influx of memories. He willingly offers Jonas his most precious memories of love and music, and his selflessness inspires Jonas to risk his own life to save Gabriel. - Character: Gabriel. Description: The small fretful newchild whom Jonas's father takes home with him in order to help him sleep at night. Gabriel has pale eyes like Jonas and The Giver, which Jonas later learns are the color blue. Jonas discovers he is able to transmit memories to Gabriel, which means that, like Jonas, Gabriel is also capable of great emotional depth. Jonas's desire to save Gabriel from being released spurs Jonas's rebellion against the community. - Character: Jonas's Father. Description: A kind, caring man, Jonas's father is a Nurturer who looks after newchildren until they are given to families. He becomes attached to the babies he cares for and breaks small rules for their sakes, such as learning their names and bringing Gabriel home to look after him better. However, Jonas's father likes the way the community is structured, and because he does not understand what death means, he believes it is right to release children if they are too weak to be given to families. Although he claims not to believe in love, Jonas's father comes close to showing loving emotions to his children. Jonas feels love and affection for his father, which is why he feels betrayed when he discovers that his father is responsible for killing the babies. Jonas's father shows the limitations that the community places on those who might otherwise be fully loving individuals. - Character: Fiona. Description: One of Jonas's friends, who is assigned to be a Caretaker of the Old. Jonas begins taking a pill when he has an erotic dream about Fiona. Jonas later discovers that Fiona's hair is red. Fiona enjoys having Jonas as a friend but does not know how to love him in return. - Theme: The Individual vs. Society. Description: Jonas's community is founded on the idea of Sameness—the elimination of difference in its members. In order to achieve this Sameness, individualism is discouraged, and rules and discipline matter most. Jonas learns from an early age that both breaking rules and being different is considered shameful. By celebrating group birthdays, allowing only one kind of clothing and haircut, assigning spouses, jobs, children and names, and eliminating sexual relations, Jonas's society stifles the things that allow for individual differences. Without mirrors, there can be no vanity or jealousy. Without sex, vanity loses its importance, and competition and conflict are eliminated. In Sameness, no one knows the meaning of loneliness, but no one knows true happiness either. Young Jonas, however, is different in ways he cannot change. With his pale eyes and ability to see in color, he stands out in his community. While these traits at first make him uncomfortable, they give him the courage to be different in a more powerful way when he decides to escape from the community. When Jonas comes to recognize the value innate in every individual, he is horrified that his community leaders can so casually "release" their members, ending precious human lives. - Theme: Freedom and Choice. Description: In Jonas's community, no one makes choices. All choices about the community were made in the distant past when Sameness was created, and any additional changes involve painfully slow bureaucratic procedures. Without choice, no one suffers the consequences that come from making wrong choices, but they also don't experience the joys that come with making right ones. By sacrificing the freedom of choice, community members are guaranteed a stable, painless life. Consequently, the people lead pleasant—but robotic—lives. When Jonas discovers memory, he realizes that choice is essential to human happiness. Choice, he learns, is power. He makes the first real choice in his life when he decides to escape from the community and take Gabriel with him. In making this significant and dangerous choice, he gives a windfall of pleasure and pain to the people he leaves behind, and gives the freedom of choice back to the community. - Theme: Feeling and Emotion. Description: The people of Jonas's community don't understand genuine emotion or pain, because their lifestyles allow no opportunity to experience it. Birthmothers are not allowed to raise their own children. Sex is forbidden and sexual urges medicated away. Adults are not allowed to choose their own spouses. Identical twins are not both allowed to survive because they would be too close emotionally. Every decision made in the community serves a purely practical purpose and is based on the rules set down at the time of the community's establishment, promoting Sameness and leaving no room for sentimentality. Jonas is unique in that he longs for human closeness even before he meets The Giver. When he bathes Larissa at the House of the Old, he realizes the beauty of touch and intimacy. When he begins his training as Receiver, he realizes that true emotion is only accessible to those who have memory and experience. He also realizes that one can only experience joy and love if one understands pain and loneliness. As he experiences the breadth and beauty of human emotion, Jonas comes to believe that it is cruel to allow people to continue living in numbness. His ultimate escape from the community is an act of love toward those who do not know how to love him in return. By leaving, Jonas is able to give them feeling. - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: The annual December ceremony, when the "birthdays" of all children are celebrated simultaneously, is a ritual full of rites of passage. As children grow older, these rites allow them more responsibility; at eight, for example, they are given pockets and stuffed animals are taken away. At Nine, children are given bicycles. At Twelve, children are assigned jobs and adult status is conferred upon them. After Twelve, age is not counted. Yet these rites of passage are purely external, involving the giving of objects or responsibilities. Rites of passage that involve internal development are stifled. For instance, children do not become adults when they become aware of their own sexuality. Instead, they're given a pill to stifle sexual desires. Adulthood is forced upon them at a predetermined time and is associated with the ability to work instead of with the physical, mental, and emotional changes of puberty or life experience. The Giver is in many ways Jonas's coming-of-age story. Jonas reaches maturity only when he is given memory, and through memory, experience. In this way, Jonas becomes more mature at Twelve than the "adults" of his community. But The Giver also teaches Jonas the wisdom to recognize his own shortcomings. Jonas truly becomes an adult at the end of the novel, when he learns that true maturity comes through selfless love, when one is willing to sacrifice one's own life for another's. - Theme: Memory. Description: Sometime in the past, Jonas's community decided to give up their memories in order to eliminate the pain and regret that came with them. They were trying to create a totally peaceful and harmonious society without conflict, war, or hate by eliminating emotion entirely. They succeeded: the community is almost perfectly stable and totally safe. Yet Jonas realizes that without memories, a person can't learn from mistakes, celebrate accomplishments, know love or happiness or any other deep emotion, or grow as an individual. In The Giver, memory doesn't function as it does in the real world. Certain people have the power to transmit memories to others, and this ability is connected to the trait of blue eyes, which Jonas, The Giver, and Gabriel all share. Memory is also not just a mental exercise. Instead, it's an actual experience: Jonas literally feels the cold when he remembers snow. Finally, when a keeper of memories, called a Receiver, dies or leaves the community, all of his or her memories are released to the community. By bestowing upon memory these magical properties, Lowry emphasizes memory's preciousness and its power to influence, guide, and enrich life. - Climax: Jonas learns that when his father "releases" newchildren, he actually kills them. Jonas decides to leave the community. - Summary: Sometime in the future, an 11-year-old boy named Jonas lives in a seemingly perfect community in which there is little pain and little crime. People are polite. Everyone belongs to a supportive family. But this harmony comes at a price. There is also no choice, and real emotions are nonexistent. Life is dictated by strict rules. A committee of elders matches spouses and assigns them children born from women whose only job is to give birth. The committee names all babies and chooses every person's career. Sex and love are prohibited, being different is shameful, and families are dissolved when the children are grown. Everyone looks similar in skin color and dress. Everything serves a purely practical purpose—to serve the common good of the community and minimize conflict. The old and the sick are "released," which the community believes means sent to live "Elsewhere," outside the community. During family time, Jonas shares his uneasiness about the upcoming ceremony, where he will be assigned his job. Jonas's father, a Nurturer who cares for newborns, shares his concern over a baby to be named Gabriel who is not growing fast enough. When Jonas's father brings the baby home, Jonas notices that Gabriel has pale eyes like him, an unusual trait. The next day Jonas does required volunteer hours with his friends Asher and Fiona at the House of the Old. A woman named Larissa tells him an old man was recently released in a beautiful ceremony. Jonas asks what happens when someone is released, but no one knows. That night, Jonas has a dream about bathing naked with Fiona. When he tells his parents, his mother says they are natural feelings called Stirrings, and that Jonas must take a pill to stifle them. A few weeks later, at the annual ceremony, Jonas's friends are assigned jobs that seem to fit them perfectly. But the Chief Elder skips Jonas's name. After everyone else has been assigned, the Elder announces that Jonas has been selected for the great honor of being the next Receiver. She says Jonas has the Capacity to See Beyond, which explains the strange changes happening to his vision. The next day Jonas meets the current Receiver, who is now an old man. He tells Jonas his job is to transmit the memories he holds, which are all the memories in the world, to Jonas. He tells Jonas to call him The Giver. He then lays his hands on Jonas's back and gives him the memory of sledding in the snow. Jonas realizes there are hundreds of wonderful memories no one in the community has ever experienced. Over the next year, from The Giver's memories, Jonas learns about color, nature, beauty, pleasure, love, and family. (For Jonas, the Capacity to See Beyond means that he can see in color, while everyone else sees in black and white). Jonas is also given painful memories of loss, loneliness, poverty, injury, war, and death. The Giver explains that the community is founded on the principle of Sameness, which requires the stability of a world without deep emotion or memory. But he adds that the memories give the Receiver the true wisdom needed to guide the committee on their decisions. Meanwhile, in his efforts to help Gabriel avoid being released, Jonas also secretly learns that he has the power to transmit memories to Gabriel. While asking questions about release, Jonas learns from The Giver that ten years earlier, his previous trainee (later revealed to be his daughter) couldn't bear the pain of being The Receiver and asked for release. All her memories were traumatically released to the community. Later, at Jonas's request, The Giver shows Jonas a release ceremony Jonas's father is performing on an identical twin baby. Jonas realizes with horror that to be "released" means to be killed. He convinces The Giver to create a plan in which Jonas will escape from the community and release all his memories to the community members, to stop them from living such numb and ignorant lives. The Giver will stay behind to help the people cope with their new memories. When Jonas learns that Gabriel is to be released the next day, he rushes forward with the plan: he takes Gabriel, crosses the river, and flees the community by bicycle. On the road he encounters beautiful things from his memories like rain and birds, but he also encounters hunger and cold. As he is growing weak, and despairs about being able to protect Gabriel, he sees a snow-covered hill from his first memory from The Giver. At the top of the hill, they find a sled and sled down, where they hear music at the bottom of the hill and see colored lights in the windows of houses in the distance.

- Genre: Literary Fiction, Family Drama - Title: The God of Small Things - Point of view: Third person omniscient, free indirect discourse - Setting: Ayemenem, Kerala, India - Character: Rahel Ipe. Description: One of the twins and protagonists of the novel, Rahel is an energetic, imaginative girl. She and Estha are so close as to almost consider themselves one person, though their appearances and personalities are different. After Rahel is separated from Estha, she drifts from school to school and then job to job, lost without her other half. She eventually marries Larry McCaslin and moves to America, but she and Larry are divorced when Rahel's "Emptiness" becomes too much. When she is thirty-one Rahel returns to Ayemenem to see Estha again. - Character: Esthappen Yako Ipe (Estha). Description: The other twin and protagonist, Estha is more serious and well-behaved than Rahel, and he also experiences more of the harshness of the world at an early age. Estha is molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man and then lives in fear that he will be molested again. It is then Estha who must betray Velutha to his face, so he cannot hide in the fantasies that Rahel allows herself. After Ammu's scandal Estha is "returned" to live with his alcoholic father Baba, and Estha soon stops speaking entirely or even acknowledging other people. After twenty-three years Baba "re-returns" him to Ayemenem and Estha and Rahel are reunited. - Character: Ammu. Description: The mother of the twins, an independent woman who is both a loving mother and has an "unsafe edge." Ammu was beaten cruelly by Pappachi as a child, so she grew up with a natural distrust of patriarchal Indian society. She married Baba to escape Ayemenem, but he was an abusive alcoholic so Ammu left him after the twins were born. Ammu is then disgraced because of her divorce, and she causes a huge scandal by having an affair with the untouchable Velutha. After Sophie Mol's death Ammu "returns" Estha to Baba, as she can't afford to keep both twins. Ammu dies of a lung disease four years later, alone in a lodge. - Character: Navomi Ipe (Baby Kochamma). Description: Pappachi's younger sister, a staunch Syrian Christian who loves Father Mulligan when she is young. Baby Kochamma then grows into a bitter, jealous woman who betrays Ammu and the twins to save herself. When she is old she spends all day watching TV while the house falls apart around her. - Character: Chacko Ipe. Description: Ammu's brother, who received all the privilege that Ammu was denied. Chacko went to Oxford and became a Rhodes Scholar. While in London he married Margaret Kochamma, but she left him after their daughter, Sophie Mol, was born. Chacko then returns to Ayemenem and takes over Paradise Pickles. Though Chacko supports Marxism, in practice he acts as a typical landlord with traditional caste prejudices. - Character: Velutha. Description: A Paravan (Untouchable) who grew up with Ammu and is very skilled with his hands. He is an excellent carpenter and fixes all the machines in the pickle factory, but is still treated as second-class. He grows into a handsome young man and is beloved by the twins. His affair with Ammu, betrayal, and brutal death make up much of the novel's tragedy. - Character: Shri Benaan John Ipe (Pappachi). Description: Mammachi's husband, an Imperial Entomologist who discovered a new species of moth but then didn't have it named after him. This haunts him ever after, and Pappachi grows angry and cruel later in life. He viciously beats Mammachi and Ammu, all while acting like a kind husband and father in public. - Theme: Family and Social Obligation. Description: The God of Small Things basically deals with the complicated relationships between members of the Ipe family in Ayemenem, India. Each family member has different factors weighing on their relationships, like social obligation, familial duty, and personal dislike. Baby Kochamma, one of the book's most negative characters, allows her personal grudges and preoccupation with society's approval to lead her to betray her own family. Outside of the Ipes, Vellya Paapen also chooses his duty to society over familial love when he offers to kill his son, the Untouchable Velutha, for sleeping with Ammu. It is this tension between internal love and social obligations that makes up most of the novel's conflict.The most important relationship of the book is between the twins Estha and Rahel and their mother, Ammu. The twins see themselves as almost one person, and their closeness is a shelter from the harsh political and social forces of their world. The twins' relationship with Ammu is also very complex, as Ammu is both a loving mother and an unpredictable woman who sometimes says and does things that hurt her children deeply. The very existence of the twins in her current state of divorce is also a disgrace for Ammu in Indian society. Mammachi deals with social and personal issues with her children as well, as she loves Chacko with a repressed sexuality and forgives his affairs, but disowns Ammu when Ammu sleeps with an Untouchable. Familial love is always struggling with society and duty in the novel, and it is rarely victorious. - Theme: Indian Politics, Society, and Class. Description: The members of the Ipe family deal with a variety of social and political influences that cause much internal and external struggle in the novel. In the larger society of Kerala, India (in the 1969 portion of the novel), Marxist ideas have taken root and begin to upset the class system of landlords and laborers. This directly affects Paradise Pickles and the characters of Velutha, Chacko, and Comrade Pillai. The ancient Hindu caste system is another important factor – this system was officially abolished years earlier, but it still remains strongly imprinted on the minds of the public. The "Love Laws" of the caste system are of particular significance, particularly the divide between Touchables and Untouchables (a caste seen as vastly inferior).Most of the Ipe family is also "Syrian Christian," and Mammachi and Baby Kochamma in particular use their faith to justify many of their actions. Estha and Rahel, who are half-Hindu, half-Syrian Christian, must then struggle with this conflicting identity. The gender double standard of Indian society is another large factor in the plot, as Pappachi and Chacko's sins are generally overlooked, while Ammu is disgraced and scorned for being divorced. Overall, the "small things" that occur between the characters of the novel serve as a microcosm for the "big things" happening throughout India, as many political and social forces struggle against each other and the country leans towards violence and unrest. - Theme: Love and Sexuality. Description: Love comes in many forms in The God of Small Things, but it is most important when it crosses divides of society and duty. The relationship between Estha and Rahel is the strongest of the book, as the two are so close as to almost consider themselves one person. Yet when the young Rahel lists the people she loves she does not include Estha, but instead those she is "supposed" to love according to familial duty. Roy emphasizes the "Love Laws" early and often, foreshadowing the importance she will give to love that crosses boundaries of society and tradition. The central example of this is Ammu's relationship with Velutha, an Untouchable. This relationship is horrifying to the community and leads to Velutha's death and Ammu's exile, but it is also the most positive example of romantic love in the novel.Unfortunately, love and sexuality often take on more violent and oppressive forms, as Mammachi is beaten by her husband and Estha is molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man. Roy ends the novel with Estha and Rahel's incestuous union after they are reunited, followed by Ammu's first sexual encounter with Velutha. The poetic descriptions and juxtaposition of these scenes against violence and death gives them greater impact, and through them Roy shows that love can cross divides of politics and hatred. Even though such love can lead to tragedy, it is still incredibly valuable. - Theme: Change vs. Preservation. Description: Many characters try to preserve old memories and traditions in the novel, but Roy also portrays the inevitable march of change through small shifts in the status quo. Paradise Pickles & Preserves is the most obvious symbol of preservation (pickling things to preserve them), as Mammachi and the people of Ayemenem cling to the old caste system and the gender double standard. In places like Mammachi's house and the "History House" things linger from the past and are nursed and kept alive, like the "Loss of Sophie Mol" or the ghost of Kari Saipu. Other than through its name, the History House also becomes a symbol of preservation as the resting place of Rahel's plastic watch with the time painted on it – a small example of literally freezing time.Despite these attempts at preservation, the pickle jars keep leaking, and one of the book's common refrains is "things can change in a day." Much of the action takes place in two days, one in 1969 and one in 1993 – the days of Sophie Mol's death and Rahel's reunion with Estha. The efforts to preserve tradition are eroded away, and change still comes to both characters and country through the "small things." Ammu gets divorced and then loves an Untouchable, defying gender roles and the caste system, and the Marxist movement gains power and overturns the system of landlords and laborers. Small things like Ammu's warning that she loves Rahel "a little less" lead to big events like Rahel and Estha running away, which in turn leads to Sophie Mol's death. - Theme: Small Things. Description: In both the novel's title and in her writing style, Roy emphasizes the small moments, objects, and changes that symbolize and lead to the "Big Things" in life, like death, love, and political upheaval. Much of The God of Small Things is written in a kind of free indirect discourse, a style where the third-person narrator partly perceives the world in the childlike way that young Estha and Rahel do. This leads to many words written oddly (like "Bar Nowl" or "Locusts Stand I") but also to an emphasis on the innocent way a child sees the world, focusing on certain images and words. Through this lens, Roy dwells on small things like Rahel's watch, Estha's "Two Thoughts," and the little Marxist flag instead of straightforwardly describing the plot of the story.Within the narrative itself, Roy often points out that small talk is a mask for large, hidden feelings. The most important example of this is in Ammu and Velusha's relationship at the end of the book. Instead of speaking of the huge taboo they are breaking or the impossibility of their future, the two lovers focus on the bugs in the jungle around them and look no farther than "tomorrow." While the "Big Things" eventually reveal themselves, it is the small things of the novel that make the story so poignant and human, and Roy's writing style so intimate. - Climax: Sophie Mol dies and Velusha is beaten - Summary: The events of The God of Small Things are revealed in a fragmentary manner, mostly jumping back and forth between scenes in 1969 and 1993, with backstory scattered throughout. The story centers around the wealthy, land-owning, Syrian Christian Ipe family of Ayemenem, a town in Kerala, India. Most of the plot occurs in 1969, focusing on the seven-year-old twins Estha and Rahel, who live with their mother Ammu, their grandmother Mammachi, their uncle Chacko, and their great-aunt Baby Kochamma. In the backstory before 1969, Mammachi was married to Pappachi, an Imperial Entomologist who beat her cruelly. By 1969 Pappachi is dead and Mammachi is blind. Behind her house is the Meenachal River and her pickle factory, Paradise Pickles & Preserves. Baby Kochamma is a bitter, jealous old woman who unrequitedly loved an Irish missionary. Chacko went to Oxford and married Margaret Kochamma, an English woman. They had a daughter, Sophie Mol, and then Margaret left Chacko for a man named Joe. Chacko returned to Ayemenem and took over the pickle factory. Ammu married Baba, trying to escape Ayemenem, but Baba turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. After the twins were born the two separated and Ammu moved back to Ayemenem. In the wider society of Kerala, the Communist Party is gaining power and threatens to overthrow landlords like the Ipes. The Ipes live near an Untouchable (an inferior caste) family that includes Velutha, a young man who works for Chacko and is beloved by the twins. The main action centers around Sophie Mol's visit to Ayemenem. Joe dies in an accident, and Chacko invites Margaret Kochamma to Ayemenem for the holidays. Estha, Rahel, Ammu, Chacko, and Baby Kochamma make a trip to the airport, and on the way their car is trapped by a Communist march. The family then goes to see The Sound of Music, and Estha is molested by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, a vendor at the theater. The next day Sophie and Margaret arrive, and the family returns to Ayemenem. Estha fears that the Orangedrink Man will come for him, so he and Rahel find a boat and row across the river to the "History House," the abandoned home of an Englishman who "went native." The twins set up a hideout there. Meanwhile Ammu dreams about Velutha, and that night she and Velutha meet by the river and have sex. They continue to meet every night for the next two weeks. Finally Vellya Paapen (Velutha's father) comes to Mammachi and confesses his son's relationship with Ammu. Mammachi and Baby Kochamma lock Ammu in her room, where she screams that the twins are "millstones" around her neck. The twins decide to run away to the History House, and Sophie Mol comes with them. Their boat tips over as they cross the river and Sophie Mol drowns. The twins reach shore and, terrified, fall asleep in the History House, unaware that Velutha is there too. Baby Kochamma goes to the police, telling Inspector Thomas Mathew that Velutha tried to rape Ammu and kidnapped the children. Six policemen find Velutha and beat him brutally in front of Estha and Rahel. When Mathew finds out that Velutha is innocent, he threatens to charge Baby Kochamma. Terrified for herself, she convinces Estha to "save Ammu" by telling the police that Velutha killed Sophie Mol. Velutha dies in jail that night. After Sophie Mol's funeral Baby Kochamma convinces Chacko to throw Ammu out of the house, and Ammu is then forced to "return" Estha to Baba. The twins are separated for twenty-three years, during which Estha stops speaking altogether. When he is thirty-one Baba "re-returns" him to Ayemenem. Meanwhile Rahel is kicked out of many schools, and Ammu dies when Rahel is eleven. Rahel marries an American and lives in Boston, but then gets divorced and returns to Ayemenem when she hears Estha is there. The twins are reunited in 1993. Mammachi has died and Baby Kochamma and the cook, Kochu Maria, spend all day watching TV as the house falls apart. The History House has become a five-star hotel. Rahel and Estha (who still doesn't speak) sift through some old trinkets and notebooks and end up reaffirming their closeness by having sex.

- Genre: Picaresque Novel - Title: The Golden Ass - Point of view: First Person - Setting: The Roman Empire (primarily in Greece) - Character: Lucius. Description: Lucius is the narrator of The Golden Ass, although his name isn't revealed until well into the first book of the novel. The title of The Golden Ass refers to how Lucius gets turned into a donkey (an ass), and much of the book's plot is driven by Lucius's attempts to turn back into a human. Lucius is a resident of the Roman Empire, although because his family is from a Greek area (Thessaly), he is more comfortable speaking Greek than Latin. Lucius is witty and good with words, but he is also sometimes overconfident, and both his curiosity and his greed can get him into trouble. When he sees the witch Pamphile use an ointment to turn into a bird, he can't resist trying to get some of the ointment to use on himself. Instead, however, Lucius ends up being transformed into a donkey. Pamphile's maid, Photis, tells Lucius that he can cure himself if he simply eats from a rose, but each time Lucius gets near a rose, some obstacle keeps him from being able to eat it. As a donkey, Lucius endures many hardships and is often treated cruelly by his masters, who make him bear heavy loads and whip him, sometimes even threatening to kill him. His status as a donkey also allows him to overhear the stories of others. Lucius is a collector of stories, and instead of focusing on Lucius's main story, much of The Golden Ass is dedicated to stories within stories that Lucius either overhears or retells for the reader. Ultimately, Lucius is saved and turned back into a human through the intervention of the goddess Isis, which inspires Lucius to devote the rest of his life to her and her husband Osiris. On the one hand, Lucius's conversion to the cult of Isis symbolizes the benefits of loyalty and faithfulness, since it is only with Isis's help that he is turned back into a human. On the other hand, Lucius's strange journey represents how humans are subject to the whims of Fate, and while some of his misfortunes are caused by his own flaws, others are simply bad luck. - Character: Psyche. Description: Psyche is the third daughter of a king and queen—one of the most beautiful mortals in all the world and the eventual wife of Cupid. Her story, the longest in the book, is told by the old hag to Charite, while Lucius is also present. Apollo prophesies that Psyche will marry a snake-like being that will destroy the world. In a ceremony that combines elements of a wedding and a funeral, Psyche's parents take her to a crag, and then she's carried by the West Wind into a valley where she finds a mysterious mansion. A disembodied voice in the mansion claims to be her new husband. Psyche is happy in the mansion, but her scheming sisters convince her to try to find out her husband's identity (which she has been forbidden from doing). Psyche learns that her husband isn't a snake but is in fact the love god Cupid (who was tasked by his mother Venus with finding a pathetic husband for Psyche, but who disobeyed orders). The discovery of Cupid's identity starts a long chain of events that angers Venus, who forces Psyche to complete various seemingly impossible tasks. Ultimately, however, Psyche proves herself, and with the intervention of Jupiter, she is made immortal so that she can live with Cupid in peace. Psyche's story parallels the ups and downs of Lucius's story, foreshadowing the happy ending, but it also shows the consequences of curiosity and greed, as well as what happens when mortals dare to challenge the gods. - Character: Cupid. Description: Cupid is a mischievous love god who is the son of Venus and the eventual husband of Psyche. His story is told by the old hag to Charite, while Lucius is also present. When the beautiful mortal Psyche is born, a jealous Venus orders Cupid to find her someone pathetic to marry. Cupid disobeys orders and marries Psyche himself, concealing his identity. But when Psyche finds out his identity, it causes problems for both of them, and Venus learns how her son disobeyed her. Ultimately, Cupid is allowed to continue living with Psyche, after she is made immortal by Jupiter. As the god of love, Cupid represents both the pleasure of love but also the unpredictability and destruction that can ensue. Despite his story's happy ending, the story also hints at the consequences of what can happen when people are driven by love rather than logic. - Character: Isis. Description: Isis is an Egyptian goddess and the wife of the god Osiris. She appears to Lucius in a dream (while he's still a donkey), taking pity on him and telling him how he can acquire roses that will allow him to turn back into a man. Isis's vision proves correct, and so in gratitude, Lucius continues to serve Isis. The book ends with Lucius becoming a happy, devout member of the cult of Isis. Despite all the tribulations Lucius goes through over the course of The Golden Ass, the happy ending with Isis suggests that loyalty and persistence are sometimes rewarded. - Character: Photis. Description: Photis is the attractive maid who works in the house of Milo and Pamphile. Her hair is particularly striking to the narrator, Lucius. She has sex with Lucius on many occasions, and she is the one who first reveals the secrets of the witch Pamphile and how Pamphile uses ointment to turn herself into a bird. Photis becomes Lucius's accomplice when he steals some of Pamphile's ointment, but when Lucius tries to use the ointment, he accidentally turns himself into a donkey. Photis tells Lucius that the only cure for his condition is to eat from a rose, but before she can bring him any roses, bandits storm Milo's house. Photis enables Lucius to follow his own curiosity and in the process helps reveal the danger of too much curiosity. - Character: Charite (The Hostage). Description: Charite is the hostage of the thieves who sack Milo and kidnap Lucius (in donkey form). She has a fiancé (later revealed to be Tlepolemus). The thieves intend to keep Charite in order to extort money from her family. The old hag, who works with the thieves, tries to comfort Charite by telling her the story of Cupid and Psyche. Ultimately, Charite is rescued when her fiancé, Tlepolemus, infiltrates the thieves' cave in disguise and kills them. Despite escaping, however, Tlepolemus eventually ends up dead, due to scheming by Thrasyllus. This causes Charite to kill herself on Tlepolemus's sword out of despair. Charite's story symbolizes the whims of Fate, as she finds herself in an unfortunate position, then gets miraculously rescued, only to meet even greater misfortune. - Character: Old Hag. Description: The old hag is an unnamed older woman who works for the thieves who sack Milo and who kidnap Lucius and Charite. The old hag tells the longest story-within-a-story in the entire work: the story of Cupid and Psyche. The story of Cupid and Psyche involves Psyche getting into trouble through her own curiosity, then having to go through a long and arduous series of trials before finally reaching a happy ending. In many ways, the journey that Psyche goes through resembles the journey that Lucius himself goes through, and so the old hag symbolizes the power that stories have and how they can help people better understand their own lives. - Character: The Jealous Wife. Description: The jealous wife is first introduced as an eccentric wealthy woman who wants to have sex with Lucius while he's still a donkey. Later, more of her story is revealed, and it turns out that the jealous wife has been condemned to be mauled to death by wild animals because of crimes she committed. In her story, it's revealed that she kills her husband's secret illegitimate sister, believing the sister is actually his mistress. She then procures poison and proceeds to kill her husband, as well as accidentally killing the doctor who obtained the poison in the process. As part of the jealous wife's sentence, Lucius is supposed to have sex with her in public before she is executed. Lucius, however, doesn't want to do this (in part because he's afraid the wild animals will attack him too), and so he runs away before the ceremony can begin. The jealous wife symbolizes how passion and lust can drive a person to act irrationally. - Character: Tlepolemus (Haemus). Description: Tlepolemus is the cousin and fiancé of Charite. He disguises himself as Haemus in order to infiltrate the lair of the thieves who have kidnapped Charite, then tricks all the thieves into drinking a sedative and kills them. Despite his success over the thieves, however, Tlepolemus is later killed during a supposed hunting accident due to the scheming of Thrasyllus, who wants Charite for himself. Tlepolemus's story represents the whims of Fate, showing how a capable and righteous character can nevertheless meet a tragic end. - Character: Pamphile. Description: Pamphile is the wife of Milo and the mistress of the maid Photis. It is an open secret that Pamphile is a witch, and one night Lucius witnesses her using an ointment to turn into a bird so that she can approach a potential lover. This is what inspires Lucius himself to try the potion, which is how he gets turned into a donkey, an event that drives much of his conflicts for the rest of the novel. - Character: Milo. Description: Milo is a man living in Hypata, who is visited by the narrator Lucius. Milo's wife is the witch Pamphile, who uses an ointment to turn into bird (the same ointment that will later turn Lucius into a donkey). As a host, Milo is not particularly generous and doesn't offer Lucius many amenities. Later, his manor is robbed by bandits, and Lucius is blamed, although at that point Lucius is not arrested because he's still in the form of a donkey. - Character: The Pauper's Wife. Description: The pauper's wife is a character in a story that Lucius hears while staying in a hostel with Philebus's group. She is married to a poor artisan, referred to as the pauper. Like many characters in the stories in The Golden Ass, the pauper's wife is unfaithful. Unlike some of the other unfaithful characters, however, the pauper's wife experiences no consequences for her actions. When her husband almost catches her with a lover, she has her lover hide in a jar. The pauper's wife and her lover even have sex on top of the jar while the pauper is cleaning it. The story of the pauper's wife shows that Fate is complicated and that disloyal people aren't necessarily punished for their actions. - Character: The Baker. Description: The baker is yet another cruel owner of Lucius (as a donkey). He forces Lucius to do mill work. Like many characters, he has an unfaithful partner. The baker tells his spouse, the baker's wife, a story about the fuller and the fuller's wife, where unfaithfulness has dire consequences, particularly for the fuller's wife's lover. Ultimately, the baker catches his own wife cheating and divorces her, but the baker's wife plots revenge and finds a witch, who seems to send the ghost of a murdered woman to visit the baker. Ultimately, the baker ends up dead under circumstances that look like suicide but which seem to involve the ghost that the witch sent to him. The baker embodies the complex relationship between stories and reality in The Golden Ass: he tells one story, only to end up as a character in another one. He represents the complex ways that humans, and particularly people in relationships, plot against each other. - Character: Aristomenes (The Wayfarer). Description: Aristomenes is a traveler who has an unnamed traveling companion and who runs into Lucius on the road. Aristomenes tells one of the first stories-within-a-story in The Golden Ass, about an encounter with his friend Socrates and the witch Meroe. The story Aristomenes tells helps set the tone for the whole novel, and it introduces the major role that magic, witchcraft, and trickery will all play throughout. - Character: Socrates. Description: The Socrates who appears as a character in The Golden Ass is not the famous Socrates, but simply an old friend of the wayfarer Aristomenes who happens to have the same name as the philosopher. Socrates cheats on his family with an older innkeeper who is secretly the witch Meroe, and when he tries to leave, she curses him, turning him into a zombie-like living dead man. Socrates represents the dangers of both unfaithfulness and of messing with witchcraft, foreshadowing the role witchcraft will play in Lucius's story. - Character: The Baker's Wife. Description: The baker's wife is the unfaithful spouse of the cruel baker who owns Lucius (as a donkey). Her cheating is perhaps what inspires the baker to tell her the story of the fuller's wife, which demonstrates a negative outcome for infidelity. Nevertheless, in the story of her and the baker, she gets the last word. Though she is caught cheating and thrown out, the baker's wife gets help from a witch who seems to summon a ghost and coerce the baker into hanging himself. - Character: The Fuller's Wife. Description: The fuller's wife is the wife of a laundry worker (a fuller) and a character in the story that the baker tells his spouse, the baker's wife. Her story bears some similarities to the story of the pauper's wife, except that when the fuller's wife tries to hide her lover, he accidentally dies from exposure to sulfur (which was used for laundry). The story illustrates the potential consequences of infidelity and also provides a way to show how the baker suspects his own wife of infidelity—and perhaps is issuing her a warning. - Character: Thrasyllus. Description: Thrasyllus is a rich but rough-mannered young man who was one of Charite's suitors before she got engaged to Tlepolemus. Thrasyllus still holds a grudge, however, and he conspires to kill Tlepolemus when it will look like a hunting accident. Charite, however, finds out that Thrasyllus murdered Tlepolemus after she's visited by the latter's ghost. She stabs Thrasyllus's eyes out while he's sleeping, then kills herself on Tlepolemus's sword. - Character: Byrrhena. Description: Byrrhena is a woman in Hypata who claims to have acted as a mother figure to Lucius, although he doesn't remember much about her. She frequently offers her hospitality to Lucius, but Lucius is often reluctant to accept it. The interactions between Lucius and Byrrhena show how hospitality can often create obligations, and Lucius's wariness about accepting hospitality shows that he is cautious about wanting to be in anyone's debt, a position that he reverses at the end of the story when he gladly accepts a debt of loyalty to the goddess Isis. - Character: The Fuller. Description: The fuller is a laundry worker whose spouse (the fuller's wife) is cheating on him. They both appear in a story that the baker tells his own unfaithful spouse, the baker's wife. The fuller unexpectedly comes home early while his wife is with her lover. Her lover tries to hide under a wicker cage and ends up dying of sulfur exposure, highlighting the potential consequences of trying to hide infidelity. - Character: Meroe. Description: Meroe is an old innkeeper who is secretly a witch. She is vengeful, particularly when it comes to sex. When Socrates sleeps with her, then tries to leave, Meroe takes everything he has and curses him to remain in an undead state where he can be killed but still get up and walk around. Meroe foreshadows the role witchcraft will play later in the story, and she is the first of many trickster characters who appear in the stories-within-stories. - Character: Thelyphron. Description: Thelyphron is a man who tells a story at a feast hosted by Byrrhena while Lucius is in attendance, too. He agrees to guard a corpse overnight for a widow, to protect its face from being defiled by witches. At first he appears to be successful, but as it turns out, the witches have mixed him up with the dead man and stolen his own ears and nose, replacing them with wax. Thelyphron is another character who foreshadows the role magic will play in Lucius's story, and his strange misfortune shows how humans are subject to the whims of Fate. - Character: Osiris. Description: Osiris is an Egyptian god and the husband of Isis. After Isis helps Lucius return to human form by finding roses, Lucius devotes himself to the cult of Isis. Later, Osiris also appears to Lucius and asks that Lucius pay devotion to him, too. Lucius happily agrees, shaving his head to show his renewed devotion. Lucius goes to Rome to serve both Isis and Osiris by working in a legal profession. - Character: The Widow. Description: The widow comes from a story told by Thelyphron at a feast hosted by Byrrhena. She appears to be mourning her husband and hires Thelyphron to help guard the corpse from witches, but in fact, she murdered her husband to get ahold of his inheritance. The widow is one of many characters who acts deceptively for the sake of her own greed. - Character: The Pauper. Description: The pauper is a poor artisan who falls for the tricks of his unfaithful wife. The pauper's wife manages to conceal a lover by having him hide inside a jar, and the pauper doesn't realize what's happening even after the pauper's wife and her lover begin having sex on the jar while the pauper cleans it. - Character: Philebus. Description: Philebus is one of Lucius's owners (when he's a donkey) and part of a group of priests who use religious trappings to disguise their sex work. Like most of Lucius's owners, Philebus treats him cruelly, and at one point, Lucius is nearly eaten. Nevertheless, Lucius survives to be sold off yet again. - Character: The Three Sons. Description: In a story Lucius hears, the three sons help their father, a farmer whose land is threatened by a greedy landlord. During fights with the landlord, one son is killed by attack dogs, and another is killed by a spear. The third son pretends to be injured, before catching the landlord off guard and killing him (though the son himself later slits his throat to avoid being captured). Despite this costly victory, the farmer is ultimately so distraught at losing his sons that he, too, kills himself. - Character: The Farmer. Description: In a story Lucius hears, the farmer has three sons and gets into a dispute with a greedy landlord. Though the landlord is eventually killed, the three sons die in the process, and the farmer kills himself in grief. The farmer and his story represent the tragedy that can come from greed. - Character: The Landlord. Description: The landlord is a greedy figure in a story Lucius overhears who tries to kick a poor farmer off the land. The farmer's three sons intervene, and though the landlord manages to kill two of the sons, he is himself killed by the third, showing that even money has its limits, particularly when someone is blinded by selfishness. - Character: Pythias. Description: Pythias was a school friend of Lucius who happens to run into him in Hypata while he's staying with Milo. Pythias is the first to call Lucius by name, and though the two are happy to see each other, Lucius is less happy when Pythias ruins some fish that Lucius bought in order to make a point to a shopkeeper. The brief appearance of Pythias is comic and helps to establish some of Lucius's background. - Character: Proserpina. Description: Proserpina is a goddess who was abducted and forced to live in the underworld. Her story isn't recounted in The Golden Ass, but she plays a role in the story of Cupid and Psyche when Venus tasks Psyche with going to the underworld to obtain some of Proserpina's loveliness. This is supposed to be an impossible task, but Psyche is able to achieve it. - Character: The Stepmother. Description: The stepmother is involved in a terrible crime that Lucius overhears (as a donkey) while under the ownership of the soldier. She lusts after her stepson who rejects her. After this rejection, she schemes to get revenge on him, but she accidentally poisons her biological son instead. As it turns out, however, the "poison" she received was only a sedative, so her biological son is still alive. Caught in a crime, the stepmother is exiled. - Character: The Stepson. Description: The stepson is part of the story of a terrible crime that Lucius hears about (as a donkey) while under the ownership of the soldier. His stepmother falls in love with him, but he resists, angering her. She tries to poison him, but ends up accidentally poisoning her biological son instead (although in the end, it turns out the "poison" was just a sedative given to her by a doctor who was suspicious of her intentions). - Character: The Biological Son. Description: The biological son is part of the story of a terrible crime that Lucius hears about (as a donkey) while under the ownership of the soldier. The biological son is accidentally poisoned by his stepmother (who intended to poison her stepson) and is taken away to a tomb. But as it turns out, the "poison" was only a sedative, and so the biological son wakes up alive at the tomb. - Character: The Two Brothers. Description: The two brothers are both enslaved and work for a rich man. One is a pastry chef and the other is a cook. When Lucius is a donkey, they are arguably his most compassionate owners, feeding him well and just laughing it off when they find that Lucius has been stealing food from them. - Character: Thrasyleon. Description: Thrasyleon is a (deceased) member of the group of thieves who sack Milo and kidnap Lucius (in donkey form). One of his companions tells a story about how Thrasyleon tried to rob the gladiator Demochares by dressing up in a bear skin and acting like a bear, but the thieves are caught, and Thrasyleon is killed in the bear suit. - Theme: The Power of Stories. Description: Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Apuleius's The Golden Ass is that it contains several self-contained stories nested within the main story of Lucius and his quest to transform from a donkey back into a human. These nested stories-within-the-story (sometimes called "inset tales") often help illuminate part of the main plot, and—in some cases—they even contain their own nested stories. The tone and content of the inset tales varies greatly, ranging from the tragic to the comic, and while some are grounded and natural, others feature extensive coincidences or supernatural elements. Ultimately, the variety of stories contained within The Golden Ass testifies to the wide variety of reasons for storytelling. Stories can entertain, inform, trick, act as an allegory, or act as an argument, and throughout The Golden Ass, they do all of the above. Stories are important to the characters in the book. Even in unexpected moments, the characters find themselves telling long, elaborate tales, which perhaps suggests just how interested they are in trying to make sense of their lives and the world they live in. At one point in the story, for example, the baker tells his spouse, the baker's wife, a story about an unfaithful woman (the fuller's wife) who tries to conceal a lover when her husband comes home early. Instead, however, the fuller's wife ends up accidentally killing her lover. Though the baker doesn't say so directly, this story implies that he knows his own wife is unfaithful and perhaps that he is even threatening that things could end badly for her and her lover. While entertaining the audience, this story is also a means by which the baker confronts his wife's betrayal. By showing how characters like the baker navigate their world through stories, Apuleius argues that stories have the power to communicate beliefs and illuminate truths more effectively than other forms of speech. - Theme: Faithfulness and Loyalty. Description: Many of the tales within Apuleius's The Golden Ass deal with romantic and sexual relationships, and in particular with characters who go to great lengths to try to hide their infidelity. A different but related issue is the relationship between mortals and the gods, where mortals are often asked to offer proof of their faithfulness. From the baker's wife to Psyche to the fuller's wife, one thing is clear: in both romantic relationships and religious ones, humans frequently can't be trusted to uphold their promises of faithfulness. At the same time, the stories take a nuanced approach to the advantages and disadvantages of faithfulness. While many characters eventually face the consequences of their actions, some, like Arete and Philesitherus, face few or no consequences for their lack of faithfulness. Philesitherus is nearly caught in the act of having sex with Arete (the wife of Barbarus) by Barbarus himself and is only saved through the intervention of an enslaved man named Myrmex. Nevertheless, in the end, Philesitherus tricks Barbarus, feigning innocence when he sees Barbarus in the forum and even accusing his collaborator Myrmex of being a liar. Philesitherus displays no loyalty either in marriage or in friendship, and yet he survives without punishment, while on the other hand, in a different part of the book, the loyal fiancé Tlepolemus is assassinated by the jealous would-be lover of his wife Charite. This raises the question of what loyalty is worth. Arguably, the final book of The Golden Ass does emphasize the benefits of loyalty. After suffering for many years, Lucius is finally saved from being a donkey by his new religious devotion to the gods Isis and Osiris. The gods directly recognize his efforts and reward him for them. Nevertheless, this theme is complicated by earlier events in the story, where innocent and loyal characters sometimes face gruesome deaths, suggesting that faith, good intentions, and honesty aren't always rewarded in life, which can be harsh and unfair. - Theme: Identity, Transformation, and Curiosity. Description: The frame story of Apuleius's The Golden Ass is about Lucius, who through his own curiosity gets turned into a donkey and must find a way to transform back into a human by eating from a rose. Within this story, there are several episodes and inset stories that also involve transformations and changes in identity, sometimes literally (as in the case of the witch Pamphile, who can turn into a bird) and sometimes figuratively (such as when Tlepolemus pretends to be a great thief named Haemus in order to save his fiancée Charite). These episodes raise the question of what identity is and how it can change. In perhaps the most famous story in the book, Psyche is informed that she must not try to discover the identity of her new husband. When she succumbs to her own curiosity and learns that her mysterious husband is in fact the god Cupid, it enrages Venus and almost gets Psyche killed. The episode illustrates how powerful the urge to learn someone's identity can be, and yet all the transformations and concealments of identity throughout the story make identity a complicated topic. For both Lucius and Psyche, their curiosity about identity almost leads to their downfall. While Psyche is ultimately allowed to marry Cupid and Lucius is ultimately restored to his human form, they both experience many hardships along the way. Apuleius uses stories like theirs to argue that there are potential hazards associated with indulging one's curiosity, particularly when it involves discovering someone's true identity. - Theme: Consequences of Greed. Description: Many of the stories in Apuleius's The Golden Ass illustrate how greed often has consequences and can lead people to make bad decisions. The central conflict of the story—Lucius's transformation into a donkey—is arguably caused by his greed to experiment with the witch Pamphile's ointments and take some of her power as his own. Others face similar and even more direct consequences for greed, such as the thieves who rob Milo, only to be slaughtered themselves by Tlepolemus after they get too greedy and attempt a kidnapping—and Tlepolemus himself is later killed after claiming Milo's goods from the thieves. In fact, much of what Lucius suffers as a donkey is due to other people's greed. He is whipped, burdened with heavy loads, and made to do arduous work, all so that others can attempt to increase their own wealth. In the final book, Lucius learns from his suffering and puts aside his own interests in order to better serve the interests of the gods Isis and Osiris, suggesting that it's possible for selfish individuals to renounce their old ways and embrace more selfless, meaningful lifestyles. Although many of the characters in The Golden Ass face terrible fates as a result of their lack of generosity, then, Lucius's journey shows that there are still opportunities in life for greedy people to change for the better. - Climax: Lucius gets a vision from Isis telling him how to turn from a donkey back into a human. - Summary: Lucius, a man originally from the Greek part of the Roman Empire, is on a journey to Thessaly. He says he wants to tell a witty and wonderful story, but apologizes for his own poor Latin (since he grew up speaking Greek). Lucius is very interested in stories and often pauses his own story, either to recount a story he heard somewhere else or to listen to someone else telling a story. For this reason, Lucius's journey tends to be episodic and full of stories within stories. In an early encounter with a wayfarer named Aristomenes, Lucius hears a tale of witchcraft. Later, in the town of Hypata, he stays with a friend named Milo, who has a reputation for being a stingy host and whose wife, Pamphile, is rumored to be a witch. While staying at Milo's, Lucius begins to secretly have sex with a maid named Photis. One time when Lucius is with Photis, they witness Pamphile's witchcraft firsthand. The two of them secretly watch Pamphile using an ointment to turn herself into a bird. Lucius is interested in getting his hands on the ointment, so he persuades Photis to help him. When Lucius tries out the ointment for himself, however, he is surprised to find that instead of turning into a bird, he turns into a donkey. Photis advises him that he can turn back into a human if he simply eats some roses, and that she'll bring him some roses in the morning. Before she can come back with roses, however, Milo's house is sacked by thieves, and Lucius (in the form of a donkey) is taken back to the thieves' cave. And so, thus begins Lucius's journey to try to find roses and become human again. Because he is a donkey, people talk freely around him, and Lucius often witnesses or overhears some interesting stories. Perhaps the most elaborate story he hears is the story of Cupid and Psyche. An old hag who works with the thieves who sacked Milo tells the story to a hostage named Charite, perhaps as a way of comforting her. In the story, Psyche undergoes many hardships, partly because her beauty and her curiosity offend the goddess Venus. Ultimately, however, Psyche perseveres, and she is allowed to become immortal and live forever with her husband Cupid. Charite is later rescued by her fiancé, Tlepolemus, who kills all the thieves and sets Lucius off on the next leg of his journey. Many of the stories Lucius tells or hears have less happy endings and involve unfaithful spouses getting caught in the act. All the while, Lucius is passed from owner to owner, suffering cruel treatment from just about everyone in charge of him, including the priest Philebus, the ass-boy, the baker, and the soldier. Lucius is whipped, overburdened, threatened with death, and at one point almost eaten. The climax of Lucius's mistreatment comes when he encounters the jealous wife. She has been accused of terrible crimes and so has been condemned to be executed by being torn apart by wild animals. Before the woman is torn apart, she will be forced to publicly have sex with Lucius (who is still a donkey). Lucius, fearing for his own life if the wild animals are unleashed, decides that the only thing to do is flee. Shortly after Lucius escapes, he has a vision of "the mother of the universe," a deity who ultimately reveals herself as the Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis instructs Lucius in how he can obtain a rose to turn back into a human, and Lucius enthusiastically accepts her help. By following Isis's instructions exactly, Lucius is able to find a rose, eat it, and ultimately be restored to human form. After saving Lucius, Isis asks for his devotion in return, arguing that it is only fair. Lucius is happy to offer veneration and gets involved with serving the cult of Isis. Later, he is visited by Osiris, the husband of Isis, and Osiris also asks him for his loyalty and service. Lucius enthusiastically agrees. In order to prove his devotion, Lucius shaves his head, moves to Rome, and takes up a legal profession. A loyal member of the cults of Isis and Osiris, Lucius proudly displays his bald head so that everyone will be aware of his devotion.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Good Soldier - Point of view: First Person - Setting: The French Countryside and Fordingbridge, England - Character: John Dowell. Description: John Dowell is the first-person narrator of The Good Soldier. He is married to Florence Dowell and friends with Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. Because John is the narrator, everything the reader learns about the other characters comes from his perspective. Not only that, but he is notoriously unreliable and, depending on how one interprets the book, he can be seen either as a victim or a diabolical villain. According to John, he and Florence never consummated their marriage because Florence claimed to have a weak heart. He describes himself as a loyal servant to Florence; he waits on her hand and foot, and he always assumes she has the best intentions. However, their relationship comes to a dramatic end after Florence's death. Depending on whether the reader believes John, Florence's death can be interpreted one of two ways. Florence dies right after discovering Edward is romantically pursuing Nancy Rufford. As such, her death could be viewed as a suicide, just as the surface of the novel suggests. However, Florence also dies immediately after John discovers her infidelity. Because John is the first person to discover her body, there is an implication that he may have murdered her. Additionally, only a few days before her death, Florence inherited a large fortune from her Uncle John, which could provide additional motivation for murder. The same ambiguity applies to Edward's death later in the novel. Once again, John is the only person present when Edward dies, and he claims the death is a suicide. However, if one assumes John is capable of murdering Florence for her infidelity, it is not a stretch to figure that he could have killed Edward as well. Although John presents all of the other characters in the novel as flawed, he depicts himself as almost perfect. His only flaws are that he is too giving and too naïve. Whether his opinions and perspective can be trusted is something each reader must determine for themselves. - Character: Florence Dowell. Description: Florence Dowell is John Dowell's wife and Edward Ashburnham's mistress. She comes from a notable Pennsylvania family with a significant fortune. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Florence's aunts and uncles did not want Florence to marry John. However, Florence's desire to travel to England—where her family is from—leads her to accept John's hand in marriage. Although innocent on the surface, Florence can be duplicitous and cruel. She fakes a heart condition so that she does not have to have sex with John and then carries out multiple affairs, the most notable of which is with Edward. Though intelligent and knowledgeable about history, Florence is intellectually inferior to Leonora, which bothers her deeply. She regularly tries to outdo Leonora by acting as a tour guide for the group, but Leonora always knows more. However, Florence feels superior to Leonora in two ways; first, she is Protestant, and second, she is having sex with Edward. Although she can be cruel, Florence is genuinely in love with Edward. Unfortunately, Edward views Florence just another checkmark on his long list of affairs. Eventually, he grows sick of Florence and pursues Nancy Rufford instead. When Florence discovers Edward's interest in Nancy, she takes her own life. - Character: Edward Ashburnham. Description: Edward Ashburnham is Leonora Ashburnham's husband. He comes from an upper-class background and commands great respect. John regularly insists that Edward is fundamentally a good person and a sentimentalist. However, Edward's fatal flaw is that he cannot stop being unfaithful to Leonora. Over the course of the novel, John relates several of Edward's affairs—including one with Florence—all of which end in disaster. In addition to the emotional strain Edward puts on his relationship, he also loses a lot of money, making his tracks impossible to hide. Although Edward tries to obscure his actions from Leonora, she is always on to him. Edward acts as though he is ashamed of himself every time he is caught, but as soon as one affair ends, another one begins. His worst transgression comes when he begins to romantically pursue Nancy Rufford, a young woman whom he practically raised. His pursuit of Nancy ruins his relationship with Leonora and Nancy herself. In the end, he is ashamed of himself and doesn't feel as though he can salvage his remaining relationships. This realization leads him to suicide. - Character: Leonora Ashburnham. Description: Leonora Ashburnham is Edward Ashburnham's wife. She comes from a poverty-stricken background, even though her family name is well known. Her father arranged her marriage to Edward, and she does her best to make it work. Although her marriage to Edward is difficult, Leonora loves him and supports him however she can. She puts up with Edward's various affairs and handles the emotional and financial tolls that come with them. However, eventually, Leonora's relationship with Edward becomes too much of an emotional burden, and her health begins to decline. With nowhere else to turn, Leonora begs Nancy Rufford to serve as Edward's mistress, an act she believes is shameful but necessary. In the aftermath of Edward's death, Leonora marris Rodney Bayham, a man whom she considered having an affair with while still married to Edward. - Character: Nancy Rufford. Description: Nancy Rufford is a young woman whom the Ashburnham's practically raise. She is an innocent girl who, for most of the novel, is unaware of the actions of the adults around her. In particular, she is ignorant of the fact that Edward becomes romantically interested in her once she comes of age (she mistakes his flirtations for fatherly love). Eventually, Nancy learns the truth because Leonora begs her to act as Edward's mistress. Not wanting to drive more of a wedge through the Ashburnham's marriage, Nancy leaves them to live with her father in India. After Nancy learns of Edward's suicide, she is wracked with guilt and eventually becomes catatonic. - Character: Maisie Maiden. Description: Maisie Maiden is a young, beautiful woman who is married to a deployed soldier. Edward is romantically interested in her, although she doesn't know that. Leonora allows Edward to invite Maisie to Nauheim, even though she knows her husband's intentions. When Maisie discovers the truth about Edward and Leonora inviting her to Nauheim to serve as Edward's mistress, she immediately decides to leave Nauheim. However, while packing her suitcase, she has a heart attack and dies. - Character: La Dolciquita. Description: La Dolciquita is the mistress of the Russian Grand Duke. She has sex with Edward when the Ashburnhams are in Monte Carlo. After their night together, La Dolciquita tells Edward that he must pay her if he wants to continue seeing her. Edward agrees and ends up spending 20,000 pounds in a week. - Theme: Marriage and Infidelity. Description: At the center of The Good Soldier are two marriages—one between John and Florence Dowell, the other between Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. Although marriage is recognized as a valuable institution by John and Leonora, it is completely disregarded by their respective spouses Florence and Edward. Throughout the course of the story, Florence and Edward partake in multiple extramarital affairs, including one with each another. These affairs give Florence and Edward their vitality, as both characters feel the most alive when cheating on their partners. In this way, the concept of marriage does provide some utility for Florence and Edward because they revel in flouting it. This is particularly true of Edward, who cannot help but begin a new affair as soon as the last one ends, no matter how destructive his previous experience was. For instance, after his initial and relatively innocent incident with a servant girl in the back of a carriage, Edward immediately moves on to an affair with La Dolciquita. La Dolciquita is the mistress of a Grand Duke who sleeps with Edward once and then tells him he must pay her great sums of money if he wants to continue the affair. Edward accepts the offer and carries on the affair for another week before becoming bored. This pattern repeats itself throughout the novel; Edward starts an affair, grows bored, ends the affair, and then begins another. It is only at the end of their lives that Edward and Florence discover the value of prolonged intimacy between two people and only two people. For Florence, this realization occurs during her affair with Edward. She finds herself in love with Edward and cannot stand the fact that he is courting yet another woman. As a result of Edward's philandering, she ends her life. Later in the novel, Edward finds himself in a similar situation. He loves Nancy Rufford but knows he cannot be with her. As a result of his tragic circumstances, Edward also ends his life. However, although it does not endorse Edward and Florence's infidelities, the novel doesn't praise traditional marriage, either. After all, Edward and Florence only found people who they truly loved by ignoring the rules set down by marriage. Additionally, those who do not violate the boundaries of marriage are also symbolically punished in the story. Nancy's fate is especially cruel, as she did everything she could to avoid ruining a marriage but suffers a mental breakdown as a direct result. Ultimately, then, the novel does not provide a definitive moral statement on marriage and infidelity. Rather, it examines the state of male/female relationships and questions whether marriage is still a worthwhile institution at the beginning of the 20th century. - Theme: The Manipulation of Reality. Description: The Good Soldier is a completely different book depending on how one chooses to interpret it. If one takes John Dowell at his word, he is the victim whose life is full of tragedy. If one assumes that John's narration is unreliable, he can be read as a murderer who swindled Florence and her family out of a great deal of money. Furthermore, in addition to these two options, there are many interpretations of the novel that could fall somewhere in between. Regardless of how one looks at the story, it is clear that manipulation is omnipresent. If one takes John at his word, then most of the main characters manipulate one another at some point: Florence and Edward constantly manipulate their partners to engage in affairs; Leonora manipulates Edward and Nancy's feelings toward one another; Florence tricks John into thinking she has a heart defect and therefore can't risk having sex with him. However, because John narrates the story, it is possible that he's done some manipulation of his own. For instance, it is convenient that he is the only person present for the two deaths that occur in the story. It is also convenient that Florence's Uncle John died only a few days before Florence herself, allowing John to inherit over a million dollars. Of course, these facts could be coincidences. However, they could also be lies. The Good Soldier never tilts its hand too heavily in one direction or the other. Like many narrators, John is unreliable, but just how unreliable is he? The reader cannot definitively answer this question. However, it can be said that one reason The Good Soldier thematizes manipulation is to sow the seeds of paranoia and doubt in the reader's mind. As such, this theme becomes a reading method, and both the theme and the method reinforce one another. The more one reads about characters being manipulated, the more one has the sense that one is being manipulated; the more one has the sense that one is being manipulated, the more manipulation one tends to find in the story. - Theme: Class and Traditional Morality. Description: Throughout the novel, John Dowell regularly makes use of the phrase "good people," often to describe Edward and Leonora. However, it is difficult to apply this phrase to Edward and Leonora and still have it make sense. According to John's version of events, Edward and Leonora constantly lie to one another. Edward regularly carries on affairs behind Leonora's back and for much of the novel Leonora despises her husband. Meanwhile, Leonora acts selfishly toward everyone who isn't Edward. She gets angry any time Edward gives money to the poor and she essentially blames Edward's suicide on Nancy. When taking all of these actions into account, it is difficult to see how Edward and Leonora could be described as "good people." That is, until Nancy uses the phrase—or, at least, the phrase is used by John on her behalf—later in the novel. Toward the end of the novel, Nancy looks at a newspaper article, which describes the relationship of a couple she knows. Nancy thinks of the couple as "good people" because they are well off; however, the article describes a relationship full of alcoholism, infidelity, and violence. Therefore, it appears that Nancy associates the idea of "goodness" with those who are high class. By virtue of being rich, having resources, and carrying oneself in a particular way, one can affect the appearance of "goodness," even if one does not act "good" in any meaningful sense of the word. As such, The Good Soldier depicts a world where the link between wealth and traditional morality has become blurred, while simultaneously demonstrating just how absurd that conflation is. - Theme: Religion. Description: Religion is constantly in the background of The Good Soldier and there are several moments where it comes to the forefront. Although religion does not provide its central characters with moral scruples, it does still give them a certain cultural cache, which they feel attached to; in other words, characters use religion to be seen as "good people" in the eyes of their peers. Additionally, one's religion is closely linked to one's nationality, both of which carry certain assumptions about one's character. This dynamic between religion and identity is most apparent in the scene where the two couples travel to M—. In M—, Florence, who is a Protestant, reads Martin Luther's Protest and acts as though it adds value to her identity as a Protestant. She then uses the Protest to feel superior to Leonora, who is an Irish Catholic, arguing that the piece of paper makes Protestants "honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived"—unlike Catholics like Leonora, who (according to Florence) lack these traits.  In this scene, Florence does not think about or cite particular Protestant beliefs that would suggest her superiority, she simply feels superior because of the identity itself. Florence, though American, is descended from an old English family and she sees Englishness as a fundamental part of her identity. Later in the novel, John says that Edward and Leonora regularly argued over which denomination they would raise their potential children. Both felt that their respective religious upbringings were crucial to their identities and wanted their children to follow in their footsteps. Ironically, Edward and Leonora don't even end up having children, rending their argument a performative display of cultural values rather than a substantive matter of belief. Given these examples, it is clear that religion is still alive and well in the characters' minds. However, rather than providing these characters with a strict set of beliefs and morals, religion gives them a stable sense of their sociocultural and national identities. - Climax: Edward receives a letter from Nancy while alone in the stables with John. After reading the letter and seeing that Nancy is safe, Edward pulls out a knife and slits his own throat. - Summary: John Dowell, the narrator, promises to tell the saddest story he knows, which revolves around John, his wife Florence, and their friends Edward and Leonora Ashburnham. Both Florence and Edward have heart conditions, so they always spend part of their year in Nauheim, Germany for rest and relaxation. John, Florence, Edward, and Leonora first meet one another while in Nauheim and they quickly become friends. However, before long, Florence and Edward start having an affair. Leonora quickly realizes what is going on, but she does not tell John because he is oblivious, and she doesn't want to hurt him. Although the affair is hurtful to Leonora, it is not a surprise because Edward has had multiple affairs in the past. Most recently, Edward attempted to pursue a girl name Maisie Maiden. Maisie is a friend of the Ashburnhams who traveled with them to Nauheim. Leonora knows that Edward is interested in Maisie, but she allows him to pursue her anyway. Leonora is content with this dynamic because she thinks it unlikely that Maisie will give in to Edward. Additionally, even if she does give in, Leonora doesn't think Maisie will cause problems like Edward's previous lovers (in the past, Edward got himself involved in several affairs that caused the Ashburnhams legal, social, and financial problems). However, Edward's pursuit of Maisie comes to a swift end when Maisie discovers that the Ashburnhams brought her to Nauheim so that she could act as Edward's mistress and is horrified. While packing her suitcase to leave Nauheim, Maisie suffers a heart attack and dies. John often pauses his narration to think about how cleverly everyone manipulated him, especially Florence. Although the novel takes place in Europe, John and Florence are Americans who married in the U.S. before traveling abroad to Europe. Florence only told John about her heart condition after the two of them were married. According to Florence and her doctors, Florence and John cannot have sex because it would be too much for Florence's heart. John dutifully obeys the doctor's orders, only to discover later that Florence faked her heart condition. In retrospect, John spends much of his time coming to terms with the fact that his entire relationship with Florence was a lie. Florence and Edward continued their affair for some time. However, things get complicated once Edward takes an interest in Nancy Rufford. Nancy is a young woman whom the Ashburnhams practically raised. Now that she is of age, Edward displays a romantic interest in her, much to the chagrin of Leonora. When Florence discovers Edward's romantic pursuit of Nancy, she commits suicide by poisoning herself. John is the first one to discover her body. After Florence's death, John returns to America to settle her estate. Coincidentally, Florence's Uncle John died just a few days before Florence herself, leaving John a large fortune. After John ties up his financial affairs, he sails to England to visit the Ashburnhams in their manor home. John, too, is romantically interested in Nancy and hopes to ask her for her hand in marriage. Once in England, John discovers that the Ashburnhams' relationship has continued to devolve. Both Leonora and Edward are physically and mentally ill. Although Edward has stopped pursuing Nancy, he is tortured by the fact that he cannot be with her. Meanwhile, Leonora cannot stand the fact that Edward loves Nancy more than her. Because Edward's love for Nancy is literally killing him, Leonora goes to Nancy and begs her to be Edward's mistress. Nancy declines and then leaves for India, not wanting to cause more problems. On the way to India, Nancy sends the Ashburnhams a letter, letting them know she is safe and sound. Edward reads the letter while alone with John in the Ashburnham's stables. After reading the letter, Edward pulls out a penknife and slits his own throat. John watches him commit the act and does nothing to try to stop him. After Nancy finds out what Edward did, she is racked with guilt and has a mental breakdown. Because Leonora cannot bear to see Nancy, she asks John to go to her. John does as Leonora asks and travels to India. There, he finds Nancy completely broken down. She is unable to speak or function normally. John thinks it is a bitter irony that, in the end, he is once again acting as a nurse to a woman whom he loves but does not love him back.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Grapes of Wrath - Point of view: Third person omniscient narrator - Setting: Oklahoma, California, the American Southwest - Character: Tom Joad. Description: Tom Joad is the novel's protagonist. At the beginning of the novel, he has just been paroled after serving a four-year prison sentence for killing a man in self-defense. He is strong, stoic, principled, and observant; during the trip to California, the Joad family comes to rely on Tom for precisely these qualities. Tom is very principled, and injustice enrages him. This rage can get the better of him—the most notable example of this is when Tom retaliates for the murder of Jim Casyby killing the offending policeman. Over the course of the novel, Tom comes to realize the importance and strength of the migrant worker community, and at the novel's close, he has decided to dedicate himself to organizing the workers to improve their quality of life. - Character: Ma Joad. Description: Ma Joad is the ferociously dedicated matron of the Joad family. Throughout the novel she makes countless sacrifices for the good of her family, and is remarkably committed to keeping the family moving forward. Her confident leadership sometimes clashes with Pa's notions, but her willpower always wins out over his patriarchal authority. - Character: Jim Casy. Description: Jim Casy is an ex-preacher who knew the Joads as far back as Tom's childhood. Casy has since given up his religion, because he is afflicted by guilt for having had relations with some of the young women in his congregations. Casy now places his faith in the remarkable power of a united human spirit. Throughout the book, Casy performs several acts of self-sacrifice for the common good: he saves Tom by taking the blame for a scuffle at a Hooverville, and later, he gives his life leading a strike so that peach-picking workers can earn higher wages. - Character: Pa Joad. Description: Pa is the easygoing head of the Joad family. He often feels responsible for taking care of the entire family, even when this task far exceeds his abilities, and he works tirelessly for the Joads' benefit. He also feels guilt for his firstborn son Noah's poor health, as he hand-delivered Noah when the child was born. Occasionally, Pa feels emasculated by Ma, who takes a more dominant role in the leadership of the family. - Character: Rose of Sharon. Description: Rose of Sharon, also referred to as Rosasharn, is a sister of Tom's. She is pregnant, and married to Connie Rivers. Rosasharn often falls victim to superstitious concerns about the health of her baby-to-be, and loves to wallow in her guilt. At the book's close, Rosasharn serves as an iconic symbol of the text by breastfeeding a grown man to rescue him from starvation. - Character: Uncle John. Description: Uncle John is Pa Joad's brother. John is wracked with guilt over the long-past death of his young wife, whose complaints of pain he dismissed as harmless whining. He tries to atone for his sin by living as selflessly as possible; however, he occasionally gives in to temptation and gets drunk. - Character: Muley Graves. Description: A neighbor of the Joads in Oklahoma, Muley Graves compulsively refuses to leave his land despite having been evicted. He hides on his former land, sleeping wherever he can, hunting for food, and remembering his own and his family's personal history with the land. Muley also imparts advice to Tom about the repercussions of standing up to the authorities and then finding yourself hunted, foreboding Tom's eventual situation. - Theme: Humanity, Inhumanity, and Dehumanization. Description: In The Grapes of Wrath, the most brutal adversity the Joads face doesn't come from the unforgiving natural conditions of the dustbowl. Rather, the Joads and the Okie community receive the cruelest treatment from those most capable of helping them: more fortunate individuals, typically ones who wield institutional power. Throughout the book, establishments and technological advances are shown to corrupt the humans behind them. Steinbeck's depiction of the state police shows that they've been perverted by their authority: in the first Hooverville the Joads occupy, an exploitative contractor comes to recruit Okies for dirt-cheap labor, and the deputies that accompany him level blatantly false accusations of theft against Floyd Knowles, Tom, and anyone else who dares to protest.Similarly, the banks are beyond the control of the men that work for them, and like the industrial farms, they expand unchecked, without regard for human life. As the banks and farms grow and grow, their owners stoop lower and lower in order to increase their profits. Some California farms even go so far as destroying perfectly good food in order to keep prices high, all while starving migrants clamor for food and jobs. Steinbeck describes the modern men of industry as mechanized, unnatural beings who live detached from the land and in so doing have become dehumanized, unlike the farming families they displace. This hostility is contagious—even small business owners fear and resent the Okies, and local Californians form militias to intimidate the desperate migrants.At the same time, Steinbeck occasionally shows glimpses of humanity, especially in the most wretched characters. These acts often come when a character breaks the rules of an oppressive system, which further reinforces Steinbeck's point that institutions tend to be dehumanizing and morally toxic. After she is extorted at a farm company store, Ma Joad observes that "if you're in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help—the only ones." The poorest characters are often the most generous, and the richest the most selfish. Because most Okies can barely support themselves, let alone help others, every instance of altruism becomes a powerful moment in the text. Rosasharn's breastfeeding of the starving man in the book's final scene serves as the definitive example of the selfless altruism of the poor. - Theme: Dignity, Honor, and Wrath. Description: Despite their destitution, Okies are shown to be extremely conscious of maintaining their honor. No matter how dire their circumstances, the Joads are unwilling to stoop to accepting charity or stealing. When they do accept help, they are quick to repay the debt—for example, when the Wilsons offer Grampa Joad a deathbed, Al repairs their car and Ma replaces the blanket used to shroud Grampa. With this strong sense of honor comes an equally powerful notion of righteous fury: when Okies are wronged, their anger is what gives them the strength to press onward. Toward the end of the book, when California's winter floods threaten the Okies' livelihood, Steinbeck writes that "as long as fear could turn to wrath," the Okie families would be able to continue their struggle.Dignity and wrath are a defining part of Okie culture. For instance, Steinbeck describes a migrant family that is unwilling to pay anything less than the sticker price for a meal at a restaurant, because to pay less would be no better than stealing. The organization of the government camp also highlights this culture of self-sufficiency. Annie Littlefield, one of the organizers of the women's committee, remarks that "we don't allow nobody in this camp to build theirself up that-away [by giving charity to others]. We don't allow nobody to give nothing to another person. They can give it to the camp, an' the camp can pass it out. We won't have no charity!" Finally, their justified anger at being wronged by the establishment is what motivates Casy and Tom to organize against the powers that oppress them, in the hopes of improving their community's welfare.The Okies' honorableness is also meant to contrast with the unscrupulous conduct of wealthier people. "Shitheels," as the affluent are sometimes called, are known to steal from hotels, just as banks and industrial farms extort the masses for everything they're worth. Through his descriptions of the dignity and morality of Okie culture, Steinbeck glorifies their humble, self-sufficient lifestyle and denounces the greed of the upper classes. - Theme: Faith and Guilt. Description: At different times in The Grapes of Wrath, nearly all of the main characters endure spiritually trying times. Casy is the first to address this theme when he speaks of his reformed faith: instead of the black-and-white teachings of Christian dogma, Casy has come to believe in a natural unity of the human race. Tom, too, comes to this realization later in the novel, after hiding from the law in the woods. Finally, Ma Joad's determination to press forward is itself a sort of faith that things will turn out all right. Notably, the faith these characters hold is often detached from established religion. Casy abandoned his preaching because of skepticism about Christianity, and Ma Joad resists the holier-than-thou attitude of the "Jehovites" (Jehova's Witnesses) in the government camp. The aspects of Christianity still present in the Joads' lives tend to resemble rituals, like saying Grace to please Granma, more than sincere beliefs.On the flipside of the characters' faith is a sense of guilt that often cripples them. Rosasharn worries constantly that her baby will be harmed because of her own improper behavior and the behavior of those around her. Uncle John feels responsible for the death of his wife, and tries to atone for his sins by living generously, although his anguish often drives him to drink. At the emotional climax of the story—when Rosasharn delivers a stillborn child—Pa Joad agonizes about whether there was more he could have done to save the baby, just as he agonizes about hurting his firstborn, Noah, when Noah was delivered. - Theme: Powerlessness, Perseverance, and Resistance. Description: The novel often focuses on characters who resist in situations that seem hopeless. At the beginning of the novel, the Oklahoma sharecropper families are rendered powerless by the repossessing landowners. All the same, Muley Graves remains on his land, in spite of regular run-ins with law enforcement. He knows he can't change his circumstances, but he refuses to let go of his heritage. The land turtle that appears in an early chapter, is a metaphor for the Okies' helplessness, endurance, and courage: it presses forward as humans treat it with both kindness and cruelty and even manages to right itself when a car flips it over. Similarly, the Joads refuse to abandon their journey westward even when the obstacles they face seem insurmountable. Tom and Casy rebel against a corrupt industrial and political system even though it costs Casy his life and forces Tom into hiding.These individual struggles symbolize the spirit of the Okie community as a whole. At their most desperate and most powerless moments, the Okies rarely seem to lose their drive to work. Some strive to subvert the larger institutions that keep them down, like the law, the banks, and the farm owners—even when these institutions seem far too powerful to overcome. - Theme: Family, Friendship, and Community. Description: Time and again in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck demonstrates the profound ties and nuanced relationships that develop through kinship, friendship, and group identity. The arc of the Joad family shows, on one hand, a cohesive unit whose love and support of one another keeps them from abandoning hope. On the other hand, however, the novel shows that this unity comes with complications. Ma Joad's assertive leadership strips Pa of his masculine identity, and he is ashamed and embarrassed whenever his wife's determination forces him to back down in front of the entire clan. The cooperation and mutual assistance found in the Joad family extends past blood relationships to other Okies as well. This give-and-take of friendly support among the Okies is essential to all of the Okies' survival, including the Joads. Just as Wilkie Wallace helps Tom find work, the Joads are happy to assist friends they meet on their way to California, like the Wilsons.On a larger scale, a united community confers its own kind of benefits: political strength. On several occasions, Tom marvels at how the government camp can function without police. The camp's Central Committee is a testament to the power of cooperation; its system of self-governance allows residents to regulate themselves and discipline wrongdoers without sacrificing the camp's independence. Working together not only gives Okies a way to avoid the prejudice they meet in California—it also gives them power to unionize and push for reasonable wages. Despite the vicious persecution of union leaders, many Okies remain committed to the concept of working together to improve their condition. As an endorsement of collaboration, Steinbeck writes, "here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep…men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. … The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one." - Climax: Rose of Sharon's breastfeeding of a starving man - Summary: In Oklahoma during the Great Depression, drought and dust storms—the Dust Bowl—have ruined farmers' crops and destroyed livelihoods already damaged by the failing economy. Tom Joad is a young man from a farming family who has just been paroled from prison, after serving four years on a homicide charge. As Tom returns home, he meets Jim Casy, an ex-preacher whom Tom knew as a child. Casy no longer preaches of virtue and sin, and instead holds the unity and equality of human spirit as his highest ideal. Together, Tom and Casy travel back to the Joad homestead, but discover that it has been abandoned. Muley Graves, a neighbor who has stayed behind, explains to the two men that the farming families have all been evicted by the landowners and the banks, who have repossessed their land and now use tractors to cultivate it. Muley tells the men that they can find Tom's family at the home of Uncle John, the brother of Tom's father, Pa Joad.When Tom and Casy arrive at Uncle John's, they find the Joads loading up a car in preparation to leave for California. Pa Joad reveals that the family saw fruit-picking jobs advertised on handbills, and they are heading west to take advantage of these opportunities. Once on the road, the Joads befriend a migrant couple, Ivy and Sairy Wilson, and shortly thereafter, the cantankerous Grampa Joad dies of a stroke. The Wilsons travel with the Joads until the California border, where Sairy becomes too ill to continue. Noah, Tom's older brother, abandons the family at this border, choosing instead to subsist on his own.On their way to California, the Joads receive disheartening reports about a lack of jobs and hostility towards "Okies" in California. Once the family arrives in the state, these rumors prove to be true, and their hardships continue. Granma Joad dies during the family's passage through the Mojave desert. The family is forced to inhabit a Hooverville, a squalid tent city (named after President Herbert Hoover) where migrants live at the whim of unscrupulous contractors and corrupt deputies. At this camp, Connie Rivers—the husband of Tom's pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon—abandons the Joads. When Tom and a friend from the Hooverville try to negotiate better wages from a contractor, they get into a tussle with a deputy. Tom flees and Casy willingly takes the blame for the fight; the preacher is arrested and taken into custody.The Joads leave the Hooverville and find refuge at a more comfortable, government-run camp. Instead of a police presence, the camp is governed by a committee elected by the migrants themselves. At this camp, the Joads find some comfort and friendship, but only Tom can find work. One day, Tom discovers that the greedy Farmers' Association, working in tandem with corrupt deputies, plans to start a riot at an upcoming dance. This will give the deputies a pretense to destroy the camp, which will weaken the laborers' bargaining power. However, Tom and some other men discreetly pre-empt this attack, and the camp is saved.The Joads are unable to survive on the income they receive at the camp. They leave to find work elsewhere, and come across a peach-picking compound, where they are brought in to work while other migrants are on strike outside the gates. Tom discovers that Casy is the one responsible for organizing the strike. Just after Tom reunites with Casy, police find them, and one of the officers kills Casy with a pickaxe in front of Tom. In response, Tom kills the officer, and goes into hiding.The Joads leave to pick cotton and live out of a boxcar, while Tom hides in the wilderness nearby. The family has enough money to eat fairly well, and Tom's younger brother Al has gotten engaged to the daughter of their housemates, the Wainwrights. Suddenly, torrential rains come, and the Joads are forced to stay in the boxcar (as opposed to go to a hospital or find a midwife) while Rose of Sharon gives birth. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn, and the family flees to a nearby barn to escape the floods. There, they find a boy and his starving father. Ma Joad realizes that Rose of Sharon is lactating, and she gets the rest of the family to leave while Rose of Sharon breastfeeds the starving man.

- Genre: Postcolonial Novel, Murder Mystery - Title: The Grass is Singing - Point of view: Third-person narrator - Setting: Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) - Character: Mary Turner. Description: The novel begins with Mary Turner's death, and the plot largely revolves around her character. The daughter of white South African-born parents, Mary's childhood is blighted by her father's alcoholism and her mother's endless misery. (There is also a strong suggestion that Mary's father sexually abused her, although this is never stated explicitly; however, it is made clear that events from her childhood leave her repulsed by sex.) Once Mary's parents die, she embarks on a joyful and fulfilling life in an unnamed town, working as a secretary, living in a club for single women, and attending social events every night. Mary marries Dick Turner as a result of social pressure, and it is clear almost immediately that she is ill-suited to Dick's rural life. She is a strong-willed, independent, and remarkably feminist woman who resents having to live on someone else's terms. However, the biggest source of conflict in Mary's life comes from her treatment of native people. For reasons that are never made entirely clear, Mary's racism is unusually intense and sadistic, even for a white South African. At the same time, she harbors a perverse fascination with native people, and particularly Moses, a farm worker she strikes with a sambok and with whom, two years later, she develops an intimate, possibly sexual relationship. Mary suffers several nervous breakdowns over the course of the novel and by the final chapter is severely mentally incapacitated. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, she accurately predicts the fact that Moses will murder her. - Character: Dick Turner. Description: Dick Turner is Mary's husband. Born in the suburbs of Johannesburg, Dick trains as a vet in his youth before using a government grant to buy a small farm. Dick is kind and principled, and described by Mary as "a good man." However, he is an extraordinarily unsuccessful farmer. Many people—including Dick himself—interpret his failures as the result of bad luck, and several of Dick's neighbors nickname him "Jonah," the name sailors give for someone who brings bad luck to a ship (after the Biblical character Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale). Over the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that much of Dick's "bad luck" is in fact the result of irrational fantasies and poor decisions he makes about his farm. Toward the end of the novel, Dick becomes weak and is often sick, a physical manifestation of his weak will. After Mary is murdered, Dick goes mad. - Character: Moses. Description: Moses is a native man educated in a missionary school. He has a large, muscular physique and is employed by Dick as a farm worker. During Dick's first illness, when Mary takes over as overseer of the farm workers, she strikes Moses across the face with a sambok for what she perceives as rudeness. Although Moses is not actually rude in reality, he is not afraid of Mary and refuses to abide by the social conventions governing relationships between native people and white settlers. We learn fairly little about Moses's inner life, but it seems that, perhaps due to his education, he is especially aware of the injustices of colonialism and willing to stand up to white people. The relationship he develops with Mary toward the end of the novel appears somewhat affectionate, however it is never made clear why Moses behaves so kindly to someone who has treated him so badly. At the end of the novel, he approaches Mary on the veranda and stabs her to death. He waits under a nearby tree until morning, when he turns himself in; although we never learn his final fate, the other characters suggest that it is almost certain he will be hanged. - Character: Charlie Slatter. Description: Charlie Slatter is a neighbor of the Turners, and thinks of himself as Dick's "mentor." A working-class Englishman who previously worked as a grocer in London, he made a fortune through tobacco farming in Southern Rhodesia. He is at times a good friend to Dick, and seems to genuinely have Dick's interests at heart. However, he is also self-interested and strategic, and much of his support for Dick is secretly rooted in the fact that he wants to take over Dick's farm to increase his own profits. Furthermore, Charlie is exceptionally invested in maintaining the racial hierarchy of Southern Rhodesia, which leads him to force Dick and Mary to leave the farm after he comes to believe Mary is having an affair with Moses. After Mary is murdered, Charlie conspires with Sergeant Denham to cover up Mary's relationship with Moses in order to protect the reputation of the white race. - Character: Tony Marston. Description: Tony Marston is a young, well-educated Englishman who has recently moved to Southern Rhodesia after being inspired by his cousin's success in tobacco farming. Tony holds the racially "progressive" ideas that are popular in England, and is more sensitive than the other characters in the novel. At the same time, he is also keen to conform to the norms of the society around him, and his progressive ideas are shown to be rather flimsy, particularly after he comes to believe that Mary and Moses are having an affair. After Mary's murder, Tony abruptly leaves the farm and ends up working in an office, precisely the kind of work he moved to Southern Rhodesia to avoid. - Character: Sergeant Denham. Description: Sergeant Denham is the local police sergeant in the Turners' farming district. He is in charge of investigating Mary's death, although this task is made simple by the fact that Moses immediately confesses to the murder. Along with Charlie Slatter, Sergeant Denham helps to cover up the intimacy that existed between Mary and Moses in order to preserve the racial hierarchy. - Character: Mrs. Slatter. Description: Mrs. Slatter is Charlie's wife (we never learn her first name). At first she appears to be a kind and compassionate person, inviting Mary to social gatherings and commiserating with her over her experience of financial hardship. However, when Mary snubs her, Mrs. Slatter grows spiteful and accuses the Turners of living "like pigs." - Character: The Servant. Description: The unnamed servant is the third native person Dick and Mary employ to work in the house. Unlike Samson and the servant before him, this servant is accustomed to working for white women and more able to put up with Mary's abuse. However, eventually her mistreatment becomes too much and he quits. - Theme: Intimacy vs. Hatred. Description: All the characters in The Grass is Singing maintain complex and ambivalent relationships to one another. These relationships are invariably defined by feelings of both intimacy and hatred, which—rather than cancelling each other out—are shown to exist side by side, creating intense conflict and turmoil. The most significant example of this can be found in the relationship between Mary and Moses. Mary has a severely racist, cruel attitude toward all black people, and treats the black farm employees in a sadistic manner. She is especially antagonistic toward Moses, constantly insulting him and forcing him to perform an endless series of pointless tasks. At the same time, Mary is also fascinated by Moses, a fascination that she will not allow herself to openly acknowledge. Toward the end of the novel, it is revealed that she has been forcing Moses to help her with intimate tasks such as getting dressed, leading Tony and Charlie to believe that Mary and Moses are sleeping together. While Moses's feelings toward Mary are not stated explicitly, his hatred is made obvious by his resentful and defiant attitude toward her. At the same time, he cannot escape the intimacy of the master/servant relationship that inevitably binds him to her. Eventually, the coexistence of both this intense intimacy and hatred reaches an explosive climax in which Moses kills Mary. This suggests that while the dynamic of intimacy and hatred is inevitable in a colonial society, such a dynamic is unsustainable and will eventually erupt into violence. The relationship between Mary and Moses is far from the only one defined by intimacy and hatred. Mary's relationship to her husband, Dick, is similarly ambivalent, and both mirrors and contrasts with her relationship with Moses. Like Moses, Dick is deferential to Mary, obeying her wishes even when they conflict with his own desires. Mary feels more affection and respect for Dick than she does for Moses, but is repulsed by him sexually and comes to regret marrying him. The early intimacy in Mary and Dick's relationship turns to hatred as Mary becomes increasingly harsh and stubborn, while Dick is weakened due to poverty and illness. Although Dick survives his illness, Mary has a dream in which he is dead, suggesting that part of her may wish this were true, and that in some sense their relationship—like Mary's relationship with Moses—is too emotionally turbulent to survive. The combination of intimacy and hatred is again shown to lead to death—first on a symbolic level, and then on a literal one. It is not only intimacy with Dick that fills Mary with disgust. She seems to hate the idea of any physical intimacy, and the narrator points out that, up until the point at which Moses pushes her, Mary has never touched a native African. (Of course, after this point Mary does allow Moses to touch her, such as when he helps her to get dressed. Mary's willingness to consent to touching Moses in these moments is part of the mystery of their relationship.) Mary's extreme resistance to physical intimacy is partially explained by moments at which she dreams of being sexually abused by her father. When Mary dreams that Dick has died, the figure of Moses comforting her transforms into Mary's father, "menacing and horrible, who touched her with desire." This moment suggests that, due to being abused as a child, Mary cannot differentiate between affection and violation. She thus comes to hate anyone who comes into intimate contact with her, and even hates witnessing moments of intimacy between other people, such as the black mothers and babies. In a broader sense, the colonial landscape of Southern Rhodesia is also defined by currents of intimacy and hatred that exist between the white colonizer and black indigenous populations. Although built on a strict racial hierarchy, colonial societies nonetheless depend on intimate interactions between the colonizers and the colonized. Examples of these moments of intimacy include indigenous people serving as white people's house servants, nannies, and prostitutes, as well as the high levels of sexual violence perpetrated by the settler population (a phenomenon that is briefly alluded to in the novel). All of the white characters express racist hatred to some degree; even Tony, who is the least prejudiced of the white characters, is forced to assimilate into the racist mindset that governs the lives of white Rhodesians. After coming to suspect that Mary is having an affair with Moses, Charlie insists that Dick take Mary away in order to separate her from Moses. Although Mary is not Charlie's wife, he feels it is his personal responsibility to prevent intimacy between the races, and in doing so protect the colonial racial order. - Theme: Hierarchy and Authority. Description: The Grass is Singing takes place in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Southern Rhodesia) during the time of British colonial rule, and one of the most important themes of the novel is the way in which society is organized according to hierarchies. During the time the novel is set, the British socioeconomic class system remains extremely rigid, making it impossible for most people living in the United Kingdom to move up the social ladder. However, in Rhodesia and other colonies, even the poorest whites are still further up this ladder than the entire black population. (The narrator also notes that English-speaking white Rhodesians are placed above poor Dutch-descended Afrikaners: "'Poor whites' were Afrikaners, never British.") Living in the colonies also gave white Brits the chance to make money through exploiting natural resources and the labor of the oppressed indigenous population. Every white person in the novel is to some extent fixated on the desire to increase their standing in the socioeconomic hierarchy. When this plan fails for Dick and he and Mary end up living in poverty, he is left miserable, ashamed, and crippled by illness. The overarching racial and socioeconomic hierarchy is not a simple system, but rather one made up of an intricate web of smaller hierarchies that determine how much authority each person is accorded and how they are supposed to behave in relation to one another. As a woman, Mary is subservient to her husband, yet as a white person, she has authority over the black workers employed on her land (and indeed over all black people). While Mary enthusiastically wields and abuses the power she has over the black population, she often fails to honor her inferior position to Dick. Indeed, while every character in the novel is inescapably aware of the hierarchies that organize society and of their place within these hierarchies, the characters also violate these hierarchies. This happens when Mary attempts to run away from Dick in order to regain her independence, and also when Moses continues to drink water after Mary orders him to go back to work. However, arguably the most important violation of any hierarchy of power comes when Moses kills Mary. In taking the life of a white woman, Moses commits the worst possible act in the eyes of white colonizers. At the same time, when Mary's murder is discussed at the beginning of the book, the narrator notes that white people are not surprised by Moses's act. Within the white colonial mindset, black people are placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy and are expected to behave in a "savage," immoral manner. Regardless of how black people actually behave, white people will treat them as if they are brutal and violent. This fact in itself invites violence against white oppressors, and is thus one of the central (and tragic) paradoxes of colonial society. - Theme: Brutality vs. Civilization. Description: The most common justification for colonialism is the argument that the colonizers are bringing "civilization" to a primitive, brutal, and savage population. In today's world, most people acknowledge that at best this kind of thinking is naïve and patronizing, and at worst it is a thinly-veiled disguise for the colonizers' desire to abuse native people while gaining wealth and power for themselves. It is certainly difficult to see how the white characters in the novel are bringing "civilization" to the black population. While some white characters claim that they are bettering native people by forcing them to work, this is not a particularly convincing excuse for the harsh labor conditions to which they subject black workers. There is also evidence that the white characters are actually disturbed by black people who assimilate into white culture and behave in a "civilized" manner. When Charlie is saluted by two black policemen, he feels uncomfortable, and the narrator notes that he "could not bear the half-civilized native." Similarly, the narrator describes the self-assured satisfaction with which white people greet the news that Moses killed Mary. These examples suggest that even though colonizers claim that they seek to "civilize" the native population, in reality they do not truly wish to welcome native people into their vision of civilization. Instead, they would rather that natives continued to live up to the stereotype of brutality projected onto them by white people. The white characters have different reasons for treating black people badly; for example, while Dick is motivated by paternalistic feelings, Mary is more power-hungry and sadistic. However, none of them seems to really be bringing "civilization" to the black population, even while some of them—such as Dick—are convinced that they are doing so. In fact, the white characters in the novel behave in a far more brutal manner than any of the black characters. Even Moses's murder of Mary is arguably not an act of brutality, but rather a reasonable response to the experience of colonial oppression. The question of whether all violence is immoral or whether some forms of violence can in fact be justified is not given a clear answer within the novel. The reader is encouraged to feel at least some sympathy for Moses, particularly after Mary ferociously injures him by whipping him across the face. Even if his murder of Mary is judged to be immoral, there can be no denying that Moses's act of brutality is a response to the brutality to which he is subjected as a native person living under colonial rule. At the same time, the murder of Mary plays into the pre-established narrative that "white civilization" is under threat in Southern Rhodesia (and the rest of the world). Many of the white characters—and in particular Charlie—justify their actions as a way of defending white civilization from the "brutality" of the natural landscape and indigenous population. Note that at the time the novel was written, the British Empire was in the latter stage of disintegration, a fact that caused great distress among white Brits living in colonized countries whose fates were thrown into question. When Tony first arrives in Southern Rhodesia—before he has become accustomed to the severe racism of the white Rhodesians—he notices that figures like Charlie insistently deny that a white person can have a "human relationship" with a black person, and that this denial is vital to ensuring the racial order keeping the colonizers in power. In this sense, "white civilization" is not under threat from any external brutality, but rather from the lie at the center of its colonial "civilizing" project. - Theme: Independence, Isolation, and Exile. Description: Life for white colonizers is defined by a certain kind of independence, isolation, and self-imposed exile. The area in which Dick and Mary live is described as "a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind." Even within this sparse community, the Turners are discussed "in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled." The narrator explains that the reason for this prejudice is simply that the Turners "kept to themselves." The farming district in which the Turners live is already isolated in the sense that the families living there are spread far apart from one another; it is also isolated from the nearby town and, in a broader sense, from the Turners' homeland of England. It is thus remarkable that in this position, the Turners choose to further isolate themselves by declining to interact with their neighbors. Furthermore, not only do they not socialize with other white people, but—like all colonizers—they eschew the native population, treating their employees and other local black people with cruel disdain. There is no doubt about the fact that, at least to some degree, both Dick and Mary enjoy their isolation. Dick's antisocial tendencies mean that he hates going to the cinema, where the proximity to other audiences members makes him "uneasy." Mary has a more ambivalent relationship to isolation. At times it seems that she enjoys socializing with others and misses interactions with other white people after marrying Dick, but she also harbors an antisocial attitude that at times rivals her husband's. While Dick is on friendly terms with several of the black farm workers, Mary behaves with extreme, senseless cruelty to all black people, making it almost impossible to form a connection to most people around her. Her increasing resentment of Dick makes her wish she had never married, and she even goes so far as deciding to leave him in order to return to her state of premarital independence. Somewhat paradoxically, it was in this state of independence that Mary had a far more fulfilling social life. As a married woman, she is cut off from her previous friendships and forbidden from returning to her old job. For both Dick and Mary, marriage is lonely, and exacerbates their existing isolation as white colonizers in Southern Rhodesia. The exile that Dick and Mary experience in relation to their white neighbors is a microcosm of the broader experience of exile that is inherent within the colonizer's experience. The theme of exiling yourself from your homeland is explored through the narrator's reflections on Mary's sense of home: "For Mary, the word "Home," spoken nostalgically, meant England, although both her parents were South Africans and had never been to England." While some characters, such as Tony, move from England to Southern Rhodesia in their adult lives, other characters like Mary are descendents of multiple generations of colonizers whose connection to their "home" country is solely emotional, abstract, and symbolic. Mary has never even been to England, and thus the country cannot really be "home" to her; at the same time, the narrator notes elsewhere that "she had never become used to the bush, never felt at home in it." In order to maintain their superior position within the racial hierarchy of colonial society, white people such as Mary must continue to insist on their disconnection from the country in which they live and cling to the fantasy of attachment to the distant "home" of England. Yet in actuality this does nothing but increase Mary and other white characters' feeling of isolation, as they are left with a sense of having no home at all. - Theme: Femininity, Sexuality, and Maternity. Description: While most of the novel's major themes relate to issues of race and class in the colonial environment, gender and sexuality also play an important role. Lessing's exploration of gender mostly centers around Mary, and the way in which (white) femininity becomes a source of conflict in the world of the novel. Before marrying Dick, Mary epitomizes a modern, cosmopolitan form of femininity; she is independent, sociable, and pretty, and is described by the narrator as "one of the girls." Indeed, in this stage of her life Mary is shown to be girlish and even rather infantile; the narrator notes that "she still wore her hair little-girl fashion on her shoulders, and wore little-girl frocks in pastel colors." Her childishness is also shown by the fact that she is resistant to marriage, a disposition that only changes when she overhears friends gossiping in a disapproving manner about the fact that she is not married. This event highlights the way in which femininity is policed in society. While in her youth Mary lives a relatively free and independent existence, it is not considered appropriate for this state of freedom to last, and eventually she is coerced into getting married despite the fact that her impression of marriage is "poisoned" by her parents' unhappy marriage, Mary's father's alcoholism, and his sexual abuse of Mary when she was a child. Mary's marriage to Dick turns to disaster for a number of reasons. She feels disgusted by having sex with him, while he is resistant to having a child on account of their poverty. However, arguably the biggest issue lies in the fact that Mary does not wish to conform to the obedient, subservient role of a wife that was expected in this era. She is more authoritative and stubborn than Dick, who feels emasculated by the financial failures of the farm and by his series of illnesses. Moreover, while overseeing the black farm workers Mary is far more severe and sadistic than Dick. Mary's cruelty might emerge from the fact that she fails to live up to feminine ideals of gentleness and nurture—but on the other hand, her cruelty could also be seen as coherent with the ideal of white femininity, and white colonial femininity in particular. White women occupy a perverse position of power and powerlessness within racist society. While they are oppressed on account of their gender, they are oppressors within the racial order (and particularly because racist thought puts such an emphasis on protecting white femininity from "brutal" black masculinity). The narrator makes it clear that Mary takes out her feelings of powerlessness and frustration on the black workers around her, especially Moses. In this sense, white femininity can become even more vicious than white masculinity within the context of colonial society. The novel also portrays sexuality and maternity not as natural, pleasurable aspects of life, but as fraught experiences that create anxiety and conflict within the lives of the characters. As stated above, Dick is resistant to having a child, and views the prospect of becoming a parent as an additional economic burden that he cannot afford to bear. Meanwhile, Mary's desire to have a baby takes on a strange form. She hopes that having a child will give her a sense of purpose and fill the void of uselessness and meaninglessness that characterizes her life on the farm. However, she is disgusted by the lived reality of maternity, particularly when she witnesses the maternal attachment between black mothers and their children. The sight of black women nursing their babies makes her "blood boil," and she compares these babies to "leeches." Mary's extreme sense of disgust at breastfeeding is closely related to her racist detachment from the native people living around her. This in turn suggests that the experience of being a colonizer is so unnatural and toxic that it distorts people's relationship to their own humanity. Repulsed by sexuality, maternity, and socialization in general, Mary becomes increasingly mentally unstable. The nightmares in which she experiences both desire for Moses and the terrifying memory of her father's sexual abuse point to the way in which she has been forced to suppress her feelings in order to conform to the ideal of white femininity. This repression ultimately cannot hold, and causes Mary both to treat people around her with extreme cruelty and to lose her grip on reality. In this sense, white femininity is presented as being a potentially poisonous and dangerous ideal. - Climax: Mary's dream, and her death at the hands of Moses shortly thereafter - Summary: The Grass is Singing is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the 1940s. Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner, has been murdered, and a "houseboy" has confessed to the crime. Dick and Mary are poor and do not socialize with the other white settlers in their farming district. When Mary's body is discovered, the Turners' neighbor, Charlie Slatter, sends a note to the local police sergeant, Sergeant Denham. Denham then sends six native policemen to the Turners' farm, and shortly after they arrive the houseboy, Moses, turns himself in. Charlie drives to the Turners' farm to find Moses in handcuffs, and puts Dick in the back of his car. Inside the house, Charlie's assistant Tony Marston explains that he found Mary's body on the veranda. Sergeant Denham arrives, and he and Charlie question Tony. However, Tony begins to feel that they are not actually interested in his testimony, and the interview ends abruptly. The policemen take Mary's body to the car, and Tony is left wondering whether he should insist on telling Charlie and Sergeant Denham his theory about why Mary was killed. Moses will be hanged no matter what happens, but Tony wonders if by staying silent he is complicit in a "monstrous injustice." The next day, Tony packs his things and leaves the farming district. The trial takes place and it is decided that Moses murdered Mary while drunk and hoped to steal valuables from her. Tony, meanwhile, briefly takes a job in copper mining, before reluctantly ending up in an office job. Chapter 2 begins with a description of the stores that are distributed throughout southern Africa. They are simple establishments that sell food, clothes, and other necessities, operate as local post offices, and usually house a bar. Mary's father, an alcoholic, would spend their family's little money on liquor at the store, a fact that always caused arguments between Mary's parents. Mary's older brother and sister died of dysentery when she was a child, and the period of grief that followed was "the happiest time of her childhood," when her parents briefly stopped squabbling. Mary was eventually sent to boarding school and decided to leave home at 16. Between the ages of 20 and 25, both Mary's parents died, and she was thrilled to be left completely alone. She lived in a club for young women and worked as a personal secretary at an office. As the years passed, Mary's friends got married and had children, but Mary herself remained single, happy, and carefree. She was in denial about aging, and still dressed in "little-girl fashion." She felt no desire to get married, but one day overheard some married friends of hers gossiping cruelly about the fact that she was not married, and was horrified to realize that this was what people thought of her. After this point, she briefly became engaged to a 55-year-old widower, but called it off when he tried to have sex with her. Soon after this, Mary meets Dick briefly at the cinema, during one of Dick's brief visits to town. Dick is a poor farmer whose bad luck has led his neighbors to nickname him "Jonah." He is resistant to the idea of getting married due to his poverty, but cannot stop thinking of Mary. He works to the point of exhaustion over the next few months, and eventually appears at Mary's door asking to marry her. She agrees, and they marry two weeks later. When Mary first arrives at Dick's farm, she finds the house "shut and dark and stuffy," and is struck by the evidence of Dick's intense loneliness. They have tea and engage in a polite but awkward conversation. They have sex, which is not as terrible as Mary feared it would be, although she also feels "nothing" during it. In the morning, Dick introduces Mary to his longtime black house servant, Samson. While Dick clearly feels affection for Samson, Mary is immediately affronted by Samson's casual manner. Mary resolves to teach herself "kitchen kaffir," the simplified version of the native Shona language that white settlers use to communicate with their black workers. Mary uses her savings to purchase fabrics and other items for the house, and spends her days sewing and painting the house. One day, she comes to believe that Samson stole raisins she was saving to make pudding and becomes hysterical; despite Dick's protests, she insists on taking the money out of Samson's wages. Samson quits, which upsets Dick. They hire another servant, but before long he quits as well. Then they find yet another servant, this time one who is accustomed to working for white women and obeys Mary's demands in a "blank, robotic" manner. However, in a fit of emotion Mary forces the servant to spend hours scrubbing the (already clean) zinc bathtub, making him work through his lunch break. Charlie and Mrs. Slatter come over to visit; Mrs. Slatter is friendly to Mary, but Mary rebuffs her coldly. The servant quits. A few days later, Charlie advises Dick to plant tobacco, but Dick is resistant to this idea. One day, on a rare visit to the local train station to pick up groceries, Dick and Mary encounter a man who addresses Dick as "Jonah"; afterward, Dick bitterly admits that he borrowed money from the man and still owes him £50. During this period, Dick goes through a series of obsessions with keeping different animals on the farm; first bees, then pigs, and then turkeys. All these experiments fail, and cause heated arguments between Dick and Mary. Dick begins jokingly calling Mary "boss," which infuriates her. Dick eventually resolves to open a "kaffir store" on the farm, even though there is a kaffir store nearby and thus it is unlikely that Dick's store will make much money. He asks Mary to run the store; at first Mary says she "would rather die," but she eventually agrees. Mary finds the native women who sit outside the store with their children disgusting and hates her time working there. She begins to fantasize about running away and returning to her old life in the town. One day, she notices that her old office has placed an ad for a shorthand typist. She packs a suitcase and leaves the next day, asking Charlie to drive her to the train station. Back in town, Mary visits the girls' club where she used to live, but is told that they do not take married women. At her old office, she is told that the typist position has been filled. Mary returns to her hotel room and realizes she doesn't have enough money to pay the bill. At this moment, Dick arrives, and begs her to come home. Mary agrees. At first Dick and Mary slip back into their previous routine; however, Dick soon becomes severely ill with a fever. Charlie brings over a doctor, who rudely instructs Mary that she and Dick must wire the house for mosquitoes and go on a three-month holiday to be restored back to health. During this time, Mary begins supervising the farm workers while Dick is bedridden. She takes a sambok with her, and when Moses (one of the farm workers) insists on getting a drink of water, she strikes him across the face with it. She also withholds wages from the workers who arrive late, causing some of them to quit on the spot. Back at the house, Mary urges Dick to focus on growing tobacco so they will be able to make enough money to leave the farm. Dick thinks about it for three days, before agreeing to start building tobacco barns. Dick builds the tobacco barns, but in January there is a drought and the tobacco dies. Dick cannot cover the expenses, and is forced to take out a loan in order to avoid declaring bankruptcy. Mary's health deteriorates. She begins to beg Dick for a child, but Dick refuses, saying that they are too poor. Mary sinks further and further into misery, as does Dick, who takes up chain-smoking. After another house servant leaves, Dick is forced to move Moses from the field to the house, as no one else will agree to work for Mary. Mary develops a fascination with Moses, watching him as he completes his work and even one day staring at him while he washes himself outside. He stops what he is doing and stares back at her until she goes away. This infuriates Mary, who forces Moses to do a series of unnecessary tasks. She asks Dick if they can fire Moses, but Dick angrily refuses. Months pass, and Mary becomes increasingly depressed. One day, Moses tells her he is quitting, and she bursts into tears, begging him to stay. Moses gives her a glass of water, tells her to lie down on the bed, and covers her with her coat. He does not mention leaving again. A new dynamic then emerges between them; Moses is much more informal and authoritative with Mary, and Mary now feels completely under his power. During this period, Mary starts having vivid nightmares, while Dick becomes ill with malaria. She dreams that Dick has died, that Moses is touching her, and that her father is making sexual advances on her. In one dream, Moses and her father morph into the same figure, and she wakes up screaming. Moses asks her why she is afraid of him, and Mary replies in a hysterical voice that she is not afraid. Meanwhile Dick and Mary's neighbors have started spreading cruel gossip about them. One day, Charlie comes over, and urges Dick to sell his farm. Charlie stays for dinner, where he witnesses Moses and Mary's familiar, flirtatious relationship. Charlie then takes Dick to one side and sternly demands that he and Mary leave. Dick reluctantly agrees, and Charlie asks Tony to start working on Dick's farm in preparation to take over. While living on the Turners' farm, Tony comes to believe that Mary has gone mad and needs to be treated by a psychologist. One day, he catches Moses helping Mary to get dressed, and is stunned by the possibility that they are having an affair. He decides to tell Dick to fire Moses, but Moses leaves that evening and does not return. Two nights before Dick and Mary are due to leave the farm, Mary wakes up suddenly. She walks around the house in a state of paranoid delusion, swinging wildly between different emotional states. She looks for Moses, convinced that he will "finish her" that night. Mary is supposed to spend the next day packing, but accidentally falls asleep and wakes up in the late afternoon. She suddenly feels compelled to go to the store, and finds Moses in there. She runs away screaming and bumps into Tony, who gently tells her that he has suggested that Dick take her to a doctor. That night, Mary doesn't eat supper with Tony and Dick. In bed, Dick tells her that she is ill, and Mary responds that she has always been ill in her heart. After Dick is asleep, Mary gets up and creeps around the house, convinced that Moses is there. She goes out to the veranda, where she sees Moses in the distance. He comes toward her, puts a hand over her mouth, and stabs her to death. Moses briefly considers claiming innocence, before resolving to turn himself in. He waits outside the house until morning.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Great Alone - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Kaneq, Alaska - Character: Leni Allbright. Description: Leni Allbright is the child of Coraline and Ernt Allbright. She begins the novel as an awkward teenager who doesn't fit in anywhere. Her parents move around constantly, and she never gets a chance to make friends. That all changes when she moves to Kaneq, Alaska and meets Matthew Walker, the love of her life. Over the course of her teenage years, Leni falls in love with Matthew and eventually becomes pregnant with his child. However, during that same period, Leni is forced to watch her father physically and verbally abuse her mother. Leni knows that her father dislikes the Walker family and therefore does not want to tell him that she is pregnant. For that matter, Leni is always as reserved as possible around her father, and typically does what she can to keep him calm. Nonetheless, in a moment of anger, Leni reveals to her father that she is pregnant. This revelation results in Ernt ruthlessly beating Leni, which in turn leads Cora to shoot and kill Ernt. Not wanting her mother to go to jail, Leni helps Cora dispose of her father's body. For the next several years, Leni and Cora move to Seattle and live under false identities. Leni gives birth to her first child, MJ, and graduates college with a degree in visual arts. After her mother's death, Leni returns to Alaska and ends up in jail for covering up her father's murder. However, Tom Walker uses his influence to get Leni's charges dropped and soon she is able to return to Kaneq, just as she planned. Once there, Leni reunites with Matthew and introduces him to his son. She also holds a funeral service for Cora. Many years later, Leni becomes a celebrated photographer, as well as the mother to two more children, Kenai and Cora. - Character: Coraline (Cora) Allbright. Description: Coraline Allbright, or Cora, is the mother of Leni Allbright and the wife of Ernt Allbright. Cora drops out of school to live with Ernt and have his child at the age of 16. Although they don't live luxuriously, Cora and Ernt are happy together until Ernt leaves for the Vietnam War. While Ernt is away, Cora lives in hippie communes and often spends her time protesting the war. When Ernt returns, he is a changed man. Before long, he starts abusing Cora. Despite Ernt's behavior, Cora loves him and stands by his side. She is convinced that he is sick and wants to do whatever she can to make him happy. Accordingly, she often gives in to her husband's demands and puts too much trust in him, much to Leni's chagrin. During her time in Alaska, Cora becomes tough and learns to survive on her own. She continues to put up with her husband's violence and does whatever she can to pacify him. However, one day Ernt goes too far and begins to physically abuse Leni. Afraid for her daughter's life, Cora shoots Ernt twice in the back. Afterwards, she expects to go to jail, but Leni convinces her to cover up the crime. Together, Cora and Leni dispose of Ernt's body and then flee to Seattle to live under different identities. While in Seattle, Cora lives a relatively normal life, though she is haunted by how much she believes she's screwed up her daughter's life. After living in Seattle for several years, Cora learns that she has stage four lung cancer, likely a result of her constant smoking. Eventually, Cora's cancer kills her, but before she dies, she gives Leni a signed confession for Ernt's murder and tells her to return to Alaska. - Character: Ernt Allbright. Description: Ernt Allbright is the father of Leni Allbright and the husband of Coraline Allbright. Once a happy young man, Ernt is radically altered by the horrors of the Vietnam War. While in Vietnam, Ernt is captured, tortured, and forced to watch his friend, Bo Harlan, die. In an attempt to find happiness, Ernt moves his family to Kaneq, Alaska where he was bequeathed land by Bo. Although Ernt's time in Alaska begins peacefully enough, soon winter starts to approach, and he becomes moody and abusive. He also becomes close friends with Earl Harlan who is convinced that an apocalyptic event is on the horizon. Ernt's relationship to Earl increases his paranoia and he begins to develop new ways to protect himself and his property. After alienating himself from the rest of the community, Ernt's paranoia culminates in the construction of a large barricade around his property. No one is allowed in or out of it without Ernt's permission and he wears the key around his neck. Though Ernt believes he is protecting his family, he also continues to abuse them. He regularly beats Cora, especially in the wintertime, and he is physically aggressive with Leni. Additionally, Ernt is excessively jealous of Tom Walker's wealth and his relationship with Cora. He orders Leni and Cora to stay away from the entire Walker family, including Matthew, the soon-to-be father of Leni's child. When Ernt learns that Leni is pregnant with Matthew's child, he brutally beats Leni. Wanting to protect her daughter, Cora shoots Ernt in twice in the back, killing him. - Character: Matthew Walker. Description: Matthew Walker is the son of Tom and Geneva Walker, as well as the brother of Alyeska Walker. At the age of 13, Matthew meets Leni Allbright, the only other person his age in Kaneq. Matthew and Leni form a fast friendship when they discover that they share a love of the same books, particularly The Lord of the Rings. Matthew is mature for his age and does not mind that Ernt hates his father. He tells Leni that they will remain friends no matter what. One night, while returning home, Geneva falls through ice and Matthew is unable to help her. As a result, Geneva dies and Matthew moves to Fairbanks, Alaska where he can lead a more normal life and see a therapist to help him with his grief. While in Fairbanks, Matthew lives with his sister and constantly writes letters to Leni. Several years later, Matthew returns to Kaneq and resumes living with his father. He also begins a secret relationship with Leni, knowing Ernt disapproves of him. Later, Matthew steps in and rescues Leni and Cora from Ernt during a particularly fierce bout of abuse. He punches Ernt in the face, sabotages his vehicle, and takes Leni to the mountains where Ernt cannot get to her. However, on the way down from the mountains, Leni falls into a ravine, and while trying to rescue her, Matthew badly hurts himself. For many years, Matthew is unable to speak, and he lives out the rest of his life partially paralyzed. For a long time, Matthew does not know who Leni is, although he knows that someone he once loved is missing. To help fill the void and express himself, Matthew takes up painting. Eventually, Leni returns and tells Matthew why she had to leave. Leni introduces Matthew to his son and together the three of them start the family they always wanted. Matthew continues to live out his life in Alaska and eventually has two other children with Leni: Kenai and Cora. - Character: Tom Walker. Description: Tom Walker is the father of Matthew and Alyeska Walker, as well as the ex-husband of Geneva Walker. Tom's parents, Eckhart and Lily Walker, were among the first settlers of Kaneq. As a result, Tom has a lot of power and money; he is regarded as the leader of the town. However, some members of the community do not like Tom because of his status, particularly Ernt and Earl, who find him condescending. Throughout the novel, Tom attempts to modernize Kaneq, a move that is welcomed by some, but despised by the likes of Ernt and Earl. Additionally, Tom is not afraid to stand up to Ernt. When Tom learns of Ernt's abusive behavior, he—along with Marge—takes action to help Leni and Cora. Among other things, he gets Ernt sent away for several winters to work on a pipeline and rescues Cora when she drives off the road. Although Tom is generally a happy man, he becomes a melancholy figure after the death of his ex-wife and Matthew's accident. Nonetheless, when he learns Leni is in jail, he quickly gets her charges dropped and takes care of MJ in the meantime. By the end of the novel, Tom regains some of his former happiness; he marries a native woman, Atki, and gets to see Matthew and Leni live happily with children. - Character: Marge Birdsall. Description: Marge Birdsall, affectionately known as Large Marge by her friends, is the owner of the general store in Kaneq. She also lives a half mile from the Allbrights, making her their closest neighbor. Marge first came to Alaska after the death of her sister, a victim of domestic violence. Though Marge is steadfast in her love of Alaska, she is also keenly aware of its dangers. She warns the Allbrights about the perils of Alaskan winters and is the first to recognize that Alaska may not be a good place for Ernt. When something goes wrong in Kaneq, Marge is almost always first on the scene. She helps search for Geneva, rescue Cora, and she provides supplies whenever necessary, even when she knows she won't be paid back. Additionally, Marge works with other members of the community to make sure that Leni can go to college. - Character: Earl Harlan. Description: Earl Harlan, also known as Mad Earl, is the father of Bo Harlan, Clyde Harlan, and Thelma Schill. Earl writes to Ernt to let him know that Bo bequeathed him some land and a cabin in Alaska. When the Allbrights arrive in Kaneq, Earl treats them like family. However, Leni and Cora dislike how Ernt acts when he is around Earl. Earl is convinced that war is coming to Kaneq, and his paranoid thinking rubs off on Ernt. Earl is also Ernt's drinking buddy, and although Earl handles his booze just fine, it makes Ernt aggressive. Even though Earl feeds Ernt's paranoia for a long time, he eventually stops after Thelma tells him they've gone too far. Not long afterwards, Earl dies suddenly of a heart attack. - Character: Mrs. Golliher. Description: Mrs. Golliher is Cora's wealthy mother. She is largely estranged from Cora's family because she does not like or trust Ernt. At the beginning of the novel, she gives Cora money and warns her not to go to Alaska with Ernt. Toward the end of the story, Cora and Leni return to the Golliher home after fleeing Alaska. Mrs. Golliher is happy to welcome Cora and Leni into her home and takes care of them the best she can. - Character: Cecil Golliher. Description: Cecil Golliher is Cora's father. Like her mother, he is well-off and does not approve of Ernt. Because he is a lawyer, Cecil has connections, which allow him to create false identities for Cora and Leni. Like Mrs. Golliher, he is happy to help his daughter in any way he can. - Character: Thelma Schill. Description: Thelma Schill is the daughter of Earl Harlan and the sister of Bo and Clyde Harlan. She greets the Allbrights warmly and offers to help Cora in whatever way she can. When Ernt and Earl come up with disturbing and dangerous plans, Thelma is the only person to speak up against them. After Earl dies, Thelma tells Ernt that he is no longer welcome on their property. - Character: Geneva Walker. Description: Geneva is the ex-wife of Tom Walker, as well as the mother of Matthew Walker. She is romantically involved with Calhoun Malvey. Geneva helps the Allbrights get settled on their new homestead and fills in as a teacher at the Kaneq school. She is fond of Leni and encourages the relationship forming between Leni and Matthew. One night, while heading home, Geneva falls through ice and dies. - Character: Alyeska Walker. Description: Alyeska is the daughter of Tom and Geneva Walker, as well as the sister of Matthew Walker. She is away at college for much of the novel, though she comes home for her mother's funeral and after Matthew's accident. Matthew has a tight bond with Alyeska, and she serves as his primary support system after their mother's death. - Theme: Trauma and Violence. Description: Domestic violence is ever-present in the brutal world of The Great Alone. Ernt, a disgruntled Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war, regularly takes his anger out on his wife Cora. Although Cora constantly makes excuses for her husband's behavior, she eventually reaches her breaking point when he turns his violent wrath on their daughter, Leni. As Ernt beats Leni with a belt, Cora shoots him twice in the back and then disposes of his body out in the wilderness. Cora's actions throughout the novel are a response to the ongoing, intensifying violence she's endured at the hands of her husband. She often refuses to stand up for herself, assuming that to do so will trigger further abuse; when she finally does act for Leni's sake, she resorts to deadly violence. Similarly, Ernt's actions over the course of the novel are responses to the horrors of the Vietnam War. Time and time again, he believes that people are out to get him, even in remote Alaska. Generally, his abusive behavior toward his family is a result of fear and shame, two emotions that have heightened in Ernt since returning from the war. Although The Great Alone certainly empathizes with Cora as a victim more than Ernt as an abuser, it also suggests that their toxic behavior comes from a similar place of pent-up suffering. Thus they both react to traumatic situations the only way they know how: Cora through passivity (and eventually killing) and Ernt through violence. - Theme: Paranoia and the Vietnam War. Description: The Great Alone takes place in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, an event that starkly divided America, and Leni's parents stand on different sides of that divide. Ernt went off to war despite Cora's protests; he regards himself as a patriot and wants to protect the nation he loves. While Ernt is away, Cora lives with Leni in a number of hippie communes and protests the war. Upon returning from Vietnam, Ernt is a changed man. As he struggles to cope with his trauma, he starts to abuse Cora and perceives danger everywhere. Admittedly, danger is not hard to find in the aftermath of the Vietnam War; Hannah uses a number of real historical events to provide the backdrop to her novel, including the Ted Bundy murders, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the Cold War. However, even with such dangers in the world, Ernt's paranoia is excessive. He lives in remote Alaska—where the natural environmental is more likely to claim one's life than another human—and yet is still worried about people coming to hurt him and take his land. Ernt's paranoia reaches a peak when he decides to barricade himself and his family from the outside world. Ironically, Ernt's paranoia results in the exact circumstances he was trying to avoid—his death—brought about by the one person he did not expect to hurt him—his wife. In the end, paranoia is a condition that destroys Ernt by blinding him to the real threat to his family: himself. - Theme: Isolation. Description: From the title alone, it is clear that The Great Alone explores the concept of isolation. Isolation is relevant in a literal sense throughout the novel (many of its characters live in the middle of nowhere), and in a metaphorical sense, as several characters feel alone and cut off from society. Leni's sense of isolation grows throughout the novel as Ernt progressively alienates the Allbrights from the greater Kaneq community. First and foremost, Leni feels alone because the only person close to her age is Matthew Walker, a boy her father forbids her from seeing. Leni's sense of isolation only grows as her father's violence and paranoia get worse. Intentionally, Ernt attempts to cut Leni and Cora off from the rest of the world by creating a barricade around their property. At this point, Leni is left with only her mother to talk to, as she fears her father too much to have a real conversation with him. Alternatively, Matthew feels isolated from the world after suffering a crippling fall that results in severe brain damage. Unable to speak coherently, Matthew expresses his feelings by painting. Even so, he is unable to shake the sense of loneliness he feels. He waits for years for Leni to return to him, even though he cannot remember her name. Eventually, Leni and Matthew do reunite, and Leni introduces him to his son, MJ. MJ and Leni alleviate Matthew's sense of loneliness and help him to feel alive again. Ultimately, loneliness in The Great Alone is not about the number of people one surrounds themselves with, but rather who those people are and how they treat one another. - Theme: Family and Community. Description: Throughout Leni's years in Kaneq, Alaska, the lines between family and community become blurred, as she begins to fear the former and yearn for the latter. Upon first arriving in Kaneq, Leni, Cora, and Ernt are all happy to be part of a community, albeit a small one. Leni manages to make a friend in school—Matthew—while Ernt and Cora bond with the Harlan family. Before long, however, Leni and Cora begin to worry about Ernt's relationship with Earl Harlan. Though they are glad Ernt has a friend, Earl seems to feed Ernt's paranoia; the two of them often discuss apocalyptic scenarios and how to prepare for them. In addition, Earl and Ernt's rude and erratic behavior starts to isolate them both from their community and their own families. In a climactic moment in the novel, Earl dies of a heart attack, and Ernt is left with only Leni and Cora, both of whom fear him. It is this moment when Ernt begins to barricade the Allbright property, making sure no one gets in and no one gets out—including Matthew, whose father Tom Ernt especially hates. Meanwhile, Leni and Cora, who are quite fond of their neighbors, despair that they will never be able to leave their property again. Eventually, both Ernt and Cora die—Ernt is shot, Cora gets cancer—and Leni is left to pick up the pieces of her family. Always resilient, Leni makes her own family out of the Kaneq community; Marge acts as her surrogate mother, Tom her surrogate father, and Matthew her actual husband. By the end of the novel, Leni does not care whether she is biologically related to the Kaneq community; she feels that her community has become her family and enjoys a closer, healthier relationship to many of them than she ever had with Ernt. - Theme: Death and Grief. Description: Death is a near constant in the harsh world of The Great Alone. One statistic, mentioned several times over the course of the novel, says that five out of every 1000 people go missing in Alaska. In Kaneq, more than anywhere Leni has ever lived, death is a key part of life; animals are regularly killed for food, Geneva Walker freezes in the icy water, and Cora is forced to shoot Ernt when he threatens Leni's life. Throughout the novel, Leni regularly confronts her own mortality, as well as that of her family members and friends. In fact, Leni almost dies several times; once when she and Cora get into a car accident, once while crossing ice, once when Ernt fires a gun in their direction, and again when she and Matthew fall into a mountain crevice. Many of these experiences bring with them extreme grief, particularly Matthew's life-altering injuries and Cora's death. However, despite all that she goes through, Leni still returns to Alaska; she wants to raise her son in Kaneq and marry Matthew. Although it regularly focuses on death and grief, The Great Alone is not nihilistic. It allows most of its characters a relatively happy ending, ultimately celebrating the perseverance of the human spirit and the transcendent quality of love despite suffering and death. - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: The Great Alone tracks the maturation of a young girl in extraordinary circumstances. From the age of 13, Leni is asked to participate in an extreme lifestyle. Much of Alaskan life is spent preparing for the future and those who do not prepare end up dead. Among other things, Leni learns to hunt, fish, and garden. These activities are not merely hobbies, but rather necessary means of staying alive. In addition to learning to live in Alaska, Leni has a stressful and dangerous domestic situation. At almost all times, Leni is forced to bend to her father's demands; failure to comply leads to the physical abuse of her mother. Leni regularly worries that her actions will bring about her death or Cora's. While surviving Alaska and her father, Leni also goes through the normal phases of teenage life; she experiences puberty, meets a boy, and falls in love. Unfortunately, that boy is Matthew Walker, the son of Ernt's sworn enemy. Therefore, once again, extra stress is put on Leni, who must hide her love from the world. Nonetheless, Leni overcomes every hurdle that is put in her way; she saves her mother's life, escapes her father, and eventually reunites with the love of her life. Though Leni begins the novel as a young girl who is reliant on her parents, by the end she is a self-supporting adult. However, Leni's maturation does not embody the spirit of rugged individualism that is often associated with Alaskan life and that she associates with her father. Instead, she learns to be a strong, intelligent individual who can still accept help from others when necessary. She allows herself to become a part of the Kaneq community and casts off the isolationist mentality of her father. Despite the extreme circumstances she suffers through, a mature Leni finds happiness in Kaneq in a way Ernt never could. - Climax: Leni tells Ernt that she is pregnant with Matthew's child. Enraged, Ernt punches Leni in the face and beats her with a belt. Cora, concerned for her daughter's safety, shoots Ernt twice in the back, killing him. - Summary: In 1974, the Allbright family— made up of Ernt, Cora, and Leni—move from Seattle to Kaneq, Alaska. Ernt, the family patriarch, is a Vietnam veteran who is mentally disturbed after returning from the war. He is gifted land in Alaska by Bo Harlan, a former friend whom he watched die after they were captured and tortured together. The Allbrights hope Alaska will be good for Ernt, who is disgruntled by the current state of the country. However, when the Allbrights arrive in Alaska, they discover they are woefully unprepared for survival there. They make friends with the Harlans—Bo's relatives—and Marge Birdsall, their neighbor who also runs the local trading post and helps them get settled. Once they settle in, Leni begins attending school, where she meets Matthew Walker, the only person her age in Kaneq. The two become fast friends and Matthew invites Leni to a community party his father is throwing. That night, the Allbrights attend the party, and Ernt immediately clashes with Tom Walker, Matthew's father. Tom is rich and Ernt finds him to be condescending. Although Ernt doesn't make a scene, Leni and Matthew hear him talking about his dislike of Tom. Despite her father's harsh words, Leni and Matthew remain close friends. However, they are forced apart after Matthew's mother, Geneva, falls through ice and dies. After Geneva's funeral, Matthew goes to live in Fairbanks, Alaska where he can live a normal life and see a therapist. Leni is sad to see her friend go, but the two continue to write letters to one another. In the meantime, Leni, Cora, and Ernt learn to live in Alaska. Ernt teaches his wife and daughter how to shoot and fish, and other members of the Kaneq community teach the family how to garden and save food for the winter. Though Ernt initially feels better in Kaneq, his rage begins to grow. He spends a lot of time with Earl Harlan, Bo's father. Together, the two drink heavily and complain about the downfall of civilization. Both are convinced that a war will erupt soon, and people will come to take their land. Nearly everyone else thinks their claims are ridiculous but find the men themselves to be concerning. The day of Geneva's funeral, Ernt is in a particularly nasty mood and when the Allbrights arrive home, he drags Cora inside and hits her twice in the face in front of Leni. Leni always knew that her parents argued, but this is the first time she witnesses physical abuse. One night, Ernt gets angry and heads off into town to drink. While he is away, wolves come and kill the Allbrights' livestock. In the morning, Leni and Cora hike into town, worried that the scent of blood will attract bears. When they arrive in town, they find their van at the local saloon and see Tom Walker, who is concerned about their safety. Quickly, he realizes what's happened and goes to confront Ernt, despite Cora's protests. As the two men argue, Ernt makes a nasty comment about Geneva's death, so Tom drags him outside and throws him in his van, infuriating Ernt. When he arrives home, Ernt locks Leni out of the cabin and brutally abuses Cora. When Leni is allowed back inside, she grabs some emergency items and tells Cora that they are leaving Ernt. Their escape attempt results in Cora swerving off the road to avoid a bull moose and ending up in the hospital. A few days later, Tom and Marge show up at the Allbright cabin and tell Ernt that he will go work on a pipeline in the winter while Marge keeps Cora and Leni safe. Four years go by and the Allbright home is relatively calm. However, in the winter of 1978, Ernt comes home early from his job on the pipeline because he is fired for drinking. Shortly after, Tom calls everyone to town for a meeting, where he tells them he is renovating the bar and opening a boarding house for tourists. This angers Ernt, who wants things to stay the way they are, and that night he vandalizes the saloon. Around the same time, Matthew returns to Kaneq to live with his father. Matthew and Leni begin seeing each other secretly, knowing Ernt won't approve of their relationship. One day, while Ernt is away, Matthew and Leni have sex for the first time and profess their love to one another. As tensions continue to rise in Kaneq, Earl suddenly dies. At his funeral, Ernt makes a scene and Thelma, Earl's daughter, tells him that he is not welcome on the Harlan property anymore. As a result, Ernt begins to build a barricade around his property so that no one can get in or out without his permission. This frightens Leni and Cora, who decide that they need to escape for good. One day, the Allbrights go to town for supplies. While there, Leni sees Matthew and yells, "Help!" Enraged, Ernt drives home and begins abusing Cora. However, Ernt forgets to lock his gate, allowing Matthew to come in and punch Ernt in the face. While Ernt recovers, Matthew takes Cora to Marge's and Leni to the mountains where Ernt cannot get to her. On their way down from the mountains, Leni falls into a ravine and Matthew attempts to rescue her. Unfortunately, Matthew falls and seriously injures himself. Days later, a helicopter comes to rescue Matthew and Leni. Leni ends up being fine, but Matthew has serious brain damage and ends up in a coma. When Leni arrives home from the hospital, she discovers her mother failed to press charges against Ernt and he is already back in their cabin. Angry at Ernt because of what happened to Matthew, Leni refuses to speak to him from that point forward. Every day, Leni checks on Matthew, though no significant progress is made. He still cannot communicate beyond grunts and screams. In addition, Leni learns she is pregnant with Matthew's child. Leni plans to keep this information between herself and Cora, but then blurts it out at her father in a fit of rage. Angered by what he's learned, Ernt begins abusing Leni. In response, Cora shoots Ernt and kills him. Not wanting her mother to go to jail, Leni helps Cora hide Ernt's body. Together, the two of them escape Alaska and head to Seattle, where Cora's parents take them in and help them obtain false identities. Several months later, Leni has her baby and names him MJ, Matthew Junior. Several more years pass and soon 1986 arrives. In that time, Leni manages to go to college and graduate with a degree in visual arts while raising her son. Soon after Leni's graduation, Cora finds out that she has lung cancer. After months of chemotherapy, she dies and leaves Leni with a signed confession for Ernt's murder. Leni returns to Alaska, hoping to clear her name and reunite with Matthew, but ends up in jail. Luckily, Tom makes a call to the governor and manages to get her charges dropped. Afterward, Leni reunites with Matthew, who has begun to recover. Although Matthew has difficulty remembering the past and expressing himself, he soon recognizes Leni and is overjoyed to learn that he has a son. Leni and Matthew revive their relationship and eventually have two more children: Cora and Kenai. Additionally, Leni gathers the Kaneq community together to perform a funeral service for Cora. She is touched that so many people attend and thinks Cora would be, too. Years later, Leni is interviewed by a newspaper because she has become a famous photographer. In the interview, Leni talks about her love for the wildness of Alaskan life.

- Genre: Religious fiction, Allegory, Fantasy - Title: The Great Divorce - Point of view: First person, Present tense - Setting: The Grey Town, the Valley of the Shadow of Life - Character: The Narrator. Description: The Narrator of The Great Divorce is never named. Furthermore, the novel contains little information about his personality, his personal life, or his interests. While we know that he's of a literary turn of mind, and is in some ways modeled on Lewis himself (hence his respect for the author George MacDonald), it's hard to think of words that could describe him clearly—as he travels through the afterlife, learning about Christian doctrine, readers learn relatively little about him. The Narrator, in short, exemplifies an archetype called the "everyman"—a character who's supposed to be as ordinary and relatable as possible. The original everyman was the protagonist in a 15th-century morality play of the same name. Indeed, one of the most common purposes of the everyman archetype is to teach an audience about a moral point of view, especially Christianity. In The Great Divorce, the Narrator's ordinariness and open-mindedness make him an ideal "stand-in" for the book's readers—as he experiences the afterlife and learns about Christianity, Heaven, and Hell, so do we. - Character: George MacDonald. Description: George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish author (in real life, as well as in The Great Divorce) who wrote a series of highly popular children's books and fantasies, many of which had a strong Christian flavor. MacDonald's books had a major influence on the childhood of C. S. Lewis, and partly inspired Lewis to pen Christian-themed children's books of his own. In the novel, MacDonald appears as a huge, powerful Spirit who (much like Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy) guides the Narrator through the afterlife, explaining the intricacies of Christian morality. Ultimately, MacDonald teaches Lewis the most important Christian lesson of all: there are some facets of Christianity that human beings are not meant to know, especially concerning the redemption of souls. MacDonald is both the Narrator's guide and his "discussion partner," allowing Lewis to stage intelligent discussions of the book's difficult theological concepts. - Character: The Intelligent Man / Ikey. Description: A shrewd, businesslike soul who has a nonsensical plan to sell the golden apples of the Valley of the Shadow of Life to the people of the Grey Town. Ikey exemplifies the shallowness and vulgar materialism of humanity, but he also has an important narrative function in the novel: he's the character who explains the Grey Town to the Narrator (and therefore, to readers). - Character: The Hard-Bitten Ghost. Description: A bitter, cynical soul who tells the Narrator that Heaven and Hell are a "racket," both owned by the same people. The Hard-Bitten Ghost is generally distrustful of the world—despite the fact that he's "been everywhere" in life, he's never particularly impressed by the places he visits. It's possible that Lewis intended the Hard-Bitten Ghost partly as a parody of the ideas of William Blake, whose long poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, argues that good and evil are two different forms of the same vital energy. The Narrator generally respects people like the Hard-Bitten Ghost, and so the Ghost's cynical observations throw the Narrator into deep despair. - Character: Sir Archibald. Description: An intelligent, intensely curious man who became so obsessed with understanding "survival"—i.e., how to live on Earth in the best way possible—that he became impatient in the afterlife. Archibald's example acts as a warning to scientists, theologians, and philosophers, who love the search for knowledge more than they love God. - Character: Frank / Dwarf / Tragedian. Description: Frank's character is a complicated metaphor for the way humans use pity and self-loathing to manipulate other people, though he only appears toward the end of the novel. In life Frank knew and was loved by Sarah Smith, and would take advantage of her love by pretending that she'd hurt his feelings. Indeed, Frank has a long history of pretending to be sad in order to make other people feel guilty—even as a child he would do so. In the afterlife, Frank appears as two different ghosts, one small (the Dwarf), the other tall (the Tragedian). The Dwarf represents Frank's inner life: his self-hatred, and his manipulative tendencies. The Tragedian, on the other hand, represents the "image" of pain and sadness that Frank tries to project in order to make other people feel guilty. Thus, in the afterlife Frank takes on a form that externalizes the psychological processes by which Frank would try to "blackmail" Sarah into feeling sorry for him. - Theme: Dreams, Fantasy, and Education. Description: The unnamed Narrator of The Great Divorce has a long, vivid dream, during which he witnesses surreal scenes from the afterlife and learns valuable lessons about Christianity, morality, and love. The fact that the novel is structured as a dream suggests two important, closely related questions: first, what are the strengths and weaknesses of dreams and fantasy as Christian teaching tools; second, to what extent can Christianity be taught at all?Because it's framed as a dream, the novel presents the Narrator's experiences as subjective, rather than literally and universally true, suggesting some limits on their educational content. In interviews and essays, Lewis made it plain that his account of the afterlife shouldn't be taken literally. Lewis believed in the afterlife, but in his novel he never claims to know everything about Heaven and Hell; instead, the book represents his imagining of how Hell and Heaven might be. Indeed, Lewis's imagining of Hell and Heaven are altogether different from the traditional Christian Heaven and Hell: in Lewis's novel, damned souls can choose to travel out of Hell and go to Heaven (though few do so). To make it crystal-clear that his novel isn't offering any kind of literal truth about the afterlife, Lewis presents the Narrator's travels as a dream—an experience that is, by definition, subjective.But by qualifying the literal truth of his novel, Lewis focuses readers' attention on the spiritual, metaphorical truth of the Narrator's experiences—a kind of truth that fantasies and dreams are ideally suited to present. In his dreams, the Narrator sees bizarre people and places that teach him important Christian ideas symbolically. Often, the people he meets have their innermost qualities represented in some external form. For instance, he meets a man who "carries" his lust in the form of a tiny red lizard, and a man named Frank who pretends to be offended by controlling a giant with a chain. Similarly, the Narrator travels to places whose very geography symbolizes an emotional state—for example, going to Heaven, in The Great Divorce, involves climbing a mountain—an apt metaphor for the struggle for salvation. By externalizing and literalizing abstract concepts—lust, redemption, self-pity, etc.—the novel makes these concepts particularly easy to understand. In general, the novel's imaginary, dreamlike plot educates people—both readers and the Narrator himself—about key Christian concepts where a literal, abstract discussion of these same concepts might fall short. (There is also a long Christian tradition of using fantasy and allegory to teach religious lessons, arguably starting with the parables of Jesus himself.)Another noteworthy consequence of the novel's use of fantasy and allegory is that it emphasizes the common faith of all Christians, rather than the literal differences between Christian sects. Although the novel addresses many aspects of faith, such as free will, sacrifice, love, pity, and redemption, it contains few, if any, specific mentions of Christian practices. Totally absent are mentions of baptism, Holy Communion, confirmation, etc.—rituals that, according to many sects and denominations, are essential parts of the religion. Where a literal discussion of Christianity presumably would have to discuss literal Christian rituals, Lewis's allegorical treatment of Christianity is better-suited for discussing the spiritual, or even psychological, aspects of the faith. (For example, it would be difficult for The Great Divorce to present a ritual like communion symbolically—particularly since communion is arguably a symbolic ritual to begin with.) By emphasizing faith and spirituality and downplaying specific rituals, the novel seems to imply that Christians are defined primarily by their morality and faith, rather than their fidelity to a set of complicated, arbitrary rules—or, put another way, Christians are defined primarily by what they believe, not what they do.Even though fantasy and metaphor can be highly effective teaching tools, they're not enough to convince people to lead virtuous, moral lives. Dreams cannot make a human being become a Christian; they can only encourage good, Christian behavior. Ultimately, humans must exercise their free will and choose to embrace religion (see Free Will theme). Partly for this reason, The Great Divorce ends with the Narrator waking up from his dream in a cold, dark room. The Narrator must decide whether to apply the lessons he's learned to his daily life—the same choice facing readers as they finish Lewis's novel. - Theme: Heaven, Hell, and the "Great Divorce". Description: C. S. Lewis intended The Great Divorce in part to be a rebuttal to a famous poem by the English author William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Essentially, Blake used his poem to argue that Hell gets a "bad rap." While Christian theology claims that Hell is wicked, and should be avoided at all costs, Blake proposed that Hell—and evil in general—was a vital component of creativity, enlightenment, and happiness. In all, Blake suggested that the only way for humans to be truly enlightened was to "marry" Heaven and Hell in their lives—in other words, to be kind and lawful (Heavenly), but also proud and devious (Hellish). Blake further suggested that a life lived according to traditional Christian values would be boring, repetitive, and overly "prudish," and even implied that God and Satan were allies. Lewis despises this theory, and tries to refute Blake's argument, "divorcing" Heaven and Hell for good.Lewis's first line of attack against Blake (and Romanticism in general, which Blake is essentially representing) is to show that Heaven is the source of all human enlightenment, happiness, and beauty. Lewis's argument is epitomized in the character George MacDonald's claim that Heaven is "reality itself." Heaven, and good, are "real" in the sense that they're utterly rational; indeed, Lewis endeavors to show that Christianity is really just "common sense," meaning that sinners have foolishly confused themselves into worshipping evil and Hell (see the following theme). Furthermore, Lewis suggests that true happiness is only possible in Heaven. Sinners may believe that they're happy; but in reality, they've just embraced short-term pleasures and sacrificed the eternal, profound pleasures of Heaven. There is, in short, no true enlightenment without Heaven—contrary to what Romantics like Blake maintained. The novel also argues that God (as the ultimate Creator) is the source of all creativity, so there can be no beauty, art, or creativity that doesn't originally come from him, and reflect the beauty of Heaven. While William Blake might claim that the greatest art is that which incorporates both Heaven and Hell into its design, Lewis suggests that Blake has a misunderstanding of what Hell really means—by its very nature, nothing beautiful or creative could ever come from Hell.Lewis's second major line of attack against Blake is to present Hell as a boring, repetitive, and ultimately meaningless place—essentially, taking Blake's criticism of Heaven and applying it to Hell. Hell, as depicted by Lewis, is far from the creative haven that Blake posited. On the contrary, damned souls barely interact with one another at all, and most of them have drifted millions of miles away. There are many creative people in Hell, but because they lack the true "spark" of beauty and enlightenment that Heaven alone can provide, they're incapable of producing great art or philosophy. Lewis then delivers the final blow to Blake's ideas at the end of The Great Divorce when he reveals that Hell is tinier than Heaven—so tiny, indeed that it could fit inside a butterfly's mouth. Lewis suggests that Hell, quite apart from being a worthy equal to Heaven, is actually almost nothing: put another way, evil is simply the absence of beauty, enlightenment, creativity, and all the other things that only Heaven can provide. In short, Lewis argues that Blake was wrong to fetishize Hell—the supposed merits of Hell are either 1) not really merits at all, or 2) actually found in Heaven. - Theme: Christianity and Common Sense. Description: In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis uses fiction and fantasy to make a strong argument for the truth and value of Christianity. Surprisingly, though, the novel never offers a specific definition of Christianity; indeed, it would seem that the only two beliefs that a Christian must have are a belief in the existence of God and a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Using this simple, straightforward definition of Christianity, the novel aims to show that Christian morality isn't a complicated set of arbitrary rules; deep down, it's just "common sense."The Great Divorce makes the somewhat surprising argument that Christianity is the most obvious, intuitive way to think about life, morality, and happiness. In order to make such a point, Lewis makes use of the reductio ad absurdum technique: in other words, he proves that Christianity is common sense by showing that the alternatives to Christianity are irrational, nonsensical, or otherwise ill-founded. The damned souls who refuse to believe in God or the divinity of Christ are deeply confused about themselves and their place in the world. They want to hurt themselves or hurt other people, and some of them even deny the existence of any afterlife at all—despite the fact that they're in the afterlife. Furthermore, souls who deny the existence of God and Christ often fail to show basic human emotions like compassion, respect, or dignity. Even if non-Christians seem virtuous on Earth, the afterlife exposes their true irrationality and moral callousness—suggesting that Christianity alone can lead humanity to enlightenment and virtue (or alternately, that true enlightenment and virtue only comes from God).Principled, compassionate atheists are conspicuously (and maybe inevitably) absent from The Great Divorce. Damned souls insist that they're capable of love and reason, but George MacDonald—the Spirit who guides the Narrator through the afterlife—shows that, in fact, these damned souls are incapable of loving or thinking logically about the world. Even the "fat ghost" who claims to be a reasonable, intelligent man, in spite of denying Christ's resurrection, is shown to be a foolish contrarian, denying Christ's divinity for the sake of denial (and not because he really doubts Christ's divinity). Arguably, Lewis uses a series of "straw men" to make his argument—instead of seriously exploring the possibility that one can be reasonable, good, and agnostic, he invents easy targets like the fat ghost to confirm the rationality and morality of Christianity. But this is also the nature of the work, as Lewis isn't trying to present an all-encompassing argument for Christianity, but rather a short, entertaining, and hopefully enlightening story—so perhaps he's allowed to indulge in straw men for brevity's sake. - Theme: Free Will and Salvation. Description: At the heart of The Great Divorce (and Christianity) is the concept of free will. The early Christian thinker Saint Augustine proposed a useful way of understanding free will: if a human being acts a certain way, and, under identical circumstances, could have acted differently, then that human has exercised their free will. Lewis never explicitly defines free will in his book, perhaps assuming that his readers already understand what it is. Nevertheless, The Great Divorce suggests that humans can only enter Heaven by exercising their innate free will.One of the premises of The Great Divorce is that humans have the capacity to choose to go to Heaven even after they die—a notable digression from traditional Christian doctrine, in which souls either go to Heaven or Hell permanently. Humans are born with the power of free will: they can choose where to go, what to think, and—most importantly of all—whether or not to love God. Even in Hell, humans retain their powers of free will, meaning that they can choose to leave Hell and enter Heaven. Over the course of the novel, the Narrator observes the souls of human beings in Hell as they board a bus that takes them to the Valley of the Shadow of Life, located at the outskirts of Heaven. In the Valley, spirits and angels try to convince the souls of humans to love God and give up whatever sin they're clinging to that is keeping them out of Heaven. If a damned human being chooses to embrace God, they'll be welcomed into Heaven with open arms—even if they've committed horrific sins on Earth. In this way, the novel shows that going to Heaven is the result of a free, personal choice, not an external action (such as going to church, donating to charity, etc.).Toward the end of the novel, Lewis emphasizes the importance of free will by declining to clarify whether or not God has "planned" humans' ultimate fate—an idea which, it could be argued, denies the existence of free will. The notion that God knows whether humans will be saved or damned has been interpreted by some Christian thinkers, such as John Calvin, to disprove the existence of free will: for Calvin, free will is just an illusion. However, when the Narrator asks George Macdonald whether or not God knows which human beings will be saved and which human beings will be damned, MacDonald forcefully insists that the Narrator must not ask such a question. Humans must continue to exist in time and space, choosing their own destinies, whereas God, in Lewis's view, exists outside of time, and so can see what we perceive as the "future" rather as an eternal present. In short, "the mind of God" is beyond human comprehension. MacDonald's advice suggests that The Great Divorce's philosophy of free will is closer to that of the poet John Milton (a major influence on Lewis) than Calvin. Milton argued that God's foreknowledge of human salvation isn't mutually exclusive with humans' ability to choose their own salvation. Even if God does know the fate of humanity, God gives humans the power of free will; therefore, humans can exercise their free will and choose to join God in the afterlife.While going to Heaven might seem like an obvious choice for one's free will, the vast majority of the damned souls the Narrator encounters refuse to choose Heaven, suggesting that choosing God—and free will itself—is more difficult than it seems. Many of the damned souls refuse to go to Heaven because they're frightened. Loving God involves surrendering one's love of earthly things—other people, one's pride, art, etc.—and most people are afraid of giving up these things for God. Other damned souls refuse God because they're under the delusion that damnation and life in Hell are preferable to salvation. For example, the souls of educated, academic human beings smugly suggest that Hell is more conducive to "creativity" than Heaven. (This is a simplified version of William Blake's argument in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—an argument that Lewis tries to refute in his novel, even in its very title.) By definition, the concept of free will allows for humans to choose between two or more options. In The Great Divorce, most of the souls the Narrator encounters choose the wrong option—damnation—because they're confused, prideful, or otherwise corrupted.Ultimately, the novel shows that free will is potentially dangerous, yet also emancipatory for human beings. If given the option to choose, many people will make the wrong choice, choosing to go to Hell instead of embracing Heaven. Yet the pitfalls of free will make a Christian's choice to worship God more commendable: the handful of souls who freely choose to love God will be rewarded in Heaven for their difficult decision. - Theme: Love, Sacrifice, and Sin. Description: According to the novel, the only way for a human being's soul to be accepted into Heaven is for the human to love God above all other things. But why, then, must humans love God in order to be saved—and why is it often so difficult to love God?The Great Divorce, following Christian theology, posits that true morality is only possible if it comes from God. While Lewis never explicitly states why it's necessary to believe in and love God in order to be truly good, his argument takes two different forms. First, he suggests that to believe in God is to believe that infinite goodness is possible. A human being who believes in God, and therefore infinite goodness, will be capable of treating all other human beings with goodness—there is, in a sense, no upper limit to their capacity for goodness, kindness, and morality. Second, and more importantly, believing in God is the ultimate form of "humble love." A Christian who loves an all-powerful being knows how to love others selflessly. By contrast, an atheist or agnostic sometimes mistakes love for desire—in particular, the desire for ownership. For instance, the Narrator encounters a woman named Pam, who's spent the final decades of her life mourning for her dead son, Michael, to the point where she's neglected everyone else in her life, including her friends and husband. Pam insists that she loves her son, but it quickly becomes clear that her "love" is just a form of selfishness and clinginess—precisely the opposite of the calm, selfless love that a good Christian feels. Thus, the novel shows that even love—if it's not grounded in love for God—can be twisted into sin and become an obstacle to salvation. By the same token, the novel suggests that the only way for atheists and doubters of God's existence to enter Heaven is to love God completely—which, in practice, means "sacrificing" their feelings for earthly things, (including money, non-Christian ideology, sex, and even other human beings) and resituating these feelings within the context of a universal love for God.Unsurprisingly, most of the souls the Narrator meets over the course of the book find it very difficult to give up short-term, sinful pleasures for the sake of God. They've become so accustomed to enjoying earthly pleasures such as lust and wealth, or even more abstract "pleasures" like curiosity and art, that they've forgotten about loving God—in Lewis's view, the only true source of pleasure there is. A particularly clear example of this principle is Ikey, a damned soul who endures enormous physical pain in order to steal apples to sell in the Grey Town—an apt metaphor for the way that sinners foolishly sacrifice their spiritual happiness for the sake of supposed material rewards. The Narrator encounters many other sinners who've turned their back on loving God. Some of these sinners are fully conscious of what they're doing, while others have deluded themselves into believing that other pleasures are better. In either case, the novel shows that sinners have denied themselves true, eternal happiness in Heaven by declining to sacrifice their selfish love for other things. - Climax: The game of chess - Summary: An unnamed Narrator finds himself in a Grey Town, waiting for a bus. He boards the bus, along with a small number of other people, and the bus proceeds to fly over the grey town. The Narrator then talks with some of the other people on the bus, some of whom remember dying in various ways. One man, Ikey, tells the Narrator that the grey town is always getting bigger as more and more people enter it. Some of these people get closer to the bus stop, so that one day they can drive away. Others drift farther from the bus stop—indeed, some people in grey town must be millions of miles from the bus stop by now. The bus lands on a huge cliff, and the Narrator and the other passengers get out. They find that they've landed by a beautiful river, surrounded by grass and trees. However, the Narrator quickly discovers that everything in this place is motionless—even the blades of grass are rigid and hard. This makes walking around very painful. The Narrator also realizes that he no longer has a solid body—he and his peers are ghosts. The Narrator slowly realizes that he's in the afterlife. As he realizes this, he sees a group of Spirits approaching the ghosts. The Spirits are bright and have solid bodies—they've come to try to convince the ghosts to come with them toward the beautiful, majestic mountains in the distance. But most of the ghosts refuse to do so. One, the Big Ghost, notices that one of the spirits is Len, a man he knew while they were both alive. Len killed a man, and yet has become a Spirit, while the Big Ghost has led a supposedly virtuous life, and yet was sent to the dreary Grey Town. Len tries to convince the Big Ghost to "love," but the Big Ghost refuses, and walks back to the bus, eager to return to the Grey Town. The Narrator witnesses other spirits trying to convince the ghosts to stay by the river, regain their solid bodies, and eventually climb to the top of the mountain. Each time, however, the ghosts refuse to stay, and walk back to the bus. Ikey, who's eager to make "a tidy profit" in the Grey Town, picks golden apples from a tree and carries them back to the bus, causing himself great pain in the process. Another ghost, the Hard-Bitten Ghost, tells the Narrator to be careful, and argues that "the same people" must control the river, the mountains, and the grey town. The Hard-Bitten Ghost's words fill the Narrator with despair. Just as the Narrator is thinking of returning to the bus, he sees the Spirit of one of his favorite authors, George MacDonald. MacDonald greets the Narrator cheerfully and promises to show him around. He explains that the Narrator has come on a "vacation" from Hell, the Grey Town, to the "Valley of the Shadow of Life." There are many people in the Grey Town who visit the Valley and then return to the Town forever. For these people, the Grey Town is Hell. But there are others who stay in the Valley instead of returning to the Grey Town—for these people, the Grey Town is merely Purgatory; a place for them to exist before they "climb" up to Heaven. The people who are too stubborn to go to the mountains and love God, MacDonald explains, are like stubborn children who would rather be miserable than humble. For the rest of the book, MacDonald carries the Narrator around the Valley, showing him conversations between Spirits and ghosts. In the first conversation, the Narrator sees a Spirit trying to convince the ghost of a famous Artist to remain in the Valley and go to Heaven. The Artist arrogantly refuses, claiming that he couldn't stand to live in a place without personal property, where his painting wouldn't be appreciated. MacDonald shows the Narrator a female ghost who complains so much about her husband that she eventually disappears entirely—she's so consumed by pettiness and fussiness that she no longer has a soul. Another female ghost, Pam, argues with the Spirit of her brother, Reginald, about her love for her dead child, Michael. Pam claims to love Michael so much that she couldn't love anyone else during her lifetime. Reginald argues that Pam must surrender her love for Michael in order to love God completely—and afterwards, Pam will be reunited with Michael in Heaven forever. Pam refuses to give up her love for her son, though, claiming that Reginald is being cruel. Another ghost carries a tiny lizard on his shoulder—MacDonald explains to the Narrator that this lizard is Lust. Reluctantly, the ghost allows an angel to crush the lizard, freeing the ghost from his burden to sexual desire. To the Narrator's amazement, the lizard transforms into a beautiful horse, who gallops away with the ghost, now a new-born man, toward the mountains. MacDonald explains that by surrendering our earthly desire—even for our loved ones—humans can become more beautiful, more powerful, and more loving than they ever thought possible. In the final chapters of the novel, MacDonald shows the Narrator a beautiful Spirit, Sarah Smith. Sarah reunites with a man she once knew, Frank. Frank has become so embittered and self-hating that he's separated into two ghosts: a tall "Tragedian" ghost and a small "Dwarf" ghost. The Small Ghost—a bitter, self-hating being—uses a heavy chain to control the Tall Ghost—an overdramatic being who overreacts whenever Sarah does something even mildly offensive. Sarah, speaking to the Small Ghost, tries to tell Frank that he doesn't have to hate himself anymore—he's in a place of boundless love. The Small Ghost is almost ready to laugh along with Sarah and stay in the Valley. But instead, he pulls his chain, and the Tall Ghost rages theatrically, accusing Sarah of having never loved him. The Small Ghost shrinks until he's no longer visible at all. Then, the Tall Ghost disappears, too. MacDonald explains to the Narrator that Frank was trying to manipulate Sarah's pity and concern in order to pass along some of his own self-hatred to Sarah. While it might seem cruel for Sarah to be happy in the Valley, rather than spending her time pitying Frank, MacDonald insists that the saved should rejoice in their own salvation, rather than pitying the damned. If it were otherwise, he argues, then people in Hell would be able to "blackmail" people in Heaven into feeling miserable. The Narrator asks MacDonald if the people in Hell will remain in Hell for all eternity, or if one day, God will free them and bring them to Heaven. MacDonald says that Heaven is open to all those who truly desire it. However, the Narrator must not ask questions about what will happen to human beings in the future. It is the nature of human beings to live in time, uncertain about their future possibilities. For a human being to learn the mysteries of salvation would involve that human being standing "outside of time" and seeing the future—in other words, ceasing to be a human being. MacDonald illustrates this concept by taking the Narrator to a huge chessboard, across which chess pieces move rapidly. The Narrator suddenly wakes up—he's been sleeping in his study.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Great Gatsby - Point of view: First person - Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922 - Character: Jay Gatsby. Description: Nick's wealthy neighbor in West Egg. Gatsby owns a gigantic mansion and has become well known for hosting large parties every Saturday night. Gatsby's lust for wealth stems from his desire to win back the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan, whom he met and fell in love with while in military training in Louisville, Kentucky before WW I. Gatsby is a self-made man (his birth name was James Gatz) who achieved the American Dream of rising up from the lower classes to the top of society. But to Gatsby, the desire for love proves more powerful than the lust for money. Fitzgerald uses Gatsby's downfall as a critique of the reckless indulgence of Roaring Twenties America. - Character: Nick Carraway. Description: A young man from Minnesota who has come to New York after graduating Yale and fighting in World War I, Nick is the neighbor of Jay Gatsby and the cousin of Daisy Buchanan. The narrator of The Great Gatsby, Nick describes himself as "one of the few honest people that [he has] ever known." Nick views himself as a man of "infinite hope" who can see the best side of everyone he encountered. Nick sees past the veneer of Gatsby's wealth and is the only character in the novel who truly cares about Gatsby. In watching Gatsby's story unfold, Nick becomes a critic of the Roaring Twenties excess and carelessness that carries on all around him. - Character: Daisy Buchanan. Description: The love of Jay Gatsby's life, the cousin of Nick Carraway, and the wife of Tom Buchanan. She grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, where she met and fell in love with Gatsby. She describes herself as "sophisticated" and says the best thing a girl can be is a "beautiful little fool," which makes it unsurprising that she lacks conviction and sincerity, and values material things over all else. Yet Daisy isn't just a shallow gold digger. She's more tragic: a loving woman who has been corrupted by greed. She chooses the comfort and security of money over real love, but she does so knowingly. Daisy's tragedy conveys the alarming extent to which the lust for money captivated Americans during the Roaring Twenties. - Character: Jordan Baker. Description: A friend of Daisy's who becomes Nick's girlfriend. A successful pro golfer, Jordan is beautiful and pleasant, but does not inspire Nick to feel much more than a "tender curiosity" for her. Perhaps this is because Baker is "incurably dishonest" and cheats at golf. Still, there is some suggestion in the novel that she loves Nick, and that he misjudges her. - Theme: The Roaring Twenties. Description: F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term "Jazz Age" to describe the decade of decadence and prosperity that America enjoyed in the 1920s, which was also known as the Roaring Twenties. After World War I ended in 1918, the United States and much of the rest of the world experienced an enormous economic expansion. The surging economy turned the 1920s into a time of easy money, hard drinking (despite the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution), and lavish parties. Though the 1920s were a time of great optimism, Fitzgerald portrays the much bleaker side of the revelry by focusing on its indulgence, hypocrisy, shallow recklessness, and its perilous—even fatal—consequences. - Theme: The American Dream. Description: The American Dream—that hard work can lead one from rags to riches—has been a core facet of American identity since its inception. Settlers came west to America from Europe seeking wealth and freedom. The pioneers headed west for the same reason. The Great Gatsby shows the tide turning east, as hordes flock to New York City seeking stock market fortunes. The Great Gatsby portrays this shift as a symbol of the American Dream's corruption. It's no longer a vision of building a life; it's just about getting rich.Gatsby symbolizes both the corrupted Dream and the original uncorrupted Dream. He sees wealth as the solution to his problems, pursues money via shady schemes, and reinvents himself so much that he becomes hollow, disconnected from his past. Yet Gatsby's corrupt dream of wealth is motivated by an incorruptible love for Daisy. Gatsby's failure does not prove the folly of the American Dream—rather it proves the folly of short-cutting that dream by allowing corruption and materialism to prevail over hard work, integrity, and real love. And the dream of love that remains at Gatsby's core condemns nearly every other character in the novel, all of whom are empty beyond just their lust for money. - Theme: Class (Old Money, New Money, No Money). Description: The Great Gatsby portrays three different social classes: "old money" (Tom and Daisy Buchanan); "new money" (Gatsby); and a class that might be called "no money" (George and Myrtle Wilson). "Old money" families have fortunes dating from the 19th century or before, have built up powerful and influential social connections, and tend to hide their wealth and superiority behind a veneer of civility. The "new money" class made their fortunes in the 1920s boom and therefore have no social connections and tend to overcompensate for this lack with lavish displays of wealth.The Great Gatsby shows the newly developing class rivalry between "old" and "new" money in the struggle between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. As usual, the "no money" class gets overlooked by the struggle at the top, leaving middle and lower class people like George Wilson forgotten or ignored. - Theme: Past and Future. Description: Nick and Gatsby are continually troubled by time—the past haunts Gatsby and the future weighs down on Nick. When Nick tells Gatsby that you can't repeat the past, Gatsby says "Why of course you can!" Gatsby has dedicated his entire life to recapturing a golden, perfect past with Daisy. Gatsby believes that money can recreate the past. Fitzgerald describes Gatsby as "overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves." But Gatsby mixes up "youth and mystery" with history; he thinks a single glorious month of love with Daisy can compete with the years and experiences she has shared with Tom. Just as "new money" is money without social connection, Gatsby's connection to Daisy exists outside of history.Nick's fear of the future foreshadows the economic bust that plunged the country into depression and ended the Roaring Twenties in 1929. The day Gatsby and Tom argue at the Plaza Hotel, Nick suddenly realizes that it's his thirtieth birthday. He thinks of the new decade before him as a "portentous menacing road," and clearly sees in the struggle between old and new money the end of an era and the destruction of both types of wealth. - Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy - Summary: In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway moves from Minnesota to work as a bond salesman in New York. Nick rents a house in West Egg, a suburb of New York on Long Island full of the "new rich" who have made their fortunes too recently to have built strong social connections. Nick graduated from Yale and has connections in East Egg, a town where the people with social connections and "old" money live. One night Nick drives to East Egg to have dinner with his cousin, Daisy and her husband Tom Buchanan, a classmate of Nick's at Yale. There, he meets Jordan Baker, a beautiful and cynical professional golfer. Jordan tells Nick that Tom is having an affair. Upon returning home from dinner, Nick sees his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby holding out his arms toward the Long Island Sound. Nick looks out across the water, but sees only a green light blinking at the end of a dock on the far shore. A few days later, Tom invites Nick to a party in New York City. On the way, Tom picks up his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, the wife of George Wilson, the owner of an auto shop an industrial area between West Egg and New York City called the Valley of Ashes. At the party, Myrtle gets drunk and makes fun of Daisy. Tom punches her and breaks her nose. Nick also attends one of Gatsby's extravagant Saturday night parties. He runs into Jordan there, and meets Gatsby for the first time. Gatsby privately tells Jordan a story she describes as the most "amazing thing." After going to lunch with Gatsby and a shady business partner of Gatsby's named Meyer Wolfsheim, Nick meets with Jordan and learns the "amazing" story: Gatsby met and fell in love with Daisy before World War I, and bought his West Egg mansion just to be near her and impress her. At Gatsby's request, Nick arranges a meeting between Gatsby and Daisy. The two soon rediscover their love. Daisy invites Nick and Gatsby to lunch with her, Tom, and Jordan. During the lunch, Tom realizes Daisy and Gatsby are having an affair. He insists they all go to New York City. As soon as they gather at the Plaza Hotel, though, Tom and Gatsby get into an argument about Daisy. Gatsby tells Tom that Daisy never loved Tom and has only ever loved him. But Daisy can only admit that she loved them both, and Gatsby is stunned. Tom then reveals that Gatsby made his fortune by bootlegging alcohol and other illegal means. Tom then dismissively tells Daisy to go home with Gatsby, since he knows Gatsby won't "bother" her anymore. They leave in Gatsby's car, while Tom, Nick, and Jordan follow sometime later. As they drive home, Tom, Nick, and Jordan come upon an accident: Myrtle has been hit and killed by a car. Tom realizes that it must have been Gatsby's car that struck Myrtle, and he curses Gatsby as a coward for driving off. But Nick learns from Gatsby later that night that Daisy was actually behind the wheel. George Wilson, distraught, is convinced that the driver of the car yellow car that hit Myrtle is also her lover. While at work that day, Nick fights on the phone with Jordan. In the afternoon, Nick has a kind of premonition and finds Gatsby shot to death in his pool. Wilson's dead body is a few yards away. Nick organizes a funeral, but none of the people who were supposedly Gatsby's friends come. Only Gatsby's father and one other man attend. Nick and Jordan end their relationship. Nick runs into Tom soon after, and learns that Tom told Wilson that Gatsby had run over Myrtle. Nick doesn't tell Tom that Daisy was at the wheel. Disgusted with the corrupt emptiness of life on the East Coast, Nick moves back to Minnesota. But the night before he leaves he walks down to Gatsby's beach and looks out over Long Island Sound. He thinks about Gatsby, and compares him to the first settlers to America. Like Gatsby, Nick says, all people must move forward with their arms outstretched toward the future, like boats traveling upstream against the current of the past.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Half-Skinned Steer - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: The story, which involves a road trip from Massachusetts to Wyoming, takes place in numerous locales, including a ranch near the Big Horns mountain range in Wyoming, and another ranch in Dubois, Wyoming. - Character: Mero Corn. Description: Mero Corn, the protagonist of the story, left his childhood home in Wyoming in 1936 and returns for the first time in sixty years to attend the funeral of his brother, Rollo. Mero, a self-made man, is satisfied with the trajectory of his life: he went to war, married three times, held various jobs, and even got into local politics when he moved to Massachusetts. Mero believes his escape from the ranch, which allowed him to leave the natural world behind, was the correct decision; he never came back to visit his family, and implies that he does not even know when his father passed away. As Mero drives home for Rollo's funeral, however, his vivid childhood memories illustrate how his life has been profoundly impacted by his upbringing. In particular, the relationship between his father, his father's girlfriend, and Rollo affected him deeply: in his youth, Mero remembers how Rollo lusted after his father's girlfriend, and how this repulsed Mero; part of the reason Mero left the ranch was to escape both the tedium and his family's amorous tension. As Mero continues to get lost in his memories, he begins to act recklessly: he gets into a car crash and ends up lost in a snowstorm. Mero then attempts to walk home, but gets stuck in the storm before he reaches the ranch, and thus does not complete his homecoming. As he accepts his imminent death, he imagines he sees a half-skinned steeran omen from a childhood story and realizes that he never truly escaped from the ranch or from nature's wrath. - Character: Rollo Corn. Description: Rollo is Mero Corn's younger brother. According to Mero's memories, Rollo coveted and lusted after their father's girlfriend, who often entertained the men in the ranch's kitchen by telling stories. As Mero never returned to visit Rollo, Rollo's relationship with the girlfriend is left ambiguous; he did, however, father a child named Tick Corn. It is revealed that Rollo sold the family's ranch to the Girl Scouts; the Girl Scouts then sold the ranch to a neighboring family, who afterwards passed it along to an Australian businessman. The businessman established the ranch as a tourist destination, "Down Under Wyoming," which showcased imported animals, such as emus. Rollo eventually took the business over from the Australian. Rollo is killed by one of the emus, and his death compels Mero to return home. Like Mero, Rollo has a complicated, fatal relationship with nature: Rollo is killed by an animal, and Mero gets fatally trapped in a snowstorm. - Character: Mero's Father/Old Man. Description: Mero Corn refers to his father as his old man. Although the old man goes unnamed, he is an influential figure in Mero and Rollo's lives. In Mero's opinion, the old man was an alcoholic and disappointing role model: he gave up ranching to become a mailman, a choice that Rollo and Mero saw as a betrayal. Mero remembers his father as a scarred, drunken man, and vividly recalls the old man sitting at the kitchen table guzzling Everclear as he listened to his girlfriend's stories. Mero believes both Rollo and the old man lusted after her simultaneously, but Mero also frequently describes her in his memories with sexualized language and physically compares her to a horse. His father and brother's mutual infatuation disgusted Mero, and propelled him to escape the ranch and make a different life for himself. - Character: The Girlfriend. Description: Mero Corn vividly remembers his father's girlfriend, who used to tell stories with her mesmerizing voice. Mero recalls how the girlfriend told the Corn men about the story of Tin Head, a rancher who slaughters a steer but disrespects the animal's sacrifice and is cursed for his insolence. The girlfriend's telling of Tin Head's story fascinates Mero, and the tale remains in his memory sixty years later. Mero characterizes the girlfriend as a liar and a flirt, as she reveled in both Rollo and his father's attention. Mero also describes her as horse-like, and believes the girlfriend's treatment of his brother and father prompted him to leave home: he was unwilling to compete for her attention, and escaped the ranch to find a woman of his own. - Character: Tin Head. Description: Tin Head is an ill-fated character in a story told by the old man's girlfriend. Tin Head is plagued by misfortune: due to an injury, he has a metal plate embedded in his skull, and the animals on his paltry ranch continually suffer bizarre mutations. In the girlfriend's story, Tin Head slaughters steers to keep his family fed; one year, however, he kills and begins skinning the animal, but leaves the job unfinished. When he finally remembers that he needs to finish skinning the animal, he sees that the steer is gone. When he eventually locates it, he realizes that the half-skinned steer is still alive. The steer looks at him with hatred, and Tin Head realizes that he and his family are doomed; he angered and provoked nature by disrespecting the steer's sacrifice, and must suffer for his mistake. Tin Head's tale frames Mero's life story, illustrating the ongoing thematic tension between man and nature. - Character: The Anthropologist. Description: The anthropologist is an unnamed character from Mero Corn's childhood; the old man once instructed the anthropologist to show Mero some hillside paintings. The anthropologist discussed various paintings of animals with Mero before pointing out how one set of images depicted female genitalia. In his innocence, Mero initially believed the drawings depicted horse-related symbols, continuing the thematic connection between sexuality and equine imagery. This conversation with the anthropologist provides insight into Mero's burgeoning sexuality, a key motivation for his eventual departure from the ranch. - Theme: Homecoming. Description: In "The Half-Skinned Steer," the elderly Mero Corn returns home to his family's ranch to attend his brother Rollo's funeral. While driving from Massachusetts to Wyoming, Mero recalls past events that compelled him to leave home as a young man. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that Mero didn't escape completely; his choices and memories have kept him tethered to home, a place that has exerted its influence over his entire life. Mero never reaches home in the story—the story suggests that Mero dies while trudging through a snowstorm. The story thus concludes, somewhat ironically, on a note of unfinished homecoming. In the end, Mero cannot return to the place he has for six decades defined his life against. In Proulx's story, the idea of "homecoming" thus proves elusive, even as home itself is presented as having an inexorable influence over an individual's identity. Proulx begins the story by describing Mero's reasons for leaving home in his twenties. Mero rode "the train out" of Wyoming and never returned because he believed that the ranch would not provide any meaningful opportunities, and this pushed him to look for a new life elsewhere. Mero also "pulled away" when his father's girlfriend arrived and his brother Rollo fell for her charms. Mero was repulsed by his brother and father's mutual infatuation with the woman, and realized that staying on the ranch would mean his life would "go on" monotonouslyto Mero, then, the ranch was a place of claustrophobic tedium. Based on these rationales, Mero left the ranch to "find" new "territory." He went to war, married multiple times, and worked odd jobs. He retired briefly before getting into "local politics," another role he eventually left. Mero's initial escape has seemingly turned into a lifelong cycle of avoidance. One could read Mero's need for escapism, exemplified by the constant changes to his career and marital status, as the inevitable consequence of a pattern started by his initial departure from the ranch. Mero is proud to have escaped from his past, yet his identity seems to have been formed in direct rebellion to his upbringing—indicating that he never really escaped his home's influence. For example, Mero recalls how the sight of a bloody steak in a restaurant repulsed him and prompted him to become a vegetarian. Recognizing that this choice is particularly unusual as he grew up on a ranch, Mero describes himself as a "cattleman" who has "gone wrong." Mero emphasizes proudly that his vegetarianism contradicts his upbringing, ironically illustrating that he still thinks and cares deeply about his roots. In fact, Mero believes his choices make him superior to his family. When Mero hears that an emu has killed his brother, he emphasizes how he "could have" escaped the emu's attack, and credits his likely escape to the time spent on his "Exercycle" and to a diet of "green leafy vegetables." Mero claims his healthy lifestylea clear reaction to, and departure from, the life he would have led as a meat-eating or alcoholic cattlemanmakes him a more capable man than his brother. As Mero approaches the ranch, memories of home overwhelm him, indicating their hold on his identity even after decades away. He describes how "the shape of the ranch" awakens "in his mind," and how he "could recall" the various objects he built for the ranch with his own hands. Mero clearly still feels a sense of ownership, despite his insistence that he has escaped the ranch for a new life. He highlights the "eerie dream quality" of the situation, acknowledging how the ranch has remained a strangely potent place for him. In fact, the ranch seems "clear and sharp in his mind." At the same time, however, Mero knows the ranch cannot possibly be the same as when he left it: the ranch has changed ownership and shifted business models in his absence, and the home he remembers no longer exists. When he considers the idea of stopping at "Banner's place," for example, he realizes that Bob Banner "would have to be 120 years old" to greet him now; the neighbor he knew in childhood has passed away, changing his home's context. As such, Mero cannot truly return home, as the place he remembers has transformed in his absence. With his brother also dead, the potential for closure has passed. Mero's feelings of familiarity reveal his belief that some basic essence of home remains, but the fact that he fails to find the ranch at all suggests he is mistaken. Mero continues to drive homeward, but the engine of his car cuts out, and Mero understands that he is likely going to die. He claims that it is "almost a relief" to have "reached this point," and seems happy that he never truly returned to the ranch, joking to himself that he may instead "find the mythical Grand Hotel." Mero acknowledges that he will never complete his homecoming: he is content to remain trapped both physically and figuratively in a sort of limbo between two worlds, as he never truly left home yet is unable to return. Home is ultimately a complicated and rather paradoxical concept in the story. It is both an indelible part of an individual's character and a concept that largely exists only in one's mind. - Theme: Memory and the Past. Description: Proulx's story is told largely via flashback, as Mero recalls various childhood memories during his drive home to attend his brother Rollo's funeral. This suggests that Mero is a character more emotionally focused on the past than on the present. As Mero continues to fixate on people and places from long ago, however, his memories prove unreliable, and he ultimately places himself in dangerous situations that result in his probable death. In Proulx's story, history perilously overshadows the present: emotional memories become more important than current circumstances, illustrating the danger of living in one's past. On his drive homeward, Mero reminisces about his family's dynamics, fixating on his judgments of his relatives. Mero relies on his past opinions to shape his perspective, as he has no other source of insight into his relatives' personalities. For example, Mero discusses how, in his childhood, his father got a job as a mailman, leading him to resent the old man for this "defection" from ranching. Mero recalls how his father "looked guilty" as he delivered mail, and also remembers his father's constant drinking. Mero never saw past these paternal failures, and flippantly claims his old man "must be dead fifty years or more," indicating that he does not know when his father died. Mero's past opinion of his father pre-empted any reconnection; he was satisfied with his initial opinion, and never attempted to amend it. Mero also reminisces about the interactions between his father, his father's girlfriend, and Rollo. At the time, although she was his father's girlfriend, she "played" the entire family "like a deck of cards." Mero's memory highlights how she "charged" the men with an "intensity of purpose," and provided a source of tension. Despite the fact that these interactions happened decades ago, Mero still relies on these memories to understand his family's emotional dynamic. Mero then claims he never came to visit because he did not want to see his family "bankrupt and ruined." Mero is assured of his family's misfortune, even though he never came back to see it himself; he blindly trusts his former judgment of his family's situation, and his pride denies people the potential for change or growth. Mero's memories often help him justify and compartmentalize his life decisions. As he explains how his past has led him to his current circumstances, however, he begins to disregard the dangers of the present. In one scene, Mero recalls a past motivation for his departure from the ranch: after viewing the complicated dynamics between his father, brother, and his father's girlfriend, he realized his life was not likely to change. Mero recalls watching his brother covet his old man's girlfriendwhom Mero himself described with sexual language, comparing her to a robust horseand chooses to leave, as he wants to find his own "territory." Immediately after recalling this memory, Mero is pulled over by a cop who asks him "where he was going." Mero admits that he momentarily forgot "what he was doing there." Mero, lost in memories that are foundational to his past, briefly cannot remember why he is returning home. As Mero gets closer to the ranch, his long-term memories overtake his short-term memory. Despite being able to recall the intricacies of his family's relationships, Mero forgets which ramp to use on the highway, and tries to use a hotel sign as a landmark but ends up on the "wrong side" of the interstate. When he finds the correct entrance ramp, he drives recklessly, which triggers a multicar pile-up. Mero remembers the past with clarity, but his memories distract him, and he becomes a more absent-minded and thoughtless driver in the present. This again underscores the peril of living in the past. Mero's reliance on memory continues to lead him into danger; eventually, despite his belief that he knows the ranch, his misjudgment results in his probable death. As Mero nears home, he realizes he does not "recognize" the "turnoff to the ranch," despite his claims that he can visualize it in his mind. He turns into what he believes is the right entrance, but as the road gets "rougher" and he realizes that he is wrong. Despite Mero's ability to recall his youth with precise detail, he relies too heavily on inaccurate memories and gets lost. Mero's car then gets stuck in the snow, and he wonders if he can wait out the storm and head to his neighbor's house in the morning for help. He then remembers his neighbor is long dead, another clear slippage in his memory. Mero finally admits that the "map of the ranch in his memory" is "obliterated," and acknowledges that he was over-reliant on his memories of home, which are clearly outdated. Mero gets out of the car to try and extricate the stuck tire. When he grabs the "car door handle" to get back inside, however, he realizes that he forgot "the keys in the ignition." He smashes a rock through the window to retrieve them, and then sees the "passenger door" was unlocked the whole time. This indicates that his decision-making abilities are clearly addled. The car's engine dies, and Mero realizes that he is fatally trapped in the storm. His situation is a direct consequence of his failing recall; his overconfidence in his memories, which were dangerously inaccurate, lead him into mortal danger. In Proulx's story, Mero reminisces about childhood, revealing that his past impressions have remained untested in his old age. Mero's fixation with his memories prevents him from moving on: he continues to get lost in his past to the point that he loses contact with his current circumstances. Proulx's story thus illustrates how living in the past is a hindrance to one's present: when one is consumed by their memories, they become increasingly disengaged from their actual, ongoing existence. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: "The Half-Skinned Steer" contains various moments that illustrate nature's hostile relationship with human beings. The story is framed around an ominous fairytale about a man named Tin Head, whose family is cursed as a result of his disrespectful treatment of nature. Tin Head's story parallels the history of the Corn family, which owns a ranch plagued by misfortune. The Corns' lack of respect for and misunderstanding of nature results in the family's ongoing bad luck; they are fated to suffer economic hardship, emotional strife, and even death. Proulx's story, which ends with Mero likely dying in a snowstorm, presents nature as a merciless and indifferent force against which humanity is inevitably powerless. Mero's father's girlfriend introduces the story of Tin Head, which illustrates a perpetual conflict between man and nature. On Tin Head's ranch, nature acts cruelly and atypically, resulting in Tin Head's unnaturally bad luck: his chickens change "color overnight," and his cows' calves are often born with three legs. Tin Head's ranch, which is unduly affected by nature, has been singled out for bizarre misfortunes. Despite this contentious relationship between Tin Head and nature, however, Tin Head's family relies on the resources provided by his steers, which he butchers for food. One year, however, Tin Head forgets to honor the gravity of the steer's sacrifice; instead, he acts disrespectfully, and begins skinning a steer only to finish the job "halfway." Rather than completing the work, he "leaves the steer half-skinned," a clear sign of contempt for nature. Tin Head's decision to leave the steer's slaughter unfinished dooms his family. When he goes back outside, he sees the half-skinned steer's "red eyes" looking at him with "pure teetotal hate." He realizes that "he is done for" and that his entire family is now fated to suffer; his disrespect for nature has started a cycle of revenge. He acknowledges that even his house will have to "blow away or burn up," as nature is merciless and vengeful. The tale of Tin Head's family acts as context for Mero's story, and illustrates how the natural world is fated to clash with humans. The Corn family's ranch, like Tin Head's ranch, is plagued by bad luck. It is "impossible to run cows" on the "tough" land, and the cows tend to fall "off cliffs" or "into sinkholes." Even the conditions for growing the basic materials for ranching are unfriendly: hay cannot thrive, though less useful varieties of plants grow in abundance. The ranch's land seems unwilling to sustain any of the Corn family's members. This bad luck is exacerbated by the Corn family's inability to understand or work peacefully with nature. Instead of adapting to the ranch's natural resources, the family decides to exchange their cattle for emusan animal nonnative to Wyoming. They thereby turn the ranch into a tourist destination, with imported animals that do not belong in the ranch's habitat. This choice illustrates the Corn family's disregard for nature: they are unwilling to acclimate, and instead choose to introduce new and unnatural elements. Mero's brother Rollo is later killed by one of the imported emus, which attack him unexpectedly. Rollo's death is directly caused by the Corn family's doomed relationship with nature: the family provoked nature by introducing non-native species to their ranch, and one of the animals lashes out at—and eventually kills—Rollo. The hostile relationship between nature and the Corn family also impacts Mero's life, despite his attempts to escape his fate. Throughout his life, Mero has deliberately separated himself from the natural world of the ranch. He left home to work in more industrial jobs and became a vegetarian, which he considers the choice of "a cattleman gone wrong." Furthermore, he admits to knowing about nature solely through the "programs on television," a clear divergence from his family members, who learn about nature through ranching. Mero believes these choices in his youth, which kept him from being a proper "cattleman," allow him to be ignorant of nature and the natural world. Eventually, however, Mero's return to the ranch places him back into a hostile relationship with the natural world. When he drives to the ranch for his brother's funeral, he is caught in a snowstorm. Mero describes how the wind seems to fight him, and how the snow continues to fall in spite of his distress; he begins to realize that the "thread" of his life is about to end. Despite his greatest efforts to escape nature's curse, Mero once again becomes subject to the cruelty of the natural world. Mero begins to walk towards the ranch, buffeted by the snowstorm. He describes how he sees an animal appear next to him, and he suddenly realizes it is the "half-skinned steer," the omen from Tin Head's fairytale, which has been "watching for him" his entire life. This steer illustrates nature's inexorable power. Despite believing he has escaped the natural world's mistreatment of his family, Mero recognizes, in the moments before his death, that he has not escaped fate. Ultimately, he cannot break nature's curse; it has been waiting for him to return. In Proulx's "The Half-Skinned Steer," nature has an antagonistic relationship with humanity. Compounding this tense dynamic, many of Proulx's characters continually disrespect nature as they struggle to survive; as a result, nature places a curse on them for their contempt. Individuals are thus fated or doomed to suffer when they mistreat nature, and cannot hide from nature's ability to enact revenge. - Climax: As Mero gets stuck in a snowstorm on his drive home, he sees the half-skinned steer from Tin Head's story, and realizes that he has been cursed by the same misfortune. - Summary: Mero Corn takes pride in the fact that he "never" returned to visit his family after leaving his home in Wyoming decades earlier. One day, however, he is "summoned" back to Wyoming by Louise Corn, his brother Rollo's daughter-in-law, who tells him over the phone that Rollo has passed away. Louise informs Mero that an emu attacked and killed Rollo on the family's ranch, which currently operates as a tourist destination called "Down Under Wyoming." Mero decides to return home for the first time in sixty years. During the drive back to the ranch, Mero recalls formative scenes from his childhood. He describes how it was "impossible" to "run cows" on the ranch, as it was a hostile landscape; he also recalls how his father, whom he refers to as the old man, defected from the cattleman lifestyle to become a mailman. Additionally, he reminisces about his father's girlfriend, comparing her to a horse with sexualized, graphic language. Mero remembers how the girlfriend's flirtations with both Rollo and his father "charged" the family with "intensity of purpose" and added tension to an otherwise tedious existence. One of the girlfriend's stories, an ominous tale about a man named Tin Head, is a key memory from Mero's childhood. Mero recounts various fragments from the girlfriend's story of Tin Head as he continues his trip. In the tale, Tin Head and his family were particularly unlucky: his chickens would turn mysteriously blue, and his cattle were often born mutated. At the time, the girlfriend's story resulted in a sexual yet terrifying dream for Mero; he remembers how, upon waking, he realized his life could continue monotonously "like this for some time." This realization, combined with Mero's desire for a girlfriend "of his own," prompts him to leave home and make a new life. As Mero reminisces about the past, he starts disengaging from the present. When he is pulled over by a cop, for example, he momentarily forgets why he is traveling home. Mero then relates another formative moment in his youth: his sexual awakening. He recalls how an anthropologist showed him cliff paintings, and how he mistook an image of female genitalia for a horseshoe. After recounting this memory, Mero gets into a multi-car crash; he then buys a secondhand car and continues his drive homeward. He drives through Cheyenne "for the second time in sixty years," and recalls how, when he first left home, he stopped at a restaurant to order a bloody steak. The gory meal repulsed him, however, and he converted to vegetarianism. Mero considers this the path of a "cattleman gone wrong," and is proud of his decision to distance himself from his family's traditions. Continuing with the theme of gruesome imagery, Mero recounts the next part of Tin Head's story. In the tale, Tin Head selects a steer to butcher "every year" to help feed his family "all winter long." One year, however, Tin Head leaves the steer "half-skinned" and bloodied on the ground; he forgets to finish the work, as he is absentmindedly distracted by his wife's call to dinner. Mero then interrupts the story to describe the natural landscape of Wyoming, noting how the blinding snow and whipping wind rises and stops, and the road clears in front of him. As he drives onward, he mentally recalls the shape of his family's ranch, and reminisces about the "intimate fences" he had constructed in his youth. The storm begins to surge again, and Mero focuses on "keeping to the road," affirming that he has not "forgotten how to drive a winter mountain." He claims that the road is "achingly familiar" even in the snow, and recalls the neighboring ranches with fondness. Despite Mero's confidence in his directions, however, he misses the turnoff to his family's ranch. One of his car's tires then gets stuck in the snow; he gets out of the car, hoping he can extricate it. The tale of Tin Head resumes. Mero's father's girlfriend describes how Tin Head emerges from his home after dinner to look for the half-skinned steer and is surprised to see it is gone. Suddenly, Tin Head notices movement in the distance, and realizes it is the steer, which is still alive. Tin Head sees the hate in the steer's eyes, and realizes that he and his family are cursed to suffer for cruelly injuring the steer. Tin Head's story concludes, and Mero is still stuck in the snowstorm. He looks through his car's window and realizes that he left the keys in the ignition. He decides to break one of the windows to retrieve them. He then places the car's floor mats under the tire to lend it traction, and gets into his battered car to start the engine. The mats barely help, and the tires spin uselessly in the snow before giving out entirely. Mero gets out of the inoperative car to finish the journey on foot. He acknowledges that he will likely die in the storm, and claims that this is a "relief." Mero trudges through the snow, marveling at the "violent country," and realizes that one cow has broken away from its herd to follow him. He turns to look at the animal and recognizes it as the half-skinned steer, whose "red eye had been watching for him all this time."

- Genre: Speculative Fiction / Science Fiction / Dystopia - Title: The Handmaid’s Tale - Point of view: First person limited - Setting: Cambridge, Massachusetts under the dystopian government of the Republic of Gilead, which has replaced the United States. - Character: Offred. Description: The novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, Handmaid of the Commander and Serena Joy, former wife of Luke, and lover of Nick. We never learn her real name (Offred means "Of Fred," her Commander), and we know little about her physical appearance. She has brown hair, stands about five foot seven, and is 33 years old. Before Gilead, she had a daughter with Luke at about age 25. Moira was her best friend from college, and she had a rocky relationship with her radical, outrageous mother. Though Offred is rebellious, even violent, in her thoughts, and full of passionate memories, she seems stolid and devout to outsiders, doing her best to obey Gilead's laws. Readers may be quick to judge Offred for her passivity, but her keen observations and honest emotions, even after the terror and brainwashing that she's encountered, demonstrate the limitations of Gilead's power over its subjects. - Character: The Commander. Description: The head of the household where Offred serves as a Handmaid, and husband of Serena Joy. The Commander has gray hair, wears a black suit, and looks "like a Midwestern bank president." Though he is a high-ranking official of Gilead who may have played a large role in its construction, he breaks many laws, including going to the sex club Jezebel's (and at least once hiring Moira), and spending time with Offred. Though he attributes many of his misogynistic attitudes to "Nature," he cares for Offred's well being, and often wants to know her opinion on controversial matters. - Character: Serena Joy. Description: Also known as the Commander's Wife, she is unable to have children and therefore requires Offred's services. Before Gilead, she was a singer who became famous on TV for her emotional Christian music. She also used to give speeches about how women ought to be housewives. During the novel, she occupies her time gardening with Nick's help, and knitting elaborate scarves for soldiers, despite her arthritis. For much of the novel, she resentfully ignores Offred, but towards the end she encourages Offred to try to get pregnant by having sex with Nick. - Character: Nick. Description: The Commander's driver and Serena Joy's helper in the garden, and Offred's lover. Nick's official position is Guardian, and he seems to be low-ranking because he hasn't been assigned a woman. From the beginning, he roguishly rejects some of Gilead's strictures (by rolling up his uniform sleeves, for example), but the Commander and Serena Joy find him trustworthy and get his help for their own misdeeds. He is secretive and discreet, and Offred can never quite figure out what he's thinking, even during their love affair. The question of his true alliances comes to a head at the book's cliffhanger ending, but the postscript "Notes" suggest that he was working for the Resistance after all. - Character: Luke. Description: Offred's pre-Gilead husband and father of her daughter. He was previously married and had a long affair with Offred before divorcing his first wife. Though Offred passes a lot of time remembering him, he seems to have been frequently at odds with her emotions. He doesn't seem greatly distressed when Offred loses her job and must cede all her money to him. Perhaps he lacks sympathy, or perhaps he's sexist. After their failed escape, Offred imagines many fates for him, but never pictures him joining with Gilead, although subtext suggests that he might have. - Character: Moira. Description: Offred's best friend in college, a brave, opinionated feminist lesbian whom Offred encounters again at the Rachel and Leah Center. After one failed attempt, she manages to escape the Center and move along the Underground Femaleroad, but the Eyes capture and torture her. She decides to work as a prostitute rather than go to the Colonies (the Colonies are essentially a death sentence). When Offred sees her at Jezebel's, it seems that the authorities have managed to break Moira's spirit. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: Gilead is a strictly hierarchical society, with a huge difference between the genders. As soon as the Gileadean revolutionaries take over after terrorism destroys the US government, they fire all women from their jobs and drain their bank accounts, leaving Offred desperate and dependent. Luke, however, doesn't seem so furious at this turn of events, a subtle suggestion that even good men may have embedded misogynistic attitudes, and that Gilead merely takes these common views to the logical extreme. Soon Gileadean women find all liberties taken from them, from the right to choose their clothes to the right to read.Even women in positions of power, like Aunt Lydia, are only allowed cattle prods, never guns. The Commander's Wife, once a powerful supporter of far right-wing religious ideas about how women should stay in the home, now finds herself unhappily trapped in the world she advocated for. Gilead also institutionalizes sexual violence toward women. The Ceremony, where the Commander tries to impregnate Offred, is institutionalized adultery and a kind of rape. Jezebel's, where Moira works, is a whorehouse for the society's elite. Though the story critiques the religious right, it also shows that the feminist left, as exemplified by Offred's mother, is not the solution, as the radical feminists, too, advocate book burnings, censorship, and violence. The book avoids black-and-white divisions, forcing us to take on our own assumptions regarding gender. We may blame Offred for being too passive, without acknowledging that she's a product of her society. We may fault the Commander's Wife for not showing solidarity to her gender and rebelling against Gilead, without understanding that this expectation, since it assumes that gender is the most important trait, is just a milder version of the anti-individual tyranny of Gilead. These complicated questions of blame, as well as the brutal depictions of the oppression of women, earn The Handmaid's Tale its reputation as a great work of feminist literature. - Theme: Religion and Theocracy. Description: Gilead is a theocracy, a government where church and state are combined. Religious language enters into every part of the society, from Rita's position as a Martha, named for a New Testament kitchen worker, to the store names like Milk and Honey. And religion, specifically the Old Testament, is also the justification for many of Gilead's most savage characteristics. Offred's job as Handmaid is based on the biblical precedent of Rachel and Leah, where fertile servants can carry on adulterous relationships to allow infertile women like the Commander's Wife to have families. Each month before the Ceremony, the Commander reads from Genesis the same lines that make the book's epigraph, justifying and moralizing the crude intercourse that will take place.Yet many of the biblical quotes in the book are twisted. The theocracy is so rigid about its religious influences, and so emphatic about the specific rules it upholds, that it even warps essential virtues like charity, tolerance and forgiveness. Offred knows that the prayers that the Aunts play the Handmaids in the Rachel and Leah Center are not the words that actually appear in the Bible, but she has no way of checking. The Salvagings and executions are supposedly the penalty for biblical sins like adultery, but Offred knows that others are executed for resisting the government. The Handmaid's Tale is not a criticism of the Bible in itself, but a criticism of the way that people and theocracies use the Bible for their own oppressive purposes. - Theme: Fertility. Description: Fertility is the reason for Offred's captivity and the source of her power, Gilead's major failing and its hope for the future. Inhabitants of Gilead give many reasons for the society's issues with creating viable offspring: the sexual revolution and birth control, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases. And the book hints at other, more subtle problems: in a society that restricts women so much, treating the potential child-bearers alternately as precious objects, bothersome machines, and prostitute-like sources of shame, how could anyone conceive? Similarly, though Offred knows her life depends on a successful birth, the atmosphere of extreme pressure and fear can't be as successful a motivator as the hope, love and liberty that characterized life with her first daughter and Luke. Despite the sterile atmosphere, markers of fertility, such as flowers and worms, throng in the Commander's Wife's carefully tended garden.The Commander and his wife host Offred for her proven fertility, and they even rename her as Fred's possession—her body's functions are valued, but her personhood is not. This division is highlighted in Janine's Birthing Ceremony, where Janine's Commander's Wife pretends to give birth at the same time, and the faked birth is treated as the authentic one. In this way, Gilead manages to strip away even the Handmaid's connection to the babies they bear in a version of a sharing, collective society gone totally wrong. - Theme: Rebellion. Description: Every major character in the story engages in some kind of disobedience against Gilead's laws. Moira rebels most boldly, disguising herself and managing to escape from the Handmaids' imprisonment, though her daring escape proves futile, and she ends up at Jezebel's, resigned to her fate. Ofglen's rebellion is more community-minded, since she works as part of an organized resistance, although her careful plotting also ends badly. More unexpected are the small-scale rebellions from the Commander and the Commander's Wife.The Commander seems to have every advantage, being a man, powerful in the new regime, and wealthy. Gilead should be his ideal society, especially since the book suggests that he had a role in designing it. Yet he desires a deeper emotional connection, and cares enough about Offred's well-being to break the law and consort with her beyond his duties. The Commander's Wife also tries to get around the strictures of Gilead, setting Offred up with Nick in an illegal attempt to make a family. These rebellious acts, coming from Gilead's privileged group, add complexity to their characters and to the dystopia as a whole. No one in the book is purely evil, and no one is so different from real-world humans to fully embrace the lack of independence in Gilead. Whether large or small, attempting to destroy the Gileadean government or merely to make one's personal circumstances more tolerable, each character commits rebellious acts, highlighting both the unlivable horror of Gileadean society, and the unsteadiness of its foundations. - Theme: Love. Description: Despite Offred's general passivity in the face of the oppressive society, she has a deep and secret source of strength: her love. Though love might keep Offred complacent, permitting her to daydream rather than to rebel outright, it's also responsible for the book's greatest triumph, as love drives Nick to help Offred escape, which she manages more effectively than Moira or Ofglen. Her love for her mother, her daughter, Luke, Moira, and ultimately Nick, allow her to stay sane, and to live within her memories and emotions instead of the terrible world around her. Although the novel never proposes an ideal society or a clear way to apply its message to the real world, and although the novel looks critically both on many modern movements, including the religious right and the extreme feminist left, love—both familial and romantic—surprisingly turns out to be the most effective force for good. Love is also a driving force behind other characters' actions. We know that Nick reciprocates Offred's feelings, but also the search for love, in the form of a real, not purely functional human connection, influences the Commander's desires to bend the rules for Offred. In the end, love is the best way to get around Gilead's rules, as it allows for both secret mental resistance, and for the trust and risk that result in Offred's great escape. - Theme: Storytelling and Memory. Description: The structure of The Handmaid's Tale is characterized by many different kinds of storytelling and fiction-making. For one, the title itself, and the fictional "Historical Notes on the Handmaid's Tale" of the book's end, frame the entire novel as Offred's story, that she's said into a tape recorder in the old fashioned storytelling tradition. For another, her whole story is also punctuated by shorter stories she tells herself, of the time before Gilead or Aunt Lydia's lessons. These small flashbacks can be triggered by the slightest impression, and they occur so often throughout the novel that it seems like Offred lives in several worlds, the terrible present, the confusing but free past, and the Rachel and Leah Center that bridged them.Adding to the overlap of past and present, the tenses are always shifting, with some memories in the past tense, and some in the present. A third form of storytelling comes about because of the constant atmosphere of paranoia and uncertainty. Offred constantly makes up fictions. She's filled with questions—is Ofglen a true believer, or lying? Is Nick's touching her foot accidental, or intentional? Offred must keep several stories in mind at once, imagining each to be true at the same time. This form of storytelling is most clear in her imaginings about Luke's fate, where he could be dead, imprisoned or maybe escaped. Fourth, Offred also uses storytelling as a pastime. Since she has no access to any entertainment, and very few events happen in her life, she often goes over events from other people's points of view, making up very involved fictions about what others might be thinking and saying. One major example is her long imaginary recreation of Aunt Lydia and Janine talking about Moira. Another is her creative ideas about what Nick might think of her and the Commander's relationship. With more stories and memories than current-time actions, the book is profoundly repetitive. It forms its own kind of simple, quiet hell—we, like Offred, are trapped within the echo-chamber of her mind. - Climax: The Eyes, or maybe the Mayday Resistance, come to pick up Offred - Summary: The United States has fallen, overthrown by a theocratic regime, founded on rigid Christian principles and the disempowerment of women, which has installed a new nation called Gilead in its place. The novel begins with Offred, the first-person narrator, remembering her restricted life at the Rachel and Leah Center, a training camp for Handmaids in an old high school. The scene changes to her current residence, where she lives with a Commander and his wife, Serena Joy. Offred puts on a red uniform and goes on a shopping trip with Ofglen, and afterwards they stop by the Wall to look at the bodies of recently executed men. In the evening, Offred lies in bed. She remembers her spunky friend Moira, her activist mother, and the loss of her daughter and her husband, Luke. She thinks about the previous Handmaid who left a Latin message scratched into the wall. She describes her trip to the doctor on the previous day. The doctor suggested that her Commander might be sterile and offers to have sex with her. Though her life depends on getting pregnant, Offred refused.She takes a bath and thinks about her daughter and the hysterical Handmaid Janine. After her bath, she and the rest of the members of the household gather to listen to the Commander read the bible. Then the Commander, the Commander's wife Serena Joy, and Offred perform the Ceremony: the Commander has impersonal sex with Offred while she lies between Serena Joy's legs. Afterwards, Offred sneaks downstairs in a rebellious gesture and runs into Nick, who gives her a message from the Commander to meet the following night.The next day, Offred and other Handmaids attend Janine's birth. In the afternoon, Offred remembers how Moira managed to escape from the Rachel and Leah Center disguised as an Aunt. In the evening she sees the Commander, who surprisingly only wants to play Scrabble and get a chaste kiss. Afterwards she can't stop laughing.Months pass. Offred and the Commander meet often, and the Ceremony becomes more fraught for Offred now that she and the Commander know each other. Offred and Ofglen go shopping regularly, and Ofglen reveals that she's part of a secret organized resistance. Offred recalls all the events that lead from the US government to the Republic of Gilead—a massacre of the President and Congress, a succession of restrictive measures imposed for "safety," the removal of all power and possessions from women. One night the Commander explains the meaning of the previous Handmaid's Latin, and Offred learns that the previous Handmaid hanged herself.After a shopping trip one day, Serena Joy tells Offred to have sex with Nick in an effort to get pregnant, and Offred agrees. Offred and Ofglen attend a Prayvaganza, celebrating arranged marriages. Afterward, Serena Joy shows Offred a photo of her daughter. That night, the Commander gives Offred a skimpy outfit and makeup, and Nick drives them to a nightclub/hotel filled with prostitutes. Offred spots Moira across the room, and they meet in the bathroom. Moira reveals that she spent many months on the Underground Femaleroad before she was captured. Offred and the Commander get a room and have sex, and Offred has to fake arousal.Shortly after returning home, Serena Joy leads Offred to Nick, and Offred doesn't have to fake arousal this time. Time passes, and Offred sees Nick often. She becomes so obsessed with him that she doesn't want to leave or help Ofglen with Resistance efforts. Offred and Ofglen attend a Women's Salvaging, where three women are hanged. Afterwards there's a Particicution, a frenzied group murder of a supposed rapist, who was actually a member of the Resistance. The following day, a new Handmaid comes for the shopping trip with Offred. She says that the old Ofglen committed suicide when the Eyes—the Gilead secret police—came to get her.When Offred returns home after shopping, Serena Joy confronts her with the skimpy outfit and threatens to punish her. Offred goes to her room and sees the Eyes coming for her. Nick tells her that they're secretly members of the Resistance, and she enters their van, unsure of her fate.The novel ends with "Historical Notes" from a future academic conference about Gilead. Professor Pieixoto describes the discovery of Offred's narrative on cassette tapes in Maine, suggesting that the Eyes that took her were part of the Resistance, as Nick claimed. It is revealed that researchers may have discovered who the Commander was, but no one knows what happened to Offred.

- Genre: Magical realism - Title: The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World - Point of view: Omniscient third person - Setting: A tiny coastal village on a cliff face - Character: The Drowned Man. Description: At the beginning of the story, the drowned man is found in the sand, encrusted with sea debris. He is brought back to a house by the village men, who notice his extreme size. Although he is not alive during the events of the story, he is heavily personified in the imaginations of the village's inhabitants: At first, due to his unprecedented physical beauty, he is viewed by the village women as someone of tremendous authority and poise. Later, however, after the most elderly woman asserts that his name is Esteban, the women imagine him as a humble, awkward, but good-natured man. The village men adopt this view of his character, too, once his handsome features are unveiled to them. The novel nature of the drowned man's appearance prompt the climatic, planned renewal of the central village. The villagers are so struck by his obliging nature and incredible physique that they plan to honor his visit by creating wider houses, painted walls, and extensive flower beds. Thus, despite his inaction, the drowned man causes the most consequential developments that occur in the story. The colorful renewal of the village simply would not have occurred without his visit. - Character: The Village Women. Description: The village women tend to the drowned man's body after the village men leave to see if any neighboring villages are missing a man. While they work to produce clothes for him, they imagine his character in life. They cycle through multiple perceptions of him, but the personification that they ultimately accept, that of his being an obliging man, inspires great sympathy in them. The village women transmit their view of the drowned man's character to the men once they unveil the drowned man's features. When this occurs, the village is collectively moved to renew its layout; the villagers feel their community must permanently reflect the man's splendor, as the women have claimed him as their kin. - Character: The Village Men. Description: The village men play the role of the skeptic in the story. While the village men are out inquiring about missing men to try to figure out who the drowned man is, the village women invent a sympathetic personality for the drowned man. When the men return, they are distrustful of the women, who seem far too concerned with the treatment of what was previously "a piece of cold Wednesday meat." The men are convinced, however, when the women reveal the man's face—in it, they see the drowned man's sincerity, which enables the villagers to celebrate the drowned man with an immense quantity of flowers and plan to transform their dwellings. Having overcome their skepticism, then, the men help in the town's renewal. - Theme: Transformation, Myth, and Connection. Description: In "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," a tiny remote seaside village experiences a profound transformation as a result of its encounter with a huge and handsome drowned man, whom they name Esteban. The villagers are so moved by the splendor of the man's appearance and humility of his expression that they decide to radically remake their village. They aim to honor his memory with wider doors, taller ceilings, colorful walls, and extensive flowerbeds. Yet while the most obvious consequence of the village's experience of the drowned man is this planned physical change, the story suggests that the village's transformation is more consequential than a mere renovation of appearances. The final lines of the story imagine, from the perspective of the village, a captain and passengers observing the now beautiful, flower-filled village and identifying it as Esteban's village. A village that through the story was unknown, tiny, and nameless, in the future will be noteworthy and named. The villagers who imagine this future clearly anticipate that their experience with Esteban will come to define their community. The physical renewal of their village is, understood in this light, just a physical manifestation of the closer ties the villagers have formed through their experience of the central events of the story. While initially in the story the villagers quarrel over small issues (such as the name of the drowned man, the speed at which they should prepare the body for sea burial), by the end of the story they are in clear and unanimous agreement—they all recognize Esteban's miraculous beauty and sincerity and plan to commemorate him by changing their own lives and village. The changes that the village undergoes are a clear testament to the transformative power of the villagers' shared experience. By illustrating this, the story suggests that strong, shared cultural experience and stories—what might be described as a communal founding myth—can transform group identity by creating connection and a shared vision. - Theme: Fantasy and Reality. Description: Throughout "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," the people of the village have evolving and vastly different perceptions of the huge and handsome drowned man. At first, many of the women of the village are convinced that he was a man of enormous authority and poise. But later they believe that he was actually a kind, humble, and awkward man. The women who hold onto their first perception of the man insist that his name is Lautaro, but even they eventually assent to the later assessment of his life and character and agree with the widely held belief that his name is Esteban. Similarly, the men of the village are unconvinced at first that the dead man is anything other than a piece of "cold Wednesday meat." In fact, they think he may not have even been huge when alive—that he grew in size only by absorbing water when dead. However, after the women reveal Esteban's face, the men arrive at exactly the same view of his character as the women. In both of these instances, perceptions which started as a fantasy are transmitted to the group and profoundly shape their view of what is real. Garcia Marquez cleverly suggests in his story that reality is mutable and that it could consist, surprisingly, in whatever perception it is that people jointly assent to. But the story further suggests that such a mutually agreed upon reality within a community is then stable and strong—it truly becomes reality—and can change and inspire people. - Theme: Kinship. Description: When the mysterious, huge, and handsome drowned man washes up on the shores of the village in "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," the question of which group the drowned man belongs to motivates much of the action in the story. When the body is first found, it is evident that he is not from the village—the tiny size of the village makes it easy for the villagers to recognize that no one who lives there is missing. This fact motivates the men of the village to go to neighboring villages to see if they might be missing a man. The men do this, presumably, out of a strong respect for kinship—for the fact that those who are related to the man will naturally care and want to know about his fate. When the village men later return with the news that the drowned man is not from a neighboring village, the village women delight at the fact that "he is ours." This assertion captures a difference aspect of the idea of kinship. In their time cleaning up and clothing the mysterious dead man, the woman have become attached to him—have even named him Esteban—and so when it is clear that others don't have ties of blood kinship with the man, the woman claim kinship with him themselves. Kinship does not have to be based solely on blood ties. Yet the story suggests that when people feel kinship, they want that kinship to be socially sanctioned. And so, before the funeral for Esteban the village selects two people of the village to be his mother and father so, through the close ties of the village, everyone is his kin. The village then envisions a future in which their village is seen as Esteban's village. Then the fact that their homes are not sufficiently large enough for the spirit of Esteban to move through comfortably, and are not vibrant enough to honor his handsomeness, compels the villagers to transform their community. They have made Esteban their kin, and Esteban then lives on through them and their village to which he belonged. In this sense, the relation of kinship informs the most consequential change that occurs in the story. The story suggests, then, that kinship is a matter of blood, spirit, and social relations, and that the obligations and connections people feel on the basis of kinship is what often informs the most noble acts of self-improvement. - Climax: The handsome drowned man is elaborately buried by the villagers, and they vow to redesign their village to honor his memory. - Summary: The children of a coastal village encounter the large, drowned body of a man which washes up on the beach. The body is covered with many items from the sea. A few men from the coastal village carry the body to the nearest house in the village, noticing that it is of an extreme weight and height. They speculate that the drowned body has absorbed water, making it heavier, and that it has grown taller in death. It is immediately clear that the body is a stranger's, as the village is quite tiny and its inhabitants can see that no one is missing. The village men travel to neighboring villages to see if any village is missing a man. The village women stay behind to tend to the drowned man's body. They remove the mud and sea plants that still cling to his body and see that he is extraordinarily handsome—he is the best built and most virile man they have ever seen. The women attempt to make clothes for the man, as no article from the village fits him. While the women work, they fantasize about the drowned man's life and personality. They imagine, at first, that he was magnificent man whose house was marvelous. They picture him performing incredible feats, such as him calling fish out of the water and planting flowers on cliffs. The women put down their own men in comparison, imagining the drowned man as someone far more capable. The women are pulled out of their fantasies by the most elderly woman's comment that the man "has the face of someone named Esteban." Some disagree at first, but eventually everyone agrees. Prompted by the woman's remarks, they feel profound pity for the man, whose body must have inconvenienced him in life, as it still bothers him in death. The women imagine him awkwardly navigating houses that are too small for a man of his stature, and people who ridicule him when he leaves. They weep for the drowned man and place a handkerchief over his face. The men return with the news that the drowned man does not belong to a neighboring village. The women express deep relief that the man is now their own. Fatigued from nighttime travel, the men wish to quickly dispose of the body. They construct a makeshift platform to which they will tie an anchor. But the women find many ways of delaying the drowned man's burial. They decorate his body with an assortment of items. The village men become distrustful of the women and their attachment to a floating corpse and begin to grumble. Hurt by the men's lack of care, a woman removes the handkerchief from the drowned man's face. The men are stunned by the drowned man's features. They are moved by the humility of his features and lose their mistrust. The village holds an elaborate funeral for the drowned man. The women get so many flowers that it is hard to walk about. The villagers select a family for the man so that through his relation to these people, all of the village is his kin. While they bring the man to his burial, they recognize for the first time the desolate qualities of their village. The villagers vow to paint their walls in bright colors and make houses with wider doors and taller ceilings in order to honor the drowned man's memory. They imagine a future in which a captain points to their promontory, which is covered with pungent flowers, and states that this is Esteban's village.

- Genre: Children's Literature, Fairy Tale - Title: The Happy Prince - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: An unnamed town - Character: The Happy Prince. Description: The Happy Prince is both the protagonist of this story and its namesake. Once a sheltered prince who led a life of pleasure, the Happy Prince was turned into a gilded statue upon his death and placed upon a pedestal overlooking his town. The Prince is described as exceedingly beautiful with golden skin, sapphires for eyes, and a ruby on his sword-hilt. Although his external beauty impresses everyone around him, he sees that beauty as only skin-deep; his true worth lies in his compassion for his townspeople and his willingness to sacrifice for them. The Happy Prince suffers, however, due to his sympathy for all of the misery he can see from his high perch. The "happiness" of this name is thus ironic, as the Prince describes having only experienced a false happiness in his previous life of pleasure, when he was ignorant of the true misery surrounding him. The Prince is ultimately a Christ-like figure, looking over humanity and sacrificing his life to alleviate their pain. Descriptions of the Prince also allude to classical understandings of wisdom and mentorship. The figure of the Prince, with his eloquent rhetoric and affinity for morally upstanding behavior, represents classical Greek and Roman ideals—in particular, the relationship that he develops with the younger Swallow alludes to classical mentor/mentee relationships. - Character: The Swallow. Description: The other protagonist of "The Happy Prince," the Swallow, is a bird en route to Egypt for the winter. His trip is initially delayed due to his temporary passion for a Reed, foreshadowing to the thematic importance of love in this story. Although he wants to join his companions in the sunny land of Egypt, he begins to love the Happy Prince and remains in the town to help him deliver jewels and gold to townspeople in need. Although not as selfless as the Happy Prince—he repeatedly emphasizes his desire to leave and enjoy all of the beautiful things abroad—the Swallow comes to love the Prince and understand the value of doing good. In the mentor/mentee relationship developed between the pair, the Swallow plays the role of a younger mentee who needs to be set on the right track—at the start, he expresses trepidation at delaying his own pleasure for others, speaking in the context of the typical Victorian ideals Wilde criticizes throughout the story. However, his love for the Prince helps him grow and proves that moral behavior can be learned. In the end, the Swallow makes the ultimate sacrifice out of love—because the Prince goes blind after giving away his sapphire eyes, the Swallow decides to stay by his side forever, even though he knows that remaining through the winter will mean certain death. This sacrifice ultimately lands him a place in Paradise for eternity, reinforcing the story's moral that anyone can change and choose to do good instead of acting selfishly. - Character: The Reed. Description: Although she appears relatively briefly in the story, the Reed still has an important role. The Sparrow initially falls in love with her for her slenderness and beauty and delays his migration to warmer territory in order to wait for the Reed. However, all his friends disapprove due to her poverty and having so many relations. She decides not to travel with the Sparrow, which ends their relationship and drives him away to the town where he meets the Happy Prince. However brief, this romance sets the stage for the romantic love between the Sparrow and the Prince. The ill-fated love between the Reed and the Sparrow also introduces the theme of judging falsely by appearances and the negativity of gossip and peer judgment. - Character: The Little Match-Girl. Description: A young girl selling matches on a street corner whose father beats her if she does not return with sufficient money. Having dropped her matches, she appears to be in a tragic situation until the Happy Prince sacrifices his other sapphire eye to help her. Though she plays a relatively small role in the story, the narrator emphasizes her youth and innocence in contrast with the evil and neglectful adults that populate the town. - Character: God. Description: God appears in the very last lines of the story to rescue the Sparrow's body and the Happy Prince's leaden heart and to promise them eternity in Paradise for their sacrifices. Although his mention is brief, God cements both the theme of Christianity and proves explicitly that the narrative takes the side of compassion over corruption and sacrifice over greed. - Theme: Beauty and Morality. Description: Oscar Wilde was notably committed to aestheticism and the aesthetic movement—associated with the mantra "Art for Art's sake"—and this theme recurs throughout his literary works. The titular protagonist of "The Happy Prince" is himself a statue meant to decorate the city, and through him, the story explores the relationship between art and usefulness. However, "The Happy Prince" also demonstrates the darker sides of society's obsession with beauty—that is, the extreme poverty and social inequality required to support decadent lifestyles for those living at the top of society. This turn to morality resonates with Victorian values while still condemning that society for its hypocrisy. The initial description of the Happy Prince focuses on his aesthetic beauty: he is "gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold," has eyes of "two bright sapphires," and on his sword-hilt "a large red ruby glowed." Although these descriptions focus on his outer beauty, the word "gilded" reveals that such beauty is superficial. Similarly, although the Prince's name is "happy," he weeps upon his tall column when the Swallow first meets him; the Prince's name thus also disguises—or, perhaps, gilds—reality. The Prince goes on to describe to the Swallow his childhood in a palace "where sorrow is not allowed to enter," where he was carefree because everything was "so beautiful." They called him the Happy Prince, and he said he was happy "if pleasure be happiness." True happiness, this quote hints, differs from pleasure, while beauty often hinges on obscuring suffering. Indeed, the happiness of the Prince's childhood was the happiness of ignorance. After dying and becoming a statue, he says, "they have set me up here so high I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep." The city, then, only seemed beautiful to the Prince when disguised by high walls—that is, when he couldn't see the suffering that existed alongside his own pleasure. Beauty, at least in a shallow, physical sense, is thus tied to deceit and even cruel indifference. Every time the Prince identifies someone living in poverty, meanwhile, the cause of their suffering ties back to some object of beauty. A seamstress living in the poorhouse embroiders "passion-flowers on a satin gown for the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of-honour," while her own little boy lies ill with a fever. Although he wants oranges, his mother "has nothing to give him but river water." The tragedy of their situation is deepened by the luxury goods she is working so hard to produce—not only will she not be attending any balls herself, but her work to add flowers to this satin gown does not earn enough money to even buy oranges or medicine for her sick son. Later, a young playwright "is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre" but cannot move from cold—"there is no fire in the grate, and hunger has made him faint." Even the town's arts and culture are driven by deep social inequalities. Here, as in the Prince's childhood palace, beauty is built on the backs of poor townspeople yet essentially masks their suffering. Importantly, Wilde's story doesn't disavow beauty altogether. Instead, it critiques the fixation on outer beauty at the expense of compassion and also rejects the equation of such beauty with innate value. When the Prince readily gives up his beauty, in the form of his jewels, to help the poor, he is relieving himself of that which previously brought him such pleasure—and in the process, redistributing some of its power. Notably, the jewels' grandeur in and of itself proves less impressive than their simple usefulness. When the playwright finds a sapphire on his desk, for instance, he doesn't marvel at this item "brought out of India a thousand years ago"; he merely celebrates his work being appreciated. When the match-girl finds a jewel, she says, "What a lovely bit of glass" before running "home laughing." This emphasizes that, however lovely, the jewel is ultimately nothing more than a trinket; the true value of the jewels lie in their ability to protect the match-girl from her cruel father's beatings, or to provide the playwright with much needed food, firewood, and moral support to, in turn, produce more beauty himself via his art. In keeping with this complication of the idea that external beauty connotes inherent worth, it is the ugliest part of the statue—his leaden, broken heart—that leads him to the highest reward. At first, the Town Councillors dismiss the "shabby" statue as "little better than a beggar," and pull him down, saying "as he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful." This confirms the overriding opinion among this privileged class of people that outer beauty is what imbues things with value. However, because the Prince's heart doesn't "melt in the furnace," it's thrown "on a dust-heap where the dead Swallow [is] also lying." Though the Happy Prince has lost all outer beauty, and with it all his use and value in some people's eyes, his heart's refusal to melt demonstrates a durability and steadfastness that stems from inner goodness. That's why, when God asks one of his angels for "the two most precious things in the city," these items turn out to be the dead Swallow and the leaden heart. This conclusion proves that true value and external appearances are not always the same—the most precious things sometimes come disguised as the ugliest. - Theme: Love and Compassion. Description: Many of Oscar Wilde's works contain allusions to homosexuality, in large part due to his own sexual preferences—he was famously put on trial and imprisoned in 1895 for his homosexuality, as Victorian society at the time was still notoriously conservative. In "The Happy Prince," love—arguably including homosexual love—forms the central motivations for the protagonists. In contrast, narcissism drives the story's main antagonists and leads people to make judgements about others—judgements that benefit their own worldview but cause moral impoverishment. Love and compassion, in turn, combat the devastating consequences of the status quo. As the story presents an extremely positive perspective on love and compassion, it also defends homosexuality as a positive form of love. The Happy Prince's compassion for the townspeople and the Swallow's love for the Prince motivate their heroics. When the Prince initially describes his transformation into a statue, he outlines the feeling of compassion that seeing the townspeople's suffering awoke in him. As he says, "they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep." Seeing suffering leads him to weep, a clear proof of the compassion that will come to motivate him. Although the Swallow starts out with more selfish motivations, the Prince evokes a similar sense of compassion in the bird. The Swallow at first expresses the desire to leave for the warmth of Egypt, but the Prince looks "so sad that the little Swallow" ends up promising to stay and act as messenger despite the cold. The allusion to the cold foreshadows the scale of sacrifice that remaining will demand from the Sparrow—it will eventually grow so cold that he will perish. However, the Sparrow's compassion pushes him to overcome his fears in the name of helping both the Prince and those the Prince cares about. Actions born of compassion also notably lead to personal feelings of pleasure. When the Swallow returns to tell the Prince about his success in helping distribute his jewels to those in need, he remarks, "It is curious […] but I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold." The Prince replies, "That is because you have done a good action." The story draws a direct connection between seeing suffering to compassion and from acts of compassion to feeling good about oneself. The Swallow's love for the Happy Prince also alludes to homosexuality, ultimately affirming it as a positive form of love and catalyst for compassion. Non-human characters throughout the story are gendered. For example, the Swallow had initially delayed his trip to Egypt for "he was in love with the most beautiful Reed," yet he soon "felt lonely and began to tire of his lady-love." Though the two characters are not human, their relations match a traditionally heterosexual pairing and present the Swallow as a creature in search of a romantic partner. When the Swallow initially meets the Prince, he sees him weeping and is "filled with pity." He continues to delay his trip to Egypt to help the Prince, and ultimately promises "I will stay with you always" once the Prince is left blind. The extremity of this dedication and lifelong promise exceeds the bounds of platonic love—it also shows the ways that compassion can result in and harmonize with love. The scene of the Swallow's death, in turn, exposes the reciprocal love between the Prince and the Swallow. As winter comes and the Swallow begins to freeze, "he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well." He bids farewell and asks to kiss the Prince's hand, but the Prince replies, "you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you." In the end, he kisses the Happy Prince and "[falls] down dead at his feet," after which "a curious crack sounded inside the statue […] the leaden heart had snapped right in two." Not only does this death scene include a confession of love—the heartbreak that the Prince undergoes resembles similar conclusions in other heterosexual fairy tales, where love and heartbreak take on a mythical scope. Their love forms the heart of their ethical actions, which leads to a deep defense of the moral purity of homosexuality (in stark contrast to the strict homophobic norms popular at that time in Victorian England). In the end, Wilde uses this story both as a subtle defense of homosexuality and a more direct proclamation of the centrality of love and compassion in human affairs. Love trumps all other values in this fairytale universe, from materialistic to artistic. Whereas beauty generates shallow pleasures, love leads directly to the eternal—to the kinds of actions that warrant praise from God, in this case. These conclusions, while quite optimistic on the surface, carry real nuance in the context of the difficulties that Wilde faced for his own sexuality—homosexuality would not have been seen as a theme appropriate for children, let alone a subject of proper morality. - Theme: Poverty, Inequality, and Greed. Description: Oscar Wilde was a proclaimed socialist and lived in London during a time when millions of the impoverished residents risked dying of starvation. At other points, he wrote texts like "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" outlining anarchistic beliefs and a criticism of charity as opposite to a socialist reordering of society. According to "The Happy Prince," the majority of humanity leads lives of great misery and suffering in order to support the greed of the few with money and power. The greed of the wealthy causes immense suffering, and this story takes a scathing stance against the state of inequality that forces so many people into lives of destitution and hardship. Because problems of corruption extend so widely throughout the empowered classes in society, remedies to this inequality require acknowledging the flaws in their values. The politicians and individuals responsible for the town's welfare use their power for selfish and corrupt reasons, instead of fulfilling their duties to serve the wider community. Wilde portrays the Town Councillors in the most negative light. At the start of the story, they are presented as people with selfish motivations, like the Councillor "who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes." This emphasis on his reputation betrays both a narcissism and a shallowness underpinning his desires—not only does the Councillor disregard his political responsibilities, his relationship to art is also borne only of appearances. A strain of corruption and superficiality extends into the academic realm as well. When a professor of Ornithology decides to write a long letter about the Swallow, "Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand." Rather than seeking out knowledge, both the Professor and the people citing him focus only on their reputations and the appearance of intelligence. Even the teachers and policemen responsible for children disregard their suffering. A Mathematical Master scolds the Charity Children "for he did not approve of children dreaming." Later, in winter, "two little boys were lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm." When they complain of hunger, a passing Watchman merely shouts in reply, "You must not lie here." In both of these instances, the very people entrusted with social welfare choose to disregard the innocent suffering of children out of their own spite. In contrast to the portrayal of politicians as cruel, the suffering townspeople appear hardworking and innocent. The Prince has no interest in superficial stories or appearances—even when the Swallow tries to distract him with positive stories, he says, "you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery." This quote simultaneously establishes misery as the story's focus and targets the behavior and blindness of all of the town's officials who are able to disregard that misery. In the winter, the Swallow flew "and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates." Although the rich could look right outside and see the suffering, they remain ignorant of it—which seems almost impossible, given the proximity that the Swallow describes. After the Swallow dies and the Prince's heart breaks, the Mayor remarks, "how shabby the Happy Prince looks!" Even worse, "How shabby indeed!" cried the Town Councillors, who always agreed with the Mayor." The Mayor calls the Prince a "beggar" and deplores the dead bird at his feet, saying, "We must really issue a proclamation that birds are not to be allowed to die here." To the very end, these figures appear ridiculous in their cold-heartedness and superficiality. The selfishness and shortsightedness shown by privileged individuals in this story reveal the deep flaws behind hubris and conceit. Human greed and obsession with appearances result in evil and true ugliness. These corrupt tendencies extend to all parts of society, from education to politics to art and justice—counteracting them requires that all people open their eyes to the realities "at the gates." Although Wilde was a proponent of a decadent and wealthy lifestyle, this story demonstrates his consciousness of the costs that can be wrought by profound inequality. Ultimately, those who choose to ignore the brutal realities outside their doorsteps ought to be condemned, as the most important questions humanity struggles with involve suffering. - Theme: Religion. Description: Wilde was a dedicated Christian throughout his life, and religious themes run through "The Happy Prince." The titular Happy Prince represents a Christlike figure who supports analogous teachings to those of Christian parables. Much like Christ in the Bible, the Happy Prince chooses to sacrifice himself to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and downtrodden. Ultimately, God rewards the Prince in paradise, confirming both the narrative's religious subtext and the Christian roots of the Happy Prince's values. Although the intended parallels between the narrative and Christianity lie in its values, the story also portrays other religions using stereotypes. In doing so, religious values in "The Happy Prince" sometimes fall flat. Ultimately, the intended religious influences in this story teach one to value making sacrifices for those who are oppressed by poverty and cannot advocate for themselves. The story draws clear thematic parallels to biblical teachings, centered on its Christlike central figure. The heroic statue in "The Happy Prince" spends the story sacrificing his beauty to save the citizens of the town from poverty. The statue gives up the ruby from his sword-hilt for the seamstress and one of his sapphire eyes for the playwright, and even gives up his other eye for "a little match-girl" who "has no shoes or stockings" and will be beaten by her father if she comes home with no money. The Bible includes many examples encouraging great sacrifice—from Jesus giving his life on the cross to an old widow sacrificing her last two coins in Luke's gospel. In this story, as in the Bible, the wealthy end up greedy and corrupt whereas those living in poverty are industrious and generous. The Christian God himself appears at the end of this story, in fact. He asks one of the angels to bring "the two most precious things in the city," and says the angel has "rightly chosen" for bringing "the leaden heart and the dead bird," for "in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me." The Happy Prince receives the gift of eternity in paradise for his sacrifice, which confirms the importance that the narrative places on trying to protect and save people oppressed by poverty. Despite the altruistic roots of its Christian moral teaching, the story also shows its loyalty to Christianity through its treatment of other religions. Many of the Swallow's stories about Egypt paint an exoticized picture of the country's culture and values. He describes how "on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent." He also cites his companions as "building a nest in the Temple of Baalbec." These references to Egyptian religion do not provide an accurate picture of their faith, but rather some exotic color to situate the story's town as Western and Christian in contrast. Even depictions of other religions in the town contain stereotypes. In a short cameo, Wilde describes an arguably anti-Semitic—but certainly stereotypical—scene in Jewish ghetto. The Swallow "passed over the Ghetto, and saw the old Jews bargaining with each other, and weighing out money in copper scales." The association between Judaism and moneylending has a long history in European literature, and these anti-Semitic stereotypes led to prejudice and violence at various points in history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.  While the story's religiosity primarily shines through its moral dedication to combat poverty, there is a darker undercurrent. On the one hand, Wilde presents a parable of Christian teachings of compassion, martyrdom, and care for the oppression of the poor. On the other hand, there is some hypocrisy in the story itself—for a story that condemns judgment, especially appearance-based judgment, the matter of religion remains mired in stereotype. In this case, Wilde's intended evocations of religion—Christianity, specifically—clash with his treatments of other religions. - Climax: The Swallow and Prince kiss before the Swallow perishes from cold, and the Prince's lead heart cracks. - Summary: A Swallow delays his trip to Egypt for the winter because he falls in love with a Reed—upon giving up that romance, he flies past a town where he happens to settle on a pedestal underneath a gilded statue. This statue, the Happy Prince, speaks to the Swallow about all of the poverty and suffering—especially the suffering of children—that he sees in the town from his high perch. He begs the Swallow to assist him in relieving some of that suffering by delivering the valuables from his person to those in need. First, the Swallow delivers the ruby from the Happy Prince's sword-hilt to a seamstress struggling to feed her sick son. One of the statue's sapphire eyes goes to a playwright freezing in his garret, and the other to a young match-girl whose father would beat her if she came home empty-handed. As the Sparrow has come to love the Happy Prince, he opts to remain by his side after the loss of his eyes makes him blind, and tells him stories of Egypt to keep his world vibrant as the winter gets colder. Ultimately, the winter grows too cold and the Sparrow realizes that death is looming—he confesses his love to the Happy Prince and the two exchange a kiss. The Sparrow perishes and the Happy Prince's lead heart cracks. Later, the Mayor and Town Councillors walk by the statue. Disturbed by its shabbiness, they decide to have it melted and remade. Since the lead heart won't melt, however, it gets tossed on a dust-heap with the Sparrow's body. God asks one of his angels to deliver the two most precious things in the city, which turn out to be the corpse and the broken heart. He promises an eternity in Paradise in exchange for the brave sacrifices of the Prince and the Sparrow.

