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- Genre: Short Story, Satire - Title: The Overcoat - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: St. Petersburg, Russia - Character: Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin. Description: A low-level official clerk in an unknown department in the Russian government. Akaky Akakievich is a short man with an "unmemorable" appearance. He is somewhat educated, and not at the lowest rank of bureaucracy, but he is still very poor. Akaky lives an extremely mundane life: both in and out of his department, he spends all of his time diligently copying documents. While his fellow officials are out socializing, Akaky prefers to spend his evening hours at home, finding contentment in his repetitive labor. Gogol's story revolves around Akaky's struggle to contend with St. Petersburg's bitter cold, which forces him to purchase a new overcoat—a mission that endows Akaky's existence with greater meaning. - Character: Petrovich. Description: Formerly a serf, Petrovich is a tailor and a heavy drinker. He is commissioned by Akaky Akakievich to create a new overcoat, and eventually consents to make it for the lowest possible price. The care and pride he takes in making Akaky's new overcoat is evident, and the originality of his work provides a contrast to the repetitive nature of Akaky's government job. - Character: The Important Person. Description: An anonymous, high-ranking official in the Russian government. Akaky Akakievich appeals to him when his overcoat is stolen. While the Important Person used to be kind at heart (when he was an "insignificant person" not so long ago), his important status in the bureaucracy has inflated his ego. He enjoys enforcing a rigid hierarchical process, in which information has to be passed from the lowest to highest officials in his department before reaching him. The Important Person treats Akaky poorly in order to show off his importance to a friend, but then feels guilty about it later. - Character: The District Police Superintendent. Description: Akaky Akakievich tries to get the District Police Superintendent to investigate the case of his stolen overcoat, but fails—indeed, the Superintendent treats Akaky more like a guilty suspect than the victim of a crime. It is implied that the Superintendent and his subordinate police officers only work on cases that will boost their reputation in the eyes of their superiors. - Character: The Narrator. Description: While the Narrator is not exactly a character in "The Overcoat," the story's unusual narrative style has a huge influence on the reader's experience. The Narrator draws attention to himself by withholding information, such as the name of Akaky Akakievich's department and the identity of the Important Person. He injects his own opinions about characters and the bureaucratic system in general, and manipulates the short story genre in which he is operating. The reader gets the sense that the Narrator is inside the same system as Akaky Akakievich, but also has a birds-eye view of that system's oppressive power. - Character: The Young Official. Description: A young man new to Akaky Akakievich's office. He is moved to pity when the other officials make fun of Akaky, and Akaky's defensive exclamations seem to the young official to mean "I am thy brother." The young official remembers this for a long time, and feels ashamed about the state of man's inhumanity to man. His realization marks the story's shift from a rather straightforward comedy to a more complex kind of tragicomedy. - Character: The Assistant Head Clerk. Description: An official in Akaky Akakievich's office. The assistant head clerk is higher ranked and wealthier than Akaky is, but he offers to throw a party partly to celebrate Akaky's new overcoat. The assistant head clerk lives in a wealthy district far from Akaky's home, and Akaky's overcoat is stolen on his way home from the party. - Theme: Bureaucracy and Selfhood. Description: Nikolai Gogol's Russia was a country run by an extremely unwieldy bureaucracy. Under the control of Tsar Nicholas I, the government was large, slow, and corrupt. Much of this was due to the fact that many of the civil servants in the Russian system were uneducated and very poor. In "The Overcoat," Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is one such civil servant. Though he can read and write and is not at the lowest rung of the bureaucratic hierarchy, he can still barely support himself. Over the course of the story, Gogol reveals the ways in which Akaky Akakievich's individuality is oppressed and denied by his bureaucratic society, to the point where he is neglected at the time of his greatest need.From the story's outset, Gogol presents Russia's bureaucratic oppression as a major theme. The narrator is unwilling to name the department in which Akaky Akakievich worked, fearing censorship or some other form of retribution. The clerk's superiors are described as dictators, and Akaky is paid so little that he can barely survive the brutal cold in St. Petersburg. The difficulty of Akaky Akakievich's life is compounded by the incompetence of this bureaucracy, which we see at work when he attempts to report the theft of his prized overcoat. A fellow clerk informs him that it would be useless to go to the police, who only work to please their superiors, and would not return to the overcoat even if they found it. Akaky Akakievich then seeks the help of an "Important Person," and there discovers that Russia's higher-ups care more about maintaining their appearance of importance than actually performing government work. By directly communicating with the Important Person instead of going through the "proper channels," Akaky violates the superior official's sense of hierarchy. Offended, the Important Person angrily throws Akaky out of his office: Akaky Akakievich's individual needs are completely neglected in favor of the preservation of a strict bureaucratic hierarchy and the egos of the officials within it.Interestingly, though Akaky Akakievich suffers under this bureaucratic system, he genuinely enjoys his bureaucratic job. Unlike the protagonist of Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener"—a copier who refuses to bear the drudgery of his work, and ultimately chooses to die rather than live under the heel of an oppressive system—Akaky Akakievich is content to be a cog in the Russian government. He works, as Gogol writes, "with love." Outside of his job, the clerk has no other concerns: all he does is eat, sleep, and copy. It appears that his selfhood consists entirely of his position in the bureaucracy. In this way, he is not so different from the other civil servants in Gogol's story, who are all keen to preserve their status within the government. Just as the minor bureaucrats copy their higher-ups to gain approval, so Akaky copies documents. He loves copying so much that his work supplants his individuality. The clerk's lack of inner life and agency becomes clear when he is unable to make even a minor change to a document, preferring instead to copy it word for word. Akaky Akakievich embodies the stagnancy and incompetency of the bureaucracy, while simultaneously bearing its repressive effects. - Theme: The Insignificance of the Everyman. Description: One of the tragedies Gogol highlights in "The Overcoat" is the insignificance of Akaky Akakievich's life. The clerk's unimportance is felt early on in the story. Gogol's phrase "In a certain department…there worked a certain civil servant" implies that his story could happen to any civil servant in any department, and therefore that Akaky Akakievich's life is more or less interchangeable. His interchangeability is reinforced by his occupation as a copyist, a job that has become the entirety of his life. Akaky's work, and therefore his personhood, is based on the concept of reproducible and interchangeable material. Throughout the story, both his superiors and his peers treat Akaky Akakievich poorly, and his worthlessness is exacerbated by the fact that he never rises in the bureaucracy. All of his peers are younger than he is and lead more interesting lives, and they frequently make jokes at his expense. Only once in the story, when Akaky protests, does a fellow civil servant (the young official) realize how cruelly they are treating the copyist. Immediately the young official feels ashamed at how cruelly human beings can treat each other, even when they pretend to be the most honorable of men.Akaky's life is so devoid of meaning and complexity that it may even be difficult for the reader to feel sympathy for him. Though Akaky Akakievich is apparently content with his lot, Gogol's descriptions of his mundane and pathetic life challenge the reader's ability to empathize with the clerk. Gogol at once allows the reader to scoff at Akaky Akakievich's absurd ignorance, and challenges the reader to find humanity in the most laughable and insignificant of beings. When the protagonist dies, Gogol writes, "And St. Petersburg carried on without its Akaky Akakievich just as though he had never even existed." By presenting the tragicomic fall of Akaky Akakievich, Gogol draws attention to the mundane life of a member of the silent majority, and he tests the reader's ability to care about those no one cares for.At the end of his tale, however, Gogol seeks a sort of redemption for the neglected everyman. Akaky Akakievich takes the form of a ghost who haunts St. Petersburg, stealing the overcoats of the officials who would have ridiculed him during his lifetime. He ultimately gets his revenge on the Important Person who cast him away, so terrifying him that the official adopts a more humble tone from then on. By forcing these officials to experience the brutal winter without an overcoat, Akaky Akakievich's ghost exposes them to the lives of the powerless and the insignificant. And by confronting them with his corpse, he compels them to recognize his life's inherent significance. - Theme: Materialism, Material Goods, and Art. Description: Though his fellow bureaucrats treat Akaky Akakievich as an uninteresting character through most of the story, his prized overcoat briefly raises his status in the workplace. Indeed, it's comical how differently his colleagues interact with him: the day he arrives with his new coat, he is immediately surrounded, congratulated, and complimented, and is invited to a party that night. Akaky Akakievich, too, sees himself in a new light. He is more cheerful than usual, and he does not follow his usual routine of eating, working, and sleeping; instead, he allows himself to rest after dinner, and then departs for the party. Out on the street, where previously he would notice nothing of interest, he looks in awe at people and objects that suddenly appear to him as beautiful. As Gogol writes, "Akaky Akakievich surveyed this scene as though he had never witnessed anything like it in his life. For some years now he had not ventured out at all in the evenings."On the one hand, Gogol reveals the absurdity of human interaction—so little (just an overcoat) separates others from seeing Akaky Akakievich as boring and insignificant, or as deserving of respect and admiration. In this light, Gogol's focus on the overcoat as a material good emphasizes the superficiality of Russian society, and mirrors the modern world's scorn for people who are "materialist" and shallow. On the other hand, Akaky Akakievich's overcoat embodies the actual importance of material goods in human life, especially to the poor. On the most basic level, Akaky Akakievich's coat allows him to survive the punishing winter in St. Petersburg. This improvement not only raises his standard of living, but also expands his range of activity. Suddenly accepted by his peers and able to venture outdoors at night, Akaky Akakievich begins to find meaning beyond his mundane life as a homebody and copyist.The power of material is perhaps best illustrated in the tailor Petrovich's creation of the overcoat. In this passage, the care and attention Petrovich gives to the garment is clear. He works at the coat for two weeks and delivers it himself to Akaky Akakievich's home. As Gogol writes, "He seemed to know full well that his was no mean achievement, and that he had suddenly shown by his work the gulf separating tailors who only relined or patched up overcoats from those who make new ones, right from the beginning." Here, Gogol depicts the tailor as an artist, proud of his creativity. By bringing something new into the world, Petrovich has found something meaningful in life. Likewise Akaky Akakievich, now the owner of the overcoat, finds his own identity enhanced. As the possessor of an original work, he is no longer defined by his position as a copyist. In the overcoat, we can read Gogol's argument for the liberating power of art. - Theme: Social Status and Fate. Description: Early on in "The Overcoat," Gogol gives his readers the strong sense that Akaky Akakievich's life is destined for mediocrity. His family name, Bashmachkin, derived from the Russian word bashmak, meaning "shoe," already indicates his low social standing. In addition, the narrator notes that his "far-fetched" given name, Akaky Akakievich, was actually fated, as he was named after his father. When they christen baby Akaky, Gogol writes, the baby "wept and made a grimace, as though he foresaw that he was to be a titular counsellor." From the outset, the protagonist is placed into a low social class from which he will not escape. Gogol's description of his protagonist's origins, while comic, also implies that Akaky Akakievich is resigned to his lot from a young age.Akaky Akakievich's low social standing determines how he is treated throughout the story. It almost seems like the world is conspiring against him: for example, Gogol describes Akaky Akakievich's "strange knack" of walking beneath windows just as trash is being thrown out of them. Furthermore, his position in the world seems to determine how he behaves. Outside of his low bureaucratic post, Gogol writes, "nothing else existed as far as he was concerned." He does not notice happenings on the street or the taste of his food. He merely does his duty and goes to bed. The clerk's vision of the possibilities in life is extremely, and fatally, limited.Though Akaky Akakievich seems content with his mundane life, his poverty makes it impossible for him to maintain his standard of living. In Russia's corrupt bureaucratic society, the unambitious Akaky Akakievich is tossed aside and forgotten. And even if Akaky Akakievich were a more enterprising individual, Gogol casts doubt on the possibility that he might find success. The fact that his overcoat is stolen so quickly after he procured it seems an especially potent demonstration of the difficulty of social mobility. Thus in "The Overcoat," Akaky Akakievich's social status is closely tied to his fate. His status dooms him to a life of poverty and makes his struggle to survive utterly futile—he is not "important" enough to be cared for by anyone. Ultimately, the story suggests that the powerless are only remembered once they are dead, and even then only as "ghosts" who haunt the lives of those who neglected them. - Climax: Akaky Akakievich's new overcoat is stolen. - Summary: "The Overcoat" follows the life and death of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, a low-ranking official who works as a copyist in a nameless department in the Russian bureaucracy. The Narrator suggests that Akaky Akakievich is destined for a mediocre and insignificant life from birth: his family name, Bashmatchkin, comes from the word bashmak, meaning "shoe," while the name Akaky Akakievich (which has the same ridiculous redundancy as the name "John Johnson") was given to him by his mother, who felt that her child was destined for that name. Akaky Akakievich lives an extremely dull life, devoting himself entirely to his copy work. He neglects every other aspect of his life: he does not care about his appearance, does not notice the taste of his food, does not socialize with the other officials, and barely perceives what is going on around him. The other clerks in his department constantly make fun of him. Usually Akaky does not mind, though sometimes he shouts at them to leave him alone. Akaky Akakievich seems to be content with his life, but he also faces the challenge of surviving St. Petersburg's bitter cold. Akaky decides that he needs to get his overcoat repaired. His current coat is old and tattered, and is the butt of many jokes at work. Akaky visits Petrovich, a tailor and a drunkard, to get his coat patched up—but the tailor decides that the garment is so worn out that it is not worth repairing. He insists that Akaky must commission a new overcoat for the price of one hundred fifty rubles. Akaky, stunned, has no idea where he would get that kind of money. Nevertheless, he convinces Petrovich to sell him the coat for eighty rubles, and over the next few months he lives frugally, going hungry in order to save up enough money for his new coat. With an unexpected bonus from his department director, Akaky and Petrovich are able to purchase decent cloth and fur, and Petrovich, after working on the overcoat for two weeks, personally delivers the magnificent new coat to Akaky's house. When he arrives at work wearing his overcoat, Akaky's coworkers congratulate him and insist that they celebrate his good fortune that night. Akaky is at first embarrassed by the attention, but eventually he relents. That night, he walks to the apartment of a fellow official, who lives in a wealthy district of St. Petersburg. All of the partygoers compliment Akaky on his new coat, and then return to their merriment. Akaky feels very out of place in this setting until his coworkers push him to drink some champagne. This lifts the clerk's spirits, but he decides to sneak out of the party at midnight, as it is late. On his way home, Akaky is accosted by two thieves in a square—they beat him and steal his coat. The watchman in the square claims not to have witnessed the event, and tells Akaky to report the incident to the police in the morning. Akaky, cold and distressed, returns home, where his landlady advises him to go directly to the District Police Superintendent. Akaky goes to his house the next morning, and waits the entire day before he is admitted into the District Superintendent's office. But the official, upon hearing Akaky's story, becomes suspicious of Akaky himself. Akaky leaves, unable to convince the Superintendent to help him. The next day, he goes to his department wearing his old, tattered cloak. Upon seeing him, one of his coworkers advises him not to go to the police, who only work when it will improve their position in the hierarchy. Instead, he tells Akaky to appeal to an "Important Person" who might exert some real influence. Akaky seeks the help of this Important Person, who is kind to his friends, but who enjoys flaunting his important government status and enforcing a rigid bureaucratic process. When Akaky arrives, the Important Person is shooting the breeze with an old friend, and makes Akaky wait just to demonstrate his power. When he finally allows the clerk to enter his office, Akaky awkwardly explains that his cloak has been stolen. But his familiarity offends the Important Person, who tells Akaky that he should have appealed to him through the appropriate bureaucratic channels. Akaky replies that he does not trust secretaries, which further angers the Important Person. He shouts at Akaky until he leaves the office in a daze. Feeling faint, Akaky walks through a snowstorm to reach his apartment, and is quickly struck by a fever, which intensifies quickly. As Akaky approaches death, he has visions of Petrovich, the men who robbed him, and his old, tattered coat. When he dies, barely anyone notices, and St. Petersburg goes on as it always has. After his department finds out that he has passed, they immediately replace Akaky with a new official. But rumors begin to spread that a ghost has been stalking the city, stealing the coats from people that it passes. One night the Important Person, leaving a party, decides to visit his mistress's house. On his way there, he feels a hand on his collar and turns around to see the ghost of Akaky Akakievich. The ghost demands the Important Person's cloak. Terrified, the official immediately throws his cloak at the ghost and drives home as quickly as possible. From then on, he treats his subordinates with a bit more humility, and Akaky's ghost is not seen again. In closing, the Narrator mentions one incident in which a watchman in Kolomna follows a ghost until it turns around. The watchman does not act, but notices that this ghost is too tall to be Akaky. This ghost wears a large mustache, and walks off into the night, toward the Obukhoff Bridge.

- Genre: Literary Fiction – Short Story - Title: The Painted Door - Point of view: Third-person, focalized through Ann - Setting: Saskatchewan, Canada - Character: Ann. Description: Ann is John's wife. The two of them have been married for seven years, and live together on a farm. Ann is youthful and energetic. Although she loves her husband and appreciates how hard he works, she dislikes the repetitive, isolated nature of life as a farmer's wife. At the beginning of the story and until after she has slept with Steven, Ann demonstrates a strong internal conflict. On the one hand, she thinks that John is a good husband and that she should be grateful for the things she has. On the other hand, she is restless and feels that she is wasting the best years of her life working to pay off their mortgage. After she sleeps with Steven, Ann quickly regrets her decision to cheat on John. When faced with the idea of leaving him, she realizes that she loves her husband and she will be happiest sharing a life with him. Unfortunately, John discovers her infidelity in the night and kills himself before Ann has a chance to make amends. - Character: John. Description: John is Ann's husband. He is a strong, quiet farmer who thinks he is lucky to have a wife like Ann. He has a single goal in life: to provide Ann with the material comforts he thinks she deserves. Because of this, he works long hours and pinches pennies year after year so that he can pay off the mortgage on the farm and buy them a bigger house—but at the same time, all his devoted work means he doesn't pay much attention to Ann in the present, and doesn't notice her unhappiness. John is unfailingly loyal and self-sacrificing, and sees only the best in people. When he returns home late at night to find his wife in bed with their friend Steven, he chooses to quietly kill himself by walking back out into the blizzard rather than confront them. Even in his death, John is self-sacrificing: he is careful to make his suicide look like an accident, which means that Ann's infidelity remains her secret to keep. - Character: Steven. Description: Steven is Ann and John's friend and neighbor. Ann and John both enjoy Steven's company—they see him fairly often for a game of cards or a shared meal. Ann describes him as young, good-looking, sociable, and altogether very different from her hulking, silent husband. It is at John's suggestion that Steven comes over to keep Ann company while John is away for the day. When he arrives, Steven seems very confident, even arrogant, and initiates a subtle flirtation with Ann. He seems to be aware that she is frustrated and lonely, and successfully convinces her that the blizzard outside will keep John away for the night. Steven is presented as a reflection of Ann's desires, always in contrast to John. Steven never directly states that he wants to sleep with Ann, and he expresses no anxiety or guilt around their transgression. Although he is the catalyst for the action which destroys their marriage, it is the tension between John and Ann's personalities and desires which drive the events of the story. - Character: The Neighbors. Description: John, Ann and Steven live on very isolated farms, but they do have neighbors who live close enough to be familiar faces. Ann refers to them as a group, without discussing any particular names or personalities. At the end of the story, the neighbors are described discussing John's death. Their comments confirm that his death looks like a tragic accident, and that it was foolish of him to try to come home with the double wheel around the moon in the sky. - Theme: Loyalty and Sacrifice. Description: The characters in "The Painted Door" are defined by their loyalties and the sacrifices they make for the people they love. John is deeply loyal to his wife Ann, and he expresses this by working hard year after year in the hopes of providing her with a better life someday. Ann has been loyal to John throughout the seven years of their marriage, but she secretly resents some of the sacrifices that being married to him has required of her, particularly the social isolation of their farming life. For John, sacrifice is the ultimate expression of love and loyalty. Ann understands the necessity of some sacrifice, but she sees it as a necessary evil and something which makes it more difficult to remain loyal to her husband. Because of the sacrifices he makes for a better future, John unintentionally drives Ann away from him. John is too focused on the idea of saving money for their future to see that she is unhappy in the present. When Ann feels she can no longer stand the sacrifices required of her marriage to John, she commits an extreme act of disloyalty by sleeping with Steven. Ann's attempt to "have it all" by remaining married to John while exploring the excitement of Steven ends in a harsh reality check. In the end, Ross shows us that loyalty always involves a sacrifice of some kind. Each of the characters must give something up to hold onto whatever they feel is most important. When Ann betrays her husband, she gains the attentions of Steven and the possibility of a more exciting life, but she loses the love and security of her marriage. When John kills himself, he gives Ann the freedom she seemed to want and avoids all conflict with her, but he loses everything in the process. - Theme: Men and Women. Description: Although Ross does not explicitly condone or criticize the traditional gender roles that define his characters' lives, the tension between male and female perspectives is a central source of conflict in the story. Ann feels that as a woman, she should be grateful and happy just to have a kind husband who provides for her material needs. She feels guilty for wanting a more varied, entertaining existence. John, for his part, does not understand Ann as an individual. Instead, he treats her the way he imagines that a woman would like to be treated. He believes that she will be happy if he is a hard-working breadwinner and can eventually buy her nice things, despite Ann expressing that she would rather enjoy their youth together. The tension between the way Ann is supposed to act as farmer's wife and the way she actually feels causes her to bottle up her feelings of frustration and resentment. John's traditional understanding of gender roles prevents him from seeing how unhappy his wife has become. When Ann turns to a physical relationship with Steven, she is seeking comfort by trying on a different version of stereotypical femininity and embracing a different version of stereotypical masculinity—the confident, handsome man instead of the hardworking, loyal one. Instead of acting like a perfect, self-sacrificing wife, she temporarily acts like a seductive sexual object. Unfortunately, she does not feel fully satisfied in either role, or with either man. In the end, the strict gender roles which John and Ann feel they must fulfill are what prevents them from communicating effectively to resolve their differences. - Theme: Isolation vs. Connection. Description: "The Painted Door" takes place in a very isolated physical environment. Personal connections in this kind of harsh, rural setting are not something to be taken for granted. Ann is lonely in their little farmhouse, and dreams of going to local dances or of having friends over to play cards. In order to care for his aging father and make sure Ann has company during a storm, John must walk many miles in a raging snowstorm. Maintaining any kind of connection requires extreme sacrifice. In the end, personal connections are revealed to be subjective and fleeting. No matter how strong we believe our personal relationships to be, Ross suggests, ultimately we live and die alone. John chooses to visit his father rather than stay home with Ann, which results in him losing her forever. Ann chooses the brief comfort of sleeping with Steven over her relationship with John, which results in her losing her husband forever. Ann's treasured friendship with Steven is likely to have been destroyed as well, because she chose her desire for a physical partner over her need to maintain their card-playing, meal-sharing non-sexual relationship. The wild isolation of the prairie is ready and waiting to claim any relationship, even one as close and established as Ann and John's marriage. - Theme: Time and Aging. Description: For Ann, her awareness of time passing is torturous. It always moves either too slowly or too quickly for her. She feels that she is constantly waiting for the next season to come, and constantly waiting for each year to pass so that she and John will be a little closer to paying off the mortgage on the farm and being able to enjoy their life together. Ann sees herself as young, but feels that she will be too old to enjoy nice clothes and a big house by the time John has saved enough money to buy her these things. Because Ann feels trapped by the passage of time, she takes many small actions in an effort to control it. She paints an old doorframe in an effort to make it new, and sleeps with Steven in an effort to feel young and free. Nothing she does manages to change the relentless march of the clock and calendar, however. She knows the paint will crack and peel, and isn't enough to really make the house new anyways. Her night with Steven leaves her feeling guilty and sad, doing nothing to hasten the arrival of spring or a paid-off mortgage. Both Ann and John focus so much on the future, each in their own way, that they fail to make a life for themselves in the present. The only character who seems to live fully in the present is Steven. He is only interested in enjoying a night next to Ann, and is unconcerned with the future consequences of his actions—however selfish or immoral this might be. The tragedy portrayed in "The Painted Door" shows us that the future is never certain and can disappear in an instant. Relying on the possibility of future happiness only ends in disappointment, and it is through living in the present (no matter how bleak and brutal it may seem) that we can find joy. - Climax: Ann's infidelity - Summary: It's the middle of winter on the Canadian prairies, and a storm is brewing. John, a farmer, tells his wife Ann that he is going to check on his aging father before the blizzard hits. This means walking five miles each way over hill and dale in the deep snow, and Ann doesn't want him to go. She doesn't want to be left alone to care for the animals, and she's worried about his safety. John is kind but firm, insisting that he has to go. He offers to stop by their friend Steven's house on his way, saying that he will tell Steven to come keep Ann company, and join the two of them for supper and a game of cards when he returns in the evening. John and Ann have been married for seven years. John is big, strong and quiet. He adores his pretty, lively wife, and wants to give her all the nice things she could ever want. He works day and night and refuses to hire a helping hand so that they can pay off the mortgage on the farm, move to a bigger house, and Ann can have some pretty clothes. Ann loves her husband, but she gets bored and lonely living on their farm. She knows that it will take many years before their mortgage is paid off, and she wishes they could have some fun and enjoy each other's company while they are still young. She feels guilty for not appreciating all the things John does for her, and yet she cannot help but feel trapped. When John leaves, Ann sets about tidying up the house for Steven's visit. The snowstorm outside quickly reveals itself to be just as violent and extreme as she had suspected. Ann paints the bedroom door to keep herself busy and tries not to think about her frustration at being left home alone. She begins to wonder if John will really return that night, considering how bad the storm is looking. Steven arrives in the afternoon, and Ann is overwhelmed by his presence. Although she has known him for almost as long as she has known John, this evening feels different. He is handsome and talkative, and she sees him as the opposite of everything that frustrates her about her husband. Steven takes care of feeding the animals, and then they sit down to eat and play cards. Steven insists that John will spend the night at his father's house rather than return to join them, but Ann protests. She says no blizzard has ever kept John away from her, but it's unclear whether she is trying to convince Steven or trying to convince herself. As the tension between them grows, it is clear that Steven wants to sleep with Ann and that Ann is open to the possibility. Although they never speak openly about their intentions, eventually Ann decides that John will be away all night and sleeps with Steven. Ann spends a restless, guilty night awake while Steven sleeps soundly. She imagines that she sees John, then wakes up to find it's just the shadow cast by the fire. Ann realizes that although Steven is attractive, she loves John and would never consider cheating on him again. She silently re-commits herself to their marriage, feeling grateful for the life they share. The next morning, John is found frozen to death just a little ways beyond the house. The neighbors decide that he must have gotten confused by the wind and wandered past his house, before getting caught in a snowdrift. Everyone is surprised that he even attempted to walk home in the blizzard, but Ann says that she knew in her heart that he always came home no matter what. When Ann is left alone with his body, she notices that on one of his hands is a little smear of the same white paint she used to paint the bedroom door.

- Genre: Short Story, Fantasy - Title: The Paper Menagerie - Point of view: First person - Setting: Connecticut - Character: Jack. Description: Jack, the protagonist of "The Paper Menagerie," is the biracial son of a white American father and a Chinese immigrant mother. When Jack is a child, he has a close relationship with his mother. She makes him paper animals and breathes life into them, giving them a magic ability to move and play with him. Yet, after Jack overhears the racist gossip of two female neighbors and suffers racist bullying from his neighbor Mark, he turns against his mother. He boxes up the magic paper animals she has made for him and demands that she speak only English. Because Jack won't respond to his mother when she speaks Chinese and criticizes her English, they become estranged. By the time Jack is a high school student, they aren't speaking. When Jack is in college, his mother is hospitalized with cancer. He flies home to visit her, but even in the hospital, he is thinking about his job prospects, not his dying mother. When she asks him, if she dies, to take out his paper animals and remember her on Qingming, the Chinese Festival for the Dead, he avoids promising to do so. Yet after Jack's mother's death, Jack's girlfriend Susan finds and saves the paper animals. Two years later, on Qingming, the paper tiger that Jack's mother made for him comes to life and reveals to Jack a secret letter from his mother, written in Chinese. Jack finds a Chinese tourist to translate the letter for him. It contains the story of his mother's life and asks Jack why he's stopped speaking to her. After hearing the letter, Jack asks the tourist to help him write the Chinese character for ai, which means love, on the letter. Then he refolds the letter into a tiger and carries it home with him. These two final gestures show that Jack regrets his estrangement from his mother and his childhood rejection of his Chinese heritage. - Character: Jack's Mother. Description: Jack's mother is born in the 1950s in China. In early childhood, she learns from her mother how to fold paper into animals and breathe magic life into them. When she is ten, both her parents die in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Afterward, human traffickers find her and sell her as a domestic slave in Hong Kong. At age 16, to escape the family that bought her, she signs up for an introduction service that matches American men with Asian women. Through the introduction service, she meets Jack's father, marries him, and immigrates to America. At first, she feels isolated and misunderstood in America. After Jack is born, however, she feels happy and reconnected to the family she has lost. When Jack is a child, she is very close to him. She makes him the magic paper animals that her own mother taught her how to craft. Yet after Jack experiences racist bullying from a neighborhood boy, Mark, he turns against her and rejects his Chinese heritage: he demands she speak English, asks to eat only American food at home, and boxes up the paper animals. Jack's mother remains estranged from her son up until she dies of cancer while he is in college. After her death, Jack finds a letter she has written to him, telling him the story of her life, explaining how much she loves him, and noting how hurt she is by his rejection. This letter reminds Jack of his love for his mother and reconciles him to his Chinese heritage. - Character: Jack's Father. Description: Jack's father is an American man who meets Jack's mother, a Chinese woman, through an introduction service that matches American men with Asian women. He first sees her in a catalogue of women put together by the introduction service. For a while, they exchange letters. Then he flies to Hong Kong to meet her. When he arrives, he discovers that the introduction service has been writing her letters for her, as she speaks very little English. To surmount the language barrier, he hires a translator. Jack's father and mother speak through the translator. Afterward, they marry and Jack's mother immigrates to the U.S. Although Jack's father cares enough about Jack's mother to hire a translator to speak with her, he does not support her adequately once they have moved to the U.S. When Jack demands that his mother stop speaking Chinese, Jack's father takes his son's side. When Jack rejects the paper animals his mother has made, Jack's father buys him new toys. After Jack and his mother stop speaking, Jack's father tries to reconcile them, but he fails. In a way, then, Jack's father represents Jack's American side, which hurts and fails to understand his Chinese immigrant mother. - Character: Mark. Description: Mark is Jack's childhood neighbor. One day, Mark brings an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure to Jack's house. When Jack shows Mark his own toys, the paper animals, Mark calls them "trash." When Jack's magic paper tiger knocks over and breaks Mark's action figure, Mark hits Jack, insults Jack's mother, and tears up his tiger. Later, he subjects Jack to racist bullying at school. As a result of Mark's racist bullying, Jack rejects his mother and his Chinese heritage. - Character: Susan. Description: Susan is Jack's college girlfriend. After Jack's mother dies, she comes home to help Jack and Jack's father pack up the house. She finds the box of Jack's childhood paper animals and declares Jack's mother an "amazing artist." Later, she decorates her and Jack's shared apartment with the paper animals. - Theme: Racism and Identity. Description: In "The Paper Menagerie," a biracial American boy named Jack struggles with—and eventually embraces—his Chinese heritage, showing how his identity can be both a source of discomfort and of joy. When Jack is very young, he and his mother (who immigrated from China) are very close. He seems comfortable with his Chinese identity then, which is particularly apparent in his relationship to the paper animals that his mother makes—animals that she literally brings to life by breathing into them. Jack's mother learned this skill from her own mother back in China, who made the same kinds of toys when she was young, so the animals become an embodiment of Jack's Chinese lineage. When he's young, the animals—like his Chinese identity—are a source of joy, something he easily embraces. However, once Jack is a little older, he begins to experience racism from neighbors and friends at school. In a particularly traumatic incident, a neighborhood boy named Mark disparages the paper toys for not being as good as his own plastic action figure and says something racist about Jack's family. After this, Jack puts his paper animals away for good and starts gravitating toward his white identity; he insists that his family start eating "American food" and stop speaking Chinese at home, which permanently estranges Jack from his mother. Jack's rejection of the paper toys marks a phase in his life when being Chinese is a source of torment and self-loathing; he feels that his Chinese identity, like the toys themselves, marks him as different and therefore makes him vulnerable. This only changes after Jack's mother's death, when Jack discovers that she wrote him a letter on the inside of his paper tiger in which she explained her own story of her life in China and in the U.S. She points out that his rejection of the paper animals and his refusal to speak Chinese at home hurt her, connecting this behavior to his hatred of himself. This reconnects Jack with his mother and helps him make peace with his own mixed-race identity. When he embraces the paper animals once more at the end of the story, it marks his more mature understanding of his identity; he understands the pain of experiencing racism, but he also knows that being half Chinese can bring him joy, comfort, and connection to his mother. - Theme: Familial Love and Estrangement. Description: In "The Paper Menagerie," familial love is always vulnerable to estrangement or destruction, whether by large historical forces or by more personal failings. Thus, the story suggests that such love is inherently fragile. In a letter to her Chinese American son Jack, Jack's mother explains how larger forces destroyed her own family in China, before she immigrated to the U.S. Clearly, Jack's mother did have a family that loved her: her earliest memory is her own mother giving her the family's only remaining food during the Great Famine in China. Yet during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which pitted "brother against brother," both her parents died, and she was left an orphan. Jack's mother eventually fled orphanhood and exploitation through an introduction service, but Jack's comments on his father "buying" his mother from a catalogue suggests that whatever his mother found in the U.S., it wasn't genuine family. Furthermore, American racism tears apart Jack's own family: after overhearing his neighbors' racist gossip and suffering racist bullying at the hands of his classmates, Jack turns on his mother. Because he refuses to listen to her when she speaks Chinese and criticizes her English, they stop speaking to each other, becoming estranged until her death. Jack's father sides with him, reinforcing the idea that his parents' marriage wasn't founded on genuine love to begin with.  "The Paper Menagerie" also suggests that although families can't always be successfully rebuilt, remembrance can help heal estrangement. Though orphaned at the age of 10, Jack's mother continues to write letters to her dead parents, fold the letters into magical paper cranes, and send the cranes flying toward China. When Jack is a child, she includes him in this ritual. Similarly, after his mother's death, Jack partially reconciles with her by reading a letter she has left for him within a paper tiger and remembering her. In "The Paper Menagerie," then, elusive familial love often survives most strongly through remembrance of what's been lost. - Theme: Language and Translation. Description: In "The Paper Menagerie," acts of translation represent the desire for human connection and the attempt to understand other people. Early in the story, Jack asks his American father how he came to marry his Chinese mother. and Jack's father explains that he met Jack's mother through an introduction service. Initially, he believed that she spoke English because the introduction service told him so and wrote English letters to him on her behalf. When he flew to meet her in Hong Kong, however, he learned that she spoke almost no English. Rather than becoming angry, he hired a translator. This choice to translate and seek connection despite the language barrier, rather than give up on a possible relationship, eventually leads to Jack's father and mother marrying and having Jack. Similarly, when Jack finds a letter from his mother after her death, he immediately searches for a Chinese tourist to read it aloud, translating the letter from written to spoken Chinese. The speed with which Jack searches for a translator indicates his desire to connect with and understand his mother after her death. By contrast, when characters in "The Paper Menagerie" refuse to translate, they are refusing connection and understanding. For example, after his neighbor Mark subjects Jack to racist bullying, Jack refuses to translate for his mother the racist slur Mark called him and demands that she speak only English from then on. By ignoring her request for translation, Jack prevents her from understanding how he is suffering—a disconnect that damages their relationship for the rest of his mother's life. By marking moments of connection and disconnection between characters with successful or failed translations, "The Paper Menagerie" suggests that human connection demands hard work and even discomfort, and that the effort is worth it in order to build understanding. - Theme: Art vs. Consumer Items. Description: "The Paper Menagerie" defines true art by contrasting it with mere consumer items. When the main character Jack is young, his mother folds him paper animals out of leftover Christmas wrapping paper. She brings the animals to life by blowing into them, a skill she learned from her own mother back in China. Much later, after Jack's mother has died, Jack's girlfriend Susan finds the paper animals and declares that Jack's mother was "an amazing artist." The story contrasts Jack's paper animals with an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure belonging to Jack's childhood neighbor Mark. Mark fails to appreciate the paper animals, calling them "trash." When Jack's paper tiger Laohu jumps on the Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure and breaks it, Mark tears up Laohu and begins bullying Jack. Later, Jack gives Mark a new Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure to substitute for the one broken. By contrasting the magical paper animals with the inert action figure, "The Paper Menagerie" suggests that real art is in some sense alive, whereas consumer items are dead; real art is created by an individual artist, whereas consumer items are mass produced; and real art is irreplaceable, whereas consumer items can be replaced. - Climax: Jack reads the letter his dead mother has written to him. - Summary: "The Paper Menagerie" describes the relationship between a biracial Chinese American boy, Jack, and his Chinese immigrant mother. When the story begins, a young Jack is crying. To comfort him, his mother makes him an origami tiger and breathes life into it. Later, she makes Jack more magical paper animals to play with. Once, when Jack is a teenager and is no longer speaking to his mother, he asks his father how he and Jack's mother met. His father explains that they met in Hong Kong through an introduction service that matched American men with Asian women. Jack's father saw Jack's mother in a catalogue and then flew to Hong Kong to meet her. When he arrived, he learned that Jack's mother spoke very little English, so he hired a translator to mediate between them. Afterward, Jack's mother immigrated to the U.S. and married his father. The story shifts back to when Jack is 10, after his family has just moved into a new neighborhood. Jack overhears two female neighbors exchanging racist gossip about his family, wondering why Jack's father married his mother and criticizing Jack's biracial looks. Later, a neighborhood boy named Mark comes over to Jack's house with an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure. Jack shows Mark his paper animals, and Jack calls them "trash." When Jack's paper tiger knocks over and breaks Mark's action figure, Mark insults Jack's mother and tears up his tiger. Mark begins a campaign of racist bullying against Jack at school. In response, Jack boxes up his paper animals and refuses to respond to his mother when she speaks to him in Chinese. Because Jack won't respond to Chinese and criticizes his mother's English, they slowly stop speaking to each other. When Jack is in college, his mother is hospitalized with cancer. He flies home to visit her. In the hospital, she asks Jack, if she dies, to take out his paper animals and remember her each year on Qingming, the Chinese Festival for the Dead. After Jack leaves, his mother dies. Later, Jack comes home again, with his girlfriend Susan, to help his father move. While packing, Susan finds and rescues the box containing Jack's paper animals. Jack notices the animals no longer contain the magic that allows them to move. Two years later, on Qingming, Jack's paper tiger comes to life again, approaches Jack, and reveals a letter hidden in his insides. The letter is from Jack's mother, written in Chinese. Jack, who cannot read Chinese, travels downtown and finds a Chinese tourist to read the letter for him. The letter tells Jack the story of his mother's life: she was born to a poor Chinese family in the 1950s. Her mother taught her how to fold and animate paper animals, but when she was 10, both her parents died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Human traffickers found her and sold her as a domestic slave in Hong Kong. When she was 16, to escape the family that had bought her, she signed up for the introduction service that set her up with Jack's father. At first, after immigrating to America, she felt extremely lonely, but when Jack was born, she felt happy, like her family had been returned to her. She ends the letter by asking Jack why he won't speak to her anymore. Jack asks the Chinese tourist to help him write the Chinese character for ai, meaning love, over and over on the letter. Then he folds the letter back into a tiger and goes home.

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Historiographic Metafiction - Title: The Passion - Point of view: First Person (alternating between Henri and Villanelle's perspectives) - Setting: France, Italy, and Russia - Character: Henri. Description: - Character: Villanelle. Description: - Character: The Cook/The Large Man. Description: - Character: Napoleon Bonaparte. Description: - Character: The Woman with Gray-Green Eyes. Description: - Character: Patrick. Description: - Character: Domino. Description: - Character: Joséphine. Description: - Character: Henri's Mother. Description: - Character: The Woman with Slimed-Green Hair. Description: - Theme: Passion. Description: - Theme: Storytelling. Description: - Theme: Gambling. Description: - Theme: War. Description: - Theme: Hero-Worship and Religion. Description: - Climax: Henri refuses to escape San Servelo with Villanelle. - Summary: Henri, born in a French village to a religious mother and a farmer father, joins the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, where he is assigned to strangle chickens for Napoleon's dinner. In 1804, while Napoleon's army is at Boulogne preparing to invade England, the army cook gets dead drunk while Henri is preparing chickens. An officer rushes in, tells Henri that Napoleon is about to inspect the kitchen tent, and orders Henri to hide the cook. Henri and his friend Domino, Napoleon's groom, are levering the unconscious cook upright when Napoleon enters. Napoleon, impressed by Henri, promotes him, and Henri becomes Napoleon's assistant, bringing him chicken directly. Meanwhile, the army camp spreads wild stories about how Henri and Domino—who are both much smaller than the cook—maneuvered the cook, until the humiliated cook swears vengeance on Henri. In July 1804, the army loses 2,000 men to drowning while practicing for the English invasion in a storm. Henri watches the disaster from a lookout pillar with his friend Patrick, a defrocked Irish priest with exceptionally good eyesight in one eye. In retrospect, Henri thinks that the army should have stopped hero-worshipping Napoleon after the disaster—but they don't. In August 1804, Napoleon announces that he will crown himself emperor and gives Henri leave to visit his family. Henri visits his family and then travels to Paris to attend Napoleon. Shortly before the coronation, Napoleon abruptly sends Henri away to continue his military training in the army camp. On New Year's Eve, Henri attends mass with Patrick, though he isn't religious himself. Meanwhile, a girl named Villanelle is born during a solar eclipse in Venice, Italy in the late 18th century. Villanelle's boatman father disappeared before her birth. While pregnant with Villanelle, Villanelle's mother remarried a sensible baker. Villanelle is born with webbed feet, which all Venetian boatmen are rumored to have. In 1797, Napoleon conquers Venice, and the French occupy the city. When Villanelle is 18, she begins working for Venice's Casino dressed as a young man. In August 1804, Venice holds an outdoor ball to celebrate Napoleon's birthday, and Villanelle works one of the Casino's booths at the ball. One of Villanelle's Casino regulars, a large man interested in Villanelle sexually, makes a brief appearance. Then a woman with gray-green eyes appears, wins at cards in Villanelle's booth, and vanishes. After working a while longer, Villanelle goes in search of the woman but can't find her. When she returns to her booth, the friend covering for her says a woman stopped by and left an earring for Villanelle. For several weeks, Villanelle obsesses over the woman with gray-green eyes. Meanwhile, the large man realizes that Villanelle is female and proposes marriage to her, offering to take her all over Europe in style so long as she continues to dress like a young man at home. Villanelle asks how he became rich, and he explains that he supplies low-quality meat to Napoleon's army. When Villanelle refuses his offer of marriage, he threatens her, sexually assaults her, and walks off. In November 1804, Villanelle encounters the woman with gray-green eyes in a restaurant while dressed as a young man. The woman invites Villanelle to dinner at her respectable, six-floor house. At dinner, the woman explains that she is married to an antiques merchant who travels frequently. After kissing the woman, Villanelle leaves. Awhile later, Villanelle visits the woman again. The woman tells her that her husband is returning soon. She doesn't know when she and Villanelle will see each other again. Villanelle lifts her shirt and announces that she is female. The woman says that she knows. Villanelle ends up spending the night with her. On New Year's Eve, Villanelle travels to the woman's house and watches her spending a calm, affectionate night with her husband—a sight that terrifies her. Soon the clocks strike New Year's Day, 1805. In 1812, Henri participates in Napoleon's march on Moscow through the Russian winter. As he witnesses French soldiers starve or freeze to death, he becomes disillusioned with Napoleon and decides to desert the army. When he asks Domino, gravely wounded, to desert with him, Domino refuses. Later, he finds Patrick in the kitchen tent with one of the army's sex workers. When he asks Patrick to desert with him, both Patrick and the sex worker decide to come along. After a week's travel, the deserters hide in an abandoned Russian army site and build a fire. Patrick and Henri take off their boots—but the sex worker does not, explaining that her father was a boatman, and boatmen do not remove their boots—a detail that reveals her to be Villanelle. Villanelle tells Henri and Patrick how she ended up a sex worker for the French army. She gambled away her heart to a married woman. Attempting to escape this passion, she married a large man who liked her to dress as a boy and went on a honeymoon across Europe. After two years of marriage, she stole her husband's money and abandoned him. After working in various countries and learning many languages, she returned to Venice hoping to retrieve her heart—but her furious, jilted husband found her. One of her husband's friends suggested a wager. Villanelle and her husband would play cards. If Villanelle won, her husband would leave her alone. If her husband won, he could do anything he liked to Villanelle short of killing her. Her husband won and sold Villanelle as a sex worker to French army officers. Henri, who has quickly fallen in love with Villanelle, is devastated to learn that someone else has her heart. Yet as the deserters head for Venice, Villanelle initiates a sexual relationship with Henri. Meanwhile, Patrick, weak and feverish, dies. In May 1813, Henri and Villanelle reach Venice. Villanelle's mother and stepfather welcome them, assuring Henri that they don't believe all French people are awful like Napoleon—or like Villanelle's husband. One day, Villanelle takes Henri on a boating journey to meet a mysterious homeless person, the woman with slimed-green hair, who warns Henri to "beware of old enemies in new disguises." Afterward, Villanelle asks Henri to steal her heart back—explaining that the woman with gray-green eyes has hidden Villanelle's literal heart somewhere in her house. She puts Henri's hand on her chest, and he realizes she has no heartbeat. Later, under cover of darkness, Villanelle sails Henri to the house. Henri breaks in and finds a jar with something beating inside it. He steals the jar and leaves. After he and Villanelle flee the scene, Villanelle opens the jar. Afterward, she puts Henri's hand on her chest—and he feels that she has a heartbeat. The next day, Henri asks Villanelle to marry him. She refuses. While Henri is staying with Villanelle's family and trying to decide what to do next, Villanelle takes him to the Casino—where her husband corners her against a wall. Henri and Villanelle escape and boat away. Yet Villanelle's husband pursues them by boat and corners them near a garbage tunnel—at which point Henri recognizes Villanelle's husband as the drunk army cook who swore vengeance on him. The cook, recognizing Henri in turn, explains that after Henri humiliated him, he was sent back to Paris to work in food requisitions for Napoleon's army and was able to enrich himself. He threatens to report Henri for deserting and to sell Villanelle back into sexual servitude. When he grabs Villanelle, she shoves him, and he falls on top of Henri. Villanelle tosses Henri a knife, and Henri stabs the cook to death. Afterward, Henri cuts out the cook's heart. Though Villanelle hides the cook's body and gets Henri back to her family home, the authorities come for them five days later. The cook's lawyer offers Henri his freedom in exchange for signing a confession stating that Villanelle killed the cook. Instead, Henri takes full responsibility for murdering the cook and gives specific details about how he removed the cook's heart. Henri is found insane and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Venetian asylum San Servelo. Villanelle, having inherited her husband's wealth, plans to spring Henri from San Servelo. Meanwhile, she rents a house directly across from the house of the woman with gray-green eyes. One day, the woman spies Villanelle on her balcony and invites her to dinner. At dinner that evening, the woman explains that her antique-obsessed husband has gone in search of the Holy Grail and may never return. She asks whether Villanelle will stay the night. Villanelle concludes that she'll lose her heart again if she stays—and decides to leave. The next day, she moves out of her rental house and never goes back. Villanelle has been visiting Henri during his imprisonment, and they have continued their sexual relationship. Henri has been hearing dead people's voices and hallucinating the cook strangling him, though Villanelle tells him to ignore the voices. One day, she informs him that she is pregnant and that she has plans to help him escape. When he suggests that they can marry after he escapes, she tells him she'll never marry again—and that he needs to flee to France. She'll take their child to visit him once the coast is clear. After this conversation, they begin having sex. Henri announces that he is Villanelle's husband and puts his hands on her throat. She shoves him away. He begins crying. He refuses to escape when she comes to help him free and stops accepting her visits—though when she boats across the lagoon, he sometimes waves to her. Villanelle has had a daughter and predicts that one day she will gamble her heart again, though she was never able to return Henri's passion. Meanwhile, Henri still loves Villanelle but has decided to stay in San Servelo and cultivate its neglected garden.

- Genre: Novella/ Parable - Title: The Pearl - Point of view: Third person (from the perspective of the villagers who pass down the tale through generations) - Setting: La Paz, Baja California Sur - Character: Kino. Description: A strong, young Native American, Kino is The Pearl's protagonist and the head of its central family. He lives with his wife, Juana, and their son, Coyotito, in a brush house near the Gulf Sea. They lead a simple and dignified life, and Kino works hard to keep his family nourished and protected. In the beginning of the novel, Kino is deeply connected to the culture of his ancestors—to their musical customs, their intimacy with nature, and their veneration of the family structure. When he finds the pearl, however, Kino develops grand ambitions and lofty aspirations, which distract him from these traditional values and lead him to commit uncharacteristic acts of violence in protection of the pearl—against his own wife as well as his greedy neighbors and others. By the end of the novel, after his efforts to keep the pearl have resulted in the disaster of Coyotito's death, Kino demonstrates a renewed respect for his wife and a return to his initial values, particularly when he allows Juana to walk by his side and then offers her the honor of throwing the pearl into the ocean. - Character: Juana. Description: Like her husband, Kino, Juana is hard-working, serious, and able to endure great physical and emotional strain. She nurses Coyotito, builds fires for corncakes, prays in times of distress, and attempts to heal her baby's scorpion sting. Though she defers to her husband as a wife is expected, Juana is also strong-willed, and it is she who insists that Coyotito see the doctor. When she takes initiative and tries to get rid of the evil pearl, however, Kino beats her into submission. Yet even Kino's violence Juana accepts rationally, reminding herself of the necessity of man for woman. - Character: Coyotito. Description: Perhaps the most important, though most silent, character in the novel, Coyotito is Juana and Kino's infant son. He is a naïve instigator of action: in the beginning of the novel, he shakes the rope of his hanging box, causing the scorpion to fall on his shoulder and sting him. It is to pay for his treatment that Kino searches for the pearl, and in the end, his cries awaken the trackers and cause them to shoot in his direction and kill him. - Character: The doctor. Description: The doctor is the ultimate embodiment of evil and greed in The Pearl. The opposite of what one would expect of a doctor, whose job is to care for others, he is selfish, indulgent, and malevolent, and cares only about his own wealth and pleasure. He lives alone (his wife is dead) and lies in bed all day, eating candies and chocolate. When he is first asked to care for Coyotito, he refuses and cruelly proclaims that he is not a "veterinarian." As soon as he hears of Kino's pearl, however, he falsely claims that he always intended to treat the baby. It is not clear, then, whether the treatment he uses on Coyotito is effective, or if he just manipulates Coyotito's condition to worsen and then improve, making himself look good. All he cares about is getting Kino's pearl and it can be assumed, given that he watches Kino's eyes so closely to see if they indicate the pearl's location, that he is responsible for at least one of the violent nighttime theft attempts in Kino's house. - Character: The pearl-dealers. Description: While the pearl-dealers appear to be individual buyers, each providing estimates independently of one another, they are, in fact, all operating under a single master buyer, who controls their bids and wages. Unbeknownst to Kino's family or his neighbors, before Kino comes in with the pearl, the buyers have conspired to give him the lowest estimate possible. Their underestimation infuriates Kino, making him feel powerless and cheated, and forces him to go to the capital for a fairer assessment. - Character: The neighbors. Description: Kino and Juana's neighbors often assemble as a unified chorus or procession to follow and support the family. For the most part, they unite only in times of particular excitement and, even then, their primary function is to listen, observe, and spread news. Some townspeople, however, after hearing of Kino's pearl, peel away from the passive chorus of villagers and turn against Kino, raiding his house, injuring him, and finally lighting his house on fire. These attacks occur at night, when Kino cannot see the faces of his attackers. So, while the neighbors present a unified front in the daylight, at night they attempt to realize their individual desires, in the privacy of darkness. - Character: The trackers. Description: These are the three men, two on foot and one on horseback, who come from the town to capture Kino's family and pearl. In defense, Kino kills the trackers while they are resting around a fire during. Before he does, however, one of them mistakes Coyotito's cries for those of a coyote, and shoots and kills him. - Character: The priest. Description: The priest plays an active colonizing role in La Paz by spreading the Christian faith of the Europeans to the natives of the land. While Kino and Juana are persuaded by his benevolence—they follow his advice and repeat his sermons and prayers—he may not be as virtuous as they assume. It seems at times, as when he reminds Kino and Juana to thank God for their discovery, that he, too, is only interested in the wealth that their pearl promises. - Theme: Community. Description: Social structures such as the family, village, and town, are central to The Pearl. The central unit, for Kino and Juana, is the family. Their daily lives and routines are organized around the family, and they make sacrifices for each other and for their son, Coyotito.Outside the family's hut is the village, which is small and generally comes together to follow and support Kino and his family when they are in need. The "Pearl of the World," however, brings worldly concerns of wealth and self-advancement into the village and town, and brings out the worst in the neighbors. It inspires the individualistic greed of the neighbors who try to rob Kino's home, and the communal conspiring of the pearl dealers who attempt cheat Kino of his deserved money. In the end, the one unit that remains united and strong and full of mutual love, even after loss and injury, is the family: Kino, Juana, and their dead son, Coyotito. - Theme: Good vs. Evil. Description: The plot of The Pearl is driven by a constant struggle between the morally opposite forces of good and evil. Evil in The Pearl can appear in both man (the doctor) and nature (the scorpion); both evil man (the doctor) and good man (Kino); both ugly shape (the scorpion) and beautiful shape (the pearl). While the scorpion's evil takes the form of lethal poison, man's evil throughout the novel takes the form of overriding greed. The doctor, for instance, is evil because he acts upon greed over human care and professional responsibility. Similarly, the neighbors are evil when they act upon greed over neighborly respect, and Kino is evil when he acts upon greed over love for his wife.Evil in the novel is an omnipotent, destructive force. One must either bear it (as in the case of the scorpion) or avoid it (as in the case of the pearl), because to combat it only breeds more evil. When Kino tries to fight off the thieves and protect the pearl, for instance, he ends up committing acts of evil himself, on both the thieves and his wife. Kino does destroy the evil-bearers that act to harm his family—he squashes the scorpion, kills the trackers, throws the pearl into the ocean—but he only succeeds in doing so after the evil has run its course and the poison has already seeped in. - Theme: Race, Tradition, and Oppression. Description: Kino and Juana's racial heritage both provides them with the grounding force of ritual and tradition and deprives them of power under the reign of European colonizers. They continue to sing the songs they have inherited from their ancestors, but they also continue to be oppressed as their ancestors were, by white people like the doctor and by people with economic influence like the pearl-dealers. Their oppression is brought increasingly to light throughout The Pearl, as Kino attempts to cooperate with the people who have the power (the money, the expertise) to help his son recover, but are the very same people that traditionally oppress people of Kino's race.In the end, dealing in the world of White wealth and medicine leaves Kino and Juana in a worse condition than they set out in: they end up without a son, home, or canoe. By throwing the pearl back into the ocean, it seems, Kino is attempting to free himself of the colonizers' influence and escape their system of evaluation, to return to his own set of traditions and values. As readers, we might also take a step back and wonder whether Steinbeck might himself be guilty of the kind of racial discrimination that Kino attributes to the colonizers, in consistently describing him with animalistic characteristics and by making generalizations about "his people." - Theme: Value and Wealth. Description: The value and evaluation of material entities is a central theme in The Pearl. The value of the pearl, for example, requires reassessment throughout the novel: at the moment of its discovery, it seems to be worth Coyotito's life. That the pearl-dealers then so underestimate the price of the pearl reveals how distant the monetary worth of something can be from its perceived value, and how much value is determined by those in power. Moreover, the determination of the pearl's value has little to do with anything inherent to the object itself. As the narrator describes, a pearl forms by a natural "accident": "a grain of sand could lie in the folds of muscle and irritate the flesh until in self-protection the flesh coated the grain with a layer of smooth cement." Kino's canoe, on the other hand, is described as the "one thing of value he owned in the world." Kino prizes his canoe not as a possession but as a "source of food," a tool that allows him to fish and dive for pearls. It seems, therefore, that Kino values things that can help him provide him for his family. Unlike the pearl, whose sole function is to be possessed and looked at and whose value is assigned (arbitrarily) by people in power, the canoe is valuable because of its functionality and tradition, and its association with the dignity of work. The Pearl reveals the slipperiness of value and evaluation: often, value is assessed by those who are already wealthy and powerful. What is valuable to one man (the canoe to Kino) may not seem valuable to another. Moreover, wealth in the novel is, in fact, not a source of well being, but of bad fortune or malicious greed. In the end, what remains of value to Kino and Juana is immaterial and has no price: love and the family. - Theme: Nature. Description: Nature is a powerful force in The Pearl. Natural elements often serve to instigate crucial plot-points. Sometimes they protect (as in the plants that keep Juana and Kino temporarily hidden from the trackers) and feed (as in the fire that cooks the corncakes); while at other times, they destroy (as in the scorpion that poisons Coyotito and the fire that burns down Kino's house). And throughout the novel, Kino is described as being, like his ancestors, intimately connected with nature. He is said to have "the deep participation with all things, the gift he had from his people. He heard every little sound of the gathering night, the sleepy complaint of settling birds…and the simple hiss of distance."Though powerful, however, nature's force is essentially neutral, despite the meaning that mankind, here Kino and Juana, confer upon it. As described above, the pearl in itself is worthless—a mere cement-wrapped grain of sand—but, in the course of the novel, it represents for Kino and Juana first prosperity and hope, and then evil and despair. In attributing the pearl such meaning, Kino drifts away from his practice of "deep participation with all things" and into a system of valuation that is not his own, and that ultimately ends up backfiring. Finally, ridding himself of the pearl and all of the significance it's been overlaid with, Kino is free to return to his truly meaningful, ancestral relationship with nature. - Climax: Kino's beating of Juana and his killing of a man in protection of the pearl - Summary: The Pearl takes place in a small village on the outskirts of La Paz, California. It begins in the brush house of Kino, Juana, and their baby, Coyotito, a family of Mexican Native Americans. In the midst of Kino and Juana's morning routine, Coyotito is stung by a scorpion that has fallen into his hanging box.Aware of how poisonous the scorpion's sting is, Juana orders that the doctor be gotten and when the doctor refuses to come to them, insists they go to the doctor themselves. Kino, Juana, Coyotito, and their neighbors proceed together to the city. When the servant reports their arrival at his gate, the doctor, lounging indulgently in bed, is insulted by the mere notion that he would "cure insect bites for 'little Indians'" without compensation. The servant informs Kino that the doctor will not be able to see them and Kino punches the gate, infuriated by the doctor's evident discrimination.Kino and Juana set off in their canoe to search for pearls. Kino dives down to the seafloor and finds one oyster lying alone, gleaming from within. Upon returning to the canoe, Kino opens this oyster last and finds within it the most perfect pearl in the world.News of Kino's pearl spreads rapidly through the town, inspiring desire and envy in everyone who hears of it. When Juan Tomas asks Kino what he will do as a rich man, he responds that he and Juana will be married in a church, that they will have new clothes, that he will have a rifle, and that his son will receive an education. The priest visits the brush house to remind Kino and Juana to thank God. Then the doctor, inspired by the news of the pearl, arrives in order to treat the baby. He administers a first treatment and predicts that the poison will strike within the hour. Within the hour, Coyotito indeed becomes ill and the doctor administers a second treatment to cure him. Kino promises to pay the doctor after selling the pearl, which the doctor feigns not to have heard about. That night, after dark, Kino hears noises in the house and manages to strike a thief looking for the pearl with his knife, but is also struck in return. Juana begs, to no avail, that they get rid of the pearl.The next day, Kino and Juana, followed by their neighbors, go to visit the pearl dealers. The first dealer Kino visits assesses the pearl at a mere 1000 pesos, declaring it too big and clumsy to be worth anything more, though it is clearly more valuable than he lets on. Kino accuses the dealer of cheating him, so the dealer instructs Kino to ask around for other appraisals, which are even worse than the first. Kino concludes that he's been cheated and decides to go to the capital for a better estimate.That night, Kino fights off another attacker. Juana tries to throw the pearl into the ocean, but Kino follows her, rips the pearl away from her, and beats her to the ground. Some minutes later, Juana rises to discover that Kino has been attacked yet again, and, this time, has killed his attacker. Now that Kino is guilty of murder, Kino and Juana truly must leave the town.As Kino approaches the canoe to prepare for their departure, he sees that someone has made a hole in its bottom. Then, upon seeing that their house is engulfed in flames, the family seeks refuge in Juan Tomas's house. They flee north at nighttime, pursued by trackers who have followed them from the village. The family retreats into a cave on a mountainside, under which the trackers come to rest at night. When it's completely dark, Kino prepares to attack them but, as he is about to, Coyotito lets out a cry, provoking one of the trackers to shoot at what he assumes to be a coyote. Though Kino succeeds in killing the men, Coyotito has already been shot dead.Juana and Kino, united and beleaguered, walk back to the village side-by-side with Coyotito's dead body in Juana's shawl. Kino throws the pearl back into the sea.

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: The Pedestrian - Point of view: Third person limited omniscient - Setting: A city in the United States, the year 2053 - Character: Leonard Mead. Description: Mead, the only named character in the story, is an adult male living in an unnamed city in the middle of the 21st century. He is unique among city dwellers; he lives alone, doesn't own a television, and his profession as a writer is outdated, since no one reads anymore. Moreover, his favorite activity is to walk the streets alone at night. For ten years on these nightly walks, Mead has passed the homes of the other citizens and never met another person. Despite being a loner, Mead seems contented in his isolation, and he enjoys his solitude. He appreciates nature, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells on his walks. His enjoyment of nature and his imaginative reveries show that Mead has cultivated a Romantic sensibility, allowing him to maintain his individuality in the face of pervasive social conformity. Mead's contented solitude is interrupted, however, when he encounters the city's only police car, which interrogates him and reveals his lack of conformity to social norms. At the story's conclusion, the car takes Mead away to a psychiatric institution to be studied for his "regressive tendencies." Since Mead is the viewpoint character of the story's narration, the reader gains access to his thoughts and feelings, increasing sympathy for him and highlighting through his perspective the deadness and repression of the city he lives in. As an unrepentant individualist, Mead strongly contrasts with the ghost-like other citizens and the mechanical, robotic police car, and his characterization demonstrates the rewards as well as risks of social nonconformity. - Character: Other Citizens. Description: Mead passes the homes of these characters on his nightly walks. These characters are undifferentiated and dehumanized. They are not given individual identities; rather, they are described in general terms and associated with death: they are like ghosts and "gray phantoms," their neighborhoods are likened to graveyards, and their homes are "tomb-like." They whisper and murmur in their dimly lit homes as they watch light entertainment shows. During the day, they drive around the city in automobiles that are described as if they were insects. The portrayal of the other citizens shows how technological progress and social conformity can cause people to lose their individuality and even their humanity. - Character: Robotic Police Car. Description: The only other character besides Mead who speaks, it is revealed that the car is robotic and operated remotely. Its "iron voice" speaks to Mead in a harsh, accusatory tone as it interrogates him. The car asks why Mead is walking alone, and then it inquires about his profession, home life, marital status. Its questions reveal by implication the expectations of social conformity that Mead fails to embody. Representing swift and unforgiving state power to enforce social conformity, the car possesses the absolute authority to incarcerate Mead, as happens at the story's conclusion. The car's harsh tone and its inhumanity reinforce the theme of dehumanization in the story. - Theme: Technology and Dehumanization. Description: Ray Bradbury's short story "The Pedestrian" narrates the life of Leonard Mead, a resident of an unnamed city in the year 2053. For 10 years, Mead has walked the city streets alone, night after night, past homes of other citizens who sit transfixed by their televisions. He is ultimately arrested merely for walking freely on the street, an absurd event that reveals Bradbury's grim view of 21st century: it's a dystopian world where technology has deadened the populace and enabled state power to enforce conformity. Bradbury's short stories and novels frequently explore the social costs of technological progress. Through imagery of death, descriptions of humans in cars as insects, and Mead's interaction with the robotic police car, "The Pedestrian" expresses the pessimistic view that the technological advances of the 1950s (like televisions, automobiles, and computers) will ultimately rob people of their essential humanity and give undue power to machines.  As Leonard Mead walks through the city, the streets, homes, and people are all described with imagery of death. Through this use of morbid language, Bradbury predicts that one of the most exciting technological advances of his time, the television, will eventually deaden its viewers. Walking through the "silent and long and empty" streets is like "walking through a graveyard." This establishes the landscape as one that has been robbed of all vitality by the television, which everyone is inside watching. The homes Mead passes are described as housing the dead: "tombs, ill-lit by television light." The houses, too, are devoid of any signs of liveliness, and people's pacification in front of their televisions inside these deathly structures indicates that modern technology is the cause. Passing one "tomb-like building," Mead sees "gray phantoms" through open windows, and he hears "whisperings and murmurs" from the people within. The people inside watching their televisions are motionless and emotionless, metaphorically dead: "the people sat like the dead, the gray or multicolored lights touching their faces, but never really touching them." The people of 2053 are clearly more concerned with what is happening in the fictional, sensationalized realm of television than they are with their own physical surroundings—though they are superficially "touched" by what they watch, it has no meaningful, tangible impact upon them. Mead, then, is established as the last living soul in a world of empty, lifeless "phantoms" who are wholly consumed by technology. In comparing the masses to the dead, Bradbury portrays people as having lost their uniquely human life force and spirit. He takes this notion a step further by critiquing the automobile's effects on humans, likening people in cars to mindless, swarming insects rather than complex, sentient beings. Bradbury describes the city in the daytime as "a great insect rustling and a ceaseless jockeying for position as the scarab-beetles, a faint incense puttering from their exhausts, skimmed homeward to the far direction." The people driving are not mentioned. Instead, the city of automobiles resembles a swarm of insects scurrying around. While walking puts Mead in direct, reverent contact with the beauty of his natural surroundings, those around him have become wholly disconnected from nature via their televisions and cars. Even Mead, the sole pedestrian remaining in his city, is not immune to the dehumanizing effects of the automobile. As soon as he comes in contact with the police car, he is also likened to a helpless insect, "[standing] entranced, not unlike a night moth, stunned by the illumination, and then drawn toward it." Here, Mead's personality and individuality seem to disappear the moment he is forced to interact with the cold, robotic authority of the police car. Interrogated by the voice from the police car, Mead is further described as being like a bug on display: "The light held him fixed, like a museum specimen, needle thrust through chest." This image of Mead as an insect killed to be studied foreshadows the story's ending, when he loses his freedom and is taken away to a psychiatric institution, and thereby wholly stripped of his humanity and agency as an individual. While technology is clearly dehumanizing people, Bradbury also depicts machines as becoming more human. The police car that accosts Mead in the street is made of the materials of technology but has human qualities, such as its "metallic," "phonographic" voice that questions Mead. The voice from the car strips Mead of his individuality, defining him as deviant by the standards of this society, despite being subhuman itself. Mead is instructed to get in the back seat of the car, which is like "a little black jail cell with bars." The "clean and hard and metallic" smells of the police car further reinforce its power to strip Mead of his humanity, as this unpleasant artificial environment starkly contrasts with the delightful, entrancing smells of the outdoors that he enjoyed on his walk earlier in the story. As Mead gets in the car, he sees that there is no one driving it. He asks the car where he is going, and it is revealed that the car is robotic and run by a remote computer: "The car hesitated, or rather gave a faint whirring click, as if information, somewhere, was dropping card by punch-slotted card under electric eyes." It is this robotic, inhuman entity that ultimately decides Mead's fate and sentences him to be locked in a psychiatric institution and stripped of his dignity and freedom. Modern innovations like televisions, automobiles, and computers are manmade innovations, and Bradbury warns against the dangers of relying on these machines to the point that they control humans, rather than the other way around. When "The Pedestrian" was published in 1951, sales of televisions were booming, car culture was taking over American cities, and computer technology was on the rise. Through his portrayal of a listless, soulless population contrasted with the sentient, authoritarian technology in the story, Bradbury predicted that within the next century, these technological developments would dehumanize and disempower the populace, turning neighborhoods into graveyards, homes into tombs, and people into phantoms and mindless insects. Moreover, he predicted that technology would be harnessed to enforce obedience to the social status quo and punish those, like Leonard Mead, who didn't conform. - Theme: Nonconformity. Description: In "The Pedestrian," the citizens of the future city are described as being all the same, scurrying around like insects during the day or mesmerized by their televisions at night. Leonard Mead is different from everyone else, yet he does not feel lonely or alienated. Instead, he asserts his individuality in a society that expects conformity, and he lives a fulfilling life by doing what he enjoys rather than following social norms. Though Mead is ultimately punished for his nonconformity, he is the only character in the story who seems happy or fulfilled. Therefore, Bradbury suggests that in a society that is corrupt or broken, nonconformity is necessary to maintain one's humanity. Mead's nonconformity is most apparent in his enjoyment of solitary walks. While others in the city do not walk around alone for pleasure, this is precisely "what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do." Bradbury describes Mead's long walks alone with words that convey individual empowerment: "stride," "march on," "his journey." The only description of other people in this conformist society shows them to be lifeless and disconnected, so the sense of purpose and true pleasure that Mead experiences through his nonconformist actions seems even more important and unique. Furthermore, Bradbury suggests that Mead's pleasure in walking is not simply unusual in his society, but also perhaps dangerous. Mead feels that he must be secretive about his walking, and he "wisely" protects himself from being discovered by wearing sneakers, which make less noise. Mead knows that he is deliberately defying the norms of the city, and his effort to prevent being found out indicates that his society is unwelcoming to nonconformists, and also maybe punitive towards them. This shows how strong Mead's sense of self is: in order to be fulfilled and find happiness, he is willing to put himself at risk. When a police car stops Mead on one of his walks, Bradbury reveals the extent of Mead's nonconformity, which goes far beyond his solitary walks. As the police car interrogates Mead, it first asks for his "business or profession." Mead replies that he is a writer, which the car notes as "no profession." The car marks "no profession" because, with television dominant, no one reads magazines or books anymore, and Mead "hadn't written in years." This is another nod towards this society's erasure of a person's sense of self: Mead cannot possibly have an occupation that he alone would appreciate, so writing—as far as the police are concerned—does not exist. This once again places Mead at odds with his society, since writing is clearly important enough to his identity that he says it's what he does, and yet those around him consider writing to be so irrelevant as to not exist. In addition to revealing Mead's writing, the car's interrogation leads Mead to acknowledge that he doesn't own a television—a nonconformity so significant that the car simply responds with "crackling quiet that in itself was an accusation." In this society, everyone has a television and it seems to be their sole source of entertainment. For Mead to not participate shows the extent of his alienation from others, and also gestures to a facet of Mead's humanity-saving individualism. While passive television consumption seems correlated with the members of this society lacking any individuality and failing to derive any real fulfillment from their lives, Mead's commitment to actively pursuing his personal hobbies—such as walking or writing—rather than passively watching the same thing as everyone else seems to have preserved his happiness and sense of self. Furthermore, on learning that Mead is unmarried, the robotic car seems angry, addressing him from behind a "fiery beam" of light and shouting, "Don't speak unless you're spoken to!" Everyone else, it seems, is married—it's a way of being tied to this society that Mead has rejected. The police car, a direct enforcer of mandatory conformity under the state, makes it clear that Mead's individualism and nonconformity will not be tolerated. At the story's end, Mead is punished for his nonconformity. Upon discovering his outdated profession, failure to use modern technology, purposeless walks, and bachelor status, the car takes him to "the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies." The word "regressive" usually has a negative connotation, implying movement back to an earlier, less advanced state. Ironically, Mead is seen as primitive and backward because he has preserved his individuality by not conforming to a society that has dehumanized the population with technological "progress." Bradbury doesn't reveal what happens to Mead at the "Psychiatric Center," but it is presumably something sinister. Considering the detached brutality of the police car, the state's strict control of the populace, and the fact that there are no witnesses to his arrest, something terrible could easily happen to Mead. Despite these presumably severe consequences, Bradbury's earlier positive descriptions of Mead—particularly his enduring humanity within an entirely dehumanized society—suggest that his nonconformity is, in the end, worth it. It is better to live fully and be punished for it, the story suggests, than to live the kind of half-life that the sedated citizens of this future world lead. Many writers from the 20th century explore the theme of alienation, showing how different aspects of modern life – city life, new technologies, and social changes – can lead people to feel estranged from others or even from themselves. By contrast, "The Pedestrian" shows its loner protagonist as relatively contented and happy in his isolation. The citizens of "The Pedestrian" are alienated and dehumanized precisely because of their conformity to a dystopian status quo, so the nonconformist Mead is the only one capable of experiencing happiness. Ultimately, Bradbury's story warns about societies that punish differences so severely, while also showing how in such a society, nonconformity is the only way to stay truly human. - Theme: Nature vs. the City. Description: Nineteenth century Romantic writers portrayed the natural world as vibrant and spiritual, valuing nature as a place for introspection. Similarly, Bradbury describes nature in a Romantic way with vivid sensory imagery. Entranced by televisions indoors, all the other citizens lack the imagination and feeling to connect spiritually with the natural world. Mead, however, is a devout pedestrian: he walks thousands of miles outdoors for the sheer pleasure and beauty of the act, communing with nature and finding solace in it. Despite the pervasive urbanization described in the story, the natural world endures. Bradbury shows how even in a dystopian future city where technology is all-encompassing, communing with nature still offers imaginative reverie and spiritual solace. The story's descriptions of nature use a variety of images to render it vivid, and even spiritual. Tactile images bring the natural world to life for the reader. In the empty streets Mead walks, "There was a good crystal frost in the air; it cut the nose and made the lungs blaze like a Christmas tree inside." The simile comparing Mead's lungs to a Christmas tree gives his time in nature a spiritual connotation, associating the simple act of breathing cold air with a religious celebration. Walking outdoors, then, is not merely an absent-minded hobby for Mead—it is a reverent act, similar to that of worship, which invigorates and energizes him. Auditory details further convey Mead's impressions of nature: "He listened to the faint push of his soft shoes through autumn leaves with satisfaction, and whistled a cold quiet whistle between his teeth." He also picks up one of the leaves and smells "its rusty smell." This tangible sensory connection with nature creates a sense of "satisfaction" and contentment, which contrasts starkly with the people in the houses Mead passes on his walks, whose faces are touched by the light of their televisions sets but are "never really touching" what is conveyed on an emotional level. Mead's walks are described with imagery of peaceful solitude and communion with nature, suggesting that it is natural and good for human beings to connect with their environment, rather than cloistering themselves indoors. As Mead walks the "silent and long and empty" street, his only company is his shadow, described as "moving like the shadow of a hawk in midcountry." Comparing Mead to a hawk suggests that he belongs in the natural world and that his solitary walks are as natural as bird flight. Depriving people of their freedom to move about in the world, as is Mead's fate at the end of the story, is akin to clipping a wild bird's wings. Mead's time in nature prompts a turning inward to imagination: "If he closed his eyes and stood very still, frozen, he could imagine himself upon the center of a plain, a wintry, windless Arizona desert with no house in a thousand miles, and only dry river beds, the streets, for company." Since Mead has never met anyone else out walking in all of his 10 years as a solitary pedestrian, the reader can infer that he feels alienated from those around him. In lieu of close human relationships, Mead feels that nature is his companion. His introspective sense of peace within this image of a barren desert shows that he is able to transcend the oppressive urban landscape of his dystopian city, just as the Romantics rebelled against the cold rationalism of their era, by escaping into the timeless sensory pleasures of the natural world. As Mead emerges for the night, he steps onto a "buckling concrete walk" where he must "step over grassy seams." Walking presents a challenge as it is revealed that Mead "stumbled over a particularly uneven section of sidewalk. The cement was vanishing under flowers and grass." With no one using the sidewalks, they are reverting back to their natural state. Nature itself, then, also seems to be resisting conformist society and reclaiming the urban landscape through which Mead walks, suggesting that the manmade environment of the dystopian city is not progressive or ideal despite its futuristic image—rather, it is devoid of natural beauty and inherently unfit for living things. Mead's Romantic appreciation of nature represents another aspect of his nonconformity. Unlike other citizens who use the landscape only for driving during the day and metaphorically bury themselves in their homes at night, Mead appreciates, communes with, and is uplifted by his experience outdoors. In the mid-20th century, cities continued their evolution into concrete jungles and suburbs were cutting into green space. Bradbury predicted that in the future, the natural world will be largely forgotten or compartmentalized. However, the simple escape of walking outdoors and experiencing a spiritual connection with nature's sensory details will still be available to those willing to appreciate its beauty, and it can serve as an escape from the dull, lifeless landscape of the modern city. - Climax: Leonard Mead is taken to a psychiatric institution - Summary: "The Pedestrian" is a dystopian short story that describes one night in the life of Leonard Mead, resident of an unnamed city in the year 2053. Mead enjoys walking the city streets alone every night. As he walks the empty streets, he passes the homes of other citizens, who are inside watching television. He has done this for ten years and never encountered another person, since all the other people remain inside their homes, mesmerized by the light entertainment programs on their television screens. The other citizens are described as if they are dead: "gray phantoms" who live in "tombs." As he walks, Mead enjoys taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the natural world. He also talks to himself, addressing the people in the homes, asking under his breath what they are watching on television. On this night, however, Mead meets a robotic police car—the only one left in the city, since crime is virtually nonexistent. The car interrogates Mead, trying to discover why he is out by himself. This questioning reveals that Mead is nonconformist in many ways: he doesn't own a television, he is unmarried and lives alone, and he is a writer in a society that doesn't value the written word. Upon revealing the depth of Mead's nonconformity, the car instructs Mead get in and tells him he is being taken to a psychiatric institution to be studied for regressive tendencies. The car then drives away with Mead inside.

- Genre: Feminist Literature, Postmodern Literature - Title: The Penelopiad - Point of view: Penelope, in a first-person narrative, and The Twelve Maids, in various narrative forms - Setting: Ancient Greece and the Greek afterlife - Character: Penelope. Description: Penelope is the daughter of King Icarius, the mother of Telemachus, Odysseus's wife, and the first-person narrator of the majority of the novel. Penelope, although not a beauty, is known for her cleverness, her devotion, and her modesty. Penelope is insecure about her looks and her ability to attract men, often comparing herself to her cousin Helen, whom she loathes. Penelope marries Odysseus at age fifteen and then returns to Ithaca with him. In Ithaca, Penelope finds herself with few friends. She loves Odysseus, however, and the two often lie in bed together, telling stories. Penelope gives birth to Telemachus a year before Odysseus leaves for the Trojan War. During Odysseus's absence, Penelope becomes an expert at managing Odysseus's estate independently, employing twelve of her Maids to help her spy on the Suitors who have come to beg for her hand in marriage. A skilled weaver, Penelope tricks the impatient Suitors by telling them that she will not select one of them for marriage until she is finished making a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes. She then unravels her progress each night with the help of her trusted Maids. In the afterlife, Penelope is haunted by the fact that Odysseus ordered her Maids' deaths when he returned home. Penelope never chooses to be reborn, preferring, like she did in life, to stay at home in the fields of asphodel. - Character: Odysseus. Description: Odysseus is Penelope's husband, Telemachus's father, King of Ithaca, and the hero of the Greek myth of the Odyssey, upon which The Penelopiad is based. Odysseus is described as short-legged, barrel-chested, and extremely clever. He has a deep voice that contributes to his profound powers of persuasion and his superior storytelling abilities. Odysseus is also an expert sailor. Odysseus marries Penelope after cheating to win a running race for her hand. He is kind to Penelope, who falls in love with him. Odysseus's own feelings towards Penelope are less clear. After being summoned by Menelaus, Odyssey wages war against the Trojans. However, he does not return until long after the war is done. During the years he is gone, some suggest that he was completing the heroic deeds recounted in the Odyssey, while others suggest those stories were only to cover up his philandering and waywardness, and his lack of a desire to return home. When Odysseus does eventually return, he kills Penelope's Suitors and executes her Maids, leaving him with profound, irreconcilable guilt. - Character: Helen. Description: Helen is Penelope's cousin, Menelaus's wife, and Paris's lover. She is considered to be the most attractive woman in the Greek world and she uses her divine beauty to her advantage. Penelope characterizes Helen as vain, cruel, and flirtatious. Penelope feels that she is living in Helen's shadow and often compares herself to her. She worries that Odysseus prefers Helen to her. In Penelope's narrative, Helen runs away from Menelaus with Paris, a Trojan prince, inciting the Trojan War and causing Odysseus to leave Ithaca. In the afterlife, Helen continues to seek male attention. She often goes to séances and decides to be reincarnated in the world of the living. - Character: Eurycleia. Description: Eurycleia is Odysseus's former nurse and a servant in his household. Eurycleia is entirely devoted to Odysseus and always thinks she knows what's best for him. This annoys Penelope, who finds Eurycleia controlling and condescending. Still, Eurycleia is loyal servant and one of the few people who takes the time to show Penelope the ropes when she arrives at Ithaca. Eurycleia also helps Penelope deliver Telemachus and nurses him with care. Eurycleia is the one who points out Penelope's favorite Maids to Odysseus to be killed at the end of the book. - Character: Telemachus. Description: Telemachus is Odysseus and Penelope's only son and the Prince of Ithaca. Born only one year before Odysseus left for Troy, Telemachus knows of his father mostly through the stories his mother tells him. Penelope and Eurycleia raise Telemachus, spoiling him as a child. As a teenager, Telemachus is angsty and rude to his mother, criticizing her for letting the Suitors eat away at his inheritance. Ultimately, Telemachus sails to find his father and helps him kill the Suitors and the Twelve Maids. - Character: The Suitors. Description: The Suitors are the swarms of men who come to beg for Penelope's hand in marriage after Odysseus's departure. The Suitors are generally much younger than Penelope. They profess to be in love with her, and to think she is beautiful and charming. However, behind Penelope's back, the Suitors talk about how Penelope is old and ugly, and they admit to only pursuing Penelope for her considerable dowry. The Suitors feast every day at Ithaca, eating away at Odysseus's fortune and Telemachus's inheritance. They recklessly disregard the property and they rape and seduce Penelope's Maids. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he and Telemachus kill all of the Suitors. - Character: The Twelve Maids. Description: The Twelve Maids are Penelope's twelve most trusted servants, whom she raised since they were children. Throughout the novel, the Maids, acting as a Greek Chorus, give their own perspective on the events of the plot, sometimes contradicting Penelope's account. The Maids are the daughters of poor women and slaves and they have spent their entire lives working for Penelope and her family. The Maids are devoted to Penelope and they help her during Odysseus's absence. They Maids spy on the Suitors for her, sometimes falling in love with or being raped by the men in the process. In order to gain the Suitors' trust, Penelope commands the Maids to say bad things about her and Odysseus. At night, the Maids also help to unravel the shroud that Penelope weaves for Laertes in order to procrastinate choosing one of the Suitors. At the book's end, Odysseus orders the Maids to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. In the afterlife, the Maids haunt Odysseus. - Character: King Icarius of Sparta. Description: Icarius is Penelope's father and a King of Sparta. According to stories that Penelope heard growing up, Icarius tried to kill Penelope when she was a baby by throwing her into the sea. After the incident, Icarius was overly affectionate towards Penelope, but Penelope never felt at ease with him. Icarius had wanted Penelope and Odysseus to stay in the Spartan court, but they instead broke with tradition and sailed to Ithaca. - Character: Penelope's Mother (The Naiad). Description: Penelope's mother is a Naiad (a Water Nymph, or kind of minor goddess), wife of King Icarius of Sparta, and a Queen of Sparta. Characterized as neglectful and cold, Penelope's mother shows little to no interest in Penelope's life, preferring to spend time swimming in fresh water. She does, however, give Penelope the advice to "be like water" in order to get what she wants, leading to Penelope's weaving scheme. - Character: Menelaus. Description: Menelaus is Helen's husband, Odysseus's friend and ally, and a King of Sparta. Rich, loud, and not especially good looking, Menelaus is a powerful ruler who won Helen's hand in a contest. When Helen ran away with Paris, Menelaus came to Ithaca to ask Odysseus to join him in a war against the Trojans, since Odysseus swore an oath to protect Menelaus's claims to Helen. Later, Telemachus goes to Menelaus's palace to seek news of his father. - Character: Laertes. Description: Laertes is Odysseus's father, Anticleia's husband, and Penelope's father-in-law. Laertes is faithful to his wife Anticleia because he is afraid of her. Laertes lets Odysseus rule the island and, after his disappearance and Anticleia's death, Laertes takes up a quiet life as a farmer (possibly because he has gone a little crazy). It is Laertes's shroud that Penelope weaves in order to trick the Suitors. - Character: Uncle Tyndareous. Description: Uncle Tyndareous is Penelope's uncle, Helen's father, and King Icarius's brother. He and Icarius share the throne of Sparta. Tyndareous is characterized as mean, selfish, and conniving. Penelope believes that Tyndareous helped Odysseus cheat in the running competition for her hand in marriage so that Odysseus would take Penelope away to Ithaca and Tyndareous's children could inherit the Spartan throne. - Character: Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks. Description: Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks is one of the Twelve Maids and a particular favorite of Penelope's. She often has a speaking role in the Maids' poems, plays, and songs. When Penelope told the Maids to insult her and her family to gain the Suitors' trust, Melantho threw herself into the role whole-heartedly. - Character: Palamedes. Description: Palamedes is a man faithful to Menelaus who goes with him to press Odysseus into joining them in a war against the Trojans. Palamedes is the one who places Telemachus in front of Odyssey's cart, thereby proving that Odysseus is faking his madness to try to get out of going to war. - Character: The Fates. Description: The Fates are mysteries figures in Greek mythology that decide the destiny and lifespans of mortal humans. They are three old women who spin thread, measuring it out to determine the length of people's lives. The Fates are more powerful than the other Greek gods and goddesses (even Zeus) and cannot be tricked by mortals. - Theme: Storytelling, Textual Authority, and Falsehoods. Description: Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad reinvents the myth of Homer's Odyssey, retelling it through the eyes of Penelope, Odysseus's wife. In her retelling, Atwood actively engages with questions of mythology and invention, self-reflexively investigating the relationship between storytelling and truth. The concept of storytelling is highly important from the very beginning of the novel, when in Penelope's first chapter she talks about why she is finally telling her own story and discusses how she had previously remained silent because she "wanted happy endings." Penelope clearly implies that the normal narrative arc towards a happy ending, or narrative structure in general, has silenced her side of the story. In this chapter, Penelope also describes many of the stories invented about her infidelity following the circulation of the Odyssey as "scandalous gossip," again linking storytelling with untruth. Penelope then furthers this idea by frequently connecting storytelling to fiber work and her own weaving, which she uses for deceptive purposes. Furthermore, Atwood's decision to write the novel itself could also be taken as a criticism of the idea of textual authority (the concept that the text is sacred, final, truthful, and cannot be questioned). The Penelopiad's very existence implies that Homer's version of the story is somehow misleading or incomplete. Atwood's revision also undermines several major plot points of the Odyssey, including the idea that Penelope did not recognize Odysseus when he arrived back at Ithaca in beggar's clothing. Moreover, to write her revision, Atwood relied on other contemporary Greek texts besides the Odyssey, suggesting that the Odyssey is not the only authoritative account of the myth. In fact, in her introduction, Atwood specifically states that the Odyssey is "not the only version of the story" and discusses how, because of its nature, oral myth is inherently made up of many different voices. While the reader may assume that Atwood's revision of the myth through Penelope's eyes is a kind of "correction" of the Odyssey, the fact that Atwood troubles the idea of a complete and truthful narrative undermines the trustworthiness of her own novel as well. Atwood actively engages with this tension, especially through the chorus of Maids whose voices are present throughout the novel. The Twelve Maids question Penelope's decisions, suggesting that Penelope is complicit in their murders since she does not reveal to Odysseus that they were helping her all along. Although Penelope attempts to exonerate herself in her narrative, suggesting that there was little she could have done to help at the time, the Maids' chorus condemns Penelope for her lack of action. In opening Penelope's own narrative up for criticism, then, Atwood suggests that even Penelope's voice cannot be taken as authoritative or definitive. This overthrow of textual authority in turn troubles the idea of an authoritative or correct reading of the Odyssey, opening the text up for more radical interpretation. The Maids explicitly discuss this in the section "An Anthropology Lecture," where they argue that the Odyssey represents the overthrow of women-led society and the switch to a male-dominated society—a social upheaval that likely actually took place in early history. The Maids believe that their listeners may disregard their alternative reading as "feminist claptrap," suggesting how, up to the present, readers of the Odyssey who questioned predominate power structures were soundly rejected by the mainstream readers. However, Atwood's implication that there is no objective truth in storytelling allows for the possibility of a breadth of readings, not only a "correct one." In short, while Atwood dismantles the idea of objective, truthful storytelling and the authoritative text, she also opens the Odyssey up for more creative, alternative readings. - Theme: Class, Womanhood, and Violence. Description: Atwood's account of the events of the Odyssey through Penelope and the Maids' eyes focuses on the hardship and heartbreak of life as a woman in ancient Greece. Among these difficulties are the social and psychological pressures that women face. Atwood examines them primarily through Penelope, whose first person account gives the reader a sense of how Penelope feels about the societal expectations of women. One of the problematic social dynamics that Atwood explores is the intense competition between women. Much of this competition is over male sexual attention, like in the case of Helen and Penelope's rivalry and Penelope's sense of inadequacy because of Helen's beauty. Penelope spends quite a bit of her narrative taking stock of her own plainness compared to Helen, while Helen repeatedly rubs in her superior beauty. This toxic dynamic results in Penelope's fierce dislike of Helen, whom she calls "that septic bitch." Rather than being allied in their shared status as women, or in their familial relations (Helen is Penelope's cousin), Penelope and Helen are rivals for male attention. This rivalry seems to be the consequence of a society that values women only for their beauty, since Penelope's cleverness and devotion go undervalued. Some of the competition between women, though, is less focused on male sexual attention, and more on correctly filling a stereotypically female role in general. For example, Penelope finds that her mother in law (Anticleia) and Odysseus's former nurse (Eurycleia) are constantly judging Penelope's performance as a wife. Eurycleia takes Penelope under her wing, but many of her instructions give Penelope unnecessary stress. Eurycleia tells Penelope "whether to cover your mouth when you laugh, on what occasions to wear a veil, how much of the face it should conceal," centering her instruction around female modesty and showing how the minute details of women's behavior are constantly policed. Eurycleia also controls Penelope's mothering of Telemachus very closely and criticizes her independent choices. Through Penelope's narrative, Atwood shows how social norms of women's behavior and desirable qualities cause Penelope constant stress and make her feel extremely alienated. While Penelope suffers because of the psychological pressures of her gender, Atwood shows how, in comparison, the Twelve Maids have it much worse. Because of how their class status interacts with their gender, the Twelve Maids suffer even more than Penelope does in the male-dominated society of Greece. Though Penelope still has to fend off the Suitors that come to marry her after Odysseus does not return, the Suitors at least never threaten to harm Penelope physically. The Maids, however, are often the victims of rape at the hands of these same Suitors. Both Penelope and the Maids discuss rape as an extremely common event in ancient Greece, committed by both the Greek gods and mortal men. While Penelope theoretically is also susceptible to this threat, the Maids' lowly status means that they are totally unprotected from it. When the Maids are raped, none of their rapists are punished for their deeds. On the contrary, Penelope and Eurycleia treat rape as a normal, if unfortunate, occurrence. Still, it is clear that the Maids themselves are extremely affected emotionally and physically by the violation. Penelope describes, for example, how the girls "felt guilty" and "needed to be tended and cared for." Ultimately, the maids are not only raped, but they are then punished for their rapes with murder. When Odysseus returns and kills the Maids, he says his murders were not a problem because the Maids were "whores." Eurycleia also describes these women as "notorious whores," despite the fact that she knows that many of them were actually rape victims, and did not willingly have sex with the Suitors. During the "The Trial of Odysseus" chapter, Penelope states that the women were killed because they were raped with their master's permission, not just because they were raped, highlighting the fact that their slave status makes them especially unprotected. The Maids also specifically blame their slave status for their fate, stating in their second chapter that they were discarded because they were "born to the wrong parents." In sum, while Atwood shows the struggles that women face in Greek society in general, her characterization of the Twelve Maids highlights how low class status exacerbates the violence and psychological trauma that all women are susceptible to. - Theme: Antiquity, Modernity, and Progress for Women. Description: The Penelopiad is framed as Penelope and the Maids' retrospective narratives, in which they look back from the afterlife on what they did in the past. Due to this dynamic, Penelope repeatedly refers to how society has changed since the time when she was alive in Greece. The ancient Grecian characters are keenly aware of what goes on in the modern era. In the afterlife, spirits have the option to return to earth for a time with the memories of their past lives wiped out. As a result, they are up to date on societal shifts and trends. Helen, who has taken this option several times, tells Penelope about "bikinis, and aerobic exercises, and body piercings" and suggests that she and Penelope take a trip to Las Vegas. Even understandings of Grecian history, which Penelope and Helen actually lived through, have changed since their time on earth. Penelope, for example, notes that modern people consider the Trojan War, in which Helen's elopement with Paris is supposed to be the central issue, to have been an issue of trade routes. Through her comparison of contemporary customs and her narrative description of older ones, Penelope highlights the vast difference in culture between antiquity and the modern day. At the same time, however, these changes have not done as much as the reader may think to improve the world, especially in regards to the treatment of women. Atwood most clearly showcases this during the Maids' chapter "The Trial of Odysseus." The chapter is written as a court transcript. The format of the trial is in the style of a modern-day court system, featuring lawyers, a judge, order in the court, etc. But despite the court's modernity, the judge arrives at the same outcome for Odysseus as the Greeks did—no punishment for killing the Maids. The judge states that it is impossible to judge Odysseus because his times "were not our times." However, the judge then goes on to say that it would be a shame if this one "minor incident" ruined his career. This is highly ironic, because fear of ruining a man's career is an often-cited, and often criticized, excuse for silencing victims of rape in modern times. Through this irony, Atwood shows how Odysseus's times are, in fact, not very different from our times, with violence against women going undiscussed and unpunished. Not only does Atwood suggest that modern times have not made much progress in regard to the treatment of women, but she even suggests that progress is not guaranteed, and that societies can regress rather than progress. To give one example, Penelope discusses how, during her time in Greece, a switch was being made in marital practices. According to Penelope, men used to move in with their wives' families, and money and titles were kept in women's families as a result. Women were still being used as vessels to convey inheritances, just like in later Western Civilization before women could own property, but in this original Greek system women were at least not completely uprooted from their communities and physically trafficked elsewhere. But, as Penelope notes, during her youth there was a new and growing trend toward women moving in with their husband's family instead of the husband moving to join the wife's family. Penelope and Odysseus take part in this growing trend, with Penelope leaving fashionable Sparta for the isolated island of Ithaca. While Penelope is not upset about this when it happens, she often discusses feeling isolated and lonely, suggesting that this change may not be in her best interest. In general, this change could be considered to be more objectifying and more damaging for women, a regression in their personal rights. Atwood makes the possibility of regressing in society's treatment of women clearer in the chapter titled "An Anthropology Lecture." During this chapter, the Twelve Maids explicitly make the case that the scene at the end of The Odyssey and The Penelopiad represents the switch from a women-centered society to one that is male dominated. In their argument, the maids argue that the twelve of them plus Penelope represent the thirteen lunar moons in a year, and that their rape and hanging represent the "overthrow of the matrilineal moon-cult by an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father-god-worshipping barbarians." Their argument is not only based in the symbolism of the narrated event and its parallels to other iconography, but also in the fact that there is archeological evidence that such an overthrow actually existed. In other words, the Maids describe the fall of a women-centered society in favor of a men-centered one, leading to the rest of the patriarchal history of Western Civilization. Atwood's emphasis on the precariousness of progress for women forces the modern reader to look critically at their own society and the cultural changes being made. - Theme: Christianity vs. Greek Religion. Description: Atwood's novel, which Penelope narrates from the afterlife of the ancient Greek underworld, actively engages with spiritual and religious subject matter, imagining the relationships between lofty concepts like death, fate, and repentance. From her postmortem perspective, Penelope spends a significant amount of time describing the conditions of the afterlife, which Atwood bases on Greek mythology. In the afterlife, Penelope walks through fields of asphodel (the section of the afterlife for the virtuous, heroic, and god-favored), occasionally running into other dead people from her time in Ithaca. Below the fields of asphodel are other layers of the underworld, with grottoes for the less morally good (the "pickpocket…stockbroker… and small-time pimp"). The lowest layers feature mental torture for the most "villainous"— i.e. the people who have disobeyed and displeased the gods. In describing the afterlife, Penelope often focuses on the strangeness of being physically disembodied. She describes how the gods cannot physically punish the dead because of their bodilessness, and emphasizes her own state of "bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness." Christian concepts, meanwhile, seem to have been added to supplement Greek religion, despite their often contrasting ideals. In modern times, Penelope notes, the Greek gods are much less present than they were in her times. This is perhaps because Christianity is much more prevalent, and the Greek gods have to share time with the Christian one. Penelope also states that a new establishment to take in dead people has opened near the fields of asphodel, with "fiery pits, wailing and gnashing of teeth, gnawing worms, demons with pitchforks." Presumably, this is meant to be Christian Hell. In contrast to the fields of asphodel, Christian Hell is an embodied state where people endure physical torture, so physical bodies must be preserved during burial. Atwood does not discuss Christian Heaven at all in the book, presumably because, unlike Hell, which Penelope says is next door, Heaven would not be located underground, near the Greek underworld. While Christian religion seems to have been seamlessly added adjacent to the old Greek one, Penelope still insists on the existence of certain Greek concepts such as fate, bringing the two religions into contrast. In Greek mythology, as Penelope notes, fate is controlled by three sisters, the Fates. These three women, who are spinners, measure out the length of people's lives with thread and cut it when they are to die. This idea obviously does not afford for much will power or personal choice, although, notably, Penelope does imply that there are ways to trick the Fates. For example, Penelope describes Odysseus using his wits to circumvent the fate that the Fates had prescribed him. Still, Odysseus's ability to do so is an exception, and most mortals live and die by the whims and the wills of the Fates. Notably, the concept of the Fates places women, and women's work like spinning, in the most important religious roles, giving them the power to end and begin life itself. The Fates are, in fact, considered to be even more powerful than the gods, including Zeus. This undercuts the otherwise male-dominated structure of the Greek god system, in which Zeus, a male god, is the most powerful. The concept of the Fates also contrasts starkly with the Christian faith, which puts a male god in total control of the lifespan of humans. The idea of the Fates and fate more generally also differs starkly from the modern Christian concepts of sin, repentance, and redemption. The ideas of sin, repentance, and redemption rely on the belief that each individual makes personal choices and does not have a prescribed destiny, fundamentally contradicting the idea of fate. In Christianity, if a person makes an immoral choice, God holds them responsible for it, punishing them in the afterlife. A person can also repent through a series of rituals and be forgiven in the eyes of God. Unlike Christianity, ancient Greek religion offers no recourse for people who have acted immorally. In Greek religion, righteousness has more to do with flattering the gods, who have individual quirks and who themselves are fallible and often behave in ways that contradict modern morality. As a result, morality and goodness are fairly separated from religious practice. This is a problem for Odysseus and Penelope, who have no way of redeeming themselves and making up for the murder of the Maids. Instead, the Maids taunt Odysseus and Penelope, following them around the fields of asphodel and performing skits and songs to remind them of their culpability forever. Through her descriptions of Christianity and Greek religion, Atwood gives the reader a portrait of these two distinct and contradictory but coexisting religious systems, each with different relationships to blame, destiny, freewill, punishment, and the afterlife. - Climax: Odysseus's murder of the Suitors and the Twelve Maids - Summary: Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad retells the story of the Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope and her Twelve Maids. The story is told in retrospect, with Penelope and the Maids in the afterlife reflecting on the events that occurred centuries before. Penelope's first person narrative is a mostly chronological account starting at her birth, while the Maids provide commentary on her narrative. Penelope's account begins with her deciding from the afterlife to tell her side of the famous story of her marriage to Odysseus after thousands of years. The Maids, meanwhile, introduce themselves through a song that accuses Odysseus of killing them. Penelope begins her account with her childhood, stating that she was born in Sparta to King Icarius and a Naiad mother. According to stories Penelope heard growing up, Icarius tried to kill Penelope in infancy by throwing her into the sea, but Penelope was saved by a flock of ducks. Her mother, meanwhile, was neglectful and cold. In the Maids' commentary on Penelopes' childhood, they compare their own lineage, contrasting their slave and peasant parents with Penelope's royal ones. Penelope next describes the contest for her hand in marriage, a running race, when she was fifteen. Odysseus won the race (supposedly by cheating) and married Penelope that day. The Maids comment on the section with envy, since they are not allowed to marry. Contrary to custom, Odysseus took his bride back to his home on the island of Ithaca. The sea journey was rough for Penelope, and once they landed things weren't much better. Although Penelope quickly came to love Odysseus, she did not get along with her mother in law, Anticleia, and found Odysseus's former nurse, Eurycleia, to be very condescending. Penelope had no friends her own age or status. Penelope's only comfort was the birth of her son, Telemachus, and her love for Odysseus. Eventually, Odysseus received word that Penelope's cousin Helen, whom Penelope despised, had left her husband Menelaus for a Trojan prince named Paris. Menelaus and several other men intended to lay siege to Troy in response. They came to search for Odysseus, who had sworn an oath to Menelaus to protect his rights to Helen. Odysseus tried to feign madness to get out of his obligation, but he was caught in the end. Odysseus sailed for Troy. Time passed, Telemachus grew up, and Anticleia died. Penelope learned to manage Odysseus's estates in his absence. News came from minstrels about Odysseus's exploits during the war. Then, finally, news came that the Greeks had won the war. Expecting Odysseus to come home, Penelope looked for ships on the horizon, but none came. Minstrels brought strange tales of Odysseus's difficult attempts to get home, until one day the reports stopped coming. The Maids, during one of their commentaries, give a poem-form synopsis of the experiences that Odysseus supposedly had in the Odyssey. Meanwhile Suitors began to show up at Ithaca, asking to marry Penelope in the hopes of gaining access to her dowry. Claiming that they were guests, the Suitors took everything they wanted from the estate, running it into the ground. As the time of Odysseus's absence lengthened, the number of suitors grew bigger and they became more impatient. Penelope devised a plan to fend them off, saying that she would not pick one to marry until she had finished weaving a shroud for Odysseus's father Laertes. However, every night, Penelope and her Twelve Maids secretly unraveled the work that she had done that day, prolonging the process and buying her more time. Meanwhile, Penelope told the Maids to spend time with the Suitors and gain their confidence by sleeping with them and saying bad things about Odysseus and his family. The Maids obliged and told Penelope whatever they learned. The Suitors finally learned of Penelope's trick with the shroud thanks to the loose lips of one of the Maids. They confronted Penelope about it. Penelope promised to finish the shroud quickly and then pick a suitor. Telemachus, growing impatient, secretly left to search for word of his father. When he returned, Penelope prayed to the gods once more for Odysseus's return. She then found Odysseus out in the courtyard, disguised as a beggar. Penelope did not let on that she recognized him, but sent him to Eurycleia for a bath. Eurycleia recognized Odysseus by the scar on his leg, but did not tell Penelope about his identity, although, secretly, Penelope already knew. During his time in the palace, Odysseus overheard the Twelve Maids saying bad things about his family, unaware that they were acting according to Penelope's orders. Penelope spoke with the beggar/Odysseus, still pretending not to know who he was. She said that she still missed her husband and remained faithful to him. She then asked his advice on her idea to have an archery contest to finally decide which Suitor should win her hand, knowing that the task she had set was one only Odysseus could succeed in. Odysseus/the beggar agreed this was a good idea, and he won the contest when Penelope held it that day. He then locked Penelope in her room and killed all of the Suitors. After the Suitors' murders, Odysseus asked Eurycleia to point out the Maids who had been unfaithful to him. Eurycleia pointed to the Twelve Maids who had been spying for Penelope, and Telemachus hung them. Following the hanging, Odysseus "revealed" his identity to Penelope, who pretended to be surprised. Odysseus then set sail again soon after finally arriving back at home, to go on a quest to cleanse himself of the Suitors' murders. In the afterlife, the Twelve Maids haunt Odysseus, following him everywhere. The Maids, in their commentary, evaluate their own murders from an anthropological perspective and then hold a mock trial for Odysseus to attempt to punish him for his deeds. Odysseus chooses to leave Penelope over and over again in order to be reborn and temporarily escape the Maids. Penelope, meanwhile, stays in the fields of asphodel, and the couple replays their estrangement over and over again in the world of the dead.