- Genre: Fiction; horror; suspense - Title: The Haunting of Hill House - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: Northeast USA - Character: Eleanor Vance. Description: Eleanor Vance is the isolated, fanciful, and disturbed protagonist of The Haunting of Hill House. A thirty-two-year-old woman who has spent the last eleven years—the majority of her adult life—caring alone for her invalid mother, Eleanor is desperate to find where she belongs in the world. When she receives an invitation from the mysterious Doctor Montague to spend the summer at Hill House, she leaps at the chance to get away from her controlling sister Carrie, her brother-in-law, and her young niece—whom she greatly dislikes—and strike out on her own. Eleanor goes so far as to steal the car she and her sister share in order to make the hundred-mile drive to Hill House. Once at the manor, Eleanor recognizes the evil and danger within immediately—but she is so determined to establish her independence, make some friends, and exist on her own in the world that she stays on. As the disturbances within the house increase in frequency and intensity, the house seems to be communing with or calling for Eleanor—writing addressed to Eleanor appears on the walls of the house in chalk and in blood, and Eleanor feels herself fracturing and slipping, tempted by the desire to "surrender" to whatever haunts the house. Eleanor's fraught and possibly romantic relationship with her roommate at Hill House, Theodora, is a source of anxiety and frustration for Eleanor, who longs for connection with another person but seems uncertain of how to make her desires known. Throughout the novel, Jackson sustains a sense of mystery surrounding Eleanor—she lies almost constantly about her age, her background, where she lives and how. What's more, she seems not to know the truth of important details about her own life, insisting for example that a widely-reported poltergeist incident at her childhood home was simply the taunting of angry neighbors. The mysteries surrounding Eleanor only multiply and thicken as the novel goes on. As she ultimately falls entirely under the house's spell, she attempts one night to commit suicide by jumping from its tallest turret after being lulled onward by a voice she believes to be the voice of her dead mother (whom, the narrative implies, she may actually have killed or allowed to die). At the novel's conclusion, Eleanor commits suicide by driving her car into the oak tree in the house's driveway, effectively choosing to die rather than allowing the other characters to send her away. Eleanor is one of contemporary literature's most fascinating and mysterious protagonists and anti-heroes, and her arc encompasses all of the novel's major themes: the war between the supernatural and the psychological, the search for home, the perils of isolation, and the dissociative properties of fear. - Character: Doctor John Montague. Description: Doctor John Montague is an anthropologist with a secret passion for parapsychology—the study of supernatural psychic phenomena. Hoping to quietly advance his research away from the prying eyes of his judgmental colleagues, Doctor Montague rents the famed haunted mansion of Hill House for the summer and invites several people from around the country who have, through magazine articles and other records, come to his attention as people with psychic sensitivities. The only two to actually show up for the experiment are Eleanor Vance and Theodora, who join Montague and Luke Sanderson, who stands to inherit Hill House, at the imposing manor. Doctor Montague is clearly fascinated with and knowledgeable about the dark history of Hill House, and he is determined to get to the bottom of its mysteries both for his own personal satisfaction and his professional glory. Montague is a kind and mild man who seems to genuinely enjoy the company of his three companions at Hill House. Though he's brought them there to draw out the house's disturbances, he never uses them as bait or exploits their suffering—anytime there is a disturbance, or the sense that one is about to begin, Montague actually tries to shelter his companions and bring them all together so that they can offer one another solace. Doctor Montague also seems to be dominated in his personal life by his wife, Mrs. Montague, who joins the experiment late in the novel and refuses to value the work he has done. Doctor Montague goes on to publish an article about Hill House after the fraught conclusion of his experiment there—but it is poorly received, and he retires from scholarly life. Doctor Montague's arc embodies several of the novel's major themes—the pain of isolation, the search for home, and the delicate dance between the world of the supernatural and the world of the psychological. - Character: Theodora. Description: Theodora is a young and beautiful bohemian who lives with a female roommate in an unnamed city and is summoned to Hill House by Doctor Montague because of her reputation for psychic sensitivity. She is rumored to be able to guess the faces of cards when they are held up out of her sight and hearing, and Doctor Montague hopes that her apparent clairvoyance will bring out the presence that haunts Hill House. Theodora is flirtatious, light-hearted, and open-minded, and she and Eleanor bond right away over their many similarities—though it's unclear whether each of them is really telling the truth. Though Theodora refers to her female roommate as a "friend," it's implied that the two may actually be romantically or sexually involved. As with so much else in the novel, the truth of Theodora's past—and even her present—is shadowed and uncertain, but what is clear is that Theodora's attachment to Eleanor, and vice versa, becomes the primary source of tension and suffering for each of them in spite of the terror all around them. Their relationship arc is emblematic of several of the novel's major themes and theories—that isolation, lack of connection, and the recesses of the human mind are all more frightening than supernatural or paranormal horrors. Glamorous, spiteful, fickle, and emotional, Theodora is Eleanor's perfect foil. The women orbit one another, drawing closer until they ultimately cause each other's suffering and confusion within Hill House to escalate—perhaps, it's implied, past the point of no return, and into the realm of madness. - Character: Luke Sanderson. Description: A rakish young man, a liar, and a thief who stands to inherit Hill House from his aunt, its current owner. Doctor Montague's lease on the house carries the stipulation that a member of the family must be present during his tenure there—Luke, a young rascal with an impish curiosity about the house, tags along and soon realizes he's gotten much more than he bargained for. Luke reveals himself to be a handsome lush with an almost bewilderingly positive attitude and a joke always at the ready. Theodora and Eleanor find themselves competing for Luke's affection and using it against each other, even as the romantic undertones in their own friendship seem to be the real root of their animosity towards one another. Luke is clearly rattled by the things he experiences within Hill House, and, because he stands to inherit the house himself one day, it's obvious that he processes his experience of the "haunting" through a very different lens than the other characters. Still, Luke uses humor to lighten the mood every chance he gets, and he rarely lets his terror get the best of him. At the end of the novel, Luke moves away to Paris. - Character: Mrs. Montague. Description: Doctor Montague's wife. Mrs. Montague joins the research team at Hill House nearly a week into their tenure there—she sweeps in with little regard for the delicate observations they've been doing so far, determined to contact the presence within Hill House through her planchette, an automatic writing tool. Mrs. Montague speaks of the presence that haunts Hill House as one or several poor souls desperate to have their stories heard—she turns a blind eye to the malevolence of the house, and in spite of her clear ignorance as to the truth of what resides there, she acts as if her word is law. Mrs. Montague clearly has great contempt for her husband, and for Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke, as well—her companion Arthur Parker is the only one whom she will allow to help her work. - Character: Mrs. Dudley. Description: The housekeeper and cook at Hill House. Mrs. Dudley speaks in a flat, robotic tone, never conversing with anyone other than to explain her schedule over and over. She and her husband Mr. Dudley, the caretaker, leave Hill House before it gets dark and refuse to return after nightfall, completing their duties there during daylight only. The only person to whom Mrs. Dudley seems to take a shine is Mrs. Montague, for reasons that are never explained. - Character: Hugh Crain. Description: The man who built Hill House. Hugh Crain delighted in creating a place which did not subscribe to traditional rules of design and architecture, seemingly hoping to make the house as disorienting as possible. Hugh Crain's wife died on her way up to visit the completed manor for the first time, leaving Crain to care for their two daughters on his own. Little is known about how he raised the girls, but Luke Sanderson finds evidence—in the form of a scrapbook which cobbles together Bible verses, art, etchings, and disturbing illustrations—that Crain was, in all likelihood, deranged, controlling, and even abusive. It is unclear whether Crain's influence on Hill House has made it the evil entity it is today, or whether it is the house which corrupted him. - Character: Old Miss Crain. Description: Hugh Crain's elder daughter, and one of the previous owners of Hill House. She lived out her life alone and left the house to a young woman from the nearby village who had acted as her companion. Old Miss Crain's younger sister later sued the companion for Hill House, furious that Old Miss Crain had not left it to her, and the conflict eventually lead to the companion's suicide at the house. - Theme: The Supernatural vs. The Psychological. Description: A war exists at the heart of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House—a war between supernatural and psychological phenomena. At the start of the novel, a group of individuals with psychic sensitivities is recruited by anthropologist—and closet parapsychologist—Doctor Montague to spend a summer at the "evil" mansion, delving into the house's terrifying mysteries as part of an experiment which Montague hopes will validate his research in the field of paranormal activity. Through their adventures at Hill House, Jackson shows how each individual is also at the mercy of the horrors that dwell within his or her own mind. Jackson argues that the traumas, illusions, and terrors lurking within the human psyche are often more frightening than ghosts or hauntings—and that the line between supernatural and psychological phenomena is often blurry and porous. As Jackson describes the supernatural and paranormal phenomena that take place within the walls of Hill House, she leaves open the possibility that at least a portion of the "haunting" is taking place in the minds of the four characters who have come to investigate the manor—primarily within the troubled brain of the novel's protagonist, Eleanor Vance. Jackson uses Eleanor's unstable and rapidly deteriorating mental state to break down the boundaries between paranormal events and psychological ones, and to show that the recesses of the human mind hold far greater horrors than even a haunted, accursed house. When Eleanor first arrives at Hill House, she immediately senses evil and hopelessness emanating from the manor. Even though her instincts tell her to turn around, decline Dr. Montague's invitation, and return to the cramped apartment she shares with her sister, brother-in-law, and niece, Eleanor's desire to break free of her claustrophobic circumstances and strike out on her own pushes her forward. Eleanor begins to relax as she meets the other subjects of Dr. Montague's experiment: Theodora, a psychic who is sensitive to the realm beyond the human one, and Luke Sanderson, the young man who stands to inherit Hill House. However, Eleanor tells no one the truth of her life: that after years of caring for her sick and ailing mother, she is now, at thirty-two, unequipped emotionally or financially to handle the world. What's more, she remains haunted by a childhood encounter with what may have been a poltergeist. As the narrative progresses, Jackson casts doubt over whether the "haunting" from Eleanor's childhood was truly the work of a poltergeist—or the result of Eleanor's own telekinetic abilities. The writing on the walls that appears throughout Hill House in chalk and later in blood, entreating Eleanor to "COME HOME," may also be the work of her powerful subconscious. Jackson never provides an answer as to the truth of Eleanor's powers or lack thereof—Eleanor may be at the mercy of supernatural or paranormal tormentors, or her own mind may be her worst enemy. In cultivating ambiguity surrounding Eleanor's capabilities, Jackson creates a potent metaphor about the terrifying power of the human mind to isolate, debilitate, or even defeat the individual ostensibly in control.  Though Eleanor is the novel's primary protagonist, she's not the only one who suffers during her time at Hill House. The phenomena which Eleonor, Theodora, Dr. Montague, and Luke all experience come in many forms: phantom dogs, loud knocking and shaking at their bedroom doors, and, most ominously, the writing on the wall. At one point, Theodora experiences a frightening vision, which she never describes but is clearly terrified by, while Eleanor is seized by a strange, giddy desire to throw herself off the roof of Hill House. As Eleanor's mental state declines, the group tries to send her away—only to watch helplessly as she crashes her car and commits suicide in front of them on her way out of the Hill House gates. By showing that other people besides Eleanor are physically and emotionally affected by the house, Jackson further complicates the question of whether the strange happenings outlined in the novel are the result of a true "haunting," or part of individual or collective delusions which grip those who visit the house. Though Jackson ultimately offers no definitive answer, she uses the mysterious ambiguity surrounding the "haunting" to suggest that perhaps the most frightening thing of all is a psychologically haunted self.  The Haunting of Hill House uses the trappings of Gothic horror and familiar haunted-house tales to tell a different story entirely, one rooted deeply in metaphor: the story of a mind becoming unhinged. As the titular haunting unfolds, Jackson muddies the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined, what is supernatural and what is terrifyingly mundane—to Jackson, the human mind is, at the end of the day, the most haunted and unknowable place of all. - Theme: The Search for Home. Description: Hill House is an enormous, oddly constructed manor whose seclusion from society, odd angles, labyrinth-like layout, and disturbing history all make it a decidedly inhospitable home. Still, the characters who venture there to study the house's mysteries and discover its secrets all have one thing in common: they are looking for a sense of home and belonging. As Doctor Montague, Eleanor Vance, Luke Sanderson, and Theodora play house inside of their haunted retreat, it becomes clear that all four individuals are searching for connection and a sense of belonging in all the wrong places. Ultimately, the characters fail to find what they're looking for—and Jackson uses their collective failure, combined with the potent central symbol of Hill House, to make the bleak argument that for some people (or perhaps even all people) home and belonging can never be found. Through the journey of Eleanor Vance and her companions at Hill House, Jackson shows how embarrassing, vulnerable, and ultimately fruitless the search for home can feel, or even be. Eleanor has never felt at home in the world. Once the caretaker for her ailing mother, and now a burden to her sister, brother-in-law, and niece, with whom she lives in a small apartment, she has never known independence or belonging. She has never, she tells Theodora, been "wanted" anywhere—she has merely bounced from place to place. Eleanor arrives at Hill House with a repetitious phrase in her head, a line of Shakespeare which she remembers as a song: "Journeys end in lovers' meeting." Eleanor believes, as she arrives at Hill House, that despite the place's malevolent energy, her journey there will end in happiness and recognition. However, when the presence haunting Hill House begins attempting to communicate directly with Eleanor—by scrawling, in chalk and then in blood, the words "HELP ELEANOR COME HOME" over and over again—a strange paradox emerges. Eleanor is being summoned "home," but as the house itself makes increasingly desperate attempts to connect with Eleanor, she starts to go mad and believes that the house is the only home she has ever, or will ever, truly know. When she briefly tries to find "home" and friendship in Theodora, and expresses her desire to move to the city where her new friend makes her own home, Theodora's rejection makes Eleanor lose all hope of ever feeling wanted, needed, or loved. The novel ends with Eleanor, who has been urged to leave Hill House in light of her worsening mental state, crashing her car into an oak tree at the foot of the driveway and committing suicide rather than departing from the only place where she has ever felt welcomed or wanted. The bleak irony of the fact that the only place Eleanor has ever felt at home is a twisted, haunted, and inhospitable mansion is Jackson's way of metaphorically expressing the true depths of Eleanor's isolation, and of showing that for some unlucky people, the search for home ends in being called "home" to a realm beyond.  The other visitors to Hill House—Doctor Montague, Theodora, and Luke Sanderson—are united with Eleanor in their search for home and a sense of belonging. Doctor Montague, an academic compelled by a fascination with the strange, the occult, and the paranormal, longs for the clout that will allow him to make a name and a home for himself in the field he wants to pioneer. Theodora, a psychic who has abandoned her last name (and symbolically her ties to her past and her original home), lives a freewheeling and bohemian lifestyle, and it's heavily implied that she longs for family, stability, and permanence (though she ultimately rejects Eleanor's offer of friendship and companionship). Luke Sanderson, the heir to Hill House, is searching for home in a more literal sense—he knows the dark history of the house he stands to inherit, but he wants to get to the bottom of what may or may not be haunting the strange place so that he can decide what to do once it falls under his ownership. All four of these characters are drawn to Hill House because of what the place represents. Home is a place where one feels safe, known, and welcome: at Hill House, Eleanor, Montague, Luke, and Theodora find the opposite. There's a reason Hill House is always referred to as a house, not a home—though it's a domicile, it's been unoccupied for years, and the family that once resided there was broken, ruined, and indeed haunted. None of the characters can, in the present day, find any trappings of home in the manor, in spite of all their efforts to convince themselves that the place could lead to happiness. The search for home ends in failure not just for Eleanor, but indeed for all of the other characters who venture to the house: Luke runs off to Europe, Theodora returns to her unhappy apartment and roommate in the city, and Doctor Montague, shamed due to his inability to produce any substantive research pointing to paranormal activity at the house, is forced to retire from academia. Jackson herself, in real life, moved to North Bennington, Vermont in the mid-1940s with her husband, who worked as an instructor at Bennington College. Jackson felt isolated from the rest of the town, and during her time living there she wrote several works of fiction which reflected the competing feelings of misanthropy and exclusion she was experiencing. The Haunting of Hill House, then, adopts as its thesis the bleak suggestion that the idyllic, perfect idea of "home" perhaps does not exist for anyone, really—home is made of memories, imperfect and unreliable, and the attempt to reconstruct an ideal of home will almost always fail. Jackson's characters search for security, family, and the familiar in an almost comically bleak and inhospitable place, hoping against hope they'll be able to find a place to belong. But in the end, all of them fail, and they're flung back to their far corners of the world just as alone as when they began their journey to Hill House. - Theme: Fear and Dissociation. Description: Throughout The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson creates a palpable atmosphere of fear. As she builds terror and dread, Jackson examines the effects of prolonged bouts of fear on her four main characters—Eleanor, Doctor Montague, Luke, and Theodora—and, in so doing, ultimately suggests that the state of being acutely afraid over such an extended period of time creates an effect of dissociation or depersonalization, rendering individuals strangers to themselves and one another. When Eleanor first arrives at Hill House, she is tethered to reality—though a little whimsical and fanciful at times, there's nothing about Eleanor to suggest that she's insane, delusional, or prone to dissociative episodes. As the house deepens its claim on her, however, Eleanor slowly loses her grip on reality—and on herself. She begins to feel she is "disappearing inch by inch" into the house, "going apart a little at a time" due to the pressure of the fear she's experiencing, and the increasing frequency with of sounds, noises, and even presences that only she can perceive. In the book's denouement, as Eleanor's spirit seems to meld with—or be taken over entirely by—whatever possesses Hill House, Eleanor runs wild through the house in the middle of the night. She is both herself and not herself; she clearly is in possession of her own memories, but she refers to herself in the third person and speaks of having at last found her way "home" to the very "inside" of Hill House. The morning after the episode, once Luke and the others have coaxed Eleanor down off of a rotting iron staircase from which she was, ostensibly, preparing to plunge to her death, Eleanor is encouraged to leave the house but seems reluctant to—she has become obsessed with the house, and decides to commit suicide in its driveway rather than leave it. Only in the "unending, crashing second before the car" hits a giant oak tree does Eleanor briefly seem to return to herself, wondering at last why she is "doing this" and why no one is stopping her. Eleanor's fear seems to have completely severed her connection with reality until that final moment, when it's already to late to reclaim her sense of self. The housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Dudley, is perhaps the most profound example of someone whose elongated exposure to the evil within Hill House—and the terror it inspires—has resulted in a kind of dissociation. Mrs. Dudley speaks robotically and flatly in sentences that describe only her schedule in the house—her entire existence has become oriented around the times at which she enters the house, performs her duties, and leaves again. She never reveals anything more about herself or her life to the new guests, and she doesn't ask any questions about them either—in fact, she never even varies the words she uses. Mrs. Dudley's flat affect, depersonalized speech, and inability to focus on anything other than getting out of the house shows that in order for her to complete her accursed duties at Hill House, it's necessary for her to separate herself from anything but the task at hand. Just as Eleanor, in the depths of her fear, cannot access anything beyond being afraid, Mrs. Dudley's life outside Hill House—whatever it is—becomes inaccessible to her when she's within the confines of the house. After an encounter in which whatever possesses Hill House writes a message to Eleanor on the walls of Theodora's room in blood, Theodora moves into Eleanor's room. The two sleep in separate beds, but begin sharing clothes and possessions, as all of Theodora's things have been stained with blood. As the two of them begin dressing, speaking, and acting like one another, the line between them blurs. Theodora, dressed in Eleanor's demure clothes, begins calling herself "Eleanor" and speaking in mocking tones about "herself" in the third person. At the same time, Eleanor allows Theodora to paint her toenails bright red—though she feels provocative and out of place in her own body once the job is done—and begins adopting some of Theodora's more fiery characteristics. As the two women seem to meld together, it is almost as if they are latching onto one another's personalities as they feel their own selves dissolving in the presence of their constant state of fear and disorientation. It's easier to embody another person than it is to reckon with the confusion and strangeness that has infiltrated their own minds, and as Eleanor and Theodora both consciously and subconsciously adopt parts of one another's appearances and personalities, it seems they're trying to hide themselves away, perhaps out of an instinct to preserve whatever is left of their true selves. Additionally, Doctor Montague, Theodora, and Luke Sanderson all discuss the strange effects of being exposed to heightened fear over a long period of time. In humorous, almost academic discussions each morning as they lay out their plans for the day—and in the evenings, often after an encounter with the presence within Hill House—they deconstruct the emotions they experienced during the episodes with an eerie detachment, often poking fun at their own terror or one another's. As the novel progresses, these chats become more and more ludicrous to the imperiled Eleanor, who is—depending on how one views the narrative—either drifting further away from herself, or closer to the true core of who she is: a woman possessed by an entity even she can't understand. Indeed, as the others try to bring Eleanor back from the brink of her own destruction, they do so with the same tongue-in-cheek, disbelieving irony with which they'd deconstructed their encounters with the presence at Hill House days earlier—it's as if what's happening to their friend right before their eyes is at a distance or remove from them. "When I am afraid," Eleanor Vance states at a crucial point in the novel, after a horrific message has been scrawled in blood on the walls of Theodora's room, "I can see perfectly the sensible, beautiful, not-afraid side of the world […] But when I am afraid I no longer exist in any relation to these things." Jackson's attempt to define fear as a state of dissociation, in which the "not-afraid side of the world" exists but becomes inaccessible, is her novel's great experiment. Through the omnipresent atmosphere of terror and dread which permeates Hill House, she explores how fear slowly but surely detaches her protagonists from reality. - Theme: Isolation. Description: All of the characters in The Haunting of Hill House are isolated in their own ways—so, too, is the remote and looming manor at the center of the action. As she examines the effects of both physical and emotional isolation throughout the novel, Shirley Jackson ultimately suggests that true loneliness is the most terrifying force on earth—and more deserving of fear than even the strangest, most bone-chilling experiences with the supernatural. Eleanor Vance is a very isolated woman, and Jackson uses her character to posit that the prospect of a life spent in emotional and physical isolation from the rest of the world is more terrifying than ghosts, spirits, or unexplained phenomena. "I am always afraid of being alone," Eleanor admits after one of several encounters with whatever entity may or may not be haunting Hill House. After stating the words aloud, she is shocked by her own candor—the admission itself has made her feel even more isolated, vulnerable, and lonely. Eleanor has been a loner all her life. Eleanor has long been the caretaker to her ailing mother—now, at thirty-two, she lives with her sister and brother-in-law, but she has few friends of her own and spends most of her time daydreaming not of love or companionship but of possessing a large house all her own where she can tend to small daily rituals like cleaning, strolling through the yard, and preparing meals in peace. Eleanor, who has been lonely all her life, seems to have come to crave isolation; it is only within the halls of Hill House that she sees for the first time just how pitiful loneliness truly is, and begins to question whether a life lived out alone is even worth living. Eleanor's suicide at the end of the novel—tragic, sudden, and yet committed almost gleefully—seals the thesis that Jackson has set forth throughout the novel: that being alone, cast out, and unwanted is more terrifying than death itself.  The other characters who visit Hill House are isolated in their own ways. Theodora is unmarried, marked by her psychic sensitivities, and lives with a roommate with whom she often quarrels. Luke Sanderson is a dishonest bachelor, a thief whose devilish ways—not to mention his motherless existence—have left him feeling alone in the world. Doctor Montague is intellectually isolated, as his burning desire to research the paranormal has made him feel shameful and outcast. Eventually, his failure at Hill House renders him a complete pariah in his field and forces him to retire. He's also emotionally isolated, constantly bullied and undermined by his imposing wife, Mrs. Montague, who believes that she alone is the authority within their marriage. Doctor Montague loves being at Hill House with Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke because they regard him as an expert, take his work seriously, and make him feel less alone. All of the characters in Hill House, then, come to the haunted manor for a reason—they are so lonely in their own lives that even a mysterious invitation to a decrepit mansion seems like a worthwhile prospect that might ease their profound solitude. Indeed, upon arriving at Hill House and meeting one another, there is a jovial atmosphere in the air despite their dread, and even as the haunting escalates, Theodora, Luke, and Eleanor playact at being a family.  "Whatever walked there, walked alone," Jackson writes of the entity which may or may not have overtaken the sprawling Hill House. These lines recur in both the opening and closing paragraphs of the novel, and further hammer home the idea that isolation is a terrifying and even corrupting force in and of itself. "Whatever" now resides in Hill House is doomed—or desires—to "walk" its halls "alone" forever, driving out whoever comes to visit. This isolation seems both foisted upon the mysterious entity, whatever it may be, and self-inflicted, much like Jackson's simultaneous contempt for and exclusion from North Bennington society. The house itself is a symbol of emotional, intellectual, or circumstantial remoteness and isolation. Built at the base of a grouping of hills miles from the nearest town, Hill House was deliberately constructed to be a lonely place removed from the world—but this seclusion, Jackson shows, has given way not to peace but to an insidious rot. The thing that haunts Hill House—if such a thing exists—is both cloying and destructive, seeming to want the attention of anyone who visits the house while simultaneously frightening them into leaving. The entity appears at times as pure force—ground-shaking, door-clattering angry energy—and other times as something childlike and desperate for connection, as when a ghostly hand holds Eleanor's in the night. This simultaneous desire for connection and revulsion at the prospect of truly being seen is a hallmark of prolonged distrust and isolation—feelings with which Jackson herself struggled for a large part of her life, and was perhaps attempting to exorcise in the writing of Hill House. The Haunting of Hill House is a slim novel that takes on expansive, existential questions: what it means to be forced into isolation and what it means to crave it, and how the great terror of existence may not be the empty, finite loneliness of death but the empty, finite loneliness of life. As Jackson's characters wrestle with isolation, her own struggle to understand what it means to be a person in the world seems to be laid bare—the humiliations and vulnerability of human connection are just as terrifying as the prospect of a life lived all alone. To Jackson, and, to a greater extend extent, her characters, accepting that one's lot in life is to be lonely, isolated, or misunderstood is more terrifying than being locked inside a haunted house. - Climax: Eleanor Vance, who has become possessed by Hill, decides to crash her car into an oak tree on the property and commit suicide rather than drive away after being forced to leave by Doctor Montague. - Summary: Anthropologist and parapsychologist Doctor John Montague, hoping to legitimize the field of parapsychology through groundbreaking new research, invites a carefully-selected group of psychically sensitive individuals from around the country to spend part of the summer at Hill House—a manor in the northeastern United States with a reputation for being deeply haunted. The only two people to accept his invitation are Eleanor Vance, a childhood victim of poltergeist activity who has spent most of her adult life caring for her ailing mother, who has very recently passed away; and Theodora, a bohemian psychic with clairvoyant capabilities who lives with a roommate in a large city. Luke Sanderson, the young man who stands to inherit Hill House from his relatives, also pledges his time for the summer—Montague's lease states that a member of the family who owns Hill House must be present during the experiment to keep an eye on what the renters are doing to the house, as past tenants have had troubles up at the manor. Eleanor Vance steals the car she co-owns with her sister Carrie and her brother-in-law and drives over a hundred miles to Hill House, excited to finally have an adventure of her own. As she arrives at the house and meets the caretakers, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley, she realizes she is the first one there—and she senses a deeply malevolent energy coming from the house. Nevertheless, Eleanor is hungry for an adventure, and she decides to stay rather than turn tail and head for home. She soon meets Theodora and the two young women bond quickly—Eleanor is dazzled by Theodora's beauty and wit. Doctor Montague and Luke Sanderson soon arrive, and Doctor Montague explains that Hill House has been the site of a haunting for as long as eighty years. The man who built it, Hugh Crain, purposefully designed the house to be labyrinthine and disorienting, and after his wife's death in the house's driveway, a series of strange occurrences took hold of the place. As the four begin their stay at Hill House, they explore and chart the manor's twisting depths. A series of strange disturbances occur, mostly at night—but the pounding, rattling, strange laughter, and cold spots throughout the house and on the grounds actually excite the group. The jovial foursome joke about the presence that is all around them, and they have long discussions over meals and after-dinner drinks about the nature of fear, the feeling of terror, and the possibility that the house is trying to pit them against one another. However, after writing in chalk appears on the wall of the great hall one afternoon—writing which is directed at Eleanor—the terror the group feels increases, as does their suspicion of one another. The others suspect Eleanor of writing the scary words herself, while Eleanor reels at the possibility that the house is singling her out. After more frightening occurrences—a terrifying presence which Theodora spots in the woods, and more writing on the wall (this time in blood)—Doctor Montague summons his wife, Mrs. Montague, who is also a parapsychologist, to come join the team. Mrs. Montague arrives with her friend and traveling companion, Arthur Parker, and expresses her disappointment with how things are going so far—she seeks to draw the lonely, tortured spirit within Hill House out by communicating with it using a planchette, an automatic writing device. Mrs. Montague is contemptuous of her husband's methods and resistant to hearing about the very real terrors the group has already witnessed, and she insists on contacting the presence on her own. As Eleanor begins to suspect Theodora and Luke of talking badly about her behind her back and even scheming against her, she begins to lose her grip on reality, and feels that the house is urging her to "surrender" to it. She begins seeing and hearing things that the others seem immune to—and most chillingly of all, Mrs. Montague reports back that her planchette has written copiously about Eleanor. During a night of physical and auditory phenomena, Doctor Montague, Theodora, Luke, and Eleanor all huddle together in the doctor's room for strength, but at the height of the disturbance, Eleanor willingly gives herself over to the house. She wakes up in the morning with a renewed sense of joy and a strange ability to hear what is happening all over the house. Eleanor confronts Theodora about the tension between them and asks if she can come live with Theodora once the experiment is over. Theodora coldly refuses Eleanor, saying she doesn't take in strays. That night, Eleanor gets out of bed in the middle of the night and gleefully causes a ruckus, raising the others from their beds by pounding on their doors. She then runs away into the library, from whence she feels the voice of her deceased mother beckoning her. She climbs a rotting staircase in the corner of the library to get to a trap door that will allow her access to the house's highest turret. The group comes into the library and coaxes Eleanor down from the precarious staircase, reproaching her for her childish and worrisome behavior. In the morning, Doctor Montague and the others tell Eleanor that she needs to leave Hill House for her own good. Eleanor is unable to express to the others just how much she feels a part of the house—and how impossible it seems that she could ever leave. The others help Eleanor pack and retrieve her car from the garage. As she bids tearful goodbyes to her companions, she begs Doctor Montague to let her stay. He forces her into the car, however, and tells her she'll feel better once she's away from the mansion. Eleanor begins leaving the driveway, but is, at the last minute, compelled to crash her car into a large oak tree and commit suicide. In the seconds before impact, Eleanor has a moment of clarity, and wonders why she's doing what she's doing. In a brief epilogue, it is revealed that Doctor Montague published his article about Hill House to great contempt from his colleagues, and was all but forced to retire from academia. The presence which has always haunted Hill House remains there, walking its halls alone.

- Genre: - Title: The Help - Point of view: First-person from the perspectives of Aibileen, Minny, and Miss Skeeter, with the exception of chapter Twenty-Five which has a third-person omniscient point of view. - Setting: Jackson, Mississippi; 1962 through 1964 - Character: Aibileen Clark. Description: One of the novel's three narrators, Aibileen is a wise but reserved middle-aged black maid who takes pride in knowing that she has helped raise seventeen white children in her lifetime. Aibileen cares the most about two people in this world: her best friend Minny Jackson and Mae Mobley, the white girl she raises over the course of novel. As the novel's moral compass, Aibileen is a warm, compassionate woman who bears racial oppression with a quiet resilience. Aibileen has the uncanny ability to see the good in any person, but the death of her son Treelore causes a "bitter seed" to grow inside her that makes her less tolerant of racist housewives like her employer Miss Leefolt and Leefolt's friend Miss Hilly. This bitterness prompts her to help Miss Skeeter reveal the truth about how these women treat their maids. Her moral principles and desire to hold Jackson accountable for its oppression of black domestic workers then gives her the strength to continue working on the project, despite the dangers threatening her. - Character: Minny Jackson. Description: Another narrator and protagonist, Minny Jackson is a wise-cracking mother of five who refuses to curb her outspoken personality even though it gets her into trouble with her white employers. Quick-tempered and fiery, Minny always has a sharp word or a joke on the tip of her tongue, but her tough, sarcastic exterior hides her vulnerability. Minny's husband Leroy mercilessly beats her, and Miss Hilly tries to ruin her life by spreading racist rumors about her. In spite of all this, Minny remains fiercely determined to provide for children and give them a better life. Spurned by white people her entire life, Minny is suspicious of her white employer Celia Foote, but soon learns of Celia's compassion and strength. By the end of the novel, they develop a deep, loving friendship that transcends the racial divide. - Character: Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan. Description: The third narrator and protagonist, Skeeter is a young white college graduate who comes from a wealthy Southern family. Strong-willed and individualistic, Skeeter is frustrated by the sexist expectations society has of her. Her mother Charlotte often pressures her to be more ladylike and to find a man to marry. Skeeter wants to be a famous writer, not a housewife, though she does feel compelled to take the more conventional path when the handsome Stuart Whitworth Jr. shows a romantic interest in her. Though best friends with Hilly and Elizabeth Leefolt, she pulls away from them when she starts writing her book, Help, with Aibileen and Minny. Writing the book leads her to realize what injustices white housewives like her friends have committed against the black women of Jackson. - Character: Hilly Holbrook. Description: The novel's antagonist, Hilly is on the surface the ideal of the Southern housewife: loyal to her husband, adored by her friends and neighbors, and loving to her two children. But underneath the surface, Hilly harbors viciously racist beliefs that spur her to treat the black women in the novel as if they were subhuman. Hilly jeopardizes Minny's financial security by spreading vindictive rumors about her, also uses her influence in the white community to have her own maid, Yule May, sentenced to four years in prison just for stealing one of her rings. As conniving as she is heartless, Hilly influences the other white women to accept her beliefs, spearheading a campaign to pass a bill that would require every Mississippi household to have a separate bathroom for black domestic workers. In the end, Minny takes revenge on Hilly by including in Skeeter's book the story about feeding her the "special ingredient" pie. - Character: Celia Foote. Description: The kind but clueless employer of Minny Jackson, Celia comes from a poor "white trash" background and does not know the conventions of how a white woman is "supposed" to treat her black maid as inferior. As a result, she treats Minny with kindness and respect. Hilly, Elizabeth Leefolt, and the rest of the white Jackson housewives shun her because of her lower class status. Internalizing society's expectations of her as a woman, Celia feels shame that she cannot give her husband, Johnny Foote, a baby. As a result of Minny's friendship and sage advice, Celia learns to put less weight on what society expects from her. - Character: Elizabeth Leefolt. Description: Aibileen's employer, Elizabeth is a neglectful and verbally abusive mother to Mae Mobley. She, Hilly, and Skeeter have been best friends since elementary school. Elizabeth tries to hide her family's low income so that she can gain access to Jackson's high society. Elizabeth is also seriously lacking in moral convictions. Elizabeth builds a separate bathroom for Aibileen just so she can seem more wealthy and fit in with Hilly and her high society friends. - Character: Mae Mobley Leefolt. Description: The young daughter of Elizabeth Leefolt, Mae Mobley loves her maid, Aibileen, more than her actual mother. Due to her mother's negligence, Mae Mobley lacks self-confidence, but Aibileen tries to instill in her the belief that she is good and valuable. Mae Mobley is too young "see" race—she doesn't form judgments based on the color of people's skins—but Aibileen worries that her mother will soon teach her to see black people as inferior to white people. Aibileen successfully teaches Mae Mobley that there is no inherent difference between black and white people other than skin color. Mae Mobley internalizes this lesson and passes it on to her little brother, Ross. - Character: Stuart Whitworth, Jr.. Description: The son of a prominent segregationist senator, Stuart courts Skeeter throughout the novel. Stuart's recent break-up with his fiancée Patricia shakes him to the core, making him drink heavily and insult those around him. What depresses Stuart the most is the shame he feels for breaking-up with Patricia in order not to hurt his father's political campaign, showing that he values what his parents think of him over the possibility for love. But Stuart is also kind, providing support and motivation to Skeeter to keep writing. Ultimately, however, he's too invested in the racist status-quo of Mississippi to see the value of Skeeter's book and breaks up with her because, once again, he fears it may hurt his father's political ambitions. Still a loyal man, Stuart does not tell anyone about Skeeter's book. - Character: Constantine Bates. Description: Skeeter's childhood maid, Constantine is like a second mother to her, providing love and compassion. The novel begins in the months after Constantine has left Jackson for Chicago without telling Skeeter. Throughout the novel, Skeeter tries to find out what happened to her, eventually learning the truth from Aibileen. Ashamed that her daughter Lulabelle was pale-skinned, Constantine gave her up for adoption when she was four. But Constantine feels guilt over this moment of weakness and ultimately tries to redeem herself by leaving Jackson to go live with her estranged daughter in Chicago. Over sixty years old, Constantine only lives in Chicago for three weeks before she dies. - Character: Charlotte Phelan. Description: Skeeter's mother, Charlotte is an old-fashioned Southern woman who tries to persuade her daughter to conform to gender norms. Though dying of cancer, Charlotte is a fighter and is still alive at the end of the novel. Charlotte also harbors racist beliefs that she never renounces. Even though Constantine had been like a mother to Skeeter, she fires her just because her daughter Lulabelle pretended to be white and mingled with her white friends. - Character: Yule May. Description: Miss Hilly's college-educated maid who steals a ring to pay for her twins' college education. Yule May asked Miss Hilly for a loan, but when she refused, she resorted to theft in order to give her boys the opportunity to get an education. In revenge, Miss Hilly has her thrown in jail. Miss Hilly's heartless dealings with Yule May, a beloved member of the black community, motivates the other maids to tell Skeeter their stories in order to try to fight against the racism that black domestic workers face. - Character: Miss Walters. Description: Hilly's aging mother and Minny's employer at the beginning of the novel, Miss Walters is a kind but senile woman who appreciates Minny's outspoken personality. She shows that she is a good-humored woman with a sense of justice when she sides with Minny during the incident with the "special ingredient" pie. - Character: Lulabelle Bates. Description: Constantine's pale-skinned daughter who returns to Jackson while Skeeter is away at college. Disdainful of the racist white community, she embarrasses Charlotte Phelan by socializing with her white friends. A self-respecting woman, she spits in Charlotte's face when Charlotte tells her to get out of her house as if she were a stray dog. - Theme: Racism. Description: At its core, The Help is an exploration of the ways in which racism pervaded every aspect of social life in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi – from Jim Crow laws that sanctioned discrimination and segregation as official policy to casual conversations between middle-class white women. In particular, the novel focuses on how white housewives justified the exploitation and emotional abuse of their black maids by convincing themselves that black people are fundamentally different from – and inferior to – white people. Miss Hilly openly expresses the belief that African-Americans are figuratively and literally "unclean," prone to moral depravity and infectious diseases not carried by whites. On a larger scale, almost every white woman in the novel performs the social practices that reinforce the institutional separation of whites and blacks under Jim Crow-era law. The white women don't let their maids touch them, sit at their table, or share their food. These everyday practices dehumanize the maids and make it easier for the housewives to exploit their maids' labor. The novel investigates and portrays how racism is not inherent to human nature, but is instead passed down generation to generation by way of education. Up to a certain point, white children in the novel are "colorblind": they do not form any racial prejudices about the black maids who raise them. But, as Aibileen has learned from her experience raising seventeen white children, the kids start to see racial differences when their parents and teachers enforce prevailing racist attitudes. When Mae Mobley draws a picture of herself with a black crayon, her teacher scolds her, saying that black people are "dirty" and she should draw herself as white unless she wants people to think she's "dirty" too. To maintain the racial hierarchy in the South that allows whites tremendous amounts of political and economic power over African-Americans, adult members of society give their children a disturbing inheritance: the belief that they are inherently superior to blacks.However, the novel also provides a framework for how individuals can fight racism, or at least refuse to participate in its perpetuation, by establishing channels of honest and empathetic communication across color lines. After witnessing the disrespect with which her white friends treat their maids, Miss Skeeter risks spurring the violent anger of her community by helping the maids publish their stories about working for white families. Skeeter tries to see the world through the eyes of the maids, and makes the rather obvious realization that they too are valuable humans with the same capacity for emotion and intelligence as her white peers. By recognizing the essential humanity of these women, Skeeter comes to realize that the institutional laws and social practices that separate people based on race are unethical and founded on a social framework of lies and exploitation. As a result, she ultimately leaves her friends and family in the South rather than continue living in such a blindly racist community. This ability to simply leave, however, is a privilege Skeeter retains as a wealthy white woman, while the maids at the heart of the story don't have such an opportunity. - Theme: Gender and the Home. Description: Focused as it is on female characters—white and black—The Help portrays how the home, a traditionally feminine space, was just as much a battleground for social change as were the courtrooms and rallies of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. While Aibileen describes how white men beat or kill black men who "stepped out of line," the novel also shows how white women used their social influence to ruin the lives of the black maids in more indirect but similarly devastating ways. A white woman could have her maid fired, her maid's husband fired, their house repossessed, or even have her maid sent to jail for as small an infraction as a parking ticket. But the maids find ways to fight such racial injustice. The maids call themselves "domestic workers," which literally means that the home is their workplace. For white women, the home is a private space where they have control and authority in an otherwise sexist society, but for black women, the white woman's home is a public space of labor in which they must fight to earn respect and fairness. While Aibileen tries to inspire racial tolerance in the children she raises as a way to fight large-scale racial injustice, Minny refuses to curb her personality, demanding that the housewives see her as a human being with a distinct identity rather than as a nameless and obedient servant. These battles may not have been recorded by the news or in textbooks, but Stockett illustrates how the maids' resistance to racism in the home, the heart of Southern society, plays a vital part in changing the hearts and minds of women and children in the fight for civil rights. Through the character of Skeeter, The Help also exposes the double standards white women faced in the South during the 1960s. Skeeter chafes against the sexist Southern culture that expects white women to marry, stay home, and have children as soon as possible, while white men are allowed the freedom to explore their passions in the workforce. In contrast, other female characters like Skeeter's mother and Miss Hilly embrace gender norms and try to enforce them on Skeeter by setting her up on dates or advising her on clothing choices. This pressure also comes from men like Stuart Whitworth, who tries to shame Skeeter into giving up her career goals because they are outside the approved norms for a woman. At the other end of the spectrum, book agent Elaine Stein's high-powered career provides a model for Skeeter of an alternative lifestyle beyond the proscribed path of becoming a Southern wife, mother, and homemaker. Ultimately, Skeeter bucks the sexist conventions that dictate that her place is only in the home: instead of participating in domestic life as a wife and mother, she writes a book that exposes the racial injustices in the Southern home. Skeeter's sense of being oppressed by gender norms might make her more sensitive to the even more powerful forms of racial oppression, inspiring her determination to address the racism faced by the black domestic workers. This personal rebellion against sexist and racist attitudes in Jackson empowers her, giving her the inner confidence to reject her community and its expectations of her. Instead of passively abiding by society standards for women, she goes on at the novel's end to craft a more authentic self as a writer living in New York City. - Theme: Social Class. Description: The Help offers an in-depth meditation on the complicated effects that class has on people's social interactions, specifically with regards to race. The Help portrays class as providing the basis for Jackson's tiered white society: the wealthy and "well-bred" are at the top, setting the social conventions and attitudes for everyone else below. Elizabeth Leefolt and Celia Foote exemplify opposing ways of how a white Southern woman can navigate social class. Elizabeth comes from a "good" family, but her lack of monetary inheritance and her husband's low income mean that she cannot fully integrate into wealthy high society. As a result, Elizabeth conceals her family's lack of wealth with symbols of class, specifically by hiring a maid she can barely afford to pay. A maid confers class status to the average white 1960s Southern woman, since having a maid distances the housewife from the physical labor required to run a household, especially as physical labor is associated with black people and the lower class. However, this desire to increase her class status makes her less racially sensitive. For example, in order to appear wealthy and follow the conventions of her racist society, Elizabeth gives in to Miss Hilly's suggestion that she build a separate bathroom for "the help." Celia Foote's social standing is the exact opposite of Elizabeth's. Since Celia comes from a poor, "white trash" family but marries into a wealthy one, she lacks knowledge of the largely unspoken rules of middle-class white conduct. Thus she treats Minny, her maid, with more respect, since Celia is unaware of how white women are "supposed" to treat black people as inferior—even though this seems culturally inaccurate, since racism is not limited to the upper class or correlated to wealth at all. In the world of the novel, however, Celia's low class means she holds less racist attitudes. Even so, the allure of acceptance into high Southern society tempts Celia, and she risks letting her upper-class peers' racist influence shape her attitudes. By the end of the novel, however, her inability to assimilate into high society turns her once and for all against the discriminatory attitudes of the wealthier-born white women. Rejected by her wealthy neighbors, Celia has a sense of what it means to be unfairly discriminated against. While she is still generally blind to her own privilege, this experience does give her the empathetic sensitivity to treat Minny, a fellow outcast, with respect and human kindness. - Theme: Help vs. Hypocrisy. Description: "Help" normally signifies the giving of free services or resources to those in need, but the novel's title refers directly to the underpaid black domestic workers who, paradoxically, are the ones "helping" their wealthier and more powerful employers, people who have no real need of help. By referring to these women as "the help," the white housewives uphold the illusion that the maids are like volunteers who want—or should be grateful for the opportunity—to work for less than minimum wage, and for families that treat them as subhuman. The white women refuse to even consider that they could be the ones "helping" the maids by promoting civil rights in white communities. This irrational and absurd system in which poor black people "help" the rich whites gives way to widespread hypocrisy in white society. Miss Hilly believes that her bathroom bill and Jim Crow segregation laws actually "help" black people. She even takes the moral high ground by raising funds to "help" needy children in Africa, but this is actually a false generosity meant to raise her class status as a charitable woman. Hilly is not capable of understanding that this desire is rooted in a racist paternalism that infantilizes black people as completely helpless, adding further irony to the fact that the black domestic workers are actually the ones "helping" their white employers. If Hilly truly cared about generosity and not merely the appearance of generosity, she would provide fair wages to the woman working in very own her kitchen – not as an act of charity but as a way of amending a social injustice. The question of help becomes most complicated with regards to the relationship between the maids and the white children they raise. Stockett depicts this relationship as if the maids were as close with the children as a mother would be, despite the fact the maids are being paid to raise and be kind to the children. Unlike real mothers, they aren't allowed to snap or yell at the children, so it is no wonder the children love them more than their actual mothers. But Aibileen seems to genuinely care for Mae Mobley, wanting to give her the self-confidence she'll need to deal with her verbally abusive mother when she's older. While Aibileen's emotions may be genuine, the economic relationship between maid and employer – which makes the bond between maid and child possible – ensures that Mae Mobley will never be able to love Aibileen for who Aibileen really is. Instead, Mae Mobley's image of Aibileen will always be corrupted the fact that she was, on one level, just a kind maid who was paid to "mother" her. Skeeter models a truer form of "help," however, by risking her own life and reputation to give the maids a platform to tell their stories. The maids have never received help from a white person before, so at first they are suspicious that Skeeter would risk "helping the help." As the maids come to see her desire to help as a form of genuine concern for the plight of the African-American community, they agree to tell their stories. By the novel's conclusion, the maids realize that Skeeter's help consists not of monetary charity but a dogged attempt to learn about their lives in an effort to transcend racial divides and cultivate a mutual and genuine understanding based on human compassion. - Theme: Writing, Storytelling, and Freedom. Description: The theme of writing is threaded throughout The Help, as the novel melds fact and fiction to showcase the power of storytelling. In an act of defiance against the gender norms of her time, Miss Skeeter seeks self-determination through the act of writing. As a white woman in her society, she would have been expected to maintain the social order, to not "stir up trouble." Skeeter's book allows her to pit herself against not only the racist attitudes of her friends but also the limitations imposed on women's freedom of expression. Since Miss Skeeter is a stand-in for the author, Kathryn Stockett, the novel even suggests that the writing of the book The Help provided Stockett with an opportunity to bridge the racial divides that she witnessed growing up in her Mississippi community. Intimately related to the theme of writing is the idea of freedom. In the homes, the maids, unable to speak their mind without being fired, often say no more than "Yes, Ma'am." But Skeeter's book gives them the chance to record their voices, ones that are undervalued by society, so that the maids might make their mark on history. Their stories do help advance the cause of civil rights, spurring some white women in their neighborhood to educate themselves about race relations and initiate moments of dialogue with their black maids. The connection between freedom and writing becomes most clear in Minny's and Aibileen's narratives. Minny considers the stories as an act of freedom, stories that let her reveal the secret emotions she's been repressing as a maid. These stories and the truths she reveals unburden her, giving her a psychological freedom she never knew she was missing. Though publication of the book gets Aibileen fired, she finds new employment writing an advice column, which gives her the financial freedom to stop working for racist white families. But more metaphorically, writing provides Aibileen with the freedom to assert her individuality. As a black maid, she cannot express herself publically without fear of white violence, but writing under a pseudonym gives her the freedom to tell the truth of her experiences in her own words. The novel ends with Aibileen thinking about the future, and about the stories she now has the freedom to tell. - Climax: The white community's reaction to the publication of the book. - Summary: Set in Jackson, Mississippi, the novel begins in August 1962 with Aibileen Clark, a middle-aged black domestic worker, taking care of Elizabeth Leefolt's only child, Mae Mobley. Miss Leefolt, a white housewife, neglects her daughter, but Aibileen showers Mae Mobley with affection. The novel opens with a luncheon at Leefolt's house where the 23-year-old white women Hilly Holbrook and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan discuss Hilly's initiative to pass a bill that would require every white household to have a separate bathroom for black housemaids. Disgusted by Hilly's idea, Skeeter finds Aibileen and asks if she ever wished she could change things. Unwilling to express her true feelings to a white woman, Aibileen says that everything is fine. A few days later, Minny Jackson, another black maid and Aibileen's best friend, loses her job working for Hilly's mother. Hilly has also spread rumors about Minny being a thief so none of the other neighbors will hire her. Minny tells Aibileen that she took revenge on Hilly, but she won't give her the details, only telling her that it involved a pie. Minny ultimately finds work with the white housewife Celia Foote, a woman none of the white housewives in the community befriends because she comes from a working class background. Celia is kind to Minny and does not treat her any differently for being black. Meanwhile, Skeeter gets a job writing an advice column about housekeeping for the Jackson Journal. Since she knows nothing about cleaning or cooking, she goes to her friend Elizabeth Leefolt's house to ask Aibileen, her maid, some questions. While interviewing her, Skeeter learns that Aibileen's recently deceased son had been writing a book on his experiences working for white men in Mississippi. Seeing firsthand how her friends treat their maids, Skeeter, who wants to be a writer herself, gets the idea to interview Aibileen about her experiences for a book about black domestic workers in the South. At first, Aibileen declines to be interviewed for fear of losing her job or being targeted by white racists for publically criticizing white women. Aibileen changes her mind in order to help stop the racism that people like Miss Hilly are perpetuating in Jackson. Minny also tells her stories to Skeeter, but all the other maids in the community are too scared to talk. Skeeter also steals a book on the Jim Crow laws, which Hilly unluckily finds in her satchel. Thinking that Skeeter may be a secret integrationist, Hilly distances herself from her and tells the other women in the community to shun her. Hilly's maid, Yule May, steals a ring from Hilly so that she can afford to put her twins through college. Yule had originally asked Hilly for a loan before stealing the ring, but Hilly had refused. Despite the fact that Yule May was a loyal maid for so many years, Hilly uses her influence to have Yule thrown in jail overnight. Seething with anger at the injustice, the other maids agree to contribute their stories to Skeeter's book. When the book is nearly complete, Skeeter starts to worry that the maid's pseudonyms won't be enough to stop the Jackson housewives from figuring out that the book is about them. Minny decides to tell Aibileen and Skeeter about what she did to Hilly as "protection." As revenge for ruining her chances of finding work, Minny baked Hilly a pie with her own feces in it and fed it to her. When Hilly reads this story in the book, she'll know for sure that the book is about Jackson, but she'll also use her influence to steer people away from coming to the same conclusion about the setting so that she can protect herself from the humiliation of people finding out that she ate a black woman's excrement pie. When the book gets published, people in Jackson start to realize the book is about them, but Minny's plan works and Hilly tries to convince them otherwise. Skeeter ends up accepting a job as an editorial assistant in New York and, after a tearful goodbye with Aibileen, picks up and goes. Hilly, however, still tries to take revenge on the maids. Figuring out that Aibileen must have had a role in the project, Hilly has Elizabeth fire her. Even so, Aibileen, who has taken over Skeeter's job writing the housekeeping column for the Jackson Journal, leaves Miss Leefolt's house feeling unburdened and free now that she's told the stories. The book ends with Aibileen feeling ready to write more about her life and experiences.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Henna Artist - Point of view: Other than a brief prologue, which focuses on Radha, the story is told from Lakshmi's first-person perspective. - Setting: Jaipur, India (and briefly Shimla, a city in the Himalayan foothills) - Character: Lakshmi Shastri. Description: Lakshmi Shastri, the brilliant henna artist of the title, is the novel's protagonist. Lakshmi was born to her maa and pitaji in the large city of Lucknow, though eventually her father's political advocacy caused the family to move to the small, economically depressed village of Ajar. After being forced to marry the abusive Hari Shastri at 15, Lakshmi made her escape to Agra—but not before learning how to use herbs and plants for healing from her beloved saas (mother-in-law). In Agra, Lakshmi met Samir Singh, who introduced her to his scheming wife Parvati and brought her into the world of Jaipur high society. By the time the novel begins, Lakshmi has built a prosperous business for herself doing henna and selling contraceptive cotton bark sachets; she is close to her dream of owning her own home, thus achieving complete financial independence. The arrival of Radha, the sister she never knew she had, forces Lakshmi to balance her longstanding "ambition" with a newfound "responsibility" to family members, both blood-related and chosen (like her servant Malik, her favorite client Kanta Agarwal, and her crush and colleague Dr. Jay Kumar). Ultimately, though Lakshmi prides herself on giving women the ability to "choose" for themselves with her sachets, she comes to understand that commitments to others are equally important—and that independence is better when it exists alongside communal care. - Character: Radha. Description: Radha is Lakshmi's 13-year-old sister, born just a few months after Lakshmi made her escape from Ajar. Having been raised in poverty and the aftermath of her sister's abandonment, Radha (called the "Bad Luck Girl" by the town gossips) is used to fending for herself through humiliation and hardship. So when Radha discovers Lakshmi's comparatively lavish life in Jaipur, she both marvels at and resents the things her sister never shared with her. Despite Radha's cleverness and her skill at making henna paste, tensions between the two sisters erupt in short order, with Radha feeling that Lakshmi only interacts with her to scold or give her orders. Radha's contradictory drives toward innocence and independence are even more on display in her new relationships: she dazzles Malik, Kanta and Dr. Kumar with her intelligence and literariness, even as she gets swept up in childish fantasies throughout her affair with Ravi Singh. When Radha's lack of sexual knowledge leads to her getting pregnant with Ravi's child, Lakshmi blames herself for her sister's lack of preparedness. But as the two sisters eventually begin to find their way back to each other, Lakshmi comes to understand that she and Radha are "two sides of the same coin," both stubborn, defensive, and in dire need of each other. - Character: Malik. Description: Malik is Lakshmi's long-time servant and henna assistant; later, he becomes a close friend to Radha and a favorite of maharani Indira. Malik is the least privileged character in the novel: Lakshmi found him when he was begging on the street, and as one of the few Muslim characters, he is excluded from the hierarchies of caste entirely. Early on, Lakshmi is hesitant to find out more about Malik's life, admitting that she had "never asked" about his family or his circumstances. As Lakshmi's own spirits dampen, however, she comes to rely on Malik both as a skilled businessman—he is always doing clever backroom trades and forging useful alliances—and as a surrogate family member. Moreover, when Lakshmi is spiraling mentally and digging herself deeper into debt, Malik is the only one who can convince his beloved "Auntie-Boss" to sell her fought-for new house. Perhaps more than any other character, then, Malik shows Lakshmi how human relationships can sometimes alleviate burdens rather than multiply them. - Character: Hari Shastri. Description: Hari Shastri is the man Lakshmi married, against her will, at 15; two years later, unable to bear his verbal and physical abuse any longer, Lakshmi abandoned Hari. When the novel first introduces Hari, he is a figure of menace and disgust—various characters emphasize his "big-big scar" and his unwashed clothes. But over time, Lakshmi comes to realize that Hari has reformed himself, using the healing practices he learned from his mother (Lakshmi's saas) to help nautch girls and other women who have been brutalized. Hari thus sparks several contradictory feelings in Lakshmi. On the one hand, Lakshmi acknowledges that Hari is "trying" and "righting his wrongs"; on the other hand, she knows she can never "forgive the younger Hari…who left me with lasting scars." Hari's final moment in the text reflects this complexity—he comes to watch Lakshmi and Radha ride away from Jaipur, and though he says some (presumably kind) words, Lakshmi does not hear them. By shifting the focus from Hari in this final moment, The Henna Artist both allows him some measure of redemption and allows Lakshmi the distance she needs to truly heal. - Character: Dr. Jay Kumar. Description: Dr. Jay Kumar is an old friend of Samir's from when they both attended Oxford together; he is also the doctor who supervises Joyce Harris, Radha and Kanta during their pregnancies. At first, the Westernized doctor is deeply suspicious of Lakshmi's cotton bark sachets and her herbal approach to healing, and the two spar. But as Dr. Kumar comes into closer contact with Lakshmi, he gains new admiration for the wealth of knowledge (and empathetic bedside manner) she displays. Eventually, Dr. Kumar and Lakshmi's feelings for each other develop into a never-stated—but seemingly reciprocated—crush. In contrast to Samir, Dr. Kumar is patient and understanding of the challenges Lakshmi and her sister have had to overcome; he helps Radha get out of her adoption contract with the Jaipur royal family and, knowing Lakshmi's business has collapsed, he arranges a job for Lakshmi at his medical practice in Shimla. In the final scene, Lakshmi feels that seeing Dr. Kumar's face outside the train window is, at last, like coming "home," implying that the two will start a life together. - Character: Parvati Singh. Description: Parvati Singh is a prominent Rajput woman, with connections to everyone from the maharani Indira (a distant cousin) to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. She is Samir's husband and Ravi's mother, and she is also Lakshmi's most important client. Lakshmi considers Parvati "vain" and profoundly self-involved, though she also sympathizes with Parvati's anxiety about Samir's wandering eye. Throughout the story, Parvati grows increasingly suspicious of Lakshmi, both because of Radha's burgeoning relationship with Ravi and because of the closeness evident between Lakshmi and Samir. When Parvati learns about Lakshmi's tryst with Samir, she severs their business relationship and spreads rumors all around Jaipur that Lakshmi is a thief. Yet after Lakshmi decides to leave Jaipur, Parvati buys her house in a gesture of goodwill—acknowledging "that we may never again have someone" who can work "wonders" like Lakshmi does in her henna and on her terrazzo floor. Parvati's nuanced, ever-changing relationship with Lakshmi reflects how caste and class differences make it challenging for women to find solidarity against patriarchal norms. Instead, the patriarchy pits Lakshmi and Parvati against each other, vying for the attention of the powerful men who oppress them both. - Character: Samir Singh. Description: Samir Singh, husband to Parvati and father to Ravi, is one of the most prominent and wealthy architects in Jaipur. He is also the person who introduced Lakshmi to Jaipur society; the two met when Samir frequented the "pleasure houses" (elite brothels) in Agra, and once Samir learned about Lakshmi's contraceptive sachets, he encouraged her to move to Jaipur. At the start of The Henna Artist, Samir and Lakshmi share both a deep friendship and a not-so-harmless flirtation. Over the course of the novel, however, Lakshmi begins to learn about a darker side of Samir: this is also a man who betrays his wife consistently (including, once, with Lakshmi) and who shows no care or concern for the various women he and his son abandon. Ultimately, Lakshmi realizes that much of Samir's effortless charm stems from his ability to sweep his mistakes under the rug: as Lakshmi says, "there had been servant girls in Samir's past, too." But even as she distances herself from Samir, she acknowledges how deeply he has shaped her life and that their complicated friendship is not something she will ever forget. - Character: Ravi Singh. Description: Ravi Singh is the eldest son of Parvati and Samir Singh. Ravi is handsome and athletic, a skilled actor and polo player, and he possesses both the charm and the wealth needed to make him the most eligible young bachelor in Jaipur. Though Ravi agrees to an arranged marriage with Sheela Sharma, he also has sex with (and impregnates) Radha as well as Lala's niece, both of whom his family employs. Lakshmi is angry that Ravi lied to her sister, promising to marry her, especially because he knows that—due to his gender and his family's place in the hierarchies of class and caste—he will never face the consequences of his actions. - Character: Kanta Agarwal. Description: At 26 years old, Kanta Agarwal is Lakshmi's youngest henna client—and her favorite. Unlike the older ladies of Jaipur, Kanta treats Lakshmi "almost as an equal"; as Lakshmi successfully helps Kanta conceive a baby with her husband Manu, the two women become friends and confidants. Even more importantly, Kanta develops a special bond with Radha, introducing Radha to Western books (like Jane Eyre) and Western movies (like Some Like it Hot). Though Radha often feels closer to Kanta than she does to her own sister, Kanta goes to great pains to defend Lakshmi, helping both sisters accept a more expansive definition of family. The two families' closeness is cemented when Kanta miscarries late in her pregnancy and instead adopts Nikhil, Radha's baby with Ravi Singh. In addition to her ties to the central sisters, Kanta is important because of her modern view of womanhood: she has married for love and, like the many famous writers in her family tree, prides herself on her critical and literary faculties. - Character: Manu Agarwal. Description: Manu Agarwal is Kanta's husband and the Director of Facilities for the maharaja of Jaipur. Though his mother (Kanta's saas) is one of the more traditional characters in the novel, Manu is proudly modern; he insists on marrying Kanta in a love marriage instead of an arranged marriage, and he is devoted and patient even as Kanta struggles with fertility (a struggle that was often seen as shameful in Jaipur at the time). Manu is handsome, charming, and skilled at political schmoozing. - Character: Maharani Indira. Description: The elder maharani (queen) Indira is the wife of the late Madho Singh, a real-life maharaja (king) of Jaipur who ruled from 1880 to 1922. Madho Singh, working from the advice of an astrologer, refused to have any sons with his wife, instead preferring to have children with his concubines; his heir would ultimately be adopted. The absence of blood children is a lifelong source of "grief" for Indira, who compensates by showering attention on her plants, her parrot, and by abusing alcohol and opium. Though Lakshmi enjoys spending time with Indira she also notices how Indira's gender and the rules of caste "imprison" her despite her wealth and status. - Character: Maharani Latika. Description: When Lakshmi is first hired to do henna for the maharani (queen) Latika, it is because Latika is so depressed; fearing a coup, her husband has sent away her 8-year-old son to England, and Latika feels despondent without him. Over time, Lakshmi is able to heal Latika, getting her to eat, sleep, and even regain her former buoyant demeanor. As a gesture of thanks, Latika invites Radha to attend the Maharani School for Girls—the best in all of Jaipur—tuition-free. - Character: Sheela Sharma. Description: As a young, beautiful, wealthy Brahmin, Sheela Sharma is the toast of Jaipur society. Though Lakshmi arranges Sheela's marriage to Ravi Singh, privately, she dislikes Sheela; she recalls "the ugly twist of Sheela's mouth before she yanked her cousin's pigtails," and the "laziness" that allows her to throw away her natural gift for music. After Sheela bullies Malik, Radha and Sheela develop a rivalry. It is never clear if Sheela knows about the affair between Radha and Ravi, but at one point, Sheela elbows Radha in the face, suggesting she has at least heard rumors about her future spouse. - Character: Mrs. Sharma. Description: Mrs. Sharma is one of Lakshmi's henna clients; she is Sheela's mother and a friend (and future in-law) of Parvati Singh. As a Brahmin and one of the wealthiest women in Jaipur, Mrs. Sharma has a great deal of influence and privilege. Unlike her daughter, however, Lakshmi admires Mrs. Sharma for being "practical" and generous. Though Mrs. Sharma gets caught up in the feud between Lakshmi and Parvati, she tries her best to be kind and fair to Lakshmi. - Character: Mrs. Patel. Description: Mrs. Patel is one of Lakshmi's oldest henna clients; whereas most of Lakshmi's "ladies" want to enchant their partners or increase their fertility, Mrs. Patel just wants help with the arthritis in her hands. Initially, Mrs. Patel is one of Lakshmi's preferred clients, as she is less concerned with social gossip and palace intrigue than the rest. But when Mrs. Patel tells Lakshmi about Parvati's rumors that she is a thief, Lakshmi starts to resent Mrs. Patel for "pitying" her. - Character: Joyce Harris. Description: Mrs. Joyce Harris is a white Englishwoman (Angrezi) in Samir's social circle. When Mrs. Harris has an affair with an Indian man at the exclusive polo club, she is panicked to learn that she is pregnant, fearing that English society would shun a mixed-race child. Desperate to abort the baby, Mrs. Harris asks Lakshmi for some of her cotton bark sachets…but she lies about how far along she is in her pregnancy, making the procedure potentially deadly. Though Lakshmi is ultimately able to save Mrs. Harris, the scare makes Lakshmi realize the important of clear communication with patients. - Character: Geeta. Description: Samir Singh prefers to have affairs with older widows, and Geeta is his current mistress. Geeta lives in a well-appointed house in the ex-patriot area of Jaipur, and she inadvertently becomes the host of Lakshmi's sexual encounter with Samir; Geeta is also the person who eventually reveals this tryst to Parvati. Geeta's pain at Samir's betrayal shows just how many women his lasciviousness has hurt, even though he never seems to feel remorse. - Character: Lakshmi's Maa. Description: Lakshmi's maa (mother) is a complicated figure, simultaneously attuned to her daughters' needs and raised "not to defy, question, or contradict" the patriarchal systems and traditions of her ancestors. Despite Lakshmi's fears, Maa insists on her marriage to Hari; when Lakshmi abandons Hari to save herself, Maa never forgives her, even refusing to tell Radha that she has a little sister. - Character: Lakshmi's Pitaji. Description: Lakshmi's pitaji (father) is a schoolteacher in Ajar. In his youth, Pitaji was a passionate advocate for India's independence, selling his wife's gold jewelry to fund the movement (and thus "put[ting] politics over family"). But when his outspoken actions got him demoted from a position in bustling Lucknow and sent instead to sleepy Ajar, he fell into depression and began to struggle with alcoholism. By the time Radha is 13, Pitaji has died from alcohol abuse, leaving poverty and familial shame in his wake. - Character: Lakshmi's saas. Description: The best thing about Lakshmi's marriage to Hari Shastri is her new mother-in-law, or saas. Where Hari is verbally and physically abusive, Lakshmi's saas is the opposite: she is a skilled healer, treating women who are suffering from pregnancy problems or domestic abuse. Lakshmi learns most of her professional skills from her saas, including the recipes for her contraceptive and abortive sachets; as a tribute, Lakshmi uses her saas's bowl in all her henna appointments. Though Lakshmi's saas is Hari's blood relative, she is openly proud of Lakshmi for escaping such a violent marriage. - Character: Munchi. Description: Munchi (whom Lakshmi and Radha often call Munchi-ji) is an elderly man in Ajar, the small town the sisters were raised in. Munchi is a mentor to both young women: he teaches Lakshmi to draw and Radha how to make special pastes and paints, both skills they will later use in the henna business. Munchi also offers important advice, especially as the girls figure out how to leave Ajar. - Character: Naraya. Description: Naraya is the builder of Lakshmi's new Rajnagar house, and one of the novel's secondary antagonists. The novel frequently depicts Naraya as unmannered and cruel (as his sister Lala puts it, "a harder man you will not find"); he is also a second-rate builder, as he frequently cuts corners on Lakshmi's design. Naraya puts pressure on Lakshmi to pay off her debt, and even after Samir intervenes, he continues to raise his rates and charge heavy interest. Later, Lakshmi learns that Naraya needs the money because he wants to marry off his daughter—Lala's niece—before the world learns of her pregnancy. - Character: Lala. Description: Lala is a longtime servant of Parvati Singh's, and a friend of Lakshmi's; the two women bond about their lives spent serving Jaipur's most elite ladies. When Lala's niece has sex with Ravi, Lala loses her job and ends up working in a poor neighborhood, much to Lakshmi's dismay. By the end of the novel, however, Lakshmi has arranged a job for Lala as Kanta's new nurse, demonstrating the importance of solidarity among women of the lower classes. - Character: Lala's Niece. Description: Lala's niece was a servant girl in the Singh household until Ravi Singh impregnated her, leading to her dismissal. Her father Naraya arranges for her to marry another man, but Naraya keeps the pregnancy a secret—so when the new husband finds out, he kicks Lala's niece out of his house. With no other options, Lala's niece kills herself by setting herself on fire. Symbolically, Lala's niece acts as a mirror to Radha (another lower-class girl whom Ravi impregnates and abandons), and her story also demonstrates brutal double standards women had to contend with. - Character: Mr. Pandey. Description: Mr. Pandey is Lakshmi's neighbor in Mrs. Iyengar's building. He is also a music teacher for many of the most prominent girls in Jaipur, including Sheela Sharma. Mr. Pandey is charming, soft spoken, and smart, and many of the women in his orbit (Lakshmi included) seem to harbor harmless crushes on him. - Character: Kanta's Saas. Description: Kanta's saas, or mother-in-law, is one of the most traditional characters in the novel. Though her son Manu has chosen a more modern life, even entering into a love marriage (as opposed to an arranged one) with Kanta, Kanta's saas frequently emphasizes the importance of old Hindu customs. Kanta's saas is desperate for her daughter-in-law to have a baby boy, and the resulting pressure adds to Kanta's anxiety about her fertility. - Character: Hazi. Description: Hazi is a Muslim dancer, henna artist, and courtesan (high-class escort). She and Nasreen take Lakshmi in when she arrives in Agra. Over the course of their friendship, Hazi entertains Lakshmi with her stories of far-off places, teaches her how to do henna, and even eventually introduces her to Samir. - Theme: Choice, Independence and Women's Freedoms. Description: Lakshmi Shastri, the titular character of Alka Joshi's novel The Henna Artist, lives and works in Jaipur, India, a decade after India has gained independence from its British colonizers. But while political independence is universally celebrated, the women in Lakshmi's life have no such freedom. Whether she is applying henna for wealthy ladies like Parvati Singh or taking care of her impoverished 13-year-old sister Radha, Lakshmi is struck by women's lack of options , even across class lines. It's common for women to be forced into unwanted marriages and pregnancies, and they generally lack the same freedom of choice that men enjoy and are judged more harshly by society. Indeed, as the novel's male characters adopt and discard children, have endless affairs, and still somehow avoid any marks against their reputations, Lakshmi's female clients are told that "men can't control themselves," so it is "up to women to stay out of their way." Even maharani Indira, the most powerful woman in Jaipur, is  "imprisoned," prevented from ever having a family because of her husband's superstitions. For Lakshmi, then, real independence necessitates that women have the same agency and options afforded to men. When she starts providing her clients with abortive cotton bark tea, Lakshmi is able to "change a women's life," allowing her clients to finally "choose" for themselves what they want their lives to look like. By contrasting the rhetoric of national independence with the everyday constraints on Lakshmi, Radha, and the women they serve, Joshi illuminates the gap between political independence and personal freedom. But in valorizing Lakshmi's use of the cotton bark, The Henna Artist also demonstrates how some independence movements are fought in different, more intimate ways—and that a woman's bodily freedom is just important as a nation's governmental independence. - Theme: Family and Responsibility. Description: Alka Joshi's The Henna Patient follows Lakshmi, a talented henna artist who uses her artistic talent to escape an abusive husband. But though Lakshmi's independence and resilience allow her to succeed in remarkable ways, they also make it hard for her to adjust to life with Radha, the teenaged sister she never knew she had. Part of this difficulty stems from Lakshmi's attempt to control Radha's life—Lakshmi knows that she will be held responsible for all of Radha's behavior, as in Jaipur, "individual shame d[oes] not exist. Humiliation spread[s], as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family." And when Radha's teenage recklessness—she gets pregnant out of wedlock—does indeed threaten the prosperous existence Lakshmi has so carefully built for herself , Lakshmi struggles to balance her care for her sister with her own ambitions and objectives. Yet even as Lakshmi navigates this new territory, she and her sister find support from a variety of unrelated friends: clients Kanta and Manu; their doctor Jay Kumar; and even Malik, Lakshmi's longtime servant. On the one hand, then, The Henna Patient makes it clear that family connections have the potential to be damaging, because they require individuals to be responsible for one another's actions. Yet the novel also shows that if responsibility is the central defining factor of family, then people can expand their "families" through a sense of mutual care and duty. Though Lakshmi only has one living blood relative, by the end of the novel, she feels that she has finally come "home." - Theme: Societal Hierarchy vs. Unordered Intimacy. Description: For Lakshmi Shastri, the striving protagonist of Alka Joshi's The Henna Artist, life in 1950s Jaipur, India is defined by the stratifications of wealth and Hindu caste. To get ahead, Lakshmi must defer to her higher-status henna clients, bending over backwards and enduring countless slights in order to gain the payments and connections she needs to succeed. But while public life is strictly ordered and defined by the hierarchical caste system, in private, society's elites confess to, complain to, and seduce those of lower castes. Indeed, both Lakshmi and Radha have sex with members of the Singh family, one of the most prestigious in all of Jaipur. The societal structures that are rigid in public at first seem to be messier and more flexible in private. As the Shastri women get more entangled with the highest-status citizens of Jaipur, however, this private mobility is tested—when the Singhs' son Ravi impregnates Radha, he escapes without any damage to his reputation, while she is humiliated and heartbroken. And similarly, when Lakshmi has a dalliance with the Singh patriarch Samir, it is she who is punished, losing her clientele (and her source of income) to nasty rumors. As Lakshmi says, "we could so easily be replaced." In other words, Jaipur society treats Lakshmi and Radha not as people but as intimate commodities, as even their most personal functions can be easily replicated or outsourced. By showing the unequal consequences that members of different classes and castes face, the novel makes it clear that hierarchies can be muddled in private—but that in the end, societal inequality will almost always triumph over, and commodify, private connections. - Theme: Care and Communication. Description: Lakshmi Shastri, the titular henna artist in Alka Joshi's novel The Henna Artist, prides herself on her ability to help and heal women with herbs, oils, and touch. When Lakshmi's long-lost sister Radha arrives, Lakshmi extends this kindness to her, buying her new clothes, teaching her how to carry herself in Jaipur high society, and enrolling her sister in the best school in the city. But Radha fails to see Lakshmi's scolding as care, and the two sisters grow apart. As Radha gets herself into trouble, navigating heartbreak and pregnancy, she refuses to lean on Lakshmi for help. Lakshmi marvels that she cannot "manage one sentence that would help my sister understand that everything I did was for her own good." But even as Lakshmi struggles to articulate herself to her closest family, she thrives in communicating with medical patients, particularly rural men and women who distrust Western medicine. In fact, when skilled doctor Jay Kumar sets up a practice designed to help rural patients, he cannot get through to the people he serves until Lakshmi helps him "translate" his concerns. These two contrasting storylines show that even the most caring people (like Dr. Kumar and Lakshmi) are unable to actually make a difference unless they communicate with the people they are trying to help. Only when Lakshmi learns to be honest with Radha does her sister ask for the assistance she so desperately needs, and only when Dr. Kumar starts to incorporate Lakshmi's customs into his practice can he share a common medical language with his patients. In focusing on these healers, therefore, The Henna Artist demonstrates that no amount of bodily knowledge is complete without verbal, emotional understanding—and that great care depends on great communication. - Theme: Creativity vs. Possession. Description: Lakshmi Shastri, the gifted craftswoman at the center of Alka Joshi's The Henna Artist, prides herself on her unusually detailed and sophisticated designs. In fact, her life's goal is to own a house of her own design, complete with a terrazzo floor that permanently enshrines some of her most elaborate artistry. But as Lakshmi strives to turn her artwork into wealth, she finds that she is compromising the community and healing that drew her to such art in the first place. Sure enough, Lakshmi stops providing bespoke treatments and henna masterpieces and instead becomes a conduit through which the women of Jaipur high society can compete for gossip and status. As Lakshmi sinks further into debt and despair, her oldest friend and collaborator Malik has to intervene, showing her that she does not need to own her work to appreciate its beauty and ambition—and forcing her to sell her house, leaving behind her intricate floor and the materially focused culture of Jaipur's elite. As Lakshmi learns the danger of material obsessions, The Henna Artist shows that art and creativity can be corrupted by a desire for wealth and ownership. It follows, then, that the titular henna is the purest form of art because it is designed to heal and then to vanish, an "ephemeral" kind of creation that can be loved but never possessed. - Climax: Lakshmi must help her 13-year-old sister Radha deal with an unexpected pregnancy, while still keeping the family's reputation intact. - Summary: Eight years ago, the British colonial government formally granted India its independence. Now, in the small village of Ajar in the Indian state of Rajasthan, 13-year-old Radha has just lost both her parents. Radha knows she has a sister who abandoned her family and husband just a few months before Radha was born; with no options left, Radha is determined to find this mysterious family member. The novel jumps to Jaipur, where the buzz of the independence movement still hangs in the air. In Jaipur, sought-after henna artist Lakshmi and her assistant Malik decorate the hands of the city's wealthiest ladies. In addition to her henna business, Lakshmi supplies cotton bark sachets to philandering husbands, helping them prevent unwanted pregnancies with their mistresses. Lakshmi is particularly close with her client Parvati Singh, and Parvati's husband Samir—she hopes to help arrange their son Ravi's marriage and to use the Singh's connections to gain entrance to the palace of Jaipur. After living in Jaipur for 10 years, Lakshmi has almost enough money to build her house (complete with her custom-designed terrazzo floor), though the project is sending her into some debt. But everything changes when Hari, the husband Lakshmi abandoned years ago, shows up in Jaipur unannounced. Crazier still, Hari has brought Radha, the sister Lakshmi never knew she had. Hari tries to reunite with Lakshmi, but Lakshmi reveals that he was physically and emotionally abusive; even though abandoning him brought shame to her parents, severing those relationships, Lakshmi could not endure his violence any longer. Lakshmi gives Hari money in the hopes that he will leave her alone, but after Radha tells Lakshmi that both their parents have died, Lakshmi agrees to take Radha in. Lakshmi tries to teach Radha the nuances of Jaipur social norms, particularly when it comes to "class and caste." Radha bonds with Malik and Kanta, Lakshmi's youngest client, and she excels at mixing Lakshmi's henna pastes, though Radha does not know what to make of Lakshmi's work with the cotton sachets. For her part, Lakshmi admires Radha's bravery and intelligence but is worried about Radha's sexual naivete, especially when Kanta introduces Radha to Western movies and romance novels. Parvati throws a lavish henna party, and Lakshmi brings Radha along as her assistant. During the party, Samir pulls Lakshmi into the Singh library and gives her a gold watch, embossed with a picture of a henna artist and the letter "L." Later that night, Parvati accosts Lakshmi, explaining that Ravi and Radha had been playing inappropriately; Parvati also informs Lakshmi that she saw her in the library with Samir. Once they get home, Lakshmi forbids Radha for coming along on future henna appointments. Radha is wounded, and the two sisters begin to grow apart: Lakshmi is always busy with her clients, while Radha starts spending more and more time with a now-pregnant Kanta. After Samir makes an introduction to the palace, Lakshmi begins working for the maharani Indira and her daughter-in-law, Latika. Latika is depressed because her husband, fearing that any biological heir might overthrow him, has sent their son away to England; for weeks, Latika has refused to speak or eat solid food. Over the course of many regular appointments, Lakshmi creates an elaborate design for Latika's hands, helping her regain her voice and appetite in the process. As a thank you, Latika invites Radha to attend the Maharani School for Girls, tuition-free. Lakshmi is grateful, though she is also struck by the limited degree of freedom afforded to even Jaipur's most powerful women. A few months pass, and Lakshmi is still behind on the payments for her house—so eventually, despite her hesitation, she asks Samir to loan her some money. As Lakshmi is leaving Samir's office, she runs into Parvati…and the next day, Parvati cancels the rest of her henna appointments. On the evening that Lakshmi, Radha and Malik are scheduled to move in, it dawns on Lakshmi that her little sister is pregnant. Initially, Lakshmi suspects Hari of abusing her sister on the journey from Ajar to Jaipur, but Hari explains that he is a different person from the one Lakshmi knew all those years ago; now, he tries to help abused nautch women (sex workers). Eventually, Radha reveals to Kanta and Lakshmi that the real father of her baby is Ravi. Radha expects Ravi to marry her, so Kanta breaks the news—Lakshmi's matchmaking has been successful, and Ravi has already agreed to marry a wealthy girl named Sheela Sharma. In a panic, Lakshmi goes to the house of Samir's mistress, Geeta, in the hopes of finding Samir there. Before she can tell Samir what has happened with Ravi and Radha, lust overtakes Lakshmi, and she and Samir have sex. When Lakshmi does explain the situation, Samir reacts poorly, blaming Radha and explaining that Ravi has impregnated other servant girls in the past. Lakshmi exits in a furious huff, and Geeta, aware that Lakshmi has just had sex with Samir, warns her never to come back. Lakshmi crafts a plan: Radha will accompany Kanta to Shimla, a city in the Himalayas, where Samir's friend Dr. Kumar will care for the two pregnant women. In the meantime, Lakshmi arranges for the palace to adopt Radha's baby, as a replacement for Latika's son in England. Radha does not want to give up her baby, and Lakshmi's refusal to let her keep it enrages her. Worse still, Lakshmi's clients begin canceling en masse, and she realizes that Parvati has been telling everyone that their henna artist is a thief. Weeks later, Lakshmi is nearly out of money; Malik begins to fret that his beloved "Auntie-Boss" has stopped eating and sleeping. One day, Parvati arrives at Lakshmi's front door, shocking them both. Parvati explains that Geeta told her about Lakshmi's tryst with Samir, and that Lakshmi has utterly humiliated her. Still, Parvati pays Lakshmi the money she owes for the marriage commission. That night, Lakshmi gets a letter from Radha—Kanta is in trouble, and Lakshmi needs to go to Shimla. When Lakshmi arrives, she learns that Kanta has lost her baby—and she will never be able to have children again. Radha goes into labor shortly after, and Lakshmi realizes that Radha should give her child to Kanta instead of to the palace. Dr. Kumar helps Lakshmi get out of her adoption contract with the maharani, and the two bond over their shared love of healing others. At first, Radha wants to stay on as Kanta's nurse, and Lakshmi tries to pay back her ever-growing debt on the house. But eventually, Malik and Dr. Kumar convince Lakshmi to sell her house and move to Shimla, where she will help Dr. Kumar grow his medical practice; it helps that Lakshmi and Kumar seem to be developing feelings for each other. Radha agrees to come along, and upon arriving in Shimla, Lakshmi reflects that 1,000 miles away from the place she was born, she is "finally home."

- Genre: Genre:Fantasy; Epic - Title: The Hobbit - Point of view: Point of View:Third person omniscient - Setting: Setting:Middle Earth - Character: Bilbo Baggins. Description: The protagonist of The Hobbit, Bilbo initially seems content with his peaceful life in hobbit-town, but Tolkien hints that he secretly desires adventure and excitement (as is his birthright from his notoriously adventurous grandfather Old Took). Over the course of the novel, Bilbo journeys to the Lonely Mountain with the dwarves, and discovers his talents for riddling, fighting, and burgling, and even finds a magical ring of invisibility, even as he continues to wish for his home. In the end, he learns to balance his love for peace and tranquility with heroism and adventurousness. - Character: Gandalf. Description: The old wizard who recruits Bilbo for a quest, Gandalf is enormously wise, resourceful, and helpful to the dwarves during their journey to the Lonely Mountain, frequently saving their lives. At the same time, he can be neglectful, leaving the group outside Mirkwood forest when they most need him. It's possible that Gandalf deliberately places Bilbo and the dwarves in danger, in order to encourage them to fight for themselves and develop their skills and independence. - Character: Thorin Oakenshield. Description: The leader of the thirteen dwarves journeying to the Lonely Mountain. Thorin is the descendant of the King Under the Mountain who lost his throne when Smaug came and ousted the dwarves from their home. He has great bravery and integrity, but his love for the treasure that was stolen from him and his people leads him behave stubbornly and selfishly even after he has won it back. - Character: Smaug. Description: A dragon who heard of the treasure amassed by the dwarves of The Kingdom Under the Mountain and then proceeded to attack and expel the dwarves from their former home, desolating the nearby city of men, Dale, in the process. Smaug is clever and exceedingly greedy. Like all the other greedy characters in the novel, Smaug is also solitary, and spends much of his time sleeping on his treasure. The loss of even a single item of treasure sends him into a rage. He is adept at spreading distrust among others, and his sly words do cause Bilbo to lose some trust in Thorin and the dwarves promises. Smaug is also vain, and it is his vanity that allows Bilbo to discover his weak point. - Character: The Elvenking. Description: The leader of the wood-elves, who imprisons Thorin and the dwarves and later marches to the Lonely Mountain to claim a part of the treasure after Smaug's death (the elves have long believed that the dwarves stole some of that treasure form the elves, though the dwarves believe the elves stole treasure form the dwarves). - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: Although Bilbo Baggins is "fully grown" at the beginning of The Hobbit, his adventures teach him to be brave, to take responsibility for himself and for others, and to develop skills he didn't know he had: in effect, to grow up. When Gandalf and the dwarves approach Bilbo with an offer to be their burglar, Bilbo is so satisfied with his life and his home that the mere thought of adventure is enough to irritate and even frighten him. Yet Tolkien gives clues that Bilbo, deep down, wants to go on quests after all: he's a descendant of the famously adventurous Took family, and seems to have inherited some of the Tooks' love for maps and quests. While Bilbo never explicitly says that he wants to go with the dwarves to the Lonely Mountain (he merely rushes after them, prodded by Gandalf), it's likely that he secretly, even subconsciously, wants to join them, realizing his inner potential for adventure.Along the way to the Lonely Mountains, Bilbo is placed in countless situations where he cannot rely on anyone else, and must learn to take care of himself. A particularly illuminating example of this phenomenon occurs when Bilbo falls off of Dori's shoulders, and must out-riddle Gollum and out-maneuver the goblins to escape from the Misty Mountains. The contrast between the way Bilbo enters the mountains (on someone's shoulders) and the way he leaves them (on his own, with a ring of invisibility to help him) couldn't be clearer: his experiences force him to become stronger, more independent, more powerful—to grow up. Later, when giant spiders capture Bilbo in Mirkwood forest, he adds other skills to his resume, using his sword to kill spiders and skillfully springing the dwarves from prison. By the time Bilbo reaches the Lonely Mountain, he's brave enough to sneak in Smaug's lair while the other dwarves hang back. Travel and danger have encouraged him to develop his bravery and cunning—skills of which he shows dim signs when Gandalf approaches him at the beginning of the novel.Yet, while Bilbo matures throughout The Hobbit, he doesn't entirely reject the life he made for himself before he met Gandalf. Late in the novel, he's still regretting leaving his hobbit-hole in the first place, and when the dwarves succeed in winning their treasure and defeating Smaug, he wants to return to hobbit-town. Bilbo grows up, but he doesn't forget where he comes from—a fitting message coming from The Hobbit, a children's book that people read long after they've grown up. - Theme: The Power of Language. Description: During The Hobbit, Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves confront countless dangers: spiders, goblins, wood-elves, wolves, a dragon, etc. To defend themselves, they use an equally vast number of weapons: knives, daggers, spells, fire, rocks, sticks. Yet one of the most important weapons that they use—and one of the most important skills Bilbo develops on his travels—is language. In the early chapters of the book, Bilbo exhibits almost no sophisticated command of language, staying largely silent while the dwarves and Gandalf discuss their plans to journey to the Lonely Mountain and reclaim their treasure. When he gets lost under the Misty Mountains, he's forced to use words to compete with Gollum, telling increasingly complicated riddles. While this episode is important in Bilbo's growth as a manipulator of language, it's important to recognize that he's still a novice—he only defeats Gollum by asking a "cheap" question, "What have I got in my pocket?", not by exhibiting any real creativity or skill with words.When giant spiders capture Bilbo and the dwarves in Mirkwood forest, Bilbo finally begins to use language with more skill, improvising elaborate songs to confuse the spiders and lure them away from the dwarves so that Bilbo can free them. After his exploits, Bilbo uses language to dub his sword Sting, a name that strikes fear into the hearts of the spiders. Bilbo uses language in a similar fashion when he confronts Smaug—instead of introducing himself as Bilbo Baggins, he calls himself a barrel-rider, a clue-finder, etc. Where before Bilbo renames his sword, here he renames himself.In The Hobbit, language is a weapon, capable of intimidating, confusing, and otherwise disarming one's enemies. But perhaps even more importantly, language is a tool for changing and understanding oneself. It's no coincidence that Bilbo renames himself as he becomes braver and more confident: with the power of naming, he makes his experiences a part of his personality—he doesn't just describe himself, he changes himself. - Theme: Greed, Trust, Fellowship. Description: Virtually every one of The Hobbit's primary characters—including both the heroes and the villains—is at least partially motivated by a desire for unnecessary material things. Smaug, the primary antagonist of the novel, is so greedy that he notices when Bilbo steals a single cup from his vast collection of treasure. (Tolkien notes that his anger is that of a rich man who's lost something he never uses.) The dwarves are struggling to reclaim what is rightfully theirs from Smaug, but when they succeed in their quest, it becomes clear that their love for treasure is almost as obsessive as Smaug's—notably, they refuse to use their riches to repair the town Smaug destroys, even though it is during its destruction that Bard kills Smaug, guaranteeing the dwarves their wealth. Similarly, the wood-elves who imprison Thorin and the other dwarves believe that they have a claim to some of the dwarves' treasure. Tolkien doesn't bother to clarify whether the dwarves or the elves are correct in this dispute—the point is that both sides are flawed by their greedy, irrational desire for things they don't need. Even Bilbo, who is largely indifferent to the dwarves' talk of glory and riches, shows occasional flashes of greed. Under the Misty Mountains, he pockets Gollum's ring without thinking twice about it, and later takes the Arkenstone for himself because he's afraid that the dwarves won't honor their promise to give him one-fourteen of their treasure. (It's also worth keeping in mind that Bilbo and dwarves are constantly in want of food, and when they eat, they eat huge feasts—while this isn't greed per se, it does suggest that it's natural to want things, and perhaps to want more than one needs.)If everyone is at least a little greedy, Tolkien seems to say, then the best they can do is try to limit their nature with reason and self-control. Bilbo may be the best example of how to overcome greed—though Thorin offers him one-fourteenth of the dwarves' treasure in return for his services, he's satisfied to take back a smaller portion, reasoning that it's enough to keep him satisfied for the rest of his life. Similarly, the dwarves, elves, and men ultimately overcome their greed by uniting together to defeat the wolves and goblins. On his deathbed, Thorin seems to renounce his former greed, saying that he's now traveling to a place (presumably, the afterlife) where this is no gold or treasure. Greed, then, is ultimately futile—compromise and personal sacrifice are more important for maintaining peace and building mutual prosperity (as is evident in the fact that back before Smaug the communities of Dale, the Kingdom under the Mountain, and the elves of Mirkwood traded together and developed prosperity and mutual connection by doing so). In fact, the novel seems to place greed in direct contrast to trust and cooperation, and every overwhelmingly greedy character lives in almost complete isolation: Smaug, Gollum, and, for a time near the end of the novel, Thorin. Looked at on a larger scale, the races of dwarves, men, and elves are also separated by greed and the mistrust sown by greed. It is only after the attacking armies of the dwarves force the dwarves, elves, and men to band together in fellowship against this common enemy that they are able to rebuild their communities and attain their former prosperity. - Theme: Heroism. Description: The Hobbitis a fantasy novel, and it contains many of the genre's traditional tropes: a quest, treasure, a dark forest, and even a dragon. With this in mind, it's worth asking who the hero—arguably the most important fantasy trope — ofThe Hobbitis, and how Tolkien defines heroism. Bilbo Baggins is the protagonist ofThe Hobbit, meaning that he's the default hero. In the early chapters of the book, Bilbo is cowardly and reluctant to participate in the dwarves' quest. Ironically, this makes Bilbo seem more heroic than ever—the "reluctant hero" is an old literary archetype (Moses and King Arthur are classic examples.). Also in these early chapters, Tolkien submits one possible definition of a hero: a larger-than-life person who excels at combat. Bilbo's memories of his ancient ancestor, a hobbit who slew a goblin, suggest that this is how Bilbo, if not Tolkien, thinks of heroism.Tolkien complicates this definition of heroism, however, as the story goes on. Heroism requires skill in combat, but also bravery, cleverness, and a talent for words. Characters who excel at only one of these things—Gollum, who excels at wordplay, the dwarves, who excel at combat, etc.—tend to fail in their aims; for instance, the dwarves are captured by spiders, their skill with swords useless. Although Bilbo is hardly a hero at the start of the book, he finds that he has many of the skills required for heroism as he and the dwarves travel to the Lonely Mountain. Ultimately, Bilbo develops a talent for both wordplay—he trades riddles with Gollum—and bravery—he alone is courageous enough to sneak into the Lonely Mountain while Smaug lives there. While he also shows some talent for combat, killing the spiders in Mirkwood forest, it's clear that Bilbo is not a great warrior—indeed, he largely hides during the Battle of the Five Armies.There seems to be no single character in The Hobbit who excels at every skill required to complete a quest. Bard, the archer who kills Smaug and goes on to lead the people of Esgaroth, excels at bravery and combat, but while he also shows some talent for words during his negotiations with Thorin, it's difficult to imagine him riddling his way out of the Misty Mountains, tricking Smaug into revealing his weak point, talking his way into Beorn's house, etc. Ultimately, the question of what makes a hero, or who best exemplifies heroism is less important to Tolkien than describing how characters cooperate with each other to fight evil and accomplish their goals. Thus, both Bilbo and Bard kill Smaug: Bilbo determines how to kill Smaug, and Bard uses the information to do the deed. It may be true that no single person is heroic in every sense of the word; thus, only when characters work together (as dwarves, elves, and men do in the Battle of the Five Armies) do their achievements become truly heroic. - Theme: Home and Birthright. Description: The desire and love for a home motivates most of the main characters in The Hobbit. Sometimes, the characters' desires for home contradict each other. For instance, Bilbo Baggins says at many points throughout his journey that he regrets ever leaving his home in hobbit-town, while the dwarves with whom he's embarking on his adventure seek to return to (and reclaim from Smaug) their home under the Lonely Mountain. In many cases, having home means having a claim to some position or material wealth. Thus, Thorin, the descendant of many dwarf kings, has a claim to his ancestors' treasure, which lies under the Lonely Mountain; similarly, Bard, the descendant of the lords of Dale, can claim lordship of Dale as his birthright.But having a birthright isn't only a privilege—it's a duty. To have a home, one must also be a fair and generous "host," treating one's guests, subjects, and property with respect. Most of the antagonists in The Hobbit —the three trolls, the goblins, Gollum—are ungracious hosts who refuse to entertain Bilbo and the dwarves during their long quest. Some of the other antagonists, such as the Master and Smaug, play the part of a good hosts but are actually doing so for the wrong reasons, like the Master (who's trying to stay in power by manipulating the crowd), or trying to lure travelers into a false sense of security, like Smaug (who tells Bilbo to take what he wants of the treasure). Yet even the dwarves become ungracious hosts once they regain their treasure and their home under the Lonely Mountain, refusing to help the wood-elves or the men whose town Smaug has destroyed. Thorin even becomes ungracious to his own subjects, condemning Bilbo and the twelve other dwarves to starve during a siege. As a result, Bilbo leaves the dwarves, and a war breaks out between men, elves, and dwarves. The desire for a home is a universal human feeling, so we sympathize with Bilbo and the dwarves because they feel this desire particularly strongly. But sometimes, this desire becomes too powerful, and leads the characters, such as the dwarves, to be ungracious hosts and overprotective of their home—to make of their home something to be owned rather than shared.In the end, Tolkien implies, having a home means loving it, but not too much. Bilbo is a good model for how to regard one's home—he loves his hobbit-hole, but he's willing to invite others into it and to travel far away from it, too. Bard provides a good example of how to treat one's birthright. Unlike the Master, he doesn't exploit his position as the lord of Dale; on the contrary, he fights to feed and shelter his people, eventually bringing great prosperity the town. - Climax: Climax:The Battle of the Five Armies - Summary: Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who lives in a large, comfortable underground house in the Shire and has no interest in adventures. One day, he encounters Gandalf, a wizard who knew Bilbo's scandalously adventurous grandfather. Though he's uncomfortable that Gandalf talks about Bilbo joining an adventure, Bilbo invites Gandalf to tea the next day. At tea, Gandalf brings with him thirteen dwarves, lead by Thorin Oakenshield, who are trying to reclaim their ancestral home and treasure under the Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug. Gandalf and the dwarves offer Bilbo one-fourteenth of their treasure in return for his serving as their burglar. Bilbo doesn't explicitly consent to this agreement, but he's excited by the dwarves' stories of treasure. The next day, Gandalf tells Bilbo that he must meet the dwarves at the local tavern; Bilbo rushes there, and finds himself traveling with Gandalf and the dwarves on their quest to the Lonely Mountain. Shortly thereafter, Gandalf goes missing, it starts to rain, and the dwarves see a light in the distance. Bilbo goes to investigate the light, and finds three trolls eating their supper. The trolls catch Bilbo, but he slips free; then, the trolls capture the thirteen dwarves. Gandalf imitates the sounds of the trolls' voices, leading them to fight for so long that the sun rises and turns them to stone. The dwarves free themselves and find two swords. Bilbo finds a large knife that will work as a sword for him, too. The group rests in the Elven city of Rivendell under the care of the elf-lord Elrond. While there they learn that they will be able to enter a secret passageway in the side of the Lonely Mountain on the first day of the dwarf New Year. They travel through the Misty Mountains, where they are all imprisoned by goblins, except for Gandalf who escapes. Bilbo and the dwarves are taken before the Great Goblin, but Gandalf reappears, slays the Great Goblin, and frees Bilbo and the dwarves. In the ensuing flight from the goblins, Bilbo falls down a cavern and loses consciousness. Bilbo reawakens in a dark cavern and finds a ring lying on the ground. Not long after he encounters a treacherous creature, Gollum, with whom he holds a riddle-telling competition: if Gollum wins, he eats Bilbo; if Bilbo wins, Gollum shows him the way out. Bilbo wins the competition, but Gollum goes to find his ring, which makes the wearer invisible, so that he can kill Bilbo. When Gollum discovers the ring is missing he is enraged and plans to kill Bilbo. But Bilbo accidentally puts on the ring and realizes that the ring makes him invisible when Gollum, searching for him, ends up rushing right past him. Bilbo follows Gollum out of the cave and eludes goblins to escape from the Misty Mountains. Bilbo reunites with Gandalf and the dwarves, who are impressed with his talent for deception and concealment. As they travel down from the mountains, they're forced to hide in some trees from some wargs (talking wolves); when a fire breaks out, Gandalf summons the giant eagles, who agree to take the group to the Carrock, where they stay with the shape-shifter Beorn. Gandalf reveals that he must leave Bilbo and the dwarves as they begin the next stage of their quest through the dangerous Mirkwood forest. Despite Gandalf and Beorn's advice to stay on the path at all costs, Bilbo and the dwarves are lured off the path by the sight of wood-elves eating a feast. When the group is then captured by giant spiders, Bilbo uses his ring to free himself, kill many spiders, and free the dwarves; unfortunately, angry wood-elves capture and imprison them all, except for Bilbo who is still invisible, shortly thereafter. Bilbo uses his ring to free his friends from their cells and transports them out of the forest via barrels, which the elves use to send wine in trade down the river to the human town of Lake-town. Bilbo and the dwarves arrive in Lake-town, where they're welcomed as heroes who will vanquish the dragon, Smaug, and bring prosperity to the cities of men once again. They travel to the Lonely Mountain, where the last ray of sunshine on the dwarf New Year reveals the keyhole to a secret passageway. Bilbo alone is brave enough to enter the mountain, and manages to sneak into Smaug's lair and steal a cup from the pile of treasure. Smaug is enraged. Later Bilbo sneaks again into Smaug's lair, but this time Smaug is only pretending to sleep: Bilbo speaks to Smaug in riddles, saying that he is a barrel-rider and learning in the process that Smaug has a weak point on his belly. Bilbo later gives this information to the dwarves, and to a talking thrush who overhears them. Smaug, during that same conversation, poisons Bilbo's mind with suspicion that the dwarves will not uphold their promise to give him one-fourteen of the treasure; when he raises his doubts to Thorin, Thorin insists that Bilbo can take whatever fourteenth of the treasure he wants. Bilbo secretly takes the Arkenstone, the most beautiful jewel in the dwarves' treasure. Interpreting Bilbo's self-given name of "barrel-rider" to mean that he has been sent by men, Smaug flies to Lake-town and devastates it. But as he does so, an archer named Bard, a descendant of the Lord of Dale (a city that used to thrive as a hub of trade of dwarven gold and crafts before Smaug arrived), learns from the thrush about Smaug's weak point, and uses the information to shoot and kill him with a black arrow that had long been in Bard's family line. News of Smaug's death spreads across Middle Earth, and the men led by Bard ally with the wood-elves and march to the Lonely Mountain to claim some of the treasure, as repayment for the destruction Smaug leveled against them. Thorin refuses these requests, and it seems fighting between men, elves, and dwarves is imminent. Eager to end this conflict, Bilbo secretly gives the Arkenstone to Bard and the elves; when Bilbo admits what he's done, Thorin expels him from the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo reunites with Gandalf, who has returned from his other business. Thorin summons his cousin, Dain, to help him defend their regained city and treasure. At the same time, goblins and wolves ride to the Lonely Mountain, eager to avenge the Great Goblin's death. Gandalf encourages men, dwarves, and elves to from an alliance, and at the Battle of the Five Armies, they unite against the goblins and wolves, defeating them with the help of Beorn and the Eagles. Bilbo uses his ring to hide during the fight. When he meets up with the survivors of the battle, he finds that Thorin has been fatally wounded. Thorin tells Bilbo that he regrets expelling him. Bilbo returns to hobbit-town with two chests of treasure (having given up the claim to the even larger one-fourteenth that had originally been promised to him), enough to make him a wealthy man. A year later, he's visited by Gandalf and one of the dwarves, Balin, who tell him that Bard is now the master of Lake-town, goblins have been largely killed off, and dwarves, elves, and men now coexist peacefully.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Hollow of the Three Hills - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A hollow that lies at the base of three hills - Character: The Young Woman. Description: The young woman arrives in the titular hollow between the three hills after having abandoned her family, and she seeks audience with the old crone in order to see how her loved ones are faring without her. Though the young woman is the story's protagonist, she is a morally ambiguous and rather mysterious figure. The narration reveals very little about her personality or motives beyond the fact that she feels intense guilt over her actions and is willing to sacrifice her life to the crone in order to lift the weight of her shame. However, despite the young woman's wrongdoing, the narration suggests that her self-sacrificial attitude is unnecessary and that her guilt is causing her to act irrationally. This is most evident in the young woman's naïve willingness to trust the old crone, whose visions the young woman takes at face value despite the crone's obviously malevolent nature. Over the course of the story, the young woman becomes increasingly distressed by the crone's disturbing revelations. Upon learning in the third and final vision that her child has died in her absence, the young woman becomes overwhelmed by her shame and perishes at the crone's feet. The narration treats the young woman's death as a tragic consequence of guilt and as a victory for the evil crone. - Character: The Old Crone. Description: The old crone is an ancient and wicked sorceress who meets with the young woman in the titular hollow between the three hills. The young woman has betrayed her family, and the old crone—at the young woman's request—grants her three visions, each one detailing how this betrayal has torn her family apart. The old crone is a purely evil an unholy force, depicted using prayers "that were not meant to be acceptable in Heaven" and taking several opportunities to taunt the young woman over her grief. Due to the old crone's blatantly malevolent nature and the fact that she refers to the young woman's ordeal and ultimate death as "a sweet hour's sport," the truthfulness of the old crone's "visions" is questionable at best. - Theme: Guilt and Shame. Description: "The Hollow of the Three Hills" tells the story of an unnamed young woman burdened with guilt after having abandoned her family for unspecified reasons. Desperate to learn how her loved ones are faring without her, the woman seeks audience with a wicked old crone in a hollow between three hills and willingly trades her life in exchange for three visions. These visions detail how the woman's betrayal has affected those she left behind, each one more harrowing than the last. After the final and most devastating vision, in which the young woman learns that her child has died in her absence, she herself dies at the crone's feet, fulfilling the terms of their agreement. Through this grim and fatalistic narrative, in which an otherwise empathetic and self-sacrificing young woman chooses to end her own life rather than live with the guilt of her failures, Hawthorne highlights shame as a destructive and ineffective feeling that disproportionately punishes those who do not necessarily deserve it and ultimately allows evil to triumph. "The Hollow of the Three Hills" presents guilt not just as an emotion, but also as a form of punishment, self-appointed or otherwise. Hawthorne achieves this through his depiction of the titular hollow itself, which acts as a symbolic representation of these two concepts combined. In the story's opening, the omniscient narrator describes the young woman as having been "smitten with an untimely blight in what should have been the fullest bloom of her years," the "untimely blight" in question being her shame over her past. Meanwhile, decaying tree trunks are scattered around the hollow itself, one of which was once a "majestic oak." This suggests that the hollow, much like the woman, has been cut down in its "fullest bloom," symbolically tying the location to the woman's guilty conscience. Meanwhile, the hollow may also act as a punishment, and more specifically a representation of a Christian Hell. Hawthorne signifies this through the use of twisted religious imagery—for instance, the old crone's evil "prayers"—as well as the surrounding three hills. Though these hills have several potential symbolic meanings, given Hawthorne's recurring exploration of religion in his works, it is possible to interpret them as a representation of the Holy Trinity. Under this reading, the hollow's position beneath the hills, shrouded in complete darkness, conjures an image of condemnation from God. With these symbolic meanings in mind, the woman's voluntary choice to enter the hollow and engage with the old crone can be read as her succumbing to her own shame and subsequently choosing to punish herself for her actions. However, the story implies that the woman's intense feelings of guilt may not be entirely rational, rendering her self-confinement and ultimate sacrifice in the hollow meaningless. Hawthorne implies this irrationality through the old crone. While it is easy to take the crone's visions at face value, Hawthorne makes several suggestions that call her reliability into question, the first and most obvious of which being that she is explicitly stated to be an "evil woman." Furthermore, the crone conducts her magic by drawing a cloak over the young woman's face, both literally and figuratively pulling the wool over her eyes. However, despite the implicitly wicked nature of the old crone, the young woman trusts her word completely and judges herself according to the crone's ambiguously truthful visions. Through the young woman's naïve willingness to believe this "decrepit" woman, Hawthorne seems to suggest that those suffering with a guilty conscience become blinded by their shame, willing believe the worst possible consequences of their actions have come to pass, no matter how unreliable the source. Ultimately, Hawthorne does not portray the young woman's death as a fitting punishment for her crimes, but instead as a victory for the forces of evil. Hawthorne highlights the story as a tragedy through his portrayal of the young woman. Though she is a morally complex character, her appearance and personality paint her as the only real source of goodness in the hollow. While she abandoned her family, she displays sincere concern for their wellbeing, so much so that she is willing to sacrifice herself to see them once more. Additionally, in stark contrast to the death and gloom of the hollow, the opening paragraph describes her as being "graceful in form and fair of feature," the emphasis on her fairness highlighting her as a metaphorical light in the darkness. With the young woman's death, this light is extinguished, and the wicked crone expresses joy at this fact, proclaiming that the woman's ordeal has been a "sweet hour's sport." This final line affirms Hawthorne's stance that the young woman's self-condemnation is no cause for celebration, but instead a victory for malevolent forces. Overall, through its depiction of a morally complex character who has indeed done wrong, but who becomes blinded by her own shame and dies tragically, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" presents itself as a cautionary tale, warning its readers against the dangers of needless self-punishment and asking them to consider the irrational and often destructive nature of shame. - Theme: Women and Social Expectation. Description: In "The Hollow of the Three Hills," the protagonist, an unnamed young woman, feels immense guilt over abandoning her family and faces harsh criticism from others for her inability to perform her duties as a daughter, wife, and mother. This story of a woman punished for her failure to act the way society demands is reflective of 19th-century attitudes towards women and in particular addresses the concept of the "separate spheres." A patriarchal ideology that rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, the theory of the separate spheres claimed that in an ideal world, men should hold power over the "public" sphere (which entailed paid labor, law, and politics), while women should concern themselves with the "domestic" sphere (which included housework and childcare). The young woman's failure to uphold the standards of her gender and her subsequent exile acts as a representation of the era's judgmental attitudes towards women who attempted to break free of their assigned "sphere." Throughout the story, Hawthorne suggests that society does not judge people (and in particular women) based upon their own personal merits, but instead values them exclusively for the gendered roles they are expected to perform. The narrative demonstrates this point through the characters' names—or, more specifically, the distinct lack thereof. In choosing to leave the story's cast unnamed, Hawthorne strips his characters of personal identity and consequently reduces them to the roles they perform. This is most evident in the unnamed protagonist, whom the narrator and other characters refer to as "young woman," "daughter," "wife," and "mother"—all implicitly gendered terms which define the woman not by her traits, but by her femininity and expected functions within the domestic sphere. In stripping the young woman of any real identity beyond her gender, Hawthorne suggests that in the eyes of 19th-century America, this is all that matters: like a proper name, the woman's character beyond this is just an irrelevant detail that need not be included. Having emphasized the prevalence of strict gender roles in American culture, Hawthorne then goes on to suggest that Western society looks down upon and punishes those who reject the responsibilities of their assigned "sphere," considering these people to be guilty of a moral failing. During the old crone's third and final vision, in which the young woman witnesses the funeral of her own child, the gathered mourners explicitly state this, whispering among themselves that the young woman has "sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die." This reference to sin affirms the 19th-century stance that those who challenge their biological role are committing a crime against their own nature and are thus deserving of punishment.  Furthermore, the woman implies that her community has exiled her for her infraction. While it is true that she initially abandoned her family of her own volition, she states that she has now been "cut off forever" from her loved ones, despite wishing to see them once more. This would suggest that the woman's banishment to the hollow is not entirely self-imposed, and that it is indicative of the way in which society casts aside women who fail to perform their duties. However, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" is not unequivocally critical of the separate spheres. The story's ultimate stance on the issue comes into question primarily due to its protagonist. Though the young woman often appears in a favorable light, assuming that the old crone's visions are true, the woman's betrayal did indeed tear her family apart, resulting in her husband's confinement to a madhouse and the her own child's death. This suggests that there is some truth to the notion that when a woman fails to perform her duties, the "home and heart [is] made desolate," and it throws the domestic sphere into chaos. However, Hawthorne does appear sympathetic towards the woman, and he treats her death as a tragic victory for the evil old crone nonetheless. Additionally, the woman never reveals the true motivations underpinning her departure. These facts combined would suggest that the young woman is an intentionally ambiguous character, and that Hawthorne expects his readers to decide for themselves whether the woman is truly deserving of her fate, or if she has been unfairly and prematurely judged by a biased social system. Ultimately, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" is a reflection of the era's attitudes towards gender, especially relating to the depersonalization of women under the theory of the separate spheres. In his depiction of a morally ambiguous female protagonist who has caused chaos by abandoning her family—but who is sympathetic nevertheless—Hawthorne invites his readers to consider the immense social pressure placed upon women to fulfill a specific role, and he suggests that while this role may be integral to the fabric of society, people should not condemn those who cannot perform their duties, but instead offer them sympathy. - Theme: The Triumph of Evil. Description: "The Hollow of the Three Hills" presents the story of a young woman who, out of desperation and shame, strikes an unholy deal with an "ill-favored" and "decrepit" old crone. This agreement between the two leads to the young woman's untimely death, and in the story's closing lines the crone celebrates the woman's demise, proclaiming their transaction to have been a "sweet hour's sport." Through this pessimistic narrative, in which no character is truly blameless and the forces of evil ultimately triumph, it appears that Hawthorne is critiquing the notion of transcendentalism, a philosophical movement originating in the early 19th century which suggested that humans, when removed from societal influence, are innately good. Through this exaggeratedly cynical story of a woman succumbing to malevolent forces, Hawthorne dismisses these notions of inherent goodness as overly optimistic. In "The Hollow of the Three Hills," Hawthorne critiques the transcendentalist idea of intrinsic human goodness by subverting the movement's primary narrative, which stated that individuals could find faith and redemption by shrugging off the corrupting power of modern civilization and returning instead to the purifying presence of nature. The young woman's journey, in which she leaves her old life behind and turns to the hollow in search of closure, directly mirrors this narrative. However, instead of reaching spiritual fulfillment in the nature of the hollow, as transcendentalism would imply, the young woman instead encounters nothing but evil and corruption. Hawthorne highlights this point through his use of twisted religious imagery. Where transcendentalists believed that they could find God through nature, the young woman instead finds a pool once used by a "Power of Evil" for an "impious baptismal rite," as well as the old crone, who recites a "prayer that was not meant to be acceptable in Heaven." In describing these blasphemous rituals, Hawthorne paints the natural world not as a source of innate goodness, but as a refuge of the unholy and occult. The story further stresses this idea of nature as a source of corruption when the young woman kneels at the old crone's feet and the "border of her garment [is] dipped into the pool." In having the young woman touch the same waters once used for "impious" baptisms, Hawthorne implies that rather than finding faith on her journey to the hollow, she has instead become tainted by evil.  Having now firmly established that there is no such thing as innate natural goodness, Hawthorne goes on to assert the existence of innate and unconquerable evil. The story reflects this attitude through its depiction of light and shadow, representing good and evil, respectively. Despite the story taking place at sunset, the hollow itself remains permanently shrouded in darkness, the narrator stating that while "the golden skirts of day were yet lingering upon the hills […] deep shades obscured the hollow and the pool, as if sombre night were rising thence to overspread the world." The hollow's seeming resistance to light paints the location as a permanent and unmovable monument to evil. Meanwhile, the young woman, whom Hawthorne emphasizes for her "fair" and "pale" complexion, acts as the one source of light in the hollow. However, contrary to the transcendentalist belief that even the smallest ray of light can penetrate the darkness, the young woman dies at the hands of the old crone, once more leaving the hollow in complete shadow, and ultimately demonstrating Hawthorne's view that evil can easily overpower goodness. Overall, "The Hollow of the Three Hills" is a reactionary criticism of the transcendentalist philosophers of the era, whose sincere belief in human virtue Hawthorne paints as naivety, incompatible with the grim realities of life. Through the pervasive darkness of the hollow and victory of the old crone, Hawthorne instead portrays a world in which evil is a permanent and inevitable facet of life. - Climax: The young woman witnesses a vision of her own child's funeral before dying at the old crone's feet. - Summary: As the October sun sets, a beautiful young woman and a withered old crone meet at an appointed time in a darkened hollow between three hills. The old crone asks that the young woman state her business quickly, as they can only remain here for one hour. The young woman states that she is a stranger to this land, but that it does not matter where she comes from. She is here because she has abandoned her loved ones, and she's now cut off from them forever. Unable to rid herself of the guilt, she has come to the hollow to ask about their welfare. The old crone promises that the young woman will receive the information she seeks before the sun sets, and the young woman agrees to do the old crone's bidding, even though doing so will certainly kill her. With their agreement made, the young woman lies with her head on the old crone's knees. The crone draws a cloak over the young woman's face and begins to mutter a dark incantation. Soon, the young woman begins to hear sounds. Though initially indistinct, they become clearer and clearer, until eventually she can make out an entire scene: a ticking clock, the roar of a fire, and the despondent voices of a man and a woman. The man and woman speak sorrowfully of their missing daughter, who has brought a shame upon their family that will follow them until the day they die. They also speak of a second, more recent misfortune, but their voices fade in the wind. The young woman finds the vision humiliating, but there is more to come. Once again, the crone draws her cloak over the young woman's face and begins her prayer. Soon, the young woman hears a second scene, in which chains rattle and a cacophony of voices shriek, laugh, and sob in unison. Eventually, the young woman can make out the voice of a man who speaks desperately to anyone who will listen about his wife, who betrayed her wedding vows and abandoned her home. However, his voice is quickly drowned out by the screams and shouts of the people around him, and their collective voices once more fade into the wind. The old crone asks if the young woman ever expected that there would be so much joy in a madhouse. The young woman responds that there is joy but also misery. The old crone states that there is one last vision remaining. For a third and final time, she covers the young woman's face and begins her incantation. The young woman now hears the mournful ringing of a church bell, which grows increasingly loud until she can distinguish the sounds of a funeral procession, led by a priest reading burial rites. Though the gathered mourners do not speak aloud, there are whisperings of a daughter who abandoned her parents, a wife who betrayed her husband, and a mother who left her child to die. With this final vision done, the old crone attempts to awaken the young woman, but she is no longer moving. The old crone chuckles to herself.

- Genre: Short Story, Realism - Title: The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A coal mining town in England - Character: Mabel Pervin. Description: Mabel Pervin, the story's main female character, is the daughter of the deceased horse-dealer Joseph Pervin and the sister of Joe Pervin, Fred Henry Pervin, and Malcolm Pervin. Mabel's mother, whom she greatly loved, died when Mabel was 14; when her father married another woman for her money, Mabel was wounded. When the story begins, Mabel and her brothers have learned that due to their dead father's debt, they must vacate the family home. Mabel, humiliated by poverty and preoccupied with her dead mother, resists her brothers' attempts to pack her off to live as an impoverished dependent in their other sister's household. That Mabel experiences greater desperation than her brothers at the family's economic ruin illustrates how women had fewer opportunities to support themselves than men did at the time the story takes place. Instead of submitting to her brothers' plans, Mabel cleans her mother's grave a final time and impulsively attempts to drown herself in a pond. When the town doctor Jack Fergusson saves her from drowning and strips her out of her wet clothes, Mabel becomes convinced that he must be in love with her and makes sexual overtures to him. Though Fergusson yields to Mabel's advances and agrees that he loves her, Mabel becomes suddenly ashamed of her nakedness and doubtful of Fergusson's feelings for her. The story ends on an ambivalent note, with Mabel both afraid that Fergusson does not desire her and afraid that he does. Thus, the story suggests that Mabel's shame about her sexuality prevents her from fully living her life. - Character: Jack Fergusson. Description: A doctor in the town where the Pervin family lives, Jack Fergusson is a friend of Fred Henry Pervin and love interest of Mabel Pervin. His patients are primarily physical laborers, coal miners, and iron workers; he works at a surgery in town and makes house-calls to his patients, whose lower-class company he finds invigorating. Fergusson first appears in the story visiting the Pervin family in their home; he speaks mainly with Fred Henry and barely addresses Mabel, though he watches her. On his way to the surgery, Fergusson sees Mabel cleaning her mother's grave and feels energized by the sight of her face and eyes. Later, while walking between house-calls, he witnesses Mabel trying to drown herself in a pond. Though he cannot swim, he wades in, tows her out of the water, carries her into the empty Pervin house, and strips her out of her wet clothes in front of the kitchen fire. When Mabel regains consciousness and realizes what has happened, she becomes convinced that Fergusson is in love with her and begins kissing his knees. Initially, Fergusson, who believes that doctors ought to rise above ordinary physical experiences like love and lust, reacts with horror. When he realizes that Mabel's will to live depends on his reciprocating her passion, however, he gives in to his latent attraction to her and declares his love. Like Mabel, however, Fergusson finds sexuality shameful and so tries to legitimate his connection with her by proposing marriage at the end of the story. - Character: Joe Pervin. Description: The oldest son of deceased horse-dealer Joseph Pervin, Joe Pervin is brother to Fred Henry Pervin, Malcolm Pervin, and Mabel Pervin. He and his siblings are losing their home due to their dead father's debts. As the story begins, he asks Mabel what she plans to do with herself but does not really care about the answer. Because he has plans to marry and get a job from his father-in-law, Joe feels comparatively economically secure. Stupid and sensual, Joe cares more about losing the family's horses, with which he identifies, than about his sister; he represents humanity's primal instinct for life in contrast with Mabel's instinct for death. - Character: Fred Henry Pervin. Description: The second oldest of horse-dealer Joseph Pervin's sons, Fred Henry Pervin is brother to Joe Pervin, Malcolm Pervin, and Mabel Pervin. He is also friends with the town doctor Jack Fergusson. Of all Mabel's brothers, Fred Henry is most insistent that she go to stay with their other sister after the Pervins lose their house. His behavior suggests concern for Mabel but also a sexist desire to control her. He himself plans to travel to Northampton, a manufacturing town, presumably to seek employment. Fred Henry's mobility and prospects after the family's economic disaster, in contrast with Mabel's despair, illustrate how men had more options for supporting themselves at the time the story was written. - Character: Malcolm Pervin. Description: The youngest of horse-dealer Joseph Pervin's sons, Malcolm Pervin is brother to Joe Pervin, Fred Henry Pervin, and Mabel Pervin. A cheerful young man, Malcolm is leaving the family home to catch a train at the beginning of the story, which suggests he has somewhere to go and thus better prospects than his sister Mabel. His prospects show that at the time "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" was written, men had more opportunities, even in the face of financial ruin, than women did. - Character: Joseph Pervin. Description: Joseph Pervin is father to Mabel Pervin, Joe Pervin, Fred Henry Pervin, and Malcolm Pervin. An uneducated man, Joseph Pervin ran a horse-dealing business that was initially successful but began to fail toward the end of his life. Widowed by the death of his children's mother, he married a second time for money, but his second wife's fortune was not enough to save his business. He died leaving his children in debt. - Theme: Life and Death. Description: In "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," humans have an instinct that drives them to live and fulfill their basic needs: to work, to have relationships with others, and to have sex. But when their life instinct finds no outlet, it turns on itself and becomes a death instinct. As the story opens, the children of horse-dealer Joseph Pervin are losing their family home due to their dead father's debts. When the oldest Pervin brother, Joe, sees a groom leading away the last of the Pervins' horses by a rope, he compares himself to them; in his plans to marry and get a job, he is like a horse "go[ing] into harness." This comparison suggests both Joe's life instinct, his desire to survive even after financial disaster, and the channeling of that instinct into the socially approved outlets of employment and marriage. By contrast, Joe's sister Mabel Pervin lacks outlets for her basic desires. She used to serve as housekeeper for her brothers, but since the siblings must vacate the family home, she is about to lose even that employment. The two people she definitely loved, her mother and father, have died. From the story's beginning, Mabel's seems to be losing her will to live. The narration notes that she does not "share the same life as her brothers," and in contrast to their talking and joking, she remains almost completely silent, unresponsive, and passive, as if she is already a corpse. The only activity she seems to enjoy is cleaning her mother's grave, a morbid expression of her attraction to the "world of death" in the absence of living people for whom she can express her love. Due to the frustration of Mabel's instinct to live, her lack of opportunities for work and love, she develops an instinct to die instead. Without thinking about it, she tries to drown herself in a pond. Tellingly, when the doctor Jack Fergusson saves her from drowning, Mabel comes to believe he is in love with her: life and love are so linked in her experience that she ignores the possibility that he felt professional or moral obligations to save her in favor of a romantic interpretation. Moreover, Mabel's sexual and romantic connection with Fergusson seems immediately to banish her suicidal impulse. By posing Fergusson's love as the cure for Mabel's suicidality, "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" suggests that love and meaningful relationships are the most powerful forces that drive our instinct to live. - Theme: Marriage, Sexuality, and Shame. Description: In "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," marriage is a mere economic arrangement, whereas human sexuality is a life-affirming force. Yet due to the characters' shame about their sexuality, they attempt unsuccessfully to contain sexuality's power within marriage. Both the first two mentions of marriage in the story represent it as an economic and not a romantic act. The female protagonist's father, Joseph Pervin, remarries after his first wife dies because his horse-dealing business is doing badly and he needs his second wife's money. After Joseph Pervin dies, leaving his children in debt, his oldest son Joe decides to marry because his future father-in-law can get him a job. In both cases, the men's motives for marrying are financial, not sexual or romantic. In contrast to this cold-blooded focus on money, the main characters Mabel Pervin and Jack Fergusson are physically attracted to one another. Fergusson, worn down by work as a doctor, feels revived by remembering Mabel's face and eyes. When Mabel, seeing no future for herself due to her family's debt, attempts suicide by drowning, Fergusson rescues and resuscitates her. Mabel, for her part, begins frantically kissing Fergusson's knees when she realizes that he has saved her. The story thus clearly suggests that, in contrast to the mere economic arrangement of marriage, sexual attraction is a life-saving force: Fergusson's attraction to Mabel revives him, and in turn he saves her life. Yet Mabel and Fergusson's shame about their sexuality prevents them from embracing its life-saving force. When Mabel becomes aware, after Fergusson has saved her from the pond, that he has had to strip her out of her wet clothes, she feels intense shame and begins trying to get away from him on the pretext of fetching them dry clothes. Similarly, Fergusson feels pain and shame at the thought that anyone should know that he feels love and sexual attraction. At the end of the story, Mabel's shame overwhelms her, and she begins criticizing herself to Fergusson, suggesting that he could never want to love her. Fergusson attempts to resolve the problem of shame by promising to marry Mabel. Yet marriage, a mere economic arrangement according to the story, cannot actually contain sexuality or banish shame; both characters remain terrified of what has happened between them. Thus the problem of Mabel and Fergusson's shame and sexual attraction remains unresolved at the end of the story. - Theme: Gender and Poverty. Description: In "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," both men and women are vulnerable to poverty, but the story suggests that women are more vulnerable than men because they have fewer options for supporting themselves. The story begins after the death of horse-dealer Joseph Pervin, who has left his children in so much debt that they are losing the family house. Each Pervin brother, though devastated by the loss of their home and family business, has plans. Joe, the oldest, will marry and get a job from his father-in-law. Fred Henry, the next oldest, will travel to Northampton, a manufacturing town; although the story does not explicitly state why Fred Henry is going to Northampton, the historical association of the town with manufacturing suggests that he is seeking employment. Once again, the story does not explicitly state the plans of the youngest brother, Malcolm, but as the story begins, he is about to catch a train. Each Pervin brother, then, has plans and somewhere to go. They will be able to find work, support themselves, and get on with their lives. By contrast, their sister Mabel Pervin is more vulnerable to their family's financial disaster. Having managed the servants in the family's large household for ten years prior to the disaster, she loses her domestic authority and her sense of safety when the family can no longer afford servants. Although her brothers jokingly suggest that she take various jobs, such as servant or nurse, they mainly urge her to go live with their sister Lucy as an impoverished dependent. Mabel feels so oppressed by her lack of options and so ashamed of her poverty that she attempts suicide; only a physical rescue and an offer of marriage from the doctor Jack Fergusson seem to promise her a social future, by putting her under the protection of a new man. In this way, the story suggests that as long as women are economically dependent on men and discouraged from seeking work, they will be more vulnerable to poverty and financial disaster than men are. - Theme: Physical Labor vs. Professionalism. Description: In "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," upper-class professions divorce people from physicality and primal desires, whereas physical labor is a source of vitality. Early in the story, the doctor Jack Fergusson goes to visit the Pervin family. When one Pervin brother, Fred Henry, notices that Fergusson has a cold, another Pervin brother, Joe, bizarrely implies that doctors shouldn't get colds lest they frighten their patients. The implication that doctors shouldn't get sick, though sickness is an ordinary physical experience, suggests that professionals such as doctors should rise above their physicality. Similarly, when Fergusson falls in love with Mabel Pervin, he feels profoundly embarrassed that he, a doctor, should be experiencing love and lust. Again, the characters in the story seem to believe that professional-class people should not be subject to ordinary physical life experiences such as sickness or lust. In contrast with his lifeless professionalism, Fergusson derives vitality from spending time with his working-class patients and from the difficult, physical labor of saving Mabel from drowning in a pond. Thus "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" represents cerebral professions like medicine as lifeless and enervating, whereas physical labor puts people in touch with their bodies and their vitality. - Climax: Jack Fergusson gives way to his love for Mabel Pervin. - Summary: The Pervin brothers and their sister Mabel have just learned that their family has been financially ruined after the death of their horse-dealer father, Joseph Pervin. Sitting at breakfast, they try and fail to discuss their plans. One brother, Joe, asks Mabel what she will do. Then the brothers hear hooves and watch through the window as the family's draught horses are taken. Joe feels hopeless as he watches them, though he has plans to marry and get a job from his father-in-law. Another brother, Fred Henry, asks Mabel whether she'll go and stay with their sister. Joe and the youngest brother Malcolm jokingly propose jobs for her. Mabel ignores them. Fred Henry implies that if Mabel does not go to her sister's, she will end up homeless. Jack Fergusson, a doctor in town, comes to visit. When Fergusson asks Fred Henry what's going on, Fred Henry tells him the family must vacate their house. Mabel clears dishes from the table and leaves the room. Fergusson watches but does not speak to her. Malcolm leaves to catch a train, and Joe leaves by carriage. Alone together, Fergusson and Fred Henry declare they will miss each other. When Mabel returns to the room, Fergusson asks her whether she'll go and stay with her sister. Mabel says no. Fred Henry explodes, demanding to know what Mabel will do. Mabel, without answering, leaves. Mabel goes to clean her dead mother's grave. Fergusson, going about his errands as town doctor, spots her in the graveyard and feels energized by seeing her face and eyes. Later, walking between house-calls, Fergusson is standing on a hill over the Pervins' house when he sees Mabel walking through the fields toward a pond. She wades deep into the pond and disappears beneath the water. Fergusson runs to the pond. Though he cannot swim, he wades in after Mabel. Grabbing for her clothes, he loses his balance and falls into the water. Eventually he finds his feet, grabs Mabel's clothes, and tows her to shore. After resuscitating her, he carries her into the Pervins' house. In the empty house, Fergusson lays Mabel in front of the kitchen fire. He strips her out of her wet clothes and wraps her in blankets. When she revives, she asks him what she did. He explains that she attempted to drown herself. He wants to go change into dry clothes, but he feels strangely unable to leave her. Realizing she is naked beneath the blankets, Mabel asks who undressed her. Fergusson admits he did. Mabel asks him whether he loves her. Then, hugging his legs, she declares he does love her, kisses his knees, and tries to pull him down to the floor. Fergusson, scared yet stirred, resists her advances, but when he sees her beginning to question whether he does love her, he kneels and embraces her. She weeps; they kiss. When Fergusson asks her why she is crying, she becomes self-conscious and insists on going to get him some dry clothes. Mabel goes upstairs and tosses dry clothes down the stairs to Fergusson. He changes, realizes what time it is, and calls up to Mabel that he must return to the surgery. She comes downstairs in a nice dress and offers to make him tea. When he refuses, saying he must go, she seems to start questioning his love again and breaks down, declaring her own awfulness. Fergusson tries to comfort her by telling her that they'll marry and that he wants her, but Mabel seems terrified both by the idea that he doesn't want her and by the idea that he does.

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Hours - Point of view: Third Person Omniscient - Setting: Richmond, England; Los Angeles, California; New York City - Character: Clarissa Vaughan. Description: - Character: Laura Brown. Description: - Character: Virginia Woolf. Description: - Character: Richard/Richie. Description: - Character: Sally. Description: - Character: Louis. Description: - Character: Leonard. Description: - Character: Julia. Description: - Character: Dan. Description: - Character: Walter. Description: - Character: Kitty. Description: - Character: Evan. Description: - Character: Oliver St. Ives. Description: - Character: Ray. Description: - Theme: The Passage of Time. Description: - Theme: Suicide and Mental Health. Description: - Theme: Marriage, Relationships, and Personal Fulfillment. Description: - Theme: Reading and Writing. Description: - Climax: Richard dies by suicide. - Summary: One day near the beginning of World War II, Virginia Woolf leaves a note for her husband, Leonard, and sister, Vanessa. She then goes out to a river with stones in the pockets of her jacket to drown herself. Years later, two women (Laura and Clarissa) each deal with problems in their lives similar to those that the titular character Mrs. Dalloway faces in Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. The story shifts between three timelines, following Virginia's life in a suburb outside London in 1923 as she writes Mrs. Dalloway, Laura's life in Los Angeles in 1949 as she makes a cake for the birthday of her husband (Dan), and Clarissa's life near the turn of the millennium in New York City as she prepares a party before an awards ceremony for her friend and former lover, Richard (whose nickname for Clarissa is "Mrs. Dalloway"). Clarissa spends her morning buying flowers in preparation for Richard's party. Richard is a famous writer who is best known for his poetry, though he also wrote one long novel about a suicidal housewife. Many people interpret the novel as being inspired by Clarissa. Richard is about to receive an award called the Carrouthers prize, and Clarissa has organized a party beforehand. As Clarissa walks around New York City, she runs into some of her and Richard's mutual acquaintances, and she begins to think back to when she was in college and attempted a relationship with Richard while he was also in a relationship with Louis. The situation with didn't work out, and Richard and Louis spent many years together while Clarissa went on to live with a new partner named Sally, with whom she has a daughter (Julia). Now, Richard has left Louis and lives alone in declining health due to the toll that AIDS has taken on him. Clarissa serves as his primary caregiver. Meanwhile, back in the 1920s, Virginia spends her morning writing part of Mrs. Dalloway before preparing for a visit from her sister, Vanessa. Virginia struggles to write much because she fears that too much exertion will bring back her painful headaches. These headaches are the reason why Virginia's husband, Leonard, insists that they must live out in the peaceful suburb of Richmond, even though Virginia longs to return to the excitement of living in London. In 1949, Laura, pregnant with her second child, sleeps in late on the morning of Dan's birthday, exhausted from staying up late to read Mrs. Dalloway the night before. She wants to give Dan a perfect birthday, so she sets to work making a cake for him with their son, Richie (Clarissa's friend Richard as a child). Making the cake with Richie seems to temporarily help Laura overcome her anxieties, but when the cake is done, she fears it isn't good enough and throws it out to start over again. In Clarissa's timeline, Clarissa finally makes it to Richard's apartment and finds him anxious about attending the party and awards ceremony. Clarissa can tell how much Richard's mental state has been affected by his illness—he has lost much of the wit and sharpness that used to define him. She promises to come by early to help him get dressed and ready for his party. Back in the 1920s, Virginia wants to serve her sister the best possible refreshments, so she sends her servant Nelly on a trip to London and back. But, as it turns out, Vanessa arrives earlier than expected, throwing off Virginia's plans. Leonard refuses to leave his work until the time when Vanessa originally promised to come. As Virginia is entertaining Vanessa, her children discover a dying bird outside and hold a funeral for it. In 1949, Laura finishes a second, better cake to replace the first one she made with Richie and gets a visit from her neighbor, Kitty. Kitty reveals that she has to go to the hospital the next day to get a growth on her uterus checked out. As Laura hugs Kitty to console her, the two of them kiss on the lips, and Laura realizes how much she desires Kitty. The women pull away suddenly, and Laura becomes flustered when she realizes Richie has witnessed the intimate moment. Soon after, Laura begins to feel like she has to leave her house. She drops off Richie with a neighbor, claiming she has to run errands. However, Laura's real intention is to find a place to read Mrs. Dalloway in private. Laura realizes that it's almost impossible for her to find a place that's suitably safe and private for her needs, so she eventually ends up renting a hotel room for the night, even though she only plans to use it for a couple hours. She feels like she's doing something wrong. In Clarissa's timeline, Clarissa goes to meet Richard before his party and finds him sitting on his windowsill in a robe with one leg out the window of his fifth-story apartment. She is frightened and tries to convince Richard to come back in, but as Richard talks, he seems to be in a daze from his medication and his illness. He eventually jumps out the window, falling to his death. In Virginia's timeline, after Vanessa leaves, Virginia begins to feel particularly restless about her life in Richmond. She decides to take a spontaneous trip into London and even goes to the train station to buy a ticket. But when she's waiting for her train to arrive, she runs into Leonard, and this convinces her not to take the train after all. In 1949, Laura's birthday party for Dan seems to be a success, although when he's blowing out the candles, he accidentally spits on her cake. Even though Laura is relieved that the night has gone well, before she goes to bed with Dan, she looks at the sleeping pills in her cabinet and considers how killing herself wouldn't be any more difficult than checking into the hotel was earlier that day. Finally, the timelines intersect, with Laura, now an elderly woman, arriving at Clarissa's apartment following Clarissa's news about the death of Laura's son, Richard. The flowers that Clarissa originally bought for Richard's party now become funeral flowers. Although Richard's party is now cancelled, Clarissa, Laura, Sally, and Julia all decide to eat some of the food because it will soon go to waste. Clarissa considers how Richard's death has set her free from the Mrs. Dalloway nickname he imposed on her. She also considers the difficult hour ahead of her she must now face.

- Genre: - Title: The House on Mango Street - Point of view: First person limited, from Esperanza's point of view - Setting: Chicago, Illinois - Character: Sally. Description: A girl Esperanza befriends as she starts to get older. Sally is more sexually mature and seems beautiful and glamorous to Esperanza. She has an abusive father and lets herself be taken advantage of by boys. Esperanza feels very protective of Sally, but Sally is not a good friend to Esperanza. - Character: Marin. Description: An older Puerto Rican girl who lives with her cousins on Mango Street. Marin sells Avon makeup and spends most of her days baby-sitting, and so cannot leave the house. She dreams of both marrying her boyfriend in Puerto Rico and being swept away by a rich man in Chicago. - Theme: Language and Names. Description: One of the most important themes of The House on Mango Street is the power of words. Esperanza first learns that the lack of language (especially English) means powerlessness, as with Mamacita, who is trapped in her apartment by her ignorance and fear of English. This leads to Esperanza understanding the power of controlling language, which first comes through the idea of names. Esperanza has only one name while most characters have several – an English and Spanish name, or nicknames – and she tries to change her name to empower herself and show the "real me."Esperanza then expands from names to language itself, and she realizes that mastery over words brings a kind of freedom. She can translate her bad experiences into beautiful language (as she starts to write poetry), which both makes them less bad and helps her process them. Esperanza ultimately hopes to find physical freedom through her writing, as she vows to keep studying and escape Mango Street, yet part of her final promise to return for those "left behind" involves writing about their experiences and memorializing their suffering. - Theme: Gender and Sexuality. Description: From the start of the book Esperanza realizes that men and women live in "separate worlds," and that women are nearly powerless in her society. There is a constant conflict between being a sexual being and keeping one's freedom, as most of the book's female characters are trapped both by abusive husbands and needy children. Esperanza comes to recognize this dichotomy as she is caught between her own budding sexuality and her desire for freedom.To try and reconcile the contradiction, Esperanza decides to become "beautiful and cruel" like a femme fatale of the movies – having both sexuality and autonomy – but she soon finds this impossible in the culture of Mango Street, as Sally is exploited by boys and Esperanza herself is assaulted and raped. Indeed, most of the men in the book are exploitative and violent, and the women rarely help each other, as Tito's mother ignores Sally's plight and Sally abandons Esperanza first in the Monkey Garden and then at the carnival. At the end of the book, when Esperanza imagines returning for "the ones left behind," she is thinking of the powerless women of Mango Street. - Theme: Foreigness and Society. Description: The House on Mango Street is set in a Latino community in Chicago, and on one level it is about building a cultural identity in a society where Latinos are seen as foreign. Throughout the book, Esperanza must struggle against the feelings of shame and isolation that come with living in the barrio – she is ashamed of her shabby house and how her classmates see her as "different." Cathy, her first friend in the neighborhood, represents the people who leave when Latino families move into the neighborhood, and the white people of "Those Who Don't" who are afraid when they drive past. Esperanza's struggle against these prejudices leads to a dream of a house of her own—a house she owns, loves, and of which she can be proud—and finding freedom and identity through her writing. - Theme: Identity and Autonomy. Description: Esperanza's essential goal is to be an autonomous individual who controls her own choices, a desire driven by her observations of the many trapped and powerless people of Mango Street. This desire is physically represented by her dream of a new house in a different place – at first it is a house for her family, but by the story's end it is a house that she alone owns, where she can write. She also symbolizes her dream of agency by trying to change her name to something that better shows the "real me."The House on Mango Street also presents identity and autonomy in terms of culture and gender. The book is about coming of age as a Chicana, and it portrays the experiences of building a cultural identity in the face of suffering and prejudice. In gender terms, Esperanza wants to be loved by men, but she also doesn't want to become a trapped woman – as most of her married female neighbors have no agency whatsoever. In the end, Esperanza's goals focus on having a house of her own, mastering writing, and escaping Mango Street, and through these she will be able to achieve her own identity and autonomy. - Theme: Dreams and Beauty. Description: Dreams and beauty are spread throughout The House on Mango Street, and most often come as a means of escaping the harsh realities of life. Esperanza's name means "hope" in Spanish, and dreams and beauty pervade even the writing style, which is poetic and dreamlike and scattered with internal rhymes like "their height was not tall, and their feet were very small." Esperanza's dream of a house also recurs throughout the book.The idea of creating beauty offers another kind of dreaming and escape. Esperanza finds that describing things with beautiful language makes life seem less hard, and she starts to recite poems and write her own. The "monkey garden" represents another incarnation of escape through beauty, as the children create fantasies and mythologies to make their lives seem better. Throughout the book they also look up at clouds and compare them to people or objects. This fantasizing, like Esperanza's storytelling, becomes another form of hoping for something better in the future, or a life far from Mango Street. - Climax: Esperanza's rape - Summary: The House on Mango Street is a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) of a young Chicana (Mexican-American) girl named Esperanza Cordero. The book is told in small vignettes which act as both chapters of a novel and independent short stories or prose poems. The story encompasses a year in Esperanza's life, as she moves to a house on Mango Street in a barrio (Latino neighborhood) of Chicago, Illinois. The house on Mango Street is an improvement over Esperanza's previous residences, but it is still not the house she or her family dreams of, and throughout the book Esperanza feels that she doesn't belong there. Over the course of the year Esperanza grows emotionally, artistically, and sexually, and the novel meanders through her experiences with her neighbors and classmates. Esperanza makes friends with two other Chicana girls of Mango Street, Rachel and Lucy. These three, along with Esperanza's little sister Nenny, have many small adventures in the first part of the book, including searching through a labyrinthine junk store and learning from an older girl named Marin. While exploring her world, Esperanza experiences the shame of poverty, the unfairness of racism, and the beauty of poetry and music. Along with chronicling Esperanza's growth, the book's vignettes also move through brief descriptions of her neighbors. While some of these portraits involve eccentric or memorable men (Meme Ortiz, Geraldo, or Earl), most of them involve women who are trapped in some way. There is Mamacita, who does not leave her apartment because she is afraid of the English language, and Rafaela, whose husband keeps her locked up because she is beautiful. Alicia must stay up all night studying so she can graduate from college and get a good job someday, but her father makes her wake up early to make tortillas and do the chores. Rosa Vargas is imprisoned by the impossible task of taking care of her many unruly children. There is also Minerva, who writes poems like Esperanza, but is already married with two children and a husband who beats her. Esperanza goes through puberty and matures sexually during the book, beginning with an adventure walking around in high-heeled shoes with the other neighborhood girls. Most of Esperanza's female neighbors are abused or oppressed by their fathers and husbands, so Esperanza knows she wants to escape such a male-dominated society, but at the same time she must deal with her own emerging sexuality and her desire to be loved by men. She decides that she wants to be "beautiful and cruel" like a woman in the movies, one who is attractive to men but also retains all her own power. Esperanza befriends a girl named Sally, who is beautiful and more sexually mature than the other girls, but has an abusive father. Esperanza experiences a "loss of innocence" moment in the neighborhood "monkey garden" when a group of boys steals Sally's keys and makes her kiss all of them to get the keys back. Esperanza's friendship with Sally also leads to her most traumatic experience of the novel, as Sally leaves her alone at a carnival and Esperanza is raped. These experiences of male oppression, Esperanza's growing creativity and desire to write, and her dream of a house of her own all cause Esperanza to want to escape Mango Street. At a neighbor's funeral, three old sisters seem to read Esperanza's mind and predict that she will leave Mango Street someday, but that she must not forget where she came from or the women still stuck there. By the end of the book, Esperanza is still in the same house, but she has matured and is confident that she is too strong to be trapped there forever. Her writing and story-telling lets her escape Mango Street emotionally, but it will also let her escape physically later through education and financial independence. And when she does leave, Esperanza vows to return for those who are not strong enough to escape on their own.

- Genre: Dystopian fiction; Young Adult fiction - Title: The Hunger Games - Point of view: First person, Katniss's perspective - Setting: Fictional dystopia known as Panem, created after the governments of North America collapsed - Character: Katniss Everdeen. Description: Katniss is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of The Hunger Games, and the story is told from her perspective. She is fiercely protective of her family and practical, having learned to care for her mom and little sister, Prim, after their father died in a mining accident when Katniss was just eleven. She's described as having dark hair, olive skin, and gray eyes, like most of the others who live in the Seam of District 12. Katniss is tough, independent, resourceful, fiery, and skilled with a bow and arrow, and yet she also has a compassionate side and deep loyalty to those she loves. This combination of traits turns out to be dangerous for the Capitol and President Snow, as it inspires others and serves as a catalyst that creates bonds among people, including between districts, threatening the government's system of division and control. - Character: Peeta Mellark. Description: Peeta is the male tribute from District 12. He's quietly loved Katniss for years, and is willing to sacrifice himself for her. He grew up as the baker's son and is built with broad shoulders, accustomed to lifting heavy sacks of flour. Peeta's love for Katniss makes him willing to defy the rules of the Hunger Games and threaten to commit a double suicide with Katniss, forcing the organizers of the Hunger Games to change the rules. In other words, his love of Katniss allows him to show, with Katniss, that the ruling Capitol can be defied. - Character: Gale. Description: Gale is Katniss's hunting companion at home. He also lives in the Seam and is responsible for keeping his younger brothers from going hungry. Gale promises to look after Katniss's family while she's participating in the Games, and he is probably the person Katniss is most comfortable with when she's in District 12. Gale is not exactly a love interest of Katniss's in The Hunger Games, but she is confused about her feelings for him versus those she feels for Peeta. - Character: Primrose Everdeen. Description: Prim is Katniss's little sister. With blonde hair and blue eyes—rare in their area of District 12—Prim is young, innocent, and not as strong or independent as Katniss. Katniss is fiercely protective of her. Against the odds, Prim's name is picked at her first reaping when she's twelve years old. Katniss volunteers to take her place in the Games. - Character: Katniss's mother. Description: Katniss and Prim's mother is from a wealthier merchant class within District 12, but she moved to the Seam to marry their father for love. When her husband dies in a mining accident, however, she falls into a daze, unable to work and take care of her children. As a result, Katniss is forced to grow up quickly to support the family and can never bring herself to fully trust her mother again. - Character: Haymitch Abernathy. Description: Haymitch is the only surviving winner of the Hunger Games from District 12, which makes him the mentor for Peeta and Katniss. He's constantly drunk, only sobering up after Peeta and Katniss aggressively ask him to be a proper mentor. Nonetheless, Haymitch is also extremely smart and sly, and he and Katniss seem to be able to understand each other's stratagems. - Character: Cinna. Description: Cinna is Katniss's stylist for the games, earning her the nickname "girl on fire" with the costumes he designs. Cinna becomes Katniss's friend, instructing her to be herself for the interviews. Unlike other residents of the Capitol, he seems to recognize the brutal and exploitative practices of the Capitol and to sympathize—or more—with the Districts. - Character: Effie Trinket. Description: Effie is the escort of the tributes from District 12, meaning she steers the tributes through the rituals of the Games. She wears a pink wig and speaks with the affected Capitol accent. Though she is very concerned with appearances and her own career—and has no self-consciousness about the Games or the political system—she comes to care personally for Peeta and Katniss. - Theme: Division and Control. Description: Panem is a dictatorship ruled by President Snow and predicated on authoritarian control. President Snow maintains his control by sowing division among Panem's people—divvying up the country into twelve districts—and ensuring their dependence upon the government. Each of the districts specializes in producing particular goods—and only those goods—and therefore relies on centralized distribution in order to survive, and this dependence is further enforced through rules like the one against poaching, which prevents residents from augmenting their meager food supply (though this is a rule that Katniss routinely breaks with her hunting). The division among the different districts is embodied by the Hunger Games, a competition that pits residents of the districts against each other—and in doing so, makes the districts focus on their rivalries with each other while reinforcing the fact that the Capitol completely controls them. - Theme: Love, Loyalty, and Compassion. Description: In the harsh environment of the Hunger Games, it is normal for tributes to form temporary "alliances" for strategic purposes, only to eventually kill their allies when the time comes. Yet though the Games turn tributes into brutal competitors who know only that they must kill or be killed, Katniss forms not alliances but relationships. First, she volunteers for the Games in place of her little sister, Prim. Because District 12 has a history of losing the Games, Katniss is essentially volunteering for a death sentence, showing that she cares more about her little sister's life than her own—a revelation that immediately draws the attention of those in the Capitol, who aren't used to seeing the inhabitants of the districts sacrifice for one another. Next, she breaks from common practice of tributes when she teams up with Rue, the smallest of the tributes, and tries to protect her despite the nature of the Games. This, in turn, prompts Thresh, a competitor from Rue's district, to show mercy on Katniss. Katniss certainly employs strategy in winning the games, but by treating her sister and at least some of the other tributes as people worthy of love and care, Katniss, in a sense, breaks the Games. Once she has created these relationships of caring, the logic shifts from how to kill each other to how to beat the Games themselves, which translates directly into beating the Capitol at its own game. This effort comes to a head in the last moment of the Hunger Games, when Katniss's relationship with Peeta—a relationship founded on the love Katniss inspires in Peeta; and on Katniss's own willingness to kill herself rather than kill Peeta—finally breaks down the structure of the Games. By preparing to eat the poisoned berries, Katniss and Peeta demonstrate that they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for one another, and this tragically noble display shows that there's undeniably more to them than just bloodlust and survival instinct—their loyalty forces the Gamemakers to change the rules. And because the government gathers strength by dividing up its residents and pitting them against each other, the way that Katniss's fierce and yet compassionate behavior encourages people to form groups willing to sacrifice themselves (as opposed to killing each other) is directly threatening to the Capitol's control. - Theme: Societal Inequality. Description: In The Hunger Games, social inequality occurs at all levels: throughout the nation of Panem, among the twelve districts, and among the inhabitants of any given district. It is this inequity that breeds strife and creates the main conflicts of the book. In Panem, for example, wealth is heavily concentrated in the hands of those living in the Capitol, and the result is that they can't even comprehend the lives of the poor. The citizens of the Capitol don't realize that the inhabitants of the districts are just as intelligent as they are—and just as capable of feeling—because they lead such drastically different lives. It's this lack of understanding that allows the citizens of the Capitol to dismiss the suffering of the Hunger Games as entertainment: they don't view the tributes as real people. They see them, via the "reality TV" of the Hunger Games, as a means of entertainment.Among the districts, District 12 is known for being one of the poorest, and this affects Peeta's and Katniss's chances in the arena as well. Some of the other tributes have had the resources to train for the competition, and this advantage extends not only to combat, but also to winning sponsors who can provide food, water, and healing kits during the Games. This setup suggests that the disadvantages of being underprivileged tend to follow the poor even after they've left their initial circumstances behind.Finally, the way that tributes are selected to be in the Games is perhaps the most obvious indicator of social inequality. Even though the lottery is random in theory, the tesserae system makes the poor more vulnerable. In exchange for extra rations of food and oil—tesserae—children can enter their names into the reaping additional times. Because the children of poor families need tesserae in order to survive and support their families, they're more likely to be picked than the children of wealthier families. - Theme: Appearances. Description: The Hunger Games are set up as entertainment for the citizens of the Capitol and are essentially a very extreme reality television show. As with American reality TV, appearances matter a lot in the Hunger Games, and they don't always depict reality. The tributes need to learn how to appeal to their viewers in the Capitol so that they can gather support from sponsors. In Katniss's case, she pretends to be in love with Peeta, and she allows this romance to capture the attention of her audience.Surface appearances also cover up the real brutality of the Hunger Games and the citizens who watch them. In the days leading up to the Games, for example, the tributes are housed in fancy rooms, dressed in designer clothes, and fed with lavish buffets. They participate in interviews so that their audience in the Capitol might get to know them before they fight to the death. The citizens of the Capitol are obsessed with changing their own appearances as well, and they delight in exotic hair colors, advancements in plastic surgery, and extreme makeup. They're so steeped in the artificial world of appearance that it seems they no longer understand the division between what's real and what's fake, and this confusion numbs them to the reality of the Hunger Games and their own complicity in the system that allows—and demands—that he Hunger Games take place. - Theme: Hypocrisy. Description: By celebrating and watching the Hunger Games, the citizens of the Capitol suggest that the tributes, drawn from the districts of Panem, don't deserve the same security and respect that the people of the Capitol do. They suggest that the tributes are beneath them. However, during the course of the Games, many of the competitors prove that they're more capable of feeling genuine emotion—and acting on it—than the citizens of the Capitol who watch the Games play out on their TV screens. Katniss, for example, pauses in the middle of the Games in order to sing a soothing song for the dying Rue, and she drugs Peeta so that she can risk her own life to bring back medicine for him. The people of the Capitol are prone to exaggerated displays of feeling—laughing and weeping during the interviews with Caesar—but they do nothing based on these feelings. If anything, they enjoy sitting back to be entertained by the suffering on their screens. This is hypocritical on another level: while they lack authentic suffering in their own lives, the citizens of the Capitol demand real pain and death from their entertainment.The Games also encourage a certain amount of hypocrisy among tributes. In order to maximize their chances for survival, many of the tributes form alliances with one another, even though they know that they will have to kill their allies eventually in order to win the Games. The tributes are also encouraged to put on a show. In Katniss's case, she acts as if she's infatuated with Peeta—when in reality, their setting in a cutthroat arena hardly breeds romance. Still, in order to survive, the tributes have to embrace a certain level of hypocrisy. - Climax: When Peeta and Katniss threaten to eat the poisoned berries rather than kill one another to win the Hunger Games - Summary: When Katniss wakes up on Prim's first reaping day, she heads to the woods to hunt with Gale, her best friend and hunting partner. She brings home a feast that will serve as a celebratory dinner after the reaping. At the reaping, the mayor reads a speech about the history of the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are meant as a punishment for the districts that once rebelled against the Capitol. As punishment, one girl and one boy are taken from each of the twelve districts every year and forced to fight to the death until there is only one winner left. To Katniss's shock, Prim's name is called despite the odds against it as the female tribute for District 12. Before Prim can mount the stage, however, Katniss rushes out and volunteers in her place. Peeta Mellark is called as the male tribute, and Katniss is upset because she's indebted to Peeta from years ago. When Katniss's father died in a mining accident, Peeta for some reason snuck some bread to her, and this generosity prevented her family from starving. When it's time to say goodbye to her family, Katniss promises Prim that she will try hard to win the Games and return. Peeta's father, the mayor's daughter Madge, and Gale also come to say goodbye. Madge gives Katniss a mockingjay pin to wear in the arena. Katniss and Peeta take a train to the Capitol, amazed by the luxury of their compartments. They team up to get Haymitch, their drunken mentor, to stay sober enough to give them advice. When Katniss arrives at the Capitol, she's surprised by how normal-looking her stylist, Cinna, is, in comparison to the other very "artificial" citizens of the Capitol. He designs a remarkable costume made out of fake flames for Katniss to wear in the opening ceremony. The day before they enter the arena, Peeta confesses his love for Katniss in a nationally televised interview, and Katniss angrily believes that it's all part of his strategy to win the Games. When they enter the arena the next day, Katniss is able to survive in the woods fairly easily, but soon the Gamemakers engineer a number of obstacles to bring the competitors together. First, a wall of fire drives everyone away from the edge of the arena, and then a series of fireballs target Katniss. One catches her on the calf, and she becomes badly burned. When Katniss is cornered by the Career tributes (tributes from wealthier districts who have trained their whole life to compete in the Games) at the top of a tree, Rue helps her locate a tracker jacker nest, and Katniss sets it loose upon the Careers. However, Katniss also gets stung and begins hallucinating, and she vaguely remembers that Peeta—who had seemed to be allied with the Careers—put himself in danger and ends up saving her life and telling her to run. Rue and Katniss team up, but their alliance is short-lived, as Rue is soon killed. Katniss weaves a wreath for Rue and sings to Rue in her last moments, and Rue's district—District 11—sends Katniss a loaf of bread in thanks. The Gamemakers who run the Game announce that the rules have been changed so that there can be two winners from the same district, likely to ratchet up the tension of the Games for the viewing audience by getting Katniss to go and try to help Peeta, who was injured by Cato when he saved Katniss. And Katniss does immediately set off to find Peeta. After she finds him, badly injured and not far from death, Katniss realizes that Haymitch wants her to play up the romance for the audience, so she does so, while Peeta is happy just to be with her—he doesn't seem to be acting at all. The Gamemakers announce that all remaining contestants can get something they badly need at the Cornucopia where the games began. Katniss is nearly killed by the career tribute Clover from District 2, but is saved by Thresh who then lets Katniss go to repay her for the kindness she showed to Rue (he is from Rue's district). Thresh then runs off with his own package and Cato's. Katniss returns to Peeta with her package, which turns out to be medicine that soon returns him back to health. Ultimately, Katniss, Peeta, and Cato are the last remaining tributes, and Katniss and Peeta gather at the lake to wait for Cato. However, all three are attacked by genetically altered wolf-creatures (who are in fact the revivified and modified bodies of the other dead contestants), and there is a final confrontation on top of the golden horn of the Cornucopia in which Katniss shoots Cato in the hand and lets him fall off the Cornucopia where he is mauled by the wolf-creatures. Katniss puts him out of his misery with another arrow shot. The Gamemakers then announce that they're revoking their last rule revision and that there can only be one winner. In desperation, Katniss comes up with a plan, giving Peeta and herself each a handful of poison berries that Peeta had accidentally gathered. On the count of three, they start to place the berries in their mouths, committing joint suicide, but the announcer stops them in a panic, announcing that they have both won the Hunger Games. A few days later, after she and Peeta have recovered from their injuries in the Games, Haymitch informs Katniss that she's in danger because President Snow is not happy that she outsmarted and defied the Capitol. She must continue to pretend to be madly in love with Peeta—it's her only defense for her actions. Peeta learns that she's been pretending, however, and he grows distant, agreeing only to pretend for the cameras as they return to their lives back home.

- Genre: Short Story, Horror, Crime - Title: The Imp of the Perverse - Point of view: First person - Setting: A cell in an unnamed prison - Character: The Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator is a condemned man attempting to convince the reader that an irresistible impulse, which he calls the Imp of the Perverse, made him commit murder. The narrator, who apparently has an interest in phrenology, kills his victim and gets away with murder only to confess out of the blue years later in a seeming fit of insanity. He begins the story by claiming that human beings are beholden to some impulses that they know are actively harmful. "Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger," he claims. "Unaccountably we remain." This is caused by "perverse" instincts that can override humanity's own capacity for self-preservation. In this way, the narrator attempts to justify his strange confession to an unspeakable crime. The crime itself doesn't seem to bother him, but he regrets being caught, and blames both the Imp itself and humanity's inability to comprehend the Imp as the source of his dilemma. In this, the reader can spot several key characteristics. First, the narrator is immoral—willing to commit murder for inheritance money (the victim is implied to be somehow related to him) and able to live happily for years afterwards. He is also incapable of taking any true responsibility for his actions. Based on his verbose and technically complex argument at the start of the story, the narrator is also an intelligent man. He uses his skills for evil means, however, killing without remorse and outwitting the authorities so that he isn't caught until the Imp makes him reveal his crime. He is clearly prone to obsession as well, as he deliberates over the murder for months, then obsesses over being caught, and finally is driven mad by the "perverse" idea of confessing everything. - Character: The Victim. Description: The man that the narrator murders at the story's outset. Aware of the victim's nightly ritual of reading in bed, the narrator swaps the man's candle with a poisonous one, knowing that the victim's claustrophobic apartment will mean that he breathes in the candle's poisonous fumes and quickly dies. The plan works, and the coroner can't discern a cause of death, deeming it "Death by the visitation of God." The narrator and the victim are implied to be related somehow, since the narrator receives the victim's inheritance. - Theme: Reason vs. Impulse. Description: Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Imp of the Perverse" opens with what seems to be an essay on human impulses. Using verbose and technical language, the first-person narrator discusses how sciences like phrenology have ignored a certain impulse towards "perversity." Instead, they assume that all impulses must be beneficial and sent by God, and a "perverse" impulse is inherently destructive. This introduction then shifts to a discussion of the narrator's own life: he is in prison for committing a murder, which he inexplicably confessed to years after the fact. The narrator attributes this confession to the human impulse towards self-harm, which he dubs the "Imp of the Perverse." The "Imp," he claims, drives him to "make open confession" despite otherwise having gotten away with the perfect murder. Through both the narrator's scientific discussion and personal story, Poe paints a chilling portrait of the power of impulse, arguing that even seemingly "perverse" and unreasonable desires should not be ignored—or they can lead to devastating consequences. In the story's first pages, the narrator argues for the principles of reason and objectivity in the face of idealism and logical fallacies. Using phrenology (a pseudoscience devoted to studying the skull) as a stand-in for all psychological sciences, the narrator claims that people have ignored an important aspect of the human experience: the apparent impulse towards perverseness. The narrator makes some good scientific points in the process, arguing that phrenology started out with assumed conclusions—presuming to know what humans are intended to do, and in the process presuming to know God's intentions—and has worked backwards from there, instead of observing the way people really act and drawing conclusions based on facts. The narrator highlights his own objectivity here, making him seem very reasonable and logical to the reader. This essay, however, is all for the purpose of arguing that humans are incredibly unreasonable at times. The Imp of the Perverse is the narrator's personification of the impulse to do what one knows they "should not." As an example, the narrator describes a person standing on the edge of a precipice, knowing they should move away but lingering, and even feeling a wild desire to leap. This description was actually rather groundbreaking for the time (Sigmund Freud would write about it as the "death drive," but not until nearly a century later), as it went against the accepted wisdom that humans were designed reasonably by God, and so would not have natural impulses to self-destruction. Through this acute insight about the "Imp," then, both the narrator and Poe highlight the power of impulse to go even against what we want and know is best. Ironically, the narrator is not impulsive about his most drastic act in the story: committing murder. He is instead very thorough and deliberate, rejecting any plan that he thinks might get him caught until he finally hits upon a foolproof scheme: murdering his victim with a poisoned candle. In his apparent psychopathy, he sees people as merely objects and means to an end, and so disposes of his victim without remorse. He doesn't seem to have any hatred for his victim (who is implied to be related to him), but merely wants his wealth and inheritance. Horrifying though this is, it is in a sense very logical, and the narrator acts in his own best interests. The narrator's reasoning is ultimately overcome by impulse, however, as the Imp of the Perverse claims him and forces him to confess to his crime (which he had previously gotten away with). Once the thought enters his head—"I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!"—he cannot resist acting on it. In an attempt to escape his own unreasonable desire, he takes off running, eventually drawing a crowd. He then seems to black out and confesses to everything, though he has no memory of doing so. Despite his logical mind and the careful, deliberate nature of his crime, he is overcome by a sudden self-destructive impulse and loses everything he worked for. It is because of this, then, that he made his initial argument for the existence of the Imp and its powerful influence on human behavior. Part of the importance of "The Imp of the Perverse" is simply its innovation in describing and giving name to its titular impulse. Despite his many references to phrenology (which is now thoroughly debunked), Poe does make a legitimate psychological insight in the midst of his brief tale, going against the religious idealism of the time and looking forward to the age of psychoanalysis. The horror-story twist of a murderer driven not to kill but to confess dramatizes human impulses, but also argues for the importance of truly recognizing them—observing real human nature, even its darkest and most destructive aspects. - Theme: Crime, Justice, and Punishment. Description: Poe is known for his horror stories and murder mysteries, and "The Imp of the Perverse" flirts with both genres. This is a tale of murder and punishment: the anonymous narrator commits a seemingly perfect crime, gets away with it for years, then inexplicably confesses and is condemned to be hanged. Though the narrator expresses no guilt for his crime, and the murder itself is described only briefly and detachedly, justice does find him in the end. Interestingly, in this story there is no brilliant detective to catch the murderer (Poe is also credited with inventing the detective story)—instead, the narrator's own "perverse" impulses bring him to openly confess. With this, Poe seems to hint at the existence of a kind of divine justice, one that punishes the remorseless narrator despite his "perfect" crime, as he is driven by the Imp of the Perverse to confess and then is seemingly condemned to hell after his impending execution. As with many of Poe's tales, "The Imp of the Perverse" centers around a grotesque crime. The narrator, desiring his victim's inheritance (they are implied to be related), deliberates for months about how to commit murder without getting caught. He finally comes across the idea of using a poisoned candle. Knowing his victim's "habit of reading in bed," as well as his "narrow and ill-ventilated" apartment, he switches out the victim's candle for a poisoned one. The scheme works: the man dies in the night, the narrator is able to remove evidence of the "fatal taper," and the authorities declare the victim's death a "visitation of God." It seems that the narrator has escaped justice, though the brief reference to God here suggests that the narrator has only escape mortal punishment, not a divine reckoning. It's important to note that the narrator is not driven to murder by the Imp of the Perverse. Instead, the crime seemingly comes entirely of his own volition, and he never tries to blame it on the Imp or anything else. His description of the murder is short and detached, and it seems that he killed his victim entirely out of greed, not because of any special hatred or other strong emotion. He sees the victim as a means to an end, and so disposes of him coldly and logically. This is the truly horrifying aspect of the story: the narrator's chilling psychopathy, not the Imp's drive towards self-harm. Indeed, the narrator only hates and fears the Imp because it makes him confess to his crime, leading him to both earthly and divine justice. For a long time he is happy with his newfound wealth and the satisfaction of duping everyone. Eventually, however, he becomes "haunted" by fears that he will be discovered and unmasked as a murderer. To comfort himself, he takes to frequently saying "I am safe" under his breath. One day, though, "in a fit of petulance," he attaches a fatal addition to these words: "I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!" With this, the Imp of the Perverse takes hold of the narrator's mind, driving him to do exactly the opposite of what he wants. He starts running, hoping to escape his impulse, and attracts a suspicious crowd. He then collapses, confesses, and is arrested: "consigned […] to the hangman and to hell." In saying this, he seems to recognize that justice has found him, and that he deserves to be condemned. The narrator never expresses remorse for his crime, and he does consider himself a "victim" of the Imp, but he also never protests against the punishment he receives after his confession. He only wanted to outwit the police and avoid earthly punishment—he seems to have assumed that he would eventually be condemned to hell for his crime. In first describing the Imp of the Perverse, the narrator says that the impulse cannot come from Satan (the "arch-fiend") because sometimes it works "in furtherance of good." While he is still speaking broadly here, it seems that he is also referencing his own case: the Imp doesn't drive him to murder, but instead drives him to receive the punishment that he deserves. Poe doesn't let his murderer get away with it, and with this he gestures towards a larger justice, which, though not explicitly Christian, invokes a "God" who ultimately judges the wicked no matter the failures human authority. The narrator himself seems to recognize this as well, as the story ends with his desperate question of where his soul will end up after his execution. - Theme: Madness and Obsession. Description: Poe wrote about madness frequently, and many of his most famous stories concern protagonists who have either gone insane or are being driven insane as the story unfolds. The narrator, as both a cold-blooded killer and a victim of his own self-destructive impulses, exemplifies various kinds of madness and obsession. Indeed, though the essay's opening paragraphs are largely devoted to proofs of the narrator's objectivity and sound reasoning ability, his actions suggest that he is a very mentally unstable man. At certain points he exemplifies a kind of obsessive intelligence, a psychopathic amorality, and a total helplessness in the face of his darker, more "perverse" impulses. In turn, Poe offers a meditation on madness and obsession that is meant to relate to the reader in an uncomfortable way, while also being grotesque and horrifying. After an essay-like introduction that makes the narrator seem objective, reasonable, and intelligent, he suddenly reveals that he is in prison for murdering someone, and that the members of the general public ("the rabble") think he is insane. He then shifts to a description of the murder itself. Notably, the narrator never questions whether or not he should have murdered his victim, but simply begins his tale by explaining how he finally did it. In this, he seems psychopathic—he doesn't see his victim as a fellow human being, but merely as an object that must be disposed of for the narrator to get what he wants. The narrator "ponder[s]" for many months, obsessing over methods of committing a perfect murder. He doesn't appear to hate his victim—he just wants to get him out of the way, and wants to avoid being caught in doing so. The narrator never expresses any passion related to the murder, and also never seems remorseful for killing his victim (who is implied to be related to him, considering that the narrator receives his victim's inheritance upon his death). Furthermore, it is not the Imp of the Perverse that inspires the narrator to kill. His murderous act is not impulsive; it is cold, calculated, and sickeningly logical. Thus the narrator initially shows one aspect of madness and obsession: a kind of psychopathy that sees other human beings as expendable, and that uses intelligence and curiosity for wholly selfish ends. After committing the murder and reveling in his success at escaping detection, the narrator eventually becomes haunted by the idea of being caught and condemned for his crime. To reassure himself, he begins habitually saying "I am safe" over and over. One day, however, he adds to this phrase, saying, "I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!" He is then overcome by the "perverse" impulse to do exactly what he has told himself not to do. All of these thought processes—deliberating over how to commit the perfect murder, smugly ruminating on the success of his crime, anxiously fearing detection, and finally becoming fixated on the self-destructive idea of confessing—suggest a similar obsessiveness, as the narrator seems to continually brood over the same thought in various incarnations. The final instance of this obsession, however, relates to a different kind of madness: helplessness in the face of one's impulses, most notably what the narrator dubs the "Imp of the Perverse." Though the narrator devotes the opening pages of the story to a discussion of the Imp, this impulse doesn't enter his own personal tale until its finale. It is different from his obsessive ruminations and amoral psychopathy—it is an impulse that he has no control over, one that seems to take over his body and mind and makes him act in ways he cannot comprehend. He clearly has previous experience with this as well: he even says that in the past, "in no instance had [he] successfully resisted" the urgings of his "fits of perversity." When the Imp overwhelms him and pushes him "to make open confession," he takes off running and soon collapses. He then confesses to his crime, speaking in a sort of trance that he cannot remember afterwards. This is an extreme example of another aspect of the narrator's madness: an impulse to act that is beyond reason, desire, or control. The narrator exhibits his obsessive and mentally disturbed nature throughout the story, but he also makes important scientific points and presents ideas that readers will be familiar with. This contributes an unsettling tension to the story, then, as readers who have also experienced the influence of the Imp of the Perverse will find themselves aligned (however briefly) with a man who is undeniably immoral and insane. The narrator claims that his audience will "easily perceive" his sanity and innocence—and he certainly believes himself sane, if not innocent—but his tale ultimately expresses a kind of madness that is both demonstrably evil and horrifyingly relatable. - Climax: The narrator awaits his hanging after confessing to murder - Summary: The "Imp of the Perverse" begins with a meditation on the narrator's peculiar philosophy. He denounces various methods of evaluating human psychology, such as phrenology, because they do not adequately deal with the concept of a certain impulse. Phrenology assumes human impulses to be beneficial and sent by God (the periodic need to eat, for instance), but the narrator insists that darker impulses exist that can even override the need for self-preservation. Some such impulses, the narrator maintains, are actively harmful—they drive a person to "perversely" do what they know they shouldn't do. The narrator refers to this impulse as "the Imp of the Perverse." The sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the need to jump, for instance, comes from the Imp. The narrator also blames the Imp for his current circumstances: he is in a prison cell, condemned to be executed for murder. The narrator goes on to reveal that he plotted murder "for many weeks and months" in order to gain a large inheritance from his victim. He finally hits upon the notion of using a poisoned candle in the victim's room, since "I knew my victim's habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated." The ruse works, and the victim is declared dead by an act of God. For many years, the narrator enjoys his inheritance and the life it affords. Eventually, however, he grows preoccupied by a fear of discovery. The narrator keeps his troubling thoughts at bay for a time by periodically repeating the phrase, "I am safe." Eventually, though, he changes the wording of the phrase: "I am safe—I am safe—yes—if I be not fool enough to make open confession!" Once this thought enters his mind, the narrator finds that he cannot get rid of it. In an effort to shake the thought, he takes off running in the street. As he begins to run faster, his flight attracts attention, and a crowd begins to pursue him. Nevertheless, he still fights the growing urge to confess to the point where he collapses—or, as he puts it, "some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back." He confesses to the deed, though he doesn't remember doing so. Back in the story's present, the narrator now waits in a prison cell for his inevitable execution (he is to be hanged the next day). He wonders where his spirit will end up after he is killed.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Interlopers - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: The Carpathian Mountains (a mountain range across Central and Eastern Europe), the early 20th century. - Character: Ulrich von Gradwitz. Description: The wealthy owner of wide stretches of hunting grounds and forest in the Carpathian Mountains, Ulrich most closely guards one particular strip of forest because Georg Znaeym also claims ownership over it. In Ulrich's grandfather's time, his family used the court to seize the land from the neighboring Znaeym family, who the Gradwitzs believed illegally possessed the land. The Znaeyms never accepted the court's decision, and have continued to hunt in the forest patch. Ulrich has become even more devoted to protecting the land and defeating the Znaeyms than the earlier generations of his family were. He roams the forest with a posse of men and his rifle, hoping to shoot Georg instead of game. However, when Ulrich is finally alone with Georg, a near-death experience causes Ulrich to rethink his priorities, and offer peace and friendship to his life-long rival. - Character: Georg Znaeym. Description: A relatively poor forester and hunter from a family of foresters and hunters, Georg continues to hunt on the strip of land at the edge of Ulrich's forest because he believes it should still belong to his family. Georg, like Ulrich, has a gang of men who roam the forest with him, rifles ready to shoot game or the opposing party. When Ulrich and Georg become trapped together beneath a large tree, Georg declares that his men will roll the trunk over Ulrich and kill him if they are the first to arrive. And when Ulrich reconsiders their feud and offers friendship, Georg is skeptical at first. Ultimately, though, Georg accepts the peace with Ulrich, and happily imagines what the new phase in their relationship will mean for them and the rest of the people they know. - Theme: Power, Property, and Identity. Description: Ulrich and Georg both believe that a patch of forest on the edge of Ulrich's property rightfully belongs to their own, different, families. This family feud has intensified over the past two generations, even though the land is not that large or productive. The fact that Ulrich and Georg, men decades away from being able to determine certain ownership of the forest, take the land dispute even more personally than their grandfathers did suggests that the feud itself, and the ambition to win it, outweighs attachment to the actual forest. Rather than hunt for wild animals, at the story's opening the men hunt for each other. The fact that they share the objective of murder shows that they value the forest because it provides the opportunity to beat, or hunt, the other man. After Ulrich and Georg become trapped beneath a fallen tree, they first see it as a chance to finally kill the other. They both hope their men will be the first to arrive to the scene, so that their party can roll the trunk over the other.However, Ulrich and Georg ultimately come to see being stuck under the tree as a chance to be gracious toward, and free, the other. Put another way, each man's desire to get the better of the other man is not lost, just the expression of that desire has changed. Ulrich and Georg still want their party to be the first to arrive, but now they hope that their men will come so that they can act as the other's savior. Even when reconciled, the men seek validation from an action performed on the other. The forest matters to Ulrich and Georg because of how their ownership of it, and actions within it, will be known and understood by others. - Theme: Changing Interlopers. Description: The question of who "the interlopers," or intruders, are permeates this story. At the story's outset, Ulrich and Georg both see the other as interloper in his forest, and they see other men as interlopers as well. First, Georg says he is glad that he and Ulrich are alone to settle their quarrel without any "interlopers" to get in the way. Georg believes outsiders would interrupt the murderous dispute between the two men, and prevent them from reaching their goal: to kill the other. But after Ulrich makes a peace offering, Georg says that if they choose to reconcile, there will be "no interlopers from outside" to interfere with the end to their feud. Georg sees outsiders as people who would ruin the chance for violence, and then as people who would ruin the chance for peace. Georg believes that potential "interlopers" will get in the way of what he and Ulrich want, but his idea of what the potential interlopers want changes. This may suggest that Georg's intense feud with Ulrich determines his view of other people. Although he no longer sees Ulrich as an interloper, he continues to see other men as interlopers. Georg still wants to own the land, and so he considers other people on it intruders.At the end of the story, after the men have been trapped by the falling tree, wolves approach the men, suggesting that Ulrich and Georg may be the true intruders, or interlopers, in the natural world. In an alternative reading, the wolves observed at the end of the story may actually be their men, but Ulrich and Georg, crazed from cold and pain, see them as wolves. In this reading, when the men reject the feud they inherited, they also reject their relationship with the rest of society. All other men become "interlopers," and even unrecognizable as fellow men. This confusion aligns with Georg's belief that outsiders will always get in the way of what the men want, whether it be violence or peace. Other people are external to the personal feud between Ulrich and Georg, to the point where their men are no longer seen as human. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: The wish of each man to dominate the other plays out in each man's ambition to dominate the land. Georg goes hunting in the disputed border-forest to claim ownership over it. Ulrich stalks through the forest with his rifle because he hopes to kill Georg. Each man is angry about the other's claim to the border-forest because he believes that the trees and animals within it belong to him. Ulrich and Georg both feel that the other man thwarts the authority he has over nature. However, instead of either of the men murdering the other when they round a large tree and come face-to-face, the force of the storm fells the tree, and it traps them both. Nature forces the men to lie beside each other, robbed of the simple ability to walk away from or toward each other.After nature causes this near-death experience, the two men reconcile. Georg imagines that the new peace between them will mean that they dominate nature together. He thinks they will go hunting. Yet once they make amends, the men realize that even when they shout for help together, their voices are not loud enough to reach anyone through the trees and wind. No "interlopers," and not even Ulrich and Georg's own hunting parties, notice the break in the feud. (Perhaps each man exaggerated the proximity and presence of his own group of men, in an effort to intimidate or impress the other man.) Instead of either group of men arriving, wolves appear over the hillside. Neither Ulrich nor Georg is killed or rescued by the other man. Both men will receive the same death, from a natural world that does not recognize which one of the men owns it. - Theme: Death. Description: Ulrich's rifle brings the potential for death into the story's first sentence, and the threat of death lasts for the duration of the story. Initially, Ulrich and Georg think murdering the other would be victory. Yet, when given the brief chance to shoot the other, both men hesitate, showing that the potential to kill feels different, and perhaps more difficult, once it becomes real.After a large tree falls on the men, and they both face the near, real possibility of death, Ulrich's hatred for Georg "dies down." The imminence of death changes Ulrich's priorities. He decides that life is worth more than winning a property dispute. Georg agrees to become Ulrich's friend, showing that the near-death experience has also reset his values. Ulrich and Georg begin to see rescuing the other from death as an opportunity for graciousness. They each hope that their respective hunting party will come, so that their men can save, instead of kill, the other.However, although the relationship between the men has changed, it does not help either of them to move the tree off of the other. Wolves, instead of a rescue party, appear over the hill in response to Ulrich and Georg's shared call to their men. Trapped beneath the tree, Ulrich and Georg will not be able to fend of the wolves. In the story's opening the men believe that owning the land will give them power. Their near-death experience shows them it does not matter, but even this realization is not enough to prevent the approach of death. The story's ending suggests that death will come no matter one's status in or understanding of the world. - Theme: Class. Description: Georg is from a lower class than Ulrich. Ulrich sees Georg as a lowly poacher, who should be disposed of, and Georg sees Ulrich as a greedy landowner, who should give up the small patch of forest. When the men reconcile, Georg sees the class barriers between them disappear. He imagines that Ulrich will come and spend the night under his roof, and that he will go and feast in Ulrich's castle. The men may be able to make peace because they are trapped alone in the forest, without any observers there to maintain and enforce the social hierarchy. That Georg considers all other men to be "interlopers," may suggest that he considers the structured social world an unnatural one that infringes upon the natural, equal relationship between him and Ulrich. The predicament of being trapped beneath a tree also equalizes the two men. Despite his wealth, the most Ulrich has to offer is a sip of wine. And despite their different means, neither man is more able to move the tree and prevent his own death, or help the other.As wolves approach the men at the end of the story, Ulrich laughs like a man "unstrung with hideous fear." The wolves will not recognize his class, and he understands that his wealth is no protection against nature. When the tree falls and when the wolves approach, nature does not distinguish between Georg and Ulrich, suggesting that class distinctions are artificial, and become irrelevant at the end of life. - Climax: The men give up their feud and become friends, though remain stuck under the fallen tree. - Summary: It's a blustery winter night in the eastern reaches of the Carpathian mountains. Even the animals are restless. Ulrich von Gradwitz, a wealthy landowner, roams a narrow stretch at the edge of his extensive forest property, holding a rifle. He's left his party of men waiting in ambush at the top of the hill, but he and his men aren't hunting for game. Ulrich's grandfather seized this particular strip of forest from a neighboring family in a court battle. While the piece of forest isn't notably good for hunting, the lingering claim to the land from the rival family means that Ulrich guards it more closely than any of his other land. Georg Znaeym, the descendant of the man who lost the forest patch, continues to hunt on the property, believing it to be rightfully his. Ulrich hopes to meet, and kill, Georg alone in the forest, and when he rounds a huge beech tree, he does. Georg holds a rifle too, and like Ulrich, the desire to kill the other man fills his heart and mind. However, neither man can immediately shake off his training in social norms, and shoot. While they hesitate, the storm sends the beech tree crashing toward the ground and the two men. The tree pins Ulrich and Georg to the earth, nearly killing them both. Bloodied, in pain, and relieved to be alive, the men struggle against the branches, but can't free themselves. Georg gives up fighting the tree to insult Ulrich, and calls him a thief. Ulrich calls Georg a poacher in return. Georg answers with the threat that if his party of men is the first to arrive on the scene, they will roll the beech's trunk over Ulrich, killing him. Ulrich returns the same threat of death. Ulrich uses his remaining strength and one somewhat free arm to take a wine-flask from his pocket. The alcohol warms and comforts him. When he looks over to Georg, he feels pity, and offers him the flask. Georg refuses it. In his pain and weariness, Ulrich feels his intense hatred for Georg fading. He tells Georg that if his men are the first to arrive, he will ask them to save Georg first, instead of killing him. Ulrich now believes there are things to life more important than borders. After he suggests that they end their quarrel, he asks Georg to be his friend. Georg takes so long to answer that Ulrich thinks he might have fainted out of pain. But then, Georg imagines out loud the effect of ending their feud. He thinks that it would mean peace not just for the two men, but for all the forester folk they know. Georg declares that he has also changed his mind from hatred, and agrees to be Ulrich's friend. The men still hope that their party will be the first to arrive, but now they want their men to save their former rival, instead of killing him. When the wind calms for a moment, Ulrich and Georg decide to join their voices in a call for help. They send a hunting call across the forest. Ulrich cries with joy when he sees figures approaching through the trees, down the hillside where he left his men behind. The figures run. Ulrich and Georg wonder whose group of men it is. Georg realizes that there are more of them than his crew. He repeatedly asks Ulrich if they are his men. Ulrich answers no, laughing with fear. Georg asks again who the men are. Ulrich says, "Wolves."

- Genre: Children's Novel, Illustrated Novel, Historical Fiction, Steampunk - Title: The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Paris, France in 1931 - Character: Hugo Cabret. Description: Hugo Cabret is a young orphan living by himself in a train station. Every day, he maintains the train station's clocks, a job his Uncle Claude previously held before he disappeared. Hugo's father was a horologist (a clockmaker) before his death, and he instilled in Hugo a love for clocks and other mechanical objects. As such, Hugo performs his job with great care and respect. Although he does his best not to, Hugo often has to steal from the train station in order to survive. Despite the work he does, he doesn't have any money because he doesn't know how to cash Claude's paychecks. Hugo is terrified that the Station Inspector will catch him and send him away to an orphanage before he can finish the automaton he is working on. Hugo loves working on the automaton because it is the last thing his father was doing before he tragically died in a fire. Hugo feels guilty about his father's death because he asked his father to fix the automaton and thinks his father would have been somewhere else during the fire if he hadn't done so. Regardless, working on the automaton makes Hugo feel close to his father, and he desperately wants to finish it. Although he is mature in many ways, Hugo is emotionally guarded because of his difficult past. It takes him a long time to let Isabelle and Georges know the truth about his past. However, when he finally opens up, Hugo finds a new family in the Mélièses and Isabelle. He manages to fix the automaton and help Georges recover many of his lost films. At the end of the story, Hugo becomes a magician and builds a new automaton all by himself. - Character: Georges Méliès. Description: Georges Méliès is married to Jeanne Méliès and is the godfather of Isabelle. Although his portrayal in the novel is largely fictional, Georges Méliès was a real magician and director, one of the most significant figures in the early days of movie making. Unfortunately, like his real life counterpart, Georges loses his film career at the start of World War I because of financial setbacks. Sadly, Georges sold off all of his films and faded into obscurity until close to the end of his life. In the novel, Hugo first meets Georges as the crotchety operator of a toy stand near the train station where Hugo lives. Georges is a depressed old man who spends his shift at the toy stand looking at the clock, waiting for the day to end. However, when Hugo starts working for Georges, he realizes that there must be something more to him. Georges regularly entertains himself with card tricks and he knows something about the automaton in Hugo's notebook. Later, when Hugo and Isabelle discover some of Georges' old drawings, Georges looks at them and has a breakdown. He has never emotionally recovered from the tragedy of his past and has a hard time even thinking about it. However, at the end of the story, with the help of Etienne and Monsieur Tabard, Georges discovers that he has not fallen into obscurity after all. He learns about the immense impact his films have had on a generation of young film scholars and movie makers. This knowledge radically alters Georges' behavior. He starts to act more like he did when he was young and becomes a noticeably happier person. - Character: Isabelle. Description: Isabelle is the goddaughter of Georges and Jeanne Méliès. Her parents used to be friends with the Mélièses, and her father even worked on one of Georges' movies before both of them tragically died in a car accident. Isabelle was only a baby at the time and does not have any memory of her parents. Because of her unusual upbringing, Isabelle in a spirited and independent child, who befriends Hugo after discovering Georges took his notebook. Isabelle promises to help Hugo get his notebook back, partially because she likes Hugo and partially because she is curious about what is inside of it. Isabelle is exceedingly clever and manages to find out more about Hugo—including the truth of the automaton and where he lives—well before anyone else. She is also emotionally mature for her age and is willing to open up to Hugo about her past and her feelings. Isabelle's behavior enables Hugo to open up as well, allowing him to mature and move past the tragedy of his father's death. Although she is a well-meaning child, like Hugo, Isabelle tends to misbehave, often out of curiosity. She taught herself how to pick locks with a bobby pin and often utilizes that skill to get into things and places adults do not want her to see. In fact, Isabelle's ability with the bobby pin is what allows her and Hugo to discover Georges' filmmaking career. - Character: Jeanne Méliès. Description: Jeanne is Georges' wife who used to work as his assistant when he was a magician. Jeanne is a caring wife who is cautious about her husband's health. She cares deeply for Isabelle, and is kind to Hugo, but does not want to help them dig up Georges' past. She thinks the past is too painful for Georges to bear and does not want him to suffer any more than he has to. However, eventually she comes around when Etienne and Monsieur Tabard pay her a visit and explain how important Georges' works are to their lives. - Character: The Station Inspector. Description: The Station Inspector works at the train station where Hugo lives. It is the Station Inspector's job to maintain law and order, and Hugo worries he will get sent away to an orphanage if the Station Inspector finds him. Eventually, the Station Inspector catches Hugo stealing and locks him in a cage in his office. Luckily, Georges and Isabelle show up and explain Hugo's situation before the Station Inspector can send Hugo away. - Character: Etienne. Description: Etienne is Hugo and Isabelle's friend who works at a movie theater, and then the French Film Academy. He is a warm and intelligent young man who is a good role model for Hugo. He helps Hugo uncover the truth about Georges and works alongside Monsieur Tabard to make sure Georges gets the recognition he deserves. - Character: Claude. Description: Claude is Hugo's uncle. He is a mean drunk who takes Hugo in after the death of his father. Claude disappears one day and does not come back. At the end of the story, Hugo learns he drowned in the river, probably because he was drunk. Before his death, Claude maintained the clocks at the train station and taught Hugo how to do the same. - Character: Hugo's Father. Description: Hugo's father is a hardworking man with a wonderful imagination. Before his untimely death, he worked as a clockmaker. Hugo's father loved movies and machines, and before he died, he tried to get Georges' automaton working again. Hugo cherishes the notebook his father left for him, containing details on how the automaton worked. - Theme: Magic, Cinema, and Imagination. Description: The Invention of Hugo Cabret explores the real historical relationship between magic and the cinema. Movies were created at the very end of the 19th century, and, at the time, they seemed like magic to their audiences. No one had ever seen anything like them before and only those who made them knew how they worked. In The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo reads a real story about how people screamed when they first saw the Lumiere brothers' film L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat—which simply shows a train arriving at a station. People watching the film thought the train might crash right through the screen and hurt them. However, like magic, the film was merely an illusion. The relationship between magic and films was cemented when magicians began making films. The most famous magician filmmaker was Georges Méliès, who features prominently in The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Méliès is perhaps the most important filmmaker of the later 19th and early 20th century because he was the first person to develop a number of filmmaking techniques, which closely resembled magic tricks. Additionally, Méliès was one of the first people to make narrative films. Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) was his crowning achievement and features prominently in The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Throughout The Invention of Hugo Cabret, movies are described as the stuff dreams are made of. There is an indescribable quality which Hugo, Hugo's father, Georges, Jeanne, and Etienne all experience when they watch movies. This quality is similar to the experience of witnessing a magic trick or watching an automaton write, as Hugo and Isabelle do midway through the story. Although everything in a movie is explainable, audiences find delight in being tricked, because this experience captures the imagination in wonderful and ineffable ways. That is, movies and magic tricks fundamentally reshaped how people saw and understood reality, sparking wonder. Furthermore, in the early 20th century, movies and magic were both industries that dealt with cutting-edge technology and helped bring those technologies to large scale audiences for the first time. The novel brings the relationship between movies, magic, and the imagination full circle in its final chapter when readers learn that an automaton Hugo built wrote the entire story of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, images and all. Like the movies and magic, Hugo's automaton is a trick, which fundamentally alters how the reader engages with the novel. It is a manipulation of one's perception which, like watching a magic trick or film, engages the imagination and reveals the wonder of ordinary life. - Theme: Friendship, Honesty, and Vulnerability. Description: In The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo has a hard time trusting people. After the deaths of his father and uncle, Hugo is left to fend for himself, and he becomes wary about letting other people know his secrets. This issue first pops up when Georges and Isabelle ask Hugo about the contents of his notebook. The truth is that the notebook belonged to Hugo's father and contains drawings of the automaton, which are important to Hugo. However, Hugo does not want to tell Georges the truth because he is afraid to be vulnerable. He finds the idea of telling Georges about his father's death too overwhelming and would prefer to give up his precious notebook instead. Hugo's behavior suggests that he has not emotionally processed his father's death. Furthermore, Hugo blames himself for his father's death because he was the one who asked him to fix the automaton. Therefore, guilt may also play into the reason Hugo does not want to open up to Georges. Meanwhile, Georges has a similar issue. Although Hugo doesn't know it, the contents of the notebook are important to Georges as well because it contains drawings of an automaton he made when he was a magician. However, Georges purposefully keeps this information from Hugo because he, too, feels vulnerable and does not want to share that vulnerability with someone else. Georges' vulnerability stems from the troubled relationship he has with his past. For Georges, even thinking about the past is too difficult to bear. In fact, when he is forced to do so later in the book, he breaks down crying and becomes ill. Therefore, like Hugo, much of the reason Georges cannot be vulnerable with someone else is because he himself has not come to terms with his past. Toward the end of the novel, Hugo finally opens up to Isabelle and tells her the full truth about the automaton, the death of his father, and the notebook. At first, Hugo is hesitant; he doesn't know how Isabelle will react and he isn't sure whether he can trust her. However, after getting everything off his chest, Hugo feels better, and Isabelle thanks him for sharing his secrets with her, leading to a stronger friendship between the two of them. On this basis, they are able to work together to reconnect Georges with his past life. As a result of their actions, Hugo and Isabelle become like brother and sister, as Georges adopts Hugo after learning about his life in the train station. In a way, then, Hugo experiences a renewed family life—it can't replace the family he's lost, but it does help heal his past wounds, and it does the same for Georges. These positive events only occur because Hugo accepts Isabelle's friendship and takes the risk of being honest with her. Ultimately, the story shows that honesty and vulnerability are vital to healthy friendships and can lead to better, more profound relationships. - Theme: Meaning and Purpose. Description: The Invention of Hugo Cabret explores the idea of finding one's purpose in the world using an important metaphor involving machines. While working at Georges' toy stand together, Hugo and Isabelle discuss how sad it is to see a machine that does not function; machines were built for a specific purpose, and when they no longer work, they have lost their entire purpose. Hugo suggests that the same is true of people, and he points to Georges as an example. For a long time, Georges was a great filmmaker and French audiences loved him. However, at the onset of World War I, he was plagued by financial hardships and had to sell all of his films, most of which were destroyed. Indeed, after losing his film career, Georges' life lacks purpose. Although fun objects surround him at his toy stand, all Georges can do is look at the clock and watch the seconds ticking away. It is no accident that Georges falls ill after seeing the pictures in the armoire; they remind him of the purpose he once had, which is now lost. Luckily, Georges' purpose is reignited when Isabelle and Hugo bring Etienne and Monsieur Tabard to his house. After seeing one of his films and hearing Monsieur Tabard's stories, Georges realizes that his purpose never went away—it was simply hidden from him. At this point, Georges becomes a completely different person, as he starts to turn back into the man he once was before his life was engulfed in tragedy. By the end of the story, Georges is the same magical man he was in his youth. Georges' character arc proves Hugo's thesis, which is also the novel's thesis; that is, like machines, humans require purpose to properly function because without purpose, people lose touch with who they are. - Theme: Hardship and Maturity. Description: Hugo and Isabelle are both children who are more mature than they should have to be at their age. Part of their maturity comes from the fact that they are both orphans who have had to find their own way in the world. Although Isabelle has Georges and Jeanne to look after her, she becomes independent at a young age and is often out wandering the Paris streets by herself. Meanwhile, following the death of his father, Hugo is almost completely on his own. Although his Uncle Claude is around, he is more of a hindrance than a helpful role model, and, before long, Claude disappears anyway. Essentially, Hugo acts as an adult: he doesn't go to school, he works a job, and he supports himself. Repeatedly, however, the adults in the story underestimate Hugo and Isabelle because they are children. The Station Inspector does not believe Hugo could maintain the clocks by himself, and no one would have believed that Hugo could reconstruct the automaton on his own. Sometimes adults try unsuccessfully to trick Hugo and Isabelle or keep information from them. Georges tells Hugo he burned his notebook, but Hugo quickly finds out he is lying. Similarly, Jeanne and Georges try to keep the truth of Georges' past from the children, but they manage to find out anyway using their investigative skills. And their maturity isn't limited to skills or street smarts; even though Hugo and Isabelle aren't as emotionally mature as adults, they do have the maturity to come to terms with their troubled pasts and share their problems with one another on their own. In fact, the children even help Georges to accept his past and return to his former, jovial self. This suggests that Hugo and Isabelle's difficult pasts have not only equipped them to fend for themselves, but also to help others. Time and time again, Isabelle and Hugo use the precocious abilities they've gained through their hardships to meet challenges. Although Isabelle and Hugo's upbringings are far from ideal, they enabled both children to develop traits and skills that are useful both for themselves and the adults in their lives. - Climax: The Station Inspector catches Hugo and throws him in a cage. Shortly after, Georges and Isabelle go the train station and help free Hugo. - Summary: The story begins with Hugo Cabret, an orphan living in a train station, attempting to steal a windup toy from a toy shop owned by an old man named Georges. Georges catches Hugo and takes Hugo's notebook from him. This incident is upsetting to Hugo; the notebook contains his deceased father's drawings of an automaton Hugo is trying to put back together. After Hugo loses the notebook, he makes friends with Georges' adopted daughter, Isabelle. Together, Isabelle and Hugo scheme up a way to get Hugo's notebook back. Hugo is happy for Isabelle's help, but he repeatedly warns her not to look in the notebook if she finds it. While Isabelle is looking for the notebook, Hugo gets a job with Georges. Georges tells Hugo that he might give him his notebook back if he works for free to make up for what he stole. Hugo agrees to the job, which he largely enjoys, although he continues stealing when he thinks Georges isn't looking. While working for Georges, Hugo notices that Georges knows a lot of magic tricks. Hugo is interested in magic because magicians were often responsible for creating the early automatons, which they used as part of their act. Hugo wonders why someone like Georges—who is grumpy and antisocial—would know so much about magic. One day, Hugo meets Isabelle in a bookstore where she introduces him to her friend, Etienne, an older boy who works at a movie theater. Isabelle tells Hugo that Georges won't let her go to the movies, so Etienne sneaks her in for free. The following week, Isabelle and Hugo go together to Etienne's theater, only to find out he has been fired. Luckily, Isabelle knows how to pick locks and she gets them into the theater all by herself. Isabelle and Hugo have a great time, although the theater's manager throws them out once he realizes they've snuck in. One day, when Hugo goes into work, Georges starts yelling at him. He thinks Hugo broke into his house and stole his notebook. Hugo doesn't know what he is talking about until he spots Isabelle outside the shop with the notebook in her hand. Hugo runs up to Isabelle and takes the notebook, along with a key Isabelle wears on a necklace around her neck. Then, Hugo returns to his secret apartment in the train station where he keeps the automaton. At this point, the automaton is almost fully functional. The automaton has a pen in its hand, and Hugo knows that it will write something when he turns it on. However, to turn it on, he needs a key. Luckily, the key he took from Isabelle fits, just as he thought it would. Just before Hugo can turn on the automaton, Isabelle breaks into his room and demands to know what is going on. Hugo refuses to answer, but eventually she spots the automaton and turns it on herself. Although it takes some time, the automaton eventually draws an elaborate picture of what looks like a moon with a face, which has a rocket stuck in one eye. Hugo recognizes the image as something his father described to him when he was young. Apparently, it comes from an old movie that was Hugo's father's favorite. Once the automaton draws the image, it signs the name "Georges Méliès" beneath it. Isabelle tells Hugo that Georges Méliès is Georges' full name. Hugo and Isabelle start investigating to try to uncover the mystery of the automaton. Isabelle's godmother, Jeanne, who is also Georges' wife, tells them to leave the matter alone. However, they continue searching anyway. Eventually, they find a lot of elaborately drawn images tucked away in Georges' bedroom, which all bear his signature. Unfortunately, Georges happens to see what they have found, and it causes him to have a breakdown. He becomes ill and unable to work at the toy store, which is especially problematic because he is the only person in the family with an income. Hugo and Isabelle continue to investigate the mystery and run Georges' shop by themselves in the meantime. After chasing down several leads, Hugo eventually makes his way to the French Film Academy's library where he finds Etienne. Etienne managed to get a job at the academy, where he is also training to become a filmmaker. With Etienne's help, Hugo discovers that Georges was once a famous magician and filmmaker. However, for a long time, the French public thought he was dead. Hugo tells Etienne that Georges is still alive, which prompts Etienne and his professor, Monsieur Tabard, to pay Georges a visit. They bring a projector and one of Georges' films, A Trip to the Moon, along with them and screen it for Jeanne, Isabelle, and Hugo. Unbeknownst to everyone, Georges watches the film from the hallway and afterwards asks for the projector. Then, he locks himself in his room. Isabelle picks the room's lock, and everyone looks in on Georges to see what he is doing. As it turns out, Georges has all of his images spread around the room and is watching his film again on the projector. When he sees he has an audience, Georges explains that he was once a great filmmaker until he fell on hard times and had to sell all of his films. This difficult part of his life was made even worse when two of his best friends—Isabelle's parents—died in a car crash. Ever since, Georges has worked at the toy shop and fallen into obscurity. To Georges' knowledge, his only surviving creation, other than what is currently in his room, is the automaton Hugo fixed. He asks Hugo to bring the automaton to him, and Hugo happily agrees to do so. However, while Hugo is at the train station, he gets caught stealing from a café. The owner of the café, as well as the Station Inspector, chase Hugo down and eventually catch him. Then, the Station Inspector throws Hugo in a cage in his office. Not long afterward, Isabelle and Georges show up and explain Hugo's situation. Georges promises to take Hugo with them and provide him with a home from now on. Six months later, the French Film Academy holds a celebration in Georges' honor. With the help of Georges, Hugo, and Isabelle, they managed to find over 80 of Georges' films, some of which they show at the event. After the event, a small party is held at a restaurant. During the party, Hugo performs magic tricks for a small crowd, and Georges gives him the stage name "Professor Alcofrisbas." In the final chapter, the story switches to the first person, which Hugo narrates. Hugo reveals that he is an adult now and he works as a magician. Even more impressive, he managed to build an automaton on his own. The automaton is incredibly complex because it can write Hugo's life story. In fact, according to Hugo, the automaton wrote the entire story of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, illustrations and all.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Invention of Wings - Point of view: First person limited, from the perspectives of Sarah and Handful - Setting: Charleston, South Carolina 1803-1838 - Character: Hetty Handful Grimké. Description: One of the novel's two protagonists, Handful (called Hetty by her white masters) is a slave of the Grimké household who is given to Sarah as a maid. As Sarah and Handful become friends, Sarah teaches Handful to read. Handful is intelligent and takes advantage of her ability to read to broaden her world even as she remains enslaved. Handful takes after her mother Charlotte, never accepting the rhetoric of slavery that continually tries to steal her self-worth. When Sarah goes North, Handful becomes the head seamstress for the Grimkés and begins to act on her rebellious tendencies, using red thread as a reminder of her desire for freedom. Handful joins the group of slaves planning revolt under the leadership of Denmark Vesey. Handful never gives up on finding her freedom, and makes sure that she and her half-sister Sky reach freedom in the North after Charlotte's death. - Character: Sarah Grimké. Description: The novel's other protagonist, based on the real historical figure (1792-1873). The daughter of a wealthy land-owning family in Charleston, Sarah stands out for both her ambition to be a female jurist and her fight against the slavery that gives her family such a privileged life. Sarah becomes friends with her maid, Handful, teaching her to read even though it breaks the law. Sarah promises to help Handful reach freedom, starting a journey that leads Sarah go North and become a Quaker who speaks out against slavery across the nation. Sarah continually chooses her professional and abolitionist ideals above the traditional goals of a high society lady, never marrying Israel Morris in order to focus on becoming a Quaker minister. Despite huge criticism, Sarah never lets go of her principles of equality for both women and slaves. With her sister Nina, Sarah becomes one of the leading abolitionists. - Character: Angelina (Nina) Grimké. Description: Sarah's youngest sister and godchild (and also a real historical figure). Nina is more headstrong and outspoken than Sarah but shares Sarah's passion to speak out against slavery. After causing numerous scandals in Charleston, Nina moves North and joins Sarah as a Quaker. The two sisters join the abolitionist movement where Nina meets and eventually marries the prominent abolitionist Theodore Weld, while never losing her fiery spirit and intense devotion to fighting for equality for slaves and women. - Character: Charlotte Grimké (Mauma). Description: Handful's mother and the main seamstress for the Grimké family. Charlotte is intensely determined to achieve freedom for herself and Handful, rebelling in every small way she can against their lives as slaves and making sure that Handful knows her self-worth outside of being a slave. When not busy with her life story quilt, Charlotte works on the side to save money to buy freedom for herself and Handful, then disappears for good when she gets pregnant with the child of Denmark Vesey. Charlotte and her daughter Sky come back to the Grimkés' house after living on a plantation and running away as many times as they are able. Charlotte dies before she reaches freedom, but leaves Handful with the drive and money to allow Handful to go North with Sky. - Character: Denmark Vesey. Description: A free black man living in Charleston, based on a real historical figure. Denmark won his freedom by winning the lottery, and uses his autonomy to inspire other slaves to rebel against the white masters. Charlotte falls in love with Denmark and has a baby with him. Denmark never meets his daughter, Sky, as he is put to death for the planned slave revolt before Charlotte and Sky return to Charleston. - Character: Mary Grimké (Mother / Missus). Description: Sarah and Nina's mother. She is a harsh mistress to her slaves, and a stickler for propriety and status in the upper echelons of Charleston society. Though horrified by the actions of her daughters, Mary stays loyal to them as family. Mary is never swayed by any of the arguments her daughters make against slavery, believing wholeheartedly in the mistaken ideas of racial superiority. - Character: John Grimké (Father). Description: Sarah and Nina's father, a prominent judge in Charleston who is ruined by accusations of bias in his sentences. Before his death of a wasting disease, John admits to Sarah that he too believes slavery is wrong but was never brave enough to speak out against it or give up his privileged lifestyle. - Theme: Friendship. Description: The central focus of the novel is the friendship between Sarah and Handful, despite the different worlds these two women come from. As they grow older, Sarah and Handful show each other sides of life that each would never have seen in the slaveholding South – fostering in both the unshakeable belief that white and black people are equals and all deserve freedom. Yet, beneficial as this connection is, Kidd does not pretend that their friendship is easy or uncomplicated. Both Sarah and Handful must overcome prejudices—like Sarah's guilt as a slave owner and Handful's pain as a slave—in order to truly support and care for one another. As the years go by, Sarah and Handful endure seasons of distance from and sacrifice for each other, while never losing sight of the great worth of their friendship. Kidd uses this friendship to showcase the way that personal relationships can lead to the change and growth of policies and laws that help all people. Sarah and Handful use their friendship as evidence that peace and equality between white people and black people is both possible and necessary. The two women bring this knowledge to other important friendships, such as Sarah's bond with her younger sister Nina or the Quaker minister Lucretia Mott, or Handful's alliance with Denmark Vesey or her own half-sister, Sky. Together, Sarah and Handful build a community that works to free the slaves and create a world where their complex friendship would not need to be hidden. - Theme: Voice and Silence. Description: Kidd explores the power of a person's voice, and the many ways that people find to speak out in a world that consistently tries to silence them. From the beginning of the novel, one of the horrors of slavery is that nobody speaks of it, using silence as a way to protect white innocence in the face of black suffering. Kidd advises breaking that silence as a way to undermine this oppression, as Sarah learns to express her voice against slavery despite any personal cost to herself. Sarah, though a woman with little power of her own, uses her ability to read and write in order to fight for equality. By teaching Handful to read, Sarah also gives Handful the tools necessary to express her own voice, through letters and written passes that give Handful more freedom though she is a slave. Eventually, Sarah is able to literally speak out against slavery as part of an anti-slavery lecture circuit, though polite society is scandalized by women speaking in public (and Sarah faces another, more personal obstacle in her speech impediment—she has a stutter). Yet every time men try to silence Sarah's voice, she continues to use writing as a way for her opinions to be heard. Beyond literacy, Kidd explores other ways that characters can find their voice. Charlotte "writes" her life story into a quilt, witnessing all the pain she has felt as a slave as well as all the joy she has found as a human. This quilt gives Handful strength and inspiration to keep fighting against slavery after her mother is no longer there to encourage Handful with words. Through letters, pamphlets, quilts, and speeches, Kidd's characters continually let their voices be heard to battle the silence that perpetuates oppression. By using their voices in support of a fairer world for all, Sarah and Handful insist on their own power in a world that would rather they remain silent. - Theme: Equality and Intersectionality. Description: In The Invention of Wings, Kidd advocates for equality of both race and gender, two causes that Kidd sees as supporting each other rather than distracting from one another. Kidd takes an intersectional approach to equality, where all the many parts of a person's identity (race, sex, gender, economic class, etc.) are taken into account when considering the ways that a person is oppressed or privileged. While Sarah, a wealthy white woman, faces very different struggles from a free black man like Denmark Vesey, both Sarah's and Denmark's experiences are very different from the oppression confronting Handful, as an enslaved black woman. Kidd asserts the ability of equality movements to take all of these considerations in mind, indeed deeming it impossible to fight for true equality in one of these areas while ignoring injustices in another. Kidd's argument for intersectional equality is made more potent by the kind of radical (for the time) equality she upholds in the novel. Sarah speaks in favor of not just freeing the slaves, but reaching true equality between whites and blacks that overturns racial discrimination and segregation. Likewise, Sarah fights for women to not just have the same legal rights as men, but also the same opportunities and dreams of a fulfilling career outside of marriage and family. Kidd recognizes the importance of these two positions, showing characters like Handful who immediately embrace equality as the natural right of all humans, as well as characters like Sarah who need more time and evidence to be persuaded to that position. Through it all, Kidd documents the racial and gender equality that Sarah and Handful encounter in the novel, always maintaining that these women deserve equality in the fullest sense of the word. - Theme: The Evils of Slavery and the Necessity of Resistance. Description: The Invention of Wings spends significant attention on the true horrors of the everyday life of a slave, exploring the ways that slavery harmed black people, as well as the lesser known (and less extreme) injuries that the institution of slavery caused to white people in the American South. Through a focus on the experience of urban Southern slaves, Kidd gives attention to the unconscionable pain that slaves faced beyond the evils of plantation slavery (the kind usually depicted in historical fiction). Handful and her family undergo intense physical and emotional pain at the hands of their white masters, scenes of trauma that force harsh examination of these injuries as the first step towards acknowledging the historical pain of slavery and giving an opportunity to begin healing these wounds. Even those who benefit economically from slavery, such as the slave-owning Grimké family, suffer the psychological damage of slavery, as the practice sows distrust, apathy, bitterness, and weakness of mind and body in the members of the Grimké family. With all of the evils of slavery on display, Kidd turns to the numerous ways that slaves resisted their treatment, from civil disobedience to active violence. Slaves such as Handful, Charlotte, or Rosetta feign unintelligence or disability to avoid certain labor, reclaiming their time and their personhood away from their masters. Most slaves even have an alternate name that denotes their true identity rather than the identity that the masters give them. Apart from this everyday resistance, Handful also feels called to join the violent rebellion planned by Denmark Vesey, a movement that gave many slaves hope of freedom despite the deplorable circumstances of their lives. White people too, of course, must resist slavery not just because they are the ones responsible but also as a way to keep their own principles and self-worth intact, as shown by Sarah's depression when faced with the injustice of every slave's life before she begins to actively protest slavery. Kidd brings to light not just the terrible effects of slavery on everyone involved, but also the importance of resisting and overcoming slavery in order for all people to achieve and maintain self-respect. - Theme: Belonging and Religion. Description: As The Invention of Wings follows Sarah and Handful's lives, it also explores the places that these two women search for belonging. Sarah's journey for true belonging in adulthood closely follows her search for a religion that upholds all of her principles and values. Rejecting the Anglican beliefs of her family, Sarah follows first Presbyterianism and finally Quakerism as she attempts to find a religion that satisfies her spiritual needs as well as her belief that religion must do more than uphold social structures that harm slaves and women. Yet though Sarah identifies strongly with Quaker theology, she cannot fully belong to this community without rejecting her own Southern heritage or her feminist concerns. Eventually, Sarah learns that a religious community cannot (and perhaps should not) overshadow one's own personal faith. For her part, Handful finds spiritual belonging in the Fon traditions of her mother, rather than the Anglican church of her white masters or African churches that offers freedom to slaves. By staying true to her roots, Handful too finds a personal faith that is more important than belonging to a faith community. Beyond religious belonging, Kidd also considers belonging in terms of family and social class. Handful is nominally a member of the Grimké family, though as a slave she receives none of the social benefits that the Grimké name carries. Sarah, though a blood member of the Grimké family, feels incredibly out of place in the high-class planter society that the Grimkés are a part of. Both Handful and Sarah must search outside the definitions of blood family in order to find their own families to belong to. Handful forms a family with the other slaves at the Grimké house after her mother disappears, and then accepts her half-sister Sky and Sky's father Denmark Vesey as full members of her own family when her mother returns. Sarah forms a small family within the Grimké line with her sister and godchild, Nina, to the point where Nina calls Sarah "mother" for much of Nina's childhood. Sarah must accept that, though she will always feel an affinity for Charleston as her birth place, she and Nina truly belong in the North where they can fight freely for abolition. Meanwhile, Handful and Sky too leave their slave community in order to find a place in the North where they can live as free black citizens. The family that each woman has formed as the novel developed helps them belong securely in these new homes. - Climax: Sarah returns to her Charleston home, despite the ban due to her abolitionist pamphlets, and manages to sneak her former maid, Handful, to safety in the North. - Summary: The novel opens from Handful's perspective, as she retells an African legend of people who could fly but lost their wings once they were taken to America. Handful knows the legend isn't true, but loves the idea anyway. Handful, so named for her small size at birth, is a slave for the Grimké family living in Charleston, South Carolina in 1803. Handful usually helps her mother, Charlotte, with the sewing, but she is given to Sarah Grimké to be Sarah's maid for Sarah's eleventh birthday. Sarah describes her earliest memory of a slave getting whipped, an experience which caused Sarah to start to stutter. Sarah does not want to own Handful (called Hetty by the Grimkés) and even tries to set Handful free, but Sarah's parents refuse to honor that wish. Handful does poorly as a lady's maid, but Sarah keeps Handful as safe from her mother's wrath as possible. Charlotte makes Sarah promise to help Handful get free some day. On Easter Sunday, the Grimkés go to the Anglican church and Sarah begins to truly notice how mistreated the slaves are in the city. Fed up, Sarah decides teach the slave children the alphabet at their Sunday school, but is reprimanded for breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. Back at home, Charlotte is caught stealing green silk from Mary Grimké and is punished by tying her leg up for hours. Sarah defies her mother and brings Charlotte a basket of medicine. Handful accepts it gratefully, but with a new wariness about her white masters. Sarah applies herself to studying her brother Thomas' law books and covertly begins to teach Handful to read. The two girls get closer, as Sarah admits to Handful that she has chosen a silver button to remind her of her ambition to become a lawyer, and Handful tells Sarah to call her Handful instead of Hetty. Handful practices her letters by writing in the ground and signs her name, but one of Sarah's younger sisters finds the words and tattles on Handful. Sarah's father, John Grimké, punishes Sarah by refusing to let her read any books not fit for a lady, and sentences Handful to one whip lash. Sarah is absolutely heartbroken at the loss of her studies and Handful is even more worried as her mother's behavior gets more and more rebellious. Sarah asks her mother for the privilege of being her newest baby sister's godmother to soothe the loss of her dream to be a jurist. Sarah throws away her silver button, but Handful secretly rescues it. Handful makes a new start for herself by making herself a "spirit tree" using red thread that she once stole from Sarah. Six years later, Handful and Sarah's godchild Nina help Sarah get ready for a society ball. Sarah dreads these occasions, as she's ill at ease in high society, but this night she meets Burke Williams, who becomes the first man that Sarah falls for. Handful feels further from Sarah than ever, now that Sarah's attention is filled by Nina and Burke, so Handful busies herself helping her mother with the quilt that Charlotte has been sewing her entire life. Charlotte herself is distracted by a new relationship with Denmark Vesey, a free black man in Charleston who wants to empower the slaves and inspires Charlotte to begin saving to buy freedom for herself and Handful. The Grimkés leave Charleston to attend Thomas' wedding (and keep Sarah away from the merchant-class Burke) and Handful takes advantage of the absence to sneak into the library and read the price of her mother and herself: 1,050 dollars. This discovery forces Handful to see her own self-worth – far higher than any amount of money. When the Grimkés return home, Burke begins courting Sarah in earnest. Handful finally meets Denmark Vesey, but resents his condescending tone towards slaves who bow and scrape to white masters. Sarah receives an exciting proposal of marriage from Burke just as her father's job as a judge embroils the family in an impeachment case due to biased sentences. John Grimké is acquitted, but his health is badly compromised. Meanwhile, Handful finds out that her own mother is pregnant with Denmark's child. Sarah, dizzy with love, plans for her wedding until Thomas tells her that Burke is actually engaged to three other women, and has simply been courting Sarah to convince her to have sexual relations with him before they are legally wed. The Grimkés break off the engagement and Sarah retreats into isolation, prompting Handful to give Sarah back her silver button. In town the next week, Charlotte is accosted by a white guard for refusing to step into the mud to let a white woman walk by unsoiled. The guard tries to arrest Charlotte, but Charlotte runs and disappears. Handful grieves the loss of her mother with such fervor that Sarah realizes how silly she has been to treat Burke's betrayal as a tragedy. Sarah pledges never to marry and begins to devote herself to the news of abolition that she hears from the North. Handful wakes herself up from her grief-stricken stupor by finishing her mother's quilt. In 1818, six more years later, Sarah has given Handful back to her mother (Mary), and Handful takes care of all the sewing for the Grimké family now that Charlotte is gone. Handful joins the African Church as a way to connect with other slaves in the city who are planning to rebel, while Sarah joins the Presbyterian Church in an attempt to find a religion that better fits her abolitionist leanings. Handful is arrested by the guards for attending the revolutionary church and suffers an accident in the horrific Work House punishment that leaves her with a life-long limp. Sarah is aghast that her mother allowed this to happen to Handful. Sarah and Nina try to help Handful, but Handful can no longer bear being friends with white women when white people continually treat her so poorly. Sarah's mother, angry at the motherly bond between Sarah and Nina, sends Sarah north with John to try to improve John's health. Once in a private resort on the New Jersey shore, Sarah's father admits both that he does not plan to get better and that he truly agrees with Sarah about the evil of slavery. He dies in the North and Sarah writes home to say that she will not be returning immediately. Back in Charleston, Handful visits Denmark Vesey and tells him that her mother was carrying his child when she disappeared. Handful finds out that Denmark and his wife actually helped Charlotte get away those years ago, but have no idea where she is now. Handful begins to sneak out the way her mother used to, though she acts obedient in front of Mary, even sewing her an incredible mourning dress. Sarah finally takes a boat back home and meets a Quaker man named Israel Morris who gives Sarah a book about the Quaker faith, with the promise that Sarah will write him once she finishes it. Sarah tries to adjust back to life as a spinster in Charleston, but cannot stop thinking of Israel Morris. Handful is worried about being sold in the wake of John Grimké's death, but Mary keeps her on for her sewing ability. Sarah falls into a depression that is only broken when Thomas comes and forces her to argue against the prospect of freeing slaves to send them back to Africa. Sarah finally gains the courage to write Israel to ask how to become a Quaker and hears a "Voice" tell her to "Go North." Two years later, Sarah lives with Israel Morris, his children, and Catherine, Israel's sister who cares for the house now that Israel's wife has passed. Sarah misses Nina and Handful, but throws herself into becoming a true Quaker. Yet Catherine thinks it is improper that Sarah lives with a widower for whom she clearly has feelings. Catherine brings her concerns about Sarah to the Quaker elders, where only Lucretia Mott (the lone female minister) defends Sarah, and Israel is forced to ask Sarah to leave. Back in the south, the Grimké household has become a horror for the slaves now that Sarah is gone and there is no one to keep Mary in check. Handful escapes to Denmark's house every chance she gets and gives her all to the rebellion efforts, as they continue to recruit more slaves in the area. Handful gets even more involved in Denmark's plan to rise up against the white masters by stealing two bullet molds for the Black army, using the natural invisibility of women slaves to sneak into the guard house. Nina writes to Sarah about how unbearable life has been in Charleston these days and Sarah decides to return home. Sarah's new Quaker look catches attention, but not as much as the news that the slaves are planning a revolt. Sarah becomes a pariah by defending the slaves in public, and realizes that she must go north again. Handful finds out that one of the house slaves that Denmark recruited has betrayed them to the white masters. The guards thwart the plans before they can come to fruition, and Denmark and the other leaders are put to death with strict orders that no one is to mourn them. In 1826, Charlotte returns to the Grimké house with Handful's 13-year-old sister, Sky. They had run away from another plantation where Charlotte was punished harshly for all her small rebellions, but Handful is glad to see the same revolutionary spark in Charlotte's eye when she sees the quilt that Handful finished. Sarah is now staying with Lucretia Mott, and is surprised to receive a letter from Handful telling of her mother's return. The news sparks Sarah's desire to become a Quaker minister and fight against the injustices that women like Handful and Charlotte face. Sky does not fit in to the house slave life at the Grimkés, getting in constant trouble until she is given charge of the garden to keep her from being sold. Charlotte, though weak, gives Handful hope by working on more quilt squares. In Philadelphia, Sarah wears her silver button despite the Quaker distaste for fancy decorations, spurred on by Lucretia's radical ideas. Sarah receives news that Nina plans to marry a Presbyterian minister, then is shocked to hear Israel come and propose to her. Though Sarah loves Israel deeply, she has to reject his offer in order to focus on her goal of becoming a minister. Handful finally gets some good news, as Charlotte reveals that she has been saving money from odd jobs for years. There is almost $500 hidden in Charlotte's quilt. For the next year, Sarah writes letters to Nina, sharing news of her life in Quaker Philadelphia and hearing about Nina's scandalous rebellions to the Presbyterian church in Charleston. Sarah is disheartened at the lack of racial equality she finds in even abolitionist circles, but is heartened when she hears that Nina has broken off her engagement and is coming North to live with Sarah. Moving forward to 1835, the Grimké slaves now suffer under the hand of Mary Grimké and Mary's eldest daughter, also named Mary (Little Missus). Charlotte passes on, as peacefully as possible given her situation. Sarah and Nina cause an uproar when they sit in the "colored" pew one Sunday meeting. Backlash of anti-abolition sentiment has been growing, but Nina and Sarah inspire each other to keep resisting these mobs. Yet they are expelled from the Philadelphia Quaker meeting when Nina publishes a letter in the well known abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Left without a home, the sisters go to stay in secret at the house of two black Quaker women and continue writing anti-slavery pamphlets to send South. They catch the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and Elizur Wright, the editors of the most well-known anti-slavery movements. Elizur invites the two women to join a series of lectures against slavery in New York. Sarah is terrified to take this on, with her speech impediment, but Nina encourages her and the sisters accept. Handful manages to get a hold of one of the pamphlets Sarah wrote, and is completely amazed by the words. Sarah and Nina speak to huge crowds in New York, supported by Theodore Weld even when other members of the Anti-Slavery Society are scared by the outcry against abolition. As Nina and Sarah continue to tour giving speeches, Nina begins to start a romance with Theodore. Yet Sarah and Nina are soon blasted in the press for their unladylike behavior and some members of the Anti-Slavery Society ask the sisters to stop speaking in order to keep their pro-feminist ideas from distracting from the fight against slavery. Sarah and Nina insist that they can fight for the rights of both women and slaves. Handful reaches her breaking point when the younger Mary finds Charlotte's quilt and calls it ugly. Handful writes to Sarah that she and Sky will be escaping soon by any means possible. Sarah receives the letter at the reception of Nina's wedding to Theodore, heralded as the "abolition wedding." Sarah is happy to think that Handful and Sky are coming North, imagining them living with the two Quaker women who offered the sisters shelter. Sarah goes back to Charleston, ignoring the ban that the city has placed on her for her anti-slavery notoriety, to do whatever she can to help Handful. Sarah is scared for Handful, and wants Handful to wait for her to try asking Mary to grant Handful freedom. Handful is skeptical but agrees, though she is not surprised when Mary only agrees to free Handful and Sky upon her death. Handful is unwilling to wait a single day more and plans to leave as soon as possible with Sky. Handful and Sarah come up with a plan to repurpose the Grimké women's mourning clothes to hide Handful and Sky as ladies in mourning. Dressed in black dresses, with black veils over powdered faces, Handful and Sky manage to slip past guards on a boat to the North as Sarah carries Charlotte's quilt in her luggage.

- Genre: Early science fiction/horror - Title: The Invisible Man - Point of view: Third person limited narrator - Setting: Iping and Port Burdock, Sussex, England - Character: Griffin/The Invisible Man. Description: Griffin is the novel's anti-hero and the titular "Invisible Man." A former medical student at University College London, he never graduated and instead began pursuing research into light and optics. Griffin ended up discovering a way of turning living tissue invisible, and after testing out the experiment on his neighbor's cat he succeeded in performing it on himself. Unlike most scientists, Griffin did not seek the approval or admiration of the scientific community and refused to publish his research. Instead, his quest for invisibility was related to a desire for absolute power, including the ability to commit wrongdoing without consequences. However, once Griffin actually turns himself invisible he realizes that life is not as easy as he imagined it would be, and he struggles to fulfill his basic needs such as eating and seeking shelter. This fills Griffin with bitterness and rage, heightening his already misanthropic nature. Griffin is described as "almost an albino," and the book reveals nothing about his background or childhood, only that after he stole money from his father which did not actually belong to him, his father killed himself. Griffin shows a psychopathic lack of empathy and shame, and a desire to cause harm for the sake of it. He obsessed with power and, in a classic act of hubris, underestimates his own limitations. Among his many acts of violence, he shoots an off-duty policeman and Colonel Adye and kills Mr. Wicksteed. He ends up being killed by a mob of people in Port Burdock, at which point his body becomes visible again. - Character: Mrs. Hall. Description: Mrs. Hall is a woman who lives in Iping and who runs the Coach and Horses Inn with her husband, Mr. Hall. She is a polite, decent woman who fatefully overlooks Griffin's strange behavior when he promises to pay her more money for his stay. Depending on one's perspective, this arguably makes her greedy or simply a good business owner. She prides herself on being non-superstitious, and dismisses warning signs about Griffin's invisibility, only believing that he is actually invisible after he reveals it to her himself. - Character: Thomas Marvel. Description: Thomas Marvel is a "tramp" (homeless person) who lives in the Sussex countryside. Griffin strikes up an alliance with him, flattering him by telling him that he has chosen him specially to help him. Marvel is astonished by Griffin's invisibility and agrees to help him too hastily, without pausing to think about the consequences. Later Marvel steals Griffin's notebooks and money from him, and Griffin almost kills him in response. However, Marvel is able to escape with both the money and notebooks, and after Griffin's death becomes a landlord with a reputation for wisdom in the local area. He keeps his possession of the books secret, treasuring them even though he does not understand their contents. - Character: Doctor Kemp. Description: Doctor Kemp is a medical doctor who lives in Port Burdock. He is tall and fair-haired; he also has a highly rational, even-tempered, non-superstitious disposition. He studied with Griffin at University College London. Griffin ends up breaking into Kemp's house and reintroducing himself to him, telling Kemp the long story of how he came to be invisible and what happened after. Griffin presumes that Kemp will be an ally to him and help him conduct a "Reign of Terror." In reality, Kemp is deeply disturbed by Griffin's immorality and helps to bring Griffin down. Kemp is kind and merciful, as shown by the fact that he tries to stop the mob beating Griffin at the end of the novel, not realizing that it is too late, and Griffin is already dead. - Character: Mr. Wicksteed. Description: Mr. Wicksteed is a man in his forties who uses a walking stick and is known as being a completely "inoffensive" person. He is the steward to Lord Burdock. He is murdered by Griffin, who it seems he may have encountered by accident on the grounds of Lord Burdock's house. - Theme: Freedom, Anonymity, and Immorality. Description: The Invisible Man is a novel concerned with immorality and the question of how humans would behave if there were no consequences. By turning himself invisible in a scientific experiment, Griffin secures an enormous amount of freedom. When telling the story of how he turned himself invisible to Doctor Kemp, Griffin recalls, "My head was already teeming with all the wild and wonderful things I now had the impunity to do." The key word here is impunity: because he is invisible, Griffin (theoretically) does not face consequences for his actions. He uses this freedom to commit immoral acts, such as burgling the vicarage and shooting a policeman. Through Griffin's actions, the novel presents a bleak view of human agency, suggesting that if there were no consequences for their actions, many people would choose to commit evil. Crucially, Griffin does not originally make himself invisible in order to commit evil. Rather, he is a former medical student who is interested in scientific experiments, and becomes fascinated by his discovery that it would be possible to make human tissues invisible. Before making himself invisible, he tries to test the invisibility process on his neighbor's cat first, torturing the animal in the process. He then ultimately leaves the cat to fend for itself and likely die, knowing that he will not have to face any consequences because he is also invisible. Griffin's invisibility—and the lack of accountability that comes with it—causes him to sacrifice any moral principles he might have had. This is confirmed when Griffin burns down the apartment in which he was staying in order to conceal the evidence of his experiment, before going on a rampage of theft, injury, and, eventually, murder. Whether or not readers believe Griffin was evil to begin with, the experience of being invisible makes committing immoral acts too tempting to resist. Free from consequence, Griffin burgles shops in London and the Iping vicarage, shoots a policeman, murders Mr. Wicksteed, and also tries to kill Thomas Marvel and Doctor Kemp. His evil acts culminate in a plan for a "Reign of Terror" that he hopes to inflict on the general public. Having total freedom through invisibility and anonymity corrupts Griffin to the core. Not only does he lose his moral principles, but he gradually comes to want to inflict terror on complete strangers en masse. This suggests that freedom and anonymity can make people more likely to commit immoral acts, and worse, it might inspire them to unleash full-blown chaos. The novel's exploration of whether invisibility would make people commit immoral acts is a rehashing of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's examination of this same question in Book 2 of the Republic. Plato discusses a mythical artefact named the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible. Glaucon (another philosopher engaged in the "dialogue") argues that anyone wearing the ring would commit evil because morality is socially constructed, and thus if there are no social consequences to one's actions, then an act isn't strictly immoral. Socrates disagrees, and points out that anyone who wore the Ring of Gyges and used it do whatever they wanted without fear of consequences would actually become a slave of their own desires. This lack of control would ultimately harm the wearer. The Invisible Man reflects Socrates' conclusion. Although Griffin boasts that "an invisible man is a man of power," he does not appear to be very happy or fulfilled by his pursuit of evil. Throughout the novel he is portrayed as being bitter, irritable, and prone to violent rages; never once is he shown to be happy or satisfied with his life as an Invisible Man. Furthermore, the secret of invisibility, along with his crimes, is discovered by various people around him, including Mrs. Hall, Marvel, and Doctor Kemp. Rather than being anonymous and free, a district-wide search is conducted to find Griffin and punish him. The fact that he is ultimately murdered by a mob suggests that it is perhaps not actually possible to commit evil without suffering some kind of consequences in the end. - Theme: The Future vs. the Past. Description: The Invisible Man was published in 1897, on the brink of a new century and at a time of enormous societal upheaval. Scientific advancements such as the proliferation of electricity and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution meant that people's lives and belief systems were changing at an incredible pace. As a result, the novel appears to straddle two worlds: the world of the future and that of the past. In the narrative, the future is associated with urban life and middle-to-upper class people, whereas the past is embodied by the lower-class townspeople of Sussex. The social, economic, and educational barriers preventing lower-class people from accessing scientific knowledge and technology suggest that futurity and progress may remain elusive to much of the population even as scientific advancement and societal change as a whole are accelerating. Broadly speaking, in the novel, the future is represented by Griffin and Doctor Kemp, whereas the past is embodied by the ordinary townspeople of Iping, a village in Sussex. Griffin and Doctor Kemp met as medical students; although Griffin never qualified as a doctor, both men now practice science (whether officially or surreptitiously) and thus represent scientific knowledge, experimentation, and technological advancement. Furthermore, both are of a higher class status than the other characters and are associated with urbanity, as both hail from London. In contrast, the people of Iping are provincial and somewhat "backward." Indeed, when Doctor Kemp arrives in Iping and hears the rumors about the Invisible Man, he reflects: "One might think we were in the thirteenth century." The townspeople are not well-educated and are of a lower class, as seen by their accents and dialect. The contrast between Griffin and Kemp with the townspeople suggests that the future will be more urban than rural, and will be dominated by scientific knowledge and technological advancement. This reflected (accurate) predictions at the time The Invisible Man was published about what the twentieth century would hold. The townspeople's lack of economic, social, and educational privilege means that they are ignorant of the scientific advancements with which Griffin and Doctor Kemp are familiar. This indicates that they may be "left behind" in an increasingly technologically advanced world. Some townspeople, such as Mrs. Hall, pretend to understand Griffin and the work that he conducts in order to appear smart. However, the chaos and confusion caused by Griffin's arrival in Iping results from the fact that Mrs. Hall and the other townspeople do not understand him and the scientific experiments that have rendered him invisible. The issue of class tensions come to a head in the relationship between Griffin and Thomas Marvel, a "tramp." Griffin enlists Marvel to help him, promising him special rewards that he will be able to obtain through his invisibility. He takes advantage of Marvel's vulnerable status, and when Marvel tries to turn him into the police, Griffin attempts to kill him. The fact that Griffin is invisible astonishes Marvel and makes him agree to serve Griffin. Due to his poverty and lack of education, Marvel is completely powerless compared to Griffin, and Griffin deliberately chooses Marvel as an accomplice because he knows that Marvel is vulnerable. This episode demonstrates how technological advancement in the future may be used to further exploit and oppress vulnerable populations. The novel ends on an ambivalent note regarding the future and the past, particularly as they are related to different social classes. It is revealed that Marvel remains in possession of Griffin's notebooks, which contain the instructions to make a person invisible. Although at this point Marvel "has a reputation for wisdom" within the village, he cannot understand the notes, as they have been written in code. As such, there remains a barrier between Marvel and the information that would give him access to "the future"—a future of scientific knowledge and advancement. - Theme: Greed and Self-Interest. Description: In some ways The Invisible Man is a didactic novel akin to a parable, meaning that it seeks to impart a moral message to the reader. Indeed, this message comes in the form of a warning about certain immoral behaviors, most notably greed and self-interest. These are mostly embodied by the anti-hero, Griffin, who turns himself invisible in order to gain power and glory, but also by other characters, such as Mrs. Hall and Thomas Marvel, who put themselves in dangerous situations because they believe they will profit from them. Greed and self-interest are problematic because they override morality and reason. The fact that several different characters in the novel succumb to greedy, self-centered behavior suggests that these are common human flaws that all people must be vigilant against. By showing the dangerous consequences that can result from greed and self-interest, the novel warns readers not to succumb to these vices. Griffin's character trajectory shows that greed and self-interest are seductive, corrupting forces. Griffin's initial interest in invisibility is a scientific one; he approaches the topic with a researcher's mindset, curious if it would be possible to truly make living things become invisible. He believes that invisibility will confer "advantages," but does not pursue it for this reason alone. Once he starts thinking about the possibilities that invisibility affords him, however, he quickly becomes greedy, selfish, and obsessed with power. He tells Doctor Kemp that soon after becoming invisible, he planned to "take my money where I found it" and "treat myself to a sumptuous feast […]  put up at a good hotel, and accumulate a new outfit of property." Yet Griffin finds that ultimately these things do not satisfy him. Furthermore, he runs into practical problems, such as the issue that when he eats, the food he consumes is visible inside him, thereby jeopardizing his invisibility. The visibility of the food is a metaphor for the limitations of bottomless greed and consumption. Griffin hopes that being invisible will allow him to steal and manipulate his way into endless property and fortune, but in reality, such a thing is not possible. Instead it corrupts him, causing him to act in increasingly rash and destructive ways, while never making him satisfied. Although Griffin is the character most strongly associated with greed and self-interest, other characters possess these flaws too. For example, Mrs. Hall is kind and friendly, but she is also greedy. This ultimately causes her to overlook Griffin's strange behavior, which endangers herself and her inn. While reflecting on Griffin's suspicious and rude manner, she concludes: "He may be a bit overbearing, but bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual." It turns out that in order to pay his bill, Griffin robbed the vicarage, proving Mrs. Hall's adage wrong. If money is obtained by immoral means, then surely it is not all the same—yet Mrs. Hall's greed blinds her to this reality. Similarly, Thomas Marvel's greed allows him to be seduced by Griffin's offers of rewards for helping him. Griffin promises that he will "do great things for you," telling Marvel that "an Invisible Man is a man of power." He begins to warn Marvel about the consequences if he betrays him, but Marvel is so excited by the prospect of the "great things" Griffin promises that he cuts him off. In ignoring Griffin's warnings, he endangers himself—a mistake that, later in the novel, almost gets him killed. While different characters in the novel exhibit the traits of greed and self-interest to different extents, in each case the greed and self-interest are shown to be seductive, but ultimately dangerous traits that will lead to self-sabotage and potentially fatal consequences. - Theme: Skepticism vs. Belief. Description: Following Griffin's experiences as the Invisible Man, the novel tests the extent to which it is believable for a man to actually turn invisible, and how people would react if this were actually to happen. While scientific ways of thinking tend to encourage skepticism over faith, the novel suggests that sometimes faith is necessary and advantageous. This is mostly shown through the different reactions of the townspeople to the Invisible Man. While those who believe that the Invisible Man actually exists turn out to be right, the novel does not suggest that faith is automatically a correct, advantageous reaction. For example, Fearenside's faith that Griffin is a "piebald" (mixed-race) is based on Fearenside's mistaken confidence in his own erroneous, racist beliefs. On the other hand, the novel does show that faith can lead people to correctly interpret situations. Believing that Griffin is indeed invisible takes a leap of faith from everyone he meets, yet it is a correct belief (and a pragmatic one, as being overly skeptical of Griffin's invisibility makes people vulnerable to being taken advantage of by him). Furthermore, the novel also suggests that scientific thought involves both skepticism and belief, such as when one is confronted with new scientific discoveries and advancements that did not previously seem possible. In order to understand and thrive within a technologically advanced world, people must retain both skepticism and belief. From the moment Griffin arrives at the Coach and Horses Inn, he behaves in a bizarre manner. He refuses to take off his clothes, wears strange goggles, and gets irrationally angry when anyone disturbs him. Mrs. Hall finds this behavior odd, but chooses not to investigate. At first, she believes Griffin's story that he was disfigured in an accident. Later, as the true nature of his situation is gradually revealed, her skepticism prevents her from believing that he is actually invisible, even as it becomes increasingly obvious that this is the case. Only when Griffin has already wreaked chaos does Mrs. Hall finally come to believe that he truly is invisible. Mrs. Hall's difficulty in balancing skepticism and belief allows Griffin to exploit her. Indeed, when Griffin's invisibility is revealed to a group of townspeople, they cannot believe that it is actually real because it strays so far from what they have previously experienced. The narrator observes: "They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing!" This quotation highlights the way people's capacity for belief is limited by their existing experience and perceptions. While this makes sense, it can also prevent people from comprehending new situations. This is particularly problematic given the technological advancements that were proliferating at the time the novel was written. Such advancements mean that the characters cannot afford to be skeptical about phenomena just because they have never personally experienced them before. Eventually almost everyone in the novel comes to believe that Griffin is invisible after being confronted with enough evidence of his invisibility. This evidence takes different forms; some people, such as the mariner, believe in the Invisible Man simply after reading a newspaper article about him. Other people, such as Doctor Kemp, require actually touching Griffin's invisible body in order to believe that he is invisible. Again, the novel emphasizes that it is important not to require too much or too little evidence in order to get over one's skepticism and have belief. Having faith on too little evidence can lead people to believe untrue things, such as Fearenside's belief that Griffin is a "piebald." On the other hand, waiting until there is too much evidence at times puts one in danger, as is true of Mrs. Hall and Doctor Kemp. The concept of invisibility also links to issues of religious belief and skepticism. Religious belief requires trusting that God is real despite the fact that he is not visible. At the time the novel was published, society was undergoing a profound shift in which scientific skepticism was displacing religious faith. In The Invisible Man, this shift appears with an unexpected twist. Griffin has turned invisible through scientific innovation, not through any supernatural power. Because he is the first man in the world to achieve this, the townspeople initially must rely on faith in order to believe that he is actually invisible. In this sense, Griffin is akin to a strange version of God, a figure who has achieved mastery over nature, who is invisible, and who is only believed to be real by those who have faith. The novel does not comment directly on religion or give an indication of whether belief in God is legitimate. However, through Griffin's invisibility, it suggests that believing in invisible, unfathomable things is not necessarily irrational. - Theme: Humans, Science, and Nature. Description: The Invisible Man explores humanity's increasing ability to manipulate nature through science, including significant manipulations of the human body. At the end of the nineteenth century, medical advances meant that human corporeal (embodied) experience was changing rapidly, and early science fiction writers such as H.G. Wells were keen to explore where these new possibilities could lead. Advancements in medical technology led to the elimination of diseases, a better understanding of human psychology, the emergence of birth control, and other major advances. In chronicling Griffin's experience as an invisible man (the result of a science experiment), Wells emphasizes the extraordinary power of science, but also the danger inherent within this power. The novel suggests that meddling with nature and the human body in too extreme a manner can have catastrophic consequences for humanity. Indeed, while Griffin's achievement of rendering himself invisible is remarkable, his attempt to achieve mastery over nature ultimately fails, a conclusion that emphasizes the limits of human power against nature. Prior to actually turning himself invisible, Griffin is highly optimistic about the process, and is thrilled when he realizes—both through the experiment on the cat and on himself—that it is actually possible to turn living organisms invisible. The scientific explanation of how this he achieves this, though not entirely realistic, demonstrates that the novel fits within the genre of science fiction. Wells makes Griffin's attempt at invisibility seem scientifically plausible. This sense of plausibility serves as a kind of warning about the power and possibilities of science. While a horror story about a man who magically turns invisible would be creepy, the scientific underpinnings of The Invisible Man link Griffin's story to the actual social reality of the time the novel was published. At the time, scientific advancements were drastically changing society at a fast rate, such that things previously thought to be impossible were suddenly becoming possible. This created a widespread sense of awe and uncertainty about the lengths to which scientific advancement could be taken, and how this would impact society. Griffin's profound scientific achievement—turning himself invisible—serves as a meditation on the power of science and a warning about what can happen when this power is misused. Once Griffin actually becomes invisible, he realizes that he did not think through all the consequences and limitations of his invisibility. He realizes that he cannot eat anything (food is visible in his stomach), and that he cannot go outside in the snow, rain, or fog: "Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man […] and fog—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity." Griffin's self-description as a "greasy glimmer of humanity" here reveals not only the practical problem of the different ways he can be rendered visible, but also the fact that he has altered the very nature of humanity through his experiment. Griffin quickly realizes that he will need to don clothes in order to go outside and not starve to death, and this fact emphasizes the limitations of scientific alteration of the human body. While humans may be able to manipulate nature in remarkable ways through science and technology, humanity must be cautious about this ability, due to its inherent limitations and potentially catastrophic consequences. - Climax: The final fight between Griffin, Colonel Adye, and Doctor Kemp, which ends in Griffin being beaten to death by a mob - Summary: A strange man (later introduced as Griffin) arrives in Iping and takes lodging at the Coach and Horses Inn. He is completely wrapped up in clothing, which he does not take off even after Mrs. Hall, who runs the inn, lights a fire for him. Mrs. Hall notices that Griffin's face is also wrapped in bandages. Griffin is rude to her, and impatiently asks when he will be able to get his luggage from the train station. Later that day, Griffin explains that he is an "experimental investigator" and that he needs his equipment. The following day, the carrier Fearenside brings Griffin's luggage, which is filled with scientific equipment, handwritten notebooks, and crates of fluids, some of which are labeled Poison. Later that day, Mrs. Hall hears the sound of bottles smashing, and when she asks Griffin about this he tells her not to bother him, saying that she can add extra charges to his bill. Griffin stays at the inn for a number of months. He does not attend church or communicate with anyone outside of the village, and only goes out at night. The villagers gossip, inventing many different theories about him. The local doctor, Cuss, visits Griffin at the inn, and is shocked to see that his sleeve is completely empty where an arm should be—yet he still manages to pinch Cuss's nose. On the holiday of Whit Monday, Rev. Bunting and Mrs. Bunting wake up to sounds of the vicarage being burgled. They try to catch the robber, but cannot see anyone there. The same morning, Mr. Hall and Mrs. Hall notice that the door to Griffin's room is open, and his bed is empty. They call Sandy Wadgers, the blacksmith, to change the locks so they can lock Griffin out, but while they are discussing this Griffin emerges from his room (though it had seemed empty before) and goes into the parlor, which he has been using as a personal study. He locks himself in and can be heard shouting and smashing things. Later, Mrs. Hall asks Griffin why he hasn't paid his bill; when he offers her money, she is suspicious, as just days before he said he didn't have anything. When confronted by the villagers at the inn, Griffin takes off his bandages to reveal a "black cavity"—his invisible face. On learning the truth about Griffin, the villagers flee in horror. The local constable, Bobby Jaffers, attempts to arrest Griffin for burgling the vicarage, but fails and Griffin escapes. Outside of Iping, Griffin seeks the help of a local "tramp," Thomas Marvel. At first Marvel thinks he's hallucinating when he hears a disembodied voice talking to him, but Griffin proves that he is real and invisible by throwing stones at him. Amazed, Marvel agrees to help Griffin, and returns to the Coach and Horses, where he seizes some of Griffin's belongings from his room, including his notebooks. Dr. Cuss and Rev. Bunting had previously looked through the notebooks while Griffin was gone, but couldn't understand their contents. Mr. Huxter attempts to catch Marvel but fails. Griffin smashes the windows of the inn and cuts the village's telegraph wire before fleeing. Everyone in Iping is too scared to come out of their houses for two hours. Marvel tries to quit his role as Griffin's helper, but Griffin threatens to kill him if he betrays him. The next day, Marvel and Griffin reach the town of Port Stowe, and Marvel strikes up a conversation with a local mariner. The mariner tells him the rumors about the Invisible Man and shows him a newspaper article about the events in Iping. Marvel boasts that he knows about the Invisible Man from "private sources," but after Griffin hurts him he goes back on his word and tells the mariner that the whole story is a hoax. The narrative shifts to a man named Doctor Kemp as he sits in his office, which overlooks the town of Port Burdock. He is dismayed by local gossip about the Invisible Man and the "fools" who believe the story is real. Nearby, Marvel bursts into the Jolly Cricketers pub, explaining in terror that he needs help because the Invisible Man is after him. Griffin enters the pub too and there is a scuffle. One of the men in the pub shoots the air, attempting to hit Griffin. Doctor Kemp's doorbell rings, but his servant tells him that no one was there when she answered. Kemp then finds blood on his bedroom door handle and floor. In his bedroom, Griffin speaks to Kemp, and at first Kemp refuses to believe that he is really there. Griffin introduces himself, reminding Kemp that they studied together at University College London. Kemp eventually believes Griffin and gives him food and whiskey. He allows Griffin to sleep in his bedroom, and when he goes to sleep worries that Griffin might be insane and "homicidal." The next day, Griffin tells Kemp that years earlier, while researching light and optics, he discovered a way of turning living tissue invisible. He kept his findings to himself, worried that someone would steal them. After spending three years researching invisibility, Griffin realized that he would need money in order to actually conduct the experiment. He stole money from his father that did not actually belong to him, which led his father to shoot himself. Griffin admits that he did not feel guilt or sympathy for his father. Griffin says he first tested his invisibility experiment on a piece of fabric, and then on his neighbor's cat. The cat's pained meowing awoke his landlord, who grew suspicious of Griffin's activities. Griffin then conducted the experiment on himself, successfully turning himself invisible. Aware of his landlord's suspicions, he set his apartment on fire and fled. Out in the world, Griffin found it harder than he assumed to be invisible. He regularly bumped into people, was freezing because he could not wear clothes without being seen, and couldn't eat, as food showed up in his stomach before it was fully digested. He robbed two different stores, but each time got perilously close to being discovered. He was eventually able to rob clothing and other items to disguise himself, wrapping himself up to conceal his invisibility from the world. He eventually traveled to Iping, hoping to continue his scientific research there. Griffin tells Kemp that he plans to impose a "Reign of Terror," killing people as he sees fit, in order to institute "the Epoch of the Invisible Man." He hopes that Kemp will work with him, but Kemp warns him that he is choosing the wrong path. Colonel Adye then arrives at Kemp's house, and on hearing this, Griffin shouts "Traitor!" and flees. Adye and Kemp warn everyone in the local area about Griffin's plans, and a manhunt begins. Mr. Wicksteed, the steward to Lord Burdock, is found murdered on the grounds of Lord Burdock's house. No one knows exactly what happened, but everyone agrees Griffin is responsible. Griffin attacks Kemp and Adye at Kemp's house, shooting Adye with his own gun. Kemp flees, begging for help from his neighbor Mr. Heelas, who refuses. Kemp runs into town being chased by Griffin. A mob of people descends on Griffin, and although Kemp begs them to have mercy, Griffin is beaten to death. His body becomes visible again as he dies. In the epilogue, the narrator explains that after Griffin's death, Marvel used the money he stole from him to become a landlord. He is now a respected man in the local area who has a "reputation for wisdom." Sometimes Marvel shares his stories of the Invisible Man with passersby. However, he never reveals that he kept Griffin's notebooks, which he keeps stored secretly and whose contents he does not understand.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall - Point of view: Third person limited (stream of consciousness) - Setting: The deathbed of Granny, probably in the American South - Character: Granny / Ellen Weatherall. Description: Granny Weatherall is the protagonist of the story, an eighty-year-old woman on her deathbed. While the narrative is in fact written in the third person, its stream-of-consciousness style closely follows Granny's wandering thoughts through the present, the past, and the imaginary as she contemplates her oncoming death. At first, she is not a particularly sympathetic character, given that she is fairly rude to and dismissive of the people trying to look after her. As the story progresses and more is revealed about her life, however, her plight becomes increasingly sympathetic. Granny was "jilted" at the altar sixty years ago by a man named George, and despite trying her very best to move on with her life, she is still plagued by the painful memory. Nevertheless, she has remained remarkably strong, and her enduring spirit has carried her through life. She married a man named John, was a very attentive mother to her children, and kept an excellent home. She remains proud of her achievements, and has always tried to remain in control of things through the strength of her will. She can't help feeling, however, that something was missing from her life, which leads her back to George. In her dying moments Granny is once again jilted, only this time by God when she asks Him for a sign and He fails to provide one. In spite of this cruelty she manages to reclaim her own agency once again, and the story ends with her seemingly dying of her own accord, blowing out the "candle" of her life. - Character: Cornelia. Description: Cornelia is Granny Weatherall's daughter, and is the child seemingly most involved in caring for her sick mother. Readers are not told much about her other than through Granny's (mostly irritable) opinions of her, but Cornelia seems exceptionally kind and patient, and is trying her best to make her mother comfortable despite Granny Weatherall's constant criticism. - Character: Doctor Harry. Description: Doctor Harry is another character who attempts to care for Granny Weatherall despite her objections. He is fairly patronizing towards Granny, but this is arguably a natural reaction to her defiance, and because he knows how ill she truly is. Granny, however, describes him in very childlike terms. Though his actual age is unclear, she sees him as too young to warrant any respect from her. - Character: Hapsy. Description: Hapsy was seemingly Granny's favorite child, and certainly the child she most longs to see in her dying moments. Hapsy died years previously, possibly as she gave birth to the baby that Granny sees her holding during one of her hallucinations. Granny later imagines Hapsy standing over her bed as she dies. She hopes to see Hapsy again after she passes. - Character: George. Description: The story reveals little about George, other than that he is the man who jilted Granny Weatherall at the altar many decades earlier. Despite this, he plays an extremely important role in the story, given the effect that this has on the protagonist. Granny sees him as a negative force, conflated in her memory with a dark cloud that seems like hell itself. - Character: Father Connolly. Description: Father Connolly is the priest who comes to visit Granny Weatherall before her death. He is also the priest who was originally going to marry Granny and George, and he even offers to kill George when he abandons Granny, but Granny tells him not to. He seems like a fairly relaxed priest, as Granny also recalls his cursing and fondness for gossip. - Theme: Order and Control. Description: Since being jilted at the altar sixty years ago, Granny Weatherall has found peace in carefully controlling her life, creating order and structure for herself and her family. Now, on her deathbed, she is afraid of dying, but she reassures herself through small acts of control, such as making a will and organizing her possessions. However, Granny's attempts at control are no match for death: she dies much more quickly than she was expecting, and without the sign from God that she had hoped for. Nevertheless, she regains some control at the end of the story by blowing "out the light" of her own life, rather than letting someone else do it for her. Ultimately, Porter seems to suggest that although the world can never truly be controlled, people can still seek happiness and solace in their own sense of order and purpose. Sixty years ago, when her fiancé George abandoned her on their wedding day, Granny came to learn just how harsh and unpredictable the world can be. She remembers feeling that "the whole bottom [had] dropped out of the world" when he didn't turn up, and since then George has represented to Granny the aspects of her life that she cannot control. "The thought of him," Porter writes, "was a smoky cloud from hell" that "crept up and over the bright field where everything was planted so carefully in orderly rows." This carefully planted field represents Granny's deliberately structured and reassuring world, and the memory of George constantly threatens this order because it reminds Granny that she can never fully control her life no matter how hard she tries. Nonetheless, since George left her Granny has been carefully structuring her life in the hopes that she can regain some of the agency that she lost with her jilting. Porter takes care to describe in detail the mundane domestic tasks, such as lighting lamps, sewing clothes, cooking food, and tending to the garden, that Granny has spent her life obsessing over. She decided long ago that it is "good to have everything clean and folded away," and to "spread out the plan of life and tuck in the edges orderly." Once everything has been put into order, she believes, only then can a person enjoy a small moment "for peace." Granny's ordered "plan of life" makes her feel more in control, which makes her happier and more relaxed as a result. While Granny maintained the illusion of control over her life, in facing death she is more powerless to manage her fate. Nonetheless, she does what she can to create order. In an early passage, for example, she finds "death in her mind," which makes her very uncomfortable, so she turns her mind to familiar things that she can control. She thinks of her father, who lived to be "one hundred and two years old" and had "drunk a noggin of strong hot toddy" every day of his life. As if she hopes that this will extend her own life, Granny quickly asks her daughter Cornelia for the same drink. Granny also asserts control on her deathbed by trying to manage others, particularly by treating them like children. She constantly treats Cornelia, her adult daughter who is caring for her, as if she were a child—claiming, for example, that she would like to "spank her." She also treats Doctor Harry as if he were a petulant child, telling him to "take [his] schoolbooks and go" and calling him a "brat." Granny does this because she knows that she is very ill—so ill that she cannot take care of herself—but she is trying to reassure herself by belittling the people with control over her and pretending that she still has power over them, as she did in her prime. To emphasize that Granny's attempts to control death are doomed to fail, Porter draws a parallel between death and Granny's first jilting. When Granny asks God for a sign and God fails to deliver, Porter describes God's absence as, "again no bridegroom and the priest in the house." Her first bridegroom, George, failed to show up to their wedding, but in the Bible, Jesus is also referred to as a bridegroom, so when God does not appear to Granny, it is as if her bridegroom has jilted her a second time. In this way, Porter suggests that, just as Granny's pointless preparations for her first wedding could not alter its disastrous outcome, her attempts to prepare for and control death are ultimately futile. She has spent "so much time preparing for death" that she thinks it could "take care of itself now," but when death finally arrives, Granny becomes panicked and suddenly starts noting all of the tasks she hasn't had time to finish. However, thinking of order provides Granny little comfort, and so she wrests control in a more tangible way:  at the close of the story, Granny herself blows "out the light" of her own life. Earlier in the story, Porter mentions that only once all the household chores have been completed is there a little "margin" left over for "peace," and the story gives the sense that as Granny finally decides to take death into her own hands, she is allowed a moment of rest before she dies. In light of this, Porter suggests that even though life and death can never truly be controlled, some peace and reassurance can still be found in maintaining a personal sense of order. Granny's domestic structure certainly offered her contentment in life, and even though misfortune plagued her, she still managed to live and die on her own terms because of it. Her jilting at the altar and her eventual death both took her by surprise, but she found comfort in those things she could control, like her home, her children, and the last moment of her life itself. - Theme: Death and Old Age vs. Life and Youth. Description: Although "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" is a story about a death, it is also, by consequence, a story about life. Porter deliberately juxtaposes life and death, and old age and youth, so that each emphasizes the other. The story acknowledges the fear and sadness that comes with death and old age, but also makes a point of emphasizing all of the rich experiences of life that come before death, encouraging the reader to appreciate life while it still exists. In the story, death is an undeniably tragic and fearful presence. Granny does not want to die, and she tries her best to act as if everything is normal. She does this partly by moving back and forth in time in her own head. She often has flashbacks to her youth, and she fondly recalls her children as they were when they were much younger, rather than the adults they are now: "Little things, little things! They had been so sweet when they were little. Granny wished the old days were back again." She even imagines Doctor Harry as if he were a child, referring to him as a "brat" who "ought to be in knee breeches." By reducing everyone around her to childlike status, Granny is able to pretend that she is not old or sick, and that she is still in control of her life, even as she approaches death. Porter balances the despair of death and old age with a more positive view of life and youth, which means that the story isn't quite as hopeless as first implied. For instance, the title of the story leads a reader into thinking of Granny as just that, as an old woman and grandmother, but as the story travels back in time it is revealed that her name is actually "Ellen" Weatherall. The reader is encouraged to expand their view of the protagonist, and to think of her not just as a "Granny" but as a woman who was once young, and who has led a full and rich life just like anyone else. Just because she is now dying, it doesn't mean that she must be restricted to this one point in her life. The occurrence of Granny's death itself is made more positive and complex in the story by paralleling it with imagery of birth. When Granny is about to die, she confuses this with her memories of giving birth, crying out "John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, my time has come." Later in the story, she declares that "Hapsy's time has come." Hapsy was Granny's daughter, and it is implied that she died during childbirth many years ago. By replacing these deaths with Granny's memories of birth, Porter manages to imply that death needn't be as final or as hopeless as Granny might think. Instead, it is linked with the hope and optimism of new life. Porter's own near-death experience, in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, probably influenced the message of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." Being so close to death and then surviving is almost comparable to dying and being re-born, and her experience would have enabled her to appreciate the true value of life. This is, in turn, what Porter implores the reader to do. After all, Granny's life is just as important to the story as her death. Throughout the tale we learn about how Granny has lived: the family she has raised, the home she has kept, and the tragedies of her past. When her death finally arrives, it arrives simply as a part of life, rather than as the main event itself. Readers are encouraged to expand their view of the possibilities of life, rather than only focus on the end of it. - Theme: Female Strength. Description: Porter's strongest female influence while growing up was her grandmother, and several of her stories, including "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," feature a strong grandmotherly protagonist. Granny was able to face the humiliation and heartbreak of having her fiancé jilt her at the altar and still go on to lead a very successful life as wife, mother, and caregiver. Even after her later (and kinder) husband John dies, Granny pushes herself on to maintain her livelihood and family. Ultimately, Porter's story is a testament to the remarkable strength of women, especially in the face of injustice or personal tragedy. When George abandoned Granny at the altar sixty years ago, she was left to overcome the ordeal by herself. Even though she had felt as though "the whole bottom dropped out of the world," she "had not fallen." She held her head up high and carried on with her life, despite the continual pain of the memory of her jilting. Before Granny dies, she claims that "she would like to see George," so that she can show him that she "had [her] husband just the same and [her] children and [her] house just like any other woman." Granny prides herself on having upheld these traditional roles, but she has also gone above and beyond them. She has not been "just like any other woman," because she has been so determined to re-build her life after George, and to prove to herself that she didn't need him. Granny was clearly very successful as a mother, and she regards this as a big part of her success in life.  She may have been tough, but all of her children gather around her bedside as she dies, so they are obviously attached to her and respect her. Granny's daughter Lydia drove "eighty miles for advice" when one of her own children "jumped the track," and her son, Jimmy, still asked her for business advice even in her old age. Granny was also a midwife by trade, so not only did she care for her own children, but she also helped other mothers with their own. She also remembers how she once fenced one hundred acres of land, "digging the postholes herself and clamping the wires" with the help of only one boy. In other words, Granny has been an exceptionally strong woman in both her personal and professional life, and it seems like people respect her for this. Perhaps Porter was trying to illustrate the type of woman that she herself was hoping to emulate in the face of her second divorce (which she was still recovering from at the time), as well as the type of woman that her own grandmother was. Though Granny is proud of her strength and determination, she also believes that God (a traditionally male figure) is ultimately responsible for these qualities. She says directly to God, "without Thee, my God, I could never have done it." At the end of the story, however, Granny asks for a sign from God to reassure her in the face of her approaching death, but he does not give her one. Just as George, her first bridegroom, failed to be there for her on their wedding day, God, another bridegroom of sorts, fails to be there for her at her death. She is left in a situation in which, once again, she has been abandoned and has to look after herself. Yet once again she manages this. The story closes with Granny blowing "out the light" of her own life, taking matters into her own hands once she has been abandoned by God. Her steely will has not failed her, even in death. Ultimately, Granny Weatherall is portrayed as a credit to her name: she has weathered all that life has to throw at her, and stayed resolvedly strong until the end. Even when she is abandoned by God in her dying moments, she is able to pick herself up and die with dignity, on her own terms, acting as a testament to Porter's affirmation of the strength of women. - Theme: Religion vs. Humanity. Description: Porter was highly critical of religion at the time of writing "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." She had abandoned Roman Catholicism when she divorced her first husband, a Catholic who was physically abusive to her. Her views are reflected very clearly in the story, with God himself featured as the second and cruelest of Granny Weatherall's jilters, failing to give her a sign of reassurance when she needs it most. In the moments before Granny's death, religion has nothing to offer her, but the people around her—her children and her doctor—are working tirelessly to make her comfortable. By consistently paralleling the present and comforting human world with the failures of spirituality, Porter advocates a belief in humanity and human relationships as the path to happiness and redemption. The most obvious way in which religion and humanity are paralleled in the story is through the figures of the two jilters, George and God. George, Granny's first bridegroom, fails to be there for her at their wedding. Granny also refers to God as a bridegroom ("Again no bridegroom") when he fails to give her a sign of reassurance before her death. Jesus as a bridegroom is a traditional Christian idea, so when God does not appear to Granny, it is as if her bridegroom has not turned up for a second time. The two jilters, George and God, are thus made effectively equal. This parallel (which is clearly unfavorable to God and religion) is made worse by the fact that George is actually associated with hell, as Granny imagines him in her mind as "a smoky cloud from hell." Since God and George are parallel figures, and George is seen as satanic, then God is, by proxy, associated with a vision of hell itself, which completely undermines a fundamental aspect of Christian faith. Porter thus suggests that if heaven exists at all, it is no better than earth (and might actually be closer to hell). Porter also emphasizes the importance of humanity over religion by praising things that are human and "alive" over the spiritual and lifeless. Father Connolly, for example, is portrayed not as a particularly pious priest, but as a down-to-earth, normal, man. This might make him a bad priest, but it does make him a far more sympathetic character. Granny enjoys his funny stories about people's confessions, and he likes a cup of tea and a round of cards just as much as the next man. Overall, he is a likeable figure, so it's notable that he is associated more with humanity than God. Moreover, throughout the story, Granny has a growing need for "something alive" and human, rather than lifeless or spiritual. Most obviously, she drops her rosary as she dies and instead holds on to her son Jimmy's thumb. "Beads wouldn't do, it must be something alive," she thinks. In the face of her death, her human family can offer her far more comfort than her lifeless rosary, and this is Granny's first clear rejection of the spiritual in favor of the human. Overall, it is clear that Porter was far fonder of humanity than she was of religion at the time of writing "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall." Not only is Granny abandoned at the altar by her former fiancé, George, but she is also abandoned on her deathbed by God himself. Religion fails her, and instead she seeks comfort in the people that surround her. After all, "beads wouldn't do, it must be something alive." - Climax: Granny's death and "jilting" by God, at the very end of the story - Summary: The story begins with the eighty-year-old Granny Weatherall despairing of a patronizing doctor, Doctor Harry, who is inspecting her. She maintains that she is in full health, and would be fine if only he would leave her alone. Granny feels the same way about her daughter Cornelia, whom Granny hears whispering outside her bedroom door with the doctor. The narrator notes Granny's hazy perspective; she sees the doctor float around the room and feels her own bones float around her body, in the first hint that the narrative is not entirely rooted in factual reality. There are also hints that Granny is more ill than she thinks she is. She finds waving goodbye too strenuous to manage, and her eyes close of their own accord. She begins to think of everything that she should do tomorrow—Granny likes to keep her life well-ordered, to have everything neatly put away and in its place. She remembers a box full of letters from her old fiancé George and her husband John, and then thinks uncomfortably of death, but decides that she has spent so much time preparing for it that it can now "take care of itself." Granny calls Cornelia to ask for a drink, and then hears Cornelia whisper to her husband that she's acting childishly. Granny feels bitter at this and recalls a time when her children were much younger, and she was their sole provider. She then imagines her husband John, who died when he was younger than the children are now. Granny thinks back to her achievements, recalling when she once fenced a hundred acres with only the help of one boy. She remembers all of the sick people and animals that she has cared for, and feels pride that she managed to save most of them. Granny's thoughts travel back to when the children were young, and she remembers lighting a lamp so that they wouldn't have to be scared. Suddenly the narrative shifts and she is telling the children to pick all of the fruit, and to make sure nothing goes to waste. Her mind wanders to other food that has gone to waste, more specifically to a white cake, which she had laid out ready for a man who did not come. This is Granny Weatherall's jilting. She was left at the altar by a man named George over sixty years ago, and the memory of it still haunts her, as much as she tries to forget it. Cornelia appears again, washing her mother's face. She says that the doctor has returned to see her, and Granny is confused about how much time has passed since his last visit. The doctor gives her a hypodermic, and Granny starts to hallucinate about Hapsy, who is the only child she really wants to see. She imagines Hapsy holding a baby, and then sees herself as Hapsy, and Hapsy as the baby. Cornelia interrupts, asking if there is anything she can do for Granny. Granny decides that she would like to see George and tell him of her success in life without him. She suddenly realizes that there was something missing from her life, before feeling a sharp pain and asking her former husband John to fetch the doctor, confusing the earlier birth of Hapsy with her own oncoming death. Instead, a priest, Father Connolly, arrives, which unnerves Granny as it again reminds her of her failed wedding day (Father Connolly was to perform the ceremony). She thinks of the wedding cake, which was never eaten, but thrown away. She again imagines Hapsy, but this time standing by her bed, and thinks about Hapsy getting ready to give birth. Granny focuses on a picture of John, but the picture, she decides, is nothing like her husband. The priest starts to speak, and she realizes that all of her children are surrounding her. She drops her rosary and clings instead to Jimmy's thumb, feeling that she needs something alive to hold instead of beads. Death has come upon her much more quickly than she imagined, and she tries to ask God for some more time while also giving the children instructions for arrangements after her passing. She feels herself becoming a small light, leaving behind her shadowy body, and begs God for a sign. But Granny is jilted once more, as God gives no sign. She declares that nothing could be crueler than this, before blowing out the light of her own life.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Joy Luck Club - Point of view: First-person limited - Setting: San Francisco, CA; China - Character: Jing-mei "June" Woo. Description: June is the main narrator in The Joy Luck Club, as her vignettes specifically bridge the histories between mothers and daughters, and between childhood memories and present-day events. She also has the most stories in the novel – "The Joy Luck Club, "Two Kinds," "Best Quality," and "A Pair of Tickets" – since she represents both herself and her deceased mother, Suyuan. Suyuan tried to make June into a child prodigy, but June hated the pressure to succeed. Instead, she decided that being her "true self" meant having the right to be mediocre, which continues to color her adult life as she struggles with an unfulfilling career and social life. It isn't until the end of the novel that June understands that Suyuan's critique was actually her way of encouraging June to reach her full potential. June brings Suyuan's story to her long-lost half-sisters, and gains an even more profound understanding of who her mother was. - Character: Suyuan Woo. Description: Suyuan's death is what sets off the events of The Joy Luck Club. Therefore, unlike the other mothers and daughters in the novel, who actively narrate their histories through the novel, Suyuan is only experienced through stories told by her daughter June, her husband Canning, and her three Joy Luck Club friends. In 1944, Suyuan was forced to flee China, leaving both her husband (who was fighting as a Chinese Nationalist against both the Communists and the Japanese) and her two baby girls behind. Though she remarries in the United States and has June seven years later, Suyuan never stops searching for her children. Her sacrifice represents the willingness of all mothers to protect their children over their own well-being. - Character: An-mei Hsu. Description: An-mei is the narrator of "Scar" and "Magpies," and her stories revolve around the sacrifices of her disgraced mother. When she is four, An-mei's father dies and her mother is exiled from the family for remarrying and becoming a rich merchant's lowly fourth wife, rather than remaining a widow forever. An-mei's mother returns to take An-Mei to her second husband Wu Tsing's house after An-mei's grandmother, Popo, dies. At Wu Tsing's, An-mei and her mother are treated terribly by Second Wife, who controls the household. An-mei's mother eventually commits suicide on a date that frightens the superstitious Wu Tsing, giving power back to An-mei. - Character: Rose Hsu Jordan. Description: Rose is the narrator of "Half and Half" and "Without Wood." She has two sisters and three living brothers; her youngest brother Bing drowned when he was four years old while fourteen-year-old Rose was supposed to be watching him. As an adult, Rose is in the midst of a divorce from her husband, Ted Jordan. Their marriage was initially based on his attraction to her passivity, but he later became irritated by her constant indecision and deferral of opinion. Rose eventually learns how powerful her voice can be, following wise anecdotes from her mother, An-mei. - Character: Lindo Jong. Description: Lindo is the narrator of "The Red Candle" and "Double Face." She is a Horse in the Chinese Zodiac, which predetermines a strong and hardworking nature. At only two years old, Lindo is arranged to be married to a spoiled boy named Tyan-yu, based on their compatible zodiac signs. When she goes to live with Tyan-yu's family at the age of twelve, Tyan-yu's mother, Huang Taitai, abuses Lindo like an indentured servant. The marriage is short-lived, as Lindo ingeniously plans a way to get out of her marital contract. Lindo sees this ingenuity inherited in her daughter Waverly, but fears her daughter is too Americanized to ever appreciate her Chinese heritage. - Character: Waverly Jong. Description: Waverly is the narrator of "Rules of the Game" and "Four Directions." Her stories center on her experiences as a child chess prodigy, and the tension between her and her mother, Lindo, who often assumes credit for Waverly's successes. Waverly treats her mother as the ultimate opponent, rather than a guiding figure, which antagonizes their relationship up into Waverly's adulthood. While seeking Lindo's approval before her second marriage, it is revealed that Waverly believes that Lindo poisoned her confidence as a child, so that Waverly is unable to trust her own instincts over love, parenting, and life in general. She has a young daughter, Shoshana, from a previous marriage. - Character: Ying-ying St. Clair. Description: Ying-ying is the narrator of "The Moon Lady" and "Waiting Between the Trees." Though outwardly appearing as the quietest and most meek of the Joy Luck Club members, Ying-ying identifies as a Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac, meaning she has a fierce and cunning nature. She loses her Tiger spirit following the end of her first marriage and a vengeful abortion; by the time she meets and marries Clifford St. Clair, she is barely a shadow of her former spirited self. As an adult, Ying-ying is a distant mother to Lena, until she sees her daughter approaching a divorce and believes she can help her. - Character: Lena St. Clair. Description: Lena is also a Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac, like her mother Ying-ying. She grew up in a biracial household with two languages, and subsequently acted like an interpreter between her white father and Chinese mother. The role led her to feel guilty about not always perfectly translating important conversations, affecting the family's relationships. Lena also has a difficult marriage as an adult, with her husband Harold, who is oblivious to her sensitivities. Lena tries to maintain an equal partnership between them, but loses track of what equality actually looks like in a marriage, and finds herself disillusioned and silenced in his presence. - Character: Canning Woo. Description: Suyuan's second husband and June's father. He insists that June take over Suyuan's spot in the Joy Luck Club, sparking the novel's chain of events. He is aware of Suyuan's first family and shares more of Suyuan's history with June while they visit China, believing it's important for June to know her mother's legacy. - Character: Clifford St. Clair. Description: Ying-ying's husband and Lena's father. He is an American of English and Irish descent, who meets Ying-ying in China while completing military service. He barely speaks Chinese, which creates a large emotional barrier between them throughout their marriage. Clifford dies of a heart attack a few years before the beginning of The Joy Luck Club. - Character: Popo. Description: Popo is An-mei's maternal grandmother, who raises her from ages four to nine. She warns An-mei to never speak of An-mei's mother, and tells her frightening bedtime stories that scare her into obedience. When An-mei turns nine, Popo becomes deathly ill and An-mei's mother returns home to care for her, even going so far as to slice off some of her arm in an effort to make a healing brew. Unfortunately, the attempts to nurse Popo back to health aren't enough, and Popo dies without ever reconciling with An-mei's mother. - Character: An-mei's mother. Description: An-mei's mother is forced to leave the family home by her own mother, Popo, after her first husband dies and she (shamefully in the eyes of the community) becomes the unimportant fourth wife to a rich merchant named Wu Tsing. As the young widow of An-mei's father, An-mei's mother was expected to honor his life forever by never remarrying. An-mei doesn't learn the full story of An-mei's mother's tragic life until she goes to live with her mother following Popo's death. At Wu Tsing's mansion, An-mei's mother must submit to his second wife, who dominates the household with her manipulative personality. Second Wife even takes An-mei's baby brother as her own to be the official mother of Wu Tsing's heir. An-mei learns that her mother was raped by Wu Tsing, and her mother had no choice then but to marry him rather than live with the dishonor. An-mei's mother finally takes power by killing herself on the most spiritually superstitious day of the year, forcing Wu Tsing to honor An-mei so as to not enrage An-mei's mother's unsettled spirit. - Character: Wu Tsing. Description: A rich merchant who rapes An-mei's mother and forces her to marry him rather than have a shameful pregnancy out of wedlock. He is very superstitious, and An-mei's mother has her revenge by killing herself on the Lunar New Year and cursing him with furious ghosts if he doesn't care for An-mei. - Character: Second Wife. Description: The second wife of Wu Tsing, who despises An-mei's mother for being younger and more beautiful than she is. She forcibly takes An-mei's mother's new baby boy from her and adopts him, making Wu Tsing believe Second Wife gave him his heir, not An-mei's mother. When An-mei's mother commits suicide to give An-mei power over Wu Tsing, Second Wife is relegated to a position of unimportance in the family. - Character: Tyan-yu. Description: Lindo's former husband. They are betrothed when Tyan-yu is only one year old. Incredibly spoiled by his mother, Tyan-yu grows up to be an immature, underdeveloped adolescent who wants nothing to do with Lindo or their expected marital activities. This leads to Lindo view her young husband as a brother figure, but also to want nothing to do with the marriage. - Character: Amah. Description: Ying-ying's childhood nanny. Amah does the majority of parenting when Ying-ying is young, as Ying-ying's wealthy parents spend their time in leisure. Though she affectionately cares for Ying-ying, she's also aware that her job is in jeopardy whenever the girl misbehaves, causing her to be extra angry when Ying-ying sneaks off. - Character: Rich Schields. Description: Waverly's fiancé. He is very romantic in their relationship, and believes in the power of love despite Waverly's hesitation to remarry after a failed first marriage. Rich reveals how ignorant he is about Chinese culture during an awkward dinner with Lindo and Tin, but eventually wins Waverly's parents over with his enthusiasm. - Character: Wang Chwun Yu. Description: One of Suyuan's twin daughters from her first marriage. She is rescued between the cities Kweilin and Chungking in 1944, after Suyuan places her and her twin on a busy road. Suyuan, fearing that she's dying, believes her daughters will be saved if they seem orphaned. Chwun Yu grows up in China and reunites with her half-sister June at the end of the novel. - Character: Wang Chwun Hwa. Description: One of Suyuan's twin daughters from her first marriage. She is rescued between the cities Kweilin and Chungking in 1944, after Suyuan places her and her twin on a busy road. Suyuan, fearing that she's dying, believes her daughters will be saved if they seem orphaned. Chwun Hwa grows up in China and reunites with her half-sister June at the end of the novel. - Theme: Mother-Daughter Relationships. Description: The main focus in The Joy Luck Club is the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, and the inherent bond that's always between them despite generational and cultural conflicts. The novel follows June Woo's search to understand her deceased mother Suyuan's life, supplemented by stories from her mother's three best friends, Lindo, An-mei, and Ying-ying. June's memory of her mother is complicated by the revelation that Suyuan had twin baby girls during World War II, but had to leave them in China for their own safety during the Japanese invasion. June questions whether she ever truly knew her mother, but the three older women insist that Suyuan exists deep in June's bones. The novel, in fact, suggests that the connection between mother and daughter exists beyond the knowledge of personal events; it's steeped in inherited behaviors and selflessness over the course of a lifetime. An-mei tells a related story about her banished mother returning home to care for An-mei's dying grandmother, Popo; her mother goes so far as to cut out a piece of her arm to prepare special medicine. The physical sacrifice represents the lengths that some daughters go to honor their mothers. In contrast, the daughters of the Joy Luck Club members share stories about the difficulties of growing up with immigrant mothers. Cultural values clash as the American-born daughters want freedom from their mothers' old-fashioned beliefs. Yet by the end, the daughters discover their overbearing mothers have always had their best interests at heart. Ying-ying's daughter Lena tries to hide her impending divorce, but her mother wants to help her rediscover the "tiger side" of her Chinese identity, which fights and does not yield to sadness. Though initially ashamed to reveal such a failure to her mother, Lena realizes her mother fundamentally understands her decisions, as they share similar personal histories and values. As the standalone stories weave together in The Joy Luck Club, they expose how boundless maternal love can be, even when daughters misunderstand or undervalue it. As June meets her half-sisters for the first time in China, she feels her mother's presence with them, dispelling any doubt about understanding her mother's lifelong intentions. Though she cannot know every detail of her mother's history, June preserves the lessons that Suyuan taught her as a child, and the deep love for family to share with her new half-sisters. - Theme: Storytelling and Tradition. Description: The novel has four sections of four stories each, narrated in turn by one of the novel's seven main characters. At the start of each section, a one-page Chinese parable (a short story with a moral) introduces the theme that connects the four stories that follow. The brief parables reflect the mothers' own parenting styles throughout the book, as they teach their daughters lessons through stories that can be internalized, rather than direct opinions or warnings. As a child, Waverly learns not to whine for attention, because her mother tells her that the "wise guy, he not go against wind… strongest wind cannot be seen." This lesson of stoicism drives Waverly's eventual success, both as a child chess champion and as a strong-willed professional. The style mimics the Chinese tradition of oral storytelling, where family history is passed along and immortalized through generations. More than just communicating advice, storytelling allows historical context and a stronger connection to Chinese heritage to be passed on, which fades as children become more Americanized and less interested in inheriting ancient proverbs. Tradition is vital to the development of personal values in The Joy Luck Club, and slowly becomes important to the daughters as they get older and realize the relevance, and strength, of all the stories and inherited customs within their own lives.The mothers' longer narratives in each chapter often address their daughters, and storytelling acts as a way to transfer wisdom through personal experience. Suyuan repeats a story to June about escaping Kweilin, changing the ending each time as June grows older. When she's finally mature enough to comprehend the gravity of Suyuan's loss, June is told the whole story about the twins' abandonment and her mother's first husband's death. The story makes June confront the meanings of sacrifice, love, and despair more viscerally than simply being instructed to not take things for granted. - Theme: Immigration, Language, and Mistranslation. Description: Though storytelling is the main mode of communication in The Joy Luck Club, a constant conflict in the novel is the language barrier between Chinese and English. When first immigrating to the United States, the mothers wish for their children to speak perfect English and succeed as Americans. However, by assimilating into American culture, their daughters lose a sense of their Chinese heritage and inherited language, in fact they lose even the ability to fully understand that heritage or language. In the opening chapter, June remembers translating all of her mother's comments in her head, but not retaining any meaning. While able to speak some English, the mothers feel most comfortable expressing ideas and stories in their native Chinese, which often cannot be translated into English. Though the daughters understand Chinese, they do not take the time to learn the language's complexities, and therefore struggle with abstract concepts, resulting in frustration or misunderstanding. With their broken English, the mothers are often viewed as less competent or alien in American society. Non-Chinese characters often speak condescendingly to them, or ignore them altogether. Still, it is the mistranslation within the family that is most devastating. Lena recounts the relationship between her white father and Chinese mother Ying-ying, and her role as translator between them. When her mother has a stillborn son and wails her grief, Lena's father asks her to translate; rather than hurt him with her mother's near-insane words, Lena lies and tells him a more positive message. This mistranslation prevents Lena's father from properly supporting Lena's mother through her subsequent depression, resulting in Ying-ying's withdrawal from the family and life. Tan highlights the difficulty of comprehendible expression by including Chinese or broken English in the dialogue, particularly with idioms. The reader must infer meaning rather than understand outright. During a fight with her husband, Lena can only express her anger in Chinese phrases, which aren't translatable. Unable to understand her, Lena's husband believes she's deliberately shutting him out. The novel argues that immigrants are no less intelligent or complex, but often misinterpreted to the point of being silenced, even by their own families. - Theme: Fate and Autonomy. Description: The notion of fate permeates the novel, as the protagonists waver between the traditional acceptance of a singular destiny and the opportunity to decide their own fates. The mothers often refer to the Chinese belief of predetermined outcomes; in particular, they regularly mention Chinese zodiac characters established by birthdates, which supposedly dictate personalities and personal weaknesses. Still, a common thread in all the stories is the ability to break out of one's preordained life to pursue a more positive direction. As a child, Lindo is arranged to be married to Tyan-yu, a spoiled boy from a rich family. Once she's folded into the family, more as a servant than a wife, Lindo initially resigns herself to the harsh life. She changes her mind when she sees her marriage candle blow out, signaling an inauspicious end to her marriage. When the candle is lit again in the morning, she knows someone artificially maintained the light, not fate itself. She then constructs a plan to scare her in-laws into releasing her from the marital contract and paying her way to America. Though fate might have delivered her to such circumstances, it is her own will and ingenuity that construct the solution and change the course of her life. Similarly, An-mei's mother refuses to accept her abusive lot in life, especially as her children suffer alongside her. Though seemingly fated to live with her shame, An-mei's mother decides to kill herself at a time when her husband cannot refuse her anything, thus placing An-mei and her baby brother in a position of power. Though she dies, in doing so An-mei's mother decides her own destiny and the fortune of her children. Though the traditional Chinese belief in predetermined fate exists and determines much of a person's life, The Joy Luck Club reminds the reader that there is always room for free will to alter the future for the better. - Theme: Sacrifice. Description: The Joy Luck Club shows that all actions of love require some level of sacrifice, and that women in particular sacrifice themselves for the good of others. The greatest sacrifice in the book is Suyuan's decision to leave her twin babies in a safe spot to be rescued during the Japanese invasion of Kweilin. Nearly dead herself from dysentery, she places them near a road along with all her remaining money and her husband's information, believing they'd be saved if they seemed abandoned. Her willingness to put her daughters' lives before her own ensures their rescue. When An-mei's mother returns to care for her dying mother, she slices off a piece of her own arm and uses an ancestral recipe to prepare a medicinal broth, ignoring the physical pain. These actions show that no cost is too great when love is threatened. These memories of sacrifice from the immigrant mothers of the novel are directly weighed with the petulance of the American daughters, who do not value their mothers' generosities. Unable to afford piano lessons in cash, Suyuan works extra hours cleaning a piano teacher's house so that June can learn how to play. At the time, June resents her mother's desire to turn her into some sort of child prodigy, and refuses to practice. As an adult however, she appreciates her mother's attempts to foster her natural talent. Though rarely appreciated in the moment, the novel argues that the act of sacrifice is the ultimate sign of love, giving up anything for the sake of another. - Theme: Sexism and Power. Description: As a novel centered entirely on women's points of view, The Joy Luck Club grapples with the nuances of sexism. On an explicit scale, the forced marriage of Lindo to her childish husband, Tyan-yu, shows the powerlessness of being a woman in pre-modern China. Without any say in her future, Lindo is used as barter to please a more powerful family. Sexual assault and domestic abuse feature in each of the mothers' personal histories. However, Tan does not only highlight blatant acts of sexism, but also carefully considers smaller aggressions against her female characters in daily life, which add up to life-altering problems. Lena's husband Harold, who is also her boss, repeatedly denies Lena a raise, saying that it'd be awkward to reward his wife in front of other employees. Even though she has earned the company the most profit, she remains passive to maintain peace in her marriage. This power imbalance ultimately ruins her, as she grows resentful of Harold's unwillingness to listen and cherish her. Similar instances of small, but constant, devaluations of all the protagonists show that sexism is not singular to one cultural experience, but universally shared as an oppressive force in their lives. - Climax: Suyuan's sacrifice of her twin babies on the road to Chungking. - Summary: The Joy Luck Club is divided into four parts of four stories each, totaling sixteen stories in all; in the beginning of each part, a short parable introduces a common theme, connecting the four stories that follow. Each story is told by one of the seven main characters, and these stories are all woven together into a larger narrative about the complex, and often misunderstood, connection between immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters. A few months after her mother Suyuan's unexpected death, June Woo is asked to take her mothers seat at a weekly mahjong game that's been ongoing between four friends for almost forty years. The weekly meeting is known as "the Joy Luck Club," and the other members are An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair. The four women met in a San Francisco refugee center after emigrating from China to the United States during World War II, and bonded over both shared grief and resilience. Suyuan's particular grief related to the loss of her twin baby girls, whom she was separated from during the Japanese invasion of Kweilin. Suyuan secretly searches for her two daughters for the rest of her life, unbeknownst to June. With Suyuan gone, June is supposed to fill her mother's role in the group of friends, but June feels childish and out of place at the table of older women, especially when they start talking about their own daughters with whom June grew up. When the game night concludes, the three older women inform her that Suyuan's twin girls have been found as adults in China; it is up to June to travel to China and fulfill her mother's lifelong wish of reuniting the family. June worries that she doesn't know her mother's personal history well enough to communicate to her long-lost half-sisters, which the older woman strongly deny. This strong denial reveals these women's own fears: that their daughters would also be unable to articulate their Chinese heritages if asked). In the first part of the novel, An-mei, Lindo, and Ying-ying relate how their traumatic childhoods in China affected their parental styles. An-mei was initially raised by her maternal grandmother, after her mother remarried in a dishonorable manner. When her mother returns a few years later to care for An-mei's dying grandmother, her mother cuts off a piece of her own arm to brew medicine that might save her grandmother. An-mei witnesses the sacrifice, which redefines her notion of a daughter's love. Lindo's life is decided for her by the time she's two, when a matchmaker arranges a future marriage between her and Tyan-yu, a wealthy but spoiled boy. Lindo moves to Tyan-yu's family's mansion when she's twelve and becomes an indentured servant to Tyan-yu's cruel mother, Huang Taitai. After she and Tyan-yu marry, Lindo takes fate into her own hands and concocts a plan to scare Huang Taitai into annulling the marriage. When Ying-ying is only four years old she falls off her family's boat during a Moon Festival and gets separated from them. She soon comes upon the Moon Lady performing on a stage and believes it to be the goddess who grants wishes, as her nanny taught her. However, when she goes to talk to the Moon Lady, Ying-ying is horrified to discover the actor is actually a man dressed as a woman. The fear of being lost finally sinks in, and Ying-ying relates at the end of her story that she is uncertain if she was ever completely found. The second and third parts contain the stories of the older women's daughters: Waverly Jong, Rose Hsu Jordan, Lena St. Clair, and June again. These stories address their upbringings with immigrant mothers, and the way that maternal wisdom, derived from Chinese tradition, shaped them as adults. Waverly becomes a chess prodigy before she's ten years old, and thrives under the pressure of competition. Still, she gets irritated by her mother Lindo's boasting and self-congratulations, and the two have a fight that leads to Waverly quitting chess out of guilt. Lindo's ability to shake Waverly's confidence continues into Waverly's romantic life when she's an adult. Rose's stories involve her mother An-mei's faith to keep trying, despite fate's cruel circumstances. Rose's baby brother accidentally drowns while under Rose's supervision, and An-mei tries to rescue him by appeasing God and Chinese ancestral spirits with prayers and jewelry. Though unsuccessful, An-mei's attempt inspires Rose to take control of her own fate during her later divorce. Lena remembers her mother Ying-ying's unnerving ability to predict bad events, and highlights the ominous premonition about her mother's stillborn baby. Acting as an interpreter between her suffering Chinese mother and her bewildered white father, Lena fails to communicate Ying-ying's sorrow, leaving her mother bereft and without support. Ying-ying also predicts that Lena will marry a bad man, which comes true years later. Lena senses the impending divorce, but it takes Ying-ying's presence to help Lena acknowledge her husband's lack of support. June recalls Suyuan's desire to make June into a child prodigy like Waverly, which ultimately backfires. For most of her life, June believes her mother thinks she's a disappointment, until Suyuan holds a New Year's dinner party right before her passing. During the dinner of whole crabs, which represent good fortune for the next year, Waverly picks the best crabs for her and her family. By the time the plate reaches June and Suyuan, only one perfect crab remains. June tries to take a damaged crab so Suyuan can have the perfect crab, but Suyuan stops her. Later, Suyuan praises June for having such a generous heart when other people (like Waverly) only think of themselves. The final section returns to the mothers' perspectives, and tries to reconcile the gap between Chinese and American cultures by offering solutions that appease both sets of values. Using old-fashioned superstition to manipulate her abusive husband, An-mei's mother controls the outcome of An-mei's fate. Her suicidal plan both acknowledges Chinese customs as well as a new spirit of self-agency. Similarly, Ying-ying identifies with the Chinese Tiger zodiac sign, even if its assigned traits don't always appear to others. The animal's resilience motivated Ying-ying to survive her life in China, and Ying-ying believes it can help Lena through her divorce; just because the idea is old-fashioned doesn't mean it doesn't apply to American situations. Lindo contemplates her daughter Waverly's upcoming marriage and the similarities between their life paths, despite growing up in different countries. In the last of the sixteen stories, June flies to China to meet her long-lost half-sisters. Immediately after touching down in Shanghai, June feels a sense of connection to the country, and to her mother, in a more immediate way than ever before. When she finally meets her sisters, Chwun Hwa and Chwun Yu, the three of them feel their mother's presence together and represent what Chinese heritage really is: a connection to family and a greater cultural legacy that transcends place and time.

- Genre: Fable, Children's Literature - Title: The Jungle Book - Point of view: First Person and Third Person - Setting: British India - Character: Mowgli. Description: - Character: Shere Khan. Description: - Character: Kotick. Description: - Character: Rikki-tikki-tavi. Description: - Character: Baloo. Description: - Theme: The Laws of Nature. Description: - Theme: Human and Animal Relationships. Description: - Theme: Loyalty. Description: - Theme: British Imperialism. Description: - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: - Climax: Mowgli tricks and kills the Tiger Shere Khan. However, the villagers decide he must be a sorcerer, and they exile him from the village. - Summary: The Jungle Book opens with three stories and a song about Mowgli, a young boy raised in a jungle by wolves. Mother Wolf and Father Wolf find Mowgli when he is only an infant and take him in as one of their own. As Mowgli grows older, he learns the Law of the Jungle from Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Black Panther. As a young boy, Mowgli does not fully appreciate the Law of the Jungle. His lack of appreciation leads him to be kidnapped by the Bandar-log, a group of monkeys who do not regard the Law of the Jungle. Luckily, Baloo and Bagheera rescue Mowgli and bring him back to the wolf pack. As Mowgli grows older, some of the wolf pack start to resent him because the ferocious tiger, Shere Khan, convinces them that he is not one of their own and does not belong in the jungle. After a confrontation with Shere Khan and the wolves, Mowgli decides to leave the jungle and live among human beings. However, his time in a human village does not last long. While living with the humans, Mowgli tricks and kills Shere Khan. After, Mowgli skins Shere Khan and takes his pelt. One of Mowgli's fellow villagers, Buldeo, tries to steal the pelt and claim it as his own. However, Mowgli's wolf brothers pin him down and do not allow him to. This leads Buldeo to claim Mowgli is a sorcerer, which gets him kicked out of the village. After leaving the village, Mowgli returns to the jungle and displays Shere Khan's pelt. However, his return to the jungle is only temporary, as he will one day return to live among humans. A stand-alone story called "The White Seal" tells the tale of Kotick, a white seal who searches far and wide for a place where seals can live without worrying about humans clubbing them. At the end of the story, Kotick finds such a place, and it becomes the most popular spot for the seals in his area. Following "The White Seal," is a story called "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi." Rikki-tikki-tavi is a mongoose whom an English family living in India takes in after his burrow floods. Rikki-tikki-tavi feels he owes the English family his life and does everything he can to defend them from two cobras, Nag and Nagaina, who live in the family's garden. After a great struggle, Rikki-tikki-tavi kills both Nag and Nagaina, which buys him the undying loyalty of both the British family and the other animals of the garden. "Toomai of the Elephants" tells the story of a young boy named Little Toomai who hopes to one day become an elephant catcher. When he shares this information with Petersen Sahib, the leader of the local elephant catching operation, Petersen tells Little Toomai he will only achieve his dream once he witnesses an elephant dance. That night, Little Toomai follows an elephant named Kala Nag into the jungle. There, he watches a group of elephants stomp the ground for hours. The following day, Little Toomai returns to Petersen and tells him what he saw. Petersen congratulates Little Toomai and tells him he can become an elephant catcher. The final story, "Her Majesty's Servants," features a group of animals talking about their respective roles in the British-Indian army. All the animals have different strengths and weaknesses, though none understands the point of the conflict the humans have enlisted them to take part in. Meanwhile, the Amir of Afghanistan meets with the Viceroy of India. The level of control the Viceroy has over his army impresses one of the Amir's men. However, when he expresses his approval to one of the Viceroy's officers, the officer mocks him. He thinks Amir and the other Afghanis are inferior to the British forces and need to learn their place.

- Genre: Muckraking journalism/historical fiction - Title: The Jungle - Point of view: Omniscient third-person narrator. - Setting: "Packingtown," the miserable community of immigrant laborers near Chicago's industrial meatpacking area. - Character: Jurgis Rudkus. Description: The protagonist of The Jungle, Jurgis is a vigorous, motivated, and honorable Lithuanian immigrant whose idealistic vision of America is quickly crushed by grinding poverty, dangerous work, and a corrupt system. After enduring a series of miserable jobs and suffering countless tragedies, Jurgis turns to Chicago's criminal underworld to make money. After a brief period of immoral profiteering, Jurgis is cast out onto the streets again, and just as his future looks bleakest, he discovers the encouraging ideas of socialism. Jurgis finds fulfillment as an advocate for the political movement, and at the end of the book he has contributed meaningfully to what the novel depicts as socialism's noble cause. - Character: Ona Lukoszaite. Description: Ona is the young, beautiful, kind-hearted wife of Jurgis. Early in the book, she gives birth to their baby boy, Antanas. Ona works in a meatpacking factory to support her family, where her boss, Phil Connor, takes advantage of her sexually. For fear of losing her job and threatening her family's livelihood, Ona does not speak out against Connor, but Jurgis discovers the man's transgressions and ends up in jail for attacking him. Shortly after Jurgis is released from jail, Ona dies after going into premature labor during her second pregnancy. Her horrifying death fuels Jurgis's spiral into despair. - Character: Marija Berczynskas. Description: Marija is Ona's strong, stubborn cousin who comes to America to seek work with the family. At first, Marija is unafraid to fight for her rights, and even loses her job in a cannery after standing up to an unscrupulous boss that tries to cheat her of her wages. However, financial hardship forces Marija to become a prostitute to support the family, and she becomes trapped by drug addiction and exploitative brothel owners. Her transformation from a strong-willed fighter into a cynical morphine addict symbolizes the way an unforgiving capitalist system erodes the immigrant spirit. - Character: Phil Connor. Description: Phil Connor, Ona's despicable boss, is one of the clearest representations of the way capitalism corrupts industry, politics, and individual conscience alike. He threatens Ona in exchange for sexual favors. When he is attacked by Jurgis in retaliation, he uses his business clout to keep Jurgis out of a job. Finally, Connor's connections to the politician Mike Scully allow him to get away with these flagrantly illegal acts with impunity. - Character: Dede Antanas Rudkus. Description: Dede Antanas is Jurgis's father. He is eager to work but too old and infirm to obtain a job. Out of dedication to his family, he agrees to pay a man a third of his wages in exchange for finding him a job. He works tirelessly, and his job's harsh conditions soon prove too much for him: he wastes away and dies. - Character: Antanas Rudkus. Description: Baby Antanas, named for Jurgis's late father, is the only child of Ona and Jurgis. After Ona's death, he is the light of Jurgis's life, and his sole motivation to work. However, in a freak accident, Antanas drowns in a muddy street. The baby's death strips Jurgis of the little meaning that remained in his life and sends him into a period of deep crisis. - Character: Grandmother Majauszkiene. Description: Grandmother Majauskiene is a wise old woman who lives next door to the house the Rudkus family leases. She is a socialist who has seen the Packingtown labor system mistreat several waves of inexperienced immigrants. She warns the naïve immigrants that their housing contract is likely a swindle and tries to show them the predatory nature of capitalism. - Character: Stanislovas Lukoszaite. Description: Stanislovas is a teenaged son of Teta Elzbieta. He lies about his age to take a job in a slaughterhouse, but tries to avoid work when a dangerous snowstorm hits. Jurgis beats him as punishment. Later, Stanislovas falls asleep in a factory and gets eaten alive by rats. Jurgis is deeply disturbed when he hears of the boy's gruesome death. - Character: Jack Duane. Description: Jack Duane is a smooth-talking criminal that Jurgis befriends during his first jail sentence. When Jurgis returns to jail, Duane convinces him to join his life of crime. Later on, Duane is caught breaking a safe, and manages to pull strings to arrange a release from prison. However, the public is so outraged that Duane's allies decide to sacrifice him to curry favor, and he is forced to leave town. Duane's misfortune shows how easily Chicago's system of graft can turn on its own, and foreshadows Jurgis's similar fall out of favor in the criminal underworld later in the novel. - Character: Miss Henderson. Description: Miss Henderson is Ona's supervisor at the meatpacking factory. She also runs a brothel downtown, where many of Ona's coworkers work as prostitutes. Miss Henderson resents Ona's respectable lifestyle, and she and her subordinates treat Ona hostilely. Furthermore, Miss Henderson appears to be complicit in Phil Connor's sexual exploitation of Ona. - Character: Nicholas Schliemann. Description: Nicholas Schliemann is a vehement and intelligent advocate of socialism who speaks at length during a pro-socialist meeting held at Fisher's house. He sees socialism as a way to realize his vision of an egalitarian utopia, which he describes at length in the hopes of enlightening an anti-socialist magazine editor. - Character: Mike Scully. Description: Mike Scully is a powerful, conscienceless Democratic Party boss who has a hand in many of Chicago's criminal activities, including the housing scam that defrauds the Rudkus family. During Jurgis's time as a criminal, he helps Scully rig an election and enjoys the benefits of Scully's political "pull." However, Jurgis falls out of favor when he attacks Phil Connor a second time, as Connor is a close friend of Scully's. - Character: "Bush" Harper. Description: Bush Harper is a duplicitous union spy who introduces Jurgis to Mike Scully. When Jurgis gets into hot water for assaulting Phil Connor for the second time, Harper pulls strings to get Jurgis's bail reduced so that Jurgis can skip town. He later ends up pocketing some of the cash Jurgis has put towards bail. - Character: Jadvyga and Mikolas. Description: Jadvyga and Mikolas are an immigrant couple who are friends with Jurgis and Ona. Their tragic story of mistreatment by the factory system foreshadows the misfortunes Jurgis and Ona will experience. When Ona is held overnight by Phil Connor and unable to return home, she claims to have stayed at Jadvyga's as an alibi so as to avoid driving Jurgis to fury. - Theme: The Dehumanizing Evils of Capitalism. Description: The Jungle was written to demonstrate the evils of the capitalist system in America. In the novel, Upton Sinclair shows the way the capitalist system exploits the working class, gives absolute power to the wealthy few, and forces individuals to act only out of self-interest, regardless of the suffering of others. The Jungle portrays the many vices and injustices that result from capitalism, including horrific working conditions, child labor, political corruption, prostitution, drinking, cheating, and crime. Workers are exposed to brutal working conditions where they suffer exhaustion, injury, bodily harm, and death. In order to survive, individuals must compete for these horrendous jobs, send their children to work, and prostitute themselves. Under the capitalist system, cheating and dishonesty become the norm. Crooked real estate agents sell "new" homes, merchants sell medicine and food doctored up with chemicals, and politicians buy votes. Capitalism forces even well-intentioned people to become unfeeling and cutthroat and to prey on others in order to survive. For example, when Jurgis first arrives in America, he tries to make it as an honest worker at the meatpacking plant. After being continually beaten down, he starts drinking, leaves his remaining family, turns to crime, and later returns to the meatpacking plants where he works for corrupt politicians and as a scab during a strike. Throughout the book, capitalism has a dehumanizing effect, turning men into animals or machines to be used for profit. - Theme: The Immigrant Experience and Disillusionment. Description: The Jungle tells the story of one Lithuanian family's journey to America to seek a better life and their subsequent disillusionment and downfall. When the Rudkus family first arrive, they are naively hopeful about their prospects in America and have domestic dreams of owning a home, marrying, and having children. Once they arrive, their dreams are cruelly and consistently squashed. Ona and the children must go to work, family members (including children) die as a result of brutal working conditions, and the family is cheated into signing a lease on a home, which they eventually lose. The optimism and determination of the Rudkus family is contrasted with the harshness of their lives, and their dreams are replaced by a struggle for survival. Through their experience, Sinclair shows how immigrants are used as cogs in the capitalist machine. They are lured to America with false promises of a better life, and instead they are ruthlessly exploited as laborers or sold into prostitution. Despite unendurable hardship, cultural community, traditions, and memories play an important role in the Rudkus family's life and offer rare instances of hope. The novel opens with the scene of a typical Lithuanian wedding celebration, showing a rare moment of joviality and humanity. When Jurgis journeys out of the city to the country, he experiences fond memories of his native land. Memories of the old country create a bitter contrast with the characters' current lives, but also offer an escape from present conditions. - Theme: The Horrors of the Meatpacking Industry. Description: The Jungle is as an exposé of the horrific working conditions and unsanitary conditions in Chicago's meatpacking industry. Sinclair's grotesque descriptions of conditions and procedures in the meatpacking plant led to subsequent reforms in food safety regulation. From the killing beds to the fertilizer plant, the meatpacking plant is portrayed as a Hell on Earth, a place of blistering cold and burning heat, a place where a man might fall unnoticed into a boiling vat and be turned into canned food. Sinclair uses grotesque descriptions of food and diseased meat to reveal the disregard company owners have for the safety of American citizens. He also portrays the grotesque physical harm done to workers, who lose fingers, cut themselves and get blood poisoning, have their skin eroded by acid, and lose limbs under highly dangerous working conditions. Sinclair uses the industrialized brutality towards animals in the meatpacking plant as a symbol of the industrialized brutality towards workers. Like the animals, workers are "processed" for every last bit of energy and then discarded when they are no longer useful. - Theme: Family, Masculinity, and Individualism. Description: The Jungle shows how capitalism ruptures family ties and forces individuals to think only of self preservation. As the novel progresses, ideals of home, domesticity, and romantic love are steadily crushed. In the beginning, the Rudkus family live in one home together, but over the course of the book, they gradually die or disperse. After Jurgis's wife Ona dies during childbirth and his son Antanas drowns in the street, Jurgis leaves his family and heads out on his own for the country. Jurgis becomes a tramp, roaming the country and thinking only of himself. Back in the city, he becomes a criminal, preying on others in order to survive. Sinclair shows how the capitalist system makes it almost impossible to preserve a family. The only characters who attain a modicum of freedom are those who leave their families behind.Sinclair also shows how the capitalist system compromises masculinity. In the beginning of the book, Jurgis is the picture of masculinity: strong, determined, hard-working and energetic. His masculinity is tied to a sense of pride and a belief that he can support his family through hard work. As the book continues, Jurgis faces more and more hardships and is slowly beaten down, losing his masculine prowess and his ability to support and protect his family. His masculinity is also compromised when he finds out that his wife Ona has been forced to become the mistress of her boss Connor in order to save her job. Jurgis violently retaliates by attacking Connor in a futile effort to recover his lost masculine power. Though capitalism deeply threatens family ties, family continues to provide some measure of support and resistance to the deadly effects of capitalism. Near, the end of the novel, Jurgis is reunited with his cousin-in-law Marija, who is working as a prostitute and is able to help Jurgis survive. Jurgis also finds alternative types of family throughout the book—first through the criminal community in Chicago, and later through the comrades he makes through socialism. - Theme: Labor Rights and Socialism. Description: The Jungle traces Jurgis' journey from naïveté about the workings of capitalism to awareness of his position as an exploited worker and the workings of the capitalist machine. At first, Jurgis doesn't understand the discontent of other workers or the need for unions or workers' rights. He gradually becomes aware of the injustices in the meatpacking plant, and joins the union, only to realize that the union is corrupt and ineffective. Beaten down by repeated hardship, injustice, and cruelty, he becomes desensitized and hopeless and thinks only of self-preservation. Near the end of the book, when Jurgis's hope is nearly gone and he is barely able to survive, he has a conversion experience in a public hall, when he hears an impassioned speaker preach about the plight of the working class. Jurgis goes on to devote himself to the socialist cause. Sinclair was a socialist and his belief in socialism as a an alternative to and a way to combat the evils of capitalism are on strong display in the novel, particularly in the last few chapters of the book. The novel acts as an extended argument for the need for socialism, and it ends on a hopeful note by suggesting the possibility of political and social change. - Climax: The book's very last line, in which an ambitious socialist speaker yells, "Chicago will be ours!" following a surprisingly strong showing in an election. - Summary: Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite are two young newlyweds who have recently emigrated from Lithuania to make their livelihood in Chicago. They have settled in the city's "Packingtown" area, where a largely immigrant population lives in squalor and works grueling jobs to survive. The couple celebrates their marriage at a local bar, and many guests leave without contributing money to defray the cost of the party, as is customary in Lithuania. This leaves the couple in debt, which distresses the family. Jurgis finds work at a local slaughterhouse and Ona's cousin Marija gets a job in a cannery. Jurgis's father, Dede Antanas, also looks for a job, but is too old to be employable. The family naively decides to buy a home but is tricked into signing an exploitative lease instead; their financial obligations build. Dede Antanas finds work only by agreeing to forfeit a third of his wages as a finder's fee. This corruption and "graft" is routine in Packingtown. Dede Antanas is worn down by his job and soon dies. An unforgiving winter arrives. Marija's factory closes and she cannot to marry her love, Tamoszious Kuszeika. Jurgis tries to learn English, and as he tries to assimilate he begins to learn about the political corruption and vote-buying that dominate Chicago's government. In the springtime, Marija is rehired at the cannery. However, she is fired for standing up for herself when a higher-up tries to swindle her out of wages. Ona, now pregnant, has taken a meatpacking job under a hostile overseer named Miss Henderson. Ona gives birth to a boy, whom she and Jurgis name Antanas; she is forced back on the job after just one week's rest. Jurgis sprains his ankle on the job and is incapacitated for three months. Instead of compensating him, Jurgis's employers simply cut off his pay and replace him. The family's unity frays: when a snowstorm confines them indoors, Jurgis beats Ona's stepmother Elzbieta's son Stanislovas for being unable to go to work. Jonas, Elzbieta's brother, abandons the family. Elzbieta's crippled son Kristoforas dies. Jurgis recovers from his injury, but his factory will not rehire him. His only option is working in the fertilizer plant, the most miserable workplace in town. He begins to reek of the noxious chemicals he handles. To cope, Jurgis turns to alcohol. Meanwhile, Ona—pregnant again—does not return from work and begins to lie about her whereabouts. Jurgis uncovers that Ona's supervisor, Phil Connor, has been manipulating her for sex. Jurgis attacks Connor and is imprisoned. In jail, Jurgis befriends a savvy safecracker named Jack Duane. Released from jail, Jurgis learns that his family has been evicted. Jurgis finds them in a boardinghouse, and discovers Ona in premature labor. She dies an excruciating death. Jurgis, devastated, goes on a drinking binge. Afterwards, Jurgis secures work making harvesting equipment. The family's fortunes seem to have improved, but Jurgis suddenly loses his job, and baby Antanas, his only joy in life, drowns in a flooded street. Jurgis runs away to live as a vagrant in the countryside. Jurgis returns to Chicago. He works digging tunnels and spends freely, confident he'll have money to weather the winter. However, he is hurt on the job and emerges from the hospital destitute. Reduced to begging, he is given a hundred dollar bill by the son of a packing magnate, but a bartender swindles him out of the cash. Furious, Jurgis tries to fight, but nobody believes his story and he is sent back to jail. In jail, Jurgis reencounters Jack Duane, who convinces him to get involved with Chicago's criminal underworld. Jurgis starts with small-time muggings, but soon grows more and more unscrupulous—he begins lucrative work as a crony of a corrupt Democratic Party boss named Mike Scully. When a strike breaks out, he crosses the union by working as a scab. Jurgis benefits from graft until he encounters Phil Connor and attacks him a second time. Connor turns out to be Scully's friend, and Jurgis must spend all his savings to avoid prosecution. Destitute again, Jurgis reunites with Marija, now a cynical, morphine-addicted prostitute. Jurgis is at the end of his rope when he chances upon a socialist rally. The movement's message of unified workers and democratically-owned industry inspires Jurgis. He becomes a tireless advocate for socialism and gets a job as a porter in a socialist-run hotel. The book ends with an encouraging, pro-socialist message: the socialist party has made great gains in recent elections, and a socialist orator proclaims that with continued activism, "Chicago will be ours!"

- Genre: Short story, Modernist fiction - Title: The Killers - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A small town called Summit - Character: Nick Adams. Description: The story's young and naive protagonist, Nick Adams is in Henry's diner talking to George when two hitmen, Max and Al, come in and take them hostage. Nick is bound and gagged in the kitchen with the cook, Sam, while Max tells George of the plan to kill Ole Andreson. Nick gets free, though, and, at George's suggestion, agrees to go warn Ole about the hitmen. Throughout the story, Nick tries to be stoic and brave. He tries not to react when he's freed as a hostage, and he finds the courage to risk his life and safety to go warn Ole because he believes that it's the right thing to do. This seemingly relates to a belief that death is awful and avoidable, and that evil shouldn't win. However, Nick is disappointed and confused when he finds that Ole is already resigned to his fate. Seemingly not understanding Ole's resolve, Nick makes several suggestions for how Ole could get away, but Ole tells him that he's "through with all that running around" and is unwilling to do anything to save himself. Nick struggles to understand Ole's seeming indifference towards death as he returns to the diner to tell Sam and George what happened. Sam refuses to listen, but George briefly talks to Nick about what "an awful thing" it is. Feeling overwhelmed, Nick says he plans to leave town and that he can't stop thinking about it, but George tells him to put it out of his mind. Nick is left feeling disillusioned and frustrated by the idea that Ole can't be saved. He has become a little more mature through this episode, as he can now conceive of the reality of death, but he's not yet mature enough to look death in the face and accept it. - Character: George. Description: George is the manager at Henry's diner. His age and background are unknown, but his paternalistic way of talking to Nick and giving him directions indicates that he is older and more experienced than Nick. When Max and Al come into the diner, George becomes the primary target of their harassment. He is repeatedly called a "bright boy," which is meant as a slight to both his masculinity and his intelligence. Despite these insults, George's fear prevents him from standing up for himself. While Al ties up Nick and Sam in the kitchen, George is left alone with Max. George is horrified to learn about their plan to kill Ole Andreson and he frequently checks the clock while he counts down the minutes until the hitmen will give up. When Ole does not come in, they tell George he's "got a lot of luck" and they leave without hurting any of their hostages. George is better at hiding his fear than Nick is, but he is still too scared to go warn Ole about the hitmen himself, and so he tells Nick to do it. When Nick returns with news of Ole's acceptance of death, George quickly tries to put it out of his mind. He gets out a towel and begins wiping down the counters, telling Nick he "better not think about it" anymore. In general, George is slightly more able to cope with the possibility of death than Nick is, but he still can't accept and embrace the inevitability of death, a mark of immaturity in Hemingway's eyes. - Character: Ole Andreson. Description: Ole Andreson is a former prizefighter now living in a boarding house in a small town outside of Chicago. For unexplained reasons, Max and Al are sent to kill Ole. After being held hostage by the hitmen, Nick Adams gets free and finds Ole and warns him that there's a hit out on him, encouraging him to save himself. However, Ole has already accepted his death as unavoidable and is lying in bed with all of his clothes on preparing to meet death. Ole seems profoundly depressed, and he drives Nick out of his room, telling him that while he hasn't been able to steel himself to leave his room and meet death yet, he's working up the courage and he's going to do it soon. George believes Ole "must have got mixed up in something in Chicago," implying some kind of involvement with the mob. Ole himself tells Nick that he "got in wrong" and that there "ain't anything to do" to stop Max and Al (or someone else) from killing him. Ole's passive acceptance of death is a major contributor to Nick's ultimate disillusionment. - Character: Sam. Description: Sam is an African-American cook at Henry's diner. Sam is the target of racial slurs from both George and Al and is evidently not taken seriously by anyone. After Max and Al leave and he is untied, Sam tries to distance himself from the situation by repeating that he doesn't "want any more of that" and doesn't "like any of it at all." Sam understands that becoming any more involved in the situation would be a serious risk to himself, both physically and emotionally. He also tries to warn Nick to "stay out of it" instead of going to warn Ole Andreson, but his well-intentioned advice is quickly dismissed. From that point on, Sam refuses to even listen to anything Nick or George has to say about what happened. - Character: Max. Description: Max is one of the hitmen who take over Henry's diner and hold George, Nick, and Sam hostage. While Al guards Nick and Sam in the kitchen, Max stays in the front of the diner and talks to George. Max is more aggressive and talkative than his partner, Al, and Al frequently scolds him for talking "silly" or "too much." Max is the one who tells George about the plan to kill Ole and reveals that they are only doing it "to oblige a friend," providing a major clue about why Ole is being targeted. Max also takes on a leadership role, determining how long he and Al should wait for Ole and deciding what to do with their hostages when they finally leave. - Character: Al. Description: Al is one of the hitmen who takes George, Nick, and Sam hostage in Henry's diner. While Max and George stay in the front of the diner, Al guards Nick and Sam with the same gun he plans on using to kill Ole. Max makes the anti-Semitic and misogynistic comment that Al is from a "kosher convent," revealing some possible tension between the two of them. Al rarely speaks directly to the hostages and frequently expresses his anxiety about Max talking "too much" about what they are doing and why. On the other hand, Al also reveals that he is more willing to actually murder someone when he complains that leaving witnesses is "sloppy." - Character: Mrs. Bell. Description: Mrs. Bell is the manager of Hirsch's boarding house, where Ole Andreson lives. Nick Adams confuses her for Mrs. Hirsch as he is leaving Ole, which magnifies his confusion about Ole's acceptance of death. This contributes to Nick's realization that he does not really know the people around him as well as he thought he did. - Theme: Innocence and Experience. Description: In "The Killers," Max and Al—a pair of hitmen—travel to a small town to kill one of its residents, the former prizefighter Ole Andreson. At the diner where the murder will take place, Max and Al take three hostages: Nick Adams (a young man who is eating there), George (the manager), and Sam (the cook). When Ole Andreson doesn't show up, however, Max and Al leave, and the hostages grapple with their experience of evil. Sam and George—who are older and more experienced—want to stay out of the situation, but Nick Adams, the youngest of the men, feels that he needs to do something to help Ole Andreson—a plan that fails when he finds that Ole Andreson himself is resigned to his fate. By showing Nick's naivety in thinking that he could save Ole Andreson from evil or death, and then showing Nick's subsequent disillusionment (which brings him more in line with the worldviews of the older men), Hemingway suggests that aging and maturing is a process of learning to accept the inevitability of death. Although Hemingway does not provide many details about Nick's age or his past, it is clear that he is still very young and naïve. Other characters (including Max, Al, and Sam) make comments that provide clues about Nick's age and level of maturity. Max and Al repeatedly refer to Nick as a "boy," calling attention to both his youth and their complete lack of respect for him. After Max and Al leave, Sam also calls Nick a "little boy" for choosing to go to Ole Andreson's, which Sam sees as an immature lack of judgment. During his visit to Ole Andreson, Nick rather innocently suggests that there is an easy resolution to the issue or that "it was just a bluff" and Ole will be fine. Only when Ole makes it clear that he's "through with all that running around" and is not willing to avoid his problems anymore does Nick begin to accept that Ole's death, no matter how terrible, is unavoidable and that it was foolish of him to think Ole could escape it. In contrast to Nick's naïve desire to get involved with Ole, Hemingway presents Sam and George—who are somewhat older and more experienced—as jaded. They are resigned to what is happening and feel like they cannot, or should not, fix it. Sam, for instance, prefers that they all stay out of it. Even though he has literally been tied up in the back of the restaurant by a man with a gun, Sam's first reaction is simply to say, "I don't want any more of that." In service of this goal, he discourages Nick from going to see Ole Andreson, because—while Nick believes that warning Ole Andreson is a courageous and good thing to do—Sam finds it foolish, thinking that it will just bring more trouble. Furthermore, once Nick returns from Ole Andreson's, Sam literally shuts the kitchen door that he can't hear Nick and George discussing the situation. He doesn't want to be involved at all, because, it seems, experience has taught him that avoidance is best. George, meanwhile, encourages Nick to go warn Ole Andreson, but refuses to go himself. Perhaps this is simple cowardice, but clearly George doesn't want to be personally involved, either. Later, when Nick returns from warning Ole Andreson and seems haunted by the man's inevitable death, George tells Nick that he had "better not think about it." This shows that George, like Sam, ultimately prefers to shut out difficult realities and pretend they don't exist. Ole Andreson, whose name implies that he is the oldest and wisest of the men, has the most cryptic reaction to the story's events: like Sam and George, he accepts that he will die, but unlike Sam and George, he's not in denial about it—he's depressed. When Nick visits Ole Andreson, he finds the man unable to get out of bed and barely willing to speak. Nick warns him about the hitmen and Ole, at first, "did not say anything" and then says, "There isn't anything I can do about it." Nick suggests fleeing town or going to the police, but Ole believes this "wouldn't do any good." Instead, he plans to "make up his mind to go out"—and, presumably, meet his death. On the one hand, Ole seems to be paralyzed and unwilling to take action to fix the situation, much like Sam and George. On the other hand, unlike Sam and George, Ole is not ignoring a difficult reality: he has fully internalized what is going to happen to him, and he plans to work up the courage to meet it head-on. Unlike George's advice to "not think about it," Ole is thinking about it deeply and deciding how to act based on this knowledge. Hemingway implies that Ole is correct to accept his fate; Nick, after all, feels "silly" as soon as he warns Ole about the hitmen, and his attempts to give advice seem more annoying than helpful. Furthermore, across his published works, Hemingway equates courage and dignity with the ability to accept death as inevitable and meet it without flinching—something Ole is steeling himself to do. In the story's final scene, Nick returns to the diner a disillusioned man: what he thought was an act of bravery was actually silly and useless, and he knows now that Ole Andreson will certainly die. Instead of becoming as wise as Ole, however, Nick only becomes as mature as George and Sam: rather than confronting the inevitability of death, he seems to resort to denial. This is clearest when Nick tells George that he's going to "get out of this town." Instead of staying and grappling with the reality of what is happening (like Ole, who refuses to flee his killers), Nick's impulse is to get far away from a difficult situation. It's somewhat similar to Sam closing the door on a conversation he doesn't want to hear. Furthermore, Nick says of Ole contemplating his death, "I can't stand to think about him." This shows Nick's weakness and immaturity. Nick is now mature enough to know that he can't change fate, but not mature enough to be able to live with the reality of that fate. He behaves more like George, who advises him to push difficult truths from his mind, than like wise Ole, who actively contemplates and accepts his fate. In this way, Hemingway shows a progression of maturity from young idealists like Nick, who naively think they can thwart evil and death; to middle aged men like Sam and George, who understand that these things are inevitable but prefer to ignore this reality; to the wisdom of age—embodied in Ole—in which one accepts their fate and acts accordingly. - Theme: Expectations vs. Reality. Description: Throughout "The Killers," Hemingway depicts the fallout of dashed expectations. Whether the characters are merely disconcerted by their banal assumptions proving faulty (Max and Al when the diner won't serve them dinner yet), or thrust into a moral and emotional crisis by the world not conforming to deeply-held beliefs (as Nick is when Ole Andreson contradicts his ideas about mortality), the story shows profound consequences for those who believe too much in their own expectations. Max and Al, after all, fail in their plan to murder Ole, while Nick becomes panicked to the extent that he considers uprooting his whole life. In this way, Hemingway suggests that those who cling too deeply to their expectations of the world are maladapted. The world will always defy expectation, and it's best to be able to take things on their own terms. Hemingway first establishes the tension between expectation and reality through Max and Al's almost comical experience of eating at Henry's diner. The two hitmen believe themselves to be confident and suave professionals, and they appear to assume that the world will conform to their plan: they'll arrive at the diner, eat their meal, kill their target, and get out of town without a hitch. The obstacles to this are initially banal: the clock, for instance, reads 5:20 when it's actually 5:00, which immediately shows that reality isn't always as it appears. Furthermore, the menu appears to offer many options for dinner, but Max and Al try to order a few entrees and have to be told repeatedly that the dinner menu is not offered until 6:00. Instead of treating this as a routine inconvenience, the hitmen become angry and frustrated ("Everything we want's the dinner, eh? That's the way you work it."), showing that they feel entitled to an experience of the world that conforms to their expectations and desires. Their inability to be flexible with their expectations is directly related to their failure to kill Ole: when he doesn't show up as they expected, they simply leave without killing him rather than reconfiguring their plan based on the circumstances they're in. Unlike Max and Al, George (the diner's manager) is someone who can see the world for what it is, and this gives him a strategic advantage over the hitmen. This is first apparent in George's refusal to be intimidated by the rude, blustering out-of-towners who try to bully and insult him. When the hitmen bark orders at him or ask sarcastic questions insulting the town, George remains cool and matter-of-fact. This is likely due to George's ability to see that Max and Al are not who they believe themselves to be. While they fancy themselves to be clever, experienced hitmen, Hemingway depicts Max and Al as being ridiculous and bad at their job. Their outfits, for instance, are so over-the-top that they look "like a vaudeville team" and Al makes it clear that Max's behavior is unprofessional (and possibly dangerous to them) when he tells him, "You talk too goddam much." Furthermore, they show themselves to be either stupid or not paying attention when their food arrives and they can't remember who ordered what. Their theatrical appearance, mishaps, and overconfidence all betray a lack of experience, and since George sees past their attempt to cultivate a suave appearance, he is able to stay calm in the face of danger. In fact, he is even potentially able to exploit their weaknesses and manipulate them into leaving earlier than they otherwise would have: as a hostage, George looks repeatedly at the clock and tells the men that Ole isn't coming. He is potentially emphasizing the clock's fast time rather than the real hour, taking advantage of their inability to distinguish reality from appearance. All of these misalignments of expectation and reality are relatively minor, but they prepare readers for the story's major instance of subverted expectation: when Nick goes to warn Ole that his life is in danger, and Ole doesn't try to save himself as Nick expected, but instead reveals that he is resigned to his death—a betrayal of expectation that shakes Nick's world. When Nick decides to warn Ole, George and Sam's reactions make clear that Nick is putting himself in danger: Sam says so outright, and George's refusal to go himself implicitly suggests that, with Max and Al still running around, Nick might find himself in a life-threatening situation. But Nick feels that it's worth risking his life to warn Ole because the stakes are so high. Nick either values life or fears death so much that he feels that it is the correct and courageous thing to do to put himself in danger to save someone else. However, this is all predicated on the unquestioned assumption that Ole will be grateful and will take steps to change his fate. Nick, in other words, assumes that Ole couldn't possibly feel differently about the situation than Nick does. This proves incorrect when Nick arrives at the boardinghouse, tells Ole about the hitmen, and Ole "said nothing" and looked at the wall, leaving Nick feeling "silly" and confused about the situation. Ole's reaction—or lack thereof—is at such odds with Nick's expectations that, at first, all Nick can do is repeat himself stupidly and hope the outcome changes. Despite evidence to the contrary, Nick cannot admit that his assumptions about Ole's attitude towards death are false. However, as Ole explains that he's "through with all that running around" and that, after grappling with his mortality, he has resigned himself to death, readers begin to see that perhaps some things are worse than dying. This runs in direct opposition to Nick's youthful and naïve assumption that nothing is worse than death, and weighing this possibility precipitates a crisis in Nick that makes him question whether he really knows anyone or anything at all. Hemingway reveals the magnitude of Nick's crisis when Nick tells George that, in the wake of seeing Ole, he needs to "get out of this town." Having his deeply-held assumptions about life and death undetermined has made Nick want to literally leave his whole life behind—an extreme and destructive act. This drives home how putting too much stock in assumption and expectation makes a person maladapted to reality. While George sees through Max and Al and is able to "not think about" Ole's resignation to death (and can therefore live in the world on its own terms), Nick's false beliefs are so deeply held that, when they're contradicted, he has to take extreme measures to reinvent his life. Obviously that's not something a person can continually do, and the story therefore suggests that it's best to be flexible about expectations from the start and try to see the world for how it actually is. - Theme: Heroism and Masculinity. Description: Hemingway's short stories and novels famously feature what is called a "code hero." The "code hero" is a paragon of masculine virtue, boasting honor, endurance, unwavering courage in the face of adversity, and a refusal to show fear, even when facing death. In "The Killers," however, there is no code hero: all of the story's men fail to live up to Hemingway's masculine ideal, albeit in different ways. Since all of these men fail to be masculine when confronted with adversity, the story suggests that ideal masculinity is rare and difficult, or possibly unattainable altogether. Throughout the story, Max and Al lob gendered insults at their hostages to try to intimidate and control them. When Max and Al first enter the diner—even before they take hostages—they call both George and Nick "boy." This is an attempt to immediately assert their power over George and Nick, intimidating them by suggesting that they are not worthy of being considered men, but are instead weak and immature boys. This is especially notable due to the clear differences in Nick and George's ages. While George is older than Nick and in a position of power as the manager of the diner, Max and Al's suggestion that George and Nick are both boys is meant to doubly emasculate George, therefore making him easier to control later on. However, calling someone "boy" is not the most extreme form of emasculation—after all, boys eventually become men. Once Sam, George, and Nick are tied up, Max and Al escalate their emasculation by directly comparing their hostages to women. Al calls Sam and Nick (who are tied up in the kitchen) "a couple of girl friends" and Max tells George that he'd "make some girl a nice wife." While these insults are meant to make Max and Al seem powerful, their behavior ironically shows them to be cowards, and therefore to be insufficiently masculine themselves. After all, they're only brave enough to compare their hostages to women once these men are tied up and cannot physically retaliate. Were they courageous and genuinely masculine (at least by Hemingway's standards), Max and Al would stand behind their words and believe in themselves enough to let their opponents fight back. Furthermore, while Max and Al view themselves as heroes—ultra-masculine men of action who take everyone in Henry's diner hostage so they can carry out a hit—they are also criminals who have come to town "to oblige a friend" by murdering Ole Andreson, even though he "never had a chance" to do anything to them personally. This plan lacks morality or honor, which Hemingway closely associates with heroism. Unlike Max and Al, Sam and George might be candidates for heroism, as they manage to keep level heads amidst danger and chaos and do not openly admit their fear while they're tied up and held at gunpoint. Once he is untied, however, Sam seems panicked and unable to deal with the situation head-on. George is more comfortable talking about what happened, but his passivity and potential cowardice (in having Nick warn Ole instead of going himself) puts his masculinity and heroism in doubt. It is also difficult to acknowledge Nick Adams as a hero yet. He does decide to take action to try to save Ole because he believes it is right and honorable to do so (even at the risk of his life), but he also has a difficult time gracefully enduring the horror he feels over Ole's acceptance of death, rather petulantly exclaiming that he "can't stand to think" about the "awful thing" that has happened. This emotional weakness in him needs to be overcome before he can step into the masculine role of a "code hero." Finally, Ole Andreson has accepted the inevitability of death and is preparing to meet it of his own accord instead of running away, which are key characteristics of a Hemingway "code hero." He reveals that he is "through with all that running around," meaning that he has been trying to run away from death for a while but has now accepted that he must meet it head-on. While Ole has made this important realization, he is not quite ready to meet death bravely the way a hero would; he says to Nick, "I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day," and this hesitation undercuts his ability to be a true masculine hero. With all the story's male characters ineligible—in ways both large and small—for heroism, Hemingway paints a somewhat bleak picture of honor, masculinity, and courage. Since none of the men in this story are true "code heroes," then maybe no men are true men and this standard of masculinity is unattainable. It's possible to read "The Killers," therefore, as a commentary on inevitable human weakness and the impossibility of the masculine ideal, but it's also possible to draw a narrower conclusion. After all, across Hemingway's collected works, he does write some characters who live up to the standard of the "code hero" (such as Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea). With this context, one might read "The Killers" as a commentary on how rare and difficult true masculinity and heroism are, and how men can easily fall short of this, even when they believe they're succeeding. - Climax: Nick goes to warn Ole Andreson about the hitmen who are looking for him, but Ole reveals that he already knows about it and is preparing to go out and meet death. - Summary: One evening, in the 1920s, in a small town outside of Chicago, two strange men dressed in identical derby hats and too-small black overcoats enter Henry's diner and sit at the counter. Another customer, Nick Adams, sits at the other end of the counter and watches them as the manager, George, tries to take their order. The men—whose names are revealed to be Max and Al—try to order a roast pork dinner, but George tells them that this is unavailable. Frustrated, Max asks why it's on the menu if they can't order it and George explains that it is a dinner option and dinners are not ready until 6:00. George looks at the clock and tells them it's only 5:00, but Max points out that the clock actually says 5:20. George explains that the clock is actually 20 minutes fast, which further frustrates Max and Al. Once again, Max tries to order a dinner and George tells him he can't order it yet and has to choose between sandwiches or breakfast options. Max accuses George of deliberately trying to work against them, saying, "Everything we want's the dinner, eh?" Finally, Max and Al order some of the options George lists for them. While they wait for their food, Al asks what kind of drinks they can order, implying that he is looking for alcohol. George, however, follows the Prohibition laws of the 1920s and tells them they only have non-alcoholic drinks. Max sarcastically says Summit is a "hot town" and Al asks what people do there for fun at night. Max makes the snide remark that everyone comes into the diner for "the big dinner," finally frustrating George enough that he makes his own sarcastic remark that Max was right. In retaliation, Al starts calling George a "bright boy" and turns his attention to Nick and asks his name. Nick tells Al his name and Al starts calling him a "bright boy," too. George finally brings Max and Al their food and they start eating. When they finish, they abruptly order Nick to go around behind the counter and tell George to call the cook out to the front of the diner. The cook, Sam, comes out for just a moment before Al says he is going to take Nick and Sam back into the kitchen while Max and George stay out front. In the kitchen, Al, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, ties up Sam and Nick and puts towels in their mouths so they can't call for help. In the front of the diner, George asks Max what's happening, and Max reveals that they are there to kill a Swede named Ole Andreson. Max asks George about Ole's habits and George reluctantly confirms that Ole does frequently come to the diner for dinner at 6:00. George asks Max what Ole did to him and Al that makes them want to kill him and Max tells him that it's just "to oblige a friend." Al starts to get nervous about how much Max is revealing to George and tells him he is talking too much. Max tells George that if anyone does come in, he needs to tell them that the cook is sick, and if they insist on getting food then he has to prepare it himself. For the next hour, George frequently checks the clock and, at one point, he goes back into the kitchen to make a sandwich for a customer and sees Al with a sawed-off shotgun and Nick and Sam tied up together. At 6:55, George tells Max he doesn't think Ole is coming in, but Max insists on waiting a few more minutes. When Ole still doesn't show up, Max and Al prepare to leave. Before they go, Al asks what they should do with the hostages and Max insists on leaving them alive despite Al's concerns that it would be "sloppy" to leave witnesses. After Max and Al leave, George unties Sam and Nick and tells them what Max and Al were planning. George tells Nick that he should go find Ole Andreson at his boarding house and tell him about the hitmen, but Sam tells Nick to "stay out of it" because it "ain't going to get you anywhere." Despite these warnings, Nick goes to Ole's room to warn him. Nick is shocked to discover that Ole already knows there are hitmen looking for him and has actually been preparing to leave his room and let them kill him. Nick offers to go to the police or do something else to help Ole avoid death, but Ole tells him that he's "through with all that running around" and is only working up the courage to leave his room. Nick continues to make suggestions, but Ole finally tells him there "ain't anything to do" and dismisses him. George returns to the diner to tell George what happened. Sam refuses to listen to what he has to say and stays in the kitchen, but George does ask him a couple of questions and spends a few second thinking about what "an awful thing" it is. Finally, George decides to put the situation out of his mind and shows this by picking up a towel and cleaning the counters. Nick, however, has a difficult time working through his feelings about the situation and says he "can't stand to think about it." In response, George tells him he "better not think about it" and the story ends.

- Genre: Historical fiction, Drama - Title: The Kite Runner - Point of view: First person limited, from Amir's point of view - Setting: Kabul, Afghanistan, Pakistan (mostly Peshawar), and San Francisco Bay Area, California - Character: Amir. Description: The protagonist and narrator of the novel, a wealthy boy who grows up in Kabul, Afghanistan along with his father, Baba. Amir abuses his privileges over his servant and loyal friend, Hassan, and then fails to come to his aid when Hassan is being raped by local bullies after a kite-fighting tournament. The rest of the novel deals with Amir's guilt, his growing maturity (as he and Baba move to the U.S.), and his quest for redemption. - Character: Baba. Description: Amir's father, a larger-than-life figure with wild hair and a loud voice, who works hard and succeeds at all of his endeavors, but stands by his strict moral principles. Baba's great sin is committing adultery with Ali's wife, and he is Hassan's real father. Baba's many works of charity and the orphanage he builds are part of his attempts to redeem himself. - Character: Hassan. Description: Amir's childhood playmate and companion, a Hazara boy with a cleft lip. Hassan is an excellent kite runner, and is naturally intelligent, but illiterate because of his social class. He is always loyal to Amir, even when Amir betrays him. Hassan eventually marries Farzana, and has a son named Sohrab. - Character: Sohrab. Description: Hassan's son, a boy who is sent to an orphanage when Hassan and Farzana are killed. He is then taken from the orphanage and sexually abused by Assef, until Amir comes for him and brings him back to America. Sohrab is a symbol of all the terrible things that have happened to both the characters and the country of Afghanistan, but he also offers a chance for hope and redemption. - Theme: Betrayal. Description: The betrayal of a loyal friend by a wealthier, more corrupt "master" is a recurring motif in The Kite Runner, and Amir and Baba's feelings of guilt for their betrayals drive much of the novel's action. The central betrayal comes when Amir watches and does nothing as Hassan, who has always stood up for Amir in the past, gets raped by Assef. Amir then worsens the betrayal by driving Ali and Hassan from the household. Later in the book, Amir learns that Baba also betrayed his own best friend and servant – Ali, Hassan's father – by fathering a child (Hassan) with Ali's wife Sanaubar. This knowledge comes as another kind of betrayal for Amir, who had always hero-worshipped Baba and is shocked to learn of his father's flaws.These low points in the two men's lives create a sense of tension and guilt throughout the novel, but the betrayals of Amir and Baba also lead to quests for redemption that bring about some good in the end – as Baba leads a principled, charitable life, and Amir rescues Sohrab from Assef. - Theme: Redemption. Description: The quest for redemption makes up much of the novel's plot, and expands as a theme to include both the personal and the political. Throughout his childhood, Amir's greatest struggle was to redeem himself to Baba for "killing" his mother during childbirth, and for growing up a disappointing son who was unlike Baba himself. After Hassan's rape, Amir spends the rest of his life trying to redeem himself for his betrayal of his loyal friend. This ultimately culminates in Amir's return to Afghanistan and his attempts to save and adopt Hassan's son Sohrab.After Amir learns of Baba's betrayal of Ali, Amir realizes that Baba was probably trying to redeem his adultery through his many charitable activities and strong principles in later life. Amir is also able to find a kind of redemption in his bloody fight with Assef (Hassan's rapist), and his adoption of Sohrab. Hosseini subtly connects these personal quests for redemption to Afghanistan itself. Despite its violent and corrupted past, Hosseini hopes for a redemption for his country someday. - Theme: Fathers and Children. Description: The most important relationships in The Kite Runner involve fathers and their children, usually sons. The central relationship is between Baba and Amir, as Amir struggles to win his father's affections and Baba tries to love a son who is nothing like him. When Amir learns that Baba is Hassan's father as well, he realizes that Baba also had to hide his natural affection for Hassan – an illegitimate son who was also a servant, but was in many ways more like Baba than Amir was. Later in the book the relationship between Soraya and her father General Taheri becomes important as well. As a girl the independent Soraya had rebelled against her strict, traditional father.Sohrab becomes the "son" figure of the latter part of the novel. We never see Sohrab and Hassan together, but it is explained that Hassan was a good father before his death. The father/son relationship then becomes a principal part of Amir's redemption and growth, as he tries to become a father to Sohrab by rescuing him from Assef and adopting him. The novel ends without a neat conclusion, but it does imply that Sohrab will begin to open up to Amir, and that Amir will continue to find redemption in fatherhood. - Theme: Violence and Rape. Description: Rape occurs several times in The Kite Runner as the ultimate act of violence and violation (short of murder) that drastically changes the lives of both the characters and the country. The central act of the novel is Amir watching Hassan's rape by Assef. There are more peripheral instances of rape as well – it is implied that Kamal, one of Hassan's tormentors, was raped by soldiers, and Baba saves a woman from being raped by a Russian soldier. Both these examples link the theme with the "rape" of Afghanistan by violence and war, beginning with the external Russian oppressors, then the bloody infighting of different Afghan groups, and then the brutal Taliban regime.The rape of Sohrab is never shown, but it reflects Hassan's horror and his role as a "sacrificial lamb" – but with Sohrab, unlike Hassan, Amir is finally able to stand up to Assef and prevent more violence. As Baba told the young Amir, the only real crime is theft, and rape is a theft of safety and selfhood, the ultimate violence and violation, and in The Kite Runner this brutality is inflicted upon both individual characters and the country of Afghanistan. - Theme: Memory and the Past. Description: Throughout The Kite Runner, many characters are haunted by memories of the past. Amir is constantly troubled by his memory of Hassan's rape and his own cowardice, and it is this memory that leads Amir to his final quest for redemption. Baba is also haunted by his past sins of adultery with Ali's wife Sanaubar, and his memories cause him to be both strict with Amir and charitable and selfless with his work and money. Sohrab then becomes another character tortured by past traumas – his abuse at Assef's hands – as he flinches when Amir tries to touch him, and attempts suicide when he thinks Amir is going to abandon him.There is also another kind of memory in the novel, which is nostalgia for good things. Amir remembers his good times with Hassan as a child, and the old, beautiful Kabul before it was destroyed by war. These good memories bring sadness for what was lost, but also hope for what could be. - Theme: Politics and Society. Description: The movements of history are constantly interfering with the private lives of characters in The Kite Runner. The Soviet War in Afghanistan interrupts Amir's peaceful, privileged life and forces him and Baba to flee to America. After the fall of the USSR, Afghanistan continues to be ravaged by violence, and when Amir does finally return to find Sohrab, the Taliban regime rules the country with violent religious laws. It is the Taliban that give Assef an outlet for his sadistic tendencies, and it is this political state that facilitates Amir's final meeting with Assef and his redemptive beating.Hosseini also critiques the sexism and racism of Afghan society throughout the book. Ali and Hassan are Hazaras, an ethnic group that most Afghans (who are Pashtun) consider inferior, though Hosseini makes it clear that Hassan is Amir's equal and in many ways morally and intellectually superior. When Amir starts courting Soraya, both Hosseini and Soraya comment on the double standard that Afghan society holds for women and men. Men are forgiven for being promiscuous or flirting, but women will be shamed and gossiped about for life. - Climax: Amir's fight with Assef - Summary: The narrator, Amir, grows up in a luxurious home in Kabul, Afghanistan, with his father Baba. They have two Hazara (an ethnic minority) servants, Ali and his son Hassan, who is Amir's closest playmate. Amir feels he is a disappointing son to Baba, but he is close to Baba's friend Rahim Khan. Amir and Hassan fly kites and read stories together, though Hassan does chores while Amir goes to school. One day three boys named Assef, Wali, and Kamal threaten Amir, but Hassan scares them away with his slingshot. In the winter there is a big kite-fighting tournament where boys try to cut each other's kites with glass-covered strings, and then "kite runners" chase after the fallen kites. Amir wins the tournament, and then Hassan goes to retrieve the losing kite. When Amir goes after Hassan he finds him in an alley, trapped by Assef, Wali, and Kamal. Amir watches as Kamal and Wali hold Hassan down and Assef rapes him. Amir runs away, and later both he and Hassan pretend nothing has happened. Amir and Hassan soon drift apart. Amir is tormented by guilt, and he decides to make Hassan leave the house. He hides some money under Hassan's mattress and tells Baba that he stole it, and Hassan doesn't deny it. Baba forgives Hassan, but Ali and Hassan leave the household. In 1981, Baba and Amir flee Kabul, which has been invaded by the Soviets. They eventually make it to Pakistan, and months later move to Fremont, California. Baba works at a gas station and Amir finishes high school and then studies writing at college. Baba and Amir sell things at a flea market, where Amir starts noticing Soraya, the daughter of Baba's friend General Taheri. After much delaying, Amir starts courting her. Soon afterward Baba is diagnosed with lung cancer. Amir asks Baba if he will ask General Taheri to let him marry Soraya. General Taheri accepts, and Amir and Soraya get married soon after. Baba is pleased with Amir's marriage, and he dies a month later. Amir gets his first book published and he and Soraya start trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive. Meanwhile, the Soviets are driven out of Afghanistan. One day Amir gets a call from Rahim Khan, who is dying and asks Amir to come to Pakistan. Once Amir arrives, Rahim Khan tells him about the horrors of the Taliban regime and war-torn Kabul. Rahim Khan says he had been watching Baba's house for a while, but then found Hassan and convinced him and his wife Farzana to come back to Kabul. Later Farzana had a boy, Sohrab. After Rahim Khan went to Pakistan he learned that Hassan and Farzana were executed by the Taliban, and Sohrab was sent to an orphanage. Rahim Khan asks Amir to go to Kabul and find Sohrab, saying this is Amir's chance to "be good again." He also reveals that Baba was Hassan's true father. Amir agrees to go, and he finds the orphanage where Sohrab was supposed to be, but learns that a Taliban official took him away a month earlier. Amir (and his companion Farid) go to a soccer game, where at halftime the official they are looking for executes a man and woman. Amir meets the official and the man calls in Sohrab, who has clearly been sexually abused. The official then reveals himself as Assef, and he beats Amir with his brass knuckles until Sohrab shoots him in the eye with his slingshot. Amir and Sohrab escape and Amir recovers in Pakistan. Amir then asks Sohrab to come back to the U.S. with him, and Sohrab hesitantly accepts. Amir discovers it will be almost impossible for him to adopt Sohrab, and he tells him he might have to go back to an orphanage. Soraya figures out how to get Sohrab an American visa, but then Amir finds Sohrab has tried to kill himself. Sohrab survives, but stops speaking altogether. Amir brings Sohrab to California, but he remains silent and withdrawn. One day they are at a park and some Afghans are flying kites. Amir buys one, and he and Sohrab fight another kite and cut it. Sohrab smiles, and Amir goes to run the kite for him.

- Genre: Young Adult Novel, Science Fiction, Fantasy - Title: The Knife of Never Letting Go - Point of view: First Person - Setting: The New World - Character: Todd. Description: - Character: Viola/Girl. Description: - Character: Mayor Prentiss. Description: - Character: Aaron. Description: - Character: Ben. Description: - Character: Cillian. Description: - Character: Manchee. Description: - Character: Ma. Description: - Character: Mr. Prentiss Jr.. Description: - Character: Doctor Snow. Description: - Character: Boy. Description: - Theme: The Cost of Violence. Description: - Theme: Information vs. Knowledge. Description: - Theme: Bigotry and Misogyny. Description: - Theme: Humanity's Connection to Nature. Description: - Climax: Todd and Viola arrive in Haven. - Summary: Todd lives in the remote settlement of Prentisstown on a planet called the New World. He grows up believing that a race of aliens called the Spackle released a "Noise germ" that infected and killed all the women in his settlement, while giving men the ability to hear others' thoughts. Just when Todd is one month away from becoming a man in his settlement, he goes out walking with his dog Manchee in the nearby swamp and comes across a "hole" in the Noise. He fears that this means the Spackle are coming back to fight again. But when Todd's own Noise reveals the Noise hole to the other residents of Prentisstown, including the leader Mayor Prentiss and a fiery local preacher named Aaron, Todd's adoptive parents Ben and Cillian tell Todd that he has to get out of the settlement immediately. They reveal that they have been secretly preparing for him to leave for a while and even already have a bag packed. Ben gives Todd a knife for his journey as well as Todd's Ma's journal, which contains a map and a note from Ben. Todd is reluctant to leave, but when the local sheriff Mr. Prentiss Jr. (son of Mayor Prentiss) comes to Ben and Cillian's house, a fight breaks out, and soon more men are out chasing after Todd. At last, Todd agrees to go off with Manchee and follow the river to the next settlement, leaving Ben and Cillian behind. Todd follows the river back to the swamp and soon learns that the hole in the Noise he heard was actually a girl about his age named Viola. Todd is surprised, since he didn't think any girls or women were still alive on the planet, and Viola remains cautious by staying silent around Todd for a while after they first meet. Eventually, Viola speaks up, and Todd learns that she was part of a scouting ship that came from a larger settlement ship on its way to the New World. Viola's parents died when the ship crash-landed, leaving Viola as the only survivor. At one point, the zealous preacher Aaron attacks Todd and Viola. Aaron seems ready to kill Todd, and although Todd eventually gets a chance to kill Aaron, he chooses not to use his knife after all. Todd and Viola soon learn that it's not just Aaron following them: a whole army is coming from Prentisstown. Todd and Viola eventually manage to evade the army by destroying a bridge behind them. They make it to their first destination of Farbranch, where a local woman named Hildy offers them hospitality, although other residents of the settlement view Todd with suspicion because he comes from Prentisstown. To the surprise of the people in Farbranch, the Prentisstown army finds another bridge and comes across to attack their town. In the confusion, Todd and Viola escape. Todd and Viola embark on a journey to reach Haven, which is supposedly the biggest settlement in the New World. Todd believes it is the only settlement with enough people to resist the Prentisstown army, and Viola believes it may have the technology to allow her to communicate with her settlement ship (which is still seven months away from arriving) and warn them about conditions on the planet, such as the Prentisstown army. For the early part of the journey, Todd often regrets not being able to work up the courage to use his knife to kill. But when he finally gives in to this urge and kills a Spackle, he realizes with horror afterwards that the Spackle was probably innocent. Todd also learns from Viola that much of what he grew up hearing in Prentisstown was a lie—the Spackle are peaceful, and Mayor Prentiss only waged war on them to distract from the settlement's other problems. Aaron catches up with Todd and Viola, attacking them again. He manages to kidnap Viola and wound Todd with Todd's own knife. Todd chases after Viola and starts to hallucinate, seemingly due to the fact that Spackle blood got into his bloodstream when Aaron stabbed him. Todd succeeds in rescuing Viola before Aaron can sacrifice her in a ritual, but Aaron manages to catch and kill Manchee. Soon after, Todd passes out, and Viola manages to take Todd to the nearest settlement. There, a man named Doctor Snow treats Todd's disease. Todd recovers just in time to speak with Ben, who managed to escape Prentisstown. When the Prentisstown army reaches this new settlement, Todd, Ben, and Viola flee again for Haven. On the last part of their trip to Haven, Ben explains to Todd the truth about Prentisstown: the women didn't die of a disease. Instead, the men of the town killed the women at Mayor Prentiss and Aaron's command, including Todd's Ma and the former mayor, Elizabeth. Ben then leaves Todd and Viola, as he knows people don't trust men from Prentisstown and he doesn't want to be a liability to Todd. Viola finally reads Todd his Ma's journal (since Todd himself is illiterate). Todd is moved to hear about how hopeful his Ma was in the early days of the settlement, but he can't bear to hear her final words quite yet. During the final day of Todd and Viola's trip to Haven, Aaron once again attacks. Aaron's goal seems to be to provoke Todd into attacking him, in order to turn Todd into a killer. Todd wrestles with the question of whether he should kill Aaron to protect himself and Viola, but ultimately Viola is the one who kills Aaron with Todd's knife. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Prentiss Jr. surprises them and manages to shoot Viola. Todd runs with a seriously injured Viola toward Haven, just barely managing to avoid Mr. Prentiss Jr. Todd thinks that they have escaped to safety, only to find Mayor Prentiss himself waiting for them in Haven. Mayor Prentiss reveals that he rode ahead and got Haven to surrender just by threatening them with the size of his army. Todd realizes that he can't hear the mayor's Noise for some reason. Mayor Prentiss introduces himself as the president of the New World and welcomes Todd to the new capital city.

- Genre: Short story, modernist - Title: The Lady in the Looking Glass - Point of view: First-person plural - Setting: The home of Isabella Tyson - Character: Isabella Tyson. Description: Isabella Tyson, the protagonist of "The Lady in the Looking-glass," is a mysterious older woman who lives alone in a large and richly-decorated house with a beautiful garden. Though the interior of her home is described in detail throughout the story, little is revealed about the protagonist herself. The story does state that Isabella is wealthy, has traveled extensively collecting objects for her home, and has never married. The narrator, whose relationship to Isabella is unclear, spends the story speculating about the other details of her life, primarily by extrapolating from what is visible in the looking-glass. At different points in the story, the glass reveals different information about Isabella: the fine furniture and décor of her home, her careful attention to the flowers in the garden, the letters that arrive partway through the narrative, and Isabella's appearance, which the narrator perceives as "old and angular, veined and lined." Yet despite all this information, Isabella ultimately remains a mystery; for example, it is not clear whether her fine home and expensive possessions have brought her happiness, whether she has close friends, or whether she agrees with the narrator's harsh assessment of her appearance. In this way, Isabella underscores the story's theme that perception and reality can vary widely: though the narrator and the reader can see Isabella's reflection in the looking-glass, this reflection doesn't reveal much about Isabella's inner world. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is never named and their gender and relationship to Isabella is unknown—in fact, it's not even completely clear that the narrator is human, since they are never visible, they never interact physically with the room, and Isabella seems not to notice them when she returns from the garden. Despite this lack of information, the entirety of the story is told through the narrator's perspective. The narrator sits in Isabella's drawing room and observes her and her home, both in the looking-glass and in their own imagination. Their opinion of Isabella is at times respectful and almost reverent. As the narrator looks at Isabella's furniture, for example, they imagine her traveling bravely in the "most obscure corners of the world" to collect beautiful objects for her home. At other times, however, the narrator seems disdainful of Isabella, and they eventually come to the conclusion that, despite her material wealth, she has "no thoughts" and "no friends." It is not clear what, exactly, causes these shifts in opinion, though it's possible they are related to the narrator's own feelings—awe or jealousy—about Isabella's material wealth. Whatever this inconsistency comes from, it does help underscore the theme that appearances do not necessarily tell the entire story of who a character is. Though the narrator spends the entire story observing Isabella and her home, in the end, their observations may tell readers more about the narrator than about Isabella herself. - Theme: Perception vs. Reality. Description: In "The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection," Virginia Woolf describes an unnamed narrator viewing the home of a woman named Isabella Tyson, either through a looking-glass that hangs in the hall or through imagined scenes. The looking-glass reflects Isabella's belongings and the home's general ambiance, allowing the narrator to speculate about Isabella's inner life. The looking-glass, however, is flawed and distorted, and the narrator's own characterizations of Isabella seem rooted more in imagination than fact. Besides, the narrator admits that nobody really knows anything about Isabella, and Isabella herself seems uninterested in truly being known. In the end, neither the looking-glass nor the narrator (which are the only two "reflections" of Isabella that readers get) seem to have access to Isabella's reality at all. This suggests that appearances alone do nothing to reveal the truth about a person's inner life. Throughout the story, the narrator draws conclusions about who Isabella is based mostly on the reflection of her home in the looking-glass. For example, the looking-glass reflects a cabinet with many drawers, and the narrator states that these drawers "almost certainly" contain letters from the exciting friends Isabella has made throughout her rich and varied life, evidence of the "passion and experience" that characterize Isabella. Furthermore, from the "exquisite" belongings she has curated throughout her home (such as pots and rugs), the narrator extrapolates that Isabella must be happy, as these objects point to many different "avenues of pleasure" available to her. However, Woolf shows that both the looking-glass and the narrator reflect Isabella unreliably, offering a skewed and limited view of her. Woolf often emphasizes that the looking-glass reflects only part of Isabella's life; the rest exists beyond the mirror's rim, which cuts off most of Isabella's house and yard. Furthermore, the looking-glass distorts even simple, everyday things. When the mailman comes, for example, his body appears in the looking-glass as a "large, black form" that "blot[s] out everything." The letters he leaves on the table initially look like "marble tablets." That the looking-glass makes these ordinary things—including a human being—look unrecognizable casts doubt on its ability to reveal anything true about Isabella. The narrator's view of Isabella is also skewed, as this unnamed person imagines Isabella based on the (distorted) images in the looking-glass. The narrator is determined to "prize her open" with their imagination and proceeds to extrapolate from small (and sometimes completely imaginary) details to invent scenes from Isabella's life. In one example, the narrator imagines Isabella cutting a branch in the garden and invents Isabella's resulting thoughts about mortality and how life has been good to her. Yet all of this—even the branch cutting—is entirely imagined. In another scene, just seeing Isabella's correspondence arrive on the table leads the narrator to imagine how Isabella might read these letters from friends "one by one" and "with a profound sigh of comprehension." In neither of these moments is Isabella herself even visible. Once she appears in the glass, however, the narrator's perception changes. As Isabella stands by the table with the letters, the looking-glass "pour[s] over her a light" that the narrator believes "leave[s] only the truth" about Isabella. This moment reverses the narrator's previous speculation about Isabella's rich inner life and happiness: seeming "naked" in the glass's light, Isabella appears "perfectly empty." The narrator then claims that Isabella has neither thoughts nor friends, and that the letters on the table are only bills. Despite this sudden shift, the story leaves unclear whether the narrator's new perception of Isabella is actually her reality, or whether it is just another illusion rooted in imagination and the distortions of the looking-glass. The moment in which the narrator has this apparent revelation could also be simply a trick of the light: it's the looking-glass itself that douses Isabella in "a light that seem[s] to fix her," or reveal Isabella as she actually is. That the looking-glass (already shown to be distorted and unreliable) is the source of this light, and that Woolf uses the word "seems," cast doubt on whether what the narrator sees is really the truth or just a different illusion. Furthermore, the narrator's revelation may—like their previous characterizations of Isabella—be rooted in imagination. No matter how clear the light, the narrator cannot know by merely observing Isabella that she has "no thoughts" or "no friends." Finally, the narrator seems to extrapolate that the envelopes contain only bills from the sole fact that Isabella does not immediately open them. Yet there are many possible reasons why Isabella might not open the envelopes right away, making the conclusion that they are bills seem flimsy. Earlier in the story, the narrator states outright that "Isabella did not wish to be known." The narrator's quest to understand her, then, seems doomed on several fronts: the narrator observes Isabella through a looking-glass that is prone to distorting the world, the narrator's imaginative characterizations of Isabella are contradictory and based mostly on unreliable images from the looking-glass, and Isabella herself seems quite private and unwilling to reveal herself. In this way, the final image of Isabella as sad and friendless seems to be less a revelation than another illusion that is unrelated to Isabella's true inner life. All this helps to demonstrate the difference between perception and reality: even though the reader can see Isabella's reflection in the looking-glass, this reflection doesn't necessarily tell anything about the reality of who she is. - Theme: Appearances and Materialism. Description: In "The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection," Woolf questions a literary convention of the Edwardian Era in which authors would describe a character by describing, at length, the physical objects they owned. In the process of questioning this convention, she also explores whether having beautiful things can actually make a person happy, and, more generally, the nature of the connection between a person's material possessions and their inner emotional state. Though the narrator observes that Isabella Tyson is surrounded by beautiful objects, these objects don't actually tell the narrator or the reader very much about Isabella. Thus, in telling this story, Woolf challenges both the Edwardian method of describing a character's possessions to tell readers who they are and the idea that physical riches necessarily lead to a rich inner life, suggesting instead that they might actually lead to emptiness and jealousy. In Edwardian-era literature, writers commonly provided lengthy descriptions of a character's possessions, which were thought to offer insight into who that character truly was. Woolf implicitly challenges this idea by extensively describing Isabella's home and belongings and then showing how these superficial things cannot actually reveal who Isabella is. In her essay "Modern Fiction," Woolf had previously explored the theory that, while detailed descriptions may provide "an air of probability," describing specific physical details like the buttons on a piece of clothing does not necessarily bring a story to life. In the essay, she questions whether stories that are so focused on objects and physical details are really life-like, arguing instead that a person's inner world and the way they experience life is much more complex and nebulous than a simple list of possessions might suggest. In this story, Woolf takes a similar jab at the Edwardian obsession with physical details, this time employing a bit of humorous personification. Throughout the story, she describes the objects in Isabella's house as borderline human, having "passions and rages and envies and sorrows [...] like a human being," and saying the air moves through the open windows "like human breath." She claims these objects know Isabella in a way the people in her life cannot, but the claim is clearly satirical, drawing attention to the fact that things like chairs and rugs cannot actually "know" someone at all. In this way, Woolf expands on the idea from her essay, demonstrating the absurdity of thinking that a chair or a particular style of shoe can actually tell readers something about a character. She further highlights this absurdity by having the narrator admit that, despite the fact that so many of Isabella's possessions are visible, it's difficult to know much about her. Therefore, rather than shedding light on Isabella's inner world, the extensive descriptions of her possessions in this story seem to be mostly a distraction. The possessions themselves may be a distraction, too—as the story suggests, these external riches do not necessarily lead to inner riches like happiness and peace for Isabella, and they may even bring her unhappiness. The descriptions of Isabella's house and belongings are sumptuous and elegant, but the narrator's final description of her gives the rest of her life a bleaker cast. Rather than leading a rich and friend-filled life, the narrator suggests that perhaps Isabella "care[s] for nobody" and is "perfectly empty." This suggests that, in the end, Isabella may have filled her home with beautiful objects only to fill a void in herself, using material possessions as a distraction from her loneliness and unhappiness. The narrator's assertion that the letters are actually all unopened bills makes this even more tragic by implying that Isabella may not be able to pay for these nice things. If this is true, not only do these objects not bring Isabella happiness, but they also lead to her financial ruin. This further highlights the potential gulf between the happiness that possessions might seem to indicate and the possible darker truth of Isabella's inner state. Yet it is ultimately unclear whether Isabella is actually happy or unhappy, despite what the narrator seems to decide. Even so, what is clear is that the narrator takes pleasure in seeing their initial image of Isabella crumble. This mean-spiritedness seems to suggest an additional drawback of materialism: jealousy that can morph into cruelty. When the narrator sees, in the looking-glass, what they imagine to be Isabella's terrible "truth," they call it an "enthralling spectacle," and they seem to enjoy watching their perfect image of Isabella fall apart. The narrator's description of Isabella's final reflection in the looking-glass is unsparing to the point of cruelty: she is "old and angular, veined and lined," with a "wrinkled neck," "no friends" and "no thoughts." This harsh description feels almost vindictive, further supporting the idea that the narrator may be taking pleasure in Isabella's pain. Because of this cruel attitude, when the narrator says that Isabella seems to stand "naked in that pitiless light," it may actually be the narrator's judgement that is pitiless, rather than the literal light itself. It's possible, then, that this final description of Isabella says more about the narrator and their jealousy than it does about Isabella herself. In this way, the narrator's initial admiration of Isabella's material wealth may have evolved into jealousy throughout the story's course, making them eager to seize upon any evidence—even thin or completely imaginary evidence—that this wealth has not made her happy. Thus, regardless of whether the narrator's verdict on Isabella's inner life is accurate, the story does demonstrate how materialism reflects an inner emptiness: either Isabella filling an emotional void with meaningless things, or the narrator dwelling on their jealousy of Isabella because of a dissatisfaction with their own life. What's more, by showing how the narrator's fixation on Isabella's material objects tells readers nothing about who this woman really is, Woolf makes an effective case that—contrary to Edwardian literary conventions—appearances do not provide a reliable source of information about literary characters. - Theme: Imagination vs. Realism. Description: In this story, the narrator observes Isabella Tyson through her reflection in the looking-glass. Notably, looking-glasses are a common symbol for realist fiction, which seeks to accurately reflect the world back to its readers so they can see their own reality more clearly. In addition to seeing Isabella through the looking glass, the narrator spends a significant portion of the story using imagination to try to reveal Isabella's inner life. By telling the story entirely through imagination and a mirror's reflection, Woolf comments on imagination and realism as methods of accessing truth, suggesting that while both methods are inherently limited, imagination has the potential to create beauty in ways that realism can't. Throughout the story, Woolf explicitly questions how useful the imagination can be as a tool for discerning hidden reality. When Isabella can no longer be seen in the looking-glass's reflection, the narrator begins to imagine what she might be doing out in the garden—perhaps picking flowers and cutting overgrown branches. The imagined scenes feature just as much detail as the scenes in the looking-glass, with descriptions of the flowers Isabella might pick—"light and fantastic and leafy and trailing"—as well as how she feels about cutting a branch: "filled with tenderness and regret." These imagined scenes include rich language and impressive imagery, and Woolf tells them in lush, ornate sentences such as, "Avenues of pleasure radiated this way and that from where she stood with her scissors raised to cut the trembling branches while the lacy clouds veiled her face." By crafting these imagined scenes to be some of the most aesthetically pleasing in the story, Woolf makes a case for imagination as a tool for heightening a story's beauty. Yet despite the fact that they are aesthetically pleasing, these imaginative leaps are not necessarily related to the truth of who Isabella is. In other words, imagination is clearly creating beauty in the story, but it's not necessarily giving access to truth. In one example, the imagined scene of Isabella picking flowers and snipping branches is full of references to her relationships and inner life. She thinks about sending "flowers to Johnson's widow," and cutting a branch makes her sad "because it had once lived, and life was dear to her." Yet all these possible glimpses of Isabella's ideas and thoughts are undermined by the final paragraph, in which the narrator decides that Isabella actually has "no friends" and "no thoughts" of her own. Though the story never confirms whether the narrator's final assertion is true, it is clear—due to the fact that the narrator does not ultimately trust their own imagination—that readers also cannot trust imagination as a source of accurate information about Isabella. And the fact that the narrator's imaginative efforts do not lead to a new understanding of Isabella is further underscored by the way the story ends with the same words it starts with: "People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms." These words give the story a circular feeling, showing how, despite the narrator's beautiful flights of fancy, nothing has changed; no real insight into Isabella has been gained. Along with imagination, the looking-glass is the other potential source of truth in the story, one that could be thought to provide more accurate information, given how it directly reflects the world. Yet the looking-glass, too, is flawed—and Woolf uses these flaws as a way to implicitly critique realist literature. Though the story is told partially through the reflection in a looking-glass, it also consistently casts doubt on the authenticity of what that looking-glass shows. Woolf spends a lot of time describing how the looking-glass distorts things, making them "irrational and entirely out of focus" or slicing them off at odd angles with its "gilt rim." With these descriptions, Woolf indirectly questions the idea that a looking-glass—or, by extension, a story—is capable of reflecting reality without altering that reality in the process. By using a looking-glass to ask this implicit question, Woolf also questions whether realist literature is capable of reflecting the world back to its readers clearly and without bias. In this story, skewed and imperfect reflections show how even a device as simple, commonplace, and seemingly trustworthy as a mirror may distort the truth. In this way, Woolf challenges realist literature's fundamental assumption, positing that if even a looking-glass distorts reality, then a fictional story certainly can't claim to reflect reality as it is. Thus Woolf suggests that realism, like imagination, cannot ultimately provide access to truth; neither gives the narrator insight into Isabella's inner life. Furthermore, realism is limited to portraying only what can be directly reflected in the looking-glass, making it less useful than imagination, which at least offers a chance for human connection through beauty. In the end, the story makes a compelling case for imagination as a storytelling tool: though it cannot ultimately tell unambiguous truth, imagination can create beauty, while realism's superficial focus is both aesthetically bland and far too limited to provide any "real" truth at all. - Climax: The moment Isabella is seen clearly in the mirror - Summary: An unnamed narrator visits the home of Isabella Tyson and observes Isabella and her surroundings through the reflection in a looking-glass. The narrator, whose gender, age, and relationship to Isabella are unknown, spends the entirety of the story sitting in Isabella's drawing room. At the story's opening, the house is empty, and the narrator observes Isabella's furniture and decorations, noting the finery of her possessions. The narrator then puts their attention toward the hall outside and the garden path, noting that Isabella has gone into the garden carrying a basket. Because she is no longer in view of the looking-glass, the narrator turns to imagining what Isabella may be doing in the garden and pictures her picking something "fantastic and leafy and trailing." The narrator lists the facts they believe they know about Isabella, including that she has not married, that she has traveled extensively, and that she has had many friends. While the narrator is reflecting on Isabella's life and what she might be doing in the garden, a postman arrives and leaves a stack of letters on the table. The narrator imagines Isabella reading them and sighing. The narrator then pictures Isabella standing in the garden again, getting ready to snip a flower and thinking about how she should visit her friends. The narrator compares Isabella's mind to her drawing room, where many of the drawers are locked and off-limits, though this doesn't stop them from imagining Isabella feeling sad about cutting the flower. Isabella interrupts the narrator's imaginings by appearing in the looking-glass, walking slowly back from the garden. As she comes closer and her reflection grows clearer, the narrator sees her in a new way. "Here was the woman herself," the narrator remarks, deciding that Isabella is "perfectly empty" and that she actually has no inner thoughts and no friends. Based on this new perception, the narrator concludes that Isabella's mail is not correspondence, but bills—a damning observation, given that she does not open them, suggesting she may not even have the money to pay for all her fine things. It is ultimately unclear which perception of Isabella actually reflects her reality—the reverent awe of this wealthy, highly-social woman, or the disdainful scorning of a lonely, aged, and perhaps financially ruined "spinster." The story ends just as it opened, with the narrator saying, "People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms," perhaps an indication that mirrors might not offer an accurate or useful reflection of reality after all.

- Genre: Short Story, Ghost Story - Title: The Lady Maid’s Bell - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Brympton Place (a fictional estate in upstate New York) and a nearby town - Character: Hartley. Description: - Character: Mrs. Brympton. Description: - Character: Mr. Brympton. Description: - Character: Emma Saxon (The Ghost). Description: - Character: Mr. Ranford. Description: - Character: Mrs. Blinder. Description: - Character: Mr. Wace. Description: - Character: Mrs. Railton. Description: - Character: Agnes. Description: - Theme: Marital Conflict and Jealousy. Description: - Theme: Class and Hierarchy. Description: - Theme: Mystery and Ambiguity. Description: - Theme: Illness, Isolation, and Loneliness. Description: - Climax: The ghost that haunts Brympton Place tries one last time to help Hartley save her former mistress, Mrs. Brympton—but not before the unexpected arrival of Mr. Brympton causes her death. - Summary: A lady's maid named Hartley is struggling to find work after a bad case of typhoid that put her in the hospital for three months. Still "weak and tottery," she finds herself unable to convince employers to take her on, and, to make matters worse, she is running out of money. Just when she is about to give up hope of ever finding work again, she meets Mrs. Railton, a friend of a former employer, who offers her a position with Mrs. Railton's niece. Grateful to have found some work at last, Hartley accepts the job, despite Mrs. Railton's admission that Brympton, the house where Hartley will be working, is a gloomy place owned by a domineering and mean-spirited man, Mr. Brympton. When she arrives at Brympton Place, Hartley finds that it is indeed a bleak place; nevertheless, her fondness for her mistress, Mrs. Brympton, outweighs the unsettled feeling she gets from being in the house. Hartley gets into the rhythm of life at Brympton Place and finds ways to keep her spirits up, even if the gloomy atmosphere and Mr. Brympton's boorish behavior threaten to cast a pall over her life. The house is not just gloomy, however; it is also full of secrets. Hartley wonders about the exact nature of the relationship between Mrs. Brympton and the Brymptons' neighbor, Mr. Ranford, and why none of the other servants seem willing to talk about the room across the hall from hers or its former occupant, Emma Saxon. The mystery across the hall becomes more sinister when Hartley is awoken one night by the ringing of the lady's maid's bell—which Mrs. Brympton has assured her she never uses. Hartley is certain that she hears the door across the hall open and close and footsteps in the hall, even though the room is clearly unoccupied. As Mrs. Brympton's health begins to worsen, Hartley begins to suspect that the house is haunted by a ghost—a suspicion that is confirmed one day when the ghost of Mrs. Brympton's former lady's maid, Emma Saxon, appears at her side. Hartley follows the ghost to Mr. Ranford's house but is unable to decipher the ghost's message: while she is certain that the ghost wants her to do something for Mrs. Brympton, it is unclear to Hartley what she must do. Shaken, she returns home to Brympton Place and does her best to carry on with her work. That night she is awoken by the bell again, this time with the certainty that, whatever the ghost's appearance forebodes, "It is going to happen now." Hartley knocks on Mrs. Brympton's door and finds her mistress fully dressed, despite the late hour. At the sound of footsteps downstairs—a sign that Mr. Brympton has arrived home unexpectedly—Mrs. Brympton loses consciousness and falls to the floor. Mr. Brympton enters the room and disregards his unconscious wife, seemingly more interested in whatever is hidden in his wife's boudoir. He opens the door and, seeing the ghost of Emma Saxon, shrinks back. On the brink of death, Mrs. Brympton fixes one final look of accusation on Mr. Brympton and then passes away. Mrs. Brympton's funeral is held three days later, in the middle of a snowstorm. Throughout the funeral, Mr. Brympton stares daggers at Mr. Ranford, who, mysteriously, now walks with a cane. Mr. Brympton leaves the funeral before it has even concluded, leaving the servants to return home to Brympton Place alone.

- Genre: Short story; fairy tale; children's literature - Title: The Lady or the Tiger? - Point of view: Mostly third person limited, with an essay on the princess's decision toward the story's end that includes the first person - Setting: An unnamed semi-barbaric kingdom, especially the king's public arena located within the kingdom - Character: The king. Description: The "semi-barbaric" tyrant of a kingdom somewhat influenced by distant "Latin" neighbors, the king has grandiose ideals, not least among them that justice should be administered with absolute impartiality, by chance. It is to this end—and also for his own viewing pleasure— that he has established the public arena in which the accused are forced to choose between one door, one of which hides a beautiful lady to whom the accused will be married (whether he likes it or not) if he opens her door, and the other a ferocious tiger that will devour him should he open its door. When the king discovers that his daughter, the princess, has a lover beneath her royal station, a young man who serves in the royal court no less, the king condemns this young man to trial by arena. - Character: The princess. Description: The king's beloved daughter, the princess inherits her father's barbarically grandiose idealism and fiery passion. When her lover, the young man, is condemned to trial by public arena, the princess uses gold and willpower to discover which door in the arena holds which fate for him, the tiger or the lady, death or marriage. During his trial, with a slight quick movement of her hand, she directs the young man to the door on the right. So: does it hold the lady or the tiger? On the one hand, the princess is horrified to think of the young man's bloody death at the tiger's tooth and claw; on the other, she is agonizingly jealous at the prospect of her lover marrying another woman—especially the lady selected for the young man, whom the princess hates for having flirted with him in the past. While the narrator of the story invites us to meditate on the princess's dilemma, we never learn definitively what she decides to do. - Character: The young man. Description: One of the king's courtiers and the princess's lover, the young man is condemned to trial by public arena for aspiring to love one so far above him. He is "tall, beautiful, fair," one of the beautiful young men of the kingdom whose plight arouses the anxiety and admiration of the audience at his trial. His soul is one with the princess's, and when she directs him to the door on the right side of the arena he doesn't hesitate to stride over and open it: but is he greeted by the lady or the tiger? - Character: The audience. Description: The people of the kingdom who gather at the public arena to be entertained and pleased by the trials held there. The king's system of poetic justice is especially popular with audience members because they are excitedly uncertain as to whether they will witness a grizzly death or a joyous (or hilarious) wedding. When someone dies in the arena, the audience mourns with downcast hearts; when someone is married in the arena, they celebrate spectacularly. The audience is fickle in its sympathies, more interested in entertainment than in justice. - Theme: Barbarism and Civilization. Description: The king in "The Lady or the Tiger" is described as "semi-barbaric," poised halfway, it would seem, between barbarism and civilization. He has grandiose ideas and fancies; he orders that even his most whimsical and unrealistic wishes be realized, and he is burningly, gustily passionate, just like his daughter, the princess. What makes the king semi-barbaric and not wholly barbaric is that his ideas have been "somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors," presumably the Ancient Romans, whose Coliseum, the story implies, served as the model for the king's own public arena of poetic justice "by which," the narrator says, "his barbarism had become semified." The arena civilized the kingdom specifically by hosting "exhibitions of manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and cultured."However, "The Lady or the Tiger" goes on to question and weaken any firm distinction we might draw between barbarism and civilization. After all, the story reminds us that the Roman Coliseum—that architectural wonder constructed by the great civilization of antiquity—served as a stage for bloody gladiatorial battles and the (alleged) execution of Christians by lion, all to the end of entertaining the public. Aren't such practices just as, if not more, barbaric than the king's in the story? Far from being progressive, the Romans themselves were, at least in some ways, semi-barbaric too. Our ideas of what is barbaric and what is civilized seem to be little more than accidents of historical affiliation—Western culture descended from Roman culture, and therefore Westerners are quick to excuse the practices of the Coliseum from barbarism, whereas similar practices like the king's we denounce as barbaric.But the story goes a step further than this: perhaps, it suggests, we are all of us no more than semi-barbaric. After all, the narrator repeatedly suggests that what really lies at the root of barbarism are the innate human appetite for pleasure and the capacity for intense passion—it is these characteristics which give rise to the king's exuberant fancies, and these which at last make his daughter's heart unknowable to us, full of "devious mazes of passion". But who among us, the story's readers, doesn't want to be pleased, or is wholly devoid of passion? Like the audience in the story, we mourn bloody spectacle—but do we not also find such spectacle, in our heart of hearts, entertaining too, as the audience does? However, even if our wishes and passions do make us semi-barbaric, the story gives us reason for not wanting the case to be otherwise: it is, after all, the princess's barbarism which makes her love so "exceedingly warm and strong." The story is at last conflicted; although it regards the social expression of fiery passion, epitomized by the practices of the arena, to be barbaric and unjust, it also concedes that these same characteristics, privately expressed, strengthen human love and, in a sense, make life worth living. - Theme: Justice, Impartiality, and Bias. Description: The king's administration of justice rests on a principle not unlike that held by Western civilization, namely, that justice should be blind, impartially administered. However, the king pursues this principle to its logical extreme: in his kingdom, rather than use judges or juries, "the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance"—in the form of a public arena in which the accused must choose between two doors, and depending entirely on luck will end up marrying a beautiful lady or be devoured by a hungry tiger. Luck alone determines punishment or reward. Of course, it is true that chance or luck can't be biased or emotionally manipulated or bribed like human judges can, and in this sense the king's method is absolutely impartial. However, we might argue nonetheless that chance has nothing to do with justice: after all, in the king's public arena, a vicious murderer might open the door to a lady, while an innocent person might open the door to a tiger. Even though punishment and reward are impartially rendered in these cases, it is safe to say that they are not justly rendered.It would seem, then, that no justice system can be absolutely impartial: for justice to be rendered at all, human beings who are by their very nature susceptible to bias must render it. The story investigates this proposition when the princess finds herself in a position to pass judgment on her lover, the young man, who has been accused of a crime and made to face the trial of the public arena. The Princess, in this case, has found out which door in the arena leads to punishment (the tiger) and which to reward (the lady). Yet just as chance is absolutely impartial, so is the princess absolutely biased and deeply conflicted in her interests. On the one hand, she loves the young man and despairs at the thought of his bloody painful death; on the other hand, the idea that her lover should marry another woman enrages her with jealousy. Given this, she seems just as incapable of rendering justice as pure chance would be. However, if absolute impartiality, such as that offered by chance in the arena, and passionate love, such as the princess's for the young man, both compromise justice, where is justice to be found in this world at all? The story does not answer this question. - Theme: The Danger of Treating Life as Art. Description: Since the public arena doesn't administer justice at all, really, we might wonder why the king instituted it in the first place, and why his subjects in the audience continue to tolerate it. The story suggests that both king and subject do so because they are pleased and entertained by what they witness in the arena, be it "a bloody slaughter or a hilarious wedding." Both treat what happens in the arena as a work of art, a spectacular drama taut with suspense that evokes pity and terror if the accused opens the door to the tiger, or that evokes relief and laughter and merriment if the accused opens the door to the lady. In this sense, the audience of the trial in the story mirrors us as the story's readers: we are watching a drama unfold that interests us and gives us pleasure, even as we squirm with anxiety wondering what the young man's fate will be.However, the story goes on to make a dark point: the audience at the arena becomes so pleased and entertained by what they witness that they seem to forget that down below on trial are not actors but real people filled with real dread, in an unjust and potentially deadly situation. When we treat life like art, it becomes all too easy to ignore human suffering and even to become complicit in it. What's worse is that the audience recognizes the injustice of the arena—they mourn for those who die there, "that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have merited so dire a fate"—yet they never protest or boycott the institution, or intervene to protect their fellow subjects. During the young man's trial, the audience is struck by what a grand figure he is, and thinks collectively, "What a terrible thing for him to be there"—but they'd rather watch him suffer than help to get him out. If chance and passion both compromise the administration of justice, pleasure in drama and spectacle numbs us to injustice.The ambiguity at the end of the story invites us to reflect on our own feelings about the young man's dire situation—were we energized by the danger and eager for bloodshed or hilarity, or were we troubled by the political implications of what we saw, the lack of justice and its attendant human suffering? - Theme: Uncertainty, Love, and Trust. Description: From one perspective, the public arena symbolizes broad aspects of the human condition: we live in a world full of choices, but we are uncertain as to what choices lead to what consequences, just as the young man faces a stark choice between life and death, though which door in the arena holds which is a mystery to him. And, in the arena as in some visions of life, people blunder through their choices randomly for the most part, and the consequences of their choices have little or nothing to do with their just deserts. However, the young man finds himself in a unique situation: he is in love with the princess, and she loves him. Moreover, she has the unprecedented power to help him navigate with certainty the choices before him, for she knows where the lion is, and where the lady. Her love for the young man motivated the princess to acquire this knowledge—but her love also complicates the decision before her. Can she live with herself if her direction leads the young man to death? And, conversely, can she live with herself if the young man is not part of her life but another woman's? The narrator suggests that all authentically passionate love emerges from a barbaric element in human nature, which perhaps explains why the princess's love for the young man could plausibly lead her to sacrifice him to the tiger.Indeed, in a cruel double bind, it is precisely because the young man loves the princess and she him that he trusts her—but the princess's love is so strong as to make her, in a sense, untrustworthy. Like the reader at the ambiguous end of the story, the young man is in a position to judge the princess's motives when she motions him to the door on the right, and in his love for her he trusts her completely, opening the door she would have him open. But the question arises: does the young man know the princess well enough to be justified in trusting her? And, more eerily, can anybody ever know another well enough to trust them with certainty? We as readers of the story tend to assume, for example, that the young man would prefer to be married than cruelly ripped to shreds by a tiger—but do we know him well enough to make this assumption? Perhaps he, like the princess, could not live without his love, and would rather the tiger than the lady himself. Uncertainty reigns over all decisions and judgments in the story, and trust is paradoxically both generated and dissolved by love. - Theme: Interpretation and the Interpreter. Description: By the end of the story, the narrator leaves open the question as to whether the princess directs the young man to the lady or the tiger, thereby putting us in a position of judgment: "Did the tiger come out of that door, or the lady?" Many readers take this as an invitation for us to decide whether the young man is greeted by the lady or the tiger, but doing so would be just as whimsical and imaginatively tyrannical of us as the king's actions are. Besides the narrator makes it explicit that this is not the decision open to us at all: rather, we are to interpret what the princess would do, based on our knowledge of her nature and situation. But do we know enough even to consider giving a definitive interpretation as to what the princess would do, and, in the second place, are we impartial enough to judge her fairly? The story seems skeptical on both counts. We presumably do not share the young man's love for the princess, and hence don't trust her absolutely, but we nonetheless bring our own personal experience and attitudes to bear on the princess's decision, even if only subconsciously. Just as the story suggests that people can't know one another with certainty, as is the case with the young man and the princess, so too does it suggest that interpreters can't ever make any interpretive claims with certainty, but are always in a sense interpreting their own wishes, anxieties, and biases instead. It is perhaps best to follow in the narrator's footsteps at the end of the story and to concede that interpretive claims are presumptuous and that interpretation is best suspended when confronted with unanswerable ambiguities. - Climax: The princess instructs the young man to open the door on the right in the arena, and he does so—but does the lady or the tiger greet him? - Summary: There was once a "semi-barbaric" king, a man of exuberant imagination who had a tyrannical grip on his kingdom. From distant Latin neighbors, this king had borrowed the idea of building a grand public arena, but the purpose of this arena was all the king's own: he would hold trials there in accordance with a barbaric notion of poetic justice, where the accused would be forced to open one of two doors inside of the arena itself guided by nothing more than "impartial and incorruptible chance." One door led to a reward—a suitable lady whom the accused would be required to marry whether he liked it or not. The other led to punishment—a ferocious and tiger which would invariably kill the accused. No one could accuse this justice system of unfairness, because the accused himself chose which door to open; and the trials never failed to please and entertain the audience gathered for the occasion. Now, the king had a daughter, the princess, as passionate and imperious as her father himself. She and a courtier, the young man, had fallen in love, despite the fact that the courtier was of a lower social station than the princess. Their affair was a happy one—at least until the king found out about it. He ordered that the young man be imprisoned, and condemned him to trial by arena for aspiring to one so far above him. It didn't matter to the king whether the young man opened the door to the lady or the tiger, for in either case he would be disposed of (through marriage or death), and the king would enjoy the trial regardless. The day of the young man's trial came. He was released into the arena and confronted with the two fateful doors. However, his eyes met the princess's, who sat watching him, and because they were in love he discerned at once that his lover had found out which door held which fate, as he expected she would. Indeed, the princess had used gold and willpower to gain access to this secret as none before her had done, not even the king. And, in this knowledge, the princess directed the young man to the door on the right—but did it hold the lady, or the tiger? After all, the princess had agonized for days over this moment: she despaired to think of her lover being mauled and killed by the tiger, bleeding and shrieking on the arena floor—but she was also enflamed with jealousy to think that the young man should marry another woman, especially given that the princess knew which lady had been selected for the young man and hated her for having flirted with the young man in the past. The narrator does not presume to tell us what decision the princess came to; and for a final time puts the question to us: "Which came out of the opened door—the lady, or the tiger?"

- Genre: Drama/Romance - Title: The Lady With the Dog - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: The seaside resort town of Yalta, the capital of the Russian Empire Moscow, the Russian city of St. Petersburg - Character: Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov. Description: Dmitri Gurov is the protagonist of The Lady with the Dog. An unhappily married banker on vacation by himself in Yalta when he meets Anna, he decides to start an affair with her more out of boredom than anything else. He is closer to 40 than 20, with two sons and a daughter at home, as well as a history of womanizing. However, Gurov finds Anna to be different from his past affairs, which were simple and pleasurable until they weren't. He doesn't quite understand Anna, and seems to think that her opinion of him is mistakenly good, yet connect to some larger, more transcendental love through his relationship with her. Gurov finds himself unable to shake his feelings for Anna after he returns to Moscow, and gradually his entire life seems to be a hypocritical lie without Anna in it. Gurov goes to St. Petersburg to restart the affair, finding himself all the more in love with Anna as they have to be increasingly secretive about their relationship. Gurov grows to see this secret love as far more valuable and true than anything else he's experienced in his life, and he ends the story trying to find a way to be with Anna permanently. Gurov goes from chasing transitory pleasures that stave off his boredom to pursuing a genuine, tender connection with a woman who both sees him as and inspires him to be better than he is—a task all the more urgent for how comparatively late in life he's fallen in love for the first time. - Character: Anna Sergeevna Von Dideritz. Description: Anna is the titular character of the story, the Lady with the dog. She travels to Yalta ostensibly for a vacation her that husband will join later on. Instead, she begins an affair with Dmitri Gurov that persists after both have left Yalta. She is described as fair-haired, with charming grey eyes, of medium height, and, most importantly, young. Married at 20, she's closer to being in school than to having children. While Gurov initiates their affair as a practiced womanizer, she likely responds to it as the first significant thing that's happened to her since her marriage. She cares deeply what Gurov thinks of her and thinks little of herself. Anna begins the story more or less already in the place that Gurov ultimately ends up—feeling her inner life deeply, desperate to escape her day-to-day existence with her "flunkey" husband, and hungry to be really, truly loved. She is tormented by how those desires conflict with the societal expectations of her place in the world, and throughout the affair in Yalta, she interprets her feelings for Gurov as the torments of the Devil. Gradually, however, Anna goes from passively accepting the tragedy of her situation, calling the end of the affair in Yalta the "finger of Destiny," to actively traveling to Moscow to be with Gurov and trying to pursue a solution that will allow them to be together without having to hide it. - Character: Gurov's Wife. Description: Gurov's Wife has been married to Gurov for over ten years at the start of the story and had three children with him, but she does not come with him to Yalta. She is described as tall and erect, with dark eyebrows and a cold, dignified manner. While she considers herself to be very intellectual, Gurov thinks now that she's rather affected, unintelligent, and lacks any real feeling. She seems at least partially aware of Gurov's feelings for Anna after he returns to Moscow, but never directly confronts him about his infidelities. She is mostly an impediment to Gurov's happiness before, during and (one presumes) after the end of the story. - Character: Anna's Husband. Description: Anna's husband is some sort of official in St. Petersburg who means to come down to vacation in Yalta with Anna, but grows ill and never makes it. When Gurov sees him at the opera in St. Petersburg, he is described as "tall and stooping," someone who seems to be continually bowing and sucking up to his superiors. He has a bald patch and comic side-whiskers, and seems proud of the very small badge he sports on his coat. This description is in keeping with the fact that Anna considers him "a flunkey," who will get continually pushed around and never rise in his career. He both believes and doesn't believe Anna's lies about why she is traveling to Moscow when she goes to see Gurov. - Character: Gurov's Daughter. Description: Gurov's daughter is the one child who still lives at home with Gurov and Gurov's Wife. The only information given about her is that she is twelve years old. Neither she nor her two brothers, who are at boarding school, are described in the story. Gurov manages to have a warm relationship with his daughter, however, in one scene walking her to school and answering questions about science while being completely occupied with thoughts of Anna at the same time. - Theme: Truth in Deception. Description: Anton Chekhov's short story "The Lady with the Dog" centers on the passionate affair between Dmitri Gurov and Anna Sergeevna. The two meet while on vacation in the city of Yalta, and what begins as a lovely yet ostensibly fleeting romance turns into a deeply meaningful relationship—one that, because both parties are married, must be maintained in secret. As Gurov in particular navigates his feelings in society beyond Yalta, he comes to feel that the "kernel" of his life with Anna is, while outwardly concealed, the most essential thing about him. Through this revelation, Chekhov's story suggests the potential for truth to be mined even from deception. At the same time, the tale's ambiguous ending questions whether such truth can survive in the light of day. Chekhov immediately establishes Gurov's tendency towards hypocrisy and self-deception in order to highlight the transformative effect Anna has on his life. Having had many past affairs, Gurov "had been taught enough by bitter experience to call [women] anything he liked, and yet he could not have lived without the 'inferior race' even for two days." He asserts that women are beneath him even as he craves their constant company. Because Gurov has for so long sought to escape his stilted marriage in meaningless affairs, at first this is what he imagines with Anna. The thought of a "swift, fleeting love affair" takes "possession of him," though this will prove to be a sort of self-deception; his romance with Anna will be nothing like the affairs of his past. In fact, Gurov comes to feel that the "kernel" of his life with Anna is, while outwardly concealed, the most essential thing about him. That Gurov grows to feel genuine love for the first time in his life with Anna inherently means that, in searching for fulfillment in haphazard affairs, he has been deceiving himself for years. Though Gurov and Anna have found genuine, truthful connection with each other, the maintenance of their relationship requires a continuous, ever-broadening web of lies. While taking his daughter to school, for example, Gurov is outwardly explaining thunderstorms to his child while inwardly reflecting on his love for Anna and on this complex double life he leads. Both he and Anna must also lie to their spouses in order to see each other. Anna tells her husband that she is visiting a doctor when she goes to Moscow, while Gurov tells his wife he is going to St. Petersburg to "solicit for a certain young man." Anna and Gurov even feel that they are deceiving each other. Gurov fears Anna sees him as a better man than he really is, calling him "kind, extraordinary lofty; obviously, he had appeared to her not as he was in reality and therefore he had involuntarily deceived her." Anna, meanwhile, worries that Gurov views her as only a common woman, despite his repeated assurances to the contrary. Somewhat paradoxically, it seems, their attempts to preserve the truth they've found together leads only to more paranoia and deception. What's more, the story suggests that everyone is engaging is some form of deceit. Gurov comes to believe that everything "which constituted the core of his life, occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell, in which he hid in order to conceal the truth […] all this was in full view." He applies this logic to the world around him: "And he judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always supposed that every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night." Gurov's deception, then, has opened his eyes to the truth of the society in which he lives—a truth that, ironically, suggests that everyone's outward "shell" is a lie. By the end of the tale, maintaining their façade has clearly begun to take its toll on Gurov and Anna—they meet to discuss a future in which they talk "about how to rid themselves of the need for hiding, for deception." Both seem to realize that they cannot continue as they are, and that, though they have found truth in deception, that their love cannot continue to bloom in darkness. Whether their truth will survive the light, however, is notably left unsaid. By ending the story ambiguously—with no resolution as to how Gurov and Anna will maintain their relationship—Chekhov leaves the reader to question how much of people's secret inner worlds are meaningful specifically because they are unknown—and untainted—by the rest of the world. - Theme: Society and Morality. Description: Despite the illicit nature of Gurov and Anna's affair, Chekhov refuses to pass clear moral judgment on his characters' actions. Instead, he makes a distinction between the social expectations placed on the lovers—which the story presents as petty and deeply hypocritical—and the actual, positive change that the Gurov and Anna have on each other through the deepening of their allegedly immoral relationship. In doing so, "The Lady with the Dog" suggests the arbitrary nature of societal conceptions of morality. What's more, that fact that society in Chekhov's story would keep those with genuine love apart ultimately serves as a condemnation of shallow societal mores. Gurov and Anna's affair notably begins while they are separated from the judging eyes of society. Though there is anxiety that someone will spot them in Yalta—Chekhov writes that though they kiss in broad daylight, such displays of affection are often accompanied by "furtive looks around"—their relationship is able to grow in large part because they have the space to explore their feelings without fear of repercussions. That something so genuine can form in such circumstances suggests the oppressive nature of social expectations, which would have quashed any burgeoning attraction between Gurov and Anna before it had a chance to begin. As such, they both assume their relationship must end when they leave the fantasy of Yalta for their real lives Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moscow is cold and dark, distinctly contrasting with the brightness of Yalta in Gurov's memory. This further suggests the oppressive, isolating nature of the society keeping Gurov and Anna apart. Chekhov describes Gurov as a Muscovite, who "gradually became immersed in Moscow life" upon his return—"drawn to restaurants, clubs, to dinner parties, celebrations"—yet ultimately unsatisfied by shallow social preening. Indeed, as Gurov's longing for Anna grows, so, too, does his frustration with the meaninglessness of his well-to-do Moscow existence: "Frenzied card-playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant talk about the same thing," Chekhov writes. "Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one's time, the best of one's powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life…" Here, Gurov directly connects aimless societal pleasures with the curtailing of life—that is, they are distractions that prevent people from truly living. By the time that Gurov sees Anna again in St. Petersburg, his sense of propriety and societal values have radically shifted. He's lost all taste for Moscow social life and instead is filled with joy upon seeing "this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd." The usual, expected trappings of a love story—of a woman standing out in a crowd—don't matter. When the two finally have a chance to talk in the stairwell of the opera house, Gurov embraces Anna heedless of the schoolboys coming up the stairs. In that moment, he's overcome his estimation of societal appearances and taken a risky step towards a more genuine relationship. Gurov's journey into love with Anna is a journey of overcoming the societal expectations that have made him unhappy towards being worthy of the woman who does make him happy (even if that means sneaking around). The characters in "The Lady with the Dog" are knotty, ambiguous people who nonetheless feel genuine love for each other and allow themselves to be guided by that love. By creating a realistic, complex understanding of human actions, Chekhov rejects a binary world in which truth and faithfulness are inherently good and lying and cheating are inherently bad. In this world, people can only gauge their relative worth against their understanding of themselves. - Theme: Time, Mortality, and Purpose. Description: There is little urgency in Gurov and Anna's lives at the beginning of the story. When he first sees Anna, Gurov has already been on vacation for two weeks "and was used to it," Chekhov writes, highlighting the character's idle boredom. Later, while talking with Anna for the first time during dinner, Gurov comments that he is "dragging" through his second week in Yalta, to which Anna responds, "The time passes quickly, and yet it is so boring here!" Neither appears to have a strong sense of purpose guiding their days in Yalta, instead attempting merely to escape, through a change of scenery, the unhappiness that clings to their city selves and relationships. Nor does either take much notice of or pleasure in the present moment; the lack of genuine feeling makes their days paradoxically drag even as they fly by. Only upon embarking on their romance do the two become more acutely aware of the passage of time, and, it follows, of the fact that they have met each other a little too late—both already married, and Gurov into middle age. Through the resultant poignancy of their affair, the story ultimately suggests the importance of actively pursuing relationships that make life meaningful. Chekhov imbues the story with a sense of time through his repeated references to the changing seasons—Anna and Gurov's affair begins in summer and breaks off in autumn (Gurov tells himself, after he has put Anna on a train from Yalta back to St. Petersburg, that their parting is as natural as summer fading to fall), and their decision to try to be together more permanently occurs in winter. This seasonal cycle reflects the development of their relationship—which begins as a casual romance neither party expects to last beyond their stay in Yalta, turns an ongoing relationship that nonetheless must remain a secret, and finally becomes something that the two want to make permanent. Even as the tenor of their relationship is subtly impacted by the passage of time, Gurov and Anna don't seem to acknowledge any temporal restraints until the end of the story. At first, the couple remain relatively passive and idle. They fall into a steady rhythm in Yalta, developing a routine of dining, walking on the embankment, and looking at the sea together. Though they expect Anna's husband to arrive any day, and know they both must leave Yalta soon, there is a sense of timelessness to their love that belies the reality of how limited their time together actually is. This changes at the end of the story when, after having engaged in their secret affair for months, Gurov looks in the mirror and notices that he has gray hair. Beyond underscoring how much time has passed and how much he has changed since meeting Anna, such evidence of aging—and, it follows, mortality—prompts Gurov to lament wasting so much of his life on shallow affairs that had been "anything else, but not love," and how "only now, when his head was gray, had he really fallen in love as one ought to—for the first time in his life." Though their partnership in Yalta felt like time out of time, this moment shows Gurov beginning to realize that they cannot continue passively engaging in their affair and must instead take active steps to pursue the life they want together before it is too late. Gurov and Anna's response to knowing—and fearing—how short their time together might be is to love each other "like tender friends" and "forg[i]ve everything in the present." Such deep, unconditional care, the story suggests, is in part borne from awareness of the fleeting nature of life and romance. Not only does love imbue the passage of time with a sense of meaning, then, but acceptance of the inevitable march of time makes love all the more powerful. - Theme: The Transformative Power of Love. Description: Both Anna and Gurov interpret their initial affair in Yalta as a bout of madness—Gurov approaches Anna when the thought of a romance with an unknown woman "suddenly [takes] possession of him," and Anna outright says to Gurov before they sleep together that she "couldn't control [herself] any longer" and that she is going "about as if in a daze, as if I'm out of my mind." Each character initially views the affair with a certain sense of shame, which they wish to excuse by insisting they are not in control of their actions. Both further question the validity of the other's desire; Anna, for instance, repeatedly asks Gurov to reassure her that she is not a trite, low woman because of her infidelity. Gurov, meanwhile, never quite knows Anna's mind and is constantly under the impression that the way she and other women see him isn't true to who he really is. It is only slowly, over the course of resuming their affair in Moscow, that both break through the self-centered passion they feel and begin seeing themselves the way the other sees them. By showing how another's affection can better one's own self-conception, the story suggests the transformative power of love. Gurov and Anna meet because they have, separately, gone to Yalta to temporarily get away from their spouses and obligations at home. Anna stands out against the women Gurov has previously slept with and also among the vacationing society in Yalta specifically because she is a young woman with no companion but her dog. Her isolation is part of Gurov's attraction to her, yet once they begin their affair, Gurov finds her somewhat inscrutable. She often seems contradictory, and he does not understand her or what she wants. Gurov also has difficulty understanding what Anna sees in him; she thinks him "kind, extraordinary lofty," and when they first go their separate ways after Yalta, Gurov reflects that he has "involuntarily deceived" Anna because "he had appeared to her not as he was in reality." Gurov thinks, at first, that Anna sees him as better than he really is, but he does the same thing when reminiscing about their time together in Yalta. When he returns to Moscow, Gurov finds that Anna "follow[s] him everywhere like a shadow" and Gurov imagines her "younger, more beautiful, more tender than she was." The happiness he associates with their time in Yalta has colored his perception of Anna, yet it also begins to actually change his perception of himself: "he also seemed better to himself than he had been then, in Yalta," Chekhov writes. By the end of the story both Gurov and Anna seem transformed by the other's conception of them. Rather than make excuses for the affair, they actively aim to create a life in which they can live together openly—evidencing that they have accepted the truth of each other's desire as well as the validity and worthiness of their own. Gurov and Anna solidify their love for each other only when they embrace being the person that their lover sees in them. That, Chekhov argues, is how one surmounts a self-centered experience of life and reaches out to another: people become the best version of themselves when they incorporate others' beliefs about them into what they believe about themselves. - Climax: Gurov looks into a mirror and realizes both that he has grown old and is in love for the first time in his life. - Summary: Dmitri Gurov has been in Yalta for a two weeks when a mysterious woman appears in town with her white Pomeranian. No one knows anything about the woman, and people refer to her simply as "the lady with the little dog." Gurov, out of a mix of curiosity, boredom, and the desire for the pleasures of an affair, strikes up a conversation with the woman, whose name is Anna Sergeyevna Von Diderits, one night at dinner. The two trade a little bit about their backgrounds: he's a banker from Moscow who's been married with three children for some time, and gave up on his artistic training as a singer; she's from St. Petersburg, is only recently married, and seems quite disconnected from whatever her husband does for the government. They part, but that evening Gurov has trouble getting Anna out of his thoughts. A week later, the two go to see a steam ship bring new people to Yalta, and then linger long after the crowds have dispersed. They later return to Gurov's hotel room, in which he dispels a great deal of fear on Anna's part that he is losing respect for her. The two consummate their relationship and then drive out to the scenic suburb of Oreanda to watch the sun rise. Both are incredibly moved by the scene, and soon begin a routine of dining together, stealing kisses in the gardens, sleeping together, and driving out late at night to see the natural beauty of the landscape. Eventually word reaches Anna that her husband is sick, and she returns to St. Petersburg. Gurov goes back to Moscow shortly after, thinking that the affair has run its course. However, Gurov struggles to get Anna off his mind. The world of his wife, children, and Moscow society more generally loses all of its luster for him. In fact, he comes to see it as a hypocritical, shallow farce in comparison to his time full of true and tender emotions with Anna. Gurov comes up with a pretext to go to St. Petersburg, where he stakes out Anna's house but doesn't see her. Later that evening, he attends a premiere at the opera in the hopes of spotting Anna, and in fact does. She appears to him completely unremarkable and lost in the crowd, yet remains the source of all his happiness nonetheless. Gurov confronts Anna outside of the opera, badly shocking her. Anna confesses that she's also been unable to put Gurov out of her mind and promises that she will come to Moscow to see him if he will only leave the opera before people spot them together. Anna is true to her word and begins coming to Moscow semi-regularly. The two rekindle their affair without any real consequences or threats of exposure. The strength of the relationship and the fact that they've been able to successfully keep it secret completely changes Gurov's outlook on life—he is now convinced that people's personal lives exist in the most secret parts of themselves, and is somewhat amazed he's able to handle the double-life of his old Moscow relationships as well as his truest, best life with Anna. Neither Gurov nor Anna, however, is happy that their actual marriages and the geographical distance them are keeping them apart. After some time, the two meet at Anna's hotel room in Moscow, desperately searching for a solution that will bring them together more permanently. The hardest part of their relationship is just beginning, they realize, but Gurov feels love so strongly for the first time in his life that he is ready to try and surmount those complications.

- Genre: Short story, mystery, horror - Title: The Landlady - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: Bath, England - Character: Billy Weaver. Description: Billy Weaver, the story's protagonist, is an enthusiastic and innocent seventeen-year-old boy. When Billy arrives in the city of Bath—keen to make his way in the business world—his first task is to find lodgings for the night. He happens upon a charming Bed and Breakfast, and is welcomed inside by the friendly landlady there. Feeling very pleased with himself for finding such comfortable and cheap lodgings, Billy misses important clues and warnings about the landlady's true nature. Billy is curious but naïve. He finds it strange, for example, that there are no other guests staying at the Bed and Breakfast, but trusts the landlady's peculiar explanation. He also notices that there have only been two previous entries in the visitors' book—Christopher Mulholland and Gregory W. Temple—and, curiously, he recognizes both names. Although he is very keen to determine why, he is easily fooled and distracted by the landlady during his search for truth. Ultimately, the sweet-looking landlady is able to take advantage of poor Billy because his innocent and trusting nature prevents him from suspecting that things might not be as they seem. Although the story's cliffhanger does not explicitly reveal Billy's fate, it is implied that the landlady poisons his tea so that she can kill Billy and stuff him, just as she does to her pets. - Character: The Landlady. Description: The story's antagonist is the unnamed landlady who runs the Bed and Breakfast that Billy chooses to stay in. Although she appears to be sweet, friendly, and generous, the story's plot twist reveals that she is a cruel woman, or insane, capable of horrifying and wicked crimes. Throughout their evening together, Billy is increasingly curious about the landlady's previous guests, Christopher and Gregory, and it becomes apparent that the landlady is hiding a secret with regard to them, and when they left her Bed and Breakfast. Billy is sure that he has seen their names in the newspaper headlines, and that Christopher went missing in a tragic accident. Although the landlady denies this, she makes several creepy and objectifying comments about the boys' appearance. When the landlady explains that she has a taxidermy hobby, and shows Billy her stuffed pets, the reader realizes that she has killed and stuffed Christopher and Gregory too, and displayed their bodies upstairs. The two young men have never been found, and she has never been caught, presumably because nobody suspects the landlady of such terrifying violence. At this moment, Billy notices that his tea "tasted faintly of bitter almonds," and it becomes clear that the landlady has poisoned him. - Character: Mr. Greenslade. Description: Mr. Greenslade, one of the "big shots" from the "Head Office in London," is the businessman who encourages Billy to move to Bath for work. Although he is only mentioned briefly, he is an important figure in the story, as clearly Billy looks up to him. Because of Mr. Greenslade, and others like him, Billy believes that being successful means being "brisk" and making money. It is perhaps because of his "briskness" that Billy fails to notice important clues that might have helped him avoid his miserable demise. - Character: Christopher Mulholland. Description: Mr. Mulholland was one of the landlady's previous guests and victims. Throughout the story, it becomes clear that he checked into the landlady's Bed and Breakfast several years ago and has been missing ever since. The story implies that his disappearance was reported far and wide in the newspapers, which is how Billy became familiar with his name. The landlady describes how both Christopher and Gregory—another one of her victims—never left the Bed and Breakfast, and how they are still "on the fourth floor, both of them together" (implying that she killed and stuffed them, just as she did with her pets). This confuses and surprises Billy, because he thought that he was the only guest, but it doesn't yet cause Billy to suspect that the landlady might have been responsible for their disappearances. - Character: Gregory W. Temple. Description: Mr. Temple is the other of the landlady's previous guests and victims. She describes how Gregory was a little older than Christopher when he arrived at her Bed and Breakfast, but how his skin was still very youthful: "there wasn't a blemish on his body." It is clear that the landlady targets and grooms a certain kind of victim; she likes tall, innocent, and handsome young men, and their appearance is very important to her, as it's implied that she kills and stuffs them like her pets. - Theme: Appearances and Deception. Description: Roald Dahl's "The Landlady" tells the dark story of Billy Weaver, a seventeen-year-old boy who travels from London to Bath on business. When Billy spots a charming looking Bed and Breakfast near the train station, he abandons his plans to find a hotel and decides instead to take a chance on the cozy lodgings—but things aren't as they seem. Billy meets his fate when his hostess, the titular landlady, deceives and poisons him; she is a taxidermist and intends to display his stuffed body next to those of her last victims. By contrasting appearance and reality, Dahl reminds his readers that first impressions may be deceiving. "The Landlady" is thus a cautionary tale about the danger of stereotypes and prejudice. The many differences between appearance and reality in the story's setting deceive Billy and lull him into a false sense of security. The tension between appearance and reality is introduced through an early description of the buildings in Bath. At first glance, the streets seem grand and elegant, lined with tall, "swanky" houses. Looking closer, however, it is evident that "the handsome white façades were cracked and blotchy from neglect." The eerie image of Billy walking alone at night through a dilapidated neighborhood sets the tone for the story. It is because of the grim weather and the gloomy setting that Billy is drawn to the warm and "brilliantly illuminated" window of the landlady's Bed and Breakfast. Billy is misled by illusion once more when he notices "a vase of yellow chrysanthemums, tall and beautiful" underneath the Bed and Breakfast sign. In many European countries, yellow chrysanthemums symbolize death and are used as funeral flowers. Here then, the flowers could be read as a warning rather than an invitation, but Billy is too busy trying to be "absolutely fantastically brisk" to notice these clues. Similarly, Billy is pleased to spot a little dog and a parrot through the window and tells himself, "Animals were usually a good sign in a place like this." Ironically, it later becomes apparent that these pets are dead and stuffed—a very bad sign indeed. Although Billy is attracted to the coziness of the Bed and Breakfast, he does admit to himself that "he was a tiny bit frightened" of boarding houses. He is also sure that The Bell and Dragon pub would be a livelier and more "congenial" place to stay. Despite his better judgment, however, Billy is lured towards the Bed and Breakfast by its inviting appearance. The contrast between Billy's first impressions of the Bed and Breakfast, and the events that follow inside its walls, reveal the dark and sinister power of deception and illusion. Dahl thus illustrates the shallow and superficial nature of appearances, highlighting the danger of first impressions. The landlady embodies the conflict between appearance and reality herself. While she "seem[s] terribly nice," it is clear that the landlady intentionally manipulates Billy in order to lure him into her home. The price she charges for the room, for example, is incredibly cheap, and she generously offers Billy "supper" while showing him around his comfortable room. One of the main reasons that the landlady is able to deceive Billy is because he assumes that she is a sweet, harmless, lady. This assumption proves to be a fatal one. Although Billy notices immediately that she is a bit "dotty," and later that she "appeared to be slightly off her rocker," his initial perception of her is unfaltering. He underestimates her hugely, believing that "she not only was harmless—there was no question about that—but she was also quite obviously a kind and generous soul." Dahl highlights the power of stereotypes and preconceptions when Billy's prevent him from picking up on the landlady's creepiness and oddities. She contradicts herself, for example, when telling Billy first of all that they are alone in the house, and later that her other tenants are upstairs—"But my dear boy, [Mr. Mulholland] never left. He's still here. Mr. Temple is also here. They're on the fourth floor, both of them together." Billy also notices the landlady's red, painted nails, a detail that is incongruent with her inconspicuous demeanor, and indicates, perhaps, her evil and bloody intentions. Furthermore, the landlady openly objectifies and sexualizes young Billy, something that he also doesn't pay much attention to: "her blue eyes travelled slowly all the way down the length of Billy's body, to his feet, and then up again," Dahl writes, and the landlady remarks, "You have the most beautiful teeth, Mr. Weaver, did you know that?" Had the story been one about an older man preying on a much younger girl, the reader would likely be unsurprised when the landlord turned out to be a cruel, evil murderer. Through a simple role reversal, however, Dahl draws attention to the misleading nature of societal prejudices and stereotypes. Throughout the story, Dahl demonstrates how easily Billy's judgment is clouded and undermined by his positive first impressions of the landlady's Bed and Breakfast. The allegorical message at the heart of "The Landlady" urges readers to look beyond the surface. By contrasting appearance and reality, Dahl illustrates how the truth is often concealed by superficial outward appearances. - Theme: Anonymity vs. Community. Description: Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the city was conceptualized as a negative place. Home to immorality and corruption, the urban landscape symbolized a loss of tradition and the degradation of community values. Roald Dahl addresses this moral panic in "The Landlady" by exploring the moral repercussions of the anonymity provided by modern city life. Dahl depicts the dangerous consequences of seclusion and isolation, revealing that the moral fabric of society relies upon community and connectedness. In "The Landlady," Dahl depicts how anonymity is a consequence of the push towards city life. The ease with which Billy Weaver travels between cities—London to Bath—represents the connectedness of modern society. Paradoxically, Billy is decidedly unconnected in Bath; it his first time in the city and he doesn't "know anyone who live[s] there." Billy embodies anonymity in modern society. Not only is he anonymous in the literal sense—no one in Bath knows who he is—but he is also anonymous in that he lacks a unique identity of his own. Just like the "successful businessmen" he admires, he wears a suit, blends in with the crowd, and does "everything briskly." Furthermore, he unquestioningly followed the instructions of "Mr. Greenslade at the Head Office" when moving to a new city, despite not having a network there. Anonymity is apparent in the cityscape itself when Billy passes "a line of tall houses on each side, all of them identical." Like the buildings, Billy dresses and behaves identically to the "successful businessmen" he emulates. Although Billy's job is not specified, the descriptions surrounding it are distinctly capitalist: "Branch Manager," "Head Office," "successful businessmen," and "The big shots." For Billy, success means working hard, being busy, and making money. On the one hand, Billy's career promises to connect him with a network of important people and interesting places. On the other, it requires him to be alone in a new city. Indeed, the business world is very individualistic, requiring every aspiring "big shot" to compete against their colleagues; it is likely that there are a multitude of other eager young men like Billy, ready to take his spot on the corporate ladder, should he fail. Thus, Dahl reveals the paradox of modernity and globalization, which simultaneously increase interconnectivity, as well as perpetuating isolation, anonymity and individualism. The tension between community and anonymity reveals the dangers of such isolation in modern society. While the Bell and Dragon pub represents community, the landlady's Bed and Breakfast represents isolation and anonymity. The narrator traces Billy's decision-making process while he chooses whether to stay in the pub or the Bed and Breakfast. The narrator describes how the pub would be more sociable: "a pub would be more congenial […] there would be beer and darts in the evenings, and lots of people to talk to." In contrast, the Bed and Breakfast appears to offer comfort, privacy, peace, and quiet. It is Billy's isolation in Bath that makes the latter option more attractive to him, and leads him to choose the landlady's Bed and Breakfast. The tension between community and isolation continues when the landlady welcomes Billy into her home. The description of her looking "exactly like the mother of one's best school-friend welcoming one into the house to stay for the Christmas holidays," evokes feelings of safety, familiarity, and community. However, upon entering the Bed and Breakfast, Billy notices "there were no other hats or coats in the hall. There were no umbrellas, no walking-sticks-nothing". Contrary to spending the holidays with a gathering of loved ones, Billy realizes that he is completely alone in the house with the landlady when she happily declares, "We have it all to ourselves." Billy finds this a little peculiar, but innocently puts it down to the landlady being a bit "dotty." Ironically, it seems that isolation and loneliness are both the cause of the landlady's cruelty and madness, and also the reason she continues to get away with her wicked crimes. When she explains, "I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away," the landlady indicates her desperate need for company, yet her seclusion from society means that nobody has discovered that she is the murderer of the two missing men. The landlady remains nameless herself throughout the story, representing her anonymity and the danger and isolation that Billy faces within her home. Like Christopher Mulholland and Gregory W. Temple, Billy faces an eternity of isolation once he has been stuffed and displayed by the landlady. When Billy reads the list of the landlady's previous two guests, their names seem familiar, and he later remembers that they had both been in the news after going missing. Here, the newspaper reports serve as a symbol of the connectedness of community and its shared values. By contrast, the landlady lives in a vacuum, detached from the moral fabric of ordinary society. Ultimately, Dahl juxtaposes community with anonymity, presenting the former as "congenial," and the latter as dangerous. "The Landlady" is a cautionary tale about the breakdown of community structures in modern society. In contrast to the pub—which represents tradition and community—the landlady's lodgings are isolated and disconnected, and the landlady herself is lonely and anonymous. The fact that nobody has discovered that she is responsible for the men reported missing in the papers indicates how easily criminality and corruption can go unnoticed—and unpunished—within the urban environment. Through Billy's demise, Dahl highlights the importance of shared values, societal cohesiveness, and community. - Theme: Adulthood vs. Innocence. Description: In much of Roald Dahl's children's literature, childhood is portrayed as antagonistic to adulthood. Many stories feature cruel adults who inflict their evil ways upon innocent children. Similarly, in "The Landlady," a wicked lady manipulates Billy Weaver, who is just seventeen years old. Through this generational conflict, Dahl depicts the cruelty of the adult world, highlighting the tragic inevitability of growing up, and the loss of innocence that this transition requires. Billy—a young man on the cusp of adulthood—represents purity and innocence. Seventeen-year-old Billy is remarkably trusting of the adults in his life. Firstly, he follows his superior's instructions to travel to Bath, find lodgings, and pursue work there. He looks up to the adults in his life, particularly to the business "big shots," whom he admires for being "brisk" and "successful." Later, Billy puts faith in the landlady at the Bed and Breakfast, assuming that she is sweet and generous, and that she has his best interests at heart. She becomes a sort of mother or grandmother figure, indulging and fussing over him: "It's such a comfort to have a hot water-bottle in a strange bed with clean sheets […] you may light the gas fire at any time if you feel chilly." His innocence and naivety prevent him from being suspicious of her unusual behavior, particularly when she explains that she is a "teeny weeny bit choosy" about her guests. Billy kindheartedly puts her strangeness down to loneliness: "He guessed that she had probably lost a son in the war, or something like that, and had never gotten over it." Dahl's depiction of Billy illustrates the inherent goodness and trustworthiness in young people because he sees the best in the landlady, despite her peculiarities. On the other hand, Dahl depicts how Billy is naively oblivious to the blaring warnings throughout his evening with the landlady. This suggests that Billy should have been more responsible for his own safety and wellbeing, and that his dreadful demise is partly his own fault for not being more cautious. Indeed, his blind admiration for adults leads him to imitate his role models' "briskness." It is this haste when choosing the Bed and Breakfast that causes him to miss important clues about the landlady's true nature. Billy's age places him somewhere between childhood and adulthood and therefore it is never confirmed whether Billy is ultimately punished for his naivety, or whether he remains an innocent victim. In a way, the story demonstrates how people are all victims of adulthood; growing up inevitably requires a loss of innocence. In contrast to Billy, the landlady represents the cruel and corrupt nature of the adult world. She intentionally uses her age to lull Billy into a false sense of security, betraying the trust he puts in her. She seems harmless, generous, and maternal, a performance that she has carefully constructed in order to ensnare the young men who enter her home. It remains ambivalent whether the landlady is actually "dotty," or whether this is also part of her performance, although her terrifying wickedness would suggest that she is mad. It is clear, however, that the landlady is capable, precise, and organized. The description of her hands and nails, for example, reveals how agile and put together she is: "she had small, white, quickly moving hands, and red finger-nails." She wastes no time ensuring that she will be able to poison Billy the very same night he arrives, cunningly asking him to sign the guestbook: "would you be kind enough to pop into the sitting-room on the ground floor and sign the book?" Of course, this is a ruse to get him downstairs where she has an opportunity to serve him some poisoned tea. Once Billy is within her clutches, she continues to mislead him by controlling the conversation—dodging his questions, and interrupting when it is convenient for her. Indeed, the landlady is motivated entirely by control. Her interest in Billy stems from a warped and wicked motive to preserve her victims in an eternal state of innocence. She delights in the fact that Billy is seventeen, exclaiming, "Oh, it's the perfect age." Similarly, when describing Gregory Temple—another one of her victims—she explains that although he was a bit older, she "never would have guessed" because his "skin was just like a baby's." The landlady is only interested in young men because, for her, they represent innocence and purity. She takes great pleasure in ensuring that they never grow up, maintaining their youth by killing and preserving their bodies. It is possible that the landlady's taxidermy project is motivated by a desire overcome the loneliness that many parents experience when their children leave home. Through ensuring that Billy and the other men can never leave, the landlady maintains her absolute control over them. The fact that the landlady must murder those whom she wants to keep innocent, however, implies that the preservation of innocence is ultimately both impossible and unnatural. In "The Landlady," childhood and adulthood are positioned in opposition to one another through the conflict between Billy and the landlady. While the former represents innocence, goodness, hope, and youthfulness, the latter represents power, control, and cruelty. Billy's adolescence, however, complicates this dichotomy, as his age places him somewhere between childhood and adulthood. Through this tension, Dahl draws attention to the ways in which the young are robbed of their childhood and innocence by an urgent necessity to be prepared for the cruelty of adulthood and the adult world. It's also worth noting how the specter of World War II hangs over "The Landlady": written in a post-war context, Dahl demonstrates how the horror of war robbed society of its innocence, and younger generations of their childhoods. Ultimately, "The Landlady" is a tragic story about growing up in a cruel and dangerous modern world. - Climax: The landlady tells Billy that her two previous guests never left her house. - Summary: When seventeen-year old Billy Weaver takes the train from London to Bath in search of work, he is excited and optimistic about the opportunities ahead of him. The weather in Bath is miserable and "deadly cold." His first priority is finding lodgings, and after asking the porter at the train station for recommendations, he sets off towards The Bell and Dragon pub. As he walks through the unfamiliar city, Billy notices how decrepit and neglected the neighborhood is. However, he is stopped in his tracks when—in stark contrast to his gloomy surroundings—he spots a charming and "brilliantly lit" Bed and Breakfast. After a few minutes deliberating whether he should continue his journey to the pub, Billy feels inexplicably drawn toward the Bed and Breakfast. The roaring fire enchants Billy, and he can't help but notice the inviting furniture, the "pretty little dachshund" curled up by the hearth, and the cheerful yellow chrysanthemums in the window. As Billy lingers outside, in the warm glow from the Bed and Breakfast window, the door swings open and a friendly old woman welcomes him inside. The landlady is terribly kind towards Billy, and offers him a cheap price for lodgings. As he hangs up his coat, Billy notices "there are no other hats or coats in the hall." It strikes him as a little peculiar that the Bed and Breakfast is not busier, especially because it is so pleasant. As she leads him upstairs, the landlady explains that she is a little "choosy and particular" about the guests she accepts into her home. While showing him around his neat bedroom, the landlady insists that Billy sign the guest book that same night. Billy is amused by the landlady's odd behavior, but he is not alarmed that she seems "slightly off her rocker." Instead, Billy decides that she was not only "harmless," but "also quite obviously a kind and generous soul." After unpacking, Billy follows the landlady's instructions and walks downstairs to sign the visitors' book, where he finds only two previous guest entries. Both of the names written there feel somehow familiar to Billy and he wracks his brain to establish why he recognizes them. The landlady interrupts Billy's thought process, carrying a large tray of tea and placing it down besides the sofa, where she invites Billy to join her. Billy is curious about the two names in the guest book, and asks the landlady several questions about them. He becomes increasingly certain that he's heard the names somewhere, perhaps in the newspaper, but every time he gets close to working out how or why, the landlady changes the subject. Meanwhile, Billy and the landlady share a pot of tea. The landlady makes numerous strange remarks about her previous guests, Mr. Christopher Mulholland and Mr. Gregory W. Temple, commenting on their bodies, their ages, and speaking about them as if they were still living upstairs. Billy is unable to ascertain how long they were guests at the Bed and Breakfast, or when they left. The landlady contradicts herself constantly, but remains insistent that Billy must drink his tea. During one of the landlady's long silences, Billy realizes that the caged parrot in the living room is not in fact alive. The landlady explains enthusiastically, "I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away," and points to the dachshund, which is also dead and stuffed. At this exact moment, Billy notices that his "tea tasted faintly of bitter almonds." He asks the landlady, "haven't there been any other guests here except them in the last two or three years?" She replies, with a smile, that there has not.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Last Leaf - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: New York City, Greenwich Village, early 1900s - Character: Joanna ("Johnsy"). Description: A young artist from California. She lives with Sue in a studio apartment in Greenwich Village and has long dreamed of visiting Italy to paint the Bay of Naples. She falls seriously ill with pneumonia and becomes convinced that she will die when the last leaf falls from the vine outside her window. The doctor presents Johnsy's hopelessness and her acceptance of death as the primary obstacle to her recovery, but Johnsy nonetheless cannot shake her fatalistic insistence that she will die when the last leaf falls. Sue's attempts to cheer her up are unsuccessful, but when Mr. Behrman paints a realistic-looking leaf onto the wall outside Johnsy's window—tricking Johnsy into believing that one leaf has improbably survived a storm—Johnsy realizes that her attitude has been unacceptable, and she regains her health. - Character: Sue. Description: A young artist from Maine. She is very close to Johnsy, cooking for her, caring for her, and financially supporting her in her illness. When the doctor visits, Sue tells him firmly that Johnsy is not depressed because of a man and that Johnsy had always wanted to paint the Bay of Naples, suggesting her detailed knowledge of her friend's life and artistic ambitions. She tries unsuccessfully to bring Johnsy out of her depression. Throughout the story, Sue is working on a picture for a magazine story, using Behrman as a model, and plans to use the money she will earn to buy food and wine for Johnsy. After Johnsy recovers, Sue is the one to inform her that Behrman has died of pneumonia. - Character: Behrman. Description: An old and somewhat cantankerous artist who lives downstairs from Sue and Johnsy. He has been painting for four decades without any commercial success, but still hopes to paint what he calls his "masterpiece." He is an alcoholic and earns money by posing as a model for artists in the neighborhood. Despite his gruff exterior, he has a soft spot for Sue and Johnsy. He is initially dismissive of the idea that leaves on a vine could have anything to do with Johnsy's health, but ultimately goes outside on a cold and rainy night to paint a realistic-looking leaf onto the wall outside her window so that she will think one last leaf has miraculously survived the storm. As a result of this sacrifice, he catches pneumonia and dies—but Sue remarks that he had finally painted his masterpiece. - Character: Doctor. Description: A busy, older man with "shaggy grey eyebrows" who attends to Johnsy and Behrman. He diagnoses Johnsy with mental as well as physical illness, telling Sue that he cannot help a patient with medicine when she doesn't want to get better. He is skeptical of the idea that unfulfilled artistic ambitions might be the cause of Johnsy's depression, asking Sue whether she is depressed over a man. He visits Johnsy again after she has recovered and gives her a good prognosis, but tells Sue that Behrman is dying of pneumonia. - Theme: Hope and Health. Description: Confined to her bed in the Greenwich Village apartment she shares with Sue, Johnsy (who is suffering from pneumonia) becomes preoccupied with a leaf on a vine outside her window. This leaf comes to symbolize her will to live; when the last leaf falls from the vine, she tells Sue, she will die. Their neighbor Mr. Behrman scoffs at the idea: "Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing." Nevertheless, by painting the illusion of a "last leaf" on the wall outside Johnsy's window, he gives her hope again—a gift which saves Johnsy's life by reminding her that she still has a future. The illusion of a leaf is able to keep Johnsy alive because "The Last Leaf" conflates physical and psychological illness. Though the doctor diagnoses Johnsy with pneumonia, he asserts that her real problem is that she's lost the desire to live. He tells Sue that half of his medical work is useless if the patient herself doesn't want to get better, and Johnsy seems to no longer hope to regain her health or imagine a future for herself. Because of this, he urges Sue to give Johnsy hope by asking her about new winter clothes, since "if she were interested in the future, her chances would be better." Johnsy, though, insists that she is finished living and wants "to go sailing down, down, like one of those poor tired leaves," which shows the extent of her psychological ailment. When Johnsy sees that the last leaf has seemingly survived the storm against all odds, however, she regains her sense of hopefulness about the future. "I've been a bad girl, Sudie," Johnsy says. "Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was…it is a sin to want to die." Having come to the conclusion that she was wrong to lose hope, Johnsy sits up and begins to eat again, and the doctor pronounces her on the mend. Johnsy's recovery is inextricable from her rediscovery of her hope for her future. It's not winter clothes that excite her, as the doctor suggested, but the prospect of painting again: she tells Sue that she'd like to achieve her long-held dream of visiting Italy to paint the Bay of Naples. Just as thoughts of her future paintings give Johnsy the hope to overcome her sickness, Behrman finds courage and hope for himself and his neighbors in the art he will someday create. "Some day I vill baint my masterpiece," he says," and ve shall all go away. Gott! yes." It's Behrman's masterpiece—the illusionistic painting of the last leaf outside Johnsy's window—that gives Johnsy hope. In a way, then, Behrman uses his art to transfer his own hope to Johnsy. Once Behrman has painted his masterpiece, thereby achieving his life's work, he himself succumbs to pneumonia. This suggests that he, unlike Johnsy, no longer believes his best work is in front of him. Since he has just painted his masterpiece—which reminded Johnsy of her desire to paint her own masterpiece—he no longer has the will to live. O. Henry therefore suggests that physical health is strongly related to hope for the future. For the artists in "The Last Leaf," their hope for the future centers on fulfilling their life's purpose: painting a masterpiece. As the doctor suggests, though, hope can come from many sources—all that matters for restoring physical health is that a person looks forward to something. - Theme: Gender and Sexuality. Description: As young female artists in early twentieth-century New York, Sue and Johnsy are in an unusual position. Their behavior challenges accepted notions of women's roles and responsibilities in the period: rather than marrying and devoting their energies to the domestic sphere, they have chosen to move to New York and lead independent but financially precarious lives in pursuit of their art. After meeting at a restaurant and discovering their many shared interests, Sue and Johnsy decide to move in together. Confronted with the disapproval of the wider society, the two women find solace in their friendship. The story's few men dismiss and belittle Sue and Johnsy. For example, the doctor who diagnoses Johnsy's pneumonia asserts that art is not "anything…worth thinking about" for a woman. When he asks if anything is bothering Johnsy, Sue replies that "she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples one day." The doctor doesn't believe that this unfulfilled aspiration could be the cause of Johnsy's depression—"Paint—bosh!" he replies, and asks if she is upset over a man. Sue, by contrast, contradicts the doctor's view that romantic troubles could be the only thing "worth thinking about" for Johnsy. "Is a man worth—" she begins, but cuts herself off, seeming to imply that a man wouldn't warrant such a depression. Even other artists who know Sue and Johnsy and seem to respect their work can be dismissive of them based on gender. Their neighbor, Mr. Behrman expresses some of the prevailing views of the time when he shouts "You are just like a woman!" at Sue, accusing her of irrationality and jumping to conclusions. Some critics have advanced the view that Sue and Johnsy are romantically involved. At the very least, they clearly share a close intimacy that exists outside the more conventional roles for women in the period: they are unmarried, live together, and share a home life that does not involve men or caring for children. Sue seems very sure that Johnsy is not involved in a heterosexual relationship: "There is nothing of that kind," she tells the doctor. The two women call each other by various endearments including "dear," "Sudie," and "dear Johnsy." Sue is highly loyal to Johnsy, cooking and caring for her and telling her "I'd rather be here by you" when Johnsy asks her to leave. Sue is in despair at the prospect of Johnsy's death: "Think of me, if you won't think of yourself," she says. "What would I do?" O. Henry never conclusively confirms or denies the nature of their relationship, but it's clear that the two women are very close, and that they are able to support each other's ambitions and passions when others dismiss them. "The Last Leaf" thus depicts two women who lead unconventional lives. Whether or not Johnsy and Sue are romantically involved, their decision to build a life together challenges prevailing gender norms, particularly the expectation that early twentieth-century women should devote all their time and efforts to their husband and children. By devoting themselves to each other and to art instead, Johnsy and Sue form a new, alternative model of a family and suggest that women's interests and abilities are far more varied than most men of the era could understand. - Theme: The "Starving Artist" and the "Masterpiece". Description: "The Last Leaf" is set in Greenwich Village, a bohemian neighborhood in New York City famous as a gathering place for writers and artists. Sue, Johnsy, and Behrman have moved to this neighborhood because it's cheap and vibrant, but poor conditions in the impoverished areas of the city in this period—which included overcrowding, cold weather, and lack of sanitation—meant that deadly illnesses could spread quickly. In the story, an outbreak of pneumonia makes Johnsy seriously ill and ultimately kills Behrman. Despite the adversities of poverty, alcoholism, and disease, however, all three characters have made the decision to accept these hardships in order to pursue their art and produce what Behrman calls a "masterpiece." Sue, Johnsy, and Behrman attempt to make a living by painting, but can barely make ends meet. "I can sell the editor man [my picture], and buy port wine…and pork chops," Sue tells Johnsy, suggesting that food is hard to come by. Similarly, after decades of work as an artist, Behrman only makes a small income as an artist's model and has become an alcoholic. The narrator asserts that many other inhabitants of Greenwich Village share their predicament: indeed, he suggests that the neighborhood is a gathering place for artists not only because of the cheap rent, but because the winding, maze-like streets make it difficult for their creditors to find them. Thus, the story's three main characters are living the quintessential life of a starving artist. These three characters weather adversity because they are committed to an artistic project, even if that project seems like a distant dream. Johnsy wants to paint the Bay of Naples, but her poverty and poor health make a trip to Italy seem implausible. Sue labors over a single painting throughout the story, working "through most of the night." Although Behrman is over sixty, he has had little success. He is obsessed with painting a single great picture—which he terms his "masterpiece"—but he hasn't started it yet. For each of these characters, the promise of eventual success keeps them going, and it's when Johnsy forgets her desire to paint the Bay of Naples that she loses her desire to live. At the end of the story, Behrman does paint his "masterpiece"—the illusion of a leaf painted on the wall outside Johnsy's window. After he has completed this great work—the one he has struggled for all his life—Behrman succumbs to pneumonia, suggesting that the promise of a masterpiece had been his only motivating force. It's significant that he produced this masterpiece after decades of solitary struggle—it's ultimately his desire to help his neighbors inspires him to produce a great work of art. "The Last Leaf" suggests, then, that even starving artists rely on the social bonds of their neighborhood: Behrman models for Sue, he is inspired by Johnsy, and from Behrman's masterpiece Johnsy regains her will to live, primarily because she remembers her own desire to make great art. Painting a masterpiece is not simply a matter of technical accomplishment, then. Art, the narrator suggests, is a communal project. - Theme: Friendship and Sacrifice. Description: Ultimately, Behrman's "great masterpiece" is not a typical painting, but a single leaf he has painted onto the wall—a leaf so realistic that both Johnsy and Sue believe it is truly the last leaf on the vine. This masterpiece saves Johnsy's life by returning her will to live. Because he went outside in a storm to paint the leaf, however, Behrman catches pneumonia and dies. This sacrifice is not the only selfless act in the story: although the three protagonists have few possessions to call their own, they survive hardship by loving and caring for one another. Although the characters in "The Last Leaf" lead difficult artistic lives, they find meaningful connections to others in Greenwich Village. Sue and Johnsy have left their families in Maine and California, but they meet in a restaurant on Eighth Street and form a new household together. The cantankerous old artist Behrman—who has lived alone for forty years—nevertheless feels a powerful love and responsibility for his neighbors: "[H]e regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above." When Johnsy first becomes ill, she turns away from human companionship, which seems to equate social isolation with illness and death. Convinced that she is dying, Johnsy wants to be alone: "Couldn't you work in the other room?" she asks Sue "coldly." In response to Sue's desperate call to stay alive for her, Johnsy doesn't respond, lost in her own solitude and depression. "The lonesomest thing in the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey," observes the narrator. "One by one the ties that held her to friendship and to earth were loosed." Without her friendships, Johnsy would have succumbed to her own melancholy and died: it's Sue's attention and Behrman's act of kindness in painting the leaf that restore her to health. The story may finally suggest that Behrman's "masterpiece" isn't a painting at all—rather, his culminating achievement is the sacrifice of his own life to save Johnsy. Ultimately, he finds inspiration not by painting alone in his "dark room," but by using his artistic gifts for the benefit of another person. Indeed, "The Last Leaf" suggests that artistic success, health, and even life depend on the social bonds of friendship that, in the narrator's words, "tie" people "to earth." Ultimately, Behrman's masterpiece is his gift for friendship. - Climax: Sue reveals that the last leaf on the vine is actually an illusionistic painting meant to restore Johnsy's hope - Summary: "The Last Leaf" takes place in Greenwich Village, a bohemian neighborhood in New York City, sometime in the early 20th century. The story centers on Sue and Johnsy, two young women artists who share a studio at the top of a run-down apartment building. When winter comes, Johnsy becomes grievously ill with a case of pneumonia. The doctor who visits them predicts that Johnsy won't have much chance of survival if she doesn't find the will to live, since his medicines have little effect on a patient who has decided that she's going to die. When the doctor asks if Johnsy is depressed about something in particular, Sue mentions Johnsy's unfulfilled ambition to paint the Bay of Naples, but the doctor is dismissive and asks if Johnsy is troubled over a man. An increasingly fatalistic Johnsy becomes obsessed with the leaves falling from a vine outside her window. After the last leaf falls, she tells Sue, she will die. Sue works on an illustration for a magazine (which she plans to sell to buy more food for Johnsy) and tries unsuccessfully to convince Johnsy that she has something to live for. Sue goes to visit their downstairs neighbor, Behrman—an old, unsuccessful artist who, after decades of failure, still hopes to paint his "masterpiece." When he hears about Johnsy's illness and her obsession with the leaves outside her window, he is initially contemptuous of the idea that leaves could have anything to do with Johnsy's health. Ultimately, however, Behrman stays out all night in a violent storm to paint a realistic-looking leaf onto the wall outside Sue and Johnsy's window. Seeing that the "last leaf"—which is in fact Behrman's painting—has seemingly survived the storm two nights in a row, Johnsy takes hope and begins to recover. However, Behrman catches pneumonia from exposure to the rain and cold, and dies a few days later. When Sue tells Johnsy this, she remarks that Behrman had finally painted his "masterpiece."

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Last Lesson - Point of view: First person limited - Setting: A small village in Alsace-Lorraine, France - Character: Franz (The Narrator). Description: The narrator of the story, Franz is a young school boy in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine in the nineteenth century. Franz is a dawdler when it comes to schoolwork, preferring to spend time in the woods or by the local river over going to class. He doesn't like learning his French grammar lessons and, when the story begins, is terrified that his negligence will be found out by his teacher, the stern M. Hamel. Franz comes to a new appreciation of his education, however, when Prussian authorities who have occupied his home region announce that school will no longer be taught in French, but in German. Upon hearing this news, Franz feels a great sense of remorse and regrets not taking his French education more seriously while he still had the chance. - Character: M. Hamel. Description: The school master of a small village school in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine. M. Hamel is stern and intimidating to his pupils, among them the narrator of the story, Franz. He has been teaching at the school for forty years. In his classroom, he carries a ruler which he raps against his table threateningly. On the day the story is set, he is dressed in his best finery: a green coat, a shirt with frills, and a silk cap—clothes reserved for special occasions. Despite his frightening demeanor, M. Hamel also has a gentler side, revealed on the day that he announces to those gathered in his classroom that Prussian authorities have banned the teaching of French in the schools of Alsace-Lorraine. On this day of the last lesson, M. Hamel not only reveals his empathy and kindness, but also his dignity and patriotism, lecturing the gathered crowd on the importance of protecting their language and culture in the face of foreign occupation. - Character: Old Hauser. Description: One of the elder villagers who gathers with the children in M. Hamel's classroom to hear the last lesson. He brings his old primer, an elementary reading textbook, with him to the class, and uses it to help the youngest students read their letters. Like the other villagers and school children, including the story's narrator Franz, Hauser is devastated at news that the Prussian authorities who have occupied the French region of Alsace-Lorraine, where the village is located, have forbidden the teaching of French in schools. He cries as he helps the young children read and makes everyone else in the classroom want to cry and laugh at once. - Character: Prussian Soldiers. Description: Forces of the occupying Prussian power, which has invaded the French region of Alsace-Lorraine and claimed it for Prussia (then consisting of Germany, Poland, and parts of Austria). Franz passes the soldiers doing their drills as he hurries to school on the morning of the last lesson. The end of the lesson is also marked by the trumpet call of the soldiers returning from their exercises. - Theme: Culture and Language. Description: Set against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which saw the defeat of France at the hands of Prussia (then consisting of Germany, Poland, and parts of Austria), Daudet's "Last Lesson" explores the effects of cultural subjugation in a time of war. Little Franz, a schoolboy in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine, arrives at school one morning only to discover that, on the order of the Prussian forces that have taken control of the region, lessons will no longer be taught in French, but in German—the language of the invaders. The story emphasizes the deep link that exists between language and cultural identity, suggesting that language is not only a marker of unique cultural heritage, it also constitutes its very essence. Franz isn't very keen on his French lessons to begin with. On the day the story is set, Franz expects to be quizzed by his teacher M. Hamel about grammar, but he hasn't learned the rules on participles he was supposed to and is unprepared for questioning. He would have preferred to spend his day outside, in the beautiful weather, among the fields and the woods, rather than go to class. To Franz, his French grammar lesson represents the drudgery of school—he finds his school work boring and pointless, as reflected in his preference for doing other, seemingly more exciting things. Together, these details establish that Franz initially fails to value his own language. Yet upon arriving for class and discovering that this is going to be his last French lesson, Franz is devastated, just as the other pupils and the villagers in the classroom are. M. Hamel's announcement that the Prussians have mandated only the teaching of German in the schools of Alsace-Lorraine, the region they've invaded and home to Franz, makes him realize the importance of his language. Franz says that he hardly knows how to write in French, and he is terribly dejected that he must now stop learning the language altogether. When Franz is called on to recite the rule for the participle, he is unable to do so. More than ever, he regrets not studying when he had the chance: "What would I not have given," he tells the reader, "to be able to say that dreadful rule for the participle all through, very loud and clear, and without one mistake?" It is only when he finds his way of life threatened by foreign occupiers that Franz learns that the language he has taken for granted is in fact central to his identity, as well as to his freedom. The link between the French language and French cultural identity becomes clearer to Franz as the lesson proceeds. When Franz fails to recite the rule for the participle, M. Hamel gently chides him, telling him and the rest of the gathered school children and villagers that it has not served them well to put off learning until tomorrow. It is this procrastination that now gives the Prussian occupiers the right to say, "[Y]ou pretend to be Frenchmen, and yet you can neither speak nor write your own language?" M. Hamel even blames himself, taking responsibility for the times he sent his students to water his flowers, or gave them a holiday, instead of obliging them to learn their lessons. Thus, the teacher emphasizes language as the central aspect of cultural identity. One cannot be French, or even claim to be French, without mastering the French language first. M. Hamel dwells on the specific beauty and clarity of the French language. He exhorts the gathered crowd to guard it carefully, "because when a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison." Thus, M. Hamel posits the French language not only as a marker of cultural identity, but as its very essence. Without it, those who are subjugated cannot hold on to themselves or their cultures, and thus also their freedom. M. Hamel not only lectures his students on the link between language and culture, he also demonstrates this link through the final grammar instruction that he gives them. Franz remarks that the school teacher "had never explained everything with so much patience," so that the lesson seems "so easy, so easy!" to little Franz. M. Hamel thus discharges his role as a teacher of French with immense diligence. In communicating the principles of French so effectively, he not only equips his students with a better grasp of their language, he also equips them with a better grasp of their French cultural identity. Daudet's "Last Lesson," therefore, highlights how people often take language for granted, failing to realize the extent to which it lies at the very heart of their identity. Language, the story argues, is not only the means through which people express themselves, it is also the means through which their culture is preserved and perpetuated. - Theme: Patriotism and Resistance. Description: In telling the story of the last lesson that M. Hamel, a school teacher in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine, gives to Franz and his fellow pupils shortly after Prussian invasion of the region, Daudet explores the multi-faceted nature of patriotism and resistance. Through the character of M. Hamel, the reader is presented with a figure of resistance who fights his subjugation not by deploying arms, but by deploying patriotic pride. In this way, the story suggests the importance of affirming one's national identity in the face of foreign oppression. Daudet establishes that M. Hamel and the other the residents of Alsace-Lorraine are a defeated people, their land having passed into the control of Prussian invaders. M. Hamel begins the school lesson by announcing to the stunned students and townspeople who have gathered in the room that this is to be the last lesson to be held in French. An order has arrived from Berlin—the seat of the Prussian occupiers—that from the very next day onward, lessons will be taught in German. That M. Hamel must obey this order suggests the extent of his own powerlessness. He and the French community of which he is a part are now subject to the caprices of their foreign masters. Yet while M. Hamel cannot undo the order from Berlin, he nonetheless acts as a patriotic Frenchman by affirming his national identity as a means of resistance against domination. This is reflected particularly in the exercises that M. Hamel assigns his students during the class. For the lesson in writing, he has the pupils copy out the words "France, Alsace," over and over again. The nationalistic and patriotic dimension of this exercise is made evident in Franz's remark that M. Hamel's copies hanging around the room looked like "little flags floating everywhere." The words associate the region of Alsace with France, rather than with the land of the Prussian occupiers. In this way, the words function as a denial of the Prussian claim to the land, and act, instead, as an affirmation of Alsatian identity as French. Overcome with emotion at the end of the lesson, M. Hamel is unable to speak, and instead writes in large letters on the blackboard, "Vive La France!" or "Long Live France!" These words he inscribes again represent an act of resistance; they affirm his loyalty to the French republic, even in the face of subjugation to the Prussians, and embody his unconquerable allegiance to his native culture and land. Not only does the story explicitly establish M. Hamel's allegiance to his native land, it also suggests that the young narrator has learned his teacher's lesson well. The very fact that Franz recounts this story to the reader, giving emphasis to the profound impact M. Hamel's final class had on him, indicates the extent to which the lesson had a lasting effect on his development and thinking. Indeed, the narrator's name—Franz—echoes the name of his motherland. Through this play on naming, Daudet implicitly suggests that the narrator will grow up to follow his teacher's example. The association between little "Franz" and "France" establishes an indelible link between the boy and his nation. He, like his teacher, will develop into a patriotic French citizen. The "Last Lesson" that M. Hamel gives to his students, therefore, is not just a lesson in language and writing—it is a lesson in patriotism and resistance. Although his land is occupied by Prussian adversaries who have the advantage of superior military strength, M. Hamel defies his oppressors using only a French grammar book, a blackboard, and his own voice. In doing so, he teaches his pupils that even without arms, they have the power to challenge their subjugation. - Theme: Education and Knowledge. Description: Franz, the little schoolboy who narrates Daudet's "Last Lesson," is a rather negligent pupil. He doesn't keep up with his lessons, he doesn't like his teacher, M. Hamel, and he'd prefer to be out roaming the woods of his native region of Alsace-Lorraine, France, rather than in the classroom. Yet the lesson he attends on the day the story is set changes his view of school forever. Franz learns the true value of his education when he realizes that school teaches him more than just proper grammar; it teaches him how to be a committed French citizen.       Franz doesn't like going to school, and this is made clear in his consistent attempts to shirk his obligations. On the day the story is set, he considers skipping class to dawdle in the woods, particularly as he hasn't learned the lesson on participles he was meant to memorize, and which he is to deliver before the class that very day. He is, furthermore, afraid of his school teacher, M. Hamel, who carries a "terrible" ruler under his arm with which he terrorizes his students. Franz seems to approach his schoolwork as pointless and unnecessary toil, finding many other things—such as hunting for birds' nests or sliding on the river Saar—to be more worthy of his time. However, the news that Prussian authorities—who have taken control of Alsace-Lorraine—have banned the teaching of the French language in schools, gives him a new perspective on his education. Upon learning from M. Hamel that this will be his last lesson in French, Franz comes to regret his negligence of his school responsibilities. He realizes that he does not yet even have a good grasp of the language he has taken for granted—he hardly knows how to write in French. He begins to see how valuable his schooling is in general. Even the things that had seemed such a nuisance to him before—such as his books—suddenly appear to him to be "old friends" that he can't give up. As such, Franz's newfound respect for his education points to his emerging awareness that his schooling equips him with immensely valuable knowledge, knowledge that extends much deeper than he had realized. Indeed, during the lesson, Franz discerns that he as well as the rest of the villagers have made a mistake in neglecting their schooling, one which, in the face of foreign occupation, will now cost them. M. Hamel points out that his pupils' parents have colluded in their children's neglect of their education, preferring to send them out to work on farms or at the mills, for extra money. Franz notices that even the elders of the village, gathered at the back of the room, were "sorry […] that they had not gone to school more." The villagers, therefore, have prioritized labor over education. This, under the present circumstances, comes to seem shortsighted. Neglecting their own and their children's schooling in favor of work may have helped at the time, but ultimately it has robbed them and their children of the education necessary to hold on to their identities in the face of foreign conquest. Franz's last lesson is thus one that revolutionizes his own conception of his education. School, Franz learns, is about much more than memorizing boring grammar lessons—school also equips him with knowledge and values that are indispensable to his identity. While more shortsighted needs for work and play may have taken precedence in the village, the story ultimately suggests that it is only the identity instilled through education that has the power to save Franz and his community in times of danger. - Theme: Community and Solidarity. Description: Set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, Daudet's story depicts French villagers responding to restrictions on their freedoms that have been imposed on them by foreign Prussian invaders. As Franz, his school teacher M. Hamel, and other pupils and villagers gather in a classroom on the morning that news arrives that the French language will be banned in schools in the Prussian-controlled Alsace-Lorraine region, hierarchies and divisions among the village people are cast aside. Instead, the villagers come together as equals and comrades united in their resistance to a foreign adversary, one that threatens their way of life and identity. In portraying the way in which villagers of all ranks, statuses, and ages come together in the classroom, the "Last Lesson" posits the values of equality and solidarity as central aspects of community. Franz, the narrator of Daudet's story, is a small boy who is at the mercy of the adults of the Alsatian village in which he lives. He is particularly frightened of the stern M. Hamel, his school teacher, who carries a "terrible iron ruler" that he raps violently against the table during lessons. Franz is in a discombobulated state on the morning that the story opens, as he has not learned the rule for participles he was meant to memorize, and is in "great dread of a scolding" by M. Hamel. Franz's anxiety and fear of his stern teacher allude to the rigid social hierarchies that exist in the village. As a child, Franz is no equal to his teacher—and presumably to other adults in the village—and as such he is subject to their authority and displeasure. Yet when Franz arrives in the classroom, he finds that the rigid distinctions that govern village life have been cast aside on this day. For one thing, he's surprised that M. Hamel, rather than scolding him for his late arrival, speaks kindly to him as he directs him to his seat. Franz is further surprised to see that it is not only small children who have taken their places in the classroom on this morning. The village people have also assembled on the back benches of the room. The presence of the adult villagers in the same room as the children dramatizes the coming together of young and old as one community. The occasion for this leveling of community ties is the dark and momentous news that has reached the villagers from Berlin: the French language will be banned in schools in Alsace-Lorraine by order of the Prussian authorities. Although M. Hamel, who stands at the front of the room, occupies a position of authority in relation to the assembled crowd, he posits himself as their equal in more ways than one. When Franz fails to recite the rule for the participle he was supposed to learn, M. Hamel doesn't scold him. Instead, he portrays Franz's negligence as emblematic of the negligence of the entire community. Using the collective pronoun, "we," M. Hamel tells the congregation: "Every day we have said to ourselves, 'Bah! I've plenty of time. I'll learn it tomorrow.' And now you see where we've come out […] We've all a great deal to reproach ourselves with." In using "we," M. Hamel thus includes himself in the reproach, casting himself as no better than the villagers whom he lectures. M. Hamel further castigates himself, by publicly regretting those times he has encouraged his students to put off doing their lessons, by sending them to tend to his flowers, or by giving them a holiday because he wanted to go fishing. By extrapolating and generalizing from Franz's mistake, therefore, M. Hamel draws a lesson that posits all the villagers—including himself—as negligent in their responsibilities. In this way, M. Hamel's lecture casts aside hierarchies and distinctions, rendering children, adults, and teachers alike as liable to the same follies. The sense of solidarity that the lesson establishes among the gathered villagers is further reflected in the exercises that young and old undertake together. As an exercise in writing, M. Hamel assigns the class to write the words "France, Alsace" over and over again. Franz tells the reader, "You ought to have seen how every one set to work, and how quiet it was! The only sound was the scratching of the pens over the paper." As such, the adults in the room apply themselves to the exercise just as the youngsters do. This joint activity reinforces a sense of the community working together as one unit, and in one spirit. The words that they inscribe—"France, Alsace"—further reflect their communal commitment to their native country, even in the face of Prussian occupiers who have claimed Alsace for themselves. The solidarity between young and old is embodied poignantly in the image of old Hauser, a man who sits at the back of room holding an elementary book in his hands, and helps the babies chant their letters. The warm, supportive relations that are established and affirmed between M. Hamel, his pupils, and the villagers during the last lesson, therefore, indicate how the community comes together through its practice of the values of solidarity and equality. It is through acts and words of cooperation that the villagers assert not only their commitment to each other, but also their commitment to their homeland in the face of a foreign threat. - Climax: French will be banned in school! - Summary: On a beautiful day in a village in nineteenth-century Alsace-Lorraine, a region of France, the young schoolboy Franz, is in a rush to get to class. He is particularly anxious because he has not learned the French grammar lesson he was assigned by his stern teacher, M. Hamel. Resisting the temptation to skip school and linger outdoors, where Prussian soldiers are drilling, Franz passes the town hall. There, he sees a crowd congregated around the bulletin-board. Something must be wrong: the Prussian forces occupying the region communicate their oppressive commands to the subjugated French villagers through the bulletin-board. But Franz has no time to stop and check. He rushes on his way, finally arriving to find the school eerily free from the commotion that normally marks the beginning of the day. Blushing, Franz enters the classroom under the gaze of the students who have already assembled at their desks. To his surprise, M. Hamel teacher speaks to him kindly, simply telling him to take his seat. Franz notices that his teacher is wearing a beautiful green coat and shirt—clothes for a special occasion—and that elder villagers have assembled at the back of the room. As Franz tries to make sense of it all, M. Hamel makes a shocking announcement: this will be the last lesson that he will give. From tomorrow onwards, the teaching of French will be banned, under orders of the Prussian authorities. Franz, like everyone else in the room, is devastated. He realizes that this is the news that had been posted on the bulletin-board outside the town hall. The knowledge that he must stop learning his own language—which he has hardly begun to master—gives him a new appreciation for his education, and he regrets all the time he spent procrastinating on his school work. The moment that Franz has dreaded arrives: he is called on by M. Hamel to recite the grammatical rule he was meant to learn. Franz stumbles and stammers. M. Hamel, rather than scolding Franz, uses the opportunity to lecture the gathered crowd on the evils of neglecting their education. It is this neglect, he says, that now allows the Prussian invaders to question the villagers' French identity. How can the villagers claim to be French, he says, when they don't even know their own language? M. Hamel goes on to extol the beauties of the French language, telling the class that they must guard it carefully, for it is the key to their freedom. He explains the grammar lesson to the class, and Franz finds himself listening more intently than he ever has before. For the lesson in writing, M. Hamel has the class write out the words "France, Alsace," over and over again. Everyone in the room applies themselves to the exercise with diligence and concentration. The church-bell strikes twelve, and the trumpets of the Prussian soldiers sound, marking the end of their drilling exercises. It is the end of the last lesson. M. Hamel, pale, turns to the blackboard and writes in large letters, "Vive La France!" With a gesture of his hand, he dismisses the class.