- Genre: - Title: The Phoenix - Point of view: - Setting: - Character: Mr. Tancred Poldero. Description: – The antagonist of the story, Mr. Poldero is a greedy showman who owns "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld." A cruel, arrogant, and foolhardy man, he buys the phoenix at an auction, thinking that its exoticism will draw crowds. But when the bird isn't bringing in enough ticket sales, Mr. Poldero decides to torture the phoenix in order to prematurely age it, since its death—in which it will burst into flames—is likely to be a popular spectacle. When he finally succeeds at getting the phoenix to age, Poldero sells many tickets (plus the film rights) to the bird's fiery death. However, he gets his comeuppance when the flames of the phoenix kill him. His greed and arrogance result in his own death, serving as a warning to readers to not follow this path. - Character: The Phoenix. Description: – While phoenixes are mythical birds, the phoenix in this story is treated as a real (albeit exceptionally rare) creature. In the story, the phoenix was living in "Arabia" prior to its capture by Lord Strawberry, a British aristocrat and explorer. Lord Strawberry brings the bird to his aviary in England, where the phoenix thrives. But after Strawberry's death, the cruel Mr. Poldero buys the phoenix as an attraction at "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld." Due to its quiet dignity and unfashionable beauty, the phoenix fails to attract crowds, leading Poldero to torture the phoenix in order to hasten its death. (Phoenixes die by bursting into flames and then they are reborn from the ashes, a spectacle from which Poldero assumes he can profit.) Despite all its hardships, the Phoenix remains a "charming" and "affable" creature throughout the story, seeming relatively unphased by all of Poldero's antics. In the end, however, the phoenix does light itself on fire in front of the crowd Poldero has assembled, but the flames shoot everywhere and cannot be controlled. Poldero and his audience burn to death, while the phoenix is presumably reborn. - Character: Lord Strawberry. Description: – Lord Strawberry is an English nobleman and collector of rare birds, which he keeps in his private aviary. His aviary is spacious and he cares for his birds quite well. In general, Lord Strawberry is described as a benevolent and compassionate lover of nature and birds, a goodhearted man who dies penniless because he spends all of his considerable wealth giving his birds a good life. Nonetheless, Lord Strawberry is also a representation of British imperialism. As an explorer and collector, he travels to "Arabia" to capture a rare phoenix, which he brings back to Britain. While he's good to the phoenix, he treats the bird as though it were his to claim, and he has no qualms about removing a rare treasure from the place where it lives. Furthermore, his actions set the phoenix up for exploitation: while Lord Strawberry's own motives may have been relatively benevolent, after his death, the phoenix is sold to Mr. Poldero who tortures and abuses the bird. The phoenix would never have had to endure this had Lord Strawberry left the bird in its natural habitat. - Theme: Greed, Exploitation, and Capitalism. Description: Sylvia Townsend Warner's "The Phoenix" tells the story of a greedy carnival showman, Mr. Tancred Poldero, who acquires a phoenix. Seeking to maximize his profits from the bird, Poldero attempts to exploit the fact that when a phoenix dies, it bursts into flames and is then reborn in the fire, turning this death and rebirth into a show. To pull it off, Poldero tortures the bird so it will die as soon as possible. This plan works, and when the bird's death seems imminent, Poldero sells the film rights plus hundreds of tickets. But when the phoenix finally bursts into flames, Mr. Poldero and his audience die in the blaze. The story, then, suggests that greed and exploitation are destructive not merely for those being exploited, but for everyone involved. And the story, which might be described as an anti-capitalist allegory, pushes beyond just that point. It suggests that Poldero's actions are in fact motivated by the logic of capitalism, implying that capitalism will lead to its own destruction. The story focuses on economic concerns, making it immediately clear that Poldero buys the phoenix for the sake of profit. This is most obvious in the contrast between Poldero and Lord Strawberry. Lord Strawberry, who first brings the phoenix to England, does not seek to profit from the bird. While the phoenix causes the "greatest stir among ornithologists, journalists, poets, and milliners, and [is] constantly visited," Lord Strawberry never attempts to profit from the bird's popularity. He doesn't even sell its feathers to the interested milliners (hat makers). When Lord Strawberry dies, he dies penniless, largely because of the exorbitant cost of bird feed. By contrast, Poldero buys the bird for his "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld" show with the express purpose of monetizing the phoenix's popularity by charging people to come see it. When public interest in the phoenix diminishes, the story's capitalist allegory turns darker. Desperate to turn a profit, Mr. Poldero resorts to violent exploitation: torturing the bird in order to hasten its death, a fiery spectacle to which Poldero knows he can sell tickets. While he slowly tortures the phoenix, Poldero aggressively promotes the event, sells tickets, and even gets a crew to film the burning of the phoenix. It is clear that Poldero sees no value in the bird's life itself—he sees it as a "resource" to be exploited no matter the cost or violence involved. Meanwhile, his success in selling tickets to the event suggests that other members of a capitalist society also have no qualms about witnessing such exploitation—in fact, they seem to enjoy it. Finally, at one moment, the crew Poldero has hired to film the phoenix's flames thinks the bird may not erupt, but they decide that even if the bird doesn't erupt in flames, they'll be able to sell their footage as educational content. In this way, the story makes it evident that while Poldero may be the most openly vicious capitalist in the story, he is just a part of a larger capitalist system focused above all on making a profit. Yet when the phoenix does die, the resulting fire also kills both Poldero and his audience, suggesting that capitalism itself is self-destructive. At the simplest level, Poldero's death can be seen as a kind of poetic justice and a cautionary tale about individual greed: the greedy man created a fire in order to profit from it, and then he died in the flames. But the fact that the fire also kills the entire audience suggests that the moral responsibility for greed and exploitation does not just rest with Poldero; it rests also with the entire audience, the entire society and system that surrounds and motivates Poldero. It is not just greed or exploitation that the story is criticizing, but capitalism itself. As an allegory about capitalism, "The Phoenix" warns that the exploitation inherent to capitalism will yield disastrous consequences. Just as Poldero cannot control the flames from the phoenix that he himself pushed to erupt, capitalists will not be able to control the catastrophic effects of their greed. Interestingly, however, the phoenix's blast won't actually destroy the phoenix itself; the phoenix will be reborn from the fire. This suggests a renewal of some sort. In this way, the story hints that there is a possible future that isn't dominated by the exploitative capitalist practices evident in Poldero and the audience, though the story doesn't attempt to depict what such a world would look like. - Theme: Man vs. Nature. Description: While the phoenix is a mythical creature that doesn't exist in nature, the story treats it as a real living bird. In this way, the phoenix stands in for the dignity and power of nature, while Mr. Poldero—the showman who wants to exploit the bird for profit—stands in for mankind. The conflict between Mr. Poldero and the phoenix, then, can be seen as an allegory for the conflict between humanity and nature. And when Mr. Poldero's attempt to exploit the phoenix backfires, killing him and his audience, nature seems to have the last laugh. In this way, the story suggests that the power of nature must be respected. Attempting to dominate nature is perilous and can have catastrophic results. The story presents two models of human dominion over nature, and the first is Lord Strawberry, a relatively benevolent explorer who "collected birds." In general, the story depicts Lord Strawberry as a capable steward of nature, a man who respects his birds and cares for them well. His aviary is spacious and it "suited [his birds] perfectly"; they seem to eat well and have plenty of room to fly around. As the phoenix stands in for nature, Lord Strawberry's respect for this bird is important. When he first finds the phoenix in Arabia, for instance, he doesn't simply snatch it—he "w[ins] its confidence" before bringing it home, with the result that the phoenix becomes "much attached" to him. Their relationship is harmonious until Lord Strawberry dies. But despite his benevolence, Lord Strawberry is still dominating nature. No matter how much his aviary resembles nature, it's still an artificial environment that imprisons his birds. And Lord Strawberry came into possession of the phoenix by traveling to Arabia, capturing the bird, and bringing it back to his aviary in Britain, a self-centered and disruptive exercise of his power. After his death, the consequences of this behavior—both for him and for his birds—become clear. Controlling nature, it turns out, cost Lord Strawberry his whole fortune, and he died penniless due to the exorbitant costs of his aviary. Furthermore, while he might have been a benevolent steward of his birds, his death leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. Indeed, the unscrupulous Mr. Poldero buys the phoenix, only to torture and kill it for profit. This never would have happened had Lord Strawberry left nature alone and allowed the phoenix to continue its natural life in Arabia. In contrast to Lord Strawberry—who at least makes gestures towards respecting nature—Mr. Poldero is vicious, treating nature as though it exists for his purposes alone. Mr. Poldero's initial purchase of the phoenix is telling in its selfishness. With funds raised from schoolchildren and local naturalists, the London zoo makes a bid on the bird, hoping to keep the phoenix as a public treasure. But Poldero outbids the zoo without regard to what might be best for the phoenix or for British society—he only considers how much his show will profit from such a rare bird. And Mr. Poldero has no respect for the phoenix's dignified nature. Instead, he finds the bird insufferably boring, and apparently the public agrees. When people stop paying to see the bird, Poldero resorts to torturing it, hoping to hasten its death. Since the phoenix dies by bursting into flame and being reborn from the ashes, Poldero sees a business opportunity in monetizing this spectacle. His plan to sell tickets to the phoenix's premature death is so grotesque that it borders on parody, a horrific allegory of the human drive to exploit nature for profit no matter the cost. But despite Poldero's confidence that he can control and monetize nature, nature overpowers him in the end. At the climax of the story, with Poldero, a camera crew, and thousands of spectators watching, the phoenix sets itself ablaze. Rather than being an entertaining spectacle, though, it's catastrophic—the flames are uncontrollable, and they quickly engulf everything nearby, including "some thousand" spectators and Poldero himself. Poldero's plan to profit off of the phoenix backfires spectacularly, punishing not only him, but his audience, too. This is an allegory for danger of attempting to dominate nature. While humanity may think we can control the natural world (like Lord Strawberry) or even profit from it (like Poldero), the consequences of this behavior can be devastating. Furthermore, the implication is that nature doesn't simply punish mankind for its hubris; nature prevails. After all, the phoenix will rise up again from the ashes, whereas the rubble of Poldero's show cannot be reborn. In this light, it seems that nature will inevitably triumph over humanity, so perhaps it's wise to leave nature alone. - Theme: Imperialism and Rebellion. Description: "The Phoenix" was published in 1940, at a time when the British empire still extended across several continents, including large parts of Africa and Asia. This was also a time when the colonies' growing demands for independence were threatening the empire's future. In this context, "The Phoenix" can be seen as a story about the consequences of imperialism: when the aristocratic Lord Strawberry travels to "Arabia" to capture a rare phoenix and bring it home to Britain, his behavior parallels Britain's extraction of valuable resources from the colonies. And when the exploited phoenix bursts into flames, killing its British tormentors, it parallels the inevitable uprisings in colonies that can no longer tolerate their oppression. Read with British imperialism in mind, the story's ending suggests that British imperialism will lead to violent revolution. When Lord Strawberry captures the phoenix and brings it to England from its habitat in the Middle East, the story suggests that Strawberry is an imperialist figure. Lord Strawberry travels to "Arabia" (a geographic space that is vague, telling more about British control over large swaths of land in the Middle East than the precise home of phoenix) in order to complete his rare bird "collect[ion]." The phoenix is his final (and most prized) part of that collection. Lord Strawberry, then, can be seen as an explorer of the Middle East who assumes that the birds that live there are his for the taking. These actions run parallel to the larger goals of the British Empire. The British established colonies around the world from which they extracted valuable goods, such as minerals or lumber. Lord Strawberry taking the phoenix back to his London aviary reflects the broader movement of goods from the colonies to England. But unlike many imperialists, Lord Strawberry's intention is not to enrich himself—he's merely an explorer, albeit one who feels entitled to take what he wants from nature. Nonetheless, it's important to note that his actions do pave the way for Mr. Poldero to exploit the bird for money at his "Wizard Wonderworld" later in the story. In this way, Lord Strawberry can be compared to imperial explorers who may have been genuinely only interested in discovery, but who inadvertently opened up new regions of the world for colonial conquest. Once in England, the phoenix captures the public's imagination, showing how "exotic" delights could shore up public support for imperialist ventures. When Lord Strawberry brings the phoenix back to England, it causes a national stir. Journalists, poets, and other members of the British public are fascinated by the rare and exotic bird, making it the talk of the town. The public fascination with the phoenix is explicitly related to its perceived exoticism. The label on the phoenix's cage at Mr. Poldero's "Wizard Wonderworld" says that the bird was "specially imported from the East" (making clear that it's rare and from far away). Later, Mr. Poldero compares the phoenix to "Cleopatra" and "wild gypsy music," and he describes the bird's love of "oriental wood, drenched in exotic perfumes." These descriptions are meant to conjure an imagined world of faraway splendor—a world both vague and stereotypical—in order to excite the general public about both the phoenix and the empire. In this way, the phoenix is similar to the curiosities shown at colonial exhibitions. These exhibitions displayed fascinating treasures from the colonies in order to stimulate the public's imagination and inspire continued support for trade and imperial rule. But Mr. Poldero's exploitation of the phoenix parallels the true horrors of imperialism. Once public interest in the phoenix wanes, Mr. Poldero resorts to torturing the bird, attempting to make the phoenix ignite itself so that he can make money by selling tickets to its death. Mr. Poldero wants to see the phoenix catch on fire so that it can be reborn, meaning that he sees no value in the bird itself. The phoenix is only a resource that he can use until the bird can be replaced. Mr. Poldero's despicable response to the bird, unfortunately, is exactly how the empire often sees its colonized subjects. Yet, unlike the horrors of colonialism (which are often invisible to the general public in Britain, since they happen miles away in the colonies), Mr. Poldero's exploitation of the phoenix is done for the public. The story then lays bare the violence that is normally masked by trade and exoticism. Disturbingly, however, Mr. Poldero's ability to plan a large spectacle around the bird's death shows the public's comfort—delight, even—in the face of these horrors.   When Mr. Poldero's exploitation goes too far and the phoenix erupts into flames that kill Poldero and his audience, the story suggests that imperialism will destroy itself. Like British imperialists, Poldero believes that he can make money off of treasures from afar, no matter how cruel his means. But when he tortures the phoenix until it goes up in flames, it's telling that things get out of hand—he does make money from it, but the flames are uncontrollable and they kill him and his whole audience, rendering his profits moot. Thus, these flames suggest how imperialism might destroy itself. By exploiting colonized people and stealing their resources, the British are perhaps inviting disaster, just as Poldero did. When oppressed people are pushed too far, perhaps they—like the phoenix—will all fight back with disastrous consequences for their tormentors. And while the deaths of Mr. Poldero and his audience suggest the eventual death of the British empire (which did, in fact, occur years after this story's publication), the flames also predict a rebirth. The phoenix rises from the ashes, just as the former colonies will rise, independent and autonomous. - Theme: Popular Culture, Spectacle, and Cruelty. Description: Sylvia Townsend Warner's "The Phoenix" depicts a society that wants to be entertained. Mr. Tancred Poldero runs a tourist attraction called "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld," where he uses a phoenix to help boost ticket sales. While phoenixes are actually mythical birds, the story presents them as real but exceptionally rare, so it makes sense that such a bird would draw a large audience. Nonetheless, the British public soon grows bored with the phoenix, which leads Mr. Poldero to recapture their attention by selling tickets to witness the phoenix's death. As in myth, this death entails the bird bursting into flames and being reborn from the ashes—but the fire gets out of hand and kills Poldero and the audience. By ending the story with such a violent spectacle, Warner draws attention to the cruelty of popular culture. Mr. Poldero relies on violence to satisfy the public's demand for constant novelty, suggesting that a society obsessed with entertainment becomes cruel itself. Furthermore, it's telling that the audience's preferred entertainment literally kills them. This suggests that midcentury British popular culture was at least spiritually destructive to consumers, if not literally so.   At first, the phoenix is popular with the public due to its novelty. This is a bird that's so rare that many believe it to be mythical. In fact, before Lord Strawberry ventures to Arabia in search of the phoenix, other bird experts dismissed the creature as a mere fable or something long since "extinct." When Lord Strawberry proves his detractors wrong, however, and is successful in finding a phoenix, the sight of the rare bird causes a media frenzy. The bird is "constantly visited" and "in the news" upon its arrival to England. Because the bird is so unusual, it sustains a stable level of public support. After Lord Strawberry dies, bird enthusiasts and students create the "Strawberry Phoenix Fund." Though "their means were small," the fund shows that interest in the phoenix never ceased. When Mr. Poldero buys the phoenix, the Strawberry Phoenix Fund is able to help promote the bird, and the people who supported the fund are willing to pay Mr. Poldero's fees to see the phoenix in person. Their continued support of the bird is a testament to the truly exceptional and novel qualities of the bird. But the novelty wears off eventually, and the public turns away from the charming, dignified phoenix, demanding more sensational entertainments. Compared to the phoenix, for example, the other animals at "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld" are wilder and more aggressive. Audiences flock to see the "antics of the baboons, or to admire the crocodile who had eaten the woman." This shows that public tastes are inclined to more gruesome and thrilling entertainments. In contrast to these animals, the phoenix's more subdued behavior and "classical" charm is unable to draw crowds. More importantly, audiences have already seen the bird, and thus are no longer interested in visiting it again; the novelty has worn off. This suggests that even the rarest creatures can capture the popular culture for just a brief span of time before people move on to something else. The excitement towards the phoenix always ends with a steady decline, with the "visits [falling] off" at Lord Strawberry's and "business slacken[ing]" at the Wonderworld. Thus, in a news-driven popular culture (where rare birds are discovered and forgotten as other events and spectacles grab attention), public attention is inevitably fleeting. And, when juxtaposed with wilder animals, audiences ignore the calm charm of the phoenix in favor of the livelier displays of baboons. In order to recapture the public's attention (and thereby reverse his financial decline), Mr. Poldero resorts to violence, producing a spectacle of cruelty. What the other animals reveal is that violence captures the audience's attention. The phoenix must compete, notably, with a "crocodile who had eaten [a] woman." Unlike the phoenix, this crocodile draws crowds because of its gruesome history, which hints at the public's appetite for violence. Realizing that he needs to reignite interest in the phoenix, Poldero resolves to torment the bird, sending other birds to peck at it, "jeer[ing]" at it himself, and sprinkling it with water each night. These torments, while not themselves done for public attention, are meant to prematurely "age" the bird so that Poldero can sell tickets to its fiery death. Excited by the prospect of the phoenix bursting into flames, a public audience indeed comes in droves, "some thousand" people packing around the phoenix's enclosure for the cruel, violent spectacle. Only the most shocking event of a rare bird's destruction can capture this audience's attention. Finally, emphasizing that this event is a spectacle, Mr. Poldero hires a film crew to capture the phoenix's death on camera. With the "lights and cameras [] trained on the [bird's] cage," Mr. Poldero narrates through a loudspeaker what his audience is about to witness, giving the entire moment—especially the anticipation of violence—a cinematic quality. The medium of film, moreover, offers Mr. Poldero the chance to capitalize on the cruelty even after the phoenix's death has already taken place, allowing him to reach the widest audience possible. The story ends, however, by punishing Mr. Poldero and the audience for their cruelty. After watching the phoenix burst into flames, Poldero and the audience also catch on fire. Warner uses the "The Phoenix" not just to showcase the excitement found in cruelty, but also to show how that excitement destroys the audience itself. The audience fails to see the beauty in the phoenix, clamoring only for novelty and violence, meaning they have become ruled by their baser, more cruel desires. While this cruelty is spiritually destructive as society neglects its moral principles, it is also unsustainable. Moving from one increasingly horrifying and cruel spectacle to another results only in greater violence and more cruelty—death piling on and on. And when the popular culture continues to up the ante, the cost, if something goes wrong, is not merely destruction, but self-destruction. - Climax: - Summary: Lord Strawberry, a British aristocrat who collects birds, owns the grandest aviary in Europe. His only missing specimen is a phoenix, so he travels to Arabia in search of the rare bird. There, he finds a phoenix, gains its trust, captures it, and brings it back to England, where it becomes a public sensation. When all the buzz dies down, however, the phoenix can finally live comfortably in Lord Strawberry's aviary—it's a friendly and charming bird who loves Lord Strawberry. Lord Strawberry eventually dies, and the phoenix is sold at auction to Mr. Tancred Poldero. Mr. Poldero runs "Poldero's Wizard Wonderworld" and he buys the bird with the hope that the legendary animal will boost his ticket sales. Business is good for a while, but eventually the crowds start to dwindle and the cost of taking care of the phoenix outweighs its profits. After realizing that phoenix is a creature that, upon its death, will light itself on fire and be reborn, Mr. Poldero decides that he must do whatever he can to get the phoenix to burst into flames so that he can sell tickets to the event. Mr. Poldero's attempts to prematurely age the bird initially prove futile. He restricts the bird's food, cuts off the bird's heat, forces it to share a cage with less friendly birds, and sets cats after the bird. Yet each time, the bird triumphs, adapting to less food and heat, winning over the unfriendly birds, and flying out of reach of the cats. Finally, Mr. Poldero consults a book about the phoenix's habitat, which he discovers is dry. So Mr. Poldero attaches a sprinkler to the bird's cage and begins tormenting the bird himself. The phoenix grows sickly and, recognizing that the phoenix is about to die, Mr. Poldero starts advertising the once-in-a-lifetime event of witnessing the bird's death. He sells tickets to a newly intrigued audience and hires a film crew to capture the event on camera. On the night of the phoenix's death, there is a camera crew at the ready, a packed audience, and a pyre ready in the bird's cage. But the phoenix does not simply catch on fire; its flames shoot past its cage and scorch Mr. Poldero and his audience, killing "some thousand" people.

- Genre: Aestheticism, Philosophical Fiction, Gothic Fiction - Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray - Point of view: An omniscient narrator; this narrator guides us in the past tense between one place and another, able to show us the interior workings of the main characters - Setting: London - Character: Dorian Gray. Description: Represents the ideal of youth, beauty and innocence to his new acquaintances Basil and Lord Henry. He is the subject of the wonder and affection of Basil, and is immortalized in Basil's painting as a living Adonis. His luck changes though, when he starts to become aware of the transience of his good looks. He becomes obsessed with staying young, but when his wish for the portrait to do his aging for him comes true, a horrible supernatural chain of events ensues. Dorian is heavily influenced by Lord Henry, who teaches him about hedonism, and Dorian seeks a life of pleasure and ruins his reputation. In the end, his vanity and selfishness ruin him, and the portrait provides a visual representation of the degradation of his soul, meaning that his life really does become art. - Character: Lord Henry Wotton. Description: Cultured and intellectual, he inhabits the most fashionable circles, spreading his own brand of highly intelligent, paradoxical philosophies about art and life. He is a powerful, often poisonous influence on young Dorian. As the story goes on, Dorian's speech seems to mimic Lord Henry's tricky style and his heartless sentiments seem to take Lord Henry's tempting philosophies too seriously, that artful, pleasure-filled experiments in living is more important than morality. - Character: Basil Hallward. Description: The painter who becomes enamored with Dorian Gray's beauty and innocence, seeing him as the ideal to which his work has always aspired. He makes Dorian sit for hundreds of portraits. When one day he paints a portrait of true likeness to Dorian, his feelings overwhelm him. It is the best work he has ever done but he is afraid that there is too much of himself in it. After the painting, his artistry becomes average, he can never elevate his work to the perfection that Dorian inspired at his youthful peak. He tries to guide Dorian towards decency, so in love is he with the memory of that innocent boy, but the knowledge of how Basil has dictated his now tortured existence with his painting and his passion, enrages Dorian, who kills Basil. Basil becomes a sad example of a good artist disappearing in sacrifice for Art. - Character: Sybil Vane. Description: A young actress, from a poor family, who performs Shakespeare's heroines every evening at a low class theater. Dorian falls in love with her performances, but she finds performance paltry in comparison to true love and her acting suffers after her engagement to Dorian. Dorian, in turn, is uninterested in her after she no longer has her art. He leaves her heartbroken and Sybil, a Juliet-like martyr for love, commits suicide. She is a symbolic character, pure in her love and embodying an artistic ideal. - Character: James 'Jim' Vane. Description: The burly sailor brother of Sybil Vane and very different from his sister in experience and appearance. He is rough looking but very decent and seeks above all else to protect his sister. He threatens to kill whoever hurts her, and, avenging her suicide, follows and haunts Dorian. His face becomes a symbol of the goodness that Dorian has destroyed. - Character: Alan Campbell. Description: is called on by Dorian to dispose of Basil Hallward's body. He is a scientist whom Dorian knew intimately once, but grows like many others to despise Dorian and doesn't want anything to do with the crime. Dorian blackmails him and he unhappily completes the task, and commits suicide not long after. - Character: The Duchess of Monmouth. Description: A clever and pretty member of Lord Henry's social set. She is unusual amongst the women of the novel as one of the only ones able to impress Lord Henry and keep up equal banter with him. She is also enamored with Dorian and shows that marriage in this society is often just a show, revealing secret affections, something that Lord Henry seems to highly approve of. - Theme: The Mortality of Beauty and Youth. Description: The trouble starts when Henry warns Dorian that his extraordinary beauty and youth will fade, and tells him to make the most of it. Dorian's beauty is such that people are astonished by it and all of his advantages seem to come from it, even if he has got an interesting personality and wealth. With Henry's words ringing in his ears, Dorian immediately views Basil's portrait of him in a new light. Rather than immortalize him, the picture suddenly seems to mock him for not being immortal—the picture won't change, but Dorian himself will. Dorian then becomes aware of time, and aware of his own beauty as a thing that will fade. Before Dorian's realization, when his beauty seemed to him simply a part of him, he was only vaguely aware of it. But once he realizes that it is not something he can hold on to, that it will be taken from him by time, he wants desperately to keep it. In this way, mortality doesn't just destroy beauty and youth, it makes them things to treasure and obsess over because eventually they will be destroyed.Throughout the novel, beauty and death are linked. Dorian loves Sybil because he gets to watch her die onstage in all her passion and then, miraculously, be alive backstage. Her art makes her immortal each and every night. Sybil's actual death by suicide is tragic, but it also gives her a kind of eternal beauty because she was never allowed to age. Dorian, meanwhile, is similarly saved from aging by the supernatural transformation of his portrait, but while his appearance is now beyond mortality this freedom seems to drive Dorian to try to experience every kind of excess, to not care about consequences, to destroy lovers and friends through his influence and callousness. In this way that novel suggests that while mortality will always destroy beauty and youth, that beauty and youth in fact need to be destroyed—that immortal youth beauty, such as is preserved in art, is in fact monstrous in the real world. And, in fact, as Dorian's soul shrivels and he begins to seek and admire ugliness, his own beautiful face comes to seem to him just a hateful reminder of the innocence he has lost. - Theme: Surfaces, Objects and Appearances. Description: Beauty is skin-deep in Dorian's circle of friends. He is welcomed and adored because of his beautiful appearance and even when his sins ruin lives, he always has a certain power because of his attractiveness. Dorian is at his peak when he is unaware of his own beauty, but when conscious of it, his life becomes about surface and appearance. His taste for fashion grows; he loves tapestries and jewels, very flat, decorative objects. The novel of course revolves around the portrait of Dorian but this is just one of the damaging surfaces that Wilde depicts. Characters' identities and fates are entirely decided by their outward appearance. The owner of Sybil Vane's theater is reduced to a collection of Jewish features and hideous mannerisms, as is his theater reduced to its shabby decor, and in turn it is all redeemed by the beautiful face of Sybil, who herself is putting on a costume. Veils of societal roles and costumes are worn by everybody in the novel and are made more fatal by the way the characters describe and stereotype each other, never letting each other escape from their narrow identities and appearances. To Lord Henry, even knowing Dorian's sinful behavior, he remains the beautiful boy that he met in Basil's studio because appearance always wins out. - Theme: Art and the Imitation of Life. Description: The novel opens with a theory of the purpose of art, which Wilde reasons out until he reaches that "all art is quite useless". Whether or not this is some kind of warning from the narrator, we as readers don't know, but what follows certainly seems to illustrate his point. It presents art in many forms and the danger of it when it is taken too literally or believed too deeply. It starts with a painting, which alters the perspectives that look on it and seems to alter itself. Once Basil has attributed to the painting the power of capturing the spirit of Dorian Gray, and once Dorian has attributed to it the power to host and represent his own soul, the painting has a dangerous life of its own. Dorian's romance with the actress Sybil Vane is composed of the romantic characters she played and the drama of each nightly performance. To see the girl die on stage and then find her backstage alive and beautiful is a supernatural kind of existence that cannot last. The danger of seeing life only through the lens of art is that one must stay at a distance or risk ruining the illusion, just like a mirage. This is Dorian's trouble, and Basil's trouble, and through these examples we learn that the closer one comes to art, the closer one comes to some kind of death or destruction. The set up of Dorian's world in society and in his own home is full of pictures, stills and images through which we see life frozen or removed. Whether portraits, tapestries, or scenes, these images build up and up in the novel until Dorian's climactic act of stabbing his own painting. It is the ever-present pressure of art—of being a piece of living art himself, and of seeing real life mirrored in the portrait—that destroys Dorian. In addition, as we read the novel, we are aware of the power of the narrator to embody the characters omnisciently, and to implant repetitions of their particular vocabulary, imitating the influence that Lord Henry's memorable phrases have on Dorian's mind. As a piece of art itself, the novel invites us to question its form and purpose, as the argument of the preface suggests. - Theme: Influence. Description: The power of one to affect another is a theme that pervades the novel. At first, Basil is influenced by his model Dorian. On a personal level, he is confused and changed by his romantic feelings, but Dorian's influence is also more far-reaching, actually seeming to change Basil's ability for painting, and to change the painting itself in an almost supernatural way. Influence here describes an almost chemical change that one can assign to feelings and the perception of a painting. The same curse befalls Sybil Vane, when she is so influenced by Dorian, and by love, that she is transformed and can no longer act. In fact the whole course of events can be viewed as a series of domino-like influences. When the narrator recounts the series of bad relationships, where Dorian has led an innocent friend astray, the influences spread through the country, knowing no bounds.Influence is also shown in the novel as a persuasive power. It is a less magical effect, of attractive ideas and styles worming their way into others' vocabulary. Lord Henry's philosophies and paradoxes have a hypnotic power on some people, and cause Dorian to seek knowledge and believe in these theories enough that he lives by them. Henry's suggestion that the soul and the senses can mutually cure each other, for example, arises in Dorian's mind and, out of context, misguides him into thinking that opium could soothe his soul. - Theme: Women and Men. Description: Lord Henry's philosophies frequently criticize women and marriage, and the era of Dorian Gray's London society, and indeed Oscar Wilde's, becomes vivid to us in his dialogue. He says that women are a "decorative sex", and that there are always only a few worth talking to. We see his marriage with Lady Victoria Wotton as a very separate affair, both parties leading distinct lives and meeting the other occasionally. When Victoria leaves him, Henry expresses sadness and misses her company. Though his description of sadness is far from a romantic declaration, it does seem that many of the women provide the male characters with essential and distracting company, and actually, it is the hostesses that at times enable the lifestyles of connection and fashion that men like Henry and Dorian boast of. Ladies like Lady Narborough and the Duchess are the connectors. Henry says of the Duchess Gladys that her clever tongue gets on his nerves, which is comically hypocritical. And she has the same disregard of her husband as the men have for women when she falls in love with Dorian. In this way, she is used to illuminate the actions and paradoxes of the men's world. With women taking somewhat of a back seat in Dorian's tale, the romantic energy between the men takes center stage. Though there are no explicitly homosexual relationships, there are definitely homoerotic ones, and words like "admiration" and "fascination" begin to acquire a double meaning in the text. In a world where beauty is the ideal and knowledge is attractive, the older gentlemen's longing for Dorian and his admiration of them adds another layer of taboo to the secrecy of the characters' private lives. - Climax: Dorian becomes so tormented by the portrait that he stabs it with a knife, but when the scene is discovered, it is Dorian himself who lies dead on the floor. - Summary: The story begins in the studio of painter Basil Hallward, who is entertaining his old friend, the relentlessly philosophical Lord Henry Wotton. Basil confides to Henry that he is working on a portrait, the finest he has ever done, depicting a beautiful youth, Dorian Gray, who has had an extraordinary influence on him. The influence is so great, in fact, that he refuses to exhibit the picture, for fear of the secret passion it reveals. Surprised by this passion in Basil, Henry wants to meet this Dorian Gray, and as luck would have it, Dorian arrives at the studio before Basil can remove Lord Henry. Basil warns Henry that he is not to damage Dorian. He is very serious and protective over the young man. As it turns out, he has a right to worry. Lord Henry brings out his finest display of philosophical chatter for Dorian and the boy is in awe of the new ideas he's introduced to, of hedonism and aesthetics. Basil excitedly finishes his portrait, and it is agreed that it is the best thing he's ever done. After hearing Lord Henry's warning that his beauty and youth will fade, Dorian has an extreme response to the portrait. The passing of time and the certainty of his own aging terrify him and he wishes that he could trade places with the portrait, maintaining his youth while the paint alters with time. Basil offers to destroy the portrait, and Henry offers to keep it for himself, but Dorian has a fascination for it and decides he must have it. Inspired by Lord Henry, Dorian begins to seek every experience of life. He goes to parts of London that some people of his social stature never see, and finds a shabby theater, performing Shakespeare. Here, he falls in love with Sybil Vane, a beautiful young actress who embodies Shakespeare's heroines. Her brother, Jim Vane, does not approve of the match, and tells their mother to do a better job of protecting Sybil while he is away at sea, but Sybil is in love with her 'Prince Charming' and is determined to marry him. Tragedy strikes when Sybil's new love for Dorian causes her acting to become completely lifeless. Now that she has found real love, she explains, the idea of Romeo is nothing to her. Dorian is heartbroken. He finds he cannot love Sybil without her art, and calls off the engagement. When he returns home, Dorian notices that his portrait has changed somehow. It has grown a cruel expression. Could it be that his wish has come true? Dorian is terrified and pledges to make it up to Sybil, but before he can, he receives word that she has killed herself. Dorian becomes haunted by the portrait and hides it, locked in the top room of his house. But he continues to be affected by Lord Henry's theories, living for the art of experience and pleasure. He loses his remorse. Influenced especially by a particular book about a beautiful boy just like him, he fills his life with decadence and dangerous explorations. His reputation sours, but he is so charming and wealthy that he is still welcome in the highest circles. However, when confronted by Basil about the rumors surrounding him, Dorian reveals the portrait to him and is so filled with rage by Basil's horrified reaction that he stabs and kills him. Dorian blackmails a man called Alan Campbell to cleanly dispose of Basil's body. Dorian then escapes to opium dens, seeking to forget what he has done and the portrait, but while there, he is attacked Jim Vane, who is looking to avenge his sister's death. Dorian's impossible youthfulness saves him, but the image of Jim haunts him even when he goes to stay in the country with his friends. On a hunting trip, a man is killed accidentally and it turns out to be Jim Vane, ensuring that Dorian's crimes will never be discovered. Dorian vows that he will become good but he will not turn himself in. When the portrait reveals this hypocrisy, Dorian's hope is lost. In a fit of rage, he grabs a knife and goes to destroy the painting. A terrible cry is heard and when found by the servants, Dorian is lying dead on the floor, old and hideous, while the painting hangs in its original, beautiful state.

- Genre: Young Adult Novel - Title: The Pigman - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Staten Island, New York - Character: John Conlan. Description: High school sophomore John Conlan is one of the novel's two narrators. He's boisterous, handsome, and a compulsive liar. Though John is initially rather selfish and without compassion, he becomes more self-examined and develops empathy as he spends more time with Mr. Pignati. Despite his outer confidence, John has a lot of fears and insecurities—he's constantly thinking about death, for example—but keeps these insecurities to himself. John's withholding nature stems from the fact that his parents don't give him the emotional support he needs to grow. John's unaddressed issues cause him to act out, be disrespectful, and engage in self-destructive behaviors like drinking and smoking. Before meeting Mr. Pignati, he and Lorraine are each other's only friend, but John nonetheless spends much of the book picking on and undermining Lorraine, mocking her for her fears and insecurities and not being sensitive to her emotional needs. At John's urging, John and Lorraine throw a raucous, drunken party at Mr. Pignati's house, resulting in the destruction of Mr. Pignati's beloved pig collection. The shock of this betrayal (and the death of Bobo) ultimately causes Mr. Pignati to suffer a fatal heart attack, and so John and Lorraine feel somewhat responsible for Mr. Pignati's death. In the end, Mr. Pignati's death teaches John and Lorraine that all their actions have consequences and that they alone are responsible for what becomes of their lives. - Character: Lorraine Jensen. Description: High school sophomore Lorraine Jensen is one of the novel's two narrators. She is introspective, shy, and highly compassionate—the opposite of her best friend John. She exhibits her compassion and insight through her obsession with psychology, turning to articles about psychological disorders to understand the troubled behaviors of the people in her life. For instance, she attributes John's lying, drinking, and smoking to his dysfunctional household, and she attributes Lorraine's mother's abusive behavior to her difficult life and lingering heartache over her late husband's (Lorraine's father) infidelity. Though Lorraine can empathize with others' poor behavior, though, their behavior still affects her; Lorraine's mother is constantly criticizing Lorraine's behavior and appearance, and as a result, Lorraine has poor self-esteem and is highly passive. Even as Lorraine and John develop a meaningful, genuine relationship with Mr. Pignati, Lorraine remains plagued by "bad omens"; in retrospect, she believes these omens foreshadowed Mr. Pignati's death and laments her decision to ignore them. In the end, Lorraine's passivity prevents her from halting John's ill-advised plan to throw a rowdy party at Mr. Pignati's house. The shock of this betrayal indirectly causes Mr. Pignati to have a fatal heart attack, and John and Lorraine feel indirectly responsible for his death. Mr. Pignati's death teaches Lorraine that not only do her actions have consequences, but also that her inaction can have horrible consequences, too. - Character: Angelo Pignati ("The Pigman"). Description: Angelo Pignati, whom John and Lorraine nickname "the Pigman," is an elderly widower whom the teens unintentionally befriend after they randomly call his number as part of a prank phone call game and subsequently go to his house to scam him out of ten dollars. But upon meeting the man, it's immediately apparent that he's friendly, harmless, lonely, and desperate for companionship. Though Mr. Pignati at first claims that his wife Conchetta is away visiting relatives, John and Lorraine later find out that she has in fact died. The teens start cutting class to spend time at Mr. Pignati's house. They also go to the zoo, where Mr. Pignati introduces them to his beloved baboon friend, Bobo. Later, Mr. Pignati has a heart attack and must recover at the hospital, but he urges John and Lorraine to continue hanging out at his house until he recovers. Despite Lorraine's protests, John organizes a drunken party at the house; things get out of hand, and Mr. Pignati's beloved collection of pig figurines is destroyed. This betrayal severely damages Mr. Pignati's relationship with John and Lorraine. Before they have the chance to make amends, Mr. Pignati learns that Bobo has died, and the shock of this—and the lingering hurt of John and Lorraine's betrayal—leads him to suffer a fatal heart attack. - Character: Lorraine's Mom. Description: Lorraine's mom is a home nurse. She has a hard life—her work doesn't pay well and she struggles to raise a child as a single mother. But she takes her stress out on Lorraine, relentlessly criticizing her daughter's behavior and appearance and even beating Lorraine on some occasions. (Note that while the book seems to portray Lorraine's mother's behavior as merely strict, modern audiences would likely—and justifiably—consider it abuse.) Lorraine's father cheated on Lorraine's mother when she was pregnant with Lorraine, leading to their separation. Because of this, Lorraine's mother maintains a hatred of men, boys, and sexuality, and she tries to instill this hatred in Lorraine. Though Lorraine's mother's behavior and ideas hurt Lorraine, Lorraine maintains a degree of empathy toward her mother that only grows as the story progresses—she understands that her mother acts the way she does because she's unhappy and has a hard life, not because of anything that Lorraine has done wrong. At the end of the novel, Lorraine and her mother seem to come to an understanding, though it's left ambiguous whether they'll be able to heal old wounds or whether their home life will continue to be unhealthy and unstable. - Character: Mr. Conlan ("Bore"). Description: Mr. Conlan, whom John has nicknamed "Bore," is John's father. He's a recovering alcoholic who quit drinking after getting diagnosed with sclerosis of the liver (a result of his alcoholism). But before he quit drinking, he jokingly encouraged young John to drink, which ultimately led John to develop a drinking habit. John's unruliness frequently causes Bore to lose his temper, and so much of John's mother's attention goes toward ensuring that Bore remains calm, often at John's expense. Bore sees John as a misbehaving underachiever and frequently compares John to John's wealthy, successful older brother, Kenneth. Bore doesn't understand—and doesn't seem interesting in understanding—John's dreams and inner struggles. As a result, John doesn't receive the support and encouragement he needs to thrive, and he responds to this either by suffering in silence or acting out. - Character: Mrs. Conlan ("The Old Lady"). Description: Mrs. Conlan, whom John calls "The Old Lady," is John's mother. She's a timid, anxious woman who is primarily concerned with keeping her volatile husband, Bore, calm—often at John's expense. John's mother (and his father, for that matter) repeatedly fails to give him the support and encouragement he needs to thrive. When John acts out, his mother is more concerned with ensuring that John's bad behavior doesn't upset Bore than getting to the bottom of why John is acting out. As a result, John's bad behavior (and the inner unhappiness that has caused it) goes unaddressed. - Character: Bobo. Description: Bobo is a mean, vicious baboon who resides at the zoo. Despite Bobo's rather hostile demeanor, Mr. Pignati considers Bobo his friend and frequently visits him and feeds him peanuts. He perhaps does this because it reminds him of his late wife, Conchetta—Mr. Pignati and Conchetta both loved animals, and before she died, they'd go to the zoo together. At the end of the novel, Mr. Pignati learns that Bobo has died, and the shock of this revelation causes him to suffer a fatal heart attack. - Character: Conchetta Pignati. Description: Conchetta was Mr. Pignati's wife. She died sometime before the events of the story take place, and Mr. Pignati is still grieving her—so much so that he can hardly confront her death directly. When John and Lorraine first meet Mr. Pignati, for instance, he claims that Conchetta is away visiting relatives. Unlike John's and Lorraine's parents, Mr. Pignati and Conchetta really seemed to love each other and make each other happy. Mr. Pignati associates Conchetta with his beloved pig collection, so when Norton Kelly destroys the pigs during a party John organizes that gets out of hand, it crushes Mr. Pignati. - Character: Norton Kelly. Description: Norton Kelly is one of John and Lorraine's classmates who attends the raucous party they throw at Mr. Pignati's house while Mr. Pignati is recovering at the hospital. He's a stereotypical "tough guy" and bully—but John thinks this is a response to his peers ridiculing him for playing with dolls when he was a little boy. In Norton's first year of high school, he was caught stealing marshmallows at the grocery store, earning him the humiliating nickname of "The Marshmallow Kid." Ever since then, he's been a social outcast. Norton arrives at the party at Mr. Pignati's house uninvited and proceeds to destroy Mr. Pignati's beloved pig collection, after which he and John get into a physical fight. - Character: Dennis Jobin. Description: Dennis Jobin is one of John and Lorraine's classmates who attends the raucous party they throw at Mr. Pignati's house while Mr. Pignati is recovering at the hospital. He's Norton Kelly's friend, and the two of them are known as bullying troublemakers (though Norton is decidedly more dangerous and unhinged than Dennis). Like many of The Pigman's teenage characters, Dennis grows up in a rather dysfunctional household—his father is a mean alcoholic. - Character: Miss Reillen. Description: Miss. Reillen is the school librarian. She's apparently somewhat overweight but wears tight dresses anyway. While John mocks her for this (which today's readers may find especially cruel and uncalled for), Lorraine has more empathy and tries to imagine reasons why Miss Reillen might dress the way she does—for instance, perhaps Miss Reillen gained weight but can't afford to buy new clothing. - Character: Deanna Deas. Description: Deanna Deas is one of John and Lorraine's classmates who attends the raucous party they throw at Mr. Pignati's house while Mr. Pignati is recovering at the hospital. She also works in the Dean's office at school and, because she has a crush on John, ensures that John and Lorraine's cut and absentee cards don't get sent home, allowing them to cut class without consequence. - Theme: Death and Grief. Description: The Pigman is told from the perspective of high school sophomores Lorraine Jensen and John Conlan. The book takes the form of a confession in which John and Lorraine look back on their experience getting to know an old man named Mr. Pignati and examine how a series of selfish, unthinking decisions they made contributed to his recent death. From the start, then, the book establishes death as one of its core ideas, and Mr. Pignati's death is just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, the teens seem rather obsessed with death—a local cemetery is their favorite place to hang out, and Lorraine is haunted by what she calls "bad omens," strange things she witnessed that she believes, in retrospect, foreshadowed Mr. Pignati's eventual demise. John, meanwhile, engages in harmful behaviors like smoking cigarettes and alcohol abuse. Lorraine suggests that John engages in harmful behaviors because he wants to die. Eventually, John thinks she might be right, and he even considers that being dead might be preferable to being alive, since "[living] people think you're a disturbing influence just because you still think about God and Death and the Universe and Love." John's speculation offers insight into why he and Lorraine are so consumed with thoughts of death: because nobody they know, least of all the adults in their lives, is willing to talk about death with them. For instance, Lorraine's father died when she was very young, yet Lorraine's mother never talks about him to Lorraine (they separated before Lorraine was born due to Lorraine's father's infidelity, and Lorraine's mother still resents him). Furthermore, death anxiety doesn't diminish as one grows up. Mr. Pignati's wife, Conchetta, died sometime before the events of the novel take place, and when Mr. Pignati first meets Lorraine and John, he claims that Conchetta is away on vacation, seemingly to avoid thinking about her death and confronting his lingering grief. Thus, The Pigman suggests that anxiety about death is just as prevalent as death itself. Furthermore, the novel suggests that, not only does ignoring death do nothing to evade death itself, but that not having an outlet to talk about death only exacerbates a person's anxieties about the subject. - Theme: Personal Responsibility. Description: Though high school sophomores John and Lorraine might feel that the adults in their life underestimate and talk down to them due to their age, the reality is that they have a lot of growing up to do—in particular, learning to take responsibility for how their actions affect themselves and other people. In fact, The Pigman frames a strong sense of personal responsibility as the defining mark of maturity. At the beginning of the story, John and Lorraine are immature and careless. They have no regard for how their actions affect others, and they blame everyone but themselves for their troubles. For instance, John repeatedly insults any authority figure who tries to tell him off—even if John is in the wrong. John is also a compulsive liar (Lorraine rather euphemistically explains that John "twist[s] things subliminally")—he blames all kinds of pranks he pulls on the ghost of his Aunt Ahra, and he once told his parents that he hears voices from space inside his head. The circumstances under which the teens meet Mr. Pignati also highlight their immaturity—Mr. Pignati picks up one of their prank phone calls, and John asks him to "donate" to a made-up charity fund. Lorraine is decidedly more mature than John and has a more developed sense of personal responsibility. However, she, too, demonstrates a lack of personal responsibility by going along with whatever ill-advised schemes John concocts, like lying to Mr. Pignati about the made-up charity fund or throwing a raucous party at Mr. Pignati's house while he's at the hospital recovering from a heart attack. And in the end, people close to her suffer the consequences of her passivity: Mr. Pignati overexerts himself dealing with all the stress the teens have put him through with their carelessness and dies of a second heart attack; and when Lorraine's mother finally learns that Lorraine has been lying to her for months about hanging out with Mr. Pignati, she feels hurt and betrayed. Though of course John and Lorraine aren't directly responsible for Mr. Pignati's second, fatal heart attack, they feel they're at least partly to blame, and it's the guilt and remorse they feel in response to his death that teaches them that all their actions have consequences. The novel thus suggests that learning how one's actions affect others is a vital—and unavoidable—part of growing up. - Theme: Family. Description: Though Lorraine Jensen and John Conlan are quite different in most regards, they do have one major thing in common: they both come from dysfunctional families that don't provide them the love, comfort, and support they need to flourish. John's father (Bore) is recovering from alcoholism and constantly criticizes John, often comparing him to John's successful older brother, Kenneth. John's mother, meanwhile (the Old Lady), is a nervous, timid woman who is obsessed with ensuring that John doesn't agitate his emotionally volatile father—and in the process, she often fails to address John's needs. Lorraine, meanwhile, is raised by her single mother who works long hours as a home nurse to support Lorraine. Lorraine's mother constantly criticizes Lorraine's appearance and has convinced her that she's overweight and unattractive—neither of which are true. She's always warning Lorraine about the evils of men and boys—and threatening to punish Lorraine if she catches her "in a car, necking like a slut." And if Lorraine does something her mother deems bad enough to warrant punishment, she beats her. Growing up in unsupportive and sometimes unsafe environments affects John and Lorraine deeply, though they respond to their parents' bad parenting in different ways; while Lorraine internalizes a lot of her pain and develops a low self-esteem, John engages in reckless behavior like drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and acts out in school and at home. While the book hints that Lorraine and her mother might be capable of salvaging their relationship in the future, the book's ending offers no definitive sense of closure for John or Lorraine, and it's possible that they'll continue to endure abuse, neglect, and a lack of support from their families. At the same time, both characters undergo significant personal growth over the course of the novel, despite coming from dysfunctional families. While The Pigman rather optimistically suggests that children from dysfunctional homes can persevere and grow despite their families' failure to give them the love and support they need, the book also demonstrates the serious, lasting effects that parents' failures can have on their children. - Theme: Loneliness. Description: John and Lorraine are typical teenagers: they think nobody understands them, they detest the way adults talk down to them, they feel alienated from their peers, and they're often consumed with intense feelings of uncertainty, sadness, and loneliness. In fact, until Mr. Pignati enters their lives, they are each other's only real friend. But the novel suggests that loneliness isn't unique to adolescence; to the contrary, it portrays loneliness as a fundamental part of the human experience, affecting people of all ages and walks of life. John and Lorraine don't plan on becoming friends with Mr. Pignati—at first, they only visit him to follow up on a prank phone call they happened to place to his number, chosen at random out of a phone book. But despite this, they continue visiting him and forge a meaningful relationship with the elderly, grieving widower, who is desperate for companionship in the aftermath of his wife Conchetta's death—until John and Lorraine enter his life, his sole companion is Bobo, a rather unfriendly baboon he regularly visits and feeds peanuts to at the zoo. Though they make an unlikely trio, in time, Mr. Pignati, John, and Lorraine form a close bond that helps all three overcome the loneliness and sadness that used to dominate their lives, and they start to be happier and more hopeful about the future. Of course, this happiness is ultimately short-lived: John and Lorraine throw a raucous party at Mr. Pignati's house that gets out of hand and results in the destruction of Mr. Pignati's cherished collection of pig figurines. The incident devastates Mr. Pignati and irreparably damages his relationship with John and Lorraine. And when the teens try to make amends with Mr. Pignati, who clearly misses their company despite the hurt their actions have caused him, Mr. Pignati's beloved baboon Bobo dies suddenly, and the shock of yet another devastating loss leads him to suffer a fatal heart attack. In effect, then, he dies of despair and loneliness. Mr. Pignati's tragic fate demonstrates how deeply loneliness can affect a person's life. Still, while loneliness affects most everyone, forming and maintaining close relationships with others—even imperfect ones—can help alleviate some of the pain that loneliness causes. - Theme: Compassion. Description: In the first chapter that Lorraine narrates, she observes that what most sets her apart from her best friend, John, is that she "ha[s] compassion." Indeed, at the beginning of The Pigman, John is virtually devoid of compassion. For instance, he mocks Miss Reillen, the school librarian, for being overweight (at least in John's opinion) and wearing tight skirts. Lorraine, meanwhile, makes up for the compassion that John lacks. Though she admits that Miss Reillen's skirts are perhaps a bit too tight, she acknowledges that Miss Reillen has a personal life that Lorraine and John have no way of knowing about and, as such, there might be some reason that she dresses the way she does—perhaps she's putting all her resources toward caring for her sick mother and can't afford clothes that fit her better. While Lorraine's suggestions are purely speculative, they underscore one of the book's central themes: people can—and often are—battling hardships that go unnoticed by outsiders.  Lorraine's mother is often physically and emotionally abusive toward Lorraine. Over the course of the book, however, Lorraine gains a better understanding of how her mother's personal struggles have contributed to her abusive behavior (though it must be stated that nothing justifies or excuses child abuse or abuse of any kind). Specifically, Lorraine comes to see how a lot of her mother's cruel behavior and the criticism she directs at Lorraine are side effects of the stress and exhaustion of raising a child on her own on a meager nurse's salary; indeed, Lorraine, on numerous occasions, notes how hard her mother works and how she's sometimes caught her crying alone in the kitchen. Thus, while her mother's behavior causes Lorraine undue hurt and suffering, Lorraine's mother is herself suffering and so deserves support or, at the very least, compassion. Similarly, though John initially wants to hang out with Mr. Pignati as a way to get free food and other goodies, his attitude shifts as he and Lorraine get to know Mr. Pignati better. And when John learns how deeply Mr. Pignati's wife Conchetta's death has affected him, he realizes how important it is not to make assumptions about people. John and Lorraine's friendship with Mr. Pignati thus reaffirms the importance of treating everyone with compassion and empathy, even people one thinks might not deserve or appreciate it, because one never knows what inner struggles people are dealing with. - Climax: The shock of Bobo's death causes Mr. Pignati to suffer a heart attack, and he dies at the zoo. - Summary: The spring of their sophomore year of high school, Lorraine Jensen and John Conlan sign an oath vowing to tell the truth—and only the truth—about their experiences with Mr. Angelo Pignati, "The Pigman." What follows is a first-person confession, told from Lorraine and John's alternating perspectives, of the previous months they spent getting to know Mr. Pignati, who has since died. John is a handsome, outgoing jokester who regularly orchestrates pranks to get a rise out of people at school. Lorraine, meanwhile, is shy and reserved. She was lonely when she first moved into John's neighborhood last year, but now they're each other's best friend. Still, Lorraine grouses about John's apparent need to wear unconventional clothing, swear, drink alcohol, and smoke cigarettes, though she hypothesizes that he probably does these things to rebel—Lorraine reads a lot of psychological articles and is constantly analyzing people in her life. And John comes from a dysfunctional household: his dad (whom John calls "Bore") is a mean recovering alcoholic who introduced John to drinking at a young age, and his mother (whom John calls "The Old Lady") is too timid and anxious to defend John against his father and support him. Lorraine's situation isn't much better: Lorraine's father cheated on Lorraine's mother when she was pregnant with Lorraine and then abandoned the family and died not long after. Lorraine's mother struggles to raise Lorraine on her own on a nurse's salary. Her husband's infidelity led her to develop a hatred for men, boys, and sex, and she takes out a lot of her stress and anger on Lorraine, constantly criticizing her appearance, berating her, and even beating her. As a result, Lorraine has poor self-esteem and rarely acts on her instincts. For instance, in retrospect, Lorraine believes that she received numerous "bad omens" foreshadowing Mr. Pignati's death but chose to ignore them. Mr. Pignati first comes into John and Lorraine's life by accident. The teens are making prank phone calls with Dennis Jobin and Norton Kelly, two "really disturbed" classmates of theirs. Lorraine randomly selects Mr. Pignati's number out of a phonebook, pretending to be calling from a local charity when Mr. Pignati picks up. Lorraine instantly detects the loneliness in Mr. Pignati's voice—it's clear he's desperate for someone to talk to. Things escalate, and John arranges for the two of them to go to Mr. Pignati's house, pretending to be charity workers, to pick up Mr. Pignati's 10 dollar "donation" to their fund. John and Lorraine arrive at Mr. Pignati's house and find Mr. Pignati to be a cheerful, talkative elderly man. He invites them inside, pours them glasses of homemade wine, and talks to them about his love of zoos and his wife Conchetta, who he claims is out of town visiting relatives. When he talks about Conchetta, he momentarily looks like he's about to cry. Mr. Pignati also shows them his prized collection of pig figurines. He asks the teens if they'd like to go to the zoo tomorrow, but they're hesitant. After talking with Mr. Pignati awhile, Mr. Pignati gives John and Lorraine his "donation," and the teens excuse themselves. John uses Mr. Pignati's check to buy beer and cigarettes. Lorraine feels guilty about taking advantage of Mr. Pignati, but it doesn't bother John. Lorraine returns home and has an argument with her mom. Afterward, needing something to cheer her up, she calls up John and tells him she'd like to go to the zoo with Mr. Pignati tomorrow after all. The next day, the teens cut class and meet Mr. Pignati at the zoo. Mr. Pignati buys them peanuts and then takes them to the monkey house to introduce them to his friend Bobo, a mean, ugly baboon. Mr. Pignati, unperturbed by Bobo's unfriendliness, smiles and throws peanuts into Bobo's cage. Time passes. John and Lorraine spend their days hanging out in a local cemetery and at Mr. Pignati's house. They eventually grow close to the old man and come to think of him as one of their favorite people, though they don't yet come clean with him that they're high school students, not charity workers. One day, while at Mr. Pignati's house, John finds some papers from a local funeral home and discovers that Conchetta isn't away visiting relatives—in fact, she recently died. John shares this information with Lorraine, but they decide not to tell Mr. Pignati what they know just yet. One day, Mr. Pignati, who enjoys eclectic, foreign delicacies and other fancy foods, takes the teens to the department store Beekman's in Manhattan for a shopping spree. They also buy roller skates for the three of them. About a month after John and Lorraine start hanging out with Mr. Pignati, Norton Kelly invites John to the cemetery for a beer. Norton asks John why he spends so much time with Mr. Pignati—does he have anything in his house worth stealing? When John refuses to answer, Norton insinuates that he'll rob Mr. Pignati. In response, John calls Norton "Marshmallow Kid," a nickname kids gave Norton after he was caught shoplifting marshmallows from the local supermarket. Then John storms off, inwardly vowing to hurt Norton if he does anything to Mr. Pignati. Sometime later, John and Lorraine are at Mr. Pignati's house, and Mr. Pignati seems especially blue. The teens decide it's time to come clean about their real identities, and they reveal that they're actually high school students. In response, Mr. Pignati admits that Conchetta isn't actually visiting relatives—she's dead, and Mr. Pignati misses her terribly. The teens comfort Mr. Pignati. To lighten the mood, John puts on his roller skates and zooms around the house. Lorraine and Mr. Pignati join him. But in the process, Mr. Pignati overexerts himself and has a heart attack. John calls an ambulance. The next day, John and Lorraine cut class to visit Mr. Pignati at the hospital. He's doing much better but will have to remain at the hospital awhile longer—in the meantime, he tells the teens they can continue to hang out at his house. Lorraine and John return to Mr. Pignati's house that evening, and Lorraine makes dinner. They dress up in Mr. Pignati's and Conchetta's clothing and goof around. John thinks Lorraine looks genuinely beautiful in one of Conchetta's old dresses.; he chases Lorraine into Mr. Pignati's bedroom and kisses her, which catches them both off guard. Later, Lorraine calls up a nurse at the hospital who tells her that the earliest Mr. Pignati would be released is Saturday. That Friday, Lorraine and John return to Mr. Pignati's house. Things have been weird between them since their kiss earlier that week. Despite Lorraine's protests, John invites a bunch of their classmates over for a party that night. Around 40 kids show up; there's live music, dancing, and lots of drinking. Norton arrives later, upset that he wasn't invited. Sometime later, John hears sounds coming from the room where Mr. Pignati keeps his pig collection. He looks inside and finds Norton destroying all the pigs. Overcome with rage, John punches Norton in the face; a fight ensues. Just then, Mr. Pignati arrives home. The police escort John and Lorraine home, telling them they're lucky that Mr. Pignati isn't going to press charges. When they reach Lorraine's house and explain things to Lorraine's mother, she hits Lorraine, scolds her for lying, and then breaks down crying. Lorraine hugs her mother, guilty about all she has put her through. John calls Lorraine the next morning and says that his parents hardly reacted when the police brought him home. Bore told John he was going to make him see a psychiatrist, but John doubts this will actually happen. John and Lorraine meet up later that day and call Mr. Pignati from a pay phone to apologize for breaking his trust. He sounds sad but agrees to meet them at the zoo. When Mr. Pignati arrives at the zoo, he looks tired and sad but seems happy to see Lorraine and John. They buy some peanuts and make their way to the monkey house to see Bobo. But when they arrive, Bobo's cage is empty, and a zookeeper informs them that Bobo has died. Hearing this, Mr. Pignati has a heart attack and dies. Lorraine runs out of the monkey house while John stays behind to be with Mr. Pignati's body and deal with first responders. Afterward, John finds Lorraine outside, sitting on a bench, and sits down beside her. Inwardly, John considers how all their consequences have actions. He and Lorraine can't blame anyone for their problems—only they are responsible for what happens to them and how their actions affect others.

- Genre: Philosophical novel, Absurdist fiction - Title: The Plague - Point of view: First person limited, from an unknown narrator who is revealed to be Dr. Rieux in the last chapter - Setting: Oran, Algeria - Character: Dr. Bernard Rieux. Description: The narrator and main character of the novel, a doctor who is the first to notify the authorities of the plague and urge them to take action. Dr. Rieux is an atheist and a humanist, but he focuses on working as a healer more than finding philosophical or religious answers. Rieux struggles ceaselessly against the plague despite his great fatigue and the signs that his efforts are having little effect. Rieux is separated from his wife at the beginning of the novel, but he does not allow his personal suffering – or even individual pity for the plague victims – to distract him from his battle against the plague itself. - Character: Jean Tarrou. Description: A man visiting Oran when the plague strikes, who takes detailed notes about the city and therefore has a very good record of the early days of the plague. Eventually Rieux and Tarrou become close friends. Tarrou has a similar belief in social responsibility as Rieux does, but Tarrou is more philosophical than the doctor, often musing about sainthood, the death penalty, and the absurdity of life. Tarrou forms the volunteer anti-plague effort and works just as hard as Dr. Rieux in battling the epidemic. He contracts the plague himself, and his failed struggle to survive it is the novel's climax. - Character: Joseph Grand. Description: An elderly municipal clerk of Oran who has never been promoted from his low-ranking job. His marriage to Jeanne also fell into loveless routine, and Jeanne left him. Grand struggles constantly with trying to express himself, and suffers over trying to find the right words. Because of this inability to communicate he could never protest his lack of work promotion or justify himself to Jeanne. Grand is also trying to write a novel, but he cannot get past the first sentence, as he wants every word to be perfect. Grand joins the anti-plague effort, and gets the disease but recovers. - Character: Raymond Rambert. Description: A journalist from Paris who is trapped in Oran by the quarantine. Rambert desperately tries to escape the city and rejoin his wife in Paris, using both official and illegal means. He suffers many delays, and by the time he succeeds in securing an escape plan he decides to stay and help with the anti-plague effort. - Character: Cottard. Description: A man who committed an unknown crime in the past and so lives in a constant state of paranoia and fear of arrest, though he also craves human contact. Dr. Rieux meets him when Cottard tries to kill himself, fearing external punishment. Cottard is the only citizen of Oran who welcomes the plague, as it reduces the rest of the population to his natural state of fear and loneliness, and distracts the authorities from potentially arresting him. Cottard also runs a profitable smuggling business during the epidemic. When the plague retreats he goes mad and is arrested for firing a gun at passersby in the street. - Character: Father Paneloux. Description: A Jesuit priest and scholar of St. Augustine. When the plague arrives Paneloux preaches a sermon about how it is a punishment sent by God. After watching the death of an innocent child, Paneloux's faith is shaken, and he delivers a second, more desperate sermon and then succumbs to an unknown illness. - Character: Dr. Richard. Description: Another colleague of Dr. Rieux's, the head of the medical association in Oran. When confronted with the potential outbreak of plague, Richard prefers to take a "wait and see" approach rather than alarm the public. He falls to the disease just before he is about to make an optimistic statement about the decreasing death toll. - Theme: Absurdism. Description: The Plague is essentially a philosophical novel, meaning that it forwards a particular worldview through its plot and characterization. Camus is often considered an existentialist, but the philosophy he most identified with and developed was called absurdism. At its most basic, this philosophy holds that the universe is absurd and meaningless – there is no God or cosmic order – and that humans are doomed to suffer and die. Because of this situation, humans have three options in life: to commit suicide, to make a "leap of faith" and choose to believe in a divine entity or order, or to accept the Absurd and create one's own meaning in life. Camus advocated this third choice, as the first option is a kind of cowardice and the second is a psychological lie that Camus even compared to suicide.In The Plague, the besieged town becomes a microcosm of the universe, and the different characters illustrate different ways humans deal with the Absurd – that is, the plague. Cottard first tries to commit suicide (because of his guilt, another kind of plague) and then works with the epidemic, profiting off of others' suffering. Father Paneloux tries to assign order to the plague (as a punishment from God), but when he is faced with the true nature of the Absurd through watching a child die, Paneloux loses his faith and succumbs to disease himself. The protagonists of the novel, Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, live and struggle in the way that Camus advocates. They recognize the Absurd (the power of the plague and their own inevitable doom) but still work ceaselessly against it, finding meaning in healing others. - Theme: Suffering and Death. Description: The rest of the themes generally follow as corollaries to Camus' philosophy. In the novel the bubonic plague is a symbol of many things – the harsh, meaningless universe, the human condition, or war – but all of them mean suffering and death. The people of Oran deal with this meaningless suffering in various ways. At first they try to ignore or downplay it, and then they see it as a personal antagonist separating them from their loved ones. Some see it as divine punishment or a means to profit, and others eventually give up hope and succumb to what seems inevitable. Jacques, the young son of M. Othon, is the most poignant example of suffering and death in the novel. His torturous death is described in detail, and it ultimately leads Father Paneloux to doubt his faith in God. The novel is bleak and often crushing, as suffering and death loom constantly overhead, but it is through this that Camus reminds us of the potential horror of the human condition, and the need to confront it directly. - Theme: Heroism and Defiance. Description: Despite the enormity of suffering and death in the world and the seeming omnipotence of the plague, there are instances of heroism and altruistic struggle as well. Camus immediately undercuts the "heroic" efforts of the volunteer groups by declaring that to the fight the plague is the only decent, truly human thing to do, but this is because he believes that humans are generally good. These "heroes" fit into his idea of Absurdism, as in the face of a harsh, uncaring universe, one must struggle to help others and "fight the plague," even if defeat is inevitable. This kind of struggle in the face of certain death is a possible definition of heroism, however, so Camus is proposing a kind of heroism in everyday life – to embrace the Absurd, but at the same time to struggle hopelessly against it.The anti-plague sanitation squad is the most concrete example of this kind of defiance, and the most sympathetic characters of the novel try hard to be "healers" rather than merely "pestilences" or "victims," as Tarrou says. Rieux, the central protagonist, does not have a concrete philosophical or religious reason for struggling against the plague, but he knows that he must struggle, and Camus implies that this is the most important thing. Grand is the only character that Camus explicitly calls heroic. This might be because Grand is a sort of mediocre everyman, but he also joins the anti-plague effort and inspires others to defiance. - Theme: Language and Communication. Description: While The Plague is a tale of absurdist philosophy, it is also a novel with living characters and a deeply human story, and Camus' writing is potent in its imagery of suffering, despair, and courage. The chronicle's unknown narrator eventually reveals himself as Dr. Rieux, who has been trying to take a more detached view of the plague. This is a reflection of Camus himself, who describes the calamity of Oran objectively, without romanticizing the suffering or heroism or preaching any moral lessons, except that humans must always do battle with plague.Within the narrative, other characters also struggle with language and communication just as they struggle with disease. Grand, the most important example, is constantly trying to write a book but is never satisfied with even the first sentence, and he is incapable of justifying himself to his ex-wife because he can't find the right words for a letter. Grand's efforts often act as comedic relief, but they also serve as a kind of artistic struggle against the Absurd in communication. There is no hope of ever truly knowing or communicating with another soul, but Grand still defiantly keeps seeking that perfect sentence. The dialogue between other characters is also sparse and implies a struggle to communicate, as Rieux and his mother can never speak of their mutual affection, and Rieux and Tarrou must awkwardly confirm their friendship. Camus seems to say that the world of language is just as vast and unknowable as the universe, but we must still try to make connections between people. - Theme: Exile and Imprisonment. Description: The plague simultaneously exiles and imprisons the town of Oran, and its closed gates leave many citizens separated from their loved ones. Rambert and Rieux are both separated by the quarantine from the women they love, and Rambert, a foreigner, is exiled from his own home as well. Camus also describes the townspeople's feelings of exile as the plague progresses: first everyone wants to speed up time and end the plague, or they work ceaselessly (like Rambert) to escape and rejoin their lost loved one, while later many citizens give up hope or live in fantasies of regret and longing. For others like Tarrou, their exile is a separation from an idea, a sense of happiness, or a peace that Tarrou only finds in his last struggle against death.The closed gates of Oran also lead to a sense of imprisonment within the town itself. Many critics have compared the plague to war, and the quarantine of Oran to the German occupation of France in WWII. There are many examples of this in the novel, such as the martial law imposed on the town, the mass graves, and Camus' own experiences working for the French Resistance against the Nazis. Like an occupied town, the plague makes Oran a microcosm of Camus' absurd universe. The townspeople all suffer the same epidemic and experience similar kinds of exile and imprisonment, but they still distrust each other and feel alone in their suffering. Only those who accept the plague's power and their own state of exile, but still struggle against it – like Rambert, who finally refuses to escape to his wife if he must escape as a coward – are able to find a personal sense of freedom. - Climax: Tarrou struggles against the plague and dies - Summary: The Plague concerns an outbreak of bubonic plague in the French-Algerian port city of Oran, sometime in the 1940s. The first-person narrator is unnamed but mostly follows Dr. Bernard Rieux. Rieux notices the sudden appearance of dying rats around town, and soon thousands of rats are coming out into the open to die. The public grows panicked, and the government finally arranges a daily cremation of rat bodies. Soon after the rat epidemic disappears, M. Michel, the concierge for Dr. Rieux's office building, comes down with a strange fever and dies. More cases appear, and Dr. Rieux and his colleague Dr. Castel believe the disease is bubonic plague. They urge the government to take action, but the authorities drag their feet until the death toll rises so high that the plague is impossible to deny. Finally they close the gates and quarantine Oran. The townspeople react to their sudden isolation with feelings of exile and longing for absent loved ones, with each individual assuming that their suffering is unique. Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, delivers a sermon declaring that the plague is a divine punishment for Oran's sins. Raymond Rambert, a foreign journalist, tries to escape Oran and rejoin his wife in Paris, but he is held up by the bureaucracy and the unreliability of the criminal underground. He is aided in his attempts by Cottard, a man who committed an unknown crime in the past and has since then lived in constant paranoia. Cottard is the only citizen to welcome the plague, as it reduces the rest of the public to his level of fear and loneliness, and he builds up a small fortune smuggling. Meanwhile Rieux struggles ceaselessly against the plague and is joined by Jean Tarrou, another visitor to Oran, and Joseph Grand, an older municipal clerk who longs for his ex-wife and struggles daily over the first sentence of a book he is trying to write. Tarrou organizes an anti-plague sanitation league, and many volunteers join to help. Rambert finalizes his escape plan, but when he learns that Dr. Rieux is also separated from his wife (who is ill in a sanatorium) he decides to stay and fight the plague. After several months the public loses the selfishness in their suffering and recognizes the plague as a collective disaster. Everyone grows weary and depressed, and the death toll is so high that the authorities have to cremate the bodies. The young son of M. Othon, the strict local magistrate, comes down with the plague and Rieux and his companions – among them Father Paneloux – watch him suffer and die. Paneloux is shaken by the child's death and he delivers a second sermon, this time declaring that the horrors of plague leave only the choice to believe everything (about Christianity) or deny everything. Paneloux falls ill and dies soon afterwards, though he does not have the symptoms of the plague. Tarrou explains to Rieux how he has spent his life opposing the death penalty and "fighting the plague" in its many forms. The two men take a brief break to go swimming and then they go back to work. Grand falls ill with the plague, but then he makes a miraculous recovery. Other patients recover as well, and soon the epidemic is on the retreat, but then Tarrou falls ill. After a long struggle against the disease he dies. The townspeople slowly regain their hope and begin to celebrate. Only Cottard is upset by the end of the plague, and on the day the town's gates reopen, he goes mad and starts randomly firing a gun into the street until he is arrested. Grand writes a letter to his ex-wife and resumes work on his book. Rambert's wife joins him in Oran, but Dr. Rieux learns that his wife has died at the sanatorium. The townspeople quickly return to their normal lives, trying to pretend nothing has changed. Dr. Rieux reveals himself as the narrator of the chronicle, which he wrote as a testament to the victims of the plague and the struggles of the workers. He knows the victory over the plague is only temporary, as the bacillus microbe can lie dormant for years.