- Genre: Science Fiction; short story - Title: The Last Night of the World - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Earth - Character: The Man / Husband. Description: The unnamed man, one of the short story's protagonists, is a middle-aged, white-collar worker living in 1969. He and his wife, the story's other protagonist, have two young daughters. One night, the man has a strange dream in which a voice tells him that the end of the world is coming in a mere matter of days. However, the voice adds, the end won't be violent or intense—it will simply be "the closing of a book." Although the man thinks little of the dream at first, he soon realizes that everyone at work has had the same exact dream, including his coworker Stan Willis. Realizing the veracity of the dream, the man keeps the news to himself for four days before finally bringing it up to his wife. Although she pretends to be startled by the news of the end of the world, she eventually reveals that she, too, has had the dream. The man fluctuates between fearful anticipation and peaceful acceptance of the end. However, as the evening unfolds, the man comes to fully accept the end, which allows him to face the night bravely and calmly. He remains committed to his routine even in such dire circumstances, as he and his wife spend their final hours reading the paper, drinking coffee, listening to music on the radio, and sitting by the fireplace. While spending his evening "like always" shows the man's bravery and calm acceptance of his fate, it also suggests that he is narrowly focused on his own life and comfort. Like many other people, the man is preoccupied with his immediate reality instead of being conscious of the state of the Earth and the global community—something the story suggests is the very reason for the world's sudden end. - Character: The Woman / Wife. Description: The woman is one of the story's protagonists. She leads a quiet suburban life in 1969 with her husband and two daughters, all of whom go unnamed. Like her husband, the woman has an ominous dream about the end of the world. Even though she soon realizes that the other women in the neighborhood had the same exact dream, she outwardly considers it a coincidence. Deep down, however, the woman knows the dream is true, and that the end is fast approaching. Once she finally lets go of her fear and denial, the woman is able to talk openly about the end with her husband and come to terms with it. Like her husband, the woman remains faithful to her routine even in her final hours, as she spends the evening washing dishes, drinking coffee, and watching television. This shows how accepting one's fate, though frightening, can actually lead to a deep sense of peace and understanding. However, the woman points out that spending the evening "like always" may be part of the reason the world is ending—people have been too concerned about their own lives to care about the terrible things happening on other parts of the globe. - Character: Stan Willis. Description: Stan Willis is one of the man's coworkers and is the only named character in the story. One day, Stan confides in the man about his strange, apocalyptic dream. When the man reveals that he had the same exact dream the night before, Stan relaxes and seems unsurprised. His reaction is one of the many illustrations in the story of how accepting one's reality, rather than living in denial or anxious speculation, leads to a sense of peace—but also complacency. - Character: The Girls / Daughters. Description: The man and woman's two young daughters are likely in their toddler years, since they are seen playing with blocks and sleeping with the door ajar (implying a childlike fear of the dark). The man and woman speculate that the girls know nothing of the impending end—and try to keep it that way—though the story leaves open the possibility that the girls also had the apocalyptic dream but are too young to process its meaning and impact. - Theme: Fear and Bravery. Description: In Ray Bradbury's short story "The Last Night of the World," set in 1969, a husband and wife talk over coffee about a mysterious dream they each had, which announced that the world would end sometime that night. At first, the woman is fearful—as seen by her denial and anxious speculation—which hinders her from being able to accept reality. However, once she finally faces the circumstances and is honest with herself and her husband about her own apocalyptic dream, the woman is able to let go of her fear and face the impending end with bravery and poise. Using the husband and wife as examples, the short story asserts that bravery doesn't have to be big and bold. Instead, bravery can simply be a calm acceptance of one's fate. The short story shows that fear, often marked by speculation and denial, keeps people from fully facing the situation at hand. Even though the woman has already had the same end-of-the-world dream as her husband (and seemingly every other adult on Earth), she still pleads ignorance when her husband abruptly asks her one night what she would do if she knew it was "the last night of the world." Bewildered, she answers, "What would I do? You mean seriously? […] I don't know. I hadn't thought." It seems that the woman is too fearful to admit the reality of the situation, which consequently stalls her conversation with her husband and keeps them from speaking openly with one another. When the woman realizes that her husband is serious about the end of the world, she turns to speculation, asking if the world is ending because of war, "the hydrogen or atom bomb," or "germ warfare." Because she's fearful and in denial about her apocalyptic dream, she anxiously turns to other explanations for why the world might be ending. Of course, this is largely unhelpful, and her speculation keeps her from having an honest, open conversation with her husband about the reality at hand. Only when one acknowledges the reality of their situation, the story suggests, can their turn fear into bravery. At work, the man notices his coworker Stan Willis gazing out the window, with something clearly troubling him. Stan opens up about his dream, and when the man admits that he had the same dream the night before, Stan "didn't seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact." By affirming that he had the same dream, the man confirms the reality of the situation. This confirmation allows Stan to let go of the anxiety and speculation he was presumably experiencing while staring out the window. A few days later, when the man asks his wife why she's not protesting to his claims that the world will end that night, she hesitantly reveals that she also had the same dream the night before, but she "didn't want to say anything." Her reluctance to speak openly about the end of the world illustrates her fear, but now that she has finally accepted the circumstances, she and her husband can figure out how to bravely face their fate. Once the woman opens up about her dream, the man asks her if she's scared. She replies, "No. I always thought I would be, but I'm not." It seems that letting go of her denial and fear allowed the woman to realize that she is capable of extraordinary bravery. The man wonders why people aren't "screaming in the streets at a time like this," but his wife points out that people "don't scream about the real thing." Once again, her comment shows how acknowledging reality—realizing this is "the real thing"—leads to bravery. However, the story is quick to point out that bravery doesn't have to mean being loud and bold. Being brave can mean being calm in the face of a terrifying situation. For example, the man thinks that most people will spend their last night "like always" by watching television, listening to music, playing card games, and putting themselves and their children to bed—the same way the husband and wife spend their last night. His wife suggests, "In a way that's something to be proud of—like always." The woman points out that for many people, staying calm and committed to normalcy is actually a major act of bravery because it takes significant strength and poise. Similarly, in what are presumably their last moments, the husband and wife simply lie in bed holding hands and say "Good night" to one another. The story cuts off at this moment and possibly the world does too. The couple's final words are simple but significant, as they courageously say goodnight and goodbye to one another without traces of anxiety, fear, denial, or speculation. Their simple goodbyes bravely mirror the husband's earlier claim that the end of the world will not be violent or intense—instead, it will be like "the closing of a book." - Theme: Denial and Acceptance. Description: In "The Last Night of the World," a husband and wife come to terms with the impending end of the world—which, according to an ominous dream they both had, will happen that very night. The husband and wife initially give in to denial, obviously not wanting the dream to be true. However, this coping mechanism proves unproductive, unsatisfying, and even isolating, as it keeps the couple from being able to grapple with the situation together. Charting the husband and wife's evolution, the short story argues that although acceptance is often scary, it ultimately can lead to a sense of peace. Using the husband and wife as examples, the story shows that denial is an unproductive and unsatisfying way to handle problems. Even though she, too, has had the ominous dream about the end of the world, the woman feigns innocence when her husband asks her, "What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?" At first, she asks her husband if he's serious, and when he confirms that he is, she lies and says, "I don't know. I hadn't thought." The woman is in denial that her dream is true, and she also denies that she's given the end of the world any thought. This only stalls the conversation and keeps the couple from being able to talk openly about the end and what they mean to one another. In addition, because the husband doesn't immediately tell his wife about his dream (which he experiences three days before she does), the wife doesn't realize the significance of her own dream when it happens. This means that her own suspicions go unconfirmed for several days, keeping her from actually grappling with the dream's implications. In addition, denial only increases fear and makes people feel isolated. Not wanting to believe her dream—and confirm its validity by bringing it up to her husband as a serious concern—the wife is forced to turn to the other women in the neighborhood instead of her own husband. Even then, the woman thinks "it was only a coincidence" that other women on the block had the same dream. The woman is quick to deny the truth of the situation, which also keeps her from engaging deeply with the other women and talking about the implications of the dream. Ultimately, the story argues that accepting one's situation, though frightening, can actually bring a sense of peace, and with it the ability to move forward. When the man tells his coworker Stan Willis that he had the same dream, Stan "didn't seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact." For Stan, there is comfort in knowing that his coworker had "the same dream, with no difference," because it confirms the reality of the situation and allows him to come to peace with it. A few days later, the wife tells her husband, "You don't get too excited when you feel things are logical. This is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we've lived." Like Stan, once the woman fully confronts the indisputable reality of the situation, she feels calm and assured rather than frantic. When the woman asks her husband how he thinks everyone else will spend their last night, he says, "Go to a show, listen to the radio, watch television, play cards, put the children to bed, go to bed themselves, like always." This is exactly how the husband and wife spend their last night—knowing that there is nothing they can do to change the course of events, the couple accept their fate and manage to have a quiet, pleasant, otherwise-normal evening. In "The Last Night of the World," Bradbury highlights how denial is unproductive and isolating, whereas acceptance can be freeing. In this way, Bradbury encourages his readers to face their challenges head on. Even though accepting the reality of one's problems may seem scary and daunting, denying that the problem exists only exacerbates anxiety. - Theme: Self-Absorption vs. Global Awareness. Description: In Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," a husband and wife prepare for the rapidly approaching end of the world. According to a strange dream they both had—along with seemingly everyone on Earth—the world is going to end that very night. Instead of "screaming in the streets," however, the husband and wife maintain their quiet nighttime routine, sipping coffee and washing dishes. The short story suggests that, while this may be an act of personal bravery, the couple's commitment to their routine also reflects a larger problem that may have catalyzed the end of the world in the first place. As the couple's routine demonstrates, humans are often preoccupied with their own lives, comfort, and immediate communities and consequently fail to do their part as global citizens. The short story argues that individuals must let go of their selfish impulses and do everything in their power to ensure the Earth is a safe, healthy place. As the story unfolds, it seems like husband and wife are noble and brave for sticking to their routine on the last night of the world. The man thinks that most people will spend their last night "like always" by watching television, listening to music, playing card games, and putting themselves and their children to bed. His wife suggests, "In a way that's something to be proud of—like always." Sticking to routine in the midst of what could be chaos shows extraordinary composure and calmness. After putting their daughters to bed, the husband and wife read the newspaper, listen to music, and sit by the fireplace. The only real divergence from their routine is when they put the newly washed dishes "away with special neatness." It seems that preserving their routine—and even moving through their routine with special effort and care—is an act of quiet bravery and acceptance. While they may be brave and poised for sticking to their routine, the story implies that this is actually part of the problem, as humans are too focused on their own lives and immediate communities to care about the problems inflicting the world at large. The husband asks his wife, "We haven't been too bad, have we?" The word "we" refers to the husband and wife as individuals, but it also refers to humanity as a whole. His question, then, is if humans brought the end of the world upon themselves. His wife responds, "No [we haven't been too bad], nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble—we haven't been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things." She suggests that, in the past, people have been all too focused on their own problems instead of doing their part to help the larger community. Prior to stating that humankind hasn't been "enormously good," the wife says that "Nothing else but [the end of the world] could have happened from the way we've lived." In this way, the wife implies that humankind's selfish, narrow focus formed a direct cause-and-effect relationship with the end of the world. When the husband lists off things he'll miss about life on Earth, he claims that, besides his family, he'll really only miss "the change in the weather, and a glass of ice water when it's hot, and […] sleeping." Although it's charming—and somewhat profound—that the man will miss simple pleasures as much as he will his own family, it also reflects a narrow focus on himself. The husband's list of things he'll miss implies that he was preoccupied with his own comfort during his lifetime and turned a blind eye to the problems plaguing other parts of the globe, or even his own country or town. The story argues that, instead of narrowly focusing on their own lives and immediate communities, people should do everything they can to ensure the Earth as a whole is a peaceful and livable place. When the woman tells her husband that there's nothing they can do to stop the end of the world, he says, "That's it, of course; for if there were [something we could do], we'd be doing it." It seems the man has a newfound realization that humans need to do everything in their power to protect and nurture their planet. The realization comes too late for the couple, but not for the reader. Through "The Last Night of the World," Bradbury implores readers to act not just as individuals dedicated to themselves or their families but as global citizens committed to helping the planet and their larger communities however they can. - Theme: Family. Description: It's the evening October 19, 1969—mere hours before the world is about to end. In Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," a husband and wife come to terms with the rapidly approaching end of the world, which, according to a haunting dream they both had, will be like "the closing of a book." Over coffee, the couple looks back on their lives. Through their reflections, the story suggests that family is the most important thing in life, because it has the capacity to make people feel emotionally fulfilled and connected. In addition, as they look forward to the terrifying night ahead, the couple's words and actions show that family is also important because it can provide comfort in chaotic, scary times. The husband and wife's reflections suggest that family is one of the most important things in life, because a healthy family makes people feel loved, connected, and fulfilled. The man tells his wife, "Do you know, I won't miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three." Looking back on his life, the man realizes that his family was the most satisfying, joyful part of his existence. Things that were ostensibly supposed to fulfill him, like his white-collar career or living in a bustling city, pale in comparison to the depth and emotional fulfillment of family bonds. Similarly, lying in bed on their last night, the woman turns to her husband and says, "We've been good for each other, anyway." According to the dreams, the end of the world will happen sometime during the night, and it is 11:30 P.M. by the time the couple gets in bed. Thus, with the end of the world presumably happening any minute, what matters most to the wife is looking back on her relationship with her husband. As the night continues, the story shows how family can provide a sense of comfort in frightening times. When the man puts his young daughters to bed, he asks his wife if she thinks the girls will want the door "shut all the way" or "left a little ajar so some light comes in." The man and his wife assume their daughters do not know about the end of the world, so by leaving the door "open just a trifle," the man attempts to comfort his daughters in the face of their likely fear of the dark. Likewise, with the end of the world fast approaching, the couple falls asleep with "their hands clasped" and "their heads together." Their physical closeness reflects the way that they provide each other with comfort and solidarity in the face of a potentially terrifying end. Through the couple's reflections, Bradbury points out how much in life is arbitrary—including impressive careers and big cities—and what matters most to many people is family. In "The Last Night of the World," a husband and wife come to this conclusion, emphasizing how family can provide a sense of emotional fulfilment, support, and comfort. In this way, Bradbury urges readers to reevaluate their priorities and nurture their own family bonds. - Climax: When the husband and wife both realize that it is, in fact, the last night of the world. - Summary: Pouring himself a cup of coffee, a man asks his wife what she would do if she knew that it was "the last night of the world." He can hear his two little girls playing with blocks in the parlor. His wife says she hasn't really thought about it, and he tells her to start thinking. Anxiously, she asks if it's war, a nuclear bomb, or germ warfare. He says it's none of these—more of a "closing of a book." He has a "feeling" about the end of the world, which sometimes frightens him and sometimes makes him feel at peace. The man admits that four nights ago, he had a dream in which a voice told him that the world was about to end—that "things would stop here on Earth." At work later that day, he saw a coworker named Stan Willis gazing out the window. When the man asked Stan what was the matter, Stan told him about a peculiar dream he had the night before. As it turns out, both men had the exact same dream—as did many other people in the office. The woman asks her husband if she actually believes that the dream is true, and he is certain that it is. She asks when the world will stop, and he says that the world will stop in the middle of the night for them, but it will take a full twenty-four hours for it to stop everywhere. The man asks his wife why she's accepting everything he's saying and not arguing. She tentatively says that she also had the dream last night. Earlier today, she heard the women in the neighborhood talking about the same dream, but she thought it was just a coincidence. The man asks his wife if she's scared, and she says she's not, which is surprising because she "always thought" she would be. The man wonders why there seems to be no "spirit of self-preservation," and his wife suggests that when circumstances are logical, there's no point in getting worked up about them. She says that considering the way they've lived, "nothing else but this could have happened." The man doesn't think they've been all that bad, but his wife reminds him that they also haven't been "enormously good." They've been focused on themselves while the rest of the globe was grappling with "lots of quite awful things." The couple hears the girls laugh from the other room. The man says the only thing he'll really miss is his daughters and his wife, along with a few simple pleasures. He says he's never really liked his job or the city, so he won't miss those. He asks his wife how they're able to calmly discuss the end of the world, and she says there's nothing else they can do. He agrees, claiming that "if there were, we'd be doing it." They wonder how other people are spending their last night and figure that people are watching television, playing cards, and going to sleep "like always." The woman thinks this ability is something to be proud of. The man asks why the world has to end on this particular night—why couldn't it have ended last century or even ten centuries ago? His wife suggests that maybe it's because it's never been October 19, 1969 until today. Now that it is, and things are exactly as they are all around the world, the world must end. The man says that at this very moment, there are bomber aircrafts flying overseas that will never reach land. His wife says that's partially why the world is ending. For the rest of the evening, the couple carries on like normal. They wash the dishes, though they put them away with "special neatness," and say goodnight to their daughters. The leave the girls' bedroom door ajar, so they can see the light coming through. The woman wonders if the girls know about the end of the world, but her husband thinks that's impossible. The couple spends a few hours listening to the radio, reading the paper, and sitting by the fire. At 11:30 P.M., the two get ready for bed. The man kisses his wife, and she tells him, "We've been good for each other, anyway." He asks if she wants to cry, and she says she doesn't think so. They both get up and turn off the lights around the house. When they finally get into bed, they comment about how "clean and nice" the sheets are. Suddenly, the wife jolts out of bed and leaves the room. When she returns moments later, she tells her husband that she had left the faucet running in the kitchen and just went to turn it off. Her husband starts laughing, and so does she, "knowing what it was that she had done that was so funny." They settle back into bed and hold hands, and each say goodnight.

- Genre: historical novel; frontier novel - Title: The Last of the Mohicans - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: The forests of upstate New York, near Lake George, 1757 - Character: Hawkeye. Description: Also known as Natty Bumppo and La Longue Carabine, Hawkeye is a white man who has lived with Uncas and Chingachgook, "the last of the Mohicans" in the New York forests, for many years. Hawkeye fights with the Mohicans on the side of the English, against the French and their "Mingo" (or Iroquois) allies. At the end of the novel, after witnessing Magua's killing of Uncas, Hawkeye shoots and kills Magua. Hawkeye considers himself a brother of Chingachgook's, despite their different ancestries, and therefore treats Uncas with the love and care reserved for a son. Hawkeye refers to himself as a "man without a cross," meaning he observes no Christian religion, and sees himself as existing between the Native American and European cultures of the New World. - Character: Uncas. Description: Truly the last of the Mohican warriors, as he is the only son of Chingachgook, Uncas is devoted to his father and to Hawkeye, and fights with great valor against the Mingos and the French. Uncas dies in pursuit of Magua, at the end of the novel, and is not able to carry Cora safely back to her father, Colonel Munro. But Uncas is celebrated by the Delawares (of whom the Mohicans are a sub-tribe) as a great and powerful warrior, who will be treated as such in the "hunting grounds" of the afterlife. - Character: Chingachgook. Description: Uncas's father, Chingachgook is a stoic and skilled warrior, and a close friend of Hawkeye's. Chingachgook must watch over the funeral of his son at the close of the novel, and he celebrates his son's life, even as he recognizes that the Mohican tribe of northern New York will end with him. - Character: Duncan Heyward. Description: A Major in the "Royal American" (English) army, Duncan fights against the French and their Mingo allies. At the beginning of the novel, he is tasked with escorting Cora and Alice Munro from Fort William Henry to Fort Edward, and the adventures that occur along the way, including numerous run-ins with Magua, set the stage for the later drama of the novel. - Character: Magua. Description: The novel's antagonist, and a high-ranking Huron warrior (itself a subset of the Mingo, or Iroquois, tribes), Magua wishes to defeat the English and Mohican / Delaware forces, and also to take Cora, Munro's dark-haired older daughter, back with him to his "wigwam," as his wife. Magua is portrayed as caring more about amassing power and gaining influence than about honor, as he has a history of switching alliances in whatever way is most beneficial to him, which fits with his nickname Le Renard Subtil ("The Wily Fox"). He also has a long memory for any slight he has received, and is focused on Cora to redress wrongs he feels he has been dealt by Colonel Munro. After numerous attempts to kidnap Cora, Magua is eventually killed by Hawkeye, but not before Cora is killed by another Huron, and Magua kills Uncas. - Character: Cora Munro. Description: The older of Colonel Munro's two daughters, with dark hair and a strong, courageous disposition, Cora is the daughter of Munro's first wife, herself of a partly West Indian line. It is strongly implied that Uncas falls in love, in however chaste a fashion, with Cora, and Uncas fights to defend Cora from Magua. Cora, for her part, seems much more sympathetic to the Native Americans in general than other white characters in the novel. Cora is killed by another Huron during Magua's attempt to take her back to his wigwam. - Character: Colonel Munro. Description: Commander of Fort William Henry, near Lake George, the English Colonel Munro is the father of Alice and Cora, and the head of a doomed attempt to resist the siege led by Montcalm, commander of the French forces in the French and Indian War. Munro is later reunited with his daughter Alice, and gives Heyward his blessing for their impending marriage. But Munro also mourns his daughter Cora, of whom he was particularly fond. - Character: David Gamut. Description: A psalmodist, or singer and teacher of hymns, David Gamut meets with Heyward, Alice, and Cora on the initial trip from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry. Although Gamut has never fired a weapon and considers himself a pacifist, he manages to survive as a Huron captive for much of the novel, and is unhurt in the major skirmish that ends the book. - Character: Marquis de Montcalm. Description: Head of the French forces in the siege of Fort William Henry, Montcalm is considered, by English and French alike, a just and noble soldier. However, this assessment comes into doubt after Munro, and other English soldiers, believe Montcalm does not do enough to prevent the Mingo slaughter of innocents during the Massacre at Fort William Henry, after a supposed truce is signed between the English and French. - Character: Tamenund. Description: Patriarch of the Native American Delaware village neighboring the Huron village, in the second half of the novel, Tamenund orders that Cora be taken off by Magua, since she is "rightly" Magua's prisoner. Tamenund also orders that Hawkeye, Alice, and Heyward be set free, as the Delaware have no quarrel with Uncas or his friends. - Theme: "Savagery," Civilization, and the Frontier. Description: Last of the Mohicans is a study of two societies forced into contact in the forests of upstate New York. The first is "European" society, itself divided into the French and the English settlers and their armies. The other society is that of Native Americans, referred to in the text as natives, "savages," or as Indians. Native society is then divided into many tribal alliances. Thus the novel takes up what was considered the standard division of the American colonies, into "civilized" white settlers, French or English, and "uncivilized" Natives from all tribes. Fenimore Cooper seems to acknowledge that there are differences between native society and that of Europe, but he rejects the simple idea that natives are uncultured and Europeans alone possess culture.The activity of the novel serves to bring together members of each of these groups, either in peace or warfare. Hawkeye (also called Natty Bumppo, "La Longue Carabine") is friends with Uncas and Chingachgook, two representatives of the Mohican tribe who have long been cut off from their native lands and people. Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook come into contact, early on, with Duncan Heyward, Cora and Alice Munro, and David Gamut, a singer, when this group is traveling between English forts. Hawkeye and the two Mohicans go on to protect this group in their various scrapes, battles, and intrigues throughout the novel. Opposed to this collection of English and native characters, primarily, is Magua, himself of Huron stock, but a warrior-chief who has played with tribal alliances in order increase his power in the region. Magua allies with the French and the "Mingos" for much of the novel.The novel proposes that the "frontier" zone, existing at the edge of "European" America, is a meeting between native and European cultures. This "frontier" is then recreated, in human terms, in the interactions between the English, the French, and the natives allied to both. In particular, "frontier" culture is embodied by Hawkeye, who believes that his actions, his style of battle, are those of the native peoples of the region, but who also knows that he is a "pale-face." Hawkeye often states that he is a "man without a cross," meaning that he has disregarded his European / Christian heritage for a space between the worlds of Europe and the natives.Throughout the novel, the customs of the Europeans and the natives are described; these systems are merged, at the end, in the twin funerals of Uncas and Cora. Cora is buried in the manner of "her people," and Uncas is left to be mourned by his father in the Mohican style. This final sequence indicates that Fenimore Cooper envisions the interactions between Europeans and natives as occurring between two cultural systems. In other words, Fenimore Cooper does not feel that Europeans have come to the Americas simply to give the natives culture (because the natives purportedly "lack culture entirely). Instead, in Fenimore Cooper's rendering, native and European societies share a number of common customs: religious systems; systems of honor; male-female divisions of labor; and practices for remembrance of the dead. - Theme: Escape, Pursuit, and Rescue. Description: The structure of the novel's action is that of escape, pursuit, and rescue, in which Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook, and sometimes Heyward, engage in a back and forth with Magua, alternately rescuing and losing Cora and Alice. These complex sequences of escape, pursuit, and rescue serve several purposes in the novel. First, they are necessary components of the "frontier adventure novel," of which Last of the Mohicans is perhaps the primary example. In this form of the adventure yarn, tension is maintained primarily by the peril of its main characters, and by the defeat of a mortal enemy—in this case, Magua. Second, they underscore the difficulties of life in the American colonies at this point in their history. Many societies, native and European, converged on a relatively small space in the middle of the eighteenth century, hoping to control its vast resources. The dangers of Hawkeye, Heyward, and the rest of the group are dangers many in this region faced—though perhaps not in such dramatic and sustained fashion. Third, this structure of escape and rescue allows for a great deal of emotional impact when certain characters are not saved—namely, Uncas and Cora, the representatives of "native" and "European" society. By imperiling most of the lives detailed in the novel, Fenimore Cooper highlights the continued skill of Hawkeye, the luck of Heyward, and, ultimately, the misfortune suffered by the young Mohican warrior and by Munro's courageous daughter. - Theme: Gender Roles and Gender Expectations. Description: The Last of the Mohicans also takes up different understandings of the role of men and women in European and native societies. Cora (and, to a lesser extent, Alice) is a three-dimensional character, one possessed of courage and ingenuity in the face of danger. But the demands placed on her life are those typical of an eighteenth-century woman. Generally speaking, both British and French forces believe that war is to be fought by men and among men, and that "women and children" should not be involved in battle in any way. Thus Heyward conveys Cora and Alice from Fort Edward to Fort William Henry at the start of the novel, hoping to keep them out of harm's way. But Native American customs regarding the involvement of women in battle are different, in two ways: first, women in native cultures participate more openly and centrally in the rituals that precede battle, and in preparations for warriors; and women are treated, in Fenimore Cooper's rendering of native custom, as reasonable targets for battle, especially as regards the capture of women and the holding of them for ransom.Thus Magua demands at several times in the novel that, in order to save her sister and family, Cora abandon her European heritage (which is in fact biracial, as Cora's ancestor is a native of the West Indies) and become his wife. To the British, the notion of Cora marrying a native is abhorrent and "unnatural," and to Magua, the capture of Cora is an important sign of victory in battle—Cora is, therefore, his "prize." There is also a broader distinction made between "male" and "female" conduct. Both native and European societies have particular conceptions of acceptable male and female behavior. In particular, in native society, among the Mingos and the Delawares, it is considered a high insult for a warrior to be compared to a woman. This might happen for any of a number of reasons, but would include leaving a battle before killing all one's enemies, or the showing of mercy. On the other hand, European society obeys a chivalric set of principles regarding male-female relations: in other words, male soldiers are expected to give everything, even their lives, to protect women. Ultimately, it is the "horrific" idea of Magua capturing and marrying Cora that provokes Hawkeye and the rest of the group to follow Magua and kill him. At this climactic point of the novel, Cora officially states she would rather die than marry Magua, and though Magua hesitates in killing Cora, a confederate of his does. Cora therefore maintains her "purity," and Magua shows that, for him, Cora is the ultimate token of greatness—a wife "taken" from her European society and forcibly removed to native society. - Theme: The Natural World. Description: The Last of the Mohicans is set against a backdrop of immense beauty, wildness, and strangeness, especially for Europeans who are not accustomed to vast expanses of "unsettled" land. The natural features of upstate New York, described by Fenimore Cooper, serve several purposes in the novel. First, the caves, ledges, mountains, streams, and paths of the New York woods are essential elements of the battle-plans of the natives and Europeans. War cannot be fought, there, as it was in Europe—in long lines, from which soldiers marched in unison. Instead, battle in the rugged forests is mostly a guerilla affair, with both natives and Europeans hiding behind objects and using the "element of surprise" to overwhelm their foes. Those who can make better use of the natural environment tend to have the upper hand in battle. Second, there is an argument made throughout the text that natives like Uncas and Chingachgook have a better sense of the natural world than do the Europeans—that they are somehow "closer" to nature. To a certain extent, this is true, as both the Mohicans demonstrate a mastery of the woods that enables a good deal of scouting, and certain military victories. But Hawkeye has also acquired this knowledge after living among the natives for a great many years—indicating that it is a cultural heritage of the native population, rather than a "biological" one, that allows them to live close to the environment around them. Third, Fenimore Cooper writes from the position of a newly-formed American society, one that has passed through the French and Indian Wars, its own Revolutionary War with Britain, and a War of 1812 that again challenged American supremacy over its own soil. Fenimore Cooper understands, even in 1826, that the world of Uncas and Chingachgook is rapidly disappearing—that the towns near Lake George and Lake Champlain will only grow in size, adding more settlers, and causing the deforestation of a region that was once so densely wooded, one could barely see through it. The author is not an environmentalist—he does not argue for the preservation of the woods as such—but his description of the natural beauty, the lakes and rivers and forests, of the region are inflected by a longing for those "wilder" times, when America was not even a country, and when its settlement required heroic efforts on the part of both Americans and natives. - Theme: Loyalty and Treachery. Description: Finally, The Last of the Mohicans is a meditation on the nature of loyalty—what it means to be loyal or disloyal, and the consequences of loyalty and treachery as played out in battle. On the one hand stand Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook—men and warriors who are loyal to their own, whoever that group is said to be. Although the latter three do not start out the novel in defense of Heyward, Cora, Alice, David, and Munro, they go on, as the novel progresses, to serve them even to the point of death. Heyward's morality occasionally differs slightly both from the natives' and from Heyward's, but all these characters act on principles of trust and honesty that are unbroken throughout the novel. (One might wonder whether this kind of clear-cut moral "goodness" is realistic, but it does seem to be the case in Fenimore Cooper's conception). Magua, on the other hand, will stop at nothing to further his own interests. He leaves the tribe of his birth for a time, pretending to be a scout sympathetic to the British, then turns back to the Mingos and their allies, in the aid of the French. His common aim, simply, is to gain as much power and influence as possible, and to "acquire" Cora as his wife, partially as an act of vengeance against her father, Colonel Munro, whom Magua believed mistreated him. There is, too, the larger scale of alliances and broken promises that govern the conflict between the British and the French for control of the region. As the massacre of Fort William Henry is described, it was passively permitted by Montcalm, who, in Fenimore Cooper's telling, went on to be slain in a later battle of the French and Indian War, and who died a "hero." But Fenimore Cooper believes, largely, that the French are of changeable opinions, and that the British, from which American rebels came (including Washington), were more stalwart, upright, and loyal. Hawkeye, in this sense, remains a central figure of the novel. Although he is not, perhaps, its hero—that position is reserved for Uncas—he is its most notable, most boisterous personage, and he is a man whose confidence is hard-won. But when Hawkeye commits to a cause—that of the Mohicans, or of Heyward's band—he does so for life, and he lists the Mingos as his lifelong enemies. This immutable derring-do seems much prized by Fenimore Cooper, and is celebrated throughout the novel as exemplifying the best of "frontier" morality. - Climax: Magua murders Uncas and is killed by Hawkeye - Summary: The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, in what is now upstate New York near Saratoga Springs, during the French and Indian War. At its start, a young English Major named Duncan Heyward is to assist Cora and Alice Munro, daughters to Colonel Munro, as they travel from Fort Edward (commanded by General Webb) to Fort William Henry (commanded by Col. Munro). This band has, for its guide, a former Mingo, or Iroquois, now allied with the Delaware natives and the English, named Magua. The band sets off for Fort William Henry, meets up with a Christian singer of psalms named David along the path, and gets lost. Heyward, spotting a scout named Hawkeye, also known as Natty Bumppo and who describes himself as a "man without a cross," and two Mohicans (natives allied with the English and related to the Delawares) named Uncas and Chingachgook, asks them for advice in getting to the fort. Hawkeye says it is suspicious that Magua, a native runner, would get lost in the woods, and in confronting Magua, Hawkeye causes him to run away, deserting the band. Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook agree to escort the band the rest of the way, and attempt to protect them from Mingo (or Huron) attacks. But after the band hides in a cave and runs out of gunpowder, Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook retreat to send word to General Webb, and Magua and a group of Hurons capture Heyward, Alice, Cora, and David. Magua demands that Cora marry him, and Cora refuses. Magua then attempts to kill the remainder of the band, only to have his Huron allies killed by Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook, who have returned from their strategic retreat. The lives of all the members of the band are spared, and all the Hurons except Magua are killed. Magua escapes northward, near Lake George, and the band makes its way to Fort William Henry, where they are welcomed by Munro. Munro has been attempting to withstand a French siege of his fort, led by French Marquis de Montcalm, but after learning that General Webb will not reinforce Munro, Munro hands over the fort to Montcalm. Montcalm assures Munro that the English soldiers and women and children will have safe passage from the fort back to their other encampments. But Montcalm does not do enough to stop Magua and other Hurons from massacring many of the English as they leave the fort. Munro, Hawkeye, Heyward, Uncas, and Chingachgook kill many Hurons, but do not catch Magua, who escapes to his Huron village with Alice and Cora, and is pursued by David. The band divides up, with Heyward and Hawkeye going undercover to rescue Alice from the Hurons, and with Hawkeye then returning to rescue Uncas, who has been captured by the Hurons as well. Cora, who has been kept in a neighboring village of Delawares in an attempt, by Magua, to assuage tensions between these two tribes, still refuses to marry Magua. The Delaware patriarch, named Tamenund, states that Cora is Magua's rightful prisoner, and that she must marry Magua. But Tamenund also rules that the Delawares have no quarrel with Uncas, who is descended from the Delaware line, or with Uncas's friends Hawkeye, Heyward, and Alice. After Tamenund permits Magua and Cora to leave the Delaware village in peace, Uncas leads Hawkeye, Heyward, and a group of Delawares in a final fight with Magua. An angry Huron kills Cora after she refuses, finally, to marry Magua, an angry Magua kills Uncas, and Hawkeye, using his rifle Kildeer, kills Magua. The novel ends with a joint funeral service for Cora and Uncas, attended by Chingachgook, Hawkeye, Heyward, Alice, and Munro, in which native and colonial cultures are blended in their dual sadness over the young people's deaths. Tamenund states that the Mohican line of warriors has ended, since Uncas was Chingachgook's only son.

- Genre: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction - Title: The Lathe of Heaven - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: - Character: George Orr. Description: George Orr is the novel's protagonist. He's a 30-year-old draftsman who'd be completely ordinary, were it not for his extraordinary ability to have "effective" dreams—dreams that change reality. Orr resents his ability, however, and abuses drugs in order to stop dreaming. When Orr's drug use lands him in legal trouble, he undergoes psychiatric treatment to avoid prison time, which is how he meets the novel's antagonist, Dr. William Haber. Orr resents his effective dreams because he's the only person who retains a "double memory" of disparate realities, which alienates him from others and makes him doubt reality. Besides this, Orr is a passive man whose worldview tells him it's wrong to interfere with the natural rhythm of the universe. Orr's views put him at odds with Haber, who takes the Utilitarian stance that Orr has a moral imperative to use his effective dreams to improve humanity's quality of life. Though Orr repeatedly pleads with Haber to "cure" him of his ability, Haber covertly uses hypnosis to make Orr dream of realities that reflect Haber's image of a utopic society. Meanwhile, Haber tracks Orr's brainwaves using a machine called the Augmentor to learn how to induce effective dreams in himself. Orr struggles to control his dreams and subdue Haber, but this changes after consulting with the Aliens (a product of one of Orr's dreams), who possess a more refined understanding of dreams, consciousness, and cosmic balance, giving him the strength to glide effortlessly through his dreams and defeat Haber. Though Haber apparently "cures" Orr of his ability to dream effectively once he's done using him for research, Orr's ability to restore reality in the aftermath of Haber's failed effective dream makes it somewhat unclear whether Orr's power is completely gone, or if the Aliens' teachings simply help him control it. Early in the novel, Orr goes to a lawyer named Heather Lelache for help severing his relationship with Haber. Though Heather can't help Orr and initially refuses to believe in his effective dreams, her opinion changes after witnessing Orr alter reality gives her a double memory of her husband's death(s) in the war. Heather and Orr eventually fall in love, and Orr later dreams into reality a world where Heather is his wife, though she ceases to exist when Haber's first attempt to dream effectively nearly destroys the world. In the end, Orr restores the world to relative coherence, though elements of separate realities now coexist. Heather is restored, too, though she doesn't remember her romance with Orr. Nevertheless, Orr decides to pursue this simultaneously strange and familiar version of his former wife, optimistically leaving the future of their romance in the hands of the universe. - Character: Dr. William Haber. Description: Dr. William Haber is the psychiatrist assigned to treat George Orr. Haber begins as an ambitious but underrecognized sleep researcher, but this changes when he hypnotizes Orr into dreaming of realities that improve Haber's status until he becomes the most powerful person on the planet. Though Haber initially dismisses Orr's effective dreams, he changes his mind after one of Orr's dreams alters a mural on his wall during one of their sessions. Unlike Orr, who subscribes to Taoist ideals of effortless action and universal balance, Haber believes in the Utilitarian notion that people have a moral obligation to act in ways that maximize happiness and minimize suffering. Though Haber cares about the common good, his desire for power and control corrupts his altruism. As such, under the guise of administering treatment, Haber hypnotizes Orr, feeding him suggestions to make his effective dreams morph reality into Haber's vision of a perfect world. Meanwhile, Haber records Orr's brainwaves with the Augmentor so that he might one day induce conscious effective dreaming in himself and gain complete control of reality. Haber successfully uses Orr's dreams to eliminate overpopulation, racism, and global war; however, these utopic accomplishments are always achieved at an unforeseen, dystopic cost. In response to Haber's suggestion to dream away overpopulation, for example, Orr creates a plague that kills six billion people. Such setbacks never bother Haber, who uses the promise of a collectively better world to justify any suffering his hypnosuggestions create. Ultimately, Haber's changes bring about more suffering than happiness. The novel further conveys Haber and Orr's clashing worldviews through their opposite appearances: while Orr is fair, lean, and unassuming, Haber is "broad, hairy," and often described with bear imagery. Toward the end of the novel, once Haber unlocks the key to effective dreaming, he "cures" Orr by hypnotizing him to dream that his dreams no longer change reality. Haber then ignores Orr's advice to consult with the Aliens before inducing an effective dream in himself, and his effective dream becomes a nightmare that causes reality to collapse. Though Orr disconnects Haber from the Augmentor in time to restore reality to relative coherence, Haber's new knowledge of unreality leaves him institutionalized in a broken, catatonic state. The novel suggests that Haber's demise is the result of his unexamined adherence to Utilitarian ethics, his unwillingness to accept the unknowable and uncontrollable aspects of life, and his selfish quest for power. - Character: Heather Lelache. Description: Heather Lelache is the lawyer George Orr contacts to end his sessions with Dr. William Haber. Though Haber's important status prevents Heather from interfering with Orr's treatment, she and Orr develop feelings for each other. Heather initially dismisses Orr's claims about his effective dreams, but she reconsiders after witnessing one of Orr's dreams allows her to maintain a subconscious double memory. Later, Heather meets Orr at his cabin and recalls two conflicting memories of her late husband's death in the war, which solidifies her belief in Orr's ability. During this meeting, she expresses a deep admiration for Orr's strength, centeredness, and calm, unaffected demeanor. Heather is fierce, outspoken, and wears loud clothing that reflects her bold demeanor. She sometimes imagines herself as a "Black Widow" spider, but Heather's venomous, aggressive quality is largely superficial, and beneath this façade, she's gentle, compassionate, and adopts a stance similar to Orr's with regard to letting the universe run its natural course. Heather is biracial and struggles to decide whether she's Black, white, or neither. This might be why she relates to Orr, whose awareness of multiple, conflicting realities complicates and fragments his identity as well. During a treatment session where Haber coerces Orr to dream away racism, Orr accidentally creates a raceless world where everyone's skin is an identical gray color. Because being biracial is such a big part of Heather's identity, she ceases to exist. Orr later dreams Heather back into existence as his wife, but the only Heather that can exist in Haber's gray, raceless world is a milder, more submissive version of herself, and she's thrust into nonexistence yet again when Haber's first effective dream causes reality to splinter. After Orr restores the world to a state of relative coherence, Heather reenters reality. In her final form, she is biracial and bold once more, though she doesn't remember her romance with Orr. Orr's decision to restore Heather's boldness reflects his reinvigorated faith in the universe's ability to guide his life and relationships where they're meant to go. In the end, Heather and Orr's future together is uncertain, but the novel conveys this uncertainty in a positive, hopeful light. - Character: Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe. Description: Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe is an Aldebaranian Alien. Like all Aldebaranians, Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe is completely encased in a big, clunky, turtle-like suit that enables him to breathe the Earth's air. The turtle suits are equipped with metal rods hooked up to machines that translate words and facilitate speech. Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe works as a shopkeeper at an antiques store. When Orr drops by one day and asks Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe to explain the meaning of the Alien word iahklu', Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe tells Orr the word is incommunicable and gifts him the Beatles record "With a Little Help from My Friends" to convey the meaning to him without words. Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe's gesture deeply moves Orr. Listening to the record enables Orr to glide effortlessly and safely through his dreams and even allows him to restore Heather, who hadn't existed in the previous reality. The record instills a clarity and calmness in Orr that enables him to understand the inarticulable Alien concepts of iahklu' and Er' perrehnne he needs to make peace with his dreams and the universe. Thinking about the record, Ennbe Ennbe, and Heather is ultimately what gives Orr the strength to defeat Haber at the end of the novel, which underscores the novel's premise that fulfillment and strength are attained through living in collective harmony with others. - Character: E'nememen Asfah. Description: E'nememen Asfah is an Aldebaranian Alien who invites Orr to sleep at his apartment after Orr saves the world from Haber's effective nightmare. Just before Orr drifts off to sleep, he and Asfah exchange the Alien phrase "Er'perrehnne," which allows Orr to float safely through his dreams in an unattached, effortless manner. Orr eventually accepts a job designing appliances for Asfah's kitchen supply store, which is where he reunites with Heather. The novel's final scene depicts Asfah standing behind the glass window of his shop, watching Orr and Heather walk together to a nearby café. - Character: Aunt Ethel. Description: Aunt Ethel is Orr's aunt who came to live with Orr and his family when he was 17, during which time she sexually harassed him. During Orr's first session with Haber, he recalls how one of his first effective dreams caused Ethel to die in a car crash. Though Orr wanted to stop Ethel's harassment, he regrets his complicity in her death and cites this dream as an example of the "immoral" quality of his effective dreams. - Theme: The Limits of Utilitarianism. Description: The Lathe of Heaven takes place in a dystopian future where climate change, overpopulation, food scarcity, and global conflict wreak havoc on the world. Meanwhile, George Orr, a man who possesses the strange ability to have "effective" dreams that change reality, finds himself increasingly at odds with Dr. William Haber, the psychiatrist Orr solicits to cure him of his peculiar condition. While Orr is a passive man who thinks it's wrong to use his effective dreams to play God and meddle in the natural order of things, Haber adopts an opposite stance, arguing that Orr has an ethical obligation to use his ability for the greater good of humanity. Haber's reasoning draws heavily on Utilitarian ethics, which argue that people should strive to act in ways that maximize well-being or happiness and minimize suffering for the greatest number of people. Motivated by an exaggerated Utilitarianism, Haber increasingly exploits Orr's powers, using hypnotic suggestion to make Orr dream into existence a utopian world—or, at least, what such a world looks like to Haber. However, Haber's attempts to maximize universal well-being often backfire, creating new, previously unimaginable forms of suffering to replace the old forms he wished to eradicate. For example, Haber's attempt to eliminate overpopulation results in Orr dreaming of a deadly plague that effectively murders six billion people. The novel uses Haber's failed attempts at altruism to criticize Utilitarianism—specifically its failure to account for the unpredictable consequences of even well-intentioned actions—and the inability of any single person to define what happiness and suffering mean for the totality of humanity.  Orr's interpretations of Haber's hypnosuggestions show that Haber's vision of a better world is oversimplified, and that happiness is relative. Orr technically follows Haber's hypnosuggestions, but he does so in roundabout ways that reveal how subjective Haber's suggestions really are. When Haber gives Orr a vague hypnosuggestion to improve the quality of life by eliminating overpopulation, Orr's unconscious responds by creating a deadly plague that kills six billion people. Orr's macabre solution to overpopulation emphasizes the suffering Haber's well-intended vision imposes on a significant portion of the population. While eliminating six billion people from the planet improves the quality of life for those who survive the Plague, the opposite is true for those who perish. In other words, the maximized happiness the Plague creates for survivors happens at the expense of victims' suffering. This consequence shows that Haber's Utilitarian ideology requires a person to make uncomfortable, highly subjective decisions about whose happiness matters most, and when the amount of happiness achieved is great enough to justify the suffering that also results. Calculating the utility of an action (in this case, eliminating overpopulation) is highly subjective and not as unambiguous as Haber would like to believe.   Haber's attempts to make the world a better place, which just so happen to disproportionately improve his social position, suggest that his supposedly objective vision of a better world is biased toward subjective self-interest. At the beginning of the novel, Haber is a mediocre, not particularly well-known sleep researcher. His relative unimportance in the medical world and society at large is reflected in the unimpressive state of his office in the Willamette East Tower: he's not even important enough to snag an office with a window. However, all this changes once Haber starts influencing Orr's effective dreams, feeding Orr hypnosuggestions that improve Haber's status. Over the course of several sessions, Haber acquires an office in the HURAD Tower, the most important building in Portland, which features an enormous window overlooking downtown Portland and distant Mount Hood. Haber becomes a well-respected doctor with important government connections and, eventually, the director of HURAD (Human Utility: Research and Development), which makes him the most important man in the world. Though Haber might pretend (or really believe) he's using Orr's effective dreams to make the world a universally better place, the fact that Haber benefits most from the changes Orr's dreams bring about suggests that Haber is conflating what's best for the world with what's best for him. Haber's vision of a better world can't be objective since it's so clearly influenced by his thirst for power. Beyond this, Haber's dream of making the world a better place is itself self-serving, since it's (at least in part) motivated by Haber's desire for fame. "We've made more progress in six weeks than humanity made in six hundred thousand years!" Haber excitedly tells Orr after Orr confronts Haber about exploiting his dreams. Haber frames the role he plays in saving the world as a personal accomplishment rather than a selfless act of humanitarianism, which serves as additional proof of self-interest's influence on Haber's Utilitarian ideals. Haber's Utilitarian aspirations rely on the impossible premise that one person can quantify happiness to determine what's best for the masses. That Haber's initial altruism ultimately becomes corrupted by greed and self-interest illuminates not only the subjectivity of happiness (Haber's idea of maximized happiness for the masses and maximized happiness for himself are mutually exclusive), but also the inability to predict that the consequences of one's actions will correspond to one's intentions. In the beginning, Haber really does strive to make the world a better place, and he sporadically succeeds in doing so. However, Haber's actions nearly culminate in the destruction of humanity, creating an irreconcilable asymmetry between Haber's intentions and the consequences of his actions. - Theme: Dreams and the Limitations of Knowledge. Description: One of the central conflicts of The Lathe of Heaven is George Orr's internal struggle to know what is real and what is imagined. At first, it appears that the novel's baseline reality (from which all Orr's dreamed alternate realities diverge) is the world where Orr is apprehended for drug abuse and sent to Haber for Volunteer Therapeutic Treatment (VTT). However, it's later revealed that this reality is itself a dream that Orr willed into existence as he lay dying during the fallout of a global Nuclear War in 1998. This, to Orr's mind, renders false each subsequent reality he dreams into existence. One of the novel's central questions thus becomes: if reality exists in a state of constant flux that is beyond any one person's ability to discern, how does anyone know for certain what's real? Orr's desire to stop dreaming effectively isn't simply a passive man's discomfort with playing God, then, but a reflection of his larger discomfort with uncertainty. Orr initially seems to believe that if he can stop dreaming effectively, he will be able to exist in a more solid, stable, and knowable world. Instead, Orr eventually finds peace in the version of the world he knows least, a peace which comes only after embracing the Alien invaders' philosophy, which stresses not knowing the world with certainty, but simply coexisting with it. Through its metaphorical use of dreams, The Lathe of Heaven critiques efforts to transcend reality's unknowable character, arguing that human beings must embrace uncertainty instead. Orr initially fears his effective dreams because he can't control them. He thinks being "cured" of his ability will make him feel better. Because Orr's dreams exist only in his unconscious, he can't consciously experience them. This is his main complaint with his curious ability: that it's beyond his ability to control and comprehend. When explaining his concerns to Haber in their initial session, he cites an instance from his youth in which he dreamed his abusive Aunt Ethel died in a car crash as evidence of the "incoherent, selfish, irrational, [and] immoral" quality of his unconscious. Orr's dreams (aided by Haber's hypnosuggestions) create additional "immoral" circumstances over the course of the novel, including a massive plague and an alien invasion. Orr repeatedly attempts to suppress his dreams—abusing drugs, avoiding sleep, and avoiding his sessions with Haber—but these methods are all short-lived. Orr's failure to control his dreams—and the suffering he incurs in trying and failing to control them—suggests that repressing one's anxieties about uncertainty is an inadequate method of coping with a fear of the unknown.  Haber adopts an opposite stance, striving to eliminate uncertainty through logic and reason. Haber describes Orr's condition positively, referring to it as a "wellspring of health, imagination, creativity," which, once adequately understood, can be used to benefit mankind. Haber thinks the most effective way to conquer the unknown is to leave no mystery unsolved: "to bring up what's unconscious into the light of rational consciousness [and] examine it objectively." To Haber, Orr's effective dreams (and by extension, the unknown) are only existential threats so long as they remain unexamined and uncontrolled. Haber tries to understand Orr's dreams with the intention of inducing effective, conscious (and therefore controllable) dreams in himself to create a new reality where everything is controlled, and nothing is left to chance. But Haber's efforts backfire when his first attempt to induce a consciously effective dream turns into an uncontrollable nightmare that nearly destroys the planet. The horrors Haber witnesses during his nightmare leave him permanently insane and confined to an institution. When Orr visits him, he observes a blank-eyed Haber "looking at the world as misunderstood by the mind: the bad dream." Orr's remarks affirm what Haber failed to recognize: that it's impossible to rationalize away the mind's capacity to misunderstand the world, and the world's capacity to confound the mind. Haber's tragic end shows that there's a limit to what humanity can rationalize. In place of Orr's and Haber's equally insufficient methods to cope with uncertainty, the novel offers a third method, espoused by the Aldebaranian Aliens, which is simply to embrace uncertainty. Toward the end of the novel, Orr has an effective dream where an Alien teaches him two Alien words: iahklu', which refers to effective dreaming, and Er' perrehnne. The Alien tells Orr that if he utters this latter word "before following directions leading in wrong directions," it will guide him through troubling effective dreams. The Alien's advice works. After exchanging "Er' perrehnne's" with the Alien in his dream, Orr feels calm and reassured. When he awakens in Haber's office, a confused Haber notes that the EEG screen registers unusually powerful activity in Orr's cortex. Orr later tries to explain Er' perrehnne to Haber, though the concept remains mostly inarticulable. To Orr, the concept behind Er' perrehnne is that navigating the unknown depths of dreams requires one to "learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully." Orr's understanding of Er' perrehnne dictates that "a conscious mind," or a knowing mind, must reimagine its relationship to the unknown: it "must be part of the whole unconsciously," accepting the validity of the things it can't change or know rather than fearing or trying to conquer them. After accepting Er' perrehnne, Orr's dreams no longer plague him. When Orr finds shelter with an Alien named E'nememen Asfah the evening after Haber's effective dream nearly destroys the world, Orr and Asfah exchange Er'perrehnne's before Orr falls asleep, and Orr's dreams wash over him "like waves of the deep sea." Embracing the unknown metaphorically transforms Orr into the jellyfish featured in the novel's opening scene—strengthened rather than threatened by the vast, mysterious waters that surround him. - Theme: Cosmic Balance. Description: Taoism, a Chinese philosophical and religious tradition, influences The Lathe of Heaven in several ways. One Taoist idea that figures prominently in the novel is the idea that the universe exists in a state of cosmic balance, wherein every force has a corresponding, balancing counterforce. Many of the novel's characters struggle with the misconception that their actions have the power to disrupt this balance and force irrevocable changes onto the world. George Orr, the novel's protagonist, wants to stop his power to change the world through his dreams because he thinks it's morally wrong to disrupt the natural state of people's lives this way. Dr. William Haber, Orr's psychiatrist, disagrees and exploits Orr, manipulating the content of Orr's dreams to create a new reality that coheres to his vision of a perfect world. Though Haber and Orr represent opposite stances on the ethics of altering the natural state of the universe, what they both fail to recognize is that Orr's effective dreams can't actually disrupt the universe's cosmic balance, since, according to the book's Taoist philosophy, the universe will respond to each change they enact with a counteracting force of its own. Through the Taoist idea of cosmic balance, then, the novel suggests an alternate path of making peace with the world by reimagining one's place within the larger universe. Rather than trying to alter (or trying not to alter) the universe to conform to some hypothetical ideal, a person needs to accept their position within that larger universe, avoid engaging in deliberate action or inaction, and instead find reassurance in the restorative power of the universe's natural balance. The novel demonstrates the Taoist concept of yin and yang through the opposing personalities and ethical positions of Orr and Haber. The concept of yin and yang dictates that the universe's opposite forces complement each other to maintain universal balance. Yin symbolizes the earth, the female sex, dark, and passivity. Yang symbolizes heaven, the male sex, light, and activity. In the novel, Orr represents yin, evidenced by Haber's description of him as "passive" and "feminine." Haber, boasting typically masculine, strong qualities, represents yang: he's "broad, hairy," and repeatedly described as bear-like, which underscores the wild, aggressive, active elements central to his character. The novel establishes Orr and Haber as opposing forces, and for much of the novel they, too, regard each other as foes: Orr criticizes Haber's action, believing (correctly) that Haber is abusing his medical privileges to exploit Orr's effective dreams and meddle with the way the universe ought to be. In turn, Haber attacks Orr's inaction, citing Orr's refusal to use his effective dreams to improve society as evidence of his moral inferiority. Though Haber and Orr repeatedly challenge each other's opposing ethical stances, neither character conquers the other. This reflects the Taoist concept that opposing forces complement rather than overpower each other.  Every time Haber manipulates the content of Orr's dreams to change the world, Orr's unconscious includes caveats that undermine whatever progress Haber's changes sought to achieve. For example, in one of their sessions, Haber gives Orr a hypnosuggestion to eliminate racism. Orr's unconscious responds by eliminating race entirely, giving all of humanity identical, gray skin. Though Orr's response technically fulfills Haber's suggestion, it doesn't actually do anything to change the nature of prejudicial behavior: if everyone's skin is the same, identical shade of gray, people no longer have a reason to be racist, but that's not the same thing as eliminating racism altogether. Further, eliminating race eliminates the cultural diversity that accompanies racial difference, and this loss undercuts social progress in Haber's post-racial world. Orr's unconscious repeatedly thwarts Haber's attempts to change the world: Haber's extreme action gives way to Orr's extreme passivity, and the world remains basically as good (or as bad) as it was at the start.   In place of adopting extreme moral positions about one's relationship to the universe, the novel suggests one ought to find a balanced, middle path where one sees oneself as part of, rather than outside, the universe. Orr discovers this path in a dream, when an Alien teaches him about Er' perrehnne, an Alien concept of cosmic balance. The Alien explains to Orr that "a conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully—as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously." Whereas unconscious beings like the rock settle into a natural state of harmony within the larger universe, humanity's consciousness compels it to (incorrectly) conceive of itself as separate from—and therefore able to influence—the universe. This belief only creates dissatisfaction and suffering in confused humans like Orr and Haber, who mistakenly believe that the secret to a fulfilled existence is extreme passivity or extreme action. Orr finds peace after heeding the Aliens' advice. In his final dream, he sees "great, green sea turtles […] swimming with heavy, inexhaustible grace through the depths, their element." This image parallels the novel's opening scene, where a jellyfish swims effortlessly through the ocean, protected by its existence within the larger ocean despite an otherwise fragile physique. In the end, Orr glides through his dreams and waking life as effortlessly as the turtles and jellyfish. The animals, Orr, and his Alien teachers live a satisfying existence because they don't regard the universe as separate from themselves and as needing to be either challenged or left alone. In the words of Orr's Alien teacher: "Self is universe." Orr learns to see his dreams as part of himself, and himself as part of the world: he no longer conceives of his dreams as a harmful, unethical force he needs to control or defeat, nor the universe as a helpless victim from which he must defend those dreams: they are all one, effortlessly ebbing and flowing through time. - Theme: Power and Selfishness. Description: In The Lathe of Heaven, any attempt to exert power over others eventually has corrupting results. When Haber tries to manipulate Orr's effective dreams to uplift humanity, his initially altruistic intentions are stymied by his selfish thirst for power. While each reality that Haber indirectly creates comes with a multitude of unanticipated conflicts and challenges for the people of the world, his own position of power and status in those worlds predictably increases. In an ultimate act of power-hungry selfishness, Haber finds a way to effect reality without Orr's involvement, and in so doing he nearly brings about the end of the world, leaving him psychologically broken. Orr's salvation in the novel, on the other hand, is exemplified by his ultimate relinquishing of control over others. In his final reunion with Heather, for example, his former wife is no longer the gray, submissive version of herself that Haber's hypercontrolled, raceless world forced her to become. In a final act of selflessness, Orr uses his power to restore Heather to her formerly bold, powerful self. While their future together is uncertain, they now have the power to shape each other's lives in a mutually selfless relationship uncorrupted by selfishness. Through Haber's and Orr's contrasting fates, The Lathe of Heaven critiques selfish, ego-driven exertions of power, instead advocating for a reserved, ethical application of power that allows for a harmonious co-existence rooted in mutual empowerment.    Haber's powerful status enables him to make the world a better place, but selfishness corrupts that power and ultimately destroys him. Haber initially uses his medical privileges as Orr's psychiatrist to achieve noble ends, manipulating Orr's dreams to fix many of the world's problems. For example, he eliminates famine, nearly eradicates cancer, and improves Earth's ecological health. However, Haber becomes corrupted when he uses his power to fulfill egotistical rather than altruistic goals. The humanitarian accomplishments Haber brings about through Orr's dreams are always accompanied by changes that improve Haber's position. Though Haber begins as a middling psychiatrist, he eventually becomes the director of the Human Utility: Research and Development (HURAD) department of the World Planning Center, which makes him the most powerful person in the world. When Haber "effectivize[s]" the world to exist within his own dream, he's too self-absorbed to heed Orr's advice about consulting with the Aliens beforehand.  Once reality is "effectivized," Haber tells Orr, "this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!" Though Haber claims his new world will make people "like gods," his design renders Haber most God-like of all, positioning him as the sole creator and controller of this new, heavenly world. Ultimately, Haber loses control of his dream, sends the world into chaos, and goes insane, which leads to his institutionalization. Thus, Haber's selfish pursuit of power is his downfall. Orr succeeds where Haber fails because he adopts a more ethical, selfless relationship to power. Unlike Haber, Orr has no desire to play God. Orr's relationship to his effective dreams emphasizes the potential harm his dreams might inflict on others rather than the potential benefit they might bring himself. Orr recognizes his "obligation" to use his power to coexist with rather than to dominate others. Near the end of the novel, for example, Orr jumps inside a black hole that Haber's uncontrolled dream creates and, "by the power of will, which is indeed great when exercised in the right way at the right time," Orr teleports himself to the HURAD Tower. Once he's outside Haber's office, Orr gathers strength through thoughts of Tiua'k Ennbe Ennbe (an Alien shopkeeper he befriends), and Heather, which allows him "to cross nothingness," rip Haber from the Augmentor, and restore relative order to the world. Unlike Haber, whose egotistical relationship to power motivates him to reject the help of others and leads him down a path of complete destruction, Orr's selfless relationship to power allows him to access his abilities responsibly, remain receptive to others' help, and save the day. After disconnecting Haber from the Augmentor, Orr restores a reality that gives Heather the power to act of her own accord, which further affirms Orr's commitment to a selfless relationship to power. The Heather that Orr first dreams into existence as his wife is a gray, submissive shadow of her former self.  She's the only version of Heather that can exist in this reality, which Haber has engineered (through Orr's effective dreams) to rob people of individuality, agency, and racial difference. Because being biracial was so central to Heather's identity, she ceases to exist in this world until Orr dreams this lacking version of herself into existence. After Orr defeats Haber, he restores race, individuality, and personal freedom to the world, which allows Heather to become the person she was before Haber began his quest for world domination—and before she knew Orr. This final iteration of Heather has only a vague memory of Orr—she doesn't remember they were ever married or in love—yet this fact doesn't crush Orr; on the contrary, he looks at Heather, whom he describes as a "fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger," and optimistically welcomes the challenge of winning back her love. Though Heather and Orr's future together is uncertain, the shared, equal power they hold in developing that future has its own beauty. Unlike Haber, whose egotistical need for control corrupted his power, Orr recognizes that the highest power of all is the collective empowerment that exists within a harmonious co-existence among mutually empowered people. - Climax: Dr. William Haber uses the Augmentor to have his first conscious, effective dream, but he loses control and nearly destroys coherent reality. - Summary: It's 2002 in Portland, Oregon. The planet suffers from overpopulation, food scarcity, global war, and the devastating effects of climate change. A man named George Orr has the ability to have "effective" dreams that change reality. Disturbed by the experience, he abuses drugs to stop himself from dreaming. When Orr is caught stealing Pharmacy Cards to get more drugs, he attends therapy sessions with Dr. William Haber, an ambitious psychiatrist and sleep researcher, to avoid jail time. Though Haber initially thinks Orr is crazy, he changes his mind after witnessing Orr have an effective dream during a hypnotic sleep study. After this, Haber secretly exploits Orr's condition to change the world, enhancing Orr's dreaming capabilities using an EEG machine called the Augmentor. He also feeds Orr hypnotic suggestions to make him dream into reality utopic alternate realities that reflect Haber's vision of a better world; however, the utopic changes Orr's dreams create are always accomplished through dystopic means. For instance, when Haber gives Orr the hypnosuggestion to dream of world peace, Orr creates a world where formerly warring nations band together to defeat Alien invaders' attack on the Moon. Meanwhile, each effective dream improves Haber's status until he's in charge of the entire world. Orr consults with a lawyer named Heather Lelache to end his sessions with Haber, but Haber's elevated social status prevents Heather from interfering with Orr's treatment. Heather initially doubts Orr's ability to change the world, but she changes her mind after observing Orr dream effectively during one of his sessions with Haber; Orr's dream enables her to remember multiple realities. Orr falls in love with Heather and informs her that the real world was destroyed during nuclear war in April 1998, and their present world is just an alternate reality he dreamed of in the aftermath. In a final attempt to restore normalcy, Heather hypnotizes Orr to dream that Aliens are no longer on the Moon, but the plan backfires when Orr's dream moves the Alien invasion from the Moon to Earth. A violent battle ensues, and a bomb strikes Mount Hood, causing the previously dormant volcano to awaken and erupt. After this, Orr dreams that the Aliens are nonviolent, and they assimilate into Portland's human population. The Aliens are courteous citizens, though nobody can actually see them, since they're always encased in big, clunky turtle-like suits that allow them to breathe the Earth's air. This normalcy doesn't last for long, however, and Haber resumes his "treatment" of Orr. When Haber coerces Orr to eliminate racism, Orr creates a world that eliminates race itself, which makes everyone's skin turn an identical shade of gray. In this new reality, Heather, who is biracial, ceases to exist. Orr later dreams of an alternate reality in which a gray, milder version of Heather is his wife. Speaking with an Alien helps Orr understand his condition and empowers him to confront Haber. During their final session, Haber "cures" Orr by making him dream that he can no longer dream effectively. Haber's research with Orr enables him to use the Augmentor to have his own effective dreams. Haber's first effective dream turns into a nightmare that causes the world to melt into a state of incoherent chaos. Orr detaches Haber from the Augmentor and saves the world, though elements of different realities now commingle in a single dimension. Months later, Portland has mostly returned to normal. Haber's knowledge of unreality puts him in a catatonic state, and he's institutionalized. Orr has a job designing kitchen appliances for an Alien named Asfah. A restored Heather enters Asfah's shop one day, though she has only a vague memory of Orr. Orr invites Heather to a nearby café, optimistic about the possibility of winning back her love.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Point of view: There are various layers of narration to the story. The third-person omniscient narrator presents the reader with the first-person account given by a fictional historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who himself has heard the story from another storyteller and at times inserts elements or comments from his own experience. - Setting: Tarry Town, upstate New York, late 18th century - Character: Ichabod Crane. Description: A young schoolteacher from Connecticut, who comes to Sleepy Hollow to teach the town's children, presumably just for a time. He rotates between living at the homes of his various students for his food and lodging. Ichabod is tall, lanky, and somewhat awkward-looking. He loves singing and dancing—he also gives singing lessons—and believes he is excellent at both (there's a touch of irony in the narration that suggests he may not be as talented as he thinks). Ichabod is shrewd and clever, knowing when to treat his students strictly and when to be more obsequious to his hosts. He also has a tremendous, almost voracious, appetite. At the same time, Ichabod is gullible and has a wild imagination: he adores reading and listening to ghost stories, even though they continue to terrify him at night after he's heard them. For Ichabod, reality and fiction are less distinct than they are for most people—especially in Sleepy Hollow, where Ichabod comes under the influence of the "witchy" air. If not for that, Ichabod may well be just another example of an aimless youth, "tarrying" about with little direction or ambition. But, by the end of the story, we learn that Ichabod may have left this bewitched town and made something of himself after all—propelled back to reality by one final imaginative trick. - Character: Diedrich Knickerbocker. Description: The narrator of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," who apparently heard the story from a storyteller at a business meeting in New York. Washington Irving often used the persona of Knickerbocker in these stories, as an elderly, eccentric chronicler of Dutch history who insists upon the accuracy of his tales. Knickerbocker first appears as the pseudonymous author of Irving's 1809 "History of New York," and some of Irving's later tales are meant to come from Knickerbocker's papers. This device, called "framing," helps establish "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a "true" story rather than a fictional yarn. By claiming veracity for his story through the use of Knickerbocker, Irving plays with the boundaries between history and storytelling, and does his part in contributing to the nascent development of American literature in early American history. - Character: Brom Bones. Description: A strong, plucky, mischievous young man and major rival to Ichabod for Katrina Van Tassel. Brom Bones (whose full name is Abraham or Brom Van Brunt) loves to play practical jokes, get himself into duels, and brag about his exploits. His very name reveals his brute strength and contrasts with Ichabod's spindly figure and fearful spirit. But Brom Bones is largely harmless, and the townsfolk both admire him for his muscle and roll their eyes at him for his immaturity. However, Brom Bones may be cleverer than he appears. He pays close attention to Ichabod's fear of ghosts and goblins, and the story suggests that it may very well be Brom Bones who chases after Ichabod in the guise of the Headless Horseman, carrying a pumpkin for the spirit's head. If his plan was to chase Ichabod away from Katrina, it worked: Brom Bones does end up marrying the damsel. - Character: Katrina Van Tassel. Description: The only daughter of Baltus Van Tassel, a wealthy Dutch farmer, who is courted by several village youths but especially by Brom Bones and Ichabod. Katrina is not portrayed very favorably in the story: she is a flirt and encourages both her suitors to continue pursuing her even as she refuses to choose just one. Nevertheless, Katrina is certainly independent for the standards of her time: within the constraints of being a woman in 18th-century America, she exerts her own kind of power through her beauty and the wealth that marrying her would confer. - Character: Hans Van Ripper. Description: An old, ill-tempered Dutch farmer, who lends Ichabod his horse, Gunpowder, so that Ichabod can ride it to attend Baltus Van Tassel's quilting frolic. It is suggested that Ichabod may have fled the village out of fear of Van Ripper—indeed, he loses Van Ripper's nice Sunday saddle in the course of his race from the Headless Horseman, and immediately thinks of the old farmer's wrath that he will face. - Character: Headless Horseman. Description: Also known as the Galloping Hessian of the Hollow. The Dutch wives of Sleepy Hollow especially enjoy telling ghost stories about the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian trooper (a German mercenary who fought for the British) whose head was blown off during the Revolutionary War. As the story goes, since his death, he leaves the churchyard where his body is buried each night and gallops off in search of his head. - Character: Storyteller. Description: The source, according to Knickerbocker, of the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which he tells at a business meeting in New York that Knickerbocker attends. When he is asked about the moral of the story, he responds with a nonsensical logical syllogism that nevertheless suggests that reality might be just as strange as the supernatural. Irving also uses the storyteller as another way to blur history and storytelling, and raise questions about both. - Theme: History and Storytelling. Description: At the beginning of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," we learn from Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional historian narrating the tale, that it took place "in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since"—meaning in 1790, thirty years before the story was published in 1820. A classic example of Irving's irony and humor with its description of 30 years ago as a "remote period," this quotation nonetheless underlines a real problem for early American storytellers, who lacked a long, distinguished American history from which to draw. They could neither rely on this history as material for fiction nor rely on its aesthetic legacy in fitting their own stories into a larger meaning. Irving's use of older Dutch and German sources was one way to get around this problem. In fact, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is full of references to Dutch names, places, and social groups. Early American New York was, indeed, inhabited by many people of Dutch origin, but the references also served to create an artificial historical heritage. Irving even claims historical veracity for this tale by creating the fictional character of Diedrich Knickerbocker. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is supposed to have been found among Knickerbocker's papers, so Irving's story is no more than a transcription of this "true" story. Such a device, called framing, helps to lend a sense of age and legitimacy to the tale (and would have been especially attractive to Irving, as a historian and essayist himself). This historical frame is also complicated and nuanced—while Knickerbocker is referred to as a "historian," there are parts of the story he doesn't know. It turns out that Knickerbocker's story is also a frame for the tale of another storyteller, who appears in the postscript. "I don't believe one-half of it myself," this storyteller admits concerning his own tale, thus melding and confusing history and fiction in both humorous and disconcerting ways.In addition, even within the tale, history and storytelling interact and often fuse. Tarry Town is described as one of the quietest places in the world; even Ichabod Crane is only "tarrying" there, passing his time idly until his "real" life can begin. History doesn't happen in Sleepy Hollow—it takes place elsewhere, offstage. Nevertheless, many of the tall tales the Dutch residents tell, including those of Major André and the Headless Horseman, take place during the Revolutionary War and are unthinkable without this true historical context. By mixing history with tall tales, therefore, Irving helps to construct an artistic heritage to go along with a budding historical legacy for the new American nation. - Theme: Reality, Imagination, and the Supernatural. Description: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," if we listen to its narrator, is only one of many tales crowding Tarry Town and especially the neighborhood of Sleepy Hollow, "one of those highly favored places which abound with chronicle and great men." Ichabod Crane in particular falls under the influence of these chronicles until he is unable to separate reality from his imagination. However, he is not the only one to have trouble telling fact from fiction. There is a "witching influence" that hangs over the whole of Tarry Town, one that fills it with dreams and ghost stories and is "imbibed" not only by its residents but also by anyone that tarried there for awhile. Are people in Tarry Town simply more prone to the supernatural and the imagination? Or is there, in this odd, magical place, simply less of a distinction between the natural and supernatural?In any case, Ichabod is especially given to this sort of fantasizing. He adores listening to the Dutch wives' stories about terrifying spirits and haunting ghosts. But unlike others, Ichabod is unable to accept the stories as just that—stories. His enjoyment turns instantly to horror and fear – in other words he accepts the intrusion of these tales into his own reality. Brom Bones takes advantage of Ichabod's inability to separate reality from fiction, and plays on Ichabod's wild imagination—indeed, Ichabod's weakness is the reason Brom Bones ultimately wins the battle for Katrina Van Tassel.Nevertheless, the story is not entirely clear on whether Ichabod's melding of reality and imagination is solely a weakness or a fault. While he does lose Katrina, we do hear a rumor that it was only thanks to the terror of the Headless Horseman that he finally left Tarry Town and, ultimately, was able to make something of his life, becoming a successful lawyer and judge. And while the story seems to admonish against taking ghost stories too seriously, this warning takes place within a version of a ghost story itself. Supernatural tales and imaginative stories, Irving seems to say, do have their place—though perhaps only as long as we understand they're just stories. - Theme: War and Battle. Description: The plot of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is largely concerned with a battle—one for the heart of Katrina Van Tassel. Or rather, perhaps, a war, made up of various battles and conflicts between Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones. This imagery is not an accident: Irving's story takes place in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, around 1790. This language of war and battle would have made sense to a reader in a newly born nation fresh from the battlefield—a nation which was attempting to forge its own, internal hierarchies. The battle for Katrina takes place on various planes: Brom Bones plays practical jokes on Ichabod, for instance, while Ichabod's attempts to win over Katrina are compared to the conquests of a knight errant going off into battle. Implicit in their competition is a tension between the physical and the intellectual spheres, between Brom's brute strength and "manliness" and Ichabod's role as a schoolteacher. Even within Ichabod's sphere, there is a contrast between his magisterial reigning over the classroom and his need to ingratiate himself to the families that host and feed him.Indeed, Irving is acutely aware of the ways in which social maneuvering is its own kind of battle, with the prizes being power and wealth rather than territory or political independence. In the early United States, though there were certainly social and economic hierarchies, there was also greater mobility and interaction between classes—both Brom Bones and Ichabod are invited to the same quilting frolic, and both are permitted to court Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy family. In the newly egalitarian society of the United Sates, paradoxically, battles such as that for the conquest of Katrina only become more dramatic, since greater heights now seem attainable and within the characters' reach. - Theme: Consumption, Appetite, and Greed. Description: One of the first things we learn about Ichabod Crane is that he is a "huge feeder," with "the dilating powers of an anaconda." His massive appetite leads him from neighbor to neighbor, supplementing the food he can afford on a teacher's income—but it also leads him into courtship and, ultimately, into danger. Ichabod is initially attracted to Katrina because of the abundance of her father's farm, which is described down to the last mouth-watering detail. Indeed, Irving's very prose is full and lush, seeming to goad the reader into the kind of greed Ichabod embodies. Even Katrina is described as being a "tempting […] morsel." Her characterization as an object to be consumed relies on stereotypes of women prevalent at the time, to be sure, but it also refers back to Ichabod's obsession with consumption.Ichabod's appetite goes beyond food and women: it extends to the realm of tall tales and ghost stories, which he "swallows" eagerly—though with his own version of a stomachache afterwards, when he has consumed so much that he becomes terrified by the "ghosts" lying in wait for him on the return home. Ultimately, Irving's description of Ichabod's greed and appetite can be situated within a broader social context. In the early post-revolutionary United States, much of the country still remained to be explored (and claimed). The nation still seemed to be a vast repository of natural resources and abundance only waiting to be consumed. Irving's depiction of Ichabod serves as an implicit rebuke to this kind of thinking. While economic consumption (and competition) were necessary to a society on the cusp of modernity, Ichabod's exaggerated appetite shows the drawbacks of never-ending consumption as dangerous and unhealthy. - Climax: Ichabod is chased by the Headless Horseman through Sleepy Hollow, before being thrown off his horse at the haunted bridge to the church. - Summary: The story opens with a note that it has been found among the possessions of the "late" Diedrich Knickerbocker, who is the narrator of "Sleepy Hollow." Knickerbocker describes the setting, the quiet, bucolic "Tarry Town" in upstate New York that time seems to have passed by. A few miles from town is a small village called "Sleepy Hollow" which has a somnolent, bewitching quality: all the inhabitants, and indeed anyone who stays in the village for awhile, are prone to see visions and ghosts. The townspeople, most of whom have Dutch heritage, love to gather and tell supernatural tales. One of their favorites is of the Headless Horseman, an old Hessian trooper whose head was shot off during the Revolutionary War, and who gallops off in search of it each night. One of those "tarrying" in Sleepy Hollow for a time is our protagonist, Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher from Connecticut. Ichabod, tall and lanky with a voracious appetite, is stern and strict in the schoolhouse but can be shrewd and ingratiating when it suits him, such as at the farmhouses of the students where he lodges. He leads the psalm singing lessons at church and enjoys flirting with the young women, who admire him for his intellectualism. He also enjoys gathering with the old Dutch wives to hear ghost stories and to tell his own, many of which come from Cotton Mather's "History of New England Witchcraft," his preferred book. On his way home, however, Ichabod is also spooked by the stories he's just heard, and every rustle and chirp terrifies him. One of Ichabod's students is Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy Dutch farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. Ichabod is initially attracted to Katrina for her beauty and coquettish nature, but he falls headlong in love with her once he visits her at her father's farm and sees the culinary abundance that would await him if he managed to win her heart. Ichabod is initially confident in his ability to win over Katrina. However, many other rivals are competing with him—in particular, the brawny, clever, and mischievous Brom Bones, who wanders the villages looking for trouble with his gang of sidekicks (though all in good fun). Ichabod knows he's no match for Brom Bones physically, so he avoids confronting him. For a time, both of them continue on their courtship of Katrina separately, and while Brom Bones plays several practical jokes on Ichabod, neither of them seems to gain the upper hand with Katrina. One autumn afternoon, Ichabod is teaching at his schoolhouse when he receives an invitation to a quilting frolic at Baltus Van Tassel's estate that evening. Thrilled and nervous, he spruces himself up and even borrows a horse, Gunpowder, from the ornery old farmer Hans Van Ripper. Initially, the party seems to go well. Ichabod gorges himself on all the food, and manages to dance with Katrina all night while Brom Bones sulks and fumes. Towards the end, everyone begins to tell ghost stories, especially of the Major André, who was taken prisoner during the war, and of the Headless Horseman. Ichabod lingers afterward to talk to Katrina as the other guests begin to leave. Nevertheless, though Knickerbocker doesn't mention exactly what happened, Ichabod leaves the Van Tassel farm shortly afterward looking crestfallen. As Ichabod rides Gunpowder back home, he begins to think of all the tales of horror he has just heard at the party. He approaches the tree near to where Major André was captured and, though terrified, slips under it safely. But as he nears the stream where Major André was taken prisoner, in a place called Wiley's Swamp, he catches sight of a massive, shadowy figure on horseback. Ichabod calls out "Who are you?" but receives no answer, and quickens the pace of Gunpowder, while the figure follows behind him. At one point, the two riders climb a hill and Ichabod realizes that the figure is headless—it must, he thinks, be the Headless Horseman of the famous story. He rides faster and faster, at one point losing Gunpowder's saddle and fearing how angry Hans Van Ripper will be. But he continues riding, attempting to reach the church where, according to the tale, the Horseman will vanish. But as he crosses the bridge, the Horseman hurls its head at Ichabod, who crashes to the ground. The next day Ichabod is missing, and a search party eventually finds the fallen saddle and horses' hoof tracks next to a smashed pumpkin. Some time later, an old farmer returns from New York with the news that Ichabod had run from the village from fear and to escape Katrina's rejection but had become a successful lawyer and judge. The Dutch wives, however, insist that the Headless Horseman carried him off. In the postscript, Knickerbocker claims that he heard this story at a business meeting in New York. After its end, one elderly gentleman had asked the storyteller what the story meant. The storyteller responded with a confusing, nonsensical logical syllogism, and the gentleman claimed he still doubted the story's veracity. At that point, the storyteller claimed he didn't believe half of it himself.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Lemon Orchard - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Apartheid-era South Africa - Character: The Coloured Man. Description: The "coloured" man (a South African term meaning multiracial) is woken up in the middle of the night, bound, and taken captive by four white men. He's a well-educated teacher at a school in the white men's community who allegedly disrespected a white minister at their church and was whipped as punishment. In the story, the men are leading him through a lemon orchard to give him a second whipping in secret. They view the coloured man (and likely all non-white people) as savages and hope to drive him out of town by intimidating him through violence. But the coloured man is notably dignified and level-headed through all of this: although the leader of the four white men berates him with racial slurs and threatens to shoot him with his shotgun as they walk through the orchard, the coloured man keeps his composure in spite of his fear. The coloured man only gives into the leader's demands to refer to him as baas ("master") when Andries, another man in the group, punches him in the face and knocks him to the ground. "The Lemon Orchard" ends just as the white men stop in a clearing to whip the coloured man, and it's implied that they're going to carry out the punishment as planned. Not much is known about the coloured man other than his job as a teacher; he only speaks once, and the narrative only ever refers to him by his racial category. His character could thus be interpreted as an allegory for the broader experience of all non-white people under South African apartheid (a period of legally enforced racial segregation), as so many like him were dehumanized and brutalized during this time. - Character: The Leader. Description: The leader of the group of four white men (himself, the man with the lantern, Andries, and a fourth unnamed man) take the "coloured" (multiracial) man captive in the middle of the night march him through a lemon orchard. The white men plan to whip the coloured man in secret as punishment for disrespecting a white minister at their church. The leader walks at the back of the party despite being in charge, and he carries a loaded shotgun. He has a heavily pockmarked face and cold blue eyes that give him a menacing appearance. Though all four of the white men are cruel toward the coloured man, the leader is the most vicious of all: he continuously shoves his gun against the coloured man's back, all the while hurling racial slurs at him and threatening to shoot and kill him. The leader is also the most overtly racist of the bunch: he characterizes Black and multiracial people as barbarians, makes it clear that he won't tolerate any disrespect from non-white people, and demands that the coloured man address him as baas (a South African term for "master"). The leader's behavior thus exposes the illogic and baselessness of apartheid South Africa's racial hierarchy, since he is clearly far more barbaric toward the coloured man than the coloured man has been toward white people, yet the leader still views himself as inherently superior to non-white people purely on the basis of skin color. - Character: The Man with the Lantern. Description: The man with the lantern walks at the front of the group of four white men (himself, the leader, Andries, and a fourth unnamed man) and the "coloured" (multiracial) man, guiding them through a lemon orchard at night. The white men plan to whip the coloured man in secret as punishment for disrespecting a white minister at their church. The man with the lantern is the only one of the white men who openly expresses anxiety about hurting the coloured man, urging the leader not to shoot the man with his shotgun. But despite this, the man with the lantern is just as complicit in the group's violent abuse as the rest. At one point as they walk through the orchard, he hears a watchdog barking in the distance and comments that he would take good care of a pet like that. Clearly, then, the man with the lantern has the capacity to empathize and care for others—he simply choose not to extend that courtesy toward the coloured man. His character thus demonstrates how discriminatory beliefs are often rooted in hypocrisy and a denial of one's moral conscience. - Character: Andries. Description: Andries is part of a group of white men (along with the leader, the man with the lantern, and another unnamed man) who take the "coloured" (multiracial) man captive in the night and march him through a lemon orchard. The white men plan to whip the coloured man in secret as punishment for disrespecting a white minister at their church. Andries and one of the other men both carry whips, while their leader carries a loaded shotgun. Andries commits the most severe act of violence in the story, punching the coloured man in the face when he refuses to respond to the leader's racist provocations. His character quickly escalates from a passive member of the group to an enactor of violence, demonstrating how a mob mentality like that of the white men can reinforce and heighten abusive behavior. - Theme: Apartheid and Racial Hierarchy. Description: "The Lemon Orchard" is set in South Africa during apartheid, a period when the country's government enforced racial segregation. This system was based on the ideology of white supremacy and the racist belief that non-white people are inherently savage, barbaric, and violent. In the story, four white men take a "coloured" (multiracial) man captive in the middle of the night and prepare to whip him as punishment for disrespecting a white person in their community. But the ways in which the white men speak and behave toward the coloured man reveal the baselessness of their hatred toward him, since the man's alleged slight does not warrant how he's treated in return. "The Lemon Orchard" thus serves as an allegory for the broader injustice of apartheid, as the story implicitly condemns South Africa's racial hierarchy as despicably cruel, unwarranted, and dehumanizing for everyone in society. The white men's treatment of the coloured man is rooted in the social norms of apartheid, reinforcing the racist notion that non-white people are inherently inferior. As the four white men march the coloured man through the titular lemon orchard with the intent to whip him under cover of night, it's clear that they view him as fundamentally different from and indeed inferior to them. They wake him up and force him out in the cold with only a thin raincoat, not even allowing him to tie his shoes. The reader immediately sympathizes with the coloured man, who shivers violently while the white men are bundled up in warm clothes. The coloured man is dehumanized, deemed undeserving of even a basic need like appropriate clothing, simply because the white men view him as inferior. The white men also use language that draws a clear line between white people and Black or multiracial people. The coloured man's name is never used: the narrative only refers to him by his racial category, and the white characters only call him Afrikaans racial slurs that essentially translate to "barbarian." The leader of the group forces the coloured man to call him baas, meaning "boss" or "master," creating a kind of master/slave dynamic between the white captors and their multiracial captive. The casual way in which the men use these slurs and enforce a racial hierarchy through language implies that such divisiveness and cruelty is commonplace and acceptable in apartheid South Africa. The white men continuously harass and belittle the coloured man with this offensive language in spite of the fact that he has not personally hurt or insulted these men in any way; they hurl abuse at him for no reason other than his race and his perceived slight toward another white man. Given the unreciprocated nature of this cruelty, the story implies that this treatment is wholly undeserved, implicitly condemning the racial hierarchy underpinning the white men's behavior as baseless and unjust. As the white men's behavior toward the coloured man grows increasingly cruel, it becomes even clearer that their attitudes are embedded in a system that is entirely arbitrary—there's no justifiable basis for South Africa's racial hierarchy. The "crime" for which the coloured man is being punished was simply having "the audacity to be cheeky and uncivilised towards a minister" at the white men's church. The coloured man did not actually harm anyone, nor does he retaliate against (or even respond to) the white men's provocations as they walk through the orchard. The man is clearly not a barbarian or a criminal, yet he is automatically categorized as such under the racial hierarchy of apartheid and will be brutally whipped as a result. Indeed, the white men prove themselves to be the true savages, as they beat and continuously threaten to kill the coloured man (the leader of the group is carrying a loaded shotgun) for not answering them when they address him using racial slurs. Under apartheid, people like the coloured man are judged purely on the color of their skin rather than their moral character—an attitude that the story implicitly condemns through its sympathetic portrayal of the coloured man alongside the barbaric cruelty of the white men. Racial hierarchy, then, is shown to be an entirely arbitrary and unfair way of organizing society. When simply being non-white is treated as a criminal offense, innocent people like the coloured man in the story end up being brutalized, and those at all levels of apartheid's hierarchy—both the oppressors and the oppressed—are stripped of their humanity. - Theme: Power, Fear, and Violence. Description: "The Lemon Orchard" is largely a story of how an imbalance of power harms the underclass in society—but also how it corrupts the upper classes. The four white men who take a "coloured" (multiracial) man captive in the story clearly benefit from their privileged position relative to him, as they're able to move through society without being judged by or punished for the color of their skin the way that non-white people are. But it becomes clear that they're also possessed by a deep-seated fear of losing that social status, and as a result, they inflict senseless violence upon oppressed people like the coloured man. The story makes the case that such an imbalance of power is often unearned—and that the fear of this losing privilege that's so arbitrarily given can lead those in the higher tiers of society to violently suppress others in order to secure their social standing. The story takes place during South African apartheid (a period of legally enforced racial segregation), and it's clear that white South Africans have immense power and privilege while non-white South Africans are treated as an underclass—regardless of whether or not white people have actually earned that power. The white men in the story steal away the coloured man in the night to whip him as punishment for a perceived crime: being rude to a white minister at the men's church. The fact that something as benign as talking back to a white person of authority is treated an offense that's punishable with violence suggests that white people hold an immense amount of social and legal influence over non-white people. This imbalance of power along racial lines exists in spite of the fact that many non-white South Africans, like the coloured man in the story, are well-educated and have important roles in society. As the four white men march the coloured man through the titular lemon orchard to whip him, the leader of the group points out that the coloured man is "one of those educated bushmen" and "a teacher in a school for which we pay." The white men, by contrast, are implied to be less educated and perhaps of a lower socioeconomic status given their use of crude language and racial slurs, their mockery of educated people, and their complaints about funding the school. The power that white people hold over non-white people in apartheid South Africa, then, is seemingly unearned: it's based solely on skin color rather than on individuals' achievements, competence, or earning power. That the white men feel justified in enacting vigilante justice against the coloured man also suggests that they don't fear legal repercussions in the same way that non-white people do. The coloured man was already whipped once for his supposed transgression against the white minister, yet he didn't seek legal repercussions for this abuse—likely because he knew he'd lose the case given the court's bias in favor of white people. The white men, however, are confident that they can get away with "teach[ing] him [the coloured man] a lesson" by whipping him. It's clear that under apartheid, white people enjoy undue privilege and are able to exert violent control over non-white people simply because the system is built to enable such an imbalance of power. Though this vast inequality between white and non-white people under apartheid is socially advantageous for white people, it also creates a constant sense of fear and insecurity for them, leading them to violently suppress those they perceive as a threat to their privileged position. One of the white men in the group accuses the coloured man of "shivering with fear" as they walk through the orchard, yet the white men are clearly the ones who are afraid (and the coloured man is clearly shivering because the white men only allowed him to wear a thin jacket on a cold night). The impending whipping is an extreme overreaction to the coloured man's perceived slight, suggesting that the white men are actually terrified of the coloured man and feel the need to suppress him at all costs. The fact that the men's privileged position in society is unearned and based on something as arbitrary their skin color means that they'll always feel a sense of insecurity over their status, as evidenced by the leader's insistence that the coloured man refer to him as baas ("master") to reaffirm his sense of power over the situation. Within this tenuous dynamic, any challenge to a white person's authority is seen as a threat to their power that must be met with violence. This deep-seated insecurity and fear is further highlighted by the white men's need to threaten and belittle the coloured man and inflict smaller acts of violence upon him. As they walk through the orchard, the leader hurls racial slurs at the coloured man and threatens to kill him with his shotgun; one of the other white men, Andries, punches the coloured man in the face when he refuses to respond to their provocations. Despite their claims that the coloured man is pathetic and inferior to them, it logically follows that they wouldn't treat him with this level of brutality if they didn't see him as a formidable threat. In their eyes, the coloured man's willingness to challenge the minister was perhaps a symbolic act of challenging white authority in general—a terrifying prospect for the white men that leads them to violently suppress the coloured man. The four white men in "The Lemon Orchard" have seemingly done nothing to earn the social status they've been given; they were simply lucky to have been born white under an oppressive regime that happens to privilege their race over others. Yet the secret way in which they carry out the late-night whipping suggests that, on some level, they know that the power they hold is undeserved and that the violence they're committing is unjustified. The story thus implies that even those who benefit from apartheid know that the system is unfairly tipped to favor them—and that eradicating this power imbalance altogether is the only way to do away with the fear and violence that it perpetuates. - Theme: Discrimination and Hypocrisy. Description: "The Lemon Orchard," which takes place in South Africa during apartheid (a period of legally enforced racial segregation), is a stark portrayal of how large-scale, institutionalized racism affects people of color. But by focusing on a specific instance of racism—four white men taking a "coloured" (multiracial) man captive and whipping him as punishment for disrespecting a white person—the story also digs deep into the logical fallacies and hypocrisy underpinning the discriminatory beliefs of ordinary white civilians. Through the white men's dialogue, the story exposes the underlying inconsistencies beneath racial discrimination, arguing that people have to deceive themselves and hold hypocritical double standards in order to justify treating people of other races like second-class citizens. The white men in the story clearly judge the coloured man differently than they judge themselves, suggesting that discriminating against others is inherently illogical and unfair since it requires holding inconsistent double standards. As the white men lead the coloured man through a lemon orchard to whip him under cover of night, they berate him with racial slurs that are meant to dehumanize Black and multiracial people and characterize them as savages. Yet the group's leader also points out that the coloured man is "one of those educated bushmen," and that he's a teacher at a local school. The white men's crude manner of speech and mockery of education suggests that they are actually less educated and less civilized than this well-educated teacher is—clearly, then, the standards by which they judge non-white people are entirely separate from those by which they judge themselves. Even more nefarious is how the white men treat the coloured man like a criminal despite the fact that they're the ones about to commit a horrible act of violence against him. The coloured man's only offense is that he "had the audacity to be cheeky and uncivilised towards a minister" at the white men's church—he hasn't committed an actual crime, yet they're going to violently punish him. Again, the white men are deeply hypocritical in their treatment of the coloured man: they decry him as "uncivilised" yet march him off to be whipped, seemingly in denial of the fact that they're the barbaric criminals in this situation. Indeed, the story suggests that those who discriminate against others often know that this is wrong but do it anyway, further condemning this behavior as hypocritical. The fact that the white men kidnap the coloured man at night and take him to a secret place to be whipped suggests that, on some level, they feel guilty about what they're doing—yet they feel righteous in going through with it anyway. In this way, the story implies that racist people like the white men in the story have to engage in mental gymnastics to uphold their beliefs. They must lie to themselves and validate one another through a kind of mob mentality in order to justify their discriminatory and violent treatment of those who are different from them. In particular, the man with the lantern (who guides the others through the orchard) is notably less overt in his cruelty and seemingly more aware of his actions than the other white men are. Although he's certainly complicit in their plan to whip the coloured man, he's the only one who isn't armed with a weapon (the leader wields a loaded shotgun while Andries and another man carry whips). He expresses anxiety over the leader's threats about shooting the white men, not wanting to "be involved in any murder." Clearly, the man with the lantern knows that what they're doing is wrong—yet he goes along with the others in the group, allowing his misguided beliefs about non-white people to usurp his nagging sense of moral responsibility. At one point, the man with the lantern hears a farm dog barking in the distance and says, "I would like to have a dog like that. I would take great care of such a dog." Though this is a seemingly unrelated comment made in passing, it's actually very telling: the man with the lantern is clearly capable of empathy and care for beings who are different than him, yet he hypocritically chooses to go along with treating the coloured man worse than how he'd treat an animal. Again, he seems to be compartmentalizing his underlying moral conscience in order to conform to apartheid, reinforce his discriminatory beliefs, and absolve himself of guilt. "The Lemon Orchard" demonstrates how apartheid's systemic segregation plays out on a small scale, personalizing the issue by showing how misguided and hypocritical individual racists are in their behavior toward marginalized people. And ultimately, the story shows that by enshrining discrimination within the legal system, people feel justified in denying and undermining their consciences in order to act out this discrimination in their personal lives. - Climax: The white men stop walking and prepare to whip the coloured man, while the moonlight illuminates the sharp edges of the lemon trees. - Summary: On a cold night, a group of men walks between two rows of trees in a lemon orchard. Overhead, the moon is hidden behind grey clouds; nothing can be heard except the distant sounds of crickets chirping and a dog briefly barking. The tart smell of lemons hangs in the air. A man holding a lantern walks ahead of the others, and another man carrying a loaded shotgun calls to him to slow down because it's dark at the back of the group. Though this man walks at the rear of the party, he's the leader. Another of the men comments about the chilly weather, and the leader asks if this man is as cold as the "coloured" (multiracial) man walking ahead of them, using a racial slur to refer to him. The coloured man, whose hands are bound behind his back, shivers—he isn't dressed in warm clothing like the others are. The men had only allowed him to put on pants and a raincoat over his pajamas when they woke him up and took him captive. The coloured man is both too afraid and too stubborn to respond when the man with the lantern mockingly asks if he's cold. Andries, the fifth man in the group, says that the coloured man is shivering with fear rather than cold. Both he and the man who commented about the cold are carrying whips. Andries then says that the coloured man is dumb, which makes the leader demand that they all stop and wait. He says that the coloured man isn't dumb—rather, he's a well-educated savage. The leader shoves his shotgun against the coloured man's back and cocks back the hammer, demanding that the coloured man respond when a baas ("master") speaks to him. The man with the lantern nervously warns the leader not to shoot, since they don't want to be liable for a murder. The leader questions what the man with the lantern means. Under the lanternlight, the leader's face is dark red and so visibly pockmarked that it resembles a map covered with markings and topography. His blue eyes look like frozen water. He calls the coloured man a racial slur again and says that the man is a teacher at a school that the he and the others pay for. The leader reminds everyone that the coloured man disrespected a white minister at their church, which he won't stand for. The man with the lantern agrees with the leader, but he again cautions against murder. The leader retorts that he'll shoot any non-white person (again using a racial slur) he wants in order to get respect. The leader shoves his gun into the coloured man's back and demands to know if the coloured man heard him; Andries steps up, punches the coloured man, in the face and echoes the leader. The coloured man, stumbling to his feet, is afraid for his life. He answers "Yes, baas," in a dignified yet derisive way, though the others don't pick up on his tone. After this, the group continues walking through the orchard. The leader says that the coloured man should have gone to court to dispute the whipping that the principal and the church leader gave him. Andries says that they'll give him a whipping bad enough to teach him a lesson. The leader agrees—they'll drive the coloured man away to the city where less dignified people live. They don't want educated non-white people in their town. The sound of the dog barking in the distance interrupts the men, and the man with the lantern comments that it's a good watchdog—he unsuccessfully tried to buy it from the farmer who owns it. He says that he'd take great care of it. As the group keeps walking, the lemon trees rustle in the wind, a harsh sound that doesn't seem to fit with how nice the fruit smells—the smell is stronger now, as though the lemons were being juiced. The air has gotten chillier, the crickets louder; the moon has appeared from behind the clouds to cast silvery light on the leaves. Finally, the man with the lantern points out a place to stop: a gap in the orchard, surrounded by trees, that resembles an amphitheater. The moonlight shines onto the sharp edges of the leaves and branches, lighting up the dew so that it looks like quicksilver.

- Genre: Realistic Fiction - Title: The Lesson - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Harlem and Midtown Manhattan, likely in the 1960s - Character: Sylvia. Description: The protagonist and narrator of the story, Sylvia, is a young Black girl who lives in Harlem with her cousin Sugar and the rest of her family. Their extended family moved to New York City from the South together, and they struggle to make ends meet. Sylvia sees herself and Sugar as a single unit, separated from the rest of the world and especially opposed to Miss Moore, the self-appointed mentor of the kids in Sylvia's neighborhood. Sylvia is a rebellious child who prides herself on her independence, and she clashes with Miss Moore because she resents Miss Moore's college education, "proper" way of speaking, and patronizing lessons. She has little interest in learning about social justice issues or listening to Miss Moore's lectures on racial discrimination and economic quality—she'd rather focus on having fun with Sugar. Sylvia also has a lot of anger and lashes out verbally and physically when she is upset. This anger is first directed toward Miss Moore—but over the course of the story, she comes to better understand Miss Moore's lessons about economic inequality and social justice and realizes that some people are wealthy while others, like her own family, suffer. After an eye-opening trip to the upscale toy store FAO Schwarz, Sylvia begins to redirect her anger away from Miss Moore and toward the wealthy patrons of the toy store. - Character: Miss Moore. Description: Miss Moore is the self-appointed teacher of the kids in her Harlem neighborhood, as her college education makes her feel that it is her responsibility to teach them about the world. However, she doesn't fit in with the rest of the community: Sylvia notes that she is "the only woman on the block with no first name," and that she has "nappy hair" and "proper speech." The story heavily implies that Sylvia and the other people in her community disapprove of these qualities because they don't fit into their expectations of how a Black woman should look and act. In other words, the way Miss Moore presents her racial identity is a point of conflict between her and other Black people. The kids in the neighborhood don't pay much attention to her lessons, particularly Sylvia, who resents her and finds her patronizing. While Miss Moore has good intentions in her desire to teach, her use of formal speech and obtuse questions often alienates the kids. She is rarely straightforward with her lessons, instead encouraging the kids to figure out answers to their problems on their own, which frustrates her students but ultimately helps Sylvia start to reconsider her understanding of the world. Miss Moore is representative of the conflict between Black intellectuals and less formally educated Black people. While she has the knowledge and desire to educate her community, she is viewed as an outsider and struggles to connect with the people that she's trying to help. - Character: Sugar. Description: Sugar is Sylvia's friend and cousin who, like Sylvia, lives in Harlem with their extended family. While Sugar and Sylvia at first seem to be on the same page about everything, including their resentment of Miss Moore, over the course of the story Sugar starts to distance herself from Sylvia—first by touching the toy sailboat at FAO Schwarz and later by speaking up about what she learned on the trip to the toy store. Sugar's journey over the course of the story seems to parallel Sylvia's, as they both learn to recognize the wealth inequality in their society. But while Sylvia is unable to effectively understand and vocalize her feelings due to her anger, Sugar is able to learn from Miss Moore's lesson without feelings of resentment. This difference leads to a change in Sylvia, as she has to deal with a new gap in understanding between her and Sugar. - Character: Mercedes. Description: Mercedes is one of the children from the Harlem neighborhood who Miss Moore decides to take under her wing. Mercedes's comments throughout the story imply that she comes from a somewhat wealthier family than the rest of the group, as she has a desk at home (whereas the other kids don't) and seems much more comfortable with the expensive prices of the toys at FAO Schwarz. Whenever she mentions her family's money, the other kids in the group, particularly Rosie Giraffe, shove and mock her. Mercedes's character thus demonstrates the potential differences in wealth even within their impoverished Harlem neighborhood, and the potential for this inequality to breed resentment. - Character: Flyboy. Description: Flyboy is one of the kids in Miss Moore's group. He is poor like the other children and claims that he's homeless, but Sylvia implies that he only says this to make people feel sorry for him. At one point in the narration, Sylvia uses a homophobic slur to describe Flyboy because he doesn't mind the girls putting lipstick on him. - Character: Big Butt. Description: Big Butt is one of the kids in Miss Moore's group; he's related to Junebug. He wants to buy an expensive microscope he sees in the window of FAO Schwarz, but because his family is poor, it would take him years to save up for it. Big Butt's real name is Ronald, although only Miss Moore calls him that. - Theme: Wealth, Poverty, and Inequality. Description: In "The Lesson," a group of Black children and Miss Moore, their self-appointed mentor, take a trip from their poor Harlem neighborhood to FAO Schwarz, an upscale toy store. Here, Sylvia (the narrator) and the other kids are both fascinated and baffled by the exorbitant prices in the store, and they also become aware of their own poverty in contrast to the wealthy people who can afford to shop there. In moving from their homes, which Miss Moore describes as "slums," to this center of extravagant wealth, the children must confront how different social classes have different relationships with money: in the kids' Harlem neighborhood, money is only spent on necessities, while FAO Schwarz customers use money to buy beautiful but impractical luxuries. Sylvia is thus forced to reckon with the fact that the poverty she and her friends face is the result of a system of inequality in the U.S. that allows some people to get ahead and stay ahead, while others—like her family and community—struggle to survive and have few opportunities to better themselves financially. Most of the people in Sylvia's community struggle to afford even basic necessities, so the lavish items at FAO Schwarz are shocking to the children in Miss Moore's group. Miss Moore and the children take taxis to FAO Schwarz, and Miss Moore gives Sylvia five dollars to spend on the taxi fare. But Sylvia keeps both the tip and the change, deciding that she needs the money more than the driver. Because her family has so little, even this relatively small sum of money is important enough to her to cause her to disobey Miss Moore and risk upsetting the driver. Then, when Miss Moore and the children arrive at the toy store, Big Butt decides he wants to buy a $300 microscope he sees in the window. But when Miss Moore asks how long it would take him and Junebug to save up their allowances to afford it, they realize that it would take years. While Miss Moore is excited to encourage Big Butt's interest in science, it's clear that his family's finances make it difficult for him to pursue that interest. Just after this, the group sees a $480 glass paperweight in the store window, and none of the kids recognize what the object is. When Miss Moore explains what it is and asks if the kids have desks at home that they might need a paperweight for, almost all of them say no, emphasizing how little they have compared to the people who shop at this store. Indeed, the expensive items in the window make the children realize that the customers here must have enough money that it wouldn't matter to them if the toys were lost or broken, whereas the kids from Harlem must scrimp and save to afford the simplest items. In fact, the environment in and around the store is so different from the children's neighborhood that it makes them feel ashamed and self-conscious of their poverty. The moment the kids reach Fifth Avenue (the street in Midtown Manhattan where FAO Schwarz is located), the environment changes. Sylvia notices that "everybody dressed up in stockings," and one woman is even wearing a fur coat in the middle of the summer. These conspicuous displays of wealth mark the class divide between the kids and the people that surround them in this more affluent part of New York City. The wealthy people in Midtown and the expensive toys in the window make Sylvia feel self-conscious: she hesitates to go into the toy store because she feels "feel[s] funny, shame," even though she knows she has "as much right to go in as anybody." Then, once inside, the children "walk[] on tiptoe and hardly touch[] the games and puzzles and things." Aware of their poverty (seemingly for the first time) in contrast to the wealthy people who shop at FAO Schwarz, the children feel ashamed and unworthy of even browsing the store. Ultimately, the story presents this economic inequality that the children notice as part of an unjust system that allows some to thrive while others suffer in poverty. On the ride home from FAO Schwarz, Sylvia thinks about a $35 dancing toy clown she saw there and imagines all of the things her family could use that amount of money for. Notably, the purchases she imagines are all practical: they could buy new beds, visit Sylvia's grandfather, or pay for their rent. She is angry and confused at the idea that anyone could justify spending so much money on toys, when her family barely has enough to survive. In essence, she has an epiphany that some people live totally different lives than her and possess an amount of money that dwarfs that of her and her family. Back in Harlem, Sylvia's friend Sugar vocalizes a similar thought: she reflects on the trip by telling the group that she doesn't see how the United States is a democracy given the huge wealth disparity between the richest and poorest Americans. She points out that poor people don't have an "equal crack at the dough," meaning that they don't have as many opportunities available to them. This implies that those who are poor tend to stay poor because the system works against them. Sugar thus recognizes that there's severe economic inequality in New York City and in the U.S. more broadly, and that their Harlem community is suffering as a result. At the end of the story, Sugar suggests that they use the four dollars Sylvia has left from the taxi to buy some junk food. But Sylvia brushes Sugar off and lets her run ahead, resolving to go "think this day through" rather than spending her money. Finally, she reflects that "ain't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin." Together, Sylvia's decision to save her money and her resolve to win suggest that she's begun to understand that the U.S. has profound, systemic wealth inequality, which has deeply affected her life without her knowledge. And, as a result, she has decided to resist this system rather than passively accept it, which means taking any opportunity she's given to better herself financially—she isn't going to let the system "beat" her. - Theme: Education and Anger. Description: In "The Lesson," a woman named Miss Moore moves into a poor area in Harlem and begins teaching a group of neighborhood children about a wide range of subjects, from basic skills like arithmetic to social issues like poverty. The narrator, Sylvia, is initially angry at Miss Moore because she finds the lessons boring and patronizing. She is particularly upset when Miss Moore takes the children to FAO Schwarz, an upscale Manhattan toy store, as a lesson in wealth inequality. But this educational exercise ends up reorienting Sylvia's anger—by the end of the story, she's angry not at Miss Moore, but at the fact that wealthy people are able to spend exorbitant amounts of money on pointless trinkets at FAO Schwarz, while her own family struggles to make ends meet. This transition suggests that while anger can hold people back from learning, as it does when Sylvia first resists Miss Moore's lessons, it can also propel them forward, motivating them to better understand issues and injustices that affect them directly. At first, Sylvia is angry at Miss Moore because she finds Miss Moore's teaching style patronizing and frustrating. Sylvia is resentful of Miss Moore's college degree—which no one else in the neighborhood has—because she feels that Miss Moore uses it as a tool to control others and force them to listen to her (though, notably, Miss Moore never actually mentions her degree in the story). She also resents the patronizing questions Miss Moore asks, such as whether the kids in the group (who all come from poor families) know what money is. As a result, Sylvia refuses to listen to Miss Moore or to participate in the lessons, essentially allowing her anger and resentment to hold her back from taking Miss Moore's points seriously. On the day that the group goes to FAO Schwarz, Miss Moore gives Sylvia five dollars to spend on the taxi fare and asks that Sylvia calculate a 10-percent tip for the driver. While Sylvia at first tries to figure out the tip in her head, she ultimately fails and instead decides to just pocket the tip and extra change as a way to get back at Miss Moore. This choice demonstrates Sylvia's conflicting attitudes toward Miss Moore and education. She'd like to solve the problem to prove her own intelligence, but she is also willing to give up on learning to calculate percentages just to make herself feel like she's defeating Miss Moore. Later, outside the toy store, Sylvia is so intrigued by the toy sailboat in the window that she asks Miss Moore about the cost of a real boat. Miss Moore responds by telling Sylvia to research the question on her own, which is frustrating for Sylvia, who wanted a simple answer to her question. She isn't at all interested in finding the answer herself, again allowing her anger at Miss Moore to usurp her desire to learn new things. However, the trip to FAO Schwarz is a lesson that gets through to Sylvia, as it presents an alternative target for her anger: the injustice in her society. The first instance of this new avenue for Sylvia's anger comes when she reads the high price tag for the toy sailboat at FAO Schwarz: $1,150. Sylvia doesn't seem to understand her anger in this moment, but it's implied that she's upset because she's confronting the inequality between poor people like her (who can barely afford basic necessities) and wealthy people who can easily afford toys like the sailboat. This shift is actually a result of Miss Moore's hands-on method of teaching, though Sylvia doesn't seem to realize this either. Miss Moore forces Sylvia to encounter wealth inequality firsthand—an issue she's never had to think deeply about before—and, in doing so, pushes Sylvia's anger in a new direction. Sylvia deals with another sudden and confusing surge of anger when she witnesses her friend Sugar touch the toy sailboat in the store. Some of her reaction is based in jealousy, but it also seems to be rooted in the anger and shame she feels because of her poverty. She goes to Miss Moore to ask why Miss Moore brought the children here—and, perhaps, to get an explanation for her own unexpected feelings. But Miss Moore again refuses to give Sylvia a straight answer. In this case, Miss Moore's refusal is useful to Sylvia, as it forces her to spend time privately considering why she feels angry and what she's learned over the course of the day. Indeed, the impact of these lessons is evident when, on the way home from the toy store, Sylvia again gets angry as she begins to realize that there's a stark difference between her family's financial situation and that of the wealthy people who shop at FAO Schwarz. She recognizes how unfair it is that the cost of a toy at FAO Schwarz could pay for her things her family really needs, like rent money or new beds. This new awareness of how wealth inequality affects her life shows that while anger and resentment can close people off from learning, it can also motivate them to better understand problems that impact them. The concluding line of the story offer insight into the new perspective Sylvia has gained: as Sylvia storms away from the rest of the group, she thinks about the four dollars she has left from the taxi and reflects, "Ain't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin." By this, she seems to mean that no one is going to take her money away from her or prevent her from succeeding in life. So, by the end of the story, Sylvia's anger is still evident—she's is still defiant and fiercely independent. Yet here it seems that her target has become more productive, as she understands that her anger should not be directed at Miss Moore, but at the societal conditions that have forced her and her community into poverty. - Theme: Race, Identity, and Social Division. Description: Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" takes place in New York City sometime in the mid-20th century. The narrator, Sylvia, is a young Black girl whose family moved to Harlem from the South, where it's likely that they lived under Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. And although segregation was never legally mandated in northern states like New York, race is still a point of conflict in the story, reflecting the overall atmosphere of racial tension in the U.S. at this time. For instance, Sylvia resents her neighbor Miss Moore (who is Black) because Miss Moore wears her hair in a natural style, but also because she has a college education and uses what Sylvia calls "proper speech" rather than the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) dialect that Sylvia and her peers speak. Moreover, there's a clear divide in the story between Black people and white people, as the white people whom Sylvia and the other Black characters encounter never speak during the story and are portrayed as alien and distant from the Black characters' lives. Through these details, the story shows that the way people present their racial identity can create tension and resentment, even among people of the same race. Furthermore, it suggests that even in places where segregation isn't enforced, racism can still divide people from one another. When Miss Moore moves into Sylvia's neighborhood, Sylvia and the other Black people in the community see Miss Moore as an outsider because of how she presents her racial identity, even though she is also Black. Miss Moore has several qualities that make her stand out: she speaks "proper" English rather than AAVE, has a college education, dresses formally, and goes by Miss Moore rather than just her first name. Sylvia—along with the other kids and even the adults in the community—find all of these things alien. And given the way that Sylvia lists these qualities just before noting that Miss Moore has very dark skin, it's implied that they find Miss Moore strange specifically because she doesn't fit the stereotype of how they expect a Black woman to behave. Alongside this, Miss Moore embodies Blackness in a way that the other members of the community don't: namely, she wears her hair naturally, in a style that Sylvia describes as "nappy." This derogatory, racially charged term suggests that Sylvia (and perhaps others in the neighborhood) have a contradictory view of how Black people are supposed to look and act: they shouldn't use "proper speech" that's stereotypically associated with white people, but they also shouldn't be proud of their Blackness and embrace their natural features. From this, it's clear that the community doesn't really know what to make of Miss Moore, whose way of presenting her racial identity is very different from the other Black people in Sylvia's neighborhood. The adults talk about her behind her back, and Sylvia resents Miss Moore's college degree and mocks her appearance and way of speaking. The other characters' reactions thus show how differences in the way people think about and present racial identity can cause tension, even among people of the same race. White people, meanwhile, are presented as wholly alien to the Black characters. Notably, there are no white characters in the story, and the few white people mentioned are portrayed almost as exotic. This is particularly evident when Miss Moore takes the kids on a field trip to Midtown Manhattan (an affluent and predominately white part of New York City): she welcomes them to the neighborhood "in the voice she uses at the museum," emphasizing the surrounding white people's otherness relative to the main group. Sylvia finds white people strange, noticing one white woman on Fifth Avenue wearing a fur coat in the middle of the summer. Both Sylvia and later Rosie Giraffe comment that white people are "crazy." In presenting white people as outsiders or others, the story subverts the trope of white writers exoticizing other races and offers a reversal of the usual perspective, which still suggests that there's an unspoken but evident racial divide between white and black people in the city. Furthermore, the Black children's discomfort in predominately white spaces suggests that the New York City of the story feels racially segregated, even though segregation isn't legally mandated. Midway through the story, Sylvia and Sugar are confronted with the idea of entering the upscale toy store FAO Schwarz, a space that seems associated with whiteness because of its location in a wealthy white neighborhood. But the girls are too timid and ashamed to enter until Mercedes shoves them inside the store, emotions that Sylvia likens to the feeling of entering a Catholic church, another traditionally white space. Even after the kids enter FAO Schwarz, they're nervous and overly cautious about touching the toys, a feeling that is unfamiliar for the usually outspoken Sylvia. Together, the Black characters' feelings of unbelonging and inferiority suggest that although New York City was not legally segregated like the Jim Crow South at this time, Black people still felt excluded from predominately white neighborhoods and establishments. As a whole, then, "The Lesson" shows that even in an ostensibly equal and racially integrated society, race can still divide people. - Climax: Sylvia lets Sugar run ahead of her and thinks "ain't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin." - Summary: "The Lesson" takes place in New York City in the mid-20th century and centers on a group of Black children from Harlem and their self-appointed teacher, Miss Moore, who is also Black. One of the kids, a girl named Sylvia, is particularly frustrated with Miss Moore, whom she finds patronizing and annoying. Miss Moore is a Black woman who's college-educated and wants to teach the kids about issues that affect them (like poverty), but Sylvia and the other children pay much attention to her lessons. Sylvia and her friend Sugar especially resent Miss Moore's college education and hate her "nappy" hair, "proper speech," and formal clothes The adults in the neighborhood similarly talk about Miss Moore behind her back, though they always make the kids dress up and attend her lessons. One day, Miss Moore decides to take the kids on a trip to FAO Schwarz, an extravagant toy store in a much more affluent part of the city. Miss Moore gives Sylvia a few dollars to pay for the taxi fare and tells her to calculate a 10-percent tip. But Sylvia isn't able to do the calculation in her head, so when they arrive, she doesn't tip the driver and pockets the extra money. When the group reaches Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, they ogle at the extravagantly dressed white people on the streets, whom Sylvia thinks are "crazy." At FAO Schwarz, the children begin to look through the windows at the toys on display. They're astonished by both the high price tags and the items themselves: Big Butt wishes he could afford a $300 telescope, and all of the children are shocked by a $480 paperweight. The kids are particularly fascinated by a toy sailboat that costs $1,195, and they wonder why any parents would ever spend that much money on a toy when it would be so fragile, and they could just make their own toy boat for cheaper. Eventually, Miss Moore suggests that they go into the store. Sylvia and Sugar lead the way, but both of them feel suddenly anxious and ashamed as they get to the front door. Sylvia remembers feeling the same way when she and Sugar snuck into a Catholic Church—they were going to pull a prank on the parishioners, but Sylvia couldn't go through with it. Another one of the kids, Mercedes, marches confidently into the store, pushing past Sylvia and Sugar. The kids are too nervous to touch any of the incredibly expensive toys until Sugar decides to reach out and run her hand along the sailboat they had seen through the window. For some reason, this action upsets Sylvia, who goes to Miss Moore and asks why she brought them to the store. Miss Moore doesn't answer and instead asks if Sylvia is upset about something. Sylvia just tells Miss Moore that she thinks they should leave. On the way home, Sylvia thinks over the experience. She imagines how the money that wealthy people are spending on toys could help her family buy basic necessities and wonders how people exist who have enough money to spend on luxuries like the toys at the store. She remembers Miss Moore's lessons about inequality and injustice, which makes her angry again. When the group gets back to Harlem, Miss Moore asks the kids what they've learned. To Sylvia's surprise, Sugar volunteers and expresses her own frustration with the economic inequality she has seen. Sylvia is annoyed and tries to step on Sugar's feet to get her to stop talking, but Sugar moves away from Sylvia and continues. Miss Moore asks if anyone else has anything to say, making a point of looking at Sylvia, but Sylvia just walks away. Sugar catches up with her to ask if she wants to get ice cream with the money from the taxi fare, but Sylvia decides that she needs to take some time to think about everything that happened that day. She lets Sugar run ahead and decides that she isn't going to let anyone beat her.

- Genre: Picaresque novel - Title: The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes - Point of view: First-person narrator (Lazaro) - Setting: 16th century Spain - Character: Lazaro de Tormes. Description: Lazaro is the story's narrator and protagonist. Born to a poor family in Spain and given away by his mother at a young age, Lazaro spends his childhood serving many different masters who treat him cruelly. At first, he describes his experiences with the innocence of a young child and even a sense of humor, but as Lazaro grows older, his outlook becomes increasingly cynical and unfeeling. By the end of the book Lazaro has found a stable job advertising wines as a town crier and he seems to be known locally as a cuckold (someone whose wife is unfaithful), but he is too jaded for this to bother him much. Over the course of this short novel, Lazaro transforms from a sympathetic character into a hardened, amoral man. This transformation is symbolic of the book's general message that only those willing to trade honor for profit can succeed in a corrupt society. - Character: The blind man. Description: The blind man is Lazaro's first master, about whom Lazaro writes the most. A miserly and streetwise old beggar, the blind man earns a living by travelling from town to town saying prayers and blessings for whoever will pay him. He beats Lazaro and doesn't feed him well, but he teaches Lazaro valuable lessons about how to protect and provide for himself. Like other blind men in literature, he seems to have a gift for prophecy, predicting the two most notable developments of the book's conclusion: that Lazaro's livelihood will depend on wine, and that he will become a cuckold. - Character: The priest. Description: The priest of Maqueda is Lazaro's second master, more selfish and stingy than even the blind man. He agrees to take Lazaro on as a servant, but he deprives Lazaro of food while he indulges in excessive eating and drinking himself. The priest takes the bread that is donated to the church and eats it, and he also stuffs himself on the feasts of the funerals he administers. Through his selfishness, dishonesty, gluttonousness, and cruelty toward Lazaro, the priest epitomizes the hypocrisy of the church. - Character: The squire. Description: The squire, Lazaro's third master, is a figure of minor nobility who is obsessed with maintaining an appearance of wealth that he does not have. He dresses in fine clothes and carries a nice sword, but his home is empty of furniture save for a tattered old mattress, and he never has anything to eat. Lazaro, while in the squire's service, takes pity on him and helps him by sharing the food he is able to collect by begging. The squire symbolizes the foolishness of a superficial notion of honor that is based more on appearances and the opinions of others than actual virtue. - Character: The seller of indulgences. Description: The seller of indulgences is Lazaro's fifth master. He makes a living by selling articles that are believed to pardon the sins of those who purchase them. He is a conman, in short—a cunning master of deception. He devises elaborate theatrical productions to convince otherwise rightfully skeptical townspeople to buy his indulgences. His job is one of the most morally suspect positions in the clergy, since it represents a near complete conflation of wealth with moral purity and transforms currency into a vehicle for redemption. - Character: Zaide. Description: A black man and a slave who works in the stables of the Comendador of La Magdalena, Zaide becomes the lover of Antona Pérez after Lazaro's father is exiled. Zaide is also the father of Antona Perez's second child, Lazaro's half-brother. Though Lazaro is afraid of Zaide at first, Lazaro soon learns that Zaide provides for his family, and this secures Lazaro's trust. Zaide is then caught stealing and is separated from Lazaro and his mother as part of his punishment. - Character: The archpriest. Description: The archpriest of San Salvador, a high-ranking clergyman, takes a liking to Lazaro and offers Lazaro one of his maids to marry. Lazaro soon discovers that his new wife is the archpriest's mistress, but he turns a blind eye because the archpriest showers him and his wife with gifts. The person that the story is addressed to seems to be a friend or acquaintance of the archpriest's who has asked Lazaro to explain this matter further. Given that members of the clergy were supposed to be celibate, it would be an especially significant offense if a figure of such high office were found out to be an adulterer. - Character: The friar. Description: The friar is Lazaro's fourth master, whom Lazaro serves for only a brief time. Because he is a monk, the friar is presumed to have recused himself from worldly matters, but he seems to spend all his time running about on errands of a sexual nature. Lazaro quickly tires of following him around and decides to find another master. - Character: Tomé González. Description: Lazaro's father, a miller who is caught stealing from the mill and is exiled as punishment. He then dies while fighting in a military campaign against the Moors (a northwestern African Muslim people who had settled throughout Spain), another example of the violent expulsion of religious minorities from Spain under the Inquisition. - Theme: Truth, Deception, and Loss of Innocence. Description: Through telling his life story, Lazaro portrays the society he lives in as one in which deception is the essence of every interaction. Born to one thief and then adopted by another, it is clear from the outset that young Lazaro belongs to the class of people who depend on lying and cheating to survive. Leaving his family at a young age to fend for himself, Lazaro goes on to serve many masters who exploit the ignorance of others to make their living. Lazaro quickly learns the art of deception himself through a series of insufferable jobs in which survival and loss of innocence are revealed to be two deeply entangled processes. Although Lazaro sets up his story with the stated purpose of bringing the truth to light, the process of growing up makes him willfully ignorant of or complicit in various acts of deception. After suffering months of abuse as the blind man's servant, and taking revenge whenever the opportunity arose, Lazaro's final betrayal of the blind man represents a moment of the student surpassing the master in the art of deception. Later on, during his time spent serving the priest, Lazaro's survival depends upon his ability to maintain the illusion that the bread he steals is being eaten by mice. Years later, Lazaro marries the archpriest's maid and discovers, after some time, that she and the archpriest have carried on a secret sexual relationship under his nose. Lazaro is angry at first but then makes an arrangement with the archpriest allowing this infidelity to go on as long as both he and the archpriest continue to benefit from it. Lazaro is content that this arrangement works to his financial benefit and seems flatly unconcerned with the moral questions it poses. Against the backdrop of the Inquisition, even the credibility of Lazaro's account is, in the end, made somewhat uncertain, as it becomes clear that the impetus for telling the entire story had been to supply an explanation — and perhaps also a defense — of the arrangement he has made with the archpriest concerning his wife. Lazaro seems to suggest that the only truth that can be known with any certainty is that of the absolute rule of deception. The book's anonymous author, by contrast, is perhaps more optimistic about what can be achieved by striving to expose the truth and illuminate hypocrisy, since the book itself stands as a sharp piece of social criticism which he risked his life to have published. - Theme: Social and Religious Hypocrisy. Description: At the time in which Lazarillo de Tormes was written, the supremely powerful Catholic Church had begun the Spanish Inquisition, a violent campaign to purge religious diversity from Spain. The novel critiques the moral authority of the Catholic Church to embark on such a project by exposing the gap between the professed values and the actual behavior of Spanish Catholics. The author uses the form of the picaresque novel—a genre characterized by plots composed of distinct episodes that are each their own story—to enumerate the types of religious hypocrisy afflicting Spain. Lazarillo de Tormes is divided into sections devoted to Lazaro's time with different masters, each of whom embodies a different kind of hypocrisy. The blind man Lazaro serves at the start of the book is outwardly pious, but his cruelty and stinginess toward Lazaro stand in stark contrast to the religious values he pretends to embody. The priest is by far Lazaro's cruelest master; as the figurehead of the church, he is supposed to be a paragon of charity, selflessness, and love, but he starves Lazaro, which shows his selfishness, opportunism, and greed. The friar is presumed, as a monk, to have recused himself from worldly matters, but he seems to spend all his time running about on errands of a sexual nature. The seller of papal indulgences—an already morally suspect position to hold in the clergy—lies, cheats, and burns the faces of several other clergymen in order to sell people articles that are meant to pardon them for their sins. Finally, by the end of the book, Lazaro has entered into a tacit agreement with the archpriest (a high religious office, and presumed to be celibate) to keep the archpriest's mistress as Lazaro's wife for a small fee, implicating all parties not only in adultery but in some form of prostitution. Each of these examples shows that Catholic clergy and outwardly-pious members of the lay public were not acting in accordance with their professed values—values that they were also hypocritically demanding of others. The fact that Lazarillo de Tormes was published anonymously can be explained by these frank depictions of religious hypocrisy—the author's perspective was regarded as heretical and it resulted in the book being banned throughout Spain. While Lazarillo de Tormes focuses on religious hypocrisy, there are other forms of social hypocrisy that come to light in the course of the novel. This includes class hypocrisy—it's the poor that tend to be generous, rather than the wealthy and powerful who preach generosity—and racial hypocrisy. The novel hints at violence done to racial minorities, from the Church-backed war against the Moors to Lazaro's initial mistrust of his mother's black lover Zaide, and it's a moment of confusion about race that most powerfully brings to light the underlying dynamic of the social hypocrisy that pervades the book. Early in the novel, Lazaro recalls his dark-skinned half-brother (son of Zaide and Lazaro's mother) crying out in fear of his own dark-skinned father, not yet understanding that he himself is not white. In response, Lazaro wonders to himself how many people in the world run away from others because they can't see themselves. In this light, Lazarillo de Tormes can be seen as a text that seeks to bring the Spanish public to an understanding that their cruelties towards others stem from their own internal contradictions and confusions—perhaps, by more clearly understanding themselves, the Spanish can create a more just society. - Theme: Poverty, Crime, and Violence. Description: Lazarillo de Tormes was a unique book at the time of its publication because it portrayed the world realistically through the eyes of a poor boy rather than a nobleman or a more conventional hero. The book's frank depiction of how crime and violence are interwoven into the fabric of the lives of poor people was shocking to the Spanish readership of the 16th century. Ultimately, the author represents the crimes committed by the poor as victimless crimes, committed out of necessity, while the conditions in which poor people live and the punishments they are served for their crimes are treated by the author as the more reprehensible violence, inflicted by those in power against those without. All around Lazaro, the poor and low-born are subject to violence, either by being forced into danger in service of the rich, or by the rich punishing them directly. Lazaro himself is frequently subjected to brutal violence at the hands of the masters he serves, often with no real recourse but to continue serving them until an opportunity for escape presents itself. He moves from one master to the next, hoping that the pain he has to endure will be less. Despite all this, extreme hunger is perhaps the greatest source of suffering for Lazaro. The pain of hunger seems to be deliberately inflicted on Lazaro by his masters, making it the violence that characterizes his life story more than any other. In many instances Lazaro retaliates with violence or theft against the masters that abuse him, but these acts of violence are presented as justified. For example, Lazaro steals systematically from the blind man because the blind man deprives Lazaro of a fair share of the spoils that Lazaro helps to bring in. Lazaro injures the blind man on several occasions—finally perhaps mortally—but he feels no remorse. Lazaro also steals from the priest's chest of bread, feeling he has no choice if he hopes to survive, since the priest starves him. Over the course of the text, distinctions become blurred between cruel and arbitrary violence against the weak, violence as punishment for crime, and retaliatory violence. But by regularly treating the crimes of the powerless against those in power as justified, the author portrays poverty itself as a violence inflicted by those in power against those without. As a vivid depiction of class inequality, the book seems to encourage—sometimes explicitly—a total upheaval of the social order by means of violent rebellion. - Theme: Mercy and Compassion. Description: Though instances of mercy and compassion in the text are few and far between, these moments serve as important guideposts for the reader. Characters acting with mercy and compassion help the reader to understand the richness of the social critique being leveled throughout the text because they provide a rare example of virtue in a world otherwise rife with cruelty and vice. Virtually the only figures that are portrayed as compassionate in Lazaro's story are the neighbors he had while living with the squire. The neighbors, cotton-spinners who are quite poor themselves, give Lazaro food, shelter, and safe harbor when he is afraid, and they defend him against townspeople who falsely accuse him of stealing from the squire. The neighbors' generosity is also particularly noteworthy because, while they are the most giving figures in the text, they are also the only characters in the text who are identified as poor. The moral highpoint for Lazaro's character comes during his time with the squire. Lazaro shows compassion for the pitiful squire by sharing with him what little Lazaro is able to earn by begging. This kindness is remarkable not just because it is an inversion of the typical hierarchy of master and servant, but because this is also a time at which Lazaro has almost nothing to give. The compassion Lazaro shows in his dealings with the poor squire is demonstrative of the central virtues of Christianity, in stark contrast to the example set by Lazaro's prior masters (many of whom were themselves religious figures). In keeping with the overarching social commentary of the text, these rare instances of compassion and mercy are meant to signify a truer spirit of Christianity than is practiced or preached by the hypocritical Catholic clergymen of the text. Tellingly, it is only the poor who seem able to embody the Christlike virtues of mercy and compassion. The implication here is that even small amounts of wealth and power inevitably lead to moral corruption. - Theme: Growing Up. Description: Lazaro's story, marked by milestones of learning and loss of innocence, is a story of a boy growing older. But Lazaro's process of coming of age is unlike many other examples in literature, distinguished above all by the character's development of a deeply cynical worldview and his loss of a sense of morality. His mother's parting words—a prayer that Lazaro should "learn his worth"—loom over the entire story. If it is true that Lazaro has, in fact, realized his worth at the end of the book by settling down as a lowly town crier and a cuckold, then perhaps his mother's words are an omen that the essential worth of a human is very little indeed. Lazaro himself foreshadows his own loss of innocence early on in the text when he remarks that he has much to learn from the cruel and conniving blind man if he hopes to survive. Lazaro's time serving the chaplain years later marks a major pivot point in the text, as Lazaro begins to find financial security for the first time. However, his decision to spend his first savings on nicer clothes and a fine sword is reminiscent of the figure of the squire, who was concerned above all with appearances. This also marks the end of the streak of compassion Lazaro showed for the squire, and it foreshadows a shift in his values, from merely striving for survival and helping others when he can to having an interest in self-betterment. In the final chapter, the narrator changes his name from Lazarillo (-illo being a diminutive ending in Spanish) to Lazaro. This change of name reflects a shift in identity, cementing a loss of innocence and signaling the moral transformation that has occurred. This shift is evidenced, for example, in the deal Lazaro strikes with the archpriest to turn a blind eye to his own wife's infidelity. Here, again, coming of age and finding one's place in the world are synonymous with moral corruption. Ultimately Lazarillo de Tormes is the life story of a poor boy who is subject to one brutal violence after another until he grows up to become a passive, unfeeling, and immoral person, doling out the same injustices he suffered as a child in exchange for a bit of money or power. - Climax: - Summary: The novel is written from the perspective of Lazaro de Tormes, a town crier in the city of Toledo, telling his life story to an unknown superior in the form of a letter. In the novel's short prologue Lazaro mentions that he is telling the story to better explain a certain matter into which his addressee has inquired, though the specifics of the matter are unclear. Lazaro was born to a poor mother and father outside of Salamanca in Spain. His father was exiled when he was caught stealing from the mill where he worked, and he died at war shortly after that. Lazaro and his widowed mother move to Salamanca, where she finds work and settles down with a slave named Zaide who works in the stables. Lazaro's mother has another child by Zaide, but then Zaide is caught stealing to provide for Lazaro and his family. The court forbids Lazaro's mother from seeing Zaide again and she moves with her two sons into an inn where she finds work. While at the inn, Lazaro's mother meets a blind man who offers to take Lazaro as a servant, so Lazaro leaves his family to travel with the blind man, who makes a living by saying prayers in exchange for alms. Lazaro soon discovers that the blind man is a stingy and dishonest master. Lazaro endures many abuses and often goes hungry while in the blind man's service, though he learns many lessons about how to survive. Eventually Lazaro musters the courage to leave the blind man's service, but before he does he gets his vengeance; Lazaro stands the blind man in front of a stone pillar and tricks him into bashing his head against it by telling him he is standing on one side of a gulley that he needs to jump across. Lazaro travels alone to a town where he meets a priest who agrees to take him on as a servant, but Lazaro soon discovers that this master is even more cruel than the last. The priest starves Lazaro, but soon Lazaro gets hold of a key to the locked chest where the priest keeps a store of bread and Lazaro helps himself. When the priest notices that one of his loaves has gone missing, Lazaro is forced to become more clever. He begins eating the bread so that it looks like mice have gotten into the chest. Eventually the priest catches on to this trick as well, and Lazaro is sent on his way. Lazaro's third master is a squire who has lost all his wealth but is obsessed with maintaining his status and the appearance of nobility. Lazaro takes pity on the squire, sharing the food he earns through begging in the town. When the squire is no longer able to pay his rent he abandons the house along with Lazaro. The landlords, upon discovering the house is empty inside, assume that Lazaro has stolen everything and threaten to punish him, but Lazaro's neighbors defend him. Lazaro works briefly for a friar before he moves on to another town where he meets a seller of indulgences who makes a living by convincing people to buy articles that he claims will pardon their sins. The seller of indulgences agrees to take Lazaro as his servant, and Lazaro participates in a scheme that results in all the people of one town purchasing indulgences. Then Lazaro serves a tambourine painter briefly, followed by a chaplain for whom he leads a mule around town selling water. Lazaro keeps this job for several years and says little about it, but he is happy because it enables him to save money and provide for himself for the first time in his life. After this he works briefly for a constable before finally finding a job as a town crier in Toledo, advertising wine to earn his money. While working as a town crier, the archbishop takes an interest in Lazaro and offers him one of his maids as a wife. Lazaro takes the archbishop's offer despite widespread rumors that the maid is the archbishop's mistress. Lazaro later confirms these rumors are true but he is happy to ignore them, as he and his wife receive some money from the Archbishop. In exchange Lazaro is willing for his sham marriage to protect the Archbishop's reputation. At this point in the narrative it becomes clear that Lazaro's arrangement with the archbishop is the matter Lazaro refers to in the prologue.

- Genre: Short story, Southern Gothic - Title: The Life You Save May Be Your Own - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A remote farm in the South - Character: Tom Shiftlet. Description: Tom Shiftlet, the 28 year old protagonist of the story, is a one-armed traveling carpenter. He claims to be from Tarwater, Tennessee, and to have served in the military, traveled abroad, and worked various different jobs, although he also points out that he could be lying about any of this. This means that readers, like the story's other characters, aren't sure about his real identity. When Shiftlet first arrives at the Crater family's farm, Mrs. Crater offers to let him stay at the farm and work in exchange for food and shelter. Shiftlet agrees to this, but he seems a bit shady, as he dodges many of her questions or provides cryptic, unrelated answers. But Shiftlet does start fixing up broken things around the farm, and he also befriends Mrs. Crater's daughter, Lucynell, who is deaf and mute. He's surprisingly tender with her, even teaching her to say her first word, "bird." Finally, Shiftlet is able to miraculously get the family's broken car running—a car that he's been fixated on since the moment he arrived at the farm, seemingly because he's scheming to take it for himself. At Mrs. Crater's urging, Shiftlet agrees to marry Lucynell—but only after she promises him money to take Lucynell on a honeymoon. When they marry at a courthouse, they immediately drive off on their honeymoon. Quickly, Shiftlet abandons Lucynell at a roadside restaurant and continues on alone with the car. Throughout the story, Shiftlet has been something of a sinister Christ figure—his outstretched arms form a "crooked cross" and he seems torn between virtue (kindness to Lucynell, fixing broken things on the farm) and sin (lying and manipulation, leaving Lucynell at the restaurant). In the car, at the end of the story, Shiftlet almost has a reckoning, feeling a sudden obligation to help others and a desire for God to wash the whole world clean. While he seems to contemplate turning back towards Lucynell, he eventually chooses to drive onward, refusing the grace from God that he prayed for as he tries to outrun a gathering storm. - Character: Mrs. Crater. Description: Lucynell Crater is an old widow who lives on a remote farm with her disabled daughter (who is also named Lucynell Crater). Mrs. Crater is described as toothless and tiny, "about the size of a cedar fence post." Her husband died fifteen years before the story begins, and she wants a son-in-law to stay and help around the farm. But she also loves her daughter very much and says numerous times that she wouldn't give her up for anything, which puts her desire for a son-in-law in conflict with her desire to protect her daughter. While Mrs. Crater initially doubts that Tom Shiftlet is capable of working on her farm (due to his missing arm), she invites him to stay and eat in exchange for his labor. Once he demonstrates that he can fix things and shows his bond with Lucynell, Mrs. Crater begins scheming to get them to marry. She points out how sweet and innocent Lucynell is, even lying that she's around 16 to make her seem more attractive. Mrs. Crater is so desperate for a son-in-law that she agrees to give Shiftlet money and access to the fixed-up car to take Lucynell on a honeymoon, even though she's always said she would never let a man take Lucynell away. By the end, she's gotten what she wanted (a son-in-law), but Shiftlet leaves Lucynell at a roadside diner, and it's unclear how she will find her way home. In this way, Mrs. Crater's selfishness and disregard for protecting her daughter may cost her the most important person in her life. - Character: Lucynell Crater. Description: Lucynell lives with her mother, Mrs. Crater, on a remote farm in the south. She is deaf, mute, and has mental disabilities, but she is able to do work around the farm like sweeping and feeding the chickens. Lucynell is in her late twenties, although she seems younger. She's described as looking like an angel or a baby doll, with pink-gold hair and very blue eyes. Lucynell is excited when Shiftlet arrives at the farm. She enjoys following him around as he works, and he teaches her to say the word "bird" for the first time. Eventually, her mother arranges for her to marry Shiftlet, though it seems unlikely that she understands or consents to this arrangement. Shiftlet then takes her on a road trip, supposedly a honeymoon, but ultimately abandons her as she's sleeping in a roadside restaurant. Throughout the story, Lucynell is associated with innocence and holiness, and when Shiftlet abandons her, he is also abandoning God and virtue. - Theme: Free Will and Redemption. Description: In "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," drifter Tom Shiftlet arrives at Mrs. Crater's farm offering work in exchange for food and lodging. Shiftlet quickly gains Mrs. Crater's trust, but he has evil intentions: he's scheming to fix up the family's car and take it for himself. Shiftlet's time with Mrs. Crater and her disabled daughter, Lucynell, offers him an opportunity for redemption: he could stay with the family, marry Lucynell, and live a purposeful life in a place associated with virtue and holiness. Still, he ultimately chooses evil when he abandons Lucynell at a restaurant and takes off with the fixed-up car. Throughout the story, grace and redemption are always available to Shiftlet, but his choice to reject virtue shows that it's up to each person to decide whether or not they'll be redeemed. From the beginning, the story associates the Crater home with redemption and suggests that, if Shiftlet were to stay there permanently, he would receive God's grace. For instance, the dazzling sunset as Shiftlet first approaches the farm inspires him to raise his arms to the sky in the shape of a cross, which suggests that the sunset brings him closer to God. (Christianity holds that Jesus's sacrificial death on the cross—itself an act of God's grace—redeemed humankind.) And since the sunset is visible at the Craters' every night, staying there in the presence of God seems like a virtuous choice. Furthermore, the farm provides Shiftlet with valuable work to do, work that aligns him with Christ. He's doing carpentry, just like Christ did, and fixing everything that's broken on the farm resembles Christ's work of resurrecting the dead. Lastly, Lucynell herself is the story's embodiment of holiness. Lucynell is innocent, sweet, and she literally resembles an angel; she's fair-haired with blue eyes (as angels have often been depicted in Western art), and the waiter at the restaurant describes her explicitly as an "angel of Gawd." Lucynell clearly has affection for Shiftlet and flourishes with his companionship, such as when he teaches her to say "bird" for the first time. Shiftlet's opportunity to be her companion is a chance at grace—he could stay on the farm doing his Christlike labor and watching the holy sunsets alongside his angelic bride. Despite his fixation on stealing the car, Shiftlet does seem drawn to staying at the Crater household and being redeemed. For example, when he remarks that he'd like to "see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do," he's simultaneously appreciating the beauty of the farm and demonstrating his desire to live a virtuous life. In addition, his work for the Craters seems to satisfy him; he tells Mrs. Crater how he's able to fix up the farm because he has a "personal interest in it." This is certainly a veiled reference to his plan to steal the car, but it also seems like a backhanded confession that he actually likes living there. Finally, he develops a special connection with Lucynell, showing that it's possible for him to grow closer to God. During his time on the farm, they seem inseparable—she follows him around while he works, he's tender with her (helping her up when she falls, for instance), and he's even able to teach her to speak for the first time. All of this shows that Shiftlet is faced with a choice: he can either give into temptation and steal the car, or he can choose redemptive life in front of him. When Shiftlet steals the car, he's given a final opportunity for redemption: his emotional crisis as he drives through the storm. In this moment, Shiftlet has already chosen evil; he has abandoned Lucynell at a restaurant and driven away with the family car, clearly not intending to return. But his conscience pains him, showing that he's still not irredeemable, even after everything he's done. For one, he reflects that "a man with a car ha[s] a responsibility to others," so he looks to pick up a hitchhiker as he drives. Since he's just told the waiter at the restaurant that Lucynell was a hitchhiker, his desire to help a hitchhiker now implies that that he wants to atone for what he did to her. Furthermore, when he does pick up a hitchhiker, he gives the man an odd lecture about how good his mother was and how sad he was to have left her, crying all the while. Significantly, he describes his mother as an "angel of Gawd"—the exact language that the waiter used to describe Lucynell. This lecture has nothing to do with the hitchhiker's situation and seemingly nothing to do with Shiftlet's own mother (whom he's barely mentioned in the story), so it's plausible to think that he's really talking about Lucynell, expressing his remorse for leaving her at the restaurant. This remorse shows that Shiftlet is finally vulnerable to redemption—he's so upset over what he's done that he's weeping in front of a stranger, and he seems to be questioning his choice to drive away from the Craters, as his car is now "barely moving," suggesting that he might turn back. This final crisis helps explain the meaning of the billboard that Shiftlet saw a few miles back: "Drive carefully. The life you save may be your own." It's his driving that's his path to salvation—if he turns the car around, then he'll save his soul. In this moment, feeling overwhelmed by "rottenness" and praying that God will "wash the slime from this earth," Shiftlet seems like he's about to make the virtuous choice. But he doesn't; he steps on the gas and races away. At no point in the story was Shiftlet irrevocably doomed to sin and damnation; he could always choose to redeem himself. And the story's ending suggests that maybe—despite choosing evil yet again—he still can. - Theme: Brokenness and Repair. Description: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is full of broken objects and broken people. Tom Shiftlet, a drifting carpenter, fixes up a broken car on the Crater farm. Mrs. Crater is missing her teeth, her daughter Lucynell is mentally disabled, and their farm is full of broken objects—even though it's also a respite from a broken, sinful world. Shiftlet himself is missing an arm, but it's his spirit that is truly broken. He's able to repair things on the farm without a problem, but he can't heal his spirit—as soon as he fixes the car, he deceives Mrs. Crater so he can steal it, abandoning Lucynell in the process. The story suggests that brokenness is a natural, inevitable state for humanity, but that humanity still has an obligation to repair things whenever we can. From the beginning, the story is full of people and things that are depicted as flawed or broken. One of the first things readers learn about Shiftlet is that he's missing an arm. Likewise, the story quickly reveals that Lucynell can't speak. Even the able-bodied Mrs. Crater is depicted as old and worn down—she can't chew the gum Shiftlet offers her because she has no teeth. Right away, imperfection is the default state of the characters. The clearest example of the brokenness motif, though, is the Craters' old car. The car hasn't run in 15 years, having died the same day Mrs. Crater's husband did. Not only is the car's brokenness tied to a sense of grief, it also literally keeps Mrs. Crater and Lucynell from moving on from their "desolate" farm. This state of brokenness seems to apply to the whole world, according to Shiftlet—the world is "almost rotten," most women these days are "trash," mass-produced cars break down easily. Modern, industrialized life is depicted as sinful and degraded. In the face of this brokenness, the story suggests that the work of fixing things is not just helpful, but spiritual. Shiftlet's role as a traveling carpenter who agrees to fix things around the farm (the steps, the fence, etc.) creates a parallel with another traveling carpenter: Christ. The clearest example of this is in the story's framing of fixing the broken car as a miracle, "as if [Shiftlet] had just raised the dead." Christ also raised the dead, so this once again casts Shiftlet as a Christ figure. A third way in which the story associates Shiftlet with Christ is Shiftlet's role as a teacher (Christ himself taught through his ministry). Shiftlet is able to teach Lucynell to say the word "bird," the first time she's ever spoken, which is its own kind of miracle. Eventually, though, it becomes clear that Shiftlet's Christlike good works aren't enough to fully redeem him—something remains broken in his spirit. Shiftlet chooses to steal the car he has so virtuously fixed up, abandoning Lucynell at a roadside diner in the process. His act of repairing the car therefore becomes a literal vehicle for his own selfishness and cruelty as he drives away. By the end, Shiftlet feels as though "the rottenness of the world [is] about to engulf him," a callback to his earlier assessment of the world as an almost rotten place. He asks God to "wash the slime from this earth" as a rain cloud approaches, but instead of being washed clean by the rain (like a baptism), he steps on the gas. The car, which he uses to race the shower, stops him from being cleansed and healed. The world's inherent brokenness is never resolved in the story. Acts of repair are treated as virtuous and holy, but good works also seem intertwined with sin. The car embodies this tension, as Shiftlet's willingness and ability to fix it is Christlike, and yet once the car comes back to life, it enables Shiftlet's worst tendencies: he steals the car, abandons Lucynell, and steps on the gas to avoid his own conscience. In this way, good works alone are not an escape from sin—that would require conscience and integrity, a kind of brokenness that the story presents no way of fixing. - Theme: Gender and Disability. Description: Throughout the story, Tom Shiftlet seems preoccupied with his own masculinity. He talks frequently about what defines a man, reflecting his insecurity that others might think his missing arm makes him less of one. Meanwhile, the characters treat Lucynell as though she were the perfect woman: she's physically beautiful and, because of her intellectual disability, she's docile and mostly silent. But in the end, Shiftlet's disability makes him no less powerful—he's a man with the capacity to not only fix things around the farm, but also to be profoundly cruel in pursuit of his own freedom. And while Lucynell's disability might have made her an "ideal woman," it also leaves her powerless to protect herself in a dire situation. In this way, the story satirizes traditional gender roles, showing how society's real ideal is a woman who can't defend herself against the strength of a man. Shiftlet is preoccupied with what defines a man, which seems to stem from his insecurity about his missing arm. When Shiftlet asserts that he's a man, if not "a whole one," and that he can fix anything on the farm, it reveals the source of his anxiety about gender. Since he only has one arm, he worries that he might be—or that others might perceive him as—less of a man. Because of this, he overcompensates by insisting, over and over, on his masculinity. When he first shows up on the Craters' farm, for instance, he goes on a long tangent about what a man is, and what a man is made for. And when Mrs. Crater says she can't pay him to do work on the farm, he asks rhetorically if all a man is made for is money. Shiftlet's apparent worry that Mrs. Crater won't see him as a real man is well-founded; at first, Mrs. Crater doubts Shiftlet's ability to provide, wondering "if a one-armed man could put a new roof on her garden house." She later reminds him that the world is not kind to friendless, disabled drifters. Mrs. Crater does doubt his masculinity until he proves his ability to work, and she makes it obvious that others probably share her assumption. While Shiftlet's disability seems to undermine his masculinity, the other characters treat Lucynell as a perfect example of womanhood. Lucynell is depicted as an angelic, divine figure, in large part because of her cherubic beauty. The story frequently refers to her pink-gold hair and peacock blue eyes, which prompt a waiter at a roadside restaurant to exclaim "She looks like an angel of Gawd." Physical beauty isn't the only way Lucynell is idealized. Mrs. Crater emphasizes Lucynell's feminine value in the very first scene, pointing out that she can perform domestic labor like sweeping, washing and cooking. This emphasis suggests that proficiency in household chores is one of the primary ways of determining whether a woman has value. Another of Lucynell's supposedly feminine characteristics is her innocence. Mrs. Crater repeatedly points towards Lucynell's innocence while trying to convince Shiftlet to marry her (Shiftlet had previously stated he was still unmarried because he wanted an innocent woman rather than "trash"). Historically, female innocence meant virginity, and was required for a woman to be a desirable bride. In this case, though, innocence also seems synonymous with mental impairment and a lack of worldliness. Similarly, the story frames Lucynell's inability to talk as a virtuous quality in a wife, since she can't "sass" her husband. Both Mrs. Crater and Shiftlet seem to agree these are all desirable qualities in a woman. But Lucynell's supposed womanly perfection contrasts with her childlike, infantilized, and inscrutable nature, suggesting the characters have a distorted view of female virtue. On Lucynell's wedding day, Mrs. Crater notes approvingly that she looks like a baby doll—an inanimate object rather than a real person. This comparison suggests that Lucynell's humanity isn't taken seriously even by her mother, especially since it's not clear that Lucynell has been able to consent to or even understands her marriage. Similarly, other characters' projections onto Lucynell are not always true. For example, her mother lies to Shiftlet that she's around 16 years old when in actuality she's closer to 30. In this case, she is treated as more of a child than she really is, but the deceit—and Shiftlet's acceptance of it—emphasizes that no one, not even the reader, can ever know the truth about Lucynell's inner nature. Finally, Lucynell, in addition to being deaf and largely mute, is often described as blank and unseeing. After her courthouse wedding to Shiftlet she has a placid, thoughtless expression. When Mrs. Crater says goodbye to her—for perhaps the first and last time, as Shiftlet will abandon her soon after—Lucynell doesn't "seem to see" her mother at all. Her apparent lack of an inner life suggests Flannery O'Connor is critiquing society's idea of what defines an ideal woman. If Lucynell is the perfect wife, then any woman who can speak or think for herself is deficient. It's notable that Shiftlet's physical disability throws his manliness into question, but Lucynell's intellectual disability—which results in silence and sweetness—makes other characters see her as the perfect woman. This suggests that a "broken" man is unacceptable, while a "broken" woman is ideal. What's more frightening is that Shiftlet's disability doesn't really hold him back; his missing arm doesn't stop him from doing the masculine work of fixing things on the farm, and—though readers might expect him to feel empathy for another "broken" person—it doesn't stop him from abandoning Lucynell, either. Meanwhile, Lucynell's disability leaves her unable to defend herself at all against the cruelty of those around her. The story, then, seems to be emphasizing the horrific power dynamic of traditional gender roles: women are ideally powerless against the strength—and cruelty—that is valorized in men. - Theme: Deception and Unknowability. Description: As in many of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, nothing is what it appears in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." The most obvious example is Shiftlet, who conceals his true nature and lies about his intentions, but Mrs. Crater also acts deceitfully—and is punished for it through the loss of her daughter. In addition to the characters' posturing and false appearances, the inherent unknowability of humanity is a frequent motif in their conversations. By the end, Shiftlet's deception has allowed him to achieve his goal of owning an automobile. He nevertheless seems unfulfilled, but he can't articulate why. This suggests that a person's "true nature," if it exists at all, will always remain unknowable—even to themselves. Shiftlet's initial arrival at the Craters' farm emphasizes the unreliability of first impressions. Mrs. Crater's very first impression of Shiftlet is that he's "a tramp and no one to be afraid of." By the end of the story, when Shiftlet steals the family car and abandons Lucynell, it's clear that he is someone she should have been more worried about. The possibility of appearances being misleading is also raised in more subtle ways, like when Mrs. Crater lifts up her lip to reveal she has no teeth, or the gradual way the extent of Lucynell's disability becomes clear. Importantly, Shiftlet draws attention to the possibility that he might be lying about his identity as soon as he arrives at the Craters' farm, asking "how you know I ain't lying?" when he introduces himself. He quickly rattles off a list of possible other identities, including names and cities, suggesting that "Tom T. Shiftlet" could be another made-up name. But Mrs. Crater decides to trust him, even though she doesn't know anything about him. Both Shiftlet and (to a lesser extent) Mrs. Crater use deception to get what they think they want. Mrs. Crater is so desperate for a son-in-law that she does anything she can to convince Shiftlet to marry Lucynell, including giving him money for a trip and lying about Lucynell's age to make her seem more attractive. Of course, Shiftlet's deception is greater: he wants to steal the fixed-up family car, and he agrees to marry Lucynell only to achieve that goal. He spins a tale about taking Lucynell on a honeymoon as a way of gaining access to the car and some money. However, he quickly abandons Lucynell and makes off with the automobile. By the end, neither character has found fulfillment through their deceit. Mrs. Crater, by marrying off her daughter, has lost her—perhaps forever. The story doesn't show what becomes of Lucynell after Shiftlet abandons her, but readers do know that losing Lucynell has always been Mrs. Crater's biggest fear. Her susceptibility to Shiftlet's deceit, and her willingness to use deceit herself, have cost her everything. Meanwhile, Shiftlet appears to have gotten exactly what he wanted—access to a car—but he still seems to feel guilty and unfulfilled. He picks up a hitchhiker in a show of generosity and gets teary-eyed telling the boy about how much he regrets leaving his old mother. The language Shiftlet uses, and the emphasis on motherhood, suggests a connection to the separation between a mother (Mrs. Crater) and her child (Lucynell) that he has just caused. Still, he's unable to articulate his own guilt, and the story ends with him seriously distressed, despite having achieved his goal. Throughout the story, Shiftlet has continually made references to how little anyone, including legal and scientific authorities, understands about human nature. In the opening scene, he tells an anecdote about a doctor in Atlanta who dissected and studied a human heart, concluding by saying "he don't know no more about it than you or me." This statement functions both as a rejection of authority, and as a stubborn assertion that a person's inner nature (often represented by the heart) is unknowable to anyone. Clearly, this is an important belief to Shiftlet: he delivers it without any prompting, and repeats the sentiment throughout the story, most notably after he marries Lucynell at the courthouse: "If they was to take my heart and cut it out," he says, "they wouldn't know a thing about me." By the end, this statement comes to feel like an encapsulation of the story: none of the characters seem to have truly understood each other, and Shiftlet's final line of dialogue—"Oh Lord! Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!"—shows that he doesn't understand his own actions. This suggests that if there's any such thing as a person's "true nature," perhaps God is the only one who can understand it. - Climax: Shiftlet abandons Lucynell at a roadside diner - Summary: Tom Shiftlet, a one-armed carpenter and drifter, walks up the road towards a remote farm. When he arrives, he meets the owners: a mother and daughter who are both named Lucynell Crater. The mother, Mrs. Crater, is old and toothless; the daughter, Lucynell, is deaf, mute, and seems much younger than her age of nearly 30. Shiftlet raises his arms into the shape of a "crooked cross," remarks on the beauty of the setting sun, and then fixates on an automobile on the property, which Mrs. Crater explains hasn't run in 15 years. Mrs. Crater and Shiftlet talk for a while, agreeing that the world is a mostly rotten place. Shiftlet also describes his past work and travels, although he also points out that he might be lying about everything he says. Mrs. Crater offers him food and shelter in exchange for work. Shiftlet agrees, and he quickly starts fixing up broken things around the farm. He also befriends Lucynell, teaching her to say her first word, "bird." Although Mrs. Crater at first doubts Shiftlet's ability to work because of his missing arm, once he demonstrates that he can fix things, she begins scheming to get him to marry Lucynell. Mrs. Crater's husband has been dead for 15 years, and she longs for a son-in-law to help her on the farm. Mrs. Crater points out how sweet and innocent Lucynell is, even lying that she's around 16 to make her seem more attractive. Finally, Shiftlet is able to get the broken car running, with "an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead." He later agrees to marry Lucynell at Mrs. Crater's urging, but only after she agrees to give him money to take Lucynell on a honeymoon. Shiftlet and Lucynell marry at a courthouse and drive off on their honeymoon. Mrs. Crater says goodbye to her daughter, who she's never been separated from before, but she expects to see her again in a few days. Shiftlet's true destination, though, is Mobile. They drive for almost a hundred miles before he stops at a roadside restaurant, buys Lucynell a meal, and abandons her while she naps. As he continues to drive on alone, he feels a sudden obligation to help others, so he decides to offer a ride to a boy standing on the side of the road. Shiftlet tells the hitchhiker about his mother and how much he regrets leaving her, but the boy jumps out of the car in alarm. In this moment, Shiftlet seems to have a reckoning. His car slows to a crawl, as though he might be considering going back, and he cries out to God to "Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!" There's a rainstorm gathering overhead, but instead of turning back, he steps on the gas towards Mobile, trying to outrun the storm.

- Genre: Fairy Tale - Title: The Little Match Girl - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: An unspecified city on New Year's Eve - Character: The Little Match Girl. Description: The Little Match Girl is a child who is selling matches in the cold streets of an unnamed city on New Year's Eve. She hasn't sold a single match all day, and while she is freezing and miserable, she doesn't dare return home without having earned money, since she fears her abusive father will beat her. To make matters worse, the Little Match Girl has lost both her slippers, so her feet are naked on the cold ground, and her hands are so cold that they are almost numb. Eventually, she becomes so cold and hungry that she decides to light one of her matches to warm her hands. In the light of that match (and the subsequent ones she strikes), she has visions: an indoor fireplace to warm her feet, a holiday feast, a bright-lit Christmas tree. Finally, she has a vision of her deceased grandmother, the "only person" who ever loved her. After striking the remainder of her matches to keep this vision alive and begging her grandmother to take her to heaven, the Little Match Girl freezes to death on the cold street and sees herself flying with her grandmother to God, where there is "neither cold, nor hunger, nor fear." Freezing to death on a city street while trying unsuccessfully to sell matches to wealthy people is a terrible fate for a child, but the ending is not depicted as wholly tragic: the Little Match Girl has escaped her terrible life and moved on to a better world in heaven. That the Little Match Girl's life on earth was so wretched as to make freezing to death preferable to continuing to live, however, is Andersen's indictment of the evils of child labor and rampant capitalism that disregards community and kindness. The Little Match Girl is surrounded by the light, wealth, and food of those around her, but nobody thinks to share with her or help this vulnerable member of the community, and even her own father prioritizes her ability to make money over her wellbeing, which leads to her death. - Character: Grandmother. Description: The Little Match Girl's deceased grandmother. She is described as "the only person who had ever loved or been kind to the child." In the Little Match Girl's vision of her kind grandmother, the grandmother carries the girl to heaven—the girl has in fact died, but the vision of her grandmother has comforted her and brought her to a better life in heaven. - Character: Father. Description: The Little Match Girl's father appears in the story in passing, when she mentions that she doesn't dare escape the cold by going home on New Year's Eve. She hasn't earned even a cent, and returning home without money would lead her father to beat her. The threat of her father's abuse makes her choose to remain on the cold streets, which leads her to freeze to death. - Theme: The Cruelty of Poverty. Description: In his stories, Hans Christian Andersen often highlights the plight of the poor during the Industrial Revolution, with a particular interest in how this tumultuous period impacted the lives of children. In "The Little Match Girl," he focuses on the titular little girl as she struggles for warmth while out selling matches in the bitter cold of New Year's Eve. The story's morbid ending (the girl dies from exposure after she uses all of her matches to warm and comfort herself) is presented as a welcome reprieve from the continued suffering of her existence as a child laborer. In portraying the innocent girl's helpless, futile attempts to escape her difficult circumstances, Andersen shows that poverty is brutal, inescapable, and ultimately a worse fate than death. By emphasizing the contrast between the little girl's bleak, hopeless surroundings and her imaginary visions of warmth and nourishment, Andersen draws attention to the stark divide between the lives of the poor and the upper classes. When the girl burns the matchsticks (her only source of income), she finds that their flames spark imaginary visions of comforts like a "big iron stove," a "table spread with a damask cloth and set with the finest porcelain," and a Christmas tree with "thousands of candles." These are comforts that are available to the wealthier people who surround the little girl in the city, but she can only access them in her imagination. While these visions provide the little girl with emotional comfort, they don't change the harsh reality of her life. The city's callous fellow inhabitants—from the reckless carriage drivers "driving along awfully fast" to the little boy who steals one of the girl's slippers for himself—treat her with astounding cruelty and disregard. Furthermore, Andersen's characterization of the girl as being "cowed by life" extends to her home life; the drafty attic her family lives in is described as being "almost as cold as the street," and her father is so abusive that she won't return home even to escape the harsh cold. While holiday stories are traditionally lighthearted and feature luxurious celebrations and feasts, here Andersen portrays the comfort and joy of the holidays as things the little girl cannot access. The fact that the little girl can't enjoy something as basic as a warm room or a meal on New Year's Eve shows just how harrowing her life is compared to the average middle- or upper-class child. Due to the little girl's tragic circumstances, Andersen presents death as a worthy alternative to a life spent in poverty, because it allows the girl to be free of her suffering and live with God. Andersen seems to suggest, then, that poverty is unreasonably harsh and incredibly difficult to overcome, and that death is often the only lasting escape. Among her visions of the warm stove and holiday feast, the little girl also imagines that her beloved grandmother has returned from death to be with her. The characterization of the grandmother as "the only person who had ever loved or been kind to the child" implies that the girl's suffering has been overlooked or even directly perpetuated by those around her. As a young, innocent child, she is truly powerless to overcome the powerful societal forces working against her, and her poverty also leaves her physically vulnerable to the natural world, as she slowly freezes to death on the street. With nobody to help her and no more matches with which to help herself, death is the only possible escape from the little girl's destitute circumstances, since it is only in death that she will be with God in a place "where there is neither cold nor hunger nor fear." Given that the little girl grapples with all of these perils in life, Andersen suggests that poverty (particularly when suffered by children) is unjust and unbearable, and that a peaceful death is ultimately preferable to a life of barely scraping by. - Theme: Christianity and the Afterlife. Description: Christianity was central to the culture of 19th century Denmark (Andersen's native country), and "The Little Match Girl" reflects this in its depiction of death as being beneficial and good: a means of transcending earthly life, reuniting with deceased loved ones, and connecting with God. By portraying death as a more positive outcome than continuing to live in poverty, Andersen suggests that dying isn't something to be feared, since it is only through death that human beings can be reunited with God and be free of earthly pain and suffering. This notion is not only an endorsement of Christian ideas; it also offers an implicit criticism of the industrialized society the little match girl leaves behind after death, which he suggests is inherently flawed compared to the Christian ideal of the afterlife. In "The Little Match Girl," light is frequently associated with comfort and a godly presence. This presents itself initially through the juxtaposition Andersen makes between the "cold and darkness" of the city streets and the bright lights shining from inside the windows of the upper classes' homes, but culminates in the visions brought about by the "blessedly warm" flames of the matches. Andersen's use of the word "blessedly" implies a parallel between the reprieve that light and warmth offer from Earthly suffering and the eternal comfort that the afterlife promises. Similarly, the story's claim that a shooting star represents "the soul of a human being traveling to God" is worth noting in the context of the common association of shooting stars with wish fulfillment. The little girl's plea for the vision of her deceased grandmother to "Take me with you!" can thus be construed as a kind of prayer, suggesting that death is not something to be avoided—rather, it is where true love, happiness, and contentment lie. This is echoed by one of the story's final images of the New Year's Day sun shining on the little girl's corpse after she dies from exposure. This description emphasizes the notion that it is not Earthly comforts that save the little girl from her harrowing situation, but God himself and the comforts the afterlife offers over earthly life. Andersen uses this Christian outlook on the afterlife to levy some criticisms of the dehumanizing nature of the modern industrial city in comparison to the bliss of heavenly life. The inhabitants of the story's city, for instance, are characterized as reckless, selfish, and uncharitable, with the little girl not having received "so much as a penny" for the matches she is selling. Despite being surrounded by the flamboyant wealth of people like the "rich merchant," the little girl goes cold and hungry. It is only in death and in communion with God that she can finally be considered to have achieved something of wealth. Even in death, though, the wealth the girl enjoys is immaterial. Her visions of a decadent holiday feast are not realized—rather, she is simply reunited with her beloved grandmother and with God. As a result, she gains a lasting sense of peace, experiencing "neither cold nor hunger nor fear," all of which incessantly plagued her life. With this, Andersen invokes the Christian ideal that love, particularly God's love, is preferable to any material wealth on Earth. Andersen further emphasizes this concept by adopting a tone of vague pity when describing the townspeople's muted reactions to the little girl's death. Being united with God is preferable to a life of suffering on Earth, as he notes the townspeople's inability to know "the sweet visions" and "glory" that the girl and her grandmother witnessed upon their passage into Heaven. For once in the story, the impoverished little girl has something her fellow townspeople don't. In this sense, Andersen is noting that, while the girl's struggles are now effectively over, the townspeople's struggles will only continue until they, too, are ready to pass on. By portraying the little match girl's death as a blissful reprieve from the oppressive, dehumanizing realities of industrialized life, Andersen expresses the Christian ideal that the afterlife is something to be revered rather than feared. - Theme: Fairy Tales vs. Reality. Description: Though an author of fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen typically did not write rosy stories of royalty and magic, or triumphant feats with happily-ever-after endings. Instead, his works often dealt with more realistic (and often morbid) themes of betrayal, sin, violence, and—as in the case of "The Little Match Girl"—death. By using the conventions of the fairy tale genre as a framework (namely the story's choices of character, structure, and tone) alongside the morbid realism of the story, Andersen is able to subvert the reader's expectation that the impoverished protagonist will triumph over her circumstances and live a happy life. Instead, Andersen's fairy tale protagonist is caught in a crushing life of poverty that she cannot transcend except through a grisly death, which shows that the whimsical happy endings of traditional fairy tales do not generally apply to the real lives of the poor. While most fairy tales show an impoverished protagonist triumphing over her circumstances, "The Little Match Girl" uses a bleaker plotline to show how removed the reality of the Industrial Era is from the Romantic ideals that preceded it. To do this, Andersen relies on certain fairy tale tropes: much like Cinderella's wicked stepmother, for instance, the little girl's father is bluntly stated to be abusive ("She didn't dare go home because she had sold no matches and was frightened that her father might beat her"). However, instead of being doomed to a lifetime of menial chores, the girl is forced into a much more disturbing reality of risking her life selling matches on the street in the cold. Furthermore, much like Cinderella, Andersen describes the girl as having "long yellow hair that curled so prettily at the neck," but he notes that she "never gave a thought" to her appearance, likely because of her low social status and the more pressing concern for her mere survival. This contrasts with the convention of the fairy tale genre that a poor protagonist's beauty helps her to transcend her circumstance: here, the little match girl's beauty doesn't save her. Instead, her beauty is destroyed when she dies of exposure, suggesting that in reality—unlike in fairy tales—a person's appearance is secondary to the hardship of their life. The way Andersen depicts the power of childhood imagination (another common fairy tale trope) also emphasizes the story's difference from a traditional fairy tale. Whereas other stories might use imagination to invoke visions of enchanted kingdoms or other fantastical whimsies, here the girl imagines basic Earthly realities: warmth, food, and love. In this sense, Andersen portrays the grim reality of growing up in poverty, painting basic comforts as being just as unattainable and imaginary as dragons, princesses, or magic. The tone with which Andersen narrates the story also mirrors the moralistic, emotional tone of fairy tales. The way Andersen describes the girl's poverty, as if the odds are continually stacked against her, is designed to invoke an emotional response of pity in the reader. His visceral descriptions of the "cold and hungry" little girl whose feet are "swollen and red from the cold" are a stark contrast to her "pretty" yellow hair, emphasizing the harsh reality of her life in spite of her youth, innocence, and beauty. An audience familiar with the convention of fairy tales featuring children with difficult lives may expect these mounting pressures and cruelties to be resolved with an eventual change in luck, and—in a sense—the story does resolve them with a change in fortune. However, this turn is morbid and bittersweet: the little girl's untimely death is a significant departure from the happy and fortunate escape some may have been conditioned to expect from a story of this type. Andersen thereby subverts the conventions of a fairy tale to force the reader to contend with the fact that real life does not always have a fairy tale ending. By using the tone of a whimsical fairy tale to portray the crushing reality of poverty, Andersen highlights the underbelly of industrialized society. In doing so, he causes the reader to recognize the ways in which the Romantic ideals of fairy tales can meet their limits in a dehumanizing economic reality that does not offer children like the little match girl the basic necessities they need to thrive. - Climax: The little girl burns all her matches to keep the vision of her deceased grandmother with her, resulting in her death. - Summary: On a cold and snowy New Year's Eve, a little girl walks the city streets unsuccessfully attempting to sell matches. She is barefoot and freezing as a result of the dangers inherent to this harsh urban environment that she is far too young to navigate on her own, already having lost her slippers due to some reckless carriage drivers and a young boy who steals one for himself. The girl is cold, hungry, and alone as she wanders the streets, having sold not a single match nor received any charity. As the snow falls upon her uncovered head, she solemnly notes the pretty lights and smells of celebration and love emanating from the townspeople's windows while considering the lack of such comforts in her own home, both on account of her family's destitute living conditions in a drafty attic as well as her father's implied abuse. Fearing that her failure to sell any matches will earn her more of this abuse if she returns home, the girl decides to take shelter in a small alcove. Growing colder and colder, she burns a match for warmth. To her surprise, the flame creates an imaginary vision of a large, hot stove that disappears as soon as the match dies. Spurred by this delightful apparition, the girl burns more matches and conjures subsequent visions: first, a bountiful holiday feast with exquisite table settings, then a wonderfully lit Christmas tree with beautiful decorations. The girl then sees a shooting star and recalls the memory of her loving grandmother, who is the only person she had ever received any kindness from. She burns the rest of her matches in an effort to keep her grandmother's vision with her, begging to accompany her in heaven. The grandmother grants her this wish, taking her where she will no longer suffer the indignity of poverty: up to God. The girl's body is discovered the next day, smiling and flushed with spent matches strewn all around her. The townspeople seem unaware of the grand visions she saw and the everlasting peace she has been granted in death.

- Genre: Fable/Novella - Title: The Little Prince - Point of view: First person - Setting: Sahara Desert - Character: The Pilot/Narrator. Description: The narrator of the story, the pilot crashes in the middle of the Sahara desert when his engine fails. The pilot is a grownup, but one who has always been an explorer and is sympathetic to the values and perspectives of children, a trait that grows even more pronounced as he becomes close with the little prince. Although he's desperate to fix his engine so that he won't die of thirst in the desert, he comes to realize that his ability to comfort the little prince and to listen to his stories is even more essential. He decides to write and illustrate the book in order to remember his friendship with the little prince. - Character: The Little Prince. Description: The title character of the story, the little prince ventures to other planets in the universe after discovering that the rose he loves has lied to him. Innocent and curious, the little prince begins to miss his rose as he explores more, learning that his rose's lies were less essential than the time they had spent together. He tells his story to the pilot, helping the pilot regain the perspective of childhood as well. - Character: The Fox. Description: The little prince's meeting with the fox is the climax of the story—it's the moment when the little prince realizes why his rose is so important to him. The fox is skittish around the prince at first, but he teaches the prince how to tame him. Afterwards, he shares his secret with the little prince in the novella's iconic phrase, "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye." - Character: The Snake. Description: The snake speaks in riddles, and he meets the little prince at the beginning and the end of his journey on Earth. The snake possesses a deadly poison that he promises will send the prince back to where he came from, and at the end of the story, the little prince takes his offer, making a departure that he warns the pilot will look "a little as if I were dying." - Character: The Rose/Flower. Description: The rose is the object of the little prince's affection. She is beautiful and vain, given to telling dramatic lies, which prompts the little prince to leave his planet and set off on his journey. She apologizes right before he leaves, but he decides to go anyway—eventually, he feels sorry for leaving her and tries to return to his planet to protect her. - Character: The Lamplighter. Description: The lamplighter is a faithful but unhappy grownup, who is miserable because his job allows him no rest. His planet makes a full turn every minute, and in order to keep up, he is constantly lighting or putting out the lamp. The little prince thinks more highly of him than of the other grownups because he is the only one who thinks of something beside himself. - Character: The Geographer. Description: The geographer is the last man the little prince meets before he ventures to Earth. The geographer is a scholarly grownup who spends his life waiting for explorers to venture to his planet so that he may fill his books. He teaches the little prince the meaning of the word "ephemeral," causing the little prince to miss his rose, who he fears is in danger of speedy disappearance. - Character: The Merchant. Description: The little prince also meets a merchant on Earth. The merchant claims to sell a pill that can quench a person's thirst, saving fifty-three minutes each day. The little prince defiantly responds that he would use the extra fifty-three minutes to walk at his leisure towards a cool spring of water. - Theme: Relationships. Description: Both the pilot's and the prince's stories revolve around their relationships. For the pilot, the entire purpose of writing the story and making his drawings is to remember his relationship with the little prince. The little prince, in turn, tells the story of his journey in terms of the characters he's met along the way. The chapter with the fox, in particular, emphasizes the importance of taking time to get to know someone. The fox uses the language of "taming," which emphasizes the gradual nature of building trust. The fox also helps the little prince realize that it was the time spent with his rose that made his rose unique from all the others he encountered on Earth—even if all the roses appeared alike from the outside.The characters grow in the story through their relationships. For the little prince, the main lesson is about responsibility to those you've tamed, or befriended, and for the pilot, the main lesson is about "matters of consequence"—he learns that relationships are of the most consequence, even in a desert with a broken-down plane and limited water. - Theme: The True and the Essential. Description: At the beginning of his journey, the little prince is most concerned with the truth. He leaves his planet after catching his rose telling a lie, and although they reconcile just before he departs, he decides to explore the universe in order to discover what's true. As he encounters more on his travels, however, he realizes that what's true is not always what's essential—his rose's lies were less important than the fact that he cared for her and was therefore responsible for her. This turning point comes when the little prince meets the fox, which tells him, "What is essential is invisible to the eye." Similarly, motivated by the fact that he will die without water, the pilot is mostly focused on fixing his engine at the beginning of the story. As he begins talking to the little prince, however, this fact—or truth—becomes less essential. He finds himself comforting the boy instead of fixing his engine, and when they finally abandon the project to start walking to find water, what's essential isn't that they find the water and therefore live—it's that they found the water together and that it's sweeter for the walk they took under the stars to find it.The story also contains double meanings that require the reader to decide on the truth. The snake suggests that he can help the little prince return to his planet, alluding to death—but then, when the narrator returns to retrieve the little prince's body at the end of the story, the body is gone, suggesting that the prince really did embark on some kind of journey, maybe to return to his planet. - Theme: Exploration vs. Narrowmindedness. Description: The two main characters of the book—the pilot and the little prince—are both explorers, in a very literal sense, but also in a figurative sense. Compared to those characters that inhabit only their own tiny planets and homes, the pilot and the prince have traveled and gained more perspective on life and the universe. While the others are caught up adding sums, drinking, ruling over imaginary subjects, or completing other futile projects, these two explorers observe, talk, and listen, learning lessons that the narrator passes on to us. They have a willingness to travel outside of their comfort zones and mental boundaries that the other characters don't have—and through this willingness, they develop in the story.One of the main lessons the characters learn on their journeys is about what's truly essential. By leaving their homes and the relationships they've already formed, they learn the value of those ties. It's not until the little prince leaves his rose and explores the universe, for example, that he realizes how important his time with his flower really was. - Theme: Childhood vs. Adulthood. Description: The story often compares children to grownups, depicting grownups as a group of people who have lost their sense of imagination and the ability to see what's essential. The various grownups presented throughout the story have only utilitarian concerns and are ruled by vices like pride and greed. Unlike children, they've lost the ability to understand the true value of a friendship, the beauty of a house, or the things that aren't explicitly shown in a drawing.However, the pilot's case shows that this condition can be reversed. The little prince's appearance helps him start to see the importance of establishing ties and wasting time on drawings again, even though, as he admits, he has "had to grow old." - Theme: Innocence. Description: Innocence is a trait that both the pilot and the little prince value. For the pilot, the little prince's innocence makes it important to protect and comfort him. For the little prince, his rose's naïveté similarly makes it important for him to return to his planet to protect her. Innocence itself serves as protection as well—when the little prince encounters the snake, the snake refrains from poisoning the boy because of his innocence. Grownups are those who have lost their innocence—and as a result, have stopped seeking the truth. They care more about sums and titles than about the traits contained beneath the surface. The state of innocence is therefore valuable because it comes with perceptiveness and an ability to see the important things in life. - Climax: The fox teaches the little prince the value of his rose - Summary: The narrator, the pilot, crashes in the Sahara desert. He attempts to fix his engine, knowing that he only has a limited supply of water. As he begins to work on the engine, however, he hears a small voice asking him to draw a sheep. The narrator turns around to meet the little prince, and after making several attempts at drawing the sheep, he settles on sketching a box—he tells the little prince that the box contains a sheep, and to the pilot's astonishment, the little prince is delighted. The pilot begins to learn more about the little prince, discovering that he comes from the asteroid known as B-612. Eventually, he begins to learn other details of the little prince's planet as well, including the fact that baobab trees are a major menace and that the object of the little prince's affection is a rose. This rose is very vain, however, and tells lies, making the little prince unhappy. He decides that he cannot trust her anymore and leaves his planet. The little prince first encounters a king who claims to rule over everything, including the stars. He has no subjects on his own planet to rule, however, and the little prince grows bored and leaves. The second person the little prince meets is a conceited man who enjoys applause and admiration. The third is a tippler who says that he drinks to forget that he is ashamed of drinking. The fourth grownup is a businessman who is busy counting the stars so that he may own them. At this point, the little prince finds all the grownups very strange, and he continues onto the planet of the lamplighter, who lights a lamp on his planet when night falls and puts it out again when the sun rises. The little prince finds the lamplighter to be the least ridiculous of all the grownups because he thinks of something other than himself. The little prince then comes across a geographer who tells the little prince that his rose is "ephemeral," or in other words, "in danger of speedy disappearance." This alarms the little prince and makes him regret leaving his rose. Nevertheless, he continues on his journey to the planet Earth. The little prince lands in the middle of the Sahara desert, where he encounters a snake. The snake speaks in riddles, hinting that he has a powerful poison that can take the little prince back to his planet. The little prince continues to travel on Earth, however, eventually discovering a bed of roses, all identical to his own rose on asteroid B-612, making him question his own rose's contention that it is unique. He then meets a fox, who teaches the little prince what it means to tame—or to establish ties—with another. The little prince realizes that his rose has tamed him, making her unique in the universe, even if she's outwardly identical to all the other roses on Earth. The little prince goes on to meet a railway switchman and a merchant before returning to the Sahara where he meets the pilot. By the end of his story, the little prince and the pilot are both very thirsty, and they decide to walk and find water. They discover a well around daybreak, and together they savor the drink as well as their time together. The little prince explains that the next day is the anniversary of his descent to Earth. He sends the pilot away to fix his plane and tells him to come meet him at the same spot the following evening. The pilot fixes his engine and returns the next evening to find the little prince conversing with the poisonous snake. The little prince warns the pilot that he must return to his planet and that it will "look a little as if I were dying." The little prince allows the snake to poison him, and he falls gently to the sand. The narrator is reassured by the fact that the little prince's body is gone the following day and believes that it means he made it back to asteroid B-612. He worries, however, whether the sheep he drew will eat the prince's rose.

- Genre: Gothic Novel - Title: The Little Stranger - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Warwickshire, England in the 1940s - Character: Faraday. Description: Faraday is a doctor who is relatively well-known and respected in his community. As a child, he visited Hundreds Hall and fell in love with it. Ever since, Hundreds has allured Faraday, even though it starts falling apart shortly after his first visit. Part of Faraday's love for Hundreds relates to his desire to ascend to the upper class. Faraday's parents were poor and although Faraday got a good education and achieved a profession, he never feels adequate. Additionally, as a man of science, Faraday is a champion of rationality. No matter what strange thing happens at Hundreds, Faraday has an explanation for it that stays within the confines of rationality and scientific knowledge. However, the events at Hundreds Hall test Faraday's steadfast belief in science's explanatory power, and he is not sure what to think by the end of the novel. The novel ends as Faraday walks around Hundreds Hall alone and senses the evil presence at Hundreds. When he turns around, no one is there, and all he sees is his reflection. This passage suggests that Faraday does not see the evil at Hundreds because he is the evil at Hundreds. This interpretation makes sense if one closely examines Faraday's behavior throughout the novel. At one point, he manages to send Roderick away to a mental institution and he tries to do the same with Mrs. Ayers. The only reason he is not successful is because Mrs. Ayers dies before he gets the chance. Then, he attempts to marry Caroline and become the patriarch of Hundreds, which almost happens. However, when he fails, the ugly side of his character comes out. As it turns out, he is an obsessive man suffering from class envy, who is not beyond behaving barbarically to get what he wants. - Character: Caroline Ayers. Description: Caroline Ayers is the daughter of Colonel Ayers and Mrs. Ayers. She is also Roderick Ayers's sister. Of the Ayers family, Caroline is the least attached to her social standing. Although she cares about her wealth and Hundreds Hall, she does not cling to it like her mother and brother. In fact, at the end of the novel, she is seemingly willing to give it all up. Whether or not this is actually the case depends on one's interpretation of Caroline's death. Generally speaking, Caroline is a warm and polite girl, who is not conventionally attractive. The decline of Hundreds combined with her appearance makes it difficult for her to marry someone of her social class, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Ayers. After Roderick is sent to an institution, Caroline takes over as the head of Hundreds Hall, and she does the best she can with the little she has. However, as the events at Hundreds become odder and her mother's health declines, Caroline begins looking for a way out. She thinks Faraday might be a suitable companion who can get her away from Hundreds, so she hesitantly agrees to marry him. Unfortunately, this decision is a mistake, and she eventually decides to call off the wedding and sell Hundreds Hall. However, Hundreds never gets sold due to Caroline's untimely death. - Character: Mrs. Ayers. Description: Mrs. Ayers is the matriarch of Hundreds Hall. She was married to Colonel Ayers before his early death, and she is the mother of Susan, Caroline, and Roderick Ayers. Even in her old age, Faraday considers her an impressive and attractive woman, although both of these features become less prominent as the novel progresses. Mrs. Ayers is a polite woman who cares about her appearance and how the public perceives her family. Whenever a scandal arises, Mrs. Ayers does her best to make sure it does not get out, lest it damage her reputation. As a mother, Mrs. Ayers succeeds in some places and fails in others. Generally speaking, she wants what is best for her children, and does what she can to make their lives better. However, she also thinks Caroline and Roderick are disappointments and admits that she does not love them as much as she loved Susan. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Mrs. Ayers never moved past Susan's death, which is part of the reason she continues to hold on to her past rather than accepting her present. Mrs. Ayers dies under mysterious circumstances. Officially, Faraday rules her death a suicide, but, if one takes seriously a supernatural reading of the novel, then it is possible that whatever haunts the Ayers's house is responsible for her death. - Character: Roderick Ayers. Description: Roderick Ayers is the son of Colonel Ayers and Mrs. Ayers. He is a World War II veteran who walks with a limp because his leg was injured when his plane went down in the war. When he comes of age, Roderick is put in charge of the Ayers family estate, which proves stressful. There is little Roderick can do to stop Hundreds Hall's slow decline into irrelevance; no matter what he does, his situation only grows more dire. Additionally, Roderick is the first member of the Ayers family who tells Faraday that a malicious presence haunts Hundreds Hall. Roderick believes that the presence only wishes to hurt him, and so everyone else is safe as long as he keeps it under control. Roderick's physical and mental state continues to deteriorate and one night his room catches on fire. Although Roderick insists that the evil entity is responsible for the fire, Faraday does not believe him and has him sent to a mental institution. Whenever Faraday, Caroline, or Mrs. Ayers visit Roderick, his condition never seems to improve. However, he is happy that he is away from Hundreds. - Character: Betty. Description: Betty is a 14-year-old servant who works at Hundreds Hall. Though immature, Betty is a well-intentioned girl who does her best to take care of Hundreds Hall and the Ayers family. However, Hundreds frightens Betty, and she is the first person who believes it might be haunted. Although Faraday regularly dismisses her, by the end of the novel he cannot help but wonder whether she is right. - Character: Dr. Seeley. Description: Dr. Seeley is a doctor who Faraday considers his rival. He puts the idea of courting Caroline into Faraday's mind during the party at the hospital. Later in the novel, Faraday tells Seeley about the situation at Hundreds Hall. To Faraday's surprise, Seeley agrees with Caroline's suspicion that something paranormal could be going on. Because Seeley is an intelligent man, Faraday begins reconsidering his previously-held beliefs about science, psychology, and rationality. - Character: Mr. Morley. Description: Mr. Morley is Mrs. Baker-Hyde's brother. He is a pretentious and crude man who attends the Ayerses' party at Hundreds. Mrs. Ayers invites him because she thinks he might make a nice suitor for Caroline. However, Caroline does not like him, and they end up hating each other after Gyp bites Gillian Baker-Hyde. - Theme: Science and the Supernatural. Description: The protagonist of The Little Stranger, Dr. Faraday, is a man of science. He is a well-trained and respected doctor, who utilizes empirical evidence to reach medical conclusions. However, when Dr. Faraday meets the Ayers family and becomes a mainstay at their manor home, Hundreds Hall, his experiences force him to reevaluate his position. Both of the Ayers children, Caroline and Roderick, as well as their servants, believe that an evil force haunts Hundreds Hall. At first, Dr. Faraday dismisses their concerns as delusions, and finds appropriate medical answers for their problems. For instance, when Roderick discusses what he believes to be a supernatural experience with Dr. Faraday, Faraday tells him that he is hallucinating due to stress and a lack of sleep, compounded by his wartime trauma. Later in the novel, Dr. Faraday has a difficult time finding scientific conclusions for what happens at Hundreds. At one point, he converses with Mrs. Ayers, who believes that Susan, her deceased daughter, is haunting the manor. She claims to feel Susan's presence constantly and tells Dr. Faraday that Susan hurts her sometimes when she gets upset. With his own eyes, Faraday witnesses Mrs. Ayers suddenly start bleeding underneath her clothing, seemingly out of nowhere. Although he racks his brain for a scientific explanation of the incident, he cannot come up with one. By the end of the novel, Dr. Faraday is at a loss. He does not know what to believe, though he outwardly professes that nothing supernatural has occurred. Although the book is critical of Dr. Faraday's position, it never confirms whether the supernatural entity is real. In fact, Waters purposely gives different accounts of the supposed entity from each member of the Ayers family. None of them agree on its nature or cause, and they all experience it differently. As such, the novel does not simply pit the scientific against the supernatural. Rather, it exposes the limitations of science in the face of the unknown. - Theme: The Decline of the British Upper Class. Description: Hundreds Hall, the home of the Ayers family, is a symbol for the dying segment of the upper class to which the family belongs. Following World War II, England enacted many social policies to help the poorer members of the nation, often at the expense of the wealthy. These social conditions created a paradox for people like the Ayers family. Although they are far from poor, they can no longer afford to maintain properties as grandiose as Hundreds Hall. However, they also do not want to sell their home and admit defeat. As such, the Ayers family ends up living in a massive home that becomes less impressive with each passing year. When Dr. Faraday visits Hundreds Hall as a child, its stature amazes and intimidates him. However, when he returns to it as an adult, the home is in shambles, as are its occupants. The Ayers family sold many of their prized possessions and eventually they even sell a great deal of their land. Still, they refuse to move out of the home because their pride does not allow them to. Only at the end of the novel, after Mrs. Ayers's death, does Caroline decide she must move out of Hundreds. However, before she can, she dies mysteriously, perhaps from suicide or perhaps from the supernatural entity that haunts the home. Regardless of whether Caroline's death was a suicide, there is something in the house that will not allow her to leave. Her fate suggests that her social position—which is indelibly tied to Hundreds—cannot be escaped. Through Caroline's seemingly hopeless fate, the novel suggests that the entirety of the once-proud British gentry are doomed to crumble into decay and irrelevance. - Theme: Desire, the Unconscious, and Manipulation. Description: Romantic love does not feature prominently until the second half of The Little Stranger, when it becomes the central focus of the novel. For much of the story, Dr. Faraday does not express a romantic interest in Caroline Ayers. In fact, in the first half of the novel, he does quite the opposite. Faraday regularly calls Caroline a "plain" woman and appears more interested in her mother, Mrs. Ayers, if anything. However, when Faraday attends a dance with Caroline, someone makes a joke suggesting they are romantically involved. From this moment forward, Faraday pursues Caroline romantically and eventually asks her for her hand in marriage. However, there is reason to question whether Faraday's pursuit of Caroline is as innocent as it seems. As Caroline herself points out toward the end of the book, Faraday seems more interested in Hundreds Hall, her manor home, than he is in her. There is a good deal of evidence that suggests Caroline is correct. For instance, Faraday repeatedly urges Caroline to marry him as soon as possible, despite her discomfort. He also discourages Caroline from selling Hundreds, though he doesn't explain why. Overall, Faraday shows a complete disregard for Caroline's feelings and only worries about his desires. Even after Caroline's death, Faraday still finds himself going back to Hundreds Hall to wander the empty halls on his own. Though Faraday's attachment to Hundreds is never fully explained, it is reasonably clear that he cares more for the property than for Caroline. Although Faraday's pursuit of Caroline is manipulative, it appears as though Faraday does not consciously realize what he is doing. In his discussion on the paranormal with Seeley and Caroline, Faraday learns that paranormal occurrences are the result of an overwhelmed unconscious mind. At the end of the novel, while Faraday wanders around Hundreds on his own, he thinks he senses an evil presence in the home. However, when he turns around to look, all he sees is his reflection. This moment suggests that Faraday is responsible for the evil in Hundreds, which spawns from his unconscious desires. Therefore, the novel suggests that Faraday's manipulation is two-fold; though he does manipulate Caroline, he also spends the entire novel manipulating himself—and, perhaps, the reader as well. - Theme: Class Envy. Description: As a young boy, Dr. Faraday's parents take him to see Hundreds Hall. It is a formative moment in his youth, and for the rest of his life, he remains envious of those who live there. Faraday's mother made her living as a servant at Hundreds for some time, and his father was similarly lower-class. However, as a result of their hard work, Faraday went to a good college and eventually became a practicing doctor. Despite his improved social circumstances, Faraday finds that his position in life is not enough and feels he does not get the respect he deserves. He wants his patients to look up to him, much like he looks up to the Ayerses, but instead they see him as a social equal. Toward the end of the novel, Faraday gets engaged to Caroline Ayers, and for the first time, he feels like people treat him with more respect. For a short while, Faraday holds his head high and acts proud of his position in life. However, a few weeks later, Caroline calls the marriage off, and Faraday is crushed. The reason Faraday gets so upset is not because he loves Caroline, but rather because he is angry he cannot ascend to the upper class. When Caroline breaks up with Faraday, he is more concerned about the fate of Hundreds (and his place in it) than he is with the state of their relationship. Without Hundreds, Faraday must remain envious of Caroline and people like her, while he continues to be one of the so-called common folk. Ironically, by the end of the novel, there is not much at Hundreds Hall for Faraday to be envious of. The home itself has fallen into a state of disrepair, and the Ayers family is in shambles. However, Faraday still holds on to his love for the place; it has some mystical power over him, as he is willing to overlook its many flaws. Faraday's strange attachment to the manor suggests the emptiness of class envy, especially if one admires the upper classes for all the wrong reasons—namely, the desire for material wealth and status. - Climax: Caroline Ayers dies under mysterious circumstances. Although her death is officially ruled a suicide, the circumstances of her death suggest she was murdered, perhaps by a paranormal entity. - Summary: Dr. Faraday lives in Lidcote, England, where he spends his days tending to patients. One day, he is called out to Hundreds Hall, a once-grand manor home. Faraday went to Hundreds as a child for Empire Day, where he was presented with a medal. Ever since, the house has held a powerful allure over him, and he is eager to see what has become of it. Faraday goes to Hundreds and meets Mrs. Ayers, the house matriarch, as well as her adult children, Roderick and Caroline. These three people are the only surviving members of the Ayers household. Colonel Ayers, the house patriarch, and Susan Ayers, Mrs. Ayers' firstborn daughter, are both dead. Susan's death was particularly tragic because she died from diphtheria at only seven years old. Although Faraday is glad to see Hundreds Hall and meet the Ayers family, he is surprised at the manor's condition. Over the years, Hundreds Hall has started to fall apart. Many of the rooms are boarded up, everything looks dull, and it is clear that the Ayerses are running out of money. Nonetheless, Faraday finds himself wanting to see more of the home. As such, he decides to offer Roderick electric therapy on his leg. Roderick is a World War II veteran who was injured in the war, and Faraday offers the therapy for free. Roderick accepts and Faraday starts coming out to Hundreds at least once per week for the therapy sessions. One day, Mrs. Ayers decides to throw a party at Hundreds in the hopes of attracting a suitor for Caroline. Throughout the novel, Faraday describes Caroline as a "plain" girl, and given the state of Hundreds, she has a difficult time finding a husband. The night of the party, everything goes well at the start, except Roderick is absent for some reason. However, the party abruptly ends when Gyp, Caroline's normally well-behaved dog, bites a little girl (Gillian Baker-Hyde) in the face. Luckily, Faraday is present to help Gillian and stop the bleeding. However, the bite starts a feud between the Ayers family and the Baker-Hyde family. Eventually, in an attempt to avoid going to court, Mrs. Ayers decides to have Gyp put down, much to Caroline's dismay. Faraday performs the task himself. After the party, Roderick begins to act unlike himself. He is more irritable than normal, and eventually he stops accepting treatment from Faraday. Because of this, Faraday spends less time at Hundreds than usual. One day, while driving around town, Faraday sees Roderick looking tired and paranoid. He invites Roderick to his home, and Roderick warily accepts. There, Faraday gives Roderick a physical examination and asks him what is wrong. At first, Roderick does not want to tell him, but eventually he tells Faraday that there is an evil presence haunting him, which he must constantly guard against. Apparently, the night of the party, the presence assaulted him, which is why he did not join the guests. In response, Faraday tells Roderick he is delusional and tries to give him pills to help him sleep. Roderick gets angry, rejects Faraday's help, and leaves. Feeling he needs to do something, Faraday tells Caroline about Roderick's story. Unfortunately, Roderick finds out that Faraday broke his promise, which only makes matters worse. One night, Roderick's room catches on fire. Caroline puts out the fire, but the experience leaves her shaken. She thinks Roderick might have started it, and she tells her theory to Faraday. Faraday thinks she might be right and so he has Roderick placed in a mental institution. Following Roderick's departure, life at Hundreds is normal for some time. One night, Faraday takes Caroline to a dance because he hopes it will cheer her up. Caroline accepts the invitation and has a great time. While Caroline dances, one of Faraday's colleagues, Dr. Seeley, suggests that he romantically pursue Caroline. After the dance, Caroline and Faraday become affectionate with each other, until Caroline decides she doesn't want to go any further physically. Her rejection hurts Faraday, and he cannot figure out whether he likes Caroline or not. Around the same time, odd occurrences start happening at Hundreds again. Objects move around, telephones ring but no one is on the other end, and the Ayerses think they hear things that are not there. In a particularly terrifying moment, Mrs. Ayers gets trapped in the old family nursery and cannot get out. Out of fear, she breaks a window to get Caroline's attention and cuts herself in the process. Faraday tends to her wounds and tells Caroline to keep an eye on her. Faraday continues to pursue Caroline, though neither of them seem to know what they want. Eventually, he asks Caroline to marry him, and she hesitantly accepts. Not long after, Caroline tells Faraday that she thinks a poltergeist haunts Hundreds Hall. She shows him some books—a blend of science and the paranormal—which say that a poltergeist forms because of a powerful unconscious mind. Faraday dismisses the theory as pseudoscientific nonsense and tells Caroline to disregard it. After Mrs. Ayers recovers from the nursery incident, Faraday decides to ask her about it. Mrs. Ayers says that the ghost of her deceased daughter, Susan, haunts her and is with her at all times, including that day in the nursery. She tells Faraday that Susan is often unkind; then, suddenly, blood shows up underneath her clothing. Faraday thinks Mrs. Ayers is insane and that she's purposefully injured herself. As such, he decides she should be committed to an institution, just like Roderick. He informs Caroline of his plan and makes her promise to keep an eye on Mrs. Ayers until the next day. However, Caroline leaves her mother alone in the middle of the night, and, when she comes back, Mrs. Ayers is dead. Although her death is officially ruled a suicide, the circumstances surrounding it are strange. When she died, Mrs. Ayers had lots of cuts, bruises, and something that looked like bite marks all over her body. After Mrs. Ayers dies, Faraday pressures Caroline about setting a wedding date. Caroline gives into the pressure briefly, but then calls off the wedding when she learns that Faraday wants to continue living at Hundreds. Faraday tries to convince Caroline to take him back, but she refuses. Her rejection enrages Faraday, and he hurls crude insults at her. One night, Faraday drives out to see a patient. On his way home, he pulls over near a pond that is not too far away from Hundreds and decides to sleep in his car because he is tired. The same night, Caroline dies from what looks like a suicide attempt. Betty, the Ayers family maid, finds Caroline's body and reports it to the authorities. Because of the strange circumstances of Caroline's death, Faraday must attend a formal inquest. At the inquest, Betty tells the judge that she thinks a supernatural force killed Caroline because Caroline uttered the word "you" just before she died. Betty's theory startles the judge, and he asks Faraday if Caroline believed in ghosts. Faraday says that she did. Then, the judge asks Faraday what he thinks happened. Faraday tells the judge that he believes Caroline committed suicide even though, in reality, he does not know what to think anymore. With Faraday's testimony in mind, Caroline's death is officially ruled a suicide. Several years later, Faraday still finds himself visiting Hundreds Hall. No one bought the home after Caroline's death, and he still has a key, so he goes to Hundreds by himself and walks around. One day, Faraday thinks he senses the evil entity that supposedly haunts Hundreds. However, when he turns around, all he sees is his reflection.

- Genre: Short story sequence; Literary fiction; Autobiographical fiction; Humor - Title: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Point of view: Various - Setting: Spokane Indian Reservation - Character: Victor. Description: Victor, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, is the protagonist of the majority of these stories, and is, in many ways, an emotional stand-in for Sherman Alexie himself. We follow the path of Victor's life from his childhood through to his adulthood, and watch—sometimes from a close or first-person vantage point, and sometimes from afar—as he struggles with his relationship to himself, his relationship to his parents, and his relationship to his tribe. As a child, Victor seems to be withdrawn, pressured often into silence by the difficulties of his home life—his parents are alcoholics, and he has been raised in extreme and debilitating poverty on the Spokane Indian Reservation. As Victor matures, he navigates his relationships with his friends on the reservation, Junior Polatkin and Thomas Builds-the-Fire; he experiences the rise and fall of potential basketball stardom; he loses his father to a presumed suicide; he falls in and out of love with several women both on and off the reservation; he struggles with substance abuse, and ultimately conquers his addiction; and he ultimately ends up living alone in Spokane, confident, finally, that he "knows how his dreams end." We see the world of the reservation largely through Victor's eyes. His view of his own upbringing, adolescence, and adulthood, though tinged with raucous humor and a healthy dose of sarcasm, is a bleak one, and his tales of poverty, violence, loss, and disappointment illuminate a simultaneous resentment toward and longing for an ideal of reservation life. - Character: Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Description: One of Victor's childhood friends, Thomas Builds-the-Fire has the gift of storytelling, and his stories often seem to be visions of the past or the future. However, Thomas is described as "always talking to himself… [he] was a storyteller that nobody wanted to listen to." Victor says that he has "never been very good" to Thomas, but that Thomas has "always" been good to him. When they are older, Thomas accompanies Victor to Phoenix in order to collect Victor's father's ashes. During their trip, the two reconcile, and Thomas forgives Victor his abuses in exchange for the promise that Victor will, just once, stop and listen to one of the many stories Thomas tells. After Thomas offends a member of the tribal council, he's brought to trial, and ultimately indicts himself in crimes he may or may not have actually committed—crimes that may just have been stories he felt compelled to tell. - Character: Junior Polatkin. Description: Another one of Victor's childhood friends. Junior Polatkin is present for many of Victor's childhood escapades, and he narrates a few of the stories throughout the text. He gives an account of his education both on and off the reservation, and ultimately travels to Spokane to attend Gonzaga University. There, he has a one-night stand with a white woman, Lynn, who becomes pregnant with his child. Junior drops out of school and returns to the reservation, and is only able to speak to his son on the telephone. Junior is smart and sensitive, and, through his interactions with Norma, reveals that he carries some past secrets he still feels guilty about. - Character: Victor's Father. Description: Victor's father, who's unnamed in the book, is an alcoholic and a complicated force throughout these stories. He drives much of the narrative, though he's not always present—or alive. Alexie himself has claimed that the book is about "love and hate" between fathers and sons, and through our glimpses of Victor's relationship with his father, we see a complicated bond evolve as it grows and changes over the years. After a devastating motorcycle accident in which he is hospitalized, Victor's father tells Victor that he "ain't interested in what's real; [he's] interested in how things should be." Victor is mesmerized by his father's stories, but perturbed by the volatile relationship his parents share; when his father leaves, it seems to be almost a relief. Victor at various turns idolizes and reviles his father, and all the love and sadness and failure he represents. - Character: Victor's Mother. Description: A steadfast woman, a beautiful dancer, and a source of comfort and stability far greater than any other in Victor's childhood. She was sterilized by the Indian Health Service doctor who delivered Victor just moments after he was born, and bears the scars of violence and an inescapable cycle of poverty and loss. Her marriage to Victor's father is tumultuous, and, after he eventually leaves them for Arizona, Victor notes that his mother "misse[s] hi[s father] just enough for it to hurt." - Character: Dirty Joe. Description: An Indian of whom Victor and his friend Sadie make a spectacle when they find him passed out in an alcoholic stupor at a local carnival. Though knowing it's a "shitty thing to do," Victor and Sadie place the unconscious Joe on a roller coaster called the stallion and watch as he goes, unconscious, around and around again. Victor ultimately feels awful, and, when looking in a funhouse mirror at the end of the story, has a vision of himself as an "Indian who offered up another Indian like some kind of treaty." - Character: Samuel Builds-the-Fire. Description: Grandfather to Thomas, Samuel Builds-the-Fire is also in possession of "the gift of storytelling." He works as a hotel maid in Spokane for many years before losing his job suddenly and without warning. On the day that he's let go, he goes to a bar where he takes his first drink of alcohol, then drinks until he becomes massively drunk. Walking home from the bar, he falls down onto a set of train tracks and stays there, though he can hear the train's whistle approaching. - Character: James Many Horses. Description: Orphaned in a house fire that took his parents' lives, James Many Horses is raised by the unnamed young man who saved his life, through whose eyes we see the early years of James's life unfold. As a child James is silent and slow to develop language and motor skills; he does not cry, he does not crawl, and he does not speak. When he does begin to talk, he is, according to his guardian, deeply spiritual, intelligent, and advanced for his age. When we encounter James next, he is grown; a man "who [tells] so many jokes that he even ma[kes] other Indians get tired of his joking." He is married to a woman named Norma, who leaves him after an argument they have when he makes several jokes in the middle of telling her that he has late-stage cancer. He receives "useless" cancer treatment in a Spokane hospital for a time, but is then sent home so that he can be more "comfortable." Norma eventually returns home as well, with the intention of helping James to "die the right way." - Character: Norma. Description: Wife to James Many Horses and close friend to Junior Polatkin, Norma is described as a "warrior," a "cultural lifeguard," and "the world champion fry bread maker." She grows intolerant of her husband James's many jokes when he continues making them in the face of a terminal cancer diagnosis, and leaves him for several months to go and live with a "cousin," who may or may not be her lover. She eventually returns home to help James die in peace. Norma teaches Junior Polatkin that "watching automatically makes the watcher part of the happening," and that "even the little things matter." Norma is a wild dancer, a sexual adventurer, and is critical of Victor, unable to forgive him for the bullying he perpetrated in his younger years. - Character: Betty Towle. Description: A white missionary teacher who instructs Junior during the second grade. She is bigoted, unfair, and continually punishes Junior throughout the year; she sends him home with a letter "that [tells his] parents to either cut [Junior's] braids or keep [him] home from class." She calls Junior "indian without capitalization" in an attempt to debase and humiliate him, but this treatment seems to cause Junior to accept and own his cultural identity in a defiant, steadfast way. - Character: Lynn. Description: A young white woman of Irish heritage who attends Gonzaga University in Spokane with Junior Polatkin. The two of them have a one-night stand while both living in the dorms over Christmas break; their affair results in a pregnancy, and Lynn fathers a child named Sean Casey. Her parents "refuse to accept Sean Casey's Indian blood," but Lynn "continually" reminds Sean of his heritage by reading him books about Indians. Lynn and Junior remain in touch, and Lynn ensures that Junior is able to talk to his son on the phone after he decides to quit school and return to the reservation. - Character: Nezzy. Description: Victor's aunt; a "beautiful dancer" and a steadfast woman who remains strong in the face of forced sterilization, derision and ungratefulness from her husband and son, and several other traumas such as car crashes and reckoning with her husband's alcoholism. She is an accomplished dressmaker, and constructs a heavy beaded dress which she believes will, when worn by the right person, reveal "the one who will save [the tribe.]" When Nezzy dons the dress she struggles at first under its great weight, but eventually stands and begins to dance. - Theme: Violence, Poverty, and Loss. Description: From the collection's first story, "Every Little Hurricane," readers are thrust into a world defined by extreme poverty, casual and tragic violence, and a haunting, pervasive sense of both cultural and personal loss. As Victor watches his uncles Arnold and Adolph fistfight in the middle of an approaching hurricane, he notes how the rise and fall of their violence against one another mirrors the trajectory of the storm—it is unthinking, destructive, and undoubtedly a force of nature. Violence is a constant throughout Alexie's stories—sometimes the violence is tied to motivations such as love and hatred, as is the case with Victor's uncles' fistfight, but often the violence is random, or senseless, or due to an ineffable sense of loss and frustration. Alexie uses violence this way to mirror the rippling effects of the pervasive historical violence against Native Americans. The confusion, anguish, and profound sadness of that violence creates a sense of hopelessness and of futility in the face of it. As a teenager, Victor mercilessly beats Thomas Builds-the-Fire, one of his childhood friends and a young man blessed with intricate storytelling abilities. An Indian woman is sterilized by her doctor after giving birth to a son. Bloody and even fatal car crashes abound throughout the narrative, and more often than not, they're due to a driver's intoxication. A man's body is ravaged by cancer—his "favorite" tumor is the size of a baseball. When Victor moves off of the reservation and into a Seattle apartment with his white girlfriend, their relationship is plagued by intense verbal conflict and, occasionally, physical violence. A police officer robs Victor and his wife during a sham of a traffic stop. All of these violent acts and more are just a sampling of the intensity of a life calibrated by generational trauma and an intimate understanding of what it feels like to always expect the next blow, the next slight, the next random act of personal or institutional violence. Reservation life is rendered carefully but never romantically in this collection, and the devastating effects of inescapable poverty permeate every page. The reservation is alternately a haven and a prison for Alexie's characters—the lack of opportunities and cyclical nature of reservation life creates a veritable whirlpool of destitution, danger, and rampant substance abuse. The ubiquitous and pervasive subjugation of Native peoples provides the majority of Alexie's characters with little outside of the reservation to hope for—off the reservation, Alexie notes," among white people, every Indian gets exaggerated." Some characters work hard at minimum-wage jobs or are let go from their jobs without warning; some characters are robbed by authority figures; one character saves dollar bills in a shoebox; one character seeks a loan from the tribal council in order to travel across the country to collect his father's body. There is rarely enough money for good food, and what little money there is is often spent on alcohol. Alexie engages common stereotypes about reservation life in order to express to readers the maddening cycle of poverty, neglect, desperation, and abuse that plagues many Native Americans. He depicts money as a resource that is simply unavailable to many Native people, and the fruitless pursuit of it is a frustrating disappointment that is, unfortunately, both commonplace and expected to the majority of his many characters. In one story, a group of Indians at a party "remember their own pain. The pain grew, expanded… The ceiling lowered with the weight of each Indian's pain until it was inches from Victor's nose." The influence of individual pain on the collective community's experience of pain—and vice versa—is revealed deeply in these sentences. After Victor's father dies in "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," Victor notes that though he had "only talked to [his father] on the telephone once or twice, there was still a genetic pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone." The Native American experience as rendered within these stories is one of profound and seemingly unending loss on both a personal and cultural level. The decimation of Native American peoples, traditions, and agency over the course of the last 500 years has left a mark, so to speak, in the hearts of each of Alexie's characters. Some bear the loss with grace, and others bear it with anger and resentment, but Alexie never casts judgment or proclaims any one way of dealing with such staggering cultural loss as the "right" way. Though the stories jump around from character to character, perspective to perspective, one thing the book's arc never loses sight of or interest in is the way Native Americans confront—or don't confront—a generational pain and loss that is difficult to comprehend and impossible to forget. - Theme: Memory, Bearing Witness, Storytelling, and Imagination. Description: In the face of a ravaged cultural landscape, Alexie stresses in nearly each story the importance of four vital acts to the Native American community of his youth: remembering, witnessing, telling stories, and imagining the future. Many stories take place within characters' memories, and are constructed so that the characters the reader encounters are not actually present within the action of the narrative but only as memories or distant figures. The tension between action and memory demonstrates the erosion of Native American culture, and the idea that the gatekeepers of so much of that culture exist now only in memory. Memories are kept close, and their presence is often a difficult one; one character keeps the memory of a violent car crash "so close that she [has] nightmares for a year." In "Flight," Alexie's narrator refers to memory as "a coin trick, dropping out of sight, then out of existence" and "an abandoned car, rusting and forgotten though it sits in plain view for decades." Memory is vital in this community, but its importance is a double-edged sword; though important to the preservation of cultural life and the learning of lessons, most memories experienced by Alexie's characters are rife with pain and trauma. Bearing witness is one of the text's most potent themes not only on a narrative level, but also on a meta-narrative level. Alexie's work as a writer is centered around making visible both a cultural perspective and a world that are often deliberately made invisible through oppression, shame, or neglect. In "Every Little Hurricane," as Victor's uncles beat one another, the narrator refers to the party guests as "Witnesses…Witnesses and nothing more. For hundreds of years, Indians were witnesses to crimes of an epic scale. This little kind of hurricane was generic. It didn't even deserve a name." During Thomas Builds-the-Fire's trial, he serves as his own witness, and ultimately indicts himself through his grand storytelling, which references events hundreds of years gone by; events that may or may not have actually happened. In "Witnesses, Secret and Not," an unnamed 13-year-old narrator—possibly Victor—accompanies his father to a Spokane police station after he's called upon to provide information about a disappearance that took place ten years ago. Though the narrator's father tells the officer that he's been questioned several times and cannot remember any new details, his position as a witness—whether he is a reliable one or not—is a synecdoche (a part of a thing that stands in for its larger whole) for the larger problem of being a "witness and nothing more" that Alexie explores throughout these stories. "Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace," the narrator commands the reader in the final lines of "Imagining the Reservation." We're asked to imagine a world in which storytelling—such a crucial aspect of Native life—is enough. "I know the story because every Indian knows the story," Victor's father tells him on the way to the Spokane police station in "Witnesses, Secret and Not." Storytelling is another theme that works as a meta-narrative device—Alexie himself is telling several stories that are delivered to the reader out of order, and require a readjustment with each new tale. Many of his characters, similarly though in a more exaggerated way, are almost possessed by the stories they have to tell, and use stories alternately as currency, as punishment, and as a kind of salve. In "A Drug Called Tradition," Victor, Thomas, and their friend Junior drive out to a nearby lake in order to take drugs. "It'll be very fucking Indian. Spiritual shit, you know?" Victor tells Thomas in order to convince him to come along. The boys "all want to have their vision," and, after they take the drugs, they do. The experience is a rite of passage, but one that the boys have claimed for themselves in a way very different from their ancestors. In "Distances," Alexie creates a vision of the future inspired by a quote—or a vision—from Wovoka, the Paiute Ghost Dance Messiah. Wovoka was the leader of a religious movement which began in the late 1800s and which predicts a time when the Great Spirit will arrive to bring back "game of every kind" and "all [the] dead Indians." Visions of the future—and of the past—are vital to Alexie's characters; they press on in the face of dire circumstances powered by their hopes for a better life for themselves and for future generations. - Theme: Cultural Pain vs. Personal Pain. Description: Cultural pain and personal pain, in Alexie's estimation, are inextricably linked. The personal pain his characters experience is, of course, often born of strife between family members, friends, and partners, but Alexie renders his characters' pain in such a way that highlights its connection to an inherited cultural or generational pain that comes from loss of land, tradition, and agency. "When children grow up together in poverty, a bond is formed that causes so much pain." This quote, from "Every Little Hurricane," ties together themes of love, poverty, loss, and pain both cultural and personal. The pain that many of Alexie's characters have experienced is a result of a cultural void that comes from the oppression and decimation of Native cultural life. This creates a bond on the personal level, though it is one that is heavy with pain, loss, and even, for some characters, deep resentment. Alexie describes a "genetic pain" in one of his stories—and though he doesn't use the term repeatedly, its effects are felt deeply and resonate throughout the collection as his characters navigate that specific and difficult kind of pain. A pain that's inherited from one's parents or ancestors carries with it the weight of oppression, loss, and expectations that that pain will somehow, in some way, be soothed—but the institutional restrictions on Native people coupled with personal pain make it difficult to escape from the vortex of deep, inherited cultural suffering. "There is just barely enough goodness in all this," says Victor of reservation life. The pain and suffering that have permeated nearly every aspect of his childhood, and even his adult life, are nearly insurmountable. Small moments of "goodness" or happiness are "barely enough" to make a dent in the experience of that suffering, though they're present. The inability to fully inhabit moments of goodness is another result of the personal pain that haunts most all of Alexie's many characters. - Theme: Community vs. Isolation. Description: The recurring characters that make up the world of The Lone Ranger and Tonto are often in conflict with their inner selves as well as their community. We see characters again and again at several very different points throughout their life—namely Victor, who functions as a stand-in of sorts for Alexie himself—and come to understand them through several perspectives, disjointed in time, place, and point of view but nonetheless interconnected. The intensity of the focus on the self—the ever-changing self, the many-sided self—throughout the text is rivaled only by the intensity of the focus on the tribal community and its intricacies. Characters rebel against their upbringing or fall into step on the paths their parents and grandparents have already tread; they seek refuge in one another or reject one another in a chaotic but profound maelstrom of action. In "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," Victor asks himself after he is cruel to Thomas-Builds-the-Fire: "Whatever happened to the tribal ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams." The sense of community that many of the characters—namely Victor—struggle with again and again is something that's alternately desired and rejected. In "Amusements," Victor and a woman named Sadie find an Indian man, Dirty Joe, a well known drunk, passed out at a carnival. They put him, unconscious, onto a roller coaster, and watch and laugh while he rides it again and again. In "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore," Victor and his friend Adrian discover a young Indian man—once a budding basketball star full of promise—in a similarly drunken state, but rather than subjecting him to violence or mockery, they care for him, and Victor allows him to stay in his home. Life off the reservation, when glimpsed throughout these stories, is more often than not portrayed as isolating. In the collection's final story, "Junior Polatkin's Wild West Show," Junior goes off to a "small Jesuit college" in Spokane. He is the only Indian there, and his experiences lead him to feel trapped between two worlds. He doesn't go home for Christmas break because he doesn't want to "go back to his reservations and endure the insults that would be continually hurled at him"; however, in his relationship with a white woman, with whom he fathers a child after a one-night stand, he is made to feel othered and even rejected. Off the reservation, jobs—another kind of community—are also described as difficult or dangerous for Natives to hold. Victor is robbed during the graveyard shift at his 7-11 job; "More than that," he says "[the robber] took the dollar bill from my wallet, pulled the basketball shoes off my feet, and left me waiting for rescue [in the cooler] between the expired milk and broken egg." In another story, Samuel Builds-the-Fire—Thomas's grandfather—is let go from his job as a cleaner at a hotel on his birthday. As a meta-textual device, Alexie positions the reader—a single, isolated entity—at the feet of his vast cast of characters. At the start of each new tale, the reader must reset their perspective in order to take in the members of the tribal community with new eyes every few pages. Alexie throws the isolated reader up against this troubled, vibrant, chaotic community in order to highlight the distance, perhaps, between the reader's experience and that of the characters—or, in some cases, the lack of that distance precisely. - Theme: Love and Hatred. Description: One review of this collection refers to it as a series of "cultural love stories," and Alexie himself, in the foreword, writes that "[in] trying to figure out the main topic, the big theme, the overarching idea, the epicenter" of the collection, he arrived at "the sons in this book really love and hate their fathers." The line between love and hatred—for many of Alexie's characters, not just the sons and fathers in the text—is a fine one that is traversed back and forth time and time again. On the reservation, care and community are important but often overlooked, and treasured friendships and partnerships are similarly both valued and easily or thoughtlessly discarded. By the same token, hate and resentment spring up in many small or unexpected ways; pockets of reservation communities are again and again torn asunder by violence and ill will. In "Every Little Hurricane," Victor's uncles "slug each other which such force that they had to be in love"—the narrator describes how, during the fight, "Victor watched as his uncle held his other uncle down, saw the look of hate and love on his uncle's face." In another story, Victor says of his parents' tumultuous marriage that his mother loved his father "with a ferocity that eventually forced her to leave him. They fought each other with the kind of graceful anger that only love can create." In one of Victor's major romantic relationships, things come to a close on a note of both love and resentment. "I love you. And don't ever come back," one of his girlfriends tells him as he prepares to leave their home in Seattle and return to the Spokane Indian Reservation. Victor and his classmates, growing up, "hate" Thomas Builds-the-Fire "for his courage." Thomas is an important person in Victor's life, and Victor does seem to, in a way, grow to love him throughout the course of these stories. However, the foundation of hatred and jealousy speaks to the complicated emotions that define so many of the relationships that appear in these pages. Because the narrative isn't linear, the rise and fall of love and hatred throughout the book doesn't necessarily resolve itself or point to any kind of conclusion. Rather, the chopped-up, ever-changing narrative acts as a metaphor of sorts for the tumultuous nature of human relationships, and especially of relationships whose surroundings and foundations are calibrated by an atmosphere of poverty, violence, cultural loss or pain, and personal isolation. Alexie demonstrates the volatility of both familial and romantic relationships that come to fruition within the borders of the reservation. - Climax: Though the stories that comprise the narrative are nonlinear and often only loosely connected, we can see moments of revelation, high emotion, or the delineation of a "point of no return" in several stories, such as when Thomas Builds-the-Fire is incarcerated; when Samuel Builds-the-Fire lays his head down on train tracks as an oncoming train approaches; and when Victor and Thomas travel to Arizona to collect Victor's father's body and belongings. - Summary: In "Every Little Hurricane," Alexie introduces the volatile world of Victor's childhood—the Spokane Indian Reservation, 1976—when a hurricane "drops from the sky" during a raucous, drunken, violent party at Victor's family's HUD house. In "A Drug Called Tradition," Victor and his friends Junior Polatkin and Thomas Builds-the-Fire take drugs in hopes of each experiencing their own visions. "Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock" is an ode to Victor's father, who was, according to Victor, "the perfect hippie during the sixties, since all the hippies were trying to be Indians." Victor recollects nights when his father would come home drunk, and could only be comforted and lulled by Jimi Hendrix tapes. This story outlines the dissolution of Victor's father's marriage to Victor's mother; "when an Indian marriage starts to fall apart, it's destructive; Indians fight their way to the end, holding onto the last good thing, because our whole lives have to do with survival." In "Crazy Horse Dreams," Victor meets an attractive and engaging Indian woman at a powwow. They go home together, but each find that they are disappointed by the other. In "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Red Anymore," Victor and his friend Adrian are drinking Pepsis on Victor's porch when they see a group of Indian boys walking by. They recognize one of them as Julius Windmaker, "the best basketball player on the reservation." They muse about his potential and whether or not he'll make it off the reservation and find basketball stardom. The story flashes forward to a year later, where they are once again drinking Pepsis on the porch. Julius Windmaker "stagger[s] down the road, drunk as a skunk." Victor and Adrian lament his lost potential, and head inside. In the morning, they find Julius "passed out on the living room floor." They head out to the porch with their coffees, and another group of Indian kids walks by; they recognize one of them as a third-grade girl named Lucy, who is "so good [at basketball] that she plays for the sixth grade boys' team." Victor and Adrian sip their coffees, hoping that Lucy "makes it all the way." In "Amusements," Victor and his friend Sadie, while attending a carnival, see an Indian known as Dirty Joe passed out in a drunken stupor in the grass. Rather than help him to safety, they put him on board the roller coaster and watch as he rides it again and again, eventually staggering off, sick and disoriented. Victor catches sight of himself in a funhouse mirror and experiences a vision of himself as an "Indian who offered up another Indian like some treaty." In "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," Victor learns that his father has died of a heart attack in Phoenix. He has no money, and needs a way to get to Phoenix, so Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor's childhood friend—who'd had a vision as a boy of Victor's father's weak heart—offers to lend Victor money if Victor takes Thomas with him to Phoenix. Victor agrees. During their trip to Phoenix, and while cleaning out his father's depressing trailer, Victor experiences remembrances of his and Thomas's childhood, both good and bad; stories Thomas used to tell, and the fights they got into with each other as teens. Thomas reveals that he'd had another vision, years ago, of Victor's father finding him on a vision quest, and bringing him back to the reservation. Thomas believes that Victor's father had been his vision all along, and that his "dreams were saying Take care of each other." Victor and Thomas drive back to Spokane, and divide up Victor's father's ashes between them. Thomas asks Victor to "stop and listen, just one time" the next time he hears him telling a story. In "The Fun House," an unnamed narrator tells a series of stories about his aunt. In one, a mouse crawls up her pant leg while she quilts; in another, she and her husband crash their car after a night out drinking; in another, she jumps, in frustration with her son and his father, into a river, though she does not know how to swim; in another, we witness her child's birth, and see that she is sterilized immediately after delivering him. In "All I Wanted To Do Was Dance," we see a series of vignettes of Victor drinking, dancing, falling in love with several different women, struggling with sobriety, and juggling odd jobs. In "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," Thomas stands trial after offending a member of the Tribal Council. In a Kafkaesque (dark, dystopian, and disorienting) proceeding, Thomas recounts several of his stories (the majority of which seem to be dreams or visions rather than fact) and ultimately indicts himself on several trumped-up charges. He is sent to prison on a bus, and his fellow inmates ask him to share a story. "Distances," one of Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories or visions, depicts an alternate reality in which the white man was decimated, and only Indians remain in America. The Tribal Council rules that anything having to do with whites must be destroyed. The Others, long-dead Indians, return from "a thousand years ago," and Thomas repeatedly "dream[s] about television" and "[wakes] up crying." "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation" chronicles the infancy and childhood of James Many Horses during the late 1960s and early 1970s. After his parents die tragically in a house fire, the story's unnamed narrator—who saved him from the fire—is charged, as per Indian tradition (supposedly), with raising him. James is silent and immobile for the first several years of his life, but when he does begin speaking, he displays a deep sensitivity and exceptional intelligence. In "A Train is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result," we meet Samuel Builds-the-Fire, grandfather to Thomas. Also a prolific, gifted storyteller, he works as a maid at a motel in Spokane, and on his birthday he is fired. He proceeds to a bar, where he takes his first drink of alcohol; he becomes inebriated and, at the end of the night, stumbles and falls when crossing a set of train tracks. He hears the train's whistle approaching, but chooses not to move out of its way. In "A Good Story," Alexie creates a meta-narrative in which the narrator, Junior, tells his mother, who is busy quilting, a story about a man named Uncle Moses—presumably Moses MorningDove—telling a story to a local boy named Arnold. "The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue" recounts several vignettes from the titular event. Victor plays a piano that he brought back to the reservation from a flea market; some people eat and drink and dance; some play horseshoes, and one Indian notes that "basketball was invented just a year after the Ghost Dancers fell at Wounded Knee." "Imagining the Reservation" is an ode to imagination, and the role it plays in Native American life. Imagination is, the narrator notes, "the only weapon on the reservation." The story speculates on what life might be like for Indians if "Crazy Horse invented the atom bomb in 1876 and detonated it over Washington, D.C."; if "Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean"' if "a story [could] put wood in the fireplace." "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor" is narrated by James Many Horses, now an adult known on the reservation for his incessant joking. He angers his wife Norma by joking about dying while confessing to her that he has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. His wife leaves him, and, during his ongoing cancer treatments, he reflects fondly on their relationship. Norma returns, eventually, to help James "die the right way." "Indian Education," narrated by Junior Polatkin, tells the story of his time in school on and off the reservation. He is subjected to cruel treatment by his classmates and by his second-grade teacher, Betty Towle. He finds success as a basketball player, though he endures racism and suspicion from coaches of opposing local teams. He graduates valedictorian of his "farm town" high school, "try[ing] to remain stoic as [he] look[s] toward the future" while knowing that back on the reservation, his former classmates "look back toward tradition." "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" follows Victor, now living in Spokane, as he takes a middle-of-the-night walk to a 7-11 to buy a creamsicle, reflecting all the while on a long-since-ended relationship with a white woman in Seattle. The relationship was volatile and marked by intense arguments, during or after which Victor, frequently drunk, got in his car and drove through the night or otherwise broke lamps in their shared apartment. Victor remarks that "these days" he doesn't sleep; "he know[s] how all [his] dreams end anyway." In "Family Portrait," an unnamed narrator reflects on his childhood. He notes that "the television was always too loud," and that "'Dinner sounded like 'Leave me alone;' 'I love you' sounded like 'Inertia.'" He reflects on stories that may or may not have actually happened but that were "created [in the] collective imaginations" of his parents and his siblings. He sums up his coming-of-age and that of his siblings by remarking: "Jesus, we all want[ed] to survive." "Somebody Kept Saying Powwow," also narrated by Junior, tells the story of his long friendship with Norma, James Many Horses's wife. "Witnesses, Secret and Not" is set in 1979; a thirteen-year-old unnamed narrator's father has been summoned to the police station in Spokane to answer questions about the disappearance of Jerry Vincent, a man who went missing ten years earlier. His father reminds the questioning officer that he's been brought in nearly every year to answer the same question over and over, and the officer sends the narrator and his father away. When the narrator and his father return home that night, his father "[sits] at the table and [cries] into his fry bread" while his family watches. In "Flight," a young Indian man named John-John has repeated visions of his brother Joseph's return from the armed forces. Joseph was taken prisoner "during a routine military operation" while serving as a jet pilot. John-John saves money to "escape" the reservation and "dreams of flight." "Junior Polatkin's Wild West Show" follows Junior to college in Spokane, where he attends Gonzaga University. He is the only Indian there. While staying in the dorms over Christmas break in order to avoid going home to the reservation, Junior has a one-night stand with a white woman named Lynn. She becomes pregnant and has a baby, which she names Sean Casey. Lynn's parents refuse to acknowledge the child's Native heritage, but Lynn reads the child books about Indians and allows him to speak to Junior over the phone. Junior eventually drops out of school and returns to the reservation, anticipating "a new and painful sequel to the first act of his life."