- Genre: Historical Fiction - Title: The Poisonwood Bible - Point of view: those of Orleanna, Adah, Ruth May, Rachel, and Leah Price. - Setting: Setting:Congo, Georgia, Angola (1960-1980s) - Character: Nathaniel Price. Description: Nathaniel Price is the hypocritical, boorish patriarch of the Price family: a proud, arrogant man presiding over a family of women. As a Reverend, Nathaniel sets the plot of the novel in motion when he decides to move his family to the Congo, where he intends to preach the Bible in the tiny village of Kilanga. While Nathan seems to believe in the truth of Bible with great sincerity, his devotion to the specific rules of Christianity—especially the rules of Baptism—make him indifferent to the pains and feelings of the villagers he's supposed to be helping (not to mention those of his own family). Nathan is also presented as a racist and sexist—someone who believes that whites are superior to blacks, and men are superior to women. He treats women and Africans as children to be condescended to, even when their intelligence and sophistication vastly exceeds his own. In all, Nathan is presented as the embodiment of narrow-minded Western imperialism. His children despise him, although by the end of the novel they come to respect him for his drive and determination, if not for his character and religious beliefs. - Character: Orleanna Price. Description: The quiet, long-suffering wife of Nathaniel Price. Orleanna is a deep-thinking, intelligent woman, but because of her husband's boorish behavior, she's often forced to hide her own talents from others—especially in the Congo. Nevertheless, she feels boundless love for her four children, Leah, Rachel, Adah, and Ruth May, making sure they receive all the food and education they need. When Ruth May is killed by a snake in Africa, Orleanna falls into a deep depression, and never entirely forgives herself. Rather than endanger her family any further, she gathers her children and leaves Africa altogether. She spends the rest of her life devoted to the Civil Rights Movement in the Southern United States—a poignant reminder of her ongoing struggle to forgive herself for Ruth May's death. - Character: Rachel Price. Description: Rachel, the eldest of the Price daughters, is portrayed as a rather narrow-minded, superficial young woman, who dislikes the Congolese more blatantly than anyone in her family except for Nathan Price himself. Unlike her siblings, Rachel makes few, if any, attempts to get to know her neighbors in the village of Kilanga, although her fair skin and good looks lead many in the village to stare at her. After the CIA-sponsored military coup in the Congo in the mid-60s, Rachel marries Eeben Axelroot in order to guarantee her own safety. Over the next 15 years, she marries a string of wealthy, powerful men, who provide for her but give her no spiritual satisfaction. Ultimately, Rachel comes to own a profitable hotel, which again provides her with money but leaves her feeling lonely and unfulfilled. Rachel is arguably the member of the Price family who grows the least over the course of the book: by the end of the novel, she's still self-absorbed and superficial. The only lesson she's learned in her life, she claims, is that the purpose of life is to look out for oneself. - Character: Adah Price. Description: The daughter of Nathaniel and Orleanna Price, and the twin sister of Leah Price, Adah Price is a highly intelligent young woman who's been disadvantaged by the symptoms of hemiplegia, a blood disease that leaves her with limited control of her own limbs. Because Adah has trouble moving, she tends to be quiet and calm. Nevertheless, she's immensely thoughtful and insightful, as we see in the chapters narrated from her point of view. Adah resents her father even more than her siblings do, and she sees his devotion to Christianity as both childish and extremely arrogant. Over the course of the novel, Adah develops a new appreciation for the complexities of nature. Life in the Congo teaches her that everything is connected, and that the life of one species is always tied to the death of another. As an adult, Adah returns to the United States with her mother, where she becomes a world-class medical researcher: her experiences in the Congo give her the perfect impartial temperament for a career as a scientist. Adah also regains control of her body: a symbol of her newfound freedom and autonomy as an adult. - Character: Leah Price. Description: The daughter of Nathaniel and Orleanna Price, and the twin sister of Adah Price, Leah is an intelligent, energetic young woman who over the course of the novel grows into a passionate defender of human rights. When the novel begins, Leah is adjusting to her new life in the Congo, where her father has moved to work as a missionary. She slowly begins to educate herself in the ways of Congolese culture, developing a deep respect for her neighbors' way of life. At the same time, Leah struggles with a strong sense of guilt at being the descendant of Europeans—i.e., the people who enslaved and tortured the people of the Congo for centuries. Leah channels her passion for the Congolese (and, it must be said, her guilt) into a career as a schoolteacher in the Congo. While she continues to feel guilty at being a white American among Africans, she never lets this affect her loving relationship with Anatole Ngemba—an intelligent, equally passionate devotee of human rights. - Character: Ruth May Price. Description: The youngest of the Price children, Ruth May is a plucky, adventurous five-year-old when the novel begins. The chapters narrated from her point of view tend to be short and to-the-point, as there are many times when Ruth May can see, very clearly, what the older and more experienced characters in the book struggle to understand. For much of the novel, Ruth May is dangerously ill, since she refuses to take her malaria pills. Just when she seems to be regaining her health, she's bitten by a snake, and dies suddenly. Ruth May's untimely death sets in motion the events of the second half of the novel: Orleanna's flight from the Congo, Leah's powerful sense of guilt, etc. In the novel's Epilogue, she's presented as a spirit, looking back at her family with love, wisdom, and affection. - Character: Anatole Ngemba. Description: Anatole Ngemba is a young, intelligent Congolese man who eventually becomes Leah Price's lover and husband. Anatole is deeply connected to the history of the Congo: his mother was sent to the Belgian diamond mines when he was still a young child, meaning that his family has been directly torn apart by European imperialism. Because of his family experiences, as well as his considerable self-education, Anatole comes to support the Congolese nationalist movements of the late 50s and early 60s, leading up to the Belgians' decision to pull out of the Congo altogether. He's an enthusiastic supporter of Patrice Lumumba, even after Lumumba's assassination—as a result, he's harassed by the Mobutu state, and eventually thrown in prison for his political convictions. During all this time, Anatole shows great love and understanding for Leah, and in return, Leah loves Anatole unconditionally, even during the years when he's in prison. - Character: Reverend Frank Underdown. Description: A missionary in Africa who provides Nathan Price and his family with supplies, shelter, and advice about how to get by in the Congo. Underdown is a useful expository device in the novel: whenever there's a big historical event in the Congo, we can count on Frank Underdown showing up to explain it to the Prices—and, by extension, to us as readers. At the same time, the Underdown and his family serve as examples of the corruption and failure of missionary activities in the Congo, living in a mansion with servants rather than living among the people they have come, ostensibly, to serve. After the military coup that leaves the Congo in the hands of Joseph Mobutu, it is Underdown who advises Nathan to leave the country immediately. Nathan stubbornly decides to stay behind, ending his already strained relationship with Underdown. - Character: Eeben Axelroot. Description: A resourceful, devious man who provides the Prices with most of their food and supplies during their time in the Congo—albeit at exorbitant prices. It's strongly implied that Axelroot is involved in the CIA operation to murder Patrice Lumumba, and after Lumumba's death, Axelroot is seen as a powerful, well-connected man in the new Congolese society. Axelroot is last seen married to Rachel Price, who gravitates to Axelroot because he represents safety and security, if not love. Axelroot isn't a faithful husband at all, and after a few years Rachel leaves him for another man. - Character: Tata Ndu. Description: The leader of the village of Kilanga, who often finds himself at odds with Nathaniel Price due to Price's rigid commitments to Christianity. Ndu is shown to be an intelligent, experienced leader, who is far more in touch with the day-to-day lives of his people than Nathan. And yet Kingsolver also makes it clear that Ndu shares many of Nathan's faults: he's plainly a sexist, and cites "tradition" as the reason why women shouldn't be educated or trained. In an effort to make peace with Nathan, he asks to marry Rachel Price—a suggestion that both Rachel and Nathan rebuff angrily. - Character: Tata Kuvudundu. Description: A witch-doctor and Kilanga resident who resents Nathan Price and his family for bringing Christianity—in Kuvudundu's eyes, a dangerous, even poisonous force—to the Congo. Kuvudundu tries to attack the Price family by placing a poisonous green mamba snake near the area where Ruth May plays. Ultimately, this snake bites and kills Ruth May, setting in motion the events of the second half of the novel. Kuvudundu is ostracized from his community when news of his plot comes to light. - Character: Patrice Lumumba. Description: Populist leader of the Congo during the early 1960s, who was assassinated by the CIA due to his outspoken support for socialism. In the novel, Lumumba's sudden assassination is a major turning point in the novel: a symbol of the collapse of the Price's hopes for peace and equality in their new community. - Theme: Freedom, Growth, and Coming-of-age. Description: The magazine The Nation argues that The Poisonwood Bible is, fundamentally, a book about the struggle for freedom in all its different forms. (One could say that Freedom is the overarching theme of the book, while the 4 themes listed below are particularly important cases of the struggle for freedom.) As Kingsolver sees it, everything aspect of humanity—individual people, countries, etc.—participates in a natural process of growth and change that is the essence of human freedom. And yet this natural process of growing, or coming-of-age, is always under attack. In order to understand this, we'll have to ask: 1) whose freedom are we talking about? and 2) under attack from whom or what?Right away, we're informed that the Price family's freedom is being sucked away by the tyrannical, hypocritical father, Reverend Nathan Price. Nathan takes his family to the Congo to preach the Bible, but he seems not to consider whether or not this is a good decision for his daughters, Ruth May, Rachel, Leah, and Adah; on the contrary, he seems more or less indifferent to what's right for them. Furthermore, Nathan treats all members of his family—not only his daughters, but also his wife, Orleanna—as fools incapable of making their own decisions. For this reason, he forbids them to hunt, explore the village, make friends with the villagers, or educate themselves—in other words, all the things that his wife and children should be doing to become freer, stronger, and more mature.Kingsolver compares the power dynamic within the Price family with a different kind of struggle for freedom, that of the Congo itself. We learn a great deal about post-WWII Congolese history in this novel, and one of the overarching ideas is that the Western world limits the Congo's freedom by keeping its people uneducated and subservient to European and American administrators—essentially, the West refuses to let the Congo "grow up." One of Kingsolver's most important points is that all the exploited people in her novel—whether they're the Price daughters or the Congolese proletariat—have something in common: they're all going through varying degrees of oppression, in which a domineering "father" selfishly refuses to let them come of age. We see this idea come up again and again. For example, when Leah first learns about the Congo's troubled history, her first reaction is to compare the Congo with her own troubled family. (This certainly doesn't mean that Leah understands exactly what the Congolese are going through, but it does suggest that her family situation has trained her to be more sympathetic to the Congolese crisis of the 60s and 70s than most white Americans.) It's clear enough that the powerful characters and entities in The Poisonwood Bible, such as Nathan Price and the United States, want to deny the weak any autonomy or freedom. But ironically, the characters who try to limit others' growth wind up appearing strangely immature themselves—for instance, Nathan Price spends the last 20 years of his life engaged in the same pathetic, failed mission in the same Congolese village. Meanwhile, freed from Nathan's domination, the other Prices attain their own forms of freedom. In each case, the Prices' newfound sense of maturity is tied to their ability to love someone else selflessly; i.e., to respect another person's freedom and autonomy, just as Nathan always denied these things to his wife and children. (The exception that proves the rule is Rachel, who comes to the conclusion that life is about looking out for oneself, but who also winds up feeling lonely and unfulfilled.) By the same token, the Congo region is shown to attain a form of "maturity" as American forces pull out in the late 1980s. The centuries-old conflicts between tribes subsides, suggesting that the Congo may become stronger and safer by adopting a policy of freedom and mutual respect. In this way, Kingsolver steers her novel to an optimistic conclusion: although there are forces trying to limit freedom and growth, many characters find ways to attain their independence nonetheless. - Theme: Religion and Faith. Description: As its title would suggest, The Poisonwood Bible studies the way that religion shapes—and at times imprisons—its characters. Nathan Price, the hypocritical patriarch of the Price family, is almost a mascot for all the ways that religion can go wrong. Yet the novel doesn't condemn religion altogether (it is, after all, a book about missionaries who travel across the world to help the suffering). One could say that Kingsolver is offering two nuanced accounts of what it means to be religious: religion understood as a set of codes, rules, and regulations for human behavior, and religion understood as a kind of "faith"; i.e., a sense of mysticism, selfless love, and connection to others. By contrasting many different forms of belief, the novel comes to suggest that religion—or rather, "faith"—is an inescapable part of life.One way to construe Nathan's failure as a human being is to say that he's so focused on the Bible's specific teachings about prayer, baptism, etc., that he neglects the "spirit" of Christianity—its emphasis on love, compassion, and friendship. For example, he preaches to a host of Congolese villagers about the importance of baptism, and yet largely ignores his own children, presumably the people who need his love the most. Nathan is also arguably too focused on the supernatural, otherworldly side of religion, in the sense that by talking too much about Heaven and salvation, he ignores the concrete realities of life on Earth. Kingsolver also suggests that Nathan uses religion as an excuse for his own character flaws: because he's a naturally boorish, arrogant person, he uses his religious training to condescend to people whom he regards as ignorant and "un-saved." In all, the novel uses Nathan's character to critique the dangers of religious fervor. Even if religion itself isn't bad, it can always be a dangerous tool in the hands of certain people, because it seems to justify whatever actions they might take, no matter how cruel.And yet The Poisonwood Bible definitely doesn't argue that religion is always poisonous. Brother Fowles, Nathan's predecessor in the Congo, is a kind, intelligent man, whose knowledge of Christianity vastly exceeds Nathan's own. And yet where Nathan stresses a rigid, codified interpretation of the Bible, emphasizing rules and laws, Fowles favors an approach that encourages people to trust their innate sense of right and wrong. Because of his "loose" Christianity, Fowles is dismissed from the mission that sent him to the Congo. And yet we're given every reason to believe that Fowles is a more successful missionary than Nathan—he seems to have made good friends with the villagers, and even marries one of them. Religion can be a powerful force for good, it's suggested, especially when religion is treated as a personal, intimate relationship with the divine—in other words, as faith.As the novel reaches its conclusion, Kingsolver defines religion and faith more and more abstractly. The characters endure a great deal of tragedy and pain, and in their misery they turn to religion in its various forms. As Adah Price puts it, everyone needs to worship something; otherwise, life would be meaningless. For some, such as Adah, science can be a faith (pretty paradoxically!); for others, such as Orleanna, the Civil Rights Movement is what gives life meaning. As we see, these forms of faith provide people with a sense of peace and a belief in something greater than themselves, and thus they are much closer to Fowles's religion than to Nathan's, because they're intimate, personal, and affirming. Above all, the novel argues that religion has the power to be a force for good or evil—but which one depends on the worshipper. - Theme: Women and Sexism. Description: Many of the characters in The Poisonwood Bible, especially Orleanna Price and her four daughters, struggle with society's expectations for how women should behave. On one hand, they have to contend with Nathan Price, who represents one set of sexist social expectations for women (those of the Christian and Western world); on the other, the Price women face the sexism of the Congo, where the vast majority of women have no education, and where it's not uncommon for men to have multiple wives.One of the basic similarities between these two forms of sexism is the idea that women should be docile and domestic. Nathan Price is reluctant to let his children attend college, because he believes that women should stay in the home, take care of the children, and not have proper jobs or careers. It's clear enough that the villagers of Kilanga believe in the same principle—most of the women in the community are married off by the time they're 10 or 12 (since women's primary purpose is to take care of the house and children, there's no point in waiting around longer to see what kinds of careers they're fit for). Ironically, then, Nathan and the Congolese men have a great deal in common: they subscribe to the same form of sexism. This is especially surprising considering the contrast that Kingsolver draws between the domineering West (represented by Nathan and by the Belgian and U.S. governments) and the exploited Congolese (represented by the people of Kilanga, Lumumba, etc.)—even an exploited culture, it would seem, can still endorse the exploitation of its own women.Because Kingsolver's protagonists are women, their development over the course of the novel suggests some ways that women learn to fight sexism and misogyny. Interestingly, the Price sisters seem to end up attaining a greater degree of autonomy and power in the Congo than they would have had they grown up in the United States. Because of the fragility of Congolese society (during the course of the novel the government changes hands at least three times) Adah, Leah, Rachel, and even Ruth May are forced into situations where they're forced to lead, teach, control, and fight—in other words, to conform to the male stereotypes of their own society. Encouraged by their successes in the Congo, the Price sisters enter adulthood and continue to disrupt sexist expectations. Adah becomes a doctor (traditionally a male-dominated profession) and even Rachel, who seems perfectly willing to play the role of a ditzy, pretty lady, ends up owning her own successful hotel. Witnessing the collapse of a culture—a sexist, misogynistic culture—teaches the Price children to question any culture that orders them to be inferior to men. - Theme: Race, Racism, and Culture. Description: One of Poisonwood's most important themes is race. The Price family is white, and (prior to traveling to the Congo) enjoys all the conveniences of life as a white citizen in the United States. In the Congo, however, the Prices' new community is defined by black Africans—a novelty for a white American family used to (heavily segregated) 1950s Georgia society. While a few of the Prices (especially Leah, who marries the half-Congolese Anatole Ngemba) make an effort to get to know their African neighbors, racial differences continue to remind the Prices of the broader differences between African and American life, and of the family's perpetual "outsider" status in the Congo.Unfortunately, many of the white characters in The Poisonwood Bible treat their black neighbors with contempt, if not outright hatred. Most of the novel is set before the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, when Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other important African-American leaders fought for equal rights and legal protections. As a result, many of the American characters have been brought up to treat black people of all kinds—whether they're American or Congolese—as inferior human beings. Nathan Price, the preacher who brings his family to the Congo, thinks of the Congolese as ignorant, "unenlightened" children—a disturbing example of how his Christianity acts as a mask for his racism. But interestingly, the Congolese find the Prices just as strange as the Prices find them. As far as the villagers of Kilanga are concerned, Nathan is a pathetic figure—completely ignorant of how to feed himself or navigate his way through the jungle. In this way, the novel suggests that it's human nature to judge other people based on stereotypes and prejudices—in short, when the Prices stare at the Congolese, the Congolese stare right back. (Although, of course, the power dynamic between the oppressed Congolese and the Prices, who are inherently aligned with the imperialist oppressor, are still uneven.)Even when the Prices make an effort to understand the Congolese people, they continue to struggle with the hard, cold facts of a history of racial divides. After Leah Price falls in love with Anatole Ngemba and marries him, she's constantly reminded of the fact that she's a white woman living among Africans. Because she's white, everyone can tell immediately that she has European heritage, meaning that she's related by blood to the people who have traditionally kept the Congo impoverished, dangerous, and hopeless. In the Congo, Leah is even more conscious of her own whiteness than her neighbors are; she hates herself for belonging to the same race that has caused her husband and his friends so much pain. And yet as she enters middle age, she takes pride in the fact that she's loved and supported her husband for so many years—and that she's raised a large happy family of boys, none of whom feel the kind of racism that Leah's father Nathan once felt.In the end, Poisonwood suggests that some of the world's deadliest problems—starvation, poverty, civil war—stem from racism. Due to their racial differences, people make no effort to befriend each other or cooperate with one another, and in the end, these differences add up to the huge gap between the First World and the Third World. One way to fight the effects of racism, represented by Leah Price, is with interpersonal love and friendship. Leah and Anatole's relationship certainly doesn't solve the problems of racism that Kingsolver poses in her novel, but it does suggest that one can begin to reverse the effects of racism by starting in the same place where racism begins—two unlike people getting to know one another. - Theme: Imperialism. Description: Right away, Poisonwood establishes a clash between the Third World, represented by the Congo, and the Western world, represented by Belgium and the United States. The Western world is portrayed as powerful, greedy, and sometimes deceitful, while the Third World is depicted as weak and the frequent victim of other, more powerful nations. This certainly doesn't mean that every American character is deceitful and evil, or that every Congolese character is weak and exploited, but it does point to one of the most important themes in the novel: the influence of imperialism on the Congo.Kingsolver's novel includes large chunks of real-life history that establish the greed and ruthlessness of the Western world, as evidenced by the way it treated the Congo. For much of the 19th century, Belgium controlled the Congo's industry and natural resources, and forced the Congolese to work like slaves, in conditions that even at the time were internationally condemned for their cruelty. This, as Kingsolver sees it, is imperialism in a nutshell: the systematic control of a foreign land for the benefit of an imperial power (here, Belgium). Following the Second World War, Belgium pulled out of the Congo, but almost immediately, U.S. forces established a "puppet government" in the country. Due to the CIA's actions in the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the popular, democratically elected leader was murdered and replaced by Joseph Mobutu, a cruel dictator whom the United States supported because of his toleration for capitalism. There are plenty of differences between Belgian and the American imperialism in the Congo (for example, the Belgians' control of the government was direct and unambiguous, while the Americans exerted a huge but still indirect influence on the government, laundering their directions through a native Congolese leader). Nevertheless, Belgian and American imperialists both tried to control the Congo's wealth and resources, ensuring that money would flow back to their own countries. This emphasis on profit, even at the expense of human rights or justice, is the essence of imperialism—which, as Kingsolver sees it, is just another word for greed.In a sense, imperialism is the true villain of Poisonwood—it's the all-powerful force that murders Lumumba and ignites a civil war in the Congo, endangering the characters' lives. And yet the novel also suggests that imperialism, for all its power, fails in the end. In order to control a foreign country, imperialists have to suppress the citizens of the country itself (in the Congo, for example, imperialists had to kill Lumumba, the popularly elected leader). While it might be possible to do this in the short term, the populace will inevitably rebel—there are simply too many people like Anatole, too many people trying hard to be heard and to struggle against their oppressors. Sure enough, by the end of the novel Mobutu, the puppet leader, is dying of cancer, and American forces are in the process of pulling out of the greater Congolese region. In the end, Poisonwood brings us to the optimistic conclusion that imperialism and the doctrine of greed, despite being central to the novel's plot and deeply influential aspects of history, are ultimately less potent forces than they seem. - Climax: Climax:The death of Ruth May Price - Summary: The year is 1959, and a Georgian preacher named Nathaniel Price brings his entire family—his wife, Orleanna Price, and his four daughters, Ruth May, Adah, Leah, and Rachel—to the Congo. Nathaniel (Nathan) aims to spread Christianity to the "unenlightened" people of the world, despite the fact that the Congolese already have their own religious traditions. The novel is narrated from the perspectives of the five Price women. Nathan is a hypocritical, boorish father and husband, and his wife and children secretly resent him. Ruth May, who's only five years old, is terrified by her father, and by his sermons on Jesus Christ. Leah and Adah, who are in their mid-teens, are identical twins, except that Adah suffers from hemiplegia, a blood condition that leaves her unable to control one side of her body. Because speech is difficult for her, Adah spends long chunks of time thinking of elaborate word games, many of them based around satirizing her father's pompousness. Adah and Leah are both highly intelligent, despite the fact that Nathan doesn't entirely approve of educated, empowered women. In spite of her distrust for Nathan's Christian ideas, Leah admires her father's tenacity and drive—nevertheless, Nathan seems not to care much for her. Finally, there's Rachel, the eldest Price daughter, who's superficial and vain, and seems to share her father's contempt for the Africans, with their "ugly bodies" and "dark skins." As the Prices arrive in the village of Kilanga, Nathan is disgusted by the nakedness of the Congolese, a fact that immediately alienates him from his community. Nathan further alienates himself by arguing that all the villagers should be immediately baptized in the nearby river—despite the fact that the river is infested with crocodiles, and poses a serious danger to children. Nathan acquires a reputation for being murderous and bloodthirsty, as the villagers seem to think that he wants to feed their children to crocodiles. The only thing that endears the Prices to the Congolese is Orleanna's cooking—she bakes an elaborate feast of fried chicken that attracts hundreds of neighbors. Nathan resents Orleanna for being more successful than he in her "recruiting," but Orleanna, a calm, quiet woman, is used to her husband's rage. Rachel immediately attracts attention from the villagers, due to her beauty and fair complexion. Ruth May makes friends with some of the local children, and teaches them the game "Mother May I?" Adah and Leah are quieter and more reserved—neither makes friends right away. However, Adah is immediately struck by the constant energy of life in the Congo: every animal and plant plays a part in the ecosystem. Another important presence in the village is Eeben Axelroot, a resourceful man who owns a small plane. At various points, Ruth May notices that Axelroot has access to a radio and to diamonds, suggesting that he's a more powerful man than he seems. In flashbacks, Orleanna remembers a time when Nathan loved her sincerely. This was before Nathan went off to fight in World War II, where his experiences in the Bataan Death March left him deeply traumatized. Orleanna also considers the rise of Patrice Lumumba, a young, charismatic Congolese dictator whose opposition to U.S.-sponsored capitalism has landed him in prison. As the months go on, Nathan makes little progress in recruiting villagers to his church. Nevertheless, his wife and children become more connected to their new home. One afternoon, Ruth May breaks her arm and Axelroot has to fly her and Nathan to the nearest doctor. At the doctor's, Nathan argues that Lumumba is an "agitator" and a danger to the Congo. Shortly afterwards, the Prices host Nathan's translator and assistant, Anatole Ngemba, for dinner. Anatole is an educated Congolese man, and an enthusiastic supporter of Lumumba—a fact that worries Nathan. Anatole tells Nathan that Nathan has thoroughly alienated Tata Ndu, the leader of Kilanga. Leah admires Anatole for his honesty and intelligence, and she begins to question her father's authority, doubting whether he's as brave and courageous as she'd previously believed. Ruth May catches a horrible fever, a consequence of her refusal to take her malaria pills for the last six months. Meanwhile, Nathan gets a visit from the Underdown family—a missionary family that helped Nathan get set up in Kilanga. The Underdowns tell Nathan that Lumumba has been released from prison, and is about to become the leader of the Congo. Nathan argues that the Congo was better off when Europeans controlled it. Orleanna thinks—but doesn't say—that Nathan is missing the point: the Congo is in danger now because European imperialists have systematically denied the Congolese education and wealth for decades. Nathan and Axelroot fly to nearby Stanleyville to find more malaria pills in the hopes that they can cure Ruth May's fever. Shortly afterwards, Nathan and Leah fly to Leopoldville, where they witnesses the inauguration of Patrice Lumumba. Leah begins to spend more time with Anatole, and she helps him teach schoolchildren in the village. Anatole tells Leah about the history of Belgian presence in the Congo, and about his support for Lumumba's brand of socialism. Leah becomes especially conscious of her own whiteness, and feels guilty at being descended from Europeans who have contributed to misery in the Congo. Unexpectedly, Tata Ndu asks Nathan for Rachel's hand in marriage. Nathan refuses, and shortly afterwards, Tata Ndu informs Nathan that the villagers have elected to banish Christianity from the Congo altogether. Furious, Nathan continues to preach the Bible, despite the fact that almost nobody listens. Nathan further angers Tata Kuvudundu, the village witch-doctor, by suggesting that Kuvudundu is a charlatan. In the end, the Prices pretend that Rachel is engaged to Axelroot in an effort to discourage Ndu from his courtship. One night, the Prices awaken to discover an enormous swarm of flesh-eating ants crawling through the village. While Nathan runs away, Orleanna makes sure that her children are all protected. With Anatole's help, the Price children survive. Leah is so moved by Anatole's generosity that she tells him, "I love you." Anatole tells Leah not to say such things. In spite of the discomfort between Leah and Anatole, Anatole continues to look out for Leah. When Leah becomes adept at hunting, Anatole argues that she should be allowed to participate in the villagers' annual hunt, over the objections of Tata Kuvudundu. In the end, Leah is permitted to hunt, and succeeds in shooting an antelope. Only a few months in Lumumba's regime, the CIA conspires to assassinate him—something that won't be public knowledge for another decade. Lumumba is murdered, throwing the Congo into chaos. On the same day that Lumumba dies, Ruth May is bitten by a snake, and dies almost instantly. Orleanna in particular is devastated by Ruth May's death. In the aftermath of Lumumba's assassination, life in Kilanga becomes highly dangerous: Lumumba's successor, Joseph Mobutu, is a harsh, dictatorial leader. Orleanna decides that she can no longer endanger her children's lives by continuing to live in Kilanga, so she leaves the community with Leah, Rachel, and Adah. Here, the Price women become separated: Rachel runs off with Axelroot, who promises her wealth and security, and Leah becomes gravely sick, meaning that she's too weak to travel. While Anatole takes care of Leah, Orleanna travels back to Georgia with Adah. Back in the U.S., Orleanna—still haunted by Ruth May's death—becomes a devoted organizer in the Civil Rights Movement. Adah attends Emory University, and goes on to become a talented doctor. Her experiences in the Congo give her a novel perspective on the relationship between life and death—a perspective that makes her a talented researcher. Adah also begins to regain control of her arms and legs, as her hemiplegia has subsided. Leah continues to live with Anatole, and over the years, they come to love each other deeply. Anatole becomes increasingly involved in the political opposition to Mobutu, with Leah's full support. While Anatole campaigns and organizes demonstrations against Mobutu, Leah teaches African schoolchildren, often feeling the same deep sense of guilt for her whiteness. Suddenly, Anatole is arrested and thrown in prison. Although she's devastated by this news, Leah continues to teach her schoolchildren, and remains faithful to Anatole. During this time, Leah learns from Tata Boanda, an old friend from Kilanga, that Tata Kuvudundu planted the snake that killed Ruth May. Rachel marries Axelroot, who gives her wealth and security, but also cheats on her regularly. Rachel gets her revenge by running off with Daniel Dupree, a middle-aged ambassador. Almost immediately after marrying Dupree, she runs off with a much older man named Remy Fairley. Fairley is a prominent hotel owner, and when he dies unexpectedly, Rachel, now in her thirties, finds herself in control of a highly profitable hotel in Leopoldville. The Price sisters' fates cross again in the 1980s, when they agree to travel through Africa. On the trip, the three sisters come to agree that Nathan was an awful father, but also an important part of their lives. Leah reveals some news she's heard recently: Nathan was executed by the villagers of Kilanga. A child was eaten by a crocodile and Nathan was blamed. At the end of the trip, Leah learns that Anatole has been released from prison, and they reunite, still very much in love. While she's moved by the sight of Leah's reunion with Anatole, Rachel decides that the only purpose of life is to look out for oneself. As the novel reaches an end, the three remaining Price sisters and Orleanna travel to Africa in the hopes of returning to Kilanga and placing a special gravestone on Ruth May's burial site. They return to the Congo, but are told that Kilanga "never existed." In the Epilogue, Ruth May, speaking from the grave, tells Orleanna that her children love her enormously, and she encourages Orleanna to "move into the light."

- Genre: Psychological realism - Title: The Portrait of a Lady - Point of view: Third person - Setting: England, Italy, France, and the United States - Character: Isabel Archer. Description: The novel's protagonist, Isabel is a young American woman who is characterized by her curiosity, kindness, beauty, and progressive values. Upon Mrs. Touchett's (Isabel's estranged aunt) invitation to visit the Touchett family home in England, Isabel's positive energy and thirst for knowledge enchant those she meets in Europe, including her uncle Mr. Touchett, cousin Ralph, their neighbor Lord Warburton and his sisters, and Mrs. Touchett's friend Madame Merle. As a progressive American woman who travels extensively to experience Europe, Isabel embodies the clash between New World evolution and Old World sophistication. Isabel demonstrates her unconventional New World attitudes when she rejects marriage proposals from Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodward (an American businessman), both of which would make extremely advantageous matches for Isabel. After inheriting a significant inheritance from Mr. Touchett at Ralph's request, Isabel has the means to travel extensively through Europe as she has long desired. She is also excited by the opportunities to undertake meaningful action with her newfound wealth. However, Isabel's naïve hopes are dashed when Madame Merle and her mysterious acquaintance Gilbert Osmond dupe Isabel into a marriage with the domineering Osmond. As her husband, Osmond now controls Isabel's finances. He treats her as an object of beauty—a mere addition to his art collection—and stifles her active imagination and progressive ideas. Ultimately, Isabel's narrative depicts a young, bright, and independent woman who develops into a dissatisfied lady trapped in a miserable marriage. She is an extremely perceptive individual except for her weakness in failing to recognize the dangers of social predators such as Merle and Osmond. The end of the novel implies that Isabel chooses to remain with Osmond and his daughter, Pansy, instead of accepting Caspar Goodwood's tempting proposal that they run away together—a choice that shows Isabel ultimately bending to social convention at the expense of her own happiness and personal freedom. - Character: Ralph Touchett. Description: Ralph Touchett is Isabel Archer's cousin and Mr. Touchett and Mrs. Touchett's son. He was born in America but since infancy has lived in England at the Touchett family home, Gardencourt. He embodies many European Old World qualities, for he is sophisticated, intelligent, and courteous; these are likely the reasons he has a firm friendship with the similarly disposed Lord Warburton who lives near Gardencourt. Differing from Warburton, though, Ralph acts as a moral compass throughout the novel; he is also humorous and self-deprecating in nature, likely a result of living with chronic consumption (tuberculosis). Isabel's arrival sparks in Ralph a zest and passion for life after many mundane yet comfortable years at Gardencourt. He is fascinated by her ideas and gains great pleasure in observing her reactions to various experiences. When Mr. Touchett's health seriously declines, Ralph is instrumental in persuading his father to leave Isabel a significant portion of the family's wealth. Ralph believes that this legacy will secure Isabel's future independence; she will not have to marry in order to rely on a man to provide for her livelihood. Ralph's actions demonstrate his generosity, for it means his own portion of his father's will is significantly reduced. It is also evidence of the great admiration and love he has for his cousin Isabel; the narrative suggests that this love extends beyond platonic feelings, although Isabel is unaware of this for most of the novel. However, Ralph's generous wish for Isabel to come into wealth is also due to his selfish desire to view her subsequent actions as a type of experiment—he is intrigued what course she will take without financial limitations and, like many men in the novel, views her as a work of art rather than a real person. Ralph's illness eventually claims his life near the novel's ending, with Isabel crushed by the loss of her dear friend. - Character: Gilbert Osmond. Description: Father of Pansy and a friend of Madame Merle's, antagonist Gilbert Osmond is an American expatriate living in Italy who eventually becomes Isabel Archer's husband. Despite being American, Osmond has lived in Europe for decades and represents Old World cunning and sophistication. He lacks career prospects and spends his time collecting art for his personal prized collection. Despite having no important social status or wealth, he is able to deceive Isabel into marrying him, thereby bringing Merle's designs for the marriage to fruition. Isabel is attracted to Osmond's charm and his seemingly exquisite taste and sophistication as an art collector. However, after the marriage is official he reveals himself to be a selfish and dominating character who has trapped Isabel in a loveless union. His apparently sophisticated aesthetic taste is also revealed to be a sham. Osmond treats women poorly, isolating his daughter at a convent, treating Isabel as an object, and having been unfaithful to his first wife (now deceased). He furthermore craves admiration and obedience from those around him. Osmond is a villain and a direct foil to Isabel's innocence and kindness. Overall, his deception and consequent marriage to Isabel forces her to abandon her idealism and personal freedoms for the sake of morality and social propriety. - Character: Madame Merle. Description: Madam Merle, one of the novel's antagonists and Mrs. Touchett's friend, is similarly an American expatriate and an unconventional woman. She is a widow who lacks fortune, yet manages to spend her time traveling through Europe and the United States by using her social connections. Isabel Archer greatly admires Merle's charisma and accomplishments when they meet at Gardencourt, and the two form a strong friendship. However, Merle conspires to set up the newly wealthy Isabel with her friend Gilbert Osmond. She wants to see them married, despite their incompatibilities in values and desires. Madame Merle's strange intentions are later revealed as an attempt to secure Isabel's inheritance for Osmond and his daughter Pansy's benefit—it turns out that Pansy is the result of Osmond and Merle's longtime affair, but her parentage has remained a secret throughout her life. Merle wishes to ensure their future comforts at the expense of Isabel's happiness. She is therefore a highly ambitious character who understands the desires of others and manipulates them to her advantage. Her relationship with Pansy is ambiguous; Pansy is unaware of her parentage, and despite Merle's efforts to win favor with the girl as a family friend, Pansy seems to dislike her mother. Madame Merle lacks moral conviction, as demonstrated by her affair with Osmond and her encouraging the union between Isabel and Osmond despite knowing Osmond's cruelty. Merle is matched with Osmond as the narrative villains who bring down the protagonist. She is also a foil for Isabel, as although both are intent upon achieving personal freedom, Isabel shows the moral high road in that she will not sacrifice her morality and social duty in her pursuit for independence. Furthermore, Isabel pities Merle when she finds out the truth of Pansy's parentage and the callous scheming that Merle demonstrates. - Character: Lord Warburton. Description: A wealthy English nobleman and Mr. Touchett and Mrs. Touchett's neighbor, Lord Warburton is enchanted by Isabel Archer when she arrives at Gardencourt. He has a close friendship with Ralph Touchett and an almost fatherly relationship with his two meek sisters, the Misses Molyneux, whom he introduces to Isabel. Warburton quickly falls in love with Isabel and pursues her hand in marriage. Despite his wealth, status, and many admirable personal qualities, Isabel refuses his marriage proposal for fear that she will lose her independence. He appears to accept her decision in good spirits, but later tries to marry Isabel's stepdaughter Pansy Osmond, perhaps in order to stay close to Isabel. Despite his unusually liberal political values, Lord Warburton still embodies Old World convention as he cannot in reality accept a world where he does not exist as a patriarchal, aristocratic, and authoritative figure. - Character: Caspar Goodwood. Description: A savvy American businessman in the cotton-mill industry, Caspar Goodwood pursues Isabel Archer to England to ask for her hand in marriage. Isabel is greatly attracted by his forceful charisma, but she rejects his marriage proposal for fear their union would quash her independence. Goodwood is friends with Henrietta Stackpole and shares many of her personal qualities, for he is also ambitious, forthright, and progressive. His blunt behaviors contrast another of Isabel's suitors, the typically English and aristocratic Lord Warburton. Goodwood remains committed to Isabel throughout her marriage to Gilbert Osmond, even scandalously suggesting that she abandon Osmond so that they can begin a new life overseas together. - Character: Mrs. Touchett. Description: Ralph's mother and Isabel Archer's aunt, Mrs. Touchett is an American expatriate who discovers Isabel in America and invites her to stay at Gardencourt (the Touchett family estate) in England. Mrs. Touchett is a very pragmatic individual and also somewhat unconventional, living in Italy separate from her husband Mr. Touchett and son Ralph for most of the year. Despite her blunt and unorthodox manner, she is very dear to Isabel, and they enjoy traveling through parts of Europe together. Mrs. Touchett detests English life, preferring to reside in Italy and travel regularly back to America. - Character: Mr. Touchett. Description: Ralph Touchett's father and Isabel Archer's uncle. Mr. Touchett is an American expatriate and wealthy banker who moved his family to England for his career prospects. Mr. Touchett has a strained relationship with Mrs. Touchett, who prefers to live abroad for most of the year. He is elderly and sickly, but greatly enjoys meeting Isabel and comes to treasure her regular presence in his life. Mr. Touchett is a kind and generous man who, at Ralph's encouragement, leaves Isabel a large fortune in his will so that she can enjoy a life of personal freedom. - Character: Henrietta Stackpole. Description: A patriotic American journalist and Isabel Archer's friend. Isabel greatly admires Henrietta because she is bold, ambitious, and self-sufficient. While writing about European life for a newspaper column, Henrietta visits Isabel at Gardencourt (the Touchett family estate), where she is unimpressed with the mundane lives of the English elite. They are equally unimpressed with her brash, even ignorant attitudes. Henrietta sometimes offers Isabel sound advice, especially in her warnings about Gilbert Osmond's untrustworthiness. But although Henrietta believes she has Isabel's best interests at heart, she interferes in Isabel's life by encouraging Caspar Goodwood's romantic pursuits. Isabel is eventually disillusioned by her friend's relinquishing her independence in marrying Mr. Bantling. - Character: Edward Rosier. Description: An American expatriate and art collector who lives in Paris. Having known Isabel Archer as a child, they reconnect while Isabel is traveling Europe and remain good friends. Rosier is an unassuming and good-natured individual who falls in love with Pansy Osmond. She returns his feelings and Isabel approves of this love match. However, Pansy's father Gilbert Osmond does not, judging that Rosier is not wealthy or connected enough to be a favorable suitor for his daughter. - Character: Pansy Osmond. Description: Gilbert Osmond's only child, Pansy is fifteen years old when Isabel Archer first meets her. Educated in a Swiss convent, Pansy is an impressionable young woman who is mild-mannered and obedient to her father's every wish. She surprises Isabel with her intelligence, but remains unaware that Madame Merle is her mother. Pansy may be the central reason that Isabel returns to her marriage with Gilbert Osmond at the novel's end, for she does not want to abandon the sweet girl. - Character: Countess Gemini. Description: Gilbert Osmond's frivolous sister. She is widely regarded as disreputable due to her unfaithfulness to her husband. However, Countess Gemini demonstrates some moral fortitude when she objects to Madame Merle's designs for Gilbert Osmond to marry Isabel Archer, for the Countess believes that Isabel is too good for her unscrupulous brother. She is also the person who reveals to Isabel the truth of the relationship between Osmond, his longtime mistress Madame Merle, and their illegitimate daughter, Pansy. - Theme: Female Independence vs. Marriage. Description: Isabel Archer, the protagonist of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, is a fiercely independent young woman who departs from America to explore the enchanting world of Europe. Defying the social expectation that she be obedient and dependent on a man, Isabel is determined to forge a life in which she prioritizes personal freedom—she will not stand for others to impose their will on her. During Isabel's travels, her dynamic personality results in multiple offers of marriage, many of which come from men of towering social standing and wealth. But unlike the traditional Victorian marriage plot, James's novel does not culminate in happy matrimony for the protagonist. Despite Isabel's driving ambition to secure a life in which she is free to choose her own values and actions, she marries Gilbert Osmond, a man who reveals himself as a controlling and Machiavellian character who despises female independence. Isabel's entrapment in marriage reflects the novel's other undesirable ones, which suggest that female independence cannot exist within a Victorian marriage. Throughout the novel, Isabel's actions are motivated by the need to prove her personal freedom to herself and to the world at large. This occurs most significantly when she shocks her peers with her rejections of Lord Warburton and Caspar Goodwood's respective marriage proposals; either would have been an extremely advantageous social match for Isabel. Women of the time were expected to marry, and marriage for social gain was more common (and, perhaps, more respected) than for love. Rather than graciously accept one of the advantageous offers, Isabel rejects them both, seeing her unmarried status as an anchor of her independence in a culture dominated by masculine desire. When Isabel finally marries, she does so believing that it was her personal choice to accept Gilbert Osmond's marriage proposal—rather than an arrangement someone thrust upon her or society pressured her into—given that Osmond doesn't boast of social currency or wealth. Rather than embodying her independent mind and spirit, however, Isabel's decision to marry actually results in the sacrifice of her personal liberties. Readers are likely stunned by Isabel's choice of husband, as are her peers. In fact, Isabel ignores her family and friends' warnings about Osmond's poor character. She believes he is a noble aesthete (an individual of cultivated tastes), and that it is her choice to socially limit herself by marrying a man with little wealth or career prospects. Due to her own newly inherited wealth from her late uncle, Isabel is certain that she is actually exercising her personal freedom in empowering Osmond to fulfil his seemingly noble aesthetic ideals. However, Osmond's aesthetic pursuits turn out to be a farce, for they are not ethically principled as Isabel believed. Osmond's mask drops after their marriage, and he quashes Isabel's ideas and desires—he will not stand for female independence, evidenced in his upbringing of his wholly obedient daughter, Pansy, whom he's confined to a Swiss convent. Isabel's noble intentions have resulted in a tethered existence where she bears the whims of her husband. Furthermore, the narrative reveals Isabel's decision to marry Osmond was actually orchestrated by Madame Merle—a friend of Isabel's aunt, Mrs. Touchett—and Osmond himself. Isabel's biggest life decision, which she believed was firmly rooted in independent thought, was carefully designed by others who did not have her best interests at heart. Isabel is appalled by her mistake in marriage, and Goodwood offers her an easy escape to run away with him. Instead of leaving Osmond, though, Isabel decides she must bear her marriage to honor her commitment to him. Isabel's character development has shifted from prioritizing a woman's choice to yielding to patriarchal and social authority. As she tells her cousin Ralph, she will do what is ethically right rather than choose independence from her wicked husband. Beyond Isabel's nightmarish marriage, James peppers the novel with other failed and non-functional marriages, emphasizing that female independence cannot effectively exist within the confines of a Victorian marriage. Examples include the Countess Gemini's well-known infidelity, the revelation that Osmond was unfaithful to his first wife, and the Touchett's dysfunctional marriage that has only lasted a respectable lifetime because Mr. Touchett and his wife reside in separate countries for most of the year. James's widespread depiction of matrimonial misery paints marriage as a cage that limits women due to their social duty to bend to their husbands' desires. Although Isabel has been deceived into a terrible marriage, she is not a tragic figure. Isabel ends the novel by choosing to return to Rome to live with Osmond (or so readers are led to believe by Isabel's friend Henrietta Stackpole, her account the only explanation of Isabel's whereabouts that James includes at the narrative's conclusion). Isabel therefore exerts her own will to honor her moral commitment rather than her desired independent lifestyle. Paradoxically, her decision to return to the shackles of her dreadful marriage can perhaps be viewed as a retrospective freedom of choice as well as a certain future of dutiful matrimonial obedience. The costs of The Portrait of a Lady's multiple dismal marital unions, though, suggest that James—himself a rebel who defied his family's wishes by never marrying—did not have confidence in the righteousness of marriage. - Theme: The European Old World vs. the American New World. Description: Henry James wrote a number of stories that contrasted American New World values of ingenuity, optimism, and new money against the European Old World values of sophistication, decadence, and a history steeped in hierarchy and tradition. James's novel The Portrait of a Lady plays on this international contrast; James himself was an American who spent significant time living in Europe, and The Portrait's protagonist, Isabel Archer, is a young woman who similarly travels from America to Europe for worldly experiences. Although Isabel begins the novel a spirited individual who embodies the best elements of the New World, she is captivated by the allure of Old World values that then trap her into a dreadful marriage. Through this situation, James suggests that the Old World tradition of social duty is far more limiting and harmful than New World individualism. Although James shows New World values in positive and negative lights, none of The Portrait's characters are significantly devastated by New World behaviors, such as individualism, independence, and forward-looking optimism. At the novel's opening, Isabel exhibits the best of New World values—she is spirited, curious, ambitious, and independent, all qualities that endear her to her peers. She never significantly harms any character except her own self through her choice in marriage. Caspar Goodwood, the successful American business who dislikes England but follows Isabel there to pursue her hand in marriage, is the epitome of a New World man due to his modern outlook and unfailing self-confidence. Despite his tendency to sometimes act in a thoughtless or ruthless manner (perhaps the underbelly of such spirited optimism), he does not disadvantage any of The Portrait's characters. Like Goodwood, Isabel's friend Henrietta Stackpole, a journalist, is forcefully American in her blunt manner and career-driven lifestyle. Although she offends numerous people during her European travels, she never deals any major harm. By contrast, James uses a much heavier hand in criticizing the more unsavory aspects of the Old World. Although feudal Old World traditions are often imbued with sophistication and morality, as seen through Lord Warburton and Ralph Touchett, the accompanying decadence and social duty that Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle embody prove disastrous for Isabel Archer. A number of The Portrait's main characters possess admirable Old World qualities. Lord Warburton is noble, gallant, and gracious, while Ralph is courteous, kind, and the novel's moral compass in terms of his astute reading of other characters. Both men fit almost perfectly into Old World social and moral codes. Like Ralph, Osmond and Madame Merle are American expatriates who identify much more readily with the European cultures they have lived in for so long. However, Osmond and Merle encapsulate an Old World decadence that ensnares the naïve Isabel. They have the appearance of sophistication and taste, but lack morality entirely. Osmond in particular favors the worst of Old World values to the point that he treats his daughter and new wife as possessions that add merit to his tasteful art collection. He and Madame Merle invisibly manipulate Isabel into an unfavorable marriage compared to Caspar Goodwood and Henrietta Stackpole's frank desire for Isabel to marry Goodwood. Old World values ultimately trap Isabel in a lifestyle opposite to the New World individualism she has long desired, revealing James's underlying warning that the European Old World is stifling and even harmful in its commitment to propriety and social duty. Isabel is an ideal New World woman whose passion for Europe leads to sophisticated experiences and newfound wealth, but ultimately personal misfortune. After falling victim to Madame Merle and Osmond's scheme, she feels morally obliged to stay loyal to Osmond in their terrible marriage. Isabel ultimately demonstrates greater integrity than the Old World villains, refusing to follow in Osmond and Madame Merle's footsteps in ignoring social duty and moral conscience. However, by giving up the chance to escape her vile husband (Goodwood gives her the opportunity to run away with him and leave her husband), she has to relinquish her American-bred independence. In the clash between two worlds, Henry James uses Isabel's demise to represent entrenched European Old World values as more dangerous and powerful than starry-eyed New World ideas like optimism, innovation, and individualism. - Theme: Art and Morality. Description: In Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is an independent young American woman who travels to Europe to experience cultures steeped in history and tradition. James richly imbues Isabel's story with details of the art that she views while sightseeing and visiting private homesteads. Of particular note are the art collections belonging to Ralph Touchett (Isabel's cousin) and Gilbert Osmond (Isabel's future husband). In Europe, aesthetic taste demonstrates sophistication. As Isabel becomes more knowledgeable in European sensibilities, she comes to appreciate art in a more nuanced manner; however, she makes the mistake of equating aesthetic taste with ethical values, marrying the aesthetically refined yet morally corrupt Osmond. It is therefore Isabel's artistic as well as idealistic sensibilities that partially lead to her downfall. The character Ralph Touchett demonstrates how artistic taste is a measure of individual sophistication in Europe, while Gilbert Osmond darkly illustrates how it can be feigned to gain social power. Ralph, arguably The Portrait's most morally upright character, has a small but tasteful art collection at his family home, Gardencourt. As Isabel grows in knowledge and experience, she comes to recognize how beautiful and valuable his collection really is and simultaneously adores her cousin even more for his exquisite artistic taste. This is one of the examples by which James suggests that art is a measure of refined taste and culture, which was true of late nineteenth-century Europe when The Portrait was written. Isabel is also enchanted by Osmond's aesthetic taste and art collection. She is so enamored by his artistic ideals that it is a key persuasion for her marrying him, allowing Isabel to help fund his apparently noble aesthetic taste. However, upon their marriage, she learns that there is no real system of value underpinning Osmond's artistic taste; it is a façade of fine taste that aligns with the nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement of "art for art's sake." Osmond has feigned artistic taste and ethical behavior to gain wealth and social status from his union with Isabel. Some characters' attitudes toward their art collections extend negatively to their human relationships, revealing that artistic sensitivity and taste is by no means a marker of morality. For example, Gilbert Osmond objectifies other people, perceiving them as art over which he can exercise ownership. He views his daughter, Pansy, and his new wife as property that he owns and can control, thereby molding them into objects of taste in his aesthetic collection and limiting their personal freedom. Even the virtuous Ralph Touchett is guilty of sometimes treating people as art. He is inspired by Isabel's individualism and beauty in much the same way that his art collection inspires him; he convinces his father to gift Isabel a small fortune so that Ralph can watch Isabel's progress experiencing the world on her terms as a flourishing work of art. Though Ralph's intentions are noble, he still objectifies Isabel in the process. Art is a strong undercurrent in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, as artistic and aesthetic taste largely influence Isabel's character development and the way other people view her. While Osmond forcefully exercises ownership over Isabel as an artwork, and Ralph views Isabel as an individual who requires "artistic completion" by experiencing all Europe has to offer, Henry James himself also conceives of Isabel through art. Through the novel itself, James owns and controls Isabel's character as a work of art. This is reflected in the novel's title, The Portrait of a Lady, with James painting many portraits of Isabel ranging from a naïve yet independent young woman to a sophisticated yet socially confined wife. - Theme: The Dangers of Wealth. Description: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady describes the formative years of Isabel Archer, a spirited and idealistic American woman who travels to Europe from her home state of New York in order to experience the sophisticated culture of countries such as England, France, and Italy. Isabel is a young woman of no means who has so far happily partaken in life with a will to exercise her personal liberty in all regards, and she wants to continue enjoying this distinctively American brand of individualism during her European travels. However, her personal responsibilities are complicated when her cousin in England, Ralph Touchett, convinces his dying father, Mr. Touchett, to leave Isabel a large inheritance in his will. Ralph hopes that gifting his beloved cousin financial independence will allow her to always make own choices in life. Although wealth has afforded many of Isabel's European peers favorable opportunities, it soon becomes apparent that Isabel's social status as a relative nobody offered her more liberties than her newfound wealth does. Unforeseen wealth ultimately endangers Isabel's independence by tying her to increased social responsibilities. Wealth initially seems favorable, as it affords many of the The Portrait's characters great opportunities in lifestyle and social status. For example, wealth has afforded Isabel's suitors Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton power and charisma due to their privileged upbringings in industrialist and aristocratic families, respectively. Meanwhile, Mr. Touchett has been able to provide Mrs. Touchett and Ralph with luxurious lifestyles due to his success in banking. Ralph Touchett expects Isabel will benefit in the same way from her new windfall. Indeed, wealth initially enables Isabel to dream of diverse ways to use her money ethically. This is more than she had previously hoped for during her less exciting yet contented years in America, where she felt fulfilled through pursuits such as travel and reading despite her financial instability per Isabel's father's reckless use of family money. However, unexpected wealth is dangerous because Isabel has not been educated to understand the social responsibilities and dangers associated with prosperity. Mrs. Touchett and her friend Harriet Stackpole warn their friend of the expectations attached to wealth, but Isabel is too overwhelmed by her new money to understand the duties and risks they speak of. She is so staggered by her uncle's generous inheritance that it takes her some time to process her changed circumstances; once she finally comes to terms with her new wealth, she is almost crippled by the expectation she places on herself to achieve meaningful enterprises with her monetary gift. Most significantly, Isabel fails to acknowledge her friends' caution of the risks that come with wealth. She becomes subject to the schemes of cunning social predators: Madame Merle, Mrs. Touchett's friend, arranges for her lover, Gilbert Osmond, to court Isabel in order to marry her and gain possession of her fortune so that Merle, Osmond, and their illegitimate child Pansy can have access to it. Osmond successfully convinces Isabel to accept his proposal; upon their marriage, she realizes his true cruel personality. Despite Ralph Touchett's best intentions to free Isabel by gifting her financial independence, his family money has contributed to her downfall. She is miserable in her marriage to Osmond, particularly when compared to her carefree attitudes when she lived in America. Her fortune led her into a tragic union, and she no longer has control over her finances, having relinquished her money to Osmond upon their contract of marriage. The Portrait of a Lady therefore tells the story of an innocent young woman's demise, with money at its core. Ralph Touchett believes that wealth will enable Isabel her much-desired freedom to live by her own choices and no one else's, but Isabel's ill-informed naivety makes her an easy target of malicious opportunists. Isabel's earlier contentedness with her life of marginal means compared to her discontent at the decisions she makes concerning her newfound wealth illustrates the difference between money and happiness. Readers cannot, however, infer that Henry James is implying that wealth automatically brings ruin; after all, wealth provides endless comfort for the waning Ralph and his critically ill father. Instead, James demonstrates that unexpected prosperity can be perilous if its beneficiaries have not been thoroughly educated in wealth's liabilities. - Climax: Isabel, sitting in her room, reflects on her unhappy marriage and considers the events that led her here. - Summary: Isabel Archer, an independent and curious young woman from Albany, New York, arrives to the English countryside at the invitation of her maternal aunt Mrs. Touchett. Having never met their American relative, Isabel's uncle Mr. Touchett and her cousin Ralph greet her warmly at Gardencourt (the Touchett family estate). They are both immediately taken by Isabel's beauty and good nature after she appears like an apparition in their doorway. Mr. Touchett and Ralph are both unwell due to old age and consumption, respectively. Also present at this first introduction is the dashing Lord Warburton, the Touchett's neighbor, who is similarly enchanted upon meeting Isabel. Spending four months at Gardencourt, Isabel is grateful for the Touchett's goodwill and charmed by their reclusive, yet beautiful, rural lifestyle. She spends time daily with her uncle and cousin, her fresh perspective and energy bringing them great joy despite their ill health. Isabel's aunt continues to favor her but spends most time isolated from the family in her rooms, as is her custom; Mr. and Mrs. Touchett have succeeded in a long marriage by spending the majority of their time apart, often living in different countries. During her stay at Gardencourt, Isabel also spends time with Lord Warburton, who offers her a tour to inspect the architecture and grounds at Lockleigh, his neighboring castle property. He also introduces her to his two sisters. When Warburton proposes suddenly, Isabel is shocked. She rejects his offer as politely as she can, and is relieved by his good character in his continued visits to the Gardencourt in as friendly and gentlemanly a manner as ever. Gardencourt is also transformed by the arrival of Henrietta Stackpole, an American journalist whom Isabel idolizes for her successful career and personal independence. Henrietta is reporting on European lifestyles for her newspaper column. Ralph accompanies Isabel and Henrietta to London to experience the capital's social scene. Despite Isabel's admiration for her friend, Henrietta's frank and even tactless personality ruffles a few feathers amongst the English elite. While in London, Isabel rejects yet another request for her hand in marriage. The wealthy and charismatic American businessman Caspar Goodwood has followed her to England to pursue their burgeoning relationship. As with Warburton, Isabel is attracted to Goodwood—perhaps even more strongly—but cannot see herself marrying him. She is concerned that marriage to either man will result in the sacrifice of her personal freedoms. Isabel's current desire is to experience exotic adventures throughout Europe without being tied to down to anyone else's influence. As with Warburton, she expresses to Goodwood her desire for total independence and explains that she would not make a good wife. Madame Merle, an American ex-patriate and old friend of Mrs. Touchett's, visits Gardencourt and strikes up a firm friendship with Isabel. During this time, Mr. Touchett's health declines further. Ralph, who is fascinated by his cousin and wishes to fulfil her desire for a life of personal freedom, convinces his father to leave a significant portion of his will to Isabel. Upon Mr. Touchett's passing, Isabel is grief-stricken and also overwhelmed by the enormity of her surprising new financial assets. She comes to accept her uncle's generous gift, vowing to use her money to make meaningful change in the world. Despite Ralph's designs for new wealth to guarantee Isabel's independence, Henrietta and Mrs. Touchett warn Isabel of the responsibilities and risks of financial prosperity. Isabel begins traveling Europe, visiting various locations in England, France, and Italy. In Florence, Madame Merle introduces Isabel to another American expatriate named Gilbert Osmond. Osmond is an older gentleman who fascinates Isabel due to his worldly experiences, artistic taste, and non-conforming personal life. The two spend time together, with Isabel unaware that Osmond and Madame Merle are collaborating for Osmond to take advantage of Isabel and her new wealth. After four months Osmond proposes to Isabel. Despite her family and friends' mistrust of Osmond, Isabel accepts his proposal of marriage, believing that their union will lead to her financing his artistic exploits as a worthy cause. Usually a perceptive individual, she is completely blind to his serious flaws in character. Skipping forward two years in time, Isabel and Osmond are living in Rome in an unhappy marriage. Osmond treats Isabel as a mere addition to his art collection, and Isabel is unhappy with the lack of a true partnership. She has discovered that Osmond is a deceitful, selfish, and dominating individual. However, Isabel has come to adore Osmond's daughter, Pansy, an intelligent yet meek girl who obeys her father's every wish. Isabel's acquaintance from childhood, Edward Rosier, is a young art collector who falls in love with Pansy. Isabel approves wholeheartedly of the love match but Osmond opposes Rosier's courtship on the grounds that the young art collector has little wealth and career prospects. Osmond prefers Pansy to marry Lord Warburton instead, for the English aristocrat has shown interest is the young woman. Isabel is concerned that Warburton is only pursuing Pansy to be close to Isabel, as he may still be in love with her. Isabel learns that Ralph's health has seriously declined, and he is nearing death. She desperately wants to visit Gardencourt to be with him, but Osmond forbids it. Furthermore, Isabel learns that Pansy is the child of an affair between Osmond and Madame Merle, a secret that has been hidden throughout Pansy's life. Isabel comes to pity her previous friend, Merle, for her immoral and lonely existence. Before departing for England, Pansy begs Isabel to return to Rome, as the girl adores her stepmother. Isabel leaves without Osmond's permission. At Gardencourt, Isabel reconnects with Ralph and comforts him until he passes. She is devastated by his loss. Goodwood visits her at Gardencourt, where he reiterates his commitment to her and passionately suggests that they run away together. Upon looking for her the next day, he discovers she has left the estate. Henrietta suggests that Isabel has returned to her husband in England.

- Genre: Short Story, Gothic Fiction, Domestic Horror - Title: The Possibility of Evil - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: An unnamed American town in the mid-20th century - Character: Miss Adela Strangeworth. Description: Miss Strangeworth is an old woman who has lived in the same house her entire life. She feels protective of her community and regularly worries about the possibility of evil things happening in it. In particular, she prizes her roses and worries about strangers stealing them. At the start of the story, Miss Strangeworth heads into town to run errands. She starts with a trip to the grocer and then heads over to the library. During and between errands, she has mundane conversations with a number of people including Mr. Lewis, Helen Crane, and Miss Chandler. None of her conversations are too out of the ordinary, but she does think that her interlocuters look distracted and possibly distressed. However, when Mis Strangeworth arrives back at home, she becomes a much more sinister figure. It is revealed that she often spends her evenings writing nasty letters to the people she interacted with throughout the day. She keeps these letters anonymous, and their contents are based in gossip rather than fact. After writing her letters, Miss Strangeworth feels a sense of satisfaction because she believes that she is helping to purge evil from her community. Unfortunately for her, one of her letters falls to the ground as she is mailing it and her anonymity is exposed. At the end of the story, it is implied that her roses are destroyed as a form of retaliation carried out by Don or Helen Crane. Miss Strangeworth weeps at the fate of her roses and bemoans the presence of evil in the world. However, she never thinks of herself as part of that evil. - Character: Helen Crane. Description: Helen Crane is married to Don Crane and mother to a baby girl. She talks to Miss Strangeworth outside the grocery store. Miss Strangeworth chastises her for spoiling her daughter and tells her she worries too much about how her child is developing. Later, though, she receives a letter from Miss Strangeworth calling her daughter an "idiot." Along with her husband, she is likely responsible for the destruction of Miss Strangeworth's roses. - Character: Don Crane. Description: Don Crane is married to Helen Crane and father to a baby girl. He only appears by name in the story, but Miss Strangeworth addresses the letter calling the Crane child an idiot to him. Along with his wife, he is likely responsible for the destruction of Miss Strangeworth's roses. - Character: Dave Harris. Description: Dave Harris is a young man who is dating Linda Stewart. Miss Strangeworth is distrustful of him and writes to Linda's parents to warn them of the relationship. Near the end of the story, he sees Miss Strangeworth drop one of her letters—the one addressed to Don and Helen Crane—and decides to deliver it himself. Although he is well-intentioned, he ruins the anonymity of Miss Strangeworth's letter. - Character: Linda Stewart. Description: Linda Stewart is a young woman who is seeing Dave Harris. Miss Strangeworth overhears Linda telling Dave that he has a "dirty mind," although Dave claims to not know what she is talking about. It is implied that the cause of this argument is one of Miss Strangeworth's letters. After their conversation, Dave decides to deliver the letter Miss Strangeworth dropped and Linda asks, "Why do anyone a favour?"—an attitude suggesting that the town isn't as perfect as it seems. - Character: The Crane Baby. Description: The Crane baby is the female child of Don and Helen Crane. Helen refers to her as a princess and insists on spoiling her, much to the chagrin of Miss Strangeworth. Helen also worries about the child's development. Miss Strangeworth tells Helen she is being silly, but later writes her a letter calling her child an idiot. - Theme: Everyday Evil. Description: At the heart of "The Possibility of Evil" is the revelation that evil exists in our everyday lives, which often goes unnoticed by the person perpetrating it. Miss Strangeworth spends her days cataloging the flaws she perceives in her neighbors, only to spend her evenings criticizing them anonymously via letters. Throughout the story, Miss Strangeworth remains steadfast in the belief that she is helping to purge her community of evil, while remaining completely oblivious to the harm she is causing. Central to Miss Strangeworth's concerns—and to the story's critique of Miss Strangeworth—is the idea that evil crops up everywhere, even in places one does not expect it. Miss Strangeworth sees evil in how Don and Helen Crane pamper their child and in the romantic relationship forming between Linda Stewart and Dave Harris. Meanwhile, the story sees evil primarily in Miss Strangeworth herself. Though she is confident in the virtue of her letters, the evil contained within them is apparent to anyone else who reads them. Nowhere in her letters is Miss Strangeworth offering constructive criticism, nor is she relying on facts. (As the narrator observes, Miss Strangeworth prefers "the more negotiable stuff of suspicion" over facts.) She spreads venomous gossip—much of which has the potential to destroy relationships—only to provide herself with a sense of satisfaction. Furthermore, while a couple of her accusations are serious offences (adultery, murder), some are minor infractions (shoplifting), and others—such as those pertaining to Dave Harris—appear to be entirely unfounded. As she writes her destructive letters, Miss Strangeworth points the finger at everyone around her, failing to notice that she is the perpetrator of the most pervasive evil in her neighborhood. - Theme: Repression. Description: Although Miss Strangeworth describes her letter-writing process as a necessity to cleanse evil from her community, it is actually a way for her to release her own repressed thoughts and feelings. In particular, Miss Strangeworth is fixated on two things: money and sex. Miss Strangeworth is regularly critical of people who she thinks are flaunting their wealth. This includes Don and Helen Crane, who like to buy their child expensive garments, and Billy Moore, who drives around in his father's fancy car. Though she is not subtle about her distaste for such actions even in person, she becomes especially vitriolic in her letters, as she calls the Crane child an "idiot"—meaning intellectually disabled—and tells the school board that Billy Moore's father, a chemistry teacher, should not be able to afford his new car. Similarly, Miss Strangeworth assumes every relationship between a man and a woman to be sexual in nature and therefore evil. This is demonstrated in the letter Miss Strangeworth sends to Mrs. Harper pertaining to adultery and in the letters she sends to Linda Stewart's parents, which imply a sexual relationship between Linda and Dave Harris. Notably, all of Miss Strangeworth's accounts are unfounded and therefore say much more about her than they do about their addressees. On the subject of wealth, Miss Strangeworth is shown to be hypocritical; she lives in a nice house with expensive objects and takes great pride in the roses that she doesn't allow others to touch. Meanwhile, her obsession with sex can be interpreted to be a sign of jealousy. After all, Miss Strangeworth is single and has apparently always lived alone. Miss Strangeworth's repressed feelings might explain the rage exhibited in her letters, as well as why she feels so energized the morning after sending them. - Theme: The Illusion of Utopia. Description: "The Possibility of Evil" is a critique of mid-20th-century WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) culture, which outwardly projected an image of perfection while obscuring its unsavory elements. Jackson plays up the utopic lens through which WASPs saw their world to the point of parody. For instance, the street Miss Strangeworth lives on is named Pleasant Street and it is suffused by the smell of roses. Similarly, everyone in town cannot help but remark upon what a lovely day it is, and it seems as though the sun never stops shining. Everything on the surface looks picture perfect, but underneath evil still lurks. Miss Strangeworth is the most obvious culprit in the story, as she regularly sends out her nasty letters that disrupt the lives of others. However, she is not the only person whom Jackson critiques in the story. There is also Linda Stewart, who cynically asks, "Why do anyone a favour?" as well as Don Crane, who presumably destroys Miss Strangeworth's roses. All of the characters in the story project an appearance of innocence, but almost all of them have darkness lurking underneath. The only exception to this rule is Dave Harris, who decides to deliver Miss Strangeworth's letter out of the goodness of his heart—a decision that ironically backfires and results in the Cranes' anger and the destruction of the roses. Speaking of the roses, they are the perfect symbol to represent this theme: from far away they are beautiful and fragrant, but close up, one begins to see their thorns. Therefore, the destruction of the roses is not just a one-off act of rage, but rather a metaphor for the idea that the "utopia" of mid-20th-century WASP culture is actually an illusion. - Theme: Community and Isolation. Description: "The Possibility of Evil" is a study of an individual who is at once deeply involved in her community and remarkably isolated from it. Miss Strangeworth is familiar with everyone in town: she knows where the strawberries come from at the grocery store, she is part of the bridge club, she donates to the local library, and she knows everyone's secrets—or at least she thinks she does. In addition, Miss Strangeworth's family has lived in the community for a long time, and she takes pride in the fact that her grandfather constructed the first house on Pleasant Street. However, despite the love Miss Strangeworth professes for her community, all of her connections to it are rather superficial. Everyone she talks to throughout the day is friendly with her, but she does not appear to have any real friends. Furthermore, the conversations she engages in are largely uninteresting, as they only pertain to matters such as nice weather, groceries, and library funds. When Miss Strangeworth is having these conversations, other thoughts are going on in the back of her mind that only come out once she is alone. Also, Miss Strangeworth is completely without family. Her parents are presumably dead, and she has no husband or children. She lives in her house with only the memory of other Strangeworths to keep her company. As such, Miss Strangeworth's letters, which often center around severing relationships, can be understood as an attempt to replicate her own situation in others' lives—that is, the loneliness of knowing one's own community both too well and not at all. - Climax: Don Crane ruins Miss Strangeworth's flowers. - Summary: On a bright, sunny day in an unnamed American town, an elderly lady named Miss Adela Strangeworth runs errands. Miss Strangeworth's family has lived in the town for a long time; her grandfather built the first house—the house she still lives in—on Pleasant Street, and her grandmother planted the roses which continue to decorate her property. The roses are Miss Strangeworth's pride and joy, and she does not let anyone touch them. Miss Strangeworth begins her errands with a stop at the grocery store, where she briefly converses with Mr. Lewis, the grocer. Both of them discuss how it is a lovely day, though Miss Strangeworth thinks that there is something not quite right with Mr. Lewis. As their conversation is wrapping up, Mrs. Martha Harper arrives at the store. Miss Strangeworth and Mrs. Harper speak briefly, and Miss Strangeworth thinks about whether Mrs. Harper is taking care of herself. After her conversation with Mrs. Harper, Miss Strangeworth leaves the store and runs into Helen Crane and her baby. The two discuss how the Cranes pamper their child—something Miss Strangeworth dislikes—and how Helen is worried about the child's development. Miss Strangeworth tells her not to worry and then continues on her way. She stops by the library, has a brief conversation with Miss Chandler, the librarian, who seems distracted, and then heads home. After arriving home, Miss Strangeworth goes to her desk and begins writing anonymous nasty letters to the people she's interacted with throughout the day. The contents of her letters are not based in fact and could be quite damaging to their recipients' lives. Among other things, she tells the Cranes that their child is developmentally disabled, Mr. Lewis that his grandson is stealing from him, and Miss Chandler that the man she is seeing may be a murderer. After Miss Strangeworth finishes writing her letters, she takes a nap, eats dinner, and then goes on a walk to the post office. At the post office, she overhears a conversation between Dave Harris and Linda Stewart, who are having relationship issues, most likely because of Miss Strangeworth's letters. Miss Strangeworth then mails two of her letters, but unbeknownst to her, a third letter falls to the ground. Dave Harris finds the letter, recognizes it as Miss Strangeworth's, and then decides to deliver it directly to its recipient, which turns out to be Don Crane, Helen's husband. Miss Strangeworth walks home and goes to bed. She wakes up feeling great and realizes it must be because of the letters she sent the day before. She walks downstairs and enters her dining room, where she spots an envelope that looks surprisingly similar to one of her own. She starts to cry as she reads the contents: "Look out at what used to be your roses."

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Postmaster - Point of view: Third-person omniscient narrator - Setting: Ulapur, Bengal, British India - Character: The Postmaster. Description: The postmaster (known only by his job title, never by his actual name) is a young Indian man from Calcutta employed as a postmaster in Ulapur, a rural Bengal village. The postmaster comes to Ulapur after the British owner of an indigo dye factory in Ulapur asks the government to install a post office there. This is an institution that will modernize Ulapur, providing the isolated village with a means of contact with the outside world. Because the postmaster is from Calcutta, a large city, he feels out of place in rural Ulapur, and he is a "bad mixer": he does not know how to interact with the other men in Ulapur (indigo factory workers who are poorly educated, unlike the postmaster, and too busy with their own work to spend time with him). The postmaster has "little work to do" and earns a "meager" salary. In his free time, he tries to write poetry, though he feels somewhat disillusioned with the themes of his own poems. He writes about the transcendent beauty of nature in Ulapur, yet he would prefer to be in urban Calcutta, with its impressive "paved roads" and "high rises." Out of boredom and loneliness, the postmaster develops a relationship with Ratan, an orphan who helps him with housework, and he begins to share stories about his life with her. He also begins to teach her how to read. However, the unending monsoons in Ulapur depress the postmaster and cause him to become ill. He quits his job and leaves Ratan behind in Ulapur, offering her a significant sum of money out of guilt—which she refuses. At the end of the narrative, the postmaster, leaving Ulapur by boat, reflects "philosophically" on his situation, comforting himself by thinking that there would be "no point" in returning to Ratan, since life is fleeting, always filled with death and separation. Though the postmaster does show kindness to Ratan, his own loneliness and sense of alienation and purposelessness lead him to take advantage of the orphan girl's own loneliness and isolation. Ultimately, the postmaster's urban, educated background renders him incapable of understanding life—and other people—in Ulapur, making his return to Calcutta inevitable. - Character: Ratan. Description: Ratan is a "twelve or thirteen" year old "orphaned village girl" who helps the postmaster with housework in return for a portion of his meals. Tagore's anonymous narrator notes that it is "unlikely" that she will get married, suggesting that her future is bleak: she is lower-class, lacks a family, and cannot marry out of her poverty or find employment outside of menial household work. At first reluctant to interact with the postmaster, Ratan gradually begins to enjoy her conversations with her "master," in which she recounts her own family background and begins to form "affectionate imaginary pictures" of the postmaster's own family life. Ratan also learns quickly from the postmaster's lessons in reading and the alphabet. Eventually, Ratan comes to think of the postmaster as a father or husband, and she becomes dependent on his generosity and his conversations with her. She nurses him back to health after his sickness, "staying awake at his bedside all night long." Finally, after the postmaster has recovered and decides to leave Ulapur, Ratan asks him to take her "home" with him—essentially, to adopt or marry her. The postmaster's incredulous rejection of this proposal horrifies and embarrasses Ratan. After his departure, she wanders "near the post office, weeping copiously." Destitute, lonely, and still uneducated, Ratan cannot leave the confines of Ulapur, though she wishes desperately to. She has neither the freedom nor the philosophy of the postmaster, who can comfort himself in his grief with the knowledge that death and separation are an inescapable part of life. Ratan, though, has no such knowledge, and thus, no such comfort. - Theme: Gender, Class, and Inequality. Description: Rabindranath Tagore's "The Postmaster" explores the fraught relationship between a postmaster stationed in the fictional Bengal village of Ulapur, and a servant girl, Ratan, who assists him with household work. Ratan is an orphan and of a lower class than the postmaster, who—though not wealthy—holds significant power over Ratan and benefits from liberty she lacks. The postmaster could provide Ratan with the education and financial support she needs to flee her lower-class life, but he deliberately does not. By having the postmaster leave Ratan at the story's conclusion, Tagore affirms what has been implicit from the beginning: in colonial India, educated men have freedom and mobility, while poor, uneducated women do not. Both gender and class oppress Ratan, dooming her to continued poverty and marginalization. The impassable divide between the postmaster and Ratan is immediately apparent in the story. Though not technically the postmaster's servant, Ratan is expected to work for him, completing menial tasks (lighting his fire and his pipe, cooking, cleaning) while receiving no compensation apart from a portion of the meals she cooks. As a lower-class woman, Ratan is subservient, expected to provide domestic labor even for men she is not married or related to: the postmaster becomes Ratan's "master." The postmaster regards Ratan as a "simple little girl," suggesting that although the two share meals and discuss memories of their families together, they are intrinsically separated by both gender and class. One of the postmaster's first thoughts after meeting Ratan is that she likely will not ever marry. This underscores the precariousness of her situation: as a poor orphan, she has no one to care for her now, and if she can't find a husband, she will have no one to care for her in the future. The possibility of a lower-class woman finding opportunities on her own is inconceivable in this world—which, again, highlights the vast difference in their statuses and suggests that the postmaster is Ratan's potential savior. Indeed, however menial the work, it momentarily appears as if Ratan's proximity to the postmaster will provide her with opportunities to better her life. Ratan becomes not only a servant, but also plays the role of wife and mother to the postmaster, who falls ill and craves "the presence of loving womanhood" and "tender nursing" in his sickness. Ratan "steps into the post of mother" as she nurses the postmaster back to health. Her own education is postponed, and she is obliged to provide for the postmaster, who has become her lifeline to the possibility of life beyond Bengal. Without the postmaster, Ratan has neither companionship, nor a steady source of meals, nor a teacher who might help her to improve her own dire situation and find employment outside of the domestic sphere. She begins to feel affection for her master, even thinking of his family as her own—reflecting her clear desire to assimilate herself into his world. Ultimately, however, Ratan's emotional and physical labor for the postmaster is futile, since according to the class and gender rules that society dictates (which the postmaster chooses to follow), he cannot marry her or continue to provide education and support for her. The postmaster does attempt to reward Ratan for her work by teaching her to read, but even this can be read as an expression of his own loneliness rather than an altruistic act. In Bengal, he has "nothing to do," and in the "deep, silent mid-day interval of his work," he longs for human connection, which he finds by teaching Ratan the alphabet. This is a project that helps the postmaster to feel as if he is making a difference in a young girl's life, but it does not require him to commit himself to her in any meaningful way. This lack of commitment is clearest when the postmaster responds to Ratan's proposal that he take her to his home—and, by implication, become her husband—with laughing ridicule ("What an idea!"), suggesting that their class statuses are too distinct to be reconciled in marriage. The postmaster's declaration that he is going away destroys Ratan, who regards his rejection not only as an act of supreme cruelty, but also as a resounding reminder that she cannot leave the confines of her village. "I don't want to stay on here," Ratan says to the postmaster, weeping: though the postmaster easily and freely decides to leave the town where he has been stationed, departing by boat, Ratan cannot leave the village without him, since she is constrained by her limited education and financial means. Additionally, codes of honor prohibit her from taking the postmaster's gift of money ("the whole of his month's salary"). As a lower-class woman, Ratan must present herself as humble, grateful, and inferior—a posture that entails refusing gifts. Thus, she is forced to sacrifice a financial opportunity that may have helped her to leave her village and build a better life. This subtly reinforces how societal norms maintain class hierarchy. Further, Tagore notes that "Ratan had no philosophy." That is, she has no body of knowledge on which to draw to ease her suffering, while the postmaster, owing to his education in urban, upper-class Calcutta, has philosophy and spirituality to "console himself with" as he leaves Ulapur on "the swollen flood-waters" of the river. By the story's end, Ratan is left illiterate, filled with grief, and utterly disenfranchised, sustained only by the "false hope" that the postmaster might return and bear her away from her oppressive rural life. Though "The Postmaster" initially seems to be a simple, parable-like story imbued with lyricism and reflection on the natural world, the crux of the narrative lies in the irresoluble differences between its main characters. Because of their gender and class statuses, Ratan and the postmaster are destined for entirely different lives. Ratan is subservient to patriarchy and ultimately marginalized, deprived of education and financial support, while the postmaster's educated background and financial means allow him to move freely out of Bengal and seek a better life in Calcutta. Tagore suggests that, though educated men and lower-class women may find common ground—as Ratan and the postmaster do when they share memories and stories about their families—they do not have the same opportunities in life. - Theme: Melancholy and the Sublime Natural World. Description: Tagore's story derives much of its emotional depth from lush, elaborate depictions of the natural world, which becomes a source of both melancholy and artistic inspiration for the postmaster (who, like Tagore himself, writes poetry). The rural Bengal landscape, often soaked with rain, seems to symbolize the postmaster's own sense of confinement in the village. Yet the landscape is equally instilled with intense emotion and a sense of the sublime. While the postmaster seems moved by the natural world, nature also drives him out: the floods that persist in Ulapur prompt his illness, which ultimately spurs him to leave the village. Tagore seems to be suggesting that the powerful natural world is capable of influencing those who come into contact with it—for better or for worse. At first, the postmaster finds Ulapur radiant. In his poetry, he reflects on "the leaves trembling in the trees" and "the clouds in the sky," attempting to express the "bliss" to be experienced by observing nature. Yet he also feels that he would "come alive again" if "a genie out of an Arab table" would "come and cut down all the leafy trees overnight," make "a road," and block "out the sky with rows of tall buildings"—that is, if a "genie" were to replace Ulapur's natural scenery with the fittings of urban life. In other words, to the postmaster, the natural world is only attractive to an extent. It is also jarringly unfamiliar, since he is used to Calcutta, a city populated by "tall buildings" and "roads." Thus, the postmaster's first impression of Ulapur is split; he is both captivated by its powerful beauty and profoundly disturbed by its rural nature. Furthermore, the postmaster begins to realize that aspects of Ulapur's landscape are imbued with intense melancholy. On one lonely afternoon, he observes that "Earth's breath," "hot with fatigue," brushes against his skin, while a "persistent bird" cries out "monotonously," "making repeated and pathetic appeals at Nature's midday durbar." These pessimistic visions reflect the postmaster's own pessimistic outlook on humanity and love, made all the more extreme by his loneliness in the village. He observes these natural visions and begins to feel that the bird's "monotonous cry" is echoing his own longing for a "human object for the heart's most intimate affections"—a desire he feels he may never be able to fulfill, given his own isolation. The natural world is not only unfamiliar to the postmaster, but also representative of his solitude, misery, and confinement in Ulapur, where he is without family, friendship, or the material comforts of Calcutta. Prompted by the passionate feelings of melancholy he experiences while observing nature, the postmaster turns to Ratan, who in many ways becomes the "human object" and "close companion" he desires as they share meals and conversation. The postmaster is able to express himself to Ratan, working through his loneliness by sharing stories of his childhood and providing her with a skill—reading—that is familiar to him from his upbringing in Calcutta. Despite the growing intimacy between Ratan and the postmaster, though, Ulapur's unending, torrential monsoons become too much for the postmaster to bear. Tagore's narrator notes that the postmaster feels "in need of comfort, ill and miserable as he was, in this isolated place, the rain pouring down," and although Ratan provides comfort, the postmaster ultimately decides that the "unhealthiness" of Ulapur—its extreme weather—constitutes grounds for a transfer. Even though the postmaster has experienced closeness with another human, the influence of the natural world overpowers this intimacy and creates further despair for him. By the end of the story, all traces of the "bliss" the postmaster previously felt while observing nature (and transforming it into poetry) have disappeared, replaced by the "swollen," "fiercely" flowing river that bears the postmaster, aboard a boat, away from Ulapur. In the end, nature (in the form of the river) is cruel, relentless, and powerful. Though the postmaster wishes briefly to return to Ulapur and Ratan, he ultimately allows himself to be transported away on the river's current. The natural world is too intense for the postmaster to resist, despite moments of unity, intimacy, and emotional expression with Ratan: nature is both beautiful and melancholic, and it rivals the human world in strength. - Theme: Urban and Rural Life. Description: By returning to the city of Calcutta at the end of the story, the postmaster rejects rural life and affirms the superiority of urbanity. His dissatisfaction with his surroundings and the people with whom he interacts demonstrates an implicit, irreconcilable division between city and country, or urban and remote village life. Written at a time when India, under Britain's colonial command, was moving tentatively toward modernization, "The Postmaster" seems to function as an appeal for social change. Tagore frames rural life as hopeless, degenerate, and isolated, and strongly implies that lower-class Indians like Ratan have been left to their own devices by upper-class, educated elites like the postmaster, who cannot bear to stay and work in country settings. Ultimately, Tagore seems to be suggesting that the gulf between urban and rural places deeply fragments Indian life, hindering attempts at unity and reconciliation for Indian people. From the beginning of the story, the postmaster acts dismissively toward Ulapur's people, who are not "suitable company for an educated man" like himself. His "Calcutta background" makes him "a bad mixer," uncomfortable around the indigo factory workers whom he encounters in Ulapur, since he cannot relate to their humble, rural backgrounds. Though the postmaster himself must experience a more humble life in Ulapur, where he earns a "meager" salary and has to cook for himself (suggesting that he may have had servants in Calcutta), he nonetheless continues to feel distanced from the factory workers. Even Ratan, with whom he shares stories of his family life—stories he "would never have dreamt of divulging to the indigo employees"—is defined by her illiteracy and pitiable status to the postmaster. To him, she is an "illiterate young girl," utterly "destitute," and though she is as miserable and isolated in Ulapur as her "master," he regards her with condescension. Even before they become acquainted, he believes that her prospects of getting married look "faint," given her status as an orphan. Thus, the postmaster views the inhabitants of rural Ulapur as inherently inadequate, and he continues to juxtapose his surroundings with those of urban Calcutta. The postmaster dreams of seeing the "leafy trees" in Ulapur razed and replaced with modern trappings, "tall buildings" and "roads," and he is reluctant to give up his Calcutta habits—such as bathing with "water brought in a bucket"—despite being embedded in an entirely different world. In Ulapur, he works in a hut in a jungle, as opposed to in a "tall building," and though his work in the post office should help to connect Ulapur to the outside world, he has "very little work to do," suggesting that as a small, country village, Ulapur is isolated and backwards, almost completely cut off from other, more modern parts of India. Initially, it seems as if Ratan and the postmaster's intimate, developing relationship might help to bridge the gap between their rural and urban worlds. By learning about her family background and her life in Ulapur, the postmaster might be able to look beyond their differences and discover their fundamental similarities. Yet by cruelly rejecting Ratan at the end of the story—laughing at the "impossible" idea that they might marry or live together after he leaves Ulapur—the postmaster demonstrates the extent to which the distinction between the urban and rural is fixed. Even though the postmaster's application for a job transfer is rejected, meaning that he is without a job once he leaves Ulapur, his desperation to return to Calcutta (and urban, upper-class life) overpowers both his pragmatism and his generosity. He thinks briefly of returning to Ratan as he boards a boat to leave Ulapur, but ultimately regards their separation as one of the "many separations" one experiences in life—ignoring the notion that they might have been able to discover friendship and unity in Ulapur, despite its status as a rural, remote village. Ratan, who longed for connection with the postmaster, is left desolate and inconsolable; her life in Ulapur continues to be characterized by suffering, while the postmaster seeks relief from his suffering in Calcutta. Thus, Tagore creates a fractured image of India by suggesting that to upper-class, educated elites like the postmaster, urbanity is preferable to rural life, and that the divisions between these two disparate worlds cannot be overcome or reconciled. - Climax: The postmaster decides to leave Ulapur and Ratan because of his illness. - Summary: "The Postmaster" is set in the "humble village" of Ulapur, Bengal, during the nineteenth century and the rule of the British Raj. The British owner of an indigo dye factory in Ulapur has convinced the imperial government to open a post office in the village, and a man from Calcutta is contracted to become the postmaster. He moves to Ulapur and works in a hut that serves as a rudimentary post office, but he finds that he is unable to fit in with the other men in the town, who are less educated than him and have little time to socialize because of their work at the factory. The postmaster, though, has not much work to complete, and he spends his time attempting to write poems about his natural surroundings. Despite his small salary, the postmaster asks an orphaned village girl named Ratan to complete housework for him, for which she receives some of his food. Ratan is twelve or thirteen, impoverished, and unlikely to get married, likely because she lacks a dowry. Nonetheless, the postmaster's loneliness leads him to strike up a conversation with Ratan, even though her class status is distinct from his. The two recount stories from their childhood, and they become close, talking late into the night. Ratan begins to think of the postmaster's family as her own, but the postmaster continues to long for a "close companion" to abet his loneliness—seeing Ratan as a mere stand-in for the romantic partner he desires. The postmaster decides to teach Ratan to read, and she learns quickly from him, eager to become literate. However, the continual presence of heavy rainwaters in Ulapur causes the postmaster to become ill, and though Ratan nurses him back to health, "soothing his illness and loneliness with feminine tenderness," he decides that he has to leave his post in the village. After he is denied a transfer to another village, he quits his job altogether. The postmaster explains to Ratan that he is departing Ulapur, devastating her. Desperate, Ratan asks the postmaster to take her home with him, and the postmaster replies with disbelief: "How could I do that!" The postmaster assures Ratan that his replacement will look after her as he has, but Ratan finds no comfort in his words, declaring that she doesn't want to stay in Ulapur without him. The postmaster then tries to give Ratan a sum of money—his left-over salary—but she refuses the payment, fleeing. The postmaster travels by boat to Calcutta and recalls Ratan's "grief-stricken face," which speaks a "great inarticulate universal sorrow." He realizes that he cannot go back to her, and he ponders the "many separations" and "many deaths" that pervade life. Ratan, left behind in Ulapur, nurses a "faint hope" that the postmaster might return, but Tagore's narrator reflects that humans "cling with both arms to false hope," even in the most dire of situations—suggesting that Ratan's "hope" is utterly futile and ultimately cannot sustain her in the face of tragedy and loss.

- Genre: Bildungsroman, comedy of manners - Title: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: In and around Edinburg, Scotland - Character: Miss Jean Brodie. Description: Miss Brodie, with her dark Roman profile, is a charismatic but unorthodox teacher at the Blaine Junior school. She doesn't instruct her girls in history and arithmetic, say, so much as she shares with them poetry, makeup tips, the virtues of fascism, her own romantic history and the like. Although she is a woman of culture and even has something of an artistic nature, Miss Brodie can also be dogmatic, manipulative, and cruel. Just as the predestining God of Calvinism elects the few to salvation, so does Miss Brodie elect six of her pupils to become her special girls, girls whom she develops culturally and confides in, and who in turn loyally admire her—these six girls make up the "Brodie set". Miss Brodie's power over those around her—not just her pupils but also the men in her life—stems in part from her feeling that she is in her prime, that is, at the height of her charisma both sexual and otherwise. Indeed, she loves the Blaine art teacher Mr. Lloyd and he loves her, but, as he is married, Miss Brodie renounces her love for him, becoming intimate instead with the singing teacher Mr. Lowther. Nonetheless, she subtly grooms the instinctual Rose Stanley to have a love affair with Mr. Lloyd as her proxy, and she grooms her favorite, the insightful Sandy, to serve as her informant in regards to the affair. In this way, Miss Brodie plays God, determining the course of fate. But, in the end, all of Miss Brodie's plots go awry: it is Sandy, not Rose, who ends up sleeping with Mr. Lloyd, and it is Sandy who betrays Miss Brodie to the Blaine headmistress, for Miss Brodie in her enthusiasm for fascism encouraged a Blaine student named Joyce Emily to fight in the Spanish Civil War. So it is that Miss Brodie is forced into retirement, a pale memory in the minds of her special girls save Sandy, who both recognizes that Miss Brodie had an enlarging effect on her, but also doubts whether Miss Brodie was worthy of her loyalty. - Character: Sandy Stranger. Description: A small-eyed member of the Brodie set, Miss Brodie's favorite and most intimate confidant, Sandy is highly imaginative and deeply interested in analyzing human behavior—she has "got insight," as Miss Brodie tells her. She becomes deeply, even obsessively interested in Miss Brodie's love affairs, going so far as to create fictionalized accounts of them with her best friend Jenny when the two are only young girls. But fiction later becomes fact when, in her eighteenth year, Sandy seduces Miss Brodie's beloved Mr. Lloyd—in part because she is interested in his obsession with Miss Brodie and with his Roman Catholicism—thereby becoming her teacher's proxy in the affair (a role Miss Brodie herself anticipated that Rose Stanley would fill). Nonetheless, and rather surprisingly, Sandy also at last betrays Miss Brodie, suggesting as she does to the Blaine headmistress Miss Mackay that Miss Brodie's interest in fascism may well provide grounds for forcing her to retire. And so it does. Why Sandy would betray Miss Brodie, however, remains one of the novel's most haunting open questions. After graduating from Blaine, Sandy studies psychology and publishes a famous psychological treatise, "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"; she also converts to Roman Catholicism and becomes a nun known as Sister Helena. When asked what her greatest girlhood influence was, Sandy, now in middle age, responds: "'There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.'" - Character: Rose Stanley. Description: Rose is a member of the Brodie set, an appealing blonde "famous for sex" in her later years at the Marcia Blaine School even though has no curiosity about sex whatsoever, never talks about sex, and does not indulge in it presumably until marriage. Miss Brodie holds out hope that Rose, along with Sandy, will prove to be the "'the crème de la crème'" of her pupils, and claims that Rose herself has instinct, a quality she admires in her. Indeed, when Rose begins modeling for Mr. Lloyd's portraits, Miss Brodie gets it into her head that the girl will have a love affair with him as her, Miss Brodie's proxy, and she plans for this to come about; but it never does, for Mr. Lloyd has no sexual interest in Rose and Rose merely poses for him because she needs the money to fund her "addiction" to the cinema (i.e. movies). After graduating from Blaine, Rose marries well and, in contrast to Sandy, shakes off "Miss Brodie's influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat." - Character: Mary Macgregor. Description: Though she is a member of the Brodie set, Mary is considered by everyone at Blaine, from Miss Lockhart to Miss Brodie herself, to be rather stupid and disagreeable. She is Miss Brodie's scapegoat, the girl whom she blames everything on, and even Sandy treats her condescendingly and cruelly. Nonetheless, Mary remembers her years as a member of the Brodie set to be the happiest in her life. She dies at the age of twenty-four in a hotel fire. - Character: Jenny Gray. Description: A member of the Brodie set famous for her beauty and grace, Jenny is also Sandy's best friend when the girls are young; together, the two write a fictionalized love correspondence between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther. However, as the girls grow older, they also grow apart. While Sandy completes her last year at Blaine, Jenny enrolls at a school of dramatic art, going on to become an actress. - Character: Eunice Gardiner. Description: A member of the Brodie set famous for "her spritely gymnastics and glamorous swimming," Eunice is at first quiet, and so it is strange that she joins the Brodie set at all; but she soon becomes very entertaining to the other girls, and fits right in. After graduating, Eunice becomes a nurse and marries a doctor. - Character: Mr. Teddy Lloyd. Description: The art teacher at Blaine, Mr. Lloyd is handsome and sophisticated, half Welsh and half English, with red and gold hair. He lost his left arm during World War I. While they are colleagues together at Blaine, Mr. Lloyd falls deeply in love with Miss Brodie and she with him. But Mr. Lloyd is a married man, and so Miss Brodie renounces her love for him altogether, bestowing it instead on Mr. Lowther. So strong is Miss Brodie's love for Teddy despite this, however, that she arranges a plot whereby her student Rose Stanley is to become Mr. Lloyd's lover in her stead. So strong is Mr. Teddy Lloyd's love for Miss Brodie, in turn, that all of the people he paints portraits of, including the Brodie girls, resemble Miss Brodie herself. Ultimately, Miss Brodie's plot fails: it is not Rose but Sandy who ends up having a love affair with Mr. Lloyd, in part because Sandy is so interested in Teddy's obsession with Miss Brodie—an obsession which she shares. - Character: Mr. Gordon Lowther. Description: The singing teacher at Blaine, Mr. Lowther resembles Mr. Lloyd but is less attractive, long-bodied and short-legged; he owns a rich estate in Cramond. After Miss Brodie renounces her love for Mr. Lloyd, she becomes intimate with Mr. Lowther. The two of them, unmarried, scandalously begin sleeping together, it would seem, for Miss Ellen Kerr discovers a nightdress which quite likely belongs to Miss Brodie under one of Mr. Lowther's pillows while cleaning his house. To everyone's surprise, Mr. Lowther marries not Miss Brodie in the end but Miss Lockhart. - Character: Miss Mackay. Description: The headmistress of the Marcia Blaine School, Miss Mackay strongly disapproves of Miss Brodie's educational methods, attempting to pump the Brodie girls for incriminating information about their teacher throughout their student years. When Sandy reveals to her Miss Brodie's interest in fascist politics, Miss Mackay at last has what she needs to force Miss Brodie's retirement. - Character: Miss Lockhart. Description: The Senior science teacher at Blaine, Miss Lockhart is, in contrast to Miss Brodie, a teacher dedicated to nothing more than teaching her subject rigorously and well. She does not regard the girls in her class as personalities but as students, which they appreciate. Toward the end of the novel, Miss Lockhart becomes engaged to Mr. Lowther. - Character: Joyce Emily Hammond. Description: A rich and delinquent girl sent to Blaine as a last resort, Joyce Emily very much wants to attach herself to the Brodie set, but the other girls resist her. Nonetheless, Miss Brodie makes time for Joyce Emily, going so far as to urge this "rather mad" girl to run off to fight for Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Joyce Emily does so and dies in that conflict, a fact which Miss Mackay later uses against Miss Brodie in forcing her to retire. - Character: Miss Ellen and Alison Kerr. Description: The two sewing teachers at Blaine, the Kerr sisters are meek Calvinists who begin housekeeping for Mr. Lowther, and it seems as though one might even marry him. However, Miss Brodie crushes their prospects by becoming intimate with the singing teacher herself. Later, Miss Ellen Kerr discovers what is quite likely Miss Brodie's nightdress under one of Mr. Lowther's pillows, which she tells Miss Mackay about—but as much as she wishes to dismiss Miss Brodie, Miss Mackay recognizes that the nightdress is insufficient proof of scandal to justify Miss Brodie's dismissal. - Character: Miss Gaunt. Description: A gaunt woman, and the sister of a Calvinist minister, Miss Gaunt substitutes for Miss Brodie at Blaine in the autumn of 1931. Unlike Miss Brodie's influence on the classroom, Miss Gaunt's presence in the classroom subtracts, in her students' minds, from the sexual significance of things. She becomes like a sister to Miss Ellen and Alison Kerr and advises them to make their arrangement with Mr. Lowther permanent, but due to Miss Brodie's intervention this does not come to pass. - Character: Hugh. Description: Miss Brodie's lover who died in World War I. Miss Brodie tells her young students about her relationship with Hugh, which so excites Sandy and Jenny that as young girls they write a sexually charged, fictionalized story about him called "The Mountain Eyrie." Miss Brodie later conflates her love for Hugh with her conflicted love for Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther. - Theme: Authority and Social Groups. Description: The students at the Blaine Junior school are young, naïve, and impressionable, which is perhaps why Miss Jean Brodie—as ridiculous as she is from one perspective—can exert her authority so influentially over them, and not just during their childhoods but for a lifetime. Indeed, the insightful Sandy theorizes that Jean Brodie thinks of herself as God, wholly guiltless, wholly in control of her own fate, wholly fulfilled—even though she is perhaps more truly a lonely and eccentric spinster overcompensating for the littleness of her life. Miss Brodie's methods for establishing authority include taking her students into her confidence, as she does in sharing her romantically embellished love life with them, as well as presenting herself as urbane, cosmopolitan, and artistic, in contrast to the other, more narrow-minded adults in their lives. Consequently, Miss Brodie comes to strike her girls as glamorous, daring, and mysterious, and her charisma enthralls them. However, she also exploits more problematic methods of establishing authority, for example, scapegoating Mary Macgregor, who provides the Brodie girls with a common target for their aggression, thereby strengthening the group's identity. The novel repeatedly suggests that these methods are not unlike those used by fascist dictators—e.g., Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco—to generate in the populaces they govern both radical, unflagging loyalty and a herd mentality.Ironically, although Miss Brodie authoritatively preaches individualism to her girls, they as individuals have almost no identities of their own. Each is famous for something—Sandy for her small piggish eyes and insight, Rose for sex, etc.—but they are far more famous collectively, as the Brodie set. In an even further irony, the only thing holding the Brodie set together is the cult of personality Miss Brodie creates around herself, for the Brodie girls as individuals have "very little in common with each other" other than that. The Brodie set exists, it would seem, by Miss Brodie's authority and for her pleasure alone, and at one point Sandy even imagines that the girls of the set merely add up to "'one big Miss Brodie.'" That being said, the narrator also reveals that being perceived as a social group by others is yet another factor keeping the Brodie girls together—if other students at Blaine didn't think of the Brodie set as a distinct social unit, that unit would fall apart. Many social groups, not just the Brodie set, need other groups to define themselves against, after all. But the novel also contrasts the Brodie set with the Girl Scout Brownies the Brodie girls encounter in the Meadows (a large public park in Edinburg), for example, as well as the sports teams at Blaine—groups organized not around a charismatic leader but common interests and goals. These, the novel suggests, are the foundation for a healthier community. - Theme: Education vs. Intrusion. Description: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a Bildungsroman, that is, a novel that has as one of its themes the formative years or spiritual education of a person. In developing this theme the novel dramatizes the distinction between education and intrusion. Miss Brodie herself defines education as a leading out of what is already in a student's soul, whereas intrusion, she says, is a planting in a student's mind of what was not there before. Miss Brodie claims to be an educator, whereas she criticizes the headmistress of Blaine, Miss Mackay, for allegedly intruding. The novel as a whole, however, calls into question Miss Brodie's distinction.Miss Brodie rarely instructs her girls in history or mathematics; instead, she exposes them to poetry, makeup, world cultures from Italy's to Egypt's, as well as radical fascist politics. On the one hand, it does seem to be her intention to open her students' lives to the world, to heighten their awareness, to liberate them from parochial custom and convention. On the other, Miss Brodie primarily "leads out" of her students their sexual curiosity, with stories about her dead lover Hugh and the like. Under Miss Brodie's wing, Sandy and Jenny, for example, become preoccupied with sex, talking and giggling about it, fantasizing and writing about it, going so far as to imagine Miss Brodie having sex with their singing teacher Mr. Lowther. But, hypocritically, Miss Brodie also intrudes: she is a dogmatic teacher, who makes assertions and requires that her students be able to regurgitate them verbatim. She even insinuates her plans into her students' minds—plans as strange and disturbing as having Rose become Mr. Lloyd's lover as her, Miss Brodie's, proxy. This is a rather heinous intrusion indeed.In contrast, the Senior science teacher Miss Lockhart is the novel's model educator: a priest in relation to her discipline, who does not regard the girls in her class as personalities but, rather more appropriately, as students. She excites their curiosity on the first day by holding up gunpowder in a jar, enough, she says, to blow up the school; it is by leading out their natural curiosity about science that Miss Lockhart is in turn able to provide their now-receptive minds with new information, which Miss Brodie might dismiss as an intrusion but which the novel, perhaps, would simply call good teaching. - Theme: Sexuality, One's Prime, and Spinsterhood. Description: The Brodie set's transition from childhood to adulthood is marked primarily by changing attitudes toward sex: we follow Sandy, for example, from the time she and Jenny gossip about sex and, writing as Miss Brodie in a fictional letter, absurdly, hilariously congratulate Mr. Lowther on a good sexual performance, all the way into her eighteenth year, when she and Mr. Lloyd have an affair. But perhaps Sandy's sexual curiosity is too prematurely and too violently stimulated by Miss Brodie, for even as a young girl she privately develops an ambivalent, even antagonistic attitude toward sex, even imagining herself on a police force with the mission of putting a stop to all sex in Edinburgh altogether.Miss Brodie, on the other hand, relishes her sexuality; she often reminds her students that she is in her prime, a reference to the height of her energy and beauty and desirability as a woman. She pledges these years, her very best, to romantic involvements, first to Mr. Lloyd, then to Mr. Lowther—the latter affair sparking a scandal within her rather sexually repressive Edinburgh community. Ms. Brodie is not prepared to settle down and marry Mr. Lowther, however, and she is punished with ostracization and persecution at Miss Gaunt's hands, among others. Her most faithful lovers are Mr. Lloyd who paints her obsessively and her girls, who are in ways canvasses that take on her image. In the end, though, all Miss Brodie has to show for her prime are memories of her own charisma and influence, made bittersweet by Sandy's betrayal of her, which may be in part motivated by a complex of sexual revulsion, resentment, and repressed homoerotic attraction on Sandy's part, all directed toward Miss Brodie. The narrator takes pains to make it clear that Miss Brodie is not merely an eccentric, isolated phenomenon, but rather that there are many spinsters like her in Edinburgh. This claim amounts to an indictment of the sexual repression of the Edinburgh community as a whole, which makes it socially difficult for women to fulfill themselves outside of married life. Miss Brodie's girls who marry tend to shake her influence, as Rose and Monica and Jenny do—but Sandy alone, who vows herself to chastity as a nun, bears profoundly Miss Brodie's spirit. - Theme: Religion, Predestination, and Narrative Structure. Description: In early twentieth-century Edinburgh, the influence of Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism, was waning. Calvinists believe that human beings are so inherently and absolutely corrupted by original sin that they can only lead depraved lives, lives unworthy of salvation. However, God in His infinite mercy, and by His mercy alone, nonetheless elected before the world's creation a few people to be saved through Jesus Christ, this election being mysteriously determined not based on faith or virtue or merit, but by God alone. Those elected were elected unconditionally, regardless of their conduct on earth. In the novel, Miss Brodie reacts violently against this doctrine of predestination by usurping God's function herself—she elects six of her pupils to be her special girls, and predestines them, as it were, to be "'the crème de la crème,'" in what amounts to a secular, sexually charged appropriation of Calvinist thought. She also presumes to shape their fates, most centrally when she plans for Rose Stanley to sleep with Mr. Lloyd as her proxy. She is, in a sense, a maker of plots, just like the deft novelist—Muriel Spark—writing about her.However, Miss Brodie's plots tend to go awry. It is Sandy, not Rose, who has a love affair with Mr. Lloyd. Though Miss Brodie thinks she can marry Mr. Lowther any time she likes, a day after she makes a pronouncement to this effect it is announced in the newspaper that Mr. Lowther is engaged to Miss Lockhart. And, most crushingly, it is Sandy, one of Miss Brodie's own special girls, indeed, her favorite and most trusted, who betrays her at last to Miss Mackay. The narrative structure of the novel is full of prolepses (fast-forwards) so that present events are juxtaposed with related future events, and these juxtapositions often contrast Miss Brodie's plans and expectations with the reality that comes to pass. For example, though Miss Brodie discusses her deep devotion to her girls and the need for absolute loyalty, the reader knows almost from the beginning of the novel that one of these girls will ultimately betray her. In this way, the narrative creates ironic tension between Miss Brodie's predestining and actual destiny itself.As Miss Brodie reacts violently against Calvinism, so does Sandy react violently against the egotism and amorality and potential destructiveness of Miss Brodie's own secular program of election and predestination. She turns to Roman Catholicism (as Spark did herself) for a different vision of life, one where salvation is a function of one's faith and works, and not a product of blind election. Sandy also replaces Miss Brodie's self-election to grace and guiltlessness in herself with a deep sense of culpability before the eyes of God. - Theme: Insight, Instinct, and Transfiguration. Description: Miss Brodie can identify and transfigure common girls into extraordinary women, or such is her hope, anyway. She also has a pressing desire to experience transcendence, through art, sex, even radical politics—and transfiguring her girls so that they bear her image and so that she can in a small way guide their fates is her only real means of transcending the littleness of her life. Calvinism is a central context here: Miss Brodie reacts so strongly against its doctrine of predestination, where one cannot transfigure much less transcend one's destiny, that she goes so far as to elect herself to grace and plays a kind of secular God of Calvin in electing and transfiguring her girls into the "the crème de la crème."Miss Brodie has two criteria for election (and has good insight into who possesses these, for her girls tend to be among the brightest at Blaine): insight and instinct. Insight has to do with imaginative exuberance and psychological penetration, exemplified by Sandy; instinct has to do with sexual and social charisma, exemplified by Rose. Miss Brodie claims to possess both these qualities herself, although we might question her psychological astuteness: after all, she thinks Rose a carnal girl, when Rose has no interest in sex for the most part; Miss Brodie also thinks that she can trust Sandy absolutely, when Sandy is the Brodie girl least loyal to her in the end. Indeed, the novel as a whole seems in some ways to test or question the value of psychological insight: its pages are largely devoid of psychological analysis of its characters, as though such analysis were incidental to understanding its characters. As such, we, as readers, are forced to be the psychologists, to map what characters say and do to their reasons and motivations, especially in regards to Sandy's decision to betray Miss Brodie, which goes unexplained in the novel and is only gestured toward and skirted around.Ultimately, Miss Brodie's attempts to transfigure the commonplace fail. Rose doesn't sleep with Mr. Lloyd as Miss Brodie plans, Miss Brodie's students pursue commonplace careers as typists and nurses, and Sandy in the end betrays her teacher. Without girls to sculpt and without the arts in her life as represented by Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Lowther, Miss Brodie more and more has nothing to do with herself but obsess over the last great drama of her life which transcends mere schoolteaching, namely her betrayal; and so ends her prime. Sandy, for her part, reacts so radically against Miss Brodie she turns (like Spark herself) to Catholicism, which locates the human desire for transfiguration within the ritual of the Holy Communion, where bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. This position—of reserving transfiguration for sacred as opposed to secular life—is one the novel privileges over Calvinism and, relatedly, Miss Brodie's self-election to grace. - Climax: Sandy betrays to the headmistress of Blaine, Miss Mackay, that Miss Brodie is interested in radical fascist politics and that she even urged a girl to fight in the Spanish Civil War; this betrayal results in Miss Brodie's forced retirement. - Summary: It is the early 1930s. At the Marcia Blaine School, located in Edinburgh, Scotland, a class of ten-year-old girls begins two years of instruction with Miss Jean Brodie, a charismatic teacher at the Junior school who claims again and again to be in her "prime." She provides her pupils with an energetic if unorthodox education in unauthorized topics as various as poetry, makeup, Italian fascism under Mussolini, and her own love life, believing that Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are of supreme value, and that the arts hold a higher place than the sciences. In time, Miss Brodie singles out six girls as special to her, and who she intends to mold into "'the crème de la crème'": Sandy Stranger, Rose Stanley, Mary Macgregor, Jenny Gray, Monica Douglas, and Eunice Gardiner. These girls come to be known as the Brodie set, whom Miss Brodie culturally develops and confides in. However, in one of the novel's characteristic prolepses (fast-forwards), we learn that one of these girls will eventually betray Miss Brodie, though Miss Brodie never learns which. The girls' other teachers at the Junior school include the art master, the handsome, sophisticated Mr. Teddy Lloyd, a Roman Catholic who lost his arm during World War I, as well as the singing master, the short-legged and long-bodied Mr. Gordon Lowther. Both of these men come to love Miss Brodie, but Miss Brodie is passionate only about Teddy Lloyd, whom she commends for his artistic nature. The two kiss once, as witnessed by Monica Douglas, but Miss Brodie soon renounces her love for Teddy Lloyd, as he is married with six children. Instead, she commences an affair with the unmarried Mr. Lowther during a two-week leave of absence (although she claims that her absence is due to illness). Meanwhile, the highly imaginative, psychologically penetrating Sandy becomes increasingly obsessed with Miss Brodie's love life, going so far as to imagine her teacher having sexual intercourse. At one point in their two years in the Junior school, Sandy's best friend Jenny is accosted by a man exposing his genitals to her near the Water of Leith (a river that runs through Edinburgh), an incident investigated by a female policewoman. Sandy falls in love with the idea of this policewoman, and imagines that she is on the police force alongside her, with the purpose of preventing sex altogether. She also imagines that she and her invented policewoman should investigate the love affair between Miss Brodie and Mr. Lowther. At the age of twelve, the girls leave Miss Brodie's class and graduate to the Senior school, taught by teachers like the excellent science instructor Miss Lockhart, all of whom are committed to the authorized curriculum as Miss Brodie was not. Nonetheless, the girls retain their group identity as the Brodie set, even though they have nothing in common save being picked out by Miss Brodie, whom they visit extracurricularly as they did as students at the Junior school, going with her to the ballet and the like. The headmistress of Blaine, Miss Mackay, has all the while been fostering a professional disapproval of Miss Brodie's educational methods and scorn for the group identity of her six special girls; she wishes Miss Brodie would leave Blaine to teach at a progressive school, but Miss Brodie dismisses the idea. Consequently, Miss Mackay attempts to pump the Brodie girls for incriminating facts about their former teacher that might allow her to dismiss Miss Brodie. Miss Mackay also attempts to break the Brodie set up. Both attempts fail; the Brodie girls are unflaggingly loyal to their beloved teacher and to the principles of individualism, love, and loyalty she instilled in them. Miss Brodie's love affair with Mr. Lowther continues; when the sewing teachers at Blaine, the sisters Miss Ellen and Alison Kerr, begin to work as housekeepers for Mr. Lowther, and encroach on Miss Brodie's exclusive claim to him, she asserts her influence by coming to Mr. Lowther's house whenever the Kerr sisters are there so that she can oversee them. She criticizes them for skimping on their employer's meals, and sets about fattening Mr. Lowther up. She also begins to invite her special girls, now thirteen years old, to socialize with her in pairs at her paramour's house. She asks them often about Mr. Lloyd, for several of the girls, especially Rose Stanley, have begun to sit for portraits with their art teacher. Miss Brodie especially enjoys hearing about how each face Mr. Lloyd paints strangely resembles her own. One day in Mr. Lloyd's studio, Sandy points this fact out to Mr. Lloyd himself, glaring at him insolently; Mr. Lloyd kisses the young girl, and she doesn't know what to think about it. As the girls grow from thirteen to fourteen, fourteen to fifteen, Miss Brodie determines that she can trust Sandy absolutely as her informant and confidant. Miss Brodie is also becoming increasingly fixated on the idea that Rose—as the most instinctual of the Brodie set and famous for sex (although Rose has no interest in sex)—should have a love affair with Mr. Lloyd as her, Miss Brodie's, proxy. Miss Brodie additionally plans on Sandy being her informant regarding the affair. Indeed, so fixated does Miss Brodie become on this strange plan that she neglects Mr. Lowther, who, to everyone's surprise, soon becomes engaged to the Senior school science instructor Miss Lockhart. During this time, another girl, the "rather mad" and delinquent Joyce Emily Hammond, is sent by her rich parents to Blaine as a last resort. She desperately wants to attach herself to the Brodie set, but they won't have anything to do with her. Miss Brodie, however, will. She spends time with Joyce Emily one-on-one, and privately encourages her in her desire to run away and fight in the Spanish Civil War under Francisco Franco's Nationalist banner (Miss Brodie admires Franco, who like Mussolini is a fascist). Swiftly and shockingly, Joyce Emily does so, only to be killed when the train she is traveling in is attacked. The school holds a remembrance service for her. The Brodie girls, having turned seventeen and upon entering their final year at Blaine, begin to drift apart. Mary Macgregor and Jenny Gray leave before taking their final exams, Mary to become a typist, Jenny to enroll at a school of dramatic art. Monica Douglas becomes a scientist, and Eunice Gardiner becomes a nurse and marries a doctor. Rose makes a good marriage, and easily shakes off Miss Brodie's influence. Sandy decides to pursue psychology. During this period, both Sandy and Rose, now eighteen years of age, continue to go to Mr. Lloyd's house to model for him. One day, alone with Mr. Lloyd while his wife and children are on holiday, Sandy commences a love affair with him, usurping Rose's role in Miss Brodie's plan (Rose never had any erotic feelings for Mr. Lloyd in any case, nor he for her). The two carry on for five weeks during the summer and even once Mr. Lloyd's wife and children return home. But by the end of the year Sandy loses interest in Mr. Lloyd as a man, becoming more and more exclusively interested in his painter's mind, as well as in his obsession with Miss Brodie as it is documented on his canvases. She eventually leaves Teddy altogether, but takes with her his Roman Catholic beliefs. That following autumn, Sandy approaches Miss Mackay and announces for reasons never made explicit that she is interested "'in putting a stop to Miss Brodie.'" She tells Miss Mackay about Miss Brodie's side interest in fascist politics and suggests that by following up on this lead Miss Mackay will at last have the incriminating evidence she needs to dismiss Miss Brodie. And indeed, presumably connecting Miss Brodie to Joyce Emily's running away, Miss Mackay at last succeeds in forcing Miss Brodie to retire. Sandy's betrayal is complete, and it won't be until the end of World War II, when she is near death, that Miss Brodie can bring herself to think that it was her most intimate confidant Sandy who betrayed her. By middle age, Sandy is the author of a famous psychological treatise entitled "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"; she is also a Roman Catholic nun called Saint Helena of the Transfiguration. Over the years, she receives several visitors at her convent, mostly Brodie girls, and invariably conversation turns to Miss Brodie: Sandy suggests that Miss Brodie was silly but also an enlarging presence, yet she also suggests that she nor any other Brodie girl owed Miss Brodie any loyalty. One day, a young man comes to the convent to interview Sandy about her famous work in psychology, asking her at one point, "'What were the main influences of your schooldays, Sister Helena? Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?'" Sandy responds: "'There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime'"; it would seem that she of all the Brodie set was most deeply influenced by their strange, charismatic teacher.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: A prison camp in South Africa in the 1960s - Character: Brille. Description: The story's protagonist and a member of Span One. Though a physically weak, bespectacled black prisoner, he ends up winning a limited victory over the repressive prison system. Despite his poor eyesight, Brille can "see" more clearly than his comrades, and immediately sizes up Warder Hannetjie as "brutal" and "not human"—thoroughly unlike all of the submissive, easily broken warders that Span One has dealt within the past. Brille's assessment is proved correct when the guard beats Brille for his defiant attitude. Significantly, Brille swiftly removes his glasses before Hannetjie beats him, preventing them from being destroyed, and symbolically allowing him to continue "seeing" what needs to be done about the situation. A teacher, Brille was married with 12 children, but his home life was turbulent because poverty and overcrowded living quarters prompted the children to violence. This "chaos and mismanagement […] drove him into politics," where he found structure, idealism, and escape from home in attending conferences. Now faced with a real-world power struggle in prison, Brille realizes that his previous political work was escapist, theoretical, and overly idealistic. This epiphany prompts him to take a more practical and underhanded approach in dealing with the repressive Hannetjie. When he observes the guard stealing fertilizer, Brille accepts a bribe of tobacco to keep his mouth shut—but then promptly gets Hannetjie in trouble for the theft, and then later for handing out tobacco. Over time, Hannetjie guard crumbles under Brille's cunning machinations, and offers to give him anything he wants. Surprisingly, Brille does not ask for perks or creature comforts, but tells the warder, "We want you on our side. We want a good warder." Ironically, given his near-sightedness, Brille takes a long view in forming an alliance with Hannetjie that will benefit Span One throughout the "long stretch ahead" of their imprisonment. Yet despite Brille's being able to "see" clearly what will benefit his group, his solution is at the same time short-sighted. The alliance with Brille does not improve life for prisoners outside of Span One, who are merely transformed into better inmates—"the best work span in the camp." - Character: Warder Hannetjie. Description: Brought in to subdue the "out of control" inmates of Span One, Warder Hannetjie is the antagonist of the story who undergoes a profound moral transformation. Brille initially perceives Hannetjie as "frightening […] simple, primitive brutal" and "not human," and the guard bears out this judgment in his first act: beating Brille for challenging his authority. The warder's strict authority destroys the autonomy that Span One had enjoyed due to its ability to flout prison rules and frighten warders into submission. With "eyes at the back of his head," Hannetjie keeps the span in "constant trouble." His surveillance reveals the inmates stealing cabbages, smoking tobacco, and private downwind conversations. After about two weeks of enduring this treatment with the rest of the span, Brille catches the guard stealing five bags of fertilizer. It is implied that despite his absolute authority at the prison, Hannetjie has vulnerabilities, as shown by his need to steal a large quantity of farm supplies. The guard tries to reestablish his authority over Brille and the work span, but cannot. Harshly reprimanded by the prison chief, Hannetjie "failed to defend himself" and "his nerve broke completely." He begs Brille to stop the vendetta, pleading with the prisoner that he has a wife and children to care for and is being driven to suicide. He begs helplessly: "I can give you anything you want." Completely stripped of his authority as a guard, white man, and even as an adult (as Brille observes, "the man was really a child"), Hannetjie is reborn as a "good warder." He becomes "good and human" in a broadly moral sense, as shown by his greatly improved treatment of the prisoners—even putting himself on an equality with them, working alongside them in the fields. - Character: Span One. Description: The work group, or span, to which Brille belongs. Span One is comprised of ten men and is unique in the prison camp for a few reasons. They are all political prisoners grouped together to avoid the possibility of a black guard being converted to their opposition of the apartheid system. Since they have been imprisoned for political reasons and are not societal outcasts, they do not feel guilt for their crimes and "cower" like the other prisoners. This leads Span One to be more assertive than the other work groups. They have a strong sense of group identity and solidarity: "they moved, thought, and acted as one." Because of their assertiveness and unity, they are not beaten like the inmates in other spans, warders cannot control them, and they are able to steal food and tobacco with ease. They generally enjoy more freedom than the other work groups until Hannetjie's arrival, but due to Brille's cunning manipulations, they get their special status back at the end of the story. In their final alliance with Hannetjie, Span One's defiance transforms into subservience as they become known as "the best work span in the camp." - Theme: Apartheid, Racial Oppression, and Dehumanization. Description: "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" is set in a South African prison camp during the era when the system of apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa. Instituted after World War II, apartheid mandated strict classification and separation of the races according to a hierarchy of white, colored (mixed race), and black. This brutal and racist system incited much opposition, and the South African government frequently jailed political protestors. "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" was published in 1973 at the height of apartheid's sway, and focuses on a bespectacled political prisoner named Brille who is a part of a group of black political prisoners called Span One that is relatively successful in resisting the prison's authority until a new, brutal guard named Hannetjie is brought in specifically to subdue them. Through its portrayal of the conflict between Hannetjie and Span One, the story demonstrates the way that oppressive authorities seek to use physical and psychological violence to break down and dehumanize those who are oppressed until they accept that oppression. But the story also shows the way that such behavior also dehumanizes the oppressors. Violence and strict discipline are accepted as normal in the prison camp. All the prisoners are subjected to brutal physical violence and harsh punishments: "it was the kind of prison where men got knocked out cold with a blow at the back of the head from an iron bar." The imagery of the "iron bar" both describes a literal implement of violence and suggests the cold, hard, unyielding nature of the state power behind it. A specific example of such violence occurs after Brille talks back to Hannetjie, challenging the warder's authority: "Hannetjie whipped out a knobkerrie and gave Brille several blows about the head." Other non-physical punishments inflicted are similarly harsh. At one point, Hannetjie notices that Brille has dropped a cabbage while working on the prison farm, and uses this error as a way to punish all of Span One by withholding three meals from them. Brille apologizes to the Span, and his fellows reply, "What happens to one of us, happens to all of us." This statement expresses group solidarity, but also demonstrates their resignation to the harsh punishments inflicted. Later in the story, an elderly prisoner is punished with a week in solitary confinement for stealing grapes—all the prisoners, not just those of Span One, are routinely punished far beyond the extent of any "crime" they may have committed. The prisoners are also degraded psychologically through racial epithets and pejoratives that were commonly used in South Africa during the apartheid era. After dropping the cabbage, Brille challenges the justice of Hannetjie's punishing the entire Span. Hannetjie replies: "Look 'ere, I don't take orders from a kaffir. You don't know what kind of kaffir you think you are." The word Hannetjie uses is a racist pejorative used in South Africa to describe a black person. Equivalent to the n-word in the United States, it is often referred to as the k-word. Hannetjie's use of it here is clearly intended to degrade Brille, as allowed and encouraged by the racist hierarchy of the time. In the same interchange, Hannetjie also attempts to establish his racial superiority and degrade the inmates by insisting that Brille call him by his title: "Why don't you say Baas. I'm your Baas. Why don't you say Baas, hey?" During apartheid, black and colored South Africans were forced to use "Baas" when addressing white people as a sign of respect. The story makes clear that the prison in general, and Hannetjie in particular, are engaged in an effort to dehumanize the prisoners, to make them feel and believe that they are inferior to white people, and in so doing to make them more pliable prisoners. In fact, the story further captures the way that apartheid more broadly is designed to accomplish the same goals: to justify the treatment of non-white people as second-class citizens by engineering conditions such that non-white people are dehumanized even when not imprisoned. The story makes this case by describing the chaos and "extreme, almost unbelievable human brutality" that characterized Brille's family life before he was imprisoned. Brille and his wife had 12 children because they were unable to use contraceptives properly. The difficulty of supporting this large family on Brille's teacher salary, their lack of economic stability, and their overcrowded home led to "16 years of bedlam." Brutal fighting occurred among the children: "They'd get hold of each other's heads and give them a good bashing against the wall." The story makes clear that Brille's children are not inherently violent, but that their violence is the result of the inequities of the apartheid system—specifically, lack of birth control, education, and economic opportunity for Brille and his wife. And yet the story also makes clear that the white society that created apartheid would, conveniently, never recognize these details and would instead see Brille's children as evidence that white racist attitudes were, in fact, correct. The story undermines any such racist arguments, though, by portraying the white guard Hannetjie—and by extension all defenders of apartheid—as being brutally inhuman themselves. Even before Hannetjie does anything vicious or brutal, he is described as being obviously brutal: "His eyes were the color of the sky but they were frightening. A simple, primitive, brutal soul gazed out of them." After seeing Hannetjie, Brille says to the rest of Span One: "We're in for trouble this time, comrades." When asked why, Brille replies "Because he's not human." In describing how Hannetjie's white characteristics—his blue eyes—mark his brutality and inhumanity, the story turns on its head common apartheid practices of seeing black people as inhuman or brutal based on their appearance. The word "primitive" in the racist discourse of the time was often used to describe Africans who were thought to be less intellectually and culturally developed than their European colonizers. This portrayal is reversed in the description of Hannetjie's "frightening" blue eyes that reveal his "primitive, brutal soul." And Hannetjie does end up being just as brutal and inhuman as his appearance makes Brille suspect, which of course invalidates the racist apartheid idea that "primitiveness" is a uniquely "non-white" characteristic, with white people as the defenders of civilized society. But the story pushes even further. Eventually, Brille finds a way to turn the tables on Hannetjie to the degree that he has Hannetjie in his power. But rather than force Hannetjie to bribe him for protection, he instead tells Hannetjie that he wants to form an alliance with him. Hannetjie takes the deal, but what at first is certainly an alliance of convenience over time evolves into what seems like something more. As Span One helps Hannetjie, he in turn often responds with such generosity that it leaves the prisoners "speechless with surprise." As he ceases to be a guard and instead becomes a kind of partner with the prisoners, Hannetjie undergoes a moral transformation. He ceases to be brutal or inhuman. The racist and white supremacist apartheid system was based on the idea that non-white people were inherently inferior to white people, and therefore were deserving of lesser status and opportunity due to their underdeveloped and primitive nature. Head's story challenges this logic in two ways: by making clear how apartheid is designed to create dehumanizing conditions under which non-white people suffer; but also, through the initial brutality and subsequent moral transformation of the white jailer Hannetjie, that in perpetrating apartheid white society is in fact dehumanizing itself. The story shows the false logic and belief underlying apartheid, and the danger that such false beliefs pose to both the oppressed and the oppressor. - Theme: Idealism, Politics, and Resisting Oppression. Description: "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" describes what life was like for a group of incarcerated South African political prisoners and narrates their small-scale subversion of the prison system. More specifically, the story describes the political development of a glasses-wearing character named Brille, who transforms from a man who was originally attracted to the clean and attractive theories of anti-apartheid political activism into a man who is an active and practicing member of a resistance group, and who realizes how to use and wield political power to achieve tangible results. Brille is initially attracted to political activism because it offered a kind of beautiful, idealistic escape. Political activism offered Brille an escape from the "chaos and mismanagement" of his home life. In his political work, "there were conferences to attend, all very far away from home." For Brille, the world of political activism represented "an ordered beautiful world with just a few basic slogans to learn along with the rights of mankind." By contrast with his violent and disorderly home, his experience of politics involved structure, certainty, simplicity, and an idealist, theoretical pursuit of the "rights of mankind." However, after Brille is imprisoned, he comes face-to-face with real-world, high-stakes power struggles between prisoners and warders, and he realizes that he is "only learning right now what it means to be a politician." He gains self-awareness of the escapist nature of his former political work, thinking to himself, "All this while I've been running away from Martha and the kids." This self-awareness leads him to take more direct and concrete action, to become an integral member of his group of political prisoners, called Span One. In contrast with his previous escapist, theoretical activism, in prison Brille becomes integrated into a group of 10 political prisoners who comprise Span One. This group is politically aware, defiant, unified, and focused on subversion of the prison system that will yield tangible benefits. Unlike the other prisoners, members of Span One do not accept the guilt attributed to them by the state: "As political prisoners they were unlike the other prisoners in the sense that they felt no guilt nor were they outcasts of society." Their lack of guilt leads them to be "assertive" and "beyond the scope of white warders to handle." Span One's resistance to authority is particularly effective because they are unified. The story narrates that "they moved, thought and acted as one," an idea that their very name reinforces. The group identity and solidarity of the Span is reinforced by their always being described as a group, with Brille the only member given unique characterization. For example, when Brille apologizes for his defiance of Hannetjie which leads to punishment of the entire Span, they reply as a group: "Never mind, brother […] What happens to one of us, happens to all." By functioning as a seamless group, Span One is able to fight back against their oppression in ways that individual prisoners cannot. Members of the Span engage in surreptitious defiance of prison rules and the guards who enforce them. The story plainly states, "They were the best thieves and liars in the camp […] they had perfected every technique of group concealment." They beat their tobacco smoke into the ground; whisper conversations downwind so as not to be heard, and pretend to plant cabbages that they then dig up and eat. But it is after the especially brutal warder Hannetjie is brought in to beat and punish Span One into submission that Brille's full evolution into a true politician occurs. In figuring out how to handle Hannetjie, Brille reverses the power dynamic between Span One and Hannetjie by breaking away from his earlier theoretical, abstract, and purely moral view of politics, and instead engages in techniques of realpolitik: politics based on situational and practical factors rather than moral and ideological principles. After Brille witnesses Hannetjie stealing five bags of fertilizer, he realizes that he now has leverage over the brutal warden and engineers a series of actions designed to gain power over the guard: he first accepts a bribe of tobacco in exchange for not informing on Hannetjie to the prison authorities, and then breaks this promise and informs on him anyway. Brille justifies reneging on the deal with Hannetjie with reference to consequentialist ethics, where an action is judged right or wrong based on the outcome it will produce. Brille tells his fellow inmates, "I'm going to punish him severely because we need a good warder." Betraying Hannetjie, while morally wrong in the abstract, is justifiable to Brille because it will benefit all of Span One. Later, when Brille is seen by another guard smoking one of the cigarettes that Hannetjie gave him, Brille again betrays Hannetjie by revealing that he is the source of the cigarettes. After Hannetjie is harshly punished by the prison chief, Hannetjie's "nerve broke completely" and the guard gives up, telling Brille that: "I can give you anything you want." But at this point Brille makes another brilliant political move: he informs Hannetjie that he no longer wants bribes of tobacco, but an alliance with him. Hannetjie agrees to this alliance, which ends up being mutually beneficial. Hannetjie not only ceases his beatings and cruelty, he also actually helps Span One work in the fields and brings them eggs from his farm. And Span One helps Hannetjie by stealing fertilizer for him, that he can then use on his farm. Over time, Span One becomes recognized as the prison's "best work span." "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" story shows how resistance to oppression can grow from theoretical principles like the ones Brille absorbed before prison, but also how such principles alone are not enough. Ultimately, the story suggests that what is required is both a motivated and unified group of resistors working together, but also a practical-minded politics that is willing to use opportunities to create good outcomes (and overlook certain possibly immoral actions), while also searching for mutually beneficial solutions to problems. And yet, it's also important to recognize that Brille and Span One's victory in the story is only partial. The prison still exists, they are still its inmates, and the other prisoners' lives are unaltered. Moreover, Brille's victory over Hannetjie ironically reinforces the prison system. Once it is in partnership with Hannetjie, Span One transforms from "out of control" into being the prison's "best work span." Thus, there is an implication that Brille's realpolitik strategy, while effective, is at the end of the day also insufficient, as short-sighted as Brille himself. - Theme: The Possibility of Racial Coexistence. Description: The brutal white guard Hannetjie is originally installed by the prison to beat Span One—Brille's group of political prisoners—into submission. However, after Brille manages to turn the tables on Hannetjie by catching Hannetjie stealing from the prison, he tells Hannetjie that rather than forcing Hannetjie to buy him off with bribes, he instead wants to form an alliance with Hannetjie. The guard agrees, and a transformation occurs to the prisoners and guard that suggests racial coexistence as possible, even if true equality is not. First, both Span One and Hannetjie benefit materially from this new arrangement. The beatings and degradation of Span One cease. Hannetjie brings Span One extra supplies, while Span One use their skills at resisting prison rules to steal fertilizer for him (which he uses on his farm). Second, and more importantly, the story suggests that the partnership—in which Span One will help out Hannetjie if he becomes a "good warder"—also results in Hannetjie's moral evolution. In other words, that through his coexistence and cooperation with the prisoners Hannetjie regains his humanity. Brille's request for an alliance with Hannetjie could have resulted simply in termination of beatings and overlooking Span One's routine breaking of prison rules. Instead, Hannetjie's "interpretation of what was good and human often left the prisoners […] speechless with surprise." The guard actually works the fields with them and gifts them with "unheard-of luxuries." Hannetjie's actions suggest that he interpreted being a "good warder" not to mean that he would simply stop being unduly brutal, but instead in a broadly moral sense, according to "good and human" standards of generosity and benevolence. And, in fact, the story also describes Span One with similar moral terms. The story describes Span One is having "responded nobly" to Hannetjie's benevolent treatment, and that Span One soon gains "the reputation of being the best work span in the camp." Using the word "nobly" to describe Span One's response gives it a connotation of moral growth. When read in this way, the story seems to suggest that racial reconciliation and racial coexistence are possible and achievable—that the moral growth visible in Hannetjie, and the reduced rebelliousness in Span One indicate that there is a potential path to eliminate the racist policies of apartheid and achieve a real "alliance" between races. And yet the story also contains a degree of irony or discordance that suggests such an idealistic reading is unfounded. For instance, the description of Span One as having "responded nobly" to Hannetjie's benevolent treatment seems condescending. It suggests that when Span One was, out of principle, aggressively resisting its unjust imprisonment, that it wasn't acting "nobly." The only people who would really describe Span One as being "noble" when it became "the best work span in the camp," rather than when it was the worst, would be those who ran the prison—those who saw any instance of black resistance to apartheid as being a sign of ignobility rather than nobility. With this realization comes another: Hannetjie was brought in to try to quash Span One's rebelliousness. His brutal tactics for achieving this failed miserably. But in failing, and in agreeing to become an ally of the Span, Hannetjie actually ended up succeeding: Span One stopped being rebellious, even as they continue to be prisoners (albeit better-treated ones). Span One has succeeded in its short-term goal of better treatment. But one can argue that in accepting this victory and ceasing to fight, it lost the larger war. "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" does seem to suggest that racial coexistence in South Africa is possible. And taking the story's plot as a model suggests that the means of achieving this sort of racial coexistence is for the black majority to stand up and take power by working from within the system—just as Brille works from within the system to ease Span One's situation in the prison by using political power to turn Hannetjie from an adversary to an ally. And yet, the fact that the political prisoners remain prisoners despite this success, implies that such a strategy offers only a small-scale fix, and not an actual long-term solution to the overall structure of oppression. And one could argue that "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" did in fact foretell the future of South Africa. Twenty years after "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" was published, the political policy of apartheid was abolished in the 1990s, after sustained political pressure both from outside South Africa and from the black majority within South Africa. However, despite this massive victory, in the decades since the end of apartheid, racial inequality has persisted in vast differences in wealth and status between the black majority and white minority. "The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses" seems to foreshadow this outcome. - Climax: Brille blackmails Hannetjie, forcing him to treat the prisoners better. - Summary: A group of black South African political prisoners, called Span One, works on the prison's farm picking cabbages. Because of their strong sense of group solidarity and lack of guilt over their political crimes, they have grown rebellious and impossible for the white guards to subdue. Consequently, they flout many of the prison's rules: they eat cabbages, smoke tobacco, talk to each other, and enjoy more considerably more freedom than other prisoners. Span One's special status changes when a new guard, or warder, arrives at the prison. Strict and brutal to the point of inhumanity, one of Warder Hannetjie's first acts is to severely beat a prisoner with glasses for a minor offense. In fact, he punishes the entire work group, and, seeming "to have eyes at the back of his head," his surveillance and authority destroy Span One's freedom. They live in fear and suffer under Hannetjie's harsh treatment until the bespectacled prisoner, Brille, concocts a plan to subdue the guard. Before Brille puts his plan into action, the story describes his life before prison. He had been a teacher with a large family of 12 unruly children who fought with each other all day long. To escape his domestic turmoil, he became involved in political activism, inspired by its vision of "an ordered beautiful world" as well as the chance to attend conferences away from his tumultuous home. However, after Hannetjie's savage beating and then witnessing the suffering of his comrades, Brille determines to take a more practical approach in their power struggle with Hannetjie. Brille puts his plan into action after seeing Hannetjie steal fertilizer to use on his farm. He informs the authorities of Hannetjie's theft, and the warder is strictly reprimanded. Hannetjie then pleads with Brille and bribes him with tobacco. However, when Brille is seen smoking, he again betrays Hannetjie by telling the authorities that the guard supplied him with the contraband tobacco. Disciplined by his superiors once more, Hannetjie's "nerve br[eaks] completely" as he crumbles under Brille's machinations. He promises to do anything if the prisoner will stop informing on him. However, Brille surprises Hannetjie by not asking for the usual contraband items. Instead, he tells the guard, "It's not tobacco we want, but you." Span One needs a "good warder" on their side so that they can endure the long incarceration ahead of them. This proposal prompts Hannetjie and Span One to form a sort of alliance that benefits both sides materially as well as morally. Hannetjie stops mistreating the prisoners, and he brings them food and cigarettes. Span One, for their part, help Hannetjie by stealing supplies for his farm. Hannetjie also seems to become "good" by relinquishing his authority, as seen when he removes his gun and works alongside the prisoners in the cabbage fields. Span One, contrasting with their earlier rebellion, respond "nobly" to their better treatment, becoming known as "the best work span in the camp."

- Genre: Spy novel, thriller, war novel - Title: The Quiet American - Point of view: Point of View:First person - Setting: Setting:Vietnam, mid-1950s - Character: Thomas Fowler. Description: The protagonist and narrator of The Quiet American, Thomas Fowler is a cynical, middle-aged English journalist who has been reporting on the military conflict in Vietnam for more than two years. An experienced journalist who knows how to maneuver his way through the complicated bureaucracy of the French military, Fowler prides himself on not being engagé—in other words, being neutral to the political and military conflicts in the region—but as the novel proceeds, his claims seem less and less true. Fowler is cynical, virtually atheistic, and laconic, and seems perfectly willing to lie and manipulate to get his way. In this way, he succeeds in dissuading his young rival, Alden Pyle, from competing for the affections of his lover, Phuong Hei, at least for a brief time. Despite Fowler's veneer of cynicism and indifference, it ultimately becomes clear that he is engagé, both morally and politically. In the end, Greene shows that Fowler is caught in an unresolvable dilemma: he's amoral enough to conspire in the murder of Alden Pyle, but also moral enough to feel tremendously guilty about his actions. - Character: Alden Pyle. Description: Alden Pyle is young, highly idealistic, and romantic—the titular quiet American. A professor's son, Pyle has led a gentle, intellectual life in Boston and at Harvard University, where he first encounters the writings of his intellectual hero, York Harding. Inspire to enact sweeping political change abroad, he joins the American Secret Service and travels to Vietnam. Pyle shows himself to be capable of immense honor and bravery—once saving Fowler's life by carrying him away from an explosion—as well as enormous callousness and brutality. Pyle's faith in his ideals—the mysterious Third Force that Harding celebrates—is so great that he can justify any action—even the murder of babies—if he believes that it will lead to the realization of his political goals. Pyle is often condescending to individual people, since he believes that ideas are more important than lives. At one point, he argues that the Vietnamese are like children, and must be brought into "adulthood" with violence and revolution. As Pyle competes with Fowler for the affections of Phuong Hei, Fowler discovers that Pyle is conspiring with General Thé to blow up buildings throughout Saigon. This discovery, along with Fowler's jealousy over Pyle's relationship with Phuong, leads Fowler to play an important part in Pyle's death. - Character: Phuong Hei. Description: Phuong Hei is a young, beautiful Vietnamese woman, for whom Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle compete throughout The Quiet American. Although Fowler and Pyle often treat her as an "object"—a prize to be fought over—Greene suggests that Phuong is an intelligent, motivated woman, capable of making up her own mind about the political climate in Vietnam, as well as her feelings for the two men in her life. Because the novel is narrated by Fowler, Greene gives us limited access to Phuong's thoughts and feelings, and ultimately, she's a mystery to us. - Character: General Thé. Description: An enigmatic Vietnamese military commander, General Thé uses violence and cruelty to achieve his political aims, but it's never made clear what these aims are. Thé becomes an object of great fascination for Alden Pyle, the young idealist who believes that Thé represents the Third Force prophesized by York Harding. In the end, Greene doesn't explain to us whether Thé is a noble idealist, as Pyle thinks, or a brutal "bandit," as Fowler suspects. - Character: Helen Fowler. Description: Thomas Fowler's wife Helen Fowler appears in the novel through the letters she sends her husband from England. She is a Roman Catholic, and thus unwilling to grant Fowler the divorce he requests—but her letters offer unique insights into Fowler's personality. Even when Fowler lies to himself about his love for Phuong, Helen cleverly points out the truth about his relationship with Phuong—a truth that Fowler himself hadn't realized. Ironically, Helen does finally grant Fowler a divorce at the end of the novel—but had she done so only a few months earlier, most of the important events in the novel, including Pyle's death, might not have occurred. - Character: York Harding. Description: An influential intellectual and author of The Role of the West, a book idolized by Alden Pyle. York Harding believes that the proper "path" for Third World Countries must be neither Communism nor colonialism, but rather a mysterious Third Force (yet it's never explained what form this "Force" takes). Harding plays a huge role in compelling Pyle to use violence to enact political change—indeed, Fowler blames Harding for Pyle's death. - Character: Mr. Heng. Description: A Vietnamese businessman and manufacturer who helps Alden Pyle build plastic explosives, but also plays an important part in ordering Pyle's death. Heng is seemingly amoral, and realistic about his position in Vietnam—he explains to Fowler that he sells his services to the highest bidder. Unlike Fowler, Heng believes that it's impossible not to be engagé in Vietnam. - Theme: Vietnam and the West. Description: Set in Vietnam from 1952-1955, The Quiet American examines the country's colonial history and its relationship to Europe and America at that time. France colonized and controlled Vietnam from 1887 to 1954. In a brief period after World War II, the communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared independence for Vietnam from France, but British and French troops soon reasserted French colonial power. Ho Chi Minh led local communist forces from the north (Vietminh) in a fight for independence. America began to aid the local southern government in order to end French colonialism with the broader goal of establishing a locally run and democratic South Vietnamese government capable of stopping the spread of Communism. In 1954, the French gave the North Vietnamese independence, but South Vietnam and the United States rejected this agreement. The Quiet American focuses on the early stages of U.S. involvement in the political unrest that led to the Vietnam War. The novel explores the nuances among French, American, and British social and political relations with Vietnam. French culture saturates Vietnamese society. French is the common language between the Vietnamese and the Westerners. Gamblers commonly play a French dice game called Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un (Four Hundred Twenty-One). Still, the novel highlights that many Vietnamese do not speak fluent French, pointing to the cultural clash resulting from colonialism. Alden Pyle ascribes to the ideas of the fictional political theorist York Harding and believes that the only way to ultimately thwart the communists is for the development of a "Third Force" in Vietnam, which is not communist but also not something imposed by foreign, colonialist leaders. Pyle believes the Third Force would have to combine democracy with local traditions and leaders to create strong local protection against the spread of communism.In addition to the overt discussion of the political climate in Vietnam, Graham Greene uses the relationships between the characters Fowler (British), Pyle (American), and Phuong (Vietnamese) to mirror the relations between their respective international powers. Fowler and Pyle compete for Phuong, much like America and colonialist Europe were fighting over Vietnam. Fowler's role as a Brit is complicated, since England, a colonialist European power, was implicated in maintaining French colonial rule, and yet not directly involved. Pyle believes he knows what is best for Phuong, and Greene points to the fact that the younger, wealthier, and marriageable American would probably be the more sensible partner for Phoung. Fowler is unable to marry Phuong yet seeks the continued benefits of living with Phuong, suggesting a partnership that looks more like colonization. However, Greene never explores Phuong's desires on the matter, instead depicting her as a willing and loyal lover of either man. The story is told through Fowler's eyes, and while he is supposed to be the suitor that better understands Phuong and Vietnam, Greene suggests that neither of the Western participants are fully aware of the thoughts or desires of the natives, and instead vie for control over it for their own purposes. - Theme: Impartiality and Action. Description: The Quiet American deals with the difficulty of remaining neutral, or impartial, despite one's intentions. Graham Greene weaves the concept of impartiality into areas of journalism, politics, and personal relationships. Fowler's profession as a journalist means he is only supposed to report on the war, not engage in it. Fowler highly values journalistic impartiality. He prefers to call himself a "reporter," rather than a journalist. To him, "reporting" suggests relaying facts about what he sees, whereas "journalism" suggests recording a journal of opinions on Vietnam. He seeks to publish an objective account of the situation in Vietnam. Moreover, though he is from the West, his British nationality and lack of affiliation with the French or American forces allows him to claim political impartiality. The novel often uses the term engagé to describe active political participation, and Fowler prides himself on not being engagé. However, many people tell Fowler that it is impossible not to be engagé and that he must take a side. Though he never admits to being engagé, Fowler eventually sides with the Communists to arrange Pyle's assassination, and thus demonstrates that he cannot maintain his impartiality. Contrary to Fowler's passive stance, Pyle represents an active participant in regards to the war. Pyle believes in fighting against communism and instilling democracy. Though his involvement in the war becomes clear only gradually, Fowler eventually discovers that Pyle is a C.I.A. agent providing military counter-insurgency support in the form of plastic used to conceal bombs in bicycle pumps. These bicycle pump bombs were targeted at Communist leaders.Much of The Quiet American explores themes in both political relationships on an international scale and personal relationships on an individual scale. In this way, Greene applies the discussion of impartiality to Fowler's relationship to Pyle. Though Fowler often acts with passive disinterest toward Pyle, he eventually takes action against Pyle in the extreme by helping to arrange his assassination. Along with the journalistic aspect of impartiality comes the idea of investigation. In part, Fowler's journalistically investigative missions into the Vietnamese war zone guide the plot. They make Fowler hate war, contributing to his desire to remain impartial in the war. Other parts of the novel are shaped by the investigation Vigot conducts surrounding Pyle's death, in which Fowler has reluctantly become an active participant. The novel ultimately sides with the several characters who cautioned Pyle that everyone becomes engagé at some point. The extremity of war reaches even to civilians who wish to remain uninvolved and forces them into active participation in the war. - Theme: Inevitability of Death. Description: Covering the war between the French colonialists and the communist rebels means Fowler must face death throughout the novel. And what he sees—bomb victims and slain women and children—cause Fowler to hate war. However, Fowler frets over the fact that his presence in the war, like accompanying a bombing mission that he is not even allowed to report on, makes him complicit in the death. The inevitability of death weighs heavily on Fowler. He often reflects on death as the one absolute in the world. His own old age and his frequent confrontations with death on a large scale make Fowler doubtful that anything could be considered permanent, since death is an inevitable and approaching end. His belief that nothing will be permanent brings about his passive behavior toward change. And yet, even so, he hates the change he sees coming. He is caught in a kind of stasis: he sees little point in life and claims to want to die, but is afraid of death and change. Fowler also relates his feelings about death to his feelings about relationships. Leaving his wife was a kind of cowardly death, he says. Furthermore, his happiness when with Phuong prevents him from wanting death to come. Yet, the relationship, like any for Fowler, is bittersweet because he fixates on its end, which he believes to be as inevitable as death.Though Fowler does not kill Pyle himself, he helps arrange Pyle's assassination. Though distanced, Fowler is still actively complicit in Pyle's death, which mirrors Fowler's relationship to reporting on the war. The climate of death spurred on by the war pervades Fowler's personal life. To settle the "fight" over Phuong, Fowler resorts to assassination. The fleeting but horrid images of war dead in The Quiet American, coupled with its portrayal of the pervasiveness of cruelty in war, form a striking anti-war novel. While death is inevitable, as so plagues Fowler, Greene focuses on the needless casualties of war – mainly women and children – to condemn the vast toll war and the death it causes takes on individual human life and on society at large. - Theme: Friendship, Loyalty, and Betrayal. Description: The central relationship of the novel is the complicated one between Fowler and Pyle. Pyle wants to maintain an amiable relationship with Fowler. Initially, Pyle's youth and political views make Fowler cautious of Pyle, but Fowler also takes a liking to Pyle's blunt and innocent American charm. This complicated relationship is made more complicated when Pyle tells Fowler that he is interested in Fowler's girlfriend, Phuong, as well as by the cultural differences between them: Pyle consistently calls Fowler by his first name, Thomas, though Fowler only feels comfortable referring to Pyle by his surname. Fowler lies to Pyle multiple times in order to make himself seem a more viable partner for Phuong. Contrastingly, Pyle lays his intentions out to Fowler very clearly, but his lack of consideration for Fowler's relationship with Phuong is as aggressive as Fowler's deceit. They admire each other, but are each also jealous of the other. Their mutual love for Phuong draws them together in a way that is extremely uncomfortable for Fowler.The relationship between the two is very uneven. Fowler's role in Pyle's assassination demonstrates the ultimate betrayal of friendship. On the other hand, Pyle saves Fowler's life at the risk of his own, a symbol of utmost loyalty. The text shows various ways in which the artifice of friendship breaks down due to deception and betrayal. For example, Fowler tries to maintain the veneer of friendship with Vigot even as Vigot suspects him of Pyle's murder. Yet it is not loyalty or communication that can save a friendship either, as seen in the failure of Pyle's selflessness and communication to produce a successful friendship with Fowler. As in politics, Greene suggests that aligned goals are actually the most important factor in maintaining a friendship. - Theme: Romance and Sex. Description: Fowler and Pyle's desire for Phuong prompts much discussion over differing views of intimate relationships. Fowler, an older, more experienced lover, has a more detached opinion toward relationships. He dwells on their inevitable end, yet hopes to prolong his relationship with Phuong as long as possible. He also claims to be disinterested in Phuong's feelings, only using the relationship for his own physical pleasure, but it is clear that he has deep feelings for her. It is easier for Fowler to deny his own feelings knowing that his relationship with her will likely end soon than to face the difficulties of ending an emotionally invested relationship. On the other hand, Pyle has strong emotional feelings toward Phuong, yet his upright moral background prevents him from pursuing a passionate relationship before their future together, separate from Fowler, is assured. For example, when he dances with Phuong, he maintains a distance from her that Fowler finds comical. Fowler corresponds with his wife, who lives in England. They were separated and could not maintain their marriage, but his wife's religion prohibits them from getting a divorce. Thus, Fowler cannot marry Phuong, as he is already technically married. Pyle, who has a less experienced and more traditional view of romance, believes that Fowler is doing a disservice to Phuong and that she deserves to be married. For her part, Phuong's approach to love is practical. When Fowler asks for a kiss, for example, she pauses her story, kisses him, and resumes her story with no indication of romantic attachment. She obeys Fowler's commands and maintains a purely domestic role that mostly consists of preparing Fowler's opium pipes and having sex with him. Phuong's older sister, Miss Hei, has a financially-driven view on partnership and marriage. She heavily pressures Phuong to go with Pyle, the richer suitor, which causes anxiety for Fowler. Ultimately, both Fowler and Pyle act in a way that treats her as an object to be won rather than a human being with her own feelings. Thus, on the surface, neither Fowler nor Pyle seem to exhibit real love for Phuong. Instead, Pyle displays the excitement and desire that come with romance and Fowler focuses on the physical pleasure of sex in his relationship with Phuong. Under the surface, however, Greene suggests that each suppress their true feelings of love toward Phuong in their own way, Fowler by being detached, and Pyle by waiting for more traditionally appropriate relationship conditions (getting engaged to Phuong). - Climax: Climax:The death of Alden Pyle (an event that's never directly described in the novel) - Summary: We begin in Vietnam in the 1950s, at the height of the tension between French colonialism and local Vietnamese Communism. Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English reporter, lives in Saigon with his ex-lover, Phuong Hei. Fowler is waiting for Alden Pyle, the young American for whom Phuong has left Fowler. After hours of waiting, a police officer calls Fowler in to the police station, where Fowler learns that Pyle has been killed and thrown under a bridge. The police inspector, Vigot, suspiciously asks Fowler what he knows about Pyle and Pyle's death. Although Fowler explains very little to Vigot, he privately remembers his relationship with Pyle, noting that Pyle, an agent for the American government, was responsible for at least fifty deaths in Vietnam. The novel then unfolds largely in flashbacks. Fowler remembers meeting Pyle at a bar. Pyle is young, handsome, and quiet—altogether unlike most of the Americans Fowler knew in Vietnam. Pyle works for the Economic Aid Mission, an American institution that tries to promote economic security in Vietnam. Pyle subscribes to the ideas of the political thinker York Harding, who believed that Vietnam and other Eastern nations needed a Third Force—neither colonialism nor Communism. Fowler finds Pyle naïve, but thinks that there's something charming and endearing about his boyishness. Shortly thereafter, Fowler and Phuong, who are still lovers at this time, go to the Continental Hotel to drink and dance. That night, Fowler thinks about his turbulent relationship with Phuong. She is much younger than he, and her sister, Miss Hei, is irritated with him for being unable to marry Phuong—Fowler is married to a woman, Helen Fowler, in England. At the hotel, Fowler is surprised to find Pyle, whom he greets. Pyle, Fowler, and Phuong move on to the Chalet, another local establishment, where Pyle, who speaks bad French, politely asks Phuong to dance. Pyle is a poor dancer, but his gallantry makes Fowler conscious of his own age and coarseness. A few days after Pyle meets Phuong, Fowler flies out of Saigon to Phat Diem, a town where, it's rumored, there have been Communist attacks and bombings. In Phat Diem, Fowler stays with the Lieutenant, a well-trained military officer who shows Fowler evidence of incredible violence and destruction. Fowler is reminded that he'll probably be forbidden to publish any information about Phat Diem, since all journalistic dispatches are rigorously censored. During his time with the Lieutenant, Fowler admits that he no longer believes in God, and in fact distrusts many aspects of his Christian faith. While Fowler is staying in Phat Diem, Pyle visits him. Fowler learns, amazed, that Pyle has tracked Fowler down in only a few days. Pyle explains that he's fallen in love with Phuong, and that he wants to be honest with Fowler, since they're "best friends." Fowler is highly irritated by Pyle's manner—he senses that Pyle thinks he's going to "win" Phuong in the end, because he's younger and handsomer. Pyle leaves Fowler after less than a day. Before he returns to Saigon, Fowler tells his old friend, Pietri, that he's planning to return to England. Several weeks after his encounter with Pyle, Fowler meets with Pyle and Phuong to discuss their romantic conflict. Pyle asks Fowler to tell Phuong, in French, that he loves her and wants to live with her, and Fowler does so. Phuong is silent, and Pyle and Fowler argue about their affections for her. Fowler claims, falsely, that he's staying in Vietnam, and that he's getting a divorce from his wife. Suddenly, Phuong speaks: "No," she says. With this, Pyle leaves, acknowledging that Phuong has chosen Fowler over him. Weeks later, Fowler journeys outside Saigon to attend a festival sponsored by the Caodaists, a religious and political group, led by the mysterious General Thé. The Caodaists fight against both the French colonialists and the native Communists. While he's at the festival, Fowler encounters Pyle, who's polite and warm to Fowler. Fowler offers to give Pyle a lift back to Saigon, but during the drive, their car runs out of gas. Fowler and Pyle walk away from their car, reasoning that they can find more gasoline in one of the nearby French outposts. Fowler leads Pyle over the walls of one such fortress, where they find two Vietnamese guards, who say and do nothing—Fowler reminds Pyle that, as "disinterested" English speakers, they can largely float through Vietnam without any trouble. Pyle succeeds in taking one of the guards' guns, and he and Fowler spend the night talking about Phuong, their sexual inadequacies, and York Harding's mysterious Third Force, which Pyle believes to be embodied by General Thé. Late in the night, Fowler and Pyle hear cries and shots—the Vietminh are attacking a nearby French fortress. Suddenly, there is the sound of a megaphone outside their own fortress. Fowler guesses that the Vietminh have found his car, and are telling the two guards to send down their English-speaking guests. Pyle quickly disarms the remaining guard and hands his gun to Fowler; together, they sneak down from the fort and away from the Vietminh. During the descent, Fowler hurts his leg badly and nearly dies after the Vietminh fire a bazooka at the fort. Pyle bravely carries Fowler away from the fort, and promises him that he's going to find help. Fowler curses Pyle and tells him to leave him for dead, but within a few hours, Pyle has found a French patrol, which takes both of them to safety. A few days after his adventure at the fort, Fowler has been discharged from the hospital with a pronounced limp. He reunites with Phuong, who informs him that he's received a telegram from his wife. In the telegram, Helen tells Fowler that she refuses to grant him a divorce, and that she suspects he'll get tired of Phuong soon enough. Fowler smokes opium with Phuong, and lies to her, saying that Helen has agreed to the divorce. Fowler receives a tip from his loyal informant, Dominguez, that he should go to a warehouse owned by Mr. Chou and Mr. Heng. At the warehouse, Fowler finds plastic mouldings, which, Heng explains, Pyle has sent for processing. Fowler is unsure what Pyle is planning. Afterwards, Fowler meets Pyle, and Pyle has discovered that Fowler was lying about his divorce. Phuong's sister, Miss Hei, who understands English, learned that Fowler had failed to get the divorce from Helen. Fowler cheerfully acknowledges his deceptions, and reminds Pyle that lies and deception are his only weapons against a younger, handsomer man. Pyle accuses Fowler of manipulating Phuong for sex. Fowler insists that while he's only using Phuong for her body, she's old enough to make up her own mind what she wants. Jumping forward to two weeks after Pyle's death, Fowler visits Vigot. Fowler insists that he's not engagé—in other words, he's not politically involved with either side in Vietnam. Nevertheless, Vigot insists, Fowler has chosen sides. Privately, Fowler thinks that he's a suffering prisoner with a life sentence. The narrative moves back to the weeks after Pyle discovers Fowler's deceptions. Phuong spends more and more time with Pyle, and sees Fowler only rarely. One day, Dominguez tells Fowler to look for a story at the fountain in the center of Saigon. Fowler goes there and witnesses a huge explosion. Mr. Heng, who's also present, tells Fowler that the mouldings Fowler saw at his warehouse were used to trigger explosions across Saigon. Heng stresses that he's only doing his job as a manufacturer, selling his services to the highest bidder. Fowler returns to his home to discover that Phuong has moved out altogether. He runs to the American Legation, where Pyle works, to find Phuong's sister, Miss Hei, working as a typist. She informs him that Pyle is "working from home," and Fowler deduces that he's at home with Phuong. Alone, Fowler weeps for the first time in years. Fowler leaves Saigon and goes north to report on the escalating war. He witnesses French airplanes bombing innocent civilian areas, and talks with a French officer, Captain Trouin, who tells him that the French are destined to lose the war in Vietnam. Fowler tries to have sex with a prostitute, but his memories of Phuong are so strong that he finds he can't perform in bed. Returning to Saigon, Fowler meets with Pyle, who tells him that he and Phuong are going to be married in the United States. Fowler feels a flash of sympathy for Phuong, who'll be out of her element in a new country. He asks Pyle to keep Phuong's interests in mind, and adds that he must not align himself with General Thé. He also accuses Pyle of planning the bicycle bombing, an accusation that Pyle doesn't deny. A few weeks later, there is another bombing in a heavily colonial part of Saigon. Women and their babies are killed. Fowler, who is walking through the area when the explosion occurs, sees Pyle, and berates him for being so indifferent to human life. Pyle admits that he planned the bombing in order to eliminate some dangerous colonial officials, and didn't count on killing others. Once more we "flash forward" to the aftermath of Pyle's death. Fowler meets with Vigot once again, and tells him that it was York Harding who killed Pyle, albeit from a "long range." Vigot presses Fowler for more details of Pyle's death, and Fowler insists that he knows nothing about it. After Vigot leaves, Fowler thinks that he did, in fact, see Pyle on the night that he died, contrary to what he's just told Vigot. Shortly after explosion, Fowler goes to Heng and Chou's warehouse again, and tells them that Fowler is responsible for killing babies. Heng nods and tells Fowler that they'll deal with Pyle soon enough. Heng tells Fowler to invite Pyle to dinner at the Vieux Moulin between 8:30 and 9:30. Before Howler leaves, Heng tells him, "One has to take sides. If one is to remain human." Fowler invites Pyle to his flat. There, Fowler thanks Pyle for saving his life, but reiterates that Pyle is a fool for using York Harding to enact terrorist policies. Pyle insists that the dead Vietnamese have died for a noble cause. Fowler invites Pyle to dinner, as Heng has requested, and Pyle agrees to come. On the night that he's supposed to meet Pyle for dinner, Fowler goes to a movie and then walks to the Vieux Moulin. There, Fowler encounters a coarse American reporter, Bill Granger, who tells Fowler that his son is sick with polio. They part, uncertainly, and Fowler wonders what has become of Pyle that night. The final chapter takes place after Pyle's death. Phuong has returned to Fowler, and Helen has finally granted Fowler his divorce. Even Granger's child has recovered from his polio. Fowler realizes that his life has gotten much better since Pyle's death. Nevertheless, he's still suspicious that Phuong is more in love with Pyle—and America—than with him. He wishes there were someone to whom he could say, "I'm sorry."

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Rain Horse - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The English countryside - Character: The Man. Description: The unnamed young man who is the protagonist of "The Rain Horse" is only character in the story's desolate landscape. Not much is revealed about this man—his exact age is never stated, and the story doesn't give many specific details about his life. Although the man grew up in the countryside where the story takes place, he left 12 years ago and has only now returned. While it is not clear what he has done during his time away, what is clear is that he's distanced himself from his past and from his former connection with the natural world—though his reason for returning to this place is because he wants to relive his nostalgic vision of it. He marks his separation from his "home-country" though his clothing, which is inappropriate for the weather and the geography: his nice shoes and grey suit offer him little protection from the rain and end up utterly ruined by the mud. After being disappointed by a picturesque view he remembers from childhood, which now makes him feel alienated and old, he spends the majority of the story trying to return to the nearby village as a mysterious black horse repeatedly charges at him and the rain grows heavier. Though the man at first tries to rationalize the horse's aggression and outsmart the animal, his fear causes him to think and behave in increasingly instinctual and irrational ways. He's only able to subdue the horse when he accepts nature's power and mystery and embodies the same savagery that nature has shown him, hurling rocks at the horse to defend himself. The story ends with the man having successfully escaped from the horse and taken shelter from the rain at a nearby farm. But the man feels broken and empty in the wake of what he's just experienced, as though a piece of him is missing—perhaps suggesting that letting go of his nostalgic perception of nature as safe and comforting has traumatized him. - Theme: Civilization and Nature. Description: "The Rain Horse" dramatizes the conflict between civilization—represented by the protagonist, a young man who abandoned the countryside 12 years ago—and nature. Having returned to the rural area where he grew up, the man wears a new suit as he traverses the rough terrain—a mark of his belief that he's impervious to the elements. But as he wanders through the farmland, he's powerless in the face of nature's onslaughts: driving rain, a treacherous landscape, and the aggressive horse that gives the story its name. This horse's repeated attacks and the miserable weather impede the man's progress back to the village (civilization) and contribute to his fear, discomfort, and misery. At first, he attempts to avoid and outsmart nature, but he's only able to subdue the horse when he becomes animalistic himself, embodying nature's savage energy. And after escaping the horse, the man symbolically sheds the last things that mark him as civilized when he strips off his clothes. The "Rain Horse" thus demonstrates that even as civilization tries to resist or control the natural world, nature remains a powerful force capable of controlling and humbling people. Moreover, the story suggests that to survive in nature, people must play by its rules rather than trying to outsmart it. The young man's belief that he's "civilized" and able to outsmart nature is implied by his clothing, rational thinking, and desire to return to the village. His walk began on "pleasantly remembered tarmac lanes," but it eventually became a muddy, "cross-ploughland trek" that dirties the nice suit and shoes he's wearing. The contrast between the man's surroundings and his clothing represents the divide between civilization and the natural world—and perhaps the man's belief in his own superiority over nature. In fact, his walk in the countryside is only a temporary immersion in the landscape he remembers, and when he discovers that he is incapable of connecting to nature like he used to, he wants to "get away […] as quicky as possible." He no longer belongs in this place, seemingly because he has traded his rural roots in favor of a city life. Then, once the man notices the "strange" black horse, he tries to talk himself out of his frightening impression that it's after him, telling himself that "[h]orses wander about the countryside often enough," that his fear is "absurd," that the horse likely "made a feint at him in passing" out of curiosity or playfulness, and that "anybody in their senses would just walk off." These thoughts further indicate his separation from nature and his belief in the superiority afforded to him by civilization: rather than accepting the obvious evidence of the horse's malice and protecting himself, he wastes time and provokes further attacks by clinging to his belief that he can rationalize its behavior. But as the man tries to return to the village, the heavy rain overwhelms him physically and mentally, demonstrating that nature has more control over him than he has over it. Three miles from the village, the clothing that serves as a mark of civilization succumbs to nature: the man's shoes are ruined, mud is "inching up" the legs of his suit, and his jacket offers no real protection from the increasing rain—his whole suit feels like it's made of "sheet lead." When the rain becomes "blinding" before he has managed to leave the fields, he is forced to take shelter in a stand of "little crippled trees." Sitting on the ground, the rain soothes him into a "trance-like," childish state in which he feels shrouded and protected by the branches—perhaps reflecting a memory of how nature used to make him feel when he belonged to this landscape. Yet all this time, the rain continues to "beat steadily on his exposed shoulders," meaning he is still at the mercy of the elements. Nature is relentless, diminishing the man's sense of superiority over the natural world and influencing his emotions, thoughts, and behavior. Alongside this, the horse's attempts to attack the man are the ultimate example of nature's power, and it's only when he gives into his own primal nature—rather than trying to ignore or outsmart the horse—that he's able to subdue it. His initial response to the horse's surveillance and attacks is to rely on reason and cunning. But ignoring or tricking the horse only seems to provoke it, as when it charges towards him just after he decides "not to give [it] one more thought." He changes his path back to the village no fewer than four times to outsmart it, but each time he is shocked to discover that it has anticipated his route. Finally, the man is so distraught and helpless that he abandons cunning for violence. He accepts the horse's intelligence and power by acknowledging that it is "definitely after him," arms himself with several good-sized stones, and plans a route that will provide "perfect places to defend himself" rather than one that he hopes will avoid the animal. In this way, he begins to incorporate elements of the natural world into his strategy rather than trying to escape it altogether. When he becomes angry enough to "have killed the horse" and to fantasize about breaking its owner's neck for "letting the dangerous thing loose," he begins to strike it furiously with fieldstones. It's only then that the horse becomes docile and retreats. The man's embrace of his primal nature—his ultimate willingness to meet nature's violence with his own—ends the bizarre encounter. Thus, through the man's perilous trek through the countryside and this dramatic final battle, the story suggests that the line between civilization and nature doesn't offer as much power and protection as people might wish it to, and that the only way to survive in nature is to accept its power and play by its rules. - Theme: Fear and Alienation. Description: Even before the arrival of the "nightmarish" black horse, the protagonist of "The Rain Horse" is alienated and afraid. Having returned to the countryside where he grew up after 12 years away, the man fears how empty, incompetent, and weak this place now makes him feel. It's because of this that he immediately and desperately wants to flee—but he refuses to take the easiest path because it passes by a nearby farm and he's afraid that the farmer will either remember him or mistake him as a trespasser. The man's fear of being an outsider in his own homeland is also reflected in his terrifying, violent encounter with the strange horse. The animal's repeated charges make it all the more obvious that the man no longer belongs in his "home-country." As the story progresses, the man's rising fear influences his perception of his surroundings, causing him to lose his grip on reality and control over his mind and body. This is true even when he consciously tries to rationalize what he is experiencing. Through the man's harrowing journey through the hills and woods where he grew up, the story shows that fear—especially when compounded by alienation—can be an all-consuming emotion that shapes people's view of the world around them and influences their behavior, making them think and act in ways they would otherwise consider irrational. When the man fails to recapture the nostalgic feelings of his youth while walking over the hill, he feels alienated and unsettled—and these emotions quickly turn into anxiety and fear. Although he claims he wasn't expecting a "very transfiguring experience" in returning to the area, he clearly looked forward to something. He feels alienated by his inability to conjure up "the right feelings," and this failure forces him to confront his sense that "the land no longer recognize[s] him." The place makes him feel "so outcast, so old and stiff and stupid" that he immediately wants to flee. Clearly, he is anxious about accepting that he no longer belongs in this place. In this emotionally heightened state, the man first catches sight of the unsettling horse. Immediately, his "senses [startle] alert." Even before he fully registers the horse's unnatural and "ghostly" appearance, his reaction is instinctively fearful. In this way, the man's alienation exacerbates his anxiety and makes him more likely to react fearfully, given that he already feels isolated and vulnerable. The longer the man remains mired in the muddy fields, the more disoriented and irrational he becomes, and his sense of alienation and rising fear color nearly everything he hears or sees. The harder the rain falls, the more it obscures the landscape, narrows the man's perspective, and hides landmarks. Sitting in the woods, he watches the "blue shoal of the town" rising and falling as if floating on stormy waves, reflecting how he feels unmoored, like a ship in a storm at sea. Once, when the horse charges at him, he feels as if "[i]ts whinnying snort and the spattering whack of its hooves" are "actually inside his head." His fearful overreaction demonstrates how the horse's antagonism (which represents the man's unbelonging in this place) is as much in the man's mind as in the horse's actions. Then, the man's fear of the horse drives him to think and behave in increasingly irrational ways, to the point that he seems to be losing control of his own mind and body. The horse begins to follow the man and repeatedly tries to attack him, though he can't discern its motivations. This further illustrates the man's alienation: it seems as if the horse is trying to drive him out of a territory that no longer recognizes him as a citizen. Every attempt to shelter, cross the field, or return over the hill, causes the horse to threaten the man. Yet the idea that it would be intentionally antagonizing him is so strange that he initially rejects it. As soon as the horse disappears farther into the woods, he thinks it "incredible that the horse could have mean to attack him." His explanations are increasingly tenuous as the encounter unfolds: he wonders whether the animal has "an abscess on its brain," or whether it is "clairvoyant." His "rational" explanations have become more outlandish than the simple explanation that the horse doesn't want him here. And his instinct to sneak away and avoid attacks belies his attempts at rationality; his behavior continues to be directed by his fear, even as he tries to convince himself that there's nothing to be afraid of. After the man eventually grows angry, fights back, and escapes the horse, he retreats to the safety of a nearby farm where he spent time as a child. As he takes in the familiar smells and sights, he already feels the episode with the horse slipping away, feeling less and less real. Yet the "fright and shame" of the experience remain, having only been covered briefly by his rage at the horse. He continues to behave irrationally, stripping his ruined suit off in the midst of the cold, driving rain. He feels "as if some important part had been cut out of his brain," and although the meaning of this is ambiguous, it's clear that the terrifying experience with the horse has left him empty and broken rather than triumphant. In the end, the man has survived the experience with the horse, but at the cost of his dignity and his rationality. - Theme: Nostalgia. Description: The man at the center of "The Rain Horse" has returned to the countryside where he grew up after 12 years away, and he's walked miles from the village to revisit a vista he remembers affectionately from his youth. The walk, however, has been too long, too wet, and too muddy; and when he arrives at the long-sought view, he finds it disappointing. He feels antagonized rather than comforted by nature, alienated and even mocked by a landscape that doesn't match his nostalgic memory. And as the story progresses, the rain and the repeated attacks of a strange black horse reinforce his disconcerted feeling that he no longer belongs here. Even as he retreats into childlike behavior and begins to reconnect with nature, it's clear that his desire to return to the nostalgic, romanticized version of his memories isn't possible—he's perhaps remembering a world that never truly existed. Through the bizarre and alarming violence of the man's ordeal with the horse and his deteriorating mental state, the story suggests that nostalgia is a destructive and self-defeating fantasy. The man recognizes the details of the land, but without the emotional response he expects, he feels estranged. The walk along "pleasantly remembered" lanes has, without conscious planning, brought him to the crest of this nostalgically remembered hill, which has represented the place in his memory since he left. This makes it clear that the purpose of his walk has been to recreate an old, idealized memory. When he was a child, the hill was alive and tantalizing with the promise of rabbits to hunt; now it is "sunken […] utterly deserted, shallow, bare […] black, and sodden." As a boy, he felt at home among these hedges and fields. Now, however, he cannot conjure up any feeling other than "the dullness of feeling nothing." And when a "nightmarish" black horse runs past him in the rain, he feels unsettled and unwelcome, making it even clearer that he has become a stranger in his homeland. As the man continues to indulge his nostalgia, trying to "nudge the right feelings alive," he stubbornly resists engaging with the landscape in ways that would require him to accept a less romanticized version of reality. He initially avoids nearby farms because he fears being remembered as much as he fears being run off as a trespasser. Recognition would force him to engage with the reality of the place as it is now rather than his memories; not being recognized would confirm his feeling that he no longer belongs here. As the rainstorm increases, he takes shelter in a scrubby oak wood, sinking into a trance that allows him to recapture some of his childlike feelings. Among the branches, he imagines himself to be "hidden and safe" and "warm" even though "the rain beat[s] steadily on his exposed shoulders." He plays amusing little games and entertains himself by looking for the images of "dwarfs and continents and animals" on the tree bark. Just as earlier he tried to force himself into rekindling his youthful feelings, the man must put effort into interacting with the landscape in a way that he finds emotionally satisfying. But this nostalgic longing cannot insulate him from the violence of the storm and the roughness of his shelter, as when he suddenly realizes how cold he still is, because his insufficient shelter isn't truly protecting him. Indeed, the man cannot maintain his suspension between the past and the present, and his terrifying encounter with the horse forces him to reject his immature and nostalgic worldview. His efforts to retreat into the past leave him vulnerable to the aggressive horse; the animal sneaks up and begins to watch him while he's immersed in his childish reverie. In this way, the story implies that the man's nostalgia is self-destructive, since it blinds him to the truth of his surroundings in the present moment. Although he recognizes landmarks from his childhood (such as the river on the edge of the woods that leading back to the road), the horse's repeated attacks force him to accept that he no longer belongs here. The horse is the ultimate symbol of how the safe, comforting natural world the man remembers no longer exists—and perhaps never existed. Now, nature is revealed as something mysterious, uncomfortable, and threatening, and the horse's efforts to drive the man away represent this dramatically. The need to escape the horse pushes the man toward a utilitarian view of the landscape, as when he decides to head for the river because its deep hollows and shoals of pebbles offer "perfect places to defend himself." He eventually defeats the horse by using the place to his advantage and throwing rocks at the animal. Only by literally digging into the mud—immersing himself in the unpleasant messiness of his surroundings rather than trying to retreat into the comfort and safety that he remembers—does he manage to subdue the horse. Thus, when the unnamed man confronts his memories at the end of the story, they are no longer sentimental. Reaching a nearby farm with relief, rather than dread, he recognizes equipment and the decidedly non-romantic smells of "paraffin, creosote, fertilizer, dust." He is overcome by the sensation of having lost an important part of his brain—which perhaps means that he has lost his desire to experience this place through the lens of nostalgia. But he has also lost the fear and embarrassment that held him back from accepting the reality of this scenery and his place in it. Spent from his encounter, he can face the mundane details of his memory, which are less poetic than his nostalgic version, but also less destructive than his efforts to recapture or recreate that vision. - Climax: Having armed himself with stones to use as missiles, the young man is able to fend off the horse and escape. - Summary: On a dreary and rainy day, an unnamed young man walks through the hills and farmland of the country where he grew up, but which he left 12 years ago. He has trudged miles from the village, trying to emotionally connect with his youthful stomping grounds and muddying his new shoes and nice suit in the process. But even when looking at a view that he fondly recalls, he finds himself unmoved, a bored and distant stranger in this bleak landscape. While the man considers the best way to return to the village, something catches the corner of his eye, and he turns to see a strange, "nightmarish" black horse silhouetted against the sky. Though the animal unsettles the man, and he wants to leave the area immediately, he doesn't want to take the easy route back to the nearby village because it will take him past a familiar farm. He doesn't want the farmer there to recognize him—or to not recognize him. So, he decides to take a longer route through the muddy fields, even though he's worried about dirtying his clothes even more. But with the rain intensifying, he runs for shelter among some nearby oak trees. The trees provide scant but soothing shelter in which the man desires to stay forever. But his pleasant, trance-like state in the woods is ruined when he becomes aware that the horse is watching him. This again unsettles him, but he decides that he will ignore the animal—until it charges into the woods at him. He rolls out of the way, narrowly escaping its "long yellow teeth." As the horse disappears into the undergrowth, the man decides to leave the woods in the opposite direction. However, at the edge of the woods, just as the man has managed to convince himself that the horse must have approached him out of "curiosity or playfulness" rather than malice, he sees it standing in his way. He slithers out of its sightline and tries yet again to talk himself out of his irrational, fearful reaction—while also deciding to take yet another route that he hopes will avoid the horse and leave it standing in the rain and waiting for him. But when he emerges from the cover of the vegetation, the horse charges yet again. He runs away, frightened but now also infuriated. The man is no longer worried about dirtying his suit, and he ignores the increasingly heavy rain. Faced with the realization that the horse's actions cannot be explained away, he picks up two stones from the ground. When the horse once more discovers his retreat and charges at him, he turns and hurls the stones, causing the horse to run off. Feeling enraged, empowered, and murderous, the man arms himself with more stones. The next time he sees the horse, he takes the offensive position, yelling, "brandishing his arms," and hurling stones in its direction to the brink of exhaustion. When he pauses to stretch his shoulder, the horse makes a final charge. With his aim under "some superior guidance," he cracks the horse with two final stones, finally deterring the animal. Suddenly aware that he is freezing, exhausted, and miserable, the man retreats to a nearby farm where he spent time as a child. As he enters the farmyard, he notices its familiar smell and the swallows' nests under the rafters of the shed. Taking shelter under the shed, he begins to strip off his ruined clothing and wring out the water. But then he suddenly stops, staring at the ground and feeling like an important part of his brain has been removed.