- Genre: Science fiction short story - Title: The Long Rain - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Venus - Character: Lieutenant. Description: The lieutenant is the leader of the American military men whose rocket crashes on Venus. Two of his comrades are killed in the crash, and an unnamed man in their group dies in the monster's attack, leaving only the lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard to fight for survival in the Venusian jungle. Although the lieutenant is the authority figure of the group, he appears to have little understanding of Venus' landscape, the physiological effects of the rain, or the Venusians' animosity toward Earth people. He often gives the men directions with false certainty and admits that he's only pretending to know where they're going just to keep his men happy. More often than not, the lieutenant learns about Venus through Simmons and heeds to his advice and decisions, suggesting that perhaps Simmons is the one who has lived on Venus for ten years (at the beginning of the story, one of the men in the group tells the lieutenant that he has lived on Venus for a decade, but it's unclear who says this). Even though he's not the strongest leader, the lieutenant proves smart and tenacious. He cautions the men to lie flat in the mud to avoid the monster's attack, for instance—a decision that saves all those who follow his advice. By the end of the story, the lieutenant is the only one who has not died of insanity or suicide, and he is the only one to reach the functioning Sun Dome. He shows more grit and resolve than any of the men, but it's clear that he's also just lucky—considering the number of times the men have unknowingly walked in circles, he very well could have ended up back at the destroyed Sun Dome and died of insanity like his companions. - Character: Simmons. Description: Simmons is an American military man who survives the rocket crash and the monster's attack with the lieutenant and Pickard. Despite his misery in the constant downpour, he's talkative and fairly upbeat, as he daydreams aloud about reaching the Sun Dome, where he'll enjoy "a pan of cinnamon buns" and bask in the warm sunlight. He also appears to be the most knowledgeable of the three men about Venus; he recounts several stories of people going insane or killing themselves in the Venusian jungle (something that the other two men seem unaware of until Pickard himself goes insane). He also explains the political animosity between the Venusians and Earth people, and knows both the history of the Venusians' attacks on Sun Domes and the special eight-hour drowning procedure the Venusians use on their enemies. This keen understanding of Venus and its inhabitants may suggest that Simmons is the one who has lived on Venus for ten years (as an unnamed member of their group claims at the opening of the story). If this is the case, though, it's unclear why he doesn't have a better sense of direction regarding how to get to the next Sun Dome, and it's also unclear why he was in the rocket in the first place. Though the lieutenant appears to be the group's authority figure, Simmons is the one who decides to abandon the destroyed Sun Dome in search of another one, and, later, to shoot Pickard after he's gone insane in order to put him out of his misery. Near the end of the story, Simmons loses his hearing and knows he's on the verge of going insane, just like Pickard did. Once the lieutenant is out of earshot, Simmons commits suicide by shooting himself. - Character: Pickard. Description: Pickard is one of the three American military men who survives the rocket crash and the monster's attack. Pickard and his remaining companions—the lieutenant and Simmons—miserably trample through the Venusian jungle in search of a Sun Dome. Pickard is the most pessimistic of the three men, and his sharp comments and dark, chilling laughter increase until it's clear that he's slipped into insanity. Just before he does so, though, he recounts a childhood memory of a bully in his class pinching him every five minutes, all day long, every school day. The intermittent pinching, which he now likens to the rhythmic and persistent raindrops on his head, eventually made him so agitated that he brutally attacked and almost killed the bully. This bubbling up of nearly inhuman madness mirrors his mental breakdown in the jungle. Unable to handle the incessant raindrops anymore, he screams and fires his gun six times into the sky, but then goes quiet. When the lieutenant and Simmons shine their hand lamp onto him, they see that his pupils are dilated and that his mouth is open and turned upwards, filling with water. He proves unresponsive, and Simmons realize that Pickard has gone insane and is now drowning himself by breathing in the rain, just like General Mendt did. To put Pickard out of his misery, Simmons shoots him. - Character: Unnamed Man. Description: The unnamed man is one of the four American men who initially survives the rocket crash on Venus, along with the lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard. He disobeys the lieutenant's orders to lie still when the monster begins its attack, and his choice to run away in terror is what gets him killed. The story describes his electrocuted body in gruesome detail, emphasizing humankind's frailty and powerlessness in the face of nature and death. - Character: The Monster. Description: The bright blue electrical monster that attacks the group of American men and kills the unnamed man. Bradbury leaves it ambiguous as to if the monster is real—yet another terrifying aspect of the foreign, "cartoonish nightmare" of a planet—or if the monster is purely a metaphor for a massive electrical storm. Bradbury describes the monster as being half a mile wide and mile tall. It has a thousand electric legs, which fall out of its body and electrocute anything in their path. While the lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard escape the monster unscathed by lying down in the mud (the monster is so high up, it doesn't notice things on the ground), the other man gets scared and runs at the last moment. The monster kills him instantly with a dozen lightning bolts. - Character: The Venusians. Description: The inhabitants of Venus, who live in Venus' Single Sea. Although they never physically appear in the story, the Venusians have destroyed one of the Sun Domes the men find. Simmons, who knows the most about Venus and its people, believes that the Venusians captured the inhabitants of that Sun Dome and carried them off to the sea to be tortured and killed in a special eight-hour drowning procedure. Simmons explains to the lieutenant and Pickard that the Venusians hate Earth people and seek to destroy them by destroying Sun Domes. However, this particular Sun Dome was the first one they destroyed in five years, clearly waiting for the Earth people to grow complacent and unalert before striking. - Character: General Mendt. Description: An American military general who drowned in the rain on Venus before the start of the story. He was found perched on a rock, head tilted back, mouth open, and lungs filled with water. Simmons explains the details of General Mendt's death to the lieutenant as support for his decision to shoot Pickard, as he's gone insane and is now trying to drown himself by breathing in the rain just like General Mendt did. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: In Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain," a group of American military men find themselves stranded on Venus after their rocket crashes. Four men are forced to traverse through the wild Venusian jungles and thick sheets of rain in search of a Sun Dome—one of 126 luxurious American-built shelters that are peppered among Venus' vast, single continent. As the men struggle to survive in the soaking-wet wilderness for an entire month, the story highlights how mankind is ultimately helpless in the face of nature's sheer power. Over the course of the story, the group of four tragically dissolves into just one lone survivor, the lieutenant, illustrating nature's ability to destroy humans mentally, emotionally, and physically. The men's struggle to survive in this wild, water-logged world shows how humans are ultimately at the mercy of nature. The opening of the story, for instance, depicts how the never-ending rain "shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes." The word "shrank," coupled with the invocation of apes, gives the passage Darwinian undertones, as if the rain is so powerful that it makes the humans regress into their primal ancestors. Bradbury also compares Venus' never-ending rain to the biblical story of the flood. One of the men laments, "How many nights have we slept? Thirty nights, thirty days! Who can sleep with rain slamming their head, banging away." Unlike Noah, however, the four men are currently in a small inflatable life raft, and there's no indication of any sort of God who is on their side, urging them to build an ark. By comparing the rain to a flood sent by God (which, according to Genesis, lasted forty nights and forty days, a strikingly similar duration to the men's time on Venus), Bradbury imbues nature with otherworldly power and omnipotence, emphasizing how small and helpless the humans are. The men consider themselves victims of Chinese water torture, further underscoring nature as a powerful authority figure. One of the men states, "Chinese water cure. Remember the old torture? Rope you against a wall. Drop one drop of water on your head every half hour. You go crazy waiting for the next one. Well, that's Venus, but on a big scale." By comparing themselves to prisoners roped against a wall and subjected to physical torture, the men highlight their helplessness in the face of nature's dominance. Part of nature's overwhelming power stems from its ability to destroy humans on several different levels—mentally, emotionally, and physically. The rain's power is visually apparent, as it wipes the men clean of all signs of vitality: the lieutenant "had a face that once had been brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning to turn white." It seems impossible that even the heaviest of rains could strip the color from a person's hair and eyes, but on Venus, this is case. Later, when an unnamed man in the group dies after a massive electrical monster pelts him with lightning bolts, his comrades examine his destroyed body: "The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton." In gruesome detail, Bradbury shows the extent to which nature can physically destroy human beings. In addition, the comparison between the rain and Chinese water torture also shows how nature can destroy a person mentally. Likewise, as Pickard later slips into insanity, he cries, "If only the rain wouldn't hit my head, just for a few minutes. If I could only remember what it's like not to be bothered." He likens the rhythmic, pounding rain to the way that his childhood bully pinched him every five minutes during school, noting that one day, Pickard snapped and almost killed the bully in retaliation. In the present, he wildly exclaims, "But what do I do now? Who do I hit, who do I tell to lay off, stop bothering me, this damn rain, like the pinching, always on you, that's all you hear, that's all you feel!" Clearly, the rain is doing more than physically bothering Pickard—he's being tortured mentally, too. Throughout the story, Bradbury contrasts nature's overwhelming power with humankind's helplessness, ultimately encouraging readers to view nature with humility, awe, and respect. - Theme: Determination and Luck. Description: Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" follows four American military men as they struggle to survive after their rocket crashes on Venus, killing two of their comrades on impact. Venus is smothered by a constant, torrential rain that leeches vitality—and sanity—from the men stuck beneath it. In a desperate effort to survive, the men spend a month searching determinedly for one of many American-made shelters on Venus called Sun Domes, where they will finally be able to eat, sleep, dry off, and get warm. However, as the story unfolds, and three of the four men die, Bradbury warns that tenacity isn't necessarily rewarded by default. Although the lone survivor, the lieutenant, shows extraordinary determination that outweighs that of his dead comrades, true success—in this case, survival by means of finding the Sun Dome—depends on a combination of perseverance and luck. Bradbury cautions that, though determination is required for success, it doesn't guarantee it. After enduring the rain for thirty days in search of a Sun Dome, the men are "wet and tired and slumped like clay that was melting." Still, they press on. When they finally see something in the clearing, they dejectedly realize that they've somehow circled back to their crashed rocket ship, and that a nearby electrical storm must have toyed with their compasses. After enduring another miserable day, they finally come across the Sun Dome, and it seems as if their efforts are finally being rewarded. When he reaches the door of the Sun Dome, Simmons yells excitedly, "Bring on the coffee and [cinnamon] buns!" However, when the men thrust open the doors, they're met with shock and crushing disappointment: the Sun Dome is abandoned, and water rushes through thousands of "newly punctured" holes in the ceiling. Once again, the men's determination does not necessarily ensure their success. Unluckily, they've stumbled across the one Sun Dome (out of 126) that the Venusians have just destroyed in their first attack in five years. Though the men clearly cannot always control the world around them, they can set themselves up for the best chance for success. The lieutenant, the only man in his group who survives, is more persistent and tenacious than his comrades, which certainly works in his favor. Even though by the end of the story he's on the brink of insanity and has lost all five of his companions (two from the rocket crash, one from the monster, one from insanity, and one from suicide), the lieutenant repeats to himself that he will press on for five more minutes before committing suicide: "Another five minutes and then I'll walk into the sea and keep walking." His determination to continue leads to a stroke of luck when he quickly notices a Sun Dome in the distance. As he frantically runs toward it, he slips and falls, and his inner voice tells him to quit: "Lie here, he thought; it's the wrong [Sun Dome]. Lie here. It's no use." Yet, in another moment of extraordinary perseverance, he finds the will to get back on his feet and keep running toward the Sun Dome. This Dome does indeed turn out to be a functioning one, and the lieutenant's incredible persistence is rewarded with plush Turkish towels, steaming hot chocolate, dry clothes, and a fluffy bed. The lieutenant's refusal to give up is partially what propels him to safety, but given the number of times the men's determination proved fruitless in the story—when they accidentally circled back to their rocket, or when they came across a newly-destroyed Sun Dome—the lieutenant could easily have failed. Indeed, through the fallen unnamed man, Pickard, and Simmons, Bradbury paints a dark but realistic picture of how one can be incredibly determined but still come up short. Thus, even as Bradbury encourages his readers to persevere, "The Long Rain" resists the clean, easy takeaway that such perseverance guarantees anything at all. Instead, the story ultimately suggests that while human beings aren't necessarily the masters of their fate, personal will remains an invaluable virtue: determination may not guarantee success and survival, but, without it, they are nearly impossible. - Theme: The Power of Memory. Description: When the "The Long Rain" opens, a group of military men are trampling through Venus' wet jungles and enduring its never-ending downpour in search of an American-made structure called a Sun Dome, where they will be able to find food and shelter. For each of the men, the grueling search for the Sun Dome unearths several memories, some of which are pleasant and some of which are decidedly not. Memories help the men make sense of their distinctly alien situation, yet with such clarity often comes increased anguish at their circumstances. As they grapple with the past in the midst of their torturous present, the men learn that memories can at once be a significant source of resilience and also make one's present all the more painful. Through Simmons and the lieutenant, Bradbury illustrates the power of memory to comfort and strengthen. Simmons is no stranger to Sun Domes, as he implies several times that he's spent a great deal of time on Venus. Thus, while the men are miserably trampling through the Venusian jungle, Simmons prods himself along with warm memories of the Sun Dome: "'Brother, that puts muscle in me […] A big pot of coffee for me,' panted Simmons, smiling. 'And a pan of cinnamon buns, by God! And just lie there and let the old sun hit you.'" At another point in the story, when the unnamed man in the group jumps up in terror and tries to outrun the monster, he is killed instantly. Facedown in the mud, all the lieutenant can hear is "the sound a fly makes when landing upon the grill wires of an exterminator." The narrator continues, "The lieutenant remembered this from his childhood on a farm. And there was a smell of a man burned to a cinder." Sandwiched between two gruesome details regarding his comrade's tragic death, it seems that the lieutenant's childhood memory is a way of grasping for comfort, or at least understanding, in the midst of incomprehensible horror; shortly after this moment, the men walk towards the body filled with the disbelief of those "who have not accepted death until they have touched it." Perhaps, for the lieutenant, thinking briefly of his childhood on a farm softens the blow of his friend being killed in front of him, yet it also creates a renewed sense of hopelessness of finding a Sun Dome. Indeed, the power of memory in the story means that not only can recollections be comforting, but they can also make situations more painful. After finally locating a Sun Dome only to discover that it's recently been destroyed by the Venusians, for example, Pickard shares a memory with his comrades that may help him contextualize what the men are going through, but ultimately only serves to intensify the pain he's feeling. He explains that when he was in grade school, there was a bully who sat behind him and pinched him every five minutes, all day long, every single day. After many months of enduring the pinching, Pickard snapped: "I turned around and took a metal trisquare I used in mechanical drawing and I almost killed that bastard. I almost cut his lousy head off. I almost took his eye out before they dragged me out of the room, and I kept yelling, 'Why don't he leave me alone? Why don't he leave me alone?'" Recounting this memory gets Pickard increasingly worked up. Likening the constant pinching to the constant raindrops, he exclaims, "But what do I do now? Who do I hit, who do I tell to lay off, stop bothering me, this damn rain, like the pinching, always on you, that's all you hear, that's all you feel!" Pickard's festering anger at his childhood bully melds with his frustration and agony over the rain, which only makes his present circumstances all the more unbearable. Similarly, Simmons recounts two memories of people going insane in the Venusian rain, which further emphasizes the gravity of the men's current situation. First, he recounts a memory from years ago, when he found one of his friends wandering aimlessly in the rain. His friend had clearly gone mad, and wouldn't stop repeating, "Don't know enough, to come in, outta the rain. Don't know enough, to come in, outta the rain. Don't know enough." Later, Simmons explains that General Mendt was found "sitting on a rock with his head back, breathing the rain. His lungs were full of water." Both of these memories underscore that the men's reaction to their predicament is understandable, yet also make the men's present situation all the more distressing. Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Pickard is slipping into the same sort of madness and is attempting to drown himself by breathing in the rain. Besides explaining what's happening to Pickard, Simmons' memories also emphasize how dangerous it is for Simmons and the lieutenant to continue traversing through the rain, as they too could go insane at any given moment. At the end of the story, when the lieutenant finally finds an operating Sun Dome, he is dried almost instantly the second he walks inside, and "the rain [becomes] only a memory to his tingling body." This is nearly the last line of the story, and thus feels like Bradbury gesturing to the twofold power of memory that appears throughout "The Long Rain." Perhaps, going forward, the lieutenant will use the memory of being trapped in the Venusian rain as a way to buoy himself in other difficult situations. Or, perhaps the memory of the rain will be haunting and traumatizing like that of the pinching bully, heightening painful experiences for the rest of his life. - Theme: Government, Politics, and Foreign Affairs. Description: Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" follows a group of American military men as they fight to survive after their rocket crashes unexpectedly in the Venusian jungle, which is soaked with the endless rain. As they trample through this pale, soggy world in search of an American-made shelter called a Sun Dome, the men repeatedly grumble about their government back on Earth. Through these complaints, Bradbury criticizes the government for being both misguided and slow to act, which can have catastrophic consequences for its citizens. The story's political undertones ultimately suggest that part of this lag stems from how the government has lost sight of helping its individual citizens. Instead, the government is preoccupied with sticking its nose in other territories—like Venus—even when doing so makes little sense. Bradbury clearly illustrates the danger of the government's failure—or refusal—to understand the urgency of the situation it has left its Venus-bound citizens in. When the lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard are faced with the devastating discovery that the first Sun Dome they've come across in a month is in ruins, the lieutenant suggests that they stay put and wait for a rescue mission. Always the realist, Simmons replies, "They'll send a crew to repair this place in about six months, when they get the money from Congress. I don't think we'd better wait." Simmons' comments suggest a certain inhumanity within the government's priorities; even though swiftly repairing the Sun Dome could save several lives, Congress will fail to release the funds promptly. Such sluggish bureaucracy has devastating effects even millions of miles away, as both Pickard and Simmons go insane mere hours after encountering the destroyed Sun Dome. Given that Bradbury wrote this story shortly after World War II, this could thus be read as a broader condemnation of high-level, detached policy decisions that fail to adequately consider the immediate consequences for individuals representing the country abroad. Bradbury in fact directly suggests that the government is slow to act because it's lost sight of the importance of helping individual citizens. One of the men, probably Simmons due to his other politically charged comments, explains that there are "one hundred and twenty-six [Sun Domes], as of last month. They tried to push a bill through Congress back on Earth a year ago to provide for a couple dozen more, but oh no, you know how that is. They'd rather a few men went crazy with the rain." Simmons gestures to the way that the American government is particularly slow—or entirely ineffectual—about things that would only help a relatively small number of people. Through the men's complaints, Bradbury implies that the government is too caught up with inserting itself in foreign territories, even when doing so makes little sense and comes at the cost of human life. Simmons explains the hostile dynamic between the Venusians and the Earth people (specifically Americans, whose government funds and maintains the Domes), stating, "Every once in a while the Venusians come up out of the sea and attack a Sun Dome. They know if they ruin the Sun Domes they can ruin us. […] But it's been five years since the Venusians tried anything. Defense relaxes. They caught this Dome unaware." The Venusians make their discontent with America's presence even clearer by also capturing (and presumably killing) those who were in the Sun Dome in question. Simmons muses, "The Venusians took them all down into the sea. I hear they have a delightful way of drowning you. It takes about eight hours to drown the way they work it. Really delightful." Bradbury points out that America's decision to colonize Venus (or at least set roots down in some capacity) also makes little sense in the first place due to the planet's environment. In the story, the humans repeatedly voice that they are out of their element on Venus. One of the men even likens enduring the foreign climate to enduring foreign torture tactics (further positioning the story as a commentary on the experience of soldiers in wartime). After comparing the rain to Chinese water torture, the man affirms, "We're not made for water. You can't sleep, you can't breathe right, and you're crazy from just being soggy." The man highlights how the perpetual downpour keeps humans from ensuring their basic needs are met. Similarly, moments away from going insane, the lieutenant tells himself, "We weren't made for this; no Earthman was or ever will be able to take it." Bradbury clearly shows how the Venusians don't want humans there, and the humans themselves don't want to be there, consequently casting the American government's preoccupation with Venus as absurd and even fatal. - Climax: The lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard finally reach the Sun Dome (an American-made shelter), only to discover that it's in shambles and does not have any edible food. - Summary: The lieutenant and his comrades are trudging through the soggy Venusian jungle in search of a Sun Dome, one of 126 American-made shelters peppered among Venus' single continent. The constant rain is maddening. The men's fingers are pruned, their foreheads are sore from the pelting raindrops, and their entire bodies are turning pasty white—including their eyes, hair, and uniforms. Thirty days ago, their rocket crashed on Venus, killing two of their comrades on impact. Since then, the surviving men have been navigating the waterlogged planet with difficulty, searching desperately for a Sun Dome so that they can finally eat, sleep, and dry off. The Domes are said to be filled with luxuries, like leather-bound books, hot chocolate "crowned with marshmallow dollops," soft beds, and an artificial sun suspended in the ceiling, which warms the entire building. As they tromp through the jungle, Simmons thinks he sees something in a clearing and runs ahead. His companions take off after him, hoping that they've finally found a Sun Dome. Instead, the men come face to face with their abandoned rocket—and realize they've somehow circled back around to it in the last month. They feel dejected, but the lieutenant reminds them that they still have two days' worth of food left. Suddenly, a monster rips through the jungle. The monster is bright blue, complete with a thousand lightning bolts for legs, and burns everything in its path. The lieutenant orders all of his comrades to lie down in the mud, but one of them—an unnamed man—runs away screaming. The monster zaps him instantly, and the jungle smells of burning flesh. The remaining men—the lieutenant, Simmons, and Pickard—have no choice but to carry on. They make their way across milky white rivers and through the pale jungle. Finally, they see a sheer yellow glow in the distance. The men excitedly run toward it, buoyed by the sight of the Sun Dome. However, when they arrive, the Sun Dome is completely abandoned. Rain pours down from a thousand holes in the ceiling (the handiwork of the Venusians, who don't want Earth people on their planet), and all of the food is covered with green fur. The men consider waiting for a rescue team but decide to move on to the next Dome, which is about eight hours away. After several more hours of travel, the men decide to rest—they haven't slept in thirty days, because the rain makes it impossible to do so. After lying down for only a few moments, however, Pickard suddenly starts screaming and shoots his rifle in the air repeatedly. The lieutenant fumbles for his hand lamp and shines it on Pickard's face—his pupils are dilated and his mouth is wide open, filling with water. The lieutenant yells at Pickard and tries slapping his face, but Simmons says it's no use: Pickard has gone insane and is now trying to drown himself. Simmons shoots Pickard to put him out of his misery. The lieutenant and Simmons carry on, but soon Simmons starts showing signs of insanity himself. Simmons declares that he doesn't want to die of insanity and drowning—he plans to shoot himself as soon as the lieutenant is out of sight. Unable to reason with his companion, the lieutenant is forced to carry on alone. The lieutenant miserably tells himself that he'll keep walking for just five more minutes. After that, he'll drown himself in the ocean. Within moments, however, the lieutenant sees a bright yellow glow in the distance and realizes he's reached the Sun Dome. He takes off at a run, crashing and tripping through the jungle. He finally stumbles inside the Dome and is overwhelmed by the sight. The tables are laden with steaming pots of coffee and platters of sandwiches. On a nearby chair sits a stack of fluffy Turkish towels and a fresh uniform. Gazing up at the ceiling, he sees the glorious yellow sun. He vaguely notices other men coming toward him, but he ignores them, instead pulling off his soggy clothes and walking wordlessly toward the sun.

- Genre: realism, regionalism, short fiction - Title: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Point of view: 1st person - Setting: a fishing village about an hour outside of St. John, Newfoundland and Labrador - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is a middle-aged man living in the American Midwest, who fathered John eleven years ago while in Newfoundland as a graduate student, collecting local folklore. He is successful, intelligent, and well-educated, versed in authors like Yeats and Emily Brontë, but seems to have no family or loved ones other than John and John's maternal grandparents, whom the narrator has not visited in many years. At the beginning of the story, he is intensely hesitant about the prospect of seeing John again and feels discomforted and out of place, all the more so as he realizes the extent to which John, unlike him, is a true Newfoundlander. Although he had originally intended to bring John back with him to the Midwest, after he learns from the old man that John's mother Jennifer has died in Toronto, a newfound awareness of his own ignorance about John's life leads him to relinquish his son permanently to his grandparents and Newfoundland. The story ends with him returning to the Midwest, back where he began, his rift from his son and remaining family complete. - Character: John. Description: John is the narrator's eleven-year-old son, who has spent almost all of his life in rural Newfoundland with his maternal grandparents. He is a cheerful, well-adjusted boy, enthusiastic about fishing—catching trout with his friends, building his own lobster traps—and generally unaware of the tension between the adults in the story. He is not close to either of his biological parents, despite having lived briefly with his mother in Toronto before her death, but he seems to feel a deep kinship with his grandparents, treating them with respect, regarding them as surrogate parents, and participating in their heritage. Throughout the story he fails to grasp the meaning of the narrator's arrival or the problem of his presence, which is demonstrated when he talks casually about livestock breeds at dinner as the adults are silent. However, at the end, he gives the narrator a stone he has found in one of the story's most poignant, solemn moments, in which father and son achieve a short-lived connection. - Character: The Grandfather (Ira). Description: Ira, referred to as "the old man" and "the grandfather" throughout the story, is the father of the narrator's old lover Jennifer and John's grandfather. He supports his wife and John by fishing, and is teaching John to fish so that he will be able to carry on the family occupation as an adult. He is cordial to the narrator, treating him as a guest and, later, even a friend, and seems to approach his life calmly and philosophically, although he struggles at times in the story to express deep feelings like love or grief. He is almost impersonal when speaking about his daughter Jennifer's death, capable of verbalizing his grief for her only through music, and shows no particular tenderness either toward John or toward his wife. Yet his love for John, which he describes in one of the story's most moving passages, is the catalyst that leads the narrator to decide to leave John with his family in Newfoundland. - Character: The Grandmother. Description: John's unnamed grandmother, Ira's wife and Jennifer's mother, speaks very little in the story, but plays an important role in the contrast drawn between John's relationship with his biological parents and with his adoptive family, as well as in the development of the narrator's history with the couple. When she first sees the narrator again, she responds with "open hostility"—the first suggestion that the narrator's relationship with this couple is more complex than a simple friendship. In addition, she is essential to family routines like singing together or going up to bed at a certain time and by a certain route, which contribute to the narrator's decision to leave John with his family by demonstrating to him how integrated John is into this household and culture. Another less obvious function of her character is to shed light on the relevance of gender in "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood"—as the only living woman who is meaningfully depicted in the story, the fact that she hardly speaks and adds little to the story's emotional core emphasizes the resonance of fatherhood and masculine closeness. - Character: Jennifer. Description: Jennifer Farrell, John's mother and the old couple's youngest daughter, dies before the events of the story, but is nonetheless crucial to its impact and to the relationships of her living family. The main characters grieve her in their own ways throughout the story, whether in the form of the grandfather describing her loss to the narrator, the grandparents and John singing a mournful song addressed to "Jenny," or the narrator thinking about her absence from the house late at night. Her memory makes possible some of the most profound moments of emotion and connection in the story. However, like the narrator, hers is a narrative of emotional alienation; the reader learns that she attempted to bring John with her to Toronto, much as the narrator imagines bringing him to the Midwest, but that both of them were so unhappy she sent him back to Newfoundland and his "real" family. - Character: John's Friends. Description: When the narrator first meets John, he is fishing with a group of other boys in the harbor, all of whom live in the village and attend two local schools. The narrator attempts to explain his life in the Midwest to them, but is met with as much confusion as he himself feels in the same scene while struggling to cast a fishing line. Their camaraderie and encouragement of one another, as well as their immersion in the culture of Newfoundland to the point that they cannot understand a life elsewhere in North America, demonstrate by contrast the narrator's alienation and loneliness in a world with which he is unfamiliar. - Character: The Salesman. Description: At the end of the story, the narrator encounters a heavy-equipment salesman on his flight from Newfoundland back to "the heartland." When the flight lands, the narrator watches as the salesman is happily reunited with his wife and his two children, demanding, "What did you bring me?" Though the salesman features only briefly, his family life, which appears joyful and fulfilling, underscores the abject loss that the narrator has experienced—he has found out his lover is dead, determined that he will be unable to remain in contact with her family in Newfoundland, and once and for all relinquished any claim to fatherhood. - Theme: Distance and Alienation. Description: Geographical and personal distance are key to Alistair MacLeod's "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood,"  in which the narrator journeys 2,500 miles to Newfoundland to see his son John. The narrator fathered John while visiting the village as a graduate student, but hasn't seen him since. As he awkwardly attempts to reconnect with John, MacLeod illustrates that emotional alienation cannot be resolved by closing a geographical gap. In charting the narrator's failure to meaningfully connect with his son, MacLeod demonstrates how emotional distance and cultural difference can alienate people from one another—sometimes irreparably. In "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood," MacLeod shows that even when people reunite with one another geographically, the emotional distance between them persists. At the beginning of the story, for example, the landscape draws attention to geographical distance. The harbor rocks "loom yearningly out towards Europe," and the harbor is "like a tiny, peaceful womb nurturing the life that now lies within it," connecting physical closeness to intimacy and peace. However, some distances are still too far to be crossed: "beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast […] seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination's mist." In actuality, Ireland is nearly 2,000 miles away. The description of "imagination's mist" disguising the distance foreshadows the distance between the narrator and John. Although the narrator imagines their alienation can be overcome, this dream hides a distance that is, in reality, impassable. When he finally realizes that geographical closeness cannot heal the rift between them, he considers telling his son, "come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze"—from Newfoundland and a relationship with his grandparents to the Midwest and a relationship with his father. However, he concludes, "I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto's Queen St. West […] and of lost and misplaced love." In other words, he realizes that geographical closeness doesn't affirm emotional closeness—and that after 11 years apart, the emotional distance that hovers between them may linger for life.    MacLeod outlines this alienation and emotional distance in terms of both geographical and cultural distance. The narrator's geographical closeness actually emphasizes his ignorance of his son's world. His alienation from Newfoundland culture is first clear when he watches a group of local boys fishing. When the boys are shouting encouragement, the narrator "[wishes] also to shout some enthusiastic advice but […] [does] not know what to say." He sums up his experience with "my feet are wet and chilled within my shoes. No place to be unless barefooted or in rubber boots. Perhaps for me no place at all." He has come to be with his son, but the only home his son knows is "no place at all" for him. In addition, while the grandparents and John are playing music, he feels like an "alien of [his] middle generation" and "tap[s] [his] leather foot self-consciously" while "the three of them […] sing, spanning easily the half-century that touches their extremes." The two grandparents and the child share a culture the narrator lacks. The songs also suggest interpersonal alienation ("all he'd ask I would deny") as well as isolation ("all alone as I strayed by the banks of the river") and geographical separation ("wide is the gulf, love, between you and I"). Finally, the narrator's alienation from the setting parallels the reader's own alienation from the story's universe. MacLeod is sparing with information, leaving the revelation that John is the narrator's son to very late and never giving the details of the narrator's relationship with John's mother Jennifer. Like the narrator, the reader enters an unfamiliar world without understanding its foundations. Lastly, although the narrator experiences a brief emotional connection with the grandfather, the ending affirms that the narrator's alienation from his son, the town and its people are irreparable. Although short-lived, the narrator's time with the grandfather is marked by a sense of community. The narrator refers to them as "we"—"we are warm within the dark"—suggesting intimacy rather than alienation. When the grandfather offers the narrator a drink, "before tasting it, [he knows] the rum to be strong and overproof," demonstrating comfort with local customs. For a moment, it seems he may be able to overcome his emotional distance. However, later, he decides he has been "too much at home with […] this man's house and all the feelings of his love." His failure to connect with the old man contributes to his decision to leave John behind, believing "[he has] collected many things [he] did not understand" and "[he does] not know enough of the fog on Toronto's Queen St. West and […] of lost and misplaced love." His choice to separate himself from his son—possibly for good—is founded on his ignorance and alienation. MacLeod reaffirms this when, preparing to leave, the narrator says, "'I think I will go back today' […] I try to emphasize the 'I.'" Though his emphasis affirms he is not taking John away, it also reinforces his isolation, an "I" rather than a "we." His efforts at connection in this scene are also marred by alienation. When he "[turns his] head to the others" while accepting a beautiful stone from John, "they are both looking out through the window." Similarly, though the narrator responds to the woman's "I don't know if you know what I mean, but thank you" with "I think I do," suggesting tacit intimacy and knowledge, he and the couple also refute any possibility of further connection—at least in the near future—by agreeing they have no way to keep in touch.  The story ends in insurmountable alienation between the narrator and his family. MacLeod contrasts this with a salesman on the narrator's flight home, who reunites with his children as the narrator continues on without his son. Although both fathers have given their children the "gift of blood"—the gift of life and of family—the story affirms that forming a genuine and lasting bond requires far more than that. - Theme: Cultural Heritage and Identity. Description: Though cultural differences can be alienating, "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" suggests heritage can also be a positive force that unites people. For instance, the relationship between John and his grandparents is founded partly on their intergenerational heritage, and they process the loss of John's mother Jennifer through references to local folklore and song. In this story, heritage and tradition have the ability to unite people with a common history and to help people make sense of the world around them. First, heritage solidifies the bond between John and his grandparents, who are raising him as a member of their particular culture as rural Newfoundlanders. Genetic heritage, for instance, makes their closeness visual. John's appearance is similar to his Newfoundland family: "his hair is red and curly and his face is splashed with freckles and his eyes are clear and blue." The grandparents had five daughters with red hair, including Jennifer. Since red hair is recessive, both grandparents presumably had red hair as well, and the grandfather's eyes are blue. Blue and "an equally eye-catching red" are also the colors of the checkers the grandfather taught John to make; here, John's literal heritage enters into his cultural heritage. John's grandfather has also passed on to him the cultural tradition of fishing. John first appears fishing in the harbor, and when the grandfather first appears, he wears a fisherman's jersey and a belt buckle "shaped like a dory with a fisherman standing in the bow," and announces that the weather "will be good for the fishing." Later on, the grandfather says that "John here has the makings of a good fisherman," indicating John's assimilation into Newfoundland culture and intention to follow in his family's footsteps. The heritage John and his grandparents share is perhaps most apparent when they sing together. Instead of suggesting singing, John "appears with his mouth organ," and the grandfather "notices him, nods," and wordlessly fetches his accordion. The grandmother also joins them without ever speaking, implying that this tradition is so established in their family that they do not need to discuss it. The narrator also observes that when the grandparents sing, "they take on the essence of the once-young people" in a photograph of the couple on the wall, and that the three of them "[span] easily the half-century that touches their extremes." The heritage they share blurs any age distinction, rendering them, like their traditions, ageless. Furthermore, since Jennifer—the grandparents' youngest daughter and the narrator's lover—is dead, MacLeod depicts her presence through heritage like traditional songs. With this, cultural heritage becomes a tool for the characters to communicate and make sense of their world. Although the grandfather struggles to discuss his feelings about Jennifer, he and his wife use their cultural heritage to express their grief. The songs they sing, with lyrics like "on this earth in grief and sorrow / I am bound until I die" and "as the foaming dark waters flow silently past him / Onward they flow over young Jenny's grave," bear too much relevance to their situation not to be read as a way of verbalizing their grief. Later on, the grandfather tells the narrator that on the night of Jennifer's death, "the signs [were] all bad; the grandmother knocked off the lampshade and it broke in a hunnerd pieces – the sign of death; and the window blind fell […] And the dog runned around like he was crazy, moanen and cryen […] and the next mornen, first thing I drops me knife," and finishes brusquely, "That night [Jennifer and her husband] be killed." He naturally connects Jennifer's death with traditional Newfoundland belief, emphasized by his description of Jennifer's husband James ("from Heartsick Bay he was") and the reference to the couple being "originally from Newfoundland" in their obituary. Even the narrator expresses his memories of Jennifer in terms of his relationship to Newfoundland belief. While he is imagining looking in on John during the night, he states that "[there] is no boiled egg or shaker of salt or glass of water waiting on the chair." He goes on to describe "a belief held in the outports" about how a girl might use a boiled egg, salt, and water to invoke a vision of her "true lover." The absence of these things, and therefore of the girl looking for her lover, references Jennifer's absence and its impact on him, having returned to the place where he knew her.  "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" represents cultural heritage as an overwhelmingly positive force that creates comfort and connection. Even the narrator, not a part of Newfoundland culture, is able to find some common ground with John and his family through local belief and tradition. Likewise, the family mourn the loss of their daughter Jennifer and make sense of her death by framing it as an almost folkloric event, reliant on traditional belief. - Theme: The Passage of Time. Description: In "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood," journeys are almost always futile and doomed to failure, whether in the case of a local dog being unable to find a stick or the narrator being unable to connect with his son after traveling 2,500 miles to see him. MacLeod focuses particularly on the inevitable journey through time, passing from youth to age. Although the story suggests that growing older leads to loss and sorrow, it ultimately affirms that, in the possibility for healing, peace, and the nurturing of the next generation, it is not without its rewards. MacLeod initially depicts the journey through time—aging, becoming more fragile, and losing one's children as they become adults—as profoundly sad and burdensome. Rather than satisfaction or self-confidence, aging instills embarrassment, loneliness, and regret. For example, while the narrator and the local boys are walking from the harbor, the narrator is "wheezing and badly out of breath. So badly out of shape for a man of thirty-three […] The boys walk easily, laughing and talking beside me." The boys' youth reminds the narrator of the impact that passing time has had on him, embarrassing him. In addition, MacLeod describes one picture of the grandparents as "a rather jaunty young couple taken many years ago," as well as a group "of the couple in the other picture; and one of them with their five daughters; and one of the five daughters by themselves […] roughly between the ages of ten and eighteen." One of the things marking the photograph as old seems to be the contrast between the couple's "rather jaunty" cheerfulness then and their attitudes now. The grandfather emphasizes this by saying " 'We be all alone […] All our other daughters married and far away,'" indicating that passing time has contributed to the couple's isolation from their loved ones. Finally, the songs the grandparents and John sing tie the passage of time irrevocably to loss and sorrow, as in " 'They're like the stars on a summer's morning / First they'll appear and then they're gone.'" One song concludes by summarizing this theme: " 'And on this earth in grief and sorrow / I am bound until I die.'" The passage of time is a pointless journey and a tragedy, one that cannot be escaped. Yet MacLeod doesn't leave the reader without hope. Instead, he demonstrates that the passage of time can, under some circumstances, be valuable, healing, and gladdening. His description of the setting affirms the positive aspects of passing time. The harbor is "like a tiny, peaceful womb nurturing […] life," suggesting the beauty of a new generation following the old. Also, survival and permanence, elsewhere reasons for grief, become emblems of hope and courage. The houses, "frame and flat-roofed […] cling to the rocks […] their bright colours […] buoyantly brave in the shadows," and even nails are "defiantly optimistic" and "buoyantly yet firmly permanent." Later on, the grandfather observes that "John here has the makings of a good fisherman […] He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I've made tea," soon after the reader learns that the grandfather has helped John repair his own lobster traps. Here, generational change becomes productive, both in economic terms and in terms of emotional connection. Fishing also comes into play in another positive depiction of the passage of time, when the narrator comments that "it will indeed be a good day for the fishing and this wind eventually will calm." MacLeod suggests that, though the journey through time can lead to pain and loneliness, it will also always lead to eventual peace. Lastly, an event that bookends the beginning and end of the story demonstrates the capacity of time and progress forward to heal, rather than harm. At the beginning, the narrator learns that "one of [the boys] used to have a tame seagull at his house, had it for seven years […] It died last week," and, as he is leaving the village at the conclusion of the story, he sees that the boys "are carrying something that looks like a crippled gull. Perhaps they will make it well." Although one seagull has reached the end of its life, another has appeared, and will begin a new life in good hands. MacLeod ends the story as the narrator is preparing to board another flight "even farther into the heartland." He is returning to where he began, without his son, yet the ending is not wholly tragic. Like the passage of time, his journey home is both melancholy, faced with the happiness of another man and his family, and offering the potential for comfort and healing. The airport terminal is "strangely familiar," and the "heartland" is, clearly, a place that he loves. - Climax: the narrator's realization that he is ignorant of his son's life and world and that John is better off with the adopted family who love him - Summary: The narrator arrives at a fishing village and describes in detail what he sees, including the house that is his final destination. After several small squalls, the sun is bathing the rocks and plants in light, making the rainwater left on them shine. On the ocean, the narrator can see more rainclouds and imagines he can make out the faraway coast of Ireland. Gulls fly overhead, swim in the harbor, and gather in groups on the rocks above it. The harbor itself is small and connected to the ocean by a narrow channel. Around its edges are the few colorful houses that make up the village, and in it some small boys are fishing for trout. The narrator is standing at the end of a road, which he has traveled 2,500 miles to reach. He has stopped in front of the shanty he is visiting, and, looking at it, almost turns around and leaves, but does not do so. Instead, he walks down to the harbor, joins the young boys who are fishing there, including a boy, John, whose name he knows, and watches as they attempt to reel in trout, although when he attempts to cast a line he is unable to do so successfully. While they fish, he talks with the boys about the Midwest, their schools, and whether they like their teachers. Walking back up from the harbor with the boys, he hears from one of them about a tame seagull his family kept, which died the previous week. When they reach the top of the path, they encounter John's grandfather and his dog, who have just come out of the house. The grandfather seems to know the narrator and invites him to stay for supper. Inside the house, John's grandmother greets them, looking at the narrator with "mild surprise" that turns to "open hostility" and then "self-control." They eat dinner, at which the adults are silent, "reserved and shy," and John talks about school, fishing, and a brief sojourn in Toronto. After dinner, the grandparents and John gather together and sing folk songs, including a mournful song about a woman named "Jenny." While they sing, the narrator feels "alien," out of place, not knowing the music or the family's routines. When the singing is over, John starts his homework and the old woman knits. The narrator and the old man go into the parlor, where the narrator notes decorations including photographs of the old couple and their five daughters, who he knows have red hair despite the black-and-white of the photographs. The grandfather and the narrator play checkers and drink rum together. The grandfather tells the narrator about John, his visit to his mother, Jennifer, and her husband in Toronto, and the couple's deep love for John. He shows the narrator a newspaper clipping describing Jennifer and her husband's deaths in a car crash. Following the revelation of Jennifer's death, the narrator goes to bed, where he wanders down the hall to the door of John's room. There he remembers Jennifer and his relationship with her, imagines taking John away with him to the Midwest, and ultimately decides that he cannot understand John or his experiences as well as John's adoptive family can. John is finally identified as the narrator's son, the product of his relationship with Jennifer 11 years ago, when he was a graduate student studying local folklore. In the morning, the narrator explains to the grandparents that he will be leaving that day, emphasizing the fact that he will not be taking John with him. John offers him a beautiful stone, which the narrator accepts before bidding the grandparents goodbye and leaving. On an airplane back to the Midwest, he is seated next to a heavy-equipment salesman working in Newfoundland, who, when they land, is greeted by his wife and two children. The narrator watches as the children, running to their father, demand, "Daddy, Daddy, what did you bring me?"

- Genre: Realistic Fiction; Dystopian Literature - Title: The Lottery - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A rural small town, mid-twentieth century - Character: Tessie Hutchinson. Description: The woman selected by the lottery to be sacrificed, she is stoned to death by the villagers at the very end of the story. Tessie arrives late at the lottery, saying she forgot the day. Her casual attitude as she jokes with her neighbors changes dramatically when the Hutchinson family is selected in the lottery. She attempts to claim that the drawing wasn't fair, appealing, unsuccessfully, to her neighbors and friends with whom she had chatted amiably just before. - Character: Davy Hutchinson. Description: The youngest Hutchinson child, Davy, is too young to understand the proceedings of the lottery. But his innocence is contaminated by the lottery as he is handed pebbles to throw at his mother at the end of the story. The villagers are sympathetic with his youth and breath a sigh of relief when his paper is revealed to be unmarked. That he is not exempt from the lottery proceedings further reveals the cruelty and pointlessness of the tradition. - Character: Mr. Joe Summers. Description: The unofficial leader of the village and overseer of the lottery. Mr. Summers volunteers frequently in civic roles, organizing square dances, teen club, and the Halloween party. The other villagers pity him for having no children and an unkind wife. Throughout the lottery's proceedings he coaxes others to complete the process efficiently. - Character: Old Man Warner. Description: The oldest man in the village, Old Man Warner presents the voice of tradition among the villagers. He speaks strongly in favor of continuing the lottery, because he claims that to end it would be to return society to a primitive state, permitting all sorts of other problems to arise. - Character: Mrs. Janey Dunbar. Description: Clyde Dunbar's wife and the only woman to draw in the lottery. Husbands, as the heads of households, draw for their families. A grown son might also take on this role, but the Dunbars' children are too young. Mrs. Dunbar seems to subtly resist the proceedings of the lottery. When the killing is about to start, she tells her son to run and tell his father who was chosen—perhaps saving the boy from witnessing the experience that year. Mrs. Dunbar also tells Mrs. Delacroix to run ahead of her as the crowd pursues Tessie—perhaps trying to avoid taking part in the murder. - Character: Jack Watson. Description: A youth who is old enough this year to draw in the lottery on behalf of himself and his mother. For this, he receives supportive words from the other villagers, who tell him he is a "good fellow" and that they're "glad to see" his mother has a man to draw for the family. - Theme: The Juxtaposition of Peace and Violence. Description: "The Lottery" begins with a description of a particular day, the 27th of June, which is marked by beautiful details and a warm tone that strongly contrast with the violent and dark ending of the story. The narrator describes flowers blossoming and children playing, but the details also include foreshadowing of the story's resolution, as the children are collecting stones and three boys guard their pile against the "raids of the other boys." These details introduce the language of warfare and violence into the otherwise idyllic scene. This technique models a theme that will be used throughout the story: the juxtaposition of peace and violence, contrasting ordinary life with the unusual and cruel tradition of the lottery. In the first part of the story, Jackson shows that the villagers seem to be reasonable, regular people concerned with the everyday necessities of life: the weather, farming, and taxes. These characteristics then contrast sharply with the violence these same ordinary men and women are capable of at the end of the story. This juxtaposition shows the complexity of human nature, which can be both kind and cruel—and perhaps Jackson is also implying that "ordinary" behavior and murderous behavior are not inherently in contrast. Almost anything can be normalized by society, provided that no one speaks out against it. The events of "The Lottery" were partly inspired by the Holocaust, which was a real-life example of this juxtaposition—there are accounts of Nazi officers weeping over a symphony and then committing mass murder without a second thought. In "The Lottery," the characters are able to excuse and normalize their violence by restricting it to the context of the lottery, and by explaining the lottery as an ordinary, necessary tradition. Through the chilling juxtaposition of peace and violence, Jackson reminds us that evil is not necessarily an outside force—it is a part of human nature, and the potential for violence lurks beneath even the most normal, seemingly harmless behavior. - Theme: Human Nature. Description: Jackson examines the basics of human nature in "The Lottery," asking whether or not all humans are capable of violence and cruelty, and exploring how those natural inclinations can be masked, directed, or emphasized by the structure of society. Philosophers throughout the ages have similarly questioned the basic structure of human character: are humans fundamentally good or evil? Without rules and laws, how would we behave towards one another? Are we similar to animals in our basic selfish needs, or do we possess unusual rationality, or unusual cruelty, that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world? "The Lottery" asks these same questions through its depiction of an ordinary town that is capable of unusual violence. Numerous details in the text establish the fundamental normality of this unnamed town, which is intentionally designed to seem timeless and universal. Because this town could exist in so many different places and time periods, Jackson is drawing the reader's attention to the universality of the ideas she examines. If this type of violence could happen anywhere—as Jackson suggests—then it must be due to some innate aspect of human character. With the brutal ending of her story, Jackson argues that humans are self-serving and capable of great cruelty—as long as they think their actions won't have repercussions that harm them directly. In the town, no one speaks out against the lottery before a name is drawn. Tessie Hutchinson finally protests when she is singled out, saying "it isn't fair, it isn't right," but this objection is raised too late. The other villagers are clearly relieved not have been selected, and they speak from a position of security, reminding Tessie that "all of us took the same chance." Though the villagers have lost or discarded certain aspects of the ritual of the lottery over time, "they still remembered to use stones"—implying that the central, murderous act of the lottery is an unforgettable human "tradition." Even Davy Hutchinson, a child, is given stones to throw at his mother, and other young children gather the stones for the ritual. The prevalence of violence in children, Jackson suggests, is even more conclusive proof that violence and cruelty is an inherent part of human nature. - Theme: Family Structure and Gender Roles. Description: The ritual of the lottery itself is organized around the family unit, as, in the first round, one member of a family selects a folded square of paper. The members of the family with the marked slip of paper must then each select another piece of paper to see the individual singled out within that family. This process reinforces the importance of the family structure within the town, and at the same time creates a hierarchy within that structure—one that emphasizes the importance of gender roles. The father is typically the one to draw the slip of paper on behalf of the rest of the family. This reinforces the idea that he is both the leader and the representative of his family unit—the "head of household." This idea is further emphasized by the discussion that occurs after Clyde Dunbar's absence is noticed. Mrs. Dunbar asserts that a "wife draws for her husband," but Mr. Summers, who runs the lottery proceedings, asks whether Mrs. Dunbar has a grown son who could draw for her. Women are seen as more important or responsible than children, but as less important than men—even than male children who are barely old enough to accept the adult responsibility of drawing in the lottery. The dominance of men is again emphasized by the fact that daughters draw with their husbands' families, not their parents' families—women's social identities in the story are defined by the men they marry.By connecting this male-dominated social structure so closely with the basic operation of the lottery, Jackson subtly critiques it. She shows, on the one hand, how such a social structure leaves no room for anything but the "normal," socially-approved family. It has no space for a non-traditional family, a single person, or a woman in a position of leadership. Jackson also critiques such a homogenous social structure through Tessie's fate. Tessie is the prominent figure in the story, and her popularity and self-confidence are clear from the start. She makes others laugh and speaks up more often than any other member of her family—yet she is the one destroyed by the lottery. Tessie is a confident woman who speaks out vehemently against the lottery, so this makes her a threat to the status quo, and the ideally symbolic victim of the lottery. - Theme: The Power of Tradition. Description: The villagers in the story perform the lottery every year primarily because they always have—it's just the way things are done. The discussion of this traditional practice, and the suggestion in the story that other villages are breaking from it by disbanding the lottery, demonstrates the persuasive power of ritual and tradition for humans. The lottery, in itself, is clearly pointless: an individual is killed after being randomly selected. Even the original ritual has been forgotten, and the first black box is long gone, so the lottery no longer seems like a religious ceremony made significant by sacred objects. Now that these significant objects have vanished, the lottery is upheld simply because of the villagers' belief in tradition—not a belief in any higher power. The villagers do not appear to believe that the choice of the marked slip of paper is fated, ordained, or spiritual in any way. No benefit of the lottery is described. Does it keep order? Maintain the social structure? Encourage villagers to behave a certain way? The only clear statement in favor of continuing the lottery is Old Man Warner's insistence that ending the lottery would bring "nothing but trouble." He equates removing the lottery with society regressing, "going back to live in caves" and "nobody working anymore." Yet Old Man Warner's support of the lottery has no explanation other than the importance of tradition. In this way, the story captures the circular logic that gives tradition its strength.As with several other themes in this short story, Jackson uses a single concept to point to a universal idea about human beings. In this case, Jackson shows how traditions hold power over human beings simply by continuing to exist, and how these traditions resist critical thought or attempts at change. This is not an attack on all traditions, or an argument that all traditions should be given up, but rather a reminder of the dangers of blindly following tradition simply because it is tradition—of letting a tradition guide one's actions regardless of its morality or usefulness. - Theme: Dystopian Society and Conformity. Description: Jackson's "The Lottery" was published in the years following World War II, when the world was presented with the full truth about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In creating the dystopian society of her story, Jackson was clearly responding to the fact that "dystopia" is not only something of the imagination—it can exist in the real world as well. Jackson thus meditates on human cruelty—especially when it is institutionalized, as in a dystopian society—and the societal structures that feed and direct this cruelty. One such structure—and the primary one examined in "The Lottery"—is the advantage of the many against the few. A major focus of Nazi ideology was the extermination of certain minorities in favor of the majority's best interests. Likewise, "The Lottery" shows the villagers assume a mob-like mentality as they attack Tessie Hutchinson, the minute she has been "marked" as different. Would any one of them alone have attacked her? Some among the group certainly would not, but together they feel secure and justified, not just physically but also morally. This is especially evident in the moment when someone in the crowd hands little Davy Hutchinson some stones. Davy is too young to understand the proceedings, but he is encouraged by others to participate—even in the murder of his own mother. Mrs. Delacroix tells Mrs. Dunbar to "hurry up," and Old Man Warner urges the other villagers on, saying, "come on, come on, everyone." The villagers commit this violent act with the encouragement and reinforcement of others, and so the desire to conform to the status quo is part of what keeps the villagers participating in the lottery. No one wants to refuse to participate, thus standing alone and potentially being rejected by society. Ultimately Jackson warns us that we should be skeptical of all events and traditions that only continue because everyone is afraid to standing up against the majority. Fear of non-conformity often forces people to do things they would otherwise consider immoral, and when immoral acts are institutionalized as societal norms, they can lead to a dystopian society like that in "The Lottery." - Climax: Tessie Hutchinson is stoned to death by her neighbors, which reveals the purpose of the mysterious annual lottery. - Summary: It is June 27th, and a beautiful summer morning, and villagers begin to gather in their town square (the town is unnamed) for the annual "lottery." This village has only three hundred people, and so the lottery can be completed easily in a single day, and leave time for noon dinner. The children are enjoying their summer vacation. Bobby Martin, Harry Jones, and Dickie Delacroix gather a large pile of stones and defend them from the other boys. Adults arrive and stand around talking: the men speak of farming and the weather, and the women greeting each other and gossiping. Eventually the women join their husbands and call to their children, so families are standing together as units. Mr. Joe Summers arrives. Mr. Summers conducts the lottery, as well as the square dances, the teen club, and the Halloween Program. This civic engagement stems from his free time: his wife is a scold and he is childless, so the other villagers pity him. He arrives in the square carrying the black box, followed by the postmaster, Mr. Graves, who is carrying a stool. Mr. Summers appeals to the crowd for help, and Mr. Martin and his oldest son Baxter come forward to hold the black box on the stool at the center of the square. The original black box for the lottery has long since been lost, and the current box is well worn, but the villagers don't like to upset tradition by replacing the box. Other aspects of the ritual of the lottery have also been lost or forgotten. Slips of paper, which were made up by Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves, have replaced the chips of wood in the box. Lists are made of the households and the heads of each household, and Mr. Summers is sworn in as officiator of the lottery. Just as the drawing is about to begin, Mrs. Tessie Hutchinson arrives. She tells Mrs. Delacroix that she forgot what day it was. Tessie joins her husband Bill and Mr. Summers greets her cheerfully. Tessie makes a joke, and the villagers chuckle. Mr. Summers points out that Clyde Dunbar is absent due to a broken leg, and his wife, Janey Dunbar, speaks up, saying, "wife draws for her husband." Mr. Summers asks if she doesn't have a grown son who could draw for their family, but Janey replies that Horace is only sixteen. Jack Watson, on the other hand, is old enough this year to draw on behalf of himself and his mother. Mr. Summers reads the names and the men come forward when their names are called to draw a slip of paper from the box. Everyone holds his paper without looking at it. As the drawing progresses, Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Graves comment to each other that it seems as if no time has passed since the previous year's lottery. The women watch as their husbands draw from the black box, and when Janey Dunbar steps forward for her turn, they encourage her. Mr. Adams strikes up a conversation with Old Man Warner about the north village, which is talking of giving up the lottery. Old Man Warner proclaims this to be "foolishness." He says that giving up the lottery is akin to going back to living in caves, or to nobody working any more. He says that "there's always been a lottery" and that it's "bad enough" to see the light-hearted tone Joe Summers takes as he runs the ritual. As Old Man Warner's name is called, he reminds the crowd that it's the seventy-seventh year he has been in the lottery. Once every man has drawn, the slips of paper are unfolded simultaneously and every one begins to ask, "who is it?" The word spreads through the crowd that Bill Hutchinson has the marked slip of paper. Tessie Hutchinson suddenly shouts at Mr. Summers, "you didn't give him time enough to take any paper he wanted," and, "it wasn't fair!" Mrs. Delacroix and Mrs. Graves remind her to "be a good sport" and that they "all took the same chance." Bill Hutchinson says, "shut up, Tessie." Mr. Summers asks if there are any other households included with the Hutchinsons, and Tessie points out her daughter Eva and Eva's husband Don, saying they ought to take their chance with everyone else. But Mr. Summers reminds Tessie that daughters draw with their husband's family. The Hutchinsons have three children: Bill Jr., Nancy, and little Davy. The children, Bill, and Tessie each draw another slip of paper from the black box. Mr. Graves helps little Davy draw and holds his paper for him. Nancy's school friends watch as she goes forward to draw from the box. Tessie appeals to the people around her and looks around defiantly, but draws a slip of paper. When Mr. Graves opens Davy's paper and reveals that it is blank, the crowd sighs in relief. Bill Jr. and Nancy open theirs and, laughing, happily hold them up to the crowd. Bill's slip of paper is blank as well. He goes over to his wife and forces the paper from her hand. It's the marked slip, with a dot in pencil Mr. Summer drew the night before. Mr. Summers says, "let's finish quickly." The villagers have forgotten much of the original ritual, but they remember to use stones, which they gather up as they run at Tessie. Someone gives little Davy a few pebbles. Old Man Warner urges the crowd onward. Tessie cries, "it isn't fair, it isn't right," before she is overwhelmed by the villagers and stoned to death.

- Genre: Short Story; Western; Local Color - Title: The Luck of Roaring Camp - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A mining settlement called Roaring Camp in Northern California, 1851 - Character: Kentuck. Description: A main character in the story, Kentuck is one of Roaring Camp's gruffest, most unrefined residents—but he's also fiercely devoted to and enamored with little baby Luck. He's known for never washing his clothes, his language is marked by a heavy Western twang, and he puts up a front of hypermasculinity—in other words, he's the quintessential Western outlaw. While all the men help take care of the Luck and dote on him to some extent, Kentuck especially falls in love with the baby and willingly cleans up his act (he literally changes into a clean shirt and cuts expletives out of his language) for the sake of the baby. Kentuck's character arc shows most clearly how baby Luck gives the Roaring Camp men permission to engage with a softer, more sensitive side of themselves and drop their hypermasculine masks. Given Kentuck's particularly strong affection for baby Luck, it's fitting that he and the Luck die in an embrace. This moment implies that Kentuck was trying to protect the Luck during the flood and seemingly sacrificed his own life in the attempt to do so—but on a deeper level, it speaks to how the two were practically inseparable. When Kentuck dies in the final lines of the story, he seems contented that he is following the Luck into death, which again emphasizes the pair's strong bond and Kentuck's deep, enduring, and perhaps unexpected love for the baby. - Character: Stumpy. Description: One of the main characters in the story, Stumpy is something of a leader at the Roaring Camp settlement; he's also the Luck's father figure. Unlike the other men of Roaring Camp, Stumpy has fathered two families in the past at other settlements, and this experience with family life and children is what qualifies him, in the other men's eyes, to deliver Cherokee Sal's baby. When Stumpy takes on the Luck as his own son after Sal's death, no one in the community balks, as they seem to believe that he's best equipped for this kind of responsible, fatherly role. But even though Stumpy is the Luck's primary caregiver—the two share a cabin—Stumpy welcomes the other men's participation in rearing the baby, heeding to the age-old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. And by letting the other men participate in raising the Luck, Stumpy helps spread the Luck's positive influence throughout the camp, encouraging the men (most notably Kentuck) to get in touch with a more tender, maternal side of themselves. Both Stumpy and the Luck die in the flood at the end of the story, though their bodies are found separately (the Luck is found in Kentuck's arms). Stumpy's cabin is also entirely washed away. - Character: Oakhurst. Description: Oakhurst, a resident of Roaring Camp, is a philosophical man who has a reputation as a gambler. He's often the voice of calm and reason throughout the story, like when he thoughtfully suggests that the men name the baby "the Luck" rather than using Cherokee Sal's name or the father's name (which, of course, would be impossible given that the father is unknown, and the story implies that all the Roaring Camp men have had sex with Cherokee Sal). In doing so, Oakhurst intends to give the baby a clean slate in life rather than being immediately weighed down by his mother's poor reputation as a prostitute. Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," which also features Oakhurst but is set in a different settlement, notes that Roaring Camp is Oakhurst's hometown. - Character: Sandy Tipton. Description: One of the men of Roaring Camp, Sandy Tipton is the one who suggests sending the Luck to the next town over (Red Dog), where he could be properly nursed and raised by a woman. This suggestion is met with vehement opposition from the rest of the men, emphasizing how they're already extremely attached to the Luck and are deeply suspicious of outsiders. - Character: Man-o'-War Jack. Description: Man-o'-War Jack, a resident of Roaring Camp, is an English sailor from England's Australian colonies. He often rocks the Luck and sings him long, drawn-out naval songs a lullaby, which is a prime example of how the Luck's presence encourages the hypermasculine men to engage with a more tender side of themselves. - Character: Cherokee Sal. Description: Cherokee Sal, a Native American woman and the sole woman at Roaring Camp, is the Luck's mother. She dies in childbirth, but in life she was a prostitute, and all the men at Roaring Camp were "familiar" with her—the implication being that they've all had sex with her. Because of this, it's unclear to everyone who the father of the baby is, though all of Roaring Camp (and especially Stumpy) steps up to raise the infant after Sal passes away. Her death is a lonely, painful one. - Character: Tom Ryder. Description: Tom Ryder is one of the men of Roaring Camp. He's one of the most vocal opponents to Sandy Tipton's idea that the Luck be sent to the next town over (Red Dog), where he can be nursed and raised by a woman. Like most of the Roaring Camp men, Ryder is incredibly suspicious of outsiders and doesn't trust the Red Dog residents to care for baby Luck. - Theme: Sin, Redemption, and Children. Description: "The Luck of Roaring Camp" is a satirical rehashing of the biblical birth and death of Christ. In the story, a prostitute dies while giving birth in a small settlement in the American West (where she was the only woman), leaving the all-male community in charge of a newborn. But the baby, whom the men name "the Luck," quickly changes Roaring Camp for the better, spurring the men to clean up their foul language and even their appearances. In Christianity, it's believed that Christ's life and death absolved his followers of their sins, thus giving them access to eternal life in Heaven. The story's point about redemption, though, isn't religious in nature—after all, baby Luck's christening is the first time the word "God" is uttered seriously at the camp. Instead, Luck's birth and his impact on the community show that even the most seemingly hardened and criminal people are still capable of positive transformation, or "redemption," and that children are uniquely equipped to bring about this kind of radical, positive change. Roaring Camp is full of immoral, unpleasant, or even outright criminal characters—from a biblical perspective, they can be read as sinners in need of redemption. Roaring Camp is described as a "city of refuge," a biblical allusion to ancient settlements where outcasts could find safety and community. This allusion suggests that the men of Roaring Camp are immoral enough to have been cast out from other towns, but it also implies that there's hope for them. Many Bible verses suggest that God himself created those cities of refuge—that God seeks to love and protect even the outcast and immoral by giving them a sanctuary or safe space to live. And indeed, the men are all "reckless"—some are criminals, and others are fugitives. But this reference to a "city of refuge" seems to suggest that the characters in "The Luck of Roaring Camp" are redeemable, too. Furthermore, the one woman in the settlement, Sal, is a prostitute, and she is "Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable." When she dies, she's described as leaving behind the "sin and shame" of Roaring Camp, again underscoring that the camp is riddled with sin—and desperately in need of redemption. Baby Luck's birth mirrors Christ's in several ways, suggesting that the Luck will bring about this redemption or positive change in Roaring Camp—just as Jesus is believed to redeem believers of their sins. The Christian story of Christ's birth recounts that he was born in a manger—a feeding trough for farm animals—in a modest stable, and that the Magi (wisemen) visited him here and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The Luck's birth is similarly unglamorous, as he's born in a crude cabin in the middle of the wilderness. The men of the camp, like Magi of the frontier, bring the baby precious gifts (like a gold boot spur, a diamond pin, a silver teaspoon, and an embroidered handkerchief), further likening him to Christ. The Luck's presence spurs the men of Roaring Camp to better themselves and their town in various ways. This emphasizes Luck's status as a Christ figure but also children's power more generally to effect positive change. After Sal dies, someone raises the idea of recruiting a woman from another town to nurse Luck. But the men decide against this, declaring "that 'they didn't want any more of the other kind.' This unkindly allusion to the defunct mother […] was the first spasm of propriety,—the first symptom of the camp's regeneration." While the men are making some "unkindly" generalizations about women here, their underlying intention is to protect the camp from further sin now that they have a baby to raise. Soon after the Luck's birth, positive outward change sweeps over the camp, beginning with the cabin where the Luck stays with an esteemed citizen named Stumpy. The Luck's presence catalyzes this outward regeneration—for instance, his new cradle is so nice that it makes the rest of the furniture look bad, so Stumpy goes to work trying to spruce up the rest of the cabin to make it fit for the baby. This regeneration spreads all over Roaring Camp and "produce[s] stricter habits of personal cleanliness." Even Kentuck, who "had begun to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake's, only sloughed off through decay" begins wearing clean shirts and washing his face so that he'll be clean whenever he holds the baby. The image of Kentuck sloughing off his dirty clothes like a snake sheds its skin also speaks to the more general renewal and rebirth happening in Roaring Camp. Indeed, the Luck begins to positively change the men on a deeper, more personal level. The men's usual rambunctious yelling, which is what gave Roaring Camp its name, is tempered when they're in close proximity to the Luck, and they even cut out profanity. Again, that the men go from cursing and roaring—and being known for this behavior—to respectfully tiptoeing and whispering, which indicates that caring deeply for the Luck is influencing them to change their ways. Even though the Luck is just an infant, he's redeeming and renewing the men inside and out, which speaks to his status as a redeeming Christ figure in the story. But this also underscores the story's more general point that children are uniquely capable of bringing about this kind of dramatic positive transformation in the world. Luck's death at the end of the story is tragic and seemingly meaningless—he wasn't a religious martyr who died for his people but was instead the victim of a random act of nature, a massive winter flood. But the story implies that the men have been so thoroughly changed and redeemed by Luck's presence that Luck's death was, in its own way, redemptive like Christ's. In Christian thought, Christ's death isn't the end of his influence on Earth or his connection with his followers; likewise, Luck may have died, but the story suggests that he has so radically changed and renewed the community of sinners that his influence will perhaps live on in the town. - Theme: The Fleeting Nature of Luck. Description: Despite his name, baby Luck seems far from lucky. His mother, Cherokee Sal is the town prostitute, and she dies in childbirth, orphaning baby Luck and leaving him under the care of 100 gruff, unpleasant, and even criminal men in the wilderness of the American West. And to the men, who are now suddenly in charge of a newborn, the Luck's birth doesn't seem all that lucky at first, either. But over the course of the story, the Luck positively transforms these men so dramatically that they do indeed come to believe that the baby's birth was a stroke of luck—hence why they name him "the Luck." And baby Luck does seem to be something of a good luck charm for the community, as he brings the men a newfound sense of joy, warmth, closeness, and purpose. But when the Luck dies tragically in a flood at the end of the story, readers are left wondering how lucky the Luck—or Roaring Camp itself—really was after all. Through Luck's life and death, the story suggests that luck is fragile and fleeting; it can disappear as quickly as it arrived. The concept of luck is central to how the men of Roaring Camp understand the world around them. When Sal is in labor, "Bets were freely offered and taken regarding the result"—that is, whether the baby will be a boy or a girl, whether Sal will survive, and whether the baby will survive. The camp is made up of "Gamblers and adventurers," so it's natural to the men to see life as a gamble. When the men decide on the baby's name—Tom Luck, or "the Luck" for short—Oakhurst explains, "It's better […] to take a fresh deal all round. Call him Luck, and start him fair." Oakhurst is alluding to the fact that the Luck's name has no trace of his parentage—his mother, Cherokee Sal, was a prostitute with a dishonorable reputation, and no one knows who the father is, as the story implies that most of the settlement's men had sex with Sal. The men give the Luck a name that's all his own rather than forcing him to be defined by his parents' pasts—this is a "fresh deal all round," like a freshly shuffled deck and a new set of cards delt out to the players of a card game. In other words, the men try to set up the Luck to be luckier than he perhaps would be if he'd been saddled with his mother's reputation. Once again, the concept of luck is integral to the men's worldviews. Baby Luck's birth happens quickly—as does the positive change that sweeps over the men of Roaring Camp—suggesting that luck itself comes out of nowhere. The story doesn't follow Cherokee Sal's pregnancy but instead skips right to her giving birth (to a baby later named "the Luck"), which is the story's first indication that luck can crop up seemingly out of nowhere. After the Luck's birth, "almost imperceptibly a change came over the settlement." The men clean up their foul language, dirty appearances, and rundown homes and businesses—and they begin to find more and more gold. Oakhurst proclaims that "the baby had brought 'the luck' to Roaring Camp. It was certain that of late they had been successful." As a gambler, Oakhurst conflates success not necessarily with hard work or reaping the benefits of one's labor, but with luck. Because the men have been successful recently (they're financially thriving, and the men's cleaned-up appearances and language suggests that they're thriving on more personal levels as well), Oakhurst immediately thinks that luck has something to do with it. But baby Luck's life ends nearly as quickly as it began, suggesting that luck is fleeting and short-lived. After the men spend so much time sprucing up the camp, a winter flood rushes in, turning the settlement into a pile of debris. That the men can't do anything to reverse or remedy the situation speaks to the idea that luck comes and goes quickly, and people have no control over this ebb and flow. Much to their dismay, the men discover that "the pride, the hope, the joy, the Luck, of Roaring Camp had disappeared" in the flood—baby Luck has been swept away, and with him, the camp's luck more generally. The word "disappeared" suggests that the men's luck suddenly dissolved into thin air—another indication that luck is incredibly fleeting. The flood takes Kentuck's life, too. Holding baby Luck's body in his arms, the dying Kentuck tells his fellow men, "'he's a taking me with him,—tell the boys I've got the Luck with me now'; and the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea." Here, Kentuck is explaining that the dead baby Luck is "taking [Kentuck] with him" into death, but the story is also making a commentary about luck. Like the word "disappeared," the phrase "drifted away" speaks to the fleeting nature of luck; no amount of Kentuck's "clinging" can keep luck from fading away. And even though Kentuck is a "strong man," he's still reduced to "drift[ing] away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea"—another indication that luck comes and goes of its own accord, and that people are powerless to change it. Furthermore, baby Luck (and, by extension, the men's luck) is described as fading away into a natural scene—dying is described as a river, while death itself is described as a sea—which suggests that it is natural for luck to fade away like this. This ebb and flow of luck, the story suggests, is part of the natural order of things, and it's something people must accept, just as Kentuck does. - Theme: Children, Caregiving, and Masculinity. Description: "The Luck of Roaring Camp," plays into the age-old idea that it takes a village to raise a child. It follows a gold-mining community in the American West, populated by gruff men who are in charge of rearing a baby after his mother, Cherokee Sal, dies in childbirth. Over the course of the story, these hypermasculine, hardened men take on more maternal, traditionally feminine qualities as they learn how to raise baby Luck and be his chosen family. The men's transformation from rough-and-tumble criminals to more selfless and sensitive (if imperfect) caregivers highlights that raising a child is indeed a group effort. But it also suggests that caring for children can give men permission to engage with this more tender, gentle side of themselves in a way that society often doesn't allow. Kentuck's character shows how the men of Roaring Camp are the very picture of hypermasculinity. After Luck is born, all of the men of the camp approach the baby one by one to give him gifts. When Kentuck, a particularly unruly character at the camp, meets Luck, the baby latches on to Kentuck's finger, which delights Kentuck. After this tender interaction, "[Kentuck] drank quite freely, and related with great gusto his experience, invariably ending with his characteristic condemnation of the new-comer. It seemed to relieve him of any unjust implication of sentiment, and Kentuck had the weaknesses of the nobler sex." Here, Kentuck fights to keep his hypermasculine façade by drinking to excess and generally being loud and scornful—but nevertheless, he can't help but excitedly tell everyone about how baby Luck "rastled with [Kentuck's] finger." That Kentuck is described as having "the weakness of the nobler sex"—that is, sentimentality and sensitivity—suggests that he always stuffs down these qualities, but that baby Luck is making it particularly difficult to continue to do so. One night, Kentuck resolves to visit Stumpy's cabin to see Luck, but he tries to make the visit look casual and unplanned. He pretends that he's on an aimless nighttime walk, "whistling with demonstrative unconcern," but it's clear that he is eager to visit the baby. Just like Kentuck did after first meeting Luck, here he displays a performative brand of masculinity, carefully concealing any sensitive feelings or emotions that go against the grain of his reputation. But once again, Kentuck struggles to keep this tenderness (his concern and affection for the infant) under wraps. This moment suggests that baby Luck—and children in general—spur hypermasculine men like Kentuck to engage with a more softhearted side of themselves. Because it takes a village to raise a child, all of the men—not just Kentuck—find themselves softened by baby Luck. When the men decide to keep Luck, "Certain articles were sent for to Sacramento. 'Mind,' said the treasurer, as he pressed a bag of gold-dust into the expressman's hand, 'the best that can be got,—lace, you know, and filigree-work and frills,—d—m the cost!" In this instance, the settlement's treasurer emphasizes the men's commitment to baby Luck (they're willing to pay any price to get the best clothing or furniture for the baby), as well as how they're beginning to show softer, more feminine sides of themselves as a result. Wanting "the best that can be got" for the baby, the treasurer asks for "lace, you know, and filigree-work and frills"—all delicate and stereotypically feminine fabrics and patterns. Similarly, when the men are working in the wilderness, they settle baby Luck in a shady place that they try to make pleasant for him: "there was a rude attempt to decorate this bower with flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs […]. The men had suddenly awakened to the fact that there were beauty and significance in these trifles, which they had so long trodden carelessly beneath their feet. A flake of glittering mica, a fragment of variegated quartz, a bright pebble from the bed of the creek, became beautiful to eyes thus cleared and strengthened, and were invariably put aside for 'The Luck.'" The "rude attempt" underscores that the men still are gruff, but that baby Luck's influence is helping them to shed their hardened exteriors and be "suddenly awakened" to beauty. The only outsider allowed in and out of the camp is the expressman (a mailman on horseback), and he tells people from other settlements about Roaring Camp: "They've got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day. But they're mighty rough on strangers, and they worship an Ingin [sic] baby." Here, too, the expressmen stresses that the men of Roaring Camp still are these rough-and-tumble outlaws, but they've specifically softened toward baby Luck given their deep love for him. (In this passage, the expressman calls Luck an "Ingin," or American Indian, baby, which is a reference to baby Luck's mother, Cherokee Sal, being an American Indian woman.) Tough as the men may still be on the outside, it seems that baby Luck has given them permission to engage with the more tender, sensitive parts of themselves that are attuned to beauty. - Theme: Isolation, Community, and Hardship. Description: Roaring Camp is a small gold-mining settlement in the American West—Northern California specifically, given the story's reference to the Sierra Nevada mountain range and redwood trees. The settlement is incredibly insular: it's tucked away in the wildness, far away from other towns, and is populated by 100 gruff men who are suspicious of outsiders. But rather than focusing on the negative effects of isolation—of which there certainly are many—the story focuses on how insular communities like Roaring Camp are often made stronger in being so set apart from the outside world. This dynamic is especially true in trying times, like when the men of Roaring Camp are suddenly faced with how to raise a baby without his mother—or any female presence at the camp, save for the mule. Overall, Roaring Camp's isolation isn't a cause for loneliness or despair in the midst of these circumstances—instead, it leads the men to band together in a powerful way and makes the community more tightly knit than before. Roaring Camp is physically and socially isolated from the outside world. The next town over, Red Dog, is 40 miles away, which is roughly one or two full days of travel on horseback. Roaring Camp's "only connecting link with the surrounding world" is the expressman, a kind of mailman on horseback. But the men of Roaring Camp seem to prefer being set apart like this, as they often "looked suspiciously on strangers. No encouragement was given to immigration […] This, and a reputation for singular proficiency with the revolver, kept the reserve of Roaring Camp inviolate." It's implied that this skepticism toward outsiders is integral to the Gold-Rush era West, noting that "A disbelief in the honesty of other camps prevailed at Roaring Camp as in other places." Roaring Camp is also isolated from the outside world because it's so deep in the wilderness: the camp is in a valley surrounded on all sides by either hills or a river. The only way in and out of the valley is a steep path that winds up the highest part of one of the hills. In addition, the men in the camp are emotionally and socially separated from outsiders, which only intensifies after they become responsible for baby Luck. Roaring Camp is referred to as a "city of refuge," which is an allusion to settlements for outcasts in biblical times. With this in mind, the story implies that the men have been kicked out of other communities and even cast out from their families—Stumpy, for instance, "had been the putative head of two families." The phrase "had been," in the past tense, emphasizes that Stumpy's connection to those families has since been severed. When baby Luck is born and his mother, Cherokee Sal, dies in labor, the men in Roaring Camp are left to raise him. From this point on, the men's suspicion toward outsiders deepens, a reaction that seems to be a combination of believing that the Luck is their personal good luck charm and also just wanting to keep him safe. The men thus decide to isolate themselves even further: "to make their seclusion more perfect, the land on either side of the mountain wall that surrounded the camp they duly preempted." And although it initially seems that Luck's birth might put too much strain on such an isolated community—possibly even making it collapse—it actually makes the men band together even more than before. When a baby's cry suddenly rings out while Sal is in labor, nature itself goes completely silent: "The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle." This dead silence reinforces that the men are isolated from other people and towns—there's no doctor here to help facilitate the birth, nor are there other women in the camp to nurse the Luck when Sal dies in childbirth. But instead of crumbling under this pressure and isolation, "The camp rose to its feet as one man!" From the Luck's very first cry, it's clear that the men of Roaring Camp intend to stick together and deal with what comes as a unit. The next day, the men hold a meeting to figure out what to do with the baby, and "A resolution to adopt it was unanimous and enthusiastic." But when one man, Tipton, suggests they send Luck to the next town over because the women there could raise him, "the unlucky suggestion [was] met with fierce and unanimous opposition." Here, Tipton is portrayed as the exception rather than the rule; besides him, all of the other men are on the same page about raising the Luck themselves. Of course, this again underscores Roaring Camp's insularity, as the men are wholly unwilling to bring in an outsider or to cast out one of their own. But their "unanimous and enthusiastic" decision to raise the Luck shows that their isolation and insularity is continuing to bring them closer and encouraging them to act as a strong, cohesive unit. When Cherokee Sal goes into labor and her health quickly fades, her isolation is a deep and painful burden. She's the only woman in the camp, and she's further set apart from the other Roaring Camp residents because of her status as a prostitute, which is implied to make her more of a commodity than a valued member of the community. She's incredibly lonely, and the pain of childbirth is made so much worse without other women around her. What's different about the men of Roaring Camp, though, is that they have one another. So, while isolation isn't always a positive force—it's certainly painful for Sal—the story does emphasize how it can bring tight-knit communities even closer together. - Theme: The Brutality of the Old West. Description: Like many of Harte's stories, "The Luck of Roaring Camp" takes place in a settlement in the American West during the Gold Rush era. But it's not all campfire songs and panning for gold at Roaring Camp—the men of Roaring Camp have led difficult lives, and simply surviving in the wilderness is a feat in itself. This is the brutal environment that the titular baby Luck is born into; when his mother, the town prostitute, dies in childbirth, the Luck is suddenly at the mercy of 100 husky men in an isolated settlement in the wilderness. Indeed, from Harte's perspective, the Wild West is a rough, unforgiving place, both in terms of the people who settle there and the natural landscape itself. The characters' shady pasts, coupled with the tragic natural disaster at the end of the story, dismantle the myth of the Old West as being an idyllic place full of opportunity and adventure. All of the characters have shady backstories, which paints the Western population as a whole as tough, unforgiving, and even outright dangerous. Roaring Camp is referred to as a "city of refuge," which is a biblical allusion to settlements on the outskirts of society that housed outcasts and criminals in biblical times. This allusion reveals the moral makeup of Roaring Camp: the men are outcasts and outlaws who are implied to have been kicked out of other cities. Indeed, of the hundred men living at Roaring Camp, some are criminals; some, like Oakhurst, are gamblers; and a couple of them are "actual fugitives from justice." They're often described as "roughs" (people who are disreputable and violent), "scamp[s]" (mischief-makers), and all-around "reckless" men. That all the men have some sort of shady past paints a picture of the Wild West as a whole—it's a place for rough-and-tumble outlaws and outcasts. The one woman at the settlement, Cherokee Sal, is heavily implied to be a prostitute. Her name is "familiar enough in the camp," suggesting that the majority of the men are "familiar" with her in the euphemistic form of the word—that is, they've had sex with her. In describing her, the narrator admits, "Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse, and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman." When Sal dies in childbirth, she's described as "climb[ing] […] that rugged road that led to the stars" and passing out of Roaring Camp's "sin and shame." This passage again underscores that Roaring Camp is a brutal, unforgiving place, riddled with immorality and scandal. But the metaphor of dying as a "rugged road" also begins to point to another layer of why the Wild West is so brutal. While the people who populate the West are ruthless, the story suggests that the Western landscape itself is far more brutal, further undermining the widely held belief that the West is a place of good-natured adventure and excitement. Roaring Camp, like many Western settlements during the Gold Rush era, is incredibly isolated—the closest town is 40 miles away. Roaring Camp is also isolated in that it's tucked away in the wilderness: "The camp lay in a triangular valley, between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill […]." The "steep trail" one must climb to get out of the valley is reminiscent of the metaphorical "rugged road" that Sal climbs as she dies; both paint the West as a place of physical exertion, untamed landscapes, and extremes. And while this isolation might protect Roaring Camp from outsiders, nature has no trouble infiltrating and destroying the camp in one fell swoop, which is a testament to nature's brutality and power. One night, "the North Fork suddenly leaped over its banks, and swept up the triangular valley of Roaring Camp." As the storm continues, "Each gorge and gulch was transformed into a tumultuous watercourse that descended the hillsides, tearing down giant trees and scattering its drift and debris along the plain." The flood rips trees out of the earth, making it clear that nature is powerful enough to destroy even itself. The men in the settlement, as tough and reckless as they may be, are powerless in the face of nature's might, and "little could be done to collect the scattered camp." Three of Roaring Camp's residents die in the flood: Stumpy, Kentuck, and baby Luck. Kentuck's death underscores his power (a reminder that residents of the Wild West are a force to be reckoned with) but simultaneously highlights his powerlessness in the face of the powerful natural world: "the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea." Strong as Kentuck may be, he is reduced to "clinging," "drowning," and "drift[ing] away," entirely unable to fight back against the brutal Western landscape. Initially, it seems that nature is beautiful, peaceful, and even nurturing toward baby Luck: "Nature was his nurse and playfellow. For him she would let slip between the leaves golden shafts of sunlight that fell just within his grasp; she would send wandering breezes to visit him […] to him the tall red-woods nodded familiarly and sleepily […]." But no matter how beautiful and tender this moment is, nature is precisely what kills the Luck in the end. While "The Luck of Roaring Camp" certainly affirms that Western folks are a force to be reckoned with, closing the story with a massive, fatal flood makes it clear that the Old West's natural landscape is what's really the most brutal and unforgiving. Life in the Old West isn't all adventures on horseback in the majestic wilderness. Instead, life in a place like Roaring Camp is rough, isolated, and terribly dangerous. - Climax: A massive winter flood rips through Roaring Camp, killing Kentuck and the Luck - Summary: It's 1850, and something big is happening in the gold mining settlement of Roaring Camp, deep in the wilderness of the American West. Everyone is buzzing about a woman named Cherokee Sal—the town prostitute, who happens to be the only woman at Roaring Camp. Sal is going into labor, and this is monumental at the camp. Death is normal here, as is people being banished from the settlement. But birth—the introduction of someone new into the community—is unheard of. One of the camp's men, Stumpy, is appointed to help deliver the baby. He's fathered two families before, so the other men of Roaring Camp (a collection of 100 criminals, fugitives, gamblers, or otherwise "reckless" men) decide that this makes Stumpy most qualified to help Sal. The landscape of Roaring Camp is as tough and rugged as the men who live there. The camp is nestled in a triangular valley, flanked on all sides by a river or hills; the only way in and out is a steep trail up the summit of one of the hills. Sal's health quickly declines after she delivers her baby, and she soon dies. The men aren't too upset about her death, but they are concerned about what they're supposed to do with a newborn baby. In the short term, their only option is to have the camp's female mule nurse the baby. The men line up to see the baby. One by one, they enter into the cabin in which the baby was born and leave a gift for him. By the time all of the men have had their turn, the baby has amassed a pile of gold nuggets, boot spurs, jewels, and coins. One of the gruffest and most hypermasculine of the men, Kentuck, has a particularly tender moment when it's his time to see the baby: the baby reaches out and clings to Kentuck's finger, which delights (and consequently embarrasses) Kentuck. He talks about this moment all night with anyone who will listen. The next day, the men hold a formal meeting to figure out what to do with the baby. All but one of the men believe that they should adopt him; only Tipton thinks they should send the baby to Red Dog (the next town over, which is 40 miles away), where he could be properly nursed by a woman. This idea is promptly squashed, as is the idea of sending for a woman from another settlement to stay at Roaring Camp to tend to the baby—the men don't want women here. This, the narrator interjects, may seem harsh, but it's actually "the first spasm of propriety" at the camp. Eventually, they decide to raise the baby themselves, with Stumpy and the female mule acting as his primary caregivers. As time goes on, the baby thrives, perhaps because of all the fresh air. Around this time, the men begin to find more and more gold, so they deem the baby their good luck charm and name him Tommy Luck—or "the Luck"—in honor of this. Wanting to make the settlement a better environment for the Luck, the men begin cleaning up the cabins and even themselves—bathing before they hold the baby, for instance, and cutting expletives out of their language. They even begin bringing the Luck wildflowers and other treasures they find, as the Luck has opened their eyes to the beauty surrounding them. After the Luck has been with the men for several months, they discuss the idea of building a hotel in the camp and inviting a couple "decent families" to live at Roaring Camp and give the Luck some company. The men are still highly skeptical of women, but they want the best for the Luck and think he'd benefit from "female companionship," so most of them agree to this plan. Before the plan can be put into action, a powerful winter flood sweeps through the settlement in the night. Chaos ensues, as Stumpy's entire cabin is swept away into the river and massive trees are uprooted. Roaring Camp is reduced to debris, and Stumpy is killed. Kentuck is found barely clinging to life, with the Luck's dead body in his arms. He's contented that he's following the Luck into death, though, and quickly dies, floating into the dark river and drifting to an "unknown sea."

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Lumber Room - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: An Upper-class English home with a "lumber room," which is a room used to store unused furniture and household objects - Character: Nicholas. Description: The protagonist of "The Lumber Room," Nicholas is a young and mischievous boy who lives with three other children—his younger brother, his girl-cousin, and his boy-cousin—and his cousins' aunt. He often clashes with the aunt, who is a strict and unpleasant guardian to the children. Nicholas doesn't seem particularly attached to the other children he lives with, dismissing his younger brother as "boring" and finding it amusing when his girl-cousin scrapes her knee and cries. While the other children must also endure the aunt's rules and punishments, they don't seem to actively rebel against her like Nicholas does, perhaps because he feels injustices more keenly than they do and is bolder than they are. He also doesn't invite any of these children to join in his scheme to enter the lumber room, saving it for a day when he can carry out his plan alone. The aunt has forbidden the children from entering this room, but Nicholas has a carefully constructed plan to do just that. He has accounted for every detail in his plan, right from getting the other children and aunt out of the way to practicing how to turn a key in a lock, all of which are evidence of his meticulousness and intelligence. He has an impressive imagination that lets him construct worlds out of the pictures and household objects he finds in the lumber room, such as the tapestry. Nicholas is also a careful observer and accurately anticipates how the aunt will react to certain situations. He uses his understanding of her nature to manipulate her and to show her to be a liar and hypocrite. A charming troublemaker, Nicholas disrupts an old, dusty order with his creativity and wit. - Character: The Aunt. Description: The antagonist of the story, Nicholas's cousins' aunt seems to be the only adult responsible for the four children under her charge, though the story implies that there are other adults in the household as well. The aunt steps up to the challenge of this daunting task by attempting to run a tight ship, demanding obedience from her charges and doling out harsh punishments for offenders. She is often cruel to the children, inventing picnics and treats just to punish the wrongdoers by excluding them from the fun. She is also unconcerned or unaware about the children's needs or wellbeing, focusing all her energy on ensuring their obedience. Nicholas calls her out on this in the story; after informing her that Bobby's boots are too tight, and that he told the aunt this twice, Nicholas declares, "You often don't listen when we tell you important things." She is frustratingly petty, like when she tells the children there is no strawberry jam even though she has four jars of it, and uses religion to scare the children into line, telling Nicholas that he often obeys the Evil One. Though she would like to be in full control of the children, she often fails at this, especially when it comes to her dealings with Nicholas. He is not afraid of her or her punishments, and he understands her completely and can predict her actions and reactions. The aunt, on the other hand, lacks this sharpness of thought and has no idea what to make of Nicholas or his tricks, leaving herself vulnerable to him and ending up completely speechless when he shows her to be a liar. - Character: Bobby. Description: A child in the same household as Nicholas and the aunt. He is either Nicholas's younger brother or his boy-cousin, but the story doesn't specify which. Just after the other children depart for Jagborough, Nicholas mentions to the aunt that Bobby won't enjoy himself on the excursion since his boots are too tight. When the aunt wonders why Bobby didn't mention the boots to her, Nicholas says that Bobby told her about it (twice!) but that she never listens to them. When the children return from the beach later in the story, Bobby is indeed grumpy because his boots were too tight, which prevented him from having any fun on the trip. Bobby's character highlights Nicholas's powers of observation and deduction as well as the aunt's ignorance of the real concerns the children have. - Character: Girl-Cousin. Description: Nicholas's girl-cousin lives in the same household as Nicholas and the aunt. She scrapes her knee right before the children leave to the beach and cries. Nicholas is impressed by how loudly she cried, but his aunt is certain she will forget all about her knee when she has fun at the beach. The girl-cousin's tears are in contrast to Nicholas's complete nonchalance when the children depart. This disappoints the aunt, who would have liked Nicholas to cry so she could be sure her punishment was effective. - Theme: Adults, Children, and Power. Description: "The Lumber Room" is set in early 20th-century England, a time when children were expected to always be on their best behavior and unquestioningly obey adults. However, the story's protagonist, a mischievous boy named Nicholas, goes against the grain of this expectation. As punishment for one of his many tricks, his cousins' authoritarian aunt (who is not technically Nicholas's aunt but "insist[s], by an unwarranted stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also") bars Nicholas from joining the other children on a trip to the sea. However, he ends up having an extraordinarily happy day at home, plotting his way into the forbidden lumber room, a mysterious locked room that only the adults are allowed to enter. Saki's allegiance is with Nicholas, and when Nicholas refuses to obey the authoritarian aunt he lives with, thereby stripping her of her power over him, it is a moment of victory. At the end of the story, power has shifted from the aunt to Nicholas, and Saki implies that this is right and fitting because adults aren't always worthy of the power they wield over children. Throughout the story, Saki is critical of the aunt and describes her as being a small-minded bully rather than an adult worthy of respect and deference. When the story opens, Nicholas' cousins and younger brother are going to the beach, but Nicholas is not being allowed to accompany them because he is "in disgrace" for putting a frog in his breakfast as a joke. The aunt has "hastily invented" the trip because "it was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred." Clearly, the aunt organizes fun activities for the children solely to exclude and punish those who do not play by her rules, which makes her come across as petty and manipulative. She is one of the "older, wiser, and better people" (namely, adults) who have the authority to tell children what to do and how to be. However, Saki implies that though she might be older, she is neither wiser nor better than Nicholas, and is undeserving of the power she holds. In contrast, the children in the story are portrayed in a much more sympathetic manner. For instance, when Nicholas tells his aunt that one of the children, Bobby, will not enjoy himself at the beach because his boots are too tight, the aunt is surprised to hear it. Nicholas says: "He told you [about the boots] twice, but you weren't listening. You often don't listen when we tell you important things." With this, the story emphasizes that the children are voiceless and powerless under the aunt. She largely ignores their opinions and needs. The other three children are packed off to the sands of Jagborough just to punish Nicholas, though they might not really wish to go. One of them has tight boots, while another (Nicholas's girl-cousin) skins her knee before they depart and leaves in tears. The aunt remains unaffected by or unaware of all this. While the other children seem to play by the aunt's rules, Nicholas is a rebel. His very first action in the story is a refusal to follow the aunt's orders, and his attempts to thwart his aunt's rules are depicted as humorous and clever. Saki sides with Nicholas's transgressions, implying that the boy is superior to his aunt and deserves the position of power he achieves at the end of the story. For instance, as part of his punishment, Nicholas's aunt orders him not to enter the gooseberry garden. While he has no interest in the garden, he pretends that he does. He wants the aunt to stand guard there so he can "rapidly put into execution a plan of action that had long germinated in his brain," which is to explore the lumber room (a storage room, mainly containing spare furniture, in upper-class homes). Until this point in the story, the reader, like the aunt, believes that she has been in control of the events of the day. However, it is now clear that Nicholas has been working on his plan for a while and has effortlessly manipulated the aunt into doing exactly what he wants her to do. Later, when the aunt topples into the water tank and asks Nicholas for his help—promising him a treat of strawberry jam if he does—he gleefully refuses. He claims that she must be the "Evil One" and not really his aunt, because "when [the children] asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she said there wasn't any." He says, "I know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, because I looked, and of course you know it's there, but she doesn't, because she said there wasn't any. Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself!" Of course, Nicholas knows that it is his aunt stuck in the water tank and not some evil presence trying to tempt him. With this little speech, Nicholas reveals to his aunt that he is aware of her lies and hypocrisy, and cleverly puts her in a position where she is unable to defend herself. He has the upper hand, and the tyrant is satisfyingly deposed. At the conclusion of the story, the aunt is upset by the events of the day and maintains the "frozen muteness of one who has suffered undignified and unmerited detention." Nicholas, on the other hand, doesn't gloat over his victory or revel in her sadness. He has already moved on to thinking about the interesting tapestry he discovered in the lumber room. This is in complete contrast to the aunt, who expected "a few decent tears" from Nicholas when she prevented him from going to the beach at the beginning of the story. As the story comes to a close, Saki seems to imply that Nicholas wields his power with a largesse that she lacks. - Theme: Imagination. Description: Nicholas, the protagonist of "The Lumber Room," is a quick-witted boy with a robust imagination. He comes up with very creative ideas to escape from and rebel against the drab rules imposed on him by the authoritarian aunt he lives with. Throughout the story, Saki celebrates Nicholas for being an especially imaginative child and makes it clear that he disapproves of the aunt's stultifying ways. With this, Saki suggests that children's imagination and curiosity are wonderful things, and he is critical of adults who discourage them. Throughout the story, Saki upholds the boy's fantastic imagination as a source of humor and wonder and contrasts it with the aunt's glaring deficiencies in that department. She is described as "a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration," dogged in her single-minded pursuit of obedience from the children in her charge. At the beginning of the story, the narrator points out that the aunt is Nicholas's cousins' aunt and not actually Nicholas's aunt, but she "insisted, by an unwarranted stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also." The narrator then goes on to explain the punishment she "invented" for Nicholas. Thus, the entire force of the aunt's imagination and innovativeness is limited only to preserving her authority. In contrast, Nicholas is teeming with creative ideas and imagination. His quick thinking gives him a huge advantage over the aunt, while she ends up defenseless against his machinations. For instance, Nicholas tricks the aunt into "self-imposed sentry duty" at the gooseberry garden so he can have some time to explore the lumber room (a room the children are forbidden to enter). The aunt easily falls into this trap—and then literally falls into a nearby water tank—painting her as slow-witted. Because of his vivid imagination and curious mind, Nicholas comes across as her intellectual superior. Also, in her attempts to stifle the children's imagination and creativity, the aunt keeps her home and the children's lives bland and sterile. For instance, the children's breakfast is boring bread-and-milk, which Nicholas refuses to eat. The aunt has previously refused to give him strawberry jam, lying that there was none. It seems that even from the food she offers the children, the aunt is in favor of the unexciting. Similarly, while exploring the lumber room, Nicholas is struck by "a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak the tea was supposed to come." He thinks, "How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot seems in comparison!" Once again, when choosing for the children, the aunt has opted for the "dull" option. Additionally, the lumber room is described as a "region that was so carefully sealed from youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered." So, the aunt not only keeps the imaginative treasures of the lumber room locked away but also denies the children any information about it, and in this way stifles their imagination and curiosity. Saki implies that adults (like the aunt) relegate fun and imagination to a room kept under lock and key in order to achieve a sterile sense of orderliness, but that this makes everyone's lives empty and uninteresting. In contrast, Nicholas dives headlong into ideas and imagination, and though it causes some chaos that unthreads the orderliness that the aunt so desperately tries to cultivate, Saki suggests that children need the space to delight in their imaginations and explore their curiosity. Despite being discouraged and punished by his aunt, Nicholas's wit and imagination cannot be repressed. By rebelling against her strictures, he enters the lumber room which he discovers is a "storehouse of unimagined treasures." The lumber room is mostly filled with unused household objects that others might consider boring, but to Nicholas they are fascinating and beautiful. His imagination and unbridled curiosity transform these objects into treasures. When he comes across a tapestry that was used as a fire screen, he is transfixed by the picture it depicts of a hunter who has just shot a stag while four wolves approach him without his knowledge. This scene becomes "a living, breathing story" for Nicholas, and he spends "many golden minutes" inspecting its various details and trying to figure out what will happen next in the story of the tapestry. It lingers in his thoughts even hours later, at teatime that evening when the children come back disappointed from their trip to Jagborough and the aunt is seething at being left in the water tank for so long. Nicholas shares in their silence, but unlike the others who are unhappy and sulking, he is pleasantly lost in the magic of his imagination, still thinking about the tapestry he encountered in the lumber room. His imagination helps him to escape the dullness and discomfort that surrounds him. Thus, for Saki, Nicholas's imagination has great power and value, and he is critical of the aunt's attempts to curb it. - Theme: Morality and Hypocrisy. Description: The two main characters in "The Lumber Room"—Nicholas and the aunt he lives with—are both complex characters who behave in less-than-perfect ways throughout the story. Nicholas is a mischievous rebel, and judging by the aunt's frustration and constant punishments, it seems that living with a child like him who is up to tricks all the time is extremely tiresome. Yet, while some of Nicholas's tricks might be wrong—like ruining his breakfast by putting a frog in it—Saki implies that his tricks are not nearly as bad as the aunt's self-righteous bullying and lies. From the outset, Nicholas is characterized as an aggravating trickster who is "in disgrace" for the trouble that he causes. At the very opening of the story, he refuses to eat his breakfast because there is a frog in it, and when the aunt asks him to stop talking the "veriest nonsense," he reveals that he knows for a fact that there is a frog in his food because he was the one who put it there. Later in the story, when the aunt has fallen into a water tank in the garden and asks Nicholas to help her get out, he refuses. He uses his aunt's rule as a reason not to help her—"I was told I wasn't to go into the gooseberry garden," he says—but clearly, he is once again up to his tricks. Yet, Nicholas is, after all, a child, and Saki describes his tricks with affectionate humor, making it clear that they are either harmless or merited. When he puts a frog in his breakfast, he wants to make a point that adults are not always correct about the things they express certainty about. If they think a frog in a breakfast of bread-and-milk is impossible, Nicholas will take it upon himself to demonstrate that it is not. A more generous adult might find his thought process somewhat charming, but the aunt definitely isn't such a person. To her, it is a crime worthy of punishment. Also, the aunt doesn't seem to be a good caregiver to her young charges. She is ignorant of Bobby's tight boots because, as Nicholas points out to her, she doesn't listen to the children when they tell her "important things." She also seems to enjoy denying them small pleasures, like strawberry jam, for no good reason. When seen in this context, Nicholas's rebellions against her seem like small, well-deserved victories. In contrast to Nicholas's impish tricks, the aunt is characterized as a dishonest hypocrite, which, in Saki's eyes, makes her Nicholas's moral inferior. The narrator describes her as "soi-disant aunt" and "aunt-by-assertion" because she isn't really Nicholas's aunt, even though she claims to be. She is in fact "his cousins' aunt who insisted […] in styling herself his aunt also." Nicholas has caught on to her fundamental dishonesty, which is revealed in her misrepresentation of the relationship they share. Later in the story, Nicholas is exploring the lumber room when he hears the aunt outside, yelling for him to come out of the gooseberry garden. She has forbidden him from going into the garden and suspects he is there, but, of course, he isn't. "I can see you all the time," the aunt calls out, which makes Nicholas smile as he realizes that she is lying once again—she can't possibly see him hiding in the garden, as he's hidden away in the lumber room. Later, when the aunt falls into the rain-water tank in the gooseberry garden and calls for Nicholas to help her out, Nicholas refuses. He pretends to think that it must be the Devil inside the water tank pretending to be his aunt in order to fool him. To test this supposed hypothesis, he asks if he may have strawberry jam with his tea, which his aunt readily agrees to. Nicholas claims that this proves it is the Devil in the water tank, and not his aunt, because "when [the children] asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she said there wasn't any." He says, "I know there are four jars of it in the store cupboard, because I looked, and of course you know it's there, but she doesn't, because she said there wasn't any. Oh, Devil, you have sold yourself!" He then walks away triumphantly, leaving the aunt in the tank. The aunt has paraded herself as the guardian of morality and has often told Nicholas "that the Evil one tempts [him] and that [he] always yield[s]," so when Nicholas reveals her to be a liar, she has no comebacks. Even though Nicholas's decision to leave his aunt inside the water tank isn't a moral one, the story implies that the aunt very much deserved her brief sojourn there. - Theme: The World of Conventions vs. the Natural World. Description: There is a dichotomy in the story between the aunt's well-ordered, rule-bound world and the losing battle it faces against the unruliness of children and nature. Everything about the aunt is prim and proper: she governs the children with a firm hand, is quick to punish them when they are "in disgrace," and overall runs a tight ship. However, throughout the story, the aunt's attempts at order and propriety constantly fail against Nicholas's mischievous schemes. Because of him, the natural world keeps creeping into the household, be it in the form of Nicholas's beast-like, wild behavior, or the frog he sneaks into his breakfast. Through this dynamic, Saki seems to suggest that conventions and enforced civility are powerless veneers against the natural wildness within human nature and the natural world. The aunt's world of conventions and her strict governing style only create the illusion of order and control. She spends most of her time in the story engaged in "trivial gardening operations" to ensure that Nicholas will stay out of the gooseberry garden. But her obsession with keeping Nicholas from trampling in her well-manicured garden—and thus preventing chaos from seeping into her orderly environment—is completely ineffective. While the gooseberry garden does go untouched, Nicholas instead heads right into the secrets and chaos of the lumber room. Also, in order to maintain control over her unhappy and rebellious charges, the aunt has to regularly resort to threats and punishments. This points to an underlayer of rancor and disorder in her carefully curated world. The children seem to be regularly misbehaving and her various punishments do not appear to be giving her much control over them. Her favorite punishment—that of inventing and then withholding fun trips and activities from the children who disobey her—seems to recur in their lives pretty frequently, without bringing any constant sense of order to their household. This illusion of order that the aunt struggles to enforce is easily punctuated by forces of nature, the chief of which is Nicholas himself. In the volume of Saki's short stories (The Complete Short Stories of Saki), "The Lumber Room" is part of a smaller collection entitled Beasts and Super Beasts. Indeed, Nicholas demonstrates enough wild energy and stubbornness of purpose to fall into either one of these categories. He emerges as the victor at the end of the story while the aunt is upset and defeated after being left in the water tank. Also, Nicholas has no fear of the aunt when he is up to mischief like putting a frog in his breakfast, showing that he is immune to her strict rules and easily dismantles the orderly atmosphere she tries desperately to maintain. The frog ruins the bland and "wholesome bread-and-milk" just like Nicholas brings disorder into the aunt's boring household. It is also extremely easy for Nicholas to sneak the frog (which is part of the natural world) into the house even though the adults think it is impossible, showing that their trust in convention and orderliness is misplaced. Another example in the story of the natural world foiling the aunt's careful plans is the tide at Jagborough, where she sends the other three children in order to punish Nicholas for the frog trick by not allowing him to go with them. When the children are leaving, the aunt would like to see Nicholas shed a "few decent tears," but he does not give her this satisfaction. She goes on to tell Nicholas that "it will be a glorious afternoon for racing about over those beautiful sands," implying that he will miss out on a lot of fun. But when the children return, they are dejected because the tide was at its highest at Jagborough, leaving them no sand to play on. Thus, nature intervenes, and the aunt's plan to punish Nicholas by keeping him from accompanying the other children turns into a comic failure. The "unimagined treasures" that Nicholas finds in the lumber room is another example of the wild world that has already infiltrated the ordered household. The objects that Nicholas finds there are a veritable menagerie of birds and animals: candlesticks shaped like snakes, teapots shaped like ducks. Nicholas is most fascinated by the tapestry that depicts a hunting scene. In it, a hunter has shot a stag but is unaware that four wolves are approaching him. Nicholas is unimpressed by the hunter, who he notices doesn't have much skill since he shot the stag at very close range, and also doesn't have enough arrows in his quiver to fight off the wolves. While the hunter, like the aunt, thinks he has the situation under control, he is completely unaware of the chaos that is approaching in the form of the wolves. Thus, in the "Lumber Room," Saki suggests that wildness seems to always triumph over tame conventions. Nicholas is the clear winner in the battle with his aunt, representing the victory of wildness over enforced civility. - Climax: Nicholas refuses to help the aunt climb out of the rain-water tank, pretending that he thinks she is the devil trying to trick him. - Summary: A young boy named Nicholas refuses to eat his breakfast of bread-and-milk because, he claims, there is a frog in it. The aunt he lives with (who is his cousins' aunt, but insists that she is Nicholas's aunt, too) demands that he stop making up ridiculous tales because it is impossible for a frog to be in his breakfast. However, Nicholas has himself put the frog in his breakfast bowl and is pleased to point out that the aunt was wrong when she said it was impossible. To punish Nicholas for refusing to eat his breakfast and for putting a frog in his food, the aunt sends the other children (Nicholas's boy-cousin, girl-cousin, and younger brother) on a trip to Jagborough while Nicholas is to stay home. This is a form of punishment that the aunt favors. When the children don't follow her rules, she comes up with fun activities to exclude the wrongdoer from. The aunt expects Nicholas to be sad about missing the trip, but he doesn't seem to be. Instead, when the girl-cousin scrapes her knee right before they depart and cries, Nicholas happily points out to the aunt that the girl cried very loudly. Nicholas also points out that Bobby will not enjoy the trip because his boots are too tight. The aunt wonders why Bobby didn't tell her about this, and Nicholas replies that Bobby told her twice, but that she often does not listen when the children tell her "important things." The aunt adds to Nicholas's punishment, saying that he is to stay out of the gooseberry garden. Seeing the stubborn expression on Nicholas's face, the aunt assumes that he plans to disobey her just for the sake of it. Even though she has other things to do, the aunt stations herself in the front garden with some menial gardening work just so she can catch Nicholas if he tries to sneak into the gooseberry garden. Nicholas feigns an interest in the gooseberry garden by walking past the doors leading into it a couple of times. He only wants to ensure that his aunt will stand guard in the front garden, leaving him free to put his real plan into action. When he is sure that she is out of his way, he rushes into the library and finds the key to the lumber room. Only adults are allowed to enter this room, and Nicholas has been working for a while on a plan to go inside and explore it. When he enters the lumber room, Nicholas finds it to be as magical as he had hoped. While the rest of the aunt's house is largely unexciting, the lumber room is filled with fascinating curiosities like a tapestry depicting a hunting scene in which a man has shot an arrow into a stag but is unaware of four approaching wolves. Nicholas loses himself in the story the tapestry depicts, wondering whether the man and his two dogs will be able to escape the wolves, and if there are perhaps more than four wolves. He also finds many other thrilling objects in the lumber room, like candlesticks shaped like twisted snakes, and a teapot shaped like a duck. Suddenly, Nicholas hears his aunt calling his name, asking him to come out of the gooseberry garden because she can see him there. Nicholas smiles to himself, because he knows she is lying. Soon after, he hears his aunt scream and call for someone to hurry to her. Nicholas locks up the lumber room and goes to the front garden to investigate. His aunt calls to him from the gooseberry garden and says that she has fallen into the rain-water tank. She asks him to bring her a ladder so she can climb out, but Nicholas responds by saying that he was told to stay out of the gooseberry garden. The aunt hastily tells him that she has changed her mind and that he can now enter it. To this, Nicholas replies that she doesn't sound like his aunt, and that he suspects the "Evil One" is in the water tank, not his aunt. He asks if there will be strawberry jam for tea, and when the aunt says there will be, Nicholas triumphantly declares that this is evidence that it is indeed the Evil One in the water tank pretending to be his aunt. When the children had asked the aunt for strawberry jam the previous day, she'd said there wasn't any. So clearly, Nicholas says, she couldn't have known there were four jars of it in the store cupboard. Nicholas had looked, so he knew, and the Evil One in the water tank knew, but the aunt didn't know. The Evil One has given himself away, Nicholas says, and walks away without helping the aunt out of the water tank. She is finally rescued 35 minutes later by a kitchen maid. Later that day, teatime is quiet. The aunt is upset after being stuck in the water tank. The children did not enjoy their trip to Jagborough because the tide was high and no one got to play in the sand, and Bobby is in a bad mood because of his tight boots. Nicholas is quiet, too, imagining a conclusion to the story on the tapestry, wondering if the hunter and his dogs would manage to escape if they left the stag to the wolves.

- Genre: Science fiction, dystopian fiction, short story - Title: The Machine Stops - Point of view: Third person, limited to Vashti's perspective with occasional remarks by the omniscient narrator - Setting: A futuristic society, underground beneath Sumatra and England - Character: The Machine. Description: The Machine, an enormously complex technological system that seems to provide all of humanity's wants and needs, is in many ways the central antagonist of the story. Human beings may have originally created the Machine in order to survive in the aftermath of an environmental collapse that made Earth's surface uninhabitable. They've since retreated underground, where each person lives in an individual pod. In this underground society, the Machine provides for everything from basic necessities such (air, light, food, beds) to higher desires (music, literature, social interaction). Yet the Machine has also escaped humanity's control because there is no one still alive who understands how the system operates as a whole, the original creators having died long ago. Rather than adapting the Machine to their needs and desires, people increasingly adapt themselves to the Machine, even killing off infants who might not be well-suited to life in the Machine. Because they are so dependent on the Machine, and they no longer understand how it actually operates, human beings begin to worship it as though it were a god, apparently forgetting that it is only humanity's creation. This attitude is ultimately dangerous, as their belief in the Machine's power blinds them to its vulnerabilities, a mistake that eventually causes their whole civilization to come crashing down around them. Even before that final disaster, the Machine had already damaged much of human nature, from the desire for deep connection with other people to the desire for harmony with nature. The destructiveness of the Machine symbolizes the potential dangers of human-created systems that escape from our control and separate us from what is best in ourselves. - Character: Vashti. Description: Vashti is the main viewpoint character of "The Machine Stops." She is an "everywoman" of this society, accepting its values and lifestyle. She is perfectly content to spend her whole life in her underground room, listening to music and lectures and calling her friends. She also has a great fondness for her son Kuno, even though she also finds him strange. Despite her hatred of traveling, Vashti nonetheless undergoes the journey to visit her son simply to make him happy. However, she has a falling-out with Kuno after he tells her the story of how he escaped to Earth's surface, because this, for her, is crossing a line too far. Unlike Kuno, she worships the Machine, finding great comfort in praying to her Book. But the Machine's final collapse transforms her worldview, as she finally recognizes what her son has been trying to warn her of all along: the vulnerability and destructiveness of the Machine. Vashti's perspective provides the reader with a valuable insight into the values and worldview of this society, but she is also a complex character who does not align completely with this society's values, such as in her love for her son. The clash between her conformist worldview and Kuno's rebellious worldview provides the central conflict of the story, while her final transformation as a character is the internal climax that coincides with the external climax of the Machine's destruction. - Character: Kuno. Description: Kuno, Vashti's son, is the opposite of Vashti when it comes to his rebellious attitude towards the Machine. Unlike Vashti, he is not satisfied with spending his whole life in his underground room, and has a taste for adventure. He has a deep appreciation for the natural world, drawn to the landscapes and constellations he sees while traveling aboard air-ships, and fascinated by the hills that he sees upon emerging to Earth's surface. In contrast to Vashti's compliant attitude, Kuno likes to transgress established boundaries, as demonstrated in his apparently irrational determination to "find his own way out" to Earth's surface rather than requesting an exit permit through proper channels. He is deeply critical of his society's worship of the Machine, insisting that the Machine is a creation of human beings, not an inexplicable divine entity. He has a deep faith in humanity, feeling an almost spiritual connection with humanity's past. He has hope that humanity will survive the Machine's destructiveness and will one day recognize their errors and reconnect with what is best in their own nature. These beliefs lead him to eventually seek out the "Homeless," groups of human beings who have somehow adapted to Earth's surface and live out of the reach of the Machine. In opposition to the shallowness of the society he lives in, Kuno has a desire for authentic human connection, as shown in his desire to see Vashti outside of the mediation of the Machine, and his joy in reuniting with her at the moment of their deaths. While the reader does not have direct access to Kuno's perspective, he serves as a voice for the story's thematic messages, challenging Vashti's comfortable worldview and catalyzing her ultimate transformation. His hope in the future of humanity is what makes "The Machine Stops" a fundamentally optimistic vision of human nature, rather than simply a pessimistic dystopia. - Character: The Flight Attendant. Description: The flight attendant, whom Vashti interacts with while traveling on an air-ship to visit Kuno, is one of the few characters described in the story who lives a substantial amount of her life above-ground and outside of the direct control of the Machine (although the air-ships themselves are incorporated into the Machine's system). Although she seems to accept her society's values, the flight attendant's unusual profession has nonetheless led to mannerisms that, in Vashti's eyes, are quite strange—she feels comfortable talking to people directly, and even touches Vashti, which is a great taboo in this society. Vashti's perceptions of the flight attendant—whose behavior seems entirely normal to the reader, but is seen as unusual and even rude to Vashti—highlights just how differently human behavior and customs have become due to the influence of the Machine. - Character: The Lecturer. Description: The lecturer on the French Revolution serves as a mouthpiece for the official ideology of the society in "The Machine Stops." When respirators are abolished, making it impossible for people to visit Earth's surface and observe it directly, he celebrates this change, giving a speech explaining why "tenth-hand" knowledge, filtered through a multitude of secondary interpretations, is truer than first-hand knowledge. When defects appear in the Machine, he counsels an attitude of patient suffering, to put up with the Machine's flaws and have faith that they will soon be fixed, as the Machine has provided so much for them in the past. In this way, the lecturer is the direct opposite of Kuno, who questions the official ideology of his society. The lecturer instead preaches an attitude of blind faith and willful ignorance—an attitude that will eventually mark the downfall of this civilization. - Theme: Technology vs. Nature. Description: In "The Machine Stops," an environmental catastrophe has apparently left Earth's surface inhospitable to human life. Because of this, humanity has retreated into private underground pods where people live their lives entirely dependent on a technological system called "the Machine." The Machine meets all their basic survival needs (like pumping air and delivering food), in addition to entertaining them and helping them virtually socialize. There is no need—and for most people, little desire—to leave their rooms, which means that many people spend their entire existence without ever interacting with the natural world. The story's central character, Vashti, initially embraces the mindset that estrangement from the natural world is good. Her son, Kuno, gives another perspective: that the natural world (no matter how degraded it has become) can provide joy and fulfillment that life within the Machine cannot. To convince Vashti of this, Kuno explains how he illegally snuck onto Earth's surface with a respirator and had an ecstatic experience of the Wessex hills. This experience led him to two urgent revelations: one, that the natural world feels more meaningful and intriguing to him than any experience he's had within the Machine. And two, that it's apparently a lie that humankind can't survive aboveground, since he saw evidence that there are people—the "Homeless"—living on the surface, free of the Machine. Kuno seems to believe that the Machine is deliberately keeping people from Earth's surface in order to better control them; perhaps if people remembered their innate connection to nature, they might revolt against the artificiality of their lives underground. Vashti finds this notion so threatening and heretical that she cuts off contact with her son. In the end, though, catastrophe brings Vashti around to Kuno's perspective. The Machine breaks down, and as everyone in their civilization is dying, the two coincidentally reunite. Kuno explains that while they themselves will die, this isn't the end of humanity—the Homeless living on the surface will ensure the species' survival. The implication is that their existence will be happier and more meaningful than the lives of those who died with the Machine's collapse, since the Homeless are free of the Machine's sinister control and are living in harmony with the natural world. - Theme: Religion and Faith. Description: In the story's futuristic setting, Earth's surface is apparently no longer habitable. People live underground and depend on a technological system called "the Machine" to provide them with air to breathe, food to eat, and entertainment. The Machine has grown increasingly complex over the years, to the point that no one truly understands how it works. It seems almost divine in its mystery and power, so most people—including Vashi, the story's central character—worship it like a deity. The story suggests that this society's worship of the Machine is rooted in humanity's innate desire to make sense of the unknown, and that traditional religion may share the same origin: "man […] had once made god in his image." Similarly, people, having created the Machine, forget that they themselves created it, and now they instead see it as a divine being with complete power over their lives. Vashi's rebellious (and, in her opinion, sacrilegious) son Kuno believes that for a society that prides itself on its rationality, the worshippers' attitude is fundamentally irrational. He's one of the few people from inside the Machine who's been to the Earth's surface and seen the "Homeless" people who live aboveground, free of the Machine—proving that people's faith in and dependence on the Machine might be misguided. Having had this experience, he puts his faith in people instead, believing that humanity will outlast the Machine. And he's proven right in the end, as the worshippers' powerless attitude toward the Machine leaves them vulnerable to the technology they have put their faith into: when the Machine breaks down and nobody knows how to fix it, their entire civilization is destroyed. It's implied that the Homeless will survive by depending on one another and nature instead of technology, whereas the people living underground ironically die because of their unyielding faith in the Machine that was meant to keep them safe. The story thus suggests that since people create what they worship "in [their own] image" and not the other way around, they are the ones in control. So, they would be better off placing their faith in themselves and one another—what is knowable to them—than in incomprehensible technology or mysterious deities. - Theme: Simulation vs. Experience. Description: "The Machine Stops" depicts a future society in which people, believing that Earth's surface is no longer habitable, live underground in separate pods. Real-life experiences have been replaced by mere imitations via the Machine, a complex technological system that's capable of producing anything (air, food, music, etc.). But, importantly, everything it produces is an artificial or simulated version of the real thing. For example, the Machine facilitates all communication in this society, but this is limited, as the Machine is incapable of transmitting the full depth of human emotion, such as facial expressions—it can only provide a general impression of people. And most people in the society have no interest in viewing the natural world above them, instead content to listen to lectures and discuss "ideas." Yet these ideas are always secondhand, never drawn from direct experience. This is even seen as a virtue, as when a lecturer claims that their "tenth-hand" knowledge of the French Revolution, filtered through many secondary perspectives, is far more truthful than the knowledge of those who actually lived during the French Revolution. This attitude is what leads most people in the society to avoid travel, shun in-person interactions, and eventually to accept the abolition of respirators (protective equipment needed to breath the air aboveground), making it impossible to visit Earth's surface. Kuno, the central character Vashti's son, is so unusual because unlike the vast majority of people in his society, he does want to experience things directly. He refuses to resign himself to a mere simulation of what human life used to be like. Kuno enjoys traveling on air-ships, wants to see Vashti in person rather than through the Machine, and wants to escape to Earth's surface even at the risk of his own life. And the story seems to sympathize with Kuno's viewpoint, at one point describing Vashti's pod as a "prison" rather than a home that keeps her safe and fulfills her needs. In the end, when the Machine breaks down and everyone underground is dying, even Vashti comes around to her son's worldview, weeping for the beauty of humanity and worrying that "some fool" might restart the Machine and cut humans off from the outside world again. The story thus suggests that human life is only worth living if it is filled with authentic experiences, and that people's efforts to withdraw from the real world are self-destructive. - Theme: Human Connection. Description: In the future society depicted in "The Machine Stops," human relationships have become shallow and artificial because they are entirely mediated by a technological system known as the Machine. In this world, everyone lives in individual underground rooms, rarely ever seeing others in person. Instead, they communicate through the Machine, using long-distance calling that conveys images and sound. In this way, the Machine makes it much easier to stay in touch with a large number of people—but for that very reason, it prevents them from forming deep connections with one another. For example, the central character, Vashti, has thousands of acquaintances who are constantly calling her. But because her attention is split so many ways, her conversations never rise above the level of small talk. Vashti clashes with her son Kuno, who wants to see her in person, whereas Vashti is uncomfortable talking to people outside of the Machine. She's horrified at the prospect of touching another human being (even her own son), since their society has eliminated the custom of physical touch. The absence of deeper human connection is a product of the society's highly utilitarian social structure, in which all familial obligations have been abolished. The family unit has been replaced by public nurseries, and reproduction is now a bureaucratic matter, eliminating romantic relationships. However, at the same time that this society has made most human relationships shallow and pragmatic rather than emotional, there are also indications that deeper human connections still persist. For instance, Vashti and Kuno have a close mother-son relationship, so much so that when the Machine breaks down at the end of the story, Vashti leaves her pod (which terrifies her) to reunite with Kuno. The moments before their deaths represent a triumph of human relationships, as they're able to physically touch and connect with each other on a deeper level than ever before. Even more than that, the two characters experience a sense of connection with all of humanity—past, present, and future. This brief yet poignant moment of unity in "The Machine Stops" suggests that our desire for connection with others is fundamental to our nature, and that neither technological nor social changes can ever eliminate it completely. - Theme: Emotion vs. Rationality. Description: The dystopian society of "The Machine Stops" illustrate the dangers of valuing rationality too highly over human emotions. The people in this society live underground in isolated pods, and a complex technological system called the Machine provides all of their needs and facilitates all communication. Most people in this society, such as the main character, Vashti, value "ideas" but fail to recognize that ideas detached from experience and feelings become stagnant and lifeless. There is no room for human feelings in the Machine, because although this system allows people to communicate with one another, it is incapable of conveying emotional nuance through these communications. Vashti, like most people in the society, values practicality and routine, incapable of understanding her son Kuno's seemingly irrational desire to have adventures and see the aboveground world with his own eyes. Kuno is deeply moved by the simple sight of the hills of Wessex when he escapes to Earth's surface. Vashti, on the other hand, is uninterested in the sublime landscapes of the Himalayas, the Caucasus Mountains, and Greece that she flies over as she goes to visit Kuno, simply because there are "no ideas" she can find in them. She, like most people in her society, doesn't appreciate beauty or anything else that isn't purely intellectual. Indeed, although Vashti loves music—which is, in essence, an expression of human emotion—even this is fixed into something wholly rational, as Vashti's engagement with the music she listens to seems to stay entirely at the level of intellectual, never emotional. But by the end of the story, when the Machine breaks down and everyone underground is dying, Kuno and Vashti both weep over how humanity has devalued their own senses and emotions. They recognize that their society—which has developed the human mind at the expense of the human heart, body, and spirit—has come at a great cost, creating an atrophied humanity that can only enjoy a fraction of what human beings were once capable of experiencing and feeling. - Climax: The Machine breaks down, causing the collapse of the society and the deaths of all human beings living underground - Summary: In a future human society, everyone lives in separate, underground rooms, where all their needs and wants are provided by "the Machine." One day, a woman, Vashti, receives a call from her son Kuno asking her to visit him in person. She doesn't see the point of visiting him, since they can communicate just as easily through the Machine. Kuno wants to visit the earth's surface (which is now apparently incapable of supporting life), a desire that Vashti, who is perfectly content living underground with the aid of the Machine, doesn't understand. Kuno criticizes Vashti for worshipping the Machine as if it were a divine being. Later, Kuno tells Vashti that he will not talk to her anymore until she comes to visit him. She reluctantly decides to travel on an air-ship to the other side of the world where her son lives. Onboard the air-ship, Vashti is distressed by the need to talk to and touch other people, and she is entirely uninterested in the natural scenery below. When she arrives in her son's room, angry at him for making her undergo such a worthless trip, he tells her that he has been threatened with "Homelessness"—a form of execution in which the victim is placed on the earth's surface without protective equipment, killing them. Kuno tells Vashti the story of how he escaped to the earth's surface through a ventilation shaft and stayed there for a short time, fascinated by the natural world around him, before being drawn back underground by the Machine's Mending Apparatus. Feeling that her son's deviations are unforgivable, Vashti leaves and rarely talks to him again. In the following years, respirators (protective equipment) are abolished, making it impossible to visit the earth's surface. Meanwhile, the Machine is increasingly worshipped as a god. Kuno calls Vashti and tells her that "the Machine is stopping," a statement that makes no sense to her. Defects start to appear in the Machine's system, such as flaws in the music, fruit, beds, and other objects that the Machine summons. These defects become worse as time goes on, sparking outrage and panic in the society. The Committee of the Machine reveals that the Mending Apparatus itself has been broken. One day, the ultimate disaster strikes, and the Machine stops entirely. All lines of communication are cut, and the air and light start to dissipate, condemning all the people living underground to certain death. As Vashti watches the crowds of people dying around her, she reunites with Kuno. He says there is no hope for them, but there are still humans living above-ground—"the Homeless"—who will carry on after this calamity, now that humanity has learned its lesson about the Machine. Vashti realizes that her son has been right all along about the Machine's destructive impact on humanity. Vashti and Kuno embrace as an air-ship crashes into the city, destroying it and killing them.

- Genre: Crime fiction - Title: The Maltese Falcon - Point of view: Third-person objective - Setting: San Francisco during the late nineteen-twenties - Character: Sam Spade. Description: The novel's protagonist, Sam Spade is a handsome private detective. Although he sleeps with his partner's wife, Iva Archer, and struggles with an almost greedy desire for wealth, the novel reveals his unshakable ethical integrity when he turns over his lover, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to the police for murdering his partner Miles Archer. A heavy drinker and always smoking or about to be smoking, Spade is cunning, unbeatable in a fistfight, and mistrustful of almost everyone. He has little respect for the authorities and is willing to bend the law to get to the truth, but his desire for justice and his commitment to his personal code of ethics outweighs any other concern, including love or money. - Character: Brigid O'Shaughnessy. Description: First introducing herself under a false backstory as Miss Wonderly, Brigid O'Shaughnessy employs Sam Spade for protection against the criminal Casper Gutman. She is the novel's master liar, tricking men and women alike into thinking that she is on their side. In the past, she used her attractiveness to convince Floyd Thursby to help her steal the Maltese falcon. Throughout the novel, she pretends to be helpless, but Spade is never truly convinced by her deceitful performance. Consumed by greed, Brigid kills Miles Archer in order to frame Thursby so that she would not have to share with him the profits from selling the falcon. By the end of the novel, she claims to love Sam Spade, though it is not entirely clear how true this is and how much she just wants to avoid going to jail. Most likely the answer is some of both. Ultimately, greed and deceit lead to her imprisonment. - Character: Casper Gutman. Description: Also known as Mr. G, Casper Gutman is the novel's arch-villain, using his wealth and complete lack of loyalty or scruples to attain the statue of the Maltese falcon. He employed Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook to find the statue for him. Described as the fat man, Gutman's physical size is an outward expression of his excessive lifestyle of gluttony and greed. - Character: Joel "Joe" Cairo. Description: Casper Gutman's employee, Cairo uses intimidation and deceit in his pursuit of the Maltese falcon. He, Floyd Thursby, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy worked together to steal the falcon from the Russian general Kemidov. Wearing perfume and jewelry, Cairo is described as very effeminate, and Sam Spade often insinuates that he is gay. - Character: Flitcraft. Description: The man that Sam Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy about who suddenly disappears from his family after nearly being killed by a falling steal beam. After wandering aimlessly for a few months, Flitcraft settles down with in a new town where he marries a woman who resembles the wife he left. - Character: Rhea Gutman. Description: Casper Gutman's daughter. Drugged by her father, she uses a metal pin to make scratches in her stomach in order to stay awake long enough to tell Spade that Brigid O'Shaughnessy has been kidnapped. It is unclear whether Rhea was tricked by her father or if she was in on the scheme. - Theme: Lies and Deceptions. Description: The Maltese Falcon's plot develops through a series of deceptions. Most notably, Brigid O'Shaughnessy masks her involvement in the murders by appearing powerless and in love with Samuel Spade. Unlike Brigid, who hides her criminal behavior, the arch-villain Casper Gutman openly discusses his desire for the statue of the Maltese falcon. Although Gutman does not mask his law-breaking, he does hide behind his supposed respect for plain speaking in order to perform other deceptions, like drugging Spade and using his daughter, Rhea Gutman, as bait. Even Spade, the novel's protagonist, only succeeds in apprehending the criminals by deceiving them into thinking that he is a corrupt detective. While Spade uses deceptions and lies, however, he ultimately does so for justice rather than for wealth or personal gain. Spade is also the only character to see past other people's deceptions, possibly because he mistrusts almost everyone. Characters in The Maltese Falcon also lie to themselves. Brigid, who never admits to the lies, often tells Spade that she herself can't tell the difference between when she's telling the truth and when she isn't. Likewise, in the story Spade tells Brigid, Flitcraft lies to himself about the inevitability of death. Spade, on the other hand, remains largely honest with himself, never hiding his dislike for his dead partner or deceiving himself into believing that Brigid's love is real.In terms of the overall narrative, Spade's pursuit of the truth becomes entwined with finding the statue of the Maltese falcon. The falcon itself represents the final truths for which Spade searches. Yet, as we learn at the novel's conclusion, even the falcon is a lie, suggesting that no ultimate truths exist. Likewise, although the novel appears to end with Spade revealing the truth behind all the major deceptions, a final uncertainty remains about the unknowable inner feelings of the characters. For example, Spade does not know if Brigid loves him or, even, if he truly loves her.Finally, the novel is written in the third-person objective, which means Hammet presents most information through scene descriptions and dialogue instead of through the inner thoughts of the characters. Without access to the characters' thoughts or feelings, the reader becomes like a detective, judging each character's motives, truthfulness, and integrity. Until the last chapter where Hammet reveals Spade's unerring sense of justice, the reader must guess whether or not Spade is just as crooked as the villains. - Theme: Authority, Justice, and a Code of Ethics. Description: The Maltese Falcon explores the importance of a personal code of ethics in a world of incompetent authorities and an imperfect criminal justice system. Throughout the novel, Samuel Spade calls into question the police's ability to apprehend the right criminals. Without any substantial evidence, Lieutenant Dundy changes from thinking that Spade killed Floyd Thursby to thinking that he killed Miles Archer. Spade even mocks District Attorney Bryan for concocting an unsupported mob-war motive for Thursby's murder. In contrast with the police, Spade works outside the limits of the law, getting justice by deceptive means. Although Spade will sleep with his partner's wife and lie to catch the criminals, he maintains a strict code of ethics. Spade's decision to hand Brigid O'Shaughnessy over to the police shows that his desire for justice outweighs, for him, even the possibility of finding love. Spade also risks provoking the police when he refuses to divulge his client's personal information because doing so would be against his personal code (though it's also possible to argue that Spade withholds this information for other reasons, such as wanting to prevent the police from mishandling the case).While Spade feels he has done the right thing by turning in Brigid, the novel ends with Effie Perine, Spade's assistant, feeling disgust at him for betraying the woman he loves. Effie's reaction illustrates the limitations of justice, specifically how justice cannot always exist alongside loyalty to loved ones. - Theme: Greed. Description: In The Maltese Falcon, greed is the driving force that motivates most of the characters. In the most obvious example, Brigid O'Shaughnessy kills Miles Archer so she can frame Floyd Thursby and keep the profits from selling the statue for herself. Casper Gutman, meanwhile, represents the embodiment of greed. The other characters refer to him as "Mr. G" in reference to his large "gut" as well as his greed, linking his excess desire for money with gluttony. Even Gutman's pistol is covered with jewels, suggesting that violence and greed are counterparts of one another. Greed so corrupts Gutman that he is willing to betray Wilmer Cook, who he says is like a son to him, in order to continue his pursuit of the Maltese falcon. While Spade betrays Brigid for justice, Gutman turns on Wilmer for money.In contrast, Spade struggles to and eventually does control his greed. Throughout the novel, Spade never misses an opportunity to make some quick cash. However, Spade ultimately hands over to the police the bribe he pretended to take from Gutman. The only major character who seems beyond the grasp of greed is Effie Perine who warns Spade that if he takes advantage of Brigid by taking her money without offering help, then she will lose all respect for him. In addition to being a symbol of the illusory nature of truth, the Maltese falcon also symbolizes greed. The statue drives people to murder and betrayal, but, in the end, the statue is worthless. As a result, the statue also reveals the hollowness of greed itself, how it drives people to actions that lead only to isolation or self-destruction. - Theme: Masculinity, Femininity, and Sexuality. Description: Most of the characters in The Maltese Falcon represent a different perspective on what it means to be a man or woman. For example, Samuel Spade represents the epitome of manliness. Multiple women desire him, no man is a challenge for him in a fight, and his tough exterior and unwavering sense of honor exemplify a certain type of masculinity. The novel idealizes his masculinity, essentially without criticism, even appearing to value his emotional detachment from the people around him. Hammet's construction of masculinity within the novel contrasts with how he represents gay characters. The various descriptions of Joel Cairo as effeminate imply that feminine characteristics in men are somehow both unnatural and inherently immoral. When Spade wants to insult Cairo and Wilmer Cook, he alludes to their sexual orientation in an attempt to emasculate them. While Spade has a rough and frank manner of speaking, Casper Gutman speaks in a refined way, making him seem more effeminate.Whereas Spade is a clear and singular representative of manliness, the novel's three women represent different perspectives on femininity. Brigid O'Shaughnessy appears to be Spade's feminine counterpart since she is his equal match in cunning and sexual allure, but she differs from Spade in her lack of morals and honor. She is the stereotypical "femme fatale," a sexist depiction of a woman who seduces men with deceit and causes their downfall. Although men like Gutman and Cairo are also disloyal, they lack Spade's manly traits, making disloyalty seem like only a feminine trait. Like Brigid, Iva Archer appears disloyal by cheating on her husband and lying to Spade about her actions. However, unlike Brigid, she lacks cunning or resourcefulness and makes her decisions based on emotions like love and jealousy rather than honor or greed. Finally, Effie Perine's physical appearance makes her appear masculine. Since the novel links femininity with deceit, it is unsurprising that a woman portrayed as masculine is the most trustworthy woman in the book. Effie's femininity is complicated by the supportive role she takes on with Spade, whom she nurtures as a mother would. Interacting with her as if she were family, Spade does not see her as a possible romantic partner even though she is the most trustworthy and ethically-minded woman in the novel. - Theme: Fate and Death. Description: While most characters don't respond with much emotion to the deaths that occur around them, Samuel Spade's story about Flitcraft reveals the importance of how people cope with mortality. Spade tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy about a former case of his in which a man named Flitcraft realizes how death can strike at any moment. After having this realization, Flitcraft leaves his family and wanders aimlessly around the United States before settling down with a new wife who resembles the one he left. Spade says that Flitcraft abandoned his realization about the random inevitability of death so that he could go back to living a life like his old one. For Spade, this story reveals how most people try to forget about death in order to go on living their ordinary lives. Spade, however, copes with mortality by trying to stay in control of every facet of his life rather than by simply ignoring the reality of death. Yet, death is something that no one can ultimately predict, avoid, or control. Thus, his desire to stay in control can be understood as a way of coping with his lack of control over death. Likewise, Spade's last name refers to both the instrument used to dig graves as well as a suit of cards, which connects the theme of death with that of the randomness suggested by the cards. Although Flitcraft had a brief moment of realization about death, the fact that his new life resembles his old in all the significant ways illustrates how a person cannot escape their natural inclinations or "fate." Spade tells Brigid this story in order to indirectly explain that he knows she will not be able to change her deceitful ways, because deception is in her nature. Spade also comes to a similar realization about himself when he tells Brigid it would be against his nature to let her go free once he's finally obtained the evidence that proves her guilt. - Theme: Love and Sex. Description: In The Maltese Falcon, love fails to overcome the grim realities of deception and greed. For example, Casper Gutman's greed makes him betray Wilmer Cook despite Gutman's supposed paternal love and possible sexual attraction towards him. While it's unclear what Gutman's true feelings were for Wilmer, Brigid O'Shaughnessy uses sex and affection as a kind of currency to get men to do what she wants. Although by the end of the novel Brigid may have truly fallen in love with Samuel Spade, he realizes that he cannot trust her love because her emotions are wrapped in lies and deceptions. The novel also provides no model for a good marriage, since Iva Archer cheats on her husband, Miles Archer, and Flitcraft leaves his family with no warning. For Spade, romantic love appears to be an unattainable ideal since his mistrustfulness prevents him from ever fully believing the inner and unknowable feelings of another person. As a result, Spade is not willing to risk breaking his code of ethics for something as insubstantial as love. Likewise, Spade tells Effie Perine he only knows how to interact with women through sex. Spade's inability to trust makes sex the only option for expressing affection or desire for a woman. Spade even implies that sex, rather than deep affection or trust, is the only thing that sustains his relationship with Iva. The last scene of the novel, therefore, ends with Spade having to decide if he will continue his loveless relationship with Iva by marrying her as she desires. Yet what Spade does not realize is that he already has a profound emotional attachment with Effie, which reveals that Spade can, at the very least, know a kind of familial and nonsexual love for others. - Climax: Spade's showdown with the criminals in his apartment - Summary: In San Francisco during the late 1920s, the beautiful Miss Wonderly arrives at Samuel Spade and Miles Archer's detective agency. She asks the detectives to follow a man named Floyd Thursby, who she claims has run off with her younger sister Corinne. Eager to get closer with Wonderly, Archer agrees to do the job while Spade, suspicious of the woman, mocks his partner's rashness. That evening, Spade awakes to a phone call telling him that his partner has been killed. When he arrives at the crime scene, Spade talks with the police officer Tom Polhaus about the possibility that Thursby killed Archer. An hour after Spade returns to his apartment, Polhaus and Lieutenant Dundy, an arrogant and brash cop, show up at his door with questions about the murder. The cops reveal that Thursby has also been killed, thirty minutes after Spade left the site of Archer's murder, and its clear they think it is possible that Spade killed Thursby in revenge. At his office the following day, Spade and Archer's wife, Iva Archer, discuss the secret affair they've been having behind Archer's back. After she leaves, Spade goes to meet Wonderly at her hotel, where he discovers her real name is Brigid O'Shaughnessy, she has no sister, and that Thursby was a dangerous man she met in Hong Kong. Although she provides no further details, Spade agrees to continue working for her. Back at his office, Spade meets Joel Cairo who offers him $5,000 if he can retrieve a statue of a falcon. Later, Spade and Brigid meet again, and Spade mentions his run in with Cairo and his acceptance of the offer. Brigid, who appears to know Cairo, asks if Spade could arrange a meeting so she can talk with Cairo. At the meeting, Cairo offers to pay Brigid for the bird, but she claims she doesn't have it in her possession yet. They also refer to Mr. G as the man who had Thursby killed. After the meeting, Spade asks Brigid about her relationship to Cairo and the falcon, but she sidetracks the conversation by seducing him. That night they sleep together. The next day, Spade arrives at Cairo's hotel and has a verbal confrontation with a young man named Wilmer Cook who works for Mr. G. When Spade returns to his office, Mr. G, now identified as Casper Gutman, calls to set up a meeting. At the meeting, Gutman reveals the bird's long history and its priceless value. Gutman tells Spade that he employed Brigid to steal it from a Russian general Kemidov in Constantinople. Gutman says she betrayed him and is hiding the bird somewhere in San Francisco. At this point, Spade realizes the drink that Gutman gave him is drugged and he falls to the floor unconscious. Twelve hours later, Spade wakes and searches Cairo's hotel room for more clues, discovering that the statue of the bird was on a ship called La Paloma that had arrived in San Francisco while he was unconscious. A few minutes after Spade returns to his office, Captain Jacobi of La Paloma bursts through the door, hands Spade a package, and then collapses and dies. Wrapped inside the package is the black bird. After hiding the bird, Spade returns home, where Brigid is waiting for him at his doorstep. They enter the apartment together and find Cairo, Wilmer, and Gutman waiting for them. After Gutman pays Spade $10,000 for the bird, Spade calls his secretary, Effie Perine, to have her drop the bird off at his apartment. As they wait, Spade convinces Gutman to betray Wilmer and make him the "fall-guy" for all the murders so that the police will stop investigating. Effie arrives with the bird and Gutman quickly realizes that it's a fake and that Kemidov is in possession of the real statue. In the confusion, Wilmer flees the apartment. After Gutman pulls out a gun and demands that Spade return the $10,000, Spade gives him the money but first takes one thousand dollar bill as a bribe for not calling the police. Determined to steal the bird from Kemidov, Gutman and Cairo leave the apartment with plans to return to Constantinople. Spade calls Polhaus and tells him that Wilmer killed Jacobi and Thursby at Gutman's orders. With the police arriving soon, Spade convinces Brigid to tell him the whole truth. She admits to killing Archer in order to frame Thursby for the murder so that she could keep the profits from selling the bird for herself. Although she pleads for mercy and tells Spade she loves him, Spade turns her over to the police when they arrive because he wants justice for his dead partner. Spade gives the police the thousand dollars as evidence of Gutman trying to bribe him, but the police inform Spade that Wilmer has already killed Gutman in revenge for agreeing to betray him. The next morning at the office, Effie cannot face Spade after he let the police arrest the woman who loved him. As he settles in at his desk, Iva Archer arrives and Spade reluctantly lets her in.

- Genre: Gothic, Gothic Mystery - Title: The Man of the Crowd - Point of view: First Person Limited - Setting: The streets of London during a busy evening in autumn - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is the story's unnamed protagonist, who is determined in his pursuit of an old man whose strange demeanor captures his interest. More than any other trait, curiosity is what defines the narrator. His keen interest in the personal lives of the people around him is what ultimately leads to his long and confusing pursuit of the old man, and the story plays out through the narrator's perceptive eyes, which catch every tiny detail. Throughout the story, the narrator becomes a vessel for readers to experience curiosity of their own, as the narrator wonders what secrets the old man could possibly be hiding. However, the narrator's deductions about the old man and the people of the crowd might not be all that realistic—it's totally possible that the conclusions he draws about people are inaccurate. This makes him a potentially unreliable narrator, but one who still notes the details of the people around him and attempts to categorize them. In this way, he tries to impose order on the chaotic world of the city, striving to make sense of the bewildering mass of humanity around him. This turns out to be a futile effort in the end; the old man remains a mystery that the narrator can never solve. But the narrator himself remarks that maybe his ignorance of those dark secrets is a good thing, and that maybe some things aren't meant to be known. Despite this, the narrator embodies the aspect of human nature that is constantly seeking to learn, discover, solve problems, and answer questions. Although he almost seems to abandon his curiosity at the end of the story, the narrator still tries to define and categorize the old man, even if that only means labeling him as uncategorizable. - Character: The Old Man. Description: The old man is a mysterious figure who leads the narrator on a long, strange pursuit through the streets of London. Nothing is known about the old man's past, his motives, or the dark secrets the narrator assumes he has. He is an intentionally ambiguous and confusing character—an embodiment of the unknown. In particular, his bizarre and contradictory facial expression attracts the narrator's curiosity and makes his mind run wild. The old man is assumed to be hiding a terrible secret or past crime, but little evidence actually points to this being the case, except perhaps the glinting object beneath his clothing, which might be either a stolen diamond or a dagger. This is just one of many ambiguities and contradictions that make up his character—he's carrying either a weapon or a beautiful gemstone; his clothing is dirty but seems high-quality; he's surrounded by other people but clearly alone in his own troubled mind. Because his main purpose in the story is to ignite the narrator's curiosity, it's almost as if he's hardly even a character in his own right, almost becoming a projection of the narrator's overactive imagination. The old man is just one unusual figure in a sea of thousands; he's "the man of the crowd," and his existence implies that anyone in the vast city could be hiding something. But, of course, he might not be hiding anything terrible at all, despite his strange behavior. It's this final bit of ambiguity that lets the reader decide what to make of the old man and, by extension, the narrator. - Theme: Dark Secrets. Description: The narrator spends hours people-watching from the window of a London coffee-house, entertaining himself by categorizing passersby according to their class, occupation, and other readily observable traits. But the story takes a darker turn when the narrator begins to follow a strange old man through the streets, imagining that the inscrutable man must have a remarkable history and maybe even a sinister goal in mind. With his bizarre facial expressions and unusual behavior in the crowds, the old man becomes a darkly fascinating figure in the narrator's imagination, all because of the secrets that the old man is assumed to be keeping. Just like the reader, the narrator believes that he's getting closer to revealing a dark truth as he follows the old man, but despite the exhausting chase, neither character is really pursuing a destination, but rather fleeing something. This is why the old man "refuses to be alone" though he ignores the people around him; he's harboring a burden that he can't bear to acknowledge. Indeed, as he abandons his pursuit, the narrator can only conclude that the old man is "the type and the genius of deep crime"—somehow a personification of humanity's "worst heart." Thus, instead of describing the dark side of human nature directly, Poe uses the unresolved pursuit to suggest that people—not just the old man, but perhaps the narrator and even the reader—keep their darkest secrets locked deep within themselves, going to great lengths to avoid them. - Theme: Curiosity, Obsession, and the Unknown. Description: From the very beginning, the narrator is a curious and nosy character, obsessing over the personal details he perceives in the people in the street outside the coffee-house. Almost every event in the story is dominated by this curiosity, especially as one particular old man's strange behavior piques his interest. But even before this uncategorizable figure enters the story, the narrator is determined to fill in all of the blanks about each and every stranger walking past the window. As he assigns labels to the individuals in the crowd—concerning their class, occupation, personality, and so on—he's trying to satisfy his "calm but inquisitive interest in everything," leaving no room for unknowns in his mind. But when the old man seizes the narrator's imagination, leading him on a long, fruitless pursuit through the streets, the narrator finally admits that maybe some things can't—or shouldn't—be known. Taken as a whole, the failed quest pushes the reader to think about human curiosity and, more importantly, its limits. After all, the narrator is not omniscient; he could be wrong in his impressions about every stranger he sees, including the old man. In this light, readers might wonder if the narrator's observations are trustworthy to begin with—and whether the narrator's unquenchable obsession says more about him than about the strange old man. Ultimately, it's framed as a blessing that the narrator's curiosity about the old man can't be satisfied. Poe suggests that there's a point at which curious inquiry should end, because there are some things that everyone is better off not knowing—and obsessing over them could lead toward madness. - Theme: London, Crowds, and Urban Alienation. Description: Despite the hundreds—maybe thousands—of people appearing in it, "The Man of the Crowd" is a story full of loneliness and isolation. The city of London is practically the only feature of the story that has a name; the narrator, the old man, and the countless people of the crowds are never named or given any real identity beyond their outward, everyday appearance. No lines of dialogue are shared between characters, and the two principal characters never meaningfully interact with each other. The narrator spends plenty of time speculating about the personal details of the strangers passing by the coffee-house window, but their true selves can't really be known from a quick glance. Even these individuals in the crowds are alone, despite being surrounded by people; they're each alone in their own private worlds, in a sea of strangers. All of these elements come together to create a sense of lonely alienation in teeming 19th-century London. Despite sharing a city and sometimes an occupation, class status, or other personal traits with each other, Londoners appear isolated, unable or unwilling to form meaningful connections with one another. Worse, this sense of alienation threatens to erode people's connection to themselves as well. In this bewildering urban setting, it seems easier to follow the crowd than to stop and self-reflect. For example, as he walks endlessly through the crowds and "refuses to be alone," the old man appears to be isolated from any personal sense of identity and purpose, smothering his own existence in the busy activities of others. As life in the city wears on, Poe suggests, maybe it's only a matter of time before more and more "[people] of the crowd" become alienated from themselves and others in this way. - Climax: The narrator tries to confront the mysterious old man he has been following, but the old man simply ignores him and continues on his way. - Summary: An unnamed narrator sits in a London coffee-house on an autumn evening, his body and mind having recently recovered from a brief bout of illness. Feeling unusually attentive and curious, he begins to pass the time by watching the crowd of people passing by the coffee-house window. At first, he observes the endless crowd as a whole, but then he starts focusing on the individual people in the throng and sorting them into categories in his mind. He notices small details in the clothing and mannerisms of the people he watches, allowing him to deduce their occupations, personalities, social standings, and so on. He spots people of seemingly every social class in the city, from respectable clerks and merchants to pickpockets, peddlers, beggars, young girls returning from work, and everyone in between. Eventually, the narrator spies someone in the midst of the crowd who seems impossible to categorize. This person—a feeble old man—wears a bizarre expression on his face that captures the narrator's attention and ignites his imagination. The old man's face seems to portray many contradictory feelings at once. The expression is almost indescribable, combining fear, joy, guilt, triumph, malice, despair, and much more, all in a single confusing countenance. Fascinated, and feeling sure that the old man must be harboring some dark secret or terrible crime, the narrator leaves the coffee-house and follows the stranger through the crowd, taking care not to be noticed. The narrator follows the old man through the streets for hours as the night wears on. The old man's erratic behavior during this pursuit only makes him appear more mysterious and suspicious. He seems to wander aimlessly throughout London, never taking any notice of the people around him, including the narrator. His clothes appear filthy, but they seem to be made of a beautiful material, and he's carrying what the narrator assumes to be either a dagger or a diamond. He wanders through crowds, streets, and alleyways in various parts of town all night long, still followed and watched by the increasingly curious narrator. This pursuit continues until night falls on the following day. At last, the narrator is too tired to continue. He steps in front of the old man and faces him directly, but the old man ignores him and walks past him, resuming his mysterious journey through the streets. The narrator gives up hope of learning anything about the old man, calling him "the man of the crowd" and "the type and the genius of deep crime." The old man is never alone in the city's mass of humanity, but he's alone in holding onto whatever he's hiding from the world. The narrator ends his pursuit with more questions than answers, wondering if it's a blessing that some secrets are too terrible to ever reveal themselves.

- Genre: Coming of age story - Title: The Man Who Was Almost a Man - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: - Character: Dave Saunders. Description: Dave is a Black seventeen-year-old living with his family in the American South around the 1930s. He works plowing fields on a plantation owned by a white man, Jim Hawkins, where members of his family (including his parents, Mrs. Saunders and Bob Saunders) also work. He dislikes the way he's treated by older fellow workers, who he feels regularly mock and talk down to him. Having internalized a sense that respect is a product of masculine physical power, perhaps in part because his father regularly threatens to beat him, Dave concludes that the one way to prove himself a man is to own a gun. Dave then sets about convincing his mother to give him two dollars to buy a gun with the lie that he will immediately give it to his father. Instead, after getting the gun, Dave rather recklessly hides the loaded weapon under his pillow, and then sneaks out with it, planning to go do his field work in as distant a place as possible so he can practice firing it. But this plan backfires when he shoots the gun for the first time—he closes his eyes as he pulls the trigger—and accidentally kills the mule Jenny. He attempts to lie his way out of the predicament by saying Jenny accidentally impaled herself on a spike of the plow, but no one believes him and, crying, he confesses. His father is furious, and Dave ends up deeply in debt to Mr. Hawkins, who owned the mule. Faced with this situation, Dave runs away—hopping a train for parts unknown with his now-unloaded gun, hoping to find a place where he can be a man. Dave doesn't show much growth over the course of the story—he begins it focused on a simplistic idea that strength will make him a respected man, and ends it still looking to become a man. The open-ended nature of the story's conclusion, however, suggests that what sort of man Dave will become is still up in the air. - Character: Bob Saunders (Pa). Description: Bob Saunders is a Black man living in the South around the 1930s. He is the father of Dave Saunders and Dave's younger brother as well as the husband of Mrs. Saunders. The whole family lives on a plantation owned by the white man Jim Hawkins, and Bob is an employee of Mr. Hawkins. Bob believes in imparting discipline through violence, and has beaten Dave on several occasions. He embodies the sort of masculine, physical power that Dave has come to believe is the only measure of a man. Even at the dinner table, Bob speaks harshly with his son, snapping at Dave for bringing a catalog from Joe's store to the table and asking if Dave has been getting along well with Mr. Hawkins. Dave replies that things are going "swell," but Bob still chastises him, telling him that he needs to keep his mind focused on what he's doing. This single-minded focus defines Bob—after years of working for Mr. Hawkins, he has internalized the idea that his value as a person is directly connected to his productivity, and his primary focus is on maintaining a good relationship with his employer. When Dave is caught after having accidentally shot the mule Jenny, Bob doesn't attempt to defend or comfort his son. His first priority is to settle the debt with Mr. Hawkins. At the end of the story, Bob promises to beat his son for what he's done, and this threat is part of what spurs Dave to run away from home. In keeping with his old-fashioned masculine ideals, Bob doesn't grow or change over the course of the story. - Character: Jim Hawkins. Description: As the white owner of a Southern plantation around the 1930s, Mr. Hawkins is the employer of many Black field workers, including the Saunders family (Dave, Bob, Mrs. Saunders, and Dave's younger brother). Notably, even after Dave buys the gun that he believes will prove himself as a man, he remains deferential to Mr. Hawkins. When Mr. Hawkins catches Dave sneaking out in the early morning to test out the gun, he asks Dave to go plow down by the woods, and Dave plows two whole rows before taking the gun out. Dave's compliance is rooted in more than just the fact that Mr. Hawkins pays his salary; Dave is also afraid of what his own father will do if he finds out Dave isn't getting along well with Mr. Hawkins. When Mr. Hawkins discovers that his mule Jenny has been killed and that Dave is the culprit, he doesn't react with physical violence the way Dave's father might. In fact, Mr. Hawkins seems to handle the situation genially, telling Bob Saunders not to worry and laughing about how Dave bought himself a dead mule. He offers to accept two dollars a month from Dave until Dave has paid for the value of the mule (which Mr. Hawkins sets at 50 dollars). While the public mockery that comes after "buying" the dead mule brings Dave to tears, Dave still leaves the situation believing he's gotten off easy. It is only later, as he thinks back, that he realizes what a heavy burden his debt to Mr. Hawkins will be. Dave briefly considers firing a bullet at Mr. Hawkins' house to scare him (having realized earlier in the story that a gun can shoot anyone, "black or white"), but by then, his gun is out of bullets and so he runs away without ever directly confronting Mr. Hawkins. Like Bob Saunders, Jim Hawkins also does not change over the course of the story. He remains a persistent figure of white, male authority who sits atop an economic system that gives him almost total control over his Black employees. - Character: Mrs. Saunders (Ma). Description: Mrs. Saunders is the mother of Dave and his little brother, as well as the wife of Bob Saunders, living with all of them on the plantation of the white Southern landowner Mr. Hawkins. Although Dave is employed by Mr. Hawkins to plow the fields of the plantation, Mr. Hawkins pays Dave's wages directly to Mrs. Saunders, which sets into motion the events of the story. When Dave makes his plans to buy a gun from Joe's store to prove that he's a man, he has to ask his mother for two dollars out of the money he's earned. As a no-nonsense, frugal woman who is saving money to buy winter clothes for the family, Dave's mother is reluctant to give Dave money to buy a gun. Still, Dave knows he is more likely to get the money from his mother than from his father, particularly if he can get her alone. In the end, Dave succeeds in getting the money from his mother by appealing to his father's authority: he says that his father deserves a gun and that as soon as Dave buys the gun, he'll hand it over to his father. At this point, Mrs. Saunders agrees that her husband should have a gun, which signals that, like Dave, Mrs. Saunders has internalized a respect for masculine physical power. Rather than trying to obtain more power and respect as Dave does, Dave's mother plays a domestic role and answers to her husband. The fact that Mrs. Saunders is the only female character with a significant role in the story further draws attention to the patriarchal nature of life on the plantation. - Character: Joe. Description: Joe is a white man who runs a store near Jim Hawkins' plantation. Joe is a big man with an imposing figure and Dave is nervous around him. When Dave announces his plan to buy a gun, Joe tries to tell him he doesn't need one, but he agrees to let Dave look at a catalog and take it with him overnight. Eventually, Joe does offer to sell Dave a loaded Wheeler pistol for two dollars, which Dave buys as soon as he gets the money from his mother. While Joe himself seems to generally be genial, his role in the story shows another way that the white community maintains economic dominance at the expense of the Black farmworkers. - Theme: Manhood and Violence. Description: In "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," Richard Wright explores the complicated, conflicting nature of masculinity through the eyes of Dave Saunders, a seventeen-year-old Black farm worker in the 1930s American South who believes that he can assert his masculinity by purchasing a gun. Wright has sympathy for Dave, telling much of the story in Dave's voice and chronicling the various ways Dave is abused or humiliated, particularly by his father and the older and bigger farm workers. But Dave is also flawed, and displays negative masculine traits, such as recklessness and a brittle pride. In particular, Dave's plan to buy a gun in order to prove himself a man ends in tragicomedy when Dave accidentally shoots and kills the mule Jenny, landing himself in serious debt and making him a figure of fun to those around him. By compassionately depicting Dave's doomed efforts to assert his manhood, Wright acknowledges the allure of masculinity while deftly showing how society's violent ideas about manhood—which Dave and the other characters in the story have internalized—can be oppressive and even self-destructive. Dave wants to buy a gun because he believes that being a gun owner will make him a man, but the story makes clear that he believes this because his family and community also see violence as a central part of masculinity. Dave believes that with a gun you can "kill anybody, black or white"—a level of power and control that Dave does not normally experience. In his home life, Dave defers to his mother and especially his father, who in turn both defer to their white employer, Mr. Hawkins. Dave, further, learns about the power of violence through his father, who often beats Dave as a punishment. While Dave doesn't imagine using the gun against his father, his desire to stand up to anyone who would "talk to him as though he were a little boy" seems to be an outlet for the aggression, fear, and frustration that his father provokes in him, but also a desire to act in his family and community the way that his father does. To get the money for the gun, Dave asks his mother, who has authority over him but not over his father. But his effort to convince his mother to give him the money is unsuccessful until he claims that he's in fact going to buy the gun to give it to his father. His mother then gives in, admitting that his father should have a gun—she, too, believes that the "man" of a family must be able to deal violence. Yet once Dave gets the gun, his mishandling of it shows that owning a gun can't actually make him a man. In fact, his failed attempt at using the gun makes him a laughingstock and puts him in debt, thereby undercutting his masculinity even more. Dave's simplistic belief that just owning a gun will make him a man makes him irresponsible and careless with it. He sleeps with the loaded gun under his pillow at night and keeps it tied against his bare thigh during the day. Dave doesn't see skill or responsibility as being connected to manhood, and so he shows none in his handling of the gun. Ultimately, because of his lack of skill or care, Dave's gun does the opposite of what he intends. In a darkly comic twist, he accidentally kills the mule Jenny and, rather than gaining new freedom, he ends up shackled with debt to the mule's owner, Mr. Hawkins, and an object of ridicule among the community At the end of the story, Dave briefly considers turning the gun against Mr. Hawkins, the character who owns Dave's debt and is most responsible for Dave's economic oppression. But by then, Dave is already out of bullets, and he never acts on the fantasy. In this moment, Wright acknowledges the way that violence can seemingly offer the potential for freedom. However, the way violence actually functions in the story gives the lie to this fantasy. Violence in the story always leads to a vicious cycle. Dave accidentally kills the mule and undercuts rather than augments his manhood. And Dave's father, after promising to beat his son once again, loses his son, who flees by running away. While Wright shows the negative consequences of Dave's actions throughout the story, the ending of the story—in which Dave runs away by hopping on a train car to a new, unspecified destination—is more ambiguous, offering a surprising possibility of hope but also the possibility that Dave will continue to follow the same destructive patterns. Dave's decision to run away at the end of the story can be read as optimistic. It suggests, perhaps, that he has learned that he will not be able to overcome the oppression or obstacles he faces with just a gun. A railroad could represent progress and new frontiers, and in Dave's case, the railroad could even be seen as a physical manifestation of the Underground Railroad—by leaving on a train, he is attempting to escape a life of beatings and debt slavery. At the same time, the fact that Dave purposely brings the gun with him on the train—even when it's empty of bullets—seems to represent his continued attachment to harmful ideas about masculinity. The story's lyrical, final line about rails stretching to a place "where he could be a man" leaves open both possibilities. It suggests, on the one hand, that Dave's belief in violence as the core of manhood will travel with him and his obsession with being that sort of violent man will continue to haunt both him and those he encounters. But it also suggests, on the other hand, that in leaving behind his father and community and their focus on violence as a core tenet of manhood, Dave might learn another, different way of being masculine. Wright's ambiguous final lines suggest that despite Dave's shortcomings, and despite all the obstacles he faces, it is still too early to tell what type of man he'll become. - Theme: Racism and Power. Description: White characters don't appear often or for extended periods in "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," but it's impossible to understand the anxiety Dave Saunders experiences throughout the story without considering racism. The story is set in the American South around the 1930s, nearly forty years after the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Yet by explicitly setting the story on a "plantation" in the South, and showing how authority and power in the story always ultimately flows down from the white man who owns the plantation, Richard Wright dramatizes the ways that, even after emancipation of the slaves, systems of racist power continue to ensure that the Black workers on the farm remain under the power and control of white people. The white Mr. Hawkins, who owns the plantation where Dave and his family work, is established as the premier authority over the plantation early in the story. The first paragraph of the story makes clear that Dave depends on "ol man Hawkins" for his pay, and it soon becomes clear that his father does as well. The entire income of Dave's family, then, is dependent on Mr. Hawkins. Mr. Hawkins's plantation is also designed to function by creating divide the loyalties of his back workers—much as slave-owning plantations were in pre-Civil War days—such as by using Black foremen to oversee other workers. These practices offered those given the additional power to protect the white master of the plantation, since their power and improved place flow directly from that master. Dave's father, Bob Saunders, occupies one of these marginally more powerful positions, and to protect his position, he's willing to exert Mr. Hawkins' will on other workers, even his own son—in every conversation with Dave, Bob Saunders focus is on how Dave should listen to and work well for Hawkins. "Hawkins" name itself is symbolic—it is a reference to a hawk, a bird of prey that enjoys a perch at the top of the food chain, just as Hawkins commands the power at the plantation. While Hawkins control over the plantation and some of his practices for running it are reminiscent of the pre-Civil War South, the climax of the story dramatizes one of the clearest ways that racist power functions differently in the 1930s south while still exerting control over the Black characters. After it's uncovered that Dave accidentally shot and killed Mr. Hawkins's mule, Jenny, Mr. Hawkins declares that no one is going to hurt Dave, and that instead Dave will just have to pay him back the cost of the mule—$50—at the rate of $2 per month. In slave-holding times, a plantation owner might well have whipped or otherwise harmed or killed a slave who had caused such "property damage." Hawkins, though, does no such thing, and at first Dave thinks that the debt he now owes amounts to getting out of "killing the mule so easily." It's only later that Dave realizes how much power Mr. Hawkins has gotten over him by imposing the debt—that it'll take him almost two years to pay for one dead mule. The underlying implication is that while the Black workers on the plantation are not legally slaves, they are nonetheless subject to what might be described as "wage slavery"—they are entirely dependent on Mr. Hawkins for whatever money they can earn, that money is never enough for them to be independent, and they can never cross Mr. Hawkins because of their dependence on him.  The fact that Mr. Hawkins lives in a "big white house" is also significant. In addition to the racial connotations, the color of his house invokes the White House, where United States presidents live. Through this image of the house, Wright is simultaneously demonstrating how power on plantations has evolved (instead of cracking a whip, Mr. Hawkins uses social skills and economic power to exert control, like an experienced politician) while simultaneously condemning the role the United States government played in ignoring or even promoting these imbalances of power. While in "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" Wright often depicts Dave's efforts to become a man as comedic, the story underlines a deeper tragedy: that Black Americans more generally weren't recognized as "men"—as full human beings—even after emancipation. In "The Man Who Was Almost A Man," this process of dehumanization begins at Mr. Hawkins. The story shows how a white man in the United States can exert frightening and unjust power subtly, without using violence, without even being all that present. Rather than sensationalizing or focusing on only the most extreme examples of racism, in this story Wright depicts a form racist power that, precisely because it avoided violence, could maintain an appearance of legitimacy while being just as pervasive, and giving white men just as much control over Black lives. - Theme: Economic Oppression. Description: The Saunders family is poor—Dave's mother is worried about saving enough money for winter clothes and shows extreme frugality by asking to use the catalog that Dave borrows from the local store as toilet paper in the outhouse. While Mr. Hawkins, the owner of the plantation where the Saunders family works, is not depicted as a violent or openly cruel man, in "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," Wright details the insidious ways that the economically powerful use their money and resources to oppress those with less money. While Dave's quest to buy a gun is ostensibly about proving his masculinity, being able to buy the gun is also a way for him to prove his economic independence, and Wright notes how income can affect a person's self-worth. Within the story, there is a clear hierarchy, where the characters at the top are the ones who control the money. As a Black teenager working on a Southern plantation, Dave is at the very bottom of the hierarchy: he earns a wage from Mr. Hawkins for the work he performs in Hawkins's fields, but as a teenager that wage doesn't even go to him: it is given to his mother, who then uses the money for their household. Dave earns money he can't use, while his mother gets Dave's money but it is barely enough to get by. When Dave needs to come up with the two dollars to buy a gun, he begs his mother to give it to him, because he knows that even talking to his father about money might result in a beating—it is Dave's father, then, who really controls the family's finances. Even Dave's father, however, must answer to Mr. Hawkins, who doesn't even appear until late in the story but whose authority is always felt through his ability to pay or withhold wages. The aftermath of the death of the mule Jenny shows how the control of money and resources naturally results in those in power getting even more power, and those who are economically weak getting ever more oppressed. After Dave accidentally shoots and kills the mule, Mr. Hawkins doesn't get upset. Though Wright depicts Jenny's death as gruesome—she is "slopping in blood" and dies with an open mouth and blank, glassy eyes—Hawkins just treats her death as an economic consideration, slapping a value of $50 that Dave needs to repay. On the one hand, placing a value on a life of any sort harkens back to the way that slaves in pre-Civil War South were reduced purely to their economic value. On the other, it also shows how Hawkins now sits atop an economic system that always works to his benefit. Mr. Hawkins may even benefit from the $50 repayment: when Dave is caught after killing the mule, he has no room to negotiate, and Mr. Hawkins has the power to extort more from him than the mule is worth. By saddling Dave with almost two years' worth of debt for killing the mule, Mr. Hawkins links Dave's fate to Jenny's. Wright shows the reader that, to Mr. Hawkins, the value that Dave provides is not so different from the value a mule provides. This realization echoes a conversation earlier in the story in which Dave's father asks how Dave gets along with Mr. Hawkins and Dave replies that he "plows mo lan than anybody over there." Dave wants to give an answer that will please his father, and he realizes that the best way to prove he has worth (to Mr. Hawkins, and therefore also to his father) is to prove he's a good worker, well worth the investment that Mr. Hawkins pays him as wages. While race clearly plays a role in the power imbalances between the characters in "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," Wright's keen focus on the economics of Mr. Hawkins' plantation demonstrates that Wright was also thinking more broadly about the relationship between the haves and the have-nots. While at times Wright seems to acknowledge the possibility that violence (i.e., the gun) could improve the economic situation of powerless Black Americans, the tragic and ridiculous outcome of Dave's experiences with the gun on the plantation seem to indicate that the new economic constraints now set up around Black Americans in the South are more complicated, entrenched, and invisible than any armed revolution could upend. Ultimately, near the end of the story, Dave realizes his oppression when he thinks: "They treat me like a mule." He sees that in the economic structure of the farm, he is, like Jenny, an asset rather than a person. Moments later, Dave sneaks onto a train and runs away, seeking a place "where he could be a man"—which might be taken as referring to a place that doesn't operate on an economic situation that makes independence for Black people such as Dave impossible. - Climax: Dave is caught after accidentally killing a mule and is sentenced to pay for the damages. - Summary: Dave Saunders, a black seventeen-year-old living with his family in the American South around the 1930s, is frustrated because the other, older workers always talk down to him. He believes that if he could just get a gun for himself, he'd prove his manhood and earn their respect. He goes down to the local store owned by Joe and asks to see a catalog that, among other things, sells guns. Joe lends him the catalog, but adds that he has a gun that Dave can purchase for two dollars. Dave goes back to his family's house, thinking about how to get the money he needs to buy the gun. He knows better than to ask his father, Bob Saunders, who's liable to at minimum threaten a beating at such a question. Instead, after his mother, Dave goes to his mother, Mrs. Saunders. While she is reluctant to give Dave money to buy the gun—and she actually collects his earnings from his work on Jim Hawkins's farm because she doesn't trust him with money—eventually she gives in after Dave makes the argument that his father deserves to have a gun and that he'll give the gun to his father right after purchasing it. Once he has the money, Dave buys the gun. Rather than give it to his father, though, he lies to his mother about having hidden it, and then sleeps with the loaded gun under his pillow. The next day, when Dave goes out into the field to perform his usual work, he hides the gun by strapping it to his thigh and takes it with him. As he goes out into the field to work, he takes Mr. Hawkins mule, Jenny, with him. He goes out to the farthest field, where he thinks he'll be able to practice shooting the gun without anyone bothering him. But when he does eventually fire the gun, he closes his eyes and ends up accidentally shooting the mule. Dave is distraught and frantically tries to stop the bleeding. But Jenny soon collapses and dies. Dave buries the gun by a tree and leaves the scene, trying to make up with a story to explain how the mule died that leaves the gun out of it. Later that day, someone finds the mule's body and a group gathers around it. When Jim Hawkins asks Dave to explain what happened, Dave lies and says that Jenny tripped and impaled herself on a plough. Nobody believes the story, and soon one of the gathered men comments that the wound looks like a bullet hole. Mrs. Saunders quietly asks Dave about the gun, and urges him to tell the truth. Now crying, Dave confesses. Dave's father is furious, and promises to beat Dave for what he's done. He also promises Mr. Hawkins that Dave will make things better. Mr. Hawkins decides that it would be best if Dave pays him back for the dead mule at a monthly rate to come out of his salary—$2 a month until he has covered a full $50. He asks Dave to sell the gun to make the first payment, but Dave lies and says he already threw it in a creek. His father, even angrier, tells him to find the gun, get the $2 he paid for it, and give it to Mr. Hawkins. That night, Dave can't sleep. He is upset at what happened, and afraid of the beating his father will give him. He sneaks out of the house, retrieves the gun from where he had buried it, and fires it again, this time making sure to keep his eyes open. He fires it four times, until the chamber is empty. He heads back across the field, until he is nearby Mr. Hawkins house, and thinks about how, if he had one more bullet, he'd fire at the house to prove he was a man. He hears a train in the distance, and thinks about having to pay two dollars a month for so long. Keeping the empty gun with him, he hops onto a moving train, riding it off to somewhere where he could be a man.

- Genre: Detective Novel, Spy Novel, Mystery, Psychological Thriller, Philosophical Novel, Religious Allegory - Title: The Man Who Was Thursday - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: London, the French countryside - Character: Gabriel Syme. Description: Gabriel Syme, the protagonist and title character of The Man Who Was Thursday, is a passionate but practical poet-detective who attempts to infiltrate and undermine a vast anarchist conspiracy. After growing up in a family full of crackpots and watching a brutal anarchist bombing firsthand, Syme decided to launch "a rebellion against rebellion." One day, a philosophical policeman approached him and offered him a spot in a special new anti-anarchist unit. Over the course of the novel, he talks Lucian Gregory into bringing him to a local anarchist meeting, then wins election as the new "Thursday" (the local branch's representative to the Central Committee). But once he meets the Central Committee, things start to go wrong: over several more chapters, he gradually realizes that all the other men on the Committee are also undercover detectives, and then—eventually—that the President of the Committee is the same man who hired him as a police officer. He and the other detectives try to track down the President, who leads them to a strange, utopian realm with a striking resemblance to the Christian heaven. In this realm, all is well, and Syme wears a blue drapery outfit with an image of a sun, which represents God creating the sun and moon on the fourth day of creation. In fact, the key to the novel lies not in Syme's quest to stop the anarchist plot, but rather in his shift from the nightmarish experience of pursuing the conspiracy to the relative comfort and security of life under God. Finally, in the novel's last lines, Chesterton reveals that the whole story was really just a fantasy in Syme's head: all along, he has merely been chatting with Lucian Gregory about anarchy and morality, and the novel's heavenly conclusion represents him definitively choosing the side of morality. - Character: The President/The Police Chief/Sunday. Description: The President of the Central Anarchist Committee, who uses the nickname "Sunday," is the driving force behind the novel's entire plot. He is a quintessential criminal mastermind: he's ruthless, fearless, and full of evil schemes. He has seemingly infinite resources, limitless ambition, and absolute power over everyone around him. He plans out nearly everything in the novel's plot long before it actually happens. Physically, he's gigantic and imposing, and he has superhuman strength and agility even though he's elderly. Eventually, the protagonists learn that the President was also the police chief who met with them in a pitch-black room to hire them into the anti-anarchist corps, and that the President's Anarchist Committee was never a real group, because everyone on it thought they were working for the police. In other words, the novel is really about a false conflict between fake police and fake anarchists, which Sunday set up for Gabriel Syme and the other protagonists to participate in. When they try to figure out why, Sunday refuses to tell them and runs away. But he eventually leads them to a bizarre celestial realm, where they don new robes that represent the Biblical creation story. This setting closely associates Sunday with God, even though he does not actually represent God. Instead, he wears all white, which represents the peace of the seventh day of creation: the Sabbath or day of rest. When the other characters reunite with him, they feel like themselves for the first time, and their worries about anarchy entirely disappear. Thus, the President turns out to be a benevolent figure, even if the other protagonists continue to resent him at the end of the novel. He imposed serious trials and tribulations on the protagonists precisely to disprove the anarchists and atheists who say that religious people don't confront the ugly side of life and, by blindly following dogma, live their lives without any true choices or meaning. - Character: The Secretary/Monday. Description: "Monday," whom Gabriel Syme knows as "The Secretary," is Sunday's right-hand man and the last Central Anarchist Committee member to be unmasked as an undercover detective. He's also the first one Syme meets: after Syme is first elected as Thursday, Monday greets him and escorts him to breakfast with the rest of the Committee. Syme immediately notices Monday's strangely tiny beard and frightening smile—which only seems to work on one half of his face. Indeed, Monday's physical appearance is Syme's first direct sign of how sinister and deceptive the Anarchist Committee will be. Later, after Syme teams up with the Professor, Dr. Bull, and the Marquis to stop Sunday's attack plans, the Secretary appears to be the last remaining anarchist working against them. He leads an army of black-clad mercenaries to track them down—but when he succeeds, he reveals that he's a detective and thinks they're the dangerous anarchists. This revelation is particularly significant because it shows that there was never truly an anarchist conspiracy to begin with, and that Sunday duped all of the men on the committee. In fact, this moment marks the novel's transition from a straightforward thriller (in which the detectives are trying to stop a terrorist attack) into a philosophical quest to understand Sunday's motives. At the end of the novel, the Secretary wears a black robe with a white stripe, which represents God creating light on the first day. - Character: Gogol/Tuesday. Description: Gogol, or "Tuesday," is an unkempt, sullen anarchist who looks absurd in formal dress clothes (and whom Gabriel Syme compares to an overdressed, scruffy dog). At the end of the Central Anarchist Committee meeting, Sunday exposes Gogol as an undercover detective—and Gogol's Polish accent as a convincing fake. This scene drives forward the novel's plot because it gives the other detectives their first indication that other Committee members are also secret agents, and it encourages them to investigate one another. Gogol rejoins the other detectives at the end of the novel, when they return from France to go demand answers from Sunday. However, Gogol remains a minor character with little dialogue. At the end of the novel, his special outfit is a silver dress that represents God parting the waters on the second day of creation. - Character: The Marquis de St. Eustache/Inspector Ratcliffe/Wednesday. Description: The anarchist nicknamed "Wednesday" is supposedly the Marquis de St. Eustache, a wealthy and sophisticated French nobleman who shares the aristocracy's disdain for democratic government. But, like Gogol and the Professor, he really turns out to be a detective in disguise. In the first Central Anarchist Council meeting, Sunday assigns the Marquis to carry out the group's assassination plans in France, and around halfway through the novel, Gabriel Syme, the Professor, and Dr. Bull go to try and stop him. Syme hatches an absurd plan: he pulls the Marquis's nose, challenges him to a duel, and then tries to draw out the fight for long enough that the Marquis misses his train. But in the process, he realizes that the Marquis is wearing a mask—because he, too, is really a police detective in disguise. In contrast to the optimistic Dr. Bull, throughout the novel's final chapters, Ratcliffe is consistently pessimistic about Sunday's motives, human nature, and the group's chances of surviving the supposed anarchist onslaught. However, the novel's concluding scenes prove him wrong: he ascends to the heaven-like celestial realm with the rest of the detectives. Once there, he wears a green outfit that represents God creating the earth and plants on the third day. - Character: The Professor de Worms/Wilks/Friday. Description: The Central Anarchist Committee member nicknamed "Friday" appears to be the elderly German nihilist philosopher Professor de Worms. When Gabriel Syme first meets him, he is so old and senile that he can barely get across a coherent thought or control his own body. Yet after the meeting, he manages to follow Syme around central London for several hours, even as Syme runs away from him as fast as he can. This baffles Syme until the Professor explains himself: he is really an actor and detective named Wilks, who has spent several years professionally impersonating the Professor. (However, the narrator continues to mostly call him "The Professor.") Wilks's disguise is extremely believable—in fact, he began wearing it full-time after he convinced an audience of the Professor's students and supporters that he was the real Professor, and the real Professor was an impostor. Ever since, Wilks has adopted many of the Professor's mannerisms even when he is not consciously in character. This breakdown in the relationship between actor and role is one of the clearest ways in which the novel asks whether people can know what their true identities really are. The Professor is the first of the other anarchists to tell Syme that he's really a detective, and the two men work together to try and sabotage Sunday's assassination plans throughout the second half of the novel. At the end of the book, Wilks wears a purple suit that represents God creating birds and sea creatures on the fifth day. - Character: Dr. Bull/Saturday. Description: Dr. Bull (nicknamed "Saturday") is one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Committee. Like the rest, he turns out to be an undercover detective. Compared to the other men on the Council, he is young, sharp, and energetic—but he also rarely speaks. Notably, Bull's dark glasses make his true expression impossible to see and his true feelings impossible to guess. This makes him seem like the "wickedest of all" the Councilmen when Gabriel Syme first meets him. After the group's initial meeting, Sunday tasks Bull with planning the assassination of the Russian Czar and French President. Syme and the Professor visit the small garret where he lives to try and stop him. During their visit, Syme asks Bull to take off his glasses. Bull's eyes are small and shine brightly, like an innocent boy's, which makes Syme realize that Bull is actually a benevolent detective, not an evil anarchist. For the rest of the novel, Dr. Bull turns out to be the most optimistic and trusting detective in the group. In the book's closing scene, his outfit depicts God creating animals and humans on the sixth day of Biblical creation. - Character: The Narrator. Description: Chesterton's narrator is omniscient and speaks in the third person, but mostly presents the story through the lens of Gabriel Syme's thoughts, actions, and feelings. For instance, the narrator never reveals any of the other main characters' true identities until Syme finds out about them. When the narrator does reveal hidden information about other characters, it's often intended to throw the reader off, which builds suspense later on. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator presents Lucian Gregory as the hero. The narrator also frequently uses irony and describes the environment—and especially the sky—in rich, descriptive language. - Character: Lucian Gregory. Description: Lucian Gregory is the charming, flamboyant anarchist poet who unwittingly helps Gabriel Syme infiltrate the Central Anarchist Council in the novel's first two chapters. In the first chapter, Gregory and Syme argue about whether poetry creates beauty through chaos or through order. In the second, Gregory takes Syme to his anarchist group's secret underground lair, where Syme persuades the congregation to choose him over Gregory to be their next representative, or "Thursday." Gregory does not reappear until the novel's very last scene, when he marches into the mysterious celestial realm wearing a black cloak and absurdly complains that people who believe in moral values do not truly suffer or fight for anything. Syme and Sunday quickly prove him wrong. Chesterton initially throws the reader off by presenting Gregory as the novel's hero. But at the very end, it becomes clear that Gregory is the novel's only true anarchist—and therefore also its only true villain. After all, his first name, Lucian, associates him with Satan, or Lucifer. Then, the novel's final paragraphs reveal that the whole story was actually Syme's extended fantasy, and that he has really been talking to Lucian Gregory the whole time. Both their conversation and Syme's fantasy about hunting down the anarchist conspiracy are metaphors for the conflict between an optimistic worldview in which everything has a purpose and good and evil exist, on the one hand, and a pessimistic view in which everything is meaningless and there's no difference between good and evil, on the other. - Character: Rosamond Gregory. Description: Rosamond Gregory is Lucian Gregory's sister. At the beginning of the novel, Gabriel Syme notices her beautiful red hair and chats with her for several minutes about poetry and her brother's anarchism. He thinks about her hair periodically over the course of the novel, and in its very last sentence, he watches her cut lilacs (which generally symbolize love and rebirth). Syme's romantic interest in Rosamond Gregory gives him a certain, constant goal to yearn for, which contrasts with the nightmarish moral uncertainty that plagues him throughout the rest of the novel. - Character: Colonel Ducroix. Description: Colonel Ducroix is a French soldier and member of the prestigious Legion of Honour who serves as one of the Marquis's "seconds" (official attendants) during his trip to France. He officiates the duel between the Marquis and Gabriel Syme, and then he helps the Marquis, Syme, Dr. Bull, and the Professor escape the Secretary's army by enlisting the help of the peasant, the innkeeper, and Dr. Renard. Like these three men, the Colonel is unfailingly honest and principled—to the point that he joins the Secretary's army after the Secretary convinces him that the detectives are really criminals on the run. - Character: The French Peasant. Description: The peasant is the suntanned farmer who helps Gabriel Syme, the Professor, Dr. Bull, the Marquis (Inspector Ratcliffe), and Colonel Ducroix escape the Secretary's black-clad army after Syme's duel with the Marquis. Whereas the detectives think that the peasant is poor and miserable, Ducroix points out that he is actually wealthy because French peasants own their land. He treats the peasant as a dignified equal, and they strike an amicable deal: the peasant helps the detectives escape in their cart. Chesterton uses this comic scene to comment on how out-of-touch anarchists (and their passionate opponents) are from ordinary people's everyday struggles, as well as to suggest that society would be better off if land were distributed more equally. Later, the peasant joins the Secretary's army to help bring the detectives, whom he believes to be criminals, to justice. - Character: The Elderly Innkeeper. Description: The innkeeper is an elderly French man and friend of Colonel Ducroix who runs the country inn "Le Soleil d'Or." He helps Ducroix and the detectives (Gabriel Syme, the Professor, Dr. Bull, and Inspector Ratcliffe) escape the Secretary's encroaching army by lending them horses. But later, when he learns that this army works for the police and is trying to bring the detectives to justice, he gives them horses, too, and then joins them. - Character: Dr. Renard. Description: Dr. Renard is a respected doctor and friend of Colonel Ducroix who lives in the fictional French town of Lancy. The only honest rich man in town, Ducroix helps the detectives (Gabriel Syme, the Professor, Dr. Bull, and Inspector Ratcliffe) escape by lending them one of his three cars and his antique lantern. But, like the peasant and the innkeeper, he ultimately joins forces with the Secretary (including by lending them his other two cars). All three do this because they are honest men who want to see law, order, and justice prevail over the fleeing detectives, whom they believe to be criminals. - Theme: Order, Chaos, and God. Description: G. K. Chesterton's 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare follows the intrepid poet-detective Gabriel Syme's quest to save the world from a global anarchist conspiracy. Syme infiltrates the Central Anarchist Council, whose members use the days of the week as pseudonyms, and starts working to sabotage the group's plans. But gradually, he realizes that all of the other council members are also undercover detectives doing the exact same thing—and its President (Sunday) was the one who hired them to do it. The novel ends with an extended religious metaphor, in which the six detectives visit a heavenlike realm for a banquet and their nicknames become metaphors for the seven days of creation in the Book of Genesis. Chesterton's novel satirizes the conflict between the orderly beauty of society and the chaotic, senseless destruction of anarchy, but he wasn't really trying to make a point about politics. Paradoxically enough, by showing six detectives relentlessly pursue one another to stop an anarchist plot that never existed, while an all-powerful mastermind orchestrates their every move, Chesterton really wanted to warn his readers against the kind of doubt, pessimism, and paranoia that were popular in his day. In Gabriel Syme's world, where nothing can be known for sure, it's impossible to tell the difference between friends and foes, safety and danger, or saving the world and bringing about its end. But Chesterton was a devout man, and the Christian allegory at the end of the novel suggests that faith offers readers a way out of this dilemma. Chesterton underscores this point by subtitling his novel A Nightmare: Syme and his companions' wild goose chase represents the moral trap that people fall into when they don't believe in a higher power or underlying order to the world. - Theme: Identity. Description: In The Man Who Was Thursday, nobody is who they seem to be. All of the protagonists have multiple identities, and the more sinister they seem at the outset of the novel, the more benevolent they tend to be by the end. Indeed, in the middle section of the novel, Gabriel Syme learns that one after another of his supposed anarchist rivals are actually fellow undercover detectives. For instance, Syme learns that the man he knows as Friday, or the Professor de Worms, is actually an actor named Wilks, who learned to impersonate the Professor years before. Wilks's imitation was so accurate that the Professor's fans and students decided it was realer than reality: they labeled the real Professor an impostor, forced him into exile, and replaced him with Wilks. Meanwhile, Wilks has been playing the Professor for so long that he has involuntarily adopted the Professor's mannerisms—he doesn't remember what it's like to be himself anymore. The novel is full of puzzles like this one, in which people lose track of their identities by switching loyalties, putting on masks, contradicting themselves, or even questioning whether there's a deeper truth to identity at all. Chesterton doesn't reject the concept of identity altogether, but he does show that people's identities are often defined by forces outside their control, like the roles that they play and the way that others perceive them. Fortunately, he also suggests that people can shape or even rediscover their own identities by choosing to play the right roles—or wear the right masks. For Chesterton, this means embracing the roles pre-ordained for us by God. The six detectives and Sunday do this at the end of the novel, albeit unintentionally, when they try on outfits that represent the seven days of creation and feel comfortable and authentic for the first time in the whole book. As the novel puts it, they find themselves by putting on "disguises [that do] not disguise, but reveal." - Theme: Tradition vs. Modernity. Description: The Man Who Was Thursday is set around the turn of the 20th century, when major social, economic, technological, and philosophical changes were transforming life in Europe. Pessimist intellectuals were turning against democracy and the Enlightenment. The Second Industrial Revolution was making factory work the norm and technologies like steam trains and electric street lamps more widely accessible. And the majority of the population was living in cities for the first time. All of these developments set the stage for radical politics to grow, and anarchist terrorists assassinated dozens of prominent leaders and bombed countless public places between the late 1870s and the outbreak of World War I. All of these developments figure prominently in The Man Who Was Thursday, and G. K. Chesterton was not particularly happy about any of them. Throughout the novel, he comically juxtaposes aspects of his contemporary European society with the earlier, more traditional, religious, and agrarian societies that he preferred. For example, in just a few pages, his protagonists fight a traditional duel while waiting to catch a steam train, debate property ownership laws for French and British peasants while running away from a mob of masked anarchists, run over a horse with an automobile, and win a shootout with the help of an antique religious lantern. In these and countless other situations throughout the novel, Chesterton uses humor to suggest that modern technology and cities create a hollow society and make people's lives worse by distancing them from their roots. But whereas pessimists and anarchists view this hollowness as a justification for destroying society, Chesterton wants to save it. In this sense, his tongue-in-cheek examples of old meeting new also serve as examples of how he thinks modern people can embrace history and tradition, thereby living richer, happier lives. - Theme: The Purpose of Art. Description: Gabriel Syme, the protagonist and title character of The Man Who Was Thursday, is no normal detective: he's also a poet. Even when he's supposed to be busy saving the world, Syme spends much of his time contemplating the meaning of humanity and the beauty of the environment. In fact, G. K. Chesterton's broader interest in the nature and purpose of art is apparent from the very beginning of the novel, which describes the neighborhood of Saffron Park as "a frail but finished work of art" and then narrates a debate between Syme and Lucian Gregory about the meaning of poetry. Syme believes that poetry is a way to create meaning by imposing a linguistic structure on the world, while Gregory believes that poetry creates beauty by refusing to fit into structure—or even destroying it. But, through his rich descriptions and frequent comparisons between things in the environment and works of art, Chesterton proposes a different theory altogether: art's purpose is not to change or destroy the world, but merely to faithfully capture and communicate its beauty. - Climax: The six detectives chase after the President and embark on a spiritual journey. - Summary: In G.K. Chesterton's otherworldly spy novel The Man Who Was Thursday, the poet, philosopher, and police detective Gabriel Syme infiltrates a vast anarchist conspiracy to save the world from its sinister plots. But when Syme learns that the other anarchist leaders are not who they seem to be, he starts questioning what his mission really meant in the first place—and who has been pulling the strings. The novel begins in a garden in the quaint London suburb of Saffron Park, where the firebrand anarchist poet Lucian Gregory passionately lectures his friends about the evils of organized society and the beauty of destruction. When Gabriel Syme attends one of Gregory's parties, they debate whether poetry is a form of order or chaos. Syme accuses Gregory of not being serious about anarchism, and in response, Gregory offers Syme "a very entertaining evening"—but only if he promises not to tell the police. Gregory takes Syme to a seedy pub, where their table shoots down through a secret passageway into an underground anarchist bunker full of bombs and weapons. Gregory explains that his group wants to destroy all religion, government, and morality. He's expecting the local branch to elect him to the Central Anarchist Council at its next meeting—which is in just a few minutes. Right before it starts, Syme tell Gregory that he works for the police. Gregory knows that, if he exposes Syme to the other anarchists, then Syme will expose him to the police. Instead, he lightens the tone of his election speech to try and convince Syme that his group is harmless. But this backfires: Syme challenges him in the election, gives a fiery speech promising murder and destruction, and wins easily. A tugboat carries him down the Thames to meet the rest of the Council. A flashback explains how Syme became a detective. After growing up in a family of unstable nonconformists and witnessing a bloody anarchist attack, Syme decided to launch a "rebellion against rebellion." When a police officer approached him and asked him to join a special new anti-anarchist unit, he signed up. Notably, the unit chief insisted on meeting him in a pitch-black room—and told him that he would die a martyr. Syme gets off the tugboat at daybreak and meets the Secretary, a menacing man who can only smile with one side of his face. The Secretary takes Syme to meet the rest of the Council in central London's Leicester Square. Since people assume that serious anarchists would never talk about anarchism publicly, the Council President has decided the group should plan their attacks in full public view, over breakfast on the balcony of a popular restaurant. Even though they know each other's real names, the Council's members use days of the week as pseudonyms. The imposing President is called Sunday, the Secretary is Monday, and Syme is now Thursday. Tuesday is an unkempt Polish malcontent named Gogol. Friday is an elderly nihilist philosopher named the Professor de Worms. Saturday is a lively young doctor named Bull, whose opaque black glasses make him seem like the wickedest of the bunch. And Wednesday, the French nobleman Marquis de St. Eustache, is planning to assassinate the Russian Czar and the French President when they meet in three days. Syme notices Sunday staring at him throughout the breakfast. Then, Sunday calls the whole group into a private back room and announces that one of them is a traitor. Syme is certain that he's done for—until Sunday identifies Gogol as the spy and kicks him off the Council. Relieved, Syme goes for a long walk and gets lunch. But he notices the decrepit Professor de Worms hobbling after him the whole way. Even when Syme sprints to catch a bus and intentionally gets lost in a maze of winding alleys, the Professor inexplicably catches up to him. When he finally confronts the Professor in a shady sailors' bar, the Professor admits that he's a police detective in disguise. Syme explains that he is, too. They start plotting together to stop the upcoming bombing. They develop a secret sign language and visit Dr. Bull, who's planning the attack, at his garret. But when Syme asks Bull to take off his black glasses, he realizes that Dr. Bull's shining eyes are far too innocent to be an anarchist's. Surely enough, Bull works for the police, too. The three detectives head to France to stop the bombing. Syme hatches a plan: he challenges the Marquis to a fencing duel, then makes sure to plan it on the morning of the Marquis's train to Paris. If he misses the train, the Marquis can't carry out the assassination. The Marquis agrees to the duel, on the condition that they hold it in a field next to the train station. But he doesn't bleed or scar when Syme stabs him. Syme realizes that the Marquis is wearing a disguise—he, too, is a police detective. When the train pulls into the station, a group of anarchists wearing black masks gets off it and starts pursuing the four detectives, who borrow a peasant's cart, an elderly innkeeper's horses, and a local doctor's motorcar to escape. But somehow, the anarchists win these three men and most of the local townspeople to their side. Led by the Secretary, the anarchists corner Syme and his companions on the beach. The detectives feel like the whole universe is united against them. But then, Syme gives an impassioned speech about the value of tradition and hits the Secretary with an antique Christian lantern. The Secretary reveals that he's a detective, too—meaning that everybody on the Council worked for the police except the President, Sunday. The detectives return to London, find Gogol, and confront Sunday over breakfast in Leicester Square. Sunday refuses to explain who he is or what he is doing—but he does tell them one secret: "I'm the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen." He runs away, and a long chase scene ensues. At various points, Sunday escapes using a horse-drawn cab, a firetruck, an elephant, and a hot air balloon. The detectives chase Sunday to the outskirts of London, where his balloon has crashed in a field. On their way, they realize that Sunday looked different to each of them, but they all saw him as a reflection of "the universe itself." Syme comments that, just like Sunday, reality is made of two opposite sides: "the horrible back" and "the noble face." Before the detectives can reach Sunday, an old man with a scepter approaches them and brings them to six carriages, which carry them up a magical hill to a grand celestial gateway. Beyond the gate, they put on new clothes that give new meaning to their pseudonyms: the days of the week now refer to the days of creation. For example, the Secretary (Monday) wears a black robe with a white stripe, which represents God creating light on the first day, while Syme (Thursday) wears a blue outfit with an image of the sun, which represents God creating the sun and moon on the fourth day. The six detectives meet at a carnival where figures dressed in animal costumes drink and dance around a bonfire. Sunday joins them, wearing pure white, and claims to be "the Sabbath"—or "the peace of God." The detectives debate whether they can forgive Sunday for terrorizing them. Suddenly, Lucian Gregory—the novel's only "real anarchist"—arrives. He asks the detectives if law-abiding believers like them can truly suffer in the same way as anarchists who don't believe in anything at all. But Sunday's terror proves that Christians do suffer. Gregory asks Sunday the same question, and Sunday answers by quoting the Bible: "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?" In the novel's closing lines, Syme gradually becomes aware of his real-life surroundings again. Chesterton reveals that the detective drama has all been a fantasy—Syme has been taking a leisurely stroll through Saffron Park with Lucian Gregory the whole time.

- Genre: Short Fiction - Title: The Man Who Would Be King - Point of view: First Person - Setting: India, Kafiristan - Character: The Narrator. Description: The story's narrator is a correspondent for the Backwoodsman, an English-language newspaper. As part of his job, he travels by train to various parts of India, interacting with everyone from the kings of minor states to the "loafers" who travel second-class. On one of his journeys, he meets Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, who ask for his help in planning their conquest of Kafiristan. The narrator thinks Carnehan and Dravot's plan is foolish, but when they assure him they are serious, he provides them with books and maps of the region. Two years later, Carnehan returns, injured and haggard, and tells the narrator about his adventures in Kafiristan. The bulk of "The Man Who Would Be King" is a story within a story: in the framing narrative, the narrator talks of his interactions with Carnehan and Dravot, and it is within this context that Carnehan tells the story of what happened in Kafiristan. The narrator thus serves as an intermediary between the "respectable" world familiar to Kipling's Victorian British readers and the exotic setting of Carnehan and Dravot's adventure. Kipling was working as a newspaper correspondent in Lahore when he wrote "The Man Who Would Be King," so it seems likely that the narrator is a stand-in for Kipling himself. - Character: Peachey Carnehan. Description: Peachey Carnehan, one of the story's two protagonists, is a "loafer"—an Englishman in India who lacks the funds to travel first-class. He makes just enough to live on through a combination of odd jobs and extortion. Carnehan and Daniel Dravot hatch a plan to conquer Kafiristan, and they sign a contract stating that neither of them will have anything to do with women or alcohol until they have achieved their goal. Unlike Dravot, though, Carnehan seems content to control Kafiristan; he does not develop delusions of grandeur and instead focuses on training soldiers and improving agricultural practices. He keeps to the terms of the contract and earns the trust of Billy Fish, one of the local chiefs. Carnehan thus represents the kind of "benevolent" colonialism that Kipling supported—he brings "civilization" to a supposedly inferior people. However, when the people of Kafiristan revolt, they turn on Carnehan as well as Dravot. Carnehan is crucified between two pine trees, but when he survives the night, his captors let him go. He returns from Kafiristan a changed man—broken and mentally unstable, carrying the severed head of Dravot, which is still wearing its crown. It is in this state that he tells the story of his adventures to the narrator. The next day, the narrator finds Carnehan crawling through the street, apparently quite mad, and arranges for him to be taken to an asylum. Despite the narrator's intervention, however, Carnehan dies of sunstroke. - Character: Daniel Dravot. Description: Daniel Dravot is the story's other protagonist who, along with Peachey Carnehan, sets out to conquer the land of Kafiristan. Once they have conquered a few villages, however, Dravot immediately develops grander ambitions. He claims to be a god and a "son of Alexander"—that is, a descendant of Alexander the Great—and orders his subjects to make him a golden crown. Not content merely to rule Kafiristan, Dravot wants to create an empire. Spurred on by greed and hubris, he demands that the people of Kafiristan provide him with a wife. This is both against local custom and a violation of Dravot's contract with Carnehan. Dravot's bride, meanwhile, is terrified, as she believes that she will die if she marries a god; as soon as she is close enough, she bites him. Seeing Dravot's blood, the people realize that he is not a god but a man, sparking a revolt against Dravot and Carnehan's rule. The insurgents cut away the rope bridge on which Dravot is standing, and he plummets to his death. It is thus Dravot's greed combined with his abandonment of his moral code—his contract with Carnehan—that leads to his downfall. Dravot's rise and fall serve as a cautionary tale, suggesting that there could be catastrophic consequences if the British Empire loses its moral authority. - Character: Billy Fish. Description: Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot make up names for the chiefs of Kafiristan, presumably because they can't pronounce their real names. One of these is Billy Fish. Billy Fish warns against Dravot's plan to marry, and he remains loyal to Carnehan even after it is revealed that Carnehan and Dravot aren't gods. Because of his loyalty to Carnehan, the insurgents slit his throat. Billy Fish's experience mirrors that of Indians who remained loyal to the British during the Rebellion of 1857, many of whom were killed. - Theme: Morality and Colonialism. Description: Written during Britain's imperial rule of India, Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" is essentially a parable about the moral authority of the British Empire. Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two British men living in India, have signed a contract stating that they will abide by a strict moral code: they will not touch women or alcohol until they have become kings of the land of Kafiristan. Yet soon after becoming a king, Dravot decides that the terms of the contract have been met and commands his subjects to bring him a wife. As a direct result of abandoning his moral code, Dravot loses all of his power and meets a violent end. A framing narrative, in which the narrator describes his experiences as a newspaper correspondent in India, brackets the story of Carnehan and Dravot's adventures in Kafiristan and situates the story firmly within the context of British colonial rule. Like Daniel and Peachey, Kipling suggests, the empire cannot maintain control of its colonies if it loses its moral authority. Near the beginning of the story, Carnehan shows the narrator the "Contrack" he has signed with Dravot as evidence that their desire to become kings of Kafiristan is serious. The contract describes a morality in keeping with Victorian ideals: neither man will "look at any Liquor, nor any Woman black, white, or brown" until they have become kings. The narrator thinks Carnehan and Dravot are fools, but Carnehan uses the contract to establish his credibility, asking the narrator rhetorically, "Would two lunatics make a Contrack like that?" As far as Carnehan and Dravot are concerned, this contract demonstrates that their ambition to rule is valid. In this scene, Kipling directly ties Carnehan and Dravot's moral code to the perceived legitimacy of their colonial aspirations. Once Carnehan and Dravot have conquered Kafiristan, they further seek to justify their colonization by claiming to have improved the lives of its people. Dravot tells the Kafirs to "dig the land, and be fruitful and multiply," and he installs the village priest as the judge in a rudimentary legal system. Carnehan notes that he has provided military training and has "shown the people how to stack their oats better," demonstrating that he believes he has improved the lives of the people he has subjugated. Carnehan also states that the people don't understand Dravot's commands but benefit from them anyway. Dravot and Carnehan obviously would like to think of their paternalism as benevolent; they believe they are helping the people of Kafiristan become "civilized." Carnehan even suggests that governing is an obligation that weighs more heavily on the colonizer than the colonized, noting that "Kings always feel oppressed that way." Kipling does not challenge Carnehan and Dravot's perception that they have brought "civilization" to Kafiristan, which suggests that the author is not opposed to colonialism in principle, however ambivalent he may be about some elements of its implementation. Dravot's moral failure is what eventually causes his political (and literal) downfall. Dravot explicitly states that personal power is more important to him than improving Kafiristan. He pretends to be a god, has a crown made for him, and says that his goal is "to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us." Just before the story's climax, Dravot abandons the moral code of his contract with Carnehan by deciding to get married. He abuses his power by commanding the community to give him a wife against their—and her—will. Dravot's unwilling bride bites him, and when the people see his blood, they conclude that he is not a god after all but an imposter. They rebel, and Dravot falls to his death when his former subjects cut away a rope bridge on which he is standing. Dravot's death is therefore a direct consequence of his corrupt motivations and the abandonment of his moral code. By embedding the main story within an account of the narrator's experiences in colonial India, Kipling emphasizes a historical precedent for the events of "The Man Who Would Be King." Carnehan tells the narrator, "The country isn't half worked out because they that governs it won't let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can't lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government saying—'Leave it alone, and let us govern.'" Kipling's original audience would have understood that Carnehan was complaining about the fact that the British Crown now ruled India directly, whereas previously it had ruled indirectly through the East India Company. As a result of this change in government, Indians had gained at least some nominal legal rights, so Carnehan essentially is complaining that he no longer can exploit Indians and steal their natural resources to the extent that he would like. Furthermore, this change in government was a consequence of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (also known as the Sepoy Mutiny or India's First War of Independence), in which Indians staged a violent uprising against the oppressive rule of the East India Company. The fictional rebellion of the natives in Kafiristan thus parallels the real Rebellion of 1857. As a matter of principle, Kipling appears to accept the imperialist idea that colonialism can have a positive impact on the colonized. However, he does criticize the motives of the colonizers and suggests that a loss of moral credibility has been—and could continue to be—disastrous for the British Empire. - Theme: Ambition and Hubris. Description: Throughout "The Man Who Would Be King," Daniel Dravot's ambition is boundless. As soon as he achieves his lofty goal of becoming king of Kafiristan, he decides it's not enough: he must build an empire as well, and ultimately pronounces himself both an emperor and a god. Ambition and hubris are what drive Dravot to break his contract with Carnehan (the two men had agreed to abstain from women and alcohol until they were king), leading to his dethroning as king and his violent death at the hands of the local people. That Dravot literally plunges to his death after declaring himself a god makes clear that, in the world of Kipling's story, pride comes before the fall. After conquering Kafiristan, Dravot immediately moves on to grander plans: "I won't make a Nation," he declares, "I'll make an Empire!" His erratic behavior further suggests that his ambition has become a dangerous obsession, as he speaks in long monologues full of asides and exclamations, chews his beard, and paces back and forth. As the story unfolds, Dravot's ambition-turned-obsession bleeds into insanity when his aims are finally thwarted. As they are fleeing from the rebellious natives, Carnehan says, "My own notion is that Dan began to go mad in his head from that hour." Dravot also demonstrates his hubris by repeatedly overstating his own political and religious power. On the journey to Kafiristan, for instance, Carnehan implores Dravot "not to sing and whistle so loud for fear of bringing down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King couldn't sing it wasn't worth being King." Dravot, who is not even a king yet at this point in the story, is pompously saying here that his mere desire to be king should make him immune to the forces of nature—a patently ridiculous claim. Dravot's hubris also leads him to claim a religious authority that he does not in fact have. He exploits the local devotion to freemasonry by pretending to be a Grand Master, even though Carnehan points out that this is illegal as neither of them "ever held office in any Lodge." Dravot doesn't listen and instead uses his knowledge of Masonic ritual to convince the natives that he is a god. Dravot's lust for power and excessive pride ultimately lead him to abandon his moral code (symbolized by his contract with Carnehan) and demand a wife, which sets the stage for his fall. Dravot's desire for a wife not only goes against the grain of his moral code, but is itself based partly on ambition. He says he wants "a queen to breed a King's son for the King." In other words, he wants to establish a dynasty. It's clear that Dravot's inflated sense of his own power interferes with his judgment. When the council and Carnehan question his demand for a wife, he flies into "a white-hot rage," and Carnehan says that he is "going against his better mind." Finally, it is Dravot's hubris in claiming to be a god that sparks the rebellion against him. When his terrified wife bites him, the people discover that he bleeds and is therefore a man rather than a deity. If he had never claimed to be a god in the first place, he presumably could have avoided the situation that leads to his downfall. By highlighting the consequences of Dravot's arrogance and insatiable ambition, Kipling warns against what he sees as corrupt motivations for colonialism. The morally appropriate motivation, he believes, is the (ethnocentric) desire to bring the benefits of civilization to supposedly inferior people, not the hubristic desire for power and glory. - Theme: Civilization and the Colonized. Description: In an attempt to justify colonialism, European colonial powers routinely portrayed the people they subjugated as "uncivilized" and, it would follow, deserving of (and even benefiting from) their colonization. A large part of this stereotype involved seeing colonized people as primitive, superstitious, and cruel. Despite Kipling's critique of the British Empire's moral failings, "The Man Who Would Be King"—written during the Empire's rule of India—largely embraces this portrayal and so upholds the fundamentally flawed ideology behind colonialism. For one thing, the story depicts the colonized as technologically backward. When Carnehan and Dravot set out for Kafiristan, they carry with them a supply of "Martinis." These rifles, which were standard issue for British soldiers at the time, were products of British technological and industrial power. In contrast, the inhabitants of Kafiristan have bows, of which Carnehan is quite dismissive: he refers to one of their projectiles as "a footy little arrow." Carnehan and Dravot introduce new agricultural techniques to Kafiristan as well, further demonstrating their technological superiority. The narrator also describes the Native States—the vassal states allied with the British Empire but governed by Indian rulers—as "touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid." Harun-al-Raschid was a historical ruler, but he is better known as a character in One Thousand and One Nights; to Kipling's European readers, his name would have evoked the stereotypically violent and exotic world of Arabian folktales. To the narrator, meanwhile, the railway and telegraph—both European technological innovations—are signs of civilization; the Native States, who have limited access to these technologies, are thus depicted as being on the margins of the civilized world. Furthermore, the natives of Kafiristan are portrayed as superstitious heathens who are less religiously sophisticated than Carnehan and Dravot. Dravot notes that the people of Kafiristan have "two-and-thirty heathen idols," and Carnehan refers to them as "a stinkin' lot of heathens." When Dravot and Carnehan arrive at a village in Kafiristan, Dravot establishes his position by pretending to be a friend of the local gods. His act is farcical and condescending—he refers to the deities as "these old jim-jams"—and yet it works, indicating that the religion of Kafiristan is primitive. And though the priests of Kafiristan are familiar with Masonic symbols and rituals, Carnehan and Dravot's understanding of these rites is far greater—a fact that allows them to turn the situation to their advantage. The story also shows that the colonized—both in India and in Kafiristan—are uncivilized by depicting them as irrationally violent. Carnehan, when the narrator first meets him, is on his way to blackmail a local king, Degumber Rajah. The king has killed his father's widow by stuffing her full of red pepper, hanging her from a beam, and having her beaten to death with slippers, a clear demonstration of Degumber's cruelty. The narrator then refers to the people of Afghanistan as "utter brutes," and he says they will cut Carnehan and Dravot to pieces, further emphasizing the supposed savagery of the region's inhabitants. Carnehan and Dravot's plan further relies on the expectation that the people of Kafiristan are constantly fighting one another. This turns out to be the case—the first people they encounter upon arrival are in the middle of a battle. In contrast to the inhabitants of India and Kafiristan, whose violence seems gratuitous and irrational, Carnehan and Dravot deploy violence purposefully as a tool for imposing order and spreading civilization. For example, when Dravot sets up a new legal system in the area they have conquered, he says that if anything goes wrong, the local priest "is to be shot." This threat of violence turns out to be both effective and beneficial to the colonized: "Next week they was all turning up the land in the valley as quiet as bees and much prettier." By attributing different motivations to each, Kipling attempts to justify the violence of the colonizer even as he condemns the violence of the colonized. Although Kipling criticizes the behavior of the British Empire in India, "The Man Who Would Be King" also portrays the colonized as fundamentally uncivilized—a portrayal that seeks to justify colonialism as one superior group "helping" their inferiors. In the decades after Kipling's writing, of course, such a viewpoint would be challenged and debunked as Indians threw off the yoke of British rule. - Theme: Race and Racism. Description: At the beginning of the story, the narrator's description of an intermediate-class train journey provides a succinct account of India's racially stratified society under British governance. The British of Kipling's world believe themselves to be racially superior to the people they have colonized, and they use this prejudiced ideology to justify their rule. Initially, Carnehan and Dravot's insistence on the whiteness of the Kafirs appears to complicate this notion of the colonizer's racial superiority. However, there are some hints that Carnehan and Dravot's claims about the whiteness of those they have colonized may not be reliable. Their rejection of the racial distinction between colonizer and colonized ultimately leads to their downfall, and the story thus reinforces the racist underpinnings of colonialism.  Due to a budget shortfall, the narrator, despite being white, is forced to travel in the train's intermediate class, which he describes as "very awful indeed." The narrator divides the other passengers in intermediate class into three racial categories, which provides insight into the racial hierarchy in India under the British Crown. The first category is Eurasian—that is, people of mixed European and South Asian descent. The narrator seems to believe these are the people who naturally belong in intermediate class. The second category is "native, which for a long night journey is nasty." The narrator does not feel any need to explain what he means by this; to him, the nastiness of native Indians is self-evident. The third category is "Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated." These are white passengers who lack the financial means to travel in first or second class. "Loafer" is thus more or less the British colonial equivalent of "white trash." Carnehan and Dravot repeatedly emphasize that the colonized inhabitants of Kafiristan, in contrast to those of India, are white. When Carnehan first describes the Kafirs, he says, "They was fair men—fairer than you or me—with yellow hair and remarkable well built." The source of the conflict between two villages in Kafiristan turns out to be a woman "that was carried off." Carnehan again insists to the narrator that the woman was "as fair as you or me." After Carnehan and Dravot have exploited their knowledge of Masonic rituals to cement their control of Kafiristan, Carnehan once again notes how racism shapes his attitude toward the local people: "Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends." Carnehan and Dravot seem to conflate whiteness and morality. Dravot tells the Kafirs, "I know that you won't cheat me, because you're white people—sons of Alexander—and not like common, black Mohammedans." And when, in an effort to convince Dravot not to take a wife, Carnehan reminds him of a Bengali woman who cheated on Carnehan and stole his money, Dravot claims that this situation will be different, because "these women are whiter than you or me." There are, however, some hints that Carnehan and Dravot's claims about the whiteness of those they have colonized are either mistaken or misleading. For example, Dravot, speaking of the women of Kafiristan, says, "Boil 'em once or twice in hot water, and they'll come out like chicken and ham." This (appallingly misogynist) simile suggests that the natives' complexion may not be as pale as Dravot claims; if it were, boiling would not be required to make them "like chicken and ham" (that is, white). In addition, Dravot has a strong motive to simply believe that the Kafirs are white. In his view, this would justify both his desire to make them into a great empire and his desire to marry one of them. On account of this bias, his assertions about their whiteness may not be entirely reliable. Dravot makes two important decisions based on the dubious claim that the natives of Kafiristan are white (and therefore, in his view, morally upright): he trusts them not to rebel, and he marries one of them. Both of these decisions backfire horribly, resulting in the loss not only of Dravot's power but also of his life.   Kipling, like other Victorian advocates for colonialism, believed in the racial superiority of white Europeans. By insisting on the whiteness of the Kafirs, Carnehan and Dravot erase the racial distinction between colonizer and colonized, which leads to their demise. Kipling seems to be suggesting that if the British abandon their commitment to the idea of white superiority, then, the results will be equally disastrous. - Theme: Women and Misogyny. Description: Carnehan and Dravot's "Contrack" (contract) prohibits either man from interacting with women, which implies that women are inherently immoral. Furthermore, they believe relationships with women could distract them from achieving their goal of becoming kings of Kafiristan. Similarly, the narrator complains that the women who visit the newspaper office distract him with frivolous concerns and prevent him from doing his duty. It is also Dravot's desire for a wife that leads to his undoing, which seems to confirm the characters' sexist beliefs. Throughout the story, then, Kipling's portrayal of women is fundamentally misogynist: he presents them as an immoral distraction from the (manly) work of colonization.   To the story's male characters, the well-being of women is of very little concern. The narrator complains about "Zenana-mission ladies" who ask him to write newspaper stories about their work. The primary goal of the zenana missions was to convert Indian women to Christianity; however, they also trained women to provide medical care to Indian women who could not interact with male doctors because of the purdah system. The narrator has no interest in any of this and merely considers the zenana missionaries a nuisance. Later, Dravot doesn't care at all that his bride is afraid to marry him as long as she submits to his authority. When the priest explains that they are "a-heartening of her up down in the temple"—that is, helping her to gather her courage—Dravot simply says, "Hearten her very tender, then […] or I'll hearten you with the butt of a gun so you'll never want to be heartened again." Women are portrayed as frivolous and inherently immoral, and colonized (nonwhite) women in particular are portrayed as dishonest and sexually promiscuous. The women who interrupt the narrator's newspaper work ask him to write stories about dances and print calling cards, tasks that he considers unimportant. Furthermore, Dravot and Carnehan's contract, in stipulating that neither man should interact with any woman, suggests that women are somehow impure or morally suspect simply by virtue of their gender. Carnehan reinforces this idea when, as a cautionary tale, he tells Dravot about a past relationship with a Bengali woman: "She ran away with the Station Master's servant and half my month's pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste, and had the impidence to say I was her husband—all among the drivers in the running-shed too!" In the world of the story, women are not only inherently morally suspect but also a distraction from duty and a source of weakness for men. The narrator says that paying attention to the "Zenana-mission ladies" would require him to "abandon all his duties" as a newspaper editor. Carnehan and Dravot's "Contrack" shows that they believe interacting with women has the potential to distract them from their goal of becoming kings. Carnehan says to Dravot, "The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on women, 'specially when they've got a new raw Kingdom to work over." This is an allusion to biblical figures like Samson, who loses his strength because of Delilah, and David, who acts unjustly because of his lust for Bathsheba.  To the male protagonists of "The Man Who Would Be King," then, women's concerns and suffering are largely unimportant. Kipling describes a world in which men do the work of conquering and governing while women exist primarily as a temptation for men to avoid. - Climax: The people of Kafiristan realize that Daniel Dravot is not a god after all but merely a man, and they launch a rebellion against him. - Summary: The narrator, a newspaper correspondent, is traveling across India by second-class train when he meets Peachey Carnehan, a white man planning to extort money from a local prince. Carnehan asks the narrator to deliver a message to his friend, Daniel Dravot. The narrator agrees to do so because he and Carnehan are both Masons. A few days later, Carnehan and Dravot turn up at the narrator's office. They are planning an expedition to conquer Kafiristan, and they would like the narrator to provide them with books and maps to plan their journey. The narrator says that Carnehan and Dravot are fools and will likely die before they reach their goal. However, Carnehan and Dravot explain that they have signed a contract: neither of them will have anything to do with women or alcohol until they have become kings of Kafiristan. This contract, they believe, demonstrates that they are in earnest. Reluctantly, the narrator agrees to help them. Dravot and Carnehan, disguised as a mad priest and his servant, depart for Kafiristan, secretly carrying with them twenty British Martini rifles. The narrator receives news that they have made it across the border but hears nothing more for some time. Three years later, the narrator is again in his office when he receives a visitor. It's Peachey Carnehan, but he is so haggard and scarred that at first the narrator doesn't recognize him. Carnehan, rambling and apparently slightly mad, tells the tale of his adventures with Dravot in Kafiristan. In Carnehan's version of events, he and Dravot arrive in Kafiristan and immediately take sides in a local dispute. The locals have only bows and arrows, so Carnehan and Dravot easily take control. Carnehan stresses to the narrator that the people of Kafiristan are white ("fairer than you or me"). Carnehan and Dravot introduce new agricultural practices to the region, set up a new legal system, train the men as soldiers, and extend their power over the surrounding villages. Dravot commands their newly colonized subjects to make golden crowns for the two of them, and they declare themselves kings. It turns out that the people of Kafiristan have some familiarity with Masonic symbols and rituals, and Carnehan and Dravot exploit their superior knowledge of these rites to claim that they are gods, further cementing their control. As far as Dravot is concerned, this is "a master-stroke o' policy." However, Dravot is not content with being king. Based on the idea that the Kafirs are white—and therefore, in his mind, potentially the equal of the English—he believes that he can use them to build a great empire. As he outlines his ambitions to Carnehan, he paces back and forth, chewing his beard, showing the first signs that he is becoming unhinged. In addition, Dravot demands that the Kafirs provide him with a wife, abandoning the contract he made with Carnehan. Carnehan warns him that this is a bad idea, especially after the people object, stating their belief that any woman who marries a god will die. Dravot insists, and the Kafirs do provide a bride for him. However, she is so terrified that she bites Dravot, drawing blood. Seeing this, the Kafirs realize that Dravot is not a god after all but only a man, and they immediately rebel. Together with a few loyal soldiers, Dravot and Carnehan flee. At this point Dravot has lost his mind, raving about being an emperor even as Carnehan tries to lead him away from danger. The rebels catch up to them and cut away the rope bridge that Dravot is standing on, causing him to plummet to his death. Carnehan is crucified between two pine trees, but when he survives the night, the Kafirs declare it a miracle and release him. As he finishes telling his story to the narrator, Carnehan opens the bag he is carrying, revealing the severed head of Dravot, still wearing a golden crown. Later that day, the narrator comes across Carnehan crawling in the dust by the side of the road, singing to himself, apparently having lost his mind. The narrator takes Carnehan to an asylum. A few days later, he learns from the asylum superintendent that Carnehan has died of heatstroke. The bag carrying the crowned head of Dravot is nowhere to be found.