- Genre: short story/humor - Title: The Ransom of Red Chief - Point of view: First person from Sam's perspective - Setting: Rural small-town America - Character: Sam. Description: Sam, the story's narrator, is a con-man and a hustler who works with his partner-in-crime Bill to hatch harebrained criminal plots. He is always looking for a "good thing" and a scheme to make a little easy money, but his ideas are terrible—he has no realistic understanding of what criminals do or what plans might succeed—and therefore his plots tend to blow up in his face. When he and Bill conspire to kidnap Johnny, the son of a wealthy man, and hold him for ransom, they do not anticipate the child's difficulty, the canniness of his father, nor the logistical hurdles of holding a child hostage and demanding and collecting ransom. For their oversights, Sam and Bill wind up paying Johnny's father Ebenezer to take troublesome Johnny back, rather than making money from their scheme. Despite Sam's criminality, O. Henry portrays him as hapless and sympathetic, a benign and delusional man with pathetic criminal aspirations. Sam seems to be the leader of his and Bill's duo, as he leaves Bill with undesirable tasks, such as wrangling Johnny. He is resilient, and he patiently persists in their plan, even while Bill panics. - Character: Johnny. Description: Johnny Dorset is the ten-year-old boy whom Sam and Bill kidnap for ransom money. He is the son of Ebenezer Dorset, a prominent townsperson who, it is implied, has been a cold and negligent father to Johnny. Ebenezer's cruelty has perhaps influenced Johnny's behavior, as Johnny does things like throw rocks at kittens, physically abuse his captors, and humiliate them. Indeed, upon being kidnapped, Johnny takes charge of the situation, directing Sam and Bill in various avenues of play and terrorizing them with threats real and imagined. While Johnny at first seems troubled and unsympathetic, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that he is imaginative and starved for attention amidst a difficult childhood. Johnny has a powerful imaginative streak, and he roleplays cowboys and Indians with Bill and Sam, taking on the alter ego of Red Chief (a trope now considered racist but which was common and widely-accepted when the story was written). Bill, in particular, bears the burden of Johnny's care, and he becomes a constant playmate for Johnny, taking Johnny's abuse with few complaints and delighting Johnny with their games. Playing and camping with Bill and Sam bring a joy to Johnny that seems to have been absent in his family life with his father—Johnny even says of his captivity that "I like this fine. I never camped out before." After a few days in the cave, the men finally bring Johnny back to his father, paying Ebenezer to take his rambunctious son back rather than receiving ransom money themselves. Reunited, Johnny clings not to his father, but to Bill's legs, unhappy that his abduction is at an end. - Character: Bill Driscoll. Description: Bill Driscoll is Sam's partner in crime—together, the two men have committed a string of petty crimes "in poker games, dynamite outrages, police raids, train robberies and cyclones." In a scheme to collect ransom money, Bill and Sam kidnap Johnny, a troubled local boy. Up in a cave in the woods, Bill is often left as Johnny's only caretaker while Sam attends to other aspects of the plan. Johnny plays rough and Bill takes plenty of bruising and humiliation. Bill participates in Johnny's cowboy and Indian fantasies, playing the role of Old Hank, a trapper that Johnny holds captive. As the fantasies evolve, Bill plays Johnny's horse, Black Scout, which requires allowing Johnny to physically ride Bill while Bill is on his hands and knees—this proves to be a breaking point for Bill. After unsuccessfully trying to send Johnny home himself, Bill is the one who suggests lowering the ransom, and he finally begs Sam to pay the $250 fee that Ebenezer has requested to take his son back. Despite that Bill wants to send Johnny away, he proves himself sympathetic to Johnny—participating in his games and downplaying his difficulties—and he even seems to become a father figure to Johnny. His relationship with Johnny is ultimately touching, even redemptive, as Johnny clings to Bill's legs at the end, refusing to be returned to his own father. - Character: Ebenezer Dorset. Description: Ebenezer Dorset is Johnny's father, a wealthy businessman in the town of Summit. Sam describes him as a rich but stingy person who takes advantage of people in distress: "Respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser." Ebenezer's coldness and cruelty are also evident in the seeming hunger his son Johnny has for fatherly attention and affection. When Sam and Bill kidnap Johnny and hold him for ransom, Ebenezer displays both his humorous and his calculating sides by refusing to worry about his son's safety and pay the ransom, but instead cleverly negotiating with Johnny's captors so that they would pay him money to return his troublesome son. The unusual name Ebenezer evokes the namesake character Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and that is reinforced by the polite but calculating missives from him "written with a pen in a crabbed hand." He evokes little sympathy in the reader, perhaps because he is the only one who profits from this sad episode. - Theme: Crime, Violence, and Empathy. Description: In "The Ransom of Red Chief," two small-time crooks named Sam and Bill conspire to kidnap young Johnny Dorset and hold him until his wealthy father pays a ransom. However, as soon as Sam and Bill lay eyes on Johnny, his violence towards them—both physical and verbal—eclipses the violence of the kidnapping, which actually seems haphazard and comedic rather than cruel. Despite Johnny's violence, O. Henry depicts him as a sympathetic character—his behavior stems from his loneliness and, in particular, his father's cruelty towards him, so he (much like Sam and Bill) seems more pathetic than evil. In this way, the story's real crime isn't kidnapping or Johnny's violence towards his captors—it's the characters' inability to empathize with and care for one another, which is what leads to violence in the first place. From the beginning, O. Henry is clear that the kidnapping is not the story's defining act of violence. In fact, it's not even the story's first act of violence. When Sam and Bill first meet Johnny, he is "throwing rocks at a kitten," which primes readers not to feel too sorry for him as he is kidnapped. Furthermore, the kidnapping unfolds from the perspective of the kidnappers, so the reader is invited to identify with the "wrong" side of the kidnapping. O. Henry also carefully paints the kidnapping as comedic, as Johnny struggles "like a welter-weight cinnamon bear," and the effects aren't devastating—Johnny says, "I don't have any fun at home" and "I never had such fun in all my life." Once he is free to return home, Johnny even chooses to stay with Bill and Sam, which shows definitively that the kidnapping is not, in the traditional sense, cruel. Just as O. Henry softens the violence of the kidnapping, he complicates Johnny's violent behavior. While Johnny throws bricks, beats up Bill, and credibly threatens to scalp his captors, his behavior appears to stem from a difficult home life. In fact, his childhood has been so rotten that being kidnapped is perhaps the most fun he has ever had—"I never camped out before," he says while being held in the woods. He even begins to treat his captors as father figures and playmates. This reveals his heartbreaking desire for companionship and, by implication, the unhappiness of his home life. In this way, O. Henry gives context to Johnny's bad behavior, showing that he perhaps doesn't know how to treat others kindly because he has not been treated well himself.  By depicting the kidnapping as relatively nonviolent, and Johnny as sympathetic despite his bad behavior, O. Henry moves the reader's focus to a less obvious but more insidious form of violence: lack of empathy for others. The story's least empathetic character is Johnny's father, Ebenezer Dorset, a cold and manipulative man whose treatment of Johnny has made Johnny violent. O. Henry writes, "The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser." In a single sentence, O. Henry makes clear that Ebenezer takes advantage of the misfortunes of others ("forecloser"), he is ungenerous ("collection-plate passer"), yet rigid ("stern, upright"), and even hypocritical. It also seems clear that Ebenezer has been a bad father. Johnny has more fun being kidnapped than he did during his whole life beforehand, and he also seems openly afraid of his father. When Bill and Sam finally return Johnny to his house, for example, he doesn't cling to his father, but instead "fastened himself as tight as a leech to Bill's leg." Furthermore, this father isn't eager to have his kidnapped child back. Instead of paying the ransom to protect Johnny, Ebenezer negotiates with Bill and Sam, ultimately extorting them so that they pay him for the privilege of taking his difficult child back. All of this suggests that Ebenezer has made Johnny mean and ornery through his cruelty and indifference—the story's only unambiguous violence. While O. Henry shows that Sam and Bill's tight finances lead them to crime, and Johnny's bad childhood leads him to violence, he does offer hope for redemption through Bill and Johnny's evolving relationship. At first, Johnny seems crueler to Bill than he is to Sam—he harms Bill physically, humiliates him, and threatens him—but Bill never retaliates, and he even seems to empathize with Johnny. For instance, after Johnny beats Bill up, Bill examines his own bruises and explains to Sam simply that, "We're playing Indian. I'm Old Hank, the trapper, Red Chief's captive." Eventually, Johnny seems to understand and appreciate Bill's patience, empathy, and willingness to play—after knocking Bill into the fire, Johnny says, "I didn't mean to hurt Old Hank….I'll behave if you don't send me home." Bill and Johnny's mutual sympathy seems to show that, just as treating someone cruelly can make them violent, treating someone kindly can quell that violence, drawing out empathy and understanding instead. - Theme: Imagination and Play. Description: "The Ransom of Red Chief" is a story full of fantasy and delusion. From the very beginning, even the setting itself suggests the deluded nature of the world of the story: the town is "as flat as a flannel-cake," but its name—Summit—ironically evokes mountain summits, of which there are obviously none. Fittingly, most of the characters in Summit live in a fantasy world. Johnny constructs a child's dreamland of cowboys and Indians, a fantasy that gives him some control over the bumbling criminals who kidnap him.  The kidnappers, Sam and Bill, are also in a fantasy world: they believe that their harebrained schemes won't blow up in their faces. Because Sam and Bill are poor and small-time crooks, and Johnny is just a child, fantasy and role playing emerge as key tools of survival for these relatively powerless characters. Johnny's various role-playing fantasies give him real power over people and circumstances, showing the power of imagination. For example, Johnny's fantasies give him control over Bill. In reality Johnny is Bill's captor, but Johnny conscripts Bill into a fantasy world in which Johnny is Red Chief and Bill is "Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief's captive." Bill's acquiescence to this fantasy makes him lose power—it leads him to all manner of demeaning and ridiculous actions, such as walking through the woods on all fours while Johnny rides him like a horse, and these difficulties ultimately make him give up on their ransom plan altogether. Furthermore, Johnny's imagination transforms his circumstances. While another child might be frightened or at least uncomfortable sleeping in a cave with the strangers who have kidnapped him, Johnny immediately reconfigures his kidnapping as a camping adventure. Sam observes, "The fun of camping out in a cave had made him forget that he was a captive himself," and Johnny declares, "I never had such fun in all my life." This fearless refusal to acknowledge reality unnerves the men, giving Johnny the upper-hand. And Sam and Bill are terrified of Johnny's role-playing for good reason: they are often the victims in his fantasies. Though these fantasies might start as games ("I'm to be scalped at daybreak" or "I was to be broiled at the stake at the rising of the sun"), it's never clear where fantasy ends and reality begins for Johnny—for instance, Bill awakes screaming to find Johnny "industriously and realistically trying to take Bill's scalp." Their genuine fear of Johnny's fantasies reflects that fantasy and imagination grant Johnny real power over them. While Johnny unambiguously gains power through fantasy, Sam and Bill's delusions are a little more complicated. Imagination and fantasy often give them hope for a better future (the kidnapping idea itself occurred to them in "a moment of temporary mental apparition"), but their delusions also bring trouble. Their elaborate fantasy plans for the kidnapping are unrealistic and delusional, illustrated by Sam's description of how "this kidnapping idea struck us…during a moment of temporary mental apparition." Detailing an elaborate message drop in a wheat field, near a creek, "at the bottom of the fence-post, opposite the third tree," Sam believes his scheme would "commend itself to professional kidnappers." However, even though Sam thinks that the plan is what professional kidnappers would do, the plan is unprofessional and ridiculous. Sam's schemes—since he's the brains of the team—give him a certain sense of superiority, evident when he assesses the townspeople of Summit "as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole." He's certain the "constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical bloodhounds" will be no match for him. His delusions of grandeur lead him to underestimate Ebenezer, however, who easily outfoxes him. Despite falling prey to delusion, Sam and Bill do prove that they understand the power of fantasy when, at the end of the story, they use imagination to manipulate Johnny into returning to his father. Sam explains, "We got him to go by telling him that his father had bought a silver-mounted rifle and a pair of moccasins for him, and we were going to hunt bears the next day." In other words, they gain power over him by getting him to go along with a fantasy, just as Johnny had done to Bill. Overall, O. Henry shows that illusions are a double-edged sword: some fantasize, as Johnny does, in order to make life more bearable and fun, while some suffer under delusions, as Sam and Bill do, imagining they are making a go of it when they are really just making a mess. Regardless, none of the characters who live in make-believe come out on top, which suggests that fantasy—while it may make life more bearable or result in minor shifts in power—is not the currency of real power. After all, Ebenezer Dorset, who has no illusions at all, is the only winner in the story's final accounting. - Theme: Justice. Description: In "The Ransom of Red Chief," Sam and Bill kidnap ten year-old Johnny for ransom. Once he is their captive, however, Johnny treats them more cruelly than they do him, and getting rid of him ends up costing them money. One might expect a story about a failed ransom scheme to have a clear moral lesson, but "crime doesn't pay" is not exactly the point of this tale. As a writer who spent three years in prison, O. Henry was not a stranger to the complexities of justice, and how fairness and balance (rather than virtue) are the measures of just results. O. Henry shows that while Sam and Bill are criminals, and Ebenezer and his son Johnny are nasty in their own ways, everyone is at least partly forgivable, if not redeemable, and everyone gets a little of what they want and what they deserve in the end. Every character in this story is flawed by a range of vices, from callous cruelty and selfishness to dishonesty and criminality. Sam and Bill, for instance, are bad actors. They have plans "to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme," which is the reason they need money and decide to kidnap a child for ransom. But the child they kidnap, Johnny, is also not nice. He throws rocks and bricks at animals and people, and he tries to scalp Bill with a knife. His treatment of Bill is sometimes truly alarming, as when he hits him with a rock and Bill "loosened himself all over and fell in the fire across the frying pan of hot water." Furthermore, Johnny's father, Ebenezer, may be the meanest and most selfish of them all. He takes homes from people who can't afford their payments (he is "a forecloser"), doesn't give to the church he attends ("a collection plate-passer"), and he extorts $250 from Sam and Bill, effectively profiting from the misfortune of his only child. His cool negotiation of a reverse-ransom for the return of his kidnapped child indicates the low value he places on Johnny's wellbeing.   Despite the fact that these characters are morally flawed, O. Henry doesn't judge them too harshly for their sins—instead, he contextualizes their behavior, which engenders sympathy. Bill, whose intention is to kidnap a child, is immediately hit with a brick. His reaction ("That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars"), shows what a mild-mannered character he is, and he remains so through many injuries and humiliations perpetrated by his young captive. While Bill is sweet and patient, Sam, the narrator, is shown to be not so much evil as deluded in his contrivance of ridiculous schemes. He shows his lack of realistic self-assessment, for example, when relating his laughably-convoluted plans for the ransom. Without irony, he says that his ludicrous scheme "ought to commend itself to professional kidnappers." Furthermore, his inauspicious use of fancy language to put on airs ("Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities") makes him a silly and blundering character rather than a heartless crook. For Johnny's part, though he's a pest and a troublemaker, his misdeeds seem forgivable, given that he is a 10 year-old child who longs for parental attention and friendship. Johnny's loneliness is illustrated by his attachment to Bill, his powerful play imagination, and his excited chattering at mealtimes, saying to his kidnappers, "I like this fine. I never camped out before." Even Ebenezer, who is perhaps the least sympathetic character, is softened somewhat in context.  It's certainly a character flaw to be more interested in turning the kidnapping to his financial advantage than concerned about his child's welfare, but he is also not the one who came looking for this trouble, and he doesn't call the constables to arrest Bill and Sam. His letter in reply to the ransom demand seems humanely calculated to seek redress and restoration of the status quo, rather than to ruin the lives of the bumbling Bill and Sam, and it also shows his sense of humor about his rambunctious child's behavior. While each of the characters is, in his own way, sympathetic, this does not absolve them of justice, and nor do their flaws guarantee their destruction. In the end, these characters pretty much get what they deserve, while also gaining something they need. Sam and Bill, for instance, get their comeuppance for kidnapping someone else's child when they have to pay a fee to Johnny's father to return him, rather than receiving a ransom. However, their fate isn't all bad—Ebenezer doesn't turn them over to the cops, so they live to scheme another day, "legging it trippingly for the Canadian border." This is a hopeful outcome for them—considering they could have paid a serious legal price for their crimes, they get away cheap. For his part, Johnny is returned to his father, which is the logical and inevitable outcome of this ill-conceived kidnapping scheme. While this is something of a punishment for him, he also benefits from the experiences he has had by getting from Sam and Bill something akin to the parental attention he lacked at home. And Ebenezer, of course, gets his troubled son back, which is both punishment and reward. O. Henry portrays these characters with a balance of flaws and redeeming qualities. Johnny is mean and violent, but sympathetic as an attention-deprived child. Ebenezer is stingy and uncaring, yet not violent, angry, or vengeful when wronged. Sam is arrogant, and both he and Bill are criminals, yet the poor fellows take quite a bit of physical and mental abuse at the hands of their captive, can hardly achieve any of the grandiose schemes they intend, and barely get away with the shirts on their backs. With a few twists, reversals, and a gentle touch of humor, O. Henry shows what justice might look like through sympathetic portrayals of these flawed characters, each of whom finds a little grace or compensation rather than meeting with destruction. - Theme: Outsiders. Description: Bill and Sam arrive in small town Summit, Alabama, determined to take advantage of the backwards country folk and make fast money by kidnapping Johnny, the child of a wealthy local businessman. However, their lack of knowledge of or respect for local power structures and people complicates and derails these outsiders' elaborate plans. By underestimating Ebenezer Dorset (who outwits them) and his son (whose antics torment them), their ransom plan falls apart and they instead have to pay Ebenezer to take his son back, marking their defeat by the town and its inhabitants. They leave town tamed and compliant, chastened if not transformed by their encounter, having learned that the town's norms and social power apply to everyone who would do business there, locals and strangers alike. The kidnapping fails because Sam and Bill, as outsiders, do not understand or respect the people of Summit. Sam is sure that the people of Summit are weak, which makes it an ideal place for the kidnapping. They "couldn't get after us with anything stronger than constables," he says, or maybe "a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget" newspaper. He calls the locals "undeleterious," "self-satisfied," and "peasantry," none of which are intended as terms of respect. With this attitude, they develop their plan based on the assumption that Ebenezer Dorset, a prominent citizen in town, would put up little resistance and "melt down" for $2000 ransom. However, Ebenezer is clever and seems impervious to their threats. Just as they underestimate Ebenezer, Sam and Bill underestimate the challenges of managing Johnny, who is violent towards them. This quickly erodes their morale, undermining their plan. Despite Johnny's antics, the plan might have worked if Ebenezer and the locals had been as panicked by Johnny's disappearance as Sam and Bill expected. However, after the kidnapping Sam goes about the countryside, trying to "reconnoiter" the area, but he doesn't understand why nothing is happening: "I expected to see the sturdy yeomanry of the village armed with scythes and pitchforks," he says, perplexed. He consistently fails to predict the behavior of those around him, despite his disdain for them as simple. Ultimately, their plan fails because he and Bill are outsiders—they miscalculate how the locals will react to them, and the locals turn out to be full of surprises. Of course, the most surprising thing that a townsperson does is Ebenezer's bold reply to Sam's ransom letter. Instead of agreeing to Sam's terms (or even negotiating the ransom), Ebenezer has a different idea entirely: Sam and Bill will pay him to return his troublesome son. Finding themselves on the brink of agreeing to Ebenezer's proposition, Sam and Bill must now comply with terms that would have been unimaginable to them before this moment, which shows them adapting to the norms and logic of the town. They're becoming, in other words, more familiar—they are now less the outsiders they once were. This is also apparent in their warming up to both Johnny and Ebenezer. While they once condescended to Ebenezer, assuming that he would be easily cowed, Bill now shows respect for the man by saying, "Besides being a thorough gentleman, I think Mr. Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer." With Johnny, too, the men seem to have grown affectionate even if it is somewhat calculated, as when "Bill braced up enough to give the kid a weak sort of a smile." Seeing both Johnny and Ebenezer as complex, respectable people with redeeming qualities shows that Bill and Sam are becoming familiar with the town in a way an insider would be, which further erodes their ability to resist Ebenezer's plan. In the end, Sam and Bill do something surprising: instead of leaving Johnny and fleeing Summit without paying Ebenezer the reverse-ransom, they comply with Ebenezer's demands, submitting to this "prominent citizen" as though they themselves lived in town and respected its social order. O. Henry never specifies why they do this, and it's possible that they are simply too foolish to avoid the demanded charge, or that that they want to see Johnny off safely (as they've grown somewhat attached). However, it's also possible that, as defiant outsiders, they would be subject to pursuit and capture as renegade criminals (Ebenezer does warn them, after all, to come at night because he cannot be responsible for what his angry neigborhs might do). By contrast, agreeing to Ebenezer's "counter-proposition" provides a safer (if not more dignified) way to exit, since paying Ebenezer puts the men back on good terms with a powerful man in town. Regardless of why they do it, this final act of capitulation shows the men fully renouncing their sense of superiority as outsiders and succumbing to the town's norms. Sam and Bill enter town as renegade outsiders, with an elaborate plan to profit by wielding power over the weak resistance of the local "peasantry," including Johnny and Ebenezer Dorset. Instead, they find that Johnny has a powerful (even dangerous) imagination, the local populace is not cowed or concerned at Johnny's disappearance, and old Dorset proves a powerful negotiator. In short, Bill and Sam are brought to heel, ultimately giving in to the social norms of the town. To be sure, they remain outsiders in the end, but through cooperation (first with Johnny in his fantasies and then with his father financially), they adjust to the surprising characters and circumstances they find in Summit. After all, "legging it" out of town, as Sam and Bill do, is possibly only because they have been given leave to withdraw and a ten-minute head start. - Climax: Ebenezer responds to the ransom demand with his own demand for payment. - Summary: Bill and Sam, two petty criminals looking for an easy two thousand dollars, hatch a plot to kidnap and hold for ransom Johnny, the 10-year-old son of Ebenezer Dorset, a wealthy pillar of the community. They pick up the boy and take him to a cave hideout, but there the tables are turned. Calling himself "Red Chief" in a fantasy game of cowboys and Indians, the boy drives both men crazy—but particularly Bill. With nonsensical prattle, childish demands and mild physical abuse, the boy demands they entertain him, refusing to return to his home even when they release him from his captivity out of desperation to be rid of his antics. Nonplussed by this unexpected reaction to their crime, the outlaws write a ransom letter to the boy's father, lowering the requested ransom from two thousand dollars to fifteen hundred. Unfortunately, old man Dorset, who knows that his boy is a terror, rejects their demand and instead offers to take the boy off their hands if they pay him $250. Bruised, disheartened, and their hopes reduced by the trials of parenting, Bill and Sam hand over the cash and trick the unhappy boy into returning to his wealthy father. The elder Dorset restrains his son long enough for the chastened duo to flee town, never to return.

- Genre: Short story, Swedish literature - Title: The Rattrap - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: Rural Sweden - Character: The Peddler / The Stranger. Description: The protagonist and central character of the story is an unnamed man who lives as a tramp wandering the countryside and selling rattraps, which he makes out of wire in his spare time. Because he does not make enough money from this to survive, the rattrap peddler also engages in petty thievery and begging—though even with this he still wears only rags and is constantly on the verge of starvation. At the start of the story, the peddler is cynical and opportunistic. He has a difficult lot in life, and takes whatever he can get and trusts no one. He even steals money from the crofter after the old man offers him his hospitality. Indeed, it seems that the peddler's only pleasure in life comes from thinking of the world as one large, cruel rattrap, and ruminating on other people he knows who have been ensnared. After experiencing true kindness from Elda Wilmansson, however, the peddler seems to change his mindset. He returns the stolen money and declares that he wants to "be nice," having been freed from the "rattrap" of life by Edla's compassion and generosity. The peddler's transformation shows Lagerlöf's idea of the latent potential for goodness in all human beings. - Character: Edla Wilmansson. Description: The daughter of the ironmaster, Edla is described as "not at all pretty, but […] modest and quite shy." She is exceptionally kind, convincing the peddler to come to her house and then convincing her father to let the peddler stay for Christmas Eve, even when he is revealed to not actually be Captain von Stahle. Edla is also wise and perceptive, as she can immediately tell that the peddler is afraid, and has probably committed some crime that he is running from. She is the most positive figure in the story, and her compassion and generosity are the reason for the peddler's transformation. - Character: The Ironmaster. Description: The man who owns Ramsjö Ironworks, and Edla Wilmansson's father. Described as a "very prominent ironmaster," he stops by to watch the work at his forge every day and night and inspect the quality of his products. The ironmaster was in the military in his younger days, as he mistakes the peddler for his "old regimental comrade," Captain von Stahle. - Character: The Old Man / The Crofter. Description: An old man who lets the peddler spend the night at his house. The old man is clearly lonely and glad to have company, and provides the peddler with food, tobacco, and conversation. He used to be a crofter (someone who rents and works a small farm) at Ramsjö Ironworks, but now survives by selling the milk from his "extraordinary" cow. The old man is kind and generous, but the peddler repays his generosity by stealing thirty kronor from him after the crofter shows him where he keeps the money. - Theme: Human Kindness. Description: "The Rattrap" is a short, almost fairy-tale story that centers around the transforming power of human kindness. An unnamed peddler of rattraps goes from seeing the world as "one big rattrap" and engaging in robbery to returning his stolen money and proclaiming himself free—all as a result of experiencing true kindness and generosity from Edla Willmansson on Christmas Eve. By showing the peddler's potential for positive change, Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf expresses a belief that there is a core of goodness in all people, and that this goodness can be unlocked through compassion and kindness. When the story opens, the homeless peddler lives a hard and opportunistic life in rural Sweden—he has never known kindness, and so he himself is unkind. As he wanders the road begging and peddling his rattraps, the only pleasure he can find is in thinking "ill" of the world by imagining it as one big rattrap, and by ruminating on other people he knows who have been "trapped." He finds joy in other people's misfortunes, having only known misfortune himself. The clearest example of the peddler's initial lack of kindness comes when he takes the decidedly immoral action of stealing the crofter's money. The crofter, an old man who lives alone, welcomes the peddler in to stay with him for the night, generously offering him food, shelter, and companionship. Over the course of the evening, the crofter boasts about having earned thirty kronor by selling his cow's milk, and he pointedly shows the peddler where he keeps the money. The next day, after bidding the crofter farewell, the peddler returns and steals the thirty kronor. The old man offered him nothing but generosity and friendship, but the peddler returned this generosity by stealing all of the crofter's meager savings. The peddler even feels pleased with himself because of this—he doesn't even think in terms of compassion or generosity, but only opportunism and what he can do to survive in a cruel world. Eventually the peddler has his "rattrap" worldview overturned by experiencing further kindness. This comes primarily from Edla Willmansson, the daughter of the Ramsjö Ironworks' ironmaster. The ironmaster initially mistakes the peddler for his old regimental comrade, Captain von Stahle, and invites the peddler back to his manor house for Christmas Eve. When the ironmaster later realizes that the peddler is not von Stahle, he wants to kick him out of the house or even arrest him. Edla protests, though, and declares that she wants the peddler to stay. She reminds her father of the peddler's hard, harsh life, where he never knows kindness or companionship, and declares that she would like to offer him a safe and comfortable place for at least one day a year. The peddler is amazed by this, and thinks, "What could the crazy idea be?" He still assumes that this must be some new "trap," and that Edla is trying to get something out of him. Over the course of the next day and night, the peddler's amazement only grows, and he seems to recognize that Edla is simply a kind and compassionate person. She gifts him the suit he is wearing as a Christmas present, and then offers that he would be welcome back at the manor house next Christmas Eve if he should again want a safe and warm place to stay. While the narrative doesn't describe the peddler's thoughts at this point, it's clear that he experiences a fundamental change as a result of Edla's compassion. This is shown the next day, when the ironmaster and Edla return from church, where they learned that the peddler is actually a thief. Upon getting back to the house and expecting the peddler to have stolen from them as well, they instead find that the peddler has left behind the crofter's stolen money, a rattrap as a Christmas present, and a letter for Edla. In the letter, he explains how her kindness has helped him to "clear himself" of the rattrap of life, and says that because she was so "nice" to him and treated him like a real captain, he wants to be nice to her in return. This significant turn exhibits Lagerlöf's point about the power of human kindness. The peddler always had the latent potential for goodness within him, but because he experienced only hardship and unkindness in life, he thought of the world as an antagonistic place and was antagonistic to others in turn. When he experiences true understanding and compassion from Edla Willmansson, however, he is able to adjust his "rattrap" philosophy and find the goodness within himself, even being kind to Edla by not only giving back the stolen money but also offering a rattrap as a Christmas present. He then goes back to his difficult life of wandering and peddling rattraps, but it's assumed that the peddler has been fundamentally changed for the better by his experience of Edla's kindness. While "The Rattrap" doesn't shy away from the reality that the world can be a harsh and unkind place, it ultimately takes an optimistic view of human nature, and advocates for the power of the virtues of kindness and compassion. - Theme: Trust vs. Cynicism. Description: As "The Rattrap" begins, the homeless peddler is defined by his "rattrap" philosophy of life: that the world is nothing but a big rattrap that offers "bait" in the form of luxuries and pleasures, and then ensnares and ruins anyone who reaches for this bait. This is a fundamentally cynical worldview, and one that the story ultimately undercuts by showing its limitations and offering an alternate philosophy. Though life can be harsh and cruel at times, Selma Lagerlöf suggests that being wholly cynical only leads one to isolation, immorality, and unhappiness. Instead, the story advocates for a more trusting worldview, one that takes human kindness into account and can build community between people. At the story's beginning, the peddler is cynical and opportunistic, assuming that the world is out to get him and that he can't trust anyone. He has lived a difficult life, and so has learned this cynicism through hard experience. The old man who lets him stay the night, however, is exceedingly trusting, welcoming the peddler into his home (whereas the peddler is used to seeing "sour faces" when he asks for shelter) and even showing him where he keeps his savings of thirty kronor. The peddler then steals the money, and feels no remorse for what he's done—in fact, he feels "pleased with his smartness." He assumes that the old man was foolish, and never even considers why he might have trusted the peddler, whose company the old man clearly enjoyed. Edla Willmansson is the second person to offer the peddler her trust. While her father, the ironmaster, welcomes the peddler into his home only because he thinks the peddler is his old regimental comrade, Edla decides to trust him to stay even after learning his true identity. She and her father go to church the next day, where they learn that the peddler recently robbed the old man (who used to be a crofter at Ramsjö Ironworks). This sets up the expectation that the peddler might have robbed them as well—and this is what the cynical ironmaster believes, as he criticizes his daughter for trusting the stranger and letting him into their home. The story ultimately comes down on Edla's side, however. The peddler does not steal from the wealthy ironmaster, and even leaves them with the money he stole from the old crofter. Edla's kindness and trust apparently showed him an alternate way of dealing with people, one that is about more than just taking advantage of each other to get ahead in the "rattrap" of life. This then illustrates Lagerlöf's moral point: that even though the world can be an unkind place, people should be willing to trust each other (within reason) and not give in wholly to cynicism and opportunism. To be cynical like the peddler at the story's start is to be alone and unhappy, and to take advantage of others' trust, acting immorally in the assumption that morality is meaningless. The old man seemed to find genuine pleasure in spending an evening with the peddler, playing cards and talking about his life, and this brief community was only possible because of the old man's decision to trust the peddler. To be trusting like Edla or the old crofter is to put oneself at risk, but also to truly enjoy the company and friendship of others. - Theme: Loneliness and Companionship. Description: Connected to the themes of kindness and trust, "The Rattrap" also explores the basic human need for companionship and community, and shows the negative effects of loneliness, whether as a result of poverty, cynicism, or unkindness. At the start of the story, the peddler leads an incredibly lonely existence, and this affects him in extremely negative ways, causing him unhappiness and bitterness, and driving him to steal from and lie to others. Through the peddler's transformative interactions with the old man, the ironmaster, and Edla Willmansson, however, the story shows the importance of human companionship, and suggests that a society should bring people together rather than isolating them or turning them against each other. The peddler's loneliness is largely a result of his poverty and difficult lifestyle. He wanders the roads by himself, peddling his rattraps, begging for food and shelter, and sometimes even stealing to survive. Despite all this, he still can barely "keep body and soul together," and in general leads a "sad and monotonous life," finding pleasure only in thinking negative thoughts about others and the world in general. This initial portrayal emphasizes the fact that the peddler is driven to loneliness because he has no other option. He cannot build any kind of friendships or community as he must always keep moving, and he is even forced into the opposite of community (stealing from others and then fleeing) because of his extreme poverty. An unfair society keeps him poor and isolated, despite the fact that he tries to make a living through work. The story doesn't offer much specific social critique, but it does suggest that this is a sorry state of affairs. Someone like the peddler should not be forced to live such a sad and lonely life while someone like the wealthy ironmaster enjoys stability and luxury, and the opportunity to enjoy a community of family and friends. The old crofter is not as desperately poor as the peddler, but he does still lead a meager, lonely existence. It's stated directly that this is the reason he takes in the peddler so willingly, as he is "happy to get someone to talk to in his loneliness." The old man is able to find some brief companionship with the peddler as they talk, play cards, and smoke together, and it's clear that this gives him great pleasure. The story doesn't state the peddler's reaction to this evening, as he mostly seems focused on the money that the crofter later reveals, but it's likely that he also enjoys a night of warmth and community, no matter his cynicism, as he too is obviously lonely. When Edla Willmansson decides that she wants to the peddler to stay with her and her father for Christmas Eve, it is largely because she recognizes the man's loneliness and wants to give him a brief respite from his isolated existence. In her speech to the ironmaster she emphasizes this fact, saying that the poor peddler is not usually "welcome" anywhere, and "wherever he turns he is chased away." She knows that people need companionship and pities the peddler for his lonely life. This pity then leads to her many compassionate acts, which in themselves start to build a new kind of companionship between her and the peddler. This is shown in the peddler's final act of the story, as he leaves a Christmas present—a sign of friendship—for Edla, and even signs his letter to her as "written with friendship." He has been transformed by her kindness and trust, but also simply by the fact of being around another human being and having positive interactions together. - Theme: Identity and Naming. Description: While it is primarily focused on the potential for goodness within people and the interactions between them, "The Rattrap" also concerns itself with issues of identity, especially the construction of identity through actions and choices, and the role that names can play in this process. Ultimately, the story suggests that identity is a fluid thing, and people can change or be changed to inhabit different identities based on their choices and the actions of others. The story itself is told in a somewhat fairy-tale style, without a specific setting or even specific names for most of the characters. Even the protagonist is only referred to as "the rattrap peddler," "the stranger," or "the tramp." Other principle characters are called "the old man" (also referred to as "the crofter") and "the ironmaster." This makes these characters seem almost like archetypes rather than specific people, and contributes to the story's feeling of being a folk tale or myth. The only named characters (other than a brief mention of the master smith at Ramsjö Ironworks) are Edla Willmansson, who is the ironmaster's daughter, and Captain von Stahle, who never actually appears in the story but is the man the ironmaster mistakes the peddler for, as an old army comrade of his. It's notable that Edla and von Stahle are the only two named characters. Edla is something of a hero in "The Rattrap," if not the protagonist, for she shows the greatest compassion and understanding and helps reveal the core of goodness within the previously cynical, bitter peddler. She takes many specific positive actions in the story, such as persuading the peddler to come to the manor house, declaring her desire to provide him with a safe place to stay, and gifting the peddler with a suit and the offer of returning for Christmas Eve the next year. Actions and decisions like this give her a sense of identity within the story, one reflected by the fact that she is also given a name. This idea then shows the importance of the peddler's final letter, which he signs as "Captain von Stahle." He is not really von Stahle, of course, but it's suggested that in being transformed by Edla's kindness and taking his own positive actions of returning the stolen money and leaving a rattrap as a Christmas present, the peddler has taken on a new identity and been given a name to go with it. He has been treated like a "real captain" and so wants to act like a captain in turn, even symbolically using the title and name he previously lied about. This doesn't mean that he now is (or wants to be) an upper-class leader in the army, but rather someone others might treat with dignity and kindness, and who can treat others with dignity and kindness in turn. The story thus suggests that identity is not necessarily fixed, and one's situation and choices contribute to the identity a person inhabits at any given time. This then becomes part of Lagerlöf's positive message in "The Rattrap"—that people can change, and that means they can change for the better. - Climax: Edla returns to find the peddler's package. - Summary: The peddler lives as a tramp, wandering the roads and selling rattraps. He likes to think of the world as one big rattrap that offers bait for people in the form of luxury and pleasure, and then ensnares them. One evening in late December, the peddler comes to a cabin and asks for shelter. The old man who lives there welcomes him in, offering food, tobacco, and conversation. He shows the peddler thirty kronor that he has earned from selling his cow's milk. The next morning the peddler leaves, but then he returns to steal the old man's money. He goes into the forest to avoid detection, but soon finds himself lost. He realizes that he has been caught in the "rattrap," and fears that he will die. The peddler then hears hammering and finds that he is near an ironworks. He takes shelter there by the warm furnace, where the master blacksmith and his apprentice are working. The ironworks are owned by a wealthy ironmaster, who frequently visits the forge. He comes by that night and sees the peddler. Mistaking the peddler for an old regimental comrade, Captain von Stahle, the ironmaster invites him to come back to his manor house and spend Christmas with him and his daughter. Though the peddler first pretends to be von Stahle, he declines the ironmaster's invitation, afraid to go to the house with his stolen money. The ironmaster reluctantly leaves. Soon after, the ironmaster's daughter Edla Willmansson arrives at the forge, sent by her father to persuade the peddler to come to their home. She notes that the man looks afraid and is probably hiding from some past crime, but she treats him kindly and assures him that he can leave freely whenever he wants. The peddler agrees to come with her. The next morning, the ironmaster and Edla greet the peddler, who has been bathed and dressed in fine clothes. The ironmaster realizes he made a mistake—the stranger is not Captain von Stahle—and gets angry. The peddler offers to put his rags back on and leave, but the ironmaster threatens to call for the sheriff. This angers the peddler, who rants about how the whole world is a rattrap, and the ironmaster should consider that he might be caught one day too. This amuses the ironmaster, who agrees to let the peddler go without calling the sheriff. Edla stops him, however, and says that she wants the peddler to stay. She knows that he has a hard life and declares that he should have some warmth and safety on Christmas Eve, especially because they already promised him their hospitality. The ironmaster grumbles but agrees. The peddler, amazed by Edla's words, sleeps for most of the day, only waking for meals. At dinner, Edla tells him that he is to keep the suit he's wearing as a gift. She also tells him that he will be welcome back next Christmas. The peddler is again amazed. The next morning, which is Christmas, the ironmaster and Edla go to church, where they learn that the stranger staying with them is a thief who stole money from the old man. Edla is ashamed, and the ironmaster worries that they might have been robbed as well. When they return home, however, the peddler has left, taking nothing and leaving behind a package for Edla. Inside is the stolen money, a rattrap, and a letter. The letter thanks Edla for her kindness, and states that she has freed the peddler from being caught in the "rattrap" of life. He signs the letter as Captain von Stahle.

- Genre: Realism, historical fiction, bildungsroman, Väterliteratur ("father literature") - Title: The Reader - Point of view: First person - Setting: Post-war Germany - Character: Michael Berg. Description: The story's protagonist and narrator, who as a fifteen-year-old boy has an affair with an older woman named Hanna, only to discover years later that his lover was once a Nazi prison guard. Born to an educated middle-class family, Michael is an affable and moderately intelligent boy. Because of his strong moral upbringing, he often feels guilty and questions the morality of his actions and thoughts. When Hanna leaves him, Michael becomes distant from others and takes on a posture of arrogance and indifference, vowing never to feel guilty again. However, as a young law student, he crusades against the previous generation for their accommodation or perpetration of Nazi crimes, but when he discovers that Hanna is on trial for having worked for the SS, he begins to question whether he too is guilty for loving her. Years after Hanna is in prison, Michael resurrects his relationship with her by sending her tapes of himself reading aloud. Despite his delighted surprise when Hanna sends him a handwritten note, he does not write back to her or see her until she is about to be released from prison. When Hanna kills herself shortly after he visits her in prison, the pain and guilt surrounding their relationship still haunts him, even ten years after her death, when he begins writing their story. - Character: Hanna Schmitz (Frau Shmitz). Description: Michael's lover and the story's antagonist. Often described by Michael as "tired," Hanna's emotions, motivations, and personalities can be seen only through the eyes of Michael, who is often conflicted about her. Older than Michael by 21 years, she is commanding and at times dismissive toward him. Whenever she and Michael fight, she stubbornly refuses to take any blame, bullying Michael into holding himself responsible for what are often her misunderstandings or misinterpretations. During the affair, Hanna is evasive about her past and emotionally distant; however, decades later, Michael discovers that she had kept a newspaper clipping of his high school graduation with her until her death. Throughout most of the novel, Hanna puts considerable energy into hiding what she views as her most shameful secret, her illiteracy, despite the fact that she also participated in war crimes as a former Nazi prison guard. Initially unable to understand why she is on trial and so ashamed of being seen as uneducated, she falsely confesses to being the other prison guards' sadistic leader rather than admit she cannot write. However, years into her prison sentence, Hanna is finally able to relinquish her pride in others' perception of her and dedicates herself to learning how to read from the tapes Michael sends her. Once she learns to read, she begins to understand the extent of the horrors in which she has participated and commits suicide the day before she is to be released from prison. - Character: Michael's Father. Description: A philosophy professor who is distant from his wife and children. Though he doesn't appear often in the story, Michael's father and their relationship are mentioned more often than his other family members. Growing up, Michael often believed that his father regards the rest of the family as his "pets"—that though his father may be fond of them, they do not occupy a significant portion of his mind or time, which are devoted almost entirely to his work. This is evident from the fact that Michael and his siblings would always have to schedule appointments if they wanted to speak to their father. When Michael arranges a meeting to seek his advice, he speaks not as his father but as a philosopher. However, during this conversation, his father seems to regret his past neglect of his family, as he is unexpectedly emotional. - Character: The Jewish Woman / The Daughter. Description: The daughter (nameless in the book) who had survived, with her mother, in the church fire in which Hanna was complicit. During Hanna's trial, she gives testimony that the secret activities between Hanna and the younger, weaker girls in the camp was that the girls would read aloud to Hanna in exchange for slightly better care. The daughter also wrote a book about her time in the camps; the book was made available to the people involved in the trial, including Hanna, but was only published after the trial. When Michael reads it, he finds that the book "creates distance" and "exudes the very numbness" that Michael feels from being exposed to the trial's horrific evidence. After Hanna dies, she leaves Michael with instructions to send her money to the Jewish woman. Michael visits her in New York, and describes the woman as "matter-of-fact." She refuses to grant absolution to Hanna or to accept responsibility for her money, but she keeps Hanna's tea tin, which reminds her of the tea tin that was stolen from her at the camps. - Character: The Prison Warden. Description: The warden of Hanna's prison seems to care sincerely for the welfare of Hanna and the other prisoners. She writes to Michael to inform him of Hanna's release and ask for his help, and after Hanna dies, she tells him about Hanna's life in prison. Described by Michael as "a small, thin woman," she "seemed insignificant until she began to speak, with force and warmth and a severe gaze and energetic use of both hands and arms." - Character: The Driver. Description: The driver who allows Michael to hitchhike with him to Struthof, a nearby concentration camp. When Michael tells the driver where he is going, the man rants that it was not hatred of the Jews, orders, or obedience that led to their mass murder, but rather indifference. When the driver describes in detail the mentality of a particular soldier killing Jews in a photograph, Michael asks the driver if he was the soldier—and is kicked out of the car. - Character: The Judge. Description: The judge who presides over Hanna's trial. Michael observes the judge's near constant expression of annoyance, especially at Hanna's contradictions to certain claims about her. When Hanna asks the judge what he would have done if he were in her situation, Michael realizes that the judge's annoyance is a "mask" that allows him to take more time to answer questions. However, the judge has no satisfactory response for Hanna, as he answers only generally, rather than in personal terms. - Character: Gertrud. Description: Michael's wife, and later ex-wife. A law clerk and later a judge, Gertrud is described by Michael as "smart, efficient, and loyal." Michael marries Gertrud after she becomes pregnant with their daughter Julia. Though Michael never tells Gertrud about Hanna, he cannot stop inwardly comparing her to Hanna, which causes the marriage to fall apart. Nevertheless they maintain a friendly relationship with each other. - Character: Michael's mother. Description: Michael's mother seldom appears in the story, and as Michael's girlfriend Gesina notes, he rarely mentions her when discussing his past. However, the initiation of Michael's affair with Hanna evokes in Michael a childhood memory of his mother pampering him with a bath. From what little else the narrator tells us, Michael's mother often worries about her children. - Character: Michael's older brother. Description: Like Michael's other siblings, his brother also appears only rarely in the novel. Michael tells us that he shared a room with his brother and as young boys they often fought, either physically or verbally. Michael's brother, who is older by three years, likes to complain about him and tries to get Michael in trouble. - Theme: Guilt, Responsibility, and the Holocaust. Description: The primary concern of the novel is guilt about the Holocaust. Examining the role of guilt in post-war Germany, The Reader presents guilt as a pervasive and inevitable force. An important motif running throughout the story is the question of who must be held responsible for atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Michael and his generation lay blame on not only the Nazi perpetrators but also the bystanders — the previous generation who looked the other way, either by their inaction during the Holocaust or by accepting Nazi sympathizers and perpetrators back into society after the war. However, Michael also holds responsible his own generation for having accepted their parents, some of whom worked for Hitler's regime and many of whom were bystanders. Filial love, Michael believes, "made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes." That he identifies love for the previous generation as a kind of complicity speaks to the long-lasting role of guilt in a nation's history. For Michael, this guilt becomes a collective national inheritance passed down from generation to generation, an unavoidable "German fate." Schlink portrays guilt as both destructive and necessary. Guilt is destructive in that it creates inner conflict as well as conflict within relationships and across generations. The guilt arising from the Holocaust causes Michael's generation to be torn between love for their parents and the moral obligation of condemning them for their complicity. Another example of guilt's destructive power is the damage that Michael's guilt over disavowing Hanna inflicts on him. Michael's resulting decision "never to take guilt upon [him]self or feel guilty, never again to love anyone whom it would hurt to lose" closes him off emotionally, sabotaging his relationships with others. Yet however destructive guilt may be, it also motivates people to take responsibility for their actions, to recognize mistakes and wrongdoing, and to avoid them in the future. For example, the collective guilt that Michael's generation inherits from the Holocaust is what drives them to acknowledge and condemn Nazi war crimes. After his marriage fails, Michael feels guilty for the negative impact of his divorce on his daughter, motivating him to become more open in his relationships. That the novel presents both positive and negative consequences of guilt suggests that guilt must be accompanied by a sense of responsibility — responsibility not only to own one's mistakes and wrongdoing but also to accept guilt in a way that is productive. Essentially, Schlink is arguing that Germany must face and deal with its Nazi past in order to move forward. But even as Germany must accept guilt and deal with its Nazi past productively, absolution for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust is seemingly impossible. At the end of the novel, the Jewish woman in New York — the only remaining survivor of the church fire in which Hanna was complicit — refuses to accept Hanna's money, because to do so would be to grant her absolution, and thus to relieve a Nazi criminal of responsibility. The woman's inability to forgive Hanna suggests that some crimes are so heinous that they cannot be forgiven or atoned for. The guilty must always remain in a state of guilt, because to forgive would be to allow the guilty to forget their guilt and their victims. Though Hanna is already dead by the time Michael meets the woman, the woman's refusal to grant Hanna absolution suggests that even the dead cannot be forgiven for such crimes. - Theme: Secrets, Indifference, and Emotional Distance. Description: Indifference and emotional distance are near constant presences in Michael's and Hanna's lives. As the novel moves forward, we learn that part of this distance is caused by the secrets they keep from those around them. When Michael tries to keep his relationship with Hanna a secret, he becomes increasingly distant from his friends and family. For example, after returning home from sleeping with Hanna for the first time and lying about where he has been, Michael "felt as if [he] were saying goodbye. [He] was still there and already gone," foreshadowing his emotional absence throughout the novel. After Hanna leaves him, Michael tries to hide and repress his emotions, wavering between "callousness and extreme sensitivity." Even years after the affair is over, Michael is unable to form successful relationships with others because he is unwilling to fully confront his past with Hanna. Like Michael, Hanna also has a secret that dramatically influences the course of her life and causes her to become distant from others. Hanna's shame over her inability to read constantly pushes her to rearrange her life. In order to hide her illiteracy, Hanna takes jobs she views as "idiotic," and when presented with the possibility of a promotion, she quits and moves to a different town in order to prevent her employers from discovering her secret. Hanna's secrecy brings her down a path that leads to the SS. When faced with the choice of either hiding her illiteracy and being sentenced to life in prison, or of admitting her illiteracy and receiving a shorter sentence, she chooses to keep her secret. Though Hanna is physically intimate with Michael, her unwillingness to share her past or her illiteracy causes her to be emotionally absent—and not only does she keep herself distant from Michael, but she is also distant from herself. When Michael questions her about her life, Hanna is evasive and only divulges basic facts "as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get [him] the answers…as if it were not her life but somebody else's, someone she didn't know well and who wasn't important to her." Hanna's disconnection to herself is perhaps a consequence of the exhaustion of maintaining her secret. When Michael, as an older man, researches illiteracy, he discovers "how much energy it takes to conceal one's inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living." Like Hanna, whose secrecy is partly responsible for her distance, Michael spends a considerable amount of energy repressing his emotions for and about Hanna. And because they decide to keep their secrets, Michael and Hanna become emotionally distant from others, which prevents them from living their lives. However, as the novel presents a strong relationship between indifference and the potential for evil evil, the emotional distance that Hanna exhibits also speaks to the horrors that she committed and to which she was exposed during the Holocaust. When Michael hitchhikes to Struthof, a concentration camp, his driver claims that the Nazis killed not out of hatred but out of indifference, recalling Hannah Arendt's ideas about the "banality of evil" in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt proposed that Adolf Eichmann, a powerful Nazi organizer, did not commit his crimes out of monstrous bloodlust or ideological zealotry; rather, his actions were motivated by his desire to advance his career, a desire accompanied by indifference to the suffering caused by his work. Like Eichmann, Hanna regards her role as a concentration camp guard as a professional obligation without consideration the consequences of her actions. And like Eichmann, she is partly responsible for the Holocaust because of her indifference. Indifference can allow evil to flourish not only at the hands of perpetrators like Hanna but also because of the inaction of its bystanders. The novel assigns guilt to the "willfully blind, accommodators and accepters" of the Holocaust, because they were indifferent in both attitude and action. Just as indifference can lead to the rise of evil, evil can foster indifference. As Michael and the other spectators at the trial experience, frequent exposure to evidence of atrocities leads to emotional numbness. Reflecting on survivor literature, Michael notes that like the victims, the perpetrators too are emotionally numb, "exhibiting a mental paralysis and indifference" that allows them to continue their atrocities. This suggests that not only is the relationship between evil and indifference reciprocal, but it is also one of positive feedback: evil can lead to indifference, which can lead to even more evil, and so on. The implication of this feedback loop of indifference and evil is that emotion and openness are necessary to recognize and stop wrongdoing. The novel's main project, the emotion of guilt, motivates Michael and his classmates to uncover acts of evil committed by the Nazis, as well as more personal secrets within the lives of the two main characters. - Theme: Generational and Parent-Child Conflict. Description: The novel, which is deeply concerned with guilt, explores the tension that collective guilt creates between parents and children. The generation of Michael's parents, as well as that of Hanna, is a "generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the willfully blind, accommodators and accepters." Their children face the uncomfortable question of whether they too are complicit by loving their parents, and therefore accepting the previous generation's crimes. Michael and his peers "condemned [their] parents to shame, even if the only charge [they] could bring was that after 1945 they had tolerated the perpetrators in their midst." However, Michael is unable to maintain this condemnation, thus representing the anxiety of his generation to reconcile their love of their parents with the moral responsibility of condemning them for their actions or inaction. Michael's struggle to negotiate his love for his parents with their supposed complicity foreshadows his struggle between "understanding and condemnation" of Hanna's crimes. Like Michael's relationship with his parents, Hanna's and Michael's affair can also be viewed through the lens of parent-child conflict. Though Hanna is not Michael's parent, she does take the role of a mother figure for him. Over 20 years his senior, Hanna often addresses Michael as "kid," bathes him as part of their sexual ritual, insists that he does well at school, and engages in fingerplay with him, as if he were a small child. When Hanna and Michael vacation together, they rent a room under the guise of mother and son. Michael's affair with Hanna puts him in a unique situation that separates him from the rest of his generation. Whereas Michael and his peers did not choose their parents, regardless of their complicity in the Holocaust, Michael chose Hanna, a former Nazi prison guard, as his lover, adding another layer of conflict—guilt—to their relationship. Yet despite the separation Michael feels from his peers, he nevertheless identifies his conflicting feelings about Hanna as "the fate of [his] generation, a German fate," suggesting that his relationship with Hanna both deviates from and magnifies, almost allegorically, the generational conflict created by the Holocaust. - Theme: Reading and Illiteracy. Description: The novel presents the inability to read as a form of dependence. Hanna's illiteracy severely limits her options, determining the course of her life. Because she is unable to read, she is forced to decline promotions and must resort to jobs she views as "idiotic." Not only does Hanna's illiteracy limit her life choices, but her shame for being illiterate pushes her to make certain choices to hide her secret. These choices — her decision to work for the SS, her false confession to being the leader of the prison guards — prove disastrous and life-altering. Reading in the novel can also mean the interpretation of contexts and people, and the understanding of one's actions and their consequences. For example, Michael might be considered a skillful "reader," as he is able to easily decipher the mistakes made by Hanna and her lawyer during the trial. By contrast, Hanna seems unable to fully understand why she is on trial in the first place and how she comes across to the jury. When the judge asks Hanna if she was aware that she had sent prisoners to their deaths, she gives the trial's spectators the impression that she cared more about the logistics of clearing out space for new prisoners than about the lives of the people she sent to Auschwitz. Hanna's inability to read the written word thus mirrors her inability to comprehend situations around her. Further, Hanna's illiteracy serves as a metaphor for the willful ignorance of her generation to the evils or existence of the Holocaust. Reflecting on the impact of her illiteracy at her trial, Michael notes that the enormous amount of energy Hanna must have spent on hiding her illiteracy could have been applied to learning how to read. Rather than address the problem, Hanna chooses, for most of her life, to hide it, leading her to work for the SS, where she seems unaware of the untold harm she is inflicting on others. Similarly, those of Hanna's generation who perpetrated or turned a blind eye to the Nazis' Final Solution could have spent their energy trying to understand why they were targeting the Jews, but instead agreed, either actively or passively, to mass murder without considering the consequences, or at the very least without caring enough about the consequences to intervene. The book's title, The Reader, prompts us to ask who, exactly, is the reader. The readers within the novel represent three major groups of people involved in the Holocaust: the victims, the perpetrators, and the next generation. Michael, a member of the generation that followed the Holocaust, reads aloud to Hanna as part of their ritual of reading, showering, and sex. The victims of the Holocaust, the concentration camp prisoners, read to Hanna in secret before she sent them off to Auschwitz. While in prison for her crimes, Hanna teaches herself to read from Michael's tapes and begins to learn about the concentration camps through Holocaust literature. Hanna's newfound ability to read is especially important as it demonstrates the possibility of remorse through understanding. It is only by learning how to read that Hanna is finally able to understand her role as a perpetrator of the Holocaust and the impact her actions have had on her victims. - Theme: The Image as Memory and the Gaze. Description: A recurring motif in the novel is the idea that images function as memory. For example, Michael remembers a younger Hanna through "pictures" on a "mental projector," and for post-Holocaust Germany, images of Nazi atrocities "derived from Allied photographs and the testimony of survivors" become part of the nation's collective memory, serving as both a record of knowledge and a warning to avoid past mistakes. As a law student, Michael and his classmates use the image and the gaze as a means to bring Nazi war crimes to light by pointing to and reinforcing this collective memory: "Even when the facts took our breath away, we held them up triumphantly. Look at this!" As a facilitator of memory, the gaze is thus presented by the novel as the acknowledgment or recognition of evil. However, the gaze can also lead to the desensitization of its viewers and thus the dehumanization of others. Unlike his classmates, who "kept being horrified all over again" because they attended the trial on a weekly basis, Michael becomes numb to the horrors of Nazi war crimes because he attends the trial every day. He no longer feels the same righteous, voyeuristic fervor he once brought to uncovering the atrocities of the Holocaust. The defendants, who were exposed to the Holocaust's atrocities on a daily basis, and the trial's regular spectators are also subject to this numbness, which makes them more susceptible to dehumanizing others. As Michael recalls from survivor literature, "the gas chambers and ovens become ordinary scenery" for the perpetrators, who became used to committing murder. Desensitized to the trial's horrific evidence, the spectators also engage in dehumanization (though to a much lesser degree) in their demonization of Hanna and the other defendants. By showing the gaze's potential both to uncover and to cause evil, Schlink presents the gaze as a double-edged sword, one that must be used economically in order to reinforce, rather than anesthetize, our humanity. - Climax: Hanna is sentenced to life in prison - Summary: The narrator, Michael Berg, tells the story of his teenage affair with a former Nazi prison guard and its aftermath. In Part 1, a 15-year-old Michael is on his way home when he becomes violently ill by the side of a building. One of the building's tenants, 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz rescues him, cleaning him up and bringing him back home, where his doctor diagnoses him with hepatitis. Months later, after urging from his mother, Michael returns to the woman's apartment in order to thank her, but as the woman is preparing to walk him out, he finds himself unable to stop watching her get dressed. Embarrassed to be caught, he flees and later is plagued with guilt for fantasizing about her. However, a few days later, he visits Hanna's apartment again, intending to apologize. To his delight Hanna is not annoyed with him and merely asks him to fetch some coal from the cellar. He does so but returns covered in coal dust after accidentally dislodging a pile of coal. Hanna runs a bath for him and seduces him. The two then begin a continuing affair, including this ritual of showering and sex. Later, when Hanna becomes interested in Michael's studies, she makes his reading aloud to her a condition for sex, and their routine soon incorporates reading before their shower. During his Easter vacation, Michael plans a bicycle trip for the two of them. Hanna leaves all the logistics to Michael, who orders food from menus, registers them as mother and son at the inns, and plans their route on his maps. On their vacation, they begin their days making love and spend the rest of the day cycling. One morning, Michael decides to get Hanna breakfast before she wakes up and leaves a note. However, when she returns, she is furious. To Michael's great shock, she hits him with a belt, and then bursts into tears, because he left with no explanation. Michael tells her that he left a note, but Hanna claims that there was no note. When Michael starts a new school year in the 11th grade, he makes new friends, including Sophie, on whom he has a crush. He begins to go to the swimming pool with his classmates, and becomes torn between spending time with his friends and spending time with Hanna. Whenever he has fights with Hanna he comes increasingly resentful of how she bullies him into surrendering, but he also always begs for forgiveness, as he is afraid of losing her. As he grows closer to his friends but neglects to tell them about Hanna, he begins to feel as if he is betraying her by denying her importance in his life. One day, while Michael is at the swimming pool, he sees Hanna from a distance. Unsure of what to do, he hesitates before getting up, but in that moment she is gone. The next day, Hanna is nowhere to be found, and after asking around at her building, her employer, and the citizens' registration office, he discovers that she has denied a promotion and moved away. Plagued by guilt, Michael believes that his betrayal and his hesitation caused her to leave. Part 2 begins with Michael's struggle to overcome the pain of losing Hanna, who haunts his dreams and thoughts. As time passes, along with his pain and guilt, he appears to move on, adopting a mask of "arrogant superiority." Though his friendships and relationships come easily to him, he is at times cold and at others overemotional. Six years later, Michael is a young law student taking a class that centers on a trial concerning the concentration camps. Michael, along with his classmates, become zealous crusaders intent on uncovering the atrocities of the Third Reich. The students condemn not only direct perpetrators of the crimes but also the bystanders and accommodators who had accepted the perpetrators' activities during the Nazi regime and accepted them back into society after the war—in short, the previous generation. As part of the class, the students attend the trial on a weekly basis. At the court, when the defendants' names are called, Michael discovers that Hanna is one of the former Nazi guards on trial. However, despite the pain that Hanna's departure once gave him, he "felt nothing" at learning this news. During her preliminary hearing, Hanna reveals that she rejected a promotion at her factory job shortly before signing up as a prison guard, making it appear to the jury that she had voluntarily, if not enthusiastically, joined the SS. Hanna's lawyer does not do much to help her salvage this first bad impression, and Hanna is kept under detention for having ignored summonses. Unlike his classmates, who attend only weekly, Michael attends the trial every day, always watching Hanna. As Michael becomes exposed to more horrors for a prolonged period of time, he begins to feel numb and is emotionally distant, not unlike the survivors and even perpetrators of the Holocaust who are exposed to evil on a regular basis. The main charges against Hanna and the other four women are that they were involved in selecting 60 people to send to their deaths every month and that they had locked hundreds of women and girls in a burning church. The trial goes poorly for Hanna, whose initially bad impression becomes worse as she continually contradicts the indictment, despite her opportunity to review it before the trial began, and who cannot seem to understand the gravity of her actions at the concentration camp. When the judge asks Hanna if she knew she was participating in murder, she seems entirely concerned with the task of clearing out barracks space and indifferent to the fact that she sent people to their deaths. Though Hanna denies certain charges, she admits others that she finds true, regardless of their impact on her conviction. For example, she admits to being aware that her prisoners would die. The other defendants' lawyers use her admissions to their advantage, claiming that Hanna was the leader of the other guards, the most culpable and most cruel, and the only one aware that the prisoners would die. They point to Hanna's "special prisoners," young girls to whom Hanna would give better food and barracks space and with whom she would spend evenings before sending them off to Auschwitz. At this point, a Jewish woman who had survived the church fire with her mother suddenly remembers a secret that one of Hanna's favorites had told her: Hanna had not molested the girls as they all thought, but rather had made them read to her. Though the woman's testimony provides Hanna a good opportunity to gain the sympathies of the court, neither she nor her lawyer takes advantage of it. When the judge asks the defendants why they didn't unlock the church doors, most of the defendants claim that they were otherwise preoccupied, despite a report that they had actually been guarding the church to prevent the prisoners from escaping. The women claim that the report is false, and one defendant accuses Hanna of writing the report as a cover up. However, Hanna tells the judge that they had all decided together what to say on the report. When a prosecutor suggests calling in an expert to compare the defendants' handwriting to that of the report, Hanna confesses to writing the report. Michael realizes that Hanna cannot read or write, and he debates whether or not he should tell the judge, as testimony of Hanna's illiteracy would most likely result in a shorter prison sentence for her. However, Hanna clearly does not want to be exposed as illiterate, and Michael seeks his father's advice as a philosopher. His father tells him that though he may believe he knows what is good for his friend, he cannot go behind her back, as it would violate her human dignity; rather, he must try to convince her to do what is best for her. However, Michael is unsatisfied with this answer, as he does not feel ready to meet Hanna face-to-face. Michael decides to visit the judge but cannot bring himself to visit Hanna. He chats amicably with the judge but does not mention Hanna or her illiteracy. At the end of the trial, Hanna is sentenced to life in prison. In Part 3, after the trial is over, Michael spends much of his time obsessing over his studies and avoiding others, so that the numbness that had come over him during the trial remains. Despite his aloofness, Michael is invited to a ski trip with his classmates and he accepts. Both emotionally numb and indifferent to the cold, Michael comes down with a fever, but once he recovers, he feels the pain and horror he had during the trial. By the time Michael finishes his studies, the student movement is already underway, and the narrator contemplates his generation's struggle to deal with collective guilt for the Nazi past. Like most of his generation, Michael had assigned blame to his parents. Though Michael eventually realizes that his parents are blameless, Hanna is not, and he feels guilty for having chosen and loved her. As a law clerk, Michael marries his girlfriend Gertrud when she gets pregnant. Over the course of their marriage, Michael never tells her about Hanna but often compares Gertrud to Hanna in his mind. The marriage lasts only five years, and Michael's guilt over making his daughter Julia suffer through their divorce pushes him to become more open about Hanna in his relationships. However, he doesn't appear satisfied with the women's reactions to his past with Hanna and he eventually stops talking about her. After the divorce, Michael is restless and feels haunted by thoughts of Hanna. To pass the time, he records himself reading books aloud to her and sends her the cassette tapes. Though the tapes become Michael's way of communicating with Hanna, he never includes personal messages on the recordings. Four years later, Michael receives a handwritten thank you note from Hanna. While Michael is delighted that Hanna has finally learned to read and write, he feels sorry for how long it took her, and for how it delayed her life. Hanna begins to send Michael notes regularly, commenting on her life or the books, but Michael never writes back. However, he continues sending her tapes for the next ten years, until she is granted clemency by her parole board. When the warden at Hanna's prison writes Michael a letter to ask for his assistance during Hanna's upcoming release, Michael is hesitant, as he still cannot face Hanna. Though he agrees to set up an apartment and job for her, he does not visit her in prison or write her letters. After a year, the warden calls to let him know what Hanna will be released in a week. When Michael finally visits the prison, he is shocked to find Hanna an old woman, and he cannot find in her the woman he once loved. Their reunion is awkward and bittersweet. Though Hanna is happy to see him, both realize that they can no longer continue the relationship they had built through the cassette tapes. Michael still feels uneasy about trial and asks her whether she had thought about her time in the SS when they were together. Hanna evades the question, claiming that only the dead can "call [her] to account," but tells Michael that the dead visit her every night in prison. Michael, however, believes this is too easy of an excuse and secretly feels that he deserves to call Hanna to account too. The next week, the day before Michael is to pick Hanna up, he decides to call her at the prison, asking her to think about what she wants to do the next day. When Hanna teases him, he notices that her voice still sounds young. The next day, Hanna kills herself. The warden shows Michael Hanna's cell and reveals that Hanna had been reading up on survivor literature and books about the concentration camps. When Michael sees that Hanna had kept a newspaper photo of his high school graduation, he begins to cry, realizing how much Hanna must have cared for him. The warden informs him that Hanna had left a will. She wanted Michael to give the money in her bank account and some money in her tea tin to the daughter who had survived the church fire. Months later, Michael visits the Jewish woman in New York to explain the situation. The woman refuses to take direct responsibility for Hanna's money, nor to allow it to be donated to a Holocaust organization, as to do so would be to grant Hanna absolution. She does, however, take Hanna's tea tin, as it reminds her of the tea tin that had once held her childhood treasures and that was stolen from her at a concentration camp. The woman tells Michael that he can choose an organization and donate the money himself. Michael donates the money under Hanna's name to the Jewish League Against Illiteracy before visiting Hanna's grave for the first and only time.

- Genre: Short story, Literary Realism - Title: The Real Thing - Point of view: First person - Setting: London - Character: The Artist. Description: The narrator of "The Real Thing" is an unnamed artist who is the protagonist of the story. He lives in London in a home that also contains his studio. Although he dreams of being a great portrait painter, he makes commercial illustrations for periodicals and books in order to support himself. In his art, he is interested in capturing personality and imperfections, the kinds of things that make each individual person interesting and life-like. He serves as a symbol of artists and as a representative for the middle class in late 19th century England. When the aristocratic but down-on-their-luck Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch visit him in the hope of becoming models for his illustrations, he is initially skeptical of their potential as models (and he already has plenty of models in his employment), he agrees to take them on, thinking that it could be useful to have "the real thing" on hand when he is illustrating upper-class characters. He finds, however, that this is not the case and that, in fact, having "the real thing" as models actually works against his artistic goals. Every time he draws the Monarchs, he finds that he can't use them to inspire original work; he can only ever depict the Monarch's themselves. He relies instead on Miss Churm and Oronte, two of his lower-class models, who are able to capture a feeling or idea in their poses and so allow him to create vivid illustrations that feel authentic to the personalities and meanings that he aims to communicate. Eventually, he dismisses the Monarchs twice: once as his models and then again, later, as his servants. Even after they are gone, his work is never quite the same, and the story implies that his work with the Monarchs permanently altered his artistic vision. - Character: Mrs. Monarch. Description: Mrs. Monarch is an aristocrat who, with her husband Major Monarch, has fallen on hard times and is seeking employment, as they desperately need money. The two of them are used in the story to symbolize the English aristocracy in the late 19th century. She is somewhat shy and very proper. While she and the Major were perfect aristocrats and enjoyed social connections through much of their life, they have no actual skills. In these hard times, she has applied for many different positions in a variety of careers, but no one has been interested. Both she and the Major believe that their being aristocrats makes them the perfect candidates as inspiration for the artist's artwork depicting upper-class people. Unfortunately, she turns out to be a terrible model. She is too rigid, and the narrator finds that he can't use her to represent anything but herself. In fact, she won't even wear any of the artist's costume clothes, preferring instead to wear her own. She is so convinced that being a real lady automatically makes her the right model for upper-class characters, that she comes across as ignorant of the purpose of artistic models. Through the whole process, she is deliberate in having only professional interactions with the artist, as opposed to trying to form friendly or sociable ties with him. She dislikes the lower-class Miss Churm and Oronte, whom she believes have no business imitating characters and personages so different from themselves, particularly when she and the Major are "the real thing." When the artist dismisses her and the Major, she joins her husband in cleaning the studio, desperate to be kept on as servants in order to maintain at least some livelihood, but eventually leaves when the artist pays them to go away. - Character: Major Monarch. Description: Major Monarch is an aristocratic gentleman who, with his wife Mrs. Monarch, no longer has a fortune and now looks to be employed in order to have an income. With Mrs. Monarch, he is used in the story to symbolize the English aristocracy in the late 19th century. He is similar to his wife in his civility and patience, but he is more sociable than she is. He thinks extremely highly of his wife and is very supportive of her efforts. When the Monarchs first visit the artist, their primary goal is to get Mrs. Monarch a job as a model, although the Major offers his services as well. However, he is just as bad of a model as Mrs. Major; he, too, is stiff and unable to suggest anything other than himself. When not modeling, he usually accompanies his wife to the studio, as he has nothing else to do. While there, he chats with the artist, although he can't converse on topics beyond "sophisticated" subjects, such as fine drinks and fox hunting. He is desperate to feel useful and have a livelihood and begins cleaning the artist's studio when the latter fires them from their modelling roles, but he eventually leaves when the artist pays the Monarchs to leave him alone. - Character: Miss Churm. Description: Miss Churm is a working-class woman who works as a model for the artist. She is plain, freckled, and uneducated, although she is clever and witty. She is the artist's ideal model, as she can represent any number of types, no matter how different these personages may be from who she is. Miss Churm is used in the story to symbolize the working class in late 19th century England, and her skill as a model represents the value of adaptability and artifice (as opposed to an adherence to strict reality) in art. She develops a strong dislike for Mrs. Monarch and Major Monarch, whom she quickly comes to view as rivals. - Character: Oronte. Description: Oronte is an Italian immigrant who is another of the artist's favorite models. He is extremely expressive and has a knack for imitation. He doesn't speak any English, and he astonishes the artist with how well he can communicate without language, a talent that makes Oronte an especially useful model. Like the other main characters, he is also a symbol; he represents artifice (like Miss Churm) and also the working and immigrant classes. Oronte left Italy for England in the hopes of making more money. IN England, he sells ice cream from a hand cart until his work partner abandons him. Following this, he approaches the artist for employment as a model. Although the artist initially plans to turn him away, Oronte quickly charms and impresses the artist with his expressions and zest and is hired as both a model and a servant. As time progresses, the artist substitutes Oronte for Major Monarch in modelling sessions. - Character: Jack Hawley. Description: Jack Hawley is a long-time friend of the artist and has a knack for art criticism. Although he is not a good painter, the artist relies on Jack's input on his work. In the story, Jack has recently returned home from traveling abroad, where he was getting a fresh artistic perspective. When the artist shows Jack his work depicting Mrs. Monarch and Major Monarch, Jack completely rejects them. Although he struggles to express exactly why he so dislikes the Monarchs and the artist's work depicting them, he is very clear in his opinion that the artist will ruin his artistic career if he continues to work with them. Even after the artist does dismiss the Monarchs, Jack believes that working with them permanently damaged the artist's artistic vision. - Character: Artistic Advisor. Description: The artistic advisor is an employee at the publishing house that hires the artist to create illustrations for a special edition of a series of books by the (fictional) novelist Philip Vincent. The artist is working on a trial basis with the publisher—they will drop him should his work not be satisfactory. After the artist sends illustrations depicting the Monarchs, the artistic advisor issues a warning that this artwork is inadequate, and that the artist is at risk of losing further work. This prompts the artist to dismiss Mrs. Monarch and Major Monarch. - Theme: Reality, Artifice, and Art. Description: Henry James's short story "The Real Thing" explores the nature of art. The story opens with the arrival of an elegant gentleman and a lady—Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch—to an unnamed artist's studio. He is surprised to learn that they have fallen on hard times and are hoping to support themselves by modeling for the artist's commercial illustrations. The Monarchs reason that the artist must often depict people of the higher class, so won't his illustrations of such types be improved if his models are an actual English gentleman and lady? After taking the Monarchs on as models, though, the artist realizes that the opposite is true: the Monarchs are so rigidly themselves—they are so "real"—that he can't use them to inspire illustrations of any type; he can only ever paint them. Their inflexibility is made all the more apparent when compared to the artist's other models, Miss Churm and Oronte. While these two are not genteel or noble, they are able through their natural instinct and adaptability to represent a feeling or idea that gives the artist the inspiration he needs to create powerful illustrations. The story, then, suggests that the artist's role is to interpret and reshape reality rather than document it, and that to accomplish this feat the artist requires not reality, but artifice. James quickly establishes that the refined Major and Mrs. Monarch are incompatible with art because they can only represent themselves, and therefore leave no room for artistic interpretation. The Major and Mrs. Monarch are first introduced in the story as "A gentleman – with a lady," and this identification is the entire summation of who they are. The Monarchs are the embodiment of gentility. As they put it, they are "The real thing." Yet for all their elegance and manners, they have little substance. As people, the artist finds them affable but boring. And, worse, as models, they are "too insurmountably stiff," and "had no variety of expression." When working with the Monarchs the artist finds himself thwarted. When painting Mrs. Monarch, no matter how hard he tries to transform her, "[she] was always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing." The Major is just as bad. Each attempt "looked like a photograph or a copy of a photograph." When using "the real thing" as his subject, the artist finds himself documenting it exactly as is. As a result, he has no space for interpretation, which is what allows art to communicate meaning. As the artist puts it, "A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather beds?" In contrast to the Monarchs are Miss Churm and Oronte, the artist's other models who are ideal artistic subjects because they are able to suggest reality in a way that inspires the artist to extract and then illustrate meaning or feeling. The resulting works might be described as more real than real. Miss Churm and Oronte are foils to the Monarchs in both class and character. Both Miss Churm and Oronte are lower class; the former is uneducated and unattractive, and the latter is an immigrant Italian street-vendor. Their realities are very far from the "types"—lords, ladies, princesses—whom the artist asks them to represent. While not particularly respectable or attractive, Miss Churm and Oronte are clever and possess the flexibility required to suggest a variety of subjects. Miss Churm regularly impresses the artist with her ability to "represent everything." Oronte, who does not speak English, is equally clever, as is illustrated by his ability to communicate solely through "graceful mimicry." He is full of expression and "caught one's idea in an instant." With their ability to express an infinite range of situations and characters, Miss Churm and Oronte allow the artist to achieve the "variety and range" that he seeks. He does not wish to copy something exactly as it is, but to creatively illustrate reality in a way that gives it meaning. Through the artist's interactions with the Monarchs, James demonstrates that, in the realm of art, the literal is useless at best and damaging at worst. When the artist shows his Monarch-inspired work to his friend Jack Hawley, Jack immediately rejects it, declaring that working with these models was "execrable." In addition, the artistic advisor for whom the arist is making the illustrations despises the work with the Monarchs and threatens to stop working with the artist. When the artist finally dismisses the Monarchs in favor of Miss Churm and Oronte, the Monarchs make a final effort to be useful by acting as servants. Yet the Monarchs don't pretend to be servants; they actually go about cleaning the artist's house, literally making themselves servants. This sort of transformation—not an artistic one but an actual, real one—makes everyone uncomfortable and causes the artist to momentarily lose his creative juices. Even after ceasing to work with the Monarchs, their effect on the artist lingers. Hawley declares that they "did [the artist] permanent harm," implying that the artist's dalliance with mimicking reality rather than using artifice to interpret and re-present reality has damaged his ability to create art. The story is clear in its position that the purpose of art is to reinterpret reality through artifice. But the story also contains a final twist on this idea, embedded in the fact that the story is itself a work of art, and made through artifice. While portraying, through nothing more than words, an artist tripped up by the pitfall of the allure of reality over artifice in the pursuit of art, James the author falls into no such trap. While the artist's tale is one of a limited kind of failure, the story itself—which is written in an extremely literary style, and yet still feels full of life—is an example of a triumph on precisely the terms that James argues are necessary for true art. - Theme: Class in England at the End of the 19th Century. Description: Henry James's "The Real Thing" was published in 1892, during the late English Victorian period, and it addresses the changing social structures of its time. At this point in English history, the Industrial Revolution—along with expanding global trade opportunities created, in part, by England's colonial empire—shifted England's workforce and economy away from agriculture (which was controlled by the landed aristocracy), towards urban manufacturing (which primarily benefited the middle and working classes). The growing economic power of the middle and working classes also led to political reforms that further increased their political power. The result was a weakened English aristocracy, but one that still clung to its own traditions and sense of self. By setting up a scenario in which a middle-class, professional artist works with two sets of models—the Monarchs (made up of Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch), who are aristocrats fallen on hard times; and the working-class Miss Churm and poor immigrant Oronte—"The Real Thing" portrays the class tensions and changes at play in the late 19th century. In the end, the Monarchs are too rigid and unimaginative to successfully model, and the artist dismisses them. The artist's rejection of the Monarchs—who the story implies represent all of the English aristocracy—implies that the English aristocracy of this time has become paralyzed: it's losing its wealth and yet is unable to change. James uses the Monarchs to represent the late-Victorian English aristocracy, a class whose fortune has diminished and who struggle to adapt socially and economically to the changing times. This representation is made clear from the beginning. First, they are initially introduced not as individuals, but as types: "A gentleman—with a lady." They even self-identify as types: "The real thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady." Their name, Monarch, also suggests that they represent the entire aristocratic class. Contrary to appearances, though, they aren't wealthy. Major Monarch informs the artist that they "had the misfortune to lose [their] money," which is why they are now seeking employment. This downfall clearly parallels the fortunes of the aristocratic class more broadly, many of whom were experiencing hard times. The artist also notes that "There was something about them that represented credit," suggesting that the aristocracy are on borrowed time and money. The Monarchs are also portrayed as stuck in their customs. The artist finds them pleasant, but "so simple." Their "pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness" speak to their dedication to outdated aristocratic propriety. The fact that the Monarchs make such terrible models—they are "too insurmountably stiff"—is emblematic of their general inability to change. In contrast to the aristocracy, the middle, working, and immigrant classes (represented in the story by the artist, Miss Churm, and Oronte, respectively) all possess the flexibility that allows them to keep up with the changing socioeconomic landscape. The artist is an entrepreneurial middle-class businessman. He is both an employee (hired by newspapers, publishers, and portrait-sitters) and an employer (he hires models). He interacts easily with people of all social classes and his studio acts as a "Bohemian" oasis. Meanwhile, the working-class Miss Churm, although not formally educated, is "really very clever" in her work. The artist applauds her as "an excellent model" who "could represent everything." Because of her talent, she is "greatly in demand, never in want of employment." Through her, James suggests that members of the working class, with their varied skill sets, vitality, and adaptability, are well equipped for success. Finally, Oronte, an Italian immigrant, stands in for immigrants to England. Almost immediately, the artist identifies Oronte as "a treasure," given his wealth of expression and ability to communicate despite not even speaking English. The artist hires him in a "double capacity" as both model and servant, which shows Oronte's ability to fulfill a variety of roles. This speaks to the elasticity of not just the working class, but the immigrant class too. But the Monarchs don't just struggle with their cultivated rigidity and lack of professional experience; they also face the unwillingness of other classes to let them change. Miss Churm views the Monarchs as her "invidious rivals," and is "secretly derisive" of them. She immediately predicts their inability to model, saying of Mrs. Monarch "if she can sit, I'll tyke to bookkeeping." She is not the only one with this skeptical attitude; no one is interested in hiring the Monarchs. Mrs. Monarch says "There isn't a confounded job I haven't applied for . . . But they won't look at me." Despite the Monarchs' efforts, the professional and business classes are not interested in hiring the aristocracy, likely because the aristocrats have no concrete skills beyond being aristocrats. Eventually the Monarchs' ineptitude as models gets them fired. In response, in a moment of desperation, the Monarchs try to be useful by acting as the artist's servants: cleaning his house, washing his dishes. They are trying to do what Oronte is doing: filling dual roles. But the artist finds this transformation to be so "dreadful" that it kills his creative fervor and prompts him to give the Monarchs "a sum of money to go away." Whereas Miss Churm views the Monarchs as competition, the artist's discomfort at the Monarchs effort to work as servants is different. He sees them as "the real thing"—as the aristocracy—and the idea of them not being that real thing strikes him as dreadful. Through the story of the Monarchs, then, James suggests that the English aristocracy are impossibly stuck: it's not simply that they won't adjust to the changing circumstances of the Victorian period, but that they can't, and nobody would accept it if they did. - Theme: Money, Identity, and Class. Description: In "The Real Thing," Henry James explores how financial needs affect his characters' choices, their relationships to each other, and who they can be. The down-on-their-luck aristocratic Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch need to find jobs. The unnamed artist who narrates the story would rather paint portraits, but must instead make commercial illustrations to pay the bills. And the painter's other models—Miss Churm and Oronte—must take what work they can to live, and often must work multiple jobs. Yet while financial need constrains and shapes the options available to each of the characters, the story also clearly shows that some of the characters are better at earning a living than others: the aristocratic Monarchs fail because of a lack of adaptability, while the middle-class professional painter, working class Miss Churm, and poor immigrant Oronte are each able to shift their behaviors, roles, and even their identities to make a living. Put another way, the aristocrats fail, while the members of the other classes don't, suggesting that there is something unique about the aristocratic class in this time period that makes it unable to adapt to the changing economy. In the story, the characters' relations to each other—and therefore their identities—are defined primarily by their financial situations. When the Monarchs first show up at the artist's home, the artist initially thinks they've come to hire him to paint their portraits. But the Monarchs' loss of money has flipped the script: they've actually come in hopes that he will employ them as models. As models, the Monarchs come into social contact with the working-class Miss Churm, whom they would otherwise never encounter. It's an awkward situation. The Monarchs "didn't know how to fraternise" with Miss Churm, while Miss Churm quickly comes to see the Monarchs not as her distant betters but instead as "her invidious rivals" for work. In this way, the financial demands that the characters face have upended the traditional social order, forcing characters into new social roles and unexpected relationships with one another. The artist, Miss Churm, and Oronte all are able to shift between identities in order to support themselves financially. While the artist aspires to be "a great painter of portraits," he must work as a commercial illustrator in order to make money. In fact, the story shows the artist only making commercial work, which suggests that financial need has shifted his true "identity" from "portrait painter" to "illustrator." While making a living thwarts his dreams, he is nonetheless able to make this shift to earn money. Miss Churm, according to the artist, is a wonderful model who can "represent everything," even "types" (or characters) that are very different from who she is. Her financial life depends on this adaptability—her talent has her "greatly in demand, never in want of employment." She also sometimes does domestic work for the artist, such as serving tea, showing that she's able to take on different jobs, as well. It's clear, then, that her flexibility is key to her financial security. Similarly, Oronte was a penniless street vendor before getting hired by the artist. For the artist, he acts "in the double capacity" of servant and model. His financial situation is such that he needs to fulfill both roles, and so he does. But the aristocratic Monarchs lack this flexibility and, as a result, cannot make a living. Their failure suggests that there is something unique about them—and the aristocratic class they represent—that makes them unsuitable employees. While the Monarchs need money, they are never good candidates for the positions to which they apply. Mrs. Monarch declares that "There isn't a confounded job [she hasn't] applied for . . . But they won't look at [her]." It seems that people are not interested in hiring a pair of down-on-their-luck aristocrats whose "advantages [are] . . . preponderantly social"—in other words, who have no skills. The Monarchs' inability to adapt makes them unsuitable for modeling, too. As the artist says of Mrs. Monarch, she is "always the same lady. She was the real thing, but always the same thing." The Monarchs make a final desperate attempt to find employment by doing the painter's household chores—by acting as his servants. However, aristocrats behaving as servants so unnerves the artist that he pays them just to go away. The story implies that the failure of the Monarchs to adjust is directly connected to their aristocratic status. When they attempt to act as his servants, the artist says of the Monarchs, "They had accepted their failure, but they couldn't accept their fate." But no other character in the story would be described as having a "fate" at all. The Monarchs have a "fate" that the characters of other classes don't because of the different relationship between the social classes and money. If the middle-class painter were to lose his money, for instance, he would stop being middle class and become working class. His class would shift along with his money. But a poor aristocrat doesn't become middle class or working class; she's still an aristocrat, just a penniless one. The English aristocracy was traditionally wealthy, but its long history meant that it was also founded on heritage, tradition, and a cultural connection to England's past, such that an aristocrat can't ever be anything other than an aristocrat. "The Real Thing" portrays late nineteenth century as a world defined by money—financial concerns drive the characters' choices and relationships. But while the "newer" classes—whose members are defined by the money they have—can adaptably maneuver among the requirements of this word, the aristocrats can't change. They are doomed to be exactly who they are: "the real thing." - Climax: When the Monarchs begin cleaning the artist's studio - Summary: In London, an aristocratic gentleman and lady—Major Monarch and Mrs. Monarch—visit an artist's studio. The artist, upon seeing the poised and elegantly dressed couple, assumes that they have come to commission him to paint their portrait. He begins to ask a few preliminary questions about the portrait and payment, only to quickly discover that there has been a misunderstanding—they haven't come for a portrait at all. Instead, the couple is hoping to sit as models for the artist's commercial illustrations, the artwork for books and periodicals that he does to financially support himself. The artist is taken aback; he can't imagine such upper-class people doing as lowly a job as modeling. The couple admits that the situation is awkward, but that they are desperate to do something. They introduce themselves as Major and Mrs. Monarch, and they explain that they have lost their money and are now struggling to stay afloat. They figure that they could be models whenever the artist needs to depict people like them, that is to say, aristocrats. When the artist asks if they have any prior experience, they inform him that they have been photographed extensively. The artist isn't convinced that they will make good models, since he doesn't care about the identity of his models, just how they give him inspiration to create a finished product. He also already works with several talented models. He tells the Monarchs this, but they are persistent, even explaining that they know that the artist has recently accepted a new project where he will illustrate a new edition of the works of novelist Philip Vincent, and they hope to be used as models. For this project, the artist will do the art for the first book and, if this work is satisfactory, he will receive the contract to do the illustrations for the following books. Still pushing against the artist's resistance, Major Monarch inquires whether it wouldn't be best to have "the real thing" while illustrating ladies and gentlemen. This gets the artist to agree. At this moment, Mrs. Monarch bursts into tears, disclosing that she has applied to countless jobs, only to always get turned away. While the artist comforts her, plain and disheveled Miss Churm, one of the artist's favorite models, arrives for work. The Monarchs are perturbed that the artist would use such a lowly woman to pose as a princess and they leave the studio very assured of their future success. Miss Churm, meanwhile, is dismissive of them. The Monarchs begin modeling and the artist quickly discovers that they are terrible at it. They are too stiff and, no matter how many situations and poses the artist puts them in, they look exactly like themselves, which is a problem when they are supposed to be suggesting various "types," or characters. The artist loves capturing human character and illustrating it in all its variety, so the Monarchs' monotony frustrate him and increases his appreciation for Miss Churm, who can cleverly imitate anything. One day, while Mrs. Monarch is modeling, a young Italian man arrives. Although he can't speak English, he is able to communicate through gestures that he is looking to work as a model. Although initially skeptical, the artist is enchanted with the young man's expressions and clever mimicry, and he hires him as a servant and model. The man, whose name is Oronte, swiftly becomes another of the artist's favorite models. The artist starts on his illustrations for the special Philip Vincent book, and uses the Monarchs as his models. While he admits that it is sometimes useful to have "the real thing" before him, he is constantly thwarted in his attempts to make realistic images with them. He asks his friend Jack Hawley, a man with fine aesthetic taste, what he thinks of his new art. Upon seeing the artwork, Hawley is disgusted and warns the artist that this new artistic phase will hurt his career. But the artist doesn't dismiss the Monarch's yet. He feels trapped: he doesn't have the heart to fire them. Instead, he starts using Miss Churm and Oronte more and more for his illustrations. When the project's artistic director, to whom the artist had sent his illustrations of the Monarchs, issues a warning that the work is unsatisfactory, the artist finally fires the Major and his wife. The Monarchs stop by the studio a few days after being fired, arriving right in the middle of a modeling session with Oronte and Miss Churm. While the artist works, the dejected Monarchs begin cleaning the studio. The artist is both moved and disturbed by the Monarchs' attempt to become his servants. He uncomfortably agrees to keep them on as servants, but after a week of the unnerving sight of them cleaning, he simply pays them to go away. He never sees them again, but Hawley tells the artist that they had a damaging and permanent effect on his work. The artist doesn't deny this, but he doesn't regret the memory either.

- Genre: Short novel or novella - Title: The Red Badge of Courage - Point of view: Third-person limited omniscient - Setting: A Civil War battlefield, probably a fictionalization of the Battle of Chancellorsville, fought May 2–5, 1863, in northern Virginia - Character: Henry Fleming (the youth). Description: Henry Fleming is a young private who volunteered for the infantry against his mother's wishes. Having "dreamed of battles all his life," Henry has romantic notions of war influenced by Greek classics such as the Iliad. These ideas of war are challenged by his actual experiences with war. Henry's resulting psychological turmoil is the focus of the narrative, especially his anxiety about lacking the courage to fight. Henry's emotions are never settled: after he flees from battle, Henry is overcome by guilt and self-pity; when he shows courage under fire, he recovers his pride. Within a few short days, he transforms from a hot-headed, idealistic young boy into an experienced soldier who feels like a grown man. Over the course of the story, Henry tries out many philosophical approaches to discover his individuality and place within the war, as if searching for answers to the question he asks at one point: "Why—why—." In the face of gruesome casualties and the chaos of war, Henry also struggles to interpret symbols such as the flag for meaning. But their meaning keeps changing, and Henry flip-flops between self-confidence and insignificance, between courage and cowardice. Henry seems mature by the end of the novel, but this may be just another moment of calm in a much bigger storm. - Character: Wilson (the loud young soldier, the youth's friend). Description: Wilson is a new volunteer and Henry's closest friend in the regiment. He begins as a brash and confident soldier, but by the start of the first battle Wilson is deeply afraid that he'll die. Because of the narrator's limited point of view, Wilson disappears from the story while Henry is away from his regiment, but he too matures through personal conflicts. From being a "loud young soldier," Wilson becomes a quiet, generous, and reflective man. Like Henry, Wilson eventually fights fiercely, selflessly, and well. In the novel, Wilson serves as a reflection of Henry. His differences from Henry add perspective to Henry's character and experience. - Character: Jim Conklin ("the tall soldier"). Description: Another friend of Henry's in the regiment, Jim offers Henry a pragmatic viewpoint on courage at the beginning of the story: run when others run, fight like mad when they fight. He also embodies the consequences of this viewpoint. Jim is so terribly injured in the first battle that he is almost unrecognizable to Henry. As the injured "spectral soldier," with his eyes gazing deep into the unknown, Jim is like a window into death. But if he finds any secrets or meaning as he stares into death, Jim never passes them along. The spectral soldier represents a meeting point between life and death, and between Henry's glorious ideals of war and the shocking gruesome reality of the real thing. - Character: Tattered man. Description: A nameless, dirty, and twice-shot soldier who meets Henry in the procession of the wounded. By asking Henry about the fighting and Henry's non-existent wounds, the tattered man works like Henry's external conscience. Henry thinks that the tattered man knows his secrets, though Henry is probably projecting his guilt and shame on to others. Even though the tattered man selflessly tries to assist the wounded Jim and then needs help himself when he is on the verge of dying, Henry deserts him: a juvenile attempt to escape his own shame. The memory of the tattered man and Henry's abandonment of him plagues Henry's conscience. - Character: Henry's mother. Description: Appearing only in an early flashback, Henry's mother objects when he volunteers for the army. Henry's mother does not share her son's glorified visions of war. Instead, she advises him to avoid shameful acts and corrupt men—advice about self-preservation, not glorious self-destruction. Capping it off, she also makes him promise to mail back any socks or shirts that need mending. Henry's mother's comments contrast Henry's ideals of war with the mundane realities of life as a soldier. - Character: Insulting officer. Description: An anonymous officer who says of Henry's regiment that "they fight like a lot 'a mule drivers." Having just won their fight, Henry feels otherwise. These two difference shows how the meaning of battles and war are subject to different interpretations based on the perspective of the interpreter. From the officer's perspective, courageous individual efforts are insignificant parts of a larger strategy. From Henry's perspective, he (Henry) is a hero. The insulting officer also exposes Henry's motivations to fight—not for patriotic ideals, but to get his revenge and prove the officer dead wrong. - Character: Cheerful soldier. Description: An anonymous soldier who shows up to guide Henry after he is slammed on the head by a rifle butt, and, dazed, is searching for safety. The cheerful soldier embodies the selflessness and altruism of Henry's heroic ideals. The soldier is described with religious overtones, particularly his paternal kindness, disembodied voice, and almost miraculous ability to guide Henry back to his regiment. This symbolism counters the deep uncertainty about religious expressed in the story, such as the dead soldier in the "chapel" of trees. - Character: Lieutenant. Description: A mid-level commander in Henry's regiment named Hasbrouck. He is described as fiery with an endless supply of foul language. The lieutenant represents the qualities of selfless valor and leadership that Henry and Wilson want to emulate. Though shot in the hand and again in the arm, the lieutenant remains committed to rallying his regiment to fight and charge. In contrast to Henry's fixation on personal glory, the lieutenant sees the regiment as a unit, and does not get mired in contemplating his wounds or his actions. - Character: Dead soldier. Description: An anonymous, deceased Union soldier whose decomposing body Henry finds in the woods. The dead, decomposing body's position in a "chapel" of trees implies a profound uncertainty about the promises of religion; could this body, being eaten by ants, really have a soul in heaven? The rotting, ant-strewn corpse also shows that nature is unrelenting. Ultimately, the dead soldier shows that Henry's hopes for a glorious death are naïve. - Theme: Courage. Description: Red Badge is a study of courage and fear, as seen in the shifting currents of Henry's thoughts and actions during the battle. Henry begins the story with youthful romanticized ideas about courage from the classical tradition: in particular, the heroic ideals found in the ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad by Homer. In the Iliad, warriors mingle with gods, die gloriously, and enjoy everlasting fame. But the tremendous violence of the Civil War unsettled these notions of courage and glory. The soldiers in Red Badge, especially Henry and Wilson, begin to doubt their naïve versions of courage when faced with battle. Instead, they discover a grittier and more complicated form of courage. And they only discover it after the fact: during Henry's most courageous moments in battle, he is hardly aware of anything except heat, noise, anger, and the mechanical repetition of firing. Even when courage is present, it's not really there. So what is courage? Courage takes many forms in the novel, none of which are stable. Wanting to find a lasting form of courage, Henry hopes for a wound or "red badge of courage" to wear. Taking it to the extreme, Henry daydreams about a glorious death. But is courage self-destructive? Is it a performance for others, or for yourself? Does it happen when we're not thinking about it? Henry seeks answers from himself and from the soldiers around him, including corpses and the wounded. Though the story may provide no clear answers, it offers several perspectives: Jim Conklin, Wilson, and the lieutenant each offer different versions of courage to compare with Henry's. Perhaps there is courage in Jim's willingness to see things pragmatically, or in Wilson's acceptance of his limitations, or even in Henry's deep self-questioning. In the end, the reader must decide about courage—who has it, and even whether it's good or bad. - Theme: The War Machine. Description: Red Badge uses the language of machines, labor, and industry to describe war. In contrast, Henry dreams about a classical idealized kind of war. But that kind of romanticized war, emphasizing heroic action, is a thing of the fictional past: it has no relation to an industrial war such as the Civil War, in which individual soldiers become cogs in a much larger machine. As Red Badge reveals, the war machine is designed to move massive armies and churn out corpses. (Machine guns were used for the first time in the Civil War.) Machines are unsympathetic, unthinking, and impersonal, and the war machine makes Henry's hopes for personal glory seem pathetic, even tragic. Crane also uses the theme of a mechanized war to make a grim comment on the industrialism of the late 19th century and its dehumanizing effect on laborers. - Theme: Youth and Manhood. Description: All the men in the 304th regiment are inexperienced in battle, and many—like Henry and Wilson—are very young. The narrative consistently refers to Henry as "the youth," emphasizing his naïveté. Though Red Badge is mostly about finding courage, it is also largely about Henry's quest to become a man. Because of his romantic view of war, Henry initially thinks he'll achieve manhood through fighting. And for him, and many other soldiers, manhood seems to hang in the balance of each battle: they feel weak when the enemy has them trapped, and manly when they fight and win. By the end of the novel, after facing the realities of war, Henry is only a few days older and still has some juvenile characteristics, but he feels like a man. Has he matured? Perhaps: Henry finally dreams of tranquility and peace rather than war. He discards his boastfulness for a quiet more mature sense of self-determination. - Theme: Noise and Silence. Description: From popping musketry to the belching of artillery explosions to the "devotional silence" of the woods, Red Badge gets much of its descriptive power from its descriptions of sound. The noises of battle give the reader a soldier's point of view and do more than just describe war: they convey the intensely disorienting experience that battle must have been for soldiers on the ground. For a low-ranking infantryman like Henry, noise is his only news of the battle. The narrative describes explosions as the armies communicating with each other. All this noise overwhelms Henry and he can't understand what's going on: a metaphor for the chaos and senselessness of war. On the other hand, silence is golden. When "the loud young soldier" Wilson matures from his empty boastfulness, he quiets down. The story ends with Henry yearning for "soft and eternal peace"—the end of noise and war altogether. - Theme: Nature. Description: Henry has a keen eye for his surroundings, and descriptions of landscapes get a great deal of attention in the narrative. Descriptions of scenery emphasize the stark difference between nature and the war machine. Battles look strangely inappropriate being fought on sunny fields. When the smoke clears, the sky is just as blue and beautiful as before. Nature exists separately from the war, going "tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment." At first it seems as if this separateness makes nature a tranquil refuge from the war. But as the novel progresses, Henry realizes that nature is merely indifferent to human concerns. This is shockingly apparent when Henry sees ants feeding on the face of a dead soldier. This unsympathetic view of nature, common to Naturalism, the literary movement that Crane pioneered, comes from the late-19th-century fascination with Darwin's theory of natural selection and the fight for survival in a hostile world. - Theme: The Living and the Dead. Description: Henry is fascinated by the spectacle of death. He looks into the eyes of corpses for answers to his questions about death, but they fail to communicate anything but strangeness, emptiness, and horror. When Henry and Wilson each get a flag to carry for the regiment, a position of honor, each time they must wrestle it from the hands of a dying man. Without providing any definitive answers, Red Badge explores a host of questions regarding death in general and death in war in particular: Do our beliefs endure beyond the grave? Is fighting and dying worth it? Can death be glorious? Can we ultimately know anything about what happens after death? - Climax: Henry and his friend Wilson lead the charge to overwhelm an enemy position, taking the enemy flag and several prisoners. - Summary: The sun rises over a riverside encampment of new inexperienced soldiers in the blue Union uniforms of the 304th regiment from New York. A tall soldier, Jim Conklin, tells the others that he heard a rumor about the generals' plan: the regiment will soon be in battle. Some soldiers in the regiment believe the rumor, others are skeptical and tired of infantrymen trying to predict their commanders' strategies. A young private, Henry Fleming, listens to the debate, then returns to his bunk to think. With dreams of fighting in glorious battles, he had enlisted against his mother's will. Now Henry worries that he might act cowardly and run away during fighting. He returns to ask Jim and another soldier, the loud and overconfident Wilson, if they ever fear running away. Jim says that he'll do what the other men do. Henry feels eager for a battle to test his courage. The regiment eventually does march and digs into position in the woods. With battle imminent, Wilson gets spooked and nervously gives Henry a packet of letters to return to Wilson's family in case Wilson dies. Soon, an advance brigade of blue soldiers runs past in crazed retreat, which shakes Henry's self-confidence. The gray enemy approaches through the trees and Henry, feeling like a cog in a machine, fires frantically. The enemy retreats and the soldiers congratulate each other. But another enemy charge comes on, and Henry turns and runs away with a terrified mob of fellow blue soldiers. While he runs, Henry feels that he did the right thing in running away. He reasons that self-preservation is natural, and thinks that the generals and any soldiers who stayed to fight were fools. When the retreat stops, Henry overhears that his regiment actually did defend their position against the odds. Ashamed, Henry skulks off into the woods alone, and comes upon the corpse of a dead soldier in a "chapel" of trees. Henry is horrified by the gruesome sight of ants running over the discolored face. He flees and joins a retreating procession of wounded soldiers. Walking along, a tattered man questions Henry about his injuries, but Henry, feeling deeply guilty, moves away from him. Henry privately wishes for his own wound, "a red badge of courage." Henry sees a grievously hurt, almost ghostlike soldier who is refusing any assistance. Discovering the man to be Jim Conklin, Henry promises to help. Jim runs wildly into nearby fields and Henry and the tattered man follow. Jim falls dead. The tattered man, getting worse himself, keeps asking about Henry's wound, but Henry abandons him. Close to the battlefield, Henry encounters a large group of blue soldiers running away. He grabs one to ask "Why—why—" but the soldier bashes his rifle on Henry's head to escape. Now bleeding and disoriented, Henry wanders in search of a safe place. An anonymous cheerful soldier guides Henry back to his regiment's camp. Henry lies to his regiment that he was shot in the head. His wound is treated by a quiet subdued Wilson. The next morning, Wilson asks Henry for his packet of letters. In comparison with his friend's embarrassment about fearing death, Henry soon feels strong, proud, and ready to fight. Their regiment returns to the fight and takes part in a raucous deafening battle. Henry goes berserk, firing even after the enemy retreats. His companions view him with astonishment and the regiment's fiery lieutenant praises his bravery. Henry is dazed but pleased—he has overcome his fears without even being aware of the process. Between battles, Henry and Wilson overhear an insulting officer put down their regiment for fighting like "mule drivers." They desperately want to prove him wrong. The regiment is sent on a dangerous charge against enemy lines, and many of Henry's companions are killed. When the color guard gets shot and falls, Henry grabs the regimental battle flag and rallies the exhausted regiment to a near victory. Afterwards, other soldiers hear the regiment's commanders praising the bravery of Henry and Wilson. Still, Henry is angry at the insulting officer and dreams of being killed in a glorious battle as his revenge. Across the field, a wave of gray soldiers overtakes a crucial fence. Running with the flag, Henry leads his frenzied regiment to overwhelm the enemy soldiers. Wilson captures the enemy's battle flag. They all congratulate each other and feel that "they were men." The regiment is then ordered back over its gained ground all the way to its original camp on the river. Henry reflects on his triumphs and the guilt still haunting him, but feels matured and tranquil, yearning for peace.