- Genre: Short Story, Literary Fiction - Title: The Management of Grief - Point of view: Third-Person Limited - Setting: Toronto, Ireland, India - Character: Shaila Bhave. Description: Shaila Bhave is the story's protagonist. Her husband, Vikram Bhave, and her two sons, Vinod Bhave and Mithun Bhave, have just been killed in a plane bombing. The tragedy puts Shaila into a state of shock, and she takes Valium to help her through her grief. The shock and Valium make Shaila appear calm to outside observers like Judith Templeton, but—in reality—she wishes she could "scream" or jump from a bridge"; that is, she would do anything to feel her emotions more fully. When Shaila travels to Ireland, she's unable to identify the bodies of her family members, but instead of feeling grief, she feels optimistic and clings to the hope that they might still be alive. She finds further solace when she begins to see visions of her husband and sons, and as she grieves, she feels that her "family surrounds [her]." Even in their deaths, Shaila feels comforted by her family members. To Shaila, it seems hopeless to try and communicate these complexities of grief to Judith, whose knowledge of grieving seems limited to charts and textbooks. What's more, Shaila's path through grief is presented alongside those of Kusum and Dr. Ranganathan, who both also lost family members in the attack. After Shaila sees one final vision of her family, she moves into a different phase of life, one less defined by the immediacy of grief. - Character: Judith Templeton. Description: Judith Templeton is a Canadian social worker in charge of carrying out government communications with the people who lost loved ones in the terrorist attack. Judith says the government has to distribute money to some people and get others to sign legal documents. She wants Shaila Bhave to help her in this process because, though the government has translators, Judith thinks they're missing a "human touch." Some of the people she's trying to reach, Judith says, don't speak English and have never dealt with money—others, she says, are simply "hysterical" or depressed. She thus identifies Shaila as a potential emissary, mistaking Shaila's calmness for stoic strength. Judith's knowledge of grief seems to come exclusively from textbooks, and she says that six months after the tragedy, only a few relatives of those who have died have reached the "correct" stage of grief. In this way, the story presents her as out of touch and culturally incompetent, unwilling and unable to accept and understand people who are different from her. It's arguable that the story's title, "The Management of Grief," can be read as Judith's attempt to shoehorn the deepest, most profound and difficult human experiences into a sterile, bureaucratic model of coping that doesn't address the needs of the people it claims to serve. Shaila eventually grows tired of Judith's cluelessness and stops assisting her without explaining why. - Character: Kusum. Description: Kusum is Shaila Bhave's friend and neighbor, whose husband and youngest daughter were killed in the attack. At Shaila's house just after the attack, Kusum gets into an argument with her oldest daughter, Pam. Pam accuses Kusum of wishing that she was dead instead of her sister, who she says is Kusum's favorite child. Kusum travels with Shaila to Ireland and identifies her family members quickly before traveling to India to arrange funeral proceedings. Her journey through grief is presented alongside Shaila's—while Shaila finds herself in shock and turns to Valium to process her grief, Kusum turns to religion. Overlooking the bay where the plane crashed, Kusum paraphrases her swami (a religious teacher in Hinduism) and tells Shaila that fate led everyone to be on the plane that day and that they should be happy because their family members have gone to a better place. Kusum eventually sells her house in Toronto to move to an ashram run by her swami in the Indian city of Haridwar (referred in the story to Hardwar), where she plans to pursue inner peace. - Character: Dr. Ranganathan. Description: Dr. Ranganathan is a world-renowned electrical engineer who lost a large family in the bombing. When he and Shaila Bhave first meet in Ireland, he says that a strong swimmer might have been able to survive the crash and swim to shore. Dr. Ranganathan's optimism, pragmatism, and sense of friendship and authority give Shaila a jolt of hope, and he tells Shaila that it's "a parent's duty to hope." His journey through grief is presented alongside those of Shaila and Kusum. After he returns to Canada, Dr. Ranganathan begins a job in Ottawa but can't bring himself to sell his house in Toronto, which he has turned into a "shrine" to the family members he lost. Eventually, he takes an academic job in Texas, where "no one knows his story and he has vowed not to tell it." He and Shaila continue to talk on the phone about once a week. - Character: Elderly Couple. Description: When Shaila Bhave agrees to help Judith Templeton, they visit an elderly Sikh couple whose two sons were killed in the attack. The couple is reluctant to sign the papers Judith wants them to sign because they believe that "God will provide" for them instead of the government. By signing, they worry they'll be giving up hope that they might see their sons again. After they leave the couple's apartment without getting them to sign the papers, Shaila wants to tell Judith, "In our culture, it is a parent's duty to hope." Instead, after Judith complains about the couple's "stubbornness and ignorance"—and after Judith begins to complain about the next person they have an appointment with—Shaila leaves without explaining why. - Character: Pam. Description: Pam is Kusum's older daughter who is "always in trouble." She "dates Canadian boys and hangs out at the mall," unlike her "goody goody" younger sister, who was killed in the attack and was on the plane on her way to spend time with her grandparents because Pam wouldn't go. Pam would rather spend her time working at McDonald's and accuses Kusum of wishing that she, Pam, had died on the plane instead of her sister. After the attack, Pam sets out for California but ends up in Vancouver, where she works in a department store. - Character: Vikram Bhave. Description: Vikram Bhave was Shaila's husband, who was killed in the plane bombing. Shaila Bhave and Kusum talk about how they both wish they had spoken more openly to their husbands before the men were killed in the terrorist attack. When overlooking the bay in Ireland where the plane crashed, Shaila puts a poem that she wrote into the water, expressing to Vikram how she feels. Vikram appears to Shaila in visions, encouraging her to continue with the journey that they began together. - Character: Vinod Bhave. Description: Vinod Bhave was Shaila Bhave's older son, who was killed in the terror attack. He was about to turn 14 years old when he was killed. Shaila tells Dr. Ranganathan that Vinod was a strong swimmer who looked out for his younger brother, Mithun Bhave. The two brothers were very close. Shaila brings Vinod's pocket calculator to Ireland and lets it float away in the water. - Theme: Managing Versus Experiencing Grief. Description: The central conflict of "The Management of Grief" is between those directly experiencing grief (represented by the protagonist Shaila Bhave) and those who know about grief secondhand (represented by Judith Templeton, a Canadian government official who manages the government benefits for the family members of those killed in the plane bombing at the story's center). Judith reads textbooks on "grief management" and insists that there are proper steps—"rejection, depression, acceptance, reconstruction"—to manage grief. But Shaila, who lost her husband and two sons in the bombing, experiences grief as something much more mysterious and overwhelming. Sometimes Shaila's grief threatens to tear her apart, while at other times she has visions of her absent loved ones, who comfort her in her pain and ultimately bless her to continue the adventure they began together. In that sense, the story presents grief as something more like an uncontrollable storm, something that must be experienced, not controlled or managed. Shaila struggles to explain these more potent, unpredictable aspects of grief to Judith, and she eventually stops helping Judith communicate with the other families affected by the plane bombing because she's so frustrated that Judith can't understand. In that rejection of Judith—and in the peace that Shaila finally finds—the story suggests that Judith's approach to "managing" a supposedly predictable kind of grief is ineffective. Instead, as Shaila demonstrates, processing grief requires fully experiencing it without knowing where it might lead. - Theme: Bureaucracy. Description: Judith Templeton's approach to grief exemplifies a kind of bureaucratic coldness that the story condemns. At the beginning of the story, Judith—a white Canadian woman—enlists Shaila to help her navigate "the complications of culture, language, and customs" that she faces when she meets with grieving families who immigrated from India. Judith seems, on the one hand, aware of her own shortcomings—and, by extension, those of the Canadian government—when communicating with families affected by the tragedy. But she also views cultures, languages, and customs different than her own first and foremost as complications that can be bureaucratically solved. That perspective, and its deleterious effects, become clear when Shaila accompanies Judith to meet with a Sikh couple who lost their sons in the plane bombing. Judith aims to persuade the couple, with Shaila's assistance, to sign papers that will ensure they receive benefits from the Canadian government. The couple insists, though, that God will provide for them, not the government, and that their sons, who were killed in the attack, will help them when they return. After Judith and Shaila leave without getting the couple to sign the papers, Judith says to Shaila, "You see what I'm up against? … Their stubbornness and ignorance is driving me crazy." Shaila thinks of pointing out the shortsightedness of Judith's approach by telling her, "In our culture, it is a parent's duty to hope." She refrains from doing so, though, because it has become futile to try to effectively communicate with Judith. Judith has become rigidly attached to a bureaucratic mode of understanding the world, which organizes grief into predictable stages and sees people grieving the death of their sons as obstacles to be overcome and complications to be untangled, not human beings to be understood. - Theme: Secular vs. Spiritual. Description: The story presents two divergent approaches to grieving loved ones lost in the plane bombing: a secular approach (represented by calmness in the face of grief) and a spiritual one, in which families find peace. Judith, a representative of the secular world of the Canadian government, first identifies Shaila as a potential community intermediary because she admires that Shaila reacted to the tragedy with extraordinary calmness. But Shaila views this calmness as somewhat unnatural and unnerving—it's "not peace, just a deadening quiet," she reflects, and she calls her reaction a "terrible calm that will not go away." Shaila apparently seeks a deeper kind of peace than the superficial calmness brought on by shock and Valium—a spiritual solace that she's initially not able to access. The three main characters who lost members of their families in the attack—Shaila, Kusum, and Dr. Ranganathan—each seek communion with a spiritual realm to move through their grief. Shaila is both comforted and thrilled by visions of her family, and, ultimately, a vision of her family guides her to continue bravely down the path they all began together when they moved to Canada. Kusum explicitly seeks spiritual peace by moving, at her swami's suggestion, to an ashram in India where she also experiences visions of her lost family members. And even Dr. Ranganathan, a paragon of reason and pragmatism, turns his house into "a temple," the master bedroom "a shrine," while he sleeps on a cot and becomes "a devotee" to the family he lost. While Judith's list of grief management steps doesn't include any of these approaches, the story presents them as necessary for Shaila, Kusum, and Dr. Ranganathan to try to find peace. In this way, the story juxtaposes a mysterious spiritual peace with the false calmness offered by valium and prized by characters like Judith Templeton. - Theme: Hope, Duty, and Despair. Description: The phrase "a parent's duty is to hope" comes up multiple times throughout the story. Dr. Ranganathan first says it when he suggests that Shaila's sons, and others on the plane, may have been able to swim to safety. "It's a parent's duty to hope," he says, and Shaila is flooded with relief. She later says that she packed the suitcase she brought to Ireland, where she has gone to identify the bodies of her husband and sons, "with dry clothes for [her] boys." That action—bringing dry clothes for her sons, even though all evidence suggests they have already died—conveys not just the love Shaila has for her lost family members, but also a kind of hope that tethers her to her lost family members and keeps them alive to her when their fates remain unknown.  That same phrase—"a parent's duty is to hope"—comes up again when Judith and Shaila visit the Sikh couple to try to persuade them to sign papers so they will receive government benefits. Judith thinks that signing the papers is important for the couple because it will help them afford food and pay utility bills. But she also sees signing the papers as a kind of emotional imperative for the couple because signing will, in her view, enable them to accept the death of their sons and begin "reconstructing" their lives. When the couple decides not to sign the papers, Shaila wants to explain their refusal by telling Judith, "In our culture, a parent's duty is to hope," meaning that it is not right to ask this couple to abandon hope that their sons will return alive. Abandoning that hope would mean, for them, to abandon a central duty of being a good parent. By repeating the phrase "a parent's duty is to hope throughout the story," and by having that idea play a central role in Shaila's decision to leave Judith, the story suggests that hope not only buoys people in crisis, helping them remain above the surface of despair, but that it also enables people in grief to stay meaningfully connected to their loved ones, even when all obvious or tangible reasons for hope have been exhausted. In this way, attempting to sever that connection, or argue against that hope, is grievously misguided. - Theme: Navigating Cultural Difference. Description: When Judith initially asks for Shaila's assistance, Shaila responds by saying that she won't be able to help and that "we must all grieve in our own way." Each person's "own way" to grieve depends, the story suggests, on both their culture and their own personal, lived experience. For example, the Sikh couple maintains hope that their sons will return. Dr. Ranganathan finds refuge first in a kind of optimistic pragmatism and then by physically distancing himself from emotional tragedy by moving to Texas, where no one will know his story. Kusum moves to an ashram in Hardwar to pursue spiritual peace. Shaila seeks direction and wisdom in visions of her loved ones. By portraying the complexities of how grief is understood across different cultures, and the nuances of how people from the same culture perceive the same issues very differently, the story serves as a testament against the one-size-fits-all mentality advocated by Judith and the Canadian government. Instead, the story maintains the importance of trying to understand people as both influenced by their culture and their personal experiences, as an individual who must be taken on their own terms if someone wants to begin to understand them or enter into meaningful communication with them. - Climax: Shaila tells Judith to pull over the car and then leaves, slamming the door without further explanation. - Summary: After a tragic plane crash just off the coast of Ireland, members of Shaila Bhave's community gather in her house in Toronto. Shaila's husband and two sons were killed in the crash, as were the husband and youngest daughter of Shaila's friend and neighbor, Kusum. The majority of the people on board the plane were of Indian descent. At first, no one knows who or what to blame for the crash, but they eventually find out that Sikh terrorists planted and detonated a bomb. Shaila is in shock and uses Valium prescribed by a doctor to assuage her emotions. Judith Templeton, a well-meaning but culturally incompetent Canadian social worker, asks Shaila to help communicate with relatives of those killed by the attack. Judith explains that she has been unsuccessful in communicating with some relatives and thinks Shaila will be an asset because of her calmness and strength. Shaila views her own calmness with suspicion and says others will view her similarly. She tells Judith that everyone must grieve in their own way, but she also tells Judith that she will call her when she returns to Ireland. Shaila—along with other relatives of those killed in the attack, including Dr. Ranganathan and Kusum—travel to Ireland to identify the bodies of their loved ones. Kusum identifies her husband and daughter quickly and then travels to India to prepare their funerals. Shaila feels buoyed by hope and optimism after Dr. Ranganathan, a renowned electrical engineer who lost his entire family in the attack, tells her that a strong swimmer might have been able to survive the crash and swim to shore. She leaves Ireland for India without having identified her husband and sons. In India, Shaila stays with her parents for a few months and then travels throughout the country. Six months into her travels, she sees a vision of her husband in a temple in a small Himalayan village. In the vision, her husband, Vikram Bhave, tells her she must "finish alone what we started together." Shaila returns to Canada, while Kusum sells her house to move to an ashram in the Indian city of Haridwar (referred to in the story as Hardwar) to pursue inner peace. Dr. Ranganathan turns his house into a shrine to the family he lost before eventually selling that house and moving to Texas, where no one will know his story. When Shaila returns to Toronto, Judith Templeton asks her to help reach out to relatives of the attack with whom she has had trouble communicating. Together, they visit an elderly couple. Judith wants Shaila to help get the couple to sign a paper that will ensure they receive benefits from the Canadian government. The couple is reluctant to sign the paper, convinced that it would mean giving up hope that they would see their sons again, and Judith and Shaila leave without convincing them to sign. As they travel to their next appointment, Judith complains about the person they're about to meet. Shaila, unable to bear Judith's complaining, asks to stop the car and then leaves without explaining to Judith why. Shaila sells her house and moves to an apartment in downtown Toronto. On a rare sunny day in winter, she walks in a park and sees a vision of her family for the last time. In the vision, her family tells her that her "time has come" and to "go, be brave."

- Genre: Short story, Modernist Fiction - Title: The Mark on the Wall - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Setting:  A living room - Character: The Narrator. Description: The only substantial character in this story is the narrator; everything that occurs is filtered heavily through her thoughts and stream of consciousness reflections. Though never named, the story heavily implies that the narrator is a woman sitting in her living room with someone, likely her husband. She is well-educated, thoughtful, and very introspective, although she also self-describes as a neglectful housekeeper. These descriptions of her housekeeping and ambivalent need to take the London metro (the "Tube") suggests that the narrator is someone who comes from an affluent household, but no longer has access to or the desire for such extravagant resources. She may be a writer, and she is critical of religion, masculine authority, warfare, and modern civilization. - Character: Someone. Description: The person who interrupts the narrator is implied to be her husband (though a gender is never noted), given that the two are sitting alone in their living room smoking cigarettes after tea. He announces his intention to purchase a newspaper and complains about the snail on the wall—abruptly interrupting the narrator's introspection and ending her musings on what the mark could be. He receives no other descriptive identification in the story, but the belated acknowledgement of his presence is significant as it marks the vast distances thoughts can travel from the reality one is present in; the narrator seems entirely alone and in her own world until this voice breaks through her reverie, reminding her—and the reader—that she has in fact been sitting next to another person all along. - Theme: Nature and Civilization. Description: In the final moments of Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall," the unnamed narrator discovers that the black speck on the wall of her home—a mark that has prompted her musings about everything from war to the meaning of life—is just a snail. This mundane realization at the end of such deep introspection reflects the tension between nature (represented by the snail) and civilization. Nature, in Woolf's rendering, is indifferent to the whims of humankind—which is why the consideration of the mark on the wall—that is, an intrusion of nature into the home—repeatedly interrupts the narrator's philosophizing, grounding her before she spirals into existential dread about "accidental affair this living is after all our civilization." Writing during the rapidly changing technological and political landscape of the early twentieth century, Woolf ultimately presents the natural world as a potential antidote to the anxiety and ills caused by rapid, impersonal societal development. Though human beings would like to think of civilization as evidence of their dominion over the world, Woolf instead associates society with anxiety, isolation, and disorientation. Woolf specifically links the modern condition to technology such as the Tube (the London metro) and the post office in order to reflect the "ignorance of humanity": "if one wants to compare life to anything," she notes, "one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! […] Tumbling head over heels […] like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!" Woolf clearly feels a disconnect between highly-ordered civilization and the cold randomness of existence, asserting that her technological metaphor "seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard…." Woolf further rejects that material possessions could protect one from this chaotic loss, presenting even civilization's most prized objects as ultimately nothing more that fodder for rats to "nibble": "let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime […] the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates […] all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips." In aiming to "show how very little control of our possessions we have," Woolf denies humanity's hubristic belief that civilization has achieved mastery over the world. Natural imagery, however, frequently interrupts these negative reflections on civilization. After being drawn into a spiral of thoughts on the rapidity of life and its "perpetual waste and repair," the narrator moves into thoughts of the "after life" which center on the "slow pulling down" of green stalks of grass and an inevitable return to an indistinct world characterized by "spaces of light and darkness." When a tree taps against the window, the narrator thinks about her desire to think "quietly, calmly, spaciously" and never be interrupted; she considers thoughts about society to be interruptions, it seems, while perceptions of the natural world provide welcome relief. As the narrator fixes her gaze on the mark on the wall, she expresses a longing for certainty, solidity, and "proof of some existence other than ours." She then thinks about wood, trees, and all of the flora and fauna that live slow lives around human beings. She repeatedly expresses pleasure and happiness about thinking about the different slow, natural sensations produced by trees, until "something gets in the way" and she is pulled back through a "vast upheaval" into the room—that is, into the domestic human world.  Ultimately, the natural world lends itself to perception and reflection in ways that modern civilization does not. The narrator does not embrace an unambiguous preference for nature over civilization, however—in effect, reflections on the slower-paced and more "certain" realities of natural world can provide mental relief from the ricocheting onslaught of uncertainties in industrialized spaces. - Theme: War. Description: Woolf wrote and published "The Mark on the Wall" while World War I was sweeping across Europe. The war had a drastic impact on life in London—Germany began strategically bombing the city in 1915, and Woolf writes extensively in her diaries and other stories about the unprecedented architectural and social destruction caused by the fighting. The narrator of this story attempts to have a normal day "smoking a cigarette" after tea, but allusions to the war repeatedly interrupt her thoughts. The persistence of these interruptions on an otherwise peaceful day indicates the difficulties of leading a normal civilian life during wartime. The narrator displays a distinctly negative stance on the war but ultimately cannot escape its effects. There is a clear dissonance between the domesticity of the narrator's day and the unrest in her thoughts—despite her peaceful activities, she cannot keep her mind off the war. The story starts with the narrator sitting in her living room in winter, for instance; prompted by the sight of burning coals, the narrator jumps to the militaristic image of a "crimson flag" and a "cavalcade of red knights." This fancy is interrupted to her relief by "the sight of the mark." These thoughts link clearly to the war, revealing how deeply it has entered even into the homes of London residents. She goes on to think about how future novelists will describe the modern world and accuses herself of making "generalizations" that she calls "very worthless." She dismissively links the word "generalizations" with the military notion of general, noting, "The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers …" In her final mental monologue on the life of a tree, the narrator again uses several military metaphors and similes. She thinks about fish in streams "like flags blown out" and considers the tree with "nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon." Even the narrator's "pleasant" thoughts show a preoccupation with the war. Thinking about the war, in turn, makes the narrator feel out of control—and she deliberately tries to distance herself from such "disagreeable thoughts" by looking at the mark on her wall. She further notes that when she "must shatter this hour of peace" she should "think of the mark on the wall." This links the practice of thinking about the mark directly to distraction from unpleasant thoughts in general, which are militaristically intruding on her "hour of peace." Although she also criticizes this form of distraction, she is forced to play along to find a sense of calm after "waking from a midnight dream of horror." She describes focusing on the mark as taking action to avoid painful or exciting thoughts, even as she expresses contempt for choosing distraction over reflection. Notably, one of the narrator's primary preoccupations centers on Whitaker's Table of Precedency, which is a list of the hierarchy of officials in England such as the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Lord High Chancellor. These individuals control large social decisions, including the decision to go to war, which normal civilians take no part in. In theory these facts of hierarchy could "comfort […] instead of enraging" the narrator—in the sense that they assert someone, somewhere is handling things; however, she fixes her eyes on the mark on the wall to dismiss the Archbishops and Lord High Chancellor to "the shadows of shades." It seems she has little faith in those in charge, and this moment drives home her resentment for the war at large.  The final proof that the narrator uses the mark on the wall to distract her from the war occurs at the end of the story. Her partner says, "Curse this war; God damn this war!" and then complains about the snail on the wall, but all the narrator thinks in the final line is "Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail." She would still rather think about the mark than the war, because those thoughts are useless and "no good." In the end, "The Mark on the Wall" portrays some of the civilian costs of war. Rather than focusing on the larger economic and political costs and benefits, however, Woolf examines the impact of wartime on an everyday civilian couple. Because wartime decisions were made by officials higher up on Whitaker's Table of Precedency, there was nothing civilians could do to cope with the war besides try to take their minds off of it. Focusing on the solid natural world worked to a certain extent, but the story suggests that there was ultimately no way to entirely escape the effects of the war. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: The UK saw the birth of social movements around women's rights during the Victorian Period, but many major victories occurred during or after Woolf's lifetime. The first law on women's suffrage, for instance, was passed in the UK in 1918, one year after "The Mark on the Wall" was originally published. Virginia Woolf wrote most of her fictional work about female protagonists and often addressed the inequalities between men and women—for example, UK universities like Oxford and Cambridge only began admitting women later in Woolf's life and she regretted never having access to the formal education her husband and other friends in the Bloomsbury group had. Although the gender of the narrator of this story is never explicitly specified, the text strongly suggests she is a woman sitting in her living room with her partner. She reflects on different social expectations on men and women and addresses the male role particularly critically. However, she blames society rather than individual men and women for the problems with gender roles. The narrator reflects on developments in human history, discrediting the alleged superiority of masculine authority that has shaped so much of that history. The narrator specifically dismisses "learned men" as "the descendants of witches and hermits who "crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars." By linking such men to a history of superstition, the narrator implicitly devalues the authority of those who control society. The narrator further compares belief in the wisdom of ruling men to a form of superstition itself. Thus, "the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle"—that is, the less people put unquestioning faith in fallible masculine authority—"one could imagine a very pleasant world […] without professors or specialists or housekeepers with the profiles of policemen." Yet even as the narrator devalues male authority, she questions the ability to truly overthrow it: "This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy […] for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency?" She further notes that old traditions like "Sunday luncheons" (a reference to Sunday mass and religion) have been displaced without "damnation." In their place stands "the masculine point of view" which governs lives, sets standards, and "establishes Whitaker's Table of Precedency." Although she does not regret the loss of old traditions, she also does not celebrate the "masculine" standards that have replaced them. The narrator claims that the war has caused Whitaker's Table of Precedency to become "half a phantom to many men and women" and hopes it "will be laughed into the dustbin where phantoms go." She believes it would leave behind "an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom." The narrator's hopes are clearly linked to the rejection of masculine standards. Because she has seen progress in her own lifetime, she comes to a partially optimistic conclusion about the future that is seemingly at odds with her own assertion that such endeavors toward equality are a "mere waste of energy." Furthermore, the narrator thinks about the impact of gender roles on her own life and shows the ways that these expectations do not match her reality. She notices the dust left on the mantlepiece by her "not being a very vigilant housekeeper." Given for her desire for a world without housekeepers, this indicates that she does not wish she were a better housekeeper but rather feels trapped by the expectation that she be one in the first place. When she pictures a more beautiful "after life," she claims that "saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things" will be impossible. This means that a utopian vision in the mind of the narrator involves the eradication of the differences between the sexes. She also names the image of "men and women [sitting] after tea, smoking cigarettes" as a peaceful and happy one. And as this is what she is currently doing, the more pleasant world she pictures is clearly within reach for individuals. Unequal standards and the tendencies of "men of action" upset the narrator, but she leaves the possibility for pleasant thoughts of men and women living in harmony. Although the narrator chafes at the gender roles that have been ascribed to her, she does not make sweeping biological generalizations—that is, she does not argue that men and women are inherently different. Rather, she reflects on the way that social expectations influence people of either gender and constrict their lives. Woolf portrays a strongly egalitarian view on the relationship between men and women, indicating that both are capable of reason and goodness. A better world would emerge with the relaxation of these strict social norms—and positive relationships between men and women were already possible between individuals. - Theme: Self and the Other. Description: Although the story's narrative occurs solely in the mind of its narrator, her thoughts turn consistently towards those of other individuals and the possibility of knowing their minds. She reflects with interest on the impossibility of following another's life, yet her mind circles back to figures as diverse as the former tenants of her house, the people she sees outside a train window, and Shakespeare. These mental forays reveal some hope of encounter between others' minds, or perhaps merely a pleasant fascination with others' internal lives. However, the sudden reveal at the story's close that the narrator has not been alone in the room retrospectively colors these musings. In the end, Woolf leaves it ambiguous as to whether people can truly understand each other at all when the narrator's partner anticlimactically reveals the identity of the mark on which she has spent so long dwelling. The narrator enjoys considering the lives of others, and also cites distance between people as a source of deep concern and anxiety. In her first guess about the identity of the mark on her wall, she wonders if it belongs to the house's former tenants and says she thinks of them often because "one will never see them again" and "never know what happened." She goes on to consider how others think about her and concludes that humans like to construct romantic images of themselves. The narrator wonders what happens when that romantic image disappears and all that remains is "that shell of a person which is seen by other people." She says this leads to an "airless, shallow" world that is "not to be lived in." This would suggest that people can never truly know each other, leading to a world in which people see only the hollow shells of those around them. Despite her cynicism about the way others see her, the narrator also displays ambivalence about self-image. She talks about "dressing up the figure of herself" in her mind "stealthily." She finds it curious that "one protects the image of oneself from idolatry." This language of "dressing up" and "idolatry" indicates that the process of protecting a positive self-image from the criticisms of others is itself an illusion. Despite the deeply introspective and solitary reflections of the narrator, at the close of the story it turns out she is not alone—someone, presumably a man, interrupts her reflections. This leads to two possible conclusions. In the first instance, this moment confirms the narrator's worst cynicisms. Attempts at contact between different people's competing mental lives will lead to disappointment as they do in the conclusion of this story. To evidence this, the man's interruption "gets in the way" and causes "a vast upheaval" where "everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing." These emotions are chaotic and a shocking contrast to the calm tone of the narrator's previous reflections, which make them appear all the more unwelcome. He then curses the war and then says, "all the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on the wall." Given that the narrator has spent the entire story guessing the identity of the mark, even saying she might not want to know, this reveal is very anticlimactic and proves that none of her thoughts have been apparent to her companion. In a second, more positive interpretation, the presence of this other person proves the narrator is not as alone as she thought she was. Furthermore, if the narrator's mind is this vibrant and lively, then perhaps the minds of others are too. Only society leads one to see other people as "shells" with "glassy eyes." And though the man might have a different perspective on the mark on the wall, he and the narrator share a negative view on the war—suggesting a certain meeting of their minds. What's more, the "pleasant thoughts" that the man interrupts with such upheaval include the image of "rooms where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes." The narrator has already admitted to smoking in the first paragraphs, indicating that this happy image could refer to her and the man in question. Furthermore, when she imagines that she wants a life without interruption, she chooses to picture Shakespeare, "a man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire" much like the narrator herself. However, she soon calls this "dull" and a "historical fiction" which doesn't interest her at all—suggesting an ambivalence towards her stated desire for a solitary, uninterrupted life and perhaps, an appreciation for the intrusions of her companion. The narrator displays a paradoxical desire for solitude and connection which concludes rather ambiguously. Although she likes to imagine the lives of others and criticizes the elements of society that isolate people, she also has a romantic image of herself that she feels that others cannot see. A cynical worldview might be confirmed when she is flippantly interrupted at the end of the story, but this remains open to interpretation. The narrator indicates that encounters with others lead to a "shallow" world and the shattering of one's self-image, but that self-image is merely "romantic." The very fact of her preoccupation of others proves how necessary they are to her, even if this appears to contradict her desire for solitude, pleasant thoughts, and a life "without interruption." - Theme: Time and Memory. Description: The narrator fixates on the passage of time and discusses the objects and habits that disappear as time passes. Fragments of the past remain both in the form of memories and objects, like shards of pottery, but time still ultimately emerges victorious in its destructive force. Though people try to hold onto the past, the story suggests, life remains a "scraping paring affair" that is indifferent to individual desires. However, some of the changes that come with the passage of time are positive and even exhilarating. People should focus less on controlling and understanding the past, the story suggests, and instead focus on reality and "the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours." Although the narrator posits that considering concrete possessions allows a return to the past, that return is ultimately limited by the sheer volume of things—physical or otherwise—lost over time. At the start of the story, the narrator claims that to "fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw." She considers "the fire," "the steady film of yellow light on the page of [her] book," and the chrysanthemums "in the round glass bowl on the mantlepiece," grounding her setting in concrete images her of surroundings. This indicates that the story that follows occurred in the past, and that the narrator's stream of consciousness is also a form of memory. Even though she has grounded her story in the memory of these specific objects, her subsequent memories of objects and possessions leads her to think about their loss and the "haphazard" nature of life. She names "three blue canisters of book-binding tools" as well as "bird cages, iron hoops, the steel skates" and other items lost over the years. Although one might anchor one's memories in certain objects, then, the objects themselves will inevitably disappear with the passage of time. Inspired by the dust on her mantlepiece, she considers "the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation." The process of loss that she experienced on a personal level extends to the scale of grand civilizations like Troy; no matter how developed a society, in the end only fragments remain—fragments that only tell part of the story. She later reflects on the antiquaries—individuals who study or collect antiquities. She claims they were often retired Colonels who spent their spare time visiting sites like the "barrows on the South Downs" to try to determine whether they were tombs or camps. They might find evidence like "a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery" to support their conclusions, but the narrator dismisses this as "proving I don't know what." She concludes that "nothing is proved, nothing is known." This supports her belief that fragmentary objects cannot in themselves contain or communicate a full history. Much as Woolf laments the knowledge that time will inevitably erase her own life, she finds a distinct sense of freedom in the knowledge that everything is fleeting. The trivial, unpleasant parts of life will also disappear. For example, the narrator reflects on the Sundays she used to spend in London, which were full of "afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons" as well as "the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it." There were rules for everything, even tablecloths: "tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths." The narrator's distaste for these past Sunday afternoons provides an example of time passing in a positive way. Those habitual Sundays with her family eventually ceased, and the narrator describes "how shocking, and yet how wonderful it was" that "these real things […] were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms." Reality is not always pleasant, especially when defined by restrictive traditions, yet even the habits that constrict one's life will disappear over time, like "mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth" and leave "a sense of illegitimate freedom" in their stead. While these changes also entail some form of loss, the narrator portrays them as also positive and liberating. The narrator ultimately takes a cynical view on the prospects of historical reconstruction—that is, trying to determine what happened in the past using the fragments left in the future. However, she does not conclude that change is always bad. Instead, she mourns that all that one acquires and produces in one's life will disappear and be destroyed, while acknowledging that this unceasing march forwards can also be linked to freedom and a sense of progress. - Climax: A voice interrupts the narrator's introspection - Summary: A first-person narrator sits in her living room smoking a cigarette on a January day after tea and looks into the fire. The sight of the fire draws her into reflections on the similarity between the coals and a cavalcade of knights. Seeking distraction from these thoughts, she catches sight of a black mark on the wall several inches above the mantelpiece. The narrator cannot immediately identify the mark, which provokes a sequence of reflections on its possible identity. She wonders if it might be a nail, a hole, a leaf, or something protruding from the wall. In between her various suspicions about the mark, she follows the flow of her consciousness on the topics of knowledge, the passage of time, subjectivity, and nature. She reflects deeply on the fleeting nature of life in modern civilization, as well as her identity as a woman and the impact of gender roles on contemporary society. Throughout the story, her thoughts circle around the ongoing war. The mark on the wall helps to ground her whenever her thoughts become too unpleasant. Ultimately, a voice interrupts her reflections, revealing for the first time that she was not alone in the room. The voice states the desire to purchase a newspaper, remarks with distaste towards the ongoing war, and disparages the presence of a snail on their wall. The story closes with the narrator repeating to herself the realization that the mark had been a snail all along, disregarding the comments about the war.

- Genre: Speculative Fiction / Science Fiction - Title: The Martian - Point of view: Much of the novel is told from Mark Watney's point of view; these passages take the form of Watney's log entries during the Mars mission. Weir alternates between the log entries and passages narrated from third-person omniscient and third-person limited perspectives. - Setting: - Character: Mark Watney. Description: Watney is The Martian's protagonist, and he narrates large sections of the novel. A NASA astronaut on the Ares 3 mission, Watney is accidentally left behind on Mars by the rest of the crew and must find a way to survive on the planet alone. As the mission's botanist and engineer, Watney is the lowest-ranked member of the crew, but his botany and engineering background give him the skills he needs to survive on Mars. Watney avoids writing about his emotions—instead, he cracks jokes. Over the course of the novel, he mentions a few things about his childhood and his family (for example, he grew up in Chicago and he considers Martinez to be his best friend), but for the most part, Watney avoids writing about his emotions. Instead, he cracks jokes and keeps himself occupied with work and the media files his crewmates left behind on Mars. - Character: Commander Melissa Lewis. Description: As commander of the Ares 3 mission, Lewis takes her responsibility to protect her crew extremely seriously. She is also the crew's geologist. She was previously in the navy and is still considered military personnel. Lewis and her husband Robert collect 1970s memorabilia together, and (much to Watney's chagrin) Lewis brought an extensive collection of files containing disco music and 1970s TV with her into space. - Character: Major Rick Martinez. Description: A former Air Force pilot, Martinez is still military personnel but is now the pilot for the Ares 3 mission. His precision as a pilot is noted repeatedly by Watney and other characters throughout the novel. Martinez and his wife Marissa have a young son, David. Late in the novel, the usually-stoic Watney describes Martinez as his best friend. - Character: Beth Johanssen. Description: A "computer geek" and career software engineer, Johanssen's coding skills enable the Hermes crew to override NASA controls and perform the Rich Purnell Maneuver without authorization. She likes the Beatles and Agatha Christie novels. Blonde, petite, and conventionally beautiful, Johanssen's good looks have made her a poster-girl for the Ares missions, earning her many admirers on Earth. Over the course of the mission, she and Beck fall in love. - Character: Teddy Sanders. Description: As NASA Administrator, Teddy has the final word on all decisions at NASA. He knows that the public sees him as accountable for both NASA's successes and failures, and he takes this responsibility seriously. Even more so than other top managers, Teddy tends to be unwilling to take risks that might damage NASA's reputation. - Character: Mindy Park. Description: A low-level employee who processes Satellite images at NASA Satellite Control (Sat Con), Mindy is the first person on Earth to realize that Watney is still alive. She quickly becomes involved in conversations with upper-level NASA officials on how to track Watney's progress, make contact with him, and eventually rescue him. - Character: Annie Montrose. Description: As Director of Media Relations at NASA, Annie is responsible for keeping the public and the media informed on developments with Watney and the Ares 3 mission. Part of her job is to "spin" stories in a way that creates a positive public image of NASA. One of the few women in NASA's upper levels, Annie's candid, tough persona seems to have helped her break into the "boys club" of NASA administration. - Character: Mitch Henderson. Description: As Flight Director for Ares 3, Mitch has strong opinions about how to communicate with the Ares 3 crew. He clashes with Teddy over the decision not to tell the crew that Watney is still alive, and he strongly advocates the risky Ralph Purnell Maneuver. He is likely responsible for leaking the plans for the Ralph Purnell Maneuver to the Ares 3 crew, which resulted in the Hermes mutiny. Though at times abrasive, Mitch's stubbornness and rogue willingness to take risks ultimately proves to be an asset. - Character: Dr. Irene Shields. Description: As flight psyschologist for the Ares missions, Shields knows Watney and the other Ares 3 crew members relatively well. She appears several times on the Mark Watney Report to discuss the psychological impact of space travel and isolation. Late in the novel, Shields asks Watney to write letters to his crewmates in order to maintain his connection to life on earth. - Character: Watney's mother. Description: Watney doesn't reveal much about his mother, except that, when he complained about shoveling snow as a kid, she told him not to be a "wuss." When she writes a letter to him after he regains contact with NASA, he reads it over and over again. She lives in Chicago with Watney's father. - Theme: Science, Human Ingenuity, and the Fight to Survive. Description: In the closing pages of The Martian, Watney declares that, to the public, his story of survival represents "progress, science, and the interplanetary future." This is true: The Martian is indeed a story of scientific progress on a grand scale. However, Wier's detailed descriptions of how Watney uses basic chemistry, biology, math, botany, and engineering to survive on Mars makes it clear that science is only as powerful as the logic, creative thinking, human ingenuity, and determination of the people who wield scientific knowledge. If The Martian were simply a story of "progress" and "science," then it would probably be a pretty boring story. But the novel makes clear again and again that, though Watney's scientific background in botany gives him a critical base of knowledge from which to work, his ability to survive rests more on his ability to plan ahead, to creatively develop solutions to the issues he encounters, to tolerate risk, and his determination to do everything he can to stay alive. Without realizing that he could grow the potatoes, and without conceiving and executing a plan to retrieve the Pathfinder radio, for example, Watney's survival and rescue would have been impossible. Similarly, the Purnell Maneuver that results in Watney's rescue is not just a matter of science, but one of ingenuity and creativity. If it were just a matter of science, then anyone could have come up with it. In order to develop a solution for Watney's rescue, though, NASA needed a creative thinker like Ralph Purnell, an outsider who wasn't assigned to work on the problem but who was determined to tackle it anyway. Time and again, the novel makes clear that, while the public might see the "interplanetary future" as the inevitable result of scientific progress and the curiosity of the human spirit, this progress, in fact, requires a messy and risky marriage of science, curiosity, ingenuity, and adventure. - Theme: Bureaucracy vs. Human Endeavour. Description: Throughout The Martian, Watney and other characters complain about the limitations that bureaucratic oversight places on their work. The novel shows that NASA's many safety checks, official protocols, and layers of supervision are designed to protect scientists and astronauts, but they can also result in inefficiency. More troublingly, NASA's bureaucrats are often willing to sacrifice one individual's autonomy in the name of protecting the organization itself. The novel shows this dynamic in part through Watney's interaction with NASA. In the early chapters of The Martian, Watney is presumed dead by NASA and the Hermes crew, and Watney has no way to contact them. During this period, Watney finds a way to manufacture water, creates a new food source by cultivating potatoes, modifies the rover for multi-day trips, and eventually obtains the radio from Pathfinder. The techniques Watney uses to create water are undeniably risky, but the risks he takes pay off, giving him a way to survive on Mars, and, ultimately, a way to return to Earth. Once Watney uses Pathfinder's radio to contact NASA, however, he suddenly has supervisors. NASA discourages Watney from doing anything dangerous—ironically, the discouraged activities involve just the kind of risk-taking that has enabled Watney to survive on Mars and acquire the radio in the first place. NASA tends to micro-manage Watney in ways that limit his progress. For example, though Watney feels that he can safely do 10-hour EVAs, NASA insists that he stick to the standard 8-hour EVA normally recommended on Ares missions—a regulation that seriously shortens Watney's work days. In his log entries, Watney frequently expresses frustration with NASA's rules and regulations; nonetheless, he mostly follows them. The interaction between bureaucratic cautiousness and the more "humanistic" issues of loyalty, morality, and basic human care play out in more complicated ways between NASA and the crew of Hermes, which allows the novel to explore the sorts of moral quandaries that arise when bureaucracies, and the individuals within those bureaucracies, are in crisis situations. An example of this dynamic comes when NASA discovers that Watney is still alive, and Mitch, Venkat and Teddy spar over whether notifying the crew of Hermes will boost or hurt morale. It's possible that the knowledge that the Hermes crew abandoned Watney alive would be so emotionally painful that it would become a dangerous distraction for them, impairing their ability to get home safely. NASA's leaders pragmatically weigh the value of protecting the crew's safety against the moral value of giving them the information that they would desperately want to know. Another example of the morally complex interaction of bureaucracy and humanity is in NASA's decision not to carry out the Purnell Maneuver because it risks six lives in order to save only one. Mitch feels strongly that NASA should let the crew decide whether to risk their lives to save Watney. However, Teddy, as leader of the NASA bureaucracy (who has a responsibility to all of the people in NASA and for the reputation of NASA itself) feels compelled to make the safe choice, one that won't result in more lives lost or destroy NASA's reputation if it goes wrong. In making this decision, though, he is also purposely choosing to not allow the crew their full autonomy. Mitch's decision to break rank and leak the details of the Purnell Maneuver to the crew is one of the most complex choices in the book: first, it will likely mean the loss of his job; second, and more personally, it makes him somewhat responsible if the crew decides to go through with the maneuver and disaster happens. At the same time, though, Mitch's decision can be described as deeply moral, in that it allows the crew to make their own choices with full information about the possible risks and rewards. Though the reader understands why Teddy was unprepared to risk six lives in order to save one, the novel is also clear about presenting Mitch and the Hermes crew as having made the right decision in carrying out the Purnell Maneuver. It's a choice that exhibits loyalty and bravery, and it is also a moral choice in that it is a choice made by human beings directly facing risk with full knowledge of the complexity and danger involved. The novel suggests that this type of voluntary risk-taking and free decision-making is necessary if humans are to follow through on their natural desire to learn and explore. - Theme: Solitude and the Human Need for Connection. Description: Watney is utterly alone on Mars, and for long sections of the book, he is unable to contact NASA. While the work of surviving in this new environment initially keeps him occupied, his days and nights soon become repetitive, boring, and empty. Though Watney rarely says so, many of his actions reveal his desire for human connection. The sections of The Martian told from Watney's perspective are written as log entries. Watney hopes that NASA and other people on earth will someday read his log—even if he dies on Mars before help reaches him or without anyone even realizing he was still alive, he hopes to leave a record that can be recovered by future astronauts. In this way, the structure of the novel itself reveals Watney's innate need to connect with other human beings. During his solitude, Watney goes through media files on his crewmates' laptops and zipdrives, reading Agatha Christie novels, watching 1970s sitcoms, and listening to Lewis's disco music. At first this may just seem like entertainment for Watney, but, in fact, by reading his crewmates' books, listening to their music, and watching their TV shows, Watney stays connected to them, even in their absence. This is made most clear in the way that Watney, after discovering Lewis's love of disco and 1970s pop culture, complaints about her taste in music as a sort of running in-joke between Watney and the imagined future readers of his log. Watney, through his complaints, creates a kind of imagined camaraderie, both with Lewis and with the future log reader: he creates connections for himself. On his Sirius 4 mission to reach Pathfinder, Watney reveals that he wants the radio not only to arrange his rescue, but also so that he can regain human connection. With the radio, he writes in the log, "I could be reconnected with mankind before I even die." In an interview with CNN, NASA psychologist Dr. Irene Shields makes a similar point: "When facing death, people want to be heard. They don't want to die alone. He might just want the MAV radio so he can talk to another soul before he dies." Wier uses these comments to show that, while Watney's actions are motivated primarily by his fight for survival, human connection is, like water, oxygen, or food, a key component of human life. After the failed launch of Iris 1, Dr. Shields asks Watney to write personal notes to the Ares 3 crewmembers; these messages appear sporadically throughout the second half of the novel, giving the reader insight into Watney's relationships with the rest of the crew. In his message to Martinez, Watney writes, "She says it'll keep me tethered to humanity. I think it's bullshit. But hey, it's an order." Watney's reluctance to admit that he does, in fact, need human contact may be a survival mechanism. In spite of his cavalier attitude about remaining "tethered to humanity," Watney occasionally admits to loneliness, and he does so with greater frequency as the possibility of rescue becomes more and more likely; this suggests that he denied his own loneliness as a defense against the fact that he feared he would be alone for the rest of his life. Just before his rescue, when Watney finally has direct contact with his Ares 3 crewmembers on Hermes, he writes, "I've really missed you guys." - Theme: The Betrayal of the Familiar. Description: Stuck alone on Mars for far longer than intended, Watney finds himself in an inhospitable environment where, unlike on Earth, his body is not designed to survive. Naturally, Watney comes to rely on technology to keep himself alive, such as the Hab, the rovers, and EVA suits. While this technology keeps him alive, its very strength conceals two dangers: First, the technologies' apparent reliability allows Watney to fall into a series of familiar routines that mask just how different, and dangerous, Mars is for him. Second, because the technology is so helpful, it is easy for Watney to underestimate how vulnerable the technology is to damage, and to forget just how dependent he is on this technology in order to survive. In fact, Watney faces many of the novel's greatest challenges when he fails to account for the differences between the Earth and the Martian environment, or when a seemingly minor mistake damages his equipment. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Watney's nearly disastrous attempt to make water by separating hydrogen gas out from hydrazine fuel. During the process, Watney inadvertently leaves enough hydrogen in the air to risk an explosion. While removing the hydrogen from the air, he nearly suffocates by inhaling too much nitrogen. He then pulls on an oxygen mask, but, when he exhales, he adds enough oxygen into the air to cause an explosion in the Hab. Breathing oxygen and exhaling a combination of oxygen and carbon dioxide is, on earth, the most natural thing in the world. Yet on Mars, in the Hab, oxygen is dangerous—the very things Watney needs to survive could kill him. - Theme: The Media. Description: Watney's apparent death, the discovery that he is alive, and the effort to rescue him are, for the duration of the novel, the biggest news story on Earth. People from around the world are caught up in the story of his against-all-odds survival, and CNN dedicates a new show, The Mark Watney Report, to keeping the public up-to-date on Watney's life on Mars. NASA is keenly aware of the news coverage and the public's emotional investment in the story. As events unfold, the news media put pressure on NASA to bring Watney home safely; in doing so, they hold NASA (a publicly-funded organization) accountable to the public. Throughout the novel, Annie Montrose, NASA's director of media relations, tries to balance her responsibility to keep the public informed of ongoing events and her duty to "spin" stories so that the public's confidence in NASA remains high. As NASA Administrator, Teddy Sanders is the public face of the organization in a different way from Annie; he is well aware that both the public and the US government see him as responsible for both NASA's successes and failures. What's more, he knows that, since NASA is a publicly funded government organization, public opinion plays a critical role in whether or not future NASA missions receive funding. The American public has to believe that Mars explorations are worthwhile, or else NASA will cease to operate. It's Teddy's job, then, to make sure that news coverage and the public's concern for Watney allow him to secure the emergency funding from Congress that the rescue mission needs. While the funding for the rescue mission is an instance in which NASA and the news media's interests align, their interests are more at odds when NASA's top managers meet to discuss potential rescue strategies for Watney. Instead of simply pursuing the strategy that would be best for Watney, Teddy sees it has his job to make choices that do not further endanger NASA's reputation. While he feels genuine concern for Watney, he also wants to make choices that avert any possible PR disaster, particularly because of the high-profile nature of the case. Teddy is unwilling, then, to risk the lives of the Hermes crew to save Watney, both because he would rather save five lives than one, and because the death of six astronauts would be worse for NASA's reputation than the death of one astronaut. Mitch, the Ares 3 Flight Director sees Teddy's preoccupation with NASA's public image as cowardly, but Venkat, Director of Mars Operations, tends to support Teddy's more cautious decisions. Ultimately, Weir suggests that only the Hermes crew can make the decision to risk their own lives in order to save Watney, though Weir is not unsympathetic to the difficult position that Teddy is in regarding NASA's public reputation. At first, Watney's apparent death bodes poorly for the future of Ares missions, but by the end of the novel, his survival and rescue come to symbolize the pinnacle of hope, exploration, and scientific achievement. In The Martian's final chapter, Weir describes people around the world gathering around televisions and in public places to watch news coverage of Watney's rescue; spontaneous celebrations break out when the public learns that Watney is safely aboard Hermes. Watney himself marvels at how many people have been rooting for him during his year and a half on Mars, and Weir shows how media coverage not only keeps NASA accountable to the public, but creates the kind of collective cultural moment that occurs when Watney is rescued. - Climax: - Summary: The Martian opens with the Sol 6 log entry of astronaut Mark Watney, who is the resident botanist and engineer on NASA's Ares 3 mission to Mars. Watney explains that, while the crew was supposed to spend a month on Mars, they were forced to abort the mission early. This was due to a sandstorm with violent winds that threated to damage the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle), which the crew needed to return to their ship, Hermes. As the crew moved from the Hab to the MAV, the Hab satellite communications dish was blown through the air and its antenna punctured Watney's EVA suit and cut into his side; Watney passed out. Believing him to be dead, the rest of the crew returned to Hermes, leaving Watney behind on Mars with no way to communicate with the ship or with NASA. After regaining consciousness, Watney returned to the Hab (the mission's base on Mars), tended to his wounds, and began to make a plan that would allow him to survive until NASA could orchestrate a rescue. Watney rations his meals and finds a way to grow food on Mars. As the mission's botanist, Watney brought a small amount of Earth soil with him. He begins saving his feces and the leftovers from his meals to use as "compost," then he mixes the compost with Martian soil and Earth soil, converting it all to crop soil. While most of the mission's meals are freeze-dried, NASA sent a few whole potatoes that the crew planned to use for a Thanksgiving dinner; instead, Watney cultivates the potatoes in the Hab and in two emergency pop-tents attached to the mission's rovers. To entertain himself, Watney browses through the media files that the other members of the crew brought with them. He starts watching Commander Lewis' collection of dated 1970s television shows and listening to her disco music. In order to irrigate the crops, Watney needs to make water. He uses the Hab's oxygenator to convert carbon dioxide from the MAV's fuel plant into oxygen. Then, he converts hydrazine fuel into nitrogen and hydrogen in order to slowly burn the hydrogen in the presence of oxygen, which makes water. At first, Watney seems to be making water successfully, but he soon realizes that not all of the hydrogen has reacted to make water—some of it is lingering in the Hab's atmosphere. Since hydrogen is highly flammable, this is very dangerous; Watney has turned his habitat into a giant bomb. Watney solves this problem by tricking the Hab's oxygen regulator into pulling all the oxygen out of the Hab. While wearing a space suit, he uses an oxygen tank to burn off the hydrogen in controlled bursts. The novel then shifts to a third-person omniscient narrator on Earth, where NASA director of Mars operations Venkat Kapoor and NASA Administrator Teddy Sanders have just attended Watney's memorial service. Venkat wants to assess the damage and see if some of the leftover supplies from the Ares 3 mission could be used for a future, not-yet-funded Ares 6 mission. Teddy initially refuses, explaining that images of Watney's body would only bring more bad press coverage, but Venkat counters that the images could actually sway public opinion (and thereby, Congress) in favor of a sixth mission to Mars that could recover Watney's body. Teddy agrees. When SatCon employee Mindy Park doesn't see Watney's body in the photos, she realizes that he is still alive. She notifies Venkat, who calls a meeting with Teddy and director of media relations Annie Montrose. They decide they'll take the news public in 24 hours. Teddy decides not to inform Commander Lewis; the news could distract the Ares 3 crew, and Teddy is not prepared to risk their safety. Though they cannot communicate directly with Watney, NASA begins tracking him with Satellite imagery and starts developing a rescue plan. CNN launches The Mark Watney Report, a daily show covering the story. It's the biggest news story on the planet. The novel once again takes up the log-entry structure. Watney has developed daily routines and is successfully growing potatoes. His new goal is to find a way to get to the Ares 4 MAV at the Schiaparelli crater, 3200 km away. He'll have to cross the relatively flat Acidalia Planitia, and then the remaining, more rugged territory. To do so, he'll need to modify the rover for a long trip. After some short test drives, Watney decides that he'll heat the rover using the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator), a box of highly unstable radioactive plutonium. NASA uses RTGs to power unmanned probes, and, on the Ares missions, to power the MAV before the crew arrives. Upon the Ares 3 crew's arrival, Commander Lewis removed and buried the RTG. Watney digs it up and moves it to the rover. With the rover modifications complete, Watney starts planning for a twenty-day trip. Watney tells us he has a specific goal for the trip, but he doesn't say what it is. On Earth, Mindy attends a meeting with NASA's top management, including Teddy, Venkat, Annie, JPL director Bruce Ng, and Ares 3 flight director Mitch Henderson. Mitch challenges Teddy's decision not to inform the Ares 3 crew that Watney is alive, but Teddy does not change his mind. The team discusses their plan to keep Watney alive long enough for rescue by speeding up the process of making the Ares 4 pre-supply probe and sending it to the Ares 3 site. Later, after reviewing satellite images and mapping Watney's coordinates, Mindy and Venkat realize that Watney is headed to Pathfinder, an unmanned probe that NASA lost contact with in 1997. If Watney can get its communication system online, he can talk to NASA. The novel shifts back to Watney's log. He reaches Pathfinder, loads the small Soujourner rover and the larger Pathfinder probe (the part with the radio) onto the rover. After he returns to the Hab, Watney successfully repairs the Pathfinder and Sojourner. Pathfinder acquires a signal. On Earth, NASA's staff celebrates. Watney and NASA begin exchanging messages using a complicated system relying on Pathfinder's camera. Soon, software engineer Jack Trevor finds a way to hack Pathfinder's software so that Watney can send and receive emails in the rover. Teddy gives Mitch permission to inform the Ares 3 crew that Watney is alive. Weir shifts the novel back in time to the morning of Sol 6, showing readers the rest of the Ares 3 crew's experience of the sandstorm and Watney's apparent death. Then, Weir moves back to the "present," where the crew on Hermes receive a voice message from Mitch, telling them Watney is alive. Most of the team is overjoyed, but Lewis blames herself for giving the order to abandon Watney. Though Watney is glad to be able to communicate with NASA, he now feels that NASA is micromanaging his work. On Sol 119, as Watney exits the Hab through Airlock 1, the Hab canvas breaches, and the Airlock is torn from the rest of the Hab. In the following days, Watney manages to repair the Hab, but the soil and young potato plants are now dead. The supply probe will arrive Sol 856, but, with the potatoes dead, he only has enough food to last until Sol 600. Back at NASA, the usually-cautious Teddy decides that in order to get the Iris supply probe to Watney in time, they'll skip standard inspection procedures. By doing so, they launch the probe with a faulty bolt that comes loose, throwing the probe off-balance. Iris crashes into the ocean. Guo Ming, director of the China National Space Administration reaches out to Teddy and offers to allow NASA to modify the Chinese probe Taiyang Shen to send supplies to Watney. Meanwhile, astrodynamicist Rich Purnell has found a way to get Hermes back to Mars in time for a flyby on Sol 549. The "Rich Purnell Maneuver" uses Taiyang Shen to send Hermes a resupply probe. Watney would have to get to the Ares 4 MAV, modify it, and use it to reach Hermes. Teddy has to choose between the Purnell Maneuver and Iris 2 (the plan to send Watney food on the Taiyang Shen). Though the Purnell Maneuver is more likely to succeed than Iris 2, it risks 6 lives rather than 1. Teddy chooses to stick with Iris 2. Mitch, convinced Teddy has made the wrong choice, leaks the Purnell Maneuver to the Hermes crew. The crew decides to go against NASA's orders and executes the Purnell Maneuver. NASA informs Watney of the new plan, and Watney begins modifying both rovers in preparation for his trip to the Ares 4 MAV: he turns one into a trailer so that he can carry the "Big Three" (the atmospheric regulator, oxygenator, and water reclaimer) with him. While working on the modifications, Watney accidently sends an electrical charge to Pathfinder's hull and fries its electronics. There is no way to get Pathfinder back online. Watney spells out Morse code messages to NASA using rocks and continues on with the rover modifications. Meanwhile, on Hermes, the Taiyang Shen resupply probe successfully docks, and Johanssen and Beck are falling in love. Once Watney connects the rovers, he builds a "bedroom" tent out of canvas that attaches to the rover's airlock. Then, he sets out for Schiaparelli and the MAV 4 site. Venkat realizes that Watney's path will take him through a dust storm in Arabia Terra that will block eighty percent of sunlight, leaving him without enough energy to even run life support. The change will be so gradual that Watney likely won't notice until he's fairly far into the storm. Watney begins to notice that his batteries aren't holding a charge as well as usual, and he eventually realizes that he's in the dust storm. Watney determines that the storm is north of him and moving west; he can avoid the storm by traveling south, then east. Since Schiaparelli is to the southeast, Watney won't have to go too far out of his way. Watney successfully circumnavigates the dust storm, but as he drives into the Schiaparelli crater, the rover rolls, and the trailer breaks loose and flips. Within three days, Watney manages to get the rover and trailer upright and replace the tow hook. He continues to the Ares 4 MAV. Once there, he can use the MAV's radio to communicate with NASA and with Hermes. Bruce and Venkat instruct Watney on how to modify the MAV and electrolyze his water and urine to create more hydrogen fuel. To lighten the MAV, Watney removes all nonessential gear, backup comm systems, and all life support—he will wear his EVA suit for the launch. Martinez will pilot the MAV remotely, so Watney removes the controls. Finally, Watney removes the nose of the ship and covers the hole with Hab canvas. During the launch, the canvas breaks free and begins to flap, slowing the MAV's ascent. On Hermes, Johanssen tells Lewis the MAV will reach orbit, but the distance at intercept will be 68 km. They are 39 minutes away from intercept. They can use the ion engines and altitude thrusters to bring them close enough to the MAV to reach Watney at intercept, but they'll be traveling much too fast. As NASA scientists listen in, unable to help, Lewis orders Martinez to use the ion engines and altitude thrusters. Then, the Hermes crew seal the bridge and reactor room. Vogel builds a pipe bomb and uses it to breach the vehicular airlock on the nose of the ship. The thrust from the escaping air slows the ship enough to make the rescue risky, but possible. When Hermes reaches intercept, Beck leaves the ship on a tether and reaches Watney. The two men return safely to the ship. On Earth, people celebrate around the world. In Chicago, Watney's parents embrace. Teddy prepares to brief the press. Back on Hermes, Beck bandages up the ribs that Watney broke during the ascent, and Watney greets the rest of the crew. Watney may be tired, smelly, injured, and hungry, but it's the happiest day of his life.

- Genre: - Title: The Mayor of Casterbridge - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: The fictional town of Casterbridge and surrounding countryside, in Western England - Character: Michael Henchard. Description: protagonist Michael Henchard works as a poor hay-trusser until, in drunken anger, he sells his wife and daughter for five guineas at the Weydon-Priors fair. Unable to find his lost family members, Henchard moves to Casterbridge where, over the next eighteen years, he makes a name for himself in the hay and corn business and rises to become mayor of the town. After his long-lost wife and daughter reappear in his life, he remarries Susan and takes Elizabeth-Jane into his home. Through Susan's eventual death, and a note she leaves behind, he discovers that Elizabeth-Jane is not his biological daughter. After his wife's death, Henchard hopes to marry Lucetta, a young woman who fell in love with him during his long separation from his first wife. Henchard's life spirals into chaos as he loses his excellent business manager, Farfrae, and Lucetta marries Farfrae instead. Henchard's attempt to under-cut Farfrae's business backfires and Henchard is eventually homeless and very poor. After Lucetta's death, Henchard tries to reunite with Elizabeth-Jane, but Richard Newson, her true father, reappears, having faked his death in order to release Susan from her commitment to him. Henchard is tempted to kill himself in the river near the second bridge, but is discouraged by the image of his own effigy from the skimmington. Henchard lies to Newson about Elizabeth-Jane, but eventually leaves Casterbridge, knowing that he cannot keep Elizabeth-Jane from the truth of her parentage forever. Henchard dies in a cottage outside of Casterbridge leaving behind a will that asks for no funeral service and that no one mourn or remember him. - Character: Susan Henchard. Description: Michael Henchard's simple, but good-hearted wife. Susan is persuaded that her sale to Richard Newson is a legitimate transaction. When a neighbor to whom she confesses the past tells her that her "marriage" to Newson is not binding, she is tortured by the conviction that she ought to return to Henchard. She conceals the truth of her history with Henchard from her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. The long-lost husband and wife reunite at a secret place outside of Casterbridge, the Ring. When she and Henchard re-marry, she doesn't want Elizabeth-Jane to change her name from Newson to Henchard, as she knows that Elizabeth-Jane is in fact Newson's biological daughter. As she lays dying, Susan writes a note to Henchard, which she indicates should not be read until Elizabeth-Jane is married, that reveals the truth of her parentage. - Character: Elizabeth-Jane Newson. Description: Elizabeth-Jane is the biological daughter of Susan Henchard and Richard Newson. Susan and Michael Henchard had a daughter, also named Elizabeth-Jane, who died not long after she and her mother were sold to Newson. Elizabeth-Jane was given this dead girl's name, and Henchard naturally assumes that she is, in fact, that same girl. Elizabeth-Jane grows up in relatively poor circumstances. However, she is painfully aware of proper behavior, and when she receives a new position through her mother's re-marriage to Henchard, she tries desperately to please her new father by speaking like a young lady. She works diligently at reading and studies. Her young years are filled with confusion and unhappiness. She falls in love with Donald Farfrae, only to watch his falling out with her father, who then forbids her to interact with the young man. Eventually, she sees Farfrae fall in love with her companion, Lucetta, instead. Elizabeth-Jane lives alone for a few years, as her father loses his fortune and position in society. She later tries to care for him and love him, despite his past mistreatment of her. At the end of the novel, she ends up marrying Farfrae (after Lucetta's death), and she searches for Henchard after learning the truth about her biological father, only to discover that he has died. - Character: Donald Farfrae. Description: a young Scottish man who is traveling through Casterbridge when he offers Henchard a way of restoring wheat to a high quality. Henchard takes a liking to Farfrae and convinces him to abandon his schemes of traveling the world and to stay in Casterbridge and work as his manager instead. Farfrae and Henchard eventually part ways on bad terms and Farfrae starts his own, more successful business in town. Farfrae is well liked for his personality, his good business, and his beautiful singing voice. Farfrae, despite having first seemed interested in Elizabeth-Jane, marries Lucetta. He is unaware of the past relationship between Lucetta and Henchard until Lucetta confesses some part of this just before she dies. Farfrae eventually assumes Henchard's position in town entirely: he becomes the new mayor, he owns the most profitable business, and he buys and lives in Henchard's house. After Lucetta's death, and Henchard's willing departure from Casterbridge, Farfrae marries Elizabeth-Jane. - Character: Lucetta Templeman. Description: a young woman from Jersey who had a brief relationship with Michael Henchard when he traveled to her town on business. Lucetta nursed Henchard when he fell ill in Jersey, and, despite her innocent love for him, their interactions caused a scandal. Henchard returned to Casterbridge, having told Lucetta of his lost wife. Lucetta wrote a series of love letters to Henchard, and, once she hears that Mrs. Henchard has died, she moves to Casterbridge, having recently inherited a large fortune. In Casterbridge, she takes Elizabeth-Jane into her home and attempts to renew her relationship with Henchard, only to fall in love with Donald Farfrae instead. In order to protect herself from Henchard and his ability to reveal their secret history, she marries Farfrae without anyone's knowledge. Henchard threatens to reveal their secret, but Lucetta meets him at the Ring and begs for his mercy. However, Jopp reveals the secret instead. The villagers publically shame Lucetta with the skimmington, and she eventual dies from the emotional strain of possibly losing her husband's love. - Character: Richard Newson. Description: a gracious sailor who buys Susan Henchard and the first Elizabeth-Jane from Henchard. He cares for Susan and their daughter, the second Elizabeth-Jane, until he sees the mother's growing distress when she realizes she is morally bound to return to her first husband. Therefore, Newson pretends he has died. Later he seeks out Elizabeth-Jane once he hears her mother has passed away. He passes through Casterbridge multiple times seeking his daughter. The two are reunited despite Henchard's lie that Elizabeth-Jane has died. He dances joyfully at Elizabeth-Jane's wedding to Farfrae, and lives with the newly wed couple, before eventually settling at Budmouth, in sight of the sea. - Character: Joshua Jopp. Description: a man Henchard promised to hire as his manager, before offering the position to Farfrae instead. Jopp continues to live in Casterbridge, struggling and poor. Henchard hires Jopp after Farfrae leaves his employment. Despite Henchard's past wrong, Jopp welcomes the man into his home when Henchard loses everything to his creditors. Jopp dislikes Lucetta, as she slighted him when he asked a favor of her. Therefore, when Henchard asks him to deliver Lucetta's love letters back into her possession, Jopp willingly reveals their contents, prompting the skimmington that shames and sickens Lucetta before her eventual death, but saves Henchard's life after he sees his own effigy. - Character: Abel Whittle. Description: an employee of Henchard's and then later of Farfrae's. This young man struggles to wake up on time and arrive at work on time. Henchard clashes with his then manager Farfrae over how to punish Abel's tardiness. Abel Whittle finds Henchard wandering alone directly before his death. He takes pity on the older man and cares for him in the days before his death. - Character: The furmity-woman. Description: once a prosperous sales woman, the furmity seller witnesses Henchard's cruel choice to sell his wife and daughter for five guineas in her tent at the Weydon-Priors fair. The woman grows poorer as her business declines. Eighteen years later, at the Weydon-Priors fair, she directs Susan toward Casterbridge, as the place she knows Michael Henchard is currently living. Eventually, she travels to Casterbridge and is arrested there. During her trial, she reveals Henchard's secret past. - Theme: Self-Destruction. Description: Throughout the novel, protagonist Michael Henchard makes decisions while drunk, angry, proud, or jealous. These choices ultimately harm Henchard himself and lead to the loss of his family, his fortune, and his position in society. The novel opens with Michael Henchard's cruel act of selling his wife Susan and child Elizabeth-Jane while he is drunk. Henchard's drinking early in the novel causes an emotional riff between himself and his wife, and allows her to happily leave him for Richard Newson. After the loss of his wife and daughter, Henchard vows to not drink for twenty years. This vow allows Henchard to be successful and prosperous, rising to prominence in Casterbridge as the mayor and as the owner of a successful corn and wheat business. His subsequent return to alcoholism contributes to his poor plan to kill Donald Farfrae. Henchard's alcoholism is linked to his pride, as he uses drinking to compensate for feelings of self-hatred. His pride causes him to lose his partnership with Farfrae and to eventually go bankrupt because he cannot accept that the younger man might be more popular and more successful than himself. Henchard's pride produces his jealousy of Farfrae. After Farfrae's holiday celebrations are more popular than Henchard's, Henchard in a "jealous temper" says that the young man's time as his business manager is drawing to a close.As Farfrae starts his own separate business and continues to excel within Casterbridge society, Henchard loses family and fortune as his jealousy harms himself and his reputation. For example, Henchard's attempt to ruin Farfrae's business backfires and causes his own business to go into debt. Despite Farfrae's kindness, Henchard establishes himself as Farfrae's rival in business and in romance. Henchard's interest in Lucetta increases, primarily because of her transfer of her affections to Farfrae. Henchard jealously tries to force her to agree to marry him. When Lucetta marries Farfrae secretly, Henchard is angry and obsessed with her betrayal. Henchard is driven crazy by the thought of Farfrae taking a position as the new mayor, and their positions are completely reversed by the end of the novel. Farfrae is a successful and prominent figure in Casterbridge, and he lives in the grand house that was once Henchard's. Henchard dies, virtually alone and friendless. - Theme: Familial and Romantic Love. Description: The plot of the novel is frequently driven by complex truths about characters' family relationships, which are hidden and revealed. Early in the novel, Michael Henchard wishes to remarry Susan for his daughter's sake, but once Henchard learns that Elizabeth-Jane is not his daughter by blood, he no longer cares for her. For Henchard, ties of blood are strongest. Richard Newson also cares deeply for his own offspring, as he seeks out Elizabeth-Jane and goes to great lengths to reconnect with her by returning to Casterbridge multiple times. Susan lies to Elizabeth-Jane about her connection to Henchard. Then Henchard unknowingly misrepresents himself as her father. The final reveal of her true parentage secures her happiness and reconnection with Newson. Confusion surrounding the identity of Elizabeth-Jane's biological father continues throughout the novel, emphasizing the importance of family connections to each of the characters. Romantic love, in addition to familial love, directs characters' choices in the novel. Love causes characters to feel and behave in irrational ways that defy their circumstances. Love is presented in contrast to one's loyalty to duty and commitment. Love tears Donald Farfrae away from Elizabeth-Jane, as he falls for Lucetta. Despite Farfrae's encouragement of Elizabeth-Jane, he cannot resist Lucetta. He goes against his previous actions and hurts Elizabeth-Jane because his feelings for Lucetta are too strong to resist. Lucetta loves Henchard, despite his commitment to his wife, until she falls for Farfrae. Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane both believe that Lucetta is "bound" to Henchard because of her past commitment to him, but Lucetta prioritizes her love for Farfrae over her duty, saying "I won't be a slave to the past—I'll love where I choose!" Elizabeth-Jane is hurt by Lucetta's secret marriage because she loves Farfrae throughout the novel, despite his relationship with Lucetta. - Theme: Loyalty to Duty and Commitments. Description: Loyalty is a defining aspect of the characters Elizabeth-Jane and Susan in this novel. Both women fulfill the expectations of their duties as women, wives, and daughters, while also upholding their past commitments. Duty in the novel is any abstract idea of what is expected of an individual because of her or his position in society. Commitments are any specific agreements made in the past above and beyond one's duties. After Susan remarries Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane is remarkably motivated by a sense of duty to her father and her new position to better herself through education and proper speech. "'If I am not well-informed it shall be by no fault of my own,' she would say to herself," while studying diligently. Only Susan's belief that her sale to Newson was binding keeps her committed to him rather than to Henchard. When she learns the truth, she feels it is her duty to return to her true husband. Other characters in the novel have more complex relationships to loyalty. Henchard's awareness of his past wrongs is connected to the guilt he feels when he does not fulfill his duty to his wife, daughter, or Lucetta. Henchard wishes to remarry Susan for his daughter's sake. But Henchard also is anxious to atone for his past in which he did not maintain his commitment to his wife. Henchard feels he must marry Lucetta once his wife dies because of their past relationship. Lucetta must decide between her past commitment to Henchard and her love for Farfrae when she moves to Casterbridge. Elizabeth-Jane believes Lucetta must marry Henchard because of their past and their agreement. Lucetta struggles against this commitment because of her love for Farfrae, ultimately choosing love over commitment, which hurts both Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane, who are more driven by loyalty to others. - Theme: Humans and Nature. Description: The natural landscape of the English countryside is the source of livelihood for the inhabitants of Casterbridge. The chance occurrences of nature impact human fates and outcomes in the novel. A bad harvest causes Henchard to lose money reselling his grain when he attempts to drive Farfrae out of business. Henchard angrily says to Jopp after his loss, "you can never be sure of weather till 'tis past." Weather, although uncertain, hurts some and helps others. Farfrae is blessed by his harvests, as if he has the ability to foresee the weather. The unpredictable factor of the weather increases the emotional and economic divide between Henchard and Farfrae, and further angers and frustrates Henchard. Yet, Henchard is also saved by the natural world. The river sweeps Henchard's effigy to him, which stops him from killing himself. While Henchard attributes his survival to the skimmington with the effigies, it is the chance movements of the river that present the effigy to him at the critical moment. The landscape affects and reflects human emotions. Like a human character, the landscape is changeable, dynamic, and expressive, while directly affecting the plot of the novel. The rural farmers see a "god" in the weather directing their lives. Because of its direct affects on the villagers' livelihood, "sun elated them; quiet rain sobered them; weeks of watery tempest stupefied them." - Theme: The Past and Forgiveness. Description: Throughout the novel, the darkness of past events haunts individual characters as well as the landscape of the countryside around Casterbridge. The ancient Roman history of the region is referenced multiple times. The Ring, where Henchard meets both Susan and Lucetta is an ancient architectural remnant that once served as an amphitheater for violence and entertainment. In the time period of the novel, the Ring is used only for furtive meetings, primarily of a romantic nature, but the bloody history of the Roman Empire presents a backdrop for the events of the novel. As Henchard and Susan reunite at the Ring, their own past is as filled with pain and wrongdoing as the ancient place in which they stand.The past in this novel often represents suffering and violence, both physical and emotional. Henchard both desperately desires forgiveness and receives it, in many cases, for his past wrongs. Henchard wishes to earn Susan's forgiveness for his past action of selling her and their daughter. Guilt drives his desire for forgiveness for past wrongdoing, causing him to ask her to 'judge [him] by [his] future works" after the couple is reunited. Farfrae forgives Henchard for their business separation and continues to be generous with him. Farfrae purchases Henchard's home and furniture, but he invites Henchard to live with him and he offers to give him some of his furniture without charge. Abel Whittle forgives Henchard in the final hours of his life, despite Henchard having treated him cruelly while he was Henchard's worker. Abel is the only one with Henchard when he dies. Henchard's emotional awareness of his past wrongs, and his need for forgiveness, contribute to his isolation at the end of the novel. Henchard leaves Elizabeth-Jane after lying to Newson, her biological father, and saying she had died. He wishes for Elizabeth-Jane's forgiveness, but Elizabeth-Jane's forgiveness comes too late. - Theme: Character. Description: The full title of the novel is The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character. Henchard's "character" is neither good nor evil, but complex. Character directly impacts each person in the novel. Henchard's self-destruction is a critical aspect of his character. His self-harming personality traits lead to his isolation and poverty. Elizabeth-Jane and Susan are loyal characters. They honor their duties and their past commitments, which leads Susan to leave and then return to Henchard, and which causes Elizabeth-Jane to never act upon her love for Farfrae. Elizabeth-Jane's fortitude and good character are appropriate to her happy ending of her marriage to Farfrae and reunion with her long-lost father, Newson. Farfrae's character, his easy temperament and his natural goodness, helps his business and position in Casterbridge society and leads him to marry Lucetta. His character causes him to prioritize love and personal happiness. He continues to be kind to Henchard for a long time after he is asked to leave Henchard's business, another mark of his open and generous character. Character, in the subtitle of the novel, implies more than the way in which character correlates to events and outcomes in the novel. Character, in the 19th century, was a term frequently associated with one's social standing and reputation. A man of character was a man who was prominent and respected in society. With this meaning in mind, describing Henchard as "a man of character," is both accurate and ironic. He holds the important position of mayor in Casterbridge for most of the novel. However, this position is, in many ways, one of which Henchard is unworthy. His secret past wrong is concealed from the inhabitants of Casterbridge and when the furmity-woman reveals the story of Henchard selling his wife and daughter, Henchard's popularity declines rapidly from that day onward. - Climax: Richard Newson returns to claim his true daughter, Elizabeth-Jane. Michael Henchard, unable to endure losing his stepdaughter, plans to kill himself, only to have his suicide prevented by the miraculous appearance of an effigy of himself floating in the river. - Summary: On a September day in the 1820s, the Henchard family arrives on foot at the village of Weydon-Priors. Michael Henchard seeks work as a hay-trusser, but he and his wife Susan, who carries their small daughter Elizabeth-Jane, stop for food at the furmity tent at the local fair. Henchard takes servings of alcohol from the furmity-woman, and, as he becomes drunk, he loudly proclaims his unhappiness with his wife and his foolish decision to marry young. Eventually he, half-jokingly, decides to auction off his wife to any other man. A sailor named Richard Newson appears in the doorway of the furmity tent and offers five guineas for Susan and Elizabeth-Jane. Susan leaves with the sailor with an angry pronouncement to her husband that she will try for happiness with a different man. Henchard, drunk and somewhat confused by the outcome of events, falls asleep in the furmity tent. The next day, Henchard is furious with his wife for her simple-minded agreement to her own sale. He knows that she must believe the transaction to be valid. Henchard attempts to track down his wife and daughter, but eventually must give up the search. He vows to not drink again for twenty-years. He travels south to settle in the town of Casterbridge. Eighteen years later, Susan Henchard arrives in Weydon-Priors at the time of the annual fair. She is accompanied by her grown daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, who is unaware of her parents' history. Elizabeth-Jane has grown up with Richard Newson as her father, and only his recent death at sea has caused Susan to decide to attempt to find her long-lost first husband. Susan has recently realized her foolish commitment to Newson. For years she believed herself bound to him, until a neighbor in whom she had confided the story told her that the transaction could not be valid: Michael Henchard is her one true husband. At the fair, Susan finds the furmity-woman who had once run the tent at the fair. The poor, old woman directs Susan to Casterbridge. Susan and Elizabeth-Jane arrive in Casterbridge and find a group of the local residents gathered outside The Golden Crown Hotel where they see Henchard occupied inside at a grand meal. They learn that Henchard is now the mayor of Casterbridge. The townsfolk are complaining about a crop of bad wheat, when a stranger passes a note to Henchard at the door. Susan is reluctant to approach her husband, and she and Elizabeth-Jane spend the night at another hotel in town: The King of Prussia. At The King of Prussia, Elizabeth-Jane volunteers as a waitress in order to help pay for their stay. She delivers a meal to the stranger who had passed a note to Henchard, a young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae. Henchard arrives to speak to Farfrae, and his wife and daughter listen in on their conversation. Farfrae has a method for restoring wheat, saving Henchard money. The next day, Henchard convinces Farfrae to stay in Casterbridge and to work as his manager at his prosperous wheat and corn business. Susan contacts Henchard via a note sent by the unsuspecting Elizabeth-Jane. Henchard and Susan arrange to meet that night at a secret location near town: the Ring, an amphitheater, which is an architectural remnant of the historical Roman occupants of the area. Henchard agrees that he and Susan will slowly renew their acquaintance and then remarry. Eventually, the pair does remarry, although Henchard confesses to Farfrae that he had once formed an attachment to a woman named Lucetta. Lucetta's community shamed her for her obvious, though innocent, infatuation with Henchard, but Henchard had told her of his missing wife and his inability to marry Lucetta for that reason. Through a pair of mysterious notes sent to both of them, Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane meet at the granary. Thinking that they both are waiting for a third person, the two begin a conversation and get to know each other, although the sender of both notes never appears. Henchard and Farfrae's once companionable business partnership begins to decay. The two disagree over Henchard's treatment of a man named Abel Whittle who is perpetually late for work. Farfrae's good temperament and his mannerisms cause all the workers and villagers to like him and his company. Henchard and Farfrae organize two separate events for a public holiday, and Farfrae's dance is far more popular. Henchard jealously observes this, and sees Farfrae dancing with Elizabeth-Jane at the event. He and Farfrae part ways, but Farfrae remains in town and begins his own competing wheat and corn managing business. Henchard insists that Farfrae keep his distance from Elizabeth-Jane. Susan does not live long after her remarriage. After her death, Henchard confesses the truth of Elizabeth-Jane's parentage to his daughter. Directly after this confession, Henchard finds a letter left by his dead wife and labeled, "not to be opened till Elizabeth-Jane's wedding-day." Ignoring this cautionary note, Henchard opens the letter to discover Susan's confession: this Elizabeth-Jane is not, in fact, his biological daughter, but a second child born to Susan and Richard Newson after the first baby died. Elizabeth-Jane accepts Henchard as her father, but his moment of joy is completely disturbed by his awareness of the truth, which he does not share with her. While Henchard does not confess the contents of Susan's letter to Elizabeth-Jane, his behavior towards the young woman changes drastically. He is no longer kind to her. He responds aggressively to any evidence of Elizabeth-Jane's poor childhood and lack of education. Elizabeth-Jane tries desperately to correct this through reading and self-instruction, but her "father" does not notice. An unhappy Elizabeth-Jane is visiting her mother's grave when she meets a strange, cultured woman at the gravesite. This woman has recently moved to Casterbridge. She listens to Elizabeth-Jane's story and invites the young woman to move in with her. Only once this move has been agreed to by Elizabeth-Jane and Henchard does Henchard realize that this woman is Lucetta. Lucetta has recently inherited money and has moved to Casterbridge after hearing of Susan's death. By inviting Elizabeth-Jane into her home she hopes to encourage her father to visit, as well. Despite Lucetta's initial interest in renewing her attachment to Henchard, she meets Farfrae in an encounter that affects them both profoundly. Henchard feels he ought to remarry Lucetta and begins courting her, only to realize that Farfrae is his rival for her affections. Farfrae is unaware of this rivalry. Lucetta confesses the confusing situation to Elizabeth-Jane without explicitly telling her who each of the characters in the story are in real life. Elizabeth-Jane feels that Lucetta owes her loyalty to the first man she was interested in, who she realizes eventually is her father. Henchard hires Jopp, a man who he had originally passed over in favor of Farfrae as his business manager. In an attempt to drive Farfrae out of business, Henchard and Jopp buy extensively before the harvest. Henchard visits a man who predicts the weather to learn that the harvest will be poor and he hopes to resell at a high profit. However, the weather stays nice and Henchard has to resell at a lower price. At the very end of the harvest, the weather is poor, and Farfrae makes a great profit. Henchard's business suffers greatly, for which he blames Jopp. Henchard comes to Lucetta's home and blackmails her into agreeing to marry him. Henchard has a collection of letters written by Lucetta to himself and he vows to make their past relationship public unless she promises to marry him. The next day, Henchard presides over a local trial and the woman brought to court is the furmity-woman, who recognizes him and reveals Henchard's dark secret that he once sold his own wife and child. Henchard's reputation in Casterbridge suffers, as his business also collapses. While walking, Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane are chased by a loose bull. Henchard appears and grabs the animal, rescuing the women. He escorts Lucetta home where she confesses that she has secretly married Farfrae that week in another town. She wanted to secure him as her husband before Henchard could reveal the truth about their past. She knew she could not marry Henchard after hearing about how he once treated Susan and his own daughter. She begs Henchard to not reveal the truth at this point and so ruin her happy marriage with Farfrae. Despite Henchard's anger, he does not expose the secret. Elizabeth-Jane is also hurt and angry to learn of Lucetta's marriage to Farfrae, and she moves out of her friend's house. Henchard loses his bankrupt business, his home, and all his personal possessions to his creditors. Henchard frequently stands on the second bridge near the lower part of town bemoaning his situation, and, finally, when his twenty years are up, he begins to drink heavily again. Henchard visits Farfrae, who has purchased what used to be Henchard's grand house, and reads several of Lucetta's letters to him aloud. However, in the moment, he cannot bring himself to hurt her by sharing her name as the author of the letters. Henchard gives Jopp the letters to return to Lucetta, so she can keep her secret. Jopp, however, is angry with Lucetta for ignoring his requests that she put in a good word for him as a working partner for her husband. The letters fall into the hands of the villagers, who plan a skimmington, a method of publically shaming those who are perceived to be disloyal or unworthy of their spouses. Henchard plans to kill Farfrae and confronts him in a hayloft. The two struggle, but, again, Henchard is unable to do through with a harmful plan. Farfrae rides out of town, and is therefore absent that evening as the skimmington occurs. The skimmington features effigies of Lucetta and Henchard, tied back-to-back, and paraded through the streets. Elizabeth-Jane arrives at Lucetta's home and attempts to stop her from seeing the parade, but she does and collapses. Farfrae returns, but Lucetta has become dangerously ill. While she may have confessed some of the truth behind her illness to her husband, it is unclear to what extent she shared the story of her past. At four o'clock that morning, Lucetta passes away. Henchard and Elizabeth-Jane renew their connection. Henchard grows to depend on the girl and her affection for him, despite his knowledge that she is not his biological daughter. Richard Newson, who all had believed dead, arrives in Casterbridge and visits Henchard. He had pretended to be dead in order to free his wife to return to Henchard, but, learning of her death, he has arrived in Casterbridge to find his daughter. Henchard tells Newson that Elizabeth-Jane is dead, in order to keep her love and attention for himself. Henchard plans to commit suicide at a place in the river near the second bridge, but does not when he sees his own effigy from the skimmington floating in the river. This sign, or vision of a possible future, saves Henchard's life. In his depressed state, Henchard realizes the burden he is on Elizabeth-Jane's happiness and leaves Casterbridge, wandering the countryside for his remaining days. Richard Newson returns to Casterbridge and is reacquainted with his daughter. Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae are married, and her father dances joyfully at their wedding. Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae seek out Henchard, only to learn from Abel Whittle that he has passed away. Henchard has left behind a will, a final expression of his bitterness and loneliness in the world.

- Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction - Title: The Maze Runner - Point of view: Close Third-Person - Setting: The Glade and the Maze - Character: Thomas. Description: The novel's protagonist, Thomas is a teenaged boy who enters the Glade with no memories other than of his first name. Although Thomas comes to the Glade scared and confused, he shows himself to be brave, resourceful, and strong-willed when he saves the lives of the Gladers Alby and Minho. Thomas also shares a telepathic connection with Teresa, who he may have known before arriving in the Glade. With her help, Thomas struggles to uncover his memories and discover the true nature of his identity. By the novel's end, Thomas realizes that rather than his memories, it is his actions in the present that determine his identity. Thomas also chafes against the strict rules of the Glade, introducing new perspectives and ideas that the Gladers eventually accept since they prove useful for finding an exit to the Maze. - Character: Teresa. Description: Arriving the day after Thomas, Teresa is the only girl to have ever come to the Glade. Most of the Gladers catcall and insult her because she is a girl, but she challenges their sexist attitudes by proving herself to be a self-confident, bold, and capable young woman. Able to take any of the boys in a fight and not afraid to speak her mind, she becomes a close friend and ally to Thomas. She and Thomas can also communicate telepathically. Although she too has no memories, Teresa suggests that their telepathy may be the result of a close, possibly romantic relationship that they had shared prior to their arrival in the Glade. - Character: Chuck. Description: One of the youngest of the Gladers and Thomas' first friend in the Glade. Most of the Gladers find Chuck annoying because of his childish antics and fondness for practical jokes, but Thomas recognizes that Chuck is a loyal and caring friend. They sleep side-by-side every night and Thomas soon feels that Chuck has become like a brother to him. As a result of this affection, Thomas promises Chuck that he will help Chuck find his family once they've escaped the Maze. In the novel's dramatic finale, Chuck sacrifices his own life by jumping in front of the knife that Gally throws at Thomas. - Character: Alby. Description: The leader of the Gladers, Alby is the oldest and most trusted teenager in the Glade. Despite Alby's merciless enforcement of the strict laws of the Glade, he is a competent leader capable of inspiring loyalty and bravery in the other Gladers. After going through the Changing and learning about the devastations that have struck the outside world, Alby becomes withdrawn and loses his will to lead. Unable to confront the realities waiting for him outside the Glade, Alby sacrifices himself to the Grievers in a desperate attempt to protect his friends. - Character: Newt. Description: Alby's second-in-command, Newt is kinder, smarter, and more level-headed than Alby. While fear of punishment is Alby's preferred method for maintaining order, Newt believes work and labor are the best ways to preserve order in their society. Newt is one of the first of the Gladers to befriend Thomas. He also takes over Alby's role as leader after Alby goes through the Changing. - Character: Minho. Description: The Keeper of the Runners, Minho is in charge of leading the other Runners through the Maze. Confrontational and somewhat impulsive, Minho leads by intuition rather than thought-out planning, which sometimes gets him into trouble. Minho, however, is always willing to own up to a mistake he's made, which makes him a trustworthy and loyal friend to Thomas. - Character: Gally. Description: Described by Thomas as a bully, Gally is hotheaded and arrogant, constantly threatening the other boys with violence. Despite his flaws, Gally cares deeply about the safety of the Gladers, sacrificing his own life to prevent the Grievers from killing any of the other boys. At the end of the novel, he throws a knife at Thomas because he was under the influence of mind-control. - Character: Ben. Description: A former Runner, Ben goes through the Changing on the day Thomas arrives in the Glade. In a state of psychological distress, Ben almost kills Thomas because he thinks Thomas does not belong in the Glade. As punishment for attempted murder, Alby banishes Ben to the Maze, effectively sentencing him to death, even though Ben deeply repents and apologizes for his actions. - Theme: Memory and Identity. Description: In The Maze Runner, all the characters lose their memories before arriving in the Glade. Without these memories, Thomas loses his sense of self. As such, recovering his memories becomes one of his main goals. During his struggle to discover his identity, Thomas questions whether people are the sum total of their memories and past experiences or if we have essential natures that exist regardless of our experiences. For example, early in the novel, Thomas mistakenly believes that the Glade is a prison and that all the Gladers are criminals. Thomas wonders if, were he a criminal before arriving, would that mean that he is an essentially violent or immoral person. In the end, the novel suggests that none of the boys have truly lost their memories. Instead, their memories, buried deep within their minds, may still be determining their feelings and behaviors. For example, Thomas has a deep almost instinctual feeling that he should trust Teresa even though he doesn't remember her. Later, we learn that they had a very close friendship before their memories were erased. Thus, the novel suggests that personal relationships are so ingrained in our identities that they become part of who we are and cannot be forgotten. Moreover, the novel suggests that people are defined by their actions in the present rather than their past actions. For example, Thomas learns that before arriving in the Glade, he knowingly helped design the Maze. As such, some of Gladers distrust Thomas, but the group ultimately accepts him because he proves himself to be a loyal and brave addition to their society. Unlike Thomas' desire to uncover his memories, some characters wish to further repress their memories of life before the Glade. During the Changing, Gladers have flashes of memories from their old life. These memories are so painful that most Gladers who go through the Changing refuse to discuss the memories they've recovered. In the most extreme case, Alby loses his ability to lead after getting some of his memories back. Since Alby was known for his effective leadership, his memories actually cause him to lose the most notable aspect of his identity. In contrast to Alby, Thomas goes through the Changing on purpose in order to get his memories back. Although his memories disturb him, Thomas is only able to save the Gladers by using these memories to find a way out of the Maze. The Maze Runner novel illustrates how some people need to repress traumatic memories in order to maintain hope and a sense of self, while others seek to uncover and learn from these memories in order to deal with the problems of the present. - Theme: Stability and Order vs. Change and Chaos. Description: Throughout the novel, a tension exists between the benefits of order for maintaining a self-sustaining society and the necessary changes that must occur for the Gladers to survive the Maze. Thrust into this mysterious and dangerous world, the boys use order and rules as a way of preventing panic and despair from taking hold of their lives. With a rigid system of laws, a well-defined leadership hierarchy, and daily work assignments, the boys set up a functioning society despite their young age and extreme circumstances. Thomas quickly learns the value of order when he finds relief from his sense of hopelessness about ever leaving the Maze by committing himself to the daily work routine in the Glade.Although order provides stability, the Glade's systems of laws and punishments verges on being cruel. The Gladers banish Ben for attacking Thomas despite the fact that Ben was in a state of obvious mental distress during the attack. The laws are so rigid that the Gladers don't take into account the circumstances of Ben's attack, banishing him into the Maze, which is effectively a death sentence. When Ben, terrified and crying, pleads for mercy and forgiveness, Thomas sympathizes with the boy and realizes that the cruelty of the punishment is disproportionate to Ben's crime. Most of the Gladers, however, take pleasure in banishing Ben, showing how their desire to uphold order and discipline has become stronger than their sense of empathy or mercy for their fellow Glader.Thomas, however, initiates necessary changes that disrupt the normal routine and order of things. Although it's against the rules to be in the Maze after dark, Thomas goes inside to save Alby and Minho. Even though he saves them, the other Gladers force him to spend a day in their jail for breaking their rules. Thomas also gets frustrated with the Runners' attitude towards solving the Maze. Everyday they try the same thing, never changing the routine. Despite their initial resistance to change, Thomas eventually convinces them to forgo the stability of their routine when he helps lead most of the Gladers into the Maze. This break in the normal routine leads to their escape from the Maze. In contrast to those willing to change, the Gladers who stayed behind and stuck with the routine most likely ended up dead. - Theme: Sacrifice. Description: In The Maze Runner, many characters risk their lives for the sake of saving those around them in various acts of self-sacrifice. Thomas risks his own life, entering into the Maze to save Alby and Minho. In contrast to Thomas's act of bravery, Minho leaves behind the two of them in order to save his own life. Like Thomas, Gally sacrifices himself on the night of the Grievers' first raid so that no one else would be killed. Although Gally may have seemed selfish and arrogant for most of the novel, this sacrifice is an act of redemption that makes up for his past behaviors. In the end, most of the Gladers are willing to risk their lives in order to protect Thomas and Teresa as they look for an exit to the Maze. Although half of the Gladers die, their sacrifice makes it possible for the rest of them to escape. Thomas, however, wonders if the escape was worth their sacrifice because he thinks it's unfair that half of them died while the other half got to live. Thomas' negative feelings about sacrifice become most pronounced when Chuck sacrifices his life to save Thomas'. At first Thomas feels guilty about Chuck's sacrifice, but Teresa tells him it was Chuck's choice to throw himself in front of the knife. She tells Thomas that now he has a responsibly not to waste Chuck's sacrifice. Thomas agrees and comes to the realization that sacrifice is a tragic but noble act as long as people have the right to choose to sacrifice themselves.In contrast to these self-sacrifices, the author structures the novel around a sacrifice that is not chosen by the people who have to make it. The Creators took teenagers, wiped their memories, and put them in the Maze without their consent. Although the Creators knew that many of the boys would die, they were willing to sacrifice the boys' lives for what they thought was the greater good of humanity—this logic is presented as morally dubious within the novel, as it amounts to using people regardless of hoped-for ends of that use. Thus, sacrifice only appears as a positive act when the person doing the sacrifice has had the opportunity to make that choice for him or herself. - Theme: Growing Up. Description: Like many books in the young adult genre, The Maze Runner can be interpreted as an extended metaphor for the challenges of growing up. In a metaphor for birth, all the kids are brought into the Glade with no possessions, memories, or identity. Even the metal box from which they come appears to symbolize the womb. To make the metaphor more obvious, Newt and Chuck both tell Thomas that most Gladers spend their first weeks in the Glade scared, confused, and crying like babies. Life in the Glade also appears to conform to conventional literary descriptions of childhood. In many literary accounts, childhood is represented as an idyllic period before the hardships of adolescence and adulthood. Although the kids in the Glade have to work, the Glade shares some similarities with representations of a paradisiacal childhood. The Glade is safe, there is an abundance of food, and every day the weather is always beautiful and temperate. In this way, life in the Glade appears like an idyllic childhood.Unlike the relative peacefulness of the Glade, the author aligns the Maze with a period of adolescence. Like the Maze itself, adolescence is marked by confusion, disorientation, and hard decisions. Teenagers navigating adolescence may at times feel just as hopeless and scared as the Runners navigating the Maze. The metaphor of the Maze as adolescence becomes most obvious when Grievers sting kids in the Maze, causing them to go through the Changing. In what could be a metaphor for puberty, the Changing makes kids' bodies change in confusing and frightening ways. Finally, at the end of the novel, the Gladers manage to fight their way through the Maze and enter the harsh outside world of adulthood. For example, when the Gladers escape the Maze, they marvel at seeing adults for the first time, which marks this new world as the adult world. But what they don't realize is that by fighting their way through the Maze and entering the outside world, they themselves have become adults. Even Chuck, who has been immature and childlike for the entire novel, gains a new sense of responsibility in the adult world, as shown by his willingness to sacrifice himself for Thomas. - Theme: Hope. Description: Throughout the novel, the Gladers struggle to maintain hope despite the nightmarish and horrific nature of their circumstances. The three main leaders, Alby, Newt, and Minho, each have their own views about the best way for maintaining hope. Alby believes a system of laws and punishments will give the Gladers stability and the hope necessary for their continued search for an escape. In contrast, Newt thinks that work is the only thing that will keep the Gladers hopeful and stop them from panicking. Finally, Minho believes that the Runners' daily routine of navigating the Maze gives the rest of the group hope. While all three of the leaders at different times succumb to hope-killing fear (Alby even sacrifices himself in vain after losing all hope), together their approaches preserve hope in the Glade while preventing widespread panic from taking hold.At the end of the novel, the Creators explain that they put the boys in the Maze in order to test if they would lose hope and stop fighting for survival. The novel ends by suggesting that hope is the most important factor in surviving dire situations. - Theme: Sexism. Description: Gender plays a small but significant role in the novel. For two years, the Glade consists of boys only, until Teresa arrives the day after Thomas. Since the boys have never encountered a girl before, Alby senses that there is a risk that some of the boys may rape Teresa, so he has guards protect her. Likewise, when Teresa first arrives, the boys catcall her, treating her like an object rather than a human being. The boys, including Thomas, also direct sexist insults at her, calling her weak and helpless. Teresa, however, proves herself to be braver, stronger, and smarter than most of the boys in the Glade, proving that women are just as capable as men. - Climax: Thomas and other Gladers fight off the Grievers and find the exit to the Maze - Summary: In the dark of an elevator, a teenaged boy awakes with no memories other than that his name is Thomas. When the elevator comes to a halt, the doors open and Thomas finds himself surrounded by around fifty teenaged boys. Their leader, a boy in his late-teens named Alby, welcomes him to the Glade. Surrounded by extremely high stone walls covered in thick ivy, the Glade is a large square piece of land with a few wood and concrete buildings. In each of the surrounding four walls, there is a narrow opening. Over the course of the next few days, Thomas learns that behind the walls is the Maze – a labyrinthine structure full of Grievers. Grievers are violent mechanical creatures that only come out at night. Since the openings to the Maze, what the Gladers call Doors, close at night, the Grievers cannot get into the Glade. During the day, a few of the boys, the Runners, navigate the Maze in order to find an exit. On the same day every month, the elevator brings a new male arrival. But on the day after Thomas arrives, the elevator returns with a teenaged girl in a coma. The next day Alby and Minho, a Runner, go into the Maze to investigate a report about a dead Griever. A few minutes before the Doors close, Thomas sees Minho dragging an unconscious Alby towards the Door. With no one else around to help, Thomas enters the Maze right as the Doors close behind him. Inside, Minho tells him that a Griever stung Alby. Thomas and Minho lure a group of Grievers away from Alby and towards the Cliff – a place in the Maze where the path ends and overlooks an empty expanse. As the Grievers charge at them, the boys dive out of the way, causing the Grievers to disappear off the Cliff. It's morning and the Doors are open by the time they are able to return to Alby's location. Newt, Alby's second-in-command, cures Alby by giving him the Grief Serum, which causes him to go through the Changing. Newt tells Thomas that the Changing is a painful side effect of the Serum that makes people recall some of their memories. In the following days, the girl, whose name is Teresa, wakes up and tells Thomas that the Maze is code. The sun also suddenly disappears, which causes the Doors to remain open at night. On the first night the doors stay open, the Grievers come into the Glade and carry off a boy named Gally into the Maze. The Gladers hope that the Grievers will only take one boy per night. The following day, Thomas uses the maps that the Runners made of the Maze to figure out that the Maze's shifting walls have been spelling out the phrase, "Float. Catch. Bleed. Death. Stiff. Push." To understand the code's meaning, Thomas purposefully gets stung by the Grievers so that he can go through the Changing and recover some of his memories. After the Changing, Thomas remembers that to escape the Maze, they must put the code into a computer that is inside an invisible portal. To get to the portal, they must jump off the Cliff. After convincing them to follow his plan, Thomas helps lead an armed band of Gladers into the Maze. At the Cliff, a group of Grievers are waiting for them. Thinking that they will only kill one person a night, Alby sacrifices himself to the Grievers. But his sacrifice fails and the Gladers must attack the Grievers as Thomas and Teresa make their way into the portal. Inside, Teresa plugs in the code, which shuts down all the Grievers. The surviving Gladers meet Thomas and Teresa in the portal. They find a slide that brings them to a giant facility where they meet the creators of the Maze. A woman with the word WICKED stitched into her lab coat and a man in a hood approach the Gladers. The woman congratulates them but says there is still one more test. The man takes off his hood, revealing himself as Gally. Seeming to be mind-controlled, Gally throws a knife at Thomas, but a fellow Glader, Chuck, jumps in front of the knife. As Thomas cradles Chuck's lifeless body, a group of men and women come into the facility and shoot the woman. The Gladers follow them onto a bus and they all drive into the night. On the bus, the unnamed leader of this group tells the Gladers that in the world outside the Maze, there has been a devastating ecological disaster that has caused a widespread outbreak of disease. WICKED hoped to raise children in the harsh environment of the Maze so that they would be better prepared to face the challenges of the real world. The leader says WICKED's actions are inhuman and that her group fights to save children from their experiments. They bring the Gladers to a safe-house and give them a place to eat and sleep in peace. The novel ends with an email by the Chancellor of the Maze Trials, Ava Paige. She writes that the "rescue" was a good finale and that after the group gets a good night's sleep, phase two of the experiment will begin.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A small village in rural Dorset, southwest England - Character: Phyllis Grove. Description: Phyllis Grove is the story's protagonist, and the character who relays the story to the narrator many years later. She is a young woman who lives with her father in the countryside in Dorset, southwest England. Phyllis is so shy that she blushes when she sees other people, and when she becomes engaged to Humphrey Gould, a dull bachelor of slightly higher social standing, those around her see it as a miracle. Phyllis doesn't feel any great affection for Humphrey, who soon leaves the village for the unusually long period of a year, and she's very quick to believe rumors that he has neglected the engagement. This allows her to justify and demonstrate her affection to Matthäus Tina, a German soldier posted nearby who walks past her garden wall in the evenings. Phyllis continues these trysts against her unaffectionate father's wishes, and when Tina invites her to escape to Germany with him where they will marry, it's her father's overbearing nature that pushes her to overcome her fear and agree. But Phyllis finds herself drawn back into a life of constraint when she learns that Humphrey has returned to bring her a gift and apologize for his absence. She immediately regrets her disloyalty to him, and her fears of social instability and scandal cement her decision to stay in England without Matthäus Tina. She has a brief moment of potential courage when she watches Tina walking away from her and longs to run after him—but her caution leads her to return home. She soon learns that Humphrey has brought her the gift, an ornate mirror, not to prove his loyalty to her, but to appease her before he shares that he has secretly married another woman. Phyllis is relieved to learn this, valuing an unmarried life more than an unhappy marriage. When she later sees Matthäus Tina and Christoph shot in the military camp, however, her feelings betray her: she faints, remaining unconscious for days and delirious for weeks. For the rest of her life, she tends the graves of the two soldiers, and when she dies, she is buried nearby. - Character: Matthäus Tina/German Hussar/Soldier. Description: Matthäus Tina is a soldier in the German Legion who forms a connection—first friendly, then romantic—with Phyllis when the Legion is posted nearby. He is deeply homesick for the part of Germany he is from, a town called Saarbrück, where his mother still lives. Tina meets Phyllis when he walks past her garden wall, dressed in the stiff, ornate military garb that distinguishes him as a foreign soldier and seeming melancholy and withdrawn. When he sees Phyllis sitting on the wall in a low-cut dress, he blushes and walks on silently, demonstrating the same shyness that Phyllis shares. Over the following days, however, Tina walks the same way, having gradually longer conversations with Phyllis and sharing with her his homesickness and his resentment at being posted to England. Eventually, he tells her his plan to escape to Germany and asks her to join him. Tina knows the dangers of the plan—if he's caught, he'll be punished as a deserter—but he's so desperate to return to his home and his mother, he's willing to accept those risks. Once he has made his plans to escape—along with Phyllis and his friend, Christoph—he becomes more reckless. At one point, he stays to talk to Phyllis even after the military camp closes, at risk of demotion, because he prioritizes his loyalty and love for Phyllis over his military status. On the night of the escape, when Phyllis explains to him her decision to stay in England, Tina does not attempt to persuade her otherwise. His respect for her decision leads him to put aside his own desires, and his loyalty to Christoph, who is waiting at the harbor with the escape boat, means he must continue his plan without her. Ultimately, that loyalty leads to his death, after he and Christoph, along with two other soldiers who also decided to escape, are caught in Jersey and punished for desertion. Tina and Christoph take the blame for the escape, saving the other two soldiers and guaranteeing themselves capital punishment. Matthäus Tina dies in England, the place he was so desperate to escape, and is buried in the churchyard in an unmarked grave, next to Christoph's grave, and eventually Phyllis's, too. - Character: Humphrey Gould. Description: Humphrey Gould is a bachelor from a local family, unremarkable in both appearance and personality, who becomes engaged to Phyllis Grove. He is considered an unusually good match for her due to his slightly higher social status, though in reality he is no better off financially than Phyllis and her father. Shortly after proposing to Phyllis, Humphrey leaves for Bath, and though he promises to return to her, he stays away for a whole year. He sends letters to Phyllis, but they contain no more than formalities. He doesn't display any great affection towards her, and his absence and lack of obvious emotional attachment strengthen the rumor that he no longer considers their engagement to be a sure thing. Humphrey returns to see Phyllis, bringing a gift—an ornate mirror—but instead of restating his intention to marry her, he reveals that he has secretly married another woman. He needs Phyllis to explain to his father, who would otherwise oppose this secret marriage, that she could never have married Humphrey. Humphrey seems to have his selfishness rewarded, receiving what he desires before vanishing from the story. - Character: Dr. Grove/Phyllis's Father. Description: Phyllis's father, Dr. Grove, was once a professional, but his habits of solitary philosophical meditation reduced his income so greatly that he and Phyllis were forced to move to the countryside, no longer able to afford to live in a larger town. In the country, Dr. Grove has become more and more irritable and withdrawn, and he is unkind and oppressive to Phyllis. When rumors circulate that Humphrey may not plan on honoring his engagement to Phyllis, Dr. Grove refuses to believe them, instructing Phyllis to remain patient and loyal to the man who has shown her so little regard. He soon learns of Phyllis's frequent conversations with a German soldier, and tells her she cannot go further than the garden wall without his permission. Dr. Grove, desiring even more control over his daughter, eventually decides Phyllis must leave the village to stay with her aunt until the soldiers have moved on from their camp, and his control over her extends to his directions on what to pack for her stay. He is "triumphant" when Humphrey returns, pleased by his (incorrect) assumption that his daughter will finally have a respectable marriage. - Character: Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator is a man from the part of the English countryside in which the story takes place. He was told the story by Phyllis many years ago, when he was a teenager and she was 75. The narrator plays no part in the events of the story, but mentions that he has visited the churchyard where the two soldiers and Phyllis are buried. He is the first to share the tale widely, having waited many years to do so out of respect for Phyllis's wishes that it be kept secret until she had been dead a long time. - Character: Christoph. Description: Christoph is Matthäus Tina's friend in the German Legion and his collaborator in the escape to Germany. He plays a vital part in the plan, collecting a boat from the harbor in which the two hope to row to the French coast. Due to a navigational error, however, Tina and Christoph find themselves in Jersey (a British island) instead of France, and are captured for desertion and sentenced to death. Christoph demonstrates the same loyalty and self-sacrifice as Tina when the two of them claim full responsibility for the escape, allowing the other accompanying soldiers to avoid capital punishment. Christoph is buried alongside Matthäus Tina in the village churchyard in Dorset. - Character: Humphrey's Father. Description: Humphrey's father is an elderly man who has become too feeble to attend to his own affairs. Humphrey claims that his father's weakness is the reason he needs to stay away from Phyllis for so long. Readers learn that Humphrey's father is, like Dr. Grove, intent on Humphrey's successful engagement to Phyllis, and will not approve of Humphrey's secret, less respectable marriage. - Theme: Captivity, Restriction, and Escape. Description: Phyllis, a solitary young woman who lives in the English countryside, and Matthäus Tina, a German Hussar camped near Phyllis's home, both find themselves in situations of captivity that cause them to resent and resist their circumstances, to unhappy or even disastrous ends. Phyllis lives in the countryside with her father, Dr. Grove, as his tendency towards solitary meditation has reduced their financial means, and living in a town is no longer within their budget. Her life with her father, particularly after she meets Matthäus Tina, has become "irksome and painful in the extreme" and she receives very little affection from him. Phyllis's reluctant engagement to a young man named Humphrey becomes another restriction, compounded by her father's insistence that the engagement remain intact, and his efforts to keep her from seeing Matthäus Tina, whom she meets and befriends while Humphrey is away. To separate the lovers, Phyllis's father plans to send her to stay at her aunt's home, a place Phyllis feels is "a prison." Meanwhile, Matthäus Tina, bound by his military status, longs to be back in his homeland and near his mother in the German town of Saarbrück. He hates England, yet leaving without permission would mean becoming a deserter. Neither character is able to make a decision that results in their freedom. Matthäus Tina attempts to escape England, which ends in execution for himself and his fellow soldier; Phyllis, bound by the restrictions of her father and the expectations of society, decides to honor her engagement to Humphrey—an engagement, it turns out, he has secretly disregarded in order to marry another, exerting the freedom granted by his gender and slightly higher social status. Both Phyllis and Matthäus Tina, forced to remain in situations that cause them great sadness, are eventually buried near each other in the part of the world they have attempted to leave, suggesting that the restrictions of money, family, and wartime are inescapable, and that trying to escape them is futile. - Theme: Love vs. Societal Expectations. Description: Throughout the story, Phyllis's own feelings of attraction and desire are constantly at odds with what is expected of her by society. When she becomes engaged to Humphrey, who is from a respectable family and a higher social class, it's "as if she were going to be taken to heaven" in others' eyes—despite Humphrey's inherent, almost indescribable dullness. The lack of romance in this match is clear, and dramatically contrasts with Phyllis's feelings towards Matthäus Tina, whom she meets later on. While Humphrey is "neither young nor old; neither good-looking nor positively plain," Tina's face is "striking" and "handsome," and Phyllis can't get it out of her mind. Though Humphrey leaves for Bath and does not return for a year, and though the letters he has sent her lack affection—and even despite the rumors Phyllis hears of Humphrey neglecting their engagement—she feels hesitant to express any affection to Matthäus Tina despite feeling that affection deeply. Hardy describes "the stone wall of necessity" standing between Phyllis and Matthäus Tina, emphasizing that their differing social statuses and Phyllis's engagement form an insurmountable barrier between the two. Phyllis's father is the main proponent in Phyllis's life of the social pressure to marry well. He quotes the Elizabethan lyric, "Love me little, love me long," to imply that Phyllis should be satisfied with her formal and unromantic match, and that her dignity within society is more important than her happiness. Phyllis decides to honor her engagement with Humphrey not because of her own feelings of loyalty, but because she's afraid of the "vague" and "venturesome" life she would have with Matthäus Tina, and of losing the respect of others. The societal expectation that she should be happy with a respectable marriage means she forfeits a life with her lover for the "dreary prospect" of life with Humphrey—an outcome that shows the unhappiness that results from conforming to social rules instead of marrying for love. - Theme: Gender, Rank, and Power. Description: While Phyllis has very little power over her circumstances, the story demonstrates that the men around her wield more power over theirs. On the rare occasions when Phyllis is able to make a decision about the path of her life, she is still restricted by her overbearing father, her lack of connection, her lack of money, and her status as a woman. When she hears the rumors about Humphrey's lack of loyalty to her, she makes the decision to become more affectionate with her new friend Matthäus Tina—but still does so secretly, never going further than the garden wall. Phyllis's father, finding out about her relationship with Tina, makes plans to send her to her aunt's home, emphasizing that Phyllis's life is not under her control but can be changed at the whim of a patriarchal figure. Matthäus Tina, on the other hand, is restricted not by gender but by rank, kept against his will in a country he loathes. However, he is able to carry out his fatal escape plan with seemingly less concern for "esteem" than Phyllis has. Where he is thwarted by a death sentence due to his military status, Phyllis is hamstrung by the restrictions placed on her because of her gendered place in society. Ultimately, it turns out that Humphrey is the most powerful character in the story, due to both his gender and rank. He is able to make the decision Phyllis cannot: to find and marry a person he loves, despite his engagement to someone else. Phyllis is even asked for her help in convincing Humphrey's father of his marriage, which means that Phyllis wields the only power she has—her expression of interest, or lack of interest—to serve the happiness of a man. Through these characters' decisions and outcomes, Hardy quietly critiques the hierarchy of power operating in his day, with women at the bottom and well-connected men at the top. - Theme: Secrecy, Rumor, and Storytelling. Description: "The Melancholy Hussar" is set 90 years earlier, and the narrator is retelling a version of it that Phyllis told him 20 years ago, when he was 15 years old. Phyllis also tells the narrator that she wishes for her story to be kept a secret until she is "dead, buried, and forgotten." Furthermore, throughout the story, secrecy and rumor affect many of the decisions Phyllis makes. It is a rumor about Humphrey that causes her to cultivate her feelings for Matthäus Tina, and it is only because she overhears fragments of conversation between Humphrey and his friend and interprets them in a certain way that she decides not to escape with the man she truly loves. The narrator suggests that the rumors shared about Phyllis during her life were fragments, too, and only the ones "most unfavorable to her character." The length of time between the events and the narrator's recounting of them, along with Phyllis's desire for discretion, implies that this story could have powerful and damaging consequences for anyone involved in it. By suggesting that the story can only be told now that its characters have died and been mostly forgotten, Hardy emphasizes the danger and power of stories, and the effect they can have on a person's dignity and pride. Yet, because the narrator is recounting the version of the story told to him by Phyllis, and because he is attempting to fill in the parts of the story left out from the unflattering rumors, Hardy also suggests that sharing a complete story is less damaging to the reputations of those involved—after all, it allows one's decisions to be clearly understood, rather than allowing fragmentary, possibly misleading rumors to spread unchecked. - Theme: Loyalty. Description: Phyllis, Humphrey, and Matthäus Tina each struggle with loyalty throughout the story, and their decisions about where they place their loyalty are ultimately what decide their fate. Phyllis is loyal to Humphrey for the first year of their engagement, but when she hears that Humphrey may not be honoring the engagement in the same way, her loyalty to him weakens, and she allows herself to think of Matthäus Tina as her lover. But when she overhears Humphrey talking with his friend about his plan to bring Phyllis a present and apologize for his behavior, her loyalty to him is immediately restored. Meanwhile, Humphrey has disregarded the engagement in order to secretly marry his love match—meaning that Phyllis's loyalty to him is misplaced. Matthäus Tina's relationship with loyalty is complicated, too. He feels no great loyalty to the army he serves, preferring to stay late at the garden wall with Phyllis rather than to ensure his promotion in rank. He makes the decision to desert England and his battalion, partly because of his homesickness—a kind of loyalty to his country—and partly due to an acute loyalty to his friend, Christoph, who will be sabotaged if Tina does not go through with the plan. Tina is simultaneously loyal and disloyal, and this duplicity, though it comes from a pure longing for home and the desire to do right by his friend, ends fatally for him. Through these myriad complicated decisions and changes of mind, Hardy implies that loyalty is not a black and white issue. Loyalty given under duress, as it is by Phyllis, does not yield a happy result; disloyalty motivated by selfishness, as shown by Humphrey's actions, can, unfairly, end in satisfaction for the disloyal party. Not even the purest loyalty to one's family, country, or friends, as shown by Matthäus Tina, holds the guarantee of a reward. - Climax: Phyllis decides to remain loyal to her betrothed instead of escaping with her lover. - Summary: An unnamed narrator relays an account given to him by a woman named Phyllis Grove. When Phyllis told him the story, he was a teenager and she an old woman. Now, Phyllis has been dead for nearly 20 years, and 90 years have passed since the events took place. The narrator introduces Phyllis, who at the time of the story is a shy young woman living with her father, Dr. Grove, in the English countryside. Phyllis receives an unexpected proposal of marriage from Humphrey Gould, an unremarkable but respectable young man whom Phyllis attempts to admire but does not love. Humphrey soon leaves for Bath and does not return for a full year. During this time, a legion of German soldiers arrives to camp near Phyllis's village. She forms a connection with one of the soldiers, Matthäus Tina, after meeting him when he walks past the wall in her garden. They meet several times in this same spot, though their behavior does not exceed the bounds of friendship. Hearing rumors that Humphrey, who is still in Bath, may be neglecting his engagement with her, Phyllis decides—against the forceful instructions of her father—to become closer to Matthäus Tina. Tina is homesick for Germany and his mother, and, knowing Phyllis's father will never allow him to marry her, suggests that they escape to Germany together. Phyllis is overwhelmed by the danger and uncertainty of Tina's plan. Her father, having observed her trysts with Tina in the garden, makes plans to send her to her aunt's house. Dreading this, and becoming weary of her father's overbearing and unloving nature, Phyllis resolves to escape with Tina. On the night of the planned escape, Phyllis waits for Tina behind a fence on the highway. While she's waiting, a coach pulls up and lets two passengers out. One of the passengers is Humphrey, the other his friend. Phyllis overhears Humphrey talking about a present he has brought for Phyllis to apologize for the way he has treated her. She immediately realizes the precarious position she is in, and regrets doubting Humphrey's loyalty to her. When Tina arrives, Phyllis explains that she can't escape with him. Tina leaves anyway, unable to abandon his friend, Christoph, who is waiting at the harbor with the boat for their escape. Phyllis returns home. The next morning, Humphrey arrives with a gift: an ornate mirror. Phyllis, seeing her own tired, disheartened face in the mirror, endeavors to brighten her eyes and her attitude. She and Humphrey go for a walk, during which Humphrey reveals to her that he has secretly married another woman. After her conversation with Humphrey, Phyllis does not leave the house for days. When she does, it is to walk to the garden wall where she used to talk with Matthäus Tina. Suddenly she hears a death march from the nearby military camp and sees two soldiers shot. It transpires that they are Matthäus Tina and Christoph, who mistakenly rowed to the British island of Jersey instead of the French coast and were captured as deserters. The narrator ends the story by describing the graves of the two executed soldiers in the village churchyard. When Phyllis was alive, she tended to the graves. Now, Phyllis herself is buried near them.

- Genre: Literary fiction; family saga; coming-of-age tale - Title: The Memory Keeper’s Daughter - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: Lexington, KY and Pittsburgh, PA - Character: Dr. David Henry. Description: The novel's protagonist and its most inscrutable, complex character, David Henry is haunted by a past full of poverty, grief, and loss when he makes the painful decision to send away his newborn daughter Phoebe—who has been born with Down syndrome. David lost a sister, June, to heart failure in childhood and, knowing the medical risks associated with Down syndrome, he fears having to watch Phoebe die too. Accordingly, David sends Phoebe away with nurse Caroline Gill and constructs a terrible lie, telling everyone that Phoebe died at birth. The lie, though meant to spare his family pain and grief, ultimately becomes the source of its slow, painful dissolution over the decades that follow. David is desperate to outrun the secret he's allowed to flourish, but he's unable to escape the weight of what he's done to his family. He believes until the day of his death—ironically, from a heart attack—that he'll one day tell the truth and set things right. Rather than owning up to his mistakes, though, David retreats into an obsession with photography, which stems from a desire to find one perfect moment that will carry the same weight as the moment he chose to give Phoebe away. He alienates himself from his wife Norah and son Paul, and when he tries to find redemption by sheltering a sixteen-year-old pregnant runaway, Rosemary, he estranges himself from his family even more deeply. David is both protagonist and antagonist in many ways—he is his own worst enemy, and his hubris affects everything around him. Stubborn yet sensitive, with a debilitating need to try and fix the past and master the future, David's individual arc ties in with all of the novel's major themes. - Character: Norah Henry. Description: At the start of the novel, Norah Henry is a young, subservient wife whose only hope is to be taken care of. When she unexpectedly has twins, her husband David, who delivered the children, tells her that the girl, Phoebe, died at birth. After this point, Norah's idyllic life as a doctor's wife is derailed by grief, loss, sorrow, and frustration about her community and her own husband's failure to acknowledge the magnitude of her loss. Though Norah tries to suppress her grief for years, she feels a horrible presence taking root in her marriage, and she knows that her husband is drifting further and further from her all the time. Norah tries to mend things for a while, but after David proves increasingly inaccessible, she embarks on a career of her own as a successful travel agent and has a series of sexual dalliances, which empower her even as they estrange her from her husband and her son Paul. Norah becomes headstrong and self-assured in her later years, divorcing David and finding love with Frederic, a Frenchman who shares Norah's passion for travel. Norah remains haunted by the loss of her daughter, and often feels she can sense Phoebe's presence just out of reach. When Caroline Gill arrives on her doorstep a year after David's death to reveal the truth that Phoebe has been alive the whole time, Norah is angry and devastated—but also relieved as she feels the "jagged pieces" of her life beginning to make sense at last. Norah undergoes a serious transformation over the course of the novel, and her arc ties in with major themes including secrets and lies, and memory and the past. - Character: Caroline Gill Simpson. Description: Caroline is the novel's secondary protagonist, a sensitive yet strong nurse in Lexington, Kentucky who gets more than she bargained for when she assists in the birth of the children of Norah Henry, the wife of one of the doctors at the clinic where she works. Caroline has nursed a crush on David for years when she helps deliver his children—and so when he asks her to do the terrible deed of taking his Down syndrome-affected daughter Phoebe away to an institution, Caroline agrees. She soon realizes, though, that she can't leave the child behind. While David spreads the lie that Phoebe has died at birth, Caroline absconds with the child to Pittsburgh, where the two of them begin new lives together. Over the decades that follow, Caroline grows stronger, more political, and more empathetic. She fights tirelessly for Phoebe's right to a mainstream education and becomes an activist in her community. She finds love with Al Simpson, a kindly trucker, and eventually marries him, learning throughout their relationship that sometimes the strongest families are the ones you make—not the ones you're born into. Caroline is tender, fierce, thoughtful, and anxious, and she constantly puts Phoebe first—though towards the end of the novel, when she takes it upon herself to reveal the truth to Norah after nearly twenty-five years, she is able to admit that her motives in raising Phoebe were not entirely pure. Caroline herself was always desperate to be a mother, and she agreed to keep David Henry's secret so her own dreams could come true. One of the novel's most complex figures, Caroline's arc ties in with the novel's major themes of families born and made, difference and prejudice, and secrets and lies. - Character: Paul Henry. Description: Artistic, passionate, and often angry, Paul Henry grows up in the shadow of the twin sister he never knew. Adventurous and curious as a little boy and later introverted, focused, and creative as a young man, Paul wrestles constantly with the secrecy, isolation, and animosity at the heart of his family. Aware of his parents' distrust and dislike of one another and crushed by the pressure his father David puts on him to succeed in life, Paul vacillates between isolating himself and lashing out wildly for attention. He develops a serious talent for music, and later pursues a specialized education at Juilliard even against his father's wishes. Music, Paul says, is the only thing that makes him feel "alive"—and he chases that sensation no matter the cost, desperate to escape the crushing, stifling soullessness of his parents' house. When Paul learns the truth about his sister Phoebe after his father's death, he struggles deeply with feelings of anger and resentment that he hasn't felt since childhood. But after meeting Phoebe and beginning to heal from the wounds of the past alongside his mother Norah, Paul begins to understand how important it is not to waste one's life trying to fix past mistakes. From Phoebe, he begins to learn how to live in the moment and accept the simple joys of life—and sees that differences can bring people closer rather than dividing them. - Character: Phoebe Gill Simpson. Description: Phoebe, born with Down syndrome, is rejected by her father, David Henry, at birth. Caroline Gill is charged with taking her to a special home on the outskirts of Lexington—but unable to leave the child in such a grim place, Caroline adopts Phoebe instead. As Phoebe grows up in Pittsburgh, knowing nothing of her origins—or the fact that her birth mother, Norah, believes she is dead—she becomes a loving, outgoing—but "mercurial" and "quicksilver"—individual with big dreams. In spite of the obstacles and prejudices she faces, Phoebe develops into a self-assured young woman who holds a job at a local copy shop and has a loving relationship with a Down syndrome-affected man named Robert. Phoebe loves music and animals, and dreams of getting married one day in a big, beautiful wedding. Deeply emotional, highly sensitive, and often fanciful, Phoebe shows everyone she meets that there is beauty to be found in difference. - Character: Bree. Description: Bree is Norah's younger sister. A rebellious, intelligent, and free-spirited young woman, Bree caused a scandal in their family when she ran away from home before graduating high school to elope with a much older man. In 1964, already divorced, the twenty-year-old Bree is reclaiming her youth by enrolling in college. Bree nurtures Norah's more emotional side and urges her to rebel against societal expectations of women—and the strict demands her marriage to David makes on her. Throughout the years, Bree retains her same wild, soul-searching core, but she softens and becomes more interested in spirituality and religion as she grows older. Bree's unapologetic pursuit of personal freedom and autonomy inspires a deep envy within Norah, who feels restricted by her marriage and bound to a certain way of living even as, over the years, social and sexual norms change and evolve. - Character: Rosemary. Description: When David Henry returns to his childhood home in West Virginia—a property to which he still holds the deed—he discovers sixteen-year-old Rosemary squatting there. Pregnant, abandoned by her boyfriend, and disowned by her family, Rosemary has nowhere to go, so David makes the impulsive decision to bring her back to Kentucky with him. Norah rejects the idea of having Rosemary in the house, prompting a split in their family; David moves out of the house to live with Rosemary, and for years they share a platonic friendship. Rosemary, who is the same age as Paul—and Phoebe—represents, to David, a chance at redemption. If he cares for Rosemary, he believes, he'll be doing some sort of penance for his failure of Phoebe. Ultimately, after giving birth to her son Jack and graduating from school, Rosemary decides to marry her new boyfriend and move home to Harrisburg, where her family, having forgiven her for the delinquency of her youth, is ready to welcome her back. Rosemary is headstrong and stubbornly self-sufficient, though she softens through the years as she makes a home and a family with David. - Character: Albert "Al" Simpson. Description: Al is a kindly trucker whose chance meeting with Caroline Gill on the fateful night of Phoebe's birth transcends time and distance, and eventually blossoms into a romance and marriage. Al is patient, steadfast, and devoted to both Caroline and Phoebe. Though Caroline constantly worries that Al will become frustrated by Phoebe or the demands she makes on Caroline's time, Al is nothing but supportive, and he has an enormous amount of love for both Caroline and her daughter. - Character: Dorothy "Doro" March. Description: Doro is a Pittsburgh woman who hires Caroline to care for her elderly father Leo. Doro takes a chance on Caroline despite not having any references in support of her job application—when Caroline explains that she and her daughter are in a kind of hiding, Doro takes pity on Caroline and welcomes her into her family. Doro becomes a support system for Caroline and the two remain close friends—close, even, as sisters—even after Leo's death. - Character: June. Description: June is David Henry's deceased sister. June died in her youth from heart failure after years of illness, and her loss is in part why David gives Phoebe away—he knows that Down syndrome children have a higher risk of congenital heart defects, and he wants to spare Norah the pain of losing her early. - Character: Howard. Description: Howard is the first man with whom Norah has an extramarital affair. Norah and David meet Howard while on vacation in Aruba, and while David and Howard discuss their shared interests in art and photography, Norah develops an attraction to Howard. The two of them spend much of the vacation in Aruba making love in secret, and Norah doesn't learn until later that Paul and David knew what she was doing the entire time. - Theme: Secrets and Lies. Description: At the heart of the story of The Memory Keeper's Daughter lies a terrible secret: Dr. David Henry's choice to send away his daughter Phoebe, born with Down syndrome, while telling his wife Norah that the baby was stillborn. This lie—meant to save Norah, David himself, and their "normal" son Paul, Phoebe's fraternal twin, from a life of difficulty—ultimately casts a shadow of secrecy, pain, and estrangement over the Henry family, and causes Norah, David, and Paul to resent each other in small and large ways as the years go by. As Kim Edwards tracks the family's development in the shadow of this dark secret, she ultimately suggests that the lies people tell and the secrets they keep from one another—even in hopes of sparing another person pain and suffering—erode relationships until there is nothing real left. When David Henry makes the decision to send Phoebe away in the arms of the nurse who helped deliver her, Caroline Gill, he believes that Phoebe will be taken to a group home where she can grow up with other people like her, away from the eyes of society—and unable to cause her mother pain, worry, and strife. David's own sister, June, died as a young girl from a heart defect, and it is this that motivates him to spin a lie so enormous and egregious that it ultimately serves to ruin his life, and the lives of his wife and son. Though David believes he is being generous and benevolent, he is only hurting his family—and himself. David tells Norah that her daughter died at birth, and refuses to let her see the baby—whom he has already pressed into the arms of nurse Caroline Gill, and urged her to take the baby to a home for the incapacitated somewhere out of town. David's lie to Norah doesn't have its intended effect, though—Norah takes the death of the baby hard, and is unable to find happiness with the knowledge that Paul "survived." She is wracked with grief, and even after a "memorial service" for Phoebe—a service David allows to happen, even knowing that it's a sham which will keep him from ever revealing the truth—Norah spends the entire novel trying to overcome the grief of having "lost" a child. If David hadn't acted out of fear and cruelty—or had, at any point in his and Norah's lives together, revealed the truth—he might have been able to stop the cracks spreading through his marriage and family from deepening. At one point in the novel, Edwards shows that David does indeed realize, after all, just what his secrets and lies have done to his family. His marriage with Norah is on the rocks; the teenage Paul is distant and moody, hyperaware of his mother's longing for the daughter she never knew as well as the inexplicable strife between his parents. As David reflects on his choices, Edwards illustrates his thoughts for her readers: "[David] had given their daughter away. This secret stood in the middle of their family; it shaped their lives together. He knew it, he saw it, visible to him as a rock wall grown up between them. And he saw Norah and Paul reaching out and striking rock and not understanding what was happening, only that something stood between them that could not be seen or broken." David knows that the secrets and lies he's told have eroded the foundations of his family—and created "wall[s]" between them that can never be broached. Throughout the novel, there are repeated references to things growing, standing, or festering in the middle of the Henry family—vines, walls, and weeds—which symbolize the painful barriers that have grown up because of the silence, mistrust, and unspoken questions born of David's deceit and dishonesty. Ultimately, the Henry family dissolves. David moves out, Paul begins acting out and later moves to New York, then Europe, and Norah throws herself into her work, becoming a high-powered and single-minded business owner. Paul and Norah do not discover the truth about Phoebe until after David's death, when Caroline comes to town to reveal his secrets. By that point, David has gone to his grave carrying the secret which effectively tore his family apart—though it festered and grew first, dividing them for years and rendering them strangers to one another, devastated by their own private pain, fear, and confusion, all of which revolved around the grand lie of Phoebe's death. - Theme: Memory and the Past. Description: As the secrets and lies within the Henry family deepen, David, Norah, and Paul find themselves retreating more and more often into memory and the past—for different reasons, but all with the same desperate energy. David takes up photography as a way of slowing down and inhabiting moments, in a retroactive effort to understand his own past decisions, while Norah combs through memories of her early courtship with David and their happy first year of marriage in a futile attempt to understand what has broken between them. As Paul grows up, he, too spends time lingering in the past as he attempts to imagine what his life might have been like if his sister had not "died" at birth. As the characters in the novel wrestle with the pull of the past, Edwards argues that too much attention to time gone by is dangerous—attempts to keep history from repeating itself as well of the act of lingering in memory will only derail one's life further. The members of the Henry family all wrestle with the inexplicable pull the past has on them—but none so intensely as David Henry, the novel's protagonist. Kim Edwards turns the novel into an exploration of how the past can distort the future—and she uses David as the primary example in her careful character study. David Henry is in many ways both the protagonist and antagonist of the novel—he is trapped in a terrible, lonely world of his own making, created by the horrible secret he engendered when he sent Phoebe away with Caroline Gill. Locked in a constant battle with himself over whether or not he should tell his devastated wife and lonely son the truth about their family—that there is one member, still alive, whom they are missing—David finds himself living almost entirely in the past, pulled again and again to the memory of the night he made the fateful choice that would change his life and his family's forever. David's preoccupation—perhaps even obsession—with the past is symbolized through his late-in-life success as a photographer. Years after Norah gives him the gift of a camera as an anniversary present, David begins honing his skills as a photographer and starts taking pictures (often using Norah as a model) which focus on the unseen, embedding Norah into wide shots that focus on the background and obscure the person in the frame so that they're just a small part of the picture. David's obsession with freezing moments in time speaks to his inability to release himself not just from the most pivotal moment of his life—the moment in which he chose to give away Phoebe—but all the moments after, in which he has doubled down on his decision, letting the secret grow and fester. David's art of erasure also speaks to how he has erased Phoebe from his family—and how he's unable to forget her, yet has no idea who she's growing into or what she looks like. Phoebe is the invisible in his life—not seen or felt, but a part of the canvas, lurking just below the surface of everything he does. It's important to note that David isn't just haunted by his recent past. His impoverished childhood, made more unbearable by his sister's death at just twelve years old from a heart defect, is the root of who he is today. He chooses to give Phoebe away in part because he wants to spare Norah the pain of losing her—being a doctor himself, he's aware of the risk of congenital heart defects that accompanies Down syndrome—and spare himself the repeated pain of losing someone to heart failure. Ironically, David himself dies of a heart attack towards the end of the novel, demonstrating that no matter how hard people try to escape their pasts, they cannot outrun them forever. David Henry's fatal flaw is his simultaneous fear of and obsession with the past. David seeks to keep the past from repeating itself, but cannot live with the choices he makes in pursuit of this goal, and spends nearly his whole life feeling like a prisoner to the memories of his poor decisions, mistakes, and losses. He represents Edward's larger argument that there are no answers to be found in the past—and spending one's life obsessed with what's already transpired only keeps one from enjoying the present and building towards a future. - Theme: Difference and Prejudice. Description: From David Henry's startled, almost disgusted realization that his daughter Phoebe has been born with Down syndrome to the nurse at the hospital who, when Caroline Gill brings Phoebe in during an allergic anaphylactic reaction, asks if Caroline would like her to let the young girl simply die, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is suffused with the pall and poison that prejudice casts over society. Through the character of Phoebe—a slow learner and "late bloomer," but a deeply sensitive, intelligent, and capable individual—Kim Edwards shows how bigotry divides people unnecessarily, ultimately arguing that those who appear and act in unusual or special ways are disproportionately harmed by society's fear of difference. From the very first chapter of the novel, when Paul and Phoebe are born on a snowy winter night, the characters within the book are forced to confront their personal prejudices and fear of difference. Though David Henry orders Caroline Gill to bring the Down syndrome-affected Phoebe to a home for the impaired out of a desire to shield himself and his wife from the heartbreak of what he believes will be a short, painful life for the girl, there's a seed of judgment and intolerance in his decision, as well. When Caroline brings Phoebe to Pittsburgh, she does so out of love and a belief that Phoebe deserves to live a normal life—a life where she's given equal opportunity and never has to feel hidden, neglected, or ashamed. Caroline's struggle throughout the novel to fight for equitable rights, fair treatment, and good opportunities for her daughter is an uphill battle—one which exposes the deep prejudices running through American society not just in the 1960s, but beyond. When Phoebe is stung by a bee and develops anaphylaxis—a closing of the throat in an acute allergic reaction—Caroline and her boyfriend Al rush the confused, frightened Phoebe to the hospital. A nurse sees Phoebe struggling to breathe, turns to Caroline, who is begging for a doctor, and asks her—in coded speech—if she's sure she wants Phoebe to receive medical attention, and wouldn't just rather let her die. Caroline, outraged by the woman's cruelty (as well as the assumption that Caroline sees Phoebe as a burden), tries to slap her, but Al holds her back. This is the most pointed and indeed the most evil of several smaller encounters Caroline has with people who immediately pick up on Phoebe's difference and react to her out of fear, judgment, or disgust rather than relating to Phoebe as a whole, capable person with her own personality—a person worthy of life, happiness, and attention. Caroline also encounters difficulty finding a place for Phoebe to go to school. Through Sandra, the mother of another Pittsburgh boy with Down syndrome, Caroline begins to find and develop a community. The parents petition the school district to let their children partake of a normal, mainstream education—but the local officials refuse their request, claiming that the "mentally retarded" children would only "overwhelm the system" and drain resources form "normal" children who, in the eyes of the state, are more deserving of attention and education. Outraged by this decision, Caroline, Sandra, and other parents of other children with Down syndrome ultimately form the Upside Down Society—a place where their children can meet others like them and learn, play, and form relationships free of the judgement of those who don't understand them (and don't even want to try to). Overall, Kim Edwards uses the relationship between Phoebe and her twin brother Paul to crystallize how cruel, divisive, and ultimately pointless prejudice and judgment are—and how deeply they can wound. In the novel's final chapters, as Paul gets to know his sister, Phoebe, better and better, he observes how other people's "strained, uncertain" ways of talking and listening to Phoebe minimize and ignore her personhood. Paul loves and appreciates his twin for who she is, and grows sad as he thinks about "the difficulties she encounter[s] in the world simply by being different." Paul is comforted by the fact that Phoebe's "direct and guileless love" serves to "propel" her through the hardships and prejudices she's faced already, and will surely continue to face as she ages. Phoebe is different, but as Paul has learned, differences can be respected and celebrated instead of met with fear, disgust, or hatred. - Theme: Families Born and Made. Description: When Phoebe Henry is sent away for no reason other than her difference, Caroline Gill—the nurse who helped deliver the child—is unable to leave her at the dirty, understaffed home Dr. David Henry has sent her to, and instead adopts Phoebe as her own daughter. Throughout the novel, as Caroline and Phoebe make a new life together in Pittsburgh while the Henrys remains in Lexington—with Norah and Paul unaware that their family is incomplete—Kim Edwards calls into question what it means to be part of a family. She ultimately argues that some of the strongest families are made consciously by people who love and support each other, rather than by people simply born into the same household. The most potent example of a "made" family within the novel is that of Caroline Gill. After she adopts Phoebe as her own daughter and moves with her to Pittsburgh, she steadily and carefully creates an extended family for herself as the years go by, slowly erasing the loneliness she's always felt and realizing that she is not "some sort of vessel to be filled up with love," but instead a person with so much love to give that she unites all kinds of people from all different sorts of places. Caroline intends to make a family with just Phoebe—she feels an intense amount of love for the child, and never once pities, judges, or looks down on her as she grows. As Caroline and Phoebe settle in Pittsburgh, however, the united front of their little family draws in everyone they meet—and together, they build a larger family based on love, respect, and mutual desire to weather the world together. Caroline takes a job working as nurse and caretaker to Leo, an elderly man whose harsh exterior melts the more he gets to know her. Leo's daughter, Doro, who hires Caroline and takes a chance on her in spite of her lack of references (due to the fact that she and Phoebe are in a kind of hiding) also becomes charmed by Caroline and Phoebe's bond—and Doro becomes a sort of sister to Caroline as the years pass by. Caroline eventually marries Al, a trucker she met on the night Phoebe was born. When Caroline and Phoebe were caught in the snow, Al gave them a ride home in his rig. As the years go by, Caroline wonders often where the kind, handsome Al ended up—and one night, on the dark streets of Pittsburgh, he finds her, revealing he has been searching for her for years. Caroline and Al begin a courtship, and yet Caroline rejects Al's offers of marriage for fear that Phoebe will one day prove a burden to him. When Al heroically helps Caroline through one of Phoebe's health scares, Caroline becomes convinced that Al is the right man for her—and chooses to add him to her family, assured of his worth and his desire to choose her and Phoebe right back, every day. Towards the end of the novel, another "made" family emerges—after David Henry visits his childhood home and finds the pregnant, sixteen-year-old drifter Rosemary living there, he invites her to come back to Lexington with him and live with his family. Norah rejects Rosemary outright, believing that David is either in love with the girl or the father of her child. On a psychological level, Rosemary, who is the same age as Paul—and Phoebe, whom Norah believes is dead—reminds Norah of the daughter she never knew. While for David, this fact makes him want to shelter and protect Rosemary as penance for his secret deeds, Norah is unable to cohabitate with the girl. David and Rosemary move out and into a home of their own, where they live together platonically for several years while Rosemary gives birth to and raises her son, Jack, and takes classes. David—through circumstances of his own making —has felt like an outsider in his own family for nearly two decades. The family he chooses with Rosemary and her son is nontraditional and strange, even, but David feels more at home with the two of them than he ever did with Norah and Paul. In sending his daughter away and breaking apart the family that was born to him, David Henry commits an unspeakable and, by some standards, even evil act. However, as the novel progresses and the far-flung characters within it form and make families based on choice, trust, and mutual respect and love, Edwards shows that true family is made of the people who show up for one another out of love and commitment rather than obligation alone. Blood, goes the old adage, is thicker than water—but The Memory Keeper's Daughter shows that sometimes, the inverse is true. - Climax: After David Henry's death, Caroline Gill travels to Lexington, Kentucky to inform Norah Henry that her daughter Phoebe is alive and well in Pittsburgh. - Summary: In Lexington, Kentucky on a snowy winter night in 1964, Norah Henry goes into labor. Her husband David Henry, an orthopedic surgeon, is forced to deliver the babies himself when their obstetrician gets caught in the snowstorm. With the help of a nurse, Caroline Gill, David delivers a beautiful baby boy named Paul—and is shocked when a second baby arrives. The second child, a girl named Phoebe, is born with Down syndrome. Recognizing the medical—and social—complications that accompany the syndrome, David gives Phoebe to Caroline and orders her to take the child to an institution in the countryside. Caroline drives through the snow to the address David has given her, but once she sets eyes on the poor conditions, she absconds with the baby and returns to Lexington. When her car stalls out, a kindly trucker named Al brings her and Phoebe back to her apartment. David, meanwhile, has told Norah—who was slightly drugged during the birth—that though she delivered twins, the girl died at birth. The devastated Norah returns home with her son Paul and attempts to push through the grief she feels—grief no one else around her will acknowledge. Norah insists on holding a memorial service for Phoebe, and David reluctantly agrees. Caroline, meanwhile, sees an ad for the memorial service in the paper, and decides to take Phoebe out of town and give them both a fresh start. Over the years that follow, the novel follows the perspectives of David, Norah, Caroline, and Paul as the four of them wrestle with the unspoken secret at the heart of all their lives. While Norah tries to ignore the eerie sense that her daughter is still out there somewhere, David struggles with the desire to tell the truth—and the fear of what will happen if he does. He is haunted by a past marked by poverty, grief, and loss—David's younger sister June died of heart failure as a child, and his desire to prevent pain like that from seeping into his marriage to Norah was at the heart of his plan to give Phoebe away. He develops an obsession with photography as a way of coping with his inability to control time, always hoping that he will be able to capture one moment that feels as important and life-changing as the moment in which he chose to give his daughter away. Meanwhile, Norah balks against David's distant, aloof refusal to admit to the grief he feels over their daughter's loss, or to even talk about her. She develops a slight drinking problem and often behaves recklessly for attention. As Paul grows older, she becomes deeply overprotective of him, desperate to keep her remaining child safe for as long as she can. Caroline, meanwhile, finds work as a private nurse to a grouchy old man named Leo, and takes up residence in the large house he and his daughter Doro share. She reunites with Al and struggles with her fear that Phoebe will never be able to have a normal life. As Phoebe grows older, Caroline finds a community of other parents of children with Down syndrome, and together they form the Upside Down Society in order to advocate for their children's right to education, equality, and fair treatment. She begins sending letters and photographs of Phoebe to David, and he sends money—but never any letters—in return. As Paul grows into a teenager, he becomes angry, moody, and rebellious. He smokes marijuana with his friends, plays music nonstop, and finds himself wondering often about the sister he never knew. He knows his parents' marriage is on the rocks—his mother, now a high-powered travel agent, has had at least one affair, and though his father's photography career has gained traction, David balks at Paul's own desire to become a musician and study at Juilliard, insisting Paul needs to find a more traditional career. Paul, Norah, and David orbit one another but have no real sense of family or connection. On a trip to Pittsburgh for the opening of a museum exhibit dedicated to his photographs, David is shocked to find himself face-to-face with Caroline Gill. The two talk privately, and Caroline tells him that Phoebe is growing up to be a happy, healthy girl who is able to attend public school with other children. David tells Caroline to stay until the end of the opening, hoping to continue a conversation with her and discuss reuniting their two families, but he is dismayed when she slips away. David, reeling from the pain of what he's done to his own family, takes a bus to West Virginia and returns to his parents' house, to which he still holds the deed, hoping to confront the past. He finds a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl named Rosemary squatting there—he tells her the truth about who he is and the things he's done, but Rosemary doesn't judge him or look down on him. Taken in by her beautiful paper cuttings and moved by a desire to shelter a young woman to make up for his cruel treatment of Phoebe, David brings Rosemary home to Lexington, where a furious Norah demands David move out. Years later, David has been living platonically with Rosemary for years, helping her to raise her son Jack. She announces that she's going to move home to Pennsylvania, and David accepts her decision with both sadness and optimism. He goes out for a run, determined to visit Norah and tell her the truth about Phoebe once and for all—but when he gets to the house they used to share he finds it empty, and remembers that Norah is on vacation in Europe with her new boyfriend Frederic. David tries to leave a note explaining the past, but can't find the words. He fixes a leaky faucet for Norah and resumes his run. Weeks later, in Europe, Norah meets with Paul at the Louvre. She has been on vacation, and Paul has been touring Europe and studying music in various countries. She breaks some sad news: David passed away from a massive heart attack nine days ago. There wasn't time to contact Paul for the funeral, which Norah returned home briefly to organize and attend. Paul is shaken, but has trouble feeling grief for his father, with whom he always had a contentious and painful relationship. Norah insists that David always loved Paul. As she bids her son goodbye and returns to the hotel where she's staying with Frederic, Norah gives thanks for her life—and for the roundabout ways in which her struggles ultimately made her stronger. In Pittsburgh, Caroline and Al are dealing with the now twenty-four-year-old Phoebe's burgeoning sexuality and desire for romance and independence. Phoebe has a boyfriend named Robert, and she is determined to marry him and live on her own. Caroline is afraid to let her daughter go and move her into a group home—but when a local bank calls to inform her that an account with a large sum of money in it has been created by David Henry in Phoebe's name, Caroline and Al begin to realize that perhaps they and Phoebe can each have a shot at independence for the first time in all their lives. A year later, Norah is preparing to move out of the house in Lexington she once shared with David and Paul. She is moving to France with Frederic. As she combs through David's photographs, preparing his archives for appraisers who believe his work is worth over fifty thousand dollars, she finds a puzzling cache of photos of girls and young women. When the doorbell rings, Norah answers the door to find Caroline Gill standing on her doorstep. Caroline tells Norah the full truth about Phoebe and then leaves, promising that her home in Pittsburgh is always open should Norah want to meet Phoebe at last. Though devastated by the news, Norah cannot deny a sense of relief as all the strange, "jagged" pieces of her life begin to make sense. She starts to understand why David was always so determined to bury the past and yet linger in it as well. Unable to cope with the feelings she's having, Norah angrily begins burning some of David's photographs. Paul arrives to help her pack up the house, and Norah tells him the truth about Phoebe. Paul is similarly confused, shocked, and angry—but he urges Norah to stop burning the photographs and focus instead on packing up the house and removing themselves from their obsession with the past. Shortly after packing up the house, Paul and Norah decide to drive to Pittsburgh to meet Phoebe. The meeting is awkward and difficult, uncharted territory for everyone involved, and yet Paul and Phoebe make a profound connection. Paul and his sister share a love of music, and Paul finds himself realizing that though Phoebe is different, there's nothing about her to pity or grieve—in many ways, she's more well-adjusted to the world and optimistic about the future than Paul himself is. Months later, at Frederic and Norah's wedding in Lexington, Paul and Phoebe enjoy the festivities and prepare to send the newlyweds off to their lives in France. As Paul and Norah watch Phoebe dance, eat cake, and dream aloud about a wedding of her own, Paul expresses anger at the fact that David derailed all their lives and kept the truth from them for so long. Norah, though, urges Paul to forgive his father—or at least to try. After the party, Paul, who is driving Phoebe back to Pittsburgh to stay with her while Caroline and the recently-retired Al take their first solo vacation ever, pulls over at the Lexington cemetery. Together, he and Phoebe visit David's grave. Phoebe begins singing a hymn for the father she never knew, and Paul takes her hand and sings along.

- Genre: Dystopian, Science-Fiction, Magical Realism - Title: The Memory Police - Point of view: First Person - Setting: An unnamed island (likely in Japan) - Character: The Unnamed Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator is the protagonist of The Memory Police. She is a young woman who lives alone, since both her mother and her father are dead. She is a novelist and shares her writing with her editor, R, whom she cares deeply for and eventually falls in love with. She is close friends with her late nurse's husband, the old man who lives on a dilapidated ferry. The book is vague about her physical appearance, but she is a quiet and demure woman. When the Memory Police begin rounding up people who are unaffected by the "disappearances" on the island, she, along with the old man, devises a plan to hide and shelter R (who does not forget the memories of things that are disappeared). Sheltering R becomes her mission throughout the novel. The narrator has a bit more knowledge than the average citizen about the "disappearances," because her mother also did not forget like she was supposed to and used to show the narrator some of the beautiful items that disappeared from the island a long time ago. The narrator tries to fight back against the Memory Police and against the epidemic of forgetting—she even finishes a manuscript after novels are disappeared—but ultimately, she is unable to fill the void in her heart and mind where the memories used to be. The novel ends with the narrator—who's entire body and voice are gone—disappearing in the hidden room that she used to shelter R. - Character: R. Description: R is a literary editor who works with the unnamed narrator's manuscripts. He has a wife—and, eventually, a baby son—but for the majority of the novel, he lives in the narrator's home in a room hidden away from the Memory Police. R is part of a minority of people on the unnamed island where the story takes place who do not forget objects after a "disappearance." This puts him in danger, since the Memory Police hunt down anyone who remembers things, so R takes the shelter offered to him by the narrator and the old man and moves into a hidden room in the narrator's home. R is a slightly removed and unreadable character at first, but he becomes more animated as the story progresses and he tries to help the narrator and the old man keep or retrieve their memories of disappeared objects. He develops deep feelings for the narrator during the time that she cares for him while he lives hidden in her home, and they often spend nights lying next to each other and talking on the small bed in the hidden room. One night, they share a kiss, and by the end of the story R seems to be as in love with the narrator as she is with him. R's ultimate fate is unknown, but the story suggests that he might fare the best out of all of the characters, since, on the last page, he finally leaves the secret room and goes out into the world. - Character: The Memory Police. Description: The Memory Police function as a unified entity, even though they are made up of many men. They are a relatively new, shadowy, and repressive arm of the state government whose main goal is to destroy objects that are "disappeared" and to hunt down anyone who does not forget disappeared things. Early in the story, the Memory Police summon the unnamed narrator's mother to a government location—she dies a week later, and most people in the story believe that the Memory Police murdered her. The Memory Police wear dark green, very well-made coats and have heavy snow boots—luxuries that no civilian on the island seems to have access to. They also eat decadent food and seem well-prepared to deal with difficult disappearances, meaning that they have advanced resources and money. When they first barge into the narrator's house in the beginning of the story looking to get into her father's office, they appear to "know exactly where they are going," suggesting they have unexplained methods of surveillance. Despite their total dominance throughout most of the novel, the end of the story suggests that even they end up disappearing, since R leaves the hidden room seeming unafraid of being caught. - Character: The Old Man. Description: The old man is the unnamed narrator's late nurse's husband. He used to be a ferry mechanic until those boats "disappeared"—for most of the novel, he lives on a derelict ferry that only functions as a large hunk of metal. He has known the narrator for most of her life and is a kind and handy man. He agrees to help the narrator hide R before he even knows what he is agreeing to. When she explains what she needs him to do to help her, he builds out most of the room that R ultimately stays in: the ventilation, the plumbing system, insulation, and even the bed that R sleeps on. He gets along well with everyone. The old man, like the narrator and like most of the people on the island, is affected by the disappearances and forgets things as soon as they are disappeared. However, at one point he is captured and interrogated (possibly tortured) by the Memory Police—some people escaped the island on a boat, and even though he had nothing to do with it he was taken in and questioned. One day, the city is hit by an earthquake, and the old man becomes trapped underneath a cabinet. Although the narrator is able to get him out from underneath, he suffers a brain injury and dies a short time later of an intracranial hemorrhage. The old man's death deeply affects the narrator, and she feels terribly sad, lonely, and anxious after he's gone. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: The unnamed narrator's mother was a sculptor who was part of the minority on the island that does not forget "disappeared" objects. The story heavily implies that the Memory Police killed the narrator's mother when the narrator was a young girl. A week after complying with a summons from the (then newly-formed) Memory Police, the narrator's mother died, and although the official cause of death was a heart attack, the narrator feels sure that her mother was killed by the state because she didn't get rid of the objects that were supposed to be forgotten. The narrator's mother used to tell the narrator all about disappeared objects, which she kept in a secret, hidden cabinet in her sculpting studio. The narrator loved listening to these stories, even if she couldn't recognize any of the items. The narrator's mother also hid disappeared objects in sculptures—some of which the Professor Inui later gives the narrator before he goes into hiding, and some of which the narrator and the old man track down later in the novel. The narrator's mother is generally regarded as brave by many characters in the story, since she went through impressive efforts to hold onto the memories and objects that the Memory Police tried to eradicate. - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The unnamed narrator's father is an ornithologist who passed away of natural causes when the narrator was a young girl. The narrator has very fond memories of visiting her father at work—she would go up to the observatory near their house, pretending to bring him lunch but really just wanting to visit, and look through her father's big binoculars at all of the birds. The narrator's father was a studious researcher and had many notes, which he kept in the office in their home. Five years after he died, birds "disappeared" from the island. The narrator is relieved that her father never had to live to see birds disappear, as she doesn't think he would have been ablet to bring himself to find new work—identifying birds was his "one true gift." The Memory Police ransacked the narrator's father's office right after he died, in an attempt to get rid of any and all paperwork referring to birds. Years later, the narrator hides R in a hidden room below her father's old office. - Character: The Woman. Description: The woman is the narrator and protagonist of the unnamed narrator's manuscript, sections of which appear throughout The Memory Police. She takes typing classes and falls for her typing teacher, and the two strike up an affair. One day, the woman loses her voice, so she can only communicate to the teacher by typing to him on a typewriter. Their relationship seems typical aside from this, but it takes a turn for the worse when the teacher tricks her into following him to a room in a clock tower and locks her there. He also reveals to her that he is the one who stole her voice. At first, she wants to escape, but she eventually becomes dismally accustomed to living in the room—she even admits that she continues to find the teacher beautiful, even after he abuses her. The woman does not take her opportunity to escape when, one day, someone besides the teacher comes and knocks on the door, and after this she gives up entirely ever leaving the room. At the end of the manuscript, the woman, who has been mentally deteriorating, is simply "absorbed silently into the room, leaving no trace." The woman's captivity, inability to express herself, and eventual demise parallels the narrator's own experience living under an authoritarian regime. - Character: The Typing Teacher. Description: The typing teacher is the antagonist of the unnamed narrator's manuscript. His character starts off innocently enough—he and the woman apparently fall for each other during a typing class, and they become lovers. However, some time afterwards, the woman's voice disappears, and he pretends that he will fix her broken typewriter when really he ends up locking in the top room of the clock tower where he teaches typing classes. There, he reveals that he actually was the reason that the woman's voice went away—he says he "trapped" her voice inside the typewriter. After locking the woman inside the room and preventing her from leaving, the typing teacher physically and mentally abuses her. Eventually, the woman becomes such a shell of her former self that she does not fight back or try to leave—in the end, she is "absorbed" into the room. The typing teacher doesn't care about her absence, though, and he just picks his next victim out of the young woman in his typing class. The typing teacher can be read as an allegory for the Memory Police, the government-run militia on the island where the narrator lives. - Character: Professor Inui. Description: – Professor Inui is an old friend of the unnamed narrator and her family who works in the dermatology department at the university hospital. One night, he shows up at the narrator's basement door and tells her that he and his family (his wife, daughter, and son) are going into hiding because he has been summoned by the Memory Police—just like the narrator's mother was. He gives the unnamed narrator four statues of tapirs, made by the narrator's mother, which the narrator later finds out have "disappeared" objects hidden inside of them. Professor Inui does not tell the narrator where he and his family are going, thinking that the narrator will be safer if she does not know the specifics. Later in the story, the narrator sees blue gloves that belong to the Inuis' son in the back of a Memory Police's truck, suggesting that the Inui family was unable to avoid being captured. - Character: The Inuis' Son. Description: On the night that the Inuis show up at the unnamed narrator's door to tell her they are fleeing, the narrator clips the Inuis' young son's fingernails. He removes a pair of sky-blue gloves to let her do this. Later in the story, the narrator knows by the Memory Police have captured the Inuis because she recognizes this same set of gloves in the back of one of the Memory Police's trucks. - Character: The Young Couple. Description: The young couple are the narrator's quiet neighbors. Other people in the neighborhood think they are aloof. However, after the Memory Police raid their home and arrest them, along with the teenage boy they were hiding, the narrator learns that the couple are part of an underground network of people who hide those who don't forget when they're supposed to. When the narrator learns this, she thinks that she must have misjudged them. She later cares for their abandoned dog, Don. - Character: R's Wife. Description: R is married throughout the novel, but he and his wife are never together in any scene. After R goes into hiding, his wife—who is pregnant—is only able to communicate through secret notes that the old man brings to R. Despite having to move back to her parent's home after R goes into hiding, R's wife is very supportive of and grateful to the unnamed narrator for keeping R safe. R's wife gives birth to their son midway through the story, but R never gets to meet his child. - Theme: Memory and Connection. Description: In The Memory Police, objects on an unnamed island gradually and inexplicably start disappearing. An unknown force causes many of the island's inhabitants to immediately lose their memories of "disappeared" things and to dispose of them in turn. There are some people who retain their memory, though, and a government-run militia called the Memory Police hunts them down, arrests them, and sometimes even kills them. The narrator, a young woman on the island, is affected by the disappearances (meaning she loses her memories right away). Every time there is a new disappearance—whether it is roses, calendars, or even a body part—the narrator and other people on the island seem to adjust to their new way of life "without much fuss." The inhabitants' ability to adapt may at first seem commendable, but by the end of the book, it's clear that their hearts and minds have been hollowed out as a result of forgetting so much. The more things disappear, the colder and less helpful the townspeople become to one another, and the less they care to fight back or change what is going on. In this sense, the novel portrays memory as a fundamental part of the human experience—without it, people find it more difficult to connect with one another and lead purposeful lives. Amid all of this, the narrator (who is a novelist) shelters her editor, R, from the Memory Police because he does not forget things when he is supposed to. R constantly tries to assure the narrator that the memories everyday objects trigger are much bigger than the items themselves—these objects can connect people to their family, friends, past generations, even the future. But the disappearances never stop, and eventually the narrator's entire body and voice disappear—which, in turn, causes her to lose her sense of self. By the end of the novel, the narrator is completely gone. Her disappearance suggests the danger of forgetting things (even seemingly mundane objects) completely and the importance of holding on to memories if we are to retain our connections to other people—and indeed, if we are to be fully alive. - Theme: Loss, Isolation, and Identity. Description: On the island where The Memory Police is set, characters frequently lose things—sometimes everyday objects,  but sometimes more important things, like family members or close friends. Aside from death, loss in the novel can also mean "disappearance": the mysterious phenomenon where most people collectively forget and dispose of a once-familiar object. Or loss can be something more ambiguous, like when a person "vanishes" because they don't forget disappeared objects like they're supposed to and are either forced into hiding or arrested. Each time a character experiences a loss, they feel deeply isolated and actually seem to lose a piece of themselves—first in a figurative sense, but by the novel's end, in a very literal sense. The narrator, for instance, loses both parents at a young age, which leaves her unmoored and alone, with only two personal connections: an old man she's known since childhood and her aloof editor, R. And when birds are disappeared from the island, the narrator loses a specific bond she used to share with her father (who was an ornithologist) as well as an important part of her connection to nature. Later, when novels are disappeared, the narrator (who is a writer) loses another intangible piece of herself: her creative drive and self-expression. In this sense, the novel shows how loss of all kinds can gradually chip away at a person's very identity, leaving them isolated, directionless, and disconnected from the world around them. This idea also comes up in excerpts of the narrator's new novel, which punctuate the book. In this manuscript, a sadistic typing teacher steals a young woman's voice  as well as her freedom, locking her away in the top room of a clocktower. Eventually, she disassociates so much from herself that her body is "cut away from her soul.". The narrator's novel ends with the young woman disappearing, as she's inexplicably "absorbed" into the room. A similar phenomenon plays out at the end of main narrative in The Memory Police: the narrator cannot fight against all that she has lost and believes that her heart is empty—she's lost every body part through disappearances—so she, too, disappears into nothing. In this way, The Memory Police makes literal the isolating feeling of despair and indeed the loss of self that can accompany physical or emotional loss. - Theme: Authoritarianism and Surveillance. Description: In The Memory Police, objects on an unnamed island mysteriously "disappear," meaning that people suddenly forget them. Following a disappearance, the townspeople will typically destroy these items, often tossing them into the river or burning them in bonfires. However, there is a subset of people who are immune: they don't forget like they're supposed to and don't physically destroy the objects. So, the government creates a law enforcement branch called the Memory Police to hunt these people down. This militia spies on citizens, makes arrests without warning or reason, and operates in secret and with total impunity. The level of surveillance is so intense that the island's inhabitants live in a constant state of fear. At a certain point, even people who are suspected of hiding an immune person are subject to arrest, and the island's inhabitants grow colder to one another so as not raise suspicion. This shows how relationships and cooperation are undermined in an authoritarian state where people are constantly surveilled. However, by the end of the novel, the Memory Police's role in the narrative gets significantly smaller. The losses from disappearances become increasingly serious (even people's body parts begin to disappear), and the citizens are so good at adhering to the rules of the regime that they start to enforce them without really thinking about it. Their behavior demonstrates that if people live under an authoritarian regime for long enough, their entire way of thinking can be altered, and the state may not even need to intervene to get people to act a certain way. There is some ambiguity to the novel's ending, though, since it's possible that the Memory Police themselves have even disappeared. Before the unnamed narrator herself "disappears," she tells R (her editor who is unaffected by the disappearances) that even the Memory Police are gone. So, R is able to leave the room he was hiding in and go out into the world. In this way, the book ends by suggesting that authoritarian regimes are so destructive and antithetical to humane life that they may eventually even be their own undoing. - Theme: Storytelling, Longevity, and Defiance. Description: Though so many things disappear throughout The Memory Police, the one thing that seems to endure is storytelling. On an unnamed island, objects "disappear" without warning and are never supposed to be spoken of again—there is even a government body, the Memory Police, who roam the island to ensure these things are gone for good. However, there are people on the island who do not forget—like the unnamed narrator's mother—and who pass along their knowledge and memories through stories. The novel opens with the narrator and her mother covertly going through a hidden drawer filled with wonderous and curious items (items that have "disappeared"), and the narrator's mother sharing exciting personal stories connected to each item. Though the narrator's mother eventually gets rid of the objects, the narrator never forgets these stories her mother shares—they are integral to the narrator's character and facilitate intergenerational connection. Moreover, sharing these stories at all is an act of defiance against the Memory Police, who eventually arrest and kill the narrator's mother for the crime of remembering "disappeared" things. Additionally, the narrator is a writer, and even after novels are "disappeared," she makes a grand gesture for R (her editor whom she is in love with) to finish her final manuscript and leave him with the story before she fully disappears. She finishes "the one thing" that she is "able to leave to him." When the whole town starts burning books because they have been "disappeared," a woman who does not forget like she is supposed to screams "They'll never erase these stories!" just before she is carted off by the Memory Police, suggesting that the only notion of any kind of permanence in this novel comes through stories. Thus, the novel insists on the importance of stories and suggests that they are the most effective (possibly even the only) defiance people have against both cruel dictatorships and the general deterioration of memories over time. - Theme: Fate vs. Free Will. Description: The question of fate versus free will is an important element of The Memory Police. On an unnamed island, objects mysteriously and supernaturally "disappear," meaning that the island's inhabitants almost instantly forget everything about them. Who is and is not affected by this phenomenon seems entirely up to chance, and a government-run militia called The Memory Police hunts down, arrests, and sometimes even executes those who do remember "disappeared" things. The unnamed narrator's mother is one of these affected people, and she tells the narrator—who is affected—that she thinks she keeps her memories because she's "always thinking about" these lost items. This admission suggests that the forgetting may not be entirely random—that there may be some level of personal choice in the matter. Throughout most of the novel, the narrator, her close friend the old man, and most of the people on the island who are afflicted accept the disappearances without "much fuss." They seem to accept new "holes in their hearts" every time a disappearance happens, conceding that there's nothing to be done, even as the circumstances on the island get worse and worse. But characters like R, the narrator's editor who doesn't forget and who desperately tries to bring back his friends' memories, insist that there is a greater capacity for free will than the narrator and the old man seem to believe. The book doesn't necessarily end on a hopeful note—the narrator herself "disappears" when she disconnects from her entire body and essentially dies. But R, who has been hiding from The Memory Police in a secret room most of the book, does finally get to leave and go out into the world. Thus, the novel seems to subtly side more with R's way of thinking. The ending implies that people have more control over seemingly uncontrollable circumstances than they think, and that people should tap into their free will and try to make changes that will benefit society. - Climax: The unnamed narrator disappears, and R leaves the hidden room. - Summary: The Memory Police takes place on an unnamed island where a mysterious, supernatural force makes things "disappear." "Disappearances" start in the mind—people on the island first lose all association with the object that's been disappeared, and then they physically get rid of the item (if they can) by throwing it in the river or burning it. Nature, too, seems to comply with the mysterious rules of these disappearances, like when roses disappear and the wind somehow knows to only blow off the rose petals and not other flowers' petals. The story takes place through the eyes of the unnamed narrator, a young woman whose mother was part of a minority of people on the island whose minds are not affected by the disappearances. When the narrator was a young girl, her mother used to show her a cabinet full of secret items, all objects that had been disappeared years ago. The narrator loved hearing her mother talk about these mysterious objects, even though she was unable to remember them or create any associations with any of these items. Eventually, a state force called the Memory Police found out that the mother did not lose her memories, and they summoned her to their headquarters—a week later, she died, and the narrator is sure that the Memory Police killed her. In the present, the narrator is grown up and lives alone. Her father also died, though of natural causes. The narrator is grateful that her father didn't live long enough to see birds disappear, because he was an ornithologist, and living without birds would have devastated him. As an adult, the narrator is a writer, and she's published a few novels. She trusts her editor, R, with her manuscripts. When she finds out that R is also one of the people who doesn't lose his memories—and is thus in danger of being captured and killed by the Memory Police—she comes up with a plan to hide him. She and an old family friend, the old man, build a secret room underneath the narrator's father's old office, and R leaves his wife to move into the room for safety. Over the course of the novel, more and more things disappear, and though the island inhabitants try to get along, they find themselves less and less capable of handling the disappearances. When calendars disappear, time itself adheres to the mysterious rules of disappearances: the island is stuck in winter, with snow falling most days. When novels disappear, R tries desperately to get the narrator not to get rid of her books. But even though she is a novelist and writing was previously so important to her, she burns most of them. Punctuating the novel are excerpts from a manuscript that the narrator has been writing. In the manuscript, a young woman falls in love with her typing teacher. She loses her voice and can only communicate by typing on a typewriter. One day, her typewriter breaks, and the teacher says he will fix it. He leads her to a room at the top of a clocktower (the same building where he teaches classes)—there, the woman sees that there are many broken typewriters, all stacked high to the ceiling. Instead of fixing the machine, the teacher tells her that it was he who had taken her voice and that he'd "locked" it inside a typewriter. He then proceeds to lock the woman into the room. She has no voice, and she can't fight back. Back in the main narrative, the Memory Police increase the intensity of their searches and the brutality of their tactics. They begin searching whole neighborhoods without warning or reason. One day, the old man is arrested and interrogated—the narrator goes to the Memory Police's headquarters, but she's told she cannot visit him and is turned away. Luckily, the old man is released later that week. One night, the Memory Police storm the narrator's home. The narrator and the old man are terrified as they watch the Memory Police search the house. However, through another stroke of luck, the Memory Police don't find the hidden room and leave without discovering R. The narrator, the old man, and R try to carry on with life despite the disappearances and despite the looming fear of the Memory Police. R cannot leave the hidden room, so he becomes quite reliant on the narrator, who brings him all of his meals and looks after him. The two get into the habit of talking often—sometimes about simple things, but often about how different it is being someone who remembers versus somebody who forgets. The narrator realizes that she's fallen in love with R. Meanwhile, R tries to help the old man and the narrator retrieve some of their lost memories by showing them lost items, like a music box, that he illicitly kept after a disappearance. But although the narrator and the old man are always interested, they never form any associations with these foreign objects. Eventually, they discover that the narrator's mother had hidden more secret objects in some of her old sculptures. But even seeing these items cannot bring back any of the narrator and the old man's memories. The narrator forces herself to finish her manuscript, even though writing has become incredibly exhausting at best and impossible at worst since the disappearance of novels. In the manuscript, the woman is still locked in the room in the tower—the teacher visits her to feed her and to abuse her, but he eventually stops caring that much about her and focuses his attention on a new student. The woman is unable to leave the room, but she is also mentally deteriorating—the manuscript ends with her being "absorbed" into the room and with the teacher choosing a new victim. In the main narrative, the narrator is also disintegrating. The old man dies because of an injury he sustained during an earthquake, and the narrator feels incredibly alone. Then, not long after, left legs disappear. Slowly but surely, all body parts eventually disappear, and the people of the island are reduced to just their voices. The narrator (as a voice) sits in the hidden room with R, who begs her to remember her body. But she says that she cannot. Then, even her voice disappears. R sits, devastated, alone in the hidden room for a long time. But with this final disappearance, it is as though something has shattered through the rules of the island, and R no longer seems to fear the Memory Police (the narrator thinks that even they have disappeared). So, he eventually walks up and out of the hidden room. The narrator, no longer any sort of real entity, "continues to disappear."

- Genre: Existentialism/Absurdism/Modernism - Title: The Metamorphosis - Point of view: Third person, limited to Gregor's point of view with some exceptions - Setting: An apartment in an unnamed European city - Character: Gregor Samsa. Description: Gregor is a young traveling salesman who suddenly transforms into a giant cockroach. Before his transformation, his main concern is providing for his family. He resents the stresses of traveling for work, and dislikes his coworkers, but he is devoted to his work and hopes to even earn enough to pay for his sister Grete's violin lessons at the Conservatorium, as well as the living expenses of his feeble, sedentary mother and father. When Gregor physically transforms, his personality gradually transforms as well. He becomes unable to understand his family's behaviors or motivations, and fails to communicate or even interact with them without causing them panic. Gregor becomes much more focused on bodily concerns such as his crawling, his appetite, and his aches and pains, even as he attempts to retain a connection to his humanity, through his memories, his love of his print of the lady with the muff, and his appreciation for Grete's music. Though he comes to resent his family for neglecting him, Gregor continues to love them and want the best for them, all the way to his tragic demise. - Character: Grete Samsa. Description: Gregor's beloved 17-year-old sister. After the transformation, Grete takes care of Gregor, cleaning his room and bringing him food, at first with great kindness and attention, and then, after some months, quickly and carelessly. She takes on a job as a salesgirl to help support the family. Despite all her helpfulness to Gregor and his deep love of her, after the violin concert fiasco, she is the first to demand that he go. - Character: Father. Description: Gregor's father is mistrustful and unsympathetic towards Gregor after the transformation, though his unkindness may stem from a desire to protect his family. The father's attack with apples causes an injury that bothers Gregor for the rest of his life. During the course of the story, the father undergoes several transformations. First, he returns to work, as an assistant to small clerks at a bank. At first the job seems to make him healthier and more energetic than his former state as a tired and lazy old man, but as time wears on and he refuses to take off his dirty uniform, he becomes even more exhausted and pathetic than before. - Character: Mother. Description: Gregor's mother, like Gregor's father, is elderly and sick (she has asthma), but she also returns to work, as an underwear seamstress, when he transforms. Her attitude towards Gregor is both horrified and loving: she faints when she first sees him, and later has an asthma attack after Grete's violin concert, but also she wants to help tidy and clean Gregor's room, and when his father attacks Gregor with apples, she pleads for Gregor's life. - Character: The lodgers. Description: Several months after Gregor's transformation, the family takes on three lodgers, to whom they provide room and board. Gregor resents the lodgers for the attention they receive from the family, and for their lack of appreciation of Grete's violin playing. The lodgers always move as a unit in the story, though "the middle lodger" is the most decisive. After Gregor shows himself at Grete's concert, the middle lodger declares that he won't pay for the Samsas' services, and the other two lodgers follow suit. - Character: Charwoman. Description: A few months after Gregor's transformation, his family hires the Charwoman to replace the servant girl and the cook. She is large, white-haired, and crude. Of all the characters, she is the least disgusted and frightened by Gregor, though she is not particularly nice either. She likes to look in on him and make fun of him. - Theme: Mind vs. Body. Description: When Gregor first wakes up as a cockroach, he's more concerned about how his transformation will affect his ability to carry out his duties than the actual physical fact of having turned into a repulsive insect. At first, it seems as though Kafka is making a funny, absurdist allegory about the disconnect between the way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us. This is true on some level, but the mind vs. body theme in the story is deeper and more complex. Crucially, the difference between Gregor's human mind and animal body begins to fade as Gregor spends more time as a cockroach. Eventually, such as when he scuttles around frantically when his father frightens him, his thought processes seem human, but his conclusions are decisively insect-like. He struggles when his sister removes his furniture, which linked him to his humanity, but ultimately prefers the comfort of a bare room.Gregor's mind follows his body in its descent into insect-hood—his physical shape determines his behaviors and preferences. The Metamorphosis, as a whole, makes a case not just that the body and mind are linked, but also that the body is the more powerful of the two. In Kafka's view, human reasoning is feeble and easily overcome by bodily realities. - Theme: Family. Description: After Gregor's transformation, he becomes entirely reliant on his family, in the way that they, before his transformation, relied on his wages. His feelings of duty and responsibility toward his family concern him much more than his bizarre physical predicament. Yet his sister Grete, mother, and father are unable to think of him or treat him in the same way as before. Much of their change in attitude is due to their profound interest in conforming to the norm of the society around them. Grete is the most thoughtful, putting aside her preconceptions to bring him the rotten food he likes. But, though Gregor imagines guarding the family, he's unable to repay her for her help. When he becomes a cockroach, his relationship with his family becomes unequal, about dependence rather than cooperation. His lack of freedom to act, as well as his family's growing frustrations toward him, are factors that play into his listlessness and eventual death.Gregor's father may bear the major responsibility for his death because of injuring him with the apple, but no one in the family is blameless. At the story's end, Grete, the mother and father feel happier and freer once they no longer have to worry about Gregor. In the world of the story, even close family bonds can't triumph over the unequal relationship (and the disgust) caused by having a cockroach as a son. - Theme: Money. Description: Money (more accurately, the lack of it) hangs over the story, forming the major pressure on the family. Gregor, once transformed, can no longer be his family's income source, which makes his transformation more difficult for his family to bear. He also blocks his family from making income from taking on boarders when he creeps up on the boarders during Grete's concert. Part of the story's humor comes from the fact that the lowest-class character, the charwoman, is the most at ease with the cockroach. In contrast with the boarders, the poor charwoman is equipped to deal with absurdity and grubbiness, and treats Gregor with humor and interest, if not real kindness.Even as he becomes more and more cockroach-like, Gregor spends a huge amount of time worrying about his family's financial situation, demonstrating how fundamental money is. Even an insect can understand that abundance is better than scarcity. He does his best to eavesdrop on his family's conversations so that he can understand their finances, and his inability to do anything for them, more than his physical situation or the inconvenience he's caused his sister, contributes to his "shame and grief." - Theme: Intentions vs. Outcomes. Description: Gregor always has the best intentions, but he fails to communicate them effectively, and always makes blunders that increase his family's difficulties. The most heart-wrenching example of a well-intentioned, failed gesture comes during Grete's violin concert for the boarders. Gregor wants to prove that he's not a mere animal, and feels that the music will offer him the "unknown nourishment" he's lacking (which suggests that a lack of art and beauty contribute to his death, shortly after the concert). He creeps forward in a fit of optimism and affection, but of course his actions ruin the concert and destroy his family's attempt to make money. In this situation and in the many other moments of failed good intentions, Gregor's problem is his inability to communicate. Even without talking, he ought to be able to use body language to show what he intends, but his insect-like brain prevents him from acting in an understandable way. This theme demonstrates the extreme importance of effective communication, as well as the way that people's preconceptions and opinions create walls. To take another example, Gregor's father's certainty that Gregor's scuttling is threatening, not just nervous, leads him to attack his son. - Theme: Sympathy, Dependence, Responsibility. Description: Though Gregor's family first deals with his metamorphosis with concern and sympathy, by the story's end they're actually happier after his death. The story demonstrates the shifting roles of dependence and sympathy: at first, the dependent Gregor gains the sympathy of his family, who attempt to be responsible for him; later, they grow weary, even angered, by their responsibilities towards him. The family's loss of sympathy for Gregor stems from the trouble he's caused them financially and the ways he's embarrassed them in front of guests, but the biggest block to their sympathy is his loss of his human shape and behavior. Grete is the character with the most sympathy for Gregor, but even she reaches her limit after the disastrous violin concert. She tells her mother and father, "If this were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings can't live with such a creature and he'd have gone away…" She justifies this position by choosing not to believe that the cockroach is her brother anymore, and characterizes him as selfish and rude. The readers, on the other hand, are aligned with Gregor, since we see the story from his head. As he runs back and forth in dismay, we feel his pain, even as we wish that he could reassure his family by acting a little more human, or by being more responsible and independent. Still, Grete's assumption may be true—Gregor in this new shape might not be her brother anymore. By the end of the story, he's not so much a human trapped in an insect's body, as a very thoughtful insect, which to all outward appearances acts like an insect. But even though he's not really human anymore, does he deserve the same amount of sympathy as a human? The story suggests that he does, but it also demonstrates how that's impossible. - Climax: During Grete's violin concert for the boarders, Gregor emerges from his room - Summary: Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning and discovers that he's transformed into a giant cockroach (or some similar oversized, insect-like vermin). He realizes he's missed his train, and gets acquainted with his awkward new body as he worries about his stressful salesman job. His mother, father, and sister Grete realize something's amiss and knock at his door, but he finds he can't produce human speech and also can't open the door. His boss, the Chief Clerk, arrives, and scolds him for his tardiness and strange behavior, even suggesting that his job might be in danger. Gregor finally opens his door with difficulty and gives the Chief Clerk a long speech about his dutifulness to his job. But no one understands the speech, his family is shocked at his appearance, and the Chief Clerk runs away. Gregor injures himself when he squeezes back through the doorway into his bedroom. Gregor finds that Grete has brought him some fresh food, which doesn't appeal to him. Gregor resolves to help his family deal with the trouble he's causing them with his metamorphosis. The following morning Grete brings Gregor rotting food, and he eats hungrily. Gregor overhears the family talking about their finances, and determining that they will have to go back to work, now that he can no longer provide for them. Gregor feels upset and sorry that he can't support them anymore. About a month passes, with Grete taking care of Gregor less and less attentively. One day Grete sees Gregor out of his hiding place and is disturbed. Another month passes, then Gregor's mother wants to come help Grete and support Gregor. Grete and the mother plan to move Gregor's old furniture out so he can crawl more freely, but Gregor decides that he wants to keep his furniture, which links him to his humanity. He climbs the wall and places himself over his print of the lady with the muff, which shocks his mother when she returns to the room, causing her to faint. Gregor's father returns home and finds Gregor panicking in the dining room. Gregor's father pelts Gregor with apples, one of which severely injures him. Another month passes while Gregor recovers from his injury. His family members are exhausted from working, and Gregor feels neglected. The family takes on three lodgers for additional income, and Gregor feels even more ignored. One night Grete plays her violin for the lodgers. Though the lodgers seem bored, Gregor is profoundly affected, and crawls out of his room, enjoying the beautiful music and optimistic that he'll be able to help his family and become close to Grete again. The lodgers notice Gregor with disgust, and decide that they'll leave and not even pay for the time they'd stayed so far. Grete tells her mother and father that the cockroach, which she can't even believe is Gregor, has ruined their lives. Gregor feebly returns to his room, thinks of his family with love, and dies. The charwoman who cleans the house discovers his body the next morning. Grete, her mother and father decide to take off work. They go to the countryside by tram, and talk happily about future plans, and finding a new apartment. Gregor's mother and father realize that it is time to find a husband for Grete.

- Genre: Short story; parable - Title: The Minister’s Black Veil - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Milford, a Puritan town in Massachusetts - Character: Reverend Hooper. Description: The protagonist of "The Minister's Black Veil," Hooper is a young, mild-mannered preacher in the town of Milford. However, one day, without giving an explicit reason, he begins wearing a black veil that covers his face from his forehead down to just above his mouth. While Hawthorne never reveals exactly why Hooper decides to wear the veil, Hooper suggests that he does so to teach the townspeople to consider their own sins, to consider the way that they hide or are separated from each other and from God. Despite his somber appearance, Hooper is a kind, loving man and hates the isolation he endures when the town assumes that he must wear the veil as atonement for having committed a serious sin. Whether or not Hooper is atoning for a specific crime, his character is difficult to understand: while he exhibits great humility by cutting himself off from his society in order to deliver his message, he could be considered a proud, arrogant character, too, since the wearing of the veil is such an overt or even ostentatious way to communicate his message (a message that isn't even understood by the town until he reveals it on his deathbed). - Character: Elizabeth. Description: Elizabeth is Hooper's fiancée at the beginning of the story. After he begins wearing his veil, she is the only person in Milford who isn't immediately afraid of him. When Hooper refuses to show his face and explain himself, she begins to fear him, and shortly thereafter she breaks off the engagement. Despite abandoning Hooper, Elizabeth continues to love him even as he grows old, and on his deathbed, she takes care of him and helps to ensure that his veil isn't removed. - Character: The young woman. Description: The young woman, who is being buried on the day that Hooper first wears his veil, has no lines in "The Minister's Black Veil," but it's been suggested by some readers that she is the story's most important character. Edgar Allan Poe argued that she and Hooper were lovers, and Hooper's decision to cover his face is caused by his guilt after her death. - Theme: Puritanism and Piety. Description: "The Minister's Black Veil" takes place in a small Puritan community, so understanding the tenets of Puritanism is crucial to understanding the story. The Puritans were a Christian Protestant sect that emerged in the early 1600s in England. They were quickly banished from the country for their "subversive" beliefs, leading Puritan "pilgrims" to travel to America and establish small colonies in the region that's still called New England. The Puritans believed that all human beings were born in a state of sin inherited from Adam and Eve, and that only good behavior and religious education could lead them to an eternal afterlife in Heaven. For this reason, the Puritans' day-to-day lives and religious ceremonies were as simplified as possible: they didn't dance, sing, wear bright colors, or go to plays. They focused, instead, on their piety, and saw their behavior as an outward manifestation of their inner goodness (and likelihood of going to heaven).In "The Minister's Black Veil," Hawthorne dramatizes the conflict between Hooper's strict Puritanism and Milford's rather more lax Puritanism. At the beginning of the story, the townspeople are thinking "secular" thoughts as they walk to church: children are laughing, and the young men are admiring the young women. By contrast, Hooper, once he puts on the veil, seems like a paragon of Puritan virtues. He denies himself the pleasure of marriage or friendship, even though Hawthorne makes it clear that he values both of these things; when pressed for his reason, he insists that he is more concerned with his reward in heaven than with his life on earth: the quintessential Puritan tradeoff.As the story progresses, Hawthorne shows the flaws and contradictions of Puritanism. While it's true that Hooper's veil encourages the townspeople to pay more attention to his sermons, and fear for the state of their souls — in a sense, to be better Puritans —Hawthorne never shows the reward for the townspeople's "gloom." It's as if strict Puritanism has taken the townspeople's joy and energy for nothing. Further, the Puritan townspeople, with their focus on sinfulness, quickly come to believe that the veil must represent Hooper's sins, rather than understanding that through the veil he is trying to tell them to look to their own sins. Even Hooper, seemingly the perfect Puritan, may be violating his own beliefs. The black veil hides his face, but ironically, it makes him more "visible" and noticeable to the townspeople — in this sense, he could be guilty of the sin of pride. It's not clear why Hooper is any more moral than the townspeople laughing and enjoying their Sunday walk to church — the only difference is that he's miserable. Ultimately, Hawthorne seems to suggest, Puritanism has its good points, insofar as it encourages humans to live moral, pious lives, but it may go too far in depriving them of joy and encouraging them to "show off" their morality. - Theme: Appearance, Perception, and Interpretation. Description: Puritan communities were extremely small and close-knit. Thus, townspeople acted as each other's enforcers — if someone misbehaved, everyone else would know about it. Hawthorne makes this dynamic clear in the first paragraph of "The Minister's Black Veil," when he describes the way the sexton alerts the entire town to Hooper's altered appearance. In Hooper's funeral sermon, he says that God is always watching, but the truth is that the townspeople are always watching and judging their peers.But although the people of Milford are always watching, they're superficial in their judgments. Unlike God, they have no way of knowing the status of other people's souls; they can only see others' appearances and make interpretations of what's beneath. Though Hooper's appearance changes after he wears the veil, everything else about him is the same: he's still pensive, still in love with his fiancée, Elizabeth, still eager to greet his congregation, etc. On paper, he delivers exactly the same Sunday sermon as usual, but his appearance leads the townspeople to perceive the sermon as much darker and more severe than his usual offering. A simple piece of clothing alters their perception of a man they've known for years.Hooper's appearance leads the town to imagine elaborate interpretations of why he chooses to wear the veil. Some think he's losing his eyesight, some think he's going insane, but most think that he has committed a grave sin and is afraid to show his face. Elizabeth, who's clever enough to understand how powerful appearances can be in Milford, urges Hooper to remove the veil, lest the townspeople interpret it as a sign of his sinful behavior. Even though the townspeople are too timid to ask Hooper about his veil, or accuse him of wrongdoing, Elizabeth knows that their interpretations are dangerous by themselves. Indeed, the townspeople's interpretation of Hooper's appearance leads to his ostracism from Milford: because of the power of appearances and interpretations, he's isolated almost entirely by the town.And yet, over the years, while the people of Milford have been interpreting Hooper, Hooper has been interpreting them. On his deathbed, he comments on the townspeople's obsession with appearances, saying that everyone in Milford wears a Black Veil. In a sense, this means that the townspeople have focused too much on interpreting his appearance of sinfulness and too little on their own souls and sins. Appearances are important in Milford, but Hawthorne shows how they can be counterproductive to true understanding, or true morality. - Theme: Sin and Guilt. Description: Hooper believes that everyone lives in a state of sin, inherited from Adam and Eve. He explains this on his deathbed, saying that everyone wears a "black veil." But the black veil over his own head could symbolize a specific sin he's committed, or it could be a teaching tool that represents his inherent evilness as a human being. The townspeople assume that Hooper has committed a specific crime, and because their Puritan community recognizes the danger of sin, they're horrified that Hooper seems to be showing his sin to the public. Ironically, even though Puritans believe that sin must be defeated at all costs, they would rather sweep it under the rug than talk about it and potentially cure it. It's also possible that the townspeople of Milford do understand what Hooper's veil means; in other words, it reminds them of their own secret sins, and they ostracize Hooper as a defense mechanism to avoid coming to terms with their own guilt. Of course, the townspeople could be correct in saying that Hooper has committed a specific crime; in the end, we don't know why he veils his face. Hawthorne himself says that Hooper is "unlike" Joseph Moody of York, Maine, who veils his face as punishment for accidentally killing his friend, but it's unclear if this means that Hooper is innocent of specific wrongdoing or that he committed a different crime. In the same way Hooper cuts himself off from the town, Hawthorne cuts readers off from understanding him fully, using third person narration to distance us from Hooper's thoughts and feelings. As a result, the story seems to suggest that it's impossible to know to a certainty if another person is innocent or guilty of a specific crime. This might suggest that people shouldn't obsess over others' sins, but respect others and allow them to work through their own guilt.It's clear that Hawthorne believes that the townspeople are wrong to gossip about other people's sins; what's less apparent is whether or not Hooper is right to obsess. By wearing the veil, Hooper brings misery to himself, but also to Elizabeth, his fiancée, and the townspeople, who are newly frightened by his sermons. "The Minister's Black Veil" might suggest that the profound focus on sin to the exclusion of so much else is itself dangerous, not only because it makes people treat others poorly, but because it makes people guilty and unhappy with themselves. - Theme: Teaching by Example. Description: There's a long-standing tradition in Christianity of "teaching by example": passing on moral lessons to others by making oneself an illustration. (One famous Christian who taught by example was Saint Augustine, who used his own life story, recorded in the Confessions, to show that Christian salvation is available to all human beings, no matter how sinful they are.) One of the key questions in "The Minister's Black Veil" is whether or not the "teaching methods" used by Hooper, a Christian minister, are successful.At the beginning of the story, Hooper is a young, inexperienced preacher who pleases his congregation with "mild, persuasive influences" but doesn't impassion them to be good. When he begins to wear the veil, he gives the same sermons and delivers them in the same tone of voice, but because of his veil, his sermon is unusually sobering and effective for the congregation. As he grows older, Hooper's sermons grow increasingly "severe and gloomy" (or seem to in the minds of his congregation), and as a result, the townspeople concentrate on Christian values and the afterlife. People who convert to Christianity explicitly state that it was the sight of Hooper's black veil that made them change their ways. On his deathbed, speaking to the Reverend Clark, Hooper implies that he wore the veil in the first place to teach others a moral lesson: everyone is sinful ("on every visage a Black Veil").Yet, it's unclear whether the townspeople ever understand Hooper's lesson. While it's certainly true that they take his sermons more seriously, and even convert to Christianity because of the veil, it would seem that they don't recognize the full extent of their own sinfulness. Indeed, Hooper has to explain himself on his deathbed because none of the townspeople who have lived with him for decades can understand why he has worn the veil. Hooper has taught the townspeople a lesson, but it's not clear exactly what lesson he's taught; meanwhile, the townspeople seem not to realize they've been taught anything. So Hawthorne questions Hooper's approach to teaching by example. Since people misinterpret moral lessons, it may be the case that morality can't really be "taught" at all. - Theme: Isolation. Description: Immediately after Hooper wears the black veil, the people of Milford isolate him from their community. Children and their parents refuse to respond when he greets them, Squire Saunders "forgets" to invite him to dinner, and even his fiancée, Elizabeth, abandons him. These changes are especially painful for Hooper because, Hawthorne notes, he is a friendly, loving person. Before Elizabeth leaves him, he begs her to stay, knowing full well that he will be doomed to a lifetime of isolation without her. As Hawthorne writes of Hooper later in life, "All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart."While Hooper's veil isolates him from Milford, it also symbolizes the isolation that all human beings experience. As he explains on his deathbed, he will remove the veil only "when the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator." In Hooper's view, all humans are isolated, in the sense that they are alone with their secret sins and their guilt. Ironically, Hooper's decision to wear a veil may have been an attempt to bridge the gap between himself and his friends by acknowledging sin and attempting to work through it.Even if humans live in a state of isolation because of their sinfulness, Hawthorne suggests that it is possible to overcome this isolation with love, virtue, and patience. Elizabeth breaks off her engagement to Hooper, but she continues to love him and even tends to him on his deathbed. And for Hooper, who believes in the afterlife, all isolation is temporary, since in Heaven virtuous souls are united with God and with each other. Yet the fact that Hooper tries to teach his lesson on isolation and the townspeople never understand what he is trying to tell them only further reinforces the essential isolation between all people. - Climax: Reverend Hooper revealing why he wore the veil on his deathbed - Summary: In the small Puritan town of Milford, the townspeople walk to church. As they're settling into their seats, the sexton points out Milford's young minister, Reverend Hooper, walking thoughtfully toward the church. Hooper is wearing a black veil that covers his entire face except for his mouth and chin. This sight disturbs and perplexes the townspeople, and some think that Hooper has gone insane, but when he delivers his sermon for the day, they are unusually moved. Afterwards, Hooper goes through his usual practice of greeting his congregation, but no one seems to feel comfortable interacting with him. In the afternoon, there is a funeral service, and Hooper's veil is appropriate for the occasion. As he bends over the body, which belonged to a young woman, his veil hangs down, so that the woman could see his face if she were alive — Hooper quickly covers his face again. As Hooper leaves the church, two townspeople comment that it seems as if he is walking with the woman's ghost by his side. In the night, Hooper performs a wedding for a young couple. He catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and is so terrified by his own appearance that he spills the ceremonial wine on the carpet and rushes out of the church. Everyone talks about Hooper's veil, but no one asks him why he is wearing it. Some believe that Hooper is insane, but most say that he has committed a horrible crime, and is atoning for it by hiding his face. Eventually, a group goes to see him, but they are too intimidated to inquire about his veil. The only person in Milford who isn't afraid of Hooper is Elizabeth, his fiancée. Elizabeth asks Hooper to show her his face and explain why he has chosen to cover it; she warns him that the townspeople think he has committed a grave sin. Hooper refuses, and says that all humans have sins. He begs Elizabeth to spend her life with him, adding that he is terrified of being alone, and that when they are reunited in the afterlife, his veil will come off. Elizabeth begins to grow afraid of the veil, and breaks off their engagement. From then on, Hooper is completely isolated from the rest of Milford. Hooper's veil makes him an extremely impressive preacher. Before he wore it, his sermons were mild and pleasant; afterwards, the townspeople think that his speeches are darker, more powerful (though the narrator of the story suggests the sermons aren't much different at all). People claim that the sight of Hooper's black veil converted them to Christianity, and sinners on their deathbeds ask to see Mr. Hooper. Hooper's reputation for being an impressive preacher stretches across New England. Years pass, and Hooper grows old and sick. On his deathbed, he is nursed by Elizabeth, who has continued to love him despite never marrying him. A group of clergymen, including the young Reverend Clark, gather around Hooper and praise him for his moral reputation. They beg him to allow them to remove his veil, so that they may see the face of a good man. Hooper shouts that his veil must never be lifted on earth. Confused, Clark asks Hooper what crime has caused Hooper to hide his face. In response, Hooper asks why Milford has been afraid of him for so long, and says that they should be afraid of each other. He can only be condemned, he continues, when all humans are completely honest and open with each other. With his dying words, Hooper says that he looks around and sees a black veil on every face. Shocked and impressed, the clergymen bury Hooper with his face still covered.

- Genre: Science fiction - Title: The Minority Report - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A futuristic city - Character: John Anderton. Description: The protagonist of the story, Anderton is the creator and head of Precrime. He is Lisa's husband and colleague, Witwer's boss, and Kaplan's murderer. At the beginning of the story, Anderton is deeply insecure about his physical appearance and the security of his position at the agency, worrying that his new assistant—the handsome, young, and confident Witwer—is secretly plotting to take over Anderton's role as Police Commissioner. He initially believes that the Senate is using Witwer to remove Anderton from his position, and he even accuses his own wife of being in on it. When Anderton learns that two of the three precogs have predicted that he will commit a crime—a majority rule, or majority report, that deems Anderton officially guilty even though he hasn't actually done anything yet—Anderton immediately believes that Witwer rigged the system to get him out of the way. With police on his tail to send him to a detention camp for his would-be crime, murdering a stranger named Kaplan, Anderton is at first concerned with his own safety and resolves to not kill this mysterious Kaplan person. However, when he comes to realize that Kaplan, a retired army general trying to take down Precrime, is actually behind the plot, Anderton decides that he must focus on saving Precrime. As Anderton pieces together over the course of the story, Kaplan is trying to destabilize Precrime and make it look faulty so that the army might gain more power for itself, eradicating the careful checks and balances that exist between the two organizations. Kaplan assumes that Anderton won't actually commit murder, which would invalidate the majority report and prove that just because two of the three precogs predict that the person will commit a crime doesn't mean the person actually will. Such an outcome would dismantle the basis of Precrime and make the whole system look unjust and ineffectual. Thus, Anderton changes his mind and resolves to kill Kaplan—even if it means having to flee to another planet—in order to keep Precrime credible and functioning. - Character: Kaplan. Description: The antagonist of the story, Kaplan is an old, retired General of the Army of the Federated Westbloc Alliance. He is plotting to discredit Precrime so that the army may reassume the domestic policing powers it held before the end of the last war. Kaplan has other people do his dirty work for him, using Fleming to follow and surveil Anderton and, it's implied, planting Page at Precrime in order to receive information more quickly and directly. Significantly, Kaplan does not hold animosity towards Anderton, but simply sees him as a pawn in his power play to destabilize and ultimately take down Precrime. In his speech at the army rally, Kaplan compares the majority report (which states that Anderton will murder Kaplan) to the minority report (which states that Anderton, having learned about his future crime, will resolve not to kill Kaplan) in order to invalidate the Precrime system. He specifically suggests that "As soon as precognitive information is obtained, it cancels itself out," and thus that "there can be no valid knowledge about the future." By acknowledging Anderton, who is present at the rally, Kaplan hopes to demonstrate that the majority report, which predicted that Anderton would kill Kaplan, is incorrect. However, Anderton murders Kaplan, thereby making the majority report correct and saving Precrime's reputation. - Character: Witwer. Description: Witwer is Anderton's new assistant and future replacement. He is young, handsome, and confident, which makes Anderton incredibly insecure and puts him on the defensive from the moment they first meet, certain that Witwer is after his job. Anderton's paranoia intensifies when Witwer briefly interacts with Lisa in a friendly manner, giving rise to Anderton's suspicions that they are both involved in a Senate plot to remove Anderton from his position. Lisa attempts to be the voice of reason, pointing out to Anderton that Witwer believes in the value of Precrime, has good intentions, and is not involved in any sort of twisted plot to steal Anderton's job. Playing into Anderton's fears, though, Fleming tells Anderton that Witwer and Lisa are indeed plotting together, leaving Anderton terribly confused as to who he can trust. Over the course of the story, Witwer loses his initial over-confidence, realizing that he does not fully grasp what is transpiring because he doesn't have Anderton's wisdom and experience. For example, Witwer permits Kaplan to make a copy of the precognitive tapes, not realizing Kaplan's plot until Anderson explains it to him. At the end of the story, Witwer indeed has Anderton's job—in the wake of killing Kaplan, Anderton has to flee the planet—but Witwer is no longer so sure of himself. In their final exchange, Anderton informs Witwer that, as the new head of Precrime, he must watch out for the same predicament. Although Witwer initially makes Anderton feel paranoid and old and insecure, Witwer later functions to reinforce Anderton's superior understanding of precognitive dynamics. - Character: Lisa. Description: A Precrime executive officer, Lisa is Anderton's wife and former secretary. Because she is friendly to Witwer, Anderton suspects her of being involved in a plot with him and the Senate, a suspicion that Fleming, one of Kaplan's cronies, reinforces. She does not believe that Witwer is involved in a plot, a point she tries to persuade Anderton of more than once. Lisa also believes Anderton is innocent, but she forces him at gunpoint to return to the police station because she thinks it will help to protect Precrime. This demonstrates that her loyalties ultimately lie with the greater good—Precrime and the safe society it creates—rather than her husband. However, at the end of the story, with Precrime's reputation preserved in the wake of Kaplan's death, she decides to flee from the planet to an off-world colony with her husband, proving that she does love him deeply after all. Even though Lisa is loyal to and protective of Precrime, she raises questions about the effectiveness of the system by suggesting to Anderton that there are innocent people in the detainment camp, and that future criminals would benefit from receiving precognitive information. - Character: Fleming. Description: One of Kaplan's cronies, Fleming is an army major with the Internal Intelligence Department of Military Information. Fleming initially wins Anderton's trust by playing into his paranoia and telling him that Lisa is behind the plot. Acting like the good guy, Fleming provides Anderton with money, a new identity, and a tip that Anderton should look into the minority report. Later, when Anderton flees the police station with Lisa on a ship, Fleming, who has been hiding on the ship, attempts to prevent Lisa from forcing Anderton to return to the station. He then tries to murder Lisa, but Anderton, at this point unsure who to trust, stops him by knocking him unconscious. Reading Fleming's army identification card, Anderton thinks that he must be working for Kaplan, and that Fleming's job is to prevent Anderton from being in police custody. Kaplan never reveals why he wants to keep Anderton out of police custody, but it seems necessary for his plan to unfold. - Character: Page. Description: Page works in the precog room. He assists Anderton with the running of the precognitive system, including the processing of information. He allows Anderton to come back to the precog room to retrieve data after Precrime identifies Anderton as a criminal. Anderton believes that Page is an army plant who has been secretly feeding information to Kaplan, although it is not clear what evidence leads him to this conclusion. - Theme: Security vs. Liberty. Description: "The Minority Report" details a world in which Precrime, a division of the police, utilizes three mutants called precogs who have the special ability to foresee crimes before they are committed, called precognition. Acting on these prophecies, Precrime officers, led by Commissioner John Anderton, apprehend and detain would-be-criminals. Acting in this way, the police have virtually eliminated felonies—as well as prison sentences and other forms of punishment that were never successful deterrents—but the downside is that they have also created detention camps full of individuals who haven't actually carried out a crime. When Anderton himself is subject to the same treatment—two of the three precogs predict that he will commit a murder, forming a "majority report," a kind of majority rule that deems him guilty—he comes to understand that would-be criminals may avoid committing crimes if they are given access to precognitive data about themselves. In other words, once Anderton learns that he's going to commit a murder, this very knowledge talks him out of doing so, at least initially. "The Minority Report" thus highlights the fragile tension that exists between security and liberty in any given society. Depicting the consequences of prioritizing security at the expense of liberty, the story suggests that governments must work to find a careful balance between both values. The Precrime system eliminates nearly all major crimes, and thus eradicates suffering and makes society safer. Anderton uses the precogs' foresight, which extends a week into the future, to know who will commit a crime. On the basis of this data, Precrime officers preemptively apprehend and detain future criminals, thus ridding society of crime. Besides enabling the police to detain would-be criminals, this system also acts as a psychological deterrent. As Anderton explains, "the culprit knows we'll confine him in the detention camp a week before he gets a chance to commit the crime." Consequently, Precrime has eliminated 99.8 percent of all felonies, making society a radically safer place. However, Precrime violates citizens' physical and cognitive liberties. As Lisa, Anderton's wife, points out, Precrime imprisons innocent persons in a detention camp. Anderton also acknowledges this, explaining, "We're taking in individuals who have broken no law." "We claim they're culpable," he continues, "They, on the other hand, eternally claim they're innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent." The police not only physically imprison persons who have committed no crime, they also deprive them of the opportunity to change their minds in response to the precognitive data that resulted in their arrest. In other words, had future criminals been informed that they were going to commit a certain crime and be sent to a detention camp for it, they may have decided not to fulfill the prophecy and carry out the crime, thus saving themselves from punishment. The Precrime system creates a profound form of informational inequality in which a select few—the Police Commissioner and certain army officials—have exclusive access to that valuable precognitive data. The police thus have a great deal of relatively unchecked power, while the detained have no opportunity to challenge their imprisonment. In the interest of creating the safest society possible, Precrime has severely trampled on values like liberty and justice. Anderton's own experience with being found guilty of a crime he hasn't yet committed suggests that precognition could be used more effectively to support both security and liberty without one overriding the other. Towards the beginning of the story, Anderton learns that two of the precogs' reports state that he will murder Kaplan, a retired general who is plotting to destroy Precrime in order seize greater power for the army. The other report (the minority report) indicates that he will not murder Kaplan—that, "Having been informed that he would commit a murder, Anderton would change his mind and not do so. The preview of the murder had cancelled out the murder." And, of course, this is exactly what happens, at least at first. After learning about his own unrealized plans to commit a murder, Anderton resolves to not let that happen. This moment highlights how the precogs could support both safety and liberty if only people had access to the predictions about themselves—safety, because their predictions prevent a murder, and liberty, because their predictions give Anderton a chance to change his mind. Although Anderton affirms that the minority report is "absolutely correct"—he did resolve to not murder Kaplan after gaining access to the precognitive data—he ultimately decides "to murder Kaplan anyhow." He changes his mind because he learns that Kaplan plans to read the minority report to the public at an army rally in order to discredit the system and gain more power for the army. In order to make the majority report correct, and to thereby protect the system that he created, Anderton murders Kaplan. At an earlier point in the story, Lisa states, "Perhaps a lot of the people in the camps are like you," adding, "We could have told them the truth." In his speech at the rally, Kaplan reinforces this idea: "As soon as precognitive information is obtained, it cancels itself out […] The very act of possessing this data renders it spurious." If Kaplan's statement is true, then Precrime could cancel all crime without detaining anyone simply by sharing the relevant precognitive data with each would-be criminal. Even if it is incorrect—for it does not account for free will—sharing such data would put individuals in a better position to make informed decisions about their future. Interestingly, Anderton feels that sharing precognitive data with would-be criminals "would have been too great a risk." Indeed, people may still decide, as Anderton does, to commit a crime, even to murder someone. At the end of the day, liberty entails some degree of unavoidable risk. But on the other side of the equation, security can severely infringe on liberty. - Theme: Fate and Free Will. Description: In "The Minority Report," Dick considers the ancient ideas of fate and free will within a futuristic context, presenting three precogs who see into the future, an ability called precognition. On the basis of precognitive data, Precrime officers apprehend and detain would-be criminals before they commit any crimes. While the story initially appears to invalidate free will by establishing the validity of precognition, on closer inspection it actually affirms free will through the character of Anderton. Dick presents a world in which precognition and free will are mutually interactive and influential, in which both co-exist and converge upon the same events. The precogs record—but do not determine—what will happen. They report certain future possibilities and facts, while Anderton subjectively influences and experiences the events and thoughts corresponding to those predictions. Ultimately, the story argues that both fate (or precognition) and free will have a significant impact on human life. The precogs accurately foresee the future, demonstrating the validity of precognition. They consistently provide accurate predictions, as evidenced by the virtual elimination of all major crimes. Their reports give the police an enormous advantage: knowledge of a crime approximately a week before it will be committed. Simply put, if precognition didn't work, then Precrime wouldn't be so effective at crime reduction. Even in Anderton's case, the precognitive data is correct. Despite his initial refusal to believe the prediction, he ultimately murders Kaplan, "as the majority report had asserted." While there has been but one deliberate murder in the last five years, a critic may nonetheless point to this instance as indicative of a deeper failure. However, this rare lapse was due to a failure of enforcement, not prediction. Precrime knew the victim's name, the location, and "the exact moment" of the crime, but the criminal was still able to commit murder and evade them. This doesn't invalidate the precognitive data, but begins to show that there is more at play than fate alone. The story ultimately suggests that both fate and free will dictate the course of a human life. In the world of the novel, there are multiple time-paths—similar to alternate endings in a video game—that can have different outcomes due to either precognition or free will winning out over one another. Precrime would not work unless individuals were able to alter the future. Utilizing their free will, Precrime officers avert one time-path, in which a crime occurs, in favor of another, in which the crime never happens. This is possible because the future is not the manifestation of a singular, predetermined outcome; instead, it contains multiple time-paths. While hiding out in a hotel, Anderton listens to a radio broadcast, which explains the theory of multiple time-paths: "If only one time-path existed, precognitive information would be of no importance, since no possibility would exist, in possessing this information, of altering the future." But Precrime officers are able to alter the future by acting upon precognitive reports. The multiple time-paths correspond to different choices that individuals can make. Consequently, the precog's reports, which describe the various time-paths, are rarely unanimous. In Anderton's case, the precogs generate three reports because he changes his mind twice about murdering Kaplan over the course of the story. The first report foresees his decision to murder Kaplan in a time-path that was discarded. The second report sees him changing his mind in response to reading the first report. The third report responds to Anderton's final decision that he must, in fact, murder Kaplan in order to protect Precrime's reputation and prove that the system works. The reports influence Anderton's future by providing him with information about that future in the present. At the same time, the reports incorporate their own future influence upon Anderton. More specifically, the later reports show how Anderton changes his mind as he reads and interprets the precognitive data as a whole. The precogs' forecasts thus change the informational context within which Anderton exercises his free will, but they do not eliminate his freedom to choose. Anderton acts as the third report said he would, but his decision follows from his own reasoning. His case thus casts doubt upon Kaplan's assertion that access to precognitive data cancels out the future act to which it corresponds. Anderton's foreknowledge may have initially cancelled out the act of murder, but he ultimately chose that act. Therefore, whether the previewed event happens or not depends upon the decisions of the relevant actors. The Precrime system cannot perfectly predict the future because free will at least partially escapes prediction. This suggest that free will is ultimately, if marginally, the more powerful force. While the precognitive reports do accurately report Anderton's major decisions, they do not record every detail pertaining to his future. For example, they do not mention that Anderton and Lisa will leave the planet for an off-world colony, which they do at the end of the story. This suggests that at least some of the unrecorded details of the future are the product of unknown or unexpected decisions. In other words, precognition is not perfectly omniscient because the future is an evolving creation that is influenced by spontaneous decisions. - Theme: Trust and Paranoia. Description: In "The Minority Report," Dick examines trust and paranoia through his protagonist, Anderton, a Police Commissioner who thinks he is being framed for a crime. Insecure from the start, Anderton becomes paranoid after reading on a precognitive card that he will murder a stranger named Kaplan within a week. Quick to assume the worst in others, he imagines that his new assistant, Witwer, is working with the Senate to oust him as Commissioner. He also entertains the possibility that his wife, Lisa, is involved in the plot. Throughout much of the story, Anderton is uncertain as to what is real and true. He scrutinizes other characters' statements and motives, as he struggles to understand the precognitive dynamic in which he is entangled. Although Anderton is incorrect on certain points, his paranoia is not mere subjective delusion. In fact, it is rational and necessary, as he is the target of a complex plot involving mind-bending technology and secretive authority figures. In showing the rational basis of paranoia, Dick encourages the reader to be suspicious and investigatory like Anderton and to question bureaucratic structures with powerful technologies. Throughout the story, Anderton reacts with suspicion to the other characters. "The Minority Report" establishes Anderton's paranoid mental state in the introductory scene through his insecure reaction to Witwer, who is more physically attractive and confident than Anderton. After reading the majority report, Anderton suspects that Witwer is working with the Senate to frame him: "This creature is out to get my job. The Senate is getting at me through him." Anderton even thinks Lisa may be involved in the plot. Shocked that she invites Witwer to dinner, Anderton wonders to himself, "What were the chances of his wife's friendliness being benign, accidental?" His paranoid inner dialogue continues: "Did a covert awareness pass between them? He couldn't tell. God, he was beginning to suspect everybody—not only his wife and Witwer, but a dozen members of his staff." Fleming, who appears following the car crash Kaplan staged, seems helpful at first, taking advantage of Anderton's paranoia. He provides Anderton with money and a new identity so that he may evade the police and avoid being sent to a detention camp. Fleming tells Anderton that Lisa is behind the plot, and that "Kaplan is working directly with Witwer." Although Anderton already suspects his wife, he does not necessarily believe Fleming's claim that she is "back of the whole thing." Later, when Fleming attempts to murder Lisa, Anderton stops him. However, "It seemed strange that Anderton waited so long" to do so—an instance of his pervasive uncertainty. While Anderton's paranoia certainly leads him to suspect the wrong people, his paranoia proves helpful as it attunes him to the fact that something is terribly wrong and that he is somehow in the center of it all. His paranoia forces him to think critically about the people he comes in contact with—his own wife included—to ultimately piece together the plot against him. His paranoia, though distracting at times, acts as a kind of intuition that spurs Anderton to discover the truth and question the world around him. After his initial conversation with Kaplan, Anderton even questions his own sanity: "Perhaps he was trapped in a closed, meaningless time-circle with no motive and no beginning. In fact, he was almost ready to concede that he was the victim of a weary, neurotic fantasy, spawned by growing insecurity." Given the pressures and complexities of the situation, Anderton's response is understandable. In fact, the attentive reader will see that such a scenario is entirely possible. In the world of "The Minority Report," readers learn that they must scrutinize not only the statements and motives of every character, but also their own perceptions of what is real and true. In this way, they become like Anderton, learning that it is rational to be paranoid and to question everything. Dick introduces various data points—Anderton's experiences, suspicions, and theories; other characters' statements and actions; different interpretations of the precognitive reports—which contradict or modify each other. He does so without always providing clarifications through an all-knowing hero or authoritative explanations. For example, does precognitive information cancel out the future act to which it corresponds, as Kaplan suggests in his speech? Neither Anderton nor Dick explicitly answer this question, thus readers are left to consider it for themselves. Even when Dick does provide authoritative statements, the reader cannot trust what he says. Indeed, Dick presents, overturns, modifies, and, in certain cases, reinstates various hypotheses over the course of the story. In this way, he produces a reader who is suspicious and paranoid, and who cannot say with absolute certainty what has just transpired. Ultimately, Dick is not interested in providing tidy explanations, but in provoking the reader to question reality. - Climax: John Anderton publicly murders Leopold Kaplan, a retired army General plotting to destroy Precrime. - Summary: "The Minority Report" tells the story of John Anderton, the creator and head of Precrime, a police agency that uses three mutants called "precogs" to foresee and stop future crimes before they are committed. Anderton's own system predicts that he will murder a man within the coming week, but he thinks that he is being framed. Anderton seeks to evade capture while investigating what has happened. The story begins as Anderton meets his new assistant, Witwer, a confident, handsome young man who immediately makes Anderton insecure and defensive. After discussing the Precrime system with Witwer, Anderton learns from reading a card with precognitive data that he will murder a man named Leopold Kaplan, whom he does not know. Anderton refuses to believe this shocking prediction, and suspects that he is being set up by the Senate, which is working with Witwer to remove him as Police Commissioner. Anderton also suspects that his wife, Lisa, an executive officer at Precrime, is involved in the plot, based in part upon her overly friendly interaction with Witwer. Deciding to flee the planet before he is detained, Anderton heads home to pack, where he is apprehended by a man who takes him to see Kaplan. Standing before the man he is supposedly going to murder, Anderton tries to explain to Kaplan that Witwer and Lisa are trying to frame him—he has no intentions of actually killing Kaplan. Kaplan concedes that this may be so, but says that for his own safety, he must turn Anderton over to the police, and promptly loads Anderton into a car with body guards. Not long after they've departed, though, a bread truck crashes into the car, and a man named Fleming drags Anderton out of the car. Presenting himself as someone who wants to help Anderton, Fleming provides Anderton with money and a new identity, as well as a tip that he should look into the minority report. Anderton checks into a hotel and calls Page, who works in the precog room at the police station, asking if he can come in to examine the minority report. Page hesitates but agrees. Later, Anderton returns to the station and listens to the precog tapes, learning that while the majority report predicted he would murder Kaplan, the minority report indicates that he would not do so. Suddenly, Lisa enters the room, warns him that he should leave and offers him a ride in a ship on the roof. On the ship, Lisa tells Anderton that she believes him to be innocent, and suggests that others in the detention camp may have been in a similar situation. She tries to convince Anderton that Witwer has good intentions, and that he should put the good of the Precrime system above his own fate and turn himself in. When Anderton refuses, Lisa draws a gun to force him to return to the station. Fleming, who was hiding on the ship, knocks the pistol out of Lisa's hand and begins to strangle her. Anderton stops Fleming by knocking him unconscious, and finds out from his identification that he is an army major working with the Internal Intelligence Department of Military Information. On the basis of this information, Anderton reasons that Fleming must be working for Kaplan, that the break truck crash was a set up, and that Kaplan has been working to keep Anderton out of police custody. Anderton calls Witwer in an effort to protect the precog room, but learns that Kaplan was just there to copy the reports. Back at the station, Anderton informs Witwer of Kaplan's plot to discredit the majority report, and thereby invalidate the Precrime system. After studying the precog tapes for clues, Anderton sees out the window that the army is holding a rally, and thinks that Kaplan is going to read the minority report to the public, which would discredit Precrime and make it look flawed. Anderton then decides that he will kill Kaplan in order to save Precrime by making the majority report correct. He reasons that the army will not stop him from approaching Kaplan because they have the minority report, which states that Anderton will not murder Kaplan. At the rally, Anderton murders Kaplan, as the majority report stated. In the final scene, Anderton prepares to flee the planet with Lisa to an off-world colony. Before leaving, he explains to Witwer that there were three different, consecutive minority reports, each of which previewed a different time-area. The first report saw a discarded time-path in which he decided to murder Kaplan after learning of his plot. The second report responded to the fact that Kaplan would read the precognitive data and decide not to murder Kaplan. The third report incorporated his final decision to murder Kaplan in order to save Precrime. Two of the reports agreed that he would murder Kaplan, giving rise to the illusion of a majority report. In their final exchange, Anderton warns Witwer that he must be vigilant because, as the new Police Commissioner, he could experience a similar predicament.

- Genre: Horror, Short Story - Title: The Monkey’s Paw - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Laburnam Villa, the White's home in England - Character: Mr. White. Description: Mr. White is an old man who is tempted to alter fate and who suffers dire consequences as a (possible) result. Jacobs characterizes Mr. White as a man who cannot accept his own fate, whether it's a chess game he knows he is going to lose because of a reckless move or his quiet life in a remote part of Britain compared to his friend Morris's exciting adventures in India. At the beginning of the story, Mr. White lives a cozy, domestic life with his wife, Mrs. White, and his son, Herbert, who amusedly accept his father's frustrated outbursts over his fate. Mr. White appears drawn to the power of the monkey's paw, even though his son teases him about believing in the paw's magic and Morris warns him of the consequences. By the end of the story, a grief-stricken Mr. White has learned the consequences of trying to alter fate. Mr. White's progression from a content, if somewhat restless, family man to a childless man apathetic to his wife, shows how one should accept fate and not try to alter it through reckless or treacherous means, unless they want to lose what they hold dear. By the climax of the story, Mr. White himself seems to fully learn the consequences of tempting fate, as he fears that after wishing his son back alive, a mangled corpse will come to their home. Yet Mr. White's relationship to reality is dubious throughout the story. He claims he sees the paw move on its own, but no other character verifies this. The tragedies that befall him could be a direct result of his wishing on the paw, but they could also just be coincidences that he subscribes supernatural meaning to because of his belief in fate-altering magic. Mr. White's opaque, shifting relationship to reality shows the troubled state of mind one enters when they attempt to change destiny through supernatural means. - Character: Mrs. White. Description: Mrs. White is the wife of Mr. White and the mother of Herbert. She represents the happy domesticity present inside the house at the beginning of the story, as she knits by the cozy fire, soothes her husband's temper, and enjoys spending time with her son. The appearance of the monkey's paw disrupts this domesticity, because although Mrs. White teases Mr. White for giving credence to the paw, she also anxiously awaits the arrival of any visitor that might bring the wished-for money. However, the stranger who does bring the money also brings the news that her son is dead, thus shattering her once happy home life. Herbert's death leaves Mrs. White feeling apathetic and surrounded by her grief. She is emotionally separated from her husband, as after the death of their son they speak little to each other. Her grief makes her frantic and argumentative, and she then comes to believe that she can bring her son back to life using the monkey's paw. At the end of the story she experiences tragedy once again, as she opens the front door, expecting to see her son come back from the dead, and instead sees nothing. One could interpret her disappointment and misery at the end of the story either as a consequence of her attempts to alter fate by wishing on the paw or as a consequence of her belief that she could change fate, rather than accepting the loss of her son. - Character: Herbert White. Description: Herbert is the young adult son of Mr. White and Mrs. White. He is a happy, loving son to his parents, indicative of the domestic bliss shown at the beginning of the story. Though he teases his father for believing in the magic of the monkey's paw, Herbert himself has a moment of fear when, after his parents have gone to bed, he sees the image of a horrific monkey's face in the fireplace and picks up the monkey's paw. Herbert represents how even the sceptic can be briefly made to believe in the ability to magically alter fate. Herbert works in a factory, where he dies midway through the story in a machinery accident. His death exhibits a common occurrence in the period of industrialization in Britain, as many young people left their family homes to work in factories and many died due to dangerous working conditions created by careless and exploitative factory owners. However, Herbert's death is also possibly a consequence of his father's wish upon the monkey's paw. Both Mr. and Mrs. White believe that Herbert returns at the end of the story, as they use the second wish on the paw to bring him back to life. While Mrs. White believes her beloved son has come back to her, Mr. White fears the consequences of the monkey's paw, which will only bring back a mangled and decaying version of their son. Notably, the narrative does not explicitly state that Herbert is or isn't returned before Mr. White wishes him away again, leaving the reality of Herbert's return, and therefore the magic of the paw, dubious. The reader can interpret the fate of Herbert's character through two perspectives, one that views Herbert's death as a part of one's punishment for trying to alter fate, or as a casualty of the real issue of industrialization that was going to happen regardless of Mr. White's actions. - Character: Sergeant-Major Morris. Description: Morris is an old friend of Mr. White who has been a soldier abroad in India for 21 years. His fantastical stories of his travels show the allure of adventure in exotic places, adventures that Mr. White himself claims he would like to experience. Morris also brings the sinister monkey's paw from India to Mr. White, which also shows how people at the time viewed objects from faraway places (particularly Britain's colonies) with both suspicion and temptation. Morris himself has wished upon the paw and seems to regret it, showing the consequences of one who tempts fate. Still, when Mr. White asks him if he would take three more wishes if he could, he says, "I don't know…I don't know," suggesting that even when one suffers from attempting to change their fate, the power can still be attractive enough for one to possibly try again. However, the reality of Morris's stories is dubious. Both Herbert and Mrs. White remark that soldiers commonly tell fictional or exaggerated accounts of their adventures abroad, and the story of the paw's origins and its supposed magic may be another tall tale. In fact, the narrative never definitively states whether or not the paw actually grants Mr. White's wishes, so Morris's claims that the paw can alter fate may indeed be false. - Character: The Company Representative / The Stranger. Description: The company representative visits Mr. White and Mrs. White to tell them their son Herbert is dead. He represents the company that owns the factory where Herbert worked before he was killed in a machinery accident. When he speaks, he is visibly uncomfortable, and awkward and indirect in his speech, so much so that it takes the Whites a few moments to realize that their son is dead. The representative states that he only came to the Whites because his company asked him to, and that the company takes no responsibility for Herbert's death. In his cold and formal attitude, the representative shows the exploitative, inhumane nature of industrialization and the capitalist factory owners, who do not really care about the violent deaths of their workers. - Theme: Fate vs. Freewill. Description: Mr. White, the protagonist of "The Monkey's Paw," struggles to accept his fate in life. However, when an acquaintance gives him a magical dried monkey's paw, which supposedly has the power to grant three wishes, Mr. White believes that he can finally exert his will on the world in a quick and consequence-free manner. When he tries to do this by wishing for money, though, his wish goes awry: the money comes as compensation for the work-related death of his only son, Herbert. The result of this wish, and the sinister results of the other wishes to which the story alludes, suggest that meddling with fate comes at a cost, one that outweighs its benefits. In this way, W.W. Jacobs suggests that it's best to make the most of one's fate, rather than trying arrogantly to intervene through cheap or treacherous means. From the beginning of the story, Jacobs presents Mr. White as a man who cannot accept his fate. In the opening scene, Mr. White is playing a chess game with his son, Herbert, when he realizes too late that his son is going to win. He tries to distract Herbert by telling him to listen to the storm outside and by discussing their expected visitor, but Herbert wins anyway. When Mr. White erupts in anger, Herbert and Mrs. White share a "knowing glance," showing that this response is typical of Mr. White's character. Thus, this scene establishes Mr. White as someone who is always trying to change or avoid his fate—and, with significant foreshadowing, as someone who always fails in these attempts. The arrival of White's friend Sergeant-Major Morris with a magical, wish-granting monkey's paw presents Mr. White with an opportunity to change his life, making him believe that he will be able to exert his free will to control his own destiny. However, Jacobs immediately establishes that this power is sinister: of the last two men who wished on the monkey's paw, the first man's final wish was for death, and the second man (Morris himself) deeply regrets ever owning the paw. In fact, the fakir (an Indian holy man) who created the enchanted paw said himself that he did so because "he wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow." Yet Mr. White wishes upon the monkey's paw anyways, even though he claims he has everything he could ever want already. Mr. White's actions show the human tendency towards arrogance: one can be tempted to try to design their destiny, even when their present circumstances are pleasant and even when warned of the consequences of meddling in fate. As promised, the monkey's paw brings disaster, teaching the White family the fakir's lesson. Mr. White's first wish is for the 200 pounds he would need to pay off his mortgage, and he receives this sum from Herbert's company as compensation for his death in a machinery accident. Herbert's death proves that the fakir's words are true: when one tries to control their own fate, they will suffer the consequences. However, Mrs. White still believes that she can fix their tragic fate through more meddling: in her grief, she goads Mr. White into wishing for Herbert to come back to life. Mr. White, cautious after the disastrous results of their first wish, is certain that this next wish would summon a grotesque, decayed version of his son, but he acquiesces to his wife nonetheless and later hears a sinister, persistent knocking at the door. In this moment, Mr. White knows that he has erred, and he uses the monkey's paw to make an unnamed wish that seemingly causes the knocking to cease. While it might seem like this final wish—a reversal of his second wish—is an indication that Mr. White has learned his lesson, he has, in fact, meddled once more in fate. Jacobs never specifies what the consequences for this final wish will be, but his writing suggests that its effects will reverberate in more sinister ways to come. While the supernatural knocking has stopped, "the echoes of it were still in the house," and a cold wind rushes into the Whites' house as he and his sobbing, grief-stricken wife run towards the street into an unknown fate. - Theme: The Uncertainty of Reality. Description: The seemingly-supernatural events of "The Monkey's Paw" cause both the characters and the reader to question the nature of reality. While those who wish on the monkey's paw seem to have their wishes supernaturally granted, and then seem to be supernaturally punished for their hubris, nobody knows for sure whether the wish fulfillments and their consequences are supernatural or simple coincidence. After all, Morris's stories about the paw's powers could just be fanciful tales, Herbert's death after the first wish could have been just a coincidence, and the knocking at the door could have many causes. The story never takes a firm position on whether its events are natural or supernatural, and Jacobs is careful to cast doubt at every turn. This leaves the reader grasping for clues and questioning their interpretation of every event, mirroring the troubled state of mind of the story's characters. Ultimately, this persistent ambiguity suggests that the mere possibility of the supernatural can upend people's reality and cause them to behave in unwise, erratic ways. From the moment the monkey paw enters the Whites' life, it is dubious whether or not it can actually grant wishes and magically change one's fate. Morris says he cannot get anyone to buy the paw from him because everyone thinks the paw's power is "a fairy tale," and he himself doesn't seem wholly convinced of its powers, telling the Whites that when one makes a wish, "things happen so naturally…that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence." Furthermore, Herbert casts doubt on Morris's story of the paw, since the traveler tells many stories about his adventures that seem too incredible to be true; perhaps, then, Morris is something of a fabulist. Even Mr. White, who seems to believe most in the paw's power, feels embarrassment at his own gullibility when Herbert mocks him for buying the paw. All of this doubt cast on the paw's magical properties suggests the power of magical thinking: perhaps those who want badly enough to believe they can change their fate invent supernatural possibilities, regardless of the evidence. Even as the White family wishes on the paw and odd things begin to occur, Jacobs casts doubt on what is happening. Mr. White appears stricken after he speaks his first wish aloud, claiming that, "As I wished, [the paw] twisted in my hand like a snake." However, his wife and son, who have both witnessed this event, remain skeptical: Herbert says he doesn't believe he'll ever see the money they wished for, while Mrs. White dismisses her husband's feeling that the paw moved as mere "fancy." Even Mr. White appears to retreat from his certainty that something supernatural happened. "Never mind, though," he says, and Jacobs notes that, by the next day, the paw has been carelessly discarded ("which betokened no great belief in its virtues"). Furthermore, the atmosphere in the house is one of "prosaic wholesomeness," undercutting any sense that something supernatural has occurred. When Herbert dies in a machinery accident later that day and the family's wish for 200 pounds is granted in the form of workplace compensation, the story never specifically states that the paw actually magically caused Herbert's death. In fact, machinery accidents in unsafe factories were common during the time period of the story, so Herbert's death isn't so remarkable after all. Perhaps, then, the characters' desire to believe that they can change their fate has led them to interpret something ordinary as supernatural. Further associating the supernatural with magical thinking, Mrs. White only truly believes in the magic of the monkey's paw after the loss of her son has driven her mad. Desperate to have her only child back, she asks her husband to wish Herbert back to life, and she is certain that the subsequent knocking at the door is indeed her son returned from the grave. Mr. White—who has always believed in the paw's magic—states that the knocking is coming from a rat, but by this point this seems like an attempt to convince himself that his fears of reanimating his son's mangled corpse have not come true. When he opens the door, the road stands empty, either because he used the third wish to get rid of the corpse or because there was no person at the door in the first place. Neither the characters nor the reader will ever know what really happened, thus showing how trying to supernaturally change their fate has left the Whites unable to interpret their reality. Perhaps magical thinking alone can drive a person mad. - Theme: Inside vs. Outside. Description: From the storm that rages outside the family's home in the beginning of the story, to the supposedly cursed object Morris brings back from his travels abroad, to the knocking at the door (potentially by a reanimated corpse), all of the story's dangerous elements come from outside to menace the safety of the home. As such, "The Monkey's Paw" can be read as an allegory of British anxiety over their changing homeland, particularly addressing the xenophobia of white Britons. Jacobs published "The Monkey's Paw" at a time when his native Britain was drastically expanding its empire beyond its borders. While imperialism offered Britain more land, natural resources, and monetary wealth, many white Britons feared seeing their familiar world change under the influence of foreign cultures, particularly if that meant changing racial demographics. Jacobs, however, questions the basis of that fear. At the end of the story, when Mr. White opens the door to find an empty road rather than a sinister corpse knocking, it seems possible that he has been afraid over nothing. Jacobs thereby suggests that white Britons' anxiety over changing culture is rooted in imagined threats, not real ones. The story begins with the lines, "Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly." This establishes immediately that outside the family home, the world is unpleasant and cold, while inside, it is safe and cozy. As expected, harm befalls the family only when someone comes in from outside, an acquaintance described as a "visitor from distant parts." The visitor, Sergeant Major Morris, speaks of "strange scenes and doughty deeds, of wars and plagues and strange peoples," which gives his travels a sinister air. The danger of admitting this outsider into the home becomes clear when the monkey paw the Whites purchase from him appears to lead to the death of their son. The notion that outside influence brings misfortune to a once-safe family thereby establishes a dichotomy of the inside being safe and familiar, while the outside is dangerous and unknown. Crucially, Jacobs associates danger with faraway places, making a specific connection between India (then a British colony) and the sinister. This gives the characters' anxiety about dangers from outside a specifically racist and xenophobic overtone, especially since the family's surname is "White" and they associate India with evil. This is clearest in the fact that Morris has brought the magical monkey paw from India, and he notes that the paw is dangerous because a fakir (a holy man) put a spell on it to teach others a lesson about fate. This references an antiquated, colonial view that people who lived outside of Europe and did not practice Christianity practiced black magic, and it shows that the characters share a basic belief that the influence of Indian culture is a threat, even as they are also fascinated by it (and want to enjoy its material resources). The most horrific outside threat to the family home is the possibly that the mangled, decaying corpse of their son Herbert is knocking at their door. As he thinks he hears his undead son knocking at the door, Mr. White searches frantically for the monkey's paw, thinking "if he could only find it before the thing outside got in." The emphasis Jacobs puts on the dichotomy of outside and inside during this scene emphasizes the family's fear of the outside world and their feeling of safety inside their home. However, once Mr. White opens the door, he sees nothing but a "quiet and deserted road," either because he successfully used his third wish to get rid of his undead son, or because there was no one at the door in the first place. One reading of the story—the one in which Herbert's corpse really was at the door—would suggest that outside threats are real and should be guarded against. The family seemed to truly be happy and content before the outside influence of Morris and his foreign object. However, if Herbert was never at the door and the paw wasn't magic at all, then Mr. White opening the door to an empty road would suggest that the dangers of the outside world are actually imagined. (And further, would mean that the cause of Herbert's death was the greed and callousness of homegrown British factory owners, not foreign cultures.) Regardless, both readings are somewhat damning of British imperialism: in the latter reading, the British are irrationally racist, and in the former, their lives have been ruined by the fakir teaching them a lesson about meddling with fate. If the White family represents white Britons, then the fakir's lesson is also about the price of imperialism, whereby Britain tried to meddle in the fates of other countries. Perhaps the real "outside threat" that they fear is British colonial subjects taking revenge. - Theme: Industrialization. Description: During Jacobs' lifetime, Britain underwent rapid industrialization. Jacobs shows the harms caused by industrialization in Herbert's death through a machinery accident and the company representative's cold response to the Whites. With this tragedy, Jacobs grounds the horrors of "The Monkey's Paw" in the real life social issues surrounding industrialization, such as dangerous working conditions and worker exploitation. Herbert goes to work in a factory every day, like many young people in Britain during the period of industrialization and, like so many factory workers, Herbert dies in a machinery accident. His death exposes one of the main harms of unchecked industrialization; dangerous working conditions in factories. When the representative of the factory's owners comes to inform the Whites of their son's death, the stranger is awkward and indirect. However, he makes sure to clearly state that the company claims no responsibility for what happened in their factory. Here, Jacobs shows the cold and exploitative nature of factory owners during the period of industrialization, who maximized profit while caring little for safe working conditions for their employees. In contrast to the supernatural and ambiguous nature of the monkey's paw, the consequences of industrialization are unequivocally present in the harsh realities of Jacobs's era. This contrast allows the reader to question whether or not Herbert's death is the result of Mr. White's use of magic or an unfortunately common occurrence due to the poor working conditions of factories, thus further blurring the lines of reality and the inevitability of fate within the story. - Climax: A knocking at the door could be the mangled corpse of Herbert, while Mr. White desperately uses the third wish to make Herbert disappear. - Summary: While a storm rages outside, Mr. White and his son, Herbert, are playing chess and Mrs. White is knitting by the fire inside their home. Mr. White remarks about how he doesn't believe their guest will come on a stormy night like this. Herbert wins the game, and Mr. White shouts about how awful it is living in such a remote area when it storms. The guest arrives, an old friend of Mr. White's named Sergeant-Major Morris. Morris entertains the family with stories from his travels abroad in India. Mr. White recalls that Morris recently told him about a monkey's paw. Morris reveals that the mummified monkey's paw came from a fakir, an Indian holy man, who put a spell on the paw in order to teach people that fate ruled everyone's lives, and those who tried to alter fate would suffer. The spell grants three separate individuals three wishes each. Mr. White asks Morris if he has used his three wishes. Morris reports that he has, and another man, the first to possess it, used the third of his wishes to cause his own death. Then Morris throws the paw into the fire, but Mr. White saves it from burning. Morris tells him he should destroy it. Instead, Mr. White decides to keep it, and Morris tells him that if he wishes upon it, there will be consequences. The group goes back to listening to Morris's tales of India and sits down to eat supper, forgetting about the paw for a while. When Morris leaves, Herbert teases his father for giving Morris a small bit of money in exchange for the paw, which Herbert says must be an invented story like the rest of Morris's tall tales. Mr. White says he would not know what to wish for, since he has everything he needs already. Herbert playfully suggests that his father wishes for two hundred pounds, since that would be enough to pay off the family's mortgage, and his father complies. Mr. White cries out and drops the paw, claiming he saw it twist when he made his wish. Herbert remarks that the money does not immediately appear. The next morning, the money has still not appeared, and Herbert leaves for his job in the factory. Though Mrs. White joked along with Herbert about the foolishness of believing in the paw's spell, she finds herself eagerly awaiting a visitor who may bring the money. When a well-dressed stranger arrives at the Whites' house, she excitedly greets him. He reveals that he represents the company that owns the factory where Herbert works. He states that Herbert was caught in the factory's machinery and has died. He says that while the company takes no responsibility for their son's death, he can offer the Whites monetary compensation—a sum of two hundred pounds. Mrs. White screams, and Mr. White collapse to the floor. The Whites bury their son in a cemetery two miles from their house. Days pass and the couple resign themselves to their grief, barely speaking to each other. About a week after the funeral, Mrs. White has the idea to use one of the remaining two wishes on the paw to bring Herbert back to life. Mr. White hesitates, first saying that it was only a coincidence that the paw seemed to work before, and then saying that she would not want to see her son now, because he has been dead for ten days and his body was horribly disfigured by the accident that killed him. His wife desperately begs him to make the wish, though, so Mr. White wishes upon the paw that their son would come alive again. The Whites wait, but no one appears. Eventually, they go to bed for the night. Suddenly, a knock comes from the front door, and then two more. Mrs. White believes it's Herbert. She runs to the front door but can't reach the bolt to open it. Mr. White frantically searches for the monkey's paw, knowing he cannot let whatever horror is outside into the house. He finds the paw and makes his third wish. The knocking ends suddenly. Mrs. White drags a chair over to the door and is able to reach the bolt. She opens the door and cries out in disappointment. Mr. White runs out the door and to the gate of their property, and sees only an empty road.

- Genre: Short story, adventure - Title: The Most Dangerous Game - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A remote island in the Caribbean Sea - Character: Sanger Rainsford. Description: Sanger Rainsford is a celebrated hunter from New York City with a passion for hunting big game and a "predator versus prey" worldview. He is traveling on a yacht with his friend Whitney to hunt jaguars in the Amazon, when he falls overboard into the sea just off the coast of Ship-Trap Island. After he swims ashore, he comes across General Zaroff's enormous mansion on the island and soon learns that he has entered the trap of a sadistic serial killer. Although both men enjoy hunting animals, Rainsford draws a hard line at hunting humans. Given the choice between being Zaroff's latest prey or Ivan's torture victim, Rainsford takes to the jungle and attempts to outwit Zaroff for the three-day contest. While running from Zaroff, Rainsford realizes how hunted animals must feel and experiences true terror for the first time in his life—though, instead of inspiring thoughts about the sanctity of all life, his terror motivates him to respond with violence. Although he resisted the game at first, when forced to fight for his survival, Rainsford eventually kills both Ivan and Zaroff, winning "the most dangerous game" and crossing the ethical line he drew at the beginning of the story. Rainsford's transformation from proud hunter to terrified prey and then to cold-blooded murderer reveals that mankind is not so different from animals, and without the social contracts of a community, men will resort to brutal violence. - Character: General Zaroff. Description: General Zaroff is an extremely wealthy Russian aristocrat who inhabits Ship-Trap Island with his servant, Ivan, and hunts other men, who are, in his words, "the most dangerous game" because of their capacity for reasoning. Zaroff represents the wealthy elite and lives in a mansion with the finest furnishings, dining, and apparel, but the reader quickly learns that his showy exterior barely hides his predatory nature. When Rainsford stumbles up to his front door, he and Zaroff bond over their love of hunting until Zaroff reveals his passion for hunting humans. He justifies his actions by touting social Darwinist rhetoric that he, a superior man, is entitled to take the lives of the weak. After Rainsford rejects his offer to hunt together, he makes Rainsford his latest prey. Using hunting dogs, the finest equipment, and his extensive knowledge of his own island, Zaroff thinks he has created an unlosable game for himself, only to be defeated when Rainsford outsmarts and kills him in his own house. His reliance on his abundant resources and weakened prey reveal Zaroff, for all of his talk of hunting prowess, to be cowardly. He never enters a fair fight, but uses his dominance over socially, materially, and physically disadvantaged men to affirm his own superiority. - Character: Ivan. Description: Ivan is General Zaroff's servant, a fellow Cossack, and lives with him on the island. He is the first person Rainsford meets when he knocks on Zaroff's front door. Ivan is an extremely large, powerful looking man, and he is deaf and mute. Zaroff employs him to assist in the manhunts and to intimidate those who resist being hunted with threats of torture, as Ivan was previously a professional torturer for the Russian Czar. Near the end of the story, the reader can assume that Rainsford kills Ivan with a knife booby-trap. Both the narrator and Zaroff's treatment of Ivan throughout the story indicate that neither viewed Ivan, a disabled man, as fully human but instead more akin to a large guard dog. He is often described in a way that lumps him in with the hunting dogs, and he dies while leading their leashes. After he dies, Zaroff is irritated at the inconvenience of being without a bodyguard rather than grieved for the human loss. - Character: Whitney. Description: Whitney is a friend and hunting companion of Rainsford's who first introduces him and the reader to Ship-Trap Island and its ominous reputation as an evil place. Whitney argues with Rainsford about whether animals are capable of thought and feeling, thereby allowing the reader insight to Rainsford's predator vs. prey worldview. - Theme: Civilization and Community. Description: As the story of an aristocrat who hunts the shipwrecked men that wash ashore on his private island, "The Most Dangerous Game" challenges the idea that highbrow pastimes and aristocratic society are synonymous with being civilized or moral. The term "civilized" usually refers to highly-developed culture and refined behavior, as well as an ability to live in peaceful communities, but the aristocrat Zaroff does not meet this definition—despite his refinement and social position, General Zaroff has an innate tendency towards brutal, uncivilized violence. This tendency suggests that cultural refinement alone does not make a person "civilized." Through Zaroff's—and later, Rainsford's—actions on the remote island, Connell suggests that the fragile bonds of community can keep people from violence, but once exposed to certain behaviors or situations even civilized people often descend into brutality. Most of Connell's short story takes place in a remote, ominous place away from "civilization." Despite Zaroff's claims to have brought civilization to a wild island, the reader quickly learns that the story's most monstrous creature dwells not in the jungle, but rather in the mansion, strutting around in gentleman's tweed. After confessing his enthusiasm for hunting people, Zaroff explains to Rainsford how he replenishes his island with human prey by tricking passing ships into steering towards a rocky trap. As he describes his intricate and barbarous plan, he then adds—unprovoked, in response to nothing—"Oh, yes…I have electricity. We try to be civilized here." This comment clearly parodies of the notion of being "civilized," as he has just admitted to his routine cruel violence towards other human beings.  Zaroff also tries to seem "civilized" by regularly demonstrating his upper-class education. He knows French, Russian, and English, and he hums bits of Madame Butterfly and reads Marcus Aurelius for leisure. However, his actions demonstrate he does not truly understand those works. Madame Butterfly warns against the human cost of self-serving behavior, and Marcus Aurelius is perhaps best known for Meditations, a work of stoic philosophy that emphasizes avoiding material indulgences and maintaining strong ethical principles. While "civilization" is typically marked by a blend of refined culture, empathy for others, and ethical principles, Zaroff shows that he has only the trappings of civilization, but not the underlying humanity. Zaroff lives on a remote island with only his servant Ivan, presumably some house staff, and his occasional prisoners. In many ways, he exists as an island himself. He tethers himself to no one, experiencing no human bonds. Even his most loyal servant, Ivan, he keeps at an arm's distance much like his hunting dogs. Ivan's role is more akin to a giant guard dog; he follows orders, intimidates prisoners, and hunts holding the leash of Zaroff's dogs, grouping him together with them in the reader's mind. When Rainsford's trap kills Ivan, Zaroff feels annoyed at having to replace him, not grieved over the human loss. He expresses more sadness at losing his favorite hunting dog, Lazarus, than Ivan. During their initial meeting, Rainsford observes that Zaroff's "smile showed red lips and pointed teeth," the first clue that Zaroff is a loosely veiled predator who views other men not as people, but as prey. Though he feels disgusted with Zaroff's behavior at first, as Rainsford becomes immersed in the island, a place void of civilized community, he also resorts to violence. At the end of the story, Rainsford stands face-to-face with Zaroff for the final fight, not in the jungle but in Zaroff's mansion. In an environment that serves as a testament to human achievement, the two men share the singular goal of ending the life in front of them, reflecting to each other and the reader the innate brutality of men without community—and perhaps at the heart of all men. Rainsford's role as a flawed hero demonstrates that it doesn't take long for the fragile bonds of community to crumble, and without them, Connell suggests, men will devolve into violence. Through Connell's exploration of human nature, the reader finds that true civilization requires empathy and a sense of community, and the lack of those qualities can reduce a man, however well-educated and wealthy, to the most basic of predatory animals. - Theme: Condoned Violence vs. Murder. Description: Both Zaroff and Rainsford are former military men and avid hunters—in other words, they participate in socially-condoned killing. But Zaroff also participates in a kind of killing that is not socially accepted—hunting human beings for sport—the central plot point of "The Most Dangerous Game." Zaroff insists that his actions are justified, and that he has been liberated from the silly "Victorian" sentiments about human life to which Rainsford remains captive. Rainsford, however (and, presumably, the reader), draws a hard line against killing other human beings for sport. While the reader might at first identify morally with Rainsford, by the end of the story, Rainsford has taken two more human lives. The moral complexity of these killings demonstrates that the line between socially acceptable violence (hunting, warfare, self-defense) and murder is blurry. Both Rainsford and Zaroff approve of killing in some circumstances: they are avid, skilled hunters, and they both served in the military, which required them to kill other people. In these contexts, Connell demonstrates that killing is not just socially accepted, but also honorable or even fashionable. For example, when explaining his upbringing, Zaroff mentions his time as an officer in the Russian military, something "expected of noblemen's sons." Therefore, wartime violence was a social expectation and an indication of Zaroff's noble class status, or his "civilized" background. Furthermore, Zaroff displays his hunting trophies (animal heads) in his dining hall and throughout his house, which shows that these relics of killing are socially fashionable, making Zaroff appear, paradoxically, more civilized to others. While both of these aspects of Zaroff seem relatively normal to Rainsford, Zaroff and Rainsford do not draw the same boundary between acceptable and unacceptable killing. "Thank you, I'm a hunter, not a murderer," Rainsford says in response to Zaroff's invitation to join the manhunt, indicating Rainsford's strong feelings about the distinction between violence against people and animals. However, Connell suggests several times that this boundary is more porous than "civilized" people might like to think. Refuting Rainsford's moral prohibition against killing humans in peacetime, Zaroff suggests that the line between wartime and peacetime killing isn't actually significant; surely Rainsford's experiences in the war must have cured him of "romantic ideas about the value of human life," Zaroff says, hinting that his own experience of war is what blurred this boundary in him. Moreover, after Zaroff explains the hunt, he invites his guest to see his "new collection of heads" in the library. Readers are left to wonder whether these are human or animal heads, and with this ambiguity Connell has taken a fashionable habit and shown that it was always grotesque and brutal. While Zaroff is unquestionably a serial murderer, Connell is less clear about Rainsford. By the end of the story, Rainsford has taken two human lives: Ivan's and Zaroff's (in addition to whoever he might have killed in the war). Rainsford killed Ivan in self-defense, and one could argue that he killed Zaroff in self-defense, too—even though Rainsford had "won the game" (hypothetically ensuring his own safety), it's reasonable to conclude that Zaroff would have to die for Rainsford to be truly safe on the island. However, in the moment of his death, Zaroff was not threatening Rainsford, they were not at war, and they were not hunting animals—so the story's final killing seems to suggest, in itself, that the hard line Rainsford tried to draw between acceptable and unacceptable killing was never as clear as he thought. - Theme: Extreme Social Darwinism. Description: Zaroff personifies the social Darwinist extremism that plagued much of the early 20th century. Social Darwinism is a term used to describe the ideologies that became popular in the late 19th century applying Charles Darwin's theories of natural selection to human society. These ideas quickly escalated into extremism when societies and governments, following British philosopher Howard Spencer's phrase "survival of the fittest," started labeling certain humans as socially unfit (usually racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities, among others) and treating them as subhuman. Social Darwinist extremism led to eugenics programs across Europe and the U.S. in which procreation was encouraged in socially "fit" people (usually white, able-bodied, and middle-to-upper class), and the "unfit" were sterilized by force and/or in secret. Sometimes, the socially unfit were rounded up and killed. These extreme social views eventually culminated in the Holocaust with Nazi Germany's mass genocide of Jews, racial minorities, Romani people, the disabled, and homosexuals. In "The Most Dangerous Game," Connell explores extreme social Darwinism on a small scale on Ship-Trap Island. Zaroff seems to embody the philosophy of social Darwinism, as he attempts to justify his hunting of men by stating, "Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong. The weak of the world were put here to give the strong pleasure. I am strong. Why should I not use my gift?" He believes, in other words, that ethics are moot and human life is no more sacred than anything else in the natural world—all that matters to him is strength, and therefore strength is a justification for any behavior. As a well-educated, wealthy aristocrat, Zaroff believes himself to be of the highest caliber of natural existence, and because of this, Zaroff feels justified in hunting those he sees as less fit, be they human or animal. Rainsford seems to disagree, but by playing the game, he arguably becomes implicated in these extreme ideas as well—and Connell suggests that he may have already been complicit even before coming to the island. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some European countries and the U.S. participated to varying degrees in eugenics programs to rid their societies of the physically and mentally "unfit." Government agencies framed these actions not as murder or human rights violations, but as a duty performed for the betterment of humanity, strengthening the human race by making sure only the fit survived. Zaroff, a Russian and man of European taste and elegance, embodies the logic of such programs. He claims that the people he hunts aren't fully human anyway, saying, "I hunt the scum of the earth: sailors from tramp ships—lassars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them." To him, the killing isn't murder because those he hunts are already socially marked as unfit. This logic lays bare the moral emptiness of eugenics and social Darwinism. Unlike government eugenics programs, Zaroff has no need for the pretense that he's making the world a better place through his actions; he's honest about the fact that he kills others because strength is his guiding principle, not morality. From Zaroff's game, it's also clear how the logic of social Darwinism can easily become an excuse to dehumanize marginalized peoples (as it has been throughout history). Instead of proclaiming outright hatred for others, proponents of social Darwinism can simply say that those too weak to survive can be justifiably eradicated. This logic is even more perverse considering that Zaroff's victims, like many marginalized peoples, are not given a fair chance. Zaroff has years and years of experience hunting and killing, he is fully armed, and the game is played at his home, an island he knows intimately. His prey—who are often weakened when they wash ashore—are simply given a three-hour head start. While Zaroff believes that anyone he is able to kill is necessarily weaker than he is (therefore justifying their death), the terms of the game are clearly rigged in his favor, much like the way society fosters and protects dominant groups while blaming those without resources for their difficult lives. Connell complicates the story's ethical lines, however, when he implicates Rainsford in these ideas by having him kill to survive, and essentially taking Zaroff's place at the end of the story. The first person the reader can assume Rainsford kills is Ivan, but this killing is quickly glossed over. For the entirety of the story, Connell describes Ivan as more beastlike than human—the reader is first introduced to Ivan as "a gigantic creature" who is deaf, mute, and like all of the Cossack "race," according to Zaroff, something of a "savage." The reader isn't given time to consider the ethics of Ivan's murder because he, a brutish and disabled man, was never presented as fully human either. Intentionally or not, here Connell also calls into question societies (and readers) that may condemn eugenics programs but still participate in social Darwinist ideology by placing less value in the lives of marginalized people. Further, by the end of the text, the reader must reevaluate if there is any hero in this story at all, and consider that perhaps Rainsford is something of a villain as well. Rainsford rid the world of serial killer by being the better killer. Because Rainsford succeeds only within the survival-of-the-fittest system, and ends up sleeping in Zaroff's bed, seemingly taking his place, the reader must ask whether the story actually challenges the ideology of social Darwinism, upholds it, or pessimistically suggests that though morally empty, it is simply the way the world works. - Climax: After eluding the murderous General Zaroff in the jungle, Sanger Rainsford kills the general in his mansion. - Summary: On an especially dark night, Sanger Rainsford and his friend Whitney are sailing on a yacht heading to the Amazon to hunt jaguars. Whitney explains to Rainsford the superstition surrounding an ominous place they are passing called Ship-Trap Island. Between remarks about the island, the two men argue about whether animals experience thoughts and feelings, and Rainsford concludes that animals understand nothing and that living creatures are divided into hunters and prey. Later that night, Rainsford hears gunshots in the distance and falls overboard while trying to investigate. He swims to the mysterious island, and the next morning, he finds blood-stained weeds and signs of a hunter, indicating that the island is inhabited. Walking along the jungle's edge, he unexpectedly comes upon an enormous mansion. Rainsford knocks on the front door and meets a huge man armed with a pistol. An older, very elegant man appears and introduces himself as General Zaroff and the large man as Ivan, his servant who is deaf and mute. Zaroff recognizes Rainsford's name and welcomes the celebrated hunter into his home. Over an elaborate dinner, Rainsford and Zaroff bond over their love of hunting. Zaroff explains how integral hunting is to his identity, but says it became dull because it was too easy, so he "invented" a new animal to hunt. After Rainsford presses him, Zaroff explains that he prefers to hunt humans, because unlike animals, humans can reason and are therefore more dangerous and exciting to hunt. Shocked, Rainsford insists that Zaroff is committing murder and refuses his invitation to participate in the manhunt. Still trying to win over Rainsford, Zaroff explains the game. He gives his "prey" hunting clothes, a supply of food, a hunting knife, and a three-hour head start. He follows with a small pistol, and if the hunted man eludes the general for three days, he wins. The man can choose to participate in his game or be handed over to Ivan, a professional torturer. Disgusted, Rainsford excuses himself for the evening, and Zaroff leaves for his nightly hunt. The next day, Rainsford demands to leave the island immediately, but Zaroff insists they will hunt that night. Rainsford refuses to hunt, but eventually concedes when Zaroff gives him the choice between being hunted or being given to Ivan. Zaroff leaves for a nap, and Rainsford races off into the jungle. Despite Rainsford's three-hour lead and efforts to cover his trail, Zaroff finds his hiding spot almost at once, but then immediately leaves. Rainsford realizes that Zaroff is toying with him, and experiences true terror for the first time in his life. Running further into the jungle, Rainsford stops to craft a trap out of a dead tree and succeeds in injuring Zaroff and buying himself more time. Plodding on through the night, Rainsford accidently steps into quicksand. The soft ground inspires him to make a large pit with pointed sticks at the bottom, but the trap only claims a hunting dog. Zaroff goes home to rest, promising to return with the whole pack of hunting dogs. At daybreak, Rainsford wakes to the sound of baying dogs and sees Zaroff and Ivan drawing nearer. He quickly creates another trap and then runs, understanding now how a hunted animal feels. Looking back, he sees that Zaroff remains standing, but the booby-trap has apparently killed Ivan. Reaching the edge of the jungle, Rainsford sees the mansion across the cove and jumps into the water. Zaroff returns home, thinking Rainsford jumped to this death. While eating dinner that evening, Zaroff feels annoyed about having to replace Ivan and that Rainsford didn't stick around to fight or be killed. After locking his bedroom door for the night, Zaroff turns to see Rainsford standing next to his bed. Zaroff demands to know how Rainsford got there. Rainsford says he swam. Zaroff congratulates Rainsford on winning the game, but Rainsford refuses the victory and tells Zaroff to ready himself. The story closes with Rainsford deciding that he had never slept in a better bed.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Moving Finger - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Late 19th-century New York - Character: Mr. Ralph Grancy. Description: Mr. Grancy is Mrs. Grancy's husband. He's an affluent diplomat and a sociable man with a close circle of friends whom he often entertains at the Grancys' home. After his first marriage to a cruel, controlling woman, Mr. Grancy's happiness and confidence is only revived when he marries the second Mrs. Grancy. It's gradually revealed, however, that Mr. Grancy's feelings for her are based more on possessiveness and obsession than on genuine love. Mr. Grancy commissions his friend Claydon to paint a portrait of Mrs. Grancy, which he becomes obsessed with after Mrs. Grancy unexpectedly dies at a young age. Emotionally and physically devastated by grief, Mr. Grancy calls on Claydon to alter the portrait, making Mrs. Grancy's likeness look older to match his own deterioration. This horrifies the narrator, one of Mr. Grancy's closest friends, who thinks that Mr. Grancy is defacing Mrs. Grancy's memory in an effort to keep her with him as he ages. After this, Mr. Grancy falls ill, and Claydon ends up changing the painting once more, making Mrs. Grancy appear even older and as though she knows her husband is going to die. Mr. Grancy does end up dying from his illness, and he leaves Mrs. Grancy's portrait to Claydon in his will. Mr. Grancy's character is a case study in how grief can destroy a person from the inside out, and how a person's controlling nature can, in turn, end up possessing them. - Character: Mrs. Grancy. Description: Mrs. Grancy is Mr. Grancy's second wife, a colleague's sister whom he meets while working abroad. She and Mr. Grancy seemingly have a happy relationship, though it gradually becomes clear that Mr. Grancy wants to possess and control Mrs. Grancy. All of Mr. Grancy's friends, including the unnamed narrator, are fixated on Mrs. Grancy's physical appearance, to the point that the reader never learns anything about her besides the fact that she's beautiful. Mr. Grancy commissions his friend Claydon, an artist, to paint a portrait of Mrs. Grancy, which captures the striking youthfulness and beauty that Mr. Grancy's friends believe he brings out in his wife. Claydon becomes obsessed with the painting, to the point that he ignores the real Mrs. Grancy in favor of staring at the portrait while she speaks. After Mrs. Grancy unexpectedly dies in her thirties, Mr. Grancy, too, becomes obsessed with his memory of Mrs. Grancy and with the portrait. He calls on Claydon to alter the painting, making Mrs. Grancy appear older so that she doesn't get left behind as he ages without her. But at the end of the story, after Mr. Grancy has passed away and left the painting to Claydon in his will, Claydon restores the painting back to its original form and creates a sort of shrine around it, claiming that Mrs. Grancy now belongs to him. It's vaguely implied that Claydon and Mrs. Grancy may have had an affair, but this is left ambiguous. In fact, the reader never finds out anything definitive about Mrs. Grancy beyond the male characters' obsession with her looks and possessiveness over her. Her character is thus an example of how an overemphasis on a woman's beauty can unfairly overshadow her other qualities. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator is one of Mr. Grancy's friends. He's an observant, insightful man who frequently praises Mr. Grancy's second wife, Mrs. Grancy, for her beauty and admires the couple's seemingly happy relationship. Although the narrator doesn't quite know how to comfort his Mr. Grancy after Mrs. Grancy's unexpected death, he proves to be a loyal friend and visits Mr. Grancy often. He's shocked and offended, however, when he finds out that Mr. Grancy called on their artist friend Claydon to alter Mr. Grancy's beloved portrait of Mrs. Grancy, making her likeness look older to match Mr. Grancy's own aged appearance. The narrator sees this as a betrayal—a desecration of Mrs. Grancy's beauty. Nevertheless, he stays friends with Mr. Grancy through an illness that ultimately kills him, and he carries out his duty as one of the executors of Mr. Grancy's estate. At the end of the story, after Mrs. Grancy's portrait has been left to Claydon, the narrator is disturbed when he finds out that Claydon has restored the painting back to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy and has created a sort of shrine around her. Though the story doesn't contain much information about the narrator, he's the lens through which the reader witnesses Mr. Grancy's deterioration and he sees how the men closest to Mrs. Grancy obsess over and objectify her—even after her death. - Character: Claydon. Description: Claydon is Mr. Grancy and the unnamed narrator's friend. He's an artist whom Mr. Grancy commissions to paint a portrait of his second wife, Mrs. Grancy. Claydon quickly becomes obsessed with the painting, seemingly falling in love with it rather than with Mrs. Grancy herself. After Mrs. Grancy unexpectedly dies a few years later, Mr. Grancy calls on Claydon to alter the painting, aging Mrs. Grancy's likeness so that he doesn't have to grow old by himself. Doing so plagues Claydon with guilt—and after Mr. Grancy passes away and leaves him the portrait, Claydon restores it back to its original form and creates a shrine around it in his studio. It's vaguely implied that Claydon and Mrs. Grancy may have had an affair, but this is left ambiguous. At the end of the story, the narrator discovers Claydon's shrine, and Claydon tells him that Mrs. Grancy belongs to him now. His years-long obsession with his own romanticized vision of Mrs. Grancy's beauty, which seems to overshadow the woman herself, is a testament to how possessiveness and control can be mistaken for love. - Theme: Love, Obsession, and Control. Description: In "The Moving Finger," Mr. Grancy and Claydon are enamored with the same woman: Mr. Grancy's wife. But although these men believe that they're in love with Mrs. Grancy, their affections are actually based in an obsessive desire to possess and control her. Edith Wharton's complicated portrayal of these two men suggests that although love and obsession are very different feelings, the line between the two is blurry, and people often mistake one for the other. Furthermore, the story illustrates that when someone obsessively tries to control another person, their obsession itself can end up controlling them. Initially, it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Grancy's relationship is genuinely loving. The unnamed narrator explains that "Mrs. Grancy's niche was her husband's life" and compares her to a tree that "gave [Mr. Grancy] rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches." Mrs. Grancy is a source of support, comfort, and inspiration in Mr. Grancy's life, and Mr. Grancy also makes Mrs. Grancy happy: she appears to light up with love and joy in her husband's presence. All of the Grancys' friends pick up on this as well, and they admire the couple's relationship as something to aspire to. But while Mr. and Mrs. Grancy seem to adore each other, Wharton plants clues throughout the story that Mr. Grancy's feelings are rooted in obsession rather than genuine love. The Grancys are happy on the surface, and Mrs. Grancy certainly brings value to Mr. Grancy's life, yet there's no mention of how Mr. Grancy tangibly benefits Mrs. Grancy in return. It seems that their marriage isn't necessarily based on love and mutual support, but on what Mr. Grancy can get out of the relationship. Indeed, although Mr. Grancy's friends admire the couple's seemingly happy relationship, Mr. Grancy's affections for Mrs. Grancy seem to be rooted in obsession and possessiveness rather than genuine love or respect. After he commissions his friend Claydon to paint a portrait of Mrs. Grancy, he tells her, "You're my prisoner now—I shall never lose you. If you grew tired of me and left me you'd leave your real self there on the wall!" The Grancys' friends view the couple's relationship as romantic and idyllic, but Mr. Grancy actually thinks of Mrs. Grancy as his "prisoner" rather than his partner or his equal—a dynamic that's obsessive and controlling rather than healthy and loving. Even after Mrs. Grancy unexpectedly dies at a young age, Mr. Grancy remains obsessed with her and becomes fixated on controlling her memory. In his grief, Mr. Grancy is only able to regain his happiness when he resorts to imagining that Mrs. Grancy is still alive and "interested in what [he] was doing." His memory of his second wife isn't centered around anything substantive about her, like her personality, but rather how she served and validated him. Mr. Grancy even calls on Claydon to alter Mrs. Grancy's portrait in order to make Mrs. Grancy look older, so that Mr. Grancy doesn't have to feel alone as he ages—a prospect that terrifies him. Rather than honoring his wife's memory, Mr. Grancy wants to control and alter it: he's so distraught at the idea of no longer having someone to control that, in the absence of the real Mrs. Grancy, he resorts to keeping the painting of Mrs. Grancy as his "prisoner" by making her age alongside him. Again, although Mr. Grancy seems devoted to Mrs. Grancy, the root of his devotion is obsession and dependency, not genuine love. Claydon, too, is enamored with Mrs. Grancy. But, like Mr. Grancy, Claydon doesn't love her for who she is—he's merely fixated on her image. This is clearest when, after Claydon paints Mrs. Grancy's portrait, he becomes obsessed with the painting. Another friend of Mr. Grancy comments that Claydon "had been saved from falling in love with Mrs Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her." This suggests that, just like Mr. Grancy, Claydon is fixated on a romanticized idea of Mrs. Grancy—he's obsessed with the image he painted of her, not genuinely in love with who she is. And, also like Mr. Grancy, Claydon's seemingly innocent affections are revealed to be more sinister after Mrs. Grancy's death. Claydon feels like he's "commit[ed] murder" after fulfilling Mr. Grancy's request to make Mrs. Grancy's portrait look older. His opposition to Mr. Grancy's wishes for his wife's portrait suggest that Claydon, too, feels that he's a gatekeeper of sorts over Mrs. Grancy's memory—he still wants to control how others see her. After Mr. Grancy passes away and leaves the painting to Claydon, Claydon changes the portrait back to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy and tells the narrator, "now she belongs to me." The narrator thinks that "it was the woman [Claydon] had loved and not the picture," yet Claydon's possessive language again suggests that his fixation on Mrs. Grancy isn't based in love at all, but in obsession and control. Mr. Grancy and Claydon are both fixated on Mrs. Grancy and set on controlling her, yet their mutual obsession with possessing her is ironically what possesses them, plaguing both men and motivating virtually all of their actions in the story. Thus, story's title, "The Moving Finger," perhaps alludes to Mrs. Grancy's influence: a pointing "finger" that directs Mr. Grancy and Claydon even from beyond the grave. With this, Wharton implies that possessiveness is no substitute for genuine love—and that, when one person is obsessed with controlling another, that obsession can, in turn, end up controlling them. - Theme: Beauty and Objectification. Description: In "The Moving Finger," Mr. Grancy—and all of his close friends—are enchanted by his wife's beauty. The narrator (one of the Grancys' friends) continually praises Mrs. Grancy's lovely features, and Mr. Grancy even commissions his friend Claydon to paint a portrait of her. But while the male characters' adoration of Mrs. Grancy's appearance is meant to compliment and honor her, their attention actually ends up objectifying her and erasing her other good qualities. Through the men's treatment of Mrs. Grancy, the story critiques the male tendency to objectify women and value them solely for their physical appearance. The story's men portray Mrs. Grancy's beauty as a positive—even virtuous—characteristic that endears her to them. The narrator first describes Mrs. Grancy as a beautiful flower or tree that Mr. Grancy planted and cultivated. Introducing her character in this way implies that Mrs. Grancy's beauty is her most important trait, and that it's what Mr. Grancy tries to encourage and bring out in his wife. Through her beauty, Mrs. Grancy gives the men around her "what such a woman gives by merely being." The narrator even claims that Mrs. Grancy's beauty has the ability to "clear[] new ground, open[] fresh vistas, reclaim[] whole areas of activity that had run to waste," restoring the confidence and happiness that Mr. Grancy lost during his miserable first marriage and opening up new perspectives for him. In this way, Mrs. Grancy's physical appearance is praised as something virtuous and inspirational—it's of great value to her husband and to the Grancys' friends (like the narrator) who spend time at their home. Yet for all the narrator's glorification of Mrs. Grancy's physical attributes, the reader never finds out anything substantive about her—the male characters focus on her appearance, which overshadows her personality and intellect. While the narrator certainly intends his praise of Mrs. Grancy's appearance to be complimentary, it's significant that virtually every description of her is centered on her beautiful, youthful appearance. This sends the message that Mrs. Grancy's physical beauty is the most important thing about her—and perhaps the only thing worth knowing about her. Indeed, although the men who spend time around Mrs. Grancy enjoy her presence and marvel at her beauty, this seems to come at the cost of them knowing anything deeper about her. In other words, they objectify her looks more than they genuinely appreciate who she is. The objectification of Mrs. Grancy is clearest when Mr. Grancy commissions his friend Claydon to paint Mrs. Grancy's portrait: Claydon's painting of Mrs. Grancy portrays her the way Mr. Grancy and Claydon see her (and the way they want others to see her), rather than showing how Mrs. Grancy sees herself or who she really is. Although the painting is intended to honor Mrs. Grancy, it's really an objectified version of her presented through the male gaze. Claydon takes this focus on Mrs. Grancy's beauty to the extreme: he falls in love with his objectified vision of her rather than with the woman herself. The narrator says that "when Mrs Grancy was in the room […] Claydon, averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the picture." This image of Claydon, gazing adoringly at Mrs. Grancy's portrait while ignoring Mrs. Grancy herself, confirms that Claydon objectifies Mrs. Grancy: he values his own artistic vision of her beauty more than he values Mrs. Grancy herself. Indeed, another one of Mr. Grancy's friends comments that "Claydon had been saved from falling in love with Mrs Grancy only by falling in love with his picture of her." Years later, after Mr. Grancy's death, he leaves the portrait to Claydon in his will. Claydon proceeds to reverse the alterations that Mr. Grancy had him make to the painting over the years, restoring it back to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy. He then hangs the painting in a room full of other beautiful objects, creating a shrine of sorts with treasures "heaped […] at the feet of the woman he loved." Claydon tells the narrator that he "turned [his] real woman into a picture." But the narrator (and the reader) can see that Claydon's shrine to Mrs. Grancy is possessive rather than flattering—it's a violation of her and Mr. Grancy's relationship, and it's likely not what Mrs. Grancy would have wanted to become of her portrait. Claydon's fixation on his own vision of Mrs. Grancy's beauty obscures who she really was, which objectifies her rather than honoring her. As a female writer at the turn of the 20th century, it's likely that Edith Wharton was acutely aware of male contemporaries who portrayed women as men wanted to see them—not necessarily as they actually were. "The Moving Finger," then, perhaps reflects Wharton's own frustrations with real women being objectified and portrayed two-dimensionally, their personalities and intellect diminished under a male gaze that only saw their physical beauty. - Theme: Grief and Loneliness. Description: "The Moving Finger" begins with the unnamed narrator learning that Mrs. Grancy has died. He describes the loss as a "shock" and an "an immense blunder of fate" that leaves behind a void in the lives of everyone who knew her. This is especially true for Mr. Grancy, who is completely devastated by his wife's death and whose entire life gradually disintegrates as he mourns her: his grief affects his mental well-being, his physical health, and even his personal relationships. Mr. Grancy's years of suffering show that grief can be a powerful and isolating force that has a corrosive effect on people not only emotionally, but physically and interpersonally—essentially destroying the grieving person from within. Mr. Grancy's life is completely uprooted when Mrs. Grancy suddenly and unexpectedly dies, and his mental health suffers as a result. After Mrs. Grancy passes away, Mr. Grancy falls into a deep depression. He moves from the U.S. to Turkey, leaving all of his friends behind and throwing himself into a new job in international diplomacy as a way of distracting himself from his grief. The narrator, however, sees that Mr. Grancy's tough exterior during this time is contrived, and that it actually "testifie[s] to his inner weakness"—inside, Mr. Grancy is suffering immensely. Five years later, once Mr. Grancy has returned to the U.S., he confides in the narrator that he was indeed miserable during these "first black months." To feel okay again, he admits that he resorted to imagining that Mrs. Grancy was still alive and present with him. The narrator describes this presence as a "ghost" haunting Mr. Grancy—Mr. Grancy is unable to emotionally cope without his wife by his side, and he's willing to deny reality if it means feeling like she's still in his life. In addition to the mental strife that Mr. Grancy experiences as a result of his grief, his personal relationships are also affected, leaving him even more alienated and lonely. Although Mr. Grancy returns to the U.S. and is able to get back in touch with his old friends and revive their traditional Sunday gatherings, he spends most of his time isolated at home in his study. His friends don't seem able or willing to truly understand what he's going through. The narrator, for instance, is relieved when he parts ways with Mr. Grancy. He doesn't think that friendship adequately "perform[s], in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition," meaning that friendship, for all its promises of support and loyalty, tends to fall apart in the face of tragedy and upheaval. The narrator also feels a hint of dread at the thought of going to visit Mr. Grancy again, reflecting that "we are apt to feel that our friends' sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed." The narrator's thoughts suggest that others tend to be repelled by a grieving person, as they're unsure of how to support them and want to keep their friend's suffering at a distance. In this way, grief can cause interpersonal damage, further isolating the grieving person and plunging them deeper into loneliness and sorrow. Mr. Grancy's mourning also devastates his body and his health, showing that grief can have physical effects. After his initial grieving period, Mr. Grancy's "body showed its scars. At five-and-forty he was gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man." Though still a relatively young man at 45, Mr. Grancy's emotional pain has rapidly aged him. He falls seriously ill soon after this, as though he's literally sick with grief—a physical change that seems to be a manifestation of his inner suffering. And as Mr. Grancy grows older and sicker, he imagines that his beloved portrait of his young wife (which his friend Claydon painted nearly a decade ago) is lonely, just like he is. Afraid of Mrs. Grancy being "left behind" as he ages while she stays "unchangeably young," Mr. Grancy calls on Claydon to alter the portrait, making Mrs. Grancy appear older. The reader can see, however, that the reasoning Mr. Grancy gives for changing the portrait is just an excuse: as Mr. Grancy physically deteriorates, he wants his wife to deteriorate alongside him, so that he won't be alone in his suffering. In this way, the decline in Mr. Grancy's physical health exacerbates the decline in his mental health, leading him to further deny reality and unhealthily cling to someone who's no longer there. As Mr. Grancy's illness worsens, he calls on Claydon to alter Mrs. Grancy's portrait a second time, making her look even older and giving her an expression that looks as though she knows her husband is going to die. From this point on, the portrait becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Mr. Grancy becomes more and more obsessed with keeping Mrs. Grancy in alive, changing the painting to reflect the changes in himself, he grows weaker and sicker until he dies of his illness—just as Mrs. Grancy's likeness seemed to predict he would. Mr. Grancy's sorrow and loneliness in the wake of Mrs. Grancy's death turns him into a shell of his former self, a man so sick with grief and stuck in his past that he is destroyed from the inside out. - Climax: The narrator discovers the shrine that Claydon built around Mrs. Grancy's portrait - Summary: When Mr. Grancy's second wife, Mrs. Grancy dies, the unnamed narrator (a friend of the Grancys) is shocked. Mrs. Grancy was her husband's support system and his sole source of happiness. Mr. Grancy's first wife was self-centered and controlling, which made him miserable; when she died, and Mr. Grancy married the second Mrs. Grancy, he was finally happy again. All of Mr. Grancy's friends thought that Mrs. Grancy was the perfect match for Mr. Grancy, and they marveled at how beautiful she was. It seemed that Mrs. Grancy revitalized Mr. Grancy, and in return, he brought out her youthful beauty. Soon after his second marriage, Mr. Grancy commissioned his friend Claydon, an artist, to paint a portrait of Mrs. Grancy. The painting glorified her beauty, portraying her exactly as Mr. Grancy saw her. Soon after, the Grancys moved out of their New York City townhouse to a rural estate, where their friends gathered every Sunday in the Grancys' library. Mrs. Grancy's portrait hung in this room, and the others noticed that Claydon seemed to be in love with the portrait, gazing up at it whenever Mrs. Grancy spoke. It was three years later, when the narrator is living in Rome, that he hears of Mrs. Grancy's unexpected death. A few months later, Mr. Grancy meets up with the narrator while passing through Rome on his way to a new job as Constantinople's secretary of legation. He puts on a brave front, but the narrator can tell that he's grieving. Five years later, when the narrator and Mr. Grancy have both returned to the United States, Mr. Grancy invites the narrator and their old friends over. However, Claydon mysteriously tells the narrator that he never wants to visit Mr. Grancy's house again. Confused, the narrator decides to go to visit Mr. Grancy alone, and he's surprised to see how much Mr. Grancy has aged. The house seems haunted by Mrs. Grancy's memory, and the narrator is shocked when he sees that that Mrs. Grancy's likeness in her portrait looks older. Mr. Grancy tells the narrator that he had Claydon alter the painting for him, so that Mrs. Grancy can age alongside him. Over the next decade, Mr. Grancy falls ill and slowly deteriorates, almost dying one summer. When the narrator visits him during this time, he finds that Mr. Grancy has had Claydon alter the portrait again, making Mrs. Grancy look even older and as though she knows her husband is going to die. A few weeks later, Mr. Grancy dies and leaves Mrs. Grancy's portrait to Claydon in his will. A couple years later, the narrator attends Claydon's latest art exhibition. When he goes into a curtained room off of Claydon's studio, he finds Mrs. Grancy's portrait hung on the wall, surrounded by fine collectibles arranged like a shrine. Claydon has restored to the painting to its original youthful portrayal of Mrs. Grancy, and he tells the narrator that Mrs. Grancy belongs to him now.

- Genre: Mystery Novel - Title: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Point of view: First person (Dr. Sheppard) - Setting: King's Abbot (a small village in rural England) - Character: Dr. James Sheppard. Description: Dr. James Sheppard is the narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. As a result, avid mystery readers—both now and especially in the 1920s—would be predisposed to trust him. In detective novels, there's a long tradition, stretching back to the Sherlock Holmes stories (narrated by the reliable Dr. Watson), in which the narrator of the story is the most trustworthy character—the detective's right-hand man. However, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie challenges readers' assumptions about narration and the conventions of the mystery novel, and in the final pages of the book it's revealed that Dr. Sheppard is the murderer. Sheppard is a somewhat peculiar character: although he's the narrator of the book, readers learn a surprisingly small amount about him (the "twist ending" is dependent upon readers not learning too much about him, after all). Sheppard is a physician, and appears to be reliable, trustworthy, and altogether likeable—hence, we assume, Poirot's apparent friendship with him. In retrospect, however, Christie makes it clear that Dr. Sheppard is a weak, desperate man who, as a result of his bad investments and desire to save face, blackmails Mrs. Ferrars and is then forced to murder his friend Roger Ackroyd to prevent himself from being exposed. - Character: Hercule Poirot ("Mr. Porrot"). Description: Hercule Poirot is the detective at the center of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, as well as many other Agatha Christie stories, novels, and plays. A brilliant, often arrogant Belgian with a flair for the dramatic, Poirot can sometimes be irritating to the people around him—his flamboyant continental style clashes with the English characters' simplicity and directness. Nevertheless, Poirot repeatedly proves himself to be a first-rate detective. He's an excellent researcher, who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty to solve a case; however, his greatest strength is arguably his ability to think psychologically, sizing up his suspects' personalities and assessing their precise motives for committing a crime. Poirot isn't above bending the rules to solve his crime—in the novel, he convinces Dr. Sheppard to talk about his private medical conversations with a suspect, and he also posts a false story in the newspaper. Like many fictional detectives, Poirot isn't motivated by money, or by any concrete reward for his ingenuity; rather, he seems to take on cases because of an abstract, philosophical interest in human behavior and a general desire to solve puzzles that seem inscrutable to others. At the end of the novel, Poirot deduces that Dr. Sheppard is the murderer, but, interestingly, doesn't turn Sheppard over to the police, instead allowing Sheppard to settle his affairs and die by his own hand. This is another sign that Poirot is more interested in bringing his investigation to psychological closure than in enforcing the law. - Character: Roger Ackroyd. Description: Roger Ackroyd is, to state the obvious, the murder victim in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and his death prompts Hercule Poirot to investigate the case—eventually leading to Poirot's discovery that Dr. James Sheppard is the killer. Ackroyd is described as being a successful, middle-aged businessman; he's well-liked in his community, though he has a stubborn streak. Ackroyd's first wife dies of dipsomania (i.e., alcoholism), and he later begins a secret affair with Mrs. Ferrars, culminating in Ferrars's decision to murder her husband. At this point, Dr. Sheppard begins to blackmail Mrs. Ferrars, prompting her to kill herself and send a letter to Roger Ackroyd containing Sheppard's name. After learning about the letter, Sheppard kills Ackroyd. - Character: Caroline Sheppard. Description: Caroline Sheppard is the sister and roommate of Dr. James Sheppard (at the time, it wasn't particularly uncommon for adult siblings to live together in English villages, even if they were fairly well-off). She's an exceptionally gossipy, curious person, and throughout the book most of the comic relief stems from her frantic attempts to learn as much as possible about the case. Although many of Caroline's instincts are wrong, she's arguably the character in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd who most perfectly represents the ideal reader of Agatha Christie mysteries: she's exceptionally curious about the murders and, crucially, she has almost meta-fictional instincts about who is and isn't guilty. (For example, she's sure—as any good mystery fan would be—that Ralph Paton can't be the killer, because this would be too obvious.) - Character: Ralph Paton. Description: Ralph Paton is the young, handsome son of Ms. Paton, Roger Ackroyd's first wife. He has a reputation for being dashing and charming, but also a little weak-willed. As the novel begins, Ralph is rumored to be engaged to Flora Ackroyd, whom he's known for most of his life (but to whom he's not biologically related in any way). After Roger's murder, Ralph disappears, instantly making him a suspect in the case. Throughout the novel, most of the characters seem to believe that Ralph is the killer: he had a motive (he hated Roger, and always had to convince him to lend him more money). However, as Caroline Sheppard points out, Ralph can't be the killer—it's just too easy and too obvious. - Character: Flora Ackroyd. Description: The beautiful young niece of Roger Ackroyd, fiancé of Ralph Paton, and daughter of Mrs. Ackroyd, Flora Ackroyd is considered a suspect in Roger's murder for several reasons. She depended on Roger for money, and never had enough of it; furthermore, she claims to have been the last person to see Roger Ackroyd before his death. - Character: Mrs. Ackroyd. Description: Roger Ackroyd's sister-in-law from marriage to Cecil Ackroyd, Roger's ne'er-do-well younger brother. As Dr. Sheppard describes her, she's an exceptionally tiresome woman, who complains constantly and drones on about dull topics. She's considered a suspect because of her heavy financial dependence on Roger Ackroyd, and her heavy debts, none of which Roger knew about at the time of his death. - Character: Miss Elizabeth Russell. Description: Roger Ackroyd's housekeeper and, it's suggested, lover for a time. She's considered a suspect in the case because of her jealousy surrounding Roger's affair with Mrs. Ferrars, as well as her need for money and her connections to drugs. It's eventually revealed that Miss Russell has an illegitimate child, Charles Kent. - Character: Major Hector Blunt. Description: Major Hector Blunt is a stock character in Agatha Christie novels: the "blunt," stoic, not particularly bright military man. Blunt never really seems to be a prime suspect in the murder, but he's shown to be hiding something: he has feelings for Flora Ackroyd, and at the end of the novel, the two of them are engaged. - Character: Geoffrey Raymond. Description: Geoffrey Raymond is Roger Ackroyd's intelligent young secretary, much admired by both Hercule Poirot and Dr. Sheppard for his vigor and capability. Raymond, like the other suspects in the murder, is hiding something: he was in debt at the time of Ackroyd's death. Raymond continues to serve the Ackroyd family faithfully even after Ackroyd's death. - Character: Ursula Bourne / Ursula Paton. Description: Ursula Bourne is a parlormaid in the Roger Ackroyd home, and she's considered a suspect in Roger's murder, especially after Hercule Poirot learns that she was dismissed from her position by Ackroyd on the same day Ackroyd was murdered. Toward the end of the book, it's revealed that Ursula is secretly married to Ralph Paton—a piece of information that seems to make Ursula even more of a suspect in Roger's murder. - Theme: Secrecy and the Universal Capacity for Violence. Description: Halfway through Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot—the Belgian detective who's been convinced to investigate the titular crime—tells the suspects, "Every one of you in this room is concealing something from me." Poirot's claim is arguably the single most important sentence in the book, summing up Christie's belief that everyone—even nice, ordinary-seeming people—has a dark secret, and, furthermore, that everyone, under the right circumstances, is capable of committing a crime. Over the course of Poirot's investigation, the book reveals that almost all of the characters had some motive for murdering Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy businessman living in the small village of King's Abbot. This could be considered a convention of the mystery genre (since, after all, it wouldn't be much of a murder mystery unless multiple people could be the murderer). But Christie also makes the deeper point that all people have secrets that can compel them to kill. Some of the murder suspects are revealed to have a secret need for money. For example, Flora Ackroyd, Roger's niece, and Mrs. Ackroyd, Roger's sister-in-law, are shown to be desperate for cash, which the stingy, stubborn Roger was reluctant to give them upfront. Other suspects are motivated by a more abstract but no less intense desire for freedom; both Flora Ackroyd and Ralph Paton (Roger's adopted son) are shown to be secretly sick and tired of Roger's domineering behavior, and want to be rid of his influence forever. Other characters are shown to have committed various kinds of crimes in the past: Parker, a seemingly "proper" English butler, turns out to be a seasoned blackmailer, and Miss Russell, an equally proper-seeming housemaid, is revealed to have had an illegitimate child (which would have been considered shocking by many of Christie's readers in the 1920s). In all, the characters' questionable behavior and dark secrets confirm Poirot's observation, suggesting that no person is completely free of secrets. Christie further emphasizes her point in the novel's famous ending, in which it's revealed that Dr. Sheppard, the calm, reliable narrator of the novel, is Roger Ackroyd's killer. After falling deep into debt, Sheppard began blackmailing Roger's lover, Mrs. Ferrars, and, after she killed herself and revealed Sheppard's name to Roger, Sheppard killed Roger to protect himself. It might be hard for 21st-century readers to understand how surprising—even shocking—Roger Ackroyd's "twist ending" was in the 1920s. Traditionally, the narrator of a mystery novel is (along with the detective) the only person whom readers can safely assume to be innocent of the crime. (In the early 20th century, there was even an unofficial set of "commandments" for mystery writers, the first of which is that the narrator of a mystery novel should never be the killer.) By making Dr. Sheppard the killer, then, Christie goes further than her fellow mystery novelists in showing that everyone has secrets, and that even ordinary-seeming people can, under the right circumstances, be compelled to kill. In her later novels, Christie arguably took things even further, penning a novel in which Poirot himself turns out to be the killer! - Theme: Detection and Intellect. Description: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd doesn't just show that everybody has something to hide—it also suggests that, with a little intelligent detective work, people's secrets inevitably will be revealed. Through the character of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who appears in dozens of other Christie mysteries, Roger Ackroyd shows how an intelligent, rational person can use their "little grey cells" to solve even the most challenging of mysteries. Furthermore, Christie shows how Poirot's flexible intellect—his combination of rational disinterest and intuitive exploration—is key to solving the case. The contrast Christie sets up between Poirot's handling of the case and the official inquiry made by the police makes an argument that investigations are best when they're based on a philosophical interest in human behavior and human nature, rather than personal or professional incentives, such as the desire to close a case quickly, a quest for money or fame, or friendship with the victims. Even before Poirot begins to investigate Roger Ackroyd's murder, Christie makes it clear that he's interested in the case for purely abstract reasons. Indeed, Poirot's "disinterest" (i.e., the fact that he's not financially connected to the Ackroyd family, intimately acquainted with any of the suspects, or even legally obligated to turn over his findings to the police) is an important part of his style of detection. Because Poirot is disinterested, he's not biased toward or against particular suspects. Instead, he's free to "size up" the suspects slowly and carefully, assessing what kinds of people they are, what their motives and secrets might be, and whether or not they'd be capable, under the circumstances, of committing a crime. As befits a detective who only takes cases out of abstract, philosophical interest, Poirot's style of detection focuses on the study of human nature. Like a good logician, Poirot proceeds from a set of premises—everybody has secrets; everybody, under the right circumstances, is capable of murder—and uses them to interview the suspects and draw conclusions about the crime. By contrast, Christie portrays the sloppier style favored by the police, who have limited resources and a strong incentive to conclude their investigation as soon as possible. But Poirot isn't just an "armchair detective." In addition to his role as a philosophical "student of human nature," he's also willing to get his hands dirty by gathering evidence. Over the course of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot gathers various important pieces of evidence in the act of patrolling the Ackroyd estate, including a wedding ring, a goose quill, and a piece of cambric (a kind of fabric), without which he'd probably be unable to solve the case. Much of the time, Poirot acts like an empiricist, who believes that the best way to solve a problem is to gather evidence—either literal, physical evidence or the testimony of the suspects. But there are other occasions when Poirot seems to use his intuition to guide his investigation. Especially toward the beginning of the case, Poirot tells Dr. Sheppard that he has certain "feelings" about a particular person or piece of evidence—ideas that he's unable to support with evidence. Although many of Poirot's "feelings" later become full-fledged theories, supported by the evidence, they often begin as mere, unsubstantiated instinct. Poirot is unique from most other fictional detectives in the sense that he doesn't have any one hard and fast theory of detection. At times, he concentrates on gathering physical evidence; at other times, he focuses on forming a psychological understanding of the suspects; and sometimes, he allows his instincts to guide him. Christie implies that it is because Poirot is so flexible—he uses so many different methods of detection, employing many different aspects of his mind—that he's such a brilliant detective. - Theme: Law vs. Ethics. Description: Over the course of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie draws an important distinction between the law—symbolized by Inspector Raglan, who is duty-bound to investigate Roger Ackroyd's murder and prosecute the killer in court—and ethics, symbolized by Hercule Poirot. From the beginning, Christie shows that Poirot marches to the beat of his own drum. He's motivated by a personal, philosophical interest in the case of Roger's murder (see Detection theme), and answers to his own personal code of right and wrong. At various points in the book, Poirot is shown to be willing to lie, manipulate suspects, and engage in other behavior that many people would consider "wrong." He deceives suspects into giving away important information about themselves, and in the middle of the book, Poirot takes matters into his own hands by posting a fictitious story in the local newspaper, explaining that the police have arrested Ralph Paton, the prime suspect in Roger's murder. For Poirot, these deceptions are justified by the "greater good" of solving the case, and indeed, his lies are often quite useful in gathering new information. After he arranges for the fake news story to be published, for instance, Ursula Bourne comes forward and admits that she was married to Ralph Paton—a crucial piece of evidence that she would never have revealed otherwise. Although Poirot engages in plenty of questionable behavior, he clearly has a strong ethical code. Rather than being strongly committed to any particular rule or law, however, Poirot is committed above all to learning the truth, no matter how painful it might be. In this sense, he seems very different from the police, who are motivated by their desire to obey and enforce the law more than their abstract love for truth and enlightenment. Christie further complicates themes of law and ethics at the end of the book, when Poirot, having discovered that Dr. Sheppard is the murderer, allows Sheppard to kill himself instead of turning him over to the police. The ending strongly implies that Sheppard will kill himself, and Poirot will convince Inspector Raglan to refrain from broadcasting the news of Sheppard's guilt, thereby protecting Sheppard's sister Caroline from the pain of learning that her brother was a murderer. Poirot's behavior suggests that, although he's committed to truth—in the sense that he feels a desire, and even a duty, to learn the truth about Roger's murder—he also takes into account other factors, such as Sheppard's dignity and, more importantly, the effect that his arrest will have on Caroline and the community in general. Where a police inspector would be legally bound to arrest Sheppard and put him on public trial for his crimes, Poirot opts for a more intimate, ethically holistic form of justice. Furthermore, it appears that Inspector Raglan is going to cooperate with Poirot and keep news of Sheppard's guilt quiet. This might suggest that, ultimately, Roger Ackroyd sides with Poirot's personal, idiosyncratic ethical code, rather than the strictly "by the book" approach favored by the police: detectives should bring the truth to light, but they should also take into account the effect the truth will have on other people. - Theme: Gossip and Small Town Life. Description: Like many mystery novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is set in a small, isolated community—the English village of King's Abbot—where everybody knows everybody else, and where the whole community knows when there's someone new in town. One of the most important features of small-town English life, as Christie depicts it, is the powerful force of gossip—the information (sometimes true, sometimes not) that gets passed from person to person in a small town. And it is in part by learning to harness the power of gossip that Poirot solves the case of Roger Ackroyd's murder. Dr. Sheppard, the narrator, constantly complains about how irritating, inaccurate, and pointless gossip can be. And yet, over the course of the book, Christie shows how gossip can be a potentially important tool of detection. Counterintuitively, gossip can be more reliable than regular, face-to-face testimony. At the very beginning of the book, Sheppard's sister Caroline learns about the death of Mrs. Ferrars almost as soon as it happens, thanks to the power of gossip: Mrs. Ferrars's parlormaid passes the message on to other people, who alert Caroline. This shouldn't suggest that gossip is always one hundred percent accurate, and indeed, there are several times when Caroline and the other gossips in King's Abbot spread completely false rumors about Poirot and Roger Ackroyd. And yet, throughout Roger Ackroyd, Caroline's ideas about the case—which she proceeds to share with anyone who'll listen—prove to be more accurate than the police inspector's theories and even, at times, Hercule Poirot's theories. One reason for the reliability of gossip is that, unlike with the testimony of the murder suspects, the people communicating the information have no strong incentive to lie. Gossips sometimes lie or distort the truth in order to tell a good story, but—at least as Christie presents it in the book, if not in real life—they still want to be right. On the other hand, each one of the murder suspects has a very strong incentive to lie (their reputations or their lives hinge on their ability to conceal the truth). On a typical day in a small English town, Christie suggests, gossip might not be the best source of information. But in the midst of a murder case, when everybody is hiding something, gossip can be one of the best ways of learning the truth. Hercule Poirot solves the case of Roger's murder because he recognizes the power of gossip and learns how to use it to his advantage. At various point in the novel, Poirot makes important deductions based on what the town gossips, especially Caroline, tell him. Poirot uses Caroline's network of gossips to determine whether Ralph Paton owns boots, and he learns from Caroline that Ralph had met with a mysterious woman in the woods, paving the way for his conclusion that Ralph was married to Ursula Bourne, and couldn't have committed the murder. The knowledge that Ralph was walking through the woods is a particularly strong example of why gossip is so important to the art of detection. Previously, Dr. Sheppard concealed Ralph's behavior from Poirot for fear that it would lead Poirot to deduce that Sheppard was the killer. Gossip, on the other hand, doesn't discriminate based on guilt or innocence. By learning about the customs of a small English town, Poirot—an idiosyncratic Belgian outsider—learns to use gossip to his advantage, and solves his case. - Climax: Hercule Poirot reveals that Dr. Sheppard is the killer - Summary: Dr. James Sheppard, a resident of the small village of King's Abbot, wakes up on Friday morning to learn that Mrs. Ferrars has died. He's sent to care for her, but he's too late. He determines that Ferrars has overdosed on a sleeping medication. His sister, Caroline, with whom he lives, tells him that she's sure Mrs. Ferrars killed herself out of remorse for having killed her husband, Mr. Ashley Ferrars, the previous year. Dr. Sheppard is friendly with Roger Ackroyd, a successful middle-aged businessman who lives in the biggest house in the village. Roger was married to a Ms. Paton, who already had a child named Ralph Paton by another marriage. After Ms. Paton drank herself to death, Roger was rumored to be involved in an affair with Mrs. Ferrars. While walking through the streets, Sheppard crosses paths with Roger, who says that he needs to speak with Sheppard right away, and invites him to dinner that evening. During the day, Sheppard is visited by a patient, Miss Russell, who works as a housekeeper in Ackroyd's house. She asks Sheppard if there's any cure for drug addiction. In the afternoon, Sheppard meets his neighbor, a mysterious foreigner named "Mr. Porrott." Porrott claims that he's come to King's Abbot to retire and grow vegetables, but that he's been unable to turn his back on his old profession. Sheppard also visits Ralph Paton at the local inn, where Ralph tells Sheppard that he's been arguing with his father about money, and that he has to "play a lone hand." At 7:30, Sheppard arrives at the Ackroyd estate, carrying his black bag in case he's summoned on medical duty. Also present in the house is Mrs. Ackroyd (Roger's sister-in-law), Flora Ackroyd (Mrs. Ackroyd's daughter, and Ralph's fiancé), Major Hector Blunt (Roger's good friend), and Geoffrey Raymond (Roger's secretary). After dinner, Roger asks Dr. Sheppard to speak to him in his office. There, Roger explains that he and Mrs. Ferrars were in love, but that Mrs. Ferrars admitted that she'd murdered her husband, and has now killed herself. She also told Roger that somebody was blackmailing her. Just then, the butler, John Parker, enters the room with the evening mail, including an envelope from Mrs. Ferrars. Roger opens the letter and sees that it must contain the name of the blackmailer. Sheppard asks Roger to read it, but Roger says he'll do so later. Sheppard leaves around 8:50. On his way out, he passes by a mysterious, yet oddly familiar, stranger. When he's home, he gets a call. Shouting to Caroline that Parker has told him Roger's been murdered, Sheppard races back to the Ackroyd estate. Parker is confused—he claims not to have called Sheppard at all. Nevertheless, the two men break into the study, which was locked, and find Ackroyd stabbed in the neck. Alone in the room, Sheppard examines the body and determines that Roger has been dead for at least half an hour. Raymond rushes into the study and determines that nothing has been stolen. However, Sheppard notices that Mrs. Ferrars's letter is gone. The police arrive and take everyone's testimony. Notably, Flora claims to have seen her uncle alive at 9:50, after which she told Parker that Roger didn't want to be disturbed, and Raymond claims that he heard Roger talking to someone around 9:30. The murder weapon is a Tunisian dagger which was kept in a silver table in the Ackroyd house. The police are initially suspicious of Parker, who seems very nervous. Meanwhile, Ralph is nowhere to be found. The next morning, Flora asks Sheppard to help her convince Sheppard's neighbor, "Mr. Porrott"—who is actually the famous detective Hercule Poirot—to take on the case of Roger's murder. Poirot agrees to do so, with the condition that he'll follow it through to the very end, no matter how painful his conclusions. Poirot says that he likes Sheppard, and begins to ask for Sheppard's help in investigating the case. The head police inspector, Inspector Raglan, shows Poirot that the killer came in through the open window, wearing unique shoes with rubber-studded soles—shoes which resemble those owned by Ralph. Poirot also learns from Parker that a chair was shifted slightly in the time between Sheppard and Parker's discovery of the body and the police's arrival. The police also determine that the call Sheppard received came from the nearby train station. Raglan seems confident that Ralph is the killer, particularly since he's nowhere to be found, but Poirot isn't so sure. In a summerhouse outside the estate, Poirot and Sheppard find a scrap of cloth and a goose quill. They also find a woman's wedding ring in a goldfish pond, bearing the inscription, "From R." Ackroyd's will is opened: he's left some money to Miss Russell, Flora, and Mrs. Ackroyd, but most of his fortune to Ralph. Raymond discovers that some money is missing from Roger's unlocked desk. Poirot investigates the missing money by interviewing two maids, Ursula Bourne and Elsie Dale. Ursula had been dismissed from her job earlier on Friday. Poirot assembles his suspects—Blunt, Flora, Mrs. Ackroyd, Raymond, and Sheppard—and tells them, "Every one of you in this room is concealing something from me." Dr. Sheppard tells Poirot his theory that someone entered Roger's study through the window, leaving shoeprints behind—and yet this person couldn't have been the killer, based on Flora's testimony. Perhaps Ralph left the window open, allowing the killer to come in afterwards. Poirot says that he admires Sheppard's thinking, but that he's convinced of Ralph's innocence. Sheppard begins to see that Poirot is keeping a lot of information secret from him. The next day, Mrs. Ackroyd, who Roger supported after her husband's death, confesses to Sheppard that she was stealing silverware from the house, and that she was deep in debt. When Sheppard speaks with Ursula again, she tells him that Ralph "ought to come back." Poirot asks for Flora and Parker's help in a "little experiment," to reenact the events of the night of the murder. Based on Flora's behavior, Poirot deduces that Flora was lying about saying goodnight to Roger at 9:50—she was just trying to conceal the fact that she stole money from her uncle's desk. Flora tearfully confesses, but Major Blunt claims that he took the money. Poirot tells Blunt that, quite obviously, Blunt loves Flora. He advises Blunt to share his feelings with Flora. Raglan takes Sheppard and Poirot to meet a man the police have arrested named Charles Kent. Sheppard realizes that this is the mysterious stranger he saw on the night of the murder. Poirot confronts Miss Russell about the stranger, and Russell admits that Charles is her illegitimate, drug-addicted son, who she met with in the summerhouse on the night of the murder. Poirot later confronts Ursula and reveals that she was Ralph Paton's secret wife. Ursula admits that Poirot is right—she cast off her wedding ring after Ralph informed her that he was going to marry Flora in order to please Roger and ensure his inheritance. That evening, Poirot assembles the suspects, including Ursula, Blunt, Flora, Mrs. Ackroyd, Raymond, Parker, and Sheppard, in his home. He then produces Ralph Paton—who, unbeknownst to Poirot until recently, has been in hiding with the help of Dr. Sheppard. Sheppard admits that he's been protecting Ralph, knowing that he'd be the prime suspect in the murder. Poirot explains that he now knows who the killer is, and that the killer must come forward before he goes to speak with Inspector Raglan the next morning. Nobody comes forward, and the guests leave. Poirot asks Sheppard to stay behind, however. Poirot then explains that he's deduced that the killer is none other than—Dr. Sheppard himself. Poirot explains that he's been suspicious of the phone call that Sheppard claims to have received on the night of the murder. He deduced that the purpose of this phone call was to ensure that Sheppard would be in the room when Roger's body was first discovered. Sheppard obtained a dictaphone featuring a recording of Roger's voice, and placed the dictaphone in the office, shielded by the chair, so that it would play Roger's voice at exactly 9:30, confusing Raymond into believing that Roger was still alive. In fact, Sheppard killed Roger around 8:45, much earlier than the police thought, and then left incriminating tracks on the windowsill. He'd arranged for one of his American patients to call him from the train station, giving himself a pretext for rushing back to the estate and removing the incriminating dictaphone by placing it in his black bag. The reason that Sheppard killer Roger, Poirot has deduced, is that Sheppard was Mrs. Ferrars's blackmailer: he didn't want to be caught by Roger. Poirot calmly tells Sheppard that he can either go to the police or kill himself. Sheppard spends all night writing his confession. He plans to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping medication. He trusts that Poirot and Raglan will keep his secret, so that Caroline won't have to go through the pain of learning that her beloved brother was a murderer.

- Genre: Gothic Novel, Romance Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Mysteries of Udolpho - Point of view: Third-Person Omniscient - Setting: Rural France and a remote castle in Italy - Character: Emily St. Aubert. Description: - Character: Valancourt. Description: - Character: St. Aubert. Description: - Character: Madame Cheron/Madame Montoni. Description: - Character: Montoni. Description: - Character: Annette. Description: - Character: Count Morano. Description: - Character: Signora Laurentini/Agnes. Description: - Character: Madame St. Aubert. Description: - Character: Ludovico. Description: - Character: Marchioness De Villeroi. Description: - Character: Count De Villefort. Description: - Character: Du Pont. Description: - Character: Dorothée. Description: - Theme: Marriage, Love, and Inheritance. Description: - Theme: The Wonders of Nature. Description: - Theme: Mystery and Superstition. Description: - Theme: Mortality. Description: - Theme: The Value of Education and Art. Description: - Climax: Emily finally agrees to marry Valancourt. - Summary: St. Aubert lives at La Vallée in a peaceful part of Gascony (in France) with his wife, Madame St. Aubert, and adult daughter, Emily. St. Aubert does his best to give his daughter a well-rounded education and an appreciation of nature, and she eagerly takes to these lessons. Indeed, she loves nature so much that she often composes poems about it. Madame St. Aubert's relatively sudden death, however, breaks up this idyllic world, and St. Aubert's own poor health forces him to travel with Emily to Languedoc. On the way to Languedoc, Emily and St. Aubert meet Valancourt, a dashing and generous young man who very quickly takes a liking to Emily and finds excuses to keep traveling with her. Unfortunately, during the journey, St. Aubert dies. Before he passes away, he instructs Emily to go find some of his old papers and burn them without looking at their contents. Emily burns the papers, catching just a glimpse of what they say that both intrigues and terrifies her. She keeps a small miniature she finds, which portrays a mysterious young woman and which she once saw her father secretly kiss when he thought he was alone. As Emily's only surviving relative, Madame Cheron becomes her new guardian. When Valancourt shows up to court Emily, Madame Cheron quickly discourages the match because she believes that Valancourt's family isn't wealthy enough. She even accuses Emily of acting improper with Valancourt behind her back. Meanwhile, because Madame Cheron is a widow, she is trying to get remarry. She ultimately marries Montoni, an Italian who appears to be a wealthy gentleman. Emily must go with Montoni and her aunt (now called Madame Montoni) to Venice, where she longs for Valancourt. But Montoni tricks her into signing a letter saying she consents to marry Count Morano, Montoni's choice for her. However, Montoni's debts in Venice, combined with his obligation to help his associate Orsini (who is wanted by the Senate for arranging an assassination), cause Montoni to flee the city for a castle at Udolpho that he inherited but hasn't used for a long time. He takes Emily and Madame Montoni with him. The castle of Udolpho is a mysterious place, where Emily often remains in her chamber for her own safety. Her main companion there is her faithful servant, Annette. From her chamber, Emily can hear strange music at night, and one of the castle's biggest mysteries is a black veil, which contains something so horrifying that Emily can't even comprehend it when she lifts the veil to look at what's underneath. It causes Emily to faint. One night, Count Morano invades the castle and tries to abduct Emily by coming in through a secret passage to her room. Montoni, who has turned against Count Morano by this point, duels him and wins, ensuring that Emily remains trapped in the castle. Emily doesn't get to see her aunt, Madame Montoni, for a long period of time, and she begins to fear that perhaps her aunt is dead. At last, Emily gets to see her aunt, who is alive but on the verge of death. Montoni wants his dying wife to sign over all her estates to him, but Madame Montoni refuses and soon dies, leaving everything to Emily and causing Montoni to pressure Emily so he can take her estates and money. All the while, Annette begins a romance with the brave servant Ludovico. Eventually, bandits begin attacking the castle, partly in retaliation for raids that Montoni led with his band of mercenaries. During the confusion during one nighttime raid, Emily, Annette, Ludovico, and some others manage to make an escape. Montoni and Orsino later get captured, and they both die. Emily returns to her aunt's estate (which she now owns) and also spends time visiting the family of the Count De Villefort. She is eager to see Valancourt again, but the Count informs her that living in Paris has corrupted Valancourt: Valancourt gambled all his money away and even spend time in prison. Emily is horrified by this, and when she finally reunites with Valancourt, she decides that the two of them must part ways forever. While still feeling betrayed by Valancourt, Emily begins to unravel some of the mysteries related to the Marchioness De Villeroi. She died at a young age and lived at the Count De Villefort's house before he inherited the property. It turns out the Marchioness was murdered by the Marquis De Villeroi and Signora Laurentini, who were secretly lovers and who wanted to get rid of the Marquis's wife to remove any obstacles to their love. But after carrying out the deed, the Marquis regretted his actions and decided to move away and spend the rest of his life alone. Meanwhile, Signora Laurentini changed her name to Agnes and joined a convent, where she remained haunted by her deeds right to the moment of her death. It is during a deathbed conversation with Agnes/Laurentini herself that Emily learns most of this story. Emily wonders how St. Aubert relates to this story, as she learns that the Marchioness is the woman in his secret miniature. She suspects at first that her father may have been the Marchioness's lover, but she ultimately learns the truth: The Marchioness was his sister. Upset by Emily's rejection, Valancourt tries to prove his worth, generously giving much of his money to support Emily's old servant Theresa, whom she often worries about. Emily eventually learns that Valancourt's actions in Paris were not as bad as she feared and that particularly after going to prison, he reformed. This clears the way for Emily and Valancourt to finally get married. They have a large wedding on the same day as Count Villefort's daughter, and they live together happily and relatively modestly in La Vallée.

- Genre: Middle Grade Novel, Science Fiction - Title: The Mysterious Benedict Society - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Stonetown and Nomansan Island - Character: Reynie Muldoon. Description: Reynard "Reynie" Muldoon is the 11-year-old protagonist of the story. He has been orphaned since infancy and grew up in the Stonetown Orphanage, where the other children ostracized him for his unusual intelligence and unique way of thinking. His only companion for most of his childhood is his tutor, Miss Perumal, who he views as a mother figure. When he sees Mr. Benedict's advertisement offering "special opportunities" to gifted children, Reynie doubts that he could be considered gifted, but Miss Perumal urges him to pursue these opportunities. He proves himself to Mr. Benedict by solving the riddles and puzzles, revealing that Reynie is far more intelligent and capable than he believes. Reynie is forced to confront his self-doubt when he meets Sticky, Kate, and Constance, who quickly come to look to Reynie as a leader. The children form the Mysterious Benedict Society and embark to Nomansan Island to investigate the nefarious plan of Mr. Curtain, which leaves Reynie without an adult to look to for guidance as he leads his friends. He questions whether he has the bravery to lead, and over time he even comes to resent his leadership position, as Mr. Curtain convinces him that a leader is always alone among his friends. Reynie's internal conflict grows stronger when he begins working with Mr. Curtain's Whisperer. The Whisperer simultaneously eases Reynie's fears and saps his energy, which weakens his resolve against Mr. Curtain. In the final fight against Mr. Curtain and the Whisperer, Reynie realizes that his friends' trust in him does not isolate him—it cements a bond among the Mysterious Benedict Society that finally cures the loneliness Reynie has experienced his whole life. - Character: Sticky Washington. Description: George "Sticky" Washington is an 11-year-old prodigy with an infallible memory (his nickname comes from the way facts "stick" in his head). He struggles with anxiety and low self-esteem, assuming Reynie is smarter than him on their first meeting and doubting his ability to help Mr. Benedict fight Mr. Curtain. When he first uses the Whisperer, Sticky reveals that his greatest fear is being unwanted. This fear is shaped not only by his nervousness, but by the mistreatment Sticky has suffered from his parents. When they discovered Sticky's perfect memory, Mr. and Mrs. Washington pushed him to win fortunes on quiz shows. This escalated until they seemed to care more about Sticky's winnings than Sticky himself, prompting Sticky to run away. Like the other members of the Mysterious Benedict Society, Sticky begins the story alone and lonely. His lack of self-worth prevents him from feeling important to his friends, which hinders his ability to connect with them. At Mr. Curtain's Institute, Sticky is caught helping Kate cheat, and the Executives send him to the dreaded Waiting Room. Sticky is traumatized by the experience, but he continues helping his friends afterwards, hinting that he is braver than he believes. He proves his mettle in the climax, when he resists the Whisperer to allow Kate and Constance time to reach the Whispering Gallery. He realizes that he doesn't need to fear not living up to his friends' expectations because they care about him, not what they expect from him. As he confronts the Whisperer, Sticky also confronts his fears, and he finds the bravery he never thought he had. - Character: Kate Wetherall. Description: Kate Wetherall is a cheerful, energetic, 12-year-old member of the Mysterious Benedict Society. She fails Mr. Benedict's written exams, but her resourcefulness and kindness to Rhonda and Number Two during the tests secure her a place on Mr. Benedict's team. Kate is an orphan; her mother died when she was a baby, and her father left when she was a toddler. Kate has therefore grown up on her own, and she is desperate to prove that she can function without help from anyone. She is capable of amazing feats of strength and acrobatics, which she picked up during her years with a traveling circus, and she has a natural gift for measuring exact distances by sight. She carries every survival tool she might need in a red bucket that she brings everywhere. Though she keeps up good spirits during the children's adventures at Mr. Curtain's Institute, she occasionally hints that her cheerfulness is an act to prevent her from seeming vulnerable. Her need to prove her self-reliance gets her into trouble when she is nearly caught on a reconnaissance mission that she insists on undertaking alone. She only comes to understand this in the climax, when she sacrifices herself to save Constance and realizes that she now needs her friends to save her. Kate is rescued by Milligan, who reveals himself to be her long-lost father. The two reunite, both happy to finally have a family again. - Character: Constance Contraire. Description: Constance is the youngest member of the Society—and the most disagreeable. She earned her place on the team not by passing Mr. Benedict's tests, but by amusing him with her intelligent and witty refusals to participate, which often take the form of rude poems. The other children dislike Constance at the start of the story, and they do not understand why Mr. Benedict has accepted her. She is openly rude, teasing Sticky about being named "George Washington" and snapping at the others when they annoy her. She also seems to lack the others' intelligence, since she frequently has to ask the meaning of words. However, Mr. Benedict insists that she has an important role to play. That role becomes apparent when Constance reveals that she can hear the voices of the Messengers when Mr. Curtain powers up his mind-controlling Whisperer machine. Her capability becomes even more impressive when the children learn that Constance is only two years old (for much of the novel, her age is a secret). In the climax, Constance further proves herself to be a vital member of the team by willingly subjecting herself to the Whisperer's power. She is so stubborn that she is able to resist the Whisperer's mind-controlling effects, though the effort exhausts her. At the end of the story, Mr. Benedict adopts her as his daughter. - Character: Mr. Benedict. Description: Mr. Benedict is an eccentric man who recruits the four main children to fight Mr. Curtain. Mr. Benedict is an unparalleled genius, and years ago he detected the hidden messages that Mr. Curtain conceals within radio and television transmissions. He has created a series of tests to find the children most capable of infiltrating Mr. Curtain's Institute, from which Mr. Curtain operates his plans. Mr. Benedict is friendly, wise, and easily amused. He also has narcolepsy, a condition that makes him fall asleep without warning. His narcolepsy is triggered by strong emotions—usually laughter, which fits his jovial nature. To combat his narcolepsy, Mr. Benedict wears a peculiar pattern of green plaid that helps keep him awake. His condition leads Number Two and Rhonda, his associates and adopted daughters, to watch over him protectively. Mr. Benedict believes that Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance are necessary to defeat Mr. Curtain, but he hates putting children in danger and gives them every opportunity to turn down his offer. Like the children, Mr. Curtain grew up an orphan, and as an infant he was separated from his twin brother. This makes him ignorant of the fact that Mr. Curtain is in fact his twin until the children are already at the Institute. Unlike the solitary Mr. Curtain, Mr. Benedict has formed a family of people he loves. He imparts the importance of creating one's own family to Reynie, and at the end of the book, Mr. Benedict asks Constance if she will join his family. She accepts, and he happily adopts her. - Character: Ledroptha Curtain. Description: Mr. Curtain is the primary antagonist of the story. He is an egomaniacal man whose obsession with control is enabled by his mechanical genius. He has constructed a machine, the Whisperer, which transmits mind-controlling messages around the word, and other machines that "brainsweep" (erase the memories of) his enemies. Mr. Curtain is the founder of the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where he trains children to transmit subliminal messages and ultimately join his workforce as Executives. He is also Mr. Benedict's twin brother. The two were born in Holland, but after being orphaned, the twins were separated and raised apart, so neither man knows of the other until the Mysterious Benedict Society infiltrates the Institute. Mr. Curtain plans to use his Whisperer to take over the world by causing the mass hysteria of the Emergency and then purporting to fix it. His inflated self-importance proves to be his undoing: he believes that children are too simple-minded to match his genius, so he does not suspect the Mysterious Benedict Society until they confront him head-on. In this confrontation, Reynie easily manipulates Mr. Curtain into revealing that anger is the trigger for his narcolepsy. The children stoke Mr. Curtain's temper, and they are able to put him to sleep long enough to defeat him. Mr. Curtain hides his narcolepsy by using a wheelchair and wearing mirrored sunglasses, revealing that his need for control and skill with propaganda extend to his own self-image. - Character: Milligan. Description: Milligan is a former government agent who works as a guard for Mr. Benedict, Number Two, and Rhonda. He lost his memory at the hands of Mr. Curtain, and he initially sought out Mr. Benedict in the hopes that Mr. Benedict could restore his memory. Though Mr. Benedict could not help, Milligan remained with him out of a sense of duty. His memory loss has robbed him of all hope, so duty is all that drives him. When the children see Milligan outside of Mr. Benedict's house, he is usually in disguise, but they can identify him by his expression of intense sadness. This helps them recognize him when he arrives at the Institute, seeking to help them in their mission. He gives himself up to the Executives to throw suspicion off the children, and the Executives imprison him in the Waiting Room. During his escape attempt, Milligan's memory returns. He realizes that he is Kate's father, and that his name comes from a fractured memory of her asking to return to the mill pond where he taught her to swim—to go to the "mill again." This realization incentivizes him to escape and save his daughter. Once he and Kate are reunited, he becomes a doting father and a genuinely happy man. - Character: Number Two. Description: Number Two is Mr. Benedict's right-hand woman. She is steadfastly loyal to him, and she usually stands at his side to catch him if he suddenly falls asleep. She is also an insomniac, which directly contrasts Mr. Benedict's narcolepsy, and she eats constantly to make up for the energy she loses from lack of sleep. Number Two is the first member of Mr. Benedict's household that Reynie encounters, as she is the one who administers the entrance exams. Her strange appearance and behavior in these early chapters hints at the unexpected ways Reynie's life changes once he meets Mr. Benedict. Number Two is thin, with stiff posture and a penchant for yellow clothes, which gives her the appearance of a pencil. She is polite but evasive when Reynie asks her questions, and it is only later revealed that her unhelpful answers are another feature of the test. Once Reynie and the other children pass the tests and join Mr. Benedict, Number Two assists them with the plan to infiltrate the Institute. She has absolute faith in Mr. Benedict. She passed Mr. Benedict's tests when she was a child, and Reynie learns at the end of the story that Number Two is Mr. Benedict's adopted daughter. - Character: Rhonda Kazembe. Description: Rhonda is the youngest member of Mr. Benedict's household. Like Number Two, she passed Mr. Benedict's tests as a child and was later adopted by him. She takes part in the tests by disguising herself as a child and pretending to lose her pencil outside the testing site. If one of the test takers tries to help her, as Reynie and the other members of the Mysterious Benedict Society do, she offers to help them cheat. Since Mr. Benedict is looking for children with a powerful love of honesty, none of the potential candidates must accept her offer. Once the children pass the tests and arrive at Mr. Benedict's house, Rhonda greets them with warmth and friendliness, and she assists them with the fight against Mr. Curtain. - Character: Miss Perumal. Description: Miss Perumal is Reynie's tutor at the Stonetown Orphanage. Before he meets his friends in the Mysterious Benedict Society, Miss Perumal is the only person in Reynie's life who genuinely cares about him. She assures him of his intelligence when he doubts it and helps him register to take Mr. Benedict's tests. Though Miss Perumal is absent for much of the book, she remains one of the most important people in Reynie's life. When he is away at Mr. Curtain's Institute, he writes mental letters to Miss Perumal in an attempt to sort out his internal conflicts, and the thought of Miss Perumal helps him resist Mr. Curtain's mind-controlling Whisperer. After the children defeat Mr. Curtain and return to Stonetown, Miss Perumal adopts Reynie, finally giving him the family he has always wanted. - Character: Jackson. Description: Jackson is an Executive, a staff member at the Institute and a henchman to Mr. Curtain. He usually appears in tandem with his fellow Executive, Jillson. He is rude and dismissive to the Mysterious Benedict Society, and he demonstrates a whole-hearted dedication to Mr. Curtain. The children later learn that Jackson was one of Mr. Curtain's "special recruits" to the Institute—an orphan who has been kidnapped and brainwashed. Special recruits are usually more devoted to Mr. Curtain than other students, since they owe Mr. Curtain a debt of gratitude for taking them in. Though the children bear some sympathy to Jackson and Jillson after learning this, the Executives are too horrible to elicit any goodwill. - Character: Jillson. Description: Jillson works as an Executive at the Institute, and she usually appears with her fellow Executive Jackson. Like Jackson, Jillson came to work for Mr. Curtain as a "special recruit." She is hinted to be more competent than her partner, as she carries out more duties on her own than he does. She is the one who catches Sticky cheating on a quiz and brings him to the Waiting Room; she also teaches the lesson about "bad governments" that primes the children to be susceptible to the word association hidden in Mr. Curtain's subliminal messages. When Martina Crowe is promoted to Executive, the two occasionally work as a pair, and the two of them become a serious threat when they discover Kate's identity as a spy. - Character: Martina Crowe. Description: Martina Crowe is a cruel and self-centered student at the Institute. She works as a Messenger, helping Mr. Curtain transmit mind-controlling messages to the public with the help of his Whisperer machine. She takes pride in the status and privileges afforded by her position, and she takes an immediate dislike to Reynie and Sticky when they demonstrate their intelligence in class. Since the role of Messenger is given to the Institute's top students, she perceives Reynie and Sticky as a threat and seeks to undermine them. When Sticky is caught cheating, he (at Reynie's advice) lies to Mr. Curtain that Martina abused her Messenger status to coerce him to cheat. Rather than punish Martina for this, Mr. Curtain rewards her by promoting her to Executive. - Character: S.Q. Pedalian. Description: S.Q. Pedalian is a bumbling, good-natured Executive with large feet. He is forgetful, easily confused, and prone to malapropisms (mixing up similar-sounding words). His trust in Mr. Curtain overrides his conscience: when he expresses doubts about the morality of mind-control, Mr. Curtain easily persuades him that the process is for the greater good. - Character: Mr. and Mrs. Washington. Description: Mr. and Mrs. Washington are Sticky's parents. In the past, they have mistreated Sticky and used his perfect memory for financial gain, but after he runs away, the Washingtons realize the error of their ways and grow desperate to find their son. At the end of the novel, they find Sticky and apologize to him, and the family reunites. - Theme: Confidence and Growing Up. Description: In The Mysterious Benedict Society, the four children of the eponymous society set out to stop the evil Mr. Curtain's plans to take over the world. Mr. Curtain plans to brainwash (or "brainsweep") the global population into a state of childlike obedience, which means that the children must mature into competent young adults to defeat him. This change is bittersweet—they lose the innocence and safety of childhood, but they gain confidence, which the novel ties to self-reliance and maturity. The children take on responsibilities and face danger beyond their age when they embark for Mr. Curtain's Institute. They look to Reynie as a leader, and though he initially resents the maturity and competence his friends expect of him, Reynie gradually comes to trust his own abilities. This confidence enables him to take risks in the fight against Mr. Curtain. His plans place himself and his friends in danger, but they ultimately succeed, which highlights how the children have to forsake the safety and familiarity of childhood for the sake of humanity.  The other children also confront their insecurities: Sticky's greatest fear is being unwanted, and Kate is desperate to prove that she never needs help. Both of them learn to grow past these issues, and their newfound confidence helps them in the fight against Mr. Curtain. The link between maturity and confidence demonstrates the benefits of growing up. However, the story also underlines the tragedy in the need for these children to grow up quickly. At only two years old, Constance is the youngest of the four children, and even she must put herself in mortal danger to defeat Mr. Curtain. When the children are reunited with Mr. Benedict, Milligan, Number Two, and Rhonda at the end of the story, they also find that they have changed too much to blindly trust in the adults. Even in a group of adults, Reynie assumes a leadership position, indicating how his self-confidence has blossomed. After Mr. Curtain is temporarily defeated, Mr. Benedict brings the children back to his house, and the four members of the Mysterious Benedict Society have a snowball fight. The novel ends on this scene of the four playing, a moment in which they are briefly allowed to be children again, "if only for the moment." Though they still have some youth in them, the novel nevertheless suggests that they have grown up too much to ever truly return to childhood. - Theme: Deception vs. Truth. Description: In The Mysterious Benedict Society, four truth-loving children discover that sometimes, deception has its place. Mr. Benedict describes the four main characters as possessing a "powerful love of truth," and the contrast between truth and deception runs throughout the novel. Mr. Curtain's plan hinges on deception: his hidden signals embed thoughts into people's minds, he erases memories and lies to people about their identities, he lies to his students and Executives about the logistics of his plan, and he even prints false press releases to distribute as propaganda. Mr. Curtain's methods of deception center around controlling narratives—first the narrative of the Emergency, then the narrative of the Improvement. His subliminal messages stir widespread panic about the Emergency, and he plans to leverage that panic to construct a narrative of himself as the savior who can end the Emergency. By deceiving the public into believing in his "Improvement," Mr. Curtain intends to secure governmental authority and eventually world domination. Deception, as Mr. Curtain employs it, is something nefarious and self-serving, and so the children are all too happy to put themselves in danger to defeat him. Despite their love of truth, the children discover that sometimes deception is not universally evil—in some circumstances, it is necessary. Milligan frequently takes on disguises to hide his identity, and even Kate's spyglass, which helps the children in their search for the truth, is described as a spyglass "in disguise" as a kaleidoscope. To help the children become Messengers and learn more about Mr. Curtain's plan, Mr. Benedict asks the children to cheat. This initially horrifies them, but they have to put aside their innate impulse toward honesty in service of the greater good. The children's moral dilemma here, and their other encounters with deception, suggest that the line between deception and truth is not always black and white, as deception can be employed to uncover truth and fight for what's right and good. - Theme: Loneliness vs. Friendship. Description: All four members of the Mysterious Benedict Society struggle with loneliness, and it is the power of their friendship that allows them to triumph over Mr. Curtain. They are recruited to Mr. Benedict's team because, as Reynie observes, "[they are] all alone." This isolation has left its impact on the children, and it initially hinders their efforts to fight Mr. Curtain. Kate is desperate to prove that she can be entirely self-sufficient, while Sticky is terrified of never being wanted. This leads to Kate undertaking dangerous and reckless missions by herself and Sticky being tempted by the inclusion offered by Mr. Curtain and his team of Executives. Reynie is also lonely in his role as the group's leader, and he finds himself agreeing with Mr. Curtain's assessment that a leader is alone "even among [his] friends…for it is [him]—and [him] alone—to whom the others look for final guidance." However, the novel suggests that no one can function entirely on their own, and ultimately it is the children's mutual support of each other that empowers them to defeat Mr. Curtain. Though the children are without families, the Mysterious Benedict Society gradually becomes a family. Mr. Benedict, an orphan himself, tells Reynie that a family can be made up of dear friends, and Reynie realizes that he might count Kate, Sticky, and Constance as his family. Kate learns that she occasionally needs to ask for help, and Sticky finds friends in the other Society members who want him and care about him beyond what he can provide for them. When Reynie is resisting the Whisperer, the machine Mr. Curtain uses to broadcast subliminal messages via televisions, he draws strength from the thought of his friends. Realizing that he is not alone grants Reynie the bravery to fight the machine. Even the ill-tempered Constance demonstrates the value of friendship when she resists the Whisperer; she stubbornly identifies herself by all her friends' names instead of her own. In that instance, thinking of her friends literally helps strengthen Constance against the Whisperer. The characters' devotion to each other helps them fight Mr. Curtain, but the novel suggests that the friendships the children formed over the course of the novel will also prepare them more fully to tackle new challenges in the future. - Theme: Control vs. Freedom. Description: As the four children of the Mysterious Benedict Society explore the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, the headquarters for Mr. Curtain's nefarious plot, they discover how authority figures can exert control in stealthy and insidious ways by twisting people's understanding of what freedom is. Mr. Curtain values control above all else, and his plan is dedicated to gaining control over as many people as possible. The Whisperer is a tool that allows him to extend his control into people's minds, eliminating their free altogether. His methods of control are absolute, but they are not always obvious. When the main characters arrive at the Institute, for instance, their tour guides Jackson and Jillson explain that the school has no rules. However, they immediately contradict this by listing rules concealed as freedoms: students can eat whatever and whenever they want, as long as they eat what the cafeteria serves during meal times; they can keep the lights on in their rooms as late as they wish until 10:00; they can explore the Institute as they please, as long as they stay on the indicated paths and corridors. The story depicts freedom as the unhindered ability to make choices for oneself, and the children of the Mysterious Benedict Society ultimately thwart Mr. Curtain's efforts by refusing to give up their freedom. Mr. Curtain entices Reynie and Sticky with promises of privilege after the Improvement, but they resist this manipulation, and boys deny the Whisperer's attempts to bring them under Mr. Curtain's control. The key to their success is Constance's "stubborn independence," which enables her to resist Mr. Curtain and the Whisperer long enough to wear Mr. Curtain to the point of exhaustion. Their victory ensures that the public will retain free thought and independent will. - Theme: Hope. Description: In the fight against Mr. Curtain, the characters face increasingly dire circumstances, and they struggle to retain hope that they will succeed. The novel thus illustrates how hope drives the characters toward positive action, while a lack of hope leads to inaction and in turn to self-loathing. At the start of the story, Milligan explicitly states that he has lost all hope, and only duty keeps him going. He carries out his duties with abject misery, indicating what the children might become if they give in to hopelessness. Reynie himself starts to lose hope as he struggles to resist the Whisperer, Mr. Curtain's mind-control machine. He tries to remain optimistic, but he falls into despair as he convinces himself that he lacks the bravery to lead his friends. Losing hope in Mr. Benedict's plan causes Reynie to lose hope in himself. The Whisperer has exhausted him, and he finds that he is "tired, very tired, of always trying to do the right thing." Reynie no longer believes or even hopes that he might be able to help his friends, which leads him to give up trying, which only stirs his self-loathing and hopelessness more. A lack of hope becomes a lack of action, since Reynie no longer believes in what he is fighting for. The children of the Mysterious Benedict Society regain their hope over the course of the novel, which emboldens them to take action against Mr. Curtain. The children take risks because their hope for a positive outcome overpowers their fear of a negative one. Sticky resists the Whisperer because he has faith in Reynie and hopes that his friend's plan will come to fruition. Kate sacrifices herself to the Executives in Constance's place because she hopes that she can fight them off. Reynie once again dedicates himself to "do[ing] the right thing" because he hopes he can be brave enough. This connection between hope and morality demonstrates that hope is a vital step to finding the bravery to fight for what is right. The children do not defeat Mr. Curtain through hope alone, but their hope encourages them to overcome their self-doubt and take action. - Climax: The Mysterious Benedict Society confronts Mr. Curtain in the Whispering Gallery. - Summary: In the fictional town of Stonetown, an 11-year-old orphan named Reynie Muldoon takes a series of strange tests. His tutor at the orphanage, Miss Perumal, has helped him register for the tests, which promise "special opportunities" for gifted children. The exams are full of riddles, puzzles, and personal questions about the test-taker's bravery. Reynie manages to solve all the riddles, and he answers the question about his courage with honesty: he hopes he is brave, but he is not sure. Outside the building of the second test, Reynie encounters a girl named Rhonda, who loses her pencil. Since the children are only permitted to bring one pencil, she doesn't have a spare. Reynie breaks his pencil in half and offers her the sharpened end, reasoning that he can sharpen his half so they can both take the test. Rhonda thanks him and offers to help him cheat, but Reynie turns her down. He is the only child in his section to pass the test. After the second test, Reynie meets the other children who have passed: Sticky Washington, a nervous boy with a perfect memory; and Kate Wetherall, a cheerful and athletic girl who carries a red bucket full of various useful items. They discuss the tests and realize that helping Rhonda was a test in itself. The three children are brought to the third test, in which they have to cross a multi-colored tiled floor without setting foot on a blue or black square. They all pass and are led through an underground passage by a sad-looking man named Milligan. When they emerge from the tunnel, Milligan disguises himself and requests that they wait on the porch of a nearby house. He leaves, and the children tell each other about themselves. Kate reveals that she is an orphan like Reynie—her mother died when Kate was a baby, and her father abandoned her when she was two years old. Rhonda emerges from the house, revealing that she is not a child but a young woman. She introduces the children to their final test, a maze, and she mentions that they should be able to complete it with their eyes closed. This hint helps Reynie realize that he can navigate the maze by feeling the arrows etched into panels throughout the maze. All three children make it through the maze. Afterwards, Rhonda and the tests' administrator, a woman known only as Number Two, bring the children inside to eat dinner and meet Mr. Benedict. Mr. Benedict is the man who created the tests; he is friendly and intelligent, and he suffers from narcolepsy, a disorder that causes abrupt sleeping spells. He informs them that they are waiting on Constance Contraire, the final child who passed the tests, who did so by breaking all the rules and answering every question with rude poetry. When Constance arrives, Mr. Benedict explains that he is assembling a group of children to fight a great danger. He asks if the children can guess what they all have in common, and Reynie notes that all four are alone. Mr. Benedict agrees—Reynie, Kate, and Constance are orphans, and Sticky is a runaway. Mr. Benedict uses a machine he invented to reveal hidden messages encoded in television and radio transmissions, which causes the public to panic and which has thus resulted in what the news calls the Emergency. He explains that he needs people with a powerful love of truth to fight the Sender of these messages, and they must be children because the Sender, a man named Mr. Curtain, operates out of the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, a school on Nomansan Island. The children will go to the Institute as students and investigate. They agree to join the mission. In the days leading up to their departure, they practice Morse code and name themselves the Mysterious Benedict Society. They learn that Milligan was once a secret agent who had his memory stolen by the Sender's henchmen, and that the Sender is preparing to increase the strength of his messages. Rhonda brings the children to the Institute, where they are greeted by Jackson and Jillson, a pair of Executives (the high-ranking staff of the Institute). Maintenance duties at the Institute are performed by employees called Helpers. Jackson and Jillson explain that Executives are former students who performed well as Messengers, which is a role granted to top students. Messengers' duties are kept secret from the other students, but the Mysterious Benedict Society infers the Messengers deliver the transmitted messages. On their first day of classes, the children are greeted by Mr. Curtain, and they are horrified to see that he is identical to Mr. Benedict, save for the addition of a wheelchair and mirrored sunglasses. They send a message in Morse code to their associates on the mainland asking if Mr. Benedict has deceived them, and the response is a riddle that, when solved, reveals that Mr. Curtain is Mr. Benedict's estranged twin brother. As classes continue, Reynie and Sticky excel, which earns them an enemy in competitive student and Messenger Martina Crowe. They witness a student be punished with a trip to the "Waiting Room," which terrifies him and in turn worries Reynie and Sticky. Sticky is especially afraid of being sent to the Waiting Room. A few days later, all four children suffer terrible headaches and irritability, and they realize they are being affected by the signal of a transmitted message as Mr. Curtain increases the power. Constance is able to hear the voice of the Messenger, indicating that she possesses an unusually sensitive mind. They send a Morse message with these developments to the mainland, and, to their dismay, Mr. Benedict requests that the children begin cheating on assignments so they can earn the rank of Messengers. They do so, but their names are not on the next list of Messengers. Reynie encounters Mr. Curtain, who expresses an approval for Reynie and remarks that he sees similarities between them. Mr. Curtain also explains that Messengers will soon be obsolete when Mr. Curtain brings about what he calls "the Improvement." As the children continue investigating, they learn that the Helpers are former enemies of Mr. Curtain's, whose memories he has erased (he calls the process "brainsweeping"). Reynie starts to doubt himself, but he recalls a conversation with Mr. Benedict when the older man told Reynie that people can create their own families, which renews Reynie's dedication to his friends. Their espionage is going well until Sticky is caught cheating and brought to the Waiting Room. That night, Sticky returns to the dorm, traumatized and covered in mud. He has to speak with Mr. Curtain the next day, and he doesn't believe that he will be able to withstand the pressure and avoid giving up his friends. Reynie reassures him and comes up with a plan. When Sticky meets with Mr. Curtain, he lies that Martina Crowe abused her power as a Messenger to force him to cheat. This takes suspicion off Sticky—but instead of being punished, Martina is rewarded with a promotion to Executive. Sticky and Reynie become Messengers, and Jackson blindfolds them and brings them to the Whispering Gallery. There, they see the device that Mr. Curtain uses to transmit messages and to brainsweep his enemies: the Whisperer. The Whisperer eases its user's greatest fears, and both Reynie and Sticky are unable to resist it. The next day, the Mysterious Benedict Society searches for the Whispering Gallery. Instead, they find a room containing Mr. Curtain's plans to end the Emergency with the Improvement and install himself as "Minister And Secretary of all the Earth's Regions" (M.A.S.T.E.R.). They also find a room full of brainsweeping machines. That night, Milligan arrives on the island to help the children. He offers to take them home, but Kate insists that their work isn't done, and the others agree. Milligan accepts this and informs them he will stay hidden by the shore, where they can leave him messages. Reynie is struggling against his desire to return to the Whisperer, so he doesn't argue when Kate decides to look for the Whispering Gallery by herself. She eavesdrops on a conversation between Mr. Curtain, Jackson, and Jillson, but Mr. Curtain suspects her presence, and she only barely manages to escape. This puts Mr. Curtain on alert for a spy. Reynie suggests that to defeat Mr. Curtain, all four of them need to take him on at once. To ensure that Reynie and Sticky will be called for Messenger duty, the children tamper with the cafeteria food and give all the other students food poisoning. Reynie leaves a note informing Milligan of their plan, but the note is discovered. Milligan sacrifices himself to the Executives in order to destroy the note and keep the children safe, and the Executives imprison him in the Waiting Room. Mr. Curtain summons Reynie and Sticky to the Whispering Gallery for the final round of messages before the Improvement. Reynie asks Sticky to take the first turn with the Whisperer so he can resist it and stall for time. Sticky is afraid that Mr. Curtain will discover his subterfuge and brainsweep him, but he trusts his friend, so he does as Reynie asks. While Mr. Curtain is distracted with the Whisperer, Reynie signals to Mr. Benedict that they need Kate and Constance, and Mr. Benedict sends a message to the girls. They run to the Whispering Gallery, but Martina Crowe and Jillson decode the Morse message and chase after them. After a long chase, Kate gives herself up to save Constance. Meanwhile, Reynie takes his turn with the Whisperer. Thinking of his friends, he manages to resist it. Constance comes in through the window, and Milligan arrives to rescue Kate, having escaped from the Waiting Room. He reveals that he has regained his memories and remembers that he is Kate's long-lost father. Mr. Curtain rages at the children, and Reynie provokes him until Mr. Curtain falls asleep. Like Mr. Benedict, he has narcolepsy, and Mr. Curtain's sleeping fits are triggered by rage. Kate arrives as Mr. Curtain wakes up, and the children realize they have to strap into the Whisperer to destroy it. Constance takes on the task, using her stubbornness to confuse the Whisperer. She succeeds. Mr. Benedict, Rhonda, Number Two, and Milligan enter from a hidden door. Mr. Benedict remains to finish dismantling the Whisperer, and the others take Mr. Curtain down to the group's boat. As they board, he escapes, but his Whisperer is destroyed, and his plans are foiled. The group returns to Mr. Benedict's house. Reynie is reunited with Miss Perumal, and Sticky is reunited with his parents, who have been tirelessly searching for him. Miss Perumal adopts Reynie, and Mr. Benedict adopts Constance. All four children have found families, and they celebrate their victory with a snowball fight.

- Genre: Contemporary Immigrant Fiction, Bildungsroman - Title: The Namesake - Point of view: Third person omniscient narrator, sometimes with the added perspective of a specific character - Setting: Calcutta; Massachusetts; New York - Character: Ashoke Ganguli (Mithu). Description: a caring father to Gogol and Sonia, and husband to Ashima. Ashoke grew up in Calcutta. An avid bookworm, he especially loves Russian novels. His life is changed forever when, during a train journey to visit his grandparents, a major accident strikes – he barely survives the train wreck, and is fished from the wreckage only after rescue crews see the pages of the book that he had been reading – by Nikolai Gogol – blowing in the wind. After a long and difficult recovery, he vows to travel abroad. He goes on to become a PhD student at M.I.T., and later a professor of engineering. His pet name, by which he is known at home in India, is Mithu. - Character: Ashima Ganguli (Monu). Description: mother to Gogol and Sonia, and wife to Ashoke. Ashima is the family member most attached to the traditions of India, and who is most homesick for her family. After her arranged marriage to Ashoke, she moves with him to Cambridge. Although she has difficulty adapting to life in America, her children become a source of comfort and purpose as they make their home there – even if their American ways sometimes mystify and frustrate her. Ashima becomes a locus of Bengali immigrant activities, organizing gatherings at traditional holidays and sharing recipes that approximate Indian dishes with the American ingredients available. Her pet name, by which she is known at home in India, is Monu. - Character: Gogol/Nikhil Ganguli. Description: The story's main protagonist, Gogol is the son of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli. Growing up in a suburban town in Massachusetts, with intermittent, long trips to Calcutta, Gogol quickly becomes conscious of the difference between his parents' culture and the world in which he lives. He comes to hate the name Gogol, embarrassed by its unique oddity. When he turns eighteen, before leaving for Yale, he legally changes his name to Nikhil – the 'good name' his parents had initially intended for him to be called after he began school as a kindergartener. He later becomes an architect in New York after earning a postgraduate degree at Columbia University. He has three important romantic relationships throughout the novel – with Ruth, Maxine, and then Moushumi – that mirror his development, as he rebels against, and then returns to, his family life and cultural heritage. - Character: Sonali (Sonia) Ganguli. Description: Gogol's younger sister, who calls him, affectionately, "Goggles." She too struggles with the divide between her American friends and her Indian background, and moves to California for college. After their father dies, though, Sonia moves back in with Ashima to take care of her. She becomes engaged to Ben, a Jewish-Chinese journalist in Boston, and the two are planning a wedding in Calcutta at the end of the novel. - Character: Moushumi Mazoomdar. Description: The Bengali woman who marries Gogol, Moushumi was one of the children present at the many gatherings of Bengali friends in their childhood. She grew up in London, and had a British accent when she and Gogol first met, always preferring her books to the television that the other kids were watching. Their parents set them up after Moushumi breaks off an engagement to Graham just before their wedding. She is a PhD student at NYU during her brief marriage to Gogol, having lived in Paris after college. Moushumi and Gogol share the experience of having a complicated connection to their family and history, which brings them together, but is too limited to support a real relationship. She brings the marriage with Gogol to an end by cheating on him with Dimitri Desjardins. - Character: Maxine Ratliff. Description: Gogol's second significant girlfriend, a recent graduate from Barnard, where she studied art history. She lives with her parents in a beautiful apartment in New York. Gogol falls in love with her effortless beauty and elegant, old money lifestyle. He is most entranced by the security of her family's life, with their annual summer trips to the ancestral home in New Hampshire, where a family cemetery contains the graves of multiple generations of Ratliffs. She and Gogol break up after the death of his father, when he is pulled back toward his family and begins to feel that she is an outsider, refusing to allow her to accompany them to India for Ashoke's funeral. - Character: Ruth. Description: Gogol's first girlfriend, an English major at Yale whom he meets on the train home to Boston. The year after she and Gogol start dating (and become nearly inseparable), she decides to study abroad for a semester at Oxford, and then extends her stay over the summer. Although they stay together during her absence, when Ruth returns it becomes clear that something has changed between them, and they break up. - Theme: The Indian Immigrant Experience. Description: The experiences of the Ganguli family in America—a country that for some of them is an intensely foreign environment—offer a glimpse of life as an Indian immigrant to the United States. What is familiar for most readers in America is deeply unfamiliar to Ashoke and Ashima, who therefore provide a unique perspective on seemingly everyday things within American society. Husband and wife have differing reactions to the barrage of new customs that greets them in America, and together they embody two sides of the immigrant experience. Ashoke is often amused and fascinated by the world around him in America, and prospers first as a student and then as a professor. Although he remains attached to the family's Bengali traditions, he has always been inclined to travel, and is not actively homesick. Ashima, on the other hand, misses her life in India intensely, and often finds life in Massachusetts to be cold and lonely. She finds it difficult to understand the customs of those around her, and clings to her correspondence with her family in India, as well as the family she has in America: her husband and children. Ashima in many ways anchors the narrative, providing an emotional center and working most actively to hold her family together and maintain their Bengali traditions. The intense isolation she often feels demonstrates the difficulty that can be involved in fitting into an entirely new culture while struggling to retain one's own cultural heritage. Gogol, Sonia, and later Moushumi then represent the next generation of immigrants, the first American-born generation, for whom assimilation—the process of adapting to American culture—comes much more naturally. The Ganguli children grow up speaking English natively, unlike their parents, and are much more interested in American food and pop culture, since they have attended American schools their whole lives. For them, it is India that seems foreign. On their visits to family, they are homesick for American food and confused by common Indian rituals. However, their divided loyalties often lead to an internal struggle for a unified identity. This shift, within one generation, is a common theme in immigrant fiction, and raises questions about the gradual disappearance of the home culture. Is assimilation the best option? The tension between retaining past traditions and moving into an "American" future is one that underlies much of The Namesake. Although they are born American, the members of the second generation (Gogol and Sonia) remain in the category of "outsider" or "other" to the majority of Americans, who focus on the foreign background to which Gogol and Sonia themselves may or may not feel any connection at all. Gogol encounters this feeling most acutely when a guest at a dinner party in New Hampshire assumes that he was born in India. If they are, by force of circumstance, outsiders in both of the cultures to which they owe allegiance, where, if anywhere, can the members of this generation find their home? The quest for a home—like the quest for a true name—is at the core of the decisions made by Gogol, and then by Moushumi later in the story. - Theme: Family, Tradition, and Ritual. Description: The importance of family in The Namesake cannot be overstated. The novel is centered around the Ganguli family, and the ways in which two very different generations interact with one another.For Ashoke and Ashima, the concept of a family life is inherited directly from their background in India, where entire families share the same home for generations, are deeply invested in one another's lives, and reinforce their connection to one another through a whole range of traditions and rituals. These include naming, marriage, death, and the numerous holidays in between. Although in America Ashoke and Ashima are largely cut off from their true relatives in India, the extended "family" of fellow Bengali immigrants helps to maintain these traditions, celebrating Indian holidays with the appropriate ceremony and cooking authentic Indian food as best they can with the ingredients available to them. For the parents in the novel, then, family is a constant force, something to be relied on, and that which naturally defines one's identity. For Gogol and Sonia, however, who grow up outside of India, family becomes a symbol of those things that are foreign to their normal lives in America, something that pulls their identity away from what they are learning in school and from American society. The traditions and rituals of the Bengali community seem like empty ceremonies to the children, who are growing up in a culture that views these traditions as alien. They are more interested in Christmas than the rituals of an Indian coming-of-age ceremony. Family is always a defining force, however, even if it is one that both siblings seem to want to escape sometimes. Ashima and Ashoke provide the solid foundation that both siblings can rely on and inevitably return to, even if they spend increasing periods of time apart. When this foundation is shaken by the death of Ashoke, it is in family that the siblings find their comfort, returning to the traditions of their past. As Gogol reflects in the last chapter, among all of the accidents that have shaped their lives, the only constant has been a connection to one another. - Theme: Independence, Rebellion, and Growing Up. Description: Gogol's struggle for independence from the family that he sometimes finds embarrassing is a major feature of the novel. The Namesake fits some definitions of a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel, with Gogol as the protagonist who grows up over the course of the story. Although our view into the life of Ashoke and Ashima makes them central to the novel, it is Gogol who becomes the main protagonist, and whose development we follow most closely. As in many books in the Bildungsroman category, The Namesake tracks Gogol's growth from a baby into a young man, examining his education and the various events that form him along the way. Gogol is an independent thinker, and he actively rebels against certain things in his life that link him to a place (India) he feels less connected to than his parents do. His choice to legally change his name, which he does on his own before leaving for Yale, demonstrates this independence and spirit of rebellion. The people he meets from that point in the novel forward will know him only as Nikhil—and he is annoyed and embarrassed when his parents, visiting his college, forget the change and call him Gogol. After leaving for college, Nikhil/Gogol visits home less frequently. He starts carving out an independent life for himself in New York, one that involves a rebellious (since his parents would not approve of it) romantic attachment to Maxine. It is only after the death of his father that family again becomes a central facet of Nikhil/Gogol's life, so that when his mother, Ashima, is packing up their family home and preparing to leave for India, he wonders how he will be able to cope with being so far from her. By tracking the episodes in Gogol's life, from his departure from the family home to his professional development, his major romantic connections, and the death of his father, Lahiri provides a perspective that gives the reader a chance to imagine the motivations behind each of Gogol's choices, and to observe the ways in which he reacts to the challenges he faces. As one example, we see his love of architecture being triggered by an early visit to the Taj Mahal, and then watch this inspire his drawing of his family home, which first connects him to Ruth, his first love, and then to his later life as an architect. This guessing-game of cause and effect is one in which the reader has the power to interpret Gogol's decisions in more than one way, and Lahiri provides us with lots of material for discussion. - Theme: Identity and Naming. Description: As its title suggests, at its core The Namesake tackles the question of forming one's own identity, and explores the power that a name can carry. Gogol's decision to change his name to Nikhil before leaving home for college demonstrates his desire to take control over his own identity. The name Gogol, which "Nikhil" finds so distasteful, is a direct result of the literal identity confusion at his birth, when the letter sent from India that contained his "true name" was lost in the mail. "Gogol" is also a name that holds deep meaning for Ashoke, since it was a book of short stories by Gogol, the Russian author, that saved his life during a fateful train crash —but this meaning is not conveyed to Gogol/Nikhil during his childhood. As the other theme outlines make clear, the main tension that drives Gogol/Nikhil's identity confusion is the divide between his family's Indian heritage and his own desire for an independent, modern American lifestyle. The episodes in Gogol/Nikhil's development on display in the novel reveal a constant striving for a clear identity, a struggle which is made difficult by the divided world in which he grows up. Many of the choices that he makes seem motivated by a desire to live life as a "normal" American, and to escape the influence of his family. Gogol's relationship to Maxine, for example, an upper class New Yorker who lives at home with her stylish and modern parents, evolves to the point of offering Gogol an alternative home. He vacations with Maxine's family instead of returning home to visit his own, and embeds himself in their rituals. The identity that she and her family represent is clearly a very seductive one. However, there are also moments—like after the death of his father, or when he decides to marry Moushumi—that Gogol seems to be reaching back toward his roots. Although his marriage to Moushumi ends in divorce, the book's conclusion, as Gogol sits down to finally read the book of his namesake's short stories that his father had given him long ago, suggests a new acceptance of his past, and a willingness to allow his background to become a part of his identity. Naming, and nicknames, are also a symbol of the bonds shared by different characters throughout the novel, and they carry weight as markers of those bonds. When Ashoke and Ashima return to Calcutta on family vacations, they become "Mithu" and "Monu," and are transformed into more confident versions of themselves. Sonia calls Gogol "Goggles," Maxine is "Max" to Gogol—whom she knows as Nikhil—and to Dimitri, Moushumi is known as "Mouse." This abundance of names is also a sign of the various worlds that the main characters of Lahiri's novel inhabit simultaneously—often in a way that causes internal division, but which can also provide a form of comfort. - Theme: Love and Marriage. Description: The novel examines the nature of love and marriage by providing an intimate view into a series of Gogol's romantic relationships, which are seen alongside the enduring, arranged marriage of his parents. Gogol's story is grounded in the marriage of his parents, Ashoke and Ashima, whose conception of love is founded in their shared past in India. Characterized by clearly defined gender roles and less openly displayed affection, but also a deep sense of loyalty and companionship, this relationship can be contrasted with Gogol's romantic experiences. While Gogol has intense, influential, and openly sexual relationships with three different women over the course of the novel—outside of, and then, briefly, within a marriage—Ashima and Ashoke are one another's sole romantic partners in life, as evidenced by the first meeting between them, which was arranged by Ashima's family. This reflects a difference between the two generations about the concept of married life. Gogol uses love as another means of rebelling against his past and trying to form his own identity, and the women he is drawn to at different points in the novel match his attitude toward that past. For him, love is something to be found independently. For Ashima and Ashoke, marriage was not an exercise in independence or forming identity, but was instead another step in the traditional Indian path in life, and one that led toward companionship and the growth of a family. Although there is a traditional separation between Ashima and Ashoke that may appear as distance to an American reader—as in the moment of Gogol's birth, when Ashoke waits outside the room while Ashima delivers his son—the intimacy between the two of them is clear from the respect and care they take with one another. By contrast, the relationship between Moushumi and Gogol is driven by Moushumi's desire—which is greater even than Gogol's own—to conform to a certain image of a modern American. She and Gogol never seem to relax into the idea that they might find their identity in one another, and dinner parties with her friends in Brooklyn, where Gogol feels awkward and out of place, signal a divide between them. Moushomi's dissatisfaction with the marriage eventually leads to infidelity, and the two are divorced. Their need for independence is greater than their sense of loyalty or commitment to a family identity.Ultimately, Lahiri seems to support a balance of these two drives when it comes to love and marriage. It is important that one feel capable of defining one's identity independently, because love pursued as a means of finding stability or escape seems to fail, but it is equally important, and requires a different kind of courage, to attach oneself to a world created in collaboration with another person. - Climax: Debatably, in a novel whose scope spans three decades, the climax comes when Gogol's father, Ashoke, dies unexpectedly, causing Gogol to return toward his family, leave Maxine, and ultimately marry Moushumi. - Summary: The Namesake is the story of two generations of the Gangulis, a family of Indian immigrants to the United States. When we first meet Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli they are living in a small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about to welcome their first child into the world. The young couple met through an arranged marriage in Calcutta, India, where Ashima had lived her whole life before leaving to accompany Ashoke as he studies engineering at M.I.T. Ashoke has been set on traveling abroad ever since a terrible train accident a few years previous, which he barely survived. He was discovered by the rescue party because of the blowing pages of the book he had been reading when the train derailed—a copy of The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol. For Ashima, however, the journey abroad has proven difficult. She feels lonely and homesick in America, clinging to letters from her family and devising makeshift Indian recipes with the ingredients she can scrounge together. Soon their son is born, in the foreign environment of the American hospital. Ashoke reflects on how lucky this boy is—the baby receives the present of a book from a Bengali friend—and how different his life will be from Ashoke's own. Ashima, too, is struck by how different her son's life will be, but she pities him because he will grow up alone, without the extended family that was so central to her own development. The couple waits for their son's "good name" to come in a letter from Ashima's grandmother in India, but in the meantime they must give the hospital a temporary "pet name," and so they settle on "Gogol," the writer whose book saved Ashoke's life and made possible this new one. The novel then tracks Gogol's growth, as the family moves into a small suburban town when Ashoke is hired as an assistant professor at the local university. Gogol becomes central to his mother's life, filling some of the loneliness she feels for India. When he begins kindergarten, his parents decide that his "good name" will be Nikhil—Ashima's grandmother had suffered a stroke, so her naming letter was lost in the mail—but at school Gogol continues to be called by his "pet name," frightened by the idea of changing it. His sister Sonali (Sonia) is born, and the two siblings begin to bond as the carriers of American influence in the house. The two children, with their natural, unaccented English and socialization in the American school system, are the reason for Ashoke and Ashima's adoption of Christmas and of certain American food items. At the same time, Ashoke and Ashima take their children to regular gatherings of their Bengali friends in America, and the family takes extended trips to Calcutta, at one point living with relatives for an eight-month period. During this trip, Sonia and Gogol feel like outsiders. India is a foreign place to them, even as they see their parents' joy at being home. Gogol grows to despise his name, and is deeply embarrassed by his namesake—the author Nikolai Gogol—and by the fact that the name is not linked to any part of his identity. He does not yet know the story of his father's train accident. When he is eighteen, he decides to legally change his name to Nikhil, and when he leaves home for Yale this is the name that will follow him. It is as Nikhil that he meets his first love, Ruth, an English major who never meets his parents, even though the two are together for more than two years. They break up after Ruth spends a semester (and then a summer) abroad in England. Nikhil's escape from the world of "Gogol" is still incomplete, though, as every other weekend he travels home, where his family stubbornly persists in calling him by his pet name. The escape is pushed one step further when, living in New York after having finished an architecture degree at Columbia, Gogol falls in love with a sophisticated young art historian named Maxine Ratliff, who lives with her elegant and wealthy parents, Gerard and Lydia. Gogol moves into their house, which becomes almost a replacement for his own home. He is fascinated by the Ratliffs, whose vacation home in New Hampshire, with its own family graveyard, is emblematic of the ease, security, and solidity he has never felt growing up divided between two cultures. His escape with Maxine's family is cut short when his father dies, unexpectedly, of a heart attack. Ashoke had been living in Ohio on a teaching fellowship, and so was far from his wife and children at the time. Struck by the tragedy of this loss, Gogol returns to his family, finding comfort in the Bengali traditions he had once rebelled against. He drifts away from Maxine, who was never a part of that world, and the two stop seeing one another. Later, returning to New York, he goes on a date (suggested by his mother) with one of the other Bengali children present at the many gatherings of his childhood—Moushumi Mazoomdar. The two hit it off, surprised at the ways in which their familiarity and similar backgrounds draw them together, since both have tried hard to distance themselves from their past. Soon enough, they are married at a large Bengali ceremony in New Jersey. Although they are happy enough at first, soon small remembrances of Moushumi's past with her ex-fiancé Graham begin to trouble their relationship. Moushumi, a French Ph.D. candidate at NYU, has always sought independence, and cannot help but feel that marrying Gogol was in some way "settling." In the end, she has an affair with an old crush, Dimitri Desjardins, and she and Gogol are divorced. In the novel's last chapter, we see the family coming together again, Sonia accompanied by her new fiancé Ben, to celebrate one final Bengali Christmas Eve in their home, which has been sold. Ashima has decided to live for six months of every year in Calcutta. Reflective and sad that this link to his past is evaporating, Gogol finds a book in his room—a copy of The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol that his father had given him as a birthday present years before, when all Gogol had wanted was to escape that name. Now that there will soon be no one left to call him by it, he feels a desire to reach out toward his past once more, and he sits down on his childhood bed to read his father's favorite story.

- Genre: Realism - Title: The Necklace - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Paris - Character: Mathilde Loisel. Description: Mathilde Loisel is the daughter of a middle-class family and is married to M. Loisel. A remarkably beautiful woman, Mathilde is perpetually dissatisfied with her lot in life, constantly dreaming of the glamour and riches to which she feels her beauty entitles her. Mathilde finally has a chance to live her dreams when she and her husband receive an invitation to a party from the Minister of Education, and she borrows a diamond necklace from her friend Jeanne Forestier in order to look her best at the party. Mathilde is a huge success at the ball but disaster strikes when she loses the necklace during the carriage ride home. She and her husband spend the next ten years struggling to pay for an expensive replacement, and Mathilde's beauty fades as she experiences the hardships of poverty. When she runs into Mme. Forestier on the Champs Elysée, Mathilde is proud to tell her that the debt has finally been paid off, only to discover that the necklace she replaced was made of paste. Mathilde's primary character traits are her beauty, her vanity, and her social ambition, all of which play their part in leading her to her ruin. - Character: M. Loisel. Description: M. Loisel is married to Mathilde and works as a clerk in the Ministry of Education. He cares very much for his wife, and it is to make her happy that he procures an invitation to the party hosted by the Minister of Education. M. Loisel's generosity contrasts sharply with his wife's vanity and selfishness. For instance, he sacrifices his dream of buying a rifle to go hunting with his friends on the plains of Nanterre in order to buy a new dress for Mathilde. He searches tirelessly for the necklace when it is lost, and he sacrifices his inheritance, his honor, and takes on an enormous amount of debt to replace it. - Character: Jeanne Forestier. Description: Mme. Forestier is a well-to-do friend of Mathilde's from her convent-school days. She has a marvelous collection of jewelry and lets Mathilde borrow an expensive-looking necklace for the party. Mathilde loses and replaces the necklace but Mme. Forestier does not notice the substitution, although she is annoyed that her friend took so long to return the jewelry. Ten years later, Mme. Forestier barely recognizes Mathilde when they run into each other on the Champs Elysées, and is dismayed to inform her that the necklace that Mathilde sacrificed ten years of her life to replace was in fact made of paste. The fact that Mme. Forestier owns a fake necklace despite being wealthy enough to afford a real one shows that she understands the illusory nature of class and status. - Theme: Reality and Illusion. Description: In "The Necklace," Guy de Maupassant demonstrates that appearances—especially the appearance of wealth—are often at odds with reality. Attempting to appear richer than she truly is, Mathilde Loisel borrows a diamond necklace from her friend Jeanne Forestier and then loses it at a ball. She and her husband buy an expensive replacement on credit, return the replacement to the friend as though it's the original, and then live ten years in poverty to repay their debts. In the end, however, Mathilde learns that the original necklace was only costume jewelry—the appearance of wealth she briefly achieved at the ball was based on false diamonds and she has suffered uselessly to replace those fake diamonds with real ones, since neither she nor the necklace's owner noticed the difference. This uncontrollable slippage between reality and illusion, and the catastrophe it invites, shows that losing sight of reality in order to cultivate a false appearance can easily lead to ruin.  From the beginning of the story, Mathilde feels that her appearance does not match her reality, as she is a beautiful woman with refined taste born to a class that she feels is beneath her. Since she feels that she naturally belongs to a different class, Mathilde is constantly distressed "the poverty of her apartment, the dinginess of the walls, the shabbiness of the chairs, the ugliness of the fabrics." Instead of acknowledging and appreciating her reality, she lives in a world of daydreams, imagining "hushed antechambers with Oriental hangings," "fine furniture carrying priceless knicknacks," and eating "the rosy flesh of a trout or the wings of a grouse." Therefore, Mathilde believes that her reality should match her appearance, which leads her to believe that she deserves a different life, one which she can only live in dreams. When the Loisels receive an invitation to an elegant party hosted by the Minister of Education, Mathilde buys an expensive gown and borrows a diamond necklace from Mme. Forestier so that she does not look "like a pauper in the middle of rich women." Maupassant suggests, however, that the elegant, wealthy appearance the necklace gives Mathilde is dangerous and illusory. He describes Mathilde in Mme. Forestier's dressing room as "ecstatic in front of her reflection" in the mirror, which evokes Narcissus getting so lost in his own reflection that he died. Furthermore, at the ball, Mathilde is filled with pleasure that seems dangerous and not quite real. Maupassant writes, "She danced, intoxicated, swept away, heady with pleasure, thinking of nothing, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her conquest, in something like a cloud of happiness made of all that homage." In other words, Mathilde seems drunk on the admiration of others, forgetting that their admiration is based, in part, on an appearance of wealth that is at odds with her reality. In keeping with her unwillingness to acknowledge reality, Mathilde does not tell the truth when she realizes that she has lost her friend's necklace. Instead, she and her husband ruin themselves financially to buy an expensive replacement. In addition, Mathilde seems so invested in the notion that appearances should match reality that she cannot recognize the hints that the necklace isn't valuable. First, the Loisels visit the jeweler whose name was on the necklace's box, but he says that the necklace didn't come from him. The box, therefore, misled them as to the origin of the necklace—a potent metaphor for Mathilde herself, and a hint that the necklace might be fake. Furthermore, when Mathilde brings the expensive new necklace to "return" to her friend, Mme. Forestier doesn't even open the box and she never notices that the necklace is different. This suggests that the necklace was never particularly important to Mme. Forestier to begin with, which would likely not be true for a necklace worth 40,000 francs. Through Mathilde and her husband's suffering in the decade it takes them to pay their debts, Maupassant seems to be making a straightforward moral argument about the price of greed, but the twist ending—when Mathilde admits to Mme. Forestier that her family has been ruined by replacing the diamond necklace, and Mme. Forestier reveals that the original necklace was fake—complicates the story's morality. The fact that Mme. Forestier's necklace was made of paste shows that the appearance of wealth relies on illusion, even for the rich. Perhaps, then, the wealth Mathilde believed she was owed is inaccessible not simply to her but also to everyone else, including the truly wealthy. Furthermore, the fact that the necklace was a fake makes the Loisels' sacrifice worthless—they have bought in to the myth that appearances correspond to reality, and this leads them to lose even the meager ease and status they once had. Maupassant's treatment of the disjunction between appearance and reality therefore seems to be more than a straightforward attempt to caution people against greed and entitlement—first and foremost, it's a warning about the catastrophes that can occur when a person attempts to make reality live up to their illusion. - Theme: Women and Beauty. Description: At the beginning of "The Necklace," Guy de Maupassant writes that for women, "their beauty, their grace, and their charm serve them in lieu of birth and family background" and that "Their native finesse, their instinct for elegance, their versatile minds are their sole hierarchy, making shopgirls the equals of the grandest ladies." His implication is that a woman's beauty and poise can offer her upward social mobility. While Maupassant presents this as being the conventional wisdom—and an idea that Mathilde buys into—the remainder of his story demonstrates that beauty does not necessarily have the power to change a woman's class. Furthermore, the story suggests that believing that beauty has more power than it does can corrupt women and leave them vulnerable once their beauty is gone. Mathilde is an exceptionally beautiful woman from humble origins, but her beauty makes her feel that she "was meant for all delicacies and all luxuries." Despite this belief, Maupassant suggests that any entrance into high society that her beauty affords her is temporary. After the party, for example, Mathilde's husband covers her with "the modest garments of ordinary life, their poverty clashing with the elegance of the ball gown," ruining her fashionable appearance and bringing the magical night to a sudden end. Although Mathilde's beauty is the key to her success at the party, her beauty is not enough to make this brief interlude to become her permanent reality. Furthermore, her sense of entitlement to wealth, which is founded on her beauty, makes her greedy and leads her to poor decision making, such as borrowing the necklace from Mme. Forestier, ultimately leading to her ruin. Beauty, in this case, does not guarantee upward mobility, but rather leads the Loisels into poverty. Not only does beauty lack the power to propel Mathilde into a higher class, but Maupassant shows that beauty also can destroy a person's character. Mathilde's behavior throughout the story is vain and selfish, since her beauty gives her such a high opinion of herself. Outer beauty, then, can conceal and even create an unattractive personality. Mathilde's selfishness is clearest when she spends the money her husband has saved to buy a rife for himself in order to have an expensive dress for a single night of upper-class celebration.  Her vanity is apparent throughout the story, but it is especially noticeable when she looks at herself in the mirror, before and after the party, to obsess over her own beauty. In one sense, since Mathilde's vanity and selfishness lead her to borrow the necklace that she ultimately loses, her ruin can in part be seen as a morality tale asserting the importance of inner rather than outer beauty. Fittingly, then, by the end of the story Mathilde's outward appearance comes to match her inner ugliness. Maupassant writes: "Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the strong, and hard, and crude woman of poor households." Mathilde's poverty is experienced as a loss of her physical beauty, suggesting that the advancement of beautiful women will always be short-lived. On the other hand, though, Maupassant points out that Mme. Forrestier (unlike Mathilde) still looks young and beautiful. By contrasting the different fates of these two women Maupassant suggests that beauty is bought by status and not the other way around, revealing the false promise of advancement created by Mathilde's remarkable appearance. Although Mathilde was once admired for her physical beauty, briefly giving her access to high society, by the end of the story her beauty is gone. Mathilde's greatest mistake was to attach too much important to her physical appearance, and her ruin can be read as a correction to her vanity and selfishness, as well as a tragic end to the false sense of expectation that beauty can create. - Theme: Ambition, Greed, and Material Possessions. Description: "The Necklace" is, at its heart, a story about Mathilde's social ambition, which takes the form of a desire to acquire luxurious objects that she cannot afford. Through her ruin, Maupassant warns against the dangers of greed and criticizes those who ascribe too much value to wealth and material possessions. Mathilde invests objects like the diamond necklace she borrows from Mme. Forestier with enormous significance, and her happiness is heavily dependent on her possession of the objects she desires. Mathilde's distress at the beginning of the story is largely a result of her unfulfilled desire for material objects: "She had no wardrobe, no jewels, nothing." This materialism is inextricable from her social ambition, as she fears that she will be rejected by the higher classes because she does not appear to be wealthy enough. Once Mathilde obtains the diamond necklace she wants and is able to wear it at the party, she quickly becomes "wild with joy." However, as soon as the party is over Mathilde loses the necklace and is once again unhappy, suggesting that material possessions cannot guarantee long-lasting happiness, and that greed, in fact, can lead to ruin. Mathilde's desire for material possessions is doubly misguided because she has no concept of value beyond how much an object is worth. Throughout the story Maupassant assigns many objects a specific cash value, suggesting that an object's value is synonymous with its price. However, Maupassant undermines the adequacy of the conflation of price with value when the Loisels have to choose whether to spend 400 francs on Mathilde's evening dress or on the rifle for which her husband had long been saving. Despite the fact that these two objects have an equal cash value, the choice of how to spend the money reflects the spender's moral and social values. The dress is a somewhat frivolous purchase that corresponds to Mathilde's vanity and social ambition. Her "frugal" husband, on the other hand, asks that she buy a "suitable gown" that could be worn to other affairs. Meanwhile, the rifle (which would enable him to have a hobby that he shares with friends) seems like a much more reasonable, thought out, and class-appropriate purchase than Mathilde's dress—one that will have a lasting value rather than a temporary, superficial value. Moreover, Maupassant demonstrates that monetary value is somewhat arbitrary since even fashionable things can be had cheaply. Mathilde's husband suggests that she wear roses costing 10 francs to the ball since "they're very chic this season," but Mathilde won't hear of having ornaments that aren't visibly expensive. Furthermore, Mathilde seems only to love Mme. Forestier's necklace because she believes it is expensive, though the necklace is actually made of paste and not worth much at all. Mathilde's inability to separate price from value, then, is what leads her to her ruin. Taken together, Mathilde's obsession with money and material possessions demonstrates the dangers of greed. Instead of enjoying the small comforts of life like her husband does—a servant to do the housework, the pleasure of warm soup—Mathilde is fixated on what she doesn't have. She always wants more, and the objects she desires are far beyond her financial means. Mathilde's greed drives her to pick the most expensive-looking necklace out of Mme. Forestier's jewel box, and the huge debt she and her husband take on to replace the lost necklace can be seen as a natural consequence of her greediness. While Maupassant certainly judges Mathilde for her greed and social ambition, he also mitigates the blame by showing that she is playing into the cultural norms of her time: in late-nineteenth century France, wealth was synonymous with social status, and both depended on the ownership of material goods. Maupassant is critical not simply of Mathilde, but also of the value system in which she lives. "The Necklace" therefore demonstrates how harmful materialistic social hierarchies can be to those who cannot afford to access the upper classes. - Theme: Sacrifice, Suffering, and Martyrdom. Description: In the final section of "The Necklace," Mathilde and her husband suffer for a decade as they struggle to pay back their enormous debt from the loss of the necklace. This suffering, combined with the fact that the Loisels live on "rue des Martyrs," suggests that Maupassant wants readers to see Mathilde and her husband both as martyrs, albeit martyrs of different sorts. Mathilde is a martyr for a cause: her desire for symbols of wealth stems from her belief that anything that appears expensive must be truly worthwhile. Therefore, Mathilde thinks of her suffering less as penance (or as a moral punishment for her greed) than as a transaction, in which she was wealthy for a night and now must pay the price. In other words, Mathilde justifies her suffering and bears it remarkably well through her unwavering belief that the necklace was worth ten years of poverty. Although Mathilde seems to view her suffering as transactional rather than moral, readers can see that the ways in which she suffers seem to be in direct response to her prior vanities and greed. Mathilde felt poor and found her clothes, her apartment, and her life inadequate. Now she is forced to experience "the horrible life of necessity," showing her what true poverty is like. In the first part of the story, Mathilde is embarrassed by the Breton servant who does her housework. Now she is forced to do the housework herself and live the life of working people. The first part of the story is driven by Mathilde's ambition to be accepted into high society. She goes to the party dressed in fashionable clothes and is admired by cabinet officials and ministers. Now, however, she is "dressed like a pauper" and goes to the market to bargain with fruit dealers, grocers, and butchers who insult her. In other words, the life she experiences for ten years is the exact opposite of the life she desired at the beginning of the story, suggesting that her suffering is a penance for her earlier ambitions. However, it does not seem that Mathilde has learned the lesson from her reversal of fortune, undermining the idea that suffering can serve as a meaningful punishment for Mathilde's moral failings. Mathilde's exchange with Mme. Forestier shows that she does not accept responsibility for either borrowing or losing the necklace: "I've had a hard life since I last saw you. And lots of misery…. And all because of you!" At best, Mathilde views losing the necklace and her ensuing misfortune as a moment of bad luck. At worst, she blames it on the woman who was generous enough to lend her the necklace rather than herself, the one who lost it. In addition, Mathilde's belief that the value of the necklace justifies her suffering proves hollow when Mme. Forestier reveals that the necklace is a fake. Since Mathilde finds transactional, rather than moral, value in her suffering, the fact that the necklace is cheap makes that suffering meaningless, which is perhaps her true punishment. By contrast, Mathilde's husband experiences a different kind of suffering, and his martyrdom revolves arounds the questions of honor, generosity, and self-sacrifice. Mathilde's husband is characterized by his generosity throughout the story, and at times it seems as if he is being taken advantage of by his more selfish wife. For example, Mathilde knows to ask him for just the right amount of money, enough to afford an expensive dress but not so much as to elicit "immediate refusal and terrified exclamation from the frugal clerk." The fact that M. Loisel prioritizes his wife's frivolous desires over his own happiness leads to greater and greater sacrifices, until he must risk everything to borrow the money they need to replace the necklace. For M. Loisel, replacing the necklace is a question of honor and he is terrified by the thought of risking his signature without knowing if he can fulfill his obligations. Mathilde's husband is a martyr because it is his positive qualities—especially his kindness and his generosity—that lead to his downfall. Maupassant suggests that generosity can be catastrophic if dispensed indiscriminately. Despite their suffering, Mathilde and her husband accept their fate and heroically live a life of privation to pay back their debt. Both become martyrs, although Mathilde's martyrdom is undermined because she views her suffering as a worthwhile price to pay for the necklace, when in fact it was all for nothing. Her husband emerges as the true martyr, for his commitments to love and honor have led him to sacrifice his life to pay for a mistake that was not even his own. - Theme: Happiness. Description: In "The Necklace," Guy de Maupassant demonstrates the importance of knowing how to achieve happiness in a meaningful and lasting way. At the beginning of the story, Mathilde and her husband live a modest life, but with enough money to live comfortably. However, Mathilde is perpetually discontented, unable to be happy without the clothes and jewels of a wealthy woman. Although Mathilde achieves a fleeting moment of happiness during the party, the next ten years of her life are filled with true suffering, in sharp contrast with her earlier self-pity which seemed out of sync with the comfortable life she lived. By experiencing true poverty, Mathilde gains a new perspective on life and learns to be satisfied with what she has. Mathilde's initial unhappiness seems like a choice: she lives a perfectly pleasant life and could easily be contented with it, but instead of focusing on the good things she has, Mathilde obsesses over what she doesn't have, driving her to discontent. Maupassant points out that the things that make Mathilde so unhappy "wouldn't have even been noticed by any other woman of her station," which suggests that Mathilde's temperament is not a result of privation, but rather it is a character flaw. Furthermore, unlike Mathilde, her husband is able to be happy with their lot: he says, "Ah! A good stew! I don't know of anything better." This demonstrates that happiness is, at least in part, a matter of perception or of choice. Even when Mathilde experiences a rare moment of happiness at the party, Maupassant depicts this happiness as fleeting: the party only lasts a night, and her happiness is entirely dependent on her possession of the dress and the necklace. During the party Mathilde is in a "cloud of happiness," giving the scene a dreamlike quality, almost as if it were too good to be true. However, once the necklace is gone her happiness vanishes. As soon as the Loisels leave the party, they are "desperate and shivering," and at the end of the night, Mathilde remarks "it is over." After Mathilde has been forced to spend ten years suffering to pay off the debt she incurred after losing the necklace, she seems paradoxically more content. The fact that Mathilde is able to play her part "with sudden heroism" shows that she is no longer prey to the self-pity and dissatisfaction that characterized her in the first part of the story. She also develops a new sense of perspective with regard to happiness and suffering. At the end of the story, she remarks: "What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who can say? How little there is between happiness and misery!" The idea that things could have turned out differently shows that Mathilde has learned that happiness is not simply a matter of owning more money or more things, and the fact that her idle thoughts are contemplations of happiness and misery rather than the self-pitying daydreams of wealth she had before shows that she has become more grounded through her experience of suffering. Mathilde's new ideas on life and on happiness illustrate the idea that it is better to accept one's lot in life than to fight against it. Moreover, by experiencing a truly difficult existence, Mathilde develops a new perspective on the privileges and small comforts of her earlier life. Although Mathilde is not happy in her new life, she is more grounded in reality and she is newly willing to accept things for the way they are. - Climax: The lost necklace that Mathilde Loisel spends ten years trying to pay for is revealed to be a fake. - Summary: Mathilde Loisel is the pretty and charming daughter of a family of modest means. Her family is unable to afford a dowry and so she is married to M. Loisel, a clerk who works for the Ministry of Education. Because she is beautiful, Mathilde feels that she has been short-changed in life: she is dismayed by the shabbiness of her apartment and her humble maid, and she constantly dreams of luxurious apartments and lavish dinners to escape the pedestrian reality of her own daily existence. Hoping to cheer her up, M. Loisel gets them invited to a party hosted by the Minister of Education. However, Mathilde initially refuses the invitation, complaining that she doesn't have anything to wear. M. Loisel generously agrees to give her 400 francs to buy a new dress, the exact amount he had been setting aside to purchase a rifle in order to go hunting with his friends on the plains of Nanterre. Mathilde buys the dress, but that still isn't enough: now she wants a jewel or a gem to wear over it. At her husband's suggestion, Mathilde pays her wealthy friend Jeanne Forestier a visit to borrow some jewelry. Mathilde looks through every piece in her friend's magnificent jewel box, finally settling on an expensive-looking diamond necklace. Admiring her reflection in the mirror, Mathilde is finally happy. Mathilde is a huge success at the party, drunk with pleasure as she is admired by the other guests. However, disaster strikes when she loses the necklace during the carriage ride home. The Loisels look everywhere for the lost necklace and file a police report, but without any luck. Too ashamed to admit the loss of the necklace to Mme. Forestier, the Loisels decide to replace it with a similar one costing 40,000 francs. M. Loisel has 18,000 francs that he inherited from his father but is forced to borrow the rest, asking for loans from friends and making ruinous deals with moneylenders and loan sharks. Once the money is raised, the Loisels purchase the replacement and return the necklace to an unsuspecting Mme. Forestier. The following years are difficult for both Mathilde and her husband as they struggle to settle their debts. After dismissing their maid and renting a garret apartment, M. Loisel takes on a night job balancing accounts and copying documents, while Mathilde learns to do the heavy housework and chores of a working woman. This period of hardship takes its toll on Mathilde, who loses her once-remarkable beauty but consoles herself with the memory of the night of party when she was still beautiful and admired. After ten long years, the terrible debt is finally repaid. One day while taking a walk on the Champs Elysées, Mathilde sees Mme. Forestier, who is still young-looking and beautiful. Mme. Forestier barely recognizes her old friend, remarking how much she has changed. Now that the debt has been settled, Mathilde decides to tell Mme. Forestier the whole story, proud that she had been able to replace and pay for such an expensive necklace. However, Mme. Forestier is dismayed to inform her that all this suffering was for nothing—Mathilde bought a diamond necklace to replace hers, but the original was only costume jewelry worth, at most, 500 francs.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Night Watchman - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The early 1950s, on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Washington, D.C. - Character: Thomas Wazhashk. Description: Along with his niece Patrice, Thomas is one of the protagonists of the novel. He is the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee and the titular night watchman. He is based on Louise Erdrich's own grandfather, and the impetus for the novel came when she reread letters he wrote during the time period that the novel takes place. Thomas is Rose's husband, and Wade, Sharlo, and Fee's father. After Thomas reads the Termination Bill—introduced to congress by Senator Arthur V. Watkins—he becomes more politically active and begins to organize opposition to the bill. He helps get together a petition and assembles a delegation of people from the Turtle Mountain Reservation to travel to Washington, D.C., to testify against the bill. This effort ultimately proves successful when the attempt to terminate the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa fails. During his shifts as the night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant, Thomas often writes letters, either to public figures or allies in the fight against termination, or to his children; he saves writing letters to his children for last because he enjoys those the most. Thomas is depicted as a kind man with a sense of humor, and one of his defining characteristics is the love he has for his family. Near the end of the novel, Thomas suffers a stroke. Though he recovers, for a while he is afraid that his fight against Arthur Watkins was "a battle that [will] cost him everything." - Character: Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau. Description: Patrice is one of the novel's protagonists. Her mother, Zhaanat, is Thomas's cousin, and Patrice thinks of herself as Thomas's niece. In part because of the precarity of her home life—economically, emotionally, and physically because of her alcoholic, abusive father, Pogo Paranteau —Patrice has become self-reliant and highly values her independence. Her desire to maintain that independence often puts her at odds with prevailing gender norms of the time. For instance, she is her family's primary breadwinner with her work at the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant. Before the novel's present, Patrice was sexually assaulted by Bucky and his friends, including her coworker Doris's brother. The boxing coach and math teacher, Lloyd Barnes, is infatuated with Patrice, though she rebuffs him. After her sister, Vera, goes missing, Patrice feels compelled to go search for her, showing her deep loyalty to her family above all else. She travels to Minneapolis to try and track her down and meets Jack Malloy, who runs a nightclub where she briefly becomes a performer, wearing the waterjack suit nightly. When the circumstances at the nightclub—and Jack's attempts to manipulate her—become untenable, she escapes in the middle of the night. She then brings Vera's baby back home from Minneapolis. While Vera is missing, Patrice and Wood Mountain—along with Patrice's mother, Zhaanat—become surrogate parents to Vera's baby. At the same time, Patrice and Wood Mountain begin a romantic relationship, though it ultimately fizzles out. Through that relationship, the novel explores Patrice's ambivalence toward love, romance, and the social expectations society placed on women in the 1950s. Patrice's biggest dream, which she reveals to Millie Cloud, is to one day go to college. - Character: Arthur V. Watkins. Description: Senator Arthur V. Watkins is the novel's antagonist. A devout Mormon as well as a politician, he introduces the Termination Bill to Congress, threatening the continued survival of the people of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. The novel as a whole, especially the storyline that follows Thomas, builds to the climactic scene in which Thomas and members of a delegation from the Turtle Mountain Reservation travel to Washington, D.C. to testify before Congress against Arthur Watkins's bill. Based on a real-life senator of the same name, Watkins is described by Martin Cross the most powerful person in Congress. His motivations are undeniably racist, yet he cloaks his racism in the language of empowerment and helping others, saying that he aims to "help" Native people "stand on their own two feet" by abrogating treaties signed between the U.S. government and Native tribes that were intended to last in perpetuity. One of Watkins's most damning characteristics, according to Thomas, is that he doesn't have a sense of humor. In the chapter where the delegation testifies before congress about the harm that would be caused by termination, everything Watkins says is taken from the actual congressional record. In a concluding note following the novel, Erdrich writes that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa successfully opposed Watkins's bill and was not terminated. - Character: Vera Paranteau. Description: Vera is Patrice's sister who went missing sometime before the novel's present. She initially traveled to Minneapolis with a man who said that he wanted to marry her, but she hasn't been seen since then. In a later chapter, one of Patrice's friends, Betty Pye, tells Patrice that that's a tactic that people often use to traffic and exploit women in the area: they'll come to the reservation, tell women they want to marry them, then "sell her to someone who puts them out for sex." This seems to be what happens to Vera. Patrice and her mother, Zhaanat, begin to have disturbing dreams about Vera, where she seems to be calling out to them, trying to get them to help her. Vera ends up on a ship, going through withdrawal from drugs while her body is used sexually by men on the ship. When the withdrawal gets even worse, men on the ship dump her body in an alley. A retired Army medic, Harry Roy, finds her there and helps nurse her back to health before bringing her home. Vera comes home broken, but when she is reunited with her family and her baby, there seems to be hope for recovery. Wood Mountain and Vera also begin a romantic relationship, which Patrice approves of, thinking that she will support anything that helps Vera heal. - Character: Wood Mountain. Description: Wood Mountain is a boxer who trains with Lloyd Barnes. Throughout the novel, he has feelings for Patrice, which puts him in conflict with Barnes, who also has feelings for her. After one of Wood Mountain's fights in Fargo is canceled, instead of going home, he travels to Minneapolis to try and make sure that Patrice is doing okay while she's searching for Vera, showing that he genuinely cares for Patrice and is willing to go out of his way to try and be there for others. In Minneapolis, he finds Patrice working at Log Jam 26, and he helps engineer her escape. The two of them then take Vera's baby back home. Wood Mountain becomes a kind of surrogate parent to the baby, and he suggests naming him Archille, after his father—at least temporarily, until Vera returns. He and Patrice begin a romantic relationship at that time, too. But when Vera returns, it becomes clear, at least to Patrice, that Wood Mountain and Vera make a better match. Patrice gives Wood Mountain her blessing when he tells her that he and Vera would like to be a couple. Wood Mountain also fights against Joe Wobble in a boxing match that serves as a fundraiser for the delegation that travels to Washington, D.C., to testify against the Termination Bill. - Character: Lloyd Barnes. Description: Lloyd Barnes is a math teacher and boxing coach who trains Wood Mountain and Patrice's brother, Pokey, among others. In his mind, Barnes attaches numbers to people. He sees Patrice, with whom he's infatuated, as a "26" because he loves the curl of the two and the loop of the six. He often shows up at the Paranteau home uninvited after dropping Pokey off, hoping he might be able to speak with Patrice. On one of those visits, Patrice's mother, Zhaanat—hoping to get him to stop trying to get Patrice's attention—tells him that he smells bad. He becomes frustrated and angry when he learns that Wood Mountain also has feelings for Patrice, but Barnes eventually ends up dating Patrice's friend Valentine while having feelings for another friend, Doris, as well. He helps train Wood Mountain for the fight against Joe Wobble, which is a fundraiser for the delegation that will travel to Washington, D.C., to testify against Arthur V. Watkins's Termination Bill. - Character: Zhaanat. Description: Zhaanat is Patrice's mother. She makes baskets and beadwork, but she is a holder of traditional Chippewa knowledge and wisdom, and her real work is to pass on that knowledge to others who come to learn what she can teach. When Patrice returns from Minneapolis with Vera's baby, Zhaanat helps to raise the child, and eventually produces milk to give to him. Before Vera returns, Zhaanat and Patrice begin having identical, painful dreams about her in which Vera is in danger. When Millie Cloud, a graduate student who was raised off the reservation, meets Zhaanat, she becomes interested in what she can learn from her. At the end of the novel, Millie has decided to study with Zhaanat and is in the process of trying to secure funding to make sure Zhaanat gets paid for that study. - Character: Jack Malloy. Description: Jack Malloy is the owner of Log Jam 26, a bar in Minneapolis where Patrice ends up performing as the waterjack. He ostensibly tries to help Patrice when she first arrives in Minneapolis—he gives her food, drives her around to search for Vera, and offers her a place to stay. But over time, it becomes clear that he's manipulating her, first to try and get her to become his bar's latest waterjack, and then to stay in the role for as long as possible. Patrice is suspicious of Jack from the start, and she soon decides that she has to escape from Log Jam 26, especially after she learns that the first two waterjacks are either dead or dying, presumably because the waterjack suit is poisonous. Jack is also addicted to drugs, and when Patrice slips out of the dressing room late at night, she sees Jack having an overdose. She alerts an attendant at the hotel next door about Jack's overdose and then never sees or hears from Jack again. - Character: Millie Cloud. Description: Millie Cloud is Louis Pipestone's daughter and a graduate student who returns to the reservation at Thomas's invitation. Her white mother raised her away from the Turtle Mountain Reservation, but, as a student at the University of Minnesota, she recently completed a study of the economic conditions of the reservation. Because of her work, she eventually becomes integral in the effort to strike down the Termination Bill. She is a member of the delegation that travels to Washington, D.C. to testify before congress, and, in some respects, her economic survey is the backbone of their testimony. Millie finds patterns pleasing and often dresses in them. Her ambivalence toward romance is somewhat reminiscent of Patrice's, and she says that men are not interested in her. At one point, Millie seems to harbor romantic feelings for Patrice, but near the end of the novel, she decides to go out with Barnes after he asks her out using an equation, which she finds irresistible. At the end of the novel, she is planning to study with Zhaanat and is in the process of securing funding that would allow Zhaanat to be paid for her teaching. - Character: Valentine Blue. Description: Valentine works with Patrice at the jewel bearing plant. She is described as one of Patrice's closest friends, but throughout the novel, tensions flare up in their relationship. When Patrice is looking for a way to go to Minneapolis to search for Vera, Valentine, in an act of generosity, gives Patrice her sick days to use. Patrice is grateful, but when she returns, she becomes frustrated when Valentine won't stop talking about her own generosity and about what she did for Patrice. Valentine then grows closer to a new friend, Doris Lauder. Near the end of the novel, Valentine is given a promotion that Patrice thinks she deserves. Valentine also dates Barnes, though that relationship is short-lived. - Character: Doris Lauder. Description: Doris is a "white girl" who is new to working at the jewel bearing plant. She gives Patrice and Valentine rides to work each day and also gives Patrice a ride to the train station when she goes to Minneapolis to look for Vera, showing Doris's capacity for kindness and generosity. At the same time, though, Doris also asks Patrice what happened between her and Bucky the summer before. Through the course of the conversation, Patrice comes to understand that Doris's brother was one of the boys in the car when Bucky and his friends assaulted her. Patrice realizes then that she can't trust Doris. - Character: Betty Pye. Description: Betty Pye works with Patrice at the jewel bearing plant. She prompts Patrice's trip to Minneapolis to hunt for Vera when she tells Patrice that her cousin had recently seen Vera in the city. When Valentine receives the promotion that Patrice thinks she deserves, Betty Pye moves to the workstation beside Patrice. The two of them become closer, and Betty Pye talks to Patrice about sex and about how to get away from men they don't like. - Character: Pokey Paranteau. Description: Pokey is Patrice's younger brother. He practices boxing with Lloyd Barnes, who often drives him home, hoping for a chance to talk to Patrice. Because both he and Wood Mountain are boxers, they are friendly with each other, and Wood Mountain learns from Pokey that Patrice isn't interested in Lloyd Barnes. Pokey is with Patrice, setting snares, when they find the body of their father, Pogo Paranteau, who has died in the cabin on their property. - Character: Bucky Duvalle. Description: Bucky Duvalle and his friends sexually assaulted and attempted to rape Patrice in a car the summer before the events of the novel take place. It could have been even worse, Patrice thinks, but she managed to escape and then swim to her uncle, Thomas's, boat in the middle of the lake. After the assault, Bucky is struck by an illness that contorts his mouth and then travels down his side. Patrice feels that she did it to him—that her anger left her body and struck the side of Bucky's face. Bucky, however, thinks that Zhaanat, Patrice's mother, put a curse on him. When he asks her to lift the curse, though, she tells him that what happened is a result of his own actions and that he did it to himself. - Character: Walter Vold. Description: Walter Vold is the overseer and supervisor at the jewel bearing plant. He is described as "lurkishly" watching the women work, and he doesn't allow people to speak while they are working (though they do anyway). When Patrice needs to go to Minneapolis to look for Vera, he tells her she has just three days of leave total; when higher-ups are set to come to the factory to observe, he takes away the workers' coffee breaks and never reinstates them. Overall, he is an authority figure intent on enforcing rules and maximizing productivity by his standards, with little to no regard for the humanity of the people who work at the plant. - Character: Pogo Paranteau. Description: Pogo Paranteau is Patrice's father. He is often referred to simply as Paranteau. He is a person with alcoholism, and his outbursts at home cause chaos and fear. He is absent for most of the novel, though he sometimes returns home, asking his wife, Zhaanat, or Patrice for money. When he dies, Patrice and Pokey find his body in a cabin on their property, and the community then holds a funeral for him. - Character: LaBatte. Description: LaBatte is the night janitor at the jewel bearing plant. He and Thomas often talk with each other, especially about the ghost of their former classmate, Roderick, who often visits them in the plant at night. By Thomas's estimation, LaBatte is a very superstitious person. LaBatte also has a history of petty theft, and he plans on stealing from the jewel bearing plant before Thomas warns him not to and gives him some money. LaBatte also briefly converts to Mormonism, though he decides not to go through with it soon after and refuses to be baptized or to see Elnath or Vernon, the Mormon missionaries, again. - Character: Gerald. Description: Gerald is Zhaanat's cousin. He is a jiisikid, which means that he can fly to faraway places, inhabited by other spirits. When Vera is missing, he comes to help the Paranteaus find her. After he flies for a long time, he tells the family that he has seen Vera, lying in a ditch, with a baby beside her. - Character: Joe "Wobble" Wobleszynski. Description: Joe Wobble, as he's better known, is Wood Mountain's main boxing rival. Years ago, Joe Wobble's family encroached on land that Wood Mountain's grandmother owned. During their first fight, Wood Mountain has the opportunity to land a potentially winning combination against Joe, but the bell rings early, unfairly letting Joe escape defeat. When Barnes approaches Joe about a rematch (for the fight that will be the fundraiser for the delegation to travel to Congress), Joe agrees, saying that he didn't like the unfairness of the first fight either. For the fundraiser, Wood Mountain wins the fight on points, but it's so brutal that both boxers resolve never to fight again. - Character: Bernadette Blue. Description: Bernadette is Wood Mountain's half-sister. She lives in Minneapolis, and she reluctantly takes care of Vera's baby after Vera disappears. Bernadette tells Patrice that she doesn't know where Vera is, but she tells Wood Mountain that she is in the "hold," which eventually leads to Patrice and Wood Mountain realizing that Vera is on a ship. - Character: Roderick. Description: Roderick is a former boarding school classmate of Thomas and LaBatte who appears in the form of a ghost to both men throughout the novel. He died of tuberculosis, which he contracted after he was locked in a cellar multiple times as punishment at the boarding school. Thomas feels guilty for not doing more to help Roderick when he was locked in the cellar, but Roderick tells Thomas that he visits the jewel bearing plant to haunt LaBatte; he was locked in the cellar the first time, Roderick tells Thomas, because he took the blame for something that LaBatte did. He also says that he probably only contracted tuberculosis the second time he was locked in the cellar. LaBatte travels with Thomas to Washington, D.C. and prompts Thomas to try and win over Arthur Watkins with flattery. When Roderick misses the train back home, he decides to stay among the Native ghosts in Washington, D.C. - Character: Vernon. Description: Vernon is one of the Mormon missionaries on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. He is infatuated with Grace, and his partner, Elnath, suspects that Vernon and Grace are getting up to "the worst kind of sin." Elnath and Vernon visit Thomas's house and give him a copy of the Book of Mormon, which he occasionally reads to try and better understand Arthur V. Watkins's motivation. - Character: Elnath. Description: Elnath is one of the Mormon missionaries on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. He considers turning his missionary partner, Vernon, in for violating the rules of the church because he suspects that Vernon is having sex with Grace, but Elnath decides to confront him instead. This confrontation strains Elnath and Vernon's relationship, and they ultimately seem to decide to leave the reservation before their scheduled year of living there is up because they find the conditions too difficult to endure. - Theme: Power, Solidarity, and Community Action. Description: Time after time, when the characters in The Night Watchman confront conflicts, they respond with solidarity to overcome them. When people in power try to enforce their will on others, the most effective way those people can fight back, the novel seems to suggest, is through collective action. For example, when Patrice forgets to cook her bread and has nothing to eat for lunch, the community of people she works with steps in to give her food. She forgets to cook her bread in the first place because she is rattled by her father's drunken outburst, which is an exhibition of power (in the form of physical force and the threat of violence). Another example also takes place at the jewel bearing plant. When Mr. Vold takes away their coffee breaks, the women band together to start a petition to have them reinstated. Readers learn from a note after the book that the real-life women who worked at the plant, on whose story the book is loosely based, ultimately attempt to unionize. While they were unsuccessful in that campaign, they did get wages raised, the cafeteria finished, and coffee breaks reinstated as a result of their efforts. The central conflict of the novel demonstrates a similar dynamic. Arthur Watkins is a senator who uses his power to advocate for the elimination of federal recognition of Native tribes. If his proposed bill were to pass, it would be devastating for the Native people it impacts. To counter this exhibition of power, Thomas helps to mobilize his community, and the community bands together to fight. First, they start a petition, which Louis tends to like "a garden" as he aims to get everyone on the reservation to sign. And the community comes together again for the fundraiser, a community-sponsored boxing match, that enables a group to travel from the Turtle Mountain Reservation to Washington, D.C. to testify against the bill. This solidarity is not idealized, though. When Thomas convenes the committee to decide who will go to Washington, even though they know how important it is, most people don't want to go. Even when solidarity is widespread, action based on that solidarity can be difficult to achieve, especially because success isn't guaranteed. Eventually, though, Thomas does get a group together, and their collective action ultimately succeeds in defeating the bill. The novel suggests, then, that community action, though difficult to achieve, can effectively counter unfair displays of power, whether they come from an exploitative boss or an agent of one of the world's most powerful institutions. - Theme: Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions. Description: Much of the brutality depicted in The Night Watchman is done by people who claim, and by some who might believe, that they are acting for the good of the people they harm. When Patrice travels to Minneapolis, a stranger almost kidnaps her, and then Jack Malloy steps in to "help." Jack offers to do whatever she wants and takes her to the addresses she has written down to try and find her missing sister Vera. His plan, of course, is deeply manipulative, as he aims to make money off Patrice without concern for her wellbeing (he hires her to perform as a "waterjack," which involves dancing in a water tank in a costume that resembles Paul Bunyan's sidekick, Babe the blue ox). Patrice later removes herself from the situation soon after she learns that the first two waterjacks who performed in Jack's club "didn't last long" (ostensibly because the costume was poisonous). Similarly, Arthur V. Watkins cloaks his racism, and his desire to terminate Native tribes, in either the neutral language of bureaucracy or the salvific rhetoric of religion. He uses lofty words like "emancipation, freedom, equality, success" to "disguise the truth: termination." This desire for termination is rooted in racism and white supremacy. Martin Cross, a tribal chairman, writes to Thomas that, from his view, the Mormon project of conversion of Native people aims to "change Indians into whites" and that "they think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out." When the hearings take place, Arthur Watkins (in excerpts from the actual historical records of the proceedings) uses racist ideas and language to argue his point. This is one instance of the persistent desire, on the part of the U.S. government, to eradicate Native history, culture, and people, and Arthur Watkins plays his part in this history while still believing himself to be deeply "righteous." Another instance of this history is the boarding schools that Thomas and Roderick went to and that ultimately claimed Roderick's life. The government established the boarding schools with the supposed intention to "help" Native people, but in effect, they often sought to destroy Native culture, history, and people. Through these repeated examples, the novel shows how a desire to "help" or "do good" and a belief in one's own righteousness can often be the impetus for actions that oppress, exploit, or otherwise endanger others. - Theme: Humor and Pain. Description: When confronted with pain and suffering, characters in the novel often use humor as a way to get through it. After Thomas has had a stroke, Louis comes to the hospital to pick him up. Louis feels guilty because he thinks that if he had gone on the trip to Washington, Thomas might not have been so overworked and might not have had a stroke. Thomas, for his part, feels like this battle against the Termination Bill and Arthur Watkins might "cost him everything." Instead of delving into those emotions, when Louis and Thomas see each other for the first time, they joke with one another. Thomas asks Louis if he's down in the city because his horses got out again, and Louis says he's there to bring Thomas back in grand style, with a red carpet laid out to Juggie's car. Similarly, after Patrice has been essentially kidnapped, witnessed disturbing scenes at the addresses where she had checked for Vera, and is about to be lowered into the tank to be the waterjack (all of which happens in one day), she looks for humor in the situation. Specifically, she aims to locate a kind of feeling and thinking that could "only be described in Chippewa," where the "strangeness was also humorous" and the danger became something "you might laugh at," all while knowing you could be hurt and that the potential damage could be devastating. With that in mind, it's notable that one of Arthur Watkins's most damning qualities is that he has "no sense of humor," which Thomas finds even more frightening than the Mormon bible. Thomas also points out how the exploits of the figure Nanabozho (a trickster figure in Chippewa folklore) differ from the Mormon bible, considering how Nanabozho created "everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter." This perspective suggests that humor can transform pain into something more manageable, while a lack of humor can lead a person to harm and dehumanize others. - Theme: Sex, Violence, and Gender. Description: Sex often, though not always, goes hand in hand with violence in the novel. This violence is almost always, if not always, committed by men against women. The summer before the events of the novel, Bucky Duvalle, with the help of his friends, attempts to rape Patrice. She eventually gets away by swimming to Thomas's boat in the middle of the lake, but not before she suffers scratches, bruises, and a bite mark on her shoulder, along with deep psychological wounds. When Patrice goes to Betty Pye as a trusted confidante to talk about sex, one of the main topics of their conversation is how to get away from men who they don't like. And when Patrice is considering how her relationship with Wood Mountain might progress, she remembers something her mother told her, which she believes to be absolutely true: you don't truly know a man until you reject him, and then "his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface." When Valentine spurns Barnes's advances, he doesn't react with physical violence, but he does think to himself, in a threatening way, "a man is a man," intimating his belief that men have needs that women are obligated to satisfy. More shockingly, Vera is brutalized by men, who commit unspeakable acts of violence against her so that they can use her body for sex. She finds herself in the hold of a ship where, while going through withdrawal, she feels her insides being "pulled out" and her brain "heaving in her skull," and she comes home bearing scars of the violence committed against her. In the city, Patrice finds collars fixed to chains attached to the walls of an abandoned house, where it's suggested that women were held captive.  It's worth noting that sex and violence do not always go together in the novel. Betty Pye enthusiastically enjoys much of the sex she has with her boyfriend, and Patrice goes to her when she is curious about sex. But by presenting various women's relationships with different men, and by showing the internalization of gender norms and the violent actions of those different men, the novel suggests that gender norms at this time tended to affirm and perpetuate gender-based violence. - Theme: Agency and Exploitation. Description: When Patrice talks with Betty Pye about sex, Betty says that sometimes men come to the reservation, tell women they want to get married, then "ditch the woman, [and] sell her to someone who puts them out for sex." This seems to be what happened to Vera. And by the time Vera actually appears in the novel, she is trapped in the hold of a ship, and it seems like she has been sold into a kind of sexual slavery that strips her of her agency. When Patrice goes to the city to look for Vera, Jack claims to act in Patrice's best interests; really, though, he lies to her and manipulates the situation to try and get her to do what he wants her to. This situation doesn't entail the erasure of agency that Vera experiences—Patrice accepts the waterjack job because the money is good, and when she does it, she seems to enjoy the actual performance. But once what happened to the last two waterjacks is revealed (the first is dead, and the second is "on her last legs"), and it becomes clear that the suit is poisoning them, it also becomes clear that Jack is acting exploitatively and has erased Patrice's agency by lying to her and luring her into performing without telling her that the performance might kill her. Arthur Watkins seems to have aims similar those of Jack and the people who exploit Vera. When Millie is considering an incorrect census from years ago that made people on the Turtle Mountain Reservation seem prosperous, she says, "I suspect as always they simply want our land." The Termination Bill can be seen, in part, to have similar goals in mind, to seize land held by Native people so that those in power can use it for their own purposes. To achieve that aim, Watkins introduces a bill that, if passed, would essentially erase the agency of the Native people on that land; they would be "relocated" without a say in the matter. With that in mind, the novel highlights the tendency of people in power to erase the agency of people with less power so that they can exploit them, their bodies, or their land. - Climax: Thomas, Patrice, and others travel to Washington, D.C. to testify against the Termination Bill authored by Senator Arthur V. Watkins. - Summary: In September of 1953, Thomas Wazhashk works as a night watchman at the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant. He writes letters while he works, both personal letters to his children, and letters to government officials and reporters in his role as the chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Often, late at night, the ghost of a former boarding school classmate, Roderick, visits Thomas. Thomas soon learns about House Concurrent Resolution 108, referred to as the Termination Bill. The Termination Bill, introduced by Senator Arthur V. Watkins, aims to undo treaties signed between Native American Tribes and the United States government. If termination went into effect, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa would be forced to relocate, and all government services, including the entire Bureau of Indian Affairs, would stop. Thomas and other members of the tribe's advisory committee make a plan to counter the bill, including collecting signatures on the reservation and organizing a coalition to testify against the bill before congress in Washington, D.C. Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau also works at the Jewel Bearing Plant, making the bearings themselves, which will be used in watches and Department of Defense weapons. Her sister, Vera, has recently gone missing after moving to Minneapolis. Her father is a person with alcoholism and, when he is home, his drunken outbursts torment and terrorize Patrice along with her mother, Zhaanat, and her brother, Pokey. Pokey has started boxing lessons with Lloyd Barnes, who has unrequited feelings for Patrice. Lloyd often shows up at the Paranteau house, hoping he'll find an opportunity to talk to Patrice. When the Paranteau family holds a ceremony to try and find out where Vera is, Zhaanat's cousin Gerald, a jiisikid, tells them that Vera is still alive. Patrice decides to travel to Minneapolis to look for her. On the train there, she runs into Wood Mountain, another boxer who trains with Lloyd Barnes. Wood Mountain is on his way to a fight in Fargo, and he tells Patrice that if she wants to find Vera, then when she gets to Minneapolis, she should look for "the scum." When Patrice arrives in Minneapolis, an unmarked taxi stops for her. The driver ushers her inside, and when she gives him an address, he takes her to another place, which looks like a bar, called Log Jam 26. The driver and another man drag her inside. As they accost her, a third man, Jack Malloy, intervenes and tells Patrice that he'll help her. He then takes Patrice to the addresses she has for Vera. At the first, a dog emits a deathly whimper from behind the door. At the second, Jack seems visibly shaken. At the third place, Patrice finds Bernadette Blue, Wood Mountain's half-sister, who says she doesn't know where Vera is, but she has Vera's baby, and Patrice needs to take him. Patrice says she'll return later, and Jack takes Patrice back to Log Jam 26. He tells her that she can stay in the dressing room if she agrees to be the "waterjack" and perform in the club for $50 a night. With no better options available, and enticed by the money, Patrice agrees. After doing a few performances, though, Patrice learns that the waterjack costume is poisonous—apparently, the first waterjack performer died, and the second performer is on her last legs. Wood Mountain's fight in Fargo is canceled, and he also decides to go to Minneapolis to make sure Patrice is okay. He goes to Bernadette Blue's house and finds out that Patrice has been with Jack Malloy. From there, he goes to Log Jam 26 and sees Patrice performing as the waterjack. He leaves a note for her, saying he'll be in the hotel next door and that she should leave that night. Patrice leaves the dressing room in the middle of the night and sees Jack in the hallway, apparently in the middle of an overdose. She goes to Wood Mountain's hotel, and the next morning, the two of them go to Bernadette Blue's house to retrieve Vera's baby and then return home. Sometime later, the Turtle Mountain advisory committee holds a meeting in Fargo to try and raise awareness about the Termination Bill. At the end of the meeting, they hold a vote, in which zero people vote to support the bill and 47 people vote against it. Thomas approaches Lloyd Barnes about holding a fight between Wood Mountain and Joe "Wobble" Wobleszynski as a fundraiser to help support a delegation to travel to Washington, D.C. and testify against the bill in congress. All parties involved eventually agree, and the fight that ensues is well-attended, but for Wood Mountain and Joe Wobble, it's punishing and brutal. It's the last boxing match that either of them ever fights. When they're back home, Wood Mountain acts fatherly toward Vera's baby. Patrice calls the baby Gwiiwizens, or Little Boy, to not get too attached, but Wood Mountain gives him the temporary name of Archille, his father's name. Patrice and Wood Mountain begin a romantic relationship, and while Patrice enjoys it, she still feels like something isn't quite right. She and her mother begin to have the same dreams, in which they see Vera, alive but struggling. One day, while Patrice and Pokey are hunting in the woods, they look through the window of an old cabin on their property and see someone slumped in the bed. It turns out to be their father, who has died there. At this time, Vera has been kidnapped and trafficked to a ship where sailors use her body for sex. She has become addicted to drugs, and as she goes through brutal withdrawal, men from the ship take her and dump her body in an alley. A retired Army medic named Harry Roy finds her and takes her back home to nurse her back to health. He then brings her back to the Paranteau house, where she is reunited with her family and her son. She and Wood Mountain begin a romantic relationship, and Patrice senses that this is right, better than if she and Wood Mountain ended up together. After the success of the fundraiser, Thomas organizes the delegation to travel to Washington, D.C. to testify against the bill. In the testimony, they argue against immediate termination, while Arthur Watkins argues for it. Thomas does everything in his power to try and turn Watkins against the plan, including flattering him, even though Thomas finds Watkins contemptible. On the way home, Thomas suffers a stroke. He ultimately recovers, though, and returns to work at the Jewel Bearing Plant. In a closing note, Erdrich writes that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa succeeded in standing up against termination.

- Genre: Fairy tale, short story, satire - Title: The Nightingale and the Rose - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: A garden in an unspecified time and place - Character: The Nightingale. Description: Although she dies before the story's conclusion, the Nightingale is the protagonist of "The Nightingale and the Rose." A romantic by nature, she has spent much of her life singing about love, waiting for the day she will encounter it in real life. When she overhears the Student lamenting his lovelorn state, she resolves to bring him the red rose he needs to secure the girl's affection, sacrificing her life to stain its petals red with her blood. The other characters fail to recognize this sacrifice, but the story as a whole vindicates the Nightingale's actions. In particular, her selfless nature and beautiful voice link her to two of the story's themes: the selfless nature of true love, and the intrinsic value of art. The Nightingale, in other words, is not only a character but also a symbol of the ideal lover and the ideal artist, both of whom give without expecting anything in return. - Character: The Student. Description: Initially a sympathetic character, the Student ultimately emerges as the antagonist of "The Nightingale and the Rose." By claiming to be deeply in love with the girl, the Student inspires the Nightingale to sacrifice her own life in a quest to bring him a red rose. When the girl rejects the flower, however, the Student carelessly tosses it into the road, concluding that love is a waste of time. This dishonors the one request the Nightingale has made of him—to be a true lover—but it is in keeping with his personality. Throughout the story, the Student reveals himself to be excessively preoccupied with rationality and practicality, to the point that he is literally unable to understand the Nightingale's emotional words to him. The Student, then, illustrates the pitfalls of extreme intellectualism; his need to understand everything in terms of rules and results blinds him to "useless" qualities like selflessness or beauty. - Character: The Rose-tree. Description: There are three rose-trees in "The Nightingale and the Rose," but only the one standing outside the Student's window plays a major role in the story. This is the tree that tells the Nightingale he can produce a red rose, but only at the cost of her own life. The Nightingale agrees, and spends the night singing with her breast pressed against one of the Rose-tree's thorns, slowly bringing life to a rose and dyeing it red with her blood. Despite his role in killing the Nightingale, the Rose-tree remains sympathetic, in part because he is one of the only characters who recognizes the Nightingale's sacrifice for what it is, speaking tenderly to her as she slowly impales herself on the thorn. - Character: The girl. Description: The girl appears only briefly in "The Nightingale and the Rose," but she is vital to the story's plot and themes. The daughter of the Professor, she embodies unfeeling materialism. Having told the Student that she will dance with him if he brings her a red rose, she later goes back on her word because a wealthier suitor has provided her with jewels. The girl's surroundings further underscore her shallow nature, since the silk she is spinning and the toy dog she owns are both luxury commodities. - Character: The Lizard. Description: Like the Nightingale, the Lizard overhears the Student lamenting his unrequited love for the girl. The Lizard, however, is "a cynic," so he scoffs when he learns the Student is crying over a red rose. This foreshadows the ending of the story, when both the Student and the girl prove incapable of seeing the value of the rose as a symbol of sacrificial love. - Theme: Love and Sacrifice. Description: From start to finish, "The Nightingale and the Rose" is a story about the nature of love. Love is what the Student claims to feel for the girl, and it is also what inspires the Nightingale to sacrifice her life to create a red rose; doing so, she thinks, will help the Student win his sweetheart's affection. The fact that neither the Student nor the girl appreciates the Nightingale's sacrifice, however, complicates the story's meaning. In the end, Wilde suggests that true love is possible, but that much of what people commonly call love is shallow and self-interested. The Student is a prime example of this self-absorption, the full extent of which only becomes clear at the end of the story; when the girl rejects his rose, he is quick to label her "ungrateful," and love in general "silly." In retrospect, however, it is clear that the Student's love was self-absorbed all along. While it is common for stylized literature (like fairy tales) to include dramatic monologues, the protestations of love that open "The Nightingale and the Rose" take on a stagey and attention-seeking quality in light of the story's ending. Wilde drops another similar hint when he describes the Student going back to his room and "think[ing] of his love." The ambiguous phrasing could simply mean that the Student is thinking about the girl, but it could also imply that he is narcissistically poring over his own emotional state. The girl, meanwhile, reveals herself to be equally self-centered when she exchanges the Student for a wealthier lover, leaving only the Nightingale to symbolize true, deep love. The Nightingale, of course, is undeniably selfless. She is outwardly focused from the beginning, singing not about her own feelings, but about those of the "true lover" she dreams of meeting. Later, she flies from place to place attempting to find a red rose on someone else's behalf, her persistence standing in marked contrast to the Student's quickly-abandoned courtship. These small moments of altruism and self-denial culminate in her decision to sacrifice her life; death—the complete loss of selfhood—is the ultimate expression of selflessness. In fact, Wilde suggests that "perfect" love can exist only in death for precisely this reason. Because true love requires selflessness, death is its logical endpoint. Ultimately, then, the fact that the Nightingale's sacrifice is based on a misreading of the Student's feelings doesn't alter the story's defense of love itself. By dying, the Nightingale herself proves the existence of true love, which the story suggests will outlive her: as she dies, the Nightingale sings about "Love that dies not in the tomb." - Theme: Art and Idealism. Description: Oscar Wilde is likely the most famous British writer associated with Aestheticism, a late 19th-century movement that championed "art for art's sake." In contrast to those who argued that the arts should address social issues or impart moral lessons, the Aesthetics contended that art's sole purpose was to be beautiful. This question about the nature and role of art forms the backdrop to "The Nightingale and the Rose," with the Nightingale and the Student embodying opposite sides of the debate. Other than perhaps her selflessness, the Nightingale's defining characteristic is her beautiful voice, which she uses largely as a means of bringing pleasure to others; when the Oak-tree, for instance, requests one final song to remember the Nightingale by, she willingly complies, with a "voice…like water bubbling from a silver jar." Furthermore, to the extent that the Nightingale's songs are "about" anything, they are about ideals rather than reality. Rather than singing about her own love (or any particular pair of lovers), the Nightingale sings about love in wholly abstract terms, using stock figures like "a boy and a girl" to trace a path from young love to passionate love to love that survives death. This idealism further underscores the link between the Nightingale's art and Aestheticism, since her songs have no obvious real-world application. The Student, by contrast, believes that art should "do" something. In fact, he criticizes the Nightingale's song precisely because he sees it as useless and meaningless, saying that the Nightingale cares only about "style"—a common critique of Aestheticism. He even goes so far as to say her art is "selfish," presumably because it has no tangible impact on the world around her. This, of course, is untrue in a literal sense, since the Nightingale's song produces the red rose the Student will present to the girl. Still, it is tempting to agree with the Student's rejection of the Nightingale's song as doing no "practical good." The girl, after all, rejects the rose, and neither she nor the Student understand or appreciate the sacrifice the Nightingale has made. At the very least, the Nightingale's philosophy of art would appear to be misguided. Digging deeper, however, it is clear that the Student's views on Aestheticism are being satirized. By the end of the story, Wilde has revealed the Student's "love" to be shallow and self-involved, which casts doubt on his claims about being able to recognize true "feeling" in art. Meanwhile, the description of the Nightingale's death reveals the intrinsic value of her art and actions. It is not simply that her songs are beautiful, but that, by sacrificing herself for love, the Nightingale makes the ideal love she sings about a reality in the world. Ultimately, then, the story suggests that art is self-justifying, because the artistic process itself embodies the ideals of art. - Theme: Materialism, Intellectualism, and Emotion. Description: Despite its fairy-tale setting, "The Nightingale and the Rose" engages with the real-world debates taking place in the late 1800s. The Enlightenment of the preceding century had inspired great confidence in humanity's ability to solve scientific, practical, and even moral problems with reason. Rapid industrialization (and the wealth it generated) lent further credence to these ideas by "proving" the success of 18th-century scientific innovation and free-market economics. Nevertheless, there was significant pushback against these trends throughout the 19th-century, particularly from writers and artists. In "The Nightingale and the Rose," Wilde develops his own critique of materialism and intellectualism, as these traits are embodied by the Student and the girl. Far from promoting a realistic worldview, these philosophies actually blind the story's characters to what is happening within and around them. It is no coincidence that the Student is a student. Although the story begins with the Student loudly professing the depth of his feelings for the girl, it quickly becomes clear that he is more at ease with his studies than he is with emotions. When the Nightingale sings to the Oak-tree, for instance, the Student's response is one of cold rationalism; he jots down critical notes on what he takes to be the Nightingale's lack of genuine feeling. In fact, his assessment of the Nightingale could not be further from the truth, and it is the Student himself who lacks emotional depth. The Student's intellectualism, however, has distorted his ability to see the world clearly. Because he "only knows the things that are written down in books," the Student is quite literally incapable of understanding anyone whose guiding light is not reason—most notably the Nightingale, whose insistence that "Love is wiser than Philosophy" prioritizes an "irrational" emotion. In this sense, "The Nightingale and the Rose" links the Student's hyper-rationality to the girl's materialism. Because he understands the world solely in terms of "practicality," the Student can't make sense of selfless behavior, which by definition does not benefit the person (or bird) practicing it. Significantly, the most obviously selfish and greedy character in the story—the girl—is the daughter of a professor; the implication is that rationality inevitably produces materialism if it is not tempered with emotion. Her rationale for rejecting the Student's red rose is, after all, logical: "Everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers." Ultimately, however, Wilde suggests that the intertwined worldviews of intellectualism and materialism fail even on their own terms. While it is certainly the case that the Student and the girl consistently misread the emotional significance of the world around them (e.g. the rose and the Nightingale's song), it is equally clear that they lack self-knowledge. The story ends with the Student rejecting love as "impractical" and resolving to study metaphysics instead. Metaphysics, however, is arguably the branch of philosophy least concerned with practicality, since it involves abstract questions about mind vs. matter, the purpose of existence, and the nature of identity. The Student, then, does not appear to have a good grasp even on the philosophy he claims to support—a point further underscored by the fact that the book he pulls down to study is "dusty," implying that it does not see much use. - Climax: The Nightingale dies just as she creates the perfect red rose - Summary: While sitting in the branches of the Oak-tree, the Nightingale overhears the Student lamenting the fact that his sweetheart will not dance with him unless he brings her a red rose. The Nightingale sees in the young man a real-world example of the romance she sings about, and she thinks to herself how awe-inspiring and powerful love is. Impressed by the apparent depth of the Student's emotion, she decides to help him secure the girl's affections. The Nightingale first flies to a White Rose-tree standing in the center of a plot of grass and asks him for a red rose. He tells her that all his roses are white, but advises her to find his brother, the Yellow Rose-tree standing next to a sun-dial. The Nightingale flies to him and is again disappointed. The Yellow Rose-tree in turn suggests that she visit his brother underneath the Student's window. This Rose-tree confirms that his roses are red, but adds that as it is wintertime, he cannot provide her with a blossom. In despair, the Nightingale wonders aloud whether there is any way she can find a single red rose. Reluctantly, the Rose-tree tells her that her only option is to spend the night singing with one of his thorns in her heart. Her music will bring the flower into existence, and her blood will dye its petals red, but the process of impaling herself on the thorn will kill her. Although the thought of losing life's pleasures saddens the Nightingale, she concludes that the sacrifice will be worthwhile if done for love. The Nightingale returns to the Student and attempts to tell him her plan, asking that he repay her by always being a true lover. The Student cannot understand the Nightingale's words, but the Oak-tree, saddened, asks her to sing a final song for him. She agrees, and the Student complains that her song lacks meaning and emotion before going home. That evening, the Nightingale flies to the Rose-tree and allows the thorn to pierce her. She sings about love through the night, gradually pressing herself further onto the thorn. As she does so, a rose takes shape on the Tree, finally turning red when the thorn pierces the Nightingale's heart and kills her. Later that day, the Student finds the red rose outside his window, but does not realize where it came from. Nevertheless, he picks it up and brings it to the girl, who is sitting outside her home spinning silk. The girl, though, rejects the gift, saying that she prefers the jewels she has received from a wealthy suitor. Angry, the Student throws the rose into the road and storms off, deciding that love is not worth the trouble. The story concludes with him opening a book and returning to his studies.

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Nightingale - Point of view: Third Person and First Person - Setting: France, 1939–1945 - Character: Vianne Mauriac (The Narrator). Description: Vianne Mauriac is the mother of Sophie and Julien Mauriac, the wife of Antoine Mauriac, and the sister of Isabelle Rossignol. Antoine and Sophie are Vianne's entire life, and she does everything she can to protect them. Vianne also loves Isabelle, although their relationship is strained. Vianne feels bad that she was not more present in her sister's life following the death of their mother. At the time, however, Vianne was only a child herself and did not know how to cope or be a good sister. At the start of World War II, Vianne keeps her head down and does anything she can to protect Sophie. She chastises Isabelle for her small rebellions and does not want to take an active part in resistance efforts. However, as the war drags on, Vianne is forced to choose a side. Eventually, she begins actively helping Jewish children escape Nazi persecution with the help of her church. Later in life, she regrets that she did not do more to help earlier on in the war. She wishes she could've been more like Isabelle, who resisted from the very start. At the end of the novel, readers learn that Vianne is that unnamed narrator who appears throughout the narrative. It is also revealed that Julien, her son, is the offspring of Von Richter, a cruel Nazi who raped Vianne while living in her home. - Character: Isabelle Rossignol. Description: Isabelle Rossignol is the sister of Vianne Mauriac and the daughter of Julien Mauriac. From a young age, Isabelle is a rebel who does not do well in school and does not like acting like a lady. She rejects the role the gender norms that society forces on her, and when war comes, she is eager to sign up for the resistance. Isabelle is brave but also reckless, and her carelessness frequently endangers her loved ones. Isabelle's actions regularly upset Vianne. Ultimately, though, Isabelle's bravery outweighs her negative attributes and, although she can still be headstrong, she largely grows out of her reckless nature over the course of the novel. In fact, she becomes an active part of the French resistance and, in doing so, saves the lives of hundreds of people. Isabelle is a war hero and the novel's title is a reference to her codename, "The Nightingale." Toward the end of the novel, the Nazis discover Isabelle's resistance efforts and send her to a Nazi labor camp. There, she experiences brutal torture that breaks her physical body—but never her spirit. Isabelle survives the camp just long enough to reunite with her lover, Gaëtan, and with Vianne. She dies at the novel's end. - Character: Gaëtan. Description: Gaëtan is a French resistance fighter as well as Isabelle's lover. He is a strong and brave man who does everything he can to thwart the Nazis. At first, Gaëtan actively avoids a relationship with Isabelle; he loves her but knows that one of them could likely die in the war and doesn't want to make life harder than it already is. However, eventually he gives in to his feelings, and he and Isabelle start a passionate relationship. Shortly after, their resistance efforts force them apart, and they do not see each other for a long time. After the war is over, Gaëtan manages to return to Carriveau to reunite with Isabelle one last time before her death. - Character: Julien Rossignol. Description: Julien Rossignol is the father of Vianne Mauriac and Isabelle Rossignol. He is a World War I veteran who came back from the war a changed man. After the death of his wife, Julien essentially became estranged from his daughters. During World War II, Julien is a key member of the French resistance. He provides fake papers for those who need them and writes anti-German pamphlets. In the climax of the novel, he claims that he is the Nightingale, effectively sacrificing himself to spare Isabelle's life. - Character: Rachel de Champlain. Description: Rachel de Champlain is the wife of Marc de Champlain and the mother of Ari and Sarah de Champlain. She is also Vianne Mauriac's best friend. Rachel is a loving mother and a good friend. However, because she is Jewish, she is persecuted by the Nazis. She is fired from her job and eventually sent to a labor camp for being Jewish. After the war, Vianne learns that Rachel died while in the labor camp. - Character: Captain Beck. Description: Captain Beck is a Nazi soldier who is assigned to stay in Vianne's home. Although he is polite, Vianne doesn't know whether to trust him. Eventually, Vianne realizes that he is a good man who is simply on the wrong side of the war. He does not approve of the actions of his superiors and is doing his best to get through the war. Vianne kills him because he is about to discover a fighter pilot Isabelle has hidden in her barn. In the aftermath of his death, she struggles to come to terms with her role in his death. - Character: Julien Mauriac. Description: Julien Mauriac is the son of Vianne Mauriac and Von Richter. However, Julien thinks that his father is Antoine Mauriac because Vianne refused to tell him otherwise. Julien is completely unaware of what his mother went through during World War II until the end of the novel when he attends an event with her in Paris. - Character: Ari de Champlain. Description: Ari de Champlain is the son of Rachel and Marc de Champlain. After Rachel gets sent to a concentration camp, Vianne takes him in and raises him as her own son. At the end of the war, Ari is sent to America to live with his relatives. Decades later, he reunites with Vianne in Paris and expresses his gratitude. - Theme: Morality and Impossible Choices. Description: The Nightingale takes place during World War II, when the horrific circumstances of war caused many people to betray their moral sensibilities. Vianne Mauriac, one the two novel's two protagonists, is a mother who must constantly sacrifice her sense of what is right in order to protect her daughter, Sophie, and her husband, Antoine. Toward the beginning of the novel, after German soldiers take control of her town, Vianne is forced to allow a Nazi, Beck, to stay in her home, knowing that to resist would put her life or Sophie's life in danger. One day, Beck asks Vianne to make a list of all of the Jewish people who work at her school. Vianne doesn't want to do what Beck says, but he promises her that he will send a care package to Antoine, who is trapped in a POW camp. Ultimately, Vianne complies with Beck's demands to protect her family, even though she knows the Nazis will likely use the list for sinister purposes. Later in the novel, Vianne's choices become even more complicated as she witnesses the horrors of the Nazi regime firsthand and realizes what they are capable of. One day, she finds her sister Isabelle hiding a British pilot on her property. Vianne knows that if Beck finds the pilot, then she will be killed along with Sophie and Isabelle. Unfortunately for Vianne, Beck is specifically charged with searching for the pilot. When he later realizes that Vianne is hiding something, he searches the premises for the pilot. Beck is nearly successful; the only thing that stops him from finding the pilot is Vianne smashing the back of his heading with a shovel and killing him. In a split second, Vianne must make the impossible choice to kill Beck to prevent him from discovering the pilot and to protect herself and her family. Further complicating Vianne's choice is the fact that she actually liked Beck and thought he was a good man, despite his position in the Nazi party. Throughout the novel, Vianne's need to protect herself and her family pushes her to act in ways that harm others. In highlighting the impossible choices Vianne's circumstances repeatedly force her to make, The Nightingale suggests that war often forces people to compromise their personal morals in order to protect themselves and their loved ones. - Theme: Antisemitism and Active Resistance. Description: The Nightingale is a novel set during World War II. A central feature of World War II was the Holocaust, a genocide that the Nazi regime carried out against Jewish people. In order to justify their actions, Hitler's Nazi party spread antisemitism to demonize the millions of Jewish people whom they ruthlessly slaughtered. At the start of the novel, characters like Vianne are unwilling to acknowledge the problem that is growing all around them. Vianne sees antisemitic posters around town and even writes down a list of Jewish people who teach at her school for Beck, a German soldier. At this point, there are not overt signs of hostility directed toward Jewish people, so Vianne does not think it necessary to resist. However, as conditions worsen, Jewish people, including Vianne's best friend Rachel, are the first ones to experience direct persecution. Toward the end of the novel, the Nazis gather all of the Jewish people throughout France and send them to labor camps in Germany. It is only after Vianne witnesses a Nazi shoot Sarah, Rachel's daughter, and watches Rachel herself get sent away on a train that she realizes the cost of her refusal to act. Now aware of the indescribable evils of which the Nazis are capable, Vianne makes it her mission to save as many Jewish children as possible from Nazi persecution. Although she puts her life and Sophie's life in danger, Vianne manages to save 19 Jewish children. Even though most people would consider her a war hero, the past haunts Vianne; she feels she could have done more to stand up to the Nazis like Isabelle did. Here, the novel becomes a parable about the virtues of resistance in the face of pure evil. Although remaining inactive to protect oneself and one's family is understandable, Vianne's lingering guilt suggests that only active resistance can provide a clear conscience. - Theme: Gender Roles. Description: The Nightingale focuses on the role women played in the resistance effort during World War II. One of the novel's protagonists, Isabelle, is a young woman who is frustrated with the role society has given to her because of her gender. She is constantly told to act like a lady, but she has no interest in doing so. When the war begins, she immediately wants to run off and fight with the men. Her hero is Edith Cavell, a female war hero from World War I. Knowing that she will never fight on the front lines, however, Isabelle finds other ways to fight back. Eventually, she becomes involved with a resistance group that is attempting to return downed British fighter pilots to England. Over the course of war, Isabelle saves the lives of dozens of pilots by carrying out escort missions. Much of her success comes from the fact that she is a woman. Her appearance makes her inconspicuous to the Nazi soldiers and allows her to carry out missions right under their noses without ever being caught. In sharp opposition to Isabelle is her sister, Vianne. Before the war, Vianne occupied the traditional feminine role of taking care of her child, Sophie, and her home. For the most part, this role does not change when the war begins. Vianne still spends most of her time cooking, gardening, and taking care of Sophie. After the war begins and the Nazis seize control of Vianne's town, however, her role becomes more complicated. Because she doesn't want her best friend Rachel's son, Ari, to be sent to a death camp (Rachel and her family are Jewish), she adopts him and pretends to be his mother. Shortly afterward, Vianne begins helping a number of Jewish children to escape persecution by joining forces with the church. Throughout the war, Vianne retains her traditionally feminine sensibilities and acts as a mother to many children who desperately need one, yet at the same time, the bravery she exhibits as she risks her life to rescue Jewish children challenges sexist assumptions that women ought not to participate in the war effort. Vianne and Isabelle manage to undermine the Nazis not in spite of their gender but because of it. In its positive portrayal of femininity, the novel challenges traditional gender roles and flawed assumptions about women's capacity to assist in war efforts. - Theme: Love and War. Description: Love and war are a timeless pairing, precisely because of the complexity that one engenders in the other. In The Nightingale, both main characters are in love. Isabelle loves her fellow resistance fighter, Gaëtan, and Vianne loves her husband, Antoine. However, the war complicates both romances. For the majority of the novel, Antoine is in a prisoner-of-war camp, meaning that Vianne can only love him from afar. Nonetheless, Vianne loves Antoine and spends much of her free time thinking of him. The fact that he is alive provides Vianne with hope; no matter what the Nazis do, she can look forward to Antoine coming home one day. Meanwhile, Isabelle is in near constant contact with Gaëtan. The two of them regularly partake in romantic rendezvous and spend each night together like it is their last. Because Isabelle and Gaëtan are both resistance fighters, they know that their lives could end at any moment. Yet in the moments they are together, the war is temporarily put on pause, and they effectively use each other and their romance to escape the horrors that war has brought to their everyday lives. Although love is far from a remedy for war in The Nightingale, the novel shows how love can inspire hope and alleviate suffering during war and in other times of hardship. - Climax: The Nazis capture Isabelle and torture her for information about The Nightingale. To save his daughter, Julien sacrifices himself by turning himself in and claiming he is The Nightingale. As a result, Julien is executed, and Isabelle is sent to a concentration camp. - Summary: The Nightingale begins with an unnamed narrator looking at some old objects in her attic that date back to World War II. It is currently 1995, and the narrator lives on the Oregon Coast. Her son, Julien Mauriac, asks her about the objects, but she is evasive. Suddenly, the novel goes back in time to August 1939. The setting is Carriveau, France, a provincial town, where Vianne Mauriac lives with her husband, Antoine, and her daughter, Sophie. Although they live an idyllic life, Vianne and Antoine are worried because war is on the horizon. Vianne's father, Julien Rossignol, fought in World War I, and she knows what war can do to the human soul. Vianne is now estranged from her father because of how the war impacted him. Eventually, Antoine is called to fight, and Vianne is left home alone with Sophie. Meanwhile, Vianne's younger sister, Isabelle, gets kicked out of her third school and is forced to return to Paris to live with her father. On the train to Paris, Isabelle is nervous, fearing that her father might not accept her. Although Julien takes Isabelle in temporarily, it is clear that he does not want to. A few months later, the Nazis invade France. Before they can make it to Paris, Julien sends Isabelle out of the city to go live with Vianne. Although Isabelle protests, she does as she is told. Isabelle's journey to Carriveau is perilous. Many people are fleeing Paris, and she is forced to walk most of the way on foot. On the way, she meets a handsome young man named Gaëtan who has just been released from jail. Gaëtan implies that he was jailed because he is a communist rebel. Isabelle immediately falls in love with Gaëtan, and they travel together to Carriveau. Although Gaëtan promises to take Isabelle with him to join the resistance after they stop in Carriveau, he instead leaves Isabelle behind with a note that says, "You are not ready." Although Vianne is happy to see her sister safe, their relationship is strained. Vianne feels guilty that she was not there for Isabelle after their mother died and their father virtually abandoned them. Vianne's life becomes even more complicated when a German soldier, Beck, is assigned to live in her home. Isabelle treats Beck—and any other German she meets—rudely, and Vianne worries that she will put Sophie's life in danger. Isabelle continues her rebellious streak by joining the local resistance. In the night, she secretly passes out flyers that contain anti-German sentiments. Eventually the resistance asks her to travel to Paris to deliver a message and act as a point of contact. Before departing, she lies to Vianne and says she is leaving to be with a boy. Vianne believes Isabelle and chastises her for her seemingly irresponsible actions. Once in Paris, Isabelle convinces Julien to let her live with him. Vianne's life with Beck is mostly comfortable. Although he is a German soldier, Vianne thinks that he is a good man. He treats her and Sophie with kindness and respects their property. Additionally, he does Vianne a favor and looks into Antoine's status. As it turns out, Antoine is in a POW camp and isn't allowed to come home. One day, Beck asks Vianne to write down the names of all the Jewish people who teach at Vianne's school. Vianne is hesitant but ultimately does what Beck asks because he promises to send Julien a care package. The list gets Vianne's best friend, Rachel, fired from her job for the crime of being Jewish. Vianne angrily confronts Beck who tells her that he did not know what the list would be used for and that he was just following orders. Vianne is unsure whether to believe him. For some time, Vianne has a difficult time trusting Beck. However, one day, while Vianne is with Rachel, Beck shows up and tells them to make sure that Rachel cannot be found the following day. His implication is that something will happen to her because she is Jewish. Vianne trusts Beck. That night, she attempts to take Rachel and her children, Sarah and Ari, to the Free Zone of France. However, while standing in line to pass through a checkpoint, a Nazi soldier begins firing into a crowd of people, and a stray bullet hits Sarah, killing her. Vianne, Rachel, and Ari flee back to Vianne's home. Vianne recovers Sarah's body and buries her while Rachel and Ari hide in a secret space Isabelle created below Vianne's barn. The next day, however, authorities show up and arrest Rachel and put her on a train headed for Germany. Rachel leaves Ari with Vianne. When Vianne returns home with Ari, Beck informs her that soon Ari won't be safe either, but he promises to do what he can to help. Eventually, Beck manages to secure identity papers for Ari that say his name is Daniel. From that point on, Vianne raises Ari like her own son. In Paris, Isabelle becomes a key figure in the resistance. She also learns that her father has been acting as a member of the resistance all along. In fact, he wrote the pamphlets she delivered all over Carriveau. Not long after arriving in Paris, Isabelle spearheads an effort to transport British fighter pilots across the Pyrenees and into Spain. Over time, she rescues dozens of pilots this way. Along the way, she picks up the code name "The Nightingale" and becomes a notorious figure among the Nazis. Additionally, she reunites with Gaëtan, who is also part of the Paris resistance. One day, Isabelle returns to Carriveau for a resistance meeting. On her way to the meeting, she sees a fighter pilot go down and quickly moves to rescue him. She takes the pilot to Vianne's barn and hides him in the secret space. Beck is put in charge of finding the down pilot and is frustrated when he cannot. While Beck is away, Vianne sees the barn door open, goes to investigate, and finds Isabelle and the fighter pilot. Vianne chastises Isabelle for putting her life and Sophie's life in danger once again. Isabelle apologizes and promises to leave as soon as possible. Just then, Beck comes home and starts searching the property. Just before he checks the space in the barn, Vianne hits Beck in the head with a shovel, killing him. As she does so, Beck's gun goes off and a bullet strikes Isabelle, wounding her. Immediately after, Gaëtan shows up to help. He promises Vianne to get rid of the bodies and help Isabelle. Gaëtan gets rid of the bodies and nurses Isabelle back to health. While acting as Isabelle's nurse, Gaëtan and Isabelle fall in love and begin a sexual relationship. However, after a few weeks of romance, Gaëtan goes to join a group engaging in guerilla warfare, and Isabelle returns to escorting pilots. Not long after, Nazis capture and torture Isabelle. They want to know the identity of "The Nightingale," which Isabelle refuses to give up. Julien, wanting to protect his daughter, turns himself in to the Nazis, claiming that he's the Nightingale. The Nazis execute Julien in front of Isabelle and then ship her to a labor camp in Germany. Meanwhile, a new Nazi, Von Richter, moves into Vianne's house. Von Richter is a savage who is cruel to Vianne and her children. Vianne increasingly worries for her family's safety. One day, Vianne sees a Jewish woman being shepherded onto a train with her child. The woman gives Vianne her child and asks her to save him. Vianne takes the child to her local church leader, whom she trusts, and begs her for help. Mother Superior, the church leader, promises to help Vianne, and together they secure identity papers for the child and keep him safe. At this point, Vianne becomes an active part of the resistance and starts helping numerous children in similar ways, all with help of Mother Superior. One day, Vianne comes home and finds Von Richter with a horrifying smile on his face. He tells Vianne that he knows Ari's true identity and asks her what she will do to keep that information from getting out. Vianne tells him that she will do anything, and so he rapes her. Von Richter repeatedly rapes and abuses Vianne; months later, she discovers she is pregnant. Not long after, the German troops pull out of Carriveau, and Antoine returns home having escaped from the camp he was held in. Vianne decides to have sex with Antoine right away and pretend that the child is his. While Vianne is dealing with Von Richter and her pregnancy, Isabelle struggles to survive in a labor camp. She manages to survive until American troops come and liberate the camp. She returns home to Carriveau a sick and broken woman. Vianne cares for Isabelle the best she can, although it is clear that Isabelle will soon die. Before Isabelle dies, Gaëtan returns to Carriveau and sees her one last time. Isabelle dies in his arms. The novel ends with the unnamed narrator from the beginning attending a reunion in Paris. The novel reveals that the narrator is Vianne, and she is attending the reunion on behalf of Isabelle, and many fighter pilots who Isabelle saved as well as their families attend the event. Gaëtan is also there, as is Ari, who moved to America to live with his relatives after the war. Vianne attends the conference with her son, Julien (who is actually Von Richter's child). Although Julien learns a lot about his mother's past at the conference, Vianne never tells him who his real father is—that is one secret she wants to keep hidden.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Nose - Point of view: Third-person limited - Setting: St. Petersburg, Russia - Character: Kovalev. Description: The story's protagonist. After Kovalev's nose disappears without explanation, he spends two weeks struggling to confront, locate, and reattach the nose. Despite being the story's protagonist, Kovalev is wholly unlikeable: from beginning to the end, Kovalev is cruel and pretentious. He's rude to his barber, Ivan Yakovlevich, castrating the man for his smelly hands. He's mean, laughing at the disfigured faces of beggar women. He's also devious, frequently lying about his rank to get women to sleep with him. In beefing up his credentials from collegiate accessor to major, Kovalev also reveals himself to be incredibly pompous and self-conscious. The closest thing to an act of kindness Kovalev commits in the story is giving the police officer who returns his nose a bit of cash. Even then, Kovalev hesitates to fork over the meager sum to the financially unfortunate officer. What's more, Kovalev's story arch doesn't produce the slightest bit of change in his character. In the end, he appears to have learned nothing from the story's events. After the nose—symbolizing his particularly toxic brand of masculinity—returns to his face, Kovalev returns to his old ways, harassing women, deeming himself better than other men, and deceitfully working his way up the ladder of Russian society. - Character: Ivan Yakovlevich. Description: Drunk barber Ivan Yakovlevich, Praskovya Osipovna's husband, is the central character in the first of the story's three sections. In this section, he finds and attempts to dispose of Kovalev's nose, which inexplicably appeared in the barber's breakfast. The narrator introduces Yakovlevich as a man who has lost his name in two ways: figuratively from poverty and literally as his name faded from the rundown sign outside his barbershop. In this vein, Ivan Yakovlevich represents the working-class men in Russia who fail to obtain any position in the Table of Ranks, Russia's social hierarchy. He thus sits below men like Kovalev and the police officers. Ivan Yakovlevich's poor conditions also reflect on his outward appearance: his coat is in poor shape, and his hands are filthy. Despite his low standing in Russian society, though, Ivan Yakovlevich demonstrates an odd reverence for elite men, and particularly the sumptuous clothes they wear. In particular, he admires the police in uniform, even as he imagines his arrest. His attunement to clothing points to the story's overarching idea that clothing in the world of the novel is a kind of visual language that reflects one's status. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator of "The Nose," who appears to be a Russian citizen, referring to St. Petersburg as "the northern capital of our vast country." Employing a reportorial style, the narrator details the dates and particulars about the setting, as well as critical facts about the story's politics and characters. For instance, when introducing Kovalev, the narrator details both Kovalev's sexual proclivities and, more generally, describes the various means of obtaining the rank of a collegiate assessor. The contrast of the story's comedic occurrences and the narrator's serious tone embeds a tinge of irony within the storytelling. The serious tone also allows the narrator to slip in ironic praise for Russian society. For instance, in the middle of detailing the ridiculous obsession with rank, the narrator cheekily mentions the goodness of Russian culture. In the conclusion, the narrator speaks frankly to one of the story's key ideas: that everyday life is infused with the weird and the absurd, and that not all things have an explanation. - Character: The Newspaper Clerk. Description: The clerk at the local newspaper office. When Kovalev attempts to place an advertisement for his runaway nose, the newspaper clerk denies Kovalev's request. The clerk at first fears that Kovalev's situation is a joke intended to make him look foolish, but he sticks by his decision even after Kovalev shows his face and proves that he is, in fact, missing a nose. - Character: Podtochina. Description: Podtochina is the mother to a young sexual conquest of Kovalev. After struggling to come up with a rational explanation for his missing nose, Kovalev blames Podtochina, wrongly accusing her of using witchcraft as revenge for his mistreatment of her daughter (he toys with her but refuses to marry her). In the final section, she appears in passing as Kovalev likens Podtochina and her daughter to animals, highlighting how little he respects women. - Character: The Doctor. Description: The doctor who lives in the same building as Kovalev. Described as a wealthy man with meticulous grooming habits, a manly mustache, and the best apartment in the building, the doctor appears to be of higher rank than Kovalev. Indeed, doctors typically held higher positions than collegiate accessors in the Table of Ranks, Russia's system for governing society. During his brief appearance, the doctor yanks on Kovalev's face, indicating Kovalev's newfound submission without his nose—a symbol of his masculinity. The doctor provides little help and even advises Kovalev to live without the nose, gesturing to the idea that some events are so absurd that they resist all explanation. - Character: The Police Officer. Description: The police officer appears towards the end of the first and second sections of the story. In his first appearance, he apprehends drunk barber Ivan Yakovlevich for acting suspiciously. When he later appears with Kovalev's lifeless nose, readers can intuit that the encounter with Ivan Yakovlevich somehow led the officer to capture Kovalev's nose. As part of the Table of Ranks (Russia's system governing society), the officer sits above Ivan Yakovlevich (who holds no rank) and below Kovalev (a collegiate assessor). Readers get the sense that the police officer is of lower rank than Kovalev when the officer describes his financial hardship. - Character: The Police Commissioner. Description: A senior rank policeman who denies Kovalev's request for assistance locating the nose. In doing so, the police commissioner deeply offends Kovalev, telling him that a man of his rank is just the type to lose their nose while up to no good. The commissioner's dismissive attitude towards Kovalev indicates that he holds a higher status (indeed, commissioners held a higher rank than colligate accessors within the Table of Ranks, Russia's system governing society during the time the story is set). - Character: Praskovya Osipovna. Description: Ivan Yakovlevich's wife. The narrator describes her as "respectable," suggesting that her marriage to Ivan Yakovlevich degraded her status in society. Her attitude towards her husband reveals general frustration on his drunken state: when Ivan Yakovlevich finds the nose, Praskovya Osipovna lashes out in anger, threatening to call the police and accusing her husband of drunkenly cutting off the nose. - Theme: Fashion, Appearances, and Status. Description: "The Nose" follows a man named Collegiate Assessor Kovalev as he inexplicably loses—and tries to get back—his nose. In the time between detaching and reattaching, the nose himself has an adventure: dressing and acting like a gentleman of higher rank than his owner. Set in status-obsessed St. Petersburg during a time of widespread economic disparity, Gogol embeds a scratching critique of society within the narrator's fashion-based descriptions of the story's three principal characters: Kovalev, Yakovlevich, and the titular nose. As the characters in the story rely on sartorial choices as a type of language to communicate social position, Gogol implies that this behavior shows how shallow the characters are: to a fault, they are all focused on outward appearances, not the persons underneath. Like the age-old adage "dress for the job you want, not the job you have," Yakovlevich's own attire—plus his observations of other peoples' outfits—show that he aspires to be accepted by the upper crust of society and be perceived as a man of status and wealth, even though he has neither in reality. To eat breakfast in his own home, Yakovlevich pairs a dressy "tailcoat" with his "underclothes" for the "sake of propriety." Presumably the only bit of formal wear Yakovlevich can afford is the tailcoat, marking his outfit as both comic and tragic. While Yakovlevich is perhaps not doing the best job dressing like a true upper-class man, his breakfast outfit shows that he deeply admires the elite and longs to emulate them, even if he doesn't actually enjoy the riches and social rank that they do. At breakfast, Yakovlevich finds a detached, lifeless nose in his breakfast, which he immediately recognizes as belonging to a man named Kovalev. To avoid any trouble with Kovalev, a man of a higher class than himself, Yakovlevich decides to dump the nose in the river. As Yakovlevich walks the napkin-wrapped nose to the river, he fears the patrolling officers. But, even as he fearfully imagines the police taking him in, his thoughts turn to the stately uniforms that the officers wear: "He could already picture the scarlet collar, beautifully embroidered with silver, the sword . . . and he trembled all over." Yakovlevich's admiration for the officer uniforms betrays a reverence for the power and status they hold in society. His "tremb[ling]" suggests that he finds this power awe-inspiring, fearsome, and perhaps even rousing. While Yakovlevich is repeatedly overcome with longing to be an upper-class man, the narrator reminds the reader through another fashion-based description that in reality, Yakovlevich is simply not part of the elite. The narrator provides more details Yakovlevich's coat, noting that it is "piebald […] black, but all dappled with brownish-yellow and gray spots. In place of three buttons there hung only threads." Through this sartorial description, the narrator presents Yakovlevich as representative of his low class—"like every decent Russian artisan, a terrible drunkard"—emphasizing that clothing can be used as a type of language to denote status, or lack thereof. Although he's of a higher class than Yakovlevich, Kovalev longs for people to perceive him as more elite than he really is and uses his clothing and general appearance to do so. The narrator reveals that Kovalev took the short, shady route to his current rank of collegiate assessor, and that Kovalev "could not forget it for a moment." This establishes Kovalev as a man of lower status than he would like, setting up for the ways in which he tries to signal a higher class through his appearance. To compensate, Kovalev dresses immaculately: "The collar of his shirt front was always extremely clean and starched." He also uses his appearance more generally to signal that he is a proper, sophisticated man: "His side-whiskers were of the sort that can still be seen on provincial and regional surveyors, architects, and regimental doctors." Of course, Kovalev is none of these things, but he attempts to indicate through his facial hair that he belongs among this segment of the elite. Kovalev even goes as far as to pass himself off as a major, which is higher than his actual rank. He attempts explicitly to do so through clothes, overcompensating with a bloated combination of "seals, of carnelian, with crests." Once again, clothing is a visual language that communicates status and power—even if the person in question doesn't truly hold those things. In the second section of the story, the nose appears as a character in his own right. But not just as any man: the nose appears as a gentleman of even higher rank than Kovalev. The nose's ability to play the status game through the clothes it wears—not to mention the fact that the nose is, indeed, a nose—exposes the absurdity of St. Petersburg society's preoccupation with appearances. In a ridiculous turn of events, the nose passes as a "gentleman in a uniform." He travels around in a fancy carriage, donning a "gold-embroidered uniform with a big standing collar" with a pair of "kidskin trousers" and a "plumed hat" which together signal the "rank of state councilor." Like Kovalev and Yakovlevich, the nose attempts to propel himself into a higher class through his sumptuous clothes. Later, lifeless and unclothed, the nose is more akin to a piece of "wood" than a person. Through the ridiculous character of the nose, Gogol deepens the idea that the story's characters are so caught up in superficial appearances that they become blind to the people beneath the fancy clothes—like, for example, the fact that one such person was a nose. That the nose can pass as an elite member of society without a body indicates that the person wearing the clothes is inconsequential to the performance of a gentleman. Instead, it is the outward signal of wealth and power through fashion that counts. In this way, Gogol implies that in this society, being elite has little to do with actually holding any power, and that this reality is just as absurd as a nose strutting around town in a big feathered hat. - Theme: Absurdity, Magic, and Reality. Description: In "The Nose," readers follow Collegiate Assessor Kovalev as he wakes up one day without a nose and later stumbles upon his missing organ sauntering around town like a well-to-do gentleman. This strange tale predates magical realism but fits right in with the genre—as is typical of other works of magical realism, magic occurs in this story within a realistic setting, among real-seeming people, and without any discernable reason, making it all the more jarring and unbelievable. Through the magic, absurdity, and resulting comedy that pepper the pages of his otherwise commonplace story, Nikolai Gogol makes a statement that real life is also full of the absurd and the unexpected, and that not everything in life needs—or even has—an explanation. Even though the story centers around the loss and rediscovery of Kovalev's nose—and thus readers might anticipate some grand reveal at the end of the story as to why this all happened—the story provides no logic or reasoning to explain the nose's disappearance and subsequent reappearance. For instance, when the nose randomly appears in Ivan Yakovlevich's breakfast, readers never find out why or how it got there. As he digs around in his breakfast, Yakovlevich struggles to process the strange event in a meaningful way: "Ivan Yakovlevich poked [the bread] cautiously with his knife and felt with his finger. 'Firm!' he said to himself. 'What could it be?' He stuck in his fingers and pulled out—a nose!" The scene is one of pure bewilderment and resists any kind of explanation. Meanwhile, Kovalev's discovery of his lack of a nose is just as jarring. When he first wakes up, he follows his idiosyncratic morning routine of making a "brr…" noise "with his lips—something he always did on waking up, though he himself was unable to explain the reason for it." Right away, this sets up the idea that some events are so peculiar that there is no explanation for them. Eventually, Kovalev peers into the mirror and discovers his missing nose: "He began feeling with his hand to find out if he might be asleep, but it seemed he was not. The collegiate assessor Kovalev jumped out of bed, shook himself: no nose!" Kovalev's bewildered reaction reveals that this event also has no rhyme or reason underpinning it: he simply no longer has a nose. Likewise, near the end of the story when the police officer returns the nose to Kovalev, the officer fails to explain how he was able to apprehend the nose. Instead, he describes the capture as only "a strange chance," reinforcing the idea that this event—like other bizarre happenings outside of the pages of the story—resists explanation and reason. In the face of these odd events, Yakovlevich and Kovalev both struggle to make sense of how such a bizarre occurrence could have possibly taken place in "real" life. Upon finding the nose nestled in a loaf of bread, Yakovlevich "thought and thought and did not know what to think." His wife, Praskovya Osipova, immediately tries to fill in the gaps of this strange event with one almost-reasonable explanation: her alcoholic husband pulled or cut off the nose when giving Kovalev a trim the previous day. The two devolve into what appears to be a usual argument, with Osipova dragging her husband for his drunkenness. The irony here is that although the inciting incident is extraordinary, the ensuing argument is typical, pointing again to the story's overarching claim that strange, inexplicable things often play out against the backdrop of everyday life. Meanwhile, for most of the story, noseless and confused, Kovalev continuously questions his reality: "I must be dreaming, or just imagining it; maybe, by mistake somehow, instead of water I drank the vodka." In a moment of slapstick comedy, "the major pinched himself so painfully that he cried out" in an attempt to make sense of events. The sudden disappearance of Kovalev's nose is so wildly absurd that he is left grasping for possible explanations, and the only two he can come up with are that he is dreaming or drunk, neither of which are actually the case. As Kovalev is a realistic, run-of-the-mill character—emotional, proud, flawed, self-conscious—the story emphasizes how the weird and the inexplicable can happen to anyone at any time, even outside the confines of the story. Adding to the story's footing in reality, all these fictional events occur within the real city of St. Petersburg, Russia, allowing the story's absurd elements to build off the absurdism of everyday life. At the beginning of the story, the narrator opens with this description of the setting and events: "an extraordinarily strange incident occurred in St. Petersburg." With a real-life town as the story's backdrop, the story highlights that the strange and the inexplicable abound anywhere and everywhere. Along these lines, the plot unspools among very ordinary places within the otherwise-ordinary city: a barber shop, cafes, city streets, apartments, and a newspaper office. At the story's conclusion, the narrator still fails to find a reasonable answer for how or why the story's events unfolded the way they did. In utter bewilderment, the narrator exclaims, "Such was the story that occurred in the northern capital of our vast country!" In using the possessive "our" in "our vast country," and noting that these bizarre events happened in a well-known place—"the northern capital"—the narrator plays into the idea that the real-world of the reader is brimming with the absurd, and that many things in life resist an explanation. Likewise, the narrator closes the story declaring, "Say what you like, but such incidents do happen in the world—rarely, but they do happen." With this, the narrator—and, by extension, Gogol—is suggesting that the real world, outside of the pages of "The Nose" is also infused with absurdity. - Theme: Insecurity, Masculinity, and Identity. Description: In the story, Kovalev's nose, disembodied and passing as a person of higher rank than himself, leaves both Kovalev's face and sense of self exposed. Prior to this loss, it is clear that Kovalev's own sense of masculinity hinges on his ability to manipulate and dominate over women and ingratiate himself with other powerful men. However, without his nose—symbolic of his masculinity—Kovalev is suddenly and uncharacteristically vulnerable, submissive to other men, and even leaves women alone. As soon as he gets his nose back, though, his behavior reverts. That the missing nose so swiftly robs him of this ability to perform his toxic masculine identity suggests not only that Kovalev's masculinity is fragile, but also that he performs a hypermasculine identity as a means to cover up his many insecurities. From the outset, the narrator describes Kovalev as a man driven by a deep sense of inferiority and insecurity. Specifically, the narrator details two paths to the title of collegiate assessor: earning multiple degrees or through the bribery-laden (and therefore less respected) Caucasus. Kovalev earned his rank through the Caucasus and, in doing so, carries less social currency than his college-educated peers. To compensate, Kovalev puffs himself up, pretending to be a man of higher rank. Namely, "to give himself more nobility and weight," Kovalev inflates his title to from assessor to major, trying to overcompensate for his insecurity by inflating his civil status. Still, Kovalev "cannot forget it for a moment" that his beginnings were so shady, revealing that his insecurity is all-consuming and setting up for the ways in which he overcompensates for this insecurity. In particular, Kovalev inflates his position to manipulate women, whom he sees as objects. As the narrator puts it, Kovalev exaggerates his title to major specifically to prey on women. Under the guise of a major, he would often approach a woman and, seeing her as nothing but "little thing," give her "secret orders" to meet him in his apartment, presumably so he can sleep with her. That Kovalev commands women—whom he explicitly sees as trivial objects, or "little thing[s]—to sleep with him reveals that his particular brand of masculinity is rooted in dominance over and objectification of women. Similarly, when Kovalev's nose inexplicably disappears, and he considers who might've cast a spell against him, his thoughts immediately turn to Podtochina's daughter, a girl he was sleeping with but wouldn't marry. In thinking of this girl, Kovalev talks about her as if she's a thing: he has been "dallying with her, but kept avoiding a final settlement." Later in the story, he likens Podtochina's daughter to a "hen." By conflating her with livestock—an animal bred for food or other practical purposes—Kovalev robs Podtochina's daughter of her personhood and points again to the way that his masculinity rests on having control over women and objectifying them. Stripped of his nose and his masculinity, though, Kovalev becomes a completely different person. No longer puffed up and domineering, the noseless Kovalev is timid and submissive toward women and high-powered men. This highlights the fact that, up until this point, Kovalev has been engaging in a performance of hypermasculinity in an attempt to blot out his feelings of inferiority and insecurity. In denying Kovalev's request for help getting his nose back, the police commissioner makes a disparaging comment about Kovalev's rank. As Kovalev is ashamed of his roots and attempts to fit in among the elite, this interaction leaves Kovalev feeling further emasculated, as if "a square hit, right between the eyes." Note how the narrator uses combative language to describe the interaction, suggesting that Kovalev's lesser rank leaves him physically vulnerable. The encounter ultimately exposes Kovalev's underlying delicateness, or as the narrator describes him, "an extremely touchy man." A similar encounter occurs later in the story when Kovalev calls for a nearby doctor for help reattaching the organ. The doctor, who lives in the fanciest apartment in Kovalev's building, is an "imposing man, possessed of handsome, pitch-black side-whiskers," representing his strong masculinity. While the story earlier noted that Kovalev specifically trims his whiskers just like the "surveyors, architects, and regimental doctors" do, which would in theory allow him to at least pretend to be this man's equal, Kovalev instead shows signs of intimidation with the doctor, allowing the doctor to handle him aggressively, flick his face, and jerk him around "like a horse." Again, without his nose, Kovalev is unable to stand his ground with other men. Without his mask of masculinity—the titular nose—Kovalev is also suddenly meek toward women. At one point in the story, Kovalev briefly pauses the pursuit of his nose when he sees an enticing young woman and begins to leer at her. However, once he recalls that his nose is gone, Kovalev "jumped back as if burnt." Without his nose, Kovalev feels too emasculated to ogle at the young woman and begins to cry: "in place of a nose he had absolutely nothing, and tears squeezed themselves from his eyes." As a symbol of his masculine identity, Kovalev's nose was like mask that he could use to cover up his insecurities; without that mask, Kovalev is left vulnerable, cowering, and exposed. When Kovalev gets his nose back by the end of the story, he's renewed. Back to his old self, manipulating women, and playing up his status, Kovalev again takes up his performance of masculinity to re-conceal all of the vulnerability and insecurity he laid bare in his noseless state. Puffed up once more, Kovalev even goes so far as to feel superior to men with smaller noses—now a phallic symbol—feeling pleased with himself when he notices a man "who had a nose no bigger than a waistcoat button." Interestingly, the absence of Kovalev's nose is never really upsetting to him because it disrupts his ability to smell or breathe, but rather because loss of his nose—his mask of masculinity—threatens to expose Kovalev as an insecure, simple accessor, making it clear that he's not the big man major he presents. - Climax: The police officer returns Kovalev's nose to him. - Summary: "The Nose" details an "extraordinarily strange incident" of status-obsessed Kovalev and his nose. The story begins with drunken barber Ivan Yakovlevich unexpectedly discovering a nose in his breakfast, which he immediately recognizes as belonging to Kovalev, who is one of his clients. Fearing legal trouble, Ivan Yakovlevich hastily dumps the nose in the river. When a police officer asks him what he's up to, Ivan Yakovlevich nervously tries to sidestep the question, but the officer won't relent. The section ends at this exchange, leaving the subsequent encounter between the police officer and Ivan Yakovlevich a mystery. The second section begins with Kovalev waking up one morning to a smooth patch of skin in place of his nose. Horrified and confused, Kovalev disguises the absence of a nose with handkerchief as he attempts to go about his day. Kovalev soon discovers his nose dressed as a man of high rank entering a church. When Kovalev timidly confronts the nose, the nose responds with annoyance, declaring that he is own person—not Kovalev's nose. When Kovalev distractedly pauses to leer at a young woman, the nose slips away. From there, Kovalev fails to place an ad for his nose in the newspaper when a newspaper clerk declares that the ad would be too strange to print. Then, the police commissioner refuses to assist Kovalev, essentially declaring that whatever happened was probably Kovalev's own fault. Kovalev returns to his apartment, withdrawing from his regular practice of social climbing and pursuing women. That evening, though, the police officer from the first section returns the nose to Kovalev. The nose is no longer a gentleman, but is now lifeless and normal-sized. After failing to reattach the nose himself, Kovalev frantically requests a local doctor's assistance. The doctor ultimately declines to help Kovalev, determining that even though he could reattach it, he thinks Kovalev is better off without the nose. After offering to buy the nose from Kovalev—an offer the protagonist rejects—the doctor leaves. Wondering how such a terrible fate could have possibly befallen him, Kovalev accuses Podtochina, the mother of a young woman he mistreated, of casting a spell on him. He sends Podtochina a letter threatening legal action. When Podtochina's reply indicates that she has no idea what Kovalev is talking about, he rules her out as a probable cause. Meanwhile, rumors of the nose circulate throughout town, and the story of the nose eventually becomes a city-wide myth. With most of the city's population enthralled, some high-status men dismiss talk of the nose as crude gossip. The third section picks up two weeks later. Upon waking up one morning, Kovalev is delighted to find his nose suddenly back on his face, as if it had never left. After a careful shave from Ivan Yakovlevich, Kovalev returns to his old ways, climbing the social ladder and objectifying women. The narrator concedes how the story's bizarre and unexplained elements are difficult to believe. Still, the narrator maintains that the story is true. He ends the story: "such incidents do happen in the world—rarely, but they do happen."