- Genre: Short story, tragedy - Title: The Red Convertible - Point of view: First person (Lyman's perspective) - Setting: North Dakota - Character: Lyman Lamartine. Description: Lyman Lamartine is a Chippewa Indian who lives on the reservation with his family, including his older brother Henry with whom he is close. He is a hard worker who is good with money, briefly owning a café while he is still in his teens. He thinks of himself as "lucky," especially when Henry is drafted into Vietnam and Lyman isn't. While in Winnipeg, Lyman and Henry buy the red convertible on a whim, and they travel all over the continent in it happily. However, when they get home, Henry is drafted, and Lyman loyally labors to keep the car in top shape while Henry is gone, thinking of it as Henry's car even though Henry gave it to Lyman before he left. After Henry comes back from war a changed man, Lyman is preoccupied with Henry's distress and feels powerless to help him until he has the idea to destroy the red convertible in the hopes that Henry will fix it, thereby giving him purpose. This seems to work at first, but when they drive together to the river, Henry reveals that he knew of Lyman's plan all along and it seems not to have worked—Henry's mood is still dark. When Henry hops into the river to cool off and drowns, Lyman pushes the convertible in after him in a seeming refusal to have the car if his brother can't have it. Throughout the story, Lyman is relentlessly loyal and caring, but perhaps somewhat naïve in his inability to understand his brother's trauma and grief. - Character: Henry Lamartine. Description: Henry Lamartine, Jr. is Lyman's older brother, of a different father. He is carefree and easygoing at the beginning of the story, quick to make a joke and gentle despite his resemblance to Red Tomahawk, a famous Indian warrior. Of the two brothers, Henry is always the unlucky one—money never comes easy to him, and he is drafted into the Marines during the Vietnam War and then captured by the enemy. When he returns, he has completely changed, and "the change was no good." He has become "jumpy and mean," sitting in front of the TV for hours, never joking and hardly even laughing. He no longer takes an interest in the red convertible—the beloved car he and Lyman bought and traveled in together—or much else. Lyman "tricks" Henry into fixing the car, and for a while, he seems a renewed person, but he later reveals to Lyman that he saw through his trick all along. Shortly afterwards, he jumps into the river and drowns. It is not clear whether he meant to kill himself, or if it was an accident. - Character: Lulu Lamartine. Description: Lulu Lamartine is Henry and Lyman's mother. She is not mentioned by name in the story, but she features prominently in other chapters of Love Medicine. She previously was courted by Moses Pillager, the only nearby doctor, and because of his jealousy they do not trust him to treat Henry. Like Lyman, she is worried about Henry, but she does not know what to do for him. She expresses distaste for the ways in which conditions like Henry's (presumably PTSD) are suppressed with drugs instead of treated. - Character: Susy. Description: Susy is a young girl that Henry and Lyman pick up hitchhiking on their road trip. Her most distinctive feature is her hair, which is usually tied up in "buns around her ears," but which reaches the ground when she finally lets it down. Henry and Lyman stay with her family in Alaska happily for a season. The period the brothers spend with Susy is their most happy, youthful, and carefree; in a memorable scene that demonstrates this, she finally takes her hair down and sits on Henry's shoulders as he twirls her around. - Theme: Loss of Innocence. Description: In "The Red Convertible," brothers Henry and Lyman both lose their childhood innocence as they face the realities of adulthood. Henry is thrust into a war full of unimaginable horrors that change the way he thinks and acts. Meanwhile, Lyman is forced to deal with losing his brother not once but twice—first when Henry returns from war a changed man, and then later when he drowns in the river. Throughout the story, Erdrich depicts loss of innocence as an inevitable part of growing up, and she shows that trying to deny or forestall loss of innocence is foolish and can even lead to catastrophe. At the beginning of the story, Henry and Lyman travel all over North America seemingly without a care in the world. Their easy freedom and youthful innocence are symbolized by their red convertible, a beautiful and rare car which they amicably share, going on reckless adventures without much concern over spending all their money or putting themselves in danger. Particularly in the scene where they meet Susy, a girl with surrealistically long hair, they seem free, young, and happy—a condition that they seem to believe might last forever. However, their denial of the reality of aging is clear in the way they treat the car. They travel all over the continent "without putting up the car hood at all" (in other words, they do no maintenance, choosing to believe that the car will run perfectly in spite of their extensive travels). In fact, their youthful behavior does catch up to them and come to an end—when they return home, Henry is drafted into the Vietnam war and Lyman finds that the car is in poor condition because, of course, "the long trip did a hard job on it under the hood." This moment marks the beginning of both brothers' loss of innocence, although Henry's is much quicker and more extreme, as he loses his youth through the violence and trauma of war. While going to war is supposedly a way of "becoming a man," Erdrich makes a distinction between loss of innocence and becoming a mature adult. Henry's traumatic experience of being captured and held by the enemy does erase his sense of freedom and childhood innocence, but it does not glorify him or make him a more capable adult. Instead, Henry returns home without any of his old charm, without ambition or passion, and with his mental health in shambles. Instead of traveling or working, he spends his time nervously watching television, which is hardly the behavior of a well-adjusted adult. Notably, when Henry returns, he has no interest in his once-beloved convertible—the innocence and freedom it represents have no meaning to Henry anymore. Tragically, though, this lost innocence hasn't been replaced by maturity. Instead of moving on to the next stage of his life, he simply seems broken. While Henry has lost innocence without gaining maturity, Lyman is still in denial that his youth is fading at all. After his brother leaves for war and gifts him the convertible, Lyman still insists that the car belongs to Henry (even though, symbolically speaking, the car can no longer belong to Henry since its innocence has no place in Henry's wartime world). While Henry is gone, Lyman fixes up the car and obsessively maintains it, as though he is fighting his own aging process, trying to return himself, his brother, and their car to their childhood innocence. However, when Henry returns home and shows no interest in the car, Lyman loses a little of his innocence, too—he and his mother become responsible for looking after Henry, strategizing together about how to get him medical care despite the limited resources on the reservation. Lyman's loss of innocence is most apparent when he takes a hammer to the car in order to trick Henry into fixing it up, thereby giving his older brother a purpose. While destroying a symbol of innocence (particularly in an attempt to surreptitiously help his older brother) seems like an acknowledgement of growing older, Lyman actually thinks he can return them both to their carefree childhood if he can only reignite Henry's passion for the car. While this seems initially to work, of course it fails—their ride in the car and their raucous interactions at the river seem like they might portend a return to innocence, but they actually set the stage for Henry's subsequent drowning, which is perhaps even a suicide. Lyman's inability to acknowledge the reality of growing up leaves him unable to accept Henry on his own terms until the final scene, where Lyman pushes the car into the river after Henry has drowned, seemingly acknowledging that his childhood is irrevocably over. Though loss of innocence is natural, the way it occurs for Henry and, by extension, for his family, is brutal, harsh, and unnecessary. Erdrich doesn't provide a model for what healthy loss of innocence would look like, but presumably its primary fuel wouldn't be trauma. - Theme: The Trauma of War. Description: In "The Red Convertible," Erdrich associates war exclusively with trauma. There is no glorification or nationalistic sentiment—Henry goes to fight in Vietnam a carefree, gentle young man, and he comes back a shell-shocked veteran who eventually dies as a direct result of his untreated mental disorder. Furthermore, while Erdrich depicts Henry's mental problems at length, the characters remain muddy on the actual purpose of war. They never discuss supporting or opposing Vietnam, they never mention the war's purpose—Lyman even notes that he "could never keep it straight, which direction those good Vietnam soldiers were from," which indicates his loose grasp on even the basic facts of the war. In this way, Erdrich depicts war as a terrible and pointless experience whose primary significance is not moral or geopolitical, but rather in the way it ruins lives. Before experiencing the trauma of war, Henry is generous, easygoing, and jocular. This is clear in his close and carefree relationship with his brother Lyman, and also in his interactions with the young girl Susy, a hitchhiker he agrees to drive all the way to Alaska. After he and Lyman stay with her family for a season, she shows them her spectacularly long hair, and he puts her on his shoulders, pretending her hair is his and expressing his admiration for it. Henry's kind, agreeable, and adventurous spirit makes it all the more traumatic for Lyman and the rest of their family when Henry comes back from the war hostile, aggressive, taciturn, and depressed. His condition is no doubt related to his experience being a prisoner of war, which is mentioned once but never discussed again, presumably because it is too distressing to talk about. His complete about-face in personality demonstrates how damaging the effects of war can be. It is important that Erdrich never names Henry's condition, though it is clearly Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by today's definition, which is common among veterans. It's likely that Erdrich doesn't name PTSD as the source of Henry's problems because the family themselves don't know what is wrong. The name "PTSD" did not become widely used until after the Vietnam War, and the family has no clear idea of what has overtaken Henry, only an acute awareness that the condition is dangerous and needs medical treatment. Furthermore, Henry himself does not speak about what happened to him in war, or about what afflicts him now that he is home, perhaps because there is a stigma to discussing mental health (particularly for men and for soldiers), and perhaps because he himself does not understand what is wrong. The effect of not knowing exactly what is wrong with Henry means that Henry's condition seems scarier and more hopeless, a mystery condition for the characters, if not the reader as well. It's also important to note that Henry's access to the healthcare that could have saved his life is compromised by the fact that he is a Chippewa Indian living on a reservation. Erdrich is somewhat subtle about the systemic prejudice against Native Americans living on reservations, but she is clear that the family does not have access to good healthcare because of their identity. Lyman and his mother do not trust the local doctor who is non-Indian (they have personal history with him and fear he will be vindictive), nor do they trust hospitals to give Henry proper treatment, suspecting that the doctors will instead just get him addicted to psychiatric drugs. (American Indians have good reasons to be skeptical of "white" hospitals, as there's a long history of white doctors giving nonwhite people bad—and even unethical—care.) However, Henry's lack of treatment directly contributes to his death—either he commits suicide because he has no options, or his mental anguish leads him not to think clearly when he jumps into a river with a strong current. Henry dies from his wartime trauma despite having a loving family that tries to support him. This is partially because he is discriminated against as a Chippewa, but also because his disorder was not being comprehensively treated during the 1970s when this story takes place. Furthermore, Erdrich doesn't suggest that his death was meaningful or worthwhile—Lyman can't even identify which side is which in the war that irreparably changed his brother, and nobody in the family seems concerned with patriotism or civic duty. Henry's death is simply a senseless tragedy, not a valorous sacrifice for worthwhile ideals. - Theme: Masculinity and Silence. Description: In "The Red Convertible," the Vietnam War is a traumatic experience that young men are forced into because of the draft. The adverse effects that the war has on Henry and his family are exacerbated by the unwritten, unspoken rules of masculinity that discourage men from speaking about their trauma. For Erdrich, norms of masculinity (particularly silence) are restrictive and can be actively harmful—they force young men into wars, traumatize them, and offer them limited means of talking about their trauma afterwards, which isolates them and makes their suffering worse. Before the war, Henry does not adhere to typical norms of masculinity. He is easygoing, comic, and gentle, most notably in the scene with Susy where he says, "I always wondered what it was like to have long pretty hair." Thus, his nature contrasts sharply with the way he looks—he is physically strong, and he resembles the Native American warrior Red Tomahawk whose image is on North Dakota highway billboards. Henry becomes a Marine, which is one of the more intense and dangerous positions in the military, and his brother Lyman suspects he is chosen for that role because of how physically intimidating he looks. Despite his naturally easygoing nature, the army uses him for his brute strength, and to be reduced to physicality in that way can itself can be traumatic. After the war, Henry is so haunted by the horrors that he has seen that he finds it difficult to be a part of civilian life, ceasing to joke around or chat easily with others. He is no doubt traumatized, and since men are often discouraged from speaking about their trauma, his inability to ask for help or even express what he is going through makes him much more vulnerable and isolated. His silence is also perhaps related to social alienation. Erdrich never depicts him interacting with other veterans who might understand his experiences, and his mother and brother—who love and care about him—seem only interested in getting him to return to who he was before the war, rather than getting to know him on his own terms.  Lyman and their mother also appear to feel the pressure to be silent about Henry's illness. They never speak to him directly about it, but instead speak quietly to each other about options for helping him recover whenever he isn't around. This seems to suggest that they fear angering Henry by bringing up his suffering, and Lyman even says at one point that it would be difficult to even get Henry to the hospital, which suggests that Henry might be too ashamed or prideful to get treatment for a "mental disorder." Instead, his treatment is almost nonexistent: it consists of silently watching television, never seeing a doctor, and working on the car that Lyman intentionally destroyed to give Henry a hobby. This non-treatment culminates in Henry throwing himself in the river. "The Red Convertible" thereby subtly criticizes the culture of silence around mental illness, and particularly the ways in which men are discouraged from speaking about their trauma. Had Henry and his family been able to speak openly about his condition and seek treatment, perhaps he could have been saved. - Theme: American and American Indian Identity. Description: In "The Red Convertible," Henry and Lyman are both American and American Indian, and their identities and experiences are always shaped by a combination of those two factors. The general circumstances of the boys' lives are shared by many Americans of all races: getting a car as a teenager, for instance, or being drafted into Vietnam. However, Erdrich also emphasizes that these typically-American experiences are always tempered by the boys' American Indian identity. While their lives and their identities are by no means defined by their race, they are always affected by the undeniable realities of discrimination and the experience of living on a reservation. Henry and Lyman are fortunate in their youth because of how free and happy they are. They have a close relationship with one another, a loving mother, and their own car, which they paid for with their own money. They travel all over the continent with a lighthearted attitude, not considering any risks or responsibilities—all of which suggests that the boys have had a nice, easy childhood and are sailing seamlessly into young adulthood, too. Importantly, Henry and Lyman's coming of age comes in tandem with a sports car, which is an American icon—boys in towns, suburbs, and cities all over the country were also coming of age in cars in the 1970s, and most were not fortunate enough to have a gorgeous convertible. This clearly situates Henry and Lyman as American boys—and reasonably lucky American boys at that—although their specific American Indian identity is never overlooked. Lyman says at the beginning of the story, for example, that he has always had "one talent," making money, but he specifically claims that this is "unusual for a Chippewa." Thus, his luck and his skill with money (which earn them the car in the first place) are explained in comparison to his impoverished Indian community, rather than to the country at large. In the scheme of all Americans, Lyman would simply be considered among the lucky boys to have a nice childhood and a great car, but he is the first and only person to  drive a convertible on the reservation. Another way in which Erdrich puts American and American Indian identity in tension is through war. As an adult male American citizen, Henry is eligible for the draft—like thousands of other young men across the country, he goes to war involuntarily and comes back profoundly damaged. This was a widespread experience for American men in the 1970s, which situates Henry within a broader national context. However, like with the car, Erdrich is also clear about how his race complicates his situation. While many American veterans of all races received inadequate physical and mental healthcare, Henry's care is nonexistent because of his identity. He and his family have a reasonable mistrust of most hospitals because of generations of mistreatment, there are no American Indian doctors on the reservation, and the only nearby doctor has a conflict of interest with their mother. Henry's lack of treatment is certainly one of the factors that exacerbates his condition, and is surely part of the reason he dies. Erdrich does not adhere to stereotypes of impoverished or downtrodden American Indians. The boys come from a loving home, they have enough money, and they initially feel free and happy, despite coming from a community that has been systematically oppressed. It's not their race that brings calamity to their lives, it's the war—but the effects of the war would likely have been less severe if Henry had better access to healthcare (a lack of access related to his race). Furthermore, the psychological effects of stereotyping and discrimination are implicit in the story. Lyman notes Henry's resemblance to Red Tomahawk (an American Indian found on highway billboards), for example, and he suggests that this resemblance might have earned Henry a more difficult military assignment. Henry also howls "Crazy Indians!" as a joke (referencing how non-Native people see them) before he jumps into the river. Their perception of themselves as Indians through white eyes is always present, though Erdrich is careful not to let it subsume the story. "The Red Convertible" thereby shows the complex intersection between national identity and the specific realities of American Indian life. - Climax: Henry drowns in the river - Summary: Lyman Lamartine, a young American Indian man living in North Dakota, remembers his first car, a red convertible Oldsmobile which was unprecedented on his reservation. He used to share it with his brother Henry, but now, he claims, Henry owns the whole car, and Lyman has to walk everywhere he goes. Lyman has always been lucky in that he is good at making money, and he has no problem buying the car when he first sees it with Henry in Winnipeg. The two of them travel all over the Great Plains, even up to Alaska in the car. They meet a girl named Susy with long, flowing hair that almost touches the ground and stay with her family for a season. As soon as they get back home, Henry has to go off to war in Vietnam. He writes occasionally, but Lyman writes many more letters, reassuring him that he is taking good care of the car. Henry is captured by the enemy, but manages to make it home all the same three years later. However, he is vastly changed, affected presumably with PTSD. He is "jumpy and mean," hardly ever laughing, no longer making jokes, and unable to sit still even though he spends hours in front of their new color TV that often shows clips of the ongoing war. People generally leave him alone because he has become so strange, and, in one instance, he even bites through his lip, but lets the blood drip as if he doesn't even notice. Lyman and their mother consider taking him to a doctor, but the only doctor nearby used to court their mother, and they fear her rejection of the doctor would lead him to mistreat Henry. They refuse to take him to a hospital for fear that he will never return, or that he will be given drugs instead of proper treatment. Lyman resolves to find another way to help Henry, so he smashes up the convertible in the hopes that Henry will take an interest in something again. For a while, it seems to work—Henry fixes the car successfully, and, for months, it gives him something to do. He seems somewhat calmer, though he is still quiet. One day, after the car is fixed, Henry suggests they take it for a ride. Before they go, their eleven-year-old sister Bonita takes a picture of them with the car. Lyman will keep that photograph on the wall until it becomes too troubling and he hides it in a closet. That evening, they drive out to the Red River because Henry wants to see the high water. At the waterside, Henry reveals that he knew what Lyman was doing when he intentionally destroyed the car, and that he wants Lyman to have the car all to himself. Lyman refuses and they playfully argue, until it turns into roughhousing. They drink several beers and talk about leaving, maybe picking up some girls. Henry is quiet and withdrawn again, and says that the girls they know are crazy. Lyman, trying to keep the mood light, tells him he is crazy. For a moment, it looks like this will upset Henry, but instead he jokes back, saying that Indians are all crazy. They rile each other up all over again, and suddenly Henry jumps in the river, saying, "Got to cool me off!" But he is taken under by the strong current—the last words he says are "My boots are filling." Lyman jumps in after him, but he cannot save him, and it is unclear what Henry's intentions were in going to the river and jumping in: if it was an accident, or suicide. Lyman emerges from the river and pushes the car into the river.

- Genre: Detective fiction, crime fiction - Title: The Red-Headed League - Point of view: First person and third person - Setting: London, England - Character: Sherlock Holmes. Description: The protagonist of the story, Sherlock Holmes is a private detective who works alongside his assistant and friend, Dr. John Watson. Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker who lives next door to a bank, employs Holmes and Watson to solve the mystery of the titular Red-Headed League. As always, Holmes uses the power of logic and rationalism in order to solve the crime. Throughout the story, Holmes picks up on minute details that other people miss, and is able to use these details to deduce the facts of the crime. For example, when he pays a visit to Wilson's assistant, Vincent Spaulding, Holmes notices that the man's knees are incredibly dirty. This detail, which Watson overlooks, confirms Holmes' suspicions that Spaulding is actually criminal mastermind John Clay, and that he is digging a tunnel from Wilson's cellar to the bank's cellar so that he can rob the bank and escape undetected. Holmes is presented as a superior character in the story, both in terms of his intellect and dedication to helping others. Nevertheless, he is not the most easygoing of characters. He certainly has a high opinion of himself, and is quick to talk down to others if he assumes them to be wrong. He sharply rebukes Mr. Merryweather, for instance, for making too much noise as they wait for the criminals. He is also sharp with Watson, but this does not stop the men from maintaining a very close friendship. - Character: Dr. John Watson. Description: Dr. John Watson is the narrator of the story, and Sherlock Holmes' assistant. Although Holmes' intellect and deductive prowess easily outpace Watson's, Watson accompanies Holmes on his cases both out of fascination and a desire to improve his own detective skills. Watson is often too distracted by the extraordinary aspects of the case to be able to solve the crime. He never falters in his admiration for Holmes, though, even when Holmes does not always hold him in such high esteem. Nevertheless, they remain firm friends. Watson serves as Sherlock's chronicler, as he records everything in his journals. Watson is pleasant and easier to get along with than Holmes (who can be intense and aloof), which proves useful in dealing with clients. His occasional blunders and cheerful attitude also makes him a more relatable character for readers than Holmes, who seems to have a superhuman capacity for rationality and deduction. - Character: Jabez Wilson. Description: Jabez Wilson is an average pawnbroker, and the innocent victim of the story. He hires Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Dr. John Watson, to solve a peculiar mystery tied to a strange organization called the Red-Headed League. Because Wilson's house is next to the bank, criminal mastermind John Clay targets him as an access point. This proves fairly easy as Wilson is quite slow-witted and trusting, and doesn't suspect anything odd going on in his house. John Clay poses as an assistant to Wilson, under the guise of Vincent Spaulding. Wilson describes Spaulding as an intelligent young man with a passion for photography, not realizing that the time Clay spends in the cellar is spent not developing photographs, but digging a secret tunnel to the bank. Wilson is also a target because of his need for money, which means that he is easy to lure out of the house with the promise of a well-paid job. His greed is not malicious however, it is just a result of his struggling business. - Character: John Clay / Vincent Spaulding. Description: John Clay, the antagonist of the story, is a criminal mastermind in London. Sherlock Holmes even describes Clay as the fourth-smartest man in the city, and were it not for his criminality, Clay might even be a respectable figure. Clay has royal blood (his grandfather was a duke) and is extremely well educated, having studied at Eton and Oxford. This heritage makes him pompous and refined—even when he's arrested, he requests that the police officer address him as "sir" and remember to say "please." At the story's opening, Clay works as Jabez Wilson's assistant under the alias of Vincent Spaulding. This job, coupled with his brilliant creation of the Red-Headed League job opening, allow him to lure Wilson out of the house. With Wilson out of the way, Clay is able to dig a tunnel from Wilson's property to the bank's cellar. Although Clay plans on robbing the bank with his accomplice, Archie, and escaping undetected through the tunnel, Holmes intervenes in the nick of time, and both criminals are captured. - Character: Archie / Duncan Ross / William Morris. Description: Archie is the criminal accomplice of John Clay. He poses under the name of Duncan Ross as the employer of Jabez Wilson, as part of the scheme to get Wilson out of his house. He hires Wilson to copy out the encyclopedia for four hours every day, strictly instructing him not to leave the building during these times. Wilson therefore knows Archie, but only in the context of the Red-Headed League, not realizing that he is in fact a criminal. Archie later disappears, and it turns out that he had also been posing under the name of William Morris, claiming to the landlord of the building that he was a solicitor seeking a temporary office. The landlord had never heard of either Duncan Ross or the Red-Headed League, and the forwarding address Archie provided leads Jabez Wilson only to an artificial knee-cap factory. Although Archie initially escapes back through the tunnel during the robbery, he is presumably apprehended at the other end of the tunnel, where Sherlock Holmes has arranged for three policemen to be stationed. - Character: Detective Jones. Description: Detective Jones is the incompetent policeman assigned to the case. Sherlock Holmes describes him as an "imbecile" in his profession. Jones does not even manage to catch a criminal: only Holmes successfully grabs John Clay, whereas Jones loses his grip on Archie and allows him to escape. Fortunately, Holmes had arranged for three other policemen to guard the other end of the tunnel, ensuring Archie's eventual capture. Although it seems that Holmes was right not to trust Jones, Jones is also rather defensive, as he doesn't like to admit that Holmes is better at his job than he is. - Character: Mr. Merryweather. Description: Mr. Merryweather is the manager of the bank that John Clay and Archie have targeted, which is only a few meters away from Jabez Wilson's house. He accompanies Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson and Detective Jones in capturing the criminals, though Mr. Merryweather is largely useless and makes too much noise. - Theme: The Bizarre vs. The Mundane. Description: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League" is characterized by bizarre imagery. The concept of the titular Red-Headed League itself is utterly bizarre: it is not often that secret societies full of red-headed men are formed in London, or that someone is hired for a job purely because his hair is redder than that of hundreds of other applicants. The point of this story, however, is that the bizarre is often not as bizarre as it may seem. The everyday holds plenty of surprises, and shouldn't be overlooked just because it appears to be initially less interesting. The reader eventually learns that the bizarre Red-Headed League in this story is merely a front for an ingenious, but significantly less unusual, bank robbery. The bizarreness of the league was merely a distraction. Sherlock Holmes is able to see through this distraction, realizing that it must be a front to get Jabez Wilson out of the house for several hours a day, so that his assistant, Vincent Spaulding (who is actually criminal mastermind John Clay), can dig a secret tunnel to then rob the bank. Holmes is able to solve the mystery because he does not become too invested in its extraordinary circumstances, even though he does admit to being entertained by them. In other words, Conan Doyle's message is that it is important not to get caught up in the allure of the bizarre, as the bizarre is often of little significance. Instead, it is the more mundane, everyday occurrences that prove to be more important, if somewhat less exciting. Conan Doyle makes a point of emphasizing the bizarre in this story, positioning it at the forefront of the narrative in order to demonstrate just how easy it is to get distracted by its appeal. In fact, the whole story is set up in order to trick the reader into thinking that the Red-Headed League is far more important than it actually is. Even the title of the story suggests that it is about a Red-Headed League, rather than a bank robbery. Much of the early narrative of the story concerns the events relayed by Jabez Wilson about his experiences with the league: the bizarre image of his lining up on Fleet Street with hundreds of other red-headed men, of having his own "blazing red" hair pulled to make sure that it wasn't a wig, of writing out the Encyclopedia Britannica for four pounds a week. The whole story seems too fantastical to have any logical explanation, because this is exactly the case. The story has been completely fabricated as an elaborate façade for a commonplace bank robbery. By fooling the reader into thinking that the explanation must have something to do with the Red-Headed League itself, and then proving them completely wrong, Conan Doyle stresses the importance of not placing too much emphasis on the bizarre, as it can often point in the wrong direction entirely. Sherlock Holmes is, fortunately, able to see past the allure of the bizarre, and focuses instead on the more banal details of the case in order to reach its conclusion. Conan Doyle demonstrates Holmes' superior rationality by contrasting him against those around him who are too drawn in by the pull of the extraordinary. When Jabez Wilson is first introduced, for example, all Watson notices about him is his hair, claiming that "there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head." In only searching for what is "remarkable" about the man, Watson has failed to notice some important details that Holmes, who is paying closer attention, manages to spot. Because he is not distracted by the bizarre, Holmes notices, for example, that Wilson has recently been doing a lot of writing, because one of his cuffs is more worn than the other. By concentrating on the everyday aspects of Wilson's character, Holmes manages to deduce far more than Watson, who is only interested in the more striking aspects of Wilson's appearance, and gets nowhere as a result. Because he is not drawn in by Wilson's flaming red hair, or by the story of the Red-Headed League, Holmes is able to look past the bizarre aspects of the story and discover the true nature of the crime. He explains to Watson that "it was perfectly obvious from the first that the only possible object of this rather fantastic business of the adver-tisement of the League, and the copying of the Encyclopaedia, must be to get this not over-bright pawnbroker out of the way for a number of hours every day." With this observation, coupled with the knowledge that Wilson's assistant spent hours each day in the cellar, Holmes was able to logically assume that a tunnel was being dug to the neighboring bank, in preparation for a robbery. The tale of the Red-Headed League was simply a ruse to put Wilson off the scent of the crime. Sometimes the most bizarre of occurrences have the simplest of explanations, or as Sherlock himself claims: "As a rule, […] the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be." Because of his ability to see past the bizarre and focus instead on the everyday details, Sherlock is able to get to the heart of the matter and solve the crime. - Theme: Logic and Rationalism. Description: Arthur Conan Doyle was a firm believer in a rationalism. He was a doctor by trade and was therefore well-versed in the scientific method (a highly-rational approach to assessing facts), which he loosely applies to the practice of solving crimes. Furthermore, late-nineteenth-century London was gripped by high-profile crimes, such as the Jack the Ripper murders, and the police force was often dismissed for being ineffective at stopping or catching criminals. Conan Doyle therefore takes fire at the police force and offers up Sherlock Holmes' rationality as a superior alternative. Once Holmes applies his meticulous logic to mysterious circumstances, it's much easier to discern what has happened. He is the only character who is able to solve the bank robbery plot, and as such, Conan Doyle presents logic as the most superior method of crime-solving. Holmes' logical method is introduced early in the story, when he deduces several aspects of his client Jabez Wilson's character by carefully observing his appearance. After just a few moments, Holmes is able to conclude that Wilson had done manual labor (his muscles are larger in one hand), that he is a Freemason (his breastpin bears the "arc-and-compass" symbol of the Freemasons), that he has been in China (he has a fish tattoo that "could only have been done in China" due to its unique pink staining), and that he has been writing prolifically (one of his cuffs is more worn than the other). When Wilson learns how Holmes managed to gather all of this information, he says, "I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it, after all." This is exactly the point that Conan Doyle is trying to make: applying logic to the world makes everything seem simple and obvious. Holmes is then able to apply this technique to the business of solving the crime, demonstrating just how effective the powers of logic can be. He explains his strategy to his assistant, Watson, at the close of the story. Firstly, Holmes realized that the Red-Headed League must simply be a ruse intended to keep Wilson out of the shop for several hours a day. He was suspicious of Wilson's assistant, Spaulding, because he was happy to be paid half wages, and so correctly assumed that he must be the culprit. Wilson also mentioned that his assistant spent many hours in the cellar, and so Holmes realized that this must be the scene of the crime, and that Spaulding was likely digging a tunnel. When he went to visit the premises, Holmes carefully observed the nearby buildings and realized that there was a bank only meters away from the property, which was all the further explanation he needed to solve the crime. The assistant, who was really criminal mastermind John Clay, was digging a tunnel to the bank in order to steal thousands of pounds worth of gold, and Holmes was able to conclude as much by carefully observing the facts already available to him. By correctly applying the powers of logic, Holmes becomes the only person able to solve the crime. By contrast, the other characters in the story are unable to solve the crime, because they do not apply the same meticulous methods as Holmes. Watson attempts to study Jabez Wilson as Sherlock does, for example, but gets too engrossed by Wilson's bright red hair and fails to notice anything else as a result. He does not maintain a steady and rational outlook like Holmes. Later in the story, as Holmes taps the pavement with his stick (he is searching for the tunnel below ground), Watson is completely clueless as to Holmes' intentions. By contrasting the ineptitude of Watson against the quick and rational mind of Sherlock, Conan Doyle highlights that a scientific method is far more effective for solving crimes. Conan Doyle also employs imagery of darkness in order to demonstrate the ignorance of every character other than Holmes, including Watson, and Detective Jones, the policeman. As the men hide in the cellar at the close of the story, anticipating the criminals' exit from the tunnel, the complete darkness of their surroundings represents the metaphorical ignorance of all characters other than Holmes. Even Jones, the policeman assigned to the case, has no clue what is going on. Jones is in fact only passingly mentioned in the story, as a "complete imbecile." The police force is thus essentially made defunct in comparison to Holmes. Only Holmes, the superior crime-solver, knows that the criminals will emerge from the tunnel; everyone else is yet to reach this conclusion. When Holmes extinguishes his light, the others are left in "absolute darkness," demonstrating that Holmes alone possesses the ability to solve the crime due to his quick but careful logic. His lamp is representative of the literal enlightenment that his rational methods can offer. As such, in contrast to the ignorance of every other character in the story, Holmes' rationality is upheld on a pedestal of superiority. In this way, Conan Doyle underscores that logic and rationalism are the unequalled solutions to difficult problems, and that if the police would employ these methods, they might not be so ineffective as they currently are. - Theme: Appearances vs. Reality. Description: Things are very rarely as they first appear in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League." The Red-Headed League itself is an elaborate front for a bank robbery. In addition, the appearances of characters can also be very misleading, for example John Clay, who appears to be a respectable young man, turns out to be a famous criminal. Throughout the story, Conan Doyle reminds the reader not to take appearances at face value. If Sherlock Holmes was unable to look past the misleading appearance of the Red-Headed League, he would not have been able to uncover the true reality of the criminal plot lurking under the surface. Likewise, if one were to assume that John Clay was the respectable man that he appears to be, he would never get caught. Throughout the course of the story, Conan Doyle illustrates the many dangers in mistaking appearances for reality. The primary instance of misleading appearances comes in the form of the Red-Headed League itself. The league is really only an elaborate façade for the bank robbery that Clay and his accomplice, Archie, are plotting, designed to distract everyone else from the tunnel being dug from Jabez Wilson's cellar to the bank. Conan Doyle uses the idea of the league to demonstrate just how easy it can be to be drawn in by appearances. Indeed, much of the early narrative is dedicated entirely to the events of the league: first of Wilson's applying for his role as the most red-headed man in London, and then of his job copying out the Encyclopedia for the benefit of the league, and so forth. The story is designed to lure the reader into paying attention only to the league, and thus only to the outward appearances of the case. Even the title, "The Red-Headed League," suggests that the reader should only concentrate on the league itself. As a result, the reader is unlikely to notice what is really going on in the background of the story. It is only Sherlock's characteristic ability to look past appearances and dig deeper into the true reality of the crime that allows him to solve the mystery. The league, as strange as it is, never distracts him, and he is consequently able to dismiss it as nothing more than a front for the robbery. This ability to look past appearances, Conan Doyle implies, is crucial. Many characters in the story also have misleading appearances. Conan Doyle highlights this early on when Watson points out that Sherlock has two very different sides to him: one contemplative and calm, the other "formidable." If one were to catch Holmes in either of these moods, it would be very difficult to imagine him in the other. Through Watson's observation, Doyle insists that one should not judge a person simply by their outward appearance, as there may be multiple sides to them. This notion becomes dangerously true in the case of John Clay. From first glance, he appears to be a very respectable young man: he is first introduced as a "bright-looking, clean-shaven young fellow," and it is only later revealed that he is in fact one of the greatest criminals in London. In this way, Conan Doyle reminds the reader that overlooking the true reality of a situation can have very dangerous consequences. If Sherlock did not recognize Clay as the criminal that he was, then he would never have been caught. Conan Doyle does leave clues throughout the story, however, designed to remind the attentive reader to look beyond first appearances. Upon Jabez Wilson's first encounter with the Red-Headed League, for example, he recalls the employer pulling his hair to make sure it was real, claiming that they have to be careful, "for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once by paint." This is an early indication that the reader should not be too hasty to judge based on appearances, as it is easy to be deceived by simple disguises. Later in the story, Watson turns a corner in a road and notices that the front of the road is remarkably different to the back, presenting "as great a contrast to it as the front of a picture does to the back." In other words, there is always more than one way of looking at things, and appearances may not tell the whole story. From mysterious leagues to criminal plots, from respectable young men to criminals, Conan Doyle makes a point of emphasizing that one should not put too much faith in appearances, as they can often be deeply misleading and even dangerous. - Theme: Greed. Description: In "The Red-Headed League," characters who are greedy are eventually punished for their actions, whereas selfless characters (such as Sherlock Holmes) are rewarded. The criminals John Clay (also known as Vincent Spaulding) and Archie (also known as Duncan Ross) try to rob a bank and are punished for this greed through their arrest. Even Jabez Wilson, the innocent victim of their crime, is punished for his greed—after all, his decision to take on an assistant for half the normal wage, and to leave his shop unattended in order to earn four pounds extra a week, are two greedy acts that ultimately lead him to become the victim of a criminal scheme. Holmes, on the other hand, expects no reimbursement other than what he is fairly owed, and this fairness eventually earns him the ultimate reward: solving the case. Conan Doyle thus implies that greed in any measure is morally punishable, while moral integrity reaps rewards. The criminals John Clay and Archie are the characters most corrupted by greed in the story. This corruption is particularly noticeable in Clay, who—if not for his greed and criminal behavior—would be a respectable figure. Holmes describes him as the "fourth smartest man in London" and "a remarkable man." He is from royal blood, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and appears to be a "bright-looking, clean-shaven young fellow." Holmes even praises him for his "new and effective" scheme and clever mind. In other words, were it not for his greed, Clay might even be as respected as Holmes. Greed, however, corrupts Clay, leads him into a life of crime, and eventually brings about his arrest. Were it not for his desire to steal "30,000 napoleons" of French gold, Clay might not have ended up so badly. Jabez Wilson, on the other hand, is a far more sympathetic character. Whilst Clay has no excuse for his greed (given that he is clearly from a well-off family), Wilson's greed is more excusable because he is poor and struggling in his business. He does not try to steal, but he does push the limits of morality in order to acquire a little extra money. Wilson admits that when he hired Clay (in disguise as Vincent Spaulding) for half a normal wage, he knew "very well that he could better himself and earn twice what I am able to give him," but he was still willing to go along with it if it meant that he could save the money. Wilson is also happy to take an easy job for good pay when he fills the vacancy at the Red-Headed League, copying out the Encyclopedia Britannica for four pounds a week. He is punished for this greed when he becomes the unwitting target of Clay's scheme, but as Holmes points out, Wilson is still "richer by some 30 [pounds], to say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under the letter A. You have lost nothing." Because Wilson was never truly malicious or completely unjustified in his greed, his punishment is not as extreme as that of John Clay and Archie—but Conan Doyle still makes the point that no greed is completely excusable or goes unpunished. Sherlock Holmes is, by contrast, presented as a just and selfless character, and for this he is rewarded. When Mr. Merryweather, the bank manager, says that he doesn't know how he can begin to repay Holmes, Holmes is quite clear that he should be repaid only what he is duly owed. Unlike Wilson, who is happy to take an easy job for high pay, or Clay, who desires far more money than he could ever deserve, Holmes is a model of selflessness. He replies: "I have been at some small expense over this matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund, but beyond that I am amply repaid by having had an experience which is in many ways unique, and by hearing the very remarkable narrative of the Red-headed League." Holmes' reward for his integrity is solving the mystery, capturing the criminals, and earning the respect of all those around him—even from the criminals themselves. The moral of the story, then, is that all greed is morally punishable, and that those who are just and selfless will be rewarded for their actions. - Climax: Sherlock Holmes captures John Clay in the cellar of the bank. - Summary: Jabez Wilson comes to Sherlock Holmes and John Watson for help, claiming he has been wronged by a mysterious league of red-headed men. The titular Red-Headed League claims to be an organization of red-headed men, founded by an eccentric red-headed millionaire who wished to provide for other red-headed men by offering them easy jobs for high pay. Wilson acquired one such job, copying out the encyclopedia for four pounds a week, for his employer, Duncan Ross. However, when Wilson turned up to the office today, there was a sign on the door announcing that the league had been disbanded. After having trouble tracking down Ross, Wilson learns that the landlord of the building knew Ross under a different name, William Morris. Wilson was encouraged to apply by his assistant, a man named Vincent Spaulding. Sherlock enquires further about the assistant, and Wilson says that even though he is the best assistant he's had, Spaulding is happy to work for half wages. This alerts Sherlock to something odd about the assistant, so he asks several follow-up questions. Wilson reveals that Spaulding is an intelligent young man with a passion for photography: he spends hours in Wilson's cellar each day, developing his photographs. Wilson also reveals that Spaulding is of uncertain age, and has an acid splash on his forehead. All of these details are suspicious, but it is the acid marking that reveals to Holmes that Vincent Spaulding is in fact John Clay, one of the top criminals in London. Holmes visits Wilson's property to investigate further. The job with the Red-Headed League had required Wilson to leave the house for four hours every day, so Holmes suspects that the job was invented to simply get Wilson out of the way, leaving Clay to work on something illicit at the house. When Sherlock realizes that there is a bank on the same road as the property, he deduces that Clay is digging a tunnel from the cellar to the bank, in order to rob it. The disbanding of the league probably indicates that the tunnel is now finished, because Wilson no longer needs to leave the house. Holmes rings the doorbell, and a "bright-looking, clean-shaven young fellow" answers. Holmes asks for directions and then promptly leaves. As he walks away, Holmes reveals that the man was in fact John Clay. Holmes explains to Watson that he asked for directions because he wanted the chance to look at Clay's knees—he wanted to see if the trousers were worn down at the knee, as this would indicate that Clay had been doing a lot of digging. Holmes concludes that the robbery will likely be tonight, because the tunnel is finished. As such, he gathers Watson, Detective Jones (the policeman assigned to the case), and Mr. Merryweather (the bank manager). The men wait in total darkness in the bank cellar for the criminals to emerge from the tunnel. Eventually, two men surface from the trapdoor. The first is the same man who answered the door to Holmes earlier that day, John Clay. Holmes manages to grab hold of Clay and detains him. Detective Jones fails to capture the second criminal, Archie, who is the same man who posed as Duncan Ross and William Morris. Holmes dryly assures Clay that his accomplice will soon be caught, as he has three further policemen stationed at the only other exit from the tunnel. Clay compliments Holmes on his thoroughness, and Holmes, in turn, compliments Clay on his ingenious plan. Merryweather claims that he doesn't know how the bank can begin to repay Holmes, but Holmes asks for nothing more than his fair recompense. To conclude the story, Holmes explains step-by-step to Watson how he managed to solve the crime.

- Genre: Bildungsroman - Title: The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Point of view: First person monologue (Changez) - Setting: Lahore and New York City - Character: Changez. Description: Changez, the protagonist of the novel, is a Pakistani man who went to college in Princeton, and who narrates the story of his time in the United States to the Stranger. For most of the novel, he loves the United States and works hard to be accepted by his American friends and colleagues while working at a New York financial firm. Yet, after 9/11 changes his perspective and he faces increasing racism and discrimination, and as his relationship with the beautiful American Erica is thwarted by Erica's obsession with her dead former boyfriend Chris, he eventually becomes disillusioned with his adopted country, viewing it as a danger to the rest of the world. Changez then leaves America and returns to Pakistan, where he becomes an anti-US lecturer. Throughout Changez's narration he sometimes addresses the Stranger directly, and these interactions are never entirely clear; Changez's tone hovers between concern, politeness, and care, and a kind of over-solicitous menace (which one might also say accurately describes his feelings for the US at this point of his life). Ultimately, though, the novel ends without revealing whether or not Changez can be trusted, both as a narrator and as a friend to the Stranger, whether Changez has come to his anti-US views while still to an extent loving America, or whether he has become a terrorist. There is a sense in the cliffhanger ending, which seems poised on a knife's edge between cementing a friendship between Changez and the Stranger or descending into violence, that Changez is in that moment choosing his own path. - Character: The Stranger. Description: The unnamed person to whom Changez recounts his time in America, the Stranger never speaks in the book. In fact, the reader's only impressions of him come from Changez's remarks. Because of this, it's left unclear how much Changez can trust the Stranger – it seems possible that the Stranger is merely a tourist, and just as possible that he is some kind of government agent. In fact, there is a sense that the Stranger may even be an American spy sent specifically to investigate, apprehend, or even kill Changez. Yet the novel ends on a cliffhanger, not revealing who or what the Stranger is, and in that way capturing the uncertainty and tension in any exchange between these cultures in the post-9/11 world. - Character: Erica. Description: Erica is a beautiful and popular Princeton graduate, with whom Changez falls in love. She has strong feelings for Changez, though she sometimes seems to view Changez as an exotic foreigner more than a true friend and lover. A writer, she is nostalgic for Chris, a childhood friend and boyfriend who died a year before she and Changez met. After 9/11, she falls into depression and mental illness, focused around an obsessive nostalgia for Chris that thwarts any possibility of a relationship with Changez. By the end of the novel, she may have killed herself, though Changez in his life in Pakistan still thinks fondly of her and imagines – though without any real hope – that she will someday come to him. That the name "Erica" is contained within the word "America" is no coincidence, and Changez's relationship with Erica can be seen as analogous to his relationship to America. - Character: Jim. Description: Jim is an executive vice president at Underwood Samson, and Changez's mentor for most of his time with the company. Because he worked his way up from an impoverished family, Jim identifies with Changez's financial situation, and regularly communicates this to Changez. Like Erica, Jim's feelings for Changez may be limited by his minimal understanding of Changez's culture and personality. The novel also hints that Jim may be interested in Changez romantically, though Jim's sexuality is never revealed. - Character: The Waiter. Description: The Waiter serves Changez and the Stranger while they sit and drink tea in the café in Lahore to which Changez steered the Stranger. A member of a tribe victimized by America's military, he appears hostile and angry with the Stranger, though Changez assures the Stranger that the man is polite and gentle. At the end of the novel, the Waiter is running toward the Stranger in a dark and street, and may be about to attack him, though this isn't at all certain. - Character: Wainwright. Description: Changez's friend at Underwood Samson and the only other non-white trainee, Wainwright is laid-back and popular with his peers. He and Changez quickly become friends, but because he is more comfortable with America and American culture after 9/11, he and Changez grow apart. Nevertheless, Wainwright is the only one of Changez's peers who shakes his hand when Changez is fired. - Character: Juan-Batista. Description: The president of a Chilean publishing company that Underwood Sampson values. Changez works on the project, and becomes friendly with Juan-Batista. It is Juan-Batista's questioning that leads Changez to see himself as a "janissary" – a person who has been kidnapped and made to fight against his own culture. This revelation causes Changez to cease working at his job at Underwood Sampson. - Character: Jeepney driver. Description: One day while traveling to work for Underwood Sampson in a limousine, Changez notices a jeepney (a kind of public bus) driver staring at him angrily . Changez can't figure out whether the man seems angry at him for personal reasons, because he's jealous of Changez's suit and limousine, or because he hates Americans. After the staring match is over, Changez looks at his blonde Underwood Samson colleagues and is struck by their foreignness, and feels suddenly closer to the driver than to his colleagues. This incident is a first step in Changez's increasing alienation from the United States. - Theme: Patriotism & Post-9/11 United States. Description: As a Pakistani man in the United States, Changez has a perspective and experiences that give him insight about aspects of American patriotism that Americans take for granted. Reflecting on his time at Princeton University, he realizes that there is a hidden patriotic project in his college education. Young, intelligent students from the United States and the rest of the world are taught to love America, live in America after they graduate, and lend their services to American companies. During his time at Princeton, Changez isn't conscious of this patriotic indoctrination, but after September 11, he witnesses an enormous surge in patriotism—and a patriotic obsession with the United States' own past and purity—that affects him directly. Although he had thought that New York City had its own distinct culture, after the attack he sees the city join with the rest of the United States in forming a single culture whose most obvious characteristic is its hostility to non-Americans like Changez himself.Even though Changez is naturally resistant to this form of patriotism because it excludes him, he continues to love his new country, which has provided him with a first-rate education and job. His relationship to the United States is similar to his love for Erica (whose name, not by accident, is contained within the word "America"). Like America during the War on Terror, Changez observes, Erica becomes obsessed with her own past, most notably her love for her dead boyfriend, Chris. It's unlikely that her relationship with Chris was remotely as strong while he was alive; she idealizes the past because it's past; because it's safe, unchallenging, and unchanging. Ultimately, it is Erica's failure to escape the past that prevents her from loving Changez in the present. On the one occasion when they have sex, Changez tells Erica to pretend that he is Chris – a clever metaphor for the way Changez must pretend to be someone else to succeed in the United States.Changez's relationship with America and patriotism has all the turmoil of a love affair. Although he loves America initially, and it seems to love him in return, it becomes clear by the end of The Reluctant Fundamentalist that both the United States and Erica are too nostalgic for an idealized, semi-mythical past to reward his feelings of love or patriotism. His feelings rejected and disillusioned with the United States, Changez returns to Pakistan. - Theme: Coming of Age. Description: The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a good example of a Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. In the early chapters, Changez, the protagonist (his name clues us in to the character development he'll undergo) is an uncertain, passive young man. He travels all over the world (to Princeton University, to Greece, to New York City) without ever voicing a particularly strong reason for choosing to go to these places. In reality, he doesn't "choose" to go to Princeton or New York at all – he obeys what others tell him, or does what he thinks he's supposed to do. Because of his passivity in most of the first half of the book, Changez encounters many different models for how he should come of age. One important model is Princeton University, where he absorbs the unstated but accepted idea that a valuable life is one in which he uses his intelligence and knowledge to help a capitalist American company, which in his case is Underwood Samson. It's only when he looks back on his life later that Changez realizes that this was the hidden message of his Princeton education and that he has allowed others to control his own development.In the aftermath of September 11, Changez encounters new hostility from Americans: an aggressive airport security guard detains him, and pedestrians harass him. He begins to realize that the ideal of growing up he's been fed at Princeton and Underwood Samson makes him useful to Americans, but doesn't actually make him a part of America. Despite his contributions, he's still seen as an outsider in the United States. Naturally angry at having been used and rejected in this way, he begins to rebel against America and Underwood Samson in small ways, such as growing out his beard – an expression of his desire to take control of his own life and a symbol of his coming of age. Changez's ultimate choice to leave the United States for Pakistan contrasts markedly with his early, passive traveling.But even if The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a book about growing up, it's not completely clear what Changez grows up to be. He returns to Pakistan to become a university lecturer, but the novel never reveals whether or not he has become a supporter of terrorist groups, or simply a peaceful critic of American foreign policy. Changez's identity is unclear to us; it may also be unclear to Changez himself. The ambiguity of the ending, in which it is unclear whether he is about to befriend or attack the Stranger, may be read as a sign that Changez is still growing and still has choices to make, choices that will define who he will become. - Theme: Racism & Fundamentalism. Description: Throughout The Reluctant Fundamentalist, beginning on the first page, Hamid, the author, shows how people judge one another based on their clothing, their skin color, and their mannerisms. These forms of racism shape Changez and his impressions of the United States. Although Changez's friends at Princeton treat him respectfully, they're aware that he is an outsider in the United States. When they travel to Greece together, Changez experiences various forms of "soft" racism. While not rude or disrespectful to him, his friends think of him as an exotic "pet"; even Erica is attracted to Changez because he is "different." Changez accepts and in some ways encourages these feelings, partly because he wants Erica and his other friends to accept him and partly because he himself is unsure who he is.After September 11, Changez encounters more overt and hostile forms of racism in America. He's called an Arab, though he's really Pakistani, and is detained at an airport and harassed by a bigoted security officer. Changez refuses to "cave in" during these confrontations, and, in defiance of what he sees as their profound unfairness and viciousness, deliberately changes his behavior and appearance to appear even more obviously foreign. Put another way: the novel shows how racism helps to create the very thing it fears. In Changez's case, racism ultimately drives him from his adopted country of the United States back to Pakistan. The racism and prejudice stemming from the fear of fundamentalism leads him, a lover of America, to become at minimum more critical of the United States, and, possibly, a fundamentalist.In The Reluctant Fundamentalist's "frame narrative," Changez and the Stranger judge each other based on their racist preconceptions. The Stranger is suspicious of Changez because of his beard and clothing, while Changez sizes up the Stranger as an American based on his bearing. In the end, Hamid doesn't reveal if either Changez or the Stranger has judged accurately: Changez could be an anti-American terrorist, and the Stranger could be an American secret agent, or both, or neither. Readers are forced to decide whether the stereotypes of terrorist and spy are, in this case, accurate, and, if they are, whether Changez has been driven to terrorism by the racism he encountered as an outsider in the United States. - Theme: Human Connection. Description: In the face of racism and aggressive nationalism, Hamid questions whether it is possible for two unlike people to genuinely trust and respect one another, while also exploring humans' fundamental need for these kinds of connections. Most of Changez's classmates at Princeton are wealthy and take American culture as a given, but Changez works multiple jobs to feed his family in Pakistan. While he tries to forge strong friendships with other students, he can't shake the sense that he and his peers will never understand each other. He fares somewhat better with Erica, the beautiful Princeton undergraduate with whom he has a long romance, but even this romance ends when Erica becomes obsessed and decides that she is still in love with her deceased boyfriend, Chris. Even when he returns to Pakistan, Changez continues to search the news for information about Erica, suggesting that he's still committed to finding a connection with her, despite all evidence that such a connection is impossible.Still another attempt at human connection comes with Jim, the Underwood Samson vice president who hires Changez after realizing that they both come from impoverished families, and both feel a drive to succeed unknown to wealthier Princeton students. Over the course of the novel, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Jim tries to forge a connection with Changez for selfish reasons: he's a lonely middle-aged man looking for a friend, and he may even be sexually attracted to Changez.While all of Changez's attempts at human connection in America can be said to fail, Hamid leaves readers with the image of Changez and the Stranger in a dark alley, deciding whether or not to trust each other. Even if it's difficult to form an intimate bond of trust with a person from another culture, it might be possible to do so by listening to his story, just as the Stranger has, and just as readers of Hamid's book have done. And yet there is danger, also, in attempts at making such connections, as Changez and the Stranger's encounter in the alley seems like it just as possibly might turn to violence. - Theme: American Imperialism. Description: Through Changez's experience, The Reluctant Fundamentalist paints a picture of the enormous financial and military power that the United States wields over the rest of the world. The novel depicts how the United States' power is so great because it is both "hard," meaning that it has tremendous military force, and "soft," meaning that it encourages foreigners to adopt American customs. Meanwhile, the American characters are often ignorant or naïve about their country's power and the challenges and impact such power forces a foreigner in America to face. One of the primary "soft power" tactics that the United States uses to maintain its power is to attract talented foreign students to its universities and then encourage them to work for American companies. Changez notes that he is the perfect example of this process, since he attends Princeton University on scholarship, is given a work visa, and then works for the prestigious valuation firm, Underwood Samson (whose initials, U.S., suggest its American allegiance). When Changez travels to South America to evaluate a publishing corporation that hires Underwood Samson, the corporation's president, Juan-Batista, compares Changez to a janissary officer: a warrior kidnapped by the Ottoman Empire and forced to fight against his own culture. Changez reluctantly realizes that the analogy is accurate: America "kidnapped" him with offers of free education, convinced him to stay with a tempting offer of employment at Underwood Samson, and put him to work keeping America rich and powerful.The United States also exerts enormous military power over the world. After the events of September 11, Changez witnesses America's military interventions in Pakistan; these actions, which threaten his family's safety, remind him how much of an outsider he is in his adopted country, and convince him to return to Pakistan on a visit. Ironically, during the visit, he is faced with the effects of American "soft power," as his American experiences – particularly his romance with Erica – make him feel lonely and out of place in Pakistan, too. Changez, then, experiences American soft and hard power simultaneously, and in confusing ways: he loves the United States for its opportunities and aspects of its culture; he resents being treated as a foreigner by the citizens of the country he has come to love after 9/11; he fears the way that American hard power threatens his own family, which has done nothing to America. Ultimately, the resentments outweigh the love, and Changez returns to Pakistan to use his education to organize and educate anti-American demonstrators, to fight the American soft power that attracted him to Princeton in the first place.Finally, the possibility that the Stranger might be a secret agent sent halfway around the world to assassinate Changez reinforces the constant presence of U.S. imperialism. At the same time, he could be a perfectly innocent tourist. It's this uncertain interplay between menace and friendliness that Hamid associates with the United States throughout The Reluctant Fundamentalist. - Climax: Changez and the Stranger's confrontation (which may not be a confrontation at all) outside the Stranger's hotel - Summary: In the streets of Lahore, Pakistan, a young man, Changez, approaches an unnamed man (for the purposes of his summary, we'll call him the Stranger), and asks, in an unclear combination of extreme politeness and menacing familiarity, if he can be of assistance. Changez says that the Stranger looks American, and escorts him to a nearby cafe, where they drink tea and eat dinner. As afternoon turns into evening, Changez tells the Stranger about his time in the United States. Changez comes from a respected but declining Pakistani family. Nonetheless, he gets into and attends Princeton University, where he makes excellent grades and acts the part of an exotic foreigner, but secretly works multiple jobs to support himself and his family. He comments to the Stranger that he now sees that Princeton was indoctrinating him into a pro-American mindset—teaching him to use his skills to help American companies—but that he didn't realize this at the time. Near the end of his senior year, he interviews for a prestigious valuing firm, Underwood Samson, which does analysis to determine the worth of companies. During his interview, Jim, an executive vice president at the firm, learns that Changez is on financial aid, and conceals his economic status from his classmates; Jim tells Changez that he, too, hid his background at Princeton, and gives him a job. Between graduating Princeton and beginning his career at Underwood Samson, Changez goes on a vacation to Greece with Princeton friends and peers. It is here that he meets Erica, a beautiful and charismatic Princeton graduate, with whom he is instantly smitten. In New York, Changez begins his career at Underwood Samson. He makes friends with another trainee, Wainwright, and wins the admiration of his colleagues and supervisors. Meanwhile, he continues to spend time with Erica, who lives in New York and invites him to parties and dinners. Changez notices that Erica seems deeply lonely, even when she's surrounded by friends, and learns that her boyfriend and childhood friend, Chris, died last year. While working in Manila, in the Philippines, Changez witnesses the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and finds himself feeling pleasure at the sight of powerful, arrogant America brought to its knees. Then, on his return flight to New York, he is detained at the airport. He begins to notice and be the subject of increasing racism and discrimination in New York City and at Underwood Samson. Erica, traumatized by 9/11, begins to sink into nostalgia for Chris. One night, Changez and Erica have sex, a "success" Changez achieves partly by telling Erica to pretend that he is Chris. Changez thinks this will bring them closer, but Erica grows increasingly distant from Changez. Changez, feeling increasingly uncomfortable in New York and the United States as a foreigner after 9/11, travels to Pakistan to see his family, and feels angry with the United States for supporting India's aggression against his home. At the same time, he doesn't feel entirely Pakistani, either. Later, while traveling to Chile for Underwood Samson, he meets Juan-Batista, the president of a publishing company, who compares Changez to a janissary — a reference to Crusades era warriors who were kidnapped from their own culture, and then forced to fight against it. Changez realizes this is true, that he is doing harm to Pakistan by working for Underwood Samson. He returns to New York in the middle of his assignment. Jim fires him, but seems sympathetic to his struggle. Changez returns to Pakistan, where he lectures at a university and supports anti-American demonstrations, although, he insists, he never encourages violence. As Changez tells the Stranger his story, he frequently points out that the Stranger seems uncomfortable, and notes that the Stranger has something under his jacket in the exact position where spies keep a gun. The waiter who serves them their food seems angry with the Stranger, but Changez assures the Stranger that there is no danger. Changez then walks the Stranger back to his hotel. As they stand outside, the Stranger notices a group of people, including the waiter, who've been following them, and reaches under his jacket.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Remains of the Day - Point of view: The novel is told in the first person, with Stevens reflecting (in what seems to be the form of a diary) both on the day's events during his travels and on events from several decades in the past. While the first person might seem to grant unlimited access into Stevens's mind, the novel uses this point of view to thematize the limits of memory and the limitations of one's own perspective and self-knowledge. - Setting: - Character: Mr. Stevens. Description: The narrator and protagonist of the book, Stevens is an older man who has spent his entire life as a butler, just as his father was. After spending most of his career serving an aristocrat, Lord Darlington, he now is employed by an American, Mr. Farraday. Stevens's identity is inextricable from his position as butler: this is how he has always defined himself, and the requirements of his position seemed to have shaped, if not determined, his character. Because being a butler for an aristocratic household requires calmness and discretion, for instance, Stevens cannot imagine being anything other than cool and private in his personal life. The formality required of him in his professional position also makes him deeply formal at all times, and he finds it difficult to speak casually, to act relaxed, or to express his feelings to those around him. This has profound effects on his life; for example, Stevens is never able to express his feelings for Miss Kenton, which brings him some regret. While Stevens is extremely thoughtful, he is not always honest with himself; as he himself comes to realize over the course of his motoring trip, he implicitly or subconsciously tweaks his recollections of past events in order to fit a certain narrative. Earnest and profoundly loyal, Stevens does begin to question this narrative, in what seems like a valiant attempt to face the past more frankly than he has done before. What enables him to do so is perhaps, in part, the fact that the identity he has claimed for himself is dwindling with the decline of the aristocracy following World War II. - Character: Miss Kenton (Mrs. Benn). Description: The lead housemaid at Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton is intelligent, headstrong, and stubborn. Like Stevens, she takes a great deal of pride in her work and in her position, but she also possesses a more independent streak than Stevens, which allows her to disagree not only with him but also with the decisions made by Lord Darlington. Miss Kenton has a strong moral sense—she doesn't hesitate to object strongly to the Jewish maids being dismissed, for instance—but she also recognizes her fragility as a woman alone and without resources in a society that still requires women either to be married or beholden to life as a servant. It gradually becomes clear that Miss Kenton is in love with Stevens, though she simultaneously finds him infuriating, and her decision to leave Darlington Hall is in part due to her frustration with his lack of response, as well as to her general impulsiveness. Miss Kenton, now Mrs. Benn, seems better suited than Stevens to face her "remains of the day" outside the realm of aristocratic country houses, but she too struggles to find a place for herself in a changing world. - Character: Lord Darlington. Description: The owner of Darlington Hall, which has been in his family for hundreds of years, Lord Darlington is described by various characters as a true old gentleman. After fighting in World War I, Lord Darlington was inspired to get involved in politics and attempt to ease relations between Britain and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, as the Nazis were growing in power. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Darlington is at the center of the historical movement for "appeasement," and he even welcomes collaboration with major Nazi figures. Since Lord Darlington is described through the eyes of Stevens, it's difficult to tell just how much he bought into Nazi rhetoric; whether his anti-Semitism, for instance, was a true belief he held or, as Stevens says, something that he embraced only for a time as a result of the nefarious influence of others. The novel does seem to make clear that Lord Darlington's status as a "gentleman," with an earnest belief in congeniality, cooperation, and polite discussion, is more naïve than evil, but also entirely unsuited to the political requirements of the time. He finds himself as a result on the wrong side of history, as Stevens only gradually comes to admit to himself. - Character: Mr. John Farraday. Description: The new owner of Darlington Hall, Mr. Farraday is one of a number of wealthy Americans who moved to Britain and bought up old country houses after World War II when the estates' original owners were ruined financially or (as in Lord Darlington's case) by public opinion. Farraday is more informal and jocular than what Stevens is used to, but at the same time Farraday is fascinated by Stevens as a relic of a former age—an age he wants to be able to purchase, in some way, for himself. Matching Farraday's witty banter, nonetheless, is Stevens's professional challenge for much of the book. - Character: William Stevens, senior (Stevens's father). Description: A butler all his life, Stevens's father works for a man named Mr. John Silvers until Silvers' death, when Stevens senior comes to work with Stevens at Darlington Hall. Stevens models himself after his father, considering Stevens senior as the embodiment of dignity and professionalism. As a result, though, the narrator also has learned to maintain his formal role even when alone with his father, including at his father's deathbed. Stevens senior, too, finds his identity wrapped up in his position as butler, such that, as he approaches death, he is most troubled by his increasing inability to fulfill the tasks required of him. - Character: Mr. Graham. Description: An old friend of Stevens and a fellow butler, who appears only in Stevens's reminiscences. Mr. Graham believes, unlike Stevens, that dignity is something one cannot hope to define; they have a number of lively discussions about this aspect of their profession. The fact that, as Stevens repeats several times, he seems to have lost touch with Mr. Graham underlines the dwindling nature of the profession after the war. - Character: Sir David Cardinal. Description: A close friend of Lord Darlington who works with him to gather together important figures in order to attempt to ease relations between Britain and Germany. Sir Cardinal is another example of an earlier generation of aristocrats that are dying off by the 1930s. While their polite and unofficial way of doing politics is falling out of vogue, they still strive to maintain their power and traditions. - Character: Mr. Lewis. Description: An American senator who attends the unofficial international "conference" organized by Lord Darlington and Sir David Cardinal in March 1923 to attempt to ease reparations requirements for Germany. Mr. Lewis ultimately reveals himself to be disdainful of this attempt, diagnosing the gentlemen in attendance as amateurs, while modern politics requires professionals. Although his remarks are not taken seriously at the time, Mr. Reginald Cardinal, many years later, admits that Lewis was right. - Character: M. Dupont. Description: A Frenchman whom Lord Darlington and Sir David Cardinal manage to convince to attend their unofficial international "conference" in March 1923. It seems initially that he is under the influence of Mr. Lewis, but he ultimately reveals himself to be a gentleman of an older persuasion, who finds Mr. Lewis's attempt to sway him unsportsmanlike. - Character: Lisa. Description: A young housemaid hired by Stevens and Miss Kenton after the dismissal of Ruth and Sarah. While she arrives with dubious references and without much motivation, Miss Kenton takes it upon herself to teach and "improve" her; she seems to succeed, but eventually Lisa runs away with a footman to get married, severely disappointing Miss Kenton. - Theme: Dignity and Greatness. Description: Although Stevens has, by his own account, spent his life attempting to embody dignity, he also spends much of the novel pondering what precisely that means. To be a great butler, in Stevens's terms, is to have dignity, but there is never one single definition of dignity given: instead, Stevens offers a number of examples and anecdotes as he feels his way towards an understanding of how he has structured his own life. Stevens's father is offered as one model of dignity. He is utterly committed to his work and refuses to allow personal affairs to get in the way of his professional requirements: even when he collapses while pushing a trolley, an event that will lead to his death, he continues attempting to push it from the floor. Stevens adopts this mode of discretion and professionalism, which he doesn't link to the status of a credentialed expert (in fact, he's skeptical of this definition), but rather to the necessity of following the duties of one's position. Calmness, tact, and circumspection are especially important for a butler, who is meant to act as if invisible in the presence of employers: Stevens sometimes reflects on the need to balance a sense of constant availability with invisibility, especially when he's serving only Lord Darlington and a friend in the massive dining room, for instance. Towards the end of the novel, Harry Smith proposes another definition of dignity: that dignity is inherent to every British citizen, who—as a member of a democracy—has both the privilege and the right to contribute to the country's progress. Stevens thinks that Smith is overly idealistic—another aspect of dignity, in Stevens's view, is precisely that it needs to be attached to specific circumstances and positions. He obviously doesn't think that a butler cannot have dignity and pride, but it is a specific kind of dignity—one that can and should be distinguished from the dignity attached to someone like Lord Darlington. Indeed, much of Stevens's sense of dignity has to do with the moral status of his employer. He constantly insists on Lord Darlington's morals, although he sometimes seems to collapse his employer's ethics with the external, social qualities of being a "gentleman." Stevens and Ishiguro both show a certain insecurity throughout the novel as to whether dignity is helpful, or conversely, whether it can be harmful and even dangerous. The same coolness and detachment that Stevens has learned to embody from his father makes him unable to attend to his father at his deathbed, or to express vulnerability to Miss Kenton. Lord Darlington's dignity, meanwhile, comes to seem more suspicious in light of his earnest belief that Britain and Germany can just "work things out" like two gentlemen having an argument at a dinner party. As the senator Mr. Lewis warns during the international conference, this belief in the inherent dignity of people—and especially in the relevance of personal dignity in international politics—is naïve and may well prove devastating to European politics. On the other hand, Stevens himself, when faced with Harry Smith's definition of dignity, comes to express uncertainty as to whether or not dignity should be democratic. Even if he ultimately insists that Smith is wrong, Stevens's own uncertainty signals the ambiguous role that dignity plays throughout the novel, as something to aspire to but also in many ways a relic of a past in which "great" countries were ruled like gentelmen's clubs. The novel treats Stevens's view of dignity as admirable, in some senses, but also as tragically limited, in ways that Stevens largely—though not entirely—remains unable to see. - Theme: History, Retrospection and Regret. Description: It is difficult to tell where Stevens's professional commitment to discretion ends, and where the trouble he has with expressing his feelings in a private setting begins. Regardless of their origin, his shyness and social awkwardness become a source of regret as Stevens looks back on his life throughout the novel, and much of his regret has to do with things that went unsaid and events that could have gone otherwise—although how they could have, given the rigidness of his character, remains in doubt. The retrospective, flashback-heavy structure of The Remains of the Day makes it well-suited to such questions of regret stemming from contemplation of the past. In the present time of the novel, Stevens is driving to see Miss Kenton, whom he hasn't seen in many years, but he is also recalling a number of events related to her, and related to their lives at Darlington Hall more generally. Many of Stevens's regrets have to do with his relationship to Miss Kenton; only at the end of the novel is it mentioned explicitly that she would have liked to marry him, but this has been clear long before, though the extent to which Stevens knew this, or understood even subconsciously, remains ambiguous. This ambiguity is key to the novel's ideas about a person's relationship to the past. All past events in The Remains of the Day are told in flashbacks from an unreliable narrator who tends to tell a convenient story and then only partially correct himself. As a result, it's unclear what Stevens really understands or knows about his own past. Does he know that he loves Miss Kenton, for example, or has he repressed this even from himself? And, more to the point, is Stevens's extreme repression emblematic of a more general tendency for memory to be provisional, partial, and malleable? The novel implies that the answer to the latter question is yes, in no small part because a person's life is not just difficult to understand in retrospect—it's impossible to understand as it happens in the present, too, and so memory will always be cobbled together and partially invented. When Stevens relates how he responded to the news of the death of Miss Kenton's aunt, for instance, it is obvious that his actions were deeply hurtful to her. But Stevens struggled to understand that at the time, and thus, even in retrospect, he is unable to see how he might have acted differently. These questions take on larger importance as the vagaries of personal memory become inextricable from the larger movements of history; Stevens's troublesome reflections encompass not only on his own memories, but also historical events that led to Britain's role in World War II. Stevens is unable to admit—at the time, or in retrospect—that his employer's political dealings aided the Nazis. Likewise, many important politicians and aristocrats in England failed to truly see what was happening before their eyes as Nazi Germany rose to power. The novel suggests that one of the pitfalls of memory and history is the tendency to impose a coherence and inevitability onto events that did not exist when they were unfolding—to look back, that is, on the events leading up to World War II and assume that the war "had" to happen. At the same time, though, the novel can also be understand as a damning indictment of the naïveté and historical blindness of key factors in British history: a blindness only enabled by the ways in which wealthy Englishmen lived, cloistered away on their ancient estates. By linking Stevens's personal retrospection to the political one, the novel explores the ways in which telling a story can both clarify what was at stake, and also show how impossible it is to recognize this without the benefit of hindsight. - Theme: Class Difference and Social Change. Description: The world of English mansions, lords and ladies, butlers and maids, still exists at the time at which the novel takes place, but it's a dying world. Indeed, Darlington Hall is emblematic of one shift that has taken place, as Englishmen still with titles but with their money gone have been forced to sell their estates to rich Americans like Stevens's new employer. The acute awareness of social class and class difference that Stevens evinces in his narrative, and in the way he and the other servants act in the flashback scenes, thus coexists with a sense that those differences are now eroding. For Stevens, it is a given that, as his father was a butler, he will be one as well, just as the generations of Darlingtons have maintained their social and class status. Stevens doesn't question that his employer has so much more money, power, and comfort than he does; Stevens considers it a fact of life. Within the strict social hierarchy, from aristocracy down to the servant class, there can also be subtler differentiation, such as between a footman and a butler, or between an under-butler and a housekeeper; it's the latter that causes the first major disagreement between Stevens and Miss Kenton, who takes issue at being asked to address Stevens's father formally despite the higher status of her position. This world is clear, ordered, and (to Stevens's mind) sensible, even while it is also rigid and leaves little room for social mobility. After the war, however, it is clear that such hierarchies are shifting. Stevens is often treated as a relic of a former time by other people he encounters. He's even considered a "gentleman" by some people, a term that would normally be reserved for someone of Lord Darlington's social status. Part of the novel's pathos lies in showing how social mobility and change, which is usually thought of as positive and progressive, can also be disruptive and frightening. This is the case even for someone like Stevens who would presumably benefit from being able to adopt a new way of life, but who is afraid to be overwhelmed by the new social realities that are approaching just as his own career is winding down. - Theme: Politics and Loyalty. Description: The Remains of the Day is a deeply personal account of Stevens's life that is staged alongside the histories of Great Britain and Europe in the years preceding and following World War II. Just as Stevens sometimes recalls his personal memories incorrectly to preserve a narrative to which he is attached, his staunch loyalty to Lord Darlington reveals a disjuncture between Stevens's own characterization of certain political events and how those events appear to anyone who knows the broader political history of the time. From the beginning, Stevens acknowledges that the reputation of Lord Darlington has suffered—if not been destroyed—following the war. It slowly becomes clear that Lord Darlington spent much of the 1930s attempting to promote cooperation and good feeling between England and Germany under the Nazis. From Stevens's account, this attempt was entirely benign, evidence of Lord Darlington's character as a gentleman who truly believed that polite conversation over dinner could solve any disagreement. Yet Lord Darlington's assurances that Nazi atrocities were a "misunderstanding" are at best naïve and at worst actively harmful, and Stevens's insistence that Lord Darlington was never anti-Semitic—while still recounting Darlington's explicitly anti-Semitic comments and acts—comes to seem similarly troubling. Because he is so loyal to Lord Darlington, Stevens himself contributes to this norm by firing two Jewish maids under his employer's orders. While he's uncomfortable with this action, he never questions whether or not he should follow the order, and he's shocked that Miss Kenton would think of disobeying on moral grounds. One's own beliefs and opinions, he thinks, should never get away from the only ethical requirement he finds worth following: that of fidelity. There is a parallel between the personal and the political that is constructed throughout the book, in the argument that it is always easier to understand the truth in retrospect rather than in the process of living. But there is also an unmistakable difference between Stevens's misunderstandings, and the choices that the wealthy aristocrats around Lord Darlington made (whether actively malicious or simply misguided)—a difference that turns on the power that these men continued to wield at a perilous time in British politics. Only gradually does Stevens begin to wonder if the fierce loyalty he showed to Darlington was correct. At the same time, Stevens is rather quick to forgive Lord Darlington for his own political choices. Even if Darlington chose a certain political path of collaboration with true evil, Stevens ends up blaming himself, not necessarily for helping Darlington do so, but for failing to make his own decisions and his own mistakes. It's unquestioned loyalty more than politics that Stevens begins only belatedly to question—and only fleetingly, as he almost immediately returns to thoughts of how to be loyal to his new boss, Mr. Farraday. - Theme: Authenticity, Performance, and Self-Deception. Description: Stevens thinks of his identity as a butler as his full, authentic self. But there is also a deeply performative aspect to his role as a servant at Darlington Hall, as well as to the roles of the other employees at the estate. The novel examines how performance and authenticity are not, in fact, always in opposition: indeed, Stevens is an extreme case of the notion that performing a certain self can lead to becoming that person. The performances required to maintain formality and dignity in the aristocratic household lead to some of the few moments of humor in an otherwise nostalgic, even tragic novel. For example, when Stevens is asked to instruct Lord Darlington's godson in the facts of sex, he struggles to figure out how to do so while continuing to perform his regular duties of discretion and dignity. Other servants, like Miss Kenton, tend to think of their duties more as performances than as identities; that is, they can turn off their work behaviors once they are alone or away from the extravagant public spaces of the house. The duties they perform are not their "real" selves. In some ways, Stevens's view is more "authentic," in that he cannot be one person in some situations and another person in others. But while that might mean he is always his real self, it might also mean that he is deceiving himself by always performing—and, more troubling, that he cannot tell the difference between the two. Miss Kenton, in particular, strives to unmask Stevens's prim, proper exterior, yearning to connect with him on a deeper level. At certain points, Stevens, too, seems to want the same thing. But his difficulty in communicating with Miss Kenton ultimately seems to stem from the fact that the only way he knows how to act (or to be at all) is through the performance of his professional role. Stevens continues his performance even to the reader. Although the novel is structured as a diary, Stevens often addresses the reader as "you," as if asking the reader to confirm the way he views his own past and the conclusions he's drawn from it. This narrative choice allows Stevens to avoid confronting his memories alone, on their own terms, as he seems to prefer to address the past in the presence of an audience, which indicates a troubling insecurity. Even when Stevens remains within a first-person narration, he toggles between self-knowledge and self-deception. Stevens sometimes relates a memory through his own eyes, inviting the reader to believe him, but then later acknowledges that things actually happened differently. Without an "objective" source other than the narrator, it's difficult to know how much to take Stevens at his word, even though he seems to yearn for greater honesty over the course of the novel. This yearning—and his difficulty in fulfilling it—seems damning to the role he has played for so many years, implying that it has irrevocably shaped him into someone unable to confront (or even identify) reality and without a deeply-rooted self. - Climax: - Summary: Stevens, a butler at an old English country house called Darlington Hall, is preparing to take a short trip through the English countryside. His new employer, an American named Mr. Farraday, is returning to the United States for a visit, and Farraday has suggested that Stevens take some time off. Mr. Farraday's casual, informal manner is unfamiliar to Stevens, who had served for many years under a traditional English aristocrat, Lord Darlington. As a result, Stevens is still learning to banter and joke, which he thinks of as a professional skill he should develop. Although he's initially unsure, he finally decides he will take the trip: it will give him the chance to pay a visit to Miss Kenton, who used to be Darlington Hall's housekeeper, but who married and left several decades ago. Stevens has been making a few errors in running the household— mistakes he dismisses as minor—but he thinks Miss Kenton's return might help him resolve them. On his first day of travel, Stevens reflects on the greatness of English scenery—scenery which he believes to be all the greater precisely because it is subtle and not as "magnificent" as the landscape of other countries. Stevens also reflects on what it means to be a "great" butler, recalling a number of conversations he's had with other butlers over the years. Stevens turns to his own father (who was a butler himself) as one example of someone who was a great butler—that is, who embodied the dignity of the profession. He recalls a number of anecdotes that he thinks prove his father's dignity. The next day Stevens wonders whether or not Miss Kenton—who now, he reminds himself, uses her married name, Mrs. Benn—will actually agree to return; he's received some letters from her in which she seems unhappy, even desperate. He thinks back to when he first met Miss Kenton, in 1922. She was hired around the same time as his father, whose long-time employer had just died. Miss Kenton immediately proved herself to be stubborn and headstrong; when Stevens asked her to address his father formally, even though she was technically in a position above him, she began pointing out a number of mistakes and examples of absent-mindedness on the part of his father. At first, Stevens recalls that Miss Kenton told Stevens that his father's trivial mistakes added up to something more significant, but then Stevens realizes that he has misremembered—that in fact it was Lord Darlington who said so, in asking Stevens to remove his father from some responsibilities. Stevens recalls this request coming in the context of an approaching event of great importance: Lord Darlington had, together with his friend Sir David Cardinal, invited a number of important people to Darlington Hall to try to promote the easing of sanctions against Germany following World War I. Darlington and Cardinal were particularly eager to convince the French guest, M. Dupont, of their position, thinking that he might hold the key to changing France's course. But immediately upon his arrival, Dupont spent most of his time with an American senator, Mr. Lewis. At one point, Stevens overheard Mr. Lewis attempting to turn Dupont against the Englishmen present. During the conference, Stevens senior took ill, but Stevens's help was so needed downstairs that he barely spent time with his ailing father, leaving Miss Kenton to care for him instead. For the next few days, Stevens moved between his father's room and the drawing and dining rooms downstairs, never betraying any emotion about his father's state. During the final dinner, M. Dupont made a toast and accused Mr. Lewis of duplicity and betrayal; Lewis, in turn, called Lord Darlington an amateur who was out of his league in trying to arrange international politics in a gentlemanly way. Not long after that, Stevens's father died. Stevens was shaken and came close to crying, though he rapidly returned downstairs to serve the guests with his composure intact. Now he remembers that night with a certain feeling of triumph for having retained such dignity. Stevens's thoughts turn to the importance he's always placed in serving an employer of great moral stature. While sitting at Mortimer's Pond in Dorset, he thinks back to earlier that day when he was faced with car trouble and had to stop to ask help from a chauffeur outside a Victorian house. While saying he came from Darlington Hall, Stevens had implied that he hadn't, in fact, worked for Lord Darlington. He admits that this slightly misleading comment is related to another recent event, when friends of Mr. Farraday, the Wakefields, came to visit Darlington Hall, and he also gave the impression to Mrs. Wakefield that he had never worked for Lord Darlington. He reiterates that he is proud to have worked for Lord Darlington, and that his reticence stems only from not wanting to hear any more "nonsense" about his former employer. The next day, sitting at a tearoom in Taunton, Stevens thinks about accusations that began to be leveled at Lord Darlington after the war—accusations of anti-Semitism (including not allowing Jewish staff members to work at Darlington Hall), and association with fascists. Stevens roundly dismisses such notions: he takes pride in having served someone as morally upright as Lord Darlington. He admits that such unfounded rumors may have gotten started as a result of the short-lived influence of one of Darlington's friends in the early 1930s. After spending time with that friend (who was part of a fascist group), Lord Darlington began to make disparaging comments about Jews. At one point, he called Stevens into his office to tell him that they mustn't have Jewish people on staff; Stevens would have to dismiss the two Jewish housemaids, Ruth and Sarah. Though Stevens claims to have hated the idea of dismissing the girls, he didn't hesitate to fulfill his employer's order. Miss Kenton, though, was appalled; while she objected strongly, saying she'd quit before agreeing to do so, Stevens said it wasn't their place to say what was and wasn't right. Miss Kenton never did quit, and Stevens began to tease her about it; months later, though, she admitted that she was quite close to quitting and felt cowardly, but realized she'd have nowhere to go if she left. A year later, Lord Darlington had severed all connections to his friend and he asked Stevens if he could figure out what happened to Ruth and Sarah, as it had been wrong to dismiss them. Stevens eagerly told Miss Kenton what he'd said, as part of the evening meetings with cocoa that they regularly held in her parlor. But she was distraught that Stevens had never thought to share that he too didn't agree with the dismissals; he couldn't figure out how to explain to her why he hadn't. Now, Stevens finds himself in the private family home of the Taylors; earlier that day his car ran out of gas, and the Taylors were kind enough to invite him to stay the night. He thinks back, now, to the daily parlor meetings with Miss Kenton, wondering how they came to end. He wonders if it has to do with the time Miss Kenton interrupted him in his parlor reading a sentimental love story and teased him about it; he immediately grew cold and distant, deciding he'd have to reassert their relationship on more professional grounds. He recalls, too, that Miss Kenton began to receive letters and visit a suitor in a nearby town. Once she asked him, now that he was at the top of his profession, if he'd ever want anything else in life; he couldn't imagine what she meant, and he said he'd never be fulfilled until seeing Lord Darlington through all his goals. Not long after, Miss Kenton seemed cool and distant at one of their parlor talks, and Stevens suggested they stop meeting. She protested but he insisted, and the evenings came to an end. Now he wonders if things might have turned out otherwise had he not insisted; but he notes that only with the benefit of hindsight can one see turning points everywhere. He relates a few more failures of communication between himself and Miss Kenton, including once shortly after her aunt's death when he heard her crying on the other side of her parlor door, but didn't enter; but he reiterates that it's useless to speculate too much on the past. Stevens thinks about the events of earlier this evening, when a number of villagers came to visit him, impressed by his gentlemanly manners. Stevens began to refer to his past involvement in foreign policy, giving the impression that he'd personally known people like Lord Halifax and Mr. Churchill (both of whom had visited Darlington Hall). He's now embarrassed, not sure how or why he gave such an impression. He also thinks about one particular strain of the conversation, when one villager, Mr. Harry Smith, pronounced that dignity is something that every English citizen can have as part of their democratic participation in politics. Stevens doesn't agree: he thinks ordinary people can't expect to have such strong opinions, and that politics should be the realm of aristocratic gentlemen. He reiterates his loyalty to Lord Darlington, loyalty being a quality he continues to believe in. Even if Darlington was misguided and made mistakes—even if his life now looks like a waste—there's nothing undignified in Stevens's loyalty to him, no reason for him to feel regret or shame. The next day finds Stevens sitting in the Rose Garden hotel, waiting for Miss Kenton. He recalls a memory that he's already related, about Miss Kenton crying on the other side of the door; but now he thinks this event may have taken place months later. It was during a visit from Mr. Cardinal, Sir Cardinal's son, who was Lord Darlington's godson. He came to visit unexpectedly, when Lord Halifax and Herr Ribbentrop were also expected, so Lord Darlington asked Mr. Cardinal to wait alone. Frustrated, Mr. Cardinal had too much to drink and told Stevens that the Nazis were playing Darlington: they were manipulating his gentlemanly spirit and sense of decency to string England along, buying themselves time. Darlington, he said, was a pawn of the Nazis, and he asked if Stevens hadn't seen it—Stevens said he hadn't. Meanwhile, Miss Kenton announced to Stevens that she was going to accept her suitor's proposal of marriage. He barely responded, and she grew upset, asking if he had nothing more to say to her after so many years. He simply congratulated her and hurried back to the main rooms, telling her that she was keeping him from important events. Upset and angry, Miss Kenton told him that she and Mr. Benn often amused themselves telling anecdotes about Stevens's habits; he didn't respond. A little later she apologized, but he said he could barely recall what she was talking about, given the significant events going on upstairs. That evening, he now realizes, was when he heard Miss Kenton crying inside her parlor. Nonetheless, he feels a certain triumph when he thinks about that night, too, given how well he balanced all his responsibilities. Again, he emerged with dignity from trying circumstances. Two days later, Stevens is sitting on the pier of the seaside town of Weymouth, reflecting on his meeting with Miss Kenton. At first, they exchanged pleasantries, but then became comfortable with each other and began reminiscing about their days together at Darlington Hall. They discussed Lord Darlington's ruined postwar reputation, and Stevens tells Miss Kenton that Darlington's final days were solitary and silent, and it was tragic. As he drove her to the bus station, he ventured to ask her if she was being well-treated, given the unhappiness he sensed in some of her letters. Saying that she felt she could be honest with him, Miss Kenton told him that she initially thought of her engagement and marriage as another ruse to annoy him, not something she'd actually go through with. At first she was very unhappy, but over the years she came to love her husband. At times she still grows frustrated, imagining another life she could have had—a life with Stevens, for instance—but then she remembers that her place is with her husband, and that she can't live entirely in the past. Stevens relates that his heart was breaking then, but he remained calm and cheerful with Miss Kenton as he said goodbye. Now, Stevens thinks back to a discussion just a few hours ago that he had with another man on the bench beside him. It turned out the man was a butler himself before his retirement, so Stevens began to tell him about Darlington Hall, before confessing that he's begun to make more and more trivial errors, and he worries he doesn't have much left to give. He told the man that Lord Darlington was not a bad man; at least he made his own mistakes, which isn't something Stevens can say for himself. He began to cry, and the man tried to comfort him by telling him to keep looking forward. Now Stevens reflects that the man is right, and that all he can do is to put his fate in the hands of great gentlemen like those he serves. He thinks of Mr. Farraday's bantering, and resolves to work harder to fulfill that professional requirement as best he can.