- Genre: Fiction (novella); Parable - Title: The Old Man and the Sea - Point of view: Third-person omniscient, although largely limited to Santiago's point of view - Setting: Late 1940s; a fishing village near Havana, Cuba, and the waters of the Gulf of Mexico - Character: Santiago. Description: The protagonist of the novella, Santiago is an elderly widowed Cuban fisherman whose "luck" seems to have run out—he hasn't caught anything in 84 days. Santiago is humble in his dealings with others, yet takes great pride in his work and himself, and is frustrated and embarrassed by his failures. He views his aging body as a kind of betrayer, and fondly remembers his younger days, when he was exceptionally strong and a successful fisherman. Other than fishing, Santiago's greatest joys are the time he spends with his former apprentice, Manolin, and the time he spends talking about baseball, and, in particular, his favorite player, the "great DiMaggio." Besides Manolin, Santiago considers his only friends to be the sea, the fish, and the stars. In his conquest over the marlin, Santiago exhibits exceptional determination and endurance in the face of physical and psychological pain. Although he loses the marlin to sharks, the entire struggle constitutes a spiritual triumph in which Santiago emerges as a Christ figure. - Character: Manolin. Description: An adolescent Cuban boy who has fished with Santiago since he was a child, Manolin is Santiago's devoted apprentice. He cares for Santiago in his old age, and encourages him in his fishing even though Manolin's parents have forced Manolin to seek out a "luckier" employer. He is Santiago's only human friend, and looks up to Santiago as a mentor and father-figure. Manolin exemplifies traits of fidelity, selflessness and compassion. He accepts hard work happily, never complaining. - Theme: Resistance to Defeat. Description: As a fisherman who has caught nothing for the last 84 days, Santiago is a man fighting against defeat. Yet Santiago never gives in to defeat: he sails further into the ocean than he ever has before in hopes of landing a fish, struggles with the marlin for three days and nights despite immense physical pain and exhaustion, and, after catching the marlin, fights off the sharks even when it's clear that the battle against them is hopeless. Whenever the situation gets particularly difficult and despair threatens to overwhelm Santiago, he turns to a number of tactics to fuel his resistance to defeat: he recalls memories of his youthful strength; he relies on his pride by demanding that he prove himself a worthy role model for Manolin or by comparing himself to his hero Joe DiMaggio; and he prays to God, even though his prayers do nothing to ease his physical suffering. Ultimately, Santiago represents every man's struggle to survive. And just as Santiago's effort to bring the marlin back to land intact is doomed, no man can ever escape death. Yet through Santiago's struggle, Hemingway makes the case that escape from death is not the issue. As Santiago observes near the end of his struggle with the marlin, "a man can be destroyed but not defeated." In other words, victory over the inevitable is not what defines a man. Rather, it a man's struggle against the inevitable, even when he knows it is inevitable, that defines him. And the more difficult the struggle, the more worthy the opponent, the more powerfully a man can prove himself. - Theme: Pride. Description: Pride is often depicted as negative attribute that causes people to reach for too much and, as a result, suffer a terrible fall. After he kills the first shark, Santiago, who knows he killed the marlin "for pride," wonders if the sin of pride was responsible for the shark attack because pride caused him to go out into the ocean beyond the usual boundaries that fishermen observe. Santiago immediately dismisses the idea, however, and the events of The Old Man and the Sea support his conviction that pride is not the cause of his difficulties. In fact, Santiago's pride is portrayed as the single motivating force that spurs him to greatness. It is his pride that pushes him to survive three grueling days at sea, battling the marlin and then the sharks. Yet it is important to recognize that Santiago's pride is of a particular, limited sort. Pride never pushes him to try to be more than he is. For instance, when Manolin tells him, "The best fisherman is you," early in the story, Santiago humbly disagrees. Rather, Santiago takes pride in being exactly what he is, a man and a fisherman, and his struggle can be seen as an effort to be the best man and fisherman that he can be. As he thinks in the middle of his struggle with the marlin, he must kill the marlin to show Manolin "what a man can do and what a man endures." Santiago achieves the crucial balance between pride and humility—that "[humility] was not disgraceful and it carried no true loss of pride." - Theme: Friendship. Description: The friendship between Santiago and Manolin plays a critical part in Santiago's victory over the marlin. In return for Santiago's mentorship and company, Manolin provides physical support to Santiago in the village, bringing him food and clothing and helping him load his skiff. He also provides emotional support, encouraging Santiago throughout his unlucky streak. Although Santiago's "hope and confidence had never gone," when Manolin was present, "they were freshening as when the breeze rises." And once he encounters the marlin, Santiago refuses to accept defeat because he knows Manolin would be disappointed in him. Yet most of the novella takes place when Santiago is alone. Except for Manolin's friendship in the evenings, Santiago is characterized by his isolation. His wife has died, and he lives and fishes alone. Even so, just as he refuses to give in to death, he refuses to give in to loneliness. Santiago finds friends in other creatures. The flying fish are "his principal friends on the ocean," and the marlin, through their shared struggle, becomes his "brother." He calls the stars his "distant friends," and thinks of the ocean as a woman he loves. Santiago talks to himself, talks to his weakened left hand, and imagines Manolin sitting next to him. In the end, these friendships—both real and imagined—prevent Santiago from pitying himself. As a result, he has the support to achieve what seems physically impossible for an old man. - Theme: Youth and Age. Description: The title of the novella, The Old Man and the Sea, suggests the critical thematic role that age plays in the story. The book's two principal characters, Santiago and Manolin, represent the old and the young, and a beautiful harmony develops between them. What one lacks, the other provides. Manolin, for example, has energy and enthusiasm. He finds food and clothing for Santiago, and encourages him despite his bad luck. Santiago, in turn, has wisdom and experience. He tells Manolin stories about baseball and teaches him to fish. Santiago's determination to be a good role model for Manolin is one of his main motivations in battling the marlin for three days—he wants to show Manolin "what a man can do." Santiago's age is also important to the novella because it has made him physically weak. Without this weakness, his triumph would not be so meaningful to him. As Santiago says, he "had seen many [fish] that weighed more than a thousand pounds and had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone" and never as an old man. Santiago finds solace and strength in remembering his youth, which is symbolized by the lions on the beach that he sees in his dreams. He recalls these lions—slow, graceful but fierce creatures—from the perspective of an old man. In doing so, he realizes that he too, although slow, can still be a formidable opponent. - Theme: Man and Nature. Description: Since The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a man's struggle against a marlin, it is tempting to see the novella as depicting man's struggle against nature. In fact, through Santiago, the novella explores man's relationship with nature. He thinks of the flying fish as his friends, and speaks with a warbler to pass the time. The sea is dangerous, with its sharks and potentially treacherous weather, but it also sustains him by providing food in the form of dolphins and shrimp. Finally, Santiago does not just see the marlin as an adversary, he loves it as a brother. In the middle of their struggle, Santiago says to the marlin, "Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who." Santiago's statement shows the depth of his admiration for the marlin and hints at the fundamental law of nature that unites man and animal: all beings must die, must kill or be killed. In this way, man and nature are joined in a circular system, in which death is necessary and fosters new life. - Theme: Christian Allegory. Description: The Old Man and the Sea is full of Christian imagery. Over the course of his struggles at sea, Santiago emerges as a Christ figure. For instance: Santiago's injured hands recall Christ's stigmata (the wounds in his palms); when the sharks attack, Santiago makes a sound like a man being crucified; when Santiago returns to shore he carries his mast up to his shack on his shoulder, just as Christ was forced to bear his own crucifix; and Santiago's final position, resting on his bed, resembles Christ's position on the cross. More importantly, Santiago resembles Christ in that, like Christ, he transforms loss into triumph, faces the inevitability of death without complaint and, in doing so, transcends it. Christ literally is resurrected, while Santiago regains Manolin as an apprentice, providing both the companionship he had lost and the chance to pass his knowledge on to the next generation. - Climax: When Santiago finally harpoons and kills the marlin; when Santiago fights off the final pack of sharks - Summary: On the coast of Cuba near Havana, an old widowed fisherman named Santiago has been unable to catch a fish for 84 days. His apprentice, Manolin, has been forced by his parents to seek another "luckier" employer, although Manolin continues to help Santiago launch and retrieve his boat from the ocean each day. Manolin cares for the aging Santiago, bringing him food and clothing, and in return Santiago tells Manolin stories about baseball legends and his younger days fishing in a boat off of Africa. Every night, Santiago dreams of lions on the beaches of Africa. Early each morning, Santiago walks up the road to Manolin's family's home to wake him up for work. On the morning of the 85th day, Manolin helps Santiago launch his boat into the sea. Santiago rows over the deep well where he has been trying to catch fish for the past week and decides to try his luck farther out. Finally, in the early afternoon, he catches a ten-pound tuna, which he decides will be his meal for the day. Not long afterward, Santiago feels a hard pull on his line and realizes that a huge marlin has caught his hook. Because the marlin is so big, however, Santiago cannot pull it in. The marlin pulls Santiago's skiff farther and farther from land. As the sun goes down, Santiago begins to feel a kind of companionship with the marlin. He pities the fish, even loves it, but is still determined to kill it. He decides to cut all his other lines so that nothing will interfere with his great catch. As the sun comes up on Santiago's second day at sea, the marlin suddenly surges, pulling the line and cutting Santiago's hand. As he nurses his hand, the marlin jumps up out of the water, and Santiago can see the fish is bigger than any marlin he has ever seen, much less caught on his own. He has to hold onto the line with all his might so that the marlin does not break free from the boat. He prays that he will be able to kill the marlin, and wonders what his hero Joe DiMaggio would do if he were in Santiago's situation. As it grows dark on Santiago's second day at sea, he lets out a small line and catches a dolphinfish to eat. He rests for a few hours, but is woken by the marlin jumping frantically. Santiago continues holding the line, although it has been cutting into his hand for some time. The marlin tires and begins circling the boat as Santiago grows weaker from lack of sleep and exhaustion. Finally, Santiago uses all his strength to harpoon and kill the marlin. Santiago ties the marlin to the side of his boat and begins sailing back toward Cuba. During the homeward journey, however—his third day at sea—sharks attack the boat, tearing the flesh from the marlin. Santiago fights desperately, killing or driving off most of the sharks, but eventually the sharks eat all the flesh off the marlin. When Santiago pulls into the harbor, everyone is sleeping, and Santiago struggles to carry his mast back to his shack, leaving the marlin's skeleton still tied to his boat in the harbor. The next day, Manolin finds Santiago asleep in his shack. Manolin is overjoyed to see him but cries when he sees the cuts in Santiago's hands. He brings Santiago coffee, passing the crowd of fisherman who are marveling at the marlin's giant skeleton. When Santiago wakes up, Manolin tells him he doesn't care what his parents say—he's going to start fishing with Santiago again. Meanwhile, as a party of tourists watches the marlin's skeleton and mistakes it for a shark, Santiago drifts back to sleep under Manolin's watchful gaze and dreams of lions.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Old Nurse’s Story - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Northumberland, England - Character: Hester. Description: Hester is the titular "old nurse" who helped raise Miss Rosamond and is now telling Miss Rosamond's children a story from their mother's youth. In Hester's story, Miss Rosamond's mother comes to the village school looking for a nurse for her baby on the way, choosing young Hester to fill the position. When Miss Rosamond's parents die, it is decided that Hester will continue to care for Miss Rosamond, a decision Hester takes no issue with. She is deeply devoted to Miss Rosamond and her deceased mother, and she takes great pride in being a nursemaid. In contrast to Hester's poor parents in Westmorland, Hester now finds herself swept off to the Furnivalls' massive Manor House. At first this dark, gloomy place frightens Hester, but upon meeting Dorothy and James, she and Miss Rosamond feel welcome in their new home. Hester is especially close with Dorothy, who is also from Westmorland. When Hester learns that Miss Grace Furnivall (the lady of Manor House) had a sister, Miss Maude, and sees Maude's portrait, she doesn't understand Dorothy's nervousness regarding the painting. The rest of the staff's denial of the organ music that Hester hears around the house also confuses her. She soon discovers, however, that Manor House is haunted by the ghosts of Miss Maude, her daughter (the little girl), and her father (the old lord). This is because many years ago, after Miss Grace told the old lord about Miss Maude's secret marriage and child, the old lord banished Miss Maude and the little girl into the snow, causing them to die of exposure. When the ghosts lure Miss Rosamond outside in the cold, Hester's devotion to Miss Rosamond deepens. She intercepts a shepherd carrying her home and insists that she carry Miss Rosamond back herself, from then on determined not to leave her side. This resolution allows Hester to repeatedly prevent Miss Rosamond from going with the vengeful little girl's ghost, which ultimately saves her life. Hester's character is thus a foil for the cruel Miss Grace and the old lord, her self-sacrifice and unyielding loyalty contrasting with the Furnivalls' neglect and mistreatment of one another. - Character: Miss Rosamond. Description: Miss Rosamond is the little girl whom Hester, the titular "old nurse," cared for and is now telling a story about. In Hester's story, Miss Rosemond is only four or five when her mother and father die, and she's sent to live with wealthy relatives, the Furnivalls, at Manor House. While Miss Rosamond initially finds Manor House to be a daunting place, her lively spirit and energy bring the place to life. Even Miss Grace Furnivall (the lady of Manor House) and Mrs. Stark (her maid) seem heartened by Miss Rosamond's presence, in spite of their usual coldness. One night when Hester has gone to church, the ghosts of Miss Maude and the little girl vengefully lure Miss Rosamond out into the snow. When Miss Rosamond explains what happened, Hester does not believe her, but Miss Rosamond insists it is the truth. The next time she sees the little girl, Hester is with her and prevents Miss Rosamond from going to her. This throws Miss Rosamond into a fit, furious that Hester will not let her help the little girl, whose cries only she can hear. Even when Hester tries to teach her to pray, all she ever hears is the little girl's wailing. Her concern for the little girl is a testament to her kindness and compassion, virtues that she seems to have learned from Hester, who is unfailingly devoted to Miss Rosamond. Indeed, Hester has to pin her down when all of the ghosts appear at the end of the story, willing to hurt Miss Rosamond if it means keeping her safe from the ghosts. Miss Rosamond survives Manor House thanks to Hester, and she goes on to have the children, who are the audience of Hester's story. - Character: Miss Grace Furnivall. Description: Miss Grace Furnivall is the lady of Manor House and Lord Furnivall's great aunt, making her Miss Rosamond's distant relative. She's about 80 years old when Miss Rosamond and Hester come to live at Manor House. Though Miss Grace seems "hard" and "sad," Miss Rosamond's company seems to bring her joy. In her youth, Miss Grace and her sister, Miss Maude, fell in love with the same man (the foreigner). Their father, the old lord, always praised Miss Maude as being more beautiful than Miss Grace. Both of these points of conflict fueled jealousy and coldness between the sisters, causing Miss Grace to retreat to the west wing of the Manor House with her maid, Mrs. Stark, whom she was always closer to than to her own sister. As the rumor goes, Miss Maude finally revealed to Miss Grace that she secretly married the foreigner. Upon discovering the little girl (Miss Maude and the foreigner's daughter) hidden in the east wing, Miss Grace was blinded by jealousy and hatred and told the old lord about Miss Maude's secrets. She stood by silently as the old lord threw Miss Maude and the little girl out into the snow, where they froze to death. Miss Grace regrets this moment for the rest of her life, especially as her family members' ghosts return to haunt the house. At the end of the story, when the old lord, Miss Maude, and the little girl's ghosts emerge to reenact the night Miss Maude and her daughter died, Miss Grace begs for the ghost of her father to spare the little girl. But she is forced to face the reality that some mistakes can't be fixed, and she retires to her room for the rest of her life, muttering "Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!" Her fate thus serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of pride and of making destructive decisions that can't be "undone." - Character: Miss Maude Furnivall. Description: The eldest daughter of the old lord, Miss Maude Furnivall was "Miss Furnivall" by right and was known to sterner and more beautiful than her younger sister, Miss Grace Furnivall. Miss Maude is dead in the story's present, but Hester learns about her from Dorothy. Determined to triumph over her sister in a race for the same man's love, Miss Maude married the foreigner in secret and gave birth to his daughter (the little girl). Miss Maude loved this girl dearly, and after the foreigner abandoned them, she decided to sneak her daughter into Manor House's east wing without telling Miss Grace and the old lord. However, in her determination to best her sister, Miss Maude revealed that she married the foreigner, and Miss Grace found out about the little girl and told the old lord. Miss Maude's disobedience infuriated the old lord, and he kicked both Miss Maude and the little girl out of the house. They both froze to death and have since returned as ghosts, seeking revenge on those who betrayed and abandoned them by trying to lure Miss Rosamond out into the snow for a similar fate. - Character: The Old Lord. Description: The old lord was Miss Maude Furnivall and Miss Grace Furnivall's father. He is dead in the story's present, but Hester learns about him from Dorothy. The old lord was excessively proud and didn't think any men were worthy of his daughters' hands in marriage. Though he had a reputation for violence and sternness, the old lord also loved music and invited a foreign musician to play at Manor House. The foreigner introduced him to the organ, which the old lord became so engrossed in that he failed to notice the foreigner flirting with both of his daughters. When he discovered Miss Maude's secret marriage to the foreigner and their hidden daughter (the little girl), he drove them from the east wing, striking the little girl with his crutch and leaving them both to die outside in the cold. After this cruelty, the old lord never played the organ again. In the story's present, though, his ghost haunts Manor House, and he comes back to play the destroyed instrument on stormy winter nights, like the one on which he sentenced his daughter and granddaughter to death. - Character: The Little Girl. Description: The little girl was Miss Maude Furnivall and the foreigner's daughter. She died when the old lord discovered her secretly living in the east wing of Manor House and banished Miss Maude and the little girl, causing them to die out in the cold. In the story's present, the little girl is a ghost who haunts Manor House, crying outside in the snow and demanding to be let into the house. At one point in the story, she lures Miss Rosamond to join her out in the cold, but Hester saves Miss Rosamond before she can suffer the same fate as the little girl. Miss Grace Furnivall sees the vengeful ghost as evil—but when the ghosts emerge to reenact the night Miss Maude and the little girl died, Miss Grace begs the old lord to have mercy on the innocent child. - Character: The Foreigner. Description: Many years before the story takes place, the old lord invited the foreign musician to Manor House to share his musical gift. While there, he got the old lord hooked on playing the organ and took advantage of the old lord's distraction to flirt with both Miss Maude Furnivall and Miss Grace Furnivall, returning to Manor House annually for short visits. He married Miss Maude in secret, and they had a daughter (the little girl). However, the foreigner continued to flirt with Miss Grace, claiming it was only to conceal his marriage to Miss Maude. This behavior inspired vicious jealousy between the sisters, and the foreigner grew tired of their hostility and chose to abandon his wife and daughter. - Character: Miss Rosamond's Mother. Description: Miss Rosamond's mother is a dedicated and loving mother who adores her daughter. She first meets Hester when she is still pregnant with Miss Rosamond and is in search of a nursemaid. However, when Miss Rosamond is born, her mother is so attentive that Hester has very little to do. Miss Rosamond's mother is the granddaughter of a Lord Furnivall of Northumberland (not to be confused with her cousin, who is also called Lord Furnivall) and grew up with that family. Because of this, Hester labels Miss Rosamond's mother as "a real born lady." It was rumored that Lord Furnivall loved Miss Rosamond's mother, but she ignored his interest, knowing his father would never approve. Hester finds these rumors doubtful. Miss Rosamond's mother is pregnant with a second child when her husband dies, and this tragedy causes Miss Rosamond's mother to be bedridden. Her second child is stillborn, and she clings to life only long enough to have the baby laid on her chest. On her death bed, Miss Rosamond's mother asks Hester never to leave Miss Rosamond, a promise Hester is happy to make. - Character: Lord Furnivall. Description: Lord Furnivall is Miss Grace Furnivall's great-nephew and Miss Rosamond's mother's cousin. He arrives upon Miss Rosamond's mother's death to handle affairs. He is stern and proud, just like all the Lord Furnivalls before him were known to be. It's rumored that he loved Miss Rosamond's mother, but that she ignored his interest, knowing his father would never approve. Hester doubts these rumors considering his lack of interest in Miss Rosamond. Either way, he never married. Lord Furnivall sends one of his servants to help Hester and Miss Rosamond with the move to Manor House; it is also one of his servants who possesses the only key to the house's east wing. - Character: Mrs. Stark. Description: Mrs. Stark has been Miss Grace Furnivall's maid since her youth, and because of this, she is more like a sister and friend to Miss Grace than a part of the staff. As old women in the story's present, they spend most of their days working on a giant piece of tapestry together. Hester observes that Mrs. Stark looks like she has never loved anyone, except for Miss Grace, whom she also belittles at times. Mrs. Stark tries to keep Miss Grace's regrets about the past at bay, ignoring her comments about a long winter ahead and hurrying Hester out of the room when Miss Grace has a meltdown about Miss Rosamond interacting with the little girl's ghost out in the snow. Many years ago, Mrs. Stark was allegedly seen spying in the east wing before the little girl's existence was revealed to the old lord, which ultimately resulted in Miss Maude and the little girl's deaths. - Character: Dorothy. Description: A member of the staff at Manor House and James's wife, Dorothy is a close friend to Hester and a doting caregiver to Miss Rosamond. Dorothy is from Westmorland like Hester, and James looks down on her for only having ever lived on a farm before coming to Manor House. Dorothy is well-educated in the history of the house and is the one who informs Hester about Miss Maude Furnivall and, eventually, the dark story of Miss Maude and the little girl's deaths. - Character: James. Description: James is a staff member at Manor House and Dorothy's husband. He looks down on Dorothy for having grown up on a farm, while he has spent his entire life living with the Furnivalls. James coldly dismisses Hester's questions regarding the sound of the organ playing in the house, attempting to avoid the unnerving subject. - Character: Agnes. Description: Agnes is James and Dorothy's servant. Hester sees Agnes as below her and only engages with her when she is unable to get information out of Dorothy about the organ. Unlike Dorothy, Agnes knows bits of the rumors but none of the specifics regarding the Furnivalls' family tree and the origins of the ghosts that haunt Manor House. - Theme: Mistakes and Regret. Description: "The Old Nurse's Story" suggests that mistakes tend to lead to more mistakes, and that irreversible choices can result in a lifetime of regret. The Furnivalls, the family that the story centers on, each carry their own irreversible and haunting mistake. The old lord (the family's patriarch) makes the initial mistake of refusing to let his daughters marry, believing that no men are good enough for them. Since his daughters, Miss Maude and Miss Grace, are so limited in their prospects, they both fall in love with the same foreign musician, who proves to be an untrustworthy person. He and Miss Maude secretly marry and have a little girl, but he continues flirting with Miss Grace and eventually abandons both sisters and his daughter. In this way, the old lord makes a mistake that leads Miss Maude to make a mistake of her own: rushing into marriage with a man who quickly betrays her trust. She then puts herself and her daughter at risk when she can't resist competing with her sister, revealing her secret marriage to Miss Grace in order to prove that she won. This is another irreversible mistake, as Miss Grace soon discovers Maude's daughter hidden in the east wing of Manor House (the Furnivalls' home)—and out of jealousy and hurt pride, she reports her findings to the old lord. But Miss Grace comes to regret this action for the rest of her life, as tattling on her sister leads the old lord to make the most devastating mistake of all: sending Miss Maude and the little girl out into the snow as punishment for Miss Maude's lies, causing both of them to freeze to death. The Furnivall family's deadly chain of mistakes reflects the idea that destructive choices tend to snowball and influence others to make their own poor choices. In the story's present, many decades after this night, the old lord, Miss Maude, and the little girl's ghosts continue to haunt Manor House. The ghosts represent the idea that mistakes never fully go away—they continue to haunt the people who make them, just as a ghost haunts a house. And indeed, Miss Grace's betrayal still haunts her in old age: she looks "hard" and "sad," as though still plagued with regret. And in the final scene of the story, as the house's ghosts reenact the night when Miss Maude and her daughter died, Miss Grace cries out for the old lord to spare the child. But at that exact moment, a vision of the young Miss Grace joins the scene and does nothing to help her sister and niece. Despite Miss Grace's regret for betraying her sister, then, she cannot change the past. Instead, it plays out exactly the same. Finally, having been forced to face the mistake that's haunted her for so long, Miss Grace has a nervous breakdown, retiring to her room for the rest of her life and muttering "Alas! alas! what is done in can never be undone in age!" Miss Grace's fate serves as a moral for the reader, entreating them to make careful choices lest they end up like her, destroyed by regret over mistakes that they can't fix. - Theme: Wealth and Happiness. Description: "The Old Nurse's Story" centers on the 18-year-old nursemaid Hester and her charge, Miss Rosamond, whose mother and father die when Miss Rosamond is a young child. After their deaths, Hester is almost entirely responsible for Miss Rosamond, and the girls are sent to live with the Furnivalls (Miss Rosamond's wealthy relatives) at Manor House, their lavish home. As Hester and Miss Rosamond enter the Furnivalls' grand and exclusive world, it becomes apparent that wealth does not guarantee happiness: Manor House looks luxurious, but its residents, Miss Grace Furnivall and her maid Miss Stark, are miserable. Miss Grace is "hard" and "sad," and Mrs. Stark is "cold and grey, and stony as if she had never loved or cared for any one." For all the Furnivalls' wealth, Miss Grace and her maid don't appear to lead happy or fulfilling lives—they merely project an image of success and contentment through the house. Yet this idea of false appearances extends to the home as well: only Manor House's front entrance is manicured and free of weeds, while the other sides of the house are neglected and overgrown. This signals that the aim is not to preserve the home for those who live there, but instead to put forward a certain grand look for those visiting—and perhaps to hide a darker truth. In fact, the entire east wing of the house is closed off, and it's eventually revealed that this is because the ghosts of Miss Grace's dead family members—her father the old lord, her sister Miss Maude, and Miss Maude's little girl—haunt this part of Manor House. Miss Maude and her daughter died many years ago because Miss Grace and Mrs. Stark revealed Miss Maude's secret marriage and child to the old lord, who cast Miss Maude and the little girl out in the snow as punishment, causing them to freeze to death. Rather than admit their dark past and the wrongs they committed, Miss Grace and Miss Stark emotionally and physically compartmentalize this part of their lives, literally shutting away their painful memories in the east wing and projecting an image of luxury and comfort that obscures the truth. But Hester and Miss Rosamond are not fooled by Manor House's outer shell; they feel unwelcome as soon as they step across the threshold. In the end, it is precisely Hester and Miss Rosamond who are able to bring a glimmer of happiness to the home, not by indulging in its wealth but by fostering relationships. What transforms Manor House into a joyful place is the people in it: upon Hester and Miss Rosamond's arrival, James and Dorothy (Manor House staff members) make them feel safe in the looming mansion. And ultimately it is Miss Rosamond, "fluttering" through the house "like a bird," who brings all of the characters happiness. This is precisely why Hester wants to take Miss Rosamond away from Manor House when the ghosts try to lure her out into the snow, knowing that by choosing to remain in that house is to choose an easy lifestyle at the risk of losing Miss Rosamond. In the end, Hester would rather live modestly than put the little girl who she loves (and who is a source of real happiness) at risk. - Theme: Gender. Description: "The Old Nurse's Story" is set in the early 19th century, when women generally had fewer rights and societal privileges than men, and female characters were rarely protagonists or narrators in literature. Yet the story's female author, Elizabeth Gaskell, chooses to keep the male characters almost entirely out of sight throughout this story, which can be read as a subversion of how women at this time (both real and fictional) were often treated. In doing so, Gaskell implies that women's virtues tend to be underappreciated, and that women's lives are attention-worthy. While there are a few significant men in the story that the female narrator, Hester (the titular "old nurse"), tells her former charge Miss Rosamond's children, these characters are mostly relegated to the background. Miss Rosamond's father, for example, is never referred to by name and spends most of his time traveling away from his family. Lord Furnivall and his servant also drop into the story for a short while to facilitate Hester and Miss Rosamond's transfer to Manor House after Miss Rosamond's father and mother die, but they quickly disappear after that. James (a Manor House staff member) also plays a much less significant role in the story than his wife, Dorothy. Finally, the old lord who haunts the Manor House quite literally goes unseen, as a ghost playing the organ. In this way, the men in the story take on the passive role that women more commonly take on in Victorian literature. This reversal of gender stereotypes is meant to highlight how female characters (and indeed real-life women) tend to be brushed off or dominated by men. Hester, for instance, is worried that her listeners are disinterested in aspects of her personal story, reflecting the fact that significant moments in women's lives weren't always considered attention-worthy in this time period. Moreover, the old lord controls his daughters, Miss Grace Furnivall and Miss Maude Furnivall, by forbidding them to marry. But by keeping the focus on the story's female characters, Gaskell is able to elevate these women's experiences and character traits. Miss Rosamond's mother, for one, is affectionate and attentive to both Miss Rosamond and her stillborn child. Hester, too, is devoted and loyal to Miss Rosamond, a child who falls almost entirely into her care only after a few years of knowing the family. Even Miss Maude Furnivall, who at times seems to be a harsh woman, shows strength and selflessness when she defies her father in an attempt to protect her daughter (the little girl). All in all, these women are strong and determined yet flawed characters, and by allowing them to dominate the page, Gaskell encourages the reader to appreciate them in their full form. - Theme: Pride. Description: "The Old Nurse's Story" suggests that unrestrained pride can lead to the loss of what one cares about most. Throughout the story, the Furnivall family's pride spreads from one family member to the next. First, The old lord refuses to allow his daughters to marry because he has deemed them too beautiful to find any man deserving of them and doesn't want anyone but himself to possess them. He's especially proud of his eldest daughter, Miss Maude Furnivall's, beauty, often emphasizing it as being even greater than her sister, Miss Grace Furnivall's. But the old lord's pride backfires in two ways: by inspiring jealousy between the sisters and by forcing them to seek out love in secret. These factors lead to both sisters pursuing the same man, the foreigner, with Miss Maude ultimately marrying him and having a daughter (the little girl) with him in secret. Miss Grace eventually finds out this secret, and her inability to let go of her pride leads her to tell the old lord about the secret marriage and the little girl. The old lord then casts Miss Maude and the little girl out into the snow—his own pride wounded by Miss Maude's disobedience—which effectively sentences them to death. The old lord dies soon after (it's implied that his daughter and granddaughter's deaths hasten his own), and years later, Miss Grace is driven mad by guilt when she sees Miss Maude and the little girl's ghosts. This tragic outcome shows how pride can hurt (or even kill) other people if left unchecked, and how the resultant guilt can eat away at prideful people in turn. Hester's pride also features intermittently in the story. As the narrator of "The Old Nurse's Story," she chooses to include her schoolteacher's praise, along with every other compliment she receives. She is clearly proud to be Miss Rosamond's nursemaid and is flattered that Miss Rosamond's mother trusts her with her child. This pride takes a turn for the worse, though, as she enjoys how people look at her when she thinks she and Miss Rosamond going to live in Northumberland after Miss Rosamond's mother and father die. But it is precisely this pride that confuses her about where they're headed, assuming she's destined for Northumberland only to end up at Manor House, which is run-down and dangerous because of the ghosts who inhabit it and try to lure Miss Rosamond out into the cold. Unlike the Furnivalls, however, Hester is able to keep her pride in check. She is thus able to focus entirely on keeping Miss Rosamond safe, ultimately saving her life by preventing her from succumbing to the same fate as Miss Maude and the little girl. - Climax: The east wing door opens, and the ghosts of Manor House reenact Miss Grace Furnivall's betrayal. - Summary: Hester, the old nurse, is telling Miss Rosamond's children a story from their mother's youth. In the story, Miss Rosamond's mother comes to the village school and chose Hester to be Miss Rosamond's nursemaid. When Miss Rosamond is four or five years old and Hester is eighteen, both of Miss Rosamond's parents get sick and die within a couple weeks of each other. Miss Rosamond's mother comes from an influential family, the Furnivalls, and her cousin, Lord Furnivall, arrives to handle affairs. It is decided that Hester will continue to care for Miss Rosamond at Manor House, the home of Miss Grace Furnivall (Lord Furnivall's great aunt) and Mrs. Stark (her maid). Hester initially finds Manor House to be a cold and gloomy place, neglected out in the wilderness. But by James, Dorothy, and Agnes (members of the staff) welcome her, and she and Miss Rosamond become comfortable there. The house has two wings, and the east wing is locked and off limits. Hester and Dorothy become good friends, and Dorothy shares what she knows about the Furnivalls, namely identifying the portrait of Miss Maude Furnivall, Miss Grace's older sister. Dorothy is afraid to show this portrait to her and makes Hester promise to never tell anyone she had seen it. As winter sets in, Hester becomes convinced she sometimes hears someone playing on the organ, but the rest of the staff deny it. After interrogating Agnes, she learns that it is rumored that the old lord's ghost plays the organ on stormy winter nights, though Agnes does not know who the old lord is. Hester only half believes this story, until she opens the organ and sees that it is destroyed inside. One night, Hester decides it is too cold to take Miss Rosamond with her to church and leaves her in the charge of Dorothy. However, when she returns, she discovers that Miss Rosamond is missing. They search the whole house until Hester finally spots a set of footprints in the snow outside from a window. She rushes out to intercept a shepherd carrying a nearly frozen Miss Rosamond. When Miss Rosamond finally regains consciousness, she tells Hester that she saw a little girl out in the snow, and that the little girl had walked her up the Fells to a crying lady who then rocked her to sleep. Hester doesn't believe her, but Miss Rosamond insists it's the truth. Miss Grace is terrified by Miss Rosamond's story and tells Hester to keep Miss Rosamond away from that "evil child." From then on, Hester never leaves Miss Rosamond alone. In December, Hester and Miss Rosamond are playing together when suddenly they see the little girl out in the snow, banging on the window. Miss Rosamond runs to let the little girl in, but with a sudden blast of organ music, Hester realizes the little girl makes no noise, and that she is a ghost. She grabs Miss Rosamond before she can open the door and carries her off into the house. Dorothy finally admits that the old lord who plays the organ is Miss Grace and Miss Maude's father, and that the old lord was too proud to ever allow anyone to marry his daughters. But when he invited a foreigner to play music in their home, both sisters fell in love with the same man. The foreigner brought the organ for the old lord to learn to play, and while their father was distracted, he flirted with both daughters. Miss Maude triumphed over her sister and secretly married the foreigner, later giving birth to a daughter (the little girl who became the ghost outside Manor House). But jealousy grew between the sisters as the foreigner continued to flirt with both of them, and he eventually abandoned both sisters and his daughter. The two sisters retreated to their respective sides of the house, Miss Maude in the east wing and Miss Grace in the west. Miss Maude loved her daughter and decided to have her live secretly in the east wing with her. Rumor had it Miss Maude one day revealed to her sister that she had won and had married the foreigner in secret. This led Miss Grace and Miss Stark to spy on the east wing and discover the little girl. Miss Grace then told the old lord, who was furious and threw both Miss Maude and the little girl out into the snow. Miss Grace did nothing as the old lord ordered the staff not to help them, and ultimately Miss Maude and the little girl froze to death. The old lord never played his organ again. Having heard this story, Hester guards Miss Rosamond even more vigilantly. One night, Hester, Miss Rosamond, Miss Grace, and Mrs. Stark are all in the drawing room when the wind begins to howl, and Miss Grace declares she can hear her father's voice. Miss Rosamond says she hears the little girl. They all hurry out into the great hall, the screams coming from the east wing. Suddenly, the east wing door slams open, and the ghost of the old lord drives the ghosts of Miss Maude and the little girl through it. They watch as the ghosts reenact the night that Miss Maude and the little girl died. As the old lord strikes the little girl with his crutch, Miss Grace begs him to spare the child, but then a phantom of her younger self appears and looks onto the scene coldly. Then, all of the fires go out, and Miss Grace is left lying on the ground. She is carried to bed and spends the rest of her days facing the wall, muttering, "what is done in youth can never be undone in age!"

- Genre: - Title: The Once and Future King - Point of view: The novel is narrated in the omniscient third person, although this narrative voice consciously narrates from a contemporary era. - Setting: The semi-fictional world of the Isle of Gramarye. Gramarye is White's name for Great Britain during the early Norman period. However, White's Great Britain is filled with fantasy creatures and happenings. - Character: King Arthur or Wart. Description: Arthur is the main protagonist of the novel. He is the illegitimate son of King Uther Pendragon, although he spends his childhood thinking he is a lowly squire. King Arthur is married to Queen Guenever, although she has an affair with Arthur's best knight and friend Lancelot. It is Arthur's life-long endeavor—influenced by his childhood tutor Merlyn—to curtail violence, prevent warfare, and instill justice in England. - Character: Sir Lancelot. Description: Lancelot is considered to be the best knight in Arthur's court and his best friend. Lancelot, despite his talent, is deeply insecure and conflicted about his worthiness. He has a long affair with Queen Guenever, which only accentuates deep insecurities about his morality. On a quest, he is seduced by a woman named Elaine who gives birth to his son—Galahad. - Character: Queen Guenever. Description: Guenever is married to King Arthur, although she has a long love affair with Sir Lancelot. Despite her affair, Guenever is a deeply complex, beautiful, and fundamentally good person. Although she betrays Arthur, she is simultaneously very committed to him, supportive of him and very much loves him. Perhaps the greatest tragedy about Guenever, and what drives many of her vices, is that she remains childless. - Character: Merlyn. Description: Merlyn is an eccentric magician who serves as Wart's tutor throughout his childhood. Merlyn lives time backwards and thus already knows what is going to happen to Arthur. By turning Wart into different animals, Merlyn teaches him about violence, warfare and justice, and informs the King Arthur will become. Eventually, Merlyn meets and falls in love with the witch Nimue who locks him in a cave for thousands of years. - Character: Queen Morgause. Description: Morgause is an evil witch and one of Arthur's half-sisters. She is sister to Morgan Le Fay and Queen Elaine (different from the Elaine who seduces Lancelot), and mother to Gawaine, Gaheris, Gareth, Agravaine and Mordred. She seduces Arthur when he is very young and gives birth to his son, Mordred. Morgause is eventually murdered by her own son Agravaine after he finds her in bed with a young knight. - Character: King Pellinore. Description: King Pellinore is one of the first knights Wart meets as a child. He is a bumbling idiot, but good-hearted, whose life purpose is to chase the Questing Beast. However, in Book II, Pellinore falls in love with the Queen of Flanders' daughter and abandons his quest. King Pellinore is Sir Percival's father—one of the knights to find the Holy Grail. - Character: Gawaine. Description: Gawaine is one of the Orkney brothers and Morgause's son. He also becomes one of Arthur's knights and goes off on many quests. He is depicted throughout as a barbaric figure that cannot control his temper and violence. Towards the end of Book IV, he is driven mildly mad when Lancelot kills his brothers Gareth and Gaheris and pursues Lancelot. However, at the end of the novel, Gawaine forgives Lancelot and writes a beautiful, moving letter revealing a sensitive, moral side. - Character: Gareth. Description: Gareth is one of the Orkney brothers, but is the most moral and sensitive of them all. As the youngest, except Mordred, he flees Orkney for Camelot where he becomes a pageboy in the kitchens. He is befriended by Lancelot who knights him without knowing who he is. Later, Lancelot will accidentally kill Gareth (who is unarmed) when he rescues Guenever from her execution. - Character: Agravaine. Description: Agravaine is another of the Orkney brothers and the most twisted of them all, excepting Mordred. He is deeply in love with his mother Morgause and eventually kills her when he finds her in bed with a knight. Later in the novel, he tries to prove Lancelot and Guenevers' adulterous relationship, but is killed by Lancelot in the attempt. - Character: Sir Galahad. Description: Galahad is Lancelot's son with Elaine. He is the most deeply moral and religious characters in the novel and remains a virgin his whole life. He is one of the knights to find the Holy Grail, but never returns from the Quest, having become too perfect to return. Before finding the Grail, he spends six months on a boat with Lancelot where the two get to know each other. - Character: Elaine. Description: On his first quest, Lancelot rescues the young Elaine from a tower. She falls in love with him and seduces him, and eventually gives birth to his son Galahad. Elaine is a tortured woman who knows Lancelot will never love her, but nonetheless stays true to him. After finding Lancelot mad on the streets, the two live for a while with Galahad in a castle. After Galahad never returns from his quest and Elaine realizes Lancelot will never come back to her, Elaine kills herself. - Character: King Uther Pendragon. Description: King Uther is Arthur's father and predecessor. While King of England he killed the Earl of Cornwall and then married his wife Queen Igraine. Before they were married, Igraine gave birth to their son—Arthur—who had to be hidden away because he was born out of wedlock. Before marrying Uther, Igraine had had three daughters with the Earl of Cornwall—Morgause, Morgan Le Fay and Elaine. - Theme: Chivalry, Satire & Medieval Life. Description: The myth of King Arthur has been recounted in many different texts—including Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Chrétien de Troyes' Four Arthurian Romances and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In all these accounts, knights are depicted as heroic and highly chivalrous: knights are bound to the chivalric code and are portrayed as honorable, loyal noblemen. The chivalric code is a code of conduct associated with the medieval tradition of knighthood; the code entails following the ideals of honor, courtly love, courtesy, gallantry and service to others. However, in The Once and Future King, White systematically undermines the ideal of the chivalrous knight—both by satirizing the chivalric code and revealing its paradoxes and flaws. The first way in which White undermines the notion of chivalry is through satirizing the knight and portraying him as a clown. The first Knight that Wart encounters in the text is King Pellinore; Wart, in his naivety, is awed by the figure of King Pellinore. However, White describes King Pellinore as a clumsy, idiotic figure on the quest for something that does not exist. Another component of knighthood is the quest—a journey for some ultimate goal that entails many challenges. Upon first meeting King Pellinore, Wart learns he has been pursuing the 'questing beast' for many years. However, as soon as Sir Grummore invites him to Camelot, King Pellinore immediately gives up this quest in return for a clean bed. King Pellinore's weak adherence to the challenge of questing illustrates the arbitrary nature of the values of knighthood—King Pellinore's quest is purposeless and his dedication to it lackluster. Knighthood is governed by the chivalric code (which White pays a great deal of attention to), but also by a series of practices associated with medieval life—all of which White seeks to satirize. For example, early on in the text, King Pellinore and Sir Grummore challenge one another to a jousting match. White describes the pair as clumsy and idiotic—their armor is so heavy they are unable to canter with much speed, and when they are both dismounted they proceed to charge at each other using their bodies as weapons. Moreover, White describes their jousting tournament as though they were simply acting out a script; they consistently remind one another of the line they must say next. In this manner, White represents the so-called honor of jousting—and therefore honor in general—as simply a form of superficial rote learning, or the act of unthinkingly following a set of rigid rules.If King Pellinore is one representation of knighthood and one way in which White undermines the ideal figure, then the character of Sir Lancelot is the other. It is through Lancelot's representation that White reveals the true flaw of the knighthood ideal: Knights must commit enormous acts of violence, but must also stay true to the code of honor and chivalry—something innately incompatible. In this manner, Lancelot is simultaneously supremely insecure about his honor, but commits huge acts of violence. His is an incongruous figure and reveals the paradox of the knightly ideal.White's depiction of medieval life is a complex and evolving one: when Arthur first comes to the throne, the medieval England depicted is one very much in the dark ages—knights commit acts of violence unchecked, life is dark, harsh and illiterate. However, by the end of Arthur's rule, medieval England has altered radically: knights are bound to a different honor code where they can only commit acts of violence in the name of justice, men are educated, and life is far more enlightened. Although the medieval life depicted towards the end of Arthur's reign is arguably better, White still satirizes many of its ideals, such as its excesses and political intrigues. - Theme: Fate (Time). Description: Fate is a power that predetermines the course of all events. In The Once and Future King, fate plays an integral role. White, thinly disguised as the narrator, very consciously recounts the tale of King Arthur from a contemporary perspective—thus, the narrator regularly cites modern technologies or recent historical events, such as World War II. The narrator is very present in the novel; the voice comments subjectively upon the action within the text and gives us his opinion upon characters. White very consciously shows that this book, although set in a historical era, is being narrated from a contemporary perspective. By doing so, White simultaneously accentuates the mythic nature of the tale, but also changes the way narrative omniscience is working: the narrative omniscience functions simply because the narrator is very consciously narrating from our own contemporary era, rather than because it is innately superior to the action. This consciously modern perspective lends the tale a peculiar and somewhat alternative notion of fate: characters are fated, not because of the unstoppable force of 'fate,' but because this is a mythic story whose end is already known—the story is controlled and determined by its own folkloric tradition. Another core component of fate in the novel, in addition to the narrative perspective, is time. Traditionally, fate and time are two inextricably linked components: fate is the force that pulls characters to their destiny, while time is the vector than cannot be stopped and helps fate achieve its ends. For example, in Hamlet, Hamlet consistently laments the role fate plays in his life, but it is time that he must come to terms with—how he cannot change events that have already taken place, nor can he slow down the pace of the clock. However, in The Once and Future King, time is instead somewhat flexible. Merlyn—a magician and Wart's tutor—experiences Time backwards. He began his life in the future and must live backwards in Time, not forwards. Because of this, Merlyn is aware of what is to come and consistently gets younger throughout the novel. This representation of Time achieves a number of things: first, it feeds into the fantastical elements of the novel and suggests that the world of Camelot is somewhat removed or exempt from the normal rules of existence. This helps the reader to suspend belief when Wart undergoes his 'lessons,' transforming into an ant or a hawk. More importantly, Time is a great burden to Merlyn; he is perhaps somewhat wiser because he has already experienced the future, but it is significantly more difficult. In the beginnings of the novel, Merlyn explains his experience of Time using the analogy of trying to draw a W in a mirror: Wart, when he attempts to do this, draws only an M. Fate necessarily plays a central role in The Once and Future King—precisely because of its folkloric tradition—but Merlyn's difficulties with Time suggest that perhaps knowing what is to come is not necessarily positive. Indeed, Arthur's character undermines his folkloric self—the chivalric knight becomes the modern, innovative leader—suggesting that although the outcome of his life may be predetermined, the process in which he both innovates and ultimately fails is not. In this manner, White uses Merlyn's experience of time and Arthur's own predetermined existence to illustrate the powerlessness of fate—it is not a powerful, unrelenting force, but simply the framework of folklore than can be molded (not broken) by a modernized perspective. - Theme: Quest and The Holy Grail. Description: The Quest is a traditional literary device. In literature, a quest is a journey towards a goal and can serves as a plot device or as a symbol. In a quest, the hero must overcome many obstacles and the quest usually requires extensive travel and a series of trials to test the knight's valor and piety. One of the most famous quests in literature is that for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend.The first quest the novel describes is King Pellinore's search for the 'questing beast.' Although this is not greatly expanded upon, King Pellinore has been searching for the questing beast for years and has never found it. The 'questing beast' is symbolic; it represents the elusive quest itself: the journey to locate something that cannot be found and the aimlessness it entails, a journey that mirrors Arthur's own ultimately unsuccessful journey throughout the novel to harness tyranny and use justice as a mode of rule.Although this is one literal depiction of a quest, the quest plays a fundamental role in Wart's education and his transformation into King Arthur. Throughout The Sword in the Stone, Wart undergoes a series of his own quests—mini adventures that form the central part of his education under Merlyn. For example, his transformation into an ant. Each of these journeys are not the traditional form of quest, in that Wart is unaware of the specific goal or purpose of the adventure, but each journey serves as a lesson about how to lead and govern, so that the later King Arthur will use non-traditional (at least, non-medieval) methods of rule. With the example of the ant, Wart witnesses how ants follow the dictatorial rule of their queen unquestioningly. Although these 'citizens' are orderly, they do not question the morality of the battle the ants engage in—the reasons given for war are, by Wart's questioning of them, shown to be illogical and purely propaganda. The Holy Grail is, as already mentioned, a central component of the Arthurian myth: it is the search by King Arthur and his Knights for a copper cup or plate used by Jesus at the Last Supper. In The Once and Future King, the Holy Grail is Arthur's last resort, the ideal he turns to when his attempt to 'harness Tyranny' fails with the collapse of the Round Table and the continued domination of force over justice. However, this attempt once more proves unsuccessful; those who are successful in the Quest are too perfect, and therefore cannot exist in King Arthur's world of injustice; and those who fail do not change or improve.In traditional literature, quests are almost always successful. However, in The Once and Future King, quests are unachievable—they are ideals that almost always collapse when you move closer to them: the questing beast is forever elusive, and the Holy Grail requires an impractical level of perfection. Indeed, the only quests that do not prove unsuccessful are Wart's lessons as a child; these quests are non-traditional because they do not have a specific goal and are thus about the 'journey,' or what is learnt throughout. Thus, in The Once and Future King, the quest itself becomes an illusion when it generates false and unattainable ideals, and can only prove useful when the quest is an end in itself rather than a means. - Theme: Might vs. Right. Description: In The Once and Future King, Arthur is not depicted as a traditional heroic figure—the chivalrous, military hero—but as a political innovator. Throughout his rule, Arthur seeks to temper force and strength ('might') with justice ('right'). In the novel, these two words are symbolic for the warring forces Arthur unsuccessfully attempts to control.Merlyn's early lessons for young Wart are vehicles to teach Arthur about the correct parameters for ruling; they are to prepare Arthur to be a heroic and successful ruler. In the medieval England of Arthur's youth (as described in "The Sword and the Stone"), characters are unable to distinguish between might and right and the only justification necessary for rule is force, as opposed to justice.In "The Queen of Air and Darkness," once he is king, Arthur establishes the Round Table: the round table symbolizes Arthur's attempt to balance force with justice. The table is round so that there is no hierarchy and all knights (even Arthur) are equal. Arthur wants situations and conflicts to be resolved equally and with reason, rather than with hierarchy and strength. Arthur wanted the table to not only be symbolic, but also a vehicle for breeding a new generation of knighthood, with the importance of justice over strength instilled in them—the best of who is to be Lancelot.Arthur's attempt to temper might with right ultimately fails. In the last few pages of the novel, as Arthur is dying and coming to terms with the failings of his rule, he begins to understand the notion of justice as merely a child's dream, rather than something attainable. Perhaps the most symbolic illustration of this failure is White's depiction of Lancelot—Lancelot was to be the first of the new generation of knights who use war and violence only in the name of justice. However, Lancelot is a complex figure, neither moral nor immoral; he is a real character and, because of this, cannot attain the perfect figure of knighthood Arthur had envisioned. White seeks to challenge the mythic idealization of King Arthur as the heroic warrior, portraying his leadership as one that hopes only to replace force and strength with justice. The novel illustrates the barbarity of traditional knighthood and undermines the romanticism of the medieval era. Ultimately, however, Arthur's attempt fails; this failure is one that parallels contemporary attempts at justice—the narrator consciously places Arthur's reign against the context of World War II. White's commentary upon the medieval ideal and Arthur's failed attempt to temper power with justice highlights a perpetual human flaw, how, even today, justice and right collapse in the face of brute violence. - Theme: War. Description: War occupies a central role in The Once and Future King. The Medieval England depicted in the novel is almost a perpetual battlefield, with multiple political factions vying for power. Indeed, war is canonical in the Arthurian myth; however battle scenes are barely described in this text, and when they are, White presents war as something barbaric and violent, rather than heroic and justified. The first presentation of war is during one of Wart's lessons as a child, when he is transformed into an ant. The ant community is robotic, the ants follow commands unthinkingly—indeed the quote written above the ant nest reads "EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY." During Wart's time as an ant, the ant nest declares war on a neighboring ant nest. However, the justifications given for battle are highly illogical and paradoxical: from "We are more numerous than they are, therefore we have a right to their mash[food]," to "They are more numerous than we are, therefore they are wickedly trying to steal our mash"; or "We are a mighty race and have a natural right to subjugate their puny one" to "They are a mighty race and are unnaturally trying to subjugate our inoffensive one." Once the time for the war comes, Wart has become so sickened, not even by their wickedness, but by the terrible monotony, so as to kill the joy of life of his boyhood. At the beginning of the second book, "The Queen of Air and Darkness," Merlyn teaches Arthur about the wickedness of war—about how in the future men believed it is wrong to fight in wars of any sorts–and how there is only one fairly good reason to fight and that is if the other man starts it. This lesson and conversations along this vein determine both how Arthur will come to consider the role of war, but also the stance the book takes towards war. White was a conscientious objector during WWII—the period in which he wrote the majority of this novel. The novel maintains an anti-war stance—running contrary to the traditional Arthurian canon. White seeks to illustrate that war, as the ultimate wielding of violence, is neither heroic nor chivalrous. Rather, he sees it as barbaric, violent and only justifiable as the last measure to uphold justice and protect the weak. To some degree, this attitude is a marked statement against the use of propaganda during World War II. In order to keep up morale, the allies would rotate false photographs of battlefields to show the chivalry and heroisms of the allied troops. But, as White illustrates with his depiction of war in The Once and Future King, the ideal of war is false; war is not a chivalric pursuit but should be something simply necessary as a means of defending justice and peace. - Climax: Because this novel is made up of four individual books, there are multiple climaxes: when Wart pulls the sword from the stone in the churchyard and is crowned king; when Lancelot and Guenever are first unfaithful to Arthur; when the Holy Grail is found and Lancelot returns to Camelot converted; and when Mordred commits treason and crowns himself King while Arthur is in France. - Summary: Book I, The Sword in the Stone, introduces the character of Wart who later becomes King Arthur. Wart lives with his guardian Sir Ector and Sir Ector's son Kay at the Castle Sauvage, under the tutelage of an eccentric magician Merlyn. Throughout his early years, Wart is turned into many different animals by Merlyn, such as an ant, a fish, a badger, and a goose, and each adventure serves as a lesson about violence and authority that will inform his later years as King of England. After Kay is knighted and Wart becomes his squire, they all travel to London for a tournament. The old King Uther Pendragon has recently died leaving no heir and it is proclaimed that whoever can pull a mysterious sword from the stone will be the new King of England. While on an errand as Kay's squire, Wart pulls the sword from the stone without realizing what he's doing and is crowned King. Merlyn later tells Wart that he is King Uther's illegitimate son and that Merlyn had known this all along. In Book II, The Queen of Air and Darkness, we are introduced to the Orkney brothers—Gawaine, Gaheris, Gareth and Agravaine. They are Queen Morgause and King Lot's sons, and half-brothers to Arthur. Meanwhile, a young King Arthur is attempting to curtail the Gaelic revolt being led by King Lot. Arthur is beginning to plan how to rule when the battle is over. He comes up with the idea of the Round Table: the Order of the Knights of the Round Table will be his attempt to use Might for Right. He will band together knights who only use their power and violence for justice and the table will be round so that all knights are equal. Ultimately, Arthur squashes the rebellion and Queen Morgause comes to court, to reconcile with Arthur for King Lot. She ends up seducing him and gives birth to his son—Mordred. Book III, The Ill-Made Knight, tells the story of Lancelot. Lancelot is a boy when he first meets Arthur and decides he will become Arthur's greatest knight, although he suffers from internal conflicts about his unworthiness. Later, as a young knight at Arthur's court, Lancelot and Queen Guenever (Arthur's wife) fall in love. To escape his feelings for Guenever, Lancelot sets off on a series of quests that end in him being seduced by a young girl named Elaine. Returning to Camelot, Lancelot and Guenever begin an affair, although this abruptly ends when Elaine turns up carrying Lancelot's son. Lancelot is driven mad by Guenever's rage and wanders around England as a wild, mad man for a number of years. Eventually, years later, Elaine recognizes Lancelot in a mad man upon the streets. He returns to Camelot, but finds that Arthur's Order has begun to unravel. The knights, because they have solved most of the injustice with their violence, have begun to turn on each other. Arthur resolves to send his knights off on a Quest for the Holy Grail to make them moral men. Three knights—Sir Bors, Sir Percival and Sir Galahad (Lancelot's son by Elaine)—eventually find the Grail but are too perfected by their endeavor and never return. Lancelot returns, a holy and converted man and refuses to begin his relationship with Guenever again. However, after she is kidnapped and Lancelot rescues her, defending her honor, they quickly begin their relationship once more. In Book IV, The Candle in the Wind, Arthur's Order is truly broken. Agravaine and Arthur's son Mordred, fueled by hatred, set out to bring down Arthur's reign. They decide to use Arthur's new laws—to use a jury and proof to prove guilt, rather than trial by combat—to reveal Lancelot and Guenever's relationship. This they do and Guenever is almost executed, but rescued by Lancelot at the last moment. However, in rescuing Guenever, Lancelot kills two of the Orkney brothers (Gareth and Gaheris) who were unarmed. On the urging of Mordred and Gawaine, Arthur lays siege to Lancelot's castle. The lovers ask the Pope for pardon and are granted it—however, Lancelot is banished to France. Arthur and Gawaine follow Lancelot to France where they lay siege to him once more because Gawaine must avenge the deaths of his brothers. While they are away in France, Mordred falsely announces that the King is dead and announces himself as King. He also tries to force Guenever to marry him, but she barricades herself in the Tower of London. Arthur returns to England and Gawaine forgives Lancelot so that he can aid Arthur. The novel closes on the eve of the final battle against Mordred. Arthur knows that he will die in battle, but that Mordred will be defeated and his legacy of justice over violence will live on.

- Genre: Speculative fiction - Title: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Point of view: LeGuin defies literary convention by using a combination of first person limited (the narrator speaking to their audience) and third person omniscient (the narrator describing Omelas). - Setting: Omelas, a fictional utopian city - Character: The Narrator. Description: The Narrator is the unnamed speaker who dictates the story, speaking directly to the reader. The narrator seems to be inventing Omelas as they write. Although never stated explicitly, the narrator does not try to hide the fact that they are describing a place that exists only in their imagination and the imaginations of their readers. Thus, the narrator does not know all the details of the fictitious city, only the one absolute: that the city is perfect in every way imaginable, save for the fact that its perfection and the happiness of its citizens depend on the suffering of one child. This condition is what makes the otherwise unrealistic, utopian city of Omelas realistic, according to the narrator. The narrator serves as a bridge between the world of Omelas and the world of the audience, first guiding the reader into the city, then guiding the reader to compare Omelas to their own moral universe. - Character: The Child. Description: The Child is the awful, shameful secret of Omelas—the secret that everyone knows. Citizens are only able to experience their happiness because this child suffers. Further, every citizen must confront the truth of the child's miserable existence, as learning about the child is a type of coming-of-age ritual in Omelas. The reader never learns the child's personal information, in part because it barely has any; Omelas has denied it the opportunity to develop personhood. The narrator exclusively uses the pronoun "it" when describing the child, reinforcing the child's status as an object rather than a subject in its own right. The child is malnourished and un-socialized. Its body is underdeveloped and covered in festering sores. Even though the child is locked in perpetual suffering, it still protests its situation, pleading with its jailors: "Please let me out. I will be good!" Even though it has been objectified through torturous neglect for years, the child still remembers sunlight and its mother's voice—thus, it remembers what it was like to be treated like a human being well enough to understand that its current state is inhuman. It experienced happiness enough to understand that it is now suffering. Like all people in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," The Child is highly symbolic, serving not only as the scapegoat for the society of Omelas, but as a symbol for scapegoats more generally. (A scapegoat is an individual who suffers in place of many—for example, the one criminal who takes the fall for robbing a bank to save the rest of his criminal team from jail, even though they robbed the bank together.) The symbolic scapegoating of this one child, in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," begs the question of whether a society can be called "just" or "perfect" if it is founded on even one instance of cruelty and injustice. Le Guin does not give her readers any clear answers to this question—she only poses it to her reader by depicting the child as a scapegoat in the extreme. - Character: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Description: The narrator never reveals specific information about the individual characters of the people who decide to walk away from Omelas—only that they are all ages and genders. What unites them is their decision to reject the terms of their society. By choosing to reject this city and its structure (which requires a child's perpetual torture), they must reject all the benefits of Omelas by leaving the city, permanently. They must walk away in silence, alone, into the darkness that lies beyond Omelas. Le Guin never reveals any views about the ones who walk away—whether they are "better" or more morally upstanding than the other citizens of Omelas—nor does she reveal what, exactly, lies beyond Omelas. The narrator notes that such a place is difficult (if not impossible) to imagine. And yet, the ones who walk away seem to leave Omelas with a sense of purpose. They seem to know where they are going. Thus, the ones who walk away symbolize those who reject the idea that the oppression of others is the necessary precondition of their own happiness, and in doing so turn their backs on the very project of organized society—at least in any of the forms it has taken in human history to date. - Theme: Individual vs Society. Description: The utopian city of Omelas relies on a social contract according to which each person must accept that their city's happiness depends on the suffering of one child. Those who cannot come to terms with the child's suffering leave the city alone on foot, their destination a mystery. The story therefore presents a classic utilitarian problem: is it morally justifiable to inflict suffering on one person in the service of others' happiness? In weighing this dilemma, each citizen decides their fate. If they are able to come to terms with the suffering of another individual in the name of the common good, they remain a part of Omelas. If, however, they are overcome by feelings of guilt for the child's suffering, their only choice it to reject the society of Omelas altogether by walking away from the city and seeking out their individual fate. LeGuin doesn't take a clear moral position on which decision is right. Rather, she creates an allegorical world that invites readers to consider the sacrifices that they as individuals make (or do not make) for the good of their own society—and to ask themselves whether the terms of the social contract are acceptable. In the first part of the story—before the existence of the suffering child is known—the narrator takes great pains to establish just how happy life in Omelas is. The city of Omelas, for example, has no advertising, monarchy, slavery, nuclear weapons, war, guilt, or habit-forming drugs. Furthermore, the people of Omelas feel joy, but not at any enemy's expense.  "A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer," the narrator writes; "this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas." Through these descriptions of happiness, LeGuin establishes the stakes of the moral quandary that will follow by allowing the reader to imagine a life for which they would give almost anything. When the narrator reveals that the happiness of life in Omelas depends on the suffering of one child, however, the previously uncomplicated appearance of the perfect society fades away. The narrator describes how each of the city's children must eventually learn about and grapple with the existence of the suffering child, just as the reader is presently doing. Children learning of the suffering child become anguished and outraged, since its existence flies in the face of the perfect society they have known. Yet, because the "terms" of life in Omelas are that nobody can help the child without destroying the city's happiness, the children are powerless to act on their moral intuitions, and they have only two options for handling their distress: repress the knowledge of their own complicity in the child's suffering, or leave. Most children eventually justify continuing their perfect lives in Omelas as though nothing were wrong. They re-calibrate their moral compass, recognizing that suffering is the most basic precondition of the world they live in even if they do not experience this suffering themselves, and thus, to be a part of society requires them to participate in the scapegoating. As awful as the child's suffering may be, it seems better (at least to the citizens of Omelas) for one person to suffer than for everyone in Omelas to give up their perfect lives. Thus, most people choose to prioritize society over the individual. However, if a person decides that the quality of life for each individual matters more than collective happiness—in other words, if a person decides that the child's suffering is indefensible, even though it allows the rest of Omelas to experience happiness— they have no choice but exile. These people leave the city on foot, in silence, and never come back. While choosing the good of society over the good of the individual results in a life of boundless happiness, the consequences of rejecting the society that depends on the suffering of one individual remain mysterious. The narrator writes of those who walk away, "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist." In this way, LeGuin declines to moralize—she doesn't say whether those who make this choice are satisfied or remorseful, or whether they are rewarded or condemned. Perhaps this is because most readers, just like most citizens of Omelas, make choices that compromise the happiness of individuals for the sake of the greater good, and thus the choice to prioritize the wellbeing of one individual over the wellbeing of the whole will always remain a mystery. - Theme: Coming of Age and Coming into Society. Description: The city of Omelas practices a coming of age ritual in which every child, at some point between the ages of eight and twelve, must learn that the happiness of their city depends on the suffering of one abused and neglected child. The town's children have the choice to accept the suffering of this child and continue living their happy lives, or to walk, alone, out of the city forever. This moral choice marks the moment when a child truly grows up: they now understand that their society is not unconditionally good and that their happiness is not without cost. What they do with this knowledge—either staying in Omelas, or leaving forever—will define who they are and what their lives will become. In Omelas, childhood is beautiful and innocent. Children live perfect lives and, not knowing yet of the suffering that makes these lives possible, their goodness is not yet compromised. The Festival of Summer takes place in a lush meadow called "the Green Fields" where children run around naked. Their nakedness emphasizes their innocence. The children tend the horses with care, demonstrating how they have been taught to interact with other living beings. They speak softly and encouragingly to their horses, calling them "my beauty" and "my hope." In contrast, the suffering child is denied a childhood. It does not get a gender, nourishment, or social contact. The narrator tells us it looks six but is actually ten—the child's development is physically and emotionally arrested due to its suffering, and it will never be able to come of age. When the children learn of the suffering child's existence, their initial reaction is anguish and outrage—after all, they have been taught to be good and morally pure. However, after they have some time to think about the dilemma, most begin to contort their morals in order to justify their lives. The narrator describes these justifications in detail. For one, most people don't go to see the child, and LeGuin suggests that simply knowing of its existence is less painful than witnessing its suffering. Therefore, the child becomes an intellectual problem to the citizens of Omelas, rather than a physical indignity to which a person has an emotional response. Furthermore, as time passes, the citizens of Omelas "realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good out of its freedom." Since the child's development is so arrested, most people rationalize keeping it locked up as the more reasonable choice, since the damp cellar is the only world the child has ever known and the only world it is likely to be able to process. Finally, most people in Omelas reason that, because they are incapable of changing the terms of their society, they are not immoral in continuing to neglect the child—the world is immoral for giving them this awful choice. As LeGuin presents these moral justifications as a normal part of coming of age, she shows growing up to be, in part, a process of corruption. Most people, as they realize the complexity of the world, learn to re-calibrate their moral responses so that they can live peacefully and comfortably within an unjust society. LeGuin doesn't judge this choice—her tone is neutral as she depicts the townspeople's rationalizations, and she even suggests that this response is normal and sane. However, the narrator presents another option: children may keep their innocence and purity (and adults may regain it) by rejecting the terms of Omelas and leaving the town. This is a choice whose outcome is unknown and whose cost (the person loses their entire blissful life) is tremendous—in this way, LeGuin shows this choice to be somewhat irrational, but also morally pure. As the narrator never depicts the lives of those who have left Omelas, it's not clear what kinds of adult lives they will lead in light of their choice. This omission suggests that all readers, by growing up and making compromises large and small, are still, metaphorically, in Omelas. - Theme: Imagination and Allegory. Description: The narrator invites the reader to imagine Omelas as they wish. The narrator does not care if the reader knows Omelas is not real, so long as the city feels real to them personally. LeGuin highlights the imaginative act of storytelling by emphasizing both the narrator and reader's fabrication of Omelas. As the reader pictures Omelas more and more clearly, they become more and more complicit in the world they have built. By the time the suffering child is revealed, the reader is so deeply involved in Omelas that they are forced to consider what decision they would make. By the time the story ends, the reader has grappled enough with this decision to recognize how familiar it is to their own world. Omelas starts as an imaginary land, but eventually becomes so real to the reader that they recognize Omelas as an allegory—not a fairy tale place, but a city full of people who face the same moral questions they do. LeGuin shows her audience just how valuable imagination is by revealing how it can illuminate the reader's own life in a completely new way. The narrator emphasizes their presence as storyteller, inviting the audience to imagine Omelas with them. As they invest more in imagining the city, the reader becomes complicit in building the world of Omelas. When the allegory becomes apparent at the end of the story, the audience sees how their imaginative capacities reflect their own reality. For example, LeGuin writes, "Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all." The narrator admits that they alone cannot convince the audience of this make-believe city—the reader must work in tandem to color Omelas for themselves. The narrator checks in with their audience throughout the story: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?" The narrator does not take an authoritative stance on Omelas's reality—they ask the audience to authorize the reality of Omelas for themselves. When the narrator finally mentions the ones who walk away from Omelas, they posit that, "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness." By the end of the story, the audience has realized the allegorical nature of Omelas, and thus, the ways in which their imagination is limited by their own reality. Storytelling, then, is not just fanciful imagination, but a reflection of the reader's world that allows them to see this world in a different light. As the reader imagines Omelas more and more deeply, they unwittingly become citizens of the city who must ultimately make their own decision about how to handle the suffering child. While Omelas begins as an imaginary place, by the time the story ends, the reader is forced to reckon with how Omelas compares to their own world. When checking in with her audience midway through the story, LeGuin writes: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." The narrator then introduces the suffering child—suggesting that the suffering child's existence is what makes Omelas believable to the audience. Without explicitly asking the reader to allegorize Omelas, LeGuin invites the reader to examine their own notion of reality—for example, what it says about the reader's world if suffering is the necessary element to make the city of happiness believable. After describing the decision that each citizen must make about the child's fate, the narrator is careful to enforce the terms of the decision: "The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child." While this statement is, ostensibly, for the children of Omelas first learning of the suffering child, it is, more importantly, directed at the audience. There is no way to wriggle out of this decision, no way to change the terms. The reader's creative freedom in imagining Omelas comes to a close with this awful decision—at which point the reader is so deeply invested in their imagined Omelas that they face this decision with the same terror as the city's children. By forcing readers to see a moral choice in the clearest, most binary way possible, LeGuin draws attention to the fact that the unfairness of a choice does not erase its ethical implications. Even though the citizens of Omelas are faced with a gruesome choice, the narrator tells us that, "Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it." By showing readers this unfair moral choice and an entire city's acceptance of the choice's reality, LeGuin invites the reader to examine the gruesome moral decisions they must make in their own life—even though these decisions have become utterly normal to the reader. - Theme: Happiness and Suffering. Description: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" posits that there can be no happiness without suffering. Even in her imagined city of perfect happiness, LeGuin insists that one child must suffer extreme neglect and torture so the other citizens may experience joy. The fundamental condition of life in Omelas is that, in order for society to be happy, the child must suffer without reprieve. The price of happiness, in other words, is suffering, and without one the other cannot exist. Therefore, the story suggests not only that suffering enables joy, but also that suffering and joy are always intermingled, and that achieving happiness requires an intimate understanding of grief. However, happiness does not exist solely due to the child's suffering; the narrator also suggests other, secondary conditions for the town's happiness. They state, "Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive." For this reason, the townspeople are discerning about what aspects of life they embrace and reject. The town is bountiful in necessities, and it has non-necessities that make life more pleasant without making it too complex: subway trains, for instance, or air conditioning. They do not have technologies that are wholly unnecessary, though, like "cars or helicopters in and above the streets." Such things, LeGuin suggests, are too pleasurable—much like addictive drugs—and they therefore would invite emotions destructive to happiness, upsetting the careful balance the town must strike to preserve its joy. To LeGuin, then, happiness is a complex and precarious emotion, an idea that she believes challenges entrenched ideas about happiness. "The trouble is that we have a bad habit," she writes, "encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." In other words, to LeGuin, happiness is perhaps more complex than suffering, and it's more worthy of sustained investigation. Though people desire to be happy, they tend to know more about suffering, which does not, in isolation, help build happy lives. Since suffering and happiness are interwoven, LeGuin suggests that understanding suffering is an essential part of becoming happy. Of the people of Omelas, the narrator states, "Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free…It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science." In other words, not only do the citizens of Omelas understand that everything good in their lives is made possible by one child's suffering—they also understand that their ability to recognize and cultivate joy is made possible by their proximity to and complicity in suffering. - Climax: The reader discovers that the happiness of Omelas is dependent on the perpetual suffering of a single child. - Summary: The city of Omelas is celebrating the Festival of Summer. Bells ring, children play, and adults dance. The atmosphere is full of cheer. The Narrator pauses from describing the scene to clear any possible misconceptions they suspect the audience might have about Omelas—most importantly, that the citizens of Omelas are not simple-minded just because they are joyful. The narrator points out that humans have the "bad habit" of considering suffering to be more complicated and interesting than contentment, but that this is just a harmful myth our society perpetuates. The narrator laments the difficulty of describing Omelas and acknowledges that it's difficult for the audience to imagine an advanced society in which everyone is happy. The narrator suggests that the audience fill in the details for themselves—whatever they need to make Omelas believable to them personally, so long as the citizens experience contentment without guilt. Back at the Festival of Summer, children ready their horses for the race. The crowd gathers around the racecourse as the competing children organize at the starting line, gently tending to their horses. A trumpet blasts. The narrator tells the audience that the Festival of Summer has now truly begun. Still, the narrator is uncertain if the audience believes in Omelas. In a final attempt to convince their audience, the narrator reveals an important detail about Omelas. While the city of Omelas revels, one child is locked in a windowless room. The child's living conditions are appalling: it lives in its own excrement, frightened, malnourished, abused, and neglected. Occasionally people come to see the child, but they never interact with it, despite its desperate pleas for freedom. The narrator explains that every citizen of Omelas knows of the child's existence. In fact, everything good in Omelas depends on this child's continual suffering, such that setting the child free or even saying so much as a kind word to it would destroy the entire city's happiness. Most citizens learn of the child between the ages of eight and twelve. Although the knowledge initially disgusts most of them, almost all come to terms with the child's tortured existence as a necessary evil, and eventually manage to live guiltless lives despite the child's suffering. After all, the knowledge of the suffering child is what allows the people of Omelas to appreciate everything good in their city. Now that they have shared this information, the narrator suggests, perhaps Omelas feels more realistic—though there is one more incredible aspect of the city worth noting. Sometimes, citizens fail to come to terms with the child's suffering, and decide to leave Omelas instead. Silent and alone, they walk into the darkness beyond the city and never come back. The narrator does not know where the ones who walk away go. Their destination may be even more un-imaginable to the audience than the city of Omelas. Nevertheless, the ones who walk away seem to know where they are going.

- Genre: Short story; American naturalism - Title: The Open Boat - Point of view: Third-person limited - Setting: The open sea just off the coast of Florida - Character: Correspondent. Description: The unnamed correspondent is a journalist who survives a shipwreck and is forced to battle the open seas on a ten-foot lifeboat with three other men—the captain, the oiler, and the cook. As the captain gives orders and the cook bails out the boat, the correspondent is responsible for taking turns rowing with the oiler. He feels deeply connected to his companions, counteracting the skepticism he typically feels toward other men. The narrator describes his inner thoughts and feelings more closely than any of the other characters, suggesting that the narrator and the correspondent may even be one and the same (even though the narration is third-person). Throughout the story, the correspondent is frequently consumed by existentialist thoughts and is fixated on fate and nature's indifference to humans. In addition, his occupation as a correspondent coupled with his experience of being a shipwreck survivor who must ride on a small lifeboat with three others echoes the author's life story, suggesting that the correspondent may be Stephen Crane himself. Like the captain and the cook, the correspondent ultimately survives his time at sea and is rescued by the life-saving man. His experience leaves him feeling that he can now interpret the voice of the sea, which, in its indifference toward human life, makes "absurdly clear" the difference between right and wrong. - Character: Captain. Description: The unnamed captain of the now-sunken Commodore also captains the lifeboat, instructing his makeshift crew (which is comprised of the correspondent, the oiler, and the cook). Though injured in the hand, the captain is dedicated to his companions and does whatever he can to help them, including staying awake all day and night. He remains emotionally strong throughout the story even though he is visibly grieving over his sunken Commodore and his failed responsibility of keeping its passengers safe. The captain is a quick and innovative thinker, which is demonstrated when he makes a sail out of his coat and a flag out of a bath towel and a branch, as well as when he instructs the cook to float on his back and row himself to shore like a boat rather than struggle to swim against the waves. The captain embraces uncertainty, making him a model for the other men and a counterpoint to the cook's self-assuredness. The captain survives his time on the open sea despite his self-sacrificing behavior. He even insists to the life-saving man that the other men be rescued first. - Character: Oiler. Description: The oiler (that is, someone who oils machinery in a ship's engine room) is a quiet, tired man named Billie who rides on the lifeboat with his fellow survivors: the captain, the correspondent, and the cook. Throughout the story, the oiler takes turns rowing with the correspondent and speaks very little, save for echoing the captain's instructions or making the occasional short comment. He is the most exhausted of the four men, having worked a double shift of challenging physical labor in the ship's engine room just before the Commodore sank. Despite his fatigue, he is strong, empathetic, and always willing to relieve the correspondent from his rowing shift. In the end, the oiler is the only one who drowns. He is found face-down in shallow waters by the life-saving man. The oiler is also the only character with a name, further differentiating him from the others. - Character: Cook. Description: The cook is a cheerful, chubby man who rides the ten-foot lifeboat alongside the captain, the correspondent, and the oiler. He is responsible for bailing the water out of the boat while the captain gives orders and the correspondent and the oiler row. Throughout the story, the cook clings tightly to optimism for comfort and frequently voices his certainty of their impending rescue—but he is always wrong. The cook serves as a foil to the captain's more practical acceptance of uncertainty. Although eventually pulled from the water by the life-saving man, the cook survived in the sea thanks to the captain, who instructed him to float on his back and use an oar to row himself to shore. - Character: Life-saving man. Description: The life-saving man is the person who notices the four shipwreck survivors swimming toward the shore. After saving the cook, he tries to help the captain, who points him toward the correspondent first. He is also the first person to discover that the oiler drowned. The only time he speaks is to exclaim "What's that?" at the sight of the oiler lying face-down in the shallow water. The life-saving man is completely naked and shines "like a saint" with a "halo" above his head—praised by the narrator and characters for how he goes out of his way to help other people. - Character: Waving man. Description: The waving man is a tourist who mistakes the four shipwreck survivors for a group of fishermen. He cheerfully waves hello to the men with his coat, unaware of the men's desperation. His waving is a cause for a debate among the men, as they try to glean meaning from his movements, hoping that he is signaling them to wherever the nearest life-saving station is. When the men finally realize his waving is meaningless, they are angry at him for being so oblivious to their suffering. - Theme: Humans vs. Nature. Description: "The Open Boat" primarily centers on the dynamic between humankind and nature. Humankind is represented by the four men in the boat: the correspondent, the captain, the cook, and the oiler. The men try to prevail over nature, but nature clearly has full control over them. The story is careful to point out the way that nature's control is not due to any particular concern or contempt for the men. Instead, nature is completely indifferent to humankind, placing "The Open Boat" squarely within a literary movement known as American naturalism. Somewhat of an offshoot of realism, American naturalism is marked by themes of survival, determinism (the idea that humans can't change their fate), and, most notably, nature's indifference to humans. "The Open Boat" demonstrates repeatedly that humans have no control over nature, despite their best efforts to overcome it. Throughout the story, the four men must fight against nature for their survival by navigating their tiny lifeboat through rough waters—a fight they are clearly not winning. This process drains them of their energy and spirit, leaving them like "mummies." The men are at the mercy of nature. Whereas on land humans demonstrate their power over the natural world by branding animals, at sea these helpless men are themselves "branded" by nature: "The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded." Thus, at sea, the illusion of man's control over nature is shown to be false, as nature violently asserts its dominance over the voyagers like a man branding a cow. This man-versus-nature dynamic is also reflected in a reference to Caroline E. S. Norton's poem, "Bingers on the Rhine." As the correspondent rows against the violent sea, he remembers the poem, which he heard in his youth, about a dying soldier who tries in vain to keep from bleeding to death by holding his hand over his heart. The soldier's attempt to fight against his imminent death is fruitless. Similarly, the narrator notes that nature (and consequently fate) has the power to drown humans, and all a person can do in the face of this very real threat is "shake his fist at the clouds" and curse his fate (which is as ineffective a response as the soldier clutching his chest to keep from dying). The narrator writes that the four men in the tiny, ten-foot boat are "at the mercy of five oceans," further emphasizing the staggering difference in size and power between nature and mankind. When the correspondent catches sight of a shark next to the boat one night, the narrator likens it to deathly weaponry with a mix of horror and fascination: "The speed and power of the thing was greatly to be admired. It cut through the water like a gigantic and keen projectile." Even nature in its seemingly most harmless form has complete control over man; when a seagull lands on the captain, he can't shoo it away for fear of capsizing the boat with his vigorous movements. Instead, the captain must reluctantly sit and bear it, allowing the bird to sit on his head for as long as it likes. Though nature has complete control over humankind, it is ultimately indifferent to them—neither in favor of or against them. For example, elements of nature both help and hinder the men's progress toward shore: "A changed tide tried to force them southward, but the wind and wave said northward." Likewise, waves growl like menacing wild animals and then are subdued. The waves' temperament shifts constantly, without any regard for the words and actions of the four men on the tiny lifeboat. In the ultimate show of indifference, a large wave capsizes the boat (setting in motion the events leading up to the oiler's death), but another large wave propels the correspondent safely to shore. Nature's indifference toward the men continues after they've reached land, as the "indifferent shore" has two different "welcomes" for them. For the correspondent, the cook, and the captain, the shore means safety and survival while for the oiler the shore offers only the "sinister hospitality of the grave." Nature didn't specifically target the oiler or try to save the other three men. Ultimately, the correspondent realizes that nature is not "cruel," "beneficent," "treacherous," or "wise." Instead, the story affirms that nature is "indifferent, flatly indifferent," and that humans are insignificant and small in comparison to nature's vastness. In this way, Crane encourages his readers to let go of their human pride and feel humbled by nature's vastness and power. - Theme: Suffering, Survival, Empathy, and Community. Description: "The Open Boat" chronicles four men's experience of being shipwrecked and forced to take to the open sea on a ten-foot lifeboat. Between battling massive waves, enduring crippling exhaustion, and contemplating the possibility of death, the men suffer greatly. The short story considers what comes out of such suffering, ultimately claiming that working hard and persevering through suffering does not guarantee survival (case in point: the oiler). However, suffering can increase empathy among people and bring them closer together. Such feelings of fellowship, solidarity, and community can be a much-needed source of physical and emotional comfort in trying—and even life-threatening—times. The short story shows that, though admirable, hard work and endurance do not guarantee survival. The oiler proves this rule. He worked two back-to-back shifts of hard labor in the engine room before the ship sank, and is one of two men to row the lifeboat and battle the waves, but despite being the hardest-working, he is ultimately the only man who drowns. Underscoring the lack of any correlation between suffering and survival, three times throughout the narrative the men ask, "if I am going to be drowned, why […] was I allowed to come thus far?" Once the lifeboat capsizes, the correspondent realizes the possibility of his death despite how far they've come and how much they have endured, changing his question to "I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be possible?" A similar realization is illustrated in the poem that the correspondent remembers from his youth, Caroline E. S. Norton's "Bingers on the Rhine," which details a soldier's slow death. Though the soldier suffers greatly, he cannot "thwart the going of his life" by holding his chest to keep the blood from leaving his body. Although suffering doesn't guarantee survival, the story shows that it can increase empathy. As a boy, the correspondent cared nothing for the dying soldier in the poem "Bingers on the Rhine," as the soldier's outcome "was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point." After the correspondent endures his own share of suffering at sea, however, the soldier "quaintly came to him as a human, living thing." In addition, although the correspondent "had been taught to be cynical of men," his experience being shipwrecked with three other men leads him to feel deeply connected to them, like a "subtle brotherhood," implying that he feels a sense of responsibility and care for them as if they were family. This increase in empathy is not experienced by the correspondent alone. When the correspondent complains about rowing, "the weary-faced oiler smile[s] in full sympathy." Since the oiler and the correspondent share the burden of their suffering by taking turns rowing, they are able to empathize with one another. Besides increasing empathy, suffering also brings people together, which can help ease the pain by providing physical or emotional comfort. When the correspondent is seemingly the only one awake when a giant shark takes interest in the boat, the correspondent feels "bereft of sympathy." The next day, upon learning the captain was awake when the shark was nearby, the correspondent says, "Wish I had known you were awake," pointing to the way that the captain's company would have been a source of emotional comfort. Community also provides physical comfort. Though the men are soaking wet, they manage to keep their feet warm by huddling together. Likewise, being crammed together on the boat means that they can take turns rowing so that they can balance sleep and safety as they make progress toward shore. By highlighting the positive things that can grow out of hardship, Crane encourages his audience to cultivate community and treat one another with a greater degree of empathy. From Crane's perspective, life is full of suffering, but the good news is that humans have one another to turn to for support. - Theme: Fate and Mortality. Description: Stuck in a ten-foot lifeboat in the middle of the open sea, four shipwreck survivors—the captain, the cook, the correspondent, and the oiler—are forced to grapple with the concepts of fate and death, which now feel suddenly and alarmingly real to them. "The Open Boat" ultimately suggests that humans cannot change their fate, no matter how much they argue, curse, or shake their fists at the sky. In addition, the story cautions against trying to find a deeper meaning in one's fate, suggesting that fate is arbitrary and must be accepted as such. "The Open Boat" stresses that humans cannot change their fate, regardless of attempts to argue, threaten, or reason with the universe. For example, the men try to use logic against fate, arguing they have come too close to the shore to die now. Their argument against Fate (which they personify as a female) is childish and flimsy: "she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work." If and when using logic doesn't work, all the men can do is shake an angry first at the sky and threaten to name-call fate for potentially killing them: "Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you." In addition, while arguing about whether the mysterious object on the shore is a lifeboat or an omnibus, one of the men exclaims, "By thunder, you're right. It's an omnibus, sure as fate." Though "sure as fate" is meant here as an exclamation to end the argument, it points to the way that fate is undeniable and set in stone. Besides accepting the permanence of fate, the story suggests that humans should also avoid assigning meaning to fate. Fate is determined arbitrarily and the things that happen to people don't necessarily have a meaningful explanation. At the opening of the short story, the correspondent "watched the waves and wondered why he was there," demonstrating the human impulse to make sense of the world and why things happen. However, fate is personified as an "old ninny-woman" and an "old hen" who is incompetent at her job and puts no thought into deciding people's outcomes. Besides illustrating fate as an old woman, the men also consider the influence of the "seven mad gods who rule the sea." The gods are "mad," implying that there is no coherent logic behind their actions. The men consider their potential fate of drowning after they've almost reached shore to be "preposterous" and "absurd," showing that any attempt to make sense of their situation is fruitless. Another example of fate's arbitrary nature comes at the very moment the men need to make a flag to signal to the people on the shore, when they find both a bath towel in their lifeboat and a long stick floating in the water beside them "by some weird chance." Overall, the arbitrary nature of fate is illustrated best in the oiler. Among the four men, the oiler was the strongest, the hardest working (having worked back-to-back shifts in the engine room before the ship sunk), and the best swimmer, and yet he is the only one who ultimately drowns. "The Open Boat" asserts that despite the impulse to attempt to control and make sense of one's fate, these efforts are in vain. Fate remains solidly out of the control of humankind, and one's fate has no deeper meaning hidden in it. This worldview aligns with that of the story's author, Crane, who openly rejected religion and consequently the concepts of an afterlife, as well as a benevolent god who intervenes in human affairs in response to prayer. Crane's personal worldview explains the lack of overt religiosity in the text, save for the "seven mad gods of the sea," which seems more like an exasperated exclamation than a genuine assertion of divinity. The idea that humans cannot control their fate is called determinism and is a key part of literary naturalism, the movement of which Stephen Crane was a proponent. Thus, in "The Open Boat," Crane suggests that humans can only reconcile themselves to their fates and to the fact of their mortality, and try to live their best lives without harboring any illusions that they are in control. - Theme: Certainty and Uncertainty. Description: Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is deeply critical of the attitude of certainty. Using the experience of four shipwrecked men who are forced to endure the open sea on a ten-foot lifeboat, the short story asserts that very little in life—and in the narrative—is certain. In the story, the cook and the captain embody certainty and uncertainty, respectively. Together, the two characters illustrate how claiming certainty is unproductive and foolish, as well as why accepting uncertainty is the more realistic and practical approach to life. "The Open Boat" highlights how very little is certain in life. The first line of the story begins with the characters' uncertainty about their immediate surroundings: "None of them knew the color of the sky." The story also begins in medias res—in the middle of the action—so the reader is uncertain as to who the characters are and what is happening. Even the narrator is not always sure as to what's going on in the narrative. The third-person narrator has insight into the correspondent's inner life but can't tell what the other men are thinking or feeling. Similarly, the narrator notes that when the men in the boat ride particularly large waves, the experience is "probably splendid" and "probably glorious." The narrator is even uncertain of the men's facial expressions, stating their faces "must have been grey" while "their eyes must have glinted." Like the narrator, the correspondent can't tell what his companions are feeling: "The correspondent, observing the others, knew that they were not afraid, but the full meaning of their glances was shrouded." Despite being wedged between three other men on a ten-foot lifeboat, the correspondent still can't be certain of what thoughts and emotions are behind the other men's eyes. At one point, the correspondent is sure that the four men on the lifeboat have become a band of brothers who all feel the same closeness and responsibility for one another. However, the oiler's quickness in swimming ahead of the group after the men abandon the lifeboat implies otherwise. Claiming to be certain about something is misleading and unproductive, as seen through the words and actions of the cook. The cook relentlessly asserts that there is a house of refuge not far from them (a place that has emergency supplies but doesn't have a crew that could help them). He then asserts, just as confidently, that it is actually a life-saving station (a place that has emergency supplies and does have a crew that could help them). Moments later, he affirms "That's the house of refuge, sure." The cook is clearly uncertain but instead makes unfounded assertions that only serve to give the other men false hope. Similarly, when the men finally see people on the shore, one of the men expresses certainty that someone on the shore is signaling them to go north to a life-saving station. In reality, however, the waving man is just saying hello with his coat, thinking that the cook and his companions are fishermen. Even after the men have gotten their hopes up several times, each time to no avail, one of the men spreads false hope: "somebody in gloom spoke. 'Well, anyhow, they must have seen us from the shore by now." This assertion is unproductive, because it doesn't help the men decide how they will save themselves. In contrast, accepting uncertainty is shown to be the much more practical and realistic attitude, as evidenced by the words and actions of the captain. The captain's consistent uncertainty that the boat will reach shore means that the men are able to prepare for the worst-case scenario (death) by exchanging addresses of loved ones in case not everyone survives. Likewise, the captain is doubtful that a lifeboat is coming to save them, regardless of the cook's constant claims. The captain's uncertainty prepares the men to swim to shore rather than wait for help: "'If we stay out here much longer we will be too weak to do anything for ourselves at all.' The others silently acquiesced in this reasoning." While the captain's words clearly aren't comforting, they are realistic, which is why the other men agree reluctantly. Instead of giving into blind optimism like the cook, the captain speaks with "humor, contempt, [and] tragedy," which feels descriptive of the tone of "The Open Boat" as a whole and is realistic considering the men's dire situation. Underpinning Crane's implicit praise for the captain's acceptance of uncertainty seems to be a deep appreciation for the way the captain uses his doubt as fuel to take practical action, whether that means making the other men exchange addresses or prepare to swim. Crane encourages his readers to emulate the captain (and ignore their inner cook) by taking action in their lives rather than foolishly indulging in false hope. The recognition of life's uncertainty and the importance of taking action also underscores that "The Open Boat" is a masterwork of literary naturalism—a literary movement whose foundational belief is humankind's insignificance in the scheme of the natural universe. Since nature doesn't care about man and fate can't be bargained with, humans must fend for themselves to survive in the world. "The Open Boat" reminds readers that survival often depends on having a realistic outlook—which in turn almost always involves acknowledging uncertainty. - Climax: The men jump overboard and swim for shore - Summary: "The Open Boat" opens with four men crammed into a bathtub-sized lifeboat on the violent, steel-grey sea off of the coast of Florida. The four shipwreck survivors are the captain of the now-sunken Commodore, the cook, the correspondent, and the oiler. As the cook bails out the boat, the injured captain gives orders, and the correspondent and the oiler, named Billie, take turns rowing. The tiny lifeboat struggles to climb the massive waves, and each crest feels like it will be the one to capsize the boat. As the sun rises (visible only in the sea's changing colors, not in the grey skies), the correspondent and the cook argue. The cook asserts that they are nearing the Mosquito Inlet lighthouse, which also has a house of refuge, so the men will surely be seen and saved quickly. The correspondent corrects him, noting that houses of refuge don't have crews—just emergency supplies. Life-saving stations, however, have both. After arguing back-and-forth, the cook supposes that it could be a life-saving station after all, but regardless, there is a crew who will see and save them. The oiler grumbles that they aren't there yet, so it's not worth arguing about. The men are glad for the onshore wind that pushes them closer to shore. They are hesitant to voice their optimism, but most of them feel hopeful that they will be rescued soon. However, it's uncomfortable being packed into such a small lifeboat. When a sea gull lands on the captain's head, the captain can't even swat it away for fear of tipping the boat. Likewise, when the correspondent and the oiler take turns rowing, they must take care not to rock the boat as they switch places. The captain notices the Mosquito Inlet lighthouse in the distance. The correspondent, busy at the oars, longs to turn his head to search the horizon for the lighthouse but can't take his eyes off of the approaching waves. When he finally sees the lighthouse, it's no bigger than a needle's point. The captain says the men are bound to make it to shore as long as the wind stays in their favor and the boat doesn't collect too much water. The four men are like brothers, bound together by the extraordinary experience of being lost at sea. All the men feel unwavering respect for the captain, whose orders they obey without question. Even the correspondent, who is skeptical of others, feels deeply connected to these men. On the captain's orders, the cook and the correspondent fasten the captain's coat to the mast as a makeshift sail, and the boat picks up speed. The lighthouse in the distance gradually gets larger, and eventually the men can see a small sliver of land. As the wind calms and the makeshift sail deflates, the exhausted oiler and correspondent are forced to continue their laborious rowing. The narrator notes that for the two days prior to the Commodore's sinking, all the men had been too excited to eat or sleep, making them feel extra drained now. The oiler is even more exhausted than the others, having worked back-to-back shifts in the ship's engine room right before the ship sank. The captain grimly warns the men to preserve their strength in case they need to swim to shore. The small sliver of land comes into clearer view and the captain recognizes a house of refuge. With the lighthouse towering above them, the captain says someone is bound to see them and send help. The oiler softly says that none of the other lifeboats must have made it to shore, or else there would be a search team scouring the waters for other survivors already. Despite this, the men feel hopeful for a speedy rescue. The correspondent finds eight long-forgotten cigars in his coat pocket. Four are soaked, but the other four are entirely dry. Someone finds three dry matches among their supplies, so the men relax by smoking and drinking from their water supply as they wait to be rescued. After a while, the captain notices that the house of refuge looks empty. The cook finds it strange that the life-saving people haven't yet noticed them. The narrator interjects, explaining that there is in fact no life-saving station anywhere nearby. However, the four men are oblivious to this fact and instead take to criticizing the life-saving people's poor eyesight and lack of courage. In the midst of the men's grumbling, the captain tells them that they will have to save themselves while they still have the energy. He recommends that the men exchange addresses of loved ones in case they don't all make it to shore. The men feel angry at the possibility of drowning, wondering why the "seven mad gods who rule the sea" would let them come so close to shore only to drown. The waves near the shore grow too large for the lifeboat to linger safely, so the oiler rows the boat out to sea. One of the men assures the others that they're bound to have been seen by now. Someone else ventures the idea that the life-saving people already saw the men but assumed they're just fishermen. That afternoon, the lifeboat is pushed one way by the tides and another by the wind and waves. The oiler and the correspondent continue to take turns rowing. As one of the men takes the oars, the other lies in the bottom of the boat, soaked by the thin layer of seawater by grateful for a break from rowing. The correspondent thinks drowning sounds peaceful, like going to sleep on a large bed. Excitedly, someone notices a person on the shore who is waving at them, and the men rejoice that they're finally going to be saved. They happen to find a bath towel in the lifeboat and a large stick floating in the water beside them, so they craft a flag to wave back to the man. A large vehicle also appears on the shore, which they realize is an omnibus. They notice the waving man has produced a black flag but then realize the flag is just his coat that he's leisurely waving above his head. They argue as to whether the waving man is trying to signal them to go a certain direction—perhaps to where the nearest life-saving station is—but ultimately decide the man is just waving a friendly hello at what he thinks is a group of fishermen. In the evening, the shore can no longer be seen. The men periodically get soaked by sea spray, but they still sleep soundly. The correspondent rows through the darkness as everyone sleeps. Having spotted a giant shark swimming alongside the boat, he soon aches for the other men's company. The narrator interjects that when a man realizes that he is entirely insignificant in the face of the massive universe, that man is likely to be overcome by anger, followed by a sense of helplessness. The men on the lifeboat have not discussed nature's indifference, but they all have contemplated it privately. The correspondent remembers a poem he read during his childhood about a dying soldier who, crying out that he would never again see his homeland, tried to keep from bleeding to death by clutching his chest with his left hand. When the correspondent was a boy, he felt no compassion for the soldier, but now the correspondent is filled with sympathy. In the morning, the correspondent sees a giant wind tower perched on the beach and wonders if anyone climbs it and looks out at the sea. He thinks the wind tower is an illustration of nature's indifference to humankind. The captain cuts off the correspondent's thoughts, confirming that their boat is bound to sink soon. The men jump out into the sea. Before he leaps, the correspondent grabs a lifebelt with his left hand and clutches it to his chest. The correspondent is startled by how cold the water is and wants to cry. Looking around for his friends, he sees the oiler far ahead of the others, swimming quickly to shore. Swept up by a current, the correspondent's own progress toward shore ceases. He wonders if it's possible that he really is going to drown but is soon pulled out from the current's grasp by a large wave. The correspondent notices what looks to be a life-saving man, running across the beach and undressing quickly. As the captain yells for the correspondent to swim to the boat, the correspondent thinks of how drowning sounds like a peaceful end. Suddenly, a large wave catches the correspondent and hoists him over the boat and drops him into waist-high waters. In his exhaustion, he can't manage to stand, so he lets himself be trampled by the waves. The life-saving man, now completely naked, pulls the cook to shore and hurries to the captain, who insists the correspondent be saved first. As the man begins to drag the correspondent out from the water, he is shocked to see the motionless oiler lying face down in the shallow waters. When the correspondent finally reaches the shore, the beach swarms with people providing blankets, coffee, and clothing. The oiler is dead. That night, the winds pick up, carrying the sound of the ocean to shore. The three men—the captain, the cook, and the correspondent—feel that they can now be "interpreters" of the sea's voice.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Open Window - Point of view: Third person - Setting: An English country house in the early twentieth century - Character: Framton Nuttel. Description: A perpetually anxious gentleman sent to the English countryside to soothe his nerves. Mr. Nuttel has arrived at the Sappleton home following a letter of introduction from his sister, but is not enthused about the prospect of conversing with total strangers. His behavior is largely shaped by expectations of social etiquette, and he is easily manipulated by Vera's story about the deaths of her aunt's husband and brothers. Upon the return of Mrs. Sappleton's male relatives to the house, Mr. Nuttel dashes away without a word of explanation or apology—all his gentlemanly pretensions cast aside in the face of apparent horror. - Character: Vera Sappleton. Description: Fifteen-year-old Vera greets Mr. Nuttel upon his arrival to the Sappleton home and spins the tragic tale that sends him running away. Immediately described as "very self-possessed," Vera is an observant, clever, and above all imaginative young woman who handily fools the adults around her with "romance on short notice." Vera's name comes from the Latin for truth, and her innocent demeanor makes her tales all the more convincing. - Character: Mrs. Sappleton. Description: Vera's aunt and the lady of the Sappleton home. Though she appears to be somewhat aware of Vera's penchant for storytelling, Mrs. Sappleton nevertheless fails to detect the prank her niece has pulled on the unsuspecting Mr. Nuttel. Mrs. Sappleton nearly arrives at the truth of the matter, commenting after Mr. Nuttel's hasty exit that her guest looked as though he'd seen a ghost. - Character: Framton Nuttel's sister. Description: Though she never appears in the story, Mr. Nuttel's sister is the reason he is at the Sappleton home to begin with. Fearing her brother would spend his restorative time in the country moping, she writes letters of introduction to acquaintances she made while working at a local rectory a few years prior, remarking that "some" of these people were nice. - Theme: The Absurdity of Etiquette. Description: "The Open Window"—Saki's tale of the anxious Framton Nuttel's ill-fated encounter with the precocious young storyteller Vera in the English countryside—is, ultimately, a satire of excessive decorum. Saki wrote the story during the Edwardian Era (1901-1914), when British social mores were beginning to loosen. In the story, Saki positions the excessive social graces of the previous period as shallow and arbitrary, but also as actions that, ironically, allow for rudeness and deception. In "The Open Window" etiquette is the enemy of candor. Rigid social expectations lead to stilted, awkward conversations, as characters must say what is proper rather than what they actually feel. For example, Mr. Nuttel cannot simply offer a sincere greeting or compliment to Vera upon his arrival at the Sappleton home. Instead, he must navigate the overly-complicated task of saying "the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come." The result is silence: concern over saying the right thing results in Mr. Nuttel unable to think of anything to say at all. Saki further lampoons societal norms of conversation by writing that Vera only continued speaking after judging that she and Mr. Nuttel "had had sufficient silent communion." Etiquette also manifests as a form of insincerity. Mr. Nuttel's sister has written letters of introduction to locals she met while living in the countryside, in the hopes that meeting with them will help assuage her brother's anxiety. Yet despite asking these people for what is essentially a favor, she cannot bring herself to characterize them all favorably; she says to her brother that only "some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice." With his sister having already written letters, propriety dictates that Mr. Nuttel visit certain homes despite having no meaningful connection to their occupants. Mr. Nuttel proceeds with these social callings despite his—it turns out warranted—doubts that his "formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do much towards helping to cure his nerves." Mr. Nuttel feeling obliged to visit strangers, and those strangers feeling obliged to host him, creating the opportunity for (and perhaps ensuring) awkwardness hidden behind a veil of politeness. Saki then further points out the ridiculousness of the situation by showing how these interactions between utter strangers also create the opportunity for deception. Upon learning that the man she has been tasked with greeting is clueless about her family, Vera entertains herself by spinning a tale about her aunt's tragic history—subverting expectations of propriety to satisfy her own decidedly improper ends. Preoccupation with etiquette not only allows Vera to get away with her lies, but also results in Mr. Nuttel being made a fool of. His head spinning with Vera's story about the deaths of her male relatives, Mr. Nuttel becomes terrified upon seeing "ghosts" return to the Sappleton home and flees "without a word of good-bye or apology" (and also nearly collides with an innocent cyclist in the process). A situation spawned by decorum has ironically resulted in the anxious Mr. Nuttel coming across as a rude, and as such implies that the original social mores governing politeness and decorum are themselves hollow and absurd. - Theme: Fiction and Perspective. Description: "The Open Window" uses its story-within-a-story structure to explore the interplay of truth and imagination. Whether viewed as a cruel prank or an enjoyable practical joke, the stories that Vera makes up in "The Open Window" control the perspectives of everyone around her. Saki mines comedy from contradicting perspectives, as Vera's story results in a farcical disconnect between Mr. Nuttel's experience of the world and Mrs. Sappleton's. Based on Vera's story, Mr. Nuttel believes Mrs. Sappleton's male relatives to have been killed on a hunting trip three years ago, and so Mr. Nuttel finds it "purely horrible" to hear Mrs. Sappleton ramble "cheerfully" on about how the men will soon return. Such light topics are hardly cause for horror, unless one believes (as Mr. Nuttel does) their speaker to be delusional with grief. On a similar note, Mr. Nuttel's subsequent attempt to steer the conversation in a "less ghastly" direction by talking about his personal ailments is a nicety that appears deeply strange to Mrs. Sappleton. Lacking the fiction that shapes Mr. Nuttel's perspective of their meeting, Mrs. Sappleton cannot understand why her guest "could only talk about his illnesses" and why he runs away from the home when her relatives arrive. She instead perceives Mr. Nuttel to simply be a "most extraordinary man"—which is a kind of polite code for what she actually means: that she thinks he's crazy. Mrs. Sappleton nearly arrives at the truth of the matter when she says of Mr. Nuttel's hasty exit, "One would think he had seen a ghost." The irony is she has no idea that, in Mr. Nuttel's mind, this is precisely what happened. Saki's story also makes frequent use both situational and dramatic irony: not only does Vera fool her audience, but "The Open Window" fools its readers as well. At first, the reader has no concrete reason to question Mr. Nuttel's perception of events nor to disbelieve Vera's story. In fact, Mr. Nuttel is initially presented as an observant man, noting—correctly—that "an undefinable something" about the Sappleton home "seemed to suggest masculine habitation." By presenting much of "The Open Window" from Mr. Nuttel's perspective, Saki puts the reader in the same shoes as his gullible protagonist. And to Mr. Nuttel, Vera appears "falteringly human" and has a look of "dazed horror in her eyes" as the men return from their outing—all evidence that her ghostly story must be true. The specificity and quickness of Vera's tale further lend it an air of authenticity. However satirical "The Open Window" may be, it is only upon reaching the end of the story—when Vera invents a reason for Mr. Nuttel's frantic exit—that the reader can know for certain that Vera has been lying all along. Saki's prose is restrained in its mockery, with any authorial smirk becoming apparent only after the reader gets to the end of the tale. This shift in perspective changes the entire tone of the story; elements that initially come across as sinister become comedic through dramatic irony (that is, knowing something the characters do not). The delusional figure in the story also shifts from being Mrs. Sappleton to Mr. Nuttel. As the author of the internal tale, Vera serves as a sort of stand-in for Saki himself (who not coincidentally grew up in an English country house with his aunts). "The Open Window" thus asserts the ability of fiction to alter one's perception of the world, and the tale is ultimately a testament to the power of storytelling. - Theme: The Romance of Hypochondria. Description: In the story of Mr. Nuttel going to the country to search for the "nerve cure" for his anxieties, Saki lampoons not just the strict etiquette of the previous (Victorian) era, but also its tendency to romanticize the English countryside, tragedy, and illness. The exact nature of Mr. Nuttel's condition is never specified beyond being a vague issue of "nerves." His prescription for "complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise" reads more like justification for taking a vacation. Mr. Nuttel's anxieties seem all the more inconsequential when positioned in comparison to Mrs. Sappleton's "great tragedy" (that is, the alleged death of her husband, brothers, and dog in a bizarre accident). The fact that Vera concocts such a macabre tale in response to Mr. Nuttel's arrival suggests that she, for one, certainly does not take his ailment, nor his prescription for rest and relaxation, seriously. Romanticizing illness results in romanticizing its cure. Mr. Nuttel is shocked by Vera's story in part because he assumes the countryside to be the restorative idyll of stereotype, noting, "in this restful country spot tragedies seemed out of place." Yet in the end the countryside is neither restful nor horrifying; to a young girl starved for entertainment, it is simply boring. Saki's most scathing indictment of Mr. Nuttel's frailty comes when, in his attempts "to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic" with Mrs. Sappleton, he begins discussing his illness. Saki describes Mr. Nuttel as laboring "under the tolerably wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure." The obviously bored Mrs. Sappleton can barely stifle her yawn while listening to Mr. Nuttel. By employing the phrase "tolerably wide-spread" Saki suggests that Mr. Nuttel's delusion is not just his own, and that, rather, it spreads across society. Mr. Nuttel, then, is but a stand-in for the legions of self-absorbed hypochondriacs (that is, people who are paranoid about or preoccupied with their own health) across British society—some of whom may be reading Saki's words, and all of whom he is mocking. In the story, Saki satirizes not only preoccupation with one's own delicateness but also fascination with tragedy, as, like Mr. Nuttel, contemporary readers may have been too quick to believe Vera's tale of gothic horror. In "The Open Window," "nerves" are nothing more than self-absorbed hypochondria, and tragic romance is spun from the musings of a bored teenage girl. The story thus suggests that the maladies of the upper class—both "nerves" and overexcited "Romantic" imaginations—may simply be the result of having too much time on their hands. - Theme: Innocence and Guile. Description: Saki subverts expectations of naiveté, as the young, too-easily-dismissed Vera handily manipulates the adults around her. In "The Open Window," age does not necessarily confer wisdom, and a childish demeanor can mask audacious cunning. In the opening line of the story, Mr. Nuttel immediately observes that Vera is a "very self-possessed young lady," yet nevertheless fails to detect her prank. This is in large part because, in keeping with her self-possession, Vera knows how to play the role of an innocent, nonthreatening girl. Vera tempers her own significance from the moment she meets Mr. Nuttel, saying, "My aunt will be down presently … in the meantime you must try and put up with me." By presenting herself as inconsequential, she is able to avert suspicion of anything she subsequently says. Despite how she may present herself, however, Vera is clearly more perceptive than Mr. Nuttel. While the latter is consumed with searching for the proper thing to say and constantly worrying about his own infirmities, Vera is sizing up her guest. Her delicate prying—"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?"—goes unnoticed by Mr. Nuttel, yet grants Vera the permission she needs to make up any history she desires. The quickness and specificity of Vera's ghost story further evidences her keen knack for observation. Her detailed description of her uncles means she must have noted the exact configuration of men heading out hunting earlier in the day. Details such as the "white waterproof coat over" an uncle's arm, the presence of a spaniel, and her uncle singing "Bertie, why do you bound?" ground her story in reality. Her acting skills are well-practiced as well, as she is able to convince Mr. Nuttel that she is genuinely terrified upon the return of her uncles. That, or he just is not suspecting a young girl to so brazenly lie to his face; it appears Mr. Nuttel would rather believe ghosts have entered the Sappleton house than that a 15-year-old girl could have fooled him. "The Open Window" does not condemn Vera for her deception. On the contrary, Saki presents her as remarkably quick-thinking and imaginative young woman, simply amusing herself while surrounded by less observant adults in the stiflingly proper English countryside. Vera's name, in fact, comes from the Latin for truth. While her stories are anything but, Saki suggests that her ability to reveal the artifice of certain social situations is, in itself, an act of honesty. - Climax: Thinking he is seeing ghosts enter the Sappleton home through an open window, Framton Nuttel runs away in horror, much to the confusion of his host. - Summary: Framton Nuttel is visiting the quiet English countryside in the hope of curing his nerves. Upon arriving at Mrs. Sappleton's home, he is greeted by her self-assured 15-year-old niece named Vera. Mr. Nuttel searches in vain for the proper greeting for a teenage girl, while privately lamenting that these meetings with strangers, arranged by his sister, likely won't do him any good. Vera proceeds to ask her guest about his knowledge of the area and learns that Mr. Nuttel knows "next to nothing" about her aunt. Vera then points out a large, open window, and launches into a story about Mrs. Sappleton's "great tragedy." Vera tells Mr. Nuttel that three years ago Mrs. Sappleton's husband, two brothers, and spaniel left through that window for a hunting trip, during which they were all "engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog." Vera includes specific details about the outing that all ground her tale, such as the white raincoat one man was wearing and how her uncle Ronnie sang "Bertie, why do you bound?" to tease his sister. Now, Vera says, her aunt keeps the window open because she believes the men will still come home. Vera adds that on quiet evenings, she gets a "creepy feeling" that the dead men will indeed walk through the window. Just then Mrs. Sappleton enters the room, much to Mr. Nuttel's relief, and asks her guest whether Vera has been amusing him. She proceeds to apologize for the open window, remarking that her husband and brothers enter the house that way after hunting trips to avoid dirtying the carpet. Mr. Nuttel grows horrified by her cheerful rambling about hunting, and attempts to change the subject by discussing his illness and various cures. He notices that Mrs. Sappleton's eyes keep wandering toward the window, and considers it an "unfortunate coincidence" to have visited on such a tragic anniversary. Mrs. Sappleton barely stifles a yawn before "brightening to attention" to something outside. Mrs. Sappleton excitedly remarks that her brother and husband have arrived just in time for tea. For a moment Mr. Nuttel pities her delusion, before catching a look of terror on Vera's face. Turning to look out the window himself, he sees three men and a dog walking across the yard, one with a white raincoat slung over his arm and another singing "Bertie, why do you bound?"—just as in Vera's story. Terrified, Mr. Nuttel sprints out of the house and down the driveway. The men enter the home and the one with the white coat asks Mrs. Sappleton who the man running past was. She responds that he was a "most extraordinary gentleman," who left without saying goodbye, in such a hurry that "one would think he had seen a ghost." Immediately Vera explains that Mr. Nuttel ran off because of the spaniel, adding that he is scared of dogs due to a traumatic incident in India. The story concludes with the line, "romance at short notice was her specialty."

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: The Other Foot - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Mars - Character: Willie Johnson. Description: Willie Johnson lives on Mars with his wife, Hattie, and their three children. Their community is populated entirely by black people who fled widespread racism and cruelty on Earth twenty years prior. Willie grew up in Greenwater, Alabama, where he witnessed the horrors of slavery and racism—his father was hanged and his mother was shot by white people. When Willie learns that the white man is coming to Mars, he sees it as a chance to exact revenge and subject white people to the same inhumane treatment that black people had to endure on Earth. For much of the story, Willie is gruff and cruel. At one point, his wife tells him that he doesn't "sound human," underscoring the inhumanity of wanting to reestablish prejudice in their small, peaceful town. A natural leader, Willie initially uses his power to perpetuate racism and form a mob that looks to him for direction. Ultimately, with Hattie's help, Willie is able to understand that the Earth people have suffered feelings of pain, isolation, and homelessness in the past twenty years similar to those feelings that black people felt when they were on Earth. He realizes that everyone is "even" and encourages his fellow Martians to tear down all of the segregationist signs that he had just instructed them to put up. - Character: Hattie Johnson. Description: In contrast to her husband Willie's thirst for vengeance, Hattie Johnson does not see the white man's arrival as an opportunity to exact revenge over the cruelty and racism that the Martians experienced on Earth. Empathetic and morally upright, Hattie is horrified to think that her children might have to witness the inhumanity and racism she experienced as a child in Greenwater, Alabama, even if now it is black people abusing white people out of revenge. For most of the story, Hattie is timid and scared of her husband. She fearfully goes along with his cruel plan to reinstate segregation and racism, though she cries silently as she helps. Seeing her husband's influence over the crowd, Hattie knows that her husband is the "keystone"—if she can just dismantle his hatred, everyone else will follow suit. At the end of the story, Hattie acts with uncharacteristic boldness by being the first Martian to speak to the white man. She uses this conversation to show everyone—especially Willie—that everything on Earth has been destroyed, including physical remnants of racism such as lynching trees and plantation homes. - Character: The White Man. Description: The old white man, who is never named, steps out of the rocket to tell the Martians why the Earth people have come to Mars: a nuclear war has rendered Earth uninhabitable, and there are only five hundred thousand survivors on the entire planet. He humbly asks the Martians to allow the Earth people to come to Mars, asserting they will work for the Martians and endure whatever treatment the Martians see fit. Although many Martians initially planned to attack the white man and reinstate segregation and prejudice, the white man's humility and stories about how everything on Earth has been destroyed (and, with it, all physical traces of racism and slavery) change their minds. The Martians accept the white man's request for help and assert that all people—regardless of race—are now "on the same level." - Character: Hattie and Willie's Children. Description: Hattie and Willie's three young boys are excited about the white man's arrival. Yet, having been born on Mars (where there are only black people), the boys do not understand the deep-rooted racism that existed on Earth. Although the boys aren't allowed to go see the white man with the rest of the town, that doesn't curb their curiosity and they spend the entire day trying to understand what white people are like. - Theme: Revenge and Empathy. Description: Ray Bradbury's short story "The Other Foot" takes place on Mars, twenty years after all black people have fled the racism and cruelty of Earth to colonize the Red Planet. The impending arrival of a white man — the first white man to visit Mars since the black people colonized the planet — dredges up the Martians' deep-rooted feelings of bitterness towards a world that denied their humanity. Bradbury's story highlights the natural human impulse toward revenge while also presenting vengeance as both unproductive and unsatisfying. Because revenge simply perpetuates animosity and pain, "The Other Foot" ultimately suggests that true emotional healing can only happen when alleged enemies learn to see one another with empathy and understanding. Bradbury's story centers primarily on Willie Johnson, a Martian who immediately races home to get his guns upon hearing of the white man's arrival. Though he doesn't know who the white man is or what he wants, Willie's first impulse is toward violence. What's more, he convinces the entire town to bring guns and ropes to greet the visitor. When Hattie, Willie's wife, urges her husband to stop and think for a moment, Willie responds by pointing out that he has stewed on racial relations for the past twenty years. "I was sixteen when I left Earth, and I was glad to leave," he says. "There wasn't anything there for me or you or anybody like us." With no sense of closure after leaving Earth, Willie's pain and spite has been bottled up for two decades and the white man's arrival triggers its release. Bradbury presents Willie's desire for revenge as an understandable human impulse, but complicates matters by revealing how such feelings only perpetuate pain and strife for all involved. Getting increasingly worked up about the white man's arrival on Mars, Willie tells his wife, "the shoe's on the other foot now. We'll see who gets laws passed against him, who gets lynched, who rides the back of streetcars, who gets segregated in shows." Willie's plan for revenge means reinstating Jim Crow laws (the United States' strict racial segregation policies that were abolished in the 1950s), but altering them so that they exclude white, rather than black, people. Such a desire clearly eats away at Willie, however, whose face looks "stern and heavy and folded in upon the gnawing bitterness" as he scours his attic for guns. When Willie later proudly admits to forming a bloodthirsty mob to greet the white man, the mayor admonishes Willie that he is doing the "same thing" he always hated, and as such is "no better than some of those white men" he yells about. The mayor highlights how Willie isn't solving prejudice by turning his ire on white people; rather, he's perpetuating the same problems and attitudes that led to misery for people like him on Earth. Instead of revenge, the story suggests that to combat vengeful impulses people must view others with empathy. During Willie's angry rant prior to the white man's arrival, Hattie tells her husband that he doesn't "sound human." In his rage, Willie has become cold, heartless, and unempathetic toward people who are different from him; his desire for vengeance has stripped him of man's more noble qualities. However, after actually meeting the white man and internalizing Earth's near-complete destruction, Willie realizes that those who oppressed him have finally experienced genuine horror themselves—and, as such, must better grasp the cruelty and horror to which they subjected people who look like Willie. Indeed, Willie's vengeful impulses melt away once he is able to empathize with the white man over their shared experiences. Willie's ultimate embrace of the visitor reflects the story's belief that shared trauma can create understanding, and that understanding is the only path toward peace. - Theme: The Inhumanity of Racism. Description: "The Other Foot," which draws its dramatic tension from the impending arrival of a white man to an entirely-black community on Mars, was published in 1951, thirteen years before racial segregation laws were abolished throughout the United States. Bradbury repeatedly evokes the realities of racism on Earth throughout the story, referencing both the historical scars of slavery and contemporary lawful discrimination against black people. By setting his story on another planet, Bradbury is also able to create a sense of defamiliarization—to make racism appear at once foreign, strange, and deeply illogical. Above all, "The Other Foot" presents racism is a learned, rather than innate, human behavior. Despite the anxiety the white man's arrival kicks up for adult Martians who remember their time on Earth, Hattie and Willie's children are excited and curious about the man's arrival. Having never seen a white person before, they have no preconceptions of what he will be like and try to make sense of white skin by comparing it to milk, flowers, and chalk. There is no sense that the children think the white man is inferior or superior to them—he is simply different and interesting. Willie, meanwhile, nearly shatters this innocent understanding of race by declaring to his sons, "You ain't seeing no white man, you ain't talking about them, you ain't doing nothing." In this moment, Willie attempts to pass on his hatred onto his children, reflecting the notion that prejudice is a learned behavior. Willie then goes so far as to attempt to recreate the racism he experienced on Earth by inverting Jim Crow laws to target white, rather than black, people. Willie's blinding, dangerous fury underscores the inherent cruelty of such racist policies and their ability to erode any communal sense of peace. Hattie's horror at Willie's actions and declamation that he doesn't "sound human" further casts such prejudicial legislation as utterly inhumane. Given that Jim Crow practices were still legal at the time of Bradbury's writing, Hattie's horror can be read as a direct condemnation of contemporary societal racism in the United States. Of course, if racism is a learned behavior, it follows that it can be unlearned. The Earth people, the story suggests, have done just that; their suffering throughout World War III has forced them to reconsider previous prejudices, apologize for their foolishness, and beg for help from those they once treated as inferior. Hattie, too, recognizes the manmade nature of racism and hatred, and, as such, their ability to be dismantled piece by piece like any other structure. In the silence following the white man's plea, she thinks about the fact that, though her husband riled the crowd with talk of about prejudice and payback, these attitudes can be undone: "She wanted to get at the hate of them all," Bradbury writes, "to pry at it and work at it until she found a little chink, and then pull out a pebble or a stone or a brick and then a part of the wall, and, once started, the whole edifice might roar down and be done away with." Hattie likens the crowd's anger to an unstable wall that will tumble into a heap of rubble when its load-bearing element is removed, creating a domino effect of empathy, mercy, and forgiveness. The key to this, Hattie soon realizes, is her husband, who, after meeting the white man and listening to his stories, also comes around to the idea that racism can be unlearned. "I knew then that now the white man's as lonely as we've always been," he tells Hattie. "Now everything's even. We can start all over again, on the same level." Willie's words again reflect the notion of racism as an unnatural behavior, one that is not innate to the Earth people now seeking refuge on Mars. By starting with a clean slate—that is, one without the chosen, learned racism that tore apart life on Earth—the Martians and Earth people can finally build a peaceful, harmonious world. - Theme: Humility and Forgiveness. Description: Intimately connected to the story's themes of racism and vengeance is the power of humility, as both Willie and the white man must overcome their personal pride in the name of peace and survival. Beyond an admission of wrongdoing, the story depicts humility as evidence of taking responsibility for one's actions and a vital precursor to forgiveness and healing. "The Other Foot" presents Earth on the verge of total destruction after nearly two decades of atomic war. With are only 500,000 people left on the planet and all cities reduced to rubble, the white man has arrived on Mars to ask for the Martian's help in getting the surviving Earth people off the planet. His plea is immediately characterized by humility as he refuses to name himself, asserting that his specific identity does not matter. He goes on to unflinchingly admit that the Earth people—himself included—have been foolish and evil in their treatment of black people in the past. Humbly, he tells the Martians, "We've been stupid. Before God we admit our stupidity and our evilness. All the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and the British and the Americans. We're asking to be taken in." Continuing his plea, the white man says that the Earth people are ready and willing to work for the Martians, even if doing so means partaking in demeaning or subservient behavior. He says, "We deserve anything you want to do to us […] we'll work for you and do the things you did for us—clean your houses, cook your meals, [and] shine your shoes." The Earth people's willingness to endure the same treatment they subjected the Martians to for centuries shows an acceptance of responsibility for their past actions, as well as an acknowledgment of the immense pain they put the Martians through. The white man goes so far as to admit that the Earth people's actions have affected innumerable people over hundreds of years, saying, "[we'll] humble ourselves in the sight of God for the things we have done over the centuries to ourselves, to others, and to you." The angry Martian mob quiets at the man's words, its thirst for vengeance tempered by such honesty and self-recrimination. This reflects the power of humility to combat rage and violence. Like the white man, Willie ultimately sets aside his pride and admits his own mistakes as a means to build a more peaceful world. On the way home from meeting the white man, Willie tells Hattie that "what happens next is up to all of us. The time for being fools is over. We got to be something else except fools." Willie does not try to abdicate responsibility for trying to reestablish racial segregation and spark hatred in people's hearts. Rather, by using the word "we," he directly takes responsibility for both himself and his community. His use of the word "fools" further echoes the white man' earlier language, illustrating the similarity of realizations on both sides and suggesting the power of humility to inspire meaningful reflection in all who witness it. Indeed, Hattie recognizes that Willie's ability to set aside his pride and accept the white man means that there will be a "new start for everyone." Willie agrees, saying, "now the white man's as lonely as we've always been. He's got no home now, just like we didn't have one for so long." Humility has allowed both parties to look past their anger and instead toward their shared experiences. With the white man's admission of guilt, Willie realizes that he doesn't need to exact revenge or assert his own authority. Humility grants him the space to accept that the Martians and the Earth people have both suffered greatly over the years and can now welcome a new era of forgiveness. - Theme: The Individual vs. The Group. Description: Beyond delving into racism and revenge, "The Other Foot" also explores the tensions that exist between individuals and groups. Throughout the story Willie holds immense sway over his fellow Martians, who are quick to give in to a mob mentality at the expense of independent thought. Willie proves influential enough to stoke vengefulness, racism, and cruelty in the hearts of his followers, whom Bradbury repeatedly presents as a single entity. Hattie, meanwhile, proves pivotal in undoing Willie's work and getting her husband—and the whole community—to think clearly and humanely again. Through Hattie's actions and Willie's eventual change of heart, the story highlights the immense power individuals can have on their community—for better and for worse. For most of the story, Willie actively influences other Martians to adopt his own feelings of hatred and his desire for vengeance. On the way to the white man's landing point, he gruffly admits to his wife that he stopped by every house in the city and urged residents to fetch their guns and ropes to "be ready" for the arrival. He barks orders at others, clearly enjoying the sense of power that comes with being able to control a crowd. When the town mayor objects to his actions, for example, Willie is not cowed, retorting that they can simply elect a new mayor. In the moments before the white man's rocket touches down on Mars, Willie hands out guns to a crowd described as full of people "so close together it looked like one dark body with a thousand arms reaching out to take the weapons." This description underscores the notion of the mob as a single entity antithetical to diverse or independent thought. Many people feel unwillingly roped into the action, but the pressure to follow the group proves too strong to defy. When Willie calls out to the crowd to ask if they're ready for the white man's arrival, half of the crowd yells "Ready!" while the "other half murmured and moved like figures in a nightmare in which they wished no participation." Many Martians are clearly reticent to partake in violence, but the herd mentality that Willie has created has pressured everyone to conform to one person's will—in this case, Willie's. When someone yells that the rocket is approaching, "Like marionette heads on a single string, the heads of the crowd turned upward." This language again underscores the notion of the crowd as a puppet controlled by an outside string rather than its own convictions. After the white man lands and asks humbly for the Martians' help, the crowd again turns to Willie for instructions: "Willie Johnson held the rope in his hands. Those around him watched to see what he might do," Bradbury writes. Instead of thinking about the white man's words for themselves, people look to Willie to tell them how to feel and react, once again highlighting the power that individuals can hold over their community and the danger of suppressing independent thought. In contrast, Hattie is able to use her empathy and sensitivity to encourage the community to think clearly again. In the tense silence following the white man's request, Hattie realizes that her husband's influence over the mob means that he is the only one who can dismantle it. However, instead of simply waiting for her husband to react, Hattie takes action: "She stepped forward. She didn't even know the first words to say. The crowd stared at her back; she felt them staring." Hattie skillfully directs the conversation in ways that helps Willie see that physical remnants of racism were destroyed in the war. The second Willie realizes this and drops the noose from his hands, the crowd takes its cue: people "ran through the streets of their town and tore down the new signs so quickly made, and painted out the fresh yellow signs on streetcars, and they cut down the ropes in the theater balconies and unloaded their guns and stacked their ropes away." By quickly tearing down the newly installed artifacts of racial discrimination, the Martians seem to realize that they were swept up in Willie's wave of hatred and were not thinking for themselves. Bradbury's story ultimately cautions against giving in to mob mentality at the expense of independent critical thought. Written in the midst of a deeply segregated America, "The Other Foot" encourages readers to be bold and stand up for integrity and acceptance just like Hattie does—even if doing so means confronting to loved ones (like Willie) or stating an unpopular opinion. More specifically, it suggests the extraordinary power of individuals to fight the mob mentality of racism in their own communities. - Climax: When the white man's rocket lands on Mars - Summary: Hattie Johnson's children are buzzing with anticipation over the news: for the first time in twenty years, a white man is coming to Mars. The rocket is due to land later that day, and although her young boys are excited, Hattie has a feeling that the white man's visit will stir up trouble. Her kids pester her to tell them what white people are like and why they don't live on Mars. Hattie explains that white people live on Earth, and that twenty years ago, the Martians did too. Eventually, the Martians "just up and walked away and came to Mars," but the white people stayed on Earth and entered into a terrible atomic war with one another. It wasn't until recently that the Earth people scrapped together enough metal to build a single rocket to reach Mars. Telling her children to stay at the house, Hattie runs down the road and sees her neighbors, the Browns, piled into their family car. Mr. Brown says they're on the way to see the white man. Hattie tentatively asks the Browns if they're going to lynch the visitor, but the Browns laugh and assure her that they're going to shake his hand. Willie, Hattie's husband, pulls up in his car and gruffly asks the Browns if they're going to see the white man "like a bunch of fools." He adds that he is on his way home to get his guns, and that they should consider doing the same. Willie then forces Hattie to get into the car with him, and the two speed home. Willie mutters about why the Earth people couldn't just stay on their own planet and "blow themselves up." Appalled, Hattie tells her husband that he doesn't sound very Christian. Willie asks Hattie if she remembers all of the terrible things the white people did to the Martians, and how Dr. Phillips and Mr. Burton hanged his father on Knockwood Hill and shot his mother. Now, with the arrival of the white man, "the shoe's on the other foot." Willie adds that, on Mars, white people will have discriminatory laws leveled against them, be forced to ride in the back of streetcars and sit in the back of theaters, and even get lynched. The car pulls up in front of the Johnson household, and Willie dashes inside in search of guns and rope. Hattie reluctantly follows her husband into the house and watches him bustle around the attic, collecting his guns and muttering madly to himself. Hattie notices that his face looks twisted with bitterness and hatred. Barreling outside, Willie rounds up the children and tells them that he's locking them up—he doesn't want them to see or even talk about the white man. On the way to watch the white man's arrival at the landing port, Hattie notices that other cars are filled with guns. She accuses her husband of provoking people in the community, and Willie proudly reveals that he stopped at every house earlier that day and told everyone to bring guns and ropes. Hattie asks her husband to think about what he's doing, but he snaps that all he's done for the past twenty years is think about white people and the cruelty and racism the Martians endured on Earth. A dense crowd gathers at the landing port, and Willie passes out guns. When a trolley car pulls up, Willie climbs up into it, lugging a gallon of paint. He begins painting the seats, and the conductor quickly objects. However, when Willie steps back to reveal his handiwork, the conductor is pleased. The seat reads, "For Whites: Rear Section." Willie asks for volunteers in the growing crowd to paint every streetcar in the city. Several people race off to begin their task. Willie also asks the crowd to rope off the back two rows in the movie theaters, and several volunteers are chosen. On a roll, Willie shouts that new laws need to be passed banning intermarriages. The town's mayor tries to get Willie off of his soapbox, saying Willie has formed a mob and is behaving no better than the white men he is shouting about. Unfazed, Willie responds, "This is the other shoe, Mayor, and the other foot." Willie yells to the crowd that they will elect a new mayor. Clutching a noose in his hands, Willie asks the crowd if they're ready. Half of the crowd calls back enthusiastically, while the other half looks "like figures in a nightmare." The white man's rocket soars across the sky and begins its descent. When it lands, the crowd goes silent. The rocket's door slides open, and an old, tired-looking man steps out. The old man doesn't introduce himself, saying it doesn't matter who he is. He tells the Martians that twenty years ago, when they left Earth, World War III broke out. Since then, most of the Earth has been destroyed by atomic bombs. Historic cities like Paris and London have been reduced to smithereens. Even small cities, like Greenwater, Alabama, have been annihilated. Hearing the name Greenwater, Willie's mouth drops open. The old man continues, explaining that cotton fields, cotton mills, and factories have all been destroyed. Everything is radioactive, including the livestock, food, and roads. The old man continues that there are only five hundred thousand people left on the entire planet. Calling the Earth people fools, he asks the Martians for permission to use their rockets, which have been sitting unused for twenty years, so that he can bring the Earth people to Mars. He reaffirms that Earth people have been stupid and evil, and adds that they will work for the Martians and endure whatever treatment they see fit. When the old man finishes his speech, the crowd is silent. Many people watch Willie carefully to see how he will react. Watching her husband, Hattie thinks about how she wants to chip away at everyone's hate so that eventually, all hatred and racism will crumble. She realizes that if husband lets go of his bitterness, then maybe everyone else will too. Boldly stepping forward, she calls for the old man's attention, asking if he knows "Knockwood Hill in Greenwater, Alabama?" When the old man produces a map, Hattie asks about the big oak tree on the top of the hill. The old man says that the hill and the tree are both gone. Hattie asks if a certain Dr. Phillips and Mr. Burton are still alive, and the old man replies that they both died in the war and both of their houses burned down. He adds that there are no surviving houses or people in Greenwater. Willie thinks about how there are no more "lynching trees," pubs, or plantation homes. There is nothing "left to hate," except for an "alien people" who will be forced to sit in the back of streetcars and theaters. Quickly, Willie tells the old man that Earth people won't have to work for the Martians. Upon seeing Willie drop his noose, the other Martians swiftly unload their guns and race through town, tearing down all of the freshly painted signs and newly installed ropes. On the way home, Hattie muses that everyone will finally have a fresh start. Willie tells her that in the past twenty years, the Earth people have endured the same feelings of pain, loneliness, and homelessness that the Martians experienced on Earth, meaning that now everyone is "on the same level." When Hattie and Willie get home, Hattie lets the children out of the house, and they excitedly ask their father if he saw the white man. Rubbing his temples with his fingers, Willie answers that he did: "Seems like for the first time today I really seen the white man—I really seen him clear."

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Other Two - Point of view: Third person limited - Setting: New York City, New York - Character: Mr. Waythorn. Description: A wealthy, socially prominent businessman, slightly older than 35 years of age. At the beginning of "The Other Two," Mr. Waythorn and his new wife, Alice Waythorn, have just returned to New York from their honeymoon. Mr. Waythorn takes pleasure "owning" his new wife, and he is immensely troubled when the sudden appearances of Alice's two ex-husbands, Mr. Varick and Mr. Haskett, threaten to dismantle this sense of ownership and control. Waythorn describes himself as having "somewhat unstable sensibilities," and this instability is a constant source of anguish and insecurity for him. He strives to be the most collected and poised person in all social situations. Alice thus embodies all that Mr. Waythorn would like to be, as she is unfalteringly calm, composed, and polite. Waythorn's "somewhat unstable sensibilities," complicate his desire to appear social poised, however, as they result in outbursts of jealousy and controlling behaviors when he feels threatened by the presence of Alice's ex-husbands. When confronted with the realization that he may never be able to fully know or control is wife—that his wife's social poise comes at the price of opacity and uncertainty, and that his own social poise comes at the cost of inner discomfort—Waythorn must chooses to stifle his true emotions and desire for complete ownership and control in order to maintain his appearance of propriety. - Character: Mrs. Alice Waythorn. Description: Mr. Waythorn's new wife. Alice has "confessed" to being 35 years old, and has been married twice before—first, to Mr. Haskett, and later to Mr. Varick. Alice has a young daughter, Lily, whose father is Mr. Haskett. Alice appears to be fond of her new husband, but she never behaves honestly or candidly in his company, assuming a perpetual air of social grace and propriety. Mr. Waythorn is initially quite attracted to Alice's unremitting sense of composure, though he grows to despise it when her unreadability leads to feelings of deception and jealousy. Because Alice avoids discussing unpleasant or awkward subjects, Mr. Waythorn knows very little about her previous husbands or what problems motivated her to seek two divorces, and assumes that the men were brutes, philanderers, or both. As the story unravels, the reader discovers that Alice's marital history is not tragic, but highly calculated and opportunistic: she repeatedly marries "up" in an effort to improve her economic condition and social standing. She divorced her first husband, Haskett, not for his brutishness, but for his lack of funds. Further, one comes to understand Alice's collected demeanor not as natural, but as a carefully considered set of behaviors that will allow her to flourish in this new life of wealth and social prominence she has obtained through marriage. - Character: Mr. Gus Varick. Description: Alice's second husband. He is considered a gentleman and is a very popular member of the Waythorns' high-class social circle. Varick's marriage to Alice was "brief and stormy," and it is implied that Varick is a womanizer. Varick is a client of Mr. Sellers, a senior partner at Mr. Waythorns' workplace, and enters into the Waythorns' lives when Sellers falls ill and Waythorn is forced to negotiate a business deal for him. Alice takes pleasure in talking to Varick. Mr. Waythorn accepts Varick out of professional and propriety obligation, but remains inwardly resentful and guarded in their social interactions. - Character: Mr. Haskett. Description: Alice's first husband. He is a common man of meager means, but he will do anything for his daughter, Lily, having recently moved across the state to be nearer to her. He is described as a "small effaced-looking man with a thinnish grey beard." Alice was dissatisfied with the limited life her marriage to Mr. Haskett offered her, so she divorced him to improve her social standing. Haskett is unimposing and polite, though his manners seem clunky and pedestrian, or "over-the-counter," in Mr. Waythorn's words. He wears a "made up" tie, which Waythorn sees symbolic of his plight and personality. Mr. Waythorn is sympathetic of Mr. Haskett, however, once her sees the opportunistic motivations behind Alice's multiple marriages. - Theme: Social Etiquette and Illusions. Description: "The Other Two" follows Mr. Waythorn as he comes to terms with the fact that his wife's two ex-husbands, Mr. Haskett and Mr. Varick, are not far-off memories from another time and place but are real people who still play a role in the Waythorns' lives. Although this is already tricky territory to navigate, Mr. Waythorn's plight is complicated by the social norms and rigid standards of etiquette that govern his society. Even while feeling uncomfortable, disdainful, or embarrassed, Mr. Waythorn must behave politely, agreeably, and appropriately at all times. In "The Other Two," Edith Wharton—a member of the pristine upper class herself—reflects on the social etiquette with which she was so familiar. Charting the way that the story's protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Waythorn, continually choose to place etiquette over honesty, Wharton provides a sharp social criticism, suggesting that etiquette is just an illusion that conceals the truth and ultimately undermines relationships. As both characters repeatedly show as the story unfolds, it's impossible to be both polite and honest. Throughout the story, Wharton reinforces Mrs. Alice Waythorn's social pliancy and astute sense of etiquette, even in especially awkward or troubling circumstances. In response to Alice's daughter Lily's serious illness, Mr. Waythorn states, "no woman ever wasted less tissue in unproductive worry." Even in the exceptionally troubling circumstance of a sick child, Alice maintains her composure. Wharton situates this extreme situation next to Alice's hugely downplayed reaction in order to urge the reader to question the sincerity and motivation behind such an understated response to her daughter's health. A gravely ill child, suggests Wharton, ought to warrant some expression of worry—it speaks to Alice's misplaced priorities that she places etiquette above expressing fear over her possibly dying child. As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Alice harbors a private disdain for her first husband, Mr. Haskett. However, on coming across Mr. Haskett in her home—he is legally allowed to visit, as he is Lily's father—Alice astutely masks her displeasure. Mr. Waythorn observes: "Her smile faded for a moment, but she recalled it quickly, with a scarcely perceptible glance at Waythorn." Even though Haskett's presence takes her by surprise, Alice's sense of etiquette allows her to become immediately composed, quickly stamping out whatever emotions Haskett's presence brought up for her. Because of her composure in this moment and others, Mr. Waythorn is never able to fully grasp what his wife's relationship with Haskett was like, why she divorced him, or why his presence affects her the way that it does. When she unexpectedly encounters her husband and two ex-husbands together in the library, she proclaims enthusiastically, "I'm so sorry—I'm always late; but the afternoon was so lovely." Once again, Alice bends to propriety, dispelling an uncomfortable situation with light and cheerful—but clearly forced—language, masking whatever emotions she truly feels. Similarly, although Waythorn feels deeply uncomfortable and insecure about the significant roles Mr. Haskett and Mr. Varick still play in his and Alice's life, he refuses to express or act on these feelings for fear of appearing uncivil. When unforeseen circumstances force Mr. Waythorn to take on Alice's second husband, Varick, as a client, Waythorn—to his dismay—is forced to develop a polite and friendly business relationship with the man. At Alice's insistence, the Waythorns extend this relationship beyond the realm of business and into their larger social life. The Waythorns' social circle is overjoyed at their "acceptance" of Varick, but in reality Mr. Waythorn is only appearing to "accept" Waythorn, lest he commit a social faux pas. Such an acceptance signifies that the Waythorns have decided to overlook their own feelings of hesitation and discomfort in order to be perceived as polite and socially accommodating. In reality, Waythorn practices "acceptance" as a polite coping mechanism, having "formed a protecting surface for his sensibilities." Waythorn acts at ease around the ex-husbands, but only to appease his wife and their social circle. In another instance, Waythorn encounters Alice speaking to Varick in one of the "remoter rooms" of a house at which they are attending a ball. Embarrassed, Alice suggests that it would be "'less awkward'" to be on speaking terms with her ex-husband. Though the thought of this makes Waythorn ill, he agrees, "wearily," with his wife's decision. The actions that Waythorn takes out of politeness—maintaining a social relationship with Varick—contradict his inner feelings of unease. He would rather avoid an awkward situation than confess his insecurities to his wife, suggesting that, for the upper class, conforming to social norms is often more important than expressing one's true feelings. Despite this mutual dedication to maintaining appearances, Alice's extreme pliancy ultimately enrages Mr. Waythorn. Tensions build and remain unresolved when the couple consistently sacrifices honesty for politeness. Waythorn believes that he "could have forgiven her for blunders […] for resisting Haskett, for yielding to Varick." He could forgive anything, he believes, "but her acquiescence and her tact." Alice chooses to be polite and accommodating of her ex-husbands, making it impossible for Mr. Waythorn to ascertain how she actually feels about the two men. Though once entranced by Alice's social grace, Mr. Waythorn becomes frustrated at his wife's evasiveness, as he realizes that Alice's adherence to etiquette comes at the cost of building and maintaining intimacy and trust within their marriage. The Waythorns' fixation on social etiquette and the resultant tensions that build in their relationship reveal Wharton's critical perception of social etiquette. Although the short story ends on a cheerful note, with the Waythorns and their two guests—Alice's two ex-husbands—sitting around a tea-table, drinking, and laughing, Wharton's critical treatment of social etiquette throughout the text suggests that this happy scene is only an illusion of happiness and resolve. Mr. Waythorn laughs as he accepts another cup of tea, not because he is at ease, but because to appear otherwise would be an unspeakable social transgression. This ending, then, suggests that the Waythorns will carry on prioritizing their social status over honestly expressing themselves to acquaintances, friends, or even each other. In wholeheartedly committing themselves to maintaining an illusion of social poise, the Waythorns undermine their own relationship. - Theme: Marriage and Gender Inequality. Description: "The Other Two" features a middle-aged couple, Mr. Waythorn and Mrs. Alice Waythorn, recently returned from their unexpectedly short honeymoon. Though at first the Waythorns appear to be a happy couple, Wharton is quick to establish tensions between the pair, many of which exist as a result of gender-based inequalities. Most immediately, there is the reason for their return—Alice's daughter, Lily, has fallen ill. Unlike Mr. Waythorn, the marriage is not Alice's first: she has been married twice before, first to Mr. Haskett, and later to Mr. Varick. Their immensely different romantic pasts prove to be just the beginning of the imbalance that exists between Mr. and Mrs. Waythorn as a couple. As the reader will realize by the story's end, the Waythorn marriage is anything but loving and equal. Through the Waythorns' rocky relationship, Wharton makes a broader statement about gender inequality and married couples, suggesting that marriage is an institution that forces women into submission. Within the confines of a marriage, women are all too often treated as objects that men own—not full people in their own right. Throughout the story, Waythorn is horrified at the thought of Alice possessing even the smallest amount of agency. This becomes particularly apparent in Waythorn's eventual sympathy for Alice's first husband, Mr. Haskett. Waythorn comes to feel pity for Haskett because he believes that Haskett has been somehow wronged by Alice's conniving opportunism (divorcing him for a wealthier man). Waythorn realizes that "all he had learned [of Haskett] was favourable." Waythorn feels it is honorable for Haskett to do things for his daughter, Lily: upending his life, moving to a new city to be near her, and visiting her regularly and express concern for her wellbeing. And yet, Waythorn does not extend the same sympathies to Alice. He never considers that his wife's strategy of "moving up" might be motivated by the promise of a better life for her daughter. In Waythorn's eyes, Haskett is honest and motivated, while Alice is conniving and blindly opportunistic. As a man, Haskett's motivations are virtuous. As a woman, Alice's are viewed in a harsher light. When Waythorn regretfully admits that he "had been allowed to infer that Alice's first husband was a brute," he reveals that he would rather that Alice had been abused or belittled by her first husband, because this would deny her relative agency in the matter. What's more, it would render her a helpless victim—a damsel in distress in need of saving. Where Alice assumes the role of victim, Waythorn may render himself the hero. Ultimately, Waythorn would prefer to accept that his wife had been harmed or wronged by a man than that she could have had the intellectual or emotional capacity to make decisions based on wants and desires rather than by needs, suggesting that their marriage is based on an imbalanced power dynamic rather than genuine love and care. Another example of gender inequality is Waythorn's tendency to expresses the jealousy he feels over Alice in monetary terms. The economic aspect of Waythorn's jealousy creates an imbalance in his marriage, transforming Alice from an equal companion to an object to be owned and coveted. Sick with jealousy over the influence the ex-husbands seem to have had on Alice's present personality, Waythorn curses the naiveté with which he once supposed "that a woman can shed her past like a man." When Waythorn married Alice, he believed that he could get over the fact that he wasn't the first to do so—that he could accept that there were other men who had loved her before he'd even had the chance to know her. Wharton draws out the moment Waythorn understands the consequences of his naïve assumption with an evocative rendering of Waythorn as "a member of a syndicate" in which "he held so many shares in his wife's personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business." In this comparison, Waythorn configures himself and Alice's ex-husbands to be ex-owners of Alice, rather than ex-lovers. Waythorn's refiguring of the husbands as owners and Alice as their property effectively rips Alice of her subjecthood. When Waythorn additionally wonders "if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who lacked opportunity to acquire the art," Waythorn again conceives of his relationship with Alice as a type of ownership. In this passage, he divides her into three pieces, like shares of property to be owned, lost, and gained by each husband. Lastly, the reader may refer to a passage early in the text where Waythorn describes the beginnings of their courtship. Knowing Alice's history of divorce and remarriage, many people raised their eyebrows at Waythorn's decision to marry her. Waythorn states that "In the Wall Street phrase, he had 'discounted' them." Again, Waythorn uses economic or business terminology to talk about his romance and relationship with Alice, situating her as more of an asset to be attained than a lover to be romanced. Despite being perceived as property by her husband, however, Alice is held to a higher standard in maintaining emotional peace and tranquility in their marriage. In the beginning of the story, when Alice first informs her husband that Haskett will visit their home the next day, Waythorn responds coldly. He feels ill at the thought of another man stepping foot in his private home. Knowing that Haskett is legally permitted to see his daughter, however, he ultimately accepts this unpleasant development. In an effort to maintain some amount of control, he orders Alice to move on from brooding over this unpleasant matter. Immediately, Waythorn observes that "her own [eyes] were quite clear and untroubled: he saw that she had obeyed his injection and forgotten." Alice's discomfort (in this instance, she is upset about having to see Mr. Haskett) is always less important than her husband's. Waythorn's discomfort must always be absolved, often at the expense of Alice's. Later on in the text, Waythorn discovers that Alice has lied to him about seeing Haskett on his first visit with Lily. Even though she originally insisted that she'd neither seen nor spoke to the man, Haskett reveals the two had a rather unpleasant and unproductive disagreement that day. Alice's lie angers her husband, but the fact that Alice didn't somehow "divine" that meeting with Haskett would upset her husband in the first place "was almost as disagreeable to the latter as the discovery that she had lied to him." In Waythorn's mind, Alice must be able to sense what he wants before he says it. In contrast, Waythorn extends no effort to separate Alice's inner life from her outer actions. Waythorn's relationship to Alice's calm, polite disposition illustrates an additional asymmetry in their relationship. Reflecting on his wife's calm demeanor, Waythorn notes that "her composure was restful to him; it acted as a ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities." Mr. Waythorn takes it for granted that Alice is naturally, or even accidentally calm. He fails to see her calmness as a conscious action she performs in order to make him feel comfortable. Again, this demonstrates the inequality of their relationship, in this instance as it regards the emotional accountability of either spouse. The Waythorns' absorption of Alice's two ex-husbands into their social life might incite rising spousal tensions, but Wharton ultimately reveals the true source of their marital discontent to be an underlying framework of gender inequalities and asymmetries—a critique that pertains not only to "The Other Two," but to the larger issue of gender inequality in the early 1900s when the story was written. - Theme: Social Advancement. Description: Mr. Waythorn might be the primary breadwinner in "The Other Two," but it's his wife, Alice Waythorn, who most embodies the ideals of social advancement and self-improvement that were prevalent during the Gilded Age, when the story was published. As a woman, Alice Waythorn takes full advantage of one of the few methods by which she may improve her social standing: marriage. As the story progresses, the reader—and Mr. Waythorn—learns that Alice Waythorn wasn't always a woman of social and economic importance. Her first husband, Mr. Haskett, is a common man of limited means. Unsatisfied with the life he could provide her, she marries Mr. Varick, who provides her with material comforts but broke the bonds of marital fidelity. Unsatisfied, still, with Varick's failure to honor his marriage vows, Alice marries "up" once more, to Mr. Waythorn, who she believes will provide her with wealth, status, and loyalty. But remarrying doesn't permit Alice to improve herself—only to gain a new and improved identity each time she binds herself to a new, seemingly better husband. Alice can't be fully blamed for her imperfect opportunism: the compromised social status of women at the turn of the century would have prevented her from seeking opportunity in other, more effective ways afforded to men. Still, Alice's opportunistic, strategic marriages take a toll on the relationships she has with her husbands of past and present. In "The Other Two," Wharton explores the drastic steps Alice takes to advance her social standing. Wharton melds the domestic sphere (the Waythorn marriage) with the social sphere (polite society) in order to illustrate the pervasive culture of social advancement and self-improvement in the Gilded Age, and the negative effects this culture has on sincerity and intimacy in personal relationships. The perpetual shifting of identities that Alice undergoes makes it impossible for Mr. Waythorn to know or love the real Alice—he only knows the version of her that she has become to achieve and succeed at this current marriage. Waythorn reflects on his wife's previous legal identities: "Alice Haskett—Alice Varick—Alice Waythorn—she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of her inmost self where the unknown god abides." Waythorn believes that Alice sacrifices her genuine self in order to move up in the world, fragmenting her personality further and further with each subsequent marriage, until there is only a sliver left of herself to give. What she gains in status, Waythorn concludes, she loses in personal identity. Waythorn states that "Haskett's commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while Varick's liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues." Waythorn divides the different facets of his wife's personality to the different men to whom she once belonged, once again emphasizing that her identity is a constantly shifting response to the men in her life. Waythorn feels used by Alice's method of social advancement. Waythorn is deeply "disturbed" when he first sees Haskett, who is harmless in his economic insignificance and commonness. On realizing that Alice left Haskett not for his brutishness (the story she's spun for Waythorn) but for his lack of means, Waythorn realizes that husbands are not romantic companions to Alice, but tools by which she may move up in the world. With this, Waythorn comes to the conclusion that Alice might not love him as much as she loves the lifestyle his economic status allows her to enjoy. Once he learns the truth about Alice's motivations to remarry, Waythorn talks about the past marriages in objective, nonromantic terms. Miserably, he has no choice but to realize that his marriage to Alice is, too, a continuation of this opportunistic pattern, and this diminishes the intimacy he feels towards his wife. Waythorn repeatedly uses theater imagery in his musings about Alice and her opportunistic actions. The theatrical language and imagery imply a phoniness or staged quality to the way Waythorn perceives Alice's personality and actions within their marriage. Waythorn describes Alice's marriage to Varick as "a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted." A set, or staging, is false, and disallows for intimacy between married partners. Waythorn also observes that "It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of her life." He compares Alice's role as wife to the studied mannerisms of an actress, and therefore considers their marriage to be only a performance. Alice Waythorn sees marriage as the only viable means by which she may enter into polite society, and the result is a blurring of the line between the private world of intimacy (marriage and companionship) and the public world of society (social and economic status). Alice chooses her husbands, not as companions, but as passports into a richer, more prestigious way of life. The tragic result is a series of relationships devoid of intimacy and genuine connection, a problem that echoes the larger Gilded Age pattern of destructive social climbing that Wharton sought to critique. - Climax: Waythorn discovers the hidden motives of social advancement and self-improvement behind his wife's habit of remarriage. - Summary: "The Other Two" follows the conflict that arises between wealthy newlyweds Mr. Waythorn and Mrs. Alice Waythorn as unanticipated events force Alice's two ex-husbands into the couple's public and private lives. Despite boasting a somewhat mysterious past and having two divorces under her belt, Alice is accepted by—and even quite popular among—the Waythorns' New York social circle, due in large part to her exceptional grasp of etiquette. Mr. Waythorn reveals that he is also smitten with Alice's social grace, especially next to his "somewhat unstable sensibilities." The story begins as Mr. and Mrs. Waythorn arrive home to New York from their honeymoon, the trip cut unexpectedly short by the sudden illness of Lily Haskett, Alice's daughter from her first marriage. Mr. Waythorn waits at the dinner table for Alice, who had been upstairs checking on Lily. Alice finally arrives, accompanied by a look of grave concern. She informs Waythorn that she has received a letter from Mr. Haskett, her first husband, stating that he wishes to visit Lily in the Waythorn home while Lily is sick with typhoid. Mr. Waythorn is upset, but he reluctantly agrees that Haskett must see his daughter, if for no other reason than that the law permits him to do so. "It's beastly," Mr. Waythorn says to Alice, "but try to forget about it." Alice follows her husband's order and shifts the conversation to a cheerier subject, exclaiming, "How pretty everything is!" Waythorn leaves for work earlier than usual the next day in order to avoid running into Mr. Haskett. He plans to remain out of the house for the evening. Waythorn runs into Mr. Gus Varick, Alice's second husband, on the "elevated" train on his way to the office. Varick informs Mr. Waythorn that Mr. Sellers, the senior partner at Waythorn's firm, has fallen ill. The illness has occurred at an especially inopportune time, explains Varick, as Sellers and just taken him on as a client. The train arrives at Varick's stop, and the men part ways. At work, Sellers's illness is confirmed. Because of the illness, Mr. Sellers's work will go to Mr. Waythorn. Later that day, Waythorn stops at a restaurant close to his office for lunch. He once again spots Mr. Varick, "seated a few feet off." Fortunately, they are not as uncomfortably close as they were on the train, and Mr. Waythorn pretends he hasn't seen Varick in order to avoid making further polite, awkward small-talk. Waythorn watches Varick eat decadently and wonders whether their morning encounter made any impression on the seemingly confident, unflappable Varick. Having successfully avoided Mr. Haskett, Waythorn returns home for dinner. He and Alice exchange mundane details about one another's day, and Mr. Waythorn smugly observes how childishly happy Alice is to tell him the meaningless, banal details of her day. Waythorn does not tell Alice about his conversation with Varick. After dinner, the couple retires to the library for coffee and liqueurs. Waythorn inquires whether Haskett visited, and Alice says that he did, though she did not see him herself. While Alice serves coffee, Mr. Waythorn reflects on how good it feels to possess Alice. Ten days later, Sellers is still sick, and Waythorn is forced to take on his clients—including Varick. Waythorn is afraid of what his social circle will think of his business relationship with Varick. Lily continues to improve, and Waythorn begins to tolerate Haskett's visits. On Haskett's visiting day the following week, Lily's fever breaks, and she is considered "out of danger." Feeling that somehow he, too, is "out of danger," Waythorn lets his guard down and arrives home at a normal hour. He heads to the library and runs into Haskett, whom he describes as "a small, effaced-looking man." Waythorn is completely shocked at the reality of Haskett: he had expected Alice's first husband to be a despicable brute, but the man before him is polite, unassuming, and decidedly common. Waythorn feels violated by this unassuming stranger's presence in his house. More importantly, he feels shock and disgust at how little he knows about Mr. Haskett and the life Alice lived with him when they were married. Waythorn realizes that despite all her gracefulness and tact, his wife has deceived him, and he observes that her composure is nothing more than "a studied negation of that period of her life" when she was married to Haskett. Waythorn pities Haskett since he, too, was deceived by Alice. A week later, on Mr. Haskett's final visit to the Waythorn house, he informs Mr. Waythorn that he is unhappy with Lily's French governess and would like to see her dismissed. Waythorn sees how deeply Haskett cares for Lily and again feels ashamed for judging him, and foolish for sanctifying Alice. Alice is upset that Mr. Haskett is interfering in Lily's life, and bursts into tears. Waythorn coldly reminds Alice that Haskett is legally entitled to have a say in Lily's affairs. Per Haskett's request, the governess is let go. The winter draws on, and Varick and Waythorn's business relationship crosses expands into the social sphere. The social circle is thrilled that the Waythorns have chosen to be selfless and spare hostesses the uncomfortable task of having to choose between the Waythorns and Mr. Varick. Waythorn has only socially accepted Varick and Haskett, however, and remains plagued by anxiety and jealousy. He'd thought Alice could "shed her past like a man," when he married her, but has since changed his mind, realizing that Alice's past lives on in her mannerisms and tastes. One afternoon, Haskett returns to the Waythorn house to see Lily. Waythorn finds Haskett in the library and offers him a cigar. Shortly after, Varick appears in the doorway, followed by the footman, carrying a tea-table. The three men sit awkwardly together. Varick attempts to talk business with Mr. Waythorn when Alice enters the room to have tea with her husband. She sees the two unexpected guests, reacting pleasurably to Varick. She is almost unnoticeably perturbed at Haskett's presence. Her famous propriety takes over, and she assumes the role of accommodating, cheerful hostess. She offers the men cups of tea, and the story ends with the Waythorns and their two guests sitting together in the library. Waythorn accepts a third cup of tea "with a laugh."

- Genre: Short Story, Western, Local Color - Title: The Outcasts of Poker Flat - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The Old West settlement of Poker Flat and the Sierra Nevada mountain range - Character: John Oakhurst. Description: The protagonist of the story, John Oakhurst is a serial gambler who is exiled from the Old West settlement of Poker Flat along with three other people whom the town has deemed "improper": the Duchess, Mother Shipton, and Uncle Billy. While the other members of the group are exiled for their immorality, Oakhurst's sentence is a little more complicated. The committee that decides who stays and who goes is far from impartial, as many men on it have lost money to Oakhurst. These men, including Jim Wheeler, go so far as to suggest Oakhurst be hanged (knowing that they will be able to reclaim their money this way), while those who have managed to win money playing against Oakhurst suggest he just be banished instead. John Oakhurst is the strong, silent type, always unruffled in times of trouble. So when he is exiled to the next town over—forced to make the dangerous journey through the mountains to get there—he barely even blinks. And when things continue to go wrong (like when Uncle Billy runs off with the group's mules, and a snowstorm prevents the group from making the rest of the journey on foot), Oakhurst continues to carry himself with "philosophic calmness." Although "He [is] too much of a gambler not to accept Fate," he does show some care for his own well-being as well as that of his companions. When two innocent people fall in with the group—Tom and his fiancée, Piney—Oakhurst urges them not to linger with the outcasts, who have unwisely decided to make camp despite having very little rations. Later, when everyone is close to death, Oakhurst fashions a pair of snowshoes and sends Tom into town to get help. However, at the end of the story, Oakhurst commits suicide, raising the question of whether his unwavering calm stemmed from near-total apathy or quiet strength, and if he should have tried harder to survive. Oakhurst is originally from a settlement called Roaring Camp—which comes from one of Harte's best-known short stories, "The Luck of Roaring Camp." - Character: Uncle Billy. Description: The chief antagonist of the story, Uncle Billy is a drunk and a suspected thief (he is believed to steal gold while other people are panning for it) who is exiled from Poker Flat along with Oakhurst, the Duchess, and Mother Shipton. Although he's only suspected of being a thief, his actions in the story prove that he's deserving of this reputation. On their first night in the mountains, while the group is still treating their journey like a merry camping trip, Uncle Billy drinks heavily with the others. However, an idea "of a jocular nature" comes to him, and he's so delighted by it that he slaps his leg merrily and bites his fist in excitement: he is going to steal the group's mules, who are tied up near where the group has stopped to camp. By morning, Uncle Billy is gone and the mules are nowhere to be found. The story never reveals what happened to Uncle Billy—whether he made it to the next town over or died in the pursuit—but he is nonetheless spared the long, agonizing death that the rest of the outcasts (plus Tom and Piney) are forced to endure. Uncle Billy's theft is significant not just because it confirms his status as a thief, but also because it goes beyond his reputation as a suspected petty thief—in stealing the group's mules, he has stranded his companions and effectively sentenced them to death. What's worse, in the hours leading up to his escape, Uncle Billy seems positively giddy about his plan, as if stealing the group's sole source of transportation is an impish, playful trick rather than a malevolent and fatal one. Thus, while all of the other outcasts prove themselves more morally complex than first meets the eye—thus suggesting they weren't necessarily deserving of being demonized in Poker Flat—Uncle Billy remains nothing more than a villain. - Character: The Duchess. Description: The Duchess, whose real name is never revealed, is a prostitute in the Old West settlement of Poker Flat and is exiled for her immorality. She is forced to make the difficult journey through the mountains to the next town over with a few other unsavory characters: John Oakhurst, Mother Shipton, and Uncle Billy. Despite her tarnished reputation, the Duchess shows herself to be extraordinarily kind and compassionate, qualities that begin to surface when she meets the sweet and innocent Piney, who in many ways seems like the Duchess's foil. While the Duchess's job revolves around sex, earning her a stained reputation, Piney is the very picture of sexual purity and girlish innocence. When the group gets snowed in and are nearing death, the Duchess spends her last days holding Piney close. Days later, rescuers find the two dead woman still clutched in an embrace. In death and covered with snow, they now resemble one another so strongly that it's impossible to tell who is who—or "which was she that had sinned." While the Duchess is branded a sinner in life for her prostitution, in death, she no longer shoulders that burden. Her friendship with Piney seems to have a redemptive quality, freeing the Duchess from the reputation that exiled her in the first place. - Character: Mother Shipton. Description: Like the Duchess, Mother Shipton is a prostitute who is exiled from Poker Flat along with Oakhurst and Uncle Billy. She is a crude woman with a vocabulary to match, and she often laments her circumstances with long strings of curse words. Also like the Duchess, her real name is never revealed in the story, though the narrator mentions that she "won the title of 'Mother Shipton,'" who was a famous 15th-century prophetess. Although the historical Mother Shipton's predictions were regional and small-scale ones, she soon became a figure of legend, rumored to have made grand, sweeping predictions like the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world. In time, Mother Shipton's name became closely associated with mysterious and tragic events that cropped up in North America, the UK, and Australia up until the 19th century. That Harte's Mother Shipton "won" this nickname suggests that she, too, has the penchant for foreseeing future tragedies. In the story, when she sees a curl of smoke in the sky coming from the direction of Poker Flat, she screams bitter curses in its direction, seemingly more aware than some of her companions that they are going to die in the mountains. Despite her sharp tongue, Mother Shipton is tender and loving toward Piney, whom she calls "the child," and does everything she can to entertain the young woman. As the group's circumstances grow increasingly bleak, Mother Shipton begins starving herself, secretly tucking away her rations. On the 10th day in the mountains, moments away from death, she quietly tells Oakhurst to give her rations to Piney so that the girl can live a little bit longer. Despite her stained reputation as a prostitute and her abrasive vocabulary, Mother Shipton is also compassionate, generous, and self-sacrificial, suggesting that she wasn't so immoral after all. - Character: Tom Simson. Description: Nicknamed "The Innocent," Tom is Piney's fiancé and an acquaintance of Oakhurst's. He is a young man from the next town over—Sandy Bar, where the outcasts are headed—and is making the journey to Poker Flat to elope with Piney and begin a new life. Months ago, he played a "little game" with Oakhurst and lost a fortune (about $40 in 1850, which would be over $1,200 in 2019's currency) to the man. After, Oakhurst kindly advised Tom to never gamble again and gave him back his money. Because of this incident, Tom is delighted to run into Oakhurst in the mountains. While Oakhurst is strong and silent, Tom is boyish, giggly, and naïve. He excitedly tells the group that he and Piney are eloping because her father, Jake Woods, doesn't approve of their engagement, framing their situation as one big, exiting adventure. Likewise, Tom is enthusiastic about spending the night with the group and treats their situation like a camping trip among friends rather than a fight for survival among strangers. Thus, when Oakhurst tries to persuade him to not delay his journey as the group doesn't have food or shelter, Tom won't listen, exclaiming that he and Piney have plenty of rations to share and that he saw a clumsily built log cabin nearby where they can stay. However, Tom's blind optimism quickly leads to his downfall, as the next morning the group finds themselves stranded and snowed in. On the group's 10th day in the mountains, Oakhurst fashions a pair of homemade snowshoes from a saddle, urging Tom to try to make it to Poker Flat, even though there's only "one chance in a hundred" that he'll be able to make it there and return with help to save Piney. The story implies that Tom is successful in reaching Poker Flat—even though the rest of the group dies, they are found days when "voices and footsteps" enter the camp, presumably a search party. After his experience in the mountains and the death of his beloved fiancée, it seems that Tom is no longer innocent. - Character: Piney Woods. Description: Tom's fiancée and Jake Woods's daughter. She and Tom fall in with the group of outcasts while on their way to Poker Flat to elope and begin a new life. At 15 years old, Piney is on the cusp of womanhood, though her timidity and gentleness make her seem much younger, which is perhaps why Mother Shipton takes to affectionately calling her "the child." Tom and Piney's love is "so honest and sincere" that it has a deep impact on Mother Shipton and the Duchess—both prostitutes—and the women become maternal figures that comfort and protect her. Piney maintains her innocence and goodness throughout the story, and even seems to bring out those qualities in Mother Shipton and the Duchess. Within days of meeting Piney, Mother Shipton quietly begins to starve herself—ultimately to death—so that "the child" can have more to eat. And later, when they appear to be only hours away from death, the Duchess and Piney cling to one another tenderly. At this point, Piney "accept[s] the position of the stronger" of the two women and wraps her arms around the Duchess, as if the Duchess is the young, innocent one in need of comfort and protection. Indeed, when the two women die, the rescuers are unable to tell who is who; they both assume a look of "equal peace" and it's impossible to tell "which was she that had sinned." It thus seems that Piney, the embodiment of purity and goodness, has a redemptive quality to her, as her friendship ensures that both the Duchess and Mother Shipton can shed their tarnished reputations. Because of Piney, Mother Shipton leaves the world in an astounding act of self-sacrifice, while the Duchess is imbued with a "peace" that seems to overwrite her reputation as a sinner. Piney Woods's name, which seems all too fitting for an Old West story that takes place in the mountains, is a reference to Piney Woods Tavern; or, Sam Slick in Texas, an 1858 book by Samuel Adams Hammett ("Philip Paxton"), a southwestern humorist known for his distinctively Western tall tales. - Character: Jim Wheeler. Description: A member of Poker Flat's powerful secret committee that decides who gets to remain at the settlement and who is banished to Sandy Bar, the next town over. Wheeler, like many others on the committee, lost money to Oakhurst and is outraged about it. He thinks that Oakhurst should be hanged, though this is more of a way for Wheeler to get his precious money back than it is a moral punishment for Oakhurst—after all, many men on the committee gamble, Wheeler included, and they aren't hanged or exiled for it. Jim Wheeler's name is possibly a nod to main characters Jim Smiley and Simon Wheeler in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," a gambling-themed story by Harte's friend and fellow writer, Mark Twain. - Theme: Morality vs. Immorality. Description: In Bret Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," a committee of citizens from a struggling mining town in Gold Rush-era California banishes a group of undesirable residents: John Oakhurst (a gambler), Mother Shipton and the Duchess (prostitutes), and Uncle Billy (a drunk). Society firmly brands these four outcasts as immoral and thus deserving of whatever fate may befall them as the make the dangerous journey through the mountains to the next town over. And indeed, tragedy does strike: at least three of the four outcasts die in the mountains, as does an innocent couple that falls in with the group. While it may seem like justice has been served, the deaths of these two thoroughly innocent people (one of which, Tom, is literally nicknamed "The Innocent") complicate notions of morality and punishment, as they clearly didn't deserve to die. Likewise, although Harte doesn't exactly portray the outcasts as heroes, he also doesn't show them to have done anything to deserve their deaths, either. Thus, through the tragic end that befalls the outcasts and the innocents alike, the story suggests that people can't easily be pinned down as moral or immoral, and that punishment is not always deserved. Throughout the story, it's clear that the four outcasts are not saints, suggesting that perhaps the town was right to brand the four as immoral. John Oakhurst, the protagonist of the story, is a serial gambler whose addiction is so strong that he even gives up sleep days at a time to gamble. The other man in the group, Uncle Billy, is a drunk suspected of being a petty thief. True to form, he steals from the outcasts while they're trekking through the mountains and then abandons the group. While this confirms that Uncle Billy is immoral in terms of his penchant for thievery, this act also deepens the scope of his immorality—by stealing the group's mode of transportation, the mules, he callously sentences his other three comrades to starvation and death. Mother Shipton and the Duchess also have unsavory reputations in town. The narrator explains: "It is but due to the sex, however, to state that their impropriety was professional, and it was only in such easily established standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment." With this, the story implies that both women are prostitutes and are therefore seen as sexually promiscuous and sinful. To add to this, Mother Shipton and the Duchess are also crude and curse frequently, which was a sure sign of poor character in the nineteenth century, especially for a lady. However, Harte also casts doubt on whether or not the four outcasts are quite as immoral as they're made out to be, and whether or not they truly deserve to be exiled for their perceived crimes. Though Mother Shipton and the Duchess have committed an offense against Christian values by practicing prostitution, Harte is quick to point out that they themselves are not evil, but merely easy targets for banishment. As the story unfolds, both women prove to be deeply compassionate and caring: Mother Shipton starves herself to death so that Piney (Tom's fiancée) can have her rations and thus live a little longer, while the Duchess tenderly takes care of Piney in their final days. Several days after Piney and the Duchess die, they are found clinging to one another in an embrace: "And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned." In death, Piney and the Duchess resemble one another so strongly that it is no longer clear who is the virgin and who is the prostitute—who is moral and who is immoral—which speaks to the idea that people can't be neatly shelved as one or the other. The narrator also suggests that there is more to John Oakhurst than meets the eye. At the beginning of the story, the narrator reveals that Oakhurst was almost hanged rather than banished—but that this didn't necessarily have to do with the man's morality. What happened was that several men on the committee who had lost money to him at cards proposed that he be hanged so that they could recover some of their losses. Only some men who had managed to win money from Oakhurst at cards argued that he should be allowed to be exiled. Rather than prove that Oakhurst's gambling is morally wrong, his punishment simply speaks to the fact that he's made some enemies while gambling. Surely, the men on this committee gamble too—after all, many of them have lost or won money from him—yet they aren't banished for it. In addition, the committee has already hung two other "improper persons" before the outcasts are banished. Presumably, these victims also got on the committee's bad side somehow, or were even more socially marginal than a gambler or prostitutes. In showing Oakhurst, Mother Shipton, and the Duchess as being less immoral than they first appeared, Harte implies that the real reason for these hangings was the town's distress, not the deeds of the hanging victims. In the end, it seems that only Uncle Billy truly deserved his stained reputation and punishment—but whether he managed to escape the mountains or succumbed to death like the others is left ambiguous. The other three outcasts, though, prove themselves to be morally complex and not at all deserving of exile and death. Through his characters' tragic ends, Harte spins a cautionary tale, warning readers to avoid simplistically categorizing others as good or bad, moral or immoral. As Oakhurst, Mother Shipton, and the Duchess clearly prove, there is more to most people than meets the eye. - Theme: Fate. Description: Like a template for countless strong, silent Western heroes in old movies, protagonist John Oakhurst is a stoic. He perfectly embodies the word, which means someone who accepts hardship without complaining or showing emotion. Initially, this seems admirable—when he receives the sentence of banishment from his town, Oakhurst reacts "with philosophic calmness," making him appear strong and unflappable. However, stoicism was also linked in Harte's time not just to acting calm but to accepting one's fate, which seems to be exactly what Oakhurst does. Following Oakhurst from the moment of his sentence to his suicide in the mountains, the story asks whether it is noble to calmly accept one's fate without protest, or whether this is foolish. Ultimately, the story resists easy answers: while Harte clearly admires some of Oakhurst's traits, he also finds weakness in the gambler's passive world view. John Oakhurst is not like the rest of the outcasts. He faces hardship and death without complaining or backing down from the hard truth of their situation, making him seem admirable, and even heroic. The Duchess wilts after the group is exiled from Poker Flat, but John Oakhurst stays strong. He even gives up his superior riding horse to the Duchess, and takes her broken-down mule. Like the Duchess, Mother Shipton doesn't take the news of their exile lightly. She curses the townspeople and curses Fate. Meanwhile, "the philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent," even though he arguably has more reason than any of the group to complain. He never challenges the committee for banishing him just because townspeople lost money to him at gambling, and never even complains later to the rest of the group. Uncle Billy is also far from accepting of the group's fate and, like Mother Shipton, delivers "a Parthian volley of expletives." In first-century Asia, the Parthians would routinely pretend to flee before suddenly turning back to shoot their enemies, which is effectively what Uncle Billy does when he goes on to steal the group's mules, leaving his companions to die. In contrast, despite his clear understanding that stopping to camp is not "advisable," Oakhurst neither returns to Poker Flat nor carries on to the next town on his own. The narrator suggests that "The thought of deserting his weaker and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to [Oakhurst]," emphasizing the value of his fierce loyalty and quiet heroism. However, Harte does not make John Oakhurst a faultless hero, as he suggests that Oakhurst's calm demeanor may come from a place of apathy and weakness, not strength and heroism. Throughout the story, Oakhurst doesn't do anything to remedy his problems, and he barely tries to avoid death. He knows that the group shouldn't stop to camp because they don't have enough rations, a "fact [that] he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of 'throwing up their hand before the game was played out.'" However, "In spite of his remonstrances," or forceful protests, Oakhurst's companions choose not to listen to him and begin drinking instead. Oakhurst, for his part, refrains from drinking and stands off to the side, "calmly surveying" his companions. Though Oakhurst does speak out in an effort to save his own life as well as his companions' lives, he quickly shifts from making impassioned "remonstrances" to calmly accepting what he knows to be a dangerous situation. Later, Oakhurst also tries to discourage Tom and Piney from sticking around. He is clear about "the fact that there was no provision, nor means of making a camp," but once again Oakhurst's efforts are "in vain." It's curious that Oakhurst tries to save Tom and Piney's lives, but doesn't take his own advice, raising the question of whether his inaction is nobly self-sacrificial or a death wish. When he wakes up the following morning to a snowstorm, Oakhurst finally jumps into action: "He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers, for there was no time to lose." However, when he finds that Uncle Billy has escaped with the mules, Oakhurst immediately reverts back to "his usual calm" and chooses not to wake up the rest of the group, stoically accepting his fate. And as time goes on, the group's chances of escaping to safety get slimmer and slimmer: when they wake up the next morning, the snow is piled so thickly around the cabin that it's like "a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea," and within a week, the snow "towered twenty feet above their heads." As time goes on and Oakhurst continues to choose passivity over action, he "settled himself coolly to the losing game before him." At the end of the story, Oakhurst takes his stoicism to the extreme of suicide. Stoicism was associated in popular imagination with some famous ancient Romans who killed themselves when placed in difficult situations, not unlike this instance of being exiled from town and stranded in the mountains. After encouraging Tom to hurry into town on a pair of homemade snowshoes and declining to go with him, Oakhurst wanders deeper into the woods and shoots himself. Harte writes that the dead Oakhurst, lying dead below his final words written on a playing card, is "still calm as in life." This might at first be read as only a compliment, but Harte is also criticizing Oakhurst. He's suggesting that in a way, the gambler was like a dead body even when he was alive. In other words, his "calm" wasn't just coolness under fire, but a deadness in life that kept him from fighting to stay alive. Harte ends the story calling John Oakhurst "at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat." The strength refers to the gambler's bravery and composure in the face of death, but Harte also suggests that there are limits to this uncomplaining acceptance of hardship. In deeming Oakhurst "the weakest of the outcasts," Harte suggests that in committing suicide, Oakhurst simply gave up and succumbed to the situation he was dealt, when he should have tried harder to fight back against life. - Theme: The Brutality of the Old West. Description: While many Western stories have the protagonists battling outlaws, Harte introduces his characters battling the law itself. It is a "change in moral atmosphere" of the townspeople, not bad guys in black hats, that sentence the titular outcasts to death. Even more deadly than the townspeople, nature is the force that actually kills the outcasts—there is no dramatic shootout or rough-and-tumble fight. Through his depiction of how unforgiving life can be in Old West towns, and the even more unforgiving natural landscape, Harte punctures the romanticized myth of the Old West as idyllic and full of opportunity and adventure. Far from being a stable, supportive community, the Old West settlement of Poker Flat is immediately revealed to be a dangerous place, governed by the whims of a powerful few. From the outset, Poker Flat is in a precarious state: the town has recently "suffered the loss of several thousand dollars, two valuable horses, and a prominent citizen." In the wake of this emotional and financial loss—which perhaps came as a blow to the town's ego as well—a "secret committee" decides to cleanse the town of all of its residents that it deems "improper." The town is "after somebody," and they don't seem too particular about who they get. In their desperation to regain a sense of stability and normalcy, the townspeople find themselves whipped up in a "spasm of virtuous reaction." In this frenzied state, the townspeople are "lawless and ungovernable"—perhaps, the story implies, even more so than the "improper" outcasts that they plan to exile. The sinister secret committee has already hung two people before the outcasts are banished, making it clear that the townspeople are ruthless and a genuine threat. It's not just a matter of being run out of town—the outcasts risk being killed by the townspeople if they stay. Furthermore, it's not clear that secret committee is really concerned about morality. Several members of the committee want to take back money they have lost to Oakhurst gambling and are willing to hang him (though are talked into merely exiling him) in retaliation. This paints Poker Flat, and Old West towns more broadly, as corrupt and fueled by petty grudges and revenge. Poker Flat's isolation also makes it a dangerous place. The closest town is through the treacherous mountain pass, and this isolation and insularity seems to give the town an added level of power over its residents, as they must either comply with the town's rules and whims or face a dangerous journey that could end in death. Exiled from their homes, the outcasts are forced to make the deadly trip through the mountains to the next town over. However, nature proves itself more severe than the unfeeling townspeople, as at least three out the outcasts die in a snowstorm. At first, most of the outcasts seem to act as if they are on a camping trip. Ignoring Oakhurst's advice that they carry on for their own safety, the group drinks too much and stops to make camp in a beautiful spot by a cliff, playing into the myth of the Old West as being one big adventure in a stunning "wooded amphitheater surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite." Later, Tom and Piney are even more heedless of the danger, as they can't conceive that the beautiful natural surroundings are far more dangerous than a picnic ground. Failing to internalize the gravity of the situation, Tom is delighted when the group is snowed in, suggesting happily that they'll "have a good camp for a week, and then the snow'll melt, and we'll all go back together." Like several of the other outcasts, they, too, underestimate the power of the West's natural landscape. Throughout the story, nature does seem beautiful. Near the end of the story, Harte writes, "the wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine-boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept." However, nature's grace and beauty in this moment is hiding an ominous reality. Trapped beneath dozens of feet of snow, the remaining outcasts lie dead, no match for nature's brutal power. But from the outside, "all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above." With this, the myth of the Old West gives way to a deadlier reality for the outcasts of Poker Flat. There is no high-spirited frontier or adventure in a majestic wilderness for them. They are crushed between the dangers of a corrupt town and uncaring nature, a bleak situation that reveals the brutal reality of life in the Old West. Townspeople threaten to kill the outcasts, and nature finishes the job without sentiment or mercy. - Climax: After Mother Shipton dies, Oakhurst urges Tom to try to get to Poker Flat and get help, even though the odds of saving Piney and the others are slim. - Summary: On the morning of November 23, 1850, a gambler named John Oakhurst walks through Poker Flat, a small mining town in the American West. The town's "moral atmosphere" has changed, and Oakhurst knows that the town is "after somebody." He reflects calmly that he's probably the one the town is after—a suspicion that soon proves correct. Poker Flat has suffered a major blow to its reputation and sense of stability. It has recently lost an important resident, a large fortune, and two horses, catalyzing a "spasm of virtuous reaction." In an effort to salvage the town's reputation and reinstate a sense of normalcy, a group of powerful Poker Flat residents form a secret committee that decides who stays and who goes, whether by hanging (a fate to which two men have already been sentenced) or by exile. Oakhurst is faced with the latter punishment. Several men on the committee have lost money to Oakhurst, and they are irate. In order to reimburse themselves, they call for Oakhurst to be hanged, but the committee members who have managed to win money from Oakhurst suggest that he merely be banished. On the day of his exile, Oakhurst finds himself in the company of three other "improper persons": two prostitutes who go by the names Mother Shipton and the Duchess, as well as a drunkard and suspected thief called Uncle Billy. Though his companions cry and curse, Oakhurst is remarkably calm and unruffled as the outcasts are marched out of the settlement and sent towards the mountains. Although Sandy Bar is the next closest settlement, it's on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, making it one long, intense travel day away. Soon, the Duchess declares that she will go no further and insists they set up camp. Oakhurst knows that camping is a bad idea—they don't have food or supplies to sustain their journey. Even though he tries to make this clear, his companions don't listen and immediately take to drinking. As he doesn't drink (it clashes with his profession as a gambler, which requires him to always have clear senses and sharp decision-making skills) Oakhurst remains on the fringes, watching the group quietly. Soon, a young man named Tom "The Innocent" Simson, a resident of Sandy Bar, rides down the trail. He and Oakhurst are well acquainted, as Oakhurst won a large fortune from Tom a few months ago but sympathetically returned it to the young man with a stern warning to never gamble again. Tom is thrilled to see Oakhurst and excitedly introduces his fiancée, Piney Woods, to the group. The pair are headed to Poker Flat to elope. Oakhurst tries to convince the newcomers not to linger, but Tom cheerfully offers to share his rations and mentions that they can camp at a crudely constructed log cabin that he saw down the path. The group takes Tom up on his offer and makes camp. In the morning, Oakhurst awakens to freshly fallen snow and hurriedly prepares to wake the group so that they can beat the impending storm. However, he quickly realizes that Uncle Billy is missing, and that the group's mules have disappeared. Oakhurst lies to Piney and Tom that Uncle Billy left to find more food, and the animals accidentally stampeded, though Mother Shipton and the Duchess sense what really happened. Tom is still cheerful as ever, and over the next few days he leads the group in camp songs and storytelling. Soon, the snowfall accumulates to 20 feet, and the group struggles to find wood to keep up their fires. Mother Shipton begins to fade rapidly, and on the 10th day, she pulls Oakhurst aside and privately tells him that she's been starving herself, saving her rations so that Piney can live a little longer. She dies quietly, and the group turns somber. Oakhurst gives Tom a pair of homemade snowshoes, urging him to make it to Poker Flat, though his chances of saving Piney are slim. Although Oakhurst says he'll accompany Tom only as far as the canyon, he doesn't return to camp. The Duchess and Piney cling to one another for warmth, but eventually fall asleep and die of exposure. Days later, "pitying fingers" dust the snow off of their faces. In death, it's impossible to tell the women apart, as they both carry a look of "equal peace." Even the residents of Poker Flat recognize this, so they leave the women locked in a tender embrace. Deeper into the woods, the rescuers stumble upon Oakhurst's body. Pinned to a tree with a knife is a playing card, the deuce of clubs, upon which Oakhurst has scribbled his epitaph, claiming to have "struck a streak of bad luck." Oakhurst, who shot himself in the heart, appears just as stoic in death as he did in life. He is, the narrator affirms, "at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat."

- Genre: Young adult fiction - Title: The Outsiders - Point of view: First person - Setting: Tulsa, Oklahoma - Character: Ponyboy Curtis. Description: At 14 years old, the youngest Curtis brother and greaser. Ponyboy is intelligent and sensitive and has certain un-greaserlike characteristics: he likes to go to movies by himself, does well in school, and appreciates sunsets. The events of the novel cause him to think about the kind of life he wants to lead and motivate him to work for change in his community. He learns to see the humanity in his enemies, and takes steps to help others see that humanity as well. - Character: Darry Curtis. Description: The oldest of the Curtis brothers. Darry is 20, hardworking, and rarely shows his feelings. After the boys' parents died, Darry passed up a college scholarship and took responsibility for raising his younger brothers. Darry has high expectations for Ponyboy, and Ponyboy's occasional failure to meet those expectations causes tension between the brothers. Over the course of the novel, Darry learns how to show Ponyboy that he cares about him. - Character: Johnny Cade. Description: The second youngest of the greasers. Johnny is 16, a close friend to Ponyboy, and beloved by the entire gang. He comes from an abusive and neglectful home, and he spends as little time there as possible. The greasers are his true family, and they regard him as a little brother. Johnny's courageous acts and words, as well as his premature death, inspire Ponyboy to write about his experiences and to pursue a better path in his life. - Character: Dallas Winston. Description: A tough, hardened greaser. Dally grew up on the streets of New York and learned early to depend upon himself. He has a long criminal record and is prone to risk-taking, yet he is also a loyal and compassionate friend. He is devoted to Johnny, in whom he sees the potential that he himself has lost. - Character: Cherry Valance. Description: A Soc and Bob's girlfriend. Cherry is open-minded, sensitive, and courageous. She befriends Ponyboy early in the novel and helps him to see that Socs are people, too. After Bob dies, Cherry plays a minor role as a liaison between the two gangs. Ponyboy always keeps in mind her contention that, despite the superficial differences between them, the Socs and greasers see the same sunset. - Theme: Divided Communities. Description: Ponyboy stands in the middle of two major conflicts: the conflict between the Socs and greasers, and the conflict between Ponyboy and Darry within the Curtis family. In the gang conflict, the novel shows how the two groups focus on their differences—they dress differently, socialize differently, and hang out with different girls—and how this focus on superficial differences leads to hate and violence. Yet the novel also shows how the two groups depend on their conflict in order to continue to exist. The greasers, for instance, live by a pledge to "stick together" against the Socs. Without the conflict, the two gangs' individual members might go their own way. The novel's other divided community is Ponyboy's immediate family. Like the conflict between Socs and greasers, the conflict between Darry and Ponyboy is fueled by misperceptions. Just as the Socs and greasers are unable to see past their superficial differences to their deeper similarities, Darry and Ponyboy can't see past their own limited view to understand each other's actions. Ponyboy misinterprets Darry's desperate desire to deliver Ponyboy from the poverty and strife of their neighborhood as antagonism, while Darry interprets Ponyboy's quest to escape his conflict-ridden existence as irresponsibility and lack of consideration. - Theme: Empathy. Description: Empathy, the ability to see things through another person's perspective, is central to the resolution of both the gang and the family conflict in The Outsiders. The two gangs' preoccupation with the appearance and class status of their rivals underscores the superficiality of their mutual hostility, which thrives on stereotypes and prejudice. Certain characters can see past the stereotypes, however. When Cherry befriends Ponyboy at the drive-in and insists that "things are rough all over," she encourages Ponyboy to see Socs as individuals, and he begins to question the conflict between the gangs. Randy furthers forces Ponyboy to feel compassion for Socs as individual people by sharing details about Bob's troubled life. Ultimately, Ponyboy himself takes on the role of showing the two groups their shared humanity by writing his English essay, which turns out to be the novel itself. In the Curtis family, it is Sodapop who helps Ponyboy recognize that Darry's high expectations for Ponyboy result from Darry's love for Ponyboy and determination to provide Ponyboy with the shot at a better life. In the end, their newfound admiration for one another, combined with a desire to protect the pained Sodapop from unnecessary grief, brings about a pledge not to fight anymore. - Theme: Preserving Childhood Innocence. Description: The Outsiders shows the importance of preserving the hope, open-mindedness, and appreciation of beauty that are characteristic of childhood. Ponyboy's daydreams about the country, his appreciation of sunrises and sunsets, and his rescue of the children from the burning church distinguish him from other characters in the novel. These traits show that Ponyboy, unlike the other boys, still has preserved some of his childhood innocence. They also allow him to see beyond the shallow hatred between the Socs and greasers. Primarily through the characters of Dally and Johnny, the novel also shows how easily experience can harden people and cause them to lose these youthful traits. It also shows the tragic results of this process. Dally's rough youth has made him tough and fearsome, and he seems not to care about anything. But Dally has a soft spot too—his love for Johnny. Johnny represents the hope that Dally has lost, and Dally strives to protect Johnny from the forces that threaten to pull him into the cycle of violence that has enveloped Dally. Johnny's dying words, "stay gold," also touch on this theme by referencing the Robert Frost poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay." While the poem's message—that all beautiful things fade with the passage of time—forces the two boys to realize that they can't hide from the realities of growing up, Johnny's call for Ponyboy and the greasers to "stay gold" is also a call for them to preserve the hope and optimism of childhood no matter what the world throws at them. - Theme: Self-Sacrifice and Honor. Description: Despite the greasers' reputation as heartless young criminals, they live by a specific and honorable code of friendship, and there are many instances in which gang and family members make selfless choices. These choices often reflect a desire to make life better for the next generation of youths. Darry forfeited a college scholarship for a full-time manual labor job in order to support his younger brothers. Dally, who seems not to care about anything, demonstrates great loyalty to and compassion for his friends and for strangers in need. He helps Johnny and Ponyboy slip away to the rural town of Windrixville after Bob's stabbing, and he plays a key role in the church fire rescue. Dally's death is the ultimate tribute to Johnny, without whom life seemed meaningless. Ponyboy's essay is a different and perhaps more powerful response to Johnny's death. He honors both of his deceased friends by telling their story, an act of generosity intended to benefit the greater community. - Theme: Individual Identity. Description: Both the Socs and the greasers sacrifice their individuality to the styles and sentiments of their groups. Greasers, for example, wear their hair long and oiled, and share a common hostility toward the Socs. At the start of the novel, Ponyboy is a dedicated greaser even though he knows that certain aspects of his personality make him different from the rest of the gang. The gang provides him with too great of a sense of safety and strength to even consider life outside of it. But the events surrounding Bob's death cause Ponyboy to think more deeply about who he wants to be, and his conversations with Johnny, Cherry, and Randy lead him to reflect on the path his life is taking. He begins to question the reasons for conflict between Socs and greasers, and he thinks hard about the decision to participate in the rumble. Ponyboy's willingness to enter friendships with Socs signals the development of a distinct personal identity, one that includes association with the greasers but excludes total devotion to the greaser way of life. Darry encourages Ponyboy to pursue a life beyond gang membership, and the deaths of Johnny and Dally inspire the expression of his individual point of view in the English essay he writes. By the end of the novel, Ponyboy has committed himself to a life that will, at least in part, encourage other boys to find their own paths and voices, outside of the gang identity. - Climax: The deaths of Johnny and Dally - Summary: Ponyboy Curtis, a member of the greasers, a gang of poor East Side kids in Tulsa, leaves a movie theater and begins to walk home alone. A car follows him, and he suspects that it is filled with a bunch of Socs (pronounced "sohsh-es"), members of a rich West Side gang who recently beat up his friend Johnny. The car stops, and several Socs emerge and begin roughing Ponyboy up and try to cut off his hair. Ponyboy's cries for help alert his brothers and fellow greasers, and the Socs flee. Afterward, Ponyboy's older brother Darry, who is also his guardian since their parents' death, scolds him for walking alone. The next night, Johnny and Ponyboy go to the drive-in with fellow greaser Dally. Despite Dally's unpleasant behavior toward two Soc girls, Ponyboy strikes up a friendship with one of them, whose name is Cherry Valance. Ponyboy tells her about the Socs' attack on Johnny, and she insists that not all Socs are like that. Cherry tells him about some of the problems Socs have, and they find out they share a love of watching sunsets. The girls and greasers walk out of the drive-in together, and are confronted by a Soc named Bob, who is Cherry's boyfriend, and his friends. Things almost come to blows, but Cherry puts a stop to the confrontation by leaving with Bob. Before going home, Ponyboy talks with Johnny in the vacant lot and falls asleep. He returns home late, and Darry gets so angry that he hits Ponyboy, who runs from the house and goes with Johnny to the park. There, they run into Bob and his Soc friends. The Socs attack, dunking Ponyboy's head into the fountain. Johnny stabs and kills Bob. Dally helps them escape town. The boys take refuge in an abandoned church in the countryside. There, they cut their hair to disguise themselves and then spend five days talking, smoking cigarettes, and reading from Gone with the Wind. Dally comes to visit them and, on the way back from a restaurant, they find the church in flames. Johnny and Ponyboy run inside to save a group of schoolchildren who have come to the site for a picnic. They save the children but are all injured, including Dally, and are rushed to the hospital. At the hospital, Ponyboy recognizes for the first time how much Darry really cares for him. He also learns that Dally will recover, but Johnny's condition is extremely serious. The next night is set for a rumble between the greasers and the Socs. Ponyboy talks with Randy, Bob's best friend, who says that he has decided not to fight because after Bob's death he has realized it won't accomplish anything. Ponyboy is not feeling well, and he, too, is skeptical about the purpose of fighting, but he does participate in the rumble, which the greasers win. Afterwards, Dally and Ponyboy go to visit Johnny in the hospital, where they hear his last words: "Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold." In despair over Johnny's death, Dally flees the hospital, robs a grocery store, threatens the police with his unloaded gun, and gets shot dead. Ponyboy, in worse health after the rumble, is unconscious and delirious for several days. When Ponyboy recovers, the Socs and greasers attend a court hearing. Johnny is vindicated by all witnesses as having acted in self-defense. However, Ponyboy is depressed, his grades begin to suffer, and he almost turns to violence. His English teacher offers him a chance to pass by writing a final essay on the topic of his choice. Ponyboy can't think of a topic, though, and he and Darry fight about his lack of motivation. Sodapop becomes upset, and pleads with the brothers to stop fighting because it is tearing him apart. Ponyboy and Darry agree not to fight anymore. Back at home that night, Ponyboy examines a copy of Gone with the Wind that Johnny left him. Out of it drops a note, written by Johnny, urging Ponyboy to keep his idealism and never give up hope for a better life. Ponyboy decides to write his essay about his experiences during the last several weeks. With it, he hopes to bring attention to the plight of boys like himself and to honor the memory of the ones who died. The first sentence of the essay is the first sentence of the novel.

- Genre: Gothic frame story - Title: The Oval Portrait - Point of view: First-person, third person - Setting: An abandoned chateau in the Apennines sometime during the early 19th century - Character: The Artist. Description: The unnamed artist only appears as a character in the inner story of the narrative. The guide book that the narrator reads contains an account of his interactions with his young wife, the model for the titular oval portrait, is at the heart of Poe's thematic concerns. The artist is a renowned portrait painter known for the obsessive and moody passion he injects into his work, and for his remarkable ability to create lifelike images of people. His passion for his art, however, eclipses the living, breathing reality of his wife, over whose portrait he labors day and night, seemingly unaware of the fact that this process is physically and psychologically detrimental for her. Poe implies that he's a vampire of sorts—not in the sense of literally drinking people's blood, of course, but in the sense of draining the vital energies of his model in order to imbue his work with a maximum degree of lifelikeness. He seems to regard his wife less as a fellow human being than as an inspiration for his art, and his wife ultimately dies while he overlooks her health to focus on the portrait. Poe uses the character of the artist to dramatize his critique of obsessive perfectionism, and also to suggest that artistic creation also inevitably entails some kind of destruction. - Character: The Artist's Wife. Description: The artist's wife appears in the flesh only in the inner story, but her image—an "immortalized" painted portrait of her mortal self, remarkable in its lifelikeness—startles and appalls the narrator in the narrative's outer story. The guide book that the narrator reads describes her as vivacious and full of love for everything but the painter's vocation, which she regards as a rival for his affections. Her dominant character traits are meekness and submissiveness. Although she intensely dislikes the being painted—a process with deteriorates her physically and psychologically—she never protests about it because she loves the artist and doesn't want to stand in the way of the pleasure he takes in his work. In the end, this unconditional love results in her demise, as she dies while the artist is completing her portrait. The artist is subtly portrayed as a sort of metaphorical vampire in the way that he sucks the youth and health out of his wife in order in order to immortalize her, although her immortalization is, of course, a figurative one on canvas. Poe uses the wife's character to critique the subjection of women in the patriarchal society of his day, and also to emphasize the potentially dehumanizing effects of the male gaze. Her character is somewhat of a two-dimensional one, and this may be a deliberate ploy on the part of the Poe, as an attempt to represent the way women were often perceived in his day. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is a man whose background remains a mystery for the reader: Poe reveals nothing about him other than the fact that he's seriously injured and takes refuge in a chateau in the company of his servant, Pedro. In this chateau, the narrator is enchanted by a portrait of a beautiful young woman, whom he learns from a guide book was the wife of the painting's artist. It's can be inferred that the narrator is an educated individual who, like Poe himself, seems well-versed in the visual arts: he remarks, for example, that the oval portrait has been executed in a style similar to that of Thomas Sully, an American portrait painter, and has a knowledge of art terms such as "Moresque" and "vignette." The fact that the narrator is suffering from "incipient delirium," though, may lead some readers to question the reliability of his narration. The narrator ends up ironically falling into the same preoccupation with the woman's portrait that the painter himself did. The story's abrupt ending implies that he may have died in the midst of this, just as the painter's wife died while he was lost in his obsession with capturing her beauty. - Theme: Life vs. Art. Description: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait" is a frame story (essentially, a story within a story), which centers around life and art. The outer story follows the unnamed narrator as he spends the night in an abandoned chateau in the mountains. While there, he admires the impressive paintings that adorn the walls and becomes particularly taken with a portrait of a beautiful young woman, which is encased in an oval frame. The inner story explores the life of the woman in the portrait and her husband, who was the painter. Even though the portrait is wildly beautiful and moving, the couple's story wasn't a happy one: the husband was obsessed with his art, so much so that he didn't notice that his wife was dying right before his eyes while he was painting her portrait. Through the couple's tragic story and the narrator's captivation with the painting, Poe spins a cautionary tale about pursuing art at the expense of real life outside of the canvas, but also suggests that perhaps disconnecting from reality is simply the cost of great art. Through the character of the painter, the story suggests that being an artist requires an intense—perhaps even fanatical—level of devotion to one's work that necessarily forces the artist to disengage from reality. In Poe's words, the painter "grow[s] wild with the ardor of his work, and turn[s] his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife." In other words, the painter is so passionate and enthusiastic about art that he lets it absorb his attention completely. Even though he's painting his wife's portrait, and is thus studying her face closely, he doesn't truly see his wife's "countenance," or appearance. Despite being in close quarters with her and looking at her face day in and day out, the painter doesn't notice that she's growing pale, weak, and sickly—the reality he's creating on the canvas becomes more real in his eyes than the reality beyond the painting's confines. The painter becomes so detached from reality that he begins to mistake his art for reality itself, which proves beneficial for his craft but disastrous for his real life. The painter, "entranced before the work which he [has] wrought," starts to view his wife exclusively through the lens of the painting. The real object of his "ardor," or obsession, is not his living, breathing spouse—it's the arrangement of shapes and colors on the canvas that simulates her presence in an ideal way. As the painter grows more invested in painting the perfect portrait, he fails to see the real-life impact his single-minded devotion is having on his wife: he "would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him." When he puts the finishing touches on his painting, the artist cries out, "This is indeed Life itself!" Ironically, though, the painter has grown shaky and pale by this point, and his wife has already wasted away and died—the painter's fanatical dedication to his art has sapped him and his wife of their vitality. Poe thus seems to suggest that art is not necessarily a mere interpretation of real life that leaves reality itself unaffected. The model, described as a "maiden of the rarest beauty" who is "just ripening into womanhood," is drained of life over the course of the painting's creation, growing "daily more dispirited and weak," and finally dying just as the painting reaches the height of its perfection. Through the wife's tragic death and the painter's blind devotion to his art, the story drives home the idea that getting lost in art—mistaking it for reality—is dangerous and has serious costs. In the outer story of the narrative, the narrator's obsession with the painting seems to rival the painter's, suggesting that consuming art can be just as absorbing, forcing the viewer to detach from reality. When he first sees the painting, the narrator immediately snaps his eyes shut, unaware of why he is doing so. Once he thinks about it, he realizes that the painting was so lifelike and startling that he needed to take a moment to compose himself and make sure his eyes aren't deceiving him. Even though closing his eyes is an attempt to "calm and subdue [his] fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze," shutting his eyes upon seeing the painting seems to reflect the way that art can make a person shut out the rest of the world. Furthermore, even before he finds the specific portrait for which the story is named, the narrator is entranced by the other paintings in the mansion: "devoutly, devoutly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came." Here, the narrator becomes out of touch with reality as he loses track of time, highlighting how art can deeply impact the viewer and disconnect them from real life. In "The Oval Portrait," Poe crafts a characteristically bleak and chilling tale. Through the narrator and painter's dual obsession with the painting, Poe emphasizes the dark side of art, suggesting that it can make artists and viewers alike disconnect dangerously from reality. However, it's important to remember that Poe, too, is an artist, and that his story isn't a condemnation of art or a protest against creative passion—he's not even suggesting that the painter shouldn't have created the titular portrait. Instead, "The Oval Portrait" serves as an unsettling reminder of art's towering power, and leaves readers to wonder if perhaps all great art comes at a steep human cost. - Theme: Agency and Objectification. Description: "The Oval Portrait" relies on—and, arguably, critiques—the traditional pairing of male artist and female model, where masculinity tends to be associated with inspired creativity, activity, and seeing, and femininity with creative inspiration, passivity, and being seen. The early 19th century, when Poe was writing, was a largely patriarchal era during which time male-produced literature and art tended to underplay or even ignore female agency. At first glance, this seems true of "The Oval Portrait," too. In the story, male characters are always gazing upon and admiring the wife's beauty, but the wife herself has very little agency or depth to her character—she's characterized as an object for men to admire and venerate, but not a full person in her own right. However, it's possible that Poe crafts his characters in this way to actually criticize the dehumanizing power of the male gaze, which subjugates and objectifies female subjects. On one hand, it might appear that the author is bending to his times in terms of how he presents the dynamic of the relationship between the painter and his "model" wife (pun intended). With broad strokes, Poe "paints" the wife as a one-dimensional stereotype of the ideal 19th-century woman—a passive "angel of the house." The wife exists as an object for the painter's contemplation, and her own agency and subjectivity are downplayed to the point of virtual nonexistence:  "She was humble and obedient," Poe writes, "and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark high turret-chamber where the light dropped upon the pale canvas only from overhead."  While the wife evidently sees the painter as a human being, and suffers his passions out of love for him, aware that he takes "a fervid and burning pleasure" in the act of painting, the painter sees not the wife herself but the idealization of her that he's creating on the canvas: "[he] turned his eyes from the canvas rarely, even to regard the countenance of his wife." Furthermore, whatever love he may have for his wife is eclipsed by the "ardor of his work." The relationship between husband and wife, paralleling the relationship between artist and model, is a clearly unequal one, and the reader may initially conclude that Poe is presenting this dynamic as a social given—simply the way things are.            On the other hand, it's also possible to read "The Oval Portrait" as Poe's subtle and indirect critique of female objectification and the denial of female agency. The story's tragic climax—the painter finally looks up from the perfected canvas, only to see that his wife has died—may force the reader to re-evaluate the author's intentions. Yes, the model does indeed exist on the page solely as a one-dimensional stereotype. But perhaps that is because the reader is effectively being made to see her through the eyes of the painter—who, blind to the living reality of his wife, inadvertently causes her death through neglect—rather than directly through the eyes of the author himself. In other words, perhaps Poe fails to flesh out the wife's character, to turn her into a three-dimensional human being, not because he is himself complicit in the dehumanization of women, but rather because he's actually emphasizing the blindness of those who do so. The physical form of the portrait itself is also thematically significant in this regard. Poe describes it as a "mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner." The girl's head and shoulders, effectively severed from the rest of her body, come to serve as a decorative object intended to appeal to the (male) eye. And indeed, the language Poe uses to evoke the narrator's visual fixation on the portrait: "I remained, for an hour perhaps, […] with my vision riveted upon the portrait." This suggests that he derives aesthetic pleasure from the very act of looking at it. The painter has failed to represent the entirety of the girl's body, and by extension, perhaps, he has failed to represent her true nature and full self as well—she has become the proverbial "pretty face," existing exclusively for male gratification. It might be tempting to object that all manner of portraits are only partial depictions of the human body, and that this doesn't necessarily imply an act of dehumanization or objectification on the part of the artist. Nonetheless, in the context of Gothic fiction, and in the context of "The Oval Portrait" in particular, it's quite likely that this severe mode of framing the female body represents an act of metaphorical dismemberment. And it seems legitimate to argue that Poe uses this stark visual imagery to criticize the gendered politics of his day. Overall, then, Poe uses "The Oval Portrait" to explore the subtle interrelationships between agency, gender, and artistic works, identifying particular social structures that define who sees and who is seen—and arguably critiquing these structures in an indirect, though highly effective, fashion. - Theme: Vampirism. Description: The trope of the vampire is a commonplace of Gothic fiction. Though it stereotypically involves the drinking of blood by the fang-y undead and the subsequent siring of new immortals, these are only its outward attributes. In essence, vampires are individuals who drain or absorb people's vital energies in order to revitalize themselves—gore, the supernatural, and dodgy Transylvanian accents are optional extras. As might be expected from Poe's trademark style, the vampirism in "The Oval Portrait" is abstract and subtle: instead of fangs and black capes, Poe imbues his story with a creeping feeling of dread and the slow sapping of energy—something one might call psychic vampirism. And instead of a vampire drinking actual blood, Poe presents readers with an artist's painting his subject. The artist's wife, the model for this portrait, has her life force essentially drawn out of her (literally and figuratively) and into the painter and his canvas, upon which her image is immortalized for posterity, and she becomes a husk of her former self as a result of this "blood loss." Through the elements of vampirism present in the inner story about this husband and wife, Poe seems to make two implicit assessments, one social and historically specific, the other more broadly philosophical. The former is that marriage in a patriarchal society may well result in a lopsided power dynamic: the wife gives, the husband takes, and there is no reciprocity. The latter is that artistic creation inevitably brings about its opposite: destruction.         Marrying the painter has catastrophic consequences for the girl. Immediately after marrying her husband, she is described as being "full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn." But she begins to decline, physically as well as psychologically, as soon as her husband embarks on her portrait, her "health and spirits" withered by "the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret." The husband, in contrast, "grow[s] wild with the ardor of his work." This is psychic vampirism in action: the girl is progressively being sucked of her innocent youth and her health, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for the destructive consequences of marriage in a society that restricts women.  Poe's most explicit hint that his story is dealing with a transfusion of vital energies comes when the guide book asserts that "the tints which [the painter] spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him." This assertion makes it unambiguous that the wife's well-being is inversely related to the degree of the portrait's completion. In other words, the longer she spends in this state of married entrapment, the more enfeebled and powerless she becomes.  It's also clear, however, that Poe's treatment of vampirism in "The Oval Portrait" is specifically bound up with questions of artistic representation—the story is as much about models and artists as it is about wives and husbands, and it seems to insist that creative acts are also—at least inadvertently—simultaneously destructive ones. If, as the guide book makes clear, the painter's "real" bride is "Art," personified by dint of the capital "A," the model herself is de-personified as the life-draining process of depiction proceeds. The process of depiction may be regarded as one which transforms the living girl into an object that is possessable, in both the economic and sexual senses of the word. (It is significant that she's described as "just ripening into womanhood"—in other words, on the verge of sexual maturity.) As a vampire's victim is literally immortalized, so too is the girl is immortalized on the canvas—reduced to the status of a viewable commodity—but only at the expense of her existence as a fluid, living subject. It's evident, then, that the presentation of vampirism of "The Oval Portrait" differs significantly from vampirism as it tends to be understood in popular culture. In fact, the narrative is so utterly devoid of vampiric clichés that casual readers may easily overlook the presence of this theme in Poe's story. Nonetheless, Poe uses the theme to explore power dynamics within marriage, but he also uses it to comment on the ambiguous nature of artistic representation, which seems to entail destruction as well as creation. - Climax: The artist looks up from the completed portrait of his wife, only to discover that she has died. - Summary: "The Oval Portrait," a brief frame story (essentially, a story within a story), is set in an abandoned chateau in the Apennines, a mountain range in Italy. It takes place in an unspecified year, sometime in the early 19th century. The story opens with the unnamed narrator and his valet (servant), Pedro, breaking in to the chateau. This drastic action is necessary because the narrator is severely wounded (for reasons which are never revealed) and cannot spend the night out in the open. The narrator and Pedro hole up in a small room in a remote corner of the building, and find it to be tattered yet richly decorated—a romantic mixture of gloom and grandeur. The walls of this room are hung with tapestries, "armorial trophies," and numerous paintings in decorative gold frames. The narrator, whose unspecified injury has thrown him into a state of semi-delirium, is captivated by the paintings. Instructing his valet to shut the curtains against the night, he contemplates the images by the light of a tall candelabrum. On his pillow, he also finds a guide book that gives more insight into the paintings in the chateau. The narrator reads and gazes deep into the night, and is utterly entranced by what he sees; Pedro, meanwhile, has fallen asleep. Shifting the candelabrum to alter the light in the room, he notices a painting he hasn't yet seen—a portrait of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. He shuts his eyes involuntarily, unsure why he has done so, and then considers the reasons behind this "impulsive movement." He quickly concludes that it isn't related to the execution of the painting—a vignette in the style of the artist Thomas Sully—or with the radiant beauty of the girl it depicts. Rather, it's to do with the extreme lifelikeness of the image, which has simultaneously startled, confused, subdued and appalled him. Awed, the narrator returns the candelabrum to its former position, shutting the painting from view, and proceeds to read about the painting in the guide book. The book describes the sitter as a "maiden of rarest beauty." Full of life and love, she hates only one thing: the artistic vocation of her new husband, a renowned painter who injects wild passion into his work. In fact, she regards Art—personified with a capital "A"—as a rival for his attentions. Nonetheless, she's also meek and submissive, and doesn't protest against his burning desire to paint her. The painter spends day and night laboring over the portrait, and the closer to completion he brings it, the more physically weak and psychologically distraught his wife becomes—almost as if her vital energies are being drawn from her and into the image. But the painter, totally engrossed in his work, barely shifts his eyes from his canvas, and fails to notice his wife's plight until it's too late. Just as the painting reaches a height of lifelike perfection, he finally deigns to look up at her—only to discover that she has died.