- Genre: Short story, fairytale - Title: The Remarkable Rocket - Point of view: Third person - Setting: A kingdom in Europe - Character: The Rocket. Description: The titular Rocket is the protagonist of the story. The Rocket claims to be born of remarkable parents (though the story never confirms this), and thus believes himself to be the most remarkable thing in the world, considering himself to be the paragon of high society. Although he believes he is sympathetic and virtuous, in actuality he is haughty, arrogant, and condescending. The Rocket is certain that he is destined for greatness, but he has not yet been set off and is anticipating his entrance into public life and the magnificent impression that he is sure he will create. Like the King, the Rocket is so obsessed with himself and assured of his grand significance to the world that he is completely delusional. For every personal failure he faces, every negative interaction, and every insult directed towards him, he reinterprets it to reaffirm his own self-image as an utterly remarkable individual. For example, when he fails to light because he has foolishly soaked his gunpowder with his own tears, he believes that rather than a failure, it must mean that he is being reserved for an even grander occasion than the finale for the royal wedding between the Prince and the Princess. The Rocket's character never develops or changes over the course of the story. Until the moment that he burns out, he remains convinced of his own greatness and is thus an insufferable and pitiable figure. - Character: The King. Description: The King is the ruler of the kingdom in which the story takes place and the father of the Prince who is getting married. Like the Rocket, the King is convinced of his own greatness and his self-absorption has made him similarly delusional. The King believes that he is a skilled musician and, although his entire Court knows otherwise, that delusion is reinforced since none of his Courtiers have the courage to tell him the truth. The King is also in the habit of answering questions that are not addressed to him, believing that anyone should be happy to receive his wisdom. Although the King and the Rocket never interact, the King serves to reinforce the same self-importance and self-obsession—and the delusion that follows—that possesses the Rocket, which the story is warning against. - Character: The Frog. Description: The Frog is one of the residents of the countryside, who meets the Rocket after he has been discarded over the wall and thrown in the swamp. The Frog, like the Rocket, is utterly self-absorbed, believing that a good conversation is one in which only he speaks and that any member of good society holds all of the same opinions as he does. The Frog's arrogance leads him to be similarly delusional, believing that he and his croaking glee club are wildly popular. Rather than understanding that they are an irritant who keeps everyone from sleeping due to the noise, they believe that everyone is staying awake to enjoy their beautiful music. - Character: The Duck. Description: The Duck is a resident of the countryside who meets the Rocket while he is stuck in the swamp. The Duck thinks very little of the Rocket's pompousness and self-aggrandizing claims, since she cannot see how he offers any utility to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the Duck is of a kindly disposition, inviting the Rocket to take up residence in the country, which is the only hospitality ever offered in the story. The Duck did try her hand at public life and politics once, but quickly found that she was too pragmatic for it and opted to settle for caring for her family instead. Where the Rocket is the epitome of high-society arrogance, the Duck is the paragon of middle-class simplicity and goodness. - Theme: Pride, Arrogance, and Delusion. Description: In "The Remarkable Rocket," Wilde warns against the effects of a wildly inflated ego. The eponymous Rocket, who has been set up to honor a royal wedding, believes himself to be the most important and admirable individual who has ever lived. Though he fails to perform as a firework should, the Rocket entertains a series of delusions that allow him to maintain his belief in his own grandeur. However, he is not alone in this. The other chief characters in the story—the King and the Frog—are similarly obsessed with their own sense of self-importance, which causes each of them to live in a delusional subjective reality. These arrogant delusions prevent the Rocket, the King, and the Frog from seeing reality the way that it truly is. The King, the Rocket, and the Frog each consider themselves to be the most interesting and compelling people in the world. The King wrongly believes himself to be a talented flute player—though his Courtiers know otherwise and simply refuse to tell him so—and a wise counsel, constantly answering questions that were asked of other people in the assumption that anyone would like to be graced by his intellect. The Rocket believes that every event, including the marriage of the Prince and Princess, is dedicated to honoring himself and his own obvious grandeur. The Frog believes also in his own great musical prowess and that he need not listen to anyone else speak, since anyone who is of good society already would agree with him. The Rocket puts great emphasis on his genealogy, though nobody seems to care, and considers himself an intimate friend of the Prince despite the fact that he has never met him. Everything that the Rocket considers valuable about himself is based on his own testimony and is ultimately a farce. The delusions held by the King, the Rocket, and the Frog cannot be objectively true. The King believes himself to be a great musician, though his Courtiers know otherwise. Both the Rocket and the Frog are of the (mutually exclusive) opinion that everyone ought to listen to them, as they are the only ones with anything of importance to say, which causes conflict when they meet since neither of them has any interest in listening to the other. The Rocket also operates on the assumption that everyone greatly admires him, when in fact, no one does. For the King, the Rocket, and the Frog, these delusions are necessary to maintain their own sense of self-importance. If they were to have any grasp of objective reality and set their delusions aside, they would be forced to realize that they are each largely insignificant. Even though both the King and the Frog live in delusional, subjective realities, the people around them play along with their delusions or at least do not contradict them—as opposed to the Rocket, who is alone in his conviction—demonstrating how an entire group can be led to reinforce a delusion borne out of a single individual's arrogance. Though the narrator definitively states that the King is a dreadful musician, the people of the Court applaud every time that he plays. Due to his influence and his subjects' unwillingness to defy him, the King's delusion of being a talented musician is reciprocated and reinforced by the Courtiers' positive reinforcement, even though that is not how they truly see him. Likewise, the Frog, though he is not a powerful individual, lives in the shared delusion with the rest of his glee club that everyone finds croaking to be a beautiful sound and enjoys the frogs' all-night noise-making. The Frog and his cohort misinterpret the fact that they are annoyingly keeping the farmer's wife awake all night as proof of their immense popularity. With no one to contradict them, their delusion becomes shared within their group and mutually reinforced. Beyond merely buying into the delusions of the King, the entire Court suffers its own sincerely held delusions borne out of their own ideals, suggesting that society at large can be similarly misled and lose their grasp of objectivity. The Rocket's grandeur and the King's musical prowess are both expressly denied by the narrator. Though the Rocket believes he is remarkable until his dying breath, the narrator interjects and states that he has died in obscurity. Likewise, though the King believes that he is talented and his subjects applaud, the narrator interjects and states that of course everyone knew he was dreadful, they were just playing along. Although the delusion is shared among the Court, the Courtiers are only play-acting and do not truly believe it. By contrast, the narrator does not interject when describing the magical crystal chalice shared by the Prince and Princess. The entire Court truly believes that the chalice is magical (remaining clear if true lovers drink from it, but clouding gray if used by people who were not in love) and the narrator lets this fact stand, even though the reader will immediately surmise that it is just a regular cup. In their idealization of a perfect fairytale marriage, the whole Court has formed their own delusion, just as they are similarly deluded when believing that the King's doubling of the Page's salary is anything more than a hollow gesture. This extrapolation of delusion from an individual to an entire society shows that everyone runs the risk of letting arrogance of prideful ideals about how the world should work delude them, distorting the world around them and preventing them from seeing reality for what it truly is. Wilde, who was himself an opulent and self-important figure, seems to be mocking himself with the story's self-absorbed characters. The tenuous grasp of reality shown by the King, the Rocket, and the Frog demonstrates the way in which an inflated self-importance leads to a delusional outlook on the world. This is an obviously negative outcome, and one to be avoided. However, Wilde complicates the moral argument by pointing out that an entire society may be drawn into such delusions by their own prideful ideals. - Theme: High Society and Snobbery. Description: "The Remarkable Rocket" takes place amidst characters of high society and roundly mocks them. From the royal wedding and the Courtiers to the bundle of fireworks and their pre-flight discussions, Wilde depicts the upper class and its ceremonies and posturing as hollow, offering neither function nor beauty to the world. Through his satire of society people, Wilde insists that their preoccupations and judgments are largely meaningless. Wilde's depiction of high society is rife with posturing that is treated with great gravity but actually means nothing at all. During the royal wedding, a clever young Page twice makes comments that delight the audience and become the talk of the Court. In response, the King twice declares that the Page's salary be doubled, causing even more delight—despite the fact that the Page makes no money at all. A doubled salary of zero is still zero, and the King has not actually bestowed any real reward. Despite this, the whole Court is pleased. Likewise, when the King plays the flute terribly, the Court feigns delight, cheering him on as if he were an expert musician. Through these instances, the story suggests that all of the Courtier's expressed happiness during the wedding is similarly hollow. While the fireworks are waiting to be lit, they too are constantly trying to prove their own sophistication and status in a microcosm of what is taking place at Court. Fireworks yell "Order, Order!" or "Bahumbug" to prove their expertise in the law or their pragmatism. Similarly, a briefly humiliated firework tries to prove his own importance by bullying some of the smaller fireworks. The sheer ridiculousness of fireworks adopting courtly customs underscores how silly such customs are in the first place. Even the Duck, the most practical character in the story, took a stab at public life and politics until she realized that for all of her condemnations and calls for reform, nothing actually happened. While this demonstrates the simple pragmatism of the Duck, it is also seems to be a sharp jab at the impotence and inefficiency of politics in Victorian England. While all of the ceremony and posturing of high society is treated with great gravity, it has no actual value beyond inflating the egos of those involved. The story highlights how high society offers no function or value to the rest of the world in the way that the "provincials" or middle class do. The King and the Courtiers are never described as fulfilling any role or function, while the fireworks briefly flash into the air and die providing only a moment's worth of diversion. Neither the Court nor the fireworks, both of which represent the upper crust, accomplish or meaningfully contribute anything to society. The Duck, whom the Rocket meets while he is sinking into the mud, is unimpressed by the fact that the Rocket can soar into the sky and explode, since she sees no function in it and no way that the Rocket can contribute to society. If he were gone, no one would be bereft. The only time that the Rocket offers value to someone is when he is mistaken as an odd-looking stick by two boys who promptly use him as kindling to boil water. Only by being ripped away from high society and repurposed is the Rocket ever afforded the opportunity to contribute in the smallest way to society, and even then, he is so delusional that he does not realize or appreciate it. The Duck's trading of public life for domesticity is a clear value statement on Wilde's part. The duck is both the kindest character and the most productive, providing for her family. Such kindness and simplicity could not co-exist with the masquerading and scheming required for public life and politics. Contrarily, the Rocket considers work to be the pastime of people with nothing to do, and believes that his service to the world is merely in presenting himself to the public; he is thus the most insufferable and useless character in the story. More than offering no clear function or value to the world, high society often actively disrupts it with its penchant for vacuous, self-absorbed behavior. In the story, the Rocket and his haughty demeanor, though more or less suited to high society and certainly derived from it, are a disruptive nuisance to the residents of the countryside. Every character that he interacts with finds a reason to quickly leave, even though the Rocket insists on shouting at them after they have left. Even the Dragonfly, who had been peacefully sitting on a stalk of grass, is driven away by the Rocket's arrogance. The Rocket is a nuisance to everyone he meets. The Frog and his glee club, though not necessarily a part of the Court or High Society itself, certainly echo its sentiments of self-absorption and delusion. Though the Frog believes that everyone loves their all-night croaking, it is in fact a dreadful nuisance, disrupting the farmer's wife's sleep. Wilde uses this story to unabashedly mock the upper crust for its lack of contributed value to the rest of society. Rather than calling for the abolition of the wealthy or powerful, Wilde settles for highlighting the absurdity of all their pomp and circumstance. Once again, Wilde seems to be making fun of himself as well, since he ran in such wealthy and sophisticated circles, often being invited to dinners and events as a token celebrity. - Theme: Fame and Alienation. Description: The Rocket's sole goal in life is to be famous—that is, widely admired and the talk of the town. Not only does the Rocket desire this, he believes he deserves it, that it is his birthright due to his obvious grandeur and impressive lineage. In the Rocket's eyes, such success and fame is his inevitable end. Unfortunately, the Rocket's ego and surety of his own destiny become his downfall, exiling him to the countryside to die in obscurity. Through the arc of the Rocket, Wilde argues that, ironically, loneliness and isolation are the consequence of a vain pursuit of fame. In the Rocket's conviction that he is unique and remarkable, thus meriting fame, he either knowingly or unknowingly pushes away from the people around him. The Rocket naturally assumes that everyone he meets is beneath him, spurning the help of others. The other fireworks, with whom the Rocket would have much in common if he could manage to set aside his belief that he is utterly remarkable, offer keen advice. For example, they tell him not to cry so much and dampen his gunpowder, which indeed is what prevents his going off. Had he listened, he could have soared into the air with the others and at least be briefly seen and enjoyed by the Court. Instead, soaked from his own tears, the Rocket is tossed into the swamp. There, the Duck shows hospitality to the Rocket, despite how insufferable he is, saying that she hopes he will take up residence in the country. She values him not for his function or for his greatness, for she sees that he has none of either, but rather just on account of his personhood. The Duck, who is the only character to have left public life, seems to be the most well-adjusted, able to see value in in the most supercilious character. However, the Rocket rejects her offer of hospitality and community and further alienates himself. The Rocket is obsessed with fame and being known by all, since he believes that he deserves it. Had he been willing to set aside his demand for renown, he could have at least been known and appreciated by the other fireworks or by the Duck and her countryside community. Instead, he finds himself in a self-imposed exile, more alienated and unknown than he would have been if he had been able to set aside his obsession with fame and recognition. Though the desire of fame is to be celebrated and widely admired, the Rocket's self-imposed exile results in the exact opposite effect. The Rocket is mistaken for an old stick by two young boys and used as kindling to boil their water while they take a nap. When the flame dries the Rocket's gunpowder enough that he finally goes off, he believes that he will create such an explosion that it will become local legend. However, the narrator again interjects to state definitively that no one saw nor heard the Rocket's ascent. The Rocket dies believing that he has caused a great sensation, when in reality he has died in obscurity, unknown and uncelebrated. The only effect that the Rocket has is briefly frightening a Goose as his expired stick falls to the ground. Though he believes in his own greatness, he dies seconds after, leaving no legacy, no awe, no trace, and no one to remember him. In his quest to be widely known, he becomes permanently and irrevocably alienated from the world. Wilde, who famously said, "There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about," warns that the pursuit of fame, the desire to overcome loneliness and to be widely seen and known, is just as likely to result in abject alienation. Rather than solving the problem, single-mindedly pursuing fame simply exacerbates it. Though the Rocket is given several chances to belong and to be known, he is unwilling to settle for anything less than absolute greatness and celebrity status. Wilde suggests that as the Rocket dies with nothing, in obscurity, so will anyone who pursues fame at all costs. - Climax: The Rocket is finally set off, exploding anonymously in the countryside. - Summary: In a European kingdom, a young Prince is about to be married to a young Princess, and the whole Court is brimming with anticipation. At the wedding, the King plays the flute, which he is terrible at, though he believes he is wonderful since none of his subjects ever have the courage to do anything but cheer when he plays. The Princess has never seen fireworks, so the King orders that a display of them be set off as the finale. The fireworks, having been prepared and arranged by the Royal Pyrotechnist, begin having a conversation amongst themselves. All of the fireworks act haughtily, bickering amongst themselves over the size of the world and the death of romance. A tall, "supercilious-looking" Rocket coughs sharply, as he always does, to draw attention to himself before making his introduction. He speaks with great self-seriousness, expressing his belief that he is the most significant being in the world and reflecting on how lucky the Prince is that he should be married on the day that the Rocket is to be set off. Even though the other fireworks contradict him, insisting that certainly it is the fireworks who are being set off to honor the royal wedding and not the other way around, the Rocket is defiant. He boasts about his remarkable lineage, ponders how terribly interesting he is, and praises himself for his highly sensitive nature, which he believes makes him quite extraordinary. The rest of the fireworks listen, but do not take the Rocket seriously, though this fact eludes him. As the Rocket is monologuing about his great friendship for the Prince (despite the fact that he has never met him) and how great a tragedy it would be for the whole world if any harm ever befell the Rocket, he begins to cry. A pair of fireworks offer him the common sense warning that he should be careful not to wet himself since it will prevent his gunpowder from lighting, the Rocket angrily rejects their advice because, in his words, he is "utterly uncommon." The other fireworks keep bickering with the Rocket and his tears flow down, soaking himself. At midnight, the Royal Pyrotechnist and his assistants arrive and put their torches to the fireworks, who each set off in turn. They soar into the air and explode brilliantly, delighting the Court and enjoying themselves thoroughly. However, the Rocket, whose tears have soaked his gunpowder, does not set off, and he is left there alone. The Rocket interprets this to mean that he is being reserved for some grander occasion. The wedding ends, and the Court leaves. The next day, the cleaners find the lone Rocket and promptly toss him over the wall into a neighboring ditch in the countryside. The Rocket presumes that he is being sent on retreat to recover his strength and his nerves. As the Rocket is sitting in the mud, a Frog approaches him, talking incessantly. The Rocket coughs for attention, but the Frog merely remarks on how closely his cough sounds to a croak, which is the most beautiful sound in the world. The Frog tells the Rocket about his ultra-popular glee club, and about his beautiful daughters, never letting the Rocket get a word in. As the Frog makes to leave, the Rocket angrily points out that he was not given the chance to speak, but the Frog quips that he prefers it that way, since it prevents arguments. The Frog swims away, leaving the Rocket talking angrily after him, and reaffirming his belief that someday his greatness will be seen. A Duck swims up to the Rocket and asks him if his odd shape is a birth defect or the result of some horrible accident. The Rocket belittles her as a simple middle-class commoner, and tries to intimidate her with his high-class nobility and ability to fly into the air and explode. The Duck, however, does not care, since she can see no function that could offer society. Furthermore, she is unimpressed by his claims of nobility and aspirations for public life, having tried politics herself once finding that it accomplished nothing. Rather, the Duck settled for domesticity and caring for her family, encouraging the Rocket to do the same. However, the Rocket clings to his aspiration to make a great public impression and enjoy the finer things in life. As the Duck swims away, the Rocket yells after her that he was not finished talking and still has so many things to say. As the Rocket is pondering his own genius, two boys arrive carrying some firewood and a kettle. One of them notices the Rocket lying in the mud, mistaking him for an old stick. The boys build a small fire to boil water with the kettle, adding the Rocket to the fuel, and take a nap while they wait. The Rocket, soaked as he is, slowly dries until his gunpowder is dry enough to ignite. It does so, and while the boys are fast asleep, the Rocket soars up into the air, believing that his hour has come and he will make such an explosion in the afternoon air that it will be the talk of the country for a whole year. He explodes, but is seen by no one. The only living thing to notice him at all is a goose, which is startled by his smoldering stick falling to the ground. Nevertheless, the Rocket takes this as a sign that he has made a great sensation, and burns out.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Reservoir - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Otago, New Zealand - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is a student at the local school in a mid-20th-century New Zealand village, and a member of the tightly-knit group of children that explores the surrounding wilderness. The narrator's gender is not made explicit, but some hints in the text (such as a reference to wearing a skirt) indicate that the narrator is female. The narrator does not provide much insight into herself, instead focusing her attention on the people and events around her. Her parents, like the other adults in the village, value and expect respect from their children, so the narrator always obeys her mother. She is fascinated by the new Reservoir, and her curiosity persists even as her parents forbid her from exploring the Reservoir, where some children have drowned. The narrator is intimately familiar with the local woods, especially the creek. After an epidemic of Infantile Paralysis (polio) shuts down the school, the narrator joins her friends in playing outside. They play games imitating the trials of grown-up life, giggle and joke as they watch courting couples, and steal apples from orchards. When one of the children suggests walking to the Reservoir, though, the narrator is the first to protest. She blushes easily, and grown-ups can always tell when she is lying, so she timidly reminds the group that their parents told them not to go. However, she gives in after the other children call her a coward. The narrator first approaches the Reservoir with awe and fear, and she has the sensation that something terrible is sleeping in the Reservoir. Then, abruptly, she throws her fears aside and joins the other children in playing around the Reservoir. They play with glee until they worry that evening is approaching. The narrator's horrifying fantasies spin wilder and wilder as she races to return home, only to find herself safe and the sun still out when she and the other children reach the village. Initially she is unsure if she should tell her parents about breaking their rule, but she decides against it when they repeat the prohibition as soon as she gets home. The narrator scoffs at her parents' fear, dismissing it as out-of-date. - Character: The Children. Description: The children are a group of schoolchildren in the village who play together by the gully. None of the children are distinguished from one another, and they tend to act and think as one entity. They love to play in and explore nature, especially near the creek, which they consider their own. Like the narrator, the Children frequently speculate about the Reservoir, though, like the narrator, they are forbidden by their parents to approach it. For a while, they content themselves with other adventures, but when the school year ends and the summer grows increasingly hot, the Children become bored. They mimic and laugh at grown-ups by playing make-believe and spying on courting couples, but they soon lose interest in these games and only look forward to starting school again. When an Infantile Paralysis (polio) epidemic prevents the school from opening, the Children's boredom becomes desperation, and they decide to visit the Reservoir. Along the way, the Children gossip about Infantile Paralysis and bicker over how to pronounce various words, like sprained and hospital. They come across a bull in its paddock, and when it threatens to charge at them, they flee. Only then do they realize they have lost sight of their beloved creek. This briefly upsets them, so they hit the air with sticks until they forget their discontent and become cheerful again. When they finally reach the Reservoir, the Children ignore their parents' warnings and the warning of a nearby noticeboard. They play around the Reservoir gleefully, quarreling over how to pronounce Reservoir until the sky appears to be getting dark. They run home to avoid the unknown dangers of the darkened wilderness, indicating that perhaps their courage is not as complete as they would like to think. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: The narrator's mother gives orders to the narrator and her sister. She tells the narrator that the Reservoir has clean water, fulfilling some of the narrator's curiosity, but she consistently orders the narrator to stay away from the Reservoir itself. When she does let the narrator go out and play, the narrator's mother reminds her to keep a sun hat on and stay away from the Reservoir. With her neighbors, the narrator's mother discusses the dangers of the Reservoir, including the children who have drowned in it, and she regards the creek reaching high-flow as a terrifying tragedy. The high-strung nature of the narrator's mother reveals how parental love can become overbearing, while also poking fun at the disregard children have for the valid concerns of their parents. - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The narrator's father does not want his children near the Reservoir, though he takes a less active role in enforcing this role than the narrator's mother, and is overall less present in the story. When the narrator leaves the taps running, the narrator's father shouts that the Reservoir might run dry, which instills a fear of such an event in the narrator. The narrator describes him as bossy, a trait that some of the children occasionally try to mimic. When the children return from the Reservoir, the narrator's father looks up from his newspaper only after his wife reminds the children that they are not allowed near the Reservoir, and all he does is repeat the command. - Theme: Maturity. Description: "The Reservoir" is a story about children, and also about childishness. The narrative emphasizes the innocence of its young protagonists––but it also points out that adults are not always wiser or more mature than the children they seek to control. By turning conventions of maturity on their head, Janet Frame explores the nuances of childhood innocence while also granting agency and respect to the children in her story. The children are fascinated with "adult" experiences they don't understand, from giggling at the "courting couples" in town to playing games in which they "mimic grown-up life." However, the children know more than their parents give them credit for. While the children's parents warn them about dangers throughout the story, the narrator explicitly notes that all her friends know "the dangers, limitations and advantages" of the gully. The story continues to subvert expectations of maturity by depicting the adults and children as equally immature in their arguments over word pronunciation. Frame links the arguments with similar words, describing both as "quarrels," which highlights the trivial nature of the debates and emphasizes that adults can often be as petty as children. Moreover, when the children finally break their parents' most explicit rule and explore the Reservoir, their youthful innocence lets them see the beauty of the Reservoir instead of the dangers. When they return home and see their parents' worry about the Reservoir, the narrator remarks, "How out-of-date they were! They were actually afraid!" These almost condescending last lines portray the children in a position of greater knowledge and courage than their parents. The parents are right to be worried, since children have drowned at the Reservoir in the past, but despite their inexperience, the children have proven themselves to be capable and self-sufficient. By contrasting adults and children in this way, Frame argues that children's understanding of the world may not be complete, but they should be acknowledged and respected for their unique perspectives. - Theme: Independence vs. Obedience. Description: The theme of control runs through "The Reservoir." Frame repeats the phrase "for so long we obeyed" throughout the story to underline how much of the narrator's life is spent following orders, and the first paragraph presents the idea that animals and children must show respect to adults. Setting animals and children on the same level dehumanizes the children, implying that they are like livestock that must be herded. The metaphorical connection between children and animals is strengthened when the children encounter a bull on their adventures. It has a ring in its nose, indicating that "its savagery was tamed," and yet "it had once been savage and it kept its pride." Although the bull has submitted to authority, it retains some independence. Aligning independence with "savagery" extends the idea of obedience to a broader context, moving from children obeying their parents to societal disobedience in general. The narrator expresses some distrust of authority when describing the high-flow creek, which "conceal[s] beneath a swelling fluid darkness whatever evil which 'they,' the authorities, had decided to purge so swiftly and secretly from the Reservoir." The description of the authorities as "swift," "secretive," and "evil" paints them––and by extension, obedience to them––in a distinctly negative light, suggesting that they shouldn't be blindly trusted. When ultimately the children disobey their parents and explore the Reservoir, they assert their independence within a world that, on both a societal and familial scale, expects obedience. Such an assertion of independence, the story suggests, is a vital part of growing up. - Theme: Fear, Curiosity, and Exploration. Description: Just as the Reservoir provides the town with water, it is a source of inspiration for the local children's imaginations. The narrator imagines it as "a bundle of darkness" with a sleeping beast beneath its waters and "great wheels which peeled and sliced you like an apple." Yet this fear doesn't stop the children from exploring the Reservoir––in fact, it does the opposite. The mysterious Reservoir and its surrounding stories stir the children's curiosity, demonstrating how curiosity can inspire exploration even in the face of fear. When some of the children argue against exploring the Reservoir, it is the accusation of cowardice that convinces them to go anyway. The narrator acknowledges the group "ha[s] not quelled all our misgivings," yet they still "set out to follow the creek to the Reservoir." Immediately after noting her "misgivings," the narrator's curiosity spikes, and she spends much of the walk puzzling over what the Reservoir actually is. By immediately following fear with curiosity, Frame links the two, indicating how fear of the unknown can actually fuel the courage to overcome those fears. Throughout the story, fear and excitement blend together. When the children run home from the Reservoir, they imagine "darkness overtak[ing]" them, and for the rest of the journey the narrator imagines the horrors that might befall the children as they run. Yet, when they do return home, the children laugh at their parents for being "out-of-date" and "afraid." The curiosity that fear inspires allows the children to face their fears, and by confronting the source of their anxiety, they overcome the fear entirely. This childlike curiosity gives the children an advantage over their parents by prompting them to explore what their parents withdraw from in fear. - Theme: Friendship and Loneliness. Description: The children in "The Reservoir" often act and think as one entity, and the narrator uses the pronoun "we" more often than "I" to describe how the story progresses. The rapidly-paced conversations the children have throughout the story rarely have dialogue tags. On the rare occasion the speaker is noted, the speaker is simply called "someone," and one dialogue tag refers to the speaker as "someone––brother or sister." The bond between the children is so strong that the children's individual identities do not separate them from each other. Rather, they are all each other's brothers and sisters. The narrator is not omnipotent, but she frequently narrates what the whole group is thinking, which indicates that the friends are close enough to virtually read each other's minds. This sort of intuitive understanding is contrasted with the pine trees surrounding the Reservoir. Like the children, the pine trees speak to each other, but the trees lack the understanding that the children share. Though the pines whisper and sigh, their speech is "at its loneliest level where the meaning is felt but never explained." By highlighting this communication as the "loneliest" possible form, Frame implies that the key to friendship is not simply conversation, but being understood. When contrasted to the loneliness of trees, the children's friendship becomes framed as a privilege––a privilege they do not try to help the pine trees share. Of course, pine trees can't literally speak or befriend one another, but the personification of the trees suggests that genuine community isn't universally enjoyed, and that human loneliness is never far away, whether we acknowledge it or not. Indeed, the children don't bother to try to understand the trees, assuming "if the wind who was so close to them could not help," they never could. Yet, when the children reach the Reservoir itself, the narrator describes the trees as "subjected to the wind." Framing the wind as an oppressive force against the trees makes the children's obliviousness less excusable. The children, despite being oppressed by their parents like the trees are oppressed by the wind, share a bond that the trees do not, and it is that friendship that allows them to overcome their parents' prohibition and visit the Reservoir. The children's naive carelessness leads them to disregard the lonely pines, hinting that friendship is not equally granted to everyone, perhaps especially those who need it most. - Theme: Nature vs Modernization. Description: Throughout the story, nature comes across as dangerous, petty, or even actively malicious. The world, according to the narrator, is "full of alarm": sunstroke, lightning, tidal waves, and the summer sun that "wait[s] to pounce" all present a threat to the residents of the village. In light of these dangers, the Reservoir represents human efforts to dominate part of the natural world. Even the children share this dominating instinct; the narrator wishes to "make [something] out of the bits of the world lying about us," and when the children realize the creek is "our creek no longer," they turn their gaze "possessively" on the Reservoir. The reservoir is "the end of the world," the last piece of civilization before the land gives way to threatening wilderness. When the narrator at last reaches the Reservoir, she describes the "little […] innocent waves," which paints the water as tamed and meek. However, it becomes evident that the Reservoir is not an entirely successful conquest of the natural world. The convenience of tap water has not eased the fear of Infantile Paralysis that looms in the village, and the Reservoir has created its own dangers, too: according to the narrator's mother, multiple children have drowned in its waters. When the narrator sees the Reservoir herself, after describing its "innocent waves," the narrator gets the feeling that "something [was] sleeping" in the Reservoir that "should not be disturbed." And yet the children ignore this sense of danger, playing right beside the "DANGER" noticeboard and insisting that they are not afraid. Though the children return home seemingly triumphant, whatever is "sleeping" in the Reservoir—whether that "something" is natural or technological or both—remains unconfronted. Even where nature appears to have been successfully dominated, then, modernization can never eliminate nature's threats entirely, and in fact it might create new ones. - Climax: The children arrive at the Reservoir. - Summary: "The Reservoir" takes place in a mid-20th-century village in New Zealand, where a Reservoir has recently been installed. The Reservoir is at the edge of the wilderness surrounding the village, and the local children, including an unnamed narrator, are not allowed near it. The narrator's mother, along with neighbors and the other children's parents, forbid them from walking to the Reservoir because children have drowned there. Obeying their parents, the children explore and play in the rest of the wilderness along the local gully. They especially love the creek, and they consider themselves in tune with its moods and tides. When the creek is on high-flow, it means the Reservoir is being purged of waste that flows into the creek. The school year comes to an end, and the heat makes the children's summer vacation long and tedious. They play games, go swimming, and spread gossip, but soon all the children are looking forward to the start of the school year, the shade of school hallways, and the new experiences the year will bring. However, school does not reopen––the village is struck by an epidemic of Infantile Paralysis, which kills children across the area. The children are forced to complete their lessons by post, still suffering from the heat and their boredom. To escape the monotony, the children play along the gully. They steal apples, and watch courting couples and joke about kissing and sex. One day, the children can't find any apples or courting couples, so one of the children suggests they visit the Reservoir. The narrator acknowledges that all of the children knew they would, someday, explore the Reservoir, but she still voices her concern. When her friends dismiss her as a coward, the narrator changes her mind and goes along with them. The walk to the Reservoir is long and lined with pine trees. The children believe that pine trees cry and whisper, but the speech is at a level beyond understanding. This sort of speech, in which the meaning is felt but not articulated, is what the narrator believes is speech's loneliest level. As they walk, the children bicker and gossip. The narrator tries to imagine what the Reservoir will be like, picturing it as a place of darkness and danger. The children encounter a bull in its paddock. Although the bull has a ring in its nose, indicating it has been tamed, the bull looks like it might charge at them, so the children run away. When they finally reach the Reservoir, the narrator is momentarily intimidated by the pine trees' whispering, but she and her friends quickly push away the fear, ignoring a noticeboard that warns of danger, and play around the Reservoir. They play until they notice it seems to be getting dark out. Frightened of the dark, they rush home, only to realize the sun has barely moved in the sky at all. When they arrive home, the children aren't sure if they should tell their parents about their adventure. The question is answered for them when their parents remind them, as always, not to approach the Reservoir. The narrator laughs internally at her parents for being afraid.

- Genre: Naturalism - Title: The Return of the Native - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Egdon Heath - Character: Eustacia Vye. Description: Eustacia Vye is an aloof young woman who has dreams of escaping Egdon Heath and going to Paris. Eustacia was born in Budmouth, a fashionable seaside town, but she was forced to move to Egdon Heath after the deaths of her parents. Now, she lives with Captain Vye, her grandfather, who allows Eustacia her independence. At the start of the novel, Wildeve is secretly courting Eustacia, though he is engaged to marry Thomasin. Eustacia loses interest in Wildeve after she learns that Clym is returning from Paris—she thinks that if she marries Clym, he will take her to Paris with him. Eustacia and Clym begin a romance and eventually marry. Clym tells Eustacia that he has no desire to return to Paris, but agrees to move the couple to Budmouth within the first six months of their marriage. However, Clym's eyesight fails, and the couple is forced to stay in Egdon. This makes Eustacia miserable. One day, Mrs. Yeobright comes to visit Clym and Eustacia, but Eustacia doesn't let her into the house because Wildeve has come to visit (previously, Mrs. Yeobright had wrongly assumed that Eustacia and Wildeve were having an affair, and Eustacia does want her to get any wrong ideas). However, Mrs. Yeobright dies on her way home after Eustacia didn't let her in. When Clym learns what Eustacia has done, he ends their marriage, and Eustacia returns to live with Captain Vye. Wildeve still loves Eustacia, though, and he promises to help her escape to Budmouth. A violent storm breaks out on the night they plan to leave, however, and Eustacia falls into a pond and drowns. Wildeve also dies while trying to save her. - Character: Clym Yeobright. Description: Clym Yeobright is an intelligent young man who returns to Egdon Heath after living in Paris, where he worked as a jeweler for several years. Much to the dismay of Mrs. Yeobright, his mother, Clym did not enjoy living in Paris and is happy to return to Egdon Heath, where he plans to start a school for the locals. Shortly after Clym's arrival, he begins a romance with Eustacia, though Mrs. Yeobright disapproves of the romance. Before long, Clym and Eustacia marry, and Clym promises that he will move the two of them to Budmouth, the fashionable seaside town where Eustacia was born. However, Clym soon becomes blind, which complicates his dream of opening a school. No longer able to study, Clym becomes a furze-cutter instead. Though Clym is happy with this job, Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia disapprove, as they believe that harvesting crops is beneath Clym's status. Clym's brief happiness comes to an end after his mother dies from a snake bite. What's more, due to a misunderstanding for which Eustacia was responsible, Mrs. Yeobright dies believing that Clym turned her away from his house. When Clym learns of Eustacia's involvement in the misunderstanding, he ends their relationship. Although he tries to reconcile his relationship with Eustacia via a letter, she dies before he can do so. Clym eventually becomes a traveling priest, though he never gets over the deaths of Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright. - Character: Thomasin Yeobright. Description: Thomasin Yeobright is the niece of Mrs. Yeobright and the cousin of Clym Yeobright. Before Clym moved to Paris to work as jeweler, most locals believed he would marry Thomasin. However, Thomasin becomes engaged to Wildeve instead. The novel opens on the day they are supposed to wed, though an issue with their marriage license postpones the wedding. Humiliated by the failed wedding, Thomasin refuses to show her face around town. And though she still wants to marry Wildeve, his strained relationship with Mrs. Yeobright makes things difficult. And, unbeknownst to Thomasin, Wildeve is secretly courting Eustacia, as well. Eventually, Wildeve and Thomasin do marry. The marriage is rocky from the start: Wildeve spends much of his time away from Thomasin and withholds money from her. Eventually, Thomasin gives birth to her first child, baby Eustacia, not knowing that Clym and Eustacia's marriage has fallen apart. Later, Thomasin's doubts about Wildeve prove warranted when she discovers that he has resumed his affair with Eustacia. Not long afterward, she goes to Clym and warns him that Wildeve and Eustacia are planning to run off together. After Clym goes off looking for them in the rain, Thomasin also runs into Venn and informs him of the situation. At the end of the novel, after Wildeve's death, Thomasin decides to marry Venn. - Character: Mrs. Yeobright. Description: Mrs. Yeobright is the mother of Clym Yeobright and the aunt of Thomasin Yeobright. At the start of the novel, she opposes Thomasin's marriage to Wildeve, whom she believes is not high class enough for Thomasin. Eventually, Mrs. Yeobright accepts the marriage, though her initial disapproval creates permanent tension between herself and Wildeve. Mrs. Yeobright later tries to talk Clym out of marrying Eustacia. Despite the Vye family's wealth, Mrs. Yeobright does not respect them and considers Eustacia a "hussy." Ultimately, Clym marries Eustacia despite Mrs. Yeobright's disapproval, which causes Clym and Mrs. Yeobright to drift apart. The rift between them worsens after Mrs. Yeobright falsely accuses Eustacia of seeing Wildeve on the side for money. For a long time, Mrs. Yeobright and Clym do not speak to one another, although both of them miss each other. One day, Mrs. Yeobright decides to visit her son to make amends. When she gets there, nobody lets her inside and, due to a misunderstanding, believes that Clym has abandoned her (in reality, Clym was napping and wasn't even aware that his mother had tried to contact him). On Mrs. Yeobright's walk home from Clym's, a poisonous snake bites her; she dies believing that her son has rejected her. - Character: Damon Wildeve. Description: Damon Wildeve runs the Quiet Woman Inn. The novel begins on what's supposed to be his wedding to Thomasin, though an issue with the marriage license forces them to postpone the wedding. Although Wildeve publicly maintains that he still wants to marry Thomasin, he is carrying out a secret romance with Eustacia. After his failed wedding, Wildeve regularly visits Eustacia and promises her that he is still interested in her. However, Eustacia eventually decides that prefers Clym instead and so ends her affair with Wildeve. This prompts Wildeve decides to marry Thomasin after all, though he proves to be a bad husband. He spends much of his time away from home and does not give Thomasin any money of her own. Additionally, once Eustacia and Clym's marriage falls apart, Wildeve once again starts pursuing Eustacia behind his wife's back. He promises Eustacia that he can take her away from Egdon Heath and fantasizes about making her his mistress. Indeed, Wildeve does try to help Eustacia escape Egdon, but a violent storm breaks out the night they plan to leave, and they drown to death after getting sucked into a pond. - Character: Diggory Venn (The Reddleman). Description: Diggory Venn is a reddleman (a peddler of red dye for sheep) who is in love with Thomasin Yeobright. Previously a dairy farmer, Venn became a reddleman after Thomasin rejected his marriage proposal sometime before the events of the novel take place. The novel opens with Venn transporting Thomasin home after her failed attempt to wed Wildeve. Venn still loves Thomasin and always wants what's best for her. This motivates him to try to break up Wildeve and Eustacia so that Wildeve will still marry Thomasin. Later in the novel, after Thomasin and Wildeve are married, Venn keeps an eye on Wildeve to make sure he remains faithful to Thomasin. He also wins back Thomasin and Clym's inheritance from Wildeve after Wildeve wins it off of Christian Cantle in a game of dice. Thomasin encounters Venn during a violent storm that takes place the night that Wildeve and Eustacia go missing, presumably to run away with one another. Venn leads Thomasin to safety and helps pull Clym, along with the bodies of Eustacia and Wildeve, out of the pond. After Wildeve's death, Venn returns to dairy farming. He courts Thomasin and eventually marries her. - Character: Captain Vye. Description: Captain Vye is the grandfather of Eustacia Vye. He used to be a sailor and often entertains the locals with his stories about his former life at sea. He takes Eustacia in after both of her parents die. Although Captain Vye allows Eustacia a great deal of freedom, his blunt and unhelpful way of speaking often annoys Eustacia. Eustacia lives with Captain Vye for most of the novel until she marries Clym. After her marriage fails, Eustacia returns to live with Captain Vye, who is happy to let her back into his home. Captain Vye is one of the people who sounds the alarm that Eustacia is missing on the night of her death. - Character: Johnny Nunsuch. Description: Johnny is the son of Susan Nunsuch. He encounters Mrs. Yeobright on her way back from Clym's house, making him the last person to see her alive. During this encounter, Mrs. Yeobright told Johnny that she was angry with Clym, believing that Clym knowingly refused to see her (though Mrs. Yeobright's claim is untrue and the result of a misunderstanding). Clym is devastated when Johnny later informs him that Mrs. Yeobright died angry at him. - Theme: Humans vs. Nature. Description: The Return of the Native is part of the Naturalism literary movement, which generally elevated and revered the natural world but also portrayed it as fearsome and immensely powerful. As such, the book's setting, Egdon Heath, acts as a character in and of itself. Many passages, including the entire opening chapter of the novel, feature vivid descriptions of the heath. It's vast and beautiful, and it demands the respect of those who live on it. After all, the heath is a dangerous place: wildlife, weather, and darkness all pose a threat. Most of the inhabitants of the heath respect Egdon; they know how dangerous the heath can be and choose to take precautions. For instance, in the beginning of the novel, Mrs. Yeobright asks Olly to walk with her because she knows it is unsafe to walk alone at night. However, other characters, particularly Eustacia and Wildeve, choose to disrespect the heath. Eustacia regularly expresses her desire to move away from Egdon because she cannot stand it. She also often walks alone in the darkness, even though she knows it is dangerous. Similarly, Wildeve wants nothing to do with the heath and also chooses to walk alone in the dark. Notably, neither character makes their living off of the land, unlike most of the residents of Egdon. Additionally, both characters share an unearned respect for the modern world, despite never living anywhere except the heath in their lives. Following her failed marriage to Clym, Eustacia decides that she cannot stand the heath any longer and asks Wildeve to help her escape. Wildeve agrees, and the two of them choose a particularly dark and stormy night to travel, once again disregarding the rules of the heath. This decision leads to both of their deaths, as Eustacia and Wildeve find themselves at the bottom of a whirlpool. Ultimately, then, The Return of the Native cautions against disrespect or arrogance toward the natural world, as humans are no match for nature's sublime power. - Theme: Modernity vs. Tradition. Description: There is a conflict staged in The Return of the Native between Egdon Heath and the modern world. Egdon Heath is described in the beginning of the novel as a timeless place that modernity has yet to touch, making it a rather unusual location. It's a place that's still steeped in history, as many of its inhabitants believe in old folklore and perform traditional work that some might view as antiquated. Venn, for example, is a reddleman (someone who sells red coloring that farmers use to mark their sheep). The book describes him as "one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a curious, interesting and nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail." In other words, Venn persists in his work despite the fact that the trade—and the entire way of life it represents—is becoming "obsolete" in the face of industrialization. Moreover, the several community celebrations that take place throughout the novel (like the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire and the May Day festival) are important, long-held rituals that connect characters with one another and with their shared heritage. That said, Clym's return from Paris (a modernized city) poses a threat to the traditional way of life in Egdon Heath. Although Clym does not like Paris well enough to return to it, he does want to open a school in Egdon and educate its inhabitants—in effect, he wants to modernize them. However, Egdon and its inhabitants refuse to be modernized. When Clym suggests to Fairway, one of the locals, that he wants to start a school in Egdon, Fairway remarks that "he'll never carry it out." Indeed, Fairway turns out to be correct; Clym begins to lose his eyesight and never manages to recover. Instead, like the other residents of Egdon, he makes his living off the land as a furze-cutter—that is, someone who harvests furze, a plant to feed livestock. As such, Egdon remains untouched by the modern world. Not only that, but it also claims a so-called "modern man," in the form of Clym, as one of its own. In this way, The Return of the Native advocates for the continued existence of places like Egdon Heath, a rural town that's managed to resist modern influences and hold onto its time-honored traditions. - Theme: Class and Morality. Description: One's occupation and class are crucial factors when considering marriage proposals on Egdon Heath. Much of the drama of the first half of the novel revolves around Mrs. Yeobright's feelings that her son, Clym, and her niece, Thomasin, are not marrying people who are of a high enough social standing. Mrs. Yeobright's displeasure with Thomasin and Wildeve's marriage leads Wildeve back to Eustacia. Meanwhile, her problem with Clym and Eustacia's marriage drives a permanent wedge between herself and her son. However, a peculiar feature of Mrs. Yeobright's character is that she actually married a dairy farmer who would've been below her rank in the social hierarchy, at least according to Captain Vye. It is unclear whether she is being hypocritical or if she just doesn't want her relatives to make the same mistake that she did. Of course, though Mrs. Yeobright's classism is responsible for many issues in the novel, she also ends up being correct about her relatives' marriages, as both start and end in disasters. However, The Return of the Native does not go so far as to reward Mrs. Yeobright's classist attitude. In fact, it shows how a single-minded focus on wealth and social status can be harmful. Eustacia, for instance, manipulates and betrays her lovers throughout the book: she chooses Wildeve over Venn because he's of a higher social class, but then she abandons Wildeve for Clym because she (falsely) believes that Clym can give her a refined Parisian lifestyle. Another example of this sort of moral corruption happens toward the end of the book, when Wildeve inherits a fortune from a deceased relative. However, his sudden acquisition of wealth does not make him more virtuous, nor does it make him treat Thomasin any better. If anything, his money makes him more of a problem, because he now feels justified in keeping Thomasin as his wife and Eustacia as his mistress. As such, The Return of the Native ultimately argues that wealth is a useful tool, but not one that is synonymous with virtue. - Theme: Deception. Description: Deception is an important feature of The Return of the Native, which sees several of its characters suffer the negative consequences of lies and deceit. In particular, Wildeve and Eustacia build their relationship on a faulty foundation. Both play with each other's emotions and withhold how they truly feel: Wildeve refuses to let Eustacia know how he feels about her compared to Thomasin, and, in return, Eustacia doesn't tell Wildeve that she still loves him. Eustacia and Wildeve's unhealthy relationship comes to a head when their feelings for each other indirectly contribute to the death of Mrs. Yeobright (Eustacia's husband, Clym's, mother). Eustacia refuses to let Mrs. Yeobright inside the house because she and Wildeve are talking inside, and she doesn't want Mrs. Yeobright to think they're having an affair. And, as a result, Mrs. Yeobright is forced to walk home and suffers a fatal snakebite on the way. In hopes that she can keep Clym from learning the truth about his mother's death, Eustacia withholds the fact that she did not open the door for Mrs. Yeobright—and when the truth comes out, Clym divorces Eustacia. As such, Eustacia's deception ends up hurting everyone involved, including herself. In addition to deceiving others, Eustacia also struggles with self-deception. Often, Eustacia has a difficult time disentangling fantasy from reality. For instance, it does not appear that she meant to trick Clym into taking her to Paris (her dream of escaping to Paris what attracts her to Clym in the first place). Rather, it seems she genuinely believed he would eventually take her there, despite all signs pointing the opposite way. Like with her deception of others, Eustacia's self-deceptive ways only result in more misery for her and those she loves. Her sham relationship with Clym hurts Wildeve and, in the end, hurts Eustacia herself, since the marriage ends in divorce. Although dishonesty and delusion perhaps save Eustacia from disappointment or other people's disapproval in the short term, this sort of behavior always backfires in the end. All in all, then, the novel shows how lying and withholding information can destroy lives, and it implicitly suggests that facing the truth and communicating openly with others would be a better long-term strategy. - Climax: While attempting to find each another in a storm, Wildeve and Eustacia drown and die. - Summary: The Return of the Native opens with Venn, a reddleman, transporting Thomasin Yeobright back to Egdon Heath. Thomasin is upset because she was supposed to wed Damon Wildeve earlier that day but couldn't due to an issue with her marriage license. Meanwhile, the residents of Egdon Heath are lighting bonfires to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day. The locals dance, sing, and gossip about the latest news on the heath, including the fact that Clym Yeobright is set to return from Paris at Christmas time. Clym is Thomasin's cousin, and the locals always assumed that the two of them would marry before Clym left for Paris. The locals also discuss how Mrs. Yeobright, Clym's mother, has openly objected to Thomasin's marriage to Wildeve, whom she considers socially inferior. When Mrs. Yeobright learns that Thomasin didn't marry Wildeve after all, she gets even angrier. She knows that the aborted marriage will be the talk of the town, further embarrassing the Yeobright family. Though Wildeve insists that he still plans to marry Thomasin and will do so as soon as possible, he's not being entirely truthful: the same night he was supposed to marry Thomasin, he pays a visit to Eustacia Vye, whom he has been courting in secret. Eustacia likes Wildeve, though she is angry about his plans to marry Thomasin. Both Eustacia and Wildeve share a mutual hatred of Egdon Heath and dream about escaping; in particular, Eustacia longs to travel to Paris. Despite Wildeve's promises, he continues to postpone his marriage to Thomasin. In the meantime, he repeatedly meets with Eustacia in private and promises her that he still loves her. Unbeknownst to Wildeve and Eustacia, Venn has been spying them and caught wind of their tryst. Venn loves Thomasin, though she rejected him when he asked her to marry him. Nonetheless, Venn remains faithful to Thomasin and wants what's best for her, so he visits Eustacia and asks her to stay away from Wildeve. Unfortunately, this only makes Eustacia want Wildeve more. Eustacia's infatuation with Wildeve ends once she hears that Clym Yeobright is returning from Paris. She considers Clym a knight in shining armor who can take her away from Egdon, so she sets her sights on him instead. No longer able to marry Eustacia, Wildeve goes through with his marriage to Thomasin. Meanwhile, Clym and Eustacia strike up a romance. However, Clym isn't exactly the person Eustacia thought he'd be: Eustacia thought that Clym could help her escape to Paris, but Clym wants to stay put and start a school in Egdon. Ultimately, they reach a compromise, and Clym promises to move them to Budmouth, a fashionable, seaside city not far from Egdon. Though Mrs. Yeobright disapproves of the Vye family, Clym and Eustacia get married. Clym and Eustacia's happiness is short-lived. Clym lacks the funds to move them to Budmouth, and his plans to open a school prove difficult. To make matters worse, Clym starts to go blind, which forces him to abandon his studies. He then becomes a furze-cutter, much to the chagrin of Mrs. Yeobright and Eustacia, who consider this a low-class profession. Clym's relationship with his mother deteriorates after Mrs. Yeobright accuses Eustacia of cheating on Clym with Wildeve, though this never happened. For a long time, Clym and his mother don't speak to each other. One hot, summer day, Mrs. Yeobright decides to visit Clym and make amends. When Mrs. Yeobright arrives, Eustacia is inside talking to Wildeve. Not wanting Mrs. Yeobright to think any worse of her than she already does, Eustacia does not open the door for Mrs. Yeobright. Instead, she sneaks Wildeve out the back and assumes that Clym, who is taking a nap, will get up and answer the door. However, Clym does not answer. By the time Eustacia returns, Mrs. Yeobright has left. Meanwhile, Mrs. Yeobright walks home depressed—she thinks Eustacia and Clym have deliberately rejected her, and she shares this fear with a young boy named Johnny who accompanies her as she walks. After Mrs. Yeobright parts ways with Johnny, a venomous snake bites her. Clym later wakes from his nap and decides to visit his mother, despite Eustacia's protests. However, on his way to his mother's house, he discovers her lying unconscious in the grass. Clym takes Mrs. Yeobright to the nearest cabin. The locals fetch a doctor to try to save Mrs. Yeobright, but they are too late, and she dies. To make matters worse, Johnny tells Clym that his mother was angry with him before she died. This news devastates Clym, and Eustacia is too scared to tell him the truth. After Mrs. Yeobright's funeral, Clym starts asking around to figure out why his mother was so mad at him. Eventually, Johnny tells Clym that Mrs. Yeobright was walking back from Clym's house after Clym turned her down. Johnny also tells him that Eustacia was inside with Wildeve when. Enraged, Clym confronts Eustacia and the two of them have a big fight. Eustacia leaves Clym and moves back in with her grandfather. In the meantime, Thomasin gives birth to her first child, which she names baby Eustacia, and Wildeve inherits a fortune. Wildeve feels bad for Eustacia, whom he still loves, and tells her that he will help her in any way he can. In response, Eustacia asks him to take her to Budmouth, where she can find a ship to Paris. Wildeve agrees to do so, though he does not tell Thomasin about his plans. One night, Thomasin follows Wildeve, realizes that he is going to see Eustacia, and assumes the two of them are having an affair. Shortly afterward, Thomasin arrives at Clym's house and tells him that she thinks Wildeve and Eustacia are planning to run away together. Concerned, Clym begins searching for Eustacia and Wildeve, who are indeed planning to depart for Budmouth. Clym leaves in the middle of a terrible storm, as do Eustacia and Wildeve. Thomasin parts ways with Clym. On her way home, she encounters Venn and tells him about Eustacia and Wildeve; Venn offers to escort her home. On their way to the Quiet Woman Inn (Wildeve's inn), Venn and Thomasin come across a distressing scene: Wildeve and Clym have jumped into a pond to rescue Eustacia, who has fallen in. However, the storm has turned the pond into a whirlpool. With the help of some of the locals, Venn manages to get Clym, Wildeve, and Eustacia out of the pond. However, by the time he does so, Eustacia and Wildeve are dead. In the months following Wildeve and Eustacia's funeral, Venn becomes a dairy farmer and begins courting Thomasin; they eventually marry. Clym, overcome with grief, becomes a traveling preacher. However, the deaths of Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright never stop haunting him.

- Genre: Fiction - Title: The Return of the Soldier - Point of view: First-person limited - Setting: England - Character: Christopher (Chris) Baldry. Description: Chris is 36 years old, Kitty's husband, and Jenny's beloved cousin. He and Kitty had one child, Oliver, who died as a baby five years before the start of the story. Chris has a warm, friendly, sympathetic character. As a child, Chris had a vivid imagination, and as an adult, he always seems to be searching for lasting, transforming joy. As a young man, he took over his father's failing mining business in Mexico, but he doesn't enjoy the work. Around the same time, he had a short-lived romance with Margaret Allington, then married Kitty a few years later. He is now a captain in the British Army, serving on the front somewhere in France. After suffering shell-shock and amnesia, Chris believes that he and Margaret are still a couple, and he has no memory of Kitty. He and Margaret have a joyful reunion back home at Baldry Court, and it becomes apparent to Jenny that Chris was never satisfied with the luxurious, relatively superficial life with Kitty, having longed for a deeper relationship all the while. Chris's amnesia represents Rebecca West's view on the ultimately futile human tendency to escape into fantasies of seemingly simpler times. Although Chris is happy when he believes that his marriage to Kitty never happened, the other characters all understand that denying reality in this way will only lead him to lose his dignity in the long run. After Dr. Gilbert Anderson visits and diagnoses the longings at the root of Chris's amnesia, Margaret shows Chris some of baby Oliver's old things, and Chris comes out of his amnesia, once again "every inch a soldier." - Character: Kitty Ellis Baldry. Description: Kitty is Christopher Baldry's wife. Kitty and Chris married about 10 years ago, in 1906. Kitty is beautiful, superficial, self-involved, and petulant. She is scornful toward lower-class people. Kitty also has an aversion to suffering and grief and avoids mentioning the death of her baby son, Oliver, five years ago. When Chris returns from the front with amnesia, she initially refuses to believe his condition, then becomes angry and depressed over Chris's love for Margaret. Kitty is the only major character who is happy about Chris's eventual cure, indicating her selfish and shallow nature. - Character: Margaret Allington Grey. Description: Margaret is married to William Grey and lives in a house called Mariposa in the downscale suburb of Wealdstone. Margaret spent her teenage years living on Monkey Island on the Thames, where her father, Mr. Allington, was an innkeeper. She and Chris Baldry were a couple in 1901 and hoped to marry, then broke things off over a petty quarrel. Chris describes the youthful Margaret as shy, sharp-minded, and loving. After her breakup with Chris and her father's death, Margaret eventually married Mr. Grey, and although she isn't in love with him, she's happiest while taking care of him; she becomes depressed when she doesn't have someone to look after and protect. She and William had one child, Dick, who died at the age of two, and she is heartbroken over her childlessness. After Chris is stricken with amnesia and comes to believe that Margaret is still his girlfriend, Margaret receives a telegram from him and informs Kitty and Jenny of his condition, then rekindles a romance with him upon his return to Baldry Court. Though Kitty scorns Margaret's aged, unfashionable, lower-class appearance, Jenny realizes that Margaret has an attractive soul and that she offers Chris something deeper than either she or Kitty can—she is sensitive, romantic, and instinctively appreciative of all beautiful things. Though Margaret initially wants to let Chris remain happily lodged in the past, she decides this would be doing him a disservice in the long run and shows him his son Oliver's belongings, thereby bringing him back to the present. - Character: Jenny Baldry. Description: Jenny, age 35, is Chris Baldry's cousin and childhood playmate. She is the novella's narrator. Jenny grew up at Baldry Court and loves Chris deeply; it's implied, though never directly stated, that her feelings for Chris are at least somewhat romantic in nature. Unmarried and childless, Jenny continues living at Baldry Court as an adult and takes pride in maintaining a beautiful home for Chris. Jenny is a loyal companion to Chris's wife Kitty, but as the story develops, she sees through Kitty's superficiality more and more. Though Jenny shares Kitty's disdain for lower-class people, she gains admiration for Margaret throughout the story, and she is generally much more sensitive than Kitty, both to beauty and to other people's feelings. In these ways, she stands as a mediating character between Kitty and Margaret and the very different forms of beauty and truth that they represent. At the end, Jenny realizes that Chris's ability to face reality is more important than his happiness and supports Margaret in bringing about Chris's cure. - Character: Dr. Gilbert Anderson. Description: Dr. Anderson is the last of the several doctors who visit Chris in an effort to cure him. Jenny is surprised by his comically plump, "unmedical" appearance; he sports a catlike moustache and amspotted tie. He accurately diagnoses the suppressed longing at the root of Chris's amnesia, leading Margaret to come up with a cure. - Character: Mr. William Grey. Description: William Grey is Margaret's husband. He is a rather incompetent gardener, inclined to sickness, and has never been very successful at work. However, he appears to love Margaret and to thrive under her protective nurturing; she doesn't love him in return, but she does derive satisfaction and dignity from caring for him. He and Margaret had one child together, Dick, who died at the age of two. - Theme: Nostalgia, Escapism, and Reality. Description: Rebecca West's novella The Return of the Soldier is set during one of the bloodiest phases of World War I, the spring of 1916. English soldier Chris Baldry is suffering from amnesia caused by "shell-shock" (psychological disturbance caused by the trauma of warfare) and he remembers nothing more recent than 15 years ago, in 1901. When he returns to his country estate to recover, he cannot even remember his wife, Kitty, and so he rekindles a romance with his girlfriend of 15 years ago, Margaret. Yet because Chris's and Margaret's romance is stuck in an idealized past, it renders Chris helpless to face the present. By portraying Chris's longing to return to a seemingly "simpler" time as an eventual failure, West suggests that while nostalgia might provide a shelter from present horrors, it's only a temporary solution because it fails to deal honestly with reality. Traumatized by the war, Chris suffers a sense of dislocation from the present and he remains stuck in the past. Although Chris doesn't remember Kitty or his life with her, he vividly recalls his romance with Margaret Allington 15 years ago. As he describes their visits to Jenny (his cousin and the story's narrator), he reflects, "[P]resently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch […] Invariably, as she passed the walnut tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf and crush it and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water." While the present remains inaccessible—even to the extent that Chris can't recognize his wife—memories of Margaret are palpably real to Chris. Upon meeting Margaret, Jenny sees a stark difference between the "Margaret of time" (the aged, work-worn Margaret of the present) and the "Margaret of eternity" whose timeless memory Chris cherishes. Jenny believes that the aged "Margaret of time" cannot please Chris: "I perceived clearly that that ecstatic woman […] was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she existed in time, as the fifteen years between […] had irreparably made her. Well, I had promised to bring her to him." Jenny assumes that because Chris is stuck in the past, he will reject the "Margaret of time" just as he's rejected Jenny and Kitty. Though Jenny predicts that Chris will not be able to love the aged Margaret, this assumption proves to be incorrect. Because Chris has always romanticized Margaret, the aged Margaret of the present does not disrupt his timeless perception of her, allowing her to become a refuge from present horrors. Chris recalls the dreamlike night when he first declared his love to young Margaret: "That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured." In a sense, then, Chris has always looked at Margaret through a biased lens that "obscured" certain things about her. When Margaret was young, Chris didn't always see her clearly, instead seeing her in a romantic light that didn't allow for the possibility of real change. Therefore, now that Margaret has aged, he still sees that imagined Margaret—the one who lets Chris hide from realities of the world around him. In the escape that their relationship offers, Margaret represents a reprieve from the horrors of modern war. Though a recovered Chris would be expected to return to the front, Jenny takes comfort in the fact that "They could not take [Chris] back to the Army as he was. Only that morning as I went through the library he had raised an appalled face from the pages of a history of the war. 'Jenny, it can't be true—that they did that—to Belgium?' […] While [Margaret's] spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war." Under Margaret's timeless spell, in other words, Chris has ceased to be a functioning soldier—he no longer recognizes the world in which he is supposed to fight and he's thus able to hide from its demands on him. Though Margaret's love offers a temporary shelter from the horrors of the war, this is ultimately shown to be a negative coping mechanism because it's a mere escape from reality—and a degradation of Chris's humanity. Even though Chris seems to be truly happy with Margaret, Jenny and Margaret conclude that leaving him in a nostalgic delusion would ultimately be cruel, since it effectively denies the truth: "We had been utterly negligent of his future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For if we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his delusion turned to a senile idiocy; […] He […] would become a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the countryside […] He would not be quite a man." In other words, if Chris is allowed to stay disconnected from reality, he will lose something essential to being human—that is, his ability interact with the present. His happiness will eventually degrade into something pathetic and pitiable, reducing his dignity and potential. The reality of the present moment, then, is more important than happiness. Like Chris Baldry returning home, people in West's England no longer feel at home in the world they inhabit. Chris's amnesia can be read to symbolize society's understandable yearning to return to a deceptively simpler, happier, pre-war past. Yet West warns that pining for an earlier age isn't the answer; memories of an idealized past can't be trusted, and they don't help people face the changes all around them. Confronting those changes, in her view, is more important and more in keeping with human dignity than clinging to a deluded comfort. - Theme: Social Class, Beauty, and Humanity. Description: The Return of the Soldier pointedly contrasts wealthy, beautiful Kitty (the wife of Chris, a World War I soldier) and impoverished, ugly Margaret (Chris's girlfriend from 15 years ago) through the eyes of Jenny, who is Chris's cousin and the narrator. At first, Margaret's appearance and mannerisms are described in almost dehumanizing terms, and her lower-class home environment is distasteful compared to Kitty's gracious, cultivated Baldry Court. These details lead the reader to expect that Chris, whose amnesia means he can only remember a younger Margaret, will reject Margaret when he sees her ugliness compared to Kitty's beauty. Yet he finds Margaret to be a healing presence, and by the end of the novella, Jenny concedes that Margaret possesses a spiritual beauty that the shallow Kitty can never have. Through this reversal of expectations, West argues that the poor are more sensitive to beauty and true humanity than the rich, whose wealth insulates them from deeper beauty (and hence from pain and love). At first, Margaret's poverty causes others to associate her with a dehumanized ugliness. When Margaret first appears at Baldry Court, she's an unwelcome intrusion. Her very appearance offends Kitty and Jenny: "The bones of her cheap stays clicked as she moved […] there was something about her of the wholesome endearing heaviness of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty[.]" Even Margaret's better qualities are described in animalistic terms when they compare her to an ox or a dog. From Kitty and Jenny's perspective, Margaret does not belong in the refined world of Baldry Court—rather, she belongs closer to nature and her presence in their home is therefore "repulsive." Although Jenny usually shows more sensitivity and compassion than Kitty does, she expresses "hatred" for Margaret's poverty: "I pushed [her] purse away from me with my toe and hated her as the rich hate the poor, as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home, and introduce ugliness to the light of day." Jenny identifies Margaret (and, presumably, other people like her) with "insect things," implying that she's lowly and repulsive. In Jenny's mind, rich people shouldn't even have to see Margaret's "ugliness," much less have it in their homes. After Kitty shrilly dismisses Margaret as a fraud, Margaret tries to form a retort but she gives up, "simply because she realized that there were no harsh notes on her lyre and […] had fixed me with a certain wet, clear, patient gaze. It is the gift of animals and those of peasant stock. From the least regarded, from an old horse nosing over a gate […], it wrings the heart." Margaret has a kind of gentle sincerity that wealthy people see as weak and inferior, yet it softens Jenny's attitude into a sort of condescending sympathy. Margaret's and Kitty's environments—of hardworking squalor and leisured wealth, respectively—reflect their characters, with Margaret's emerging as the one more grounded in reality. When Jenny goes to fetch Margaret to visit Chris, she continues to find Margaret's environment distasteful: "So in her parlour I sat […] And as I spoke of his longing I turned my eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up in front of her and she had to clasp them with her seamed floury hands; and I could see that the skin of her face was damp." Jenny can't reconcile Chris's longing for Margaret with the ugliness of her lower-class surroundings—the unfashionable furniture, not to mention Margaret's work-worn hands and sweaty face—that mark Margaret as someone who must do the physical labor of the household. When Jenny and Margaret first arrive at Baldry Court, Jenny can't help comparing Margaret unfavorably to these wealthy surroundings. Her description of the landscaping is a metaphorical commentary on Margaret's and Kitty's appearances: "There is no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road […] Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity." The "controlled," artificial beauty within the gates reflects the leisure of Kitty's life and the superficiality of her personality. At the same time, the wilder, lovelier growth beyond the gates reflects Margaret's beauty, which Jenny now concedes is more grounded in reality, yet she still feels that it does not belong within the borders of Kitty's carefully sculpted realm. By the end of the story, Jenny has moved from disgust to ambivalence to admiration of Margaret, associating her poverty with spiritual beauty. Jenny attributes to Margaret's poverty a certain nobility, even spirituality: "Perhaps even her dinginess was part of her generosity […] And so I could believe of Margaret that her determined dwelling in places where there was not enough of anything, her continued exposure of herself to the grime of squalid living, was unconsciously deliberate. […] [so that] there should be not one intimation of the beauty of suave flesh to distract [Chris] from the message of her soul." In other words, Margaret's beauty is the beauty of the soul. This is something that the externally beautiful Kitty (who Jenny implies has beautiful "suave flesh" in contrast with the "spiritual" Margaret) altogether lacks. It seems that Kitty's wealth will not allow her to develop such beauty—in fact, it even stands in the way, since the luxuries it brings only "distract" from the kind of spiritual beauty that Margaret possesses. West's romanticized view of Margaret's beauty expresses her belief—reflected in her later writings and political stances—that the poor and working-class are more grounded in reality than the wealthy can be. Yet the fact that Chris ultimately returns to the present-day "reality" of his marriage to Kitty, forcing him and Margaret to separate, suggests that West is pessimistic about society's willingness to recognize the poor in this way. Overall, the novella's exploration of beauty reflects the unease of a society in which longstanding class structures are beginning to shift. - Theme: Women's Roles. Description: While Rebecca West's novella revolves around a soldier's homecoming, the story is told from a woman's perspective, and the story's central figures are, arguably, all women. Though men bear difficult burdens in the public realm—whether going to war or struggling to provide for their households—women, like Jenny, Kitty, and Margaret, also bear heavy, albeit largely private, burdens of supporting their men's happiness and even protecting them from harm to their souls and dignity. Throughout the story, in other words, men's happiness, dignity, and life trajectories rest in the hands of women. By portraying her female characters' power in this way, West argues that although women's roles are most often reserved for the private sphere, their difficult, behind-the-scenes burdens are indispensable to men's survival in the public sphere. Women bear the burden of homemaking—a difficult and dignifying task that helps compensate for the unhappiness and failure in men's lives. Jenny and Kitty bear the burden of making Baldry Court as happy as possible for Kitty's husband Chris while he runs the family business and then goes to war. Jenny describes Baldry Court as follows: "Here we had nourished [Chris's] surpassing amiability […] Here we had made happiness inevitable for him." A little later, she describes this work as "the responsibility that gave us dignity, to compensate him for his lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life." Jenny senses that Chris isn't happy with either business or war, so she wants to create a home environment that will make up for his constrained, unchosen life. Like her upper-class counterparts, Margaret, too, bears the burden of making her husband—the sickly, unsuccessful William Grey—as happy as possible. As Jenny overhears Margaret's motherly tone telling Mr. Grey about the macaroni she's left for his supper and praising the cabbages he's grown, she "perceived from its sound that with characteristic gravity she had accepted it as her mission to keep loveliness and excitement alive in his life." In other words, even though Margaret's social status is very different, she has the same fundamental task as the Baldry Court women—compensating for the unhappiness in a man's life by creating the happiest home environment possible. Women don't just look out for the day-to-day happiness of the men in their lives; they also bear the burden of protecting men's souls and preserving their dignity. When Jenny sees Margaret watching over Chris while he naps in the woods, she sees a timeless male/female dynamic: "[T]he woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I know there are things at least as great for those women whose independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the occupation of most of us." Just as women create a comforting home environment for men wearied by their public duties, Jenny also sees women's souls as protective guardians for the tired souls of men, enabling them to regain strength for their public roles. When Chris receives psychological treatment, it is up to the women whether and how Chris should ultimately be protected. Though they're tempted to let Chris remain stuck in the past, both Jenny and Margaret realize that "the first concern of love [is] to safeguard the dignity of the beloved" rather than letting him remain satisfied with "the trivial toy of happiness." In other words, they choose to protect Chris's human dignity by recalling him to the present, instead of leaving him in a fantasy which would eventually infantilize him. Thus Chris's future is in the women's hands, not his own or the doctor's, and they recognize that only they can ensure that he lives a dignified life. Rebecca West was an ardent suffragette in her youth, and she considered herself to be a staunch feminist throughout her life. The Return of the Soldier provides a good summary of her interpretation of feminism. As Margaret's "protection" of Chris's soul suggests, West sees a real yet complementary difference between men's and women's roles which goes deeper than the social conditions surrounding them. She believed that downplaying this difference didn't serve to elevate women, but instead tended to denigrate the crucial, seldom recognized role that women serve. - Theme: The Traumas of Modernity. Description: After learning that Chris has suffered shell-shock on World War I's Western Front, Jenny wonders, "Why had modern life brought forth these horrors that make the old tragedies seem no more than nursery shows?" Rebecca West explores this question in various ways throughout The Return of the Soldier, identifying manifold "horrors" that impact the natural world, the individual psyche, and society at large. While the immediate culprit for human suffering is World War I, which frames Chris's troubled homecoming and inevitable return to battle, West doesn't reduce Chris's troubles to the war alone. By situating Chris's sufferings alongside other traumatic circumstances in the early 20th century, West argues that modernity is fraught with perils that alienate people from the natural world, each other, and even themselves. Aspects of modernity, like industrialism and war, alter the natural environment in ways that detract from its beauty and constrain people's happiness. Jenny muses that the encroaching horrors of modern life are due to the fact that "adventurous men have too greatly changed the outward world which is life's engenderment. There are towns now, and even the trees and flowers are not as they were," with imported Mediterranean crocuses and Chinese larch trees altering the native English landscape. "And the sky also is different," she goes on; "a searchlight turned all ways in the night like a sword brandished among the stars," an inescapable reminder of the war's hold on human lives. In other words, men's ambition has introduced foreign elements (too many towns, unfamiliar plants, and artificial light) into the environment, all of which create distance between people and their natural environment. Describing one of those newly built towns, Jenny says that "Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; […] But all the streets are […] freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stand little women" making "feeble, doubtful gestures as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite. […] It was a town of people who could not do as they liked." Though she does not draw an explicit connection between the effects of industrialization (railroads and factories) and people's poverty, Jenny suggests that people's lives are constrained by the looming presence of industrialism—another sign of "adventurous men" altering the outward world to their liking. In addition to its impact on the natural world, modernity also takes a psychological toll on individual people, as exemplified by Chris's amnesia. Though the war itself is clearly responsible for Chris's suffering (a shell concussion causes his amnesia), West suggests that the war is a symptom of the all-encompassing social pressures of modern existence, which are thus the deeper cause of Chris's unhappiness and alienation from his own life. When a succession of doctors visits Christ, their "most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had submitted to it as a good-natured man submits to being blindfolded at a children's party," remembering Kitty and recovering a semblance of his middle-aged personality. "But as his mind came out of the control he exposed their lie that they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process by pushing away this knowledge and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know." In other words, Chris's amnesia isn't just a disruption of normalcy, but, on some level, a willful resistance of a reality that's too much for Chris to bear. Dr. Anderson, who helps finally cure Chris, actually confirms the idea that Chris's amnesia is an escape from an unhappy superficial life, explaining: "The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. […] There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self […] it takes its revenge." It's implied that Chris's deeper desire is to put aside his marriage to Kitty and his unsatisfying efforts to maintain his wealth—trappings of modern life—in order to embrace happiness with Margaret, who represents a simpler life that's closer to nature. While shell shock is the immediate cause, Chris's bigger problem is living according to a modern script (running a business he doesn't care about, marrying a wealthy girl, and fighting a pointless war) that alienates him from his true desires. Dr. Anderson's diagnosis of Chris is an expression of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which was all the rage in the early 20th century when West wrote this novel. West's point, though, is not to advocate for a particular psychological theory, any more than she directly opposes the war or mounts a considered critique of modern industrialism. Her point is that the various forces of modernity exert a crushing influence on individuals and society at large, and that these forces—attitudes about the natural and political worlds and what constitutes a happy life—must be critically examined, if people hope to live meaningful, connected lives in the future. - Climax: Chris Baldry's amnesia is cured. - Summary: It's March, 1916, during World War I. Kitty Baldry hasn't heard from her husband, Chris, who's fighting on the Western Front, for two weeks, but she's trying not to fret. Chris's cousin, Jenny, who lives at Baldry Court with Kitty and has been devoted to Chris all her life, is also worried. She tries to take comfort in the beautiful house and grounds they've worked so hard to maintain for Chris, believing that these rich surroundings make him happy and content. Even before the war, Chris's life had been difficult—he inherited his father's failing business and a job he didn't want, and his and Kitty's baby son, Oliver, died five years ago. A visitor arrives at Baldry Court—Mrs. William Grey from neighboring Wealdstone. Kitty has never heard of her and doesn't know anyone from the suburbs, but she figures the woman is looking for charity. In the hall, Kitty and Jenny find an unfashionably dressed, work-worn woman who's clearly lower-class. Mrs. Grey (Margaret) claims to have received word that Chris has suffered shell-shock on the front. Kitty doesn't believe Margaret, questions her harshly, and finally dismisses her as a fraud, making Jenny uncomfortable. Margaret hands them a telegram from Chris that was sent to her old residence, then leaves in tears. Kitty tells Jenny that whether Chris has truly gone mad or has secretly harbored affection for this objectionable woman, he's lost to them either way. The next morning, Jenny receives a letter from a cousin, Frank Baldry, who received a telegram from Chris and went to visit him in the Red Cross hospital in France. Frank found Chris in a strange state—acting "boyishly" and claiming to be in love with a girl named Margaret Allington. When Frank asked Chris what Kitty thought of all this, Chris didn't know who Kitty was—he thought it was still 1901. When Chris learned that it was actually 1916, he fainted. Frank warns Jenny to prepare Kitty for the shock of Chris's homecoming. A week later, Chris returns to Baldry Court. It's immediately clear that he does not recognize Kitty and is jarred by Jenny's age and the remodeled house. Kitty changes into a white dress for dinner, hoping to remind Chris of their wedding day, to no avail. Chris explains to Kitty that he must see Margaret, and she agrees, but Jenny notices the hateful expression on Kitty's face. After Kitty storms off to bed, Chris begins to talk to Jenny about the last memories that feel real to him—his visits to Monkey Island 15 years ago. While visiting his Uncle Ambrose, Chris used to walk to the Monkey Island Inn. He and the innkeeper's shy, thoughtful daughter, Margaret Allington, would sit and talk for hours. His last memory is of the day he found Margaret alone on the island; they declared their love for one another, and when he saw Margaret glowing indistinctly in the moonlight, Chris felt that neither Margaret nor his feelings for her could ever change. The next day, Jenny goes to Wealdstone to fetch Margaret. Jenny feels repulsed by Margaret's modest suburban home and the fact that Margaret is covered with flour and sweat from working in the kitchen. She persuades Margaret to visit Chris, and Margaret, weeping with longing, agrees. As they ride to Baldry Court, Margaret explains how her romance with Chris ended—a misunderstanding over Margaret's friendship with a neighbor boy. Soon after that, Margaret's father had died, and two years later, she married Mr. Grey, an unsuccessful, sickly man who requires a lot of tending. Recently, she revisited Monkey Island for the first time and was given old letters from Chris that had never been forwarded, as well as the telegram from the front. At Baldry Court, Jenny notices the contrast between Margaret's shabby appearance and the opulence of the estate, and she dreads Margaret's reunion with Chris. But as she and Kitty watch from a window, Chris and Margaret embrace joyfully and immediately begin an animated conversation, as if they'd never parted. Jenny was sure that Chris could never love Margaret as she is today, but she realizes she was wrong. In the coming days, Margaret continues to visit, and Chris blossoms in her presence, while Kitty grows depressed and Jenny grieves. Various doctors come to Baldry Court in an effort to help Chris regain sanity. One day, after a week, Jenny goes looking for Chris and Margaret to remind them that another doctor is coming by. Though she's been wrapped up in jealousy, she is stunned by their beauty when she comes upon them sitting in the woods. Margaret is watching over a sleeping Chris, and Jenny feels that Margaret's soul offers Chris's soul a healing shelter. In that way, Jenny thinks, Margaret has given a gift to all of them. What's more, if Chris doesn't regain his memory, he cannot be sent back to the front. Back at the house, Chris goes off with Dr. Gilbert Anderson while Jenny and Margaret go upstairs and talk. When Margaret sees Jenny's photograph of baby Oliver and learns what happened to him, Margaret reveals that she, too, had a two-year-old son, Dick, who died five years ago. In contrast to the peaceful scene in the woods, Margaret's raw grief gives Jenny a sense of foreboding. Gathering with the others, the women hear Dr. Anderson's explanation of amnesia as an act of Chris's unconscious self—he's refusing to let himself remember the present for some reason. Dr. Anderson says this is because Chris is suppressing some sort of strong desire. Kitty and Jenny can't guess what this desire might be, but Margaret says that Chris has always had a dependent nature and yearned for love, revealing that she knows him better than the others do. She suggests that a jarring memory would bring Chris back to the present—like the memory of his little boy's death. Margaret and Jenny go to Oliver's nursery to find some of the baby's old belongings. Margaret weeps, saying that there's nothing more important than happiness, and she can't bear for Chris to lose it. But when a tearful Kitty walks past, Margaret and Jenny agree that if they truly love Chris, they must try to cure him. If Chris remains stuck in the past, he will eventually become a pitiable, eccentric figure, and they must spare him that for his dignity's sake. Margaret goes to Chris with Oliver's things. Jenny collapses in sadness, then looks outside at Kitty's urging. On the lawn, Margaret has receded into the shadows, and Jenny is shaken by the sight of Chris, staring hopelessly toward the house, now walking with a soldier's step instead of a boy's. Looking over Jenny's shoulder, Kitty says with satisfaction, "He's cured!"

- Genre: Realism - Title: The Revolt of “Mother” - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: 19th-century rural New England - Character: Sarah Penn. Description: Sarah Penn is the wife, mother, and protagonist in "The Revolt of 'Mother.'" Although she has been a dutiful wife to her husband, Adoniram Penn, for 40 years, she questions his decision to build a new barn in the place where he promised her a new house. She confronts him about this, but he refuses to talk about the matter and continues to build the new barn. Throughout most of the story, Sarah is meek and defers to her husband, continuing her household duties and baking his favorite foods—that is, generally following the common expectations of a housewife during this era. However, she quietly resents his lack of consideration for the family's needs, and she resents that she cannot—as a woman living in a patriarchal society—question his decisions. One day, he receives a letter from her brother, Hiram, inviting him to visit to buy a horse. This development leads Sarah to believe that Divine Providence has intervened on her behalf. She takes advantage of her husband's absence to claim the recently constructed barn as their new house, instructing their two children to help her in transporting their belongings into the barn. Despite concern from the community and a visit from the church minister, Sarah maintains a firm resolve that she has done the right thing, and no one can interfere with her decision. When her husband returns, she now has the upper hand; his shock and confusion lead him to agree with whatever she asks of him. - Character: Adoniram Penn. Description: Adoniram is Sarah Penn's husband and the father of Nanny and Sammy. A hardworking, successful farmer, Adoniram spends more time, care, and money on the farm and livestock than he does on his family's material needs. Single-mindedly in pursuit of what he believes is best for his family, he ignores his wife's requests to reconsider his promise to her regarding a new house. Before he goes away on a trip to buy a new horse, he gives his wife orders regarding the placement of new hay and new cows into the newly finished barn. His wife, however, disregards his orders, planning to place herself and their children and belongings into the new barn instead. Upon returning home, Adoniram is so shocked over this turn of events that he starts crying. He claims he had no idea how strongly she felt about having a new house. While he grapples with the fact that his wife undermined his authority, he must also acknowledge that he disregarded her feelings for a long time. - Character: Nanny Penn. Description: Nanny Penn is the daughter of Sarah and Adoniram Penn. Engaged to be married, she spends a considerable amount of time in the story fretting over how her fiancé, George Eastman, and his family will perceive their cramped, inadequate house, and, moreover, how she possibly could have a wedding in it. Sarah's consideration of her daughter's impending nuptials is partly what prompts her to address Adoniram with her concerns over the house's inadequate state. Her mother's dialogue with her father also reveals that Nanny has been sheltered from the drudgery of domestic responsibilities: Sarah has done most of the housekeeping, enabling Nanny to keep her hands soft and her face "fine and clear as porcelain." Additionally, Nanny's facetious suggestion that they hold the wedding in the new barn is what precipitates Sarah's decision to take advantage of Adoniram's absence and transform the barn into their new home. Because Sarah makes the most of the opportunity given her, she can ensure that Nany will have the dream wedding she envisioned. - Character: Sammy Penn. Description: Sammy is Sarah and Adoniram Penn's son and Nanny's younger brother. Just like his father, he is somewhat reluctant to engage in communication with his mother and prefers to respond with monosyllabic grunts. However, Sammy assists with the farm responsibilities and listens to both parents. At first, he is awed by his mother's rebellion when she asks him to help her move the furniture into the new barn. However, by the time his father comes home, Sammy believes his mother will win the battle of wills, and he even steps in front of his mother as a protective measure. When his father asks them what they are doing in the barn, Sammy replies in a complete sentence that the barn is their new home. Despite fearing his father's disapproval, he becomes brave enough to stand up to him by the story's end, perhaps proving that he, unlike his father, has learned the value of communication before it is too late. - Character: Mr. Hersey. Description: Mr. Hersey is the community's church minister. Upon the discovery that Sarah Penn has flouted her husband's authority by turning the new barn into a house for herself and her children, he goes to visit her. His tasks are to provide her with spiritual counsel and likely sway her from her "lawless and rebellious spirit," or perhaps even to determine if she has gone "insane." However, Sarah does not take kindly to his presence, or what she perceives to be interference from the church and community. She dissuades him from talking, claims she is doing what she believes is right, and argues that this matter is between her, God, and her husband. Mr. Hersey finds himself unable to respond to her firm demeanor and resolve; he is sickly and unable to deal with present, real issues outside of the Bible. His presence proves to be ineffective, suggesting that he, the church, and the townspeople, have allowed tradition to stagnate growth and progress in the community. - Theme: Gender Roles and Power Dynamics. Description: Adoniram and Sarah Penn live in an era that promoted traditional gender roles and established men as the head of the household. As the husband and father, Adoniram makes the household decisions in the best interests of the farm, which is the family's source of income. Meanwhile, Sarah, as the wife and mother, is expected to cater to her husband's wishes—even when they go against her own wishes. Despite her resentment following a confrontation with her husband over the building of a new barn, Sarah feels that she would "never fail in sedulous attention to his wants," stifling her private misgivings in order to uphold the duties of a domestic and dutiful spouse by baking Adoniram pies and sewing him new shirts. She also tells her daughter, Nanny, not to complain about getting married in their shabby house, saying that it's futile to bemoan what men do, since men "don't look at things jest the way we do." By saying this, she attempts to prepare Nanny for the unequal marital dynamics that exist between men and women. However, Sarah's adamant refusal to wait any longer for her husband to build a new house culminates in a role reversal by the story's end. Despite her efforts to appear subdued, once her husband leaves town to purchase a horse recommended by his brother-in-law, Sarah encourages her children to help her move their belongings into the new barn. When Adoniram comes home, in shock at the discovery of their new residence, Sarah continues to tend to his needs as if nothing has changed, appearing to placate him into accepting the drastic change in residence. However, her treatment of her husband is also an assertion of dominance, subverting her husband's authority by placing him in a more helpless and docile role. She emerges from the story as the triumphant winner, as her husband promises to do "everything" she wants, having been outsmarted by his resourceful wife. In this way, the story suggests that though sexist 19th-century gender dynamics were certainly difficult to overcome, it was possible for women to use what little domestic power they were afforded to assert agency and willpower. - Theme: Community, Scandal, and Conformity. Description: "The Revolt of 'Mother'" pits Sarah Penn against not just her own husband but also the surrounding community. By boldly undermining Adoniram's plan to build a barn instead of a new house, Sarah ends up challenging the broader community, ultimately scandalizing her neighbors and their ideas about what's considered proper and reasonable in their society—especially for women. When gossip circulates about her decision to move the family's belongings into the barn, it becomes quite clear that the town strictly adheres to certain domestic conventions. In fact, the narrative explicitly notes that any "deviation from the ordinary course of life in this quiet town was enough to stop all progress in it." Everyone keeps close tabs on Sarah, illustrating the extent to which any departure from convention attracts quite a bit of attention in this community. And it's not just that the townspeople are disconcerted by an unfamiliar turn of events—they're also scandalized by Sarah herself, whom many think has gone "insane." This strong reaction to her independence is a clear illustration of how straying from convention is seen as shocking and even disgraceful for a woman living in the conformist, male-dominated environment of late-19th-century New England. When the town minister, Mr. Hersey, visits Sarah, he mainly does so to convince her to stop undermining Adoniram in his absence. In other words, he tries to persuade Sarah to once again adhere to the status quo, perhaps because her independence poses a threat to the unquestioned conformism of the rest of the town. The fact that Mr. Hersey comes to visit her in the first place suggests that the people in Sarah's community think they can somehow save her from herself. But when Sarah puts Mr. Hersey in his place, the story implies that sometimes it's necessary for individuals to go their own way without heeding the people around them—after all, if Sarah relented as a result of her conversation with Mr. Hersey, nothing would change about her life, and she would remain miserable and resentful. Thankfully, though, she recognizes the importance of living life on her own terms, regardless of what her fellow community members think. - Theme: Communication. Description: In many ways, "The Revolt of 'Mother'" is a story about the importance of effective communication. For the past 40 years, Adoniram has failed to fulfill his promise to build Sarah a new house, but Sarah has never voiced her discontent about this. Each time he builds a new shed or some other farm-related structure, she can't help but feel that he cares more about his livestock than he does about his family. Finally though, when he reveals that he's building a second barn on the exact site he originally intended to build a new house, Sarah speaks up—only to be met with Adoniram's terse response, which is "as inarticulate as a growl." This disengaged style of communication is so ingrained in Adoniram that Sarah has become well-versed in interpreting what he means, as if his grunts are her "native tongue." In fact, even his son, Sammy, has developed his own version of this uncommunicative style, ultimately suggesting that a lack of clear and effective communication can spread throughout a household, keeping its members (and, it seems, especially men) from opening up and connecting with each other. None of this, however, deters Sarah, who sits Adoniram down, admonishes him, and boldly makes a case for why he should build a new house instead of another barn. This is obviously a courageous thing to do, considering that Sarah has spent so many years withholding her feelings on the matter. Still, Adoniram dismisses her concerns, claiming he "ain't got nothin' to say." His lack of communication, however, doesn't deter Sarah from taking the initiative to thwart his plans—in fact, it possibly encourages her to do so. She has already tried to communicate openly with him, but he's unwilling to genuinely talk about the issue, so she takes matters into her own hands and decides to move the family into the new barn while Adoniram is away. The fact that Adoniram says, upon returning, "I hadn't no idee you was so set on't as all this comes to" is a good illustration of just how tragically inept he is when it comes to communicating with his wife—after all, she very plainly told him how she felt. The problem, though, is that he refused to engage in a dialogue about the mater, thus allowing himself to ignore her feelings. By outlining this dynamic, the story champions honest and unencumbered communication as a tool people can use to ignore outright conflict. - Theme: Opportunity, Religion, and Conviction. Description: "The Revolt of 'Mother'" highlights the importance of seizing opportunity when it comes along, even if that means taking advantage of unforeseen circumstances. Sarah first conceives of the idea to use her husband's new barn for a domestic space during a conversation with her engaged daughter, Nanny. After Nanny facetiously suggests that she and her fiancé should have the wedding in the new barn instead of their shabby old house, Sarah stares at her daughter "with a curious expression" before returning to her housework. Using the barn for an unintended purpose intrigues Sarah, and she presumably contemplates this course of action for months. This is indicated later in the story, when Sarah asserts to the church minister, Mr. Hersey, that she did what was right, as she "thought it all over an' over" and "made it the subject of prayer." All she needed, it seems, was an unexpected opportunity to take control of the situation, and that's exactly what she has done. This "unsolicited" opportunity comes about when Sarah's husband, Adoniram, receives a letter in the mail inviting him to come buy a horse. Hearing this news, Sarah turns "very pale" and "her heart beat[s] loudly," as she realizes that Adoniram's absence will give her a chance to take things into her own hands. Because she had nothing to do with drawing Adoniram away from their property, she believes it is an act of Divine Providence—that is, a fated turn of events determined by God. Because of this belief, Sarah is steadfast about her plan to use this unforeseen opportunity to improve her life; she sees it, in a way, as God's plan, which allows her to embody a righteous sense of conviction. This, in turn, helps her assert herself even when Mr. Hersey tries to convince her not to go through with the plan. Ultimately, then, Sarah's belief in Divine Providence leads her confidently take advantage of an opportunity to improve her family's circumstances. The story therefore illustrates both the importance of capitalizing on unexpected opportunities and the power of religious faith to embolden people to advocate for themselves. - Climax: While Adoniram is away, Sarah moves the family's household goods to the new barn. - Summary: Sarah Penn has been a dutiful wife to her husband, Adoniram Penn, for 40 years. However, she questions his decision in building a new barn in the same location where he originally promised her a new house. Although she tries to confront him about the matter, he refuses to engage in a discussion with her and continues with his plans to build the new barn. Her son, Sammy, has also known about his father's plans, but he is reluctant to discuss it with Sarah. Meanwhile, her daughter, Nanny, admits that she's self-conscious about the family home's inadequate state because she's getting married in it and fears judgment from her fiancé and his family. Although Sarah tries to defend her husband to her daughter, she feels compelled to address her daughter's concerns with Adoniram, who continues to disregard her feelings. Sarah remains meek and dutiful to her husband despite resenting his lack of consideration for the family's needs. One day, Adoniram receives a letter from her brother, Hiram, inviting him to visit to buy a horse. This development leads Sarah to believe that Divine Providence has intervened on her behalf. She takes advantage of her husband's absence to claim the recently finished barn as their new house, dissuading the hired hands from placing hay and livestock in it and instructing her children to help transport their belongings into the barn. Despite concern from the community and a visit from the church minister, Mr. Hersey, Sarah maintains a firm resolve that she has done the right thing, and no one can interfere with her decision. When her husband returns, he asks in shock and confusion what the family is doing in the barn. Nanny and Sammy defend their mother, explaining that they live there now. Sarah then tends to his bath and meal as if nothing has changed. Adoniram begins to cry, confesses that he didn't know how strongly Sarah felt about wanting a new house, and agrees to comply with whatever she asks of him. In Sarah's moment of triumph, she hides her glee.

- Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror - Title: The Road - Point of view: Third person limited, occasionally first person - Setting: Post-apocalyptic America - Character: The Man. Description: The nameless protagonist of The Road. It is never explained what position the man held in the pre-disaster world, although he does know the scientific names of parts of the brain and is an excellent shot with a pistol. Throughout the novel the man is mostly defined by his extreme devotion to his son and his resourceful perseverance in surviving. He is haunted by memories of his wife, who committed suicide rather than face the apocalyptic world in which the characters live, and the pre-disaster world, but he has made the rare decision to keep surviving and "going down the road" despite the horror of the post-apocalyptic world. The man resolves to be one of the "good guys" and to keep "carrying the fire" of humanity and goodness, but he is not afraid to use violence, especially to protect the boy. The man has some kind of respiratory disease that makes him cough up blood, which worsens throughout the book and ultimately kills him. - Character: The Boy. Description: The man's son, a young boy who was born just after the nameless apocalypse. The boy is defined by his relationship with his father, on whom he depends for survival, and his own innate kindness and innocence. The boy constantly asks the man questions, looking for reassurance and some kind of order in the world. Despite the horrible circumstances he has grown up in, the boy is the most compassionate and pure character of the book. He trusts almost everyone he meets on the road, and wants to help them by taking them along or giving away precious food. This is mostly childish naiveté, but the boy also feels like he is bearing the moral responsibility of the pair, making sure he and the man act ethically and remain as the "good guys." The man looks at the boy as a kind of religious figure, a golden-haired angel who is a last bastion of humanity and purity, while the man himself is willing to use violence to protect the boy's life. When the man dies the boy continues on, though he continues to talk to the man in his head. - Character: The Woman. Description: The man's wife and the boy's mother, in The Road she only appears through the man's memories and dreams. While the man reacted to the decline and destruction of humanity with a dogged perseverance, the woman eventually gives in to despair. She believes that it is inevitable that she will be raped, murdered, and eaten, so she decides to escape that fate by committing suicide. The man begs with her to reconsider, but he has no reasonable argument against hers. The woman leaves without saying goodbye to the boy and kills herself with a piece of obsidian. Contrasted with this bleak death are the man's memories of their happy marriage and life together before the apocalypse. - Character: The Gang Member. Description: The first "bad guy" the man and the boy meet in the novel, a member of a gang of murderers and cannibals who patrol the road in a truck. The gang member leaves his group to go to the bathroom and accidentally encounters the man and boy. After a tense negotiation the stranger lunges at the boy with a knife, and the man shoots the stranger in the forehead. Later the man returns to the scene of the crime and discovers that the stranger's companions have eaten him. - Character: Ely. Description: An old man the man and boy meet on the road. He says his name is Ely, but later admits that this isn't his real name, as he doesn't want people talking about him or knowing where he is. He says he has "lived like an animal," and is struck by the sight of the boy. At the boy's convincing, the man shares some food and their fire with Ely, but the next morning they leave him. - Character: The Thief. Description: An outcast from a commune who steals the man and boy's cart and supplies while they are exploring the beach. They catch up with him, and the man makes the thief strip off his clothes at gunpoint. Despite the boy's protests, they then leave the thief shivering in the road with no chance of survival. - Character: The "Good Guy" Man. Description: A scarred, shotgun-carrying "veteran" in a ski parka, the man who finds the boy soon after his father's death. The man says he is one of the "good guys," and he offers to let the boy join his group/family, which consists of him, a woman, a boy, and a girl. It is not definitive that the man is in fact good, though the boy chooses to trust him. - Theme: Death and Violence. Description: In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Road, almost all animals, plants, and humans have died off because of some unnamed disaster. Because of this, death is a constantly looming figure – the land and sea are covered in darkness and ashes, nothing grows, and dead bodies litter the landscape. Death is so universally present that it is often personified as a character, like the woman describing her decision to commit suicide as taking death as her "new lover." The man, too, is slowly dying, as he coughs up progressively more blood. The entire setting and plot of The Road illustrate the apparent entropy of the earth and all life, and death must be taken into account in every action the characters take.The violence of this post-apocalyptic world adds to the horror of death, as in the face of disaster many humans have reverted to terrible behaviors of murder and cannibalism. Therefore the choice inherent in living in this world is having to deal with violence. The woman chooses to kill herself rather than be eventually raped and eaten. The man is a rare case, however, in that despite the ubiquity of death he still chooses to live, and to live without violence (unless it is necessary to protect the boy). The death and violence of The Road create an oppressive mood, but also cause the characters and readers to confront the most basic aspects of humanity. - Theme: Familial Love. Description: As there are only two main characters, a father and a son, The Road's principal relationship is one of paternal love. The man and boy are "each the other's world entire," and it is only the man's love for the boy that gives him the will to persevere. Their love is generally of the stark, silent kind, as the pair's whole existence consists of surviving from one day to the next. Never in the book does either one say "I love you," but when he has the chance the man shows his love in other ways, as by giving the boy a Coca-Cola. For his part, the boy constantly looks to his father for reassurance, safety, and some kind of order in his chaotic world.Briefly contrasted with this paternal love is the maternal love of the boy's mother. The woman elected to kill herself rather than be raped and eaten, and she suggested that the man kill the boy too, as death would be better than the hellish world they now occupy. The woman is also offering a kind of familial love, but she tries to "save" the boy by protecting him from pain instead of helping him survive at whatever cost. The man and the woman both love the boy, but in such a bleak world they can only show their love out of the depths of their own hope or despair. - Theme: Survival and Perseverance. Description: Much of the action of The Road consists of the protagonists' daily struggle to survive. This creates a mood of constant suspense as death looms always overhead, and most other humans have turned to cannibalism. One of the novel's central questions then is why to persevere in such a hellish existence. The man's reason to keep struggling comes to him as the idea of "carrying the fire": an idea that seems to consist, for him, of preserving the goodness or civilization of mankind by maintaining his basic humanity, having the strength to refrain from murder and cannibalism, and prioritizing a sense of love and protection for the boy's compassion and naiveté. The woman, on the other hand, considers death better than living in the post-apocalyptic world.Over the course of the novel the man creates more immediate goals to justify his survival, like reaching the coast or going south. In this way the road becomes the great symbol for the struggle to survive. The man has no reason to persevere except his love for the boy and his natural, human desire to keep going down "the road." In the end, the going on itself is reason enough to go on. Even when the man dies, he gives up his earlier plan to kill the boy so as not to send him into the "darkness alone." Instead he opts to pass on the "fire," and he advises his son to keep going south and to remain as one of the "good guys" – the last humans to persevere against brutality. - Theme: Faith, Trust, and Doubt. Description: In the harsh world of The Road, everything depends on trusting or distrusting each other. On one level, there is a constant tension regarding whether or not the man should trust anyone he meets on the road. Some people are cannibals and rapists, while others will still steal to survive. The boy is more trusting than the man, as he is always trying to help people and give away precious food. This trustingness is part of both the boy's naiveté and purity – he has a basic faith in humanity that transcends his immediate world of brutality.Trust also extends to the spiritual level, as in such horrible times people often need a God to blame or believe in. The man feels abandoned by God, but he still talks to God as if he exists, even threatening him. The man's love for the boy often becomes spiritual as well – he describes the boy in religious terms, as if the boy himself were a god or had some purity about him that was sacred. The boy's own faith is left nebulous, but after the man's death he is taken in by a group of "good guys" who talk to him about God. The boy tries to pray, but finds it easier to talk to his father's spirit. In the end, boy's love for his father also takes on a spiritual element, and his trust in the man becomes a kind of religious faith. - Theme: Dreams and Memory. Description: The present world of The Road is dark and full of death, and the only real color appears in the man's dreams and memories. When he or the boy have nightmares they are just an extension of the present, where the worst has already happened, but in his good dreams the man returns to his happy memories of the past, and the world of nature and his wife. The boy never experienced the pre-apocalyptic world, so he has no such memories. The man's dream-memories offer him a kind of escapism that he often avoids, as they seem like a temptation to "give up" or die, but at the same time these memories are one of the reasons the man keeps persevering. For him, part of "carrying the fire" means carrying the memory of a better world.Part of memory in the novel also involves names, as the characters are conspicuously unnamed. Their anonymity makes the boy and man seem more archetypal, but it also offers another glimpse of how the present world has robbed people of their basic humanity and histories. True names, like birds, and plants, exist only in the past and in dreams. The book ends with a beautiful memory of brook trout, but the man, the only protagonist who could remember such things, is dead by then. This lyrical final scene, then, shows that the remembering of the past has become a separate entity in itself. There is only the dark present of The Road, but part of that present can still involve memories and dreams of peace and life. - Climax: The man's death - Summary: The Road takes place after some unknown apocalyptic event has nearly wiped out the earth. In this landscape everything is dead and burnt, the sun is blotted out by ash, all plants and animals are extinct, and most humans are either lone travelers or members of cannibalistic communes. The protagonists, a man and a boy, his young son, are never given names. The plot begins as they are traveling south down the road towards the coast, somewhere in the Southeastern United States. They plod along in the darkness with a shopping cart, two knapsacks, and a pistol. The man sometimes coughs up blood and the boy constantly asks for comfort and reassurance. They suffer from cold, exposure, and frequent starvation as they travel the road and search abandoned buildings for food. The man sometimes has good dreams about the past and his wife. His wife had killed herself, trying to escape what she felt was inevitable rape and murder. The man and boy cross a mountain range, where they suffer through snowstorms. On the way observe a truck of "bad guys," the gangs on the road who rape, murder, and eat other people. The man and boy accidentally encounter one of these strangers. The stranger lunges for the boy but the man shoots the stranger in the forehead. The man and boy then escape, with the boy wondering if they are still "good guys." Soon afterward they run out of food and desperately search a big plantation house that is clearly inhabited. They find a basement full of human prisoners who are being kept as livestock. Horrified, the man and boy flee just as some "bad guys" return. They keep traveling, following the man's map. They are on the verge of starvation again when the man finds an apple orchard and a well. After that food runs out, and once again starving, they find a bomb shelter full of canned food and supplies. They stay there a few days and bathe, cut their hair, and stock up. They set off again and encounter an old man named Ely, who stays one night with them. After more travel and starvation they find a house with more canned food. They finally reach the coast, but are disappointed to find the ocean just as gray and lifeless as everything else. The man sees a wrecked boat offshore, and inside he finds more food and a flarepistol. They shoot the flarepistol off one night, feeling abandoned by the "good guys" and God. One day the boy gets a fever, and the despairing man won't leave his side. After the boy recovers, they explore the beach and return to find their cart and supplies stolen. They pursue the thief to the road, and the man threatens him with the pistol. The boy cries and pleads, but the man makes the thief strip naked and then takes back their cart, leaving the thief shivering in the road. The boy is upset by this, saying that they have killed the thief. They set off south on the road again, and as they are leaving a town someone shoots the man in the leg with an arrow. The man shoots his attacker with the flarepistol, but he is left with a limp and a bad wound. The man and boy travel inland, and their progress grows more torturous as it gets colder. The man's wound worsens, and he coughs up more and more blood. One night he realizes he cannot get up again. The man had planned on killing the boy if he himself were to die (to save the boy from the cruel world), but the man finds he cannot go through with this. He tells the boy to keep going south down the road, and to keep "carrying the fire." He dies with the boy by his side. The boys spends three days with the body of his father, then sets off alone, and immediately encounters a group of "good guys" – a man and woman with a little boy and girl. The boy chooses to trust them when they invite him to join their family, and they set off together. The book ends with a lyrical memory of the brook trout that once lived in the mountain streams.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Rocking-Horse Winner - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: Somewhere near Hampshire, United Kingdom - Character: Paul. Description: Paul is the protagonist of the story. He is a small boy with strange blue eyes, and he seems to feel emotions so fiercely that he cannot control them. He recognizes that his mother Hester doesn't love him, and he becomes obsessed with luck – particularly luck that leads to financial gain – and proving to Hester that he is lucky. He starts riding his rocking-horse until he reaches a trance-like state in which it is revealed to him what horse he should bet on in upcoming horse races. Paul wants to make money for his mother (who values it above all else) and to stop his house from "whispering" about their family's constant need for more money. Paul becomes increasingly obsessive over the course of the story, and even transitions into an almost supernatural or inhuman figure. In the end he rides his rocking-horse with such intensity that he collapses and dies. - Character: Oscar Cresswell (Uncle Oscar). Description: Oscar is Paul's wealthy, greedy uncle. He likes horse races and uses Paul's tips to make bets himself. He also encourages Paul to give Hester some of his winnings. When Paul dies, Oscar suggests that Hester is better off having the money Paul made instead of having a strange son—or at least that Paul is better off dead than living in such a state. Ultimately it's implied that Oscar values wealth above everything else, and was only using his nephew's strange ability for his own benefit. - Character: Hester. Description: Hester is Paul's mother, a middle-class woman with two other children as well. She is obsessed with appearances, and particularly with keeping up the appearance of being wealthier than she actually is. Hester believes strongly in luck, and thinks that she is unlucky because she married a man (Paul's father) who doesn't make a lot of money. At the beginning of the story, Hester feels cold toward her children and cannot make herself love them. By the end of the story, however, she is overwhelmed with concern for Paul's well-being—although Lawrence doesn't show her reaction to Paul's death. - Character: Bassett. Description: Bassett is the gardener at Paul's house, a young man whose foot was wounded in World War I. He is also friends with Oscar Cresswell. Bassett talks with Paul about horse racing and is his partner in his initial betting (before Oscar finds out about it). Bassett is a serious but simple man who seems to value Paul greatly (even thinking that Paul has miraculous powers), and he keeps the money Paul wins in a safe place. - Theme: Greed and Materialism. Description: The plot of "The Rocking-Horse Winner" is fueled by a cycle of approval and greed. Hester sets this cycle in motion by seeking the approval of her neighbors. She does not have enough money to live the lifestyle that they do, but she wants their approval so badly that she becomes greedy for more material wealth. Her greed even makes her blind to the fact that her anxiety over money and the approval of others has a deep effect on her children. Paul and his siblings feel as though the house is constantly whispering that they need money, but when Paul manages to actually give Hester some money, her greed only grows. Instead of repaying her debts, she purchases new furniture and prepares to send Paul to a more prestigious school—investments which are tailored toward winning the approval of the outside world instead of providing comfort to her family or leading a sustainable lifestyle. Paul's desire for approval also leads to greed, although he does not want any money for himself. Instead, he wants his mother to think of him as lucky, so he becomes obsessed with finding luck—so much so that he whips his toy rocking-horse and rides him furiously in an effort to obtain this state of "luck." In many ways, Paul's greed is much less selfish than that of Hester, as he does not want money for himself, and only becomes greedy to help his mother and quiet the voices in his house. Hester's greed, on the other hand, is entirely selfish. But Paul's selflessness does not save him: he becomes so obsessive and intense in his pursuit of luck that he dies in the process. Ultimately Lawrence exposes greed as always harmful, no matter the intentions behind it. - Theme: Luck and Hard Work. Description: Hester defines luck as that which "causes you to have money." She tells Paul that one is born lucky or not, and God chooses to make people lucky at random. Hester values luck because she believes that if she were lucky, she would be rich and never need to worry about working or losing her fortune. She tells Paul that she used to think she was lucky, but now she thinks she isn't because she married someone who doesn't make money (Paul's father). Hester's focus on luck rather than hard work or skill as the source of money gives her a kind of emotional benefit: she is able to blame her husband and the rest of the world for her lack of money instead of herself. Although Hester does try to work and make an income for herself, she doesn't make a great deal, and certainly not enough to cover her spending. Of course, making a little money is certainly better than making no money at all, but Hester continues to complain about her luck instead of working more or spending less.Hester's focus on luck rather than work is disastrous for Paul. Paul internalizes his mother's lessons, and in him the emotional anxieties of the house become almost physical. Paul becomes fixated on being lucky—a luck he can only achieve through mad physical effort on his rocking-horse—in an attempt to quiet his house's whispers about his family's financial anxieties. And Paul's luck does come through: compared to the measly amount that Hester is paid for her work, Paul is able to win a truly enormous sum of money through his "hard work" (which, incidentally, is the very definition of useless labor—just rocking back and forth and producing nothing). But although Paul expends so much effort in the pursuit of luck, he is in the end very unlucky. Were Paul truly just "lucky," he would be able to bet on a horse at random and that horse would win. Instead, Paul needs to work himself up into a frenzied state until he "knows" which horse to bet on. When Paul bets without "knowing," he usually loses. Paul's struggle, in the end, gives no easy answers about luck and hard work, and why some things make money and others don't. Paul gains money not through luck, but only through his hard work and great personal sacrifice—essentially working for his luck—but Lawrence makes it clear that this is not an inspirational tale about the value of hard work, as the effort ends up killing Paul. - Theme: Anxiety. Description: Paul's home is so full of anxiety that even the house itself seems to worry over the family's financial situation. Hester and Paul, the two main characters, take different approaches to relieving their anxiety. Hester complains and spends more, while Paul works with Bassett and rides his rocking-horse frantically—but neither character is successful. In fact, both of them become more anxious as the story progresses. Paul is made so anxious by his whispering house that he starts obsessively riding his rocking horse for hours in search of "luck." He does end up making lots of money this way, but Hester only becomes more anxious when she receives Paul's monetary gift. Further, as Paul becomes more obsessed with riding his horse, Hester grows anxious about him as well. In the beginning of the story, Hester seems to think little about her children, but by the end she is concerned with Paul's wellbeing—so much so that Paul himself tries to reassure her and tell her not to worry. Yet in the end, her anxiety does not compel her to pay enough attention to Paul to prevent his death—she is too focused on her own feelings, even if those feelings still relate to Paul. Anxiety thus is portrayed in the story as something that becomes separate from its initial cause, so that those who suffer from it often focus on the anxiety itself rather than on its causes.Although this story is full of anxiety, that anxiety is rarely acknowledged out loud. Indeed, Paul and his siblings do not even discuss their mutual feeling that their house is whispering about the need for more money. Anxiety in the story is internal and unspoken, and it separates people. It is conveyed not through conversation or connection but silently, though the eyes. Paul is repeatedly described as having mad or frenzied eyes, particularly in contrast to the rocking-horse's cool and calm ones, and the children only use glances to "share" that they all hear the whispering house. Overall, this sense of anxiety and dread permeates the entire story, affecting the characters and their actions, and also the general mood of the work itself. - Theme: Family and Intimacy. Description: When Paul dies, Uncle Oscar implies to Hester that she is actually better off now—she has eighty thousand pounds and no longer has to deal with a son who was unfit to manage in the world. Oscar clearly does not care deeply for Paul, even though Paul is his nephew and helped him win thousands of pounds. Hester initially seems not to care for her children either and feels cold whenever they are around her. When Paul falls ill, however, she is overcome with "tormented motherhood." While she previously felt stony-hearted toward her children because she was not attached to them, she now feels as through her heart has vanished altogether and become a stone. Instead of feeling coldness, she now feels loss and despair. Paul and Hester are not close during Paul's lifetime, although they may have been growing closer—but then Paul dies, and Lawrence doesn't even show us Hester's reaction. Instead we just see Oscar's callous weighing of Paul's death in terms of its monetary value. While Hester's emotions could certainly be interpreted as the feelings of love that a mother should naturally have for her son, some critics have interpreted "The Rocking Horse Winner" in a more sexual, psychoanalytical way. These writers see Paul's riding motion and the frenzied state he falls into while riding as metaphors for intercourse or masturbation. Since Paul rides the rocking-horse to please his mother in particular, some think that this story has Freudian undertones. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed in the existence of an Oedipal complex, or that young boys are first sexually attracted to their own mothers. According to Freud, healthy children grow out of this desire, but those with neuroses do not. Thus, while "The Rocking Horse Winner" can be read as a story about the pitfalls of luck and greed, it can also be interpreted as a portrait of sexual neurosis, and how Paul's frustrated Oedipal desires ultimately lead to his death. - Climax: Paul rides his rocking-horse so hard that he collapses - Summary: The story begins with a description of Hester, who has trouble loving her three children. Hester she feels unlucky because her family is running out of money, but she cares a great deal about appearing to be wealthy. The house seems to constantly whisper, "There must be more money!" and Paul (Hester's young son) in particular becomes concerned about the family's financial situation. When he asks his mother why they don't have enough money, she explains to him they they are unlucky, and that luck is the reason people are rich. Paul claims that he is lucky, but his mother doesn't believe him, so he becomes determined to prove his luck to her. Paul obsessively and furiously starts riding his rocking-horse because he believes it can take him to luck—a habit he keeps secret from everyone else. He also talks with Bassett, the family's gardener, about horse racing and places bets on the races whenever he "knows" who will win. Paul's Uncle Oscar finds out about Paul's betting and begins betting based on Paul's recommendations, which are always correct. Paul makes an extraordinarily large amount of money, but he also becomes increasingly anxious and intense. Uncle Oscar helps Paul give some money to his mother anonymously, but the money only makes the whispering in the house worse. Instead of using it to pay off debts, Hester buys new furniture and invests in sending Paul to an elite school. Paul is more determined than ever to make the whispering stop, and he refuses to stop riding his rocking-horse, even when his mother suggests that he is too old for the toy. The Derby (a big horse race) is coming up, and Paul is obsessed with picking the winner. One night, while at a party, Hester is overwhelmed with anxiety about Paul. She calls the nurse to see how he's doing, but when the nurse offers to check on him in his room, Hester decides not to bother him until she gets home. When she finally arrives at his room, she hears a familiar yet violent noise coming from behind the door. Paul is riding his rocking-horse so hard that he and the horse are lit up in a strange light. He announces in a deep voice, "It's Malabar" and then collapses to the floor. Days later, Paul is very ill. Bassett tells Paul that Malabar (a horse's name) won the Derby, and Paul now has eighty thousand pounds. Paul is very excited to be able to prove to his mother that he is, in fact, lucky. But that night, Paul dies. Uncle Oscar suggests that Hester is better off having eighty thousand pounds instead of a strange son—but that Paul is also better off dead than living in a state where "he rides his rocking-horse to find the winner."

- Genre: Short story, coming-of-age story - Title: The Scarlet Ibis - Point of view: First person limited (Brother is the narrator) - Setting: A family home in eastern North Carolina during World War I - Character: Brother. Description: The narrator of "The Scarlet Ibis," Brother remains nameless throughout the story and is only referred to as "Brother" by his younger brother Doodle. He narrates the story years after the events he describes took place, reflecting on Doodle's short life and premature death. He is six years older than Doodle and is initially disappointed to have a brother with a disability because he wanted a companion with whom he could play. Although he comes to love and accept Doodle, he also has a mean streak towards his younger brother, initially trying to discourage him from coming outside with him by turning over his go-cart, and by forcing him to touch the coffin that his parents had built for him when he was born. When Brother realizes how much he comes to care for Doodle, he devises a "development program" for him so that he won't be ashamed of Doodle. Brother plans to teach him to run, swim, and climb like other boys so that he can fit in at school. Although this initially pleases his family when Doodle learns to walk, Brother's fierce determination to push Doodle beyond his physical limitations ultimately leads to Doodle's death when Brother abandons him in a storm out of hurt pride over Doodle's failure to make progress. - Character: Doodle. Description: The younger brother of the narrator, whom Doodle simply calls Brother. Doodle's real name is William Armstrong, and he is born with a physical disability, having a very large head and a tiny, "shriveled" body. Initially Doodle's doctor does not believe that he is going to live, but Doodle ultimately defies everybody's expectations by learning to crawl and eventually walk. Brother gives Doodle his nickname when he initially learns to crawl, because he is only able to do go backwards like a doodlebug. Brother remarks that it's the kindest thing he might have done for Doodle, because nobody expects anything from someone with a name like that. Doodle enjoys spending time with his brother and idolizes him, so he works hard to try to overcome his physical limitations, though it seems that he would have been just as comfortable progressing on his own terms and timeline. Although he has some success following the "development program" devised for him by his brother, he eventually proves unable to keep up with his brother's expectations. At the end of the story, Doodle dies alone in the forest as he strains to catch up with his brother, who has run ahead of him in a storm. In this way, Doodle's brother and his callousness are partly responsible for Doodle's death, but so is the storm, which echoes the storm that caused the death of the scarlet ibis earlier in the story. Thus, Doodle and the scarlet ibis become synonymous in the narrator's eyes, as both strange and innocent lives were crushed, tragically, too soon. - Character: Doodle's parents. Description: Also referred to as Mama and Daddy, Doodle and Brother's parents care for their sons and work to make Doodle feel loved, but they also seem disappointed that Doodle will not be able to have the experiences of a normal boy. Like Doodle's doctor, they initially expect Doodle's life to be very short, and have a coffin built for their son. Doodle's mother cries when she explains to Brother that Doodle will not be able to participate in many of the same activities that other boys engage in, but later Doodle's father builds a go-cart for Doodle so that he can go outside with his brother. Doodle's parents become very excited when Doodle begins to walk, highlighting their desire for him to live a more normal life. Although they only want the best for their son, their desire for him to be more like his brother only adds to the pressure that causes Doodle to push himself so hard, and eventually leads to his death. - Character: Doodle's doctor. Description: A person who also remains nameless, the doctor serves as a representation of the expectations and limitations that society places on people with disabilities. For instance, the doctor insists that Doodle will not live beyond infancy, that he won't walk, and that he shouldn't get too excited, too hot or cold, or play too roughly. Although Doodle proves that some of the doctor's restrictions were unreasonable or too strict, Brother ignores the doctor's restrictions completely, causing Doodle's death and demonstrating that many of the doctor's concerns and prohibitions were, in fact, justified. - Theme: Expectations and Disappointment. Description: The primary conflict of "The Scarlet Ibis" surrounds Doodle's disability and how he works to overcome it with the help of Brother. The way in which Hurst presents Doodle's journey, however, demonstrates that Doodle's biggest challenges often arise not from his actual disability, but instead from the judgment and pressure he experiences from different people in his life. Brother admits that when Doodle was born, he saw him as a "disappointment" because he was born with physical disabilities that would make him unable to play with Brother or participate in activities such as racing, boxing, and climbing trees. This disappointment is only amplified when Doodle reaches school age, as Brother worries that Doodle won't be able to physically keep up with his peers, facing Doodle with yet another societal pressure to fit in. Brother crafts a development program to teach Doodle to run, swim, climb trees, and fight. Although Doodle goes along with this program, Brother's disappointment in Doodle ultimately leads to Doodle's death at the end of the story, demonstrating the ways in which people are often gravely hurt by the unrealistic expectations of those around them. Doodle's brother is not the only person who has expectations for him. While Brother pushes Doodle to be more and more active, Doodle's doctor seems resigned to restrict his activity. When Doodle is born, his doctor doesn't think he will live past three days, but Doodle defies these expectations. Even as his life expectancy continues to be short, he surprises his doctor and parents when he starts to crawl and eventually walk, demonstrating that others' expectations do not necessarily constrain him. Doodle's parents work to make him feel loved as he is, but they also experience disappointment that Doodle cannot always share in the experiences of a normal boy. They ask Brother to include Doodle when he goes outside to play, and Doodle's father builds him a go-cart to allow him to go outside and spend time with Brother. Early in the story, however, Doodle's mother cries when she explains to Brother that Doodle likely would not be able to join him in his outdoor activities. In addition, Brother describes that Doodle only becomes one of the family when he is able to crawl and sit by the fire, demonstrating that only by overcoming his disability is the family able to accept him. Readers get few insights into Doodle's own thoughts on his disability. He seems content at first to live within the structure that his doctor has set out for him. Brother describes how a "list of don'ts" went with Doodle, and how he couldn't be too hot, too cold, too tired, couldn't be exposed to the sun, and couldn't be played with too roughly. Doodle is comfortable inside his go-cart, so he doesn't understand, at first, why his brother wants to teach him how to walk. However, he gives in to his brother's demands, and after seeing his parents' and Aunt's delight when he begins to walk, Doodle continues to work harder and harder. After a few weeks, however, Doodle's initial excitement of success wears off when he is unable to keep up with his brother and collapses after a particularly strenuous swimming and rowing lesson. However, his worst fear is not that he will be unable to keep up with other boys—it is that he will disappoint and be abandoned by his brother. Doodle experiences pressure on many sides, whether it's his brother's desire for him to overcome his disability, the subtle cues from his parents, or the restrictions of his doctor. Hurst makes it clear that these pressures constitute a far more complex and heartbreaking struggle than Doodle's disability itself. - Theme: Pride. Description: Brother takes pride in Doodle's achievements, and this sense of pride becomes a major motivation for his actions throughout "The Scarlet Ibis." He gradually acknowledges that he only helps his brother out of a sense of pride, and that this pride leads him to behave selfishly. Other characters, such as Doodle's parents, also find pride in Doodle's accomplishments and hard work, spurring Doodle to work harder and harder to please his family. Hurst's story points to both positive and negative effects that pride can have on people, but ultimately suggests that Doodle's death was caused by the pride of those around him. Brother sees Doodle as a reflection of himself, and therefore works hard to mitigate the sense of shame he feels about having a disabled brother. When Doodle is very young, Brother discovers that Doodle can smile and is aware of the people around him, and Brother feels relieved that he doesn't have to live with a brother who isn't "all there," which he thinks would be "unbearable." Thus, when he teaches Doodle to walk, he does so not out of a desire to improve Doodle's life, but rather out of a desire to have a brother who is not different. Brother's sense of pride is what initially motivates him to push Doodle to grow beyond the limitations of his disability—and, at least initially, this growth seems like a positive outcome associated with pride. Doodle's parents exhibit a different kind of pride from Brother. As Doodle makes progress, they express genuine pride in his accomplishments. Although they mean well, this expression of pride causes Doodle to push himself in unhealthy ways to win the love and approval of his family. The most joyful moment in the story occurs when Doodle and his brother show off that Doodle can walk, and his parents and Aunt are ecstatic that he has exceeded their expectations for him. However, this causes Brother to believe that he is "infallible," and to push harder and harder on Doodle. Doodle follows along because he idolizes his brother and wants to continue to make his parents happy. Thus, his parent's expression of pride in their son actually has a negative impact on him, as Hurst suggests that perhaps the catastrophe of Doodle's death could have been avoided if they had simply been proud of their son for who he was rather than reinforcing the idea that they wanted him to be different. Although Doodle's thoughts go unspoken, he continues to work to make his brother proud, and Doodle's brother in turn pushes him harder and harder. Brother describes many episodes in which Doodle collapses out of exhaustion. In the story's final moments, after Doodle has disappointed his Brother in their swimming and rowing lesson, they wordlessly turn back to the house and Doodle continues to look at his brother, "watching for a sign of mercy." However, instead of showing his brother compassion, Brother simply wonders, "what are the words that can solder cracked pride," and races ahead of Doodle in the approaching storm, inadvertently dooming Doodle to death as he does so. Thus, it is not Doodle's disability which ultimately causes his death, but rather the fact that Brother, in his pride, could not accept Doodle's failure to be a normal boy. In this way, what began as the family's innocent desire to help Doodle lead a more fulfilling life becomes poisoned by Brother's pride and self-interest when he pushes Doodle past his limits. With this story, Hurst shows that even though pride can sometimes be positive, when it is borne out of selfishness it is a force of destruction. - Theme: Death. Description: Hurst refers to death explicitly and implicitly throughout "The Scarlet Ibis," using foreshadowing, the symbolism of the ibis itself, and allusions to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. These devices give the story an allegorical dimension, demonstrating that often the most innocent people die not because they deserve to die, but because of the carelessness and wrongdoing of others. The story contains several examples of foreshadowing of Doodle's untimely death. For instance, when Doodle is born, Doodle's parents assume that he will not live and have a small coffin built for him, which continues to haunt Doodle as a "memento mori" long after he has outgrown it. Similarly, Brother menacingly remarks that Doodle's real name (William Armstrong) only sounds good on a tombstone. Together, these references serve to imbue the story with an atmosphere of death, constantly reminding readers of the eeriness and sadness of premature death. The primary symbol at work in the story, the scarlet ibis, directly parallels Doodle in its journey and serves as an omen of his own fate as it falls victim to forces outside its control. The scarlet ibis—a bird not native to North America, making sightings of it incredibly rare—appears one day in the yard of the boys' home, having been carried there by a storm. Brother observes that the bird is beautiful and graceful, but when it attempts to fly its wings are mangled, and it crashes to the ground. He wonders "how many miles it had traveled to die like this, in our yard, beneath the bleeding tree." After Brother discovers Doodle lifeless in the forest, he acknowledges his brother's connection to the bird. Doodle progresses so far past the limitations imposed on him by his disability, only to be overwhelmed by his own storm and at the very end of the story. "The Scarlet Ibis" also parallels, in some ways, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain kills his younger brother Abel out of jealousy and spite. When God asks where Abel is, he responds, "am I my brother's keeper?" and when God discovers what has happened, Cain is sent into exile. Although the motivations are different, there are clear connections between the stories. Most of The Scarlet Ibis takes place in a pastoral setting in which the boys roam free, but the opening (which occurs chronologically after Doodle has died) describes a vision of decaying nature, implying that Brother has left the idyllic world of his childhood behind. Brother betrays Doodle and causes his death, illustrating the same moral message as the Bible story: we must all behave like our brother's keepers. These allusions, combined with the symbol of the ibis and the moments of foreshadowing, strengthen the reader's understanding of Doodle as a tragic figure of innocence whose life is crushed by the selfishness and blindness of those around him. - Theme: Humans and Nature. Description: "The Scarlet Ibis" is filled with many rich descriptions of the natural world. It quickly establishes the rural North Carolina farmland in which the story takes place and draws some of its most important symbols from nature. Beyond providing a detailed vision of the story's setting, however, Hurst uses descriptions of nature and the seasons to mirror the boys' states of mind as well as the dynamic between them, and to suggest that, like nature, people can quickly turn volatile and violent. The opening two paragraphs are two prime examples of this mirroring, as they describe the season of Doodle's death and how the surroundings have changed since that time. In the first paragraph, Brother depicts a decaying world, using imagery of rotting brown magnolia petals, graveyard flowers, and rank weeds, as well as a bird's nest that sits "untenanted…like an empty cradle." These descriptions foreshadow the decay of Brother and Doodle's excitement in Doodle's training program and symbolize his eventual death. In the story's second paragraph, Brother explains that, since Doodle's death, a grindstone has replaced the old bleeding tree, and he notes how the trill of the birds seems to die as soon as they sing. Nature's beauty has been lost to Brother, just as Doodle has been lost. These two paragraphs are a good setup for the pattern that Hurst establishes, in which nature provides a mirror image of Brother's state of mind. Later in the story, nature helps the boys to connect with one another and reflects their dynamic. Early on, Brother expresses how he wanted a brother so that he would have someone to accompany him to Old Woman Swamp. When Brother realizes how much he does love Doodle, he immediately takes him there "to share with him the only beauty [he] knew." Before Brother sets out to try to teach Doodle to walk, he describes how he would gather flowers and the two of them would weave them into crowns. This moment of friendship is reflected in the idyllic setting of the swamp. It is spring when Brother plans to teach Doodle to walk, and spring returns when they set out to teach Doodle to race and swim, but when they've both grown exhausted, the season has turned to the lazy days of summer. As the story approaches its tragic conclusion, the violence of nature becomes more and more pervasive. The summer preceding Doodle's death was "blighted" with a terrible hurricane, and Brother makes a point to mention that the year is 1918, suggesting that perhaps the author meant to remind readers of the devastation of World War I as the boys and their father survey their corn and cotton fields in ruin. The harm that Brother causes Doodle is also reflected in the weather. The storm that approaches in the final moments of the story is symbolic of Brother's cruel and tyrannical treatment of Doodle. As combined forces, the storm and Brother's cruelty cause Doodle's death. In this way, the natural world acts as a mirror to the characters and their emotions, reflecting the states of mind of the two brothers and the dynamics between them and ultimately suggesting that their story is as much a tale of tragedy as it is a tale about humanity and nature. - Climax: Disappointed by Doodle's physical limitations, Brother leaves him alone in the forest as a storm rages, only to discover later that Doodle has died. - Summary: In rural North Carolina, the unnamed narrator (who is referred to as "Brother") describes the season in which the scarlet ibis landed in the tree in his family's front yard, when summer was finished but autumn had not yet begun. He remarks that he's surprised the memory is so clear to him, as is his memory of his brother, Doodle. Brother flashes back to when Doodle was born. Brother is six at the time and is immediately disappointed by Doodle. Doodle is born with a large head and tiny body, and his doctor doesn't expect him to live more than a few days, though Brother's Aunt Nicey believes that he will. Doodle's parents have a small coffin built for him, but he survives infancy and they decide to name him William Armstrong. Brother confesses how he had wanted a brother with whom he could run and play, but his parents tell him that Doodle would never be able to do those things. When he is two years old, Doodle starts to crawl, at which point Brother decides to call him Doodle, because he crawls backwards like a doodlebug. Doodle's father builds him a go-cart so that Brother can take him out to play. Even though Doodle has many restrictions on what he can do, Brother essentially ignores them. Brother takes Doodle to Old Woman Swamp, where they enjoy each other's company, but Brother is also sometimes mean to Doodle. Brother brings Doodle up to the barn loft to show him the coffin his parents had made for him, and won't let him leave until he touches it. Doodle does so, screams in terror, and as Brother carries him down the ladder Doodle begs his brother not to leave him. When Doodle is five years old, Brother decides to teach Doodle how to walk because he is ashamed of having a brother of that age who cannot. Although Doodle initially doesn't understand why he needs to learn, Brother attempts to teach him every day that summer. Doodle repeatedly falls to the ground, unable to stand, but after much perseverance, Doodle learns to walk. They decide to show their parents and Aunt Nicey, who are overjoyed. Brother, now believing that he can teach Doodle to do anything, sets out to begin a development program for Doodle, teaching him to run, swim, climb trees, and fight. They work through the spring and summer, and Doodle makes some progress, but Brother worries that he still will not be able to keep up with the other boys in school. After a particularly strenuous day, Doodle collapses and begins to cry. A few days before school begins, the family notices a scarlet ibis in a tree in their yard. Their bird book reveals that the ibis is not native to the area and must have been carried there by a storm. Suddenly, the ibis tries to fly, but its wings are uncoordinated and it crashes to the ground, dying. Doodle is very moved by the death of the ibis and solemnly buries it. After burying the ibis, the two boys go outside to practice swimming, but Doodle is too tried to swim, so Brother makes him practice rowing instead. Soon, a storm seems to be approaching, and Doodle is too tired to carry on so the boys start to return to their house. It begins to rain heavily, at which point Brother, frustrated with Doodle's failure, starts to run as fast as he can away from Doodle, who cannot keep up. After a while Brother stops and waits for Doodle, but Doodle does not appear. Brother turns back, only to find Doodle limp on the ground and bleeding from the mouth. The story ends with the image of Brother shielding Doodle's dead body from the rain like his own "fallen scarlet ibis."

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Scarlet Letter - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: Boston, Massachusetts in the 1640s - Character: Hester Prynne. Description: The protagonist of the novel, Hester is married to Roger Chillingworth and has an affair with Arthur Dimmesdale. The affair produces a daughter, Pearl. Hester plays many roles in The Scarlet Letter: devoted mother, abandoned lover, estranged wife, religious dissenter, feminist, and outcast, to name just a few. Perhaps her most important role is that of an iconoclast, one who opposes established conventions. Hester is not just a rebel, she's a glorified rebel, and Hawthorne uses her to criticize the Puritan's strict society. He portrays Hester fondly, as a woman of strength, independence, and kindness, who stands up to the judgments and constraints of her society. Though society tries to demean and disgrace her, Hawthorne emphasizes that Hester never looked more attractive as when she first emerged from prison wearing the scarlet letter. - Character: Pearl. Description: The illegitimate daughter of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Pearl serves as a symbol of her mother's shame and triumph. At one point the narrator describes Pearl as "the scarlet letter endowed with life." Like the letter, Pearl is the public consequence of Hester's very private sin. Yet also like the scarlet letter, Pearl becomes Hester's source of strength. Pearl defines Hester's identity and purpose and gives Hester a companion to love. Although she often struggles to understand Pearl's rebelliousness and devilish spirit, Hester never wavers in her loving devotion to Pearl. Pearl, an outcast, is drawn to other outcasts, such as Mistress Hibbins and her witch friends. Pearl's affinity for the occult associates her character with sin and evil, but Pearl is first and foremost a product of love, not just sin. Her rumored happiness and success as an adult in Europe make her character a symbol of the triumph of love over a repressed and oppressive society. - Character: Arthur Dimmesdale. Description: A well respected Boston reverend who has an affair with Hester Prynne and is the secret father of Pearl. Shy, retiring, and well loved and respected by his public, Dimmesdale is too frightened and selfish to reveal his sin and bear the burden of punishment with Hester. Yet at the same time, Dimmesdale secretly punishes himself for his sin by fasting and whipping himself. Ultimately the suffering and punishment he endures, though self-inflicted, proves far worse than Hester's or Pearl's, suggesting that betrayal and selfishness are greater sins than adultery. Dimmesdale's guilty conscience overwhelms him like a plague, robbing him of his health and preventing him from raising his daughter. His eventual confession comes too late, and he dies a victim of his own pride. - Character: Roger Chillingworth. Description: The old scholar who Hester Prynne met and married before coming to Boston. Chillingworth is a forbidding presence. Even his name reflects his haunting, ice-cold aura. Hester's relationship with Chillingworth, her actual husband, contrasts sharply with her relationship with Dimmesdale, her lover. Chillingworth is an older man whom she married for reasons other than love. Dimmesdale is a beloved reverend with whom she had an affair out of love and irrepressible desire. Chillingworth recognizes this difference and punishes Hester and Dimmesdale covertly by tormenting Dimmesdale almost to the point of killing him. Meanwhile, he hypocritically makes Hester swear not to reveal his true identity as her husband in order to avoid the humiliation of being associated with their scandalous affair. In the end, by tormenting Dimmesdale, Chillingworth transforms himself into a sick and twisted man, a kind of fiend. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator is inspired to write The Scarlet Letter after discovering the scarlet letter and fragments of its story in an attic of the Custom House. He describes the novel as a tale of "human frailty and sorrow" and encourages the reader to heed its moral. Throughout the novel, the narrator favors Hester against the Puritans who persecute her. His writing often reads as if he's pained to have to tell such a sad story that involves the downfall of innocent victims at the hands of an oppressive society. - Character: Mistress Hibbins. Description: Governor Bellingham's sister. She invites Hester to a witches' meeting in the woods and becomes the object of Pearl's fascination. She speaks often of the "Black Man," another name for the Devil. She is executed for practicing witchcraft about a year after Dimmesdale dies. Her death shows how merciless Puritan society had become in the name of piety and propriety: the Governor would even order the execution of his own sister. - Character: Governor Bellingham. Description: The governor of Boston and the brother of Mistress Hibbins. Bellingham conducts himself like an aristocrat, enjoying money, luxury, and the privileges of power. Yet when it comes to the actions of others, Governor Bellingham punishes any behavior that does not fit with the strict Puritan rules of behavior. This makes him a hard-hearted hypocrite. For instance, even while employing Hester to do fancy needlepoint for him, he tries to take Pearl from her, arguing that as an adulterer she's an unfit mother. Later, he convicts and executes his own sister of practicing witchcraft. - Theme: Sin. Description: The Puritans believed people were born sinners. Puritan preachers depicted each human life as suspended by a string over the fiery pit of hell. As a result, the Puritans maintained strict watch over themselves and their fellow townspeople, and sins such as adultery were punishable by death. Hester is spared execution only because the Puritans of Boston decided it would benefit the community to transform her into a "living sermon against sin." But just as Hester turns the physical scarlet letter that she is forced to wear into a beautifully embroidered object, through the force of her spirit she transforms the letter's symbolic meaning from shame to strength. Hester's transformation of the scarlet letter's meaning raises one of The Scarlet Letter's most important questions: What does it mean to sin, and who are the novel's real sinners? Hester's defiant response to her punishment and her attempts to rekindle her romance with Dimmesdale and flee with him to Europe shows that she never considered her affair with Dimmesdale to be a sin. The narrator supports Hester's innocence and instead points the finger at the novel's two real sinners: Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Chillingworth's sin was tormenting Dimmesdale almost to the point of death; Dimmesdale's was abandoning Hester to lead a lonely life without the man she loved. - Theme: Individuality and Conformity. Description: As an adulterer, Hester has broken Puritan society's harsh and strict rules. Puritan society demanded conformity because it considered any breach of that conformity a threat to its security and its religion. Hester doesn't conform and she suffers the consequences: the townspeople punish, shun, and humiliate her. The town seeks to use Hester as an example to frighten any other would-be nonconformists from breaking the strict moral rules of Puritanism. Yet Hester's unshakable faith in herself, her love for Dimmesdale, and her devotion to her daughter empower her to resist and transcend enforced Puritan conformity. In general in The Scarlet Letter, the conflict between individuality and conformity is also a battle between appearance and reality. Because the Puritan government is so harsh, all Puritans are always concerned about looking like conformists to best fit in. This means that they hide the reality of their human flaws, frailties, and sins in order to avoid punishment. The result are secrets that are the embodiment of the disconnect between private individual reality and the need to maintain the appearance of public conformity. And though keeping secrets provide a short-term solution for the sinner to avoid punishment, the novel argues that repression of the individual behind a mask of secret-keeping conformity will ultimately warp and destroy a person's soul. - Theme: Puritanism. Description: The Scarlet Letter presents a critical, even disdainful, view of Puritanism. The narrator depicts Puritan society as drab, confining, unforgiving, and narrow-minded that unfairly victimizes Hester. In the scene in which Hester is released from prison, the narrator describes the town police official as representing the "whole dismal severity of the Puritanical code of law," which fused religion with law. In contrast, he describes Hester as a woman marked by "natural dignity…force of character…[and] free will." It is precisely these natural strengths, which the narrator holds in high esteem, that Puritan society suppresses. In The Scarlet Letter, the Puritans appear as shallow hypocrites whose opinion of Hester and Pearl improves only when they become more of an asset to the community, most notably when Hester becomes a seamstress and Pearl inherits a fortune from Chillingworth. - Theme: Nature. Description: In The Scarlet Letter, nature stands in contrast to Puritanism. Where Puritanism is merciless and rigid, nature is forgiving and flexible. This contrast is made clear from the very first page, when the narrator contrasts the "black flower" of the prison that punishes sin with the red rose bush that he imagines forgives those sentenced to die. The theme of nature continues with the forest outside Boston, which is described as an "unchristianized, lawless region." In the dark forest, wild, passionate, and persecuted people like Hester, Pearl, Mistress Hibbins, and the Indians can escape from the strict, repressive morality of Puritan society. The forest, which provides a measure of comfort and protection that exists nowhere in society, is also the only place where Hester can reunite with Dimmesdale. When Hester moves to the outskirts of Boston, the narrator says she would have fit in better in the forest. Hester's choice to live on the border of society and nature represents her internal conflict: she can't thrive entirely within the constraints of Puritanism, but because of her attachment to society and to Dimmesdale, she also can't flee. - Theme: The Occult. Description: The first association most people have with the town of Salem, Massachusetts is the infamous "Salem Witch Trials." Set in and around Boston, The Scarlet Letter also deals with the specter of witchcraft and the occult. But the novel treats witchcraft and the occult sympathetically. By associating Pearl with other outcasts like Mistress Hibbins, Hawthorne suggests that witches were created by, and victims of, the excessively strict Puritan society. Puritan society created the witches by being so intolerant that people became interested in witchcraft as a way of expressing natural human feelings that Puritanism repressed. Puritanism then viewed witches as a threat to its repressive society and therefore sentenced all witches, like Mistress Hibbins, to death. - Climax: Dimmesdale's confession and death - Summary: The Scarlet Letter begins with a prelude in which an unnamed narrator explains the novel's origin. While working at the Salem Custom House (a tax collection agency), the narrator discovered in the attic a manuscript accompanied by a beautiful scarlet letter "A." After the narrator lost his job, he decided to develop the story told in the manuscript into a novel. The Scarlet Letter is that novel. The novel is set in seventeenth-century Boston, a city governed by strict Puritan law. The story begins as Hester Prynne, the novel's protagonist, is led out of a prison carrying an infant, named Pearl, in her arms. A bright red "A" is embroidered on her chest. A crowd waits expectantly as Hester is forced to climb up a scaffold to endure public shame for her sin. While on the scaffold, Hester is terrified to recognize her estranged husband, Chillingworth, in the crowd. He recognizes her too, and is shocked. Chillingworth pretends not to know Hester, and learns her story from a man in the crowd: she was married to an English scholar who was supposed to follow her to Boston but never showed up. After two years she fell into sin, committing the adultery that resulted in her baby and the scarlet "A" on her breast. Chillingworth predicts the unknown man will be found out, but when the beloved local Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale commands Hester to reveal the man's name, she refuses and is sent back to her prison cell. Chillingworth poses as a doctor to get inside the prison to speak with Hester, and there forces her to promise never to reveal that he's her husband. Three years pass. Hester is let out of prison and moves to the outskirts of Boston, near the forest. She makes a living as a seamstress, though the people who employ her still shun her. Hester refuses to tell Pearl what the scarlet letter signifies, and Pearl becomes obsessed with the letter. Meanwhile, Chillingworth is working in Boston as a physician, though he has no formal medical training. One of his patients is Dimmesdale, who has fallen ill with heart trouble. Chillingworth moves in with Dimmesdale to care for him full-time and begins to suspect a connection between Dimmesdale's heart ailment and Hester's crime. When he discovers that Dimmesdale has carved a mark over his heart that resembles Hester's scarlet letter, Chillingworth realizes that Dimmesdale is Hester's lover. Chillingworth decides to torment and expose Dimmesdale. Under Chillingworth's cruel care, Dimmesdale's health deteriorates. Dimmesdale's guilt for committing and concealing adultery causes him profound emotional suffering. He even starves and whips himself as punishment. One night Dimmesdale mounts the same scaffold upon which Hester was publicly shamed. At just that moment, Hester and Pearl pass by and join Dimmesdale on the scaffold. A meteor lights the sky in the shape of a red "A" and illuminates Chillingworth standing nearby. Hester decides she must help Dimmesdale, and pleads with Chillingworth to stop tormenting him. Chillingworth acknowledges that he's become cruel and wicked, but argues that he's actually protecting Dimmesdale by not revealing his secret to the public. Hester then takes matters into her own hands: she intercepts Dimmesdale in the forest and tells him Chillingworth's true identity. She convinces Dimmesdale to flee with her and Pearl to Europe, and they make plans to take a ship the day after Dimmesdale is scheduled to deliver an important sermon. Dimmesdale delivers the sermon (the best of his life). However, he realizes he's dying and won't make it to Europe. He mounts the scaffold and asks Hester and Pearl to join him. He confesses his sin to the crowd and bares his chest, revealing a scarlet letter carved into his own skin. He dies as Pearl kisses him for the first time. Hester and Pearl leave Boston. Chillingworth dies a year after Dimmesdale, leaving Pearl a small fortune as an inheritance. Many years later, Hester returns to her cabin on the outskirts of town. She still wears her letter "A." Pearl has married into money in Europe and writes to Hester on occasion. Hester remains in Boston until her death and is buried alongside Dimmesdale. Their shared tombstone bears a letter "A."

- Genre: Moral dialogue, allegory, fantasy, epistolary novel - Title: The Screwtape Letters - Point of view: - Setting: Setting:Hell - Character: Screwtape. Description: The experienced devil whose letters to his nephew, Wormwood, form the bulk of The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape has successfully corrupted thousands of human beings, convincing them to embrace sin and thereby condemning them to eternal punishment in Hell. As a result, he gives Wormwood copious advice on the best way to corrupt a modern man—advice which, in its thoroughness, forms a "negative" of Lewis's own theory of Christianity. In spite of, or perhaps because of his vast experience, Screwtape struggles to understand God's love for humanity, and—thanks to a treacherous Wormwood—his suggestion that God loves humans and wants them to love one another briefly places him in danger of being convicted of heresy. Screwtape believes in a doctrine of "realism," according to which the only goal of life is to compete with other living things for power and resources. Yet at times—at the end of the novel, for instance—Screwtape expresses his desire to understand God's love, and, implicitly, to embrace Christianity. - Character: Wormwood. Description: The young, inexperienced "junior tempter" whose continued, failed attempts to corrupt the patient are the subject of The Screwtape Letters. Wormwood is never actually heard from in the novel, as we hear about his experiences entirely through Screwtape, his uncle. Despite having attending "college"—or rather, the Satanic counterpart to college—Wormwood is ignorant of many of the basic strategies that experienced devils like Screwtape use to pull humans away from God. In a sense, Wormwood isn't really a character at all: he's a convenient plot device that allows Screwtape to spout his theories of Good and Evil, thereby allowing C.S. Lewis to express his own beliefs. Yet Wormwood also proves himself to be a treacherous, backstabbing individual, trying to report his uncle for speculating on the nature of love. Furthermore, it is Wormwood's failure to tempt the patient that brings the book to a close. - Character: The patient. Description: The weak, young, and deeply uncertain human being whose moral progress—and lack of progress—defines the plot of the novel. Much like Wormwood, the patient is less of a character with unique thoughts, feelings, and motivations than he is a plot device allowing C.S. Lewis to construct a theory of Christianity. (In Christian fiction, there is a long tradition of "blank" characters of exactly this type—in fact, the general name we give to this kind of character—Everyman—is an allusion to a Christian morality play from the 16th century.) Even so, the patient can be taken as an embodiment of the virtues and vices of Europe at the time when C.S. Lewis wrote his book. Thus, the patient is capable of some virtues, such as honesty, loyalty, and bravery, and yet he is also weak, arrogant, and prone to exaggeration, with a bad habit of valuing new fashions more highly than old truths. Ultimately, the patient finds a Christian community for himself, and dies in an air raid during World War II, having ensured his place in Heaven. - Character: The patient's mother. Description: The patient's mother, much like the patient, has few specific qualities—she's an embodiment of clichés and stereotypes about middle-class, 20th century English mothers. One exception to this rule is that she is dainty and fussy with her food, therefore qualifying her as a glutton in Screwtape's eyes. The patient's mother is often irritable with the patient, since they have a bad habit of arguing and bickering with each other. At the same time, she's shown to be capable of immense love for her son. - Character: The married couple. Description: The married couple befriends the patient early on in the novel, tempting him away from Christianity with their talk of atheism and their sarcastic attacks on the church. As Screwtape points out, the married couple damages the patient's faith by encouraging him to accept their beliefs as his own. The married couple also encourages the patient to conceal his faith from the married couple, thereby making him proud and arrogant about his ability to live a "double life." After a few chapters, the patient abandons the married couple and meets his lover. - Character: God. Description: Because The Screwtape Letters is told from the perspective of a devil like Screwtape, God is almost always referred to as The Enemy. In spite of his antagonistic role in the novel, God inspires a great deal of Screwtape's moral theorizing. Screwtape accuses God of wanting humans to be separate from him—in other words, free—and yet united with him in their Christian faith. Screwtape also grudging acknowledges that God loves humanity—at least until Wormwood reports this "heresy" to the authorities of Hell. In the end, Screwtape regards God as a mystery, concluding that his love for mankind must involve some secret plan. Much of the comedy in The Screwtape Letters arises from the reader's recognition that there is no secret plan behind God's love—he loves mankind, and that is all. - Character: Satan. Description: The leader of the devils, whom they refer to as "Our Father," Satan is nonetheless rarely mentioned in The Screwtape Letters, and is a far less conspicuous a presence than God. Nevertheless, on the occasions when Screwtape mentions Satan, he's portrayed as a jealous, angry tyrant, who, like Screwtape himself, cannot understand God's love for humanity, and resorts to trickery and temptation to corrupt humans. Satan was God's loyal servant until God revealed that he had created mankind, which made Satan jealous. Afterwards, Satan led some of God's angels in a rebellion against Heaven. Inevitably, God defeated Satan and cast him out of Heaven, confining him to Hell. - Character: The patient's lover. Description: A virtuous, beautiful Christian woman, the patient's lover is instrumental in attracting him toward God and leading him from temptation. Nevertheless, she is capable of some vice: because she has been raised in an educated Christian family, she has a tendency to look down on atheists and members of other religions. - Theme: Proving Christianity True by Exploring Evil. Description: Although The Screwtape Letters is a novel about Christian morality, it's written from the perspective of evildoers—devils. It's important to understand why Lewis chooses to tell his story in this way, and what the advantages and limitations of his form are.Throughout the book, the devil Screwtape gives Wormwood, his nephew, advice about how to corrupt human beings. In giving this advice, Screwtape makes observations about human nature and humanity's potential for virtue. In other words, in order to talk about doing evil, Screwtape has to talk about good. The result of this is that Screwtape's letters form a "negative" portrait of Christianity. For example, when Screwtape tells Wormwood that he should try to convince the "patient"—the human they're trying to corrupt—to embrace fashion and progress as his ideals, it's very clear that C.S. Lewis believes that fashion and progress impede Christians in their quest to remain pious. In short, The Screwtape Letters is a thorough guide to how not to be a Christian—and therefore, it's an equally thorough guide to how to be a Christian. Screwtape essentially expresses Lewis's beliefs—the only difference is that Screwtape views and expresses these beliefs in a negative way, whereas Lewis sincerely believes them.One consequence of Lewis's writing The Screwtape Letters in this "negative" fashion is that he can "disprove" evil by means of the logical strategy known as "reductio ad absurdum." In this technique, the logician first tries to prove that "not X"—the opposite of X—is true. But if, in following the logic of "not X," the logician reaches a logical impossibility, the logician then demonstrates that "not X" is absurd—and, therefore, that "X" is true after all.In this way, by depicting Screwtape's efforts to logically explain his theories, Lewis ends up showing that those theories of God and morality are self-contradictory. At one point, Screwtape acknowledges that God loves humanity. Elsewhere, he expresses his belief that love doesn't exist, and that the only goal of life is to conquer other life. When Wormwood calls him out on this contradiction, Screwtape is forced to backpedal and amend his beliefs. Following the rules of reductio ad absurdum, the message is clear: love does exist, and God has boundless love for human beings.Ultimately, the form and logical structure of The Screwtape Letters supports the traditional Christian idea that, in the end, evil actually aids the side of good. Screwtape explicitly acknowledges this toward the end of the novel, when he angrily points out that devils "can't win" when it comes to corrupting humanity. If they fill humans with fear, then humans will feel humility for their sins, and ultimately come closer to God. The devils' attempt to corrupt humanity usually backfires. In this sense, the form of The Screwtape Letters mirrors the content. Because it's written from the devils' point of view, it forms a perfect "negative" of Christian doctrine, and by showing that the worship of evil is ultimately self-contradictory and self-defeating, Lewis's examination of evil ultimately pushes the reader back to morality and piety. - Theme: Religion and Reason. Description: In Screwtape's first letter to Wormwood, he tells Wormwood that the goal of a devil should be to prevent a human being from thinking. Through this advice from one devil to another, C.S. Lewis makes the argument that if a person thinks critically and analytically about Christianity and religion in general, then that person will come to understand it and embrace it. While this idea may sound simplistic, it's by no means the common view of Christianity. In fact, as Lewis readily acknowledges, many Christian authorities throughout history have actually repressed critical thinking about religion. In contrast to many Christians before him, in The Screwtape Letters Lewis wants to use reason and logic—rather than just blind faith—to support Christian teachings.In the novel, there are countless examples of Lewis's belief that Christianity is fundamentally rational. In a sense, every letter Screwtape sends Wormwood is an attempt, at least on Lewis's part, to use logic to prove one part of Christianity. One clear example of this principle is Letter XXI, in which Screwtape shows that the patient is foolish to think that his free time belongs to him. The patient does not "own" time any more than he owns the moon. The belief in ownership, Screwtape concludes, is a silly human superstition—indeed, if humans were to stop and think logically about the concept of ownership for even a fraction of a second, they would realize how irrational it is. Screwtape's reasoning points readers in the direction of a key Christian idea: the notion that humans are not truly in control of their own lives at all. This is an idea that's arguably best exemplified at the end of the Biblical Book of Job, in which God scolds the titular human character for falsely thinking that he "owns" his own health, success, life, or happiness.Lewis uses The Screwtape Letters to prove that Christianity is a rational system of beliefs, but he also admits that reason by itself isn't enough to convert anyone to Christianity. This becomes obvious when one compares Lewis with Screwtape, his literary creation. They're both perfectly rational beings, and both have little patience for humans' foolishness and shortsightedness. And yet Lewis is a Christian and a lover of God, while Screwtape despises God and Christianity. Whatever the difference between Lewis and Screwtape might be, it has nothing to do with logic.Ultimately, Lewis suggests that reason is an extremely powerful weapon for the Christian, but it's not the only weapon—in other words, reason is "necessary but insufficient" for a belief in Christian teaching. If one pairs rationality with a sincere love for God, then Christian teachings follow logically from one another. Without love, Lewis suggests, the rational thinker is no better off than Screwtape. - Theme: Love. Description: Try as he might, Screwtape cannot understand love. As a result, Screwtape cannot understand why God created mankind, why he wants humans to be good, or why he wants to reward them in Heaven for their virtue. Screwtape's reasoning is impeccable, but his total incomprehension of love means that he'll never be a Christian. By exploring Screwtape's misunderstanding of this basic human (and divine) idea, Lewis constructs his own theory of what humans' love, both for God and for other humans, should be.Screwtape tries to define love by contrasting it with the devil's belief in "realism." The only purpose of life, he insists, is to conquer other forms of life, taking things for oneself so that other beings can't have them. The technical term for this way of looking at the world is as a "zero-sum game"—any advantage earned by one person is seen as a lost opportunity for food, shelter, or pleasure for another person. Screwtape believes that love is the opposite of "realism," that love is the belief that two beings can share the same needs, and that they can work together to satisfy these needs. This technical explanation of love may well define love for Screwtape, but it cannot convey love, in the same sense that looking at sheet music can't convey the sense of music. (It shouldn't come as a surprise that Screwtape admits that he cannot understand music, either.) In any event, Wormwood reports Screwtape to the authorities because Screwtape dares to suggest that God loves humanity—and this puts an end to Screwtape's thinking about love for some time.In the second half of The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape continues his discussion of love with Wormwood, without ever admitting the "heretical" idea that God loves humanity. At the same time that Screwtape criticizes humans' love for one another, Lewis implicitly asks questions about love, such as, "How should people love?" and "Is it possible to love too much or too little?"In order to answer his own questions, Lewis, writing in the guise of Screwtape, investigates "modern love." Modern lovers, Screwtape notes, are too eager to fall in love with others, and wrongly confuse love with lust. Most absurdly, they believe that love is the only reason to marry someone. While Screwtape's thoughts on love can hardly be trusted, his position is consistent with the beliefs Lewis subscribes to elsewhere in The Screwtape Letters. Lewis maintains that modern human beings are too "extreme" in their thinking and their behaviors. Love, he acknowledges, can often be extreme or excessive. There are many couples who avoid talking about their problems and their feelings, simply because they are in love. The result is that couples' problems with one another resurface years later, causing resentment and arguments. At the simplest level, Lewis believes, these kinds of modern behaviors are morally wrong because they encourage people to love imperfect things, such as people, more than they love God, the source of all perfection.In the end, even though the devils in The Screwtape Letters cannot understand love, Lewis spells out his own theory of love. Lewis maintains that love is of vital, indeed, self-evident importance for human civilization, but also that it can't replace other human virtues. When speaking about the love between human beings, Lewis wants people to moderate their love with other emotions and virtues: respect, loyalty, etc. The only time when love should be extreme is when a human loves God. - Theme: Freedom, Will, and Sin. Description: Early on in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape explains the challenges that human beings face in their lives. God has created humans to be deeply flawed—they have imperfect knowledge of the world and of themselves, they are foolish and irrational, and they often disrespect God. Humanity's imperfection, Screwtape maintains, is a consequence of its freedom.In Christian theology, humans are unique insofar as they have free will. While free will is a notoriously difficult concept to define (even Lewis doesn't try to do so in The Screwtape Letters), one useful "test" of free will was proposed by the important Christian thinker Saint Augustine: if a being commits a wrongful act, the act can only be considered a "sin" if the being, placed under identical circumstances, could have behaved any other way. If the being was incapable of doing anything else, then it follows that the being was not truly "free," and thus had no choice but to disrespect God.Because humans have free will, they are constantly vacillating between good and evil, or between God and Satan. Screwtape and Wormwood cannot "force" the patient to do anything, because forcing the patient to behave a certain way would mean that he has not acted freely, and therefore not really sinned. Both God and Satan can only "encourage" the patient to behave a certain way—whether the patient will embrace good or evil is ultimately up to him. While humans' free will makes them weak and prone to temptation, Screwtape grudgingly admits that free will is also a major problem for devils. Because humans face constant temptation, God respects and rewards them for resisting it throughout their lives. In this way, humans can only redeem themselves and go to Heaven because they are free—if humans had no choice but to be good, there would be nothing impressive about their actions or voluntary about their love.In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis implicitly asks an important question about free will: if humans, being free, are constantly being encouraged to do good and evil by God and Satan, respectively—in other words, if they're constantly moving between virtue and sin—then how is it possible for humans to make any real progress toward Heaven? Won't good behavior always be canceled out by sinful behavior?While Lewis acknowledges that it's impossible for any human being to behave with perfect virtue, he thinks it's extremely important that human beings try to behave this way. This is why the human will is of the utmost importance to Lewis. Screwtape points out that a human's will is the "closest thing" to his being, followed by his intellect. Screwtape explains that a devil must tempt a human to will evil—in other words, to commit evil actions. By the same logic, God wants human beings to behave morally—in other words, to be able to point to their moral actions, not just their moral thoughts. By translating will into action, humans can "train" themselves to behave morally in the future, ensuring that their behavior is much closer to perfect good than perfect evil.Ultimately, Lewis concludes that freedom is humanity's greatest weakness, but also its greatest strength. While freedom may allow humans to sin, and thus go to Hell, it also allows them to overcome their sins, train themselves to commit moral actions, and go to Heaven. - Theme: Fashion, Progress, and Change. Description: At many points in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape expresses his satisfaction with the modern European emphasis on fashion, change, and "the new." This is a signal, of course, that Lewis isn't at all fond of this emphasis.At the time when Lewis was writing The Screwtape Letters, Europe's intellectual history was (and still is) in the shadow of such monumental 19th century thinkers as George Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. While it would take thousands of pages to make a thorough analysis of all four of these thinkers, one important thing all four have in common is their emphasis on vast, historical processes. Marx, for instance, believed that all economics would gradually move toward a state of communism, according to which the proletariat (working class) would control the means of production. Similarly, Hegel believed that history is a history of ideas—that an idea that is true and "right" at one time may eventually change into another idea. Nietzsche went even further in saying that truth, as we understand it, was impossible—there were many, contradictory truths.Part of the problem with these intellectuals' emphasis on change, at least as Lewis sees it, is that they focus too much on the future. By celebrating progress, thinkers like Marx and Hegel point us toward a bright future. One side effect of this, Lewis believes, is that people learn to think of the present as secondary in importance to the things to come. This is dangerous for morality, because all sin is committed because people think about the future instead of focusing on the present. People steal, for instance, because they need the money in the future—they ignore the feelings of guilt and sin that will afflict them in the present. By the same logic, people often commit murder on the pretext that the murder is necessary in order to achieve some lofty, future goal.Another reason that Lewis distrusts the emphasis on change is that it makes people distrust the simple notions of truth and falsehood. Thus the reader of Hegel or Nietzsche, comfortable with thinking about "relative" truths, or information which can be true at one time and false at another, will lose sight of the one most important truths: the existence of the Christian God.A final reason that Lewis rejects the emphasis on change, progress, and fashion is that it encourages people to ignore truthful ideas, simply because those ideas have existed for a long time. Thus, Screwtape notes that humans ignore the late classical philosophy of Boethius, who wrote insightfully about God and free will, simply because Boethius died more than a thousand years ago. Similarly, humans reject the doctrine of Puritanism simply because Puritanism—a good ideology that encourages people to be honest, chaste, and moral—has been around for centuries. The overvaluation of new things encourages people to embrace the new simply because it is new. Lewis has no patience for such foolishness—the existence of God and the supremacy of Christianity cannot, in his opinion, go in and out of fashion.Ultimately, Lewis is skeptical of change, but he's not a reactionary. Change, he argues, is neither inherently good nor inherently bad—it just is. There may well be new philosophies and ideologies that are worth studying and practicing, but they shouldn't be taken up simply because of their novelty. By the same logic, people shouldn't abandon Christianity simply because it isn't new. - Climax: Climax:the patient's death - Summary: The novel consists of 31 letters written by a devil named Screwtape to his nephew, a young devil named Wormwood. The author, C.S. Lewis, notes that he has no intention of explaining how he came to acquire these letters. In the early letters of the book, Screwtape responds to the news that Wormwood is busy trying to tempt a young man, the patient, to move away from God—the Enemy, as Screwtape calls him—and embrace sin. Screwtape gives Wormwood advice on how to influence the patient in various small ways, thereby encouraging the patient to move away from God and toward "Our Father," Satan. Screwtape advises Wormwood to prevent the patient from thinking whenever possible, since reason will only encourage the patient to accept Christianity with greater fervency. Wormwood should try to prevent the patient from thinking about the history of Christianity, and instead influence the patient to focus excessively on the ugliness and imperfection of his peers and of family, especially his mother. In this way, Wormwood can encourage the patient to focus too exclusively on vice, imperfection, and the material realm, and reject piety, perfection, and the abstract moral realm. Wormwood reports to Screwtape that a war (World War II) has broken out in Europe, prompting Screwtape to send Wormwood a series of letters on fear, violence, and bravery. Screwtape explains that war can be good or bad for the devils' cause. It's good in the sense that it fills people with fear and makes them turn to sin and sensual pleasure, but it's also bad because it encourages people to think seriously about death, and therefore behave morally. Screwtape explains to Wormwood that whether the patient becomes a patriot or a pacifist, if he is extreme in his beliefs then his behavior will be sinful—extremism of any kind, except extremism for God, is a sin. Wormwood writes to Screwtape, proud that the patient is "losing his religion." Screwtape angrily reminds Wormwood that people are always moving between periods of depression and disappointment and periods of happiness—unfortunately, periods of depression are actually good for God, because if people can continue to worship God during this time, then it makes them nearly impossible to corrupt in the future. Screwtape adds, grudgingly, that God loves humanity and wants them to be rewarded for their virtue in Heaven. He also notes that modern European society has an irrational prejudice in favor of the new and of fashion—this encourages people to abandon Christianity simply because it's old-fashioned, a great help to devils. Screwtape learns that the patient has befriended a married couple that regularly mocks Christianity and celebrates the importance of progress. Screwtape tells Wormwood to use this development to his advantage: he should encourage the patient to spend more time with the couple, until the couple's beliefs gradually become his own. Screwtape warns Wormwood that although he is successfully corrupting the patient, he must be careful not to corrupt him too quickly, for fear that the patient will realize that he is sinning and return to the church. In his next letter, Screwtape reveals that Wormwood has failed to corrupt the patient—in fact, he has allowed the patient to return to the church. Wormwood allowed this to happen, Screwtape angrily explains, by letting the patient experience pleasure. Pleasure, Screwtape shows, is always dangerous for devils, since God is its creator. While some kinds of pleasure can be sinful, it's only sinful because of the quantity of pleasure being demanded. There is a lull in the war in Europe, filling the patient with fear and anxiety. During this lull, Screwtape addresses a wide variety of questions Wormwood has raised about humanity, virtue, and sin. Screwtape notes that humans corrupt themselves when they become "connoisseurs" of churches, and also notes with amusement that the Church of England has torn itself apart with hundreds of petty debates. He makes a thorough study of gluttony, concluding that it is just as gluttonous to fuss over small portions as it is to insist on large portions. Finally, Screwtape writes Wormwood a series of letters on the difference between love and lust, concluding that a weakness of modern European society is that is conflates these two things. As a result, millions of young couples marry out of lust, or, even worse, out of the mistaken belief that love is the only reason to marry someone. In reality, Screwtape writes, a marriage requires loyalty, respect, and hundreds of other virtues to work properly. Screwtape expresses his exasperation with the principle of love, noting that the goal of all beings is to fight and compete with other beings. Wormwood writes Screwtape a letter in which he points out a contradiction in Screwtape's reasoning—if God loves humanity, then how can it be true that the goal of all beings is to fight with other beings? Screwtape revises his own opinion, worriedly begging Wormwood not to show his letters to the "Secret Police," which is responsible for punishing devils who commit heresy. Screwtape explains that God does not love humanity—on the contrary, his love for humanity is only a smokescreen to disguise his true, mysterious plan—a plan that no devil has ever understood. In the following letter, Screwtape illustrates the fallacy in the patient's belief that he is entitled to "free time." On the contrary, the patient owes everything to God—his talent, his intellect, his body, and his time. Thus, it is sheer foolishness to suppose that one "deserves" anything at all. Screwtape speculates that God wants humans to reach the point where they can be aware of their talents and abilities, and yet also be fully aware that they owe everything to God. Screwtape learns from Wormwood that the patient has fallen in love with a Christian woman, someone so virtuous that she makes Screwtape physically ill, and causes him to transform into a giant centipede. Screwtape smugly tells Wormwood that Wormwood's attempts to report Screwtape to the Secret Police have failed, and that Wormwood faces a horrible punishment if he fails to corrupt the patient. Now that the patient is with his lover, and is meeting her educated, Christian family, Screwtape advises Wormwood to appeal to the patient's vanity and desire for the new. Modern humans, he explains, have an irrational desire for new things and fashions—this desire is ridiculous, he concludes, because new things aren't inherently good or bad. When the patient begins courting his lover, Screwtape advises Wormwood to make the young couple think of love and nothing else. In this way, Screwtape explains, they will sacrifice their own happiness for one another's sake, meaning that in the future, they will come to resent each other. The war commences, and the patient is shipped off to fulfill his "duties." Screwtape warns Wormwood that the patient could die in a state of virtue, before Wormwood has a chance to corrupt him. In general, he notes, humans are too afraid of death and too fond of life. Life and experience are good for devils, because over time, people begin to despair and become more prone to sin. Ironically, civilization values people who have had long lives and many experiences. As the air raids on the patient's community begin, Screwtape contemplates how to corrupt the patient. Wormwood's goal, he writes, should be to encourage the patient to love his community and therefore hate all Germans. But this is difficult, since Wormwood runs the danger of encouraging the patient to feel more love and therefore be a more virtuous person. In the same way, Wormwood could encourage the patient to feel cowardice, but this would result in the patient feeling humility and therefore moving closer to God. In general, Screwtape admits, devils have a very difficult job—no matter how hard they try, mankind has a way of embracing faith and piety. In his final letter to Wormwood, Screwtape greets Wormwood with false warmth and explains that the patient has died in an air raid. In his final moments of life, the patient "saw God," and realized that no evil could ever corrupt him. Screwtape admits that he has no idea what God is trying to accomplish by loving humanity, and that he doesn't know what awaits the patient in Heaven. He even expresses his desire to learn what lies in Heaven. Screwtape reminds Wormwood that he feels "the same love" for Wormwood that Wormwood feels for Screwtape. In the end, he reminds Wormwood that the penalty for failing to corrupt a human is being eaten alive—and Screwtape himself will be the devil to eat Wormwood.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Sculptor’s Funeral - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The fictional frontier town of Sand City, Kansas - Character: Harvey Merrick. Description: The story focuses on Harvey Merrick, an acclaimed sculptor whose body is returning home to Sand City, Kansas, after a life spent pursuing his art in the Eastern U.S. Unlike most protagonists, Harvey is only described through anecdotes told about him, because he dies of tuberculosis prior to the events presented in "The Sculptor's Funeral." This story is unusual because the plot revolves around Harvey's funeral, so the reader's understanding of him is shaped by only other characters' opinions of him, truthful or otherwise. However, Henry Steavens, Harvey's apprentice, shares that it was his master's dying wish that his body be returned home. Cather's sole physical description of him depicts his lack of peace in death, lying in his casket, where Harvey's face does not contain "that repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead." Harvey is remembered fondly only by Steavens and by his childhood friend, Jim Laird. The townspeople of Sand City, including his parents Martin and Annie, use Harvey's funeral as an occasion to get together and slander him for how they believed he failed, demonstrating the alienation of an artist by society. Symbolizing Harvey's achievement as an artist, a palm leaf decorates his casket. So, although most people in his hometown are incapable of recognizing his success as a sculptor, their judgment is equally incapable of rendering him as any less of a renowned artist to the rest of the world. - Character: Henry Steavens. Description: Harvey's devoted apprentice, Henry Steavens, accompanies Harvey's body home from Boston. Steavens is a stranger to everyone in Sand City, who observes the funeral unfold much like the reader does throughout the story. Steavens represents the cultured elite of the Eastern U.S. Harvey found his home with after leaving Kansas. When entering his late master's childhood home, Steavens can't recognize anything that would indicate that this is where his beloved Harvey was raised. Deeply upset by the tense interactions amongst Harvey's family, Steavens seeks out the solace of companionship in someone else that actually cared about Harvey with Roxy, the Merrick's servant, and later Laird, Harvey's childhood friend. Steavens listens to the townsfolk's various disparaging anecdotes about Harvey in disbelief, desperately wanting to escape the place that Harvey had years ago. The disparity between the townspeople's perception of Harvey and Steavens's warm memories of him serve to undercut the credibility of the townspeople. This disparity also serves to create a distinction between the values of those living on harsh frontier of the Western U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century compared to the values of those in more broadly educated, cultured Eastern U.S. Steavens's presence at the funeral makes Laird speak up against the town's disparaging portrayal of Harvey, because Laird doesn't want Steavens to reconsider his opinion about Harvey based on a small town's idle gossip. - Character: Jim Laird. Description: Standing apart from the rest of the group awaiting Harvey's body, lawyer Jim Laird's character bridges the divide between Steavens and the rest of the funeral attendees. Laird was educated with Harvey in the Eastern U.S. as a young man, but returned home to practice law instead of seeking his fortune elsewhere. Acting as a foil to Harvey, Laird represents the ruined potential of the young men who were stifled by their environment. Laird aspired to become "a great man," but it was Harvey who actually achieved that status. A drunk and a "shyster," Laird became what Sand City wanted him to be—someone they could make complicit in their crooked financial dealings. In his climactic tirade against the town's defamation of Harvey, Laird expresses his disgust with the people of Sand City. His death concludes the story, as he passes away from a cold caught on the way "to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble […] cutting government timber." - Character: Mr. Martin Merrick. Description: Martin Merrick is Harvey's father. He is too ill to wait for his son's body on the winter night the coffin arrives at the train station. Described as a meek and feeble elderly man, the unhealthy relationship dynamic between he and his wife, Annie, suggests a very unhappy boyhood for Harvey. Due in part to this dynamic, the family is only present for the beginning of the funeral before the barrage of unkind words about his son. Unable to look at his son's coffin, Mr. Merrick looks at his wife "with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip." By comparing Mr. Merrick to a beaten dog, Cather intimates the toxic home life Harvey must have had growing up, giving the reader ample reasoning for him leaving Sand City. Grieving the loss of his son, Mr. Merrick laments that Harvey was "always a good boy" but "none of us ever [did] onderstand him." His financial support of his son and genuine desire to know him makes Mr. Merrick a much more sympathetic character than the rest of the Merrick family. - Character: Mrs. Annie Merrick. Description: Annie Merrick is Harvey's mother, depicted as a violent force of nature. Cather flips gender stereotypes by placing Harvey's mother in the more dominant position over her husband, Martin, in the Merrick household. Mrs. Merrick displays a surface-level grief for her son, her face so "coarsened by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there." She is a large woman, domineering and capable of extreme violence as is demonstrated by her abuse of their servant, Roxy, during the funeral with guests present. Laird tells Steavens about the "hell" Harvey's mother put him through as child, making his homecoming in death all the more complicated. His tough childhood did not prevent him from becoming a great sculptor, but it was something Harvey had to flee from in order to become successful. - Character: Roxy. Description: Roxy is the Merrick's servant that Mrs. Merrick abuses in the kitchen during the funeral. As she is one of the only characters displaying genuine emotion over Harvey's death, Steavens feels most comfortable standing next to the person he probably has the least in common with in the room. Her gentle, maternal description exists in stark contrast to Mrs. Merrick's dramatic, overbearing one. - Theme: Artist vs. Society. Description: Willa Cather's short story "The Sculptor's Funeral" explores the relationship between the artist and society. Cather portrays the townspeople of fictional Sand City, Kansas, as unrefined and amoral. Initially, it seems that Cather's scathing descriptions of the townsfolk rely on rural, Western stereotypes. However, as the story progresses, Cather uses the townspeople to represent the "whirlpool" of societal expectations, vice, and greed from which Harvey Merrick, a sculptor, escaped to pursue his unconventional passion. By depicting Harvey's funeral as a series of judgments on his character, Cather demonstrates the alienation of the artist by a society incapable of understanding him or her and suggests that it is often necessary to escape a negative, judgmental environment in order for an artist to reach his or her true potential. Cather characterizes the townspeople as a homogeneous collective in order to demonstrate the harsh societal judgment Harvey receives when his body returns home. Awaiting Harvey Merrick's corpse, the townspeople of Sand City, Kansas are initially described as a singular entity: "The men on the siding stood first on one foot then on the other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold." Moving in unison, "the company" of men is presented like a disheveled military. While "company" can simply mean a group, it does have militaristic connotations and can refer to a squadron or battalion of troops. Cather chooses this word in order to show the unified front that the sculptor must face in Sand City, even after his death. The townspeople not only move in unison, they also think in unison, "convers[ing] in low tones […] seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them." By having a throng of judgmental townspeople, rather than family or close friends, waiting for Harvey's body, Cather highlights just how alienated Harvey was in life, and how he remains so in death. He is coming home, not to the warmth and grief one would expect from a family funeral, but to the continued denunciation of his life's work as a sculptor. In contrast to the people of Sand City, Henry Steavens, Harvey's apprentice, represents the educated elite in the Eastern United States who appreciated and recognized the artist's worth. Cather employs a sculpting metaphor to demonstrate that genius can spring from unlikely places—like the unrefined, rough-and-tumble town of Sand City. Steavens contemplates "what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter's clay." This metaphor eloquently articulates the relationship between an artist and his background—he is the refined vessel and the crude clay is the unsophisticated foundation from which he was formed—especially when that background involves individuals committed to misunderstanding him. Watching the "sunset over the marshes" in Sand City as a child, Harvey was able to "keep himself sweet" because he dedicated himself to the pursuit of beauty. Had he gotten swept up in the greed and materialism plaguing Sand City, he might not have flourished as an artist. By moving to the Eastern U.S., Harvey freed himself of the judgments of his hometown and fully committed himself to his art. In this sense, Cather portrays the artist's background (especially in relationship to societal expectations) as something to escape rather than a source of inspiration. As the only character who spent much time with Harvey as an adult, Steavens is even more amazed that such a spectacular artist "whose mind was to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions" could come from "all this raw, biting ugliness." Through Steavens's observations at the funeral that the people of Sand City, rather than Harvey, are the misguided ones, Cather clarifies her view that society often wrongly devalues artists and can hinder their potential to create. Through vivid imagery describing the townspeople alongside Steavens's keen observations, Cather paints the path of Harvey Merrick's life—one that takes him from being an overlooked outcast in Sand City, Kansas, to a celebrated sculptor in the Eastern U.S. It is not that the artist has no place in society at large; it is a particular kind of society, according to Cather, that denies art its value and denies its artists' worth. Escaping these societal limitations is what allows Harvey to follow his passion and create meaningful work, regardless of if these accomplishments will ever be appreciated by his hometown. - Theme: Judgment. Description: Judgment appears throughout "The Sculptor's Funeral" to give various perspectives on the life of the deceased sculptor whose body is returning home for burial. Cather uses the townspeople's harsh criticism of Harvey to illustrate the disparity between the toxic environment he came from and the art he went on to create. Gossiping about a living person might be a common occurrence in a small town, but Sand City citizens clearly never learned that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead. By having the townspeople disrupt the usual social niceties of a funeral, Cather implies that they are not reliable judges of character. Through the townspeople's defamation of Harvey at his own funeral, Cather explores the influence of a disapproving home on the outcome of an individual. By contrasting this criticism with Jim Laird and Henry Steavens's fond memories of Harvey, Cather presents the final Christian judgment as the only true judge of a person's character. The people of Sand City can condemn Harvey Merrick as weak and incompetent, but it is they who require the "mercy" of God.  Many of the Sand City townspeople give their individual, condemning assessments of Harvey Merrick throughout the story, showing that the residents have no qualms about belittling a dead man. The first speaker in the story, the Grand Army man, disparages that the funeral will not be a nicer "order funeral." Even though the sculptor had "some repytation," this townsperson feels no shame declaring Harvey's funerary arrangements to be inadequate. By beginning the story this way, Cather creates initial uncertainty about the reliability of the characters' opinions and uncertainty as to what kind of man Harvey Merrick really was. "Some repytation" makes Harvey sound like an infamous criminal rather than acclaimed artist. During the funeral, each townsperson takes their turn passing judgment on the sculptor and sharing anecdotes that frame the deceased man in negative light. The cattleman states that Harvey wasn't "sharp." Commenting on Harvey's "ladylike voice," the coal and lumber dealers agree that he "shore never was fond of work." Due to Harvey's pursuit of his passion, the townspeople undermine his intelligence and emasculate him. Rejecting typical social niceties one would assume at a funeral, the townspeople take this as their opportunity readily discuss their negative opinions about Harvey. However, it's clear that their criticism says more about them than it does about Harvey. At one point, the Grand Army man relates an anecdote in which Harvey unintentionally killed one of his cows. The cow escaped as Harvey was watching the sunset over the marshes. With this anecdote, Cather juxtaposes the sculptor's appreciation of nature and beauty with his inattention to the concerns of Sand City's citizens. While this story of Harvey as a younger person could have illuminated his values to his fellow townspeople by demonstrating that he was a thoughtful man who was captivated by nature and beauty, the townspeople choose to see the bad in him. While Cather abundantly portrays the negative opinions of the townspeople throughout the story, only a few characters truly appreciate who Harvey Merrick was.  It is significant that Cather includes Jim Laird and Henry Steavens's grief-stricken discussion of Harvey because it further illustrates that the townspeople aren't worthy judges of character. By comparing Harvey to an oyster in the conversation between Laird and Steavens, Cather shows that Harvey's childhood in Sand City made him closed off to human connection. However, there are a select few who knew him and appreciated him for who he really was—a master sculptor and a great man. Steavens shares that although Harvey "distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate." Much like an oyster, Harvey was seemingly impenetrable. But for the few that had the pleasure of truly knowing him, saw that he possessed a pearl of talent and an unmatched appreciation for beauty. While Laird's and Steavens's fond memories of Harvey cast significant doubt on whether the townspeople's judgments are warranted or accurate, Cather also explores the idea of Christian judgment to further devalue the townspeople's judgment as nothing more than idle talk. The minister, the character one might assume to be most justified in doling out judgment, refrains from speaking his mind about Harvey even though he wants to. His silence stems from the shame that his own sons are gamblers, one of who was shot in a gambling hall. Even more so, his shame stems from his perceived inability to raise moral sons. Cather portrays the individual that should be the most pious as incompetent and incapable of positive influence on neither his own sons nor anybody in Sand City. Cather uses the minister's inability to pass judgment on Harvey to suggest that the other, more vocal townspeople don't have room to talk, either. Prior to his death, Harvey warned his apprentice that after "[the townspeople] have had their say, I shan't have much to fear from the judgment of God!" Harvey was absolutely aware that the town would judge him harshly, but he was concerned about his apprentice's reaction to such defamation. His past made him wary of humanity, but it made him less fearful of God's final judgment. He knew he would have nothing to fear from an honest assessment of his life. However, Harvey predicted that the townspeople's would illuminate his perceived flaws and exaggerate even more, yet he did not defend himself to Steavens. For Harvey, their judgment is just as inevitable, albeit more vicious, as God's final judgment. Cather explores the townspeople's judgment of Harvey Merrick to demonstrate that those who live a life consumed by gossip and criticism are not fit to judge a life led in pursuit of passion. Cather argues that the stories others tell about an individual (honest or otherwise) cannot impact that person's identity, especially when those storytellers might not be upstanding individuals. Their anecdotes about Harvey aren't an accurate retelling of his life because they didn't know him or appreciate him for who he really was. Spinning tales that depict Harvey as a weak, incompetent drunk, the townspeople will require far more mercy for their despicable treatment of him (and the other wasted youths of Sand City) than Harvey could ever fear at the gates of God. - Theme: Success, Money, and Materialism. Description: When Steavens, Harvey's apprentice, first enters the childhood home of his late master, looking "for some mark of identification," he can't fathom that any of this home could belong to Harvey. Cather describes the sculptor's childhood home as markedly materialistic and chintzy, displaying none of Harvey's artwork. Like Harvey's family, the inhabitants of Sand City, view money as the only real measure of success. Through the townspeople's anecdotes about Harvey during his funeral, Cather posits the figure of the artist as fundamentally at odds with the rampant materialism present in parts of the Western United States in the early 20th century. Cather uses vivid imagery throughout the story to illuminate the greed-fueled materialism driving Sand City, making it difficult for the townspeople to view success as anything but a synonym for wealth. While using an ostentatious "pearl-handled pocket-knife," one of the two bankers, Phelps, laughs at the question of Harvey's will. Even though the sculptor was a widely praised artist, the townspeople would always view his lack of material wealth as reason to slander him. Phelps's outright dismissal that there could even be a will indicates the town's inability to redefine their narrow notion of success to include great artistic fame. The irony here is that the townspeople clearly are in no position to judge the quality of Harvey's character, let alone his success as an artist and how that success should present. Harvey's success as a sculptor is not diminished by his hometown's inability to acknowledge his life's work as an artist a success. The palm leaf on Harvey Merrick's coffin symbolizes his achievement as an artist, regardless of what Sand City thinks of him. After listening to the town's endless criticism of his master, Steavens is in disbelief that "the palm on the coffin meant nothing to them." By forcing interpretation of the palm leaf, Cather assumes the reader will relate more with the educated elite of the East than the uncultured townsfolk of Sand City who are ignorant of the palm leaf's significance. The palm leaf historically has been a symbol of achievement. Early Christians adopted it as a symbol of triumph over sin—use of the palm leaf on a tomb let other Christians know that a martyr was interred there. Cather invokes the traditional meaning of this symbol to confirm Harvey's great accomplishment as an artist—an accomplishment untouchable even by the harshest repudiation by his hometown. Even though Harvey's success as a sculptor doesn't align with the townspeople's definition, he is still incredibly successful in his own right. Jim Laird's tirade about the town confirms what the reader might have been suspecting—Harvey was much better off for having left Sand City. Staying behind, Jim became the "shyster," or fraudulent lawyer, the townspeople wanted him to be to suit their needs, and while he was successful (perhaps even respected), he was miserable. Jim reminds the town that he wasn't the only man they ruined, reproaching them about their behavior at past funerals, "[sitting] by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town; and, if I remember rightly, you were never too well satisfied when you checked them up." After a series of rhetorical questions illuminating the fates of a few unfortunate boys who didn't leave Sand City, Jim claims the reason for their downfall is that the town "drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers." Cather uses Laird's diatribe against the townspeople to exemplify how a backwards town like Sand City can ruin a man's potential entirely. Even though both Laird and Harvey had the intention of becoming "great men," only Harvey was able to climb the "big, clean up-grade" and escape the town's expectations. The other young men's deaths at the hand of their vices—one who "[took] to drinking and forge[d] a check and shot himself" and another who was shot in a gambling house—indicate that the town's greed rubbed off on them, which ultimately ruined their lives. Harvey's commitment to his art, and thereby his own version of success, spared him a similar fate. At a base level, the town and Harvey have drastically different values, especially regarding art, education, and what it means to be successful. The other banker in the parlor discusses how Harvey's father mortgaged some of his farms to be able to afford Harvey's continued education. Instead of viewing him as a father supporting his son's passion, the townspeople view Harvey's reliance on his father's finances as a kind of filial betrayal. To the fictional people of Sand City, Kansas, there is no value to an arts- or humanities-focused education. Phelps claims, "Where the old man made his mistake was sending the boy East to school… What Harvey needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas City business college." Not only does Phelps' retelling give Mr. Merrick all the power over the trajectory of Harvey's life, he argues that Harvey would have turned out better had he pursued a more practical education. They can't comprehend the value of Harvey's arts education, because they don't see the utility of it in their own lives. This narrow-minded, small-town stereotype creates a dichotomy of perceived intelligence between the Western U.S. and New England. Cather seems to be asserting a problematic view of the Western U.S. as plagued by money-grubbing philistines, while elevating the educated, cultured elite in the East. The Western frontier, which should be a place of prosperity, is portrayed as a corrupt wasteland when compared to the Eastern U.S., rich with its traditions and history. In "The Sculptor's Funeral," Cather posits art as the only true refuge from a materialistic, greedy world. - Theme: Homecoming. Description: Returning to the place of one's birth is a common theme in literature. However, Cather deviates from that identity-seeking narrative by having the sculptor's return home occur after his death. Rather than have the eponymous sculptor tell his own story about his upbringing and its effects, the reader hears about Harvey's life through the perspective of others. Harvey's childhood included its fair share of familial trauma, a bizarre parental dynamic, and a town that could not understand his interests or values—all things he returns to, in death, at the end of the story. Through this variant of the homecoming theme, Cather suggests that sometimes the pull of home—even if it was an unhappy one—is too powerful to resist.  Harvey's family is not awaiting his body at the train station. Instead, members of the town are there to receive the coffin and send it up to the house. Cather uses this strange detail to begin weaving the miserable tale of Harvey's boyhood, as well as to assert the importance of the townspeople in that childhood. Showing the most genuine grief at the funeral, Roxy, the Merricks' servant, "was weeping silently […] occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob." By having the sculptor's apprentice, Steavens, stand next to her at the funeral, Cather illustrates the emotional distance between Harvey and his family. Steavens understandably feels more comfortable next to the only person outwardly expressing their grief about Harvey's passing. While not stating outright that Roxy was a maternal figure in Harvey's life, Cather presents her in a much more sympathetic light than Harvey's actual mother. Harvey experienced a traumatic childhood that included an unhealthy relationship dynamic between his abusive mother and subservient father. This dynamic between mother and father repeats itself at Harvey's funeral demonstrating that, even in death, Harvey is drawn into the interpersonal whirlpool present in Sand City. Theatrical and repulsive, Mrs. Merrick puts on a show of violent grief at her son's death. Mrs. Merrick "filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in angry water…" Through this simile and subversion of gender stereotypes, Cather asserts that Harvey did not have a nurturing mother that might have been capable of supporting his art. Mr. Merrick looks at his wife "with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip." While the previous simile compares Mrs. Merrick to a man-destroying force of nature, Cather uses this simile to both pity Mr. Merrick's inferior position and demonize his wife's treatment of him. Laird expresses to Steavens that Harvey's mother made his "life a hell." Impressively resilient, his childhood friend cannot fathom "how he kept himself sweet." Cather includes this dialogue to support the notion that Harvey was able to separate himself from what he experienced as a child. Returning to one's place of origin is significant in "The Sculptor's Funeral," because it demonstrates that the sculptor sees the poetic nature of concluding one's life at its beginning. The genesis of Harvey Merrick occurred amidst terrible trauma and pain. Harvey explains to Steavens on the day he dies, "It rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the end." It seems odd that someone would willingly return to a family and town that have harshly judged him his entire life. However, by having Harvey state his final wishes to his apprentice, Cather demonstrates his final acceptance of the people who raised him and the inevitability of his homecoming. Though he had no desire to return to Sand City while he was alive, with death approaching rapidly, Harvey surmises that his body should be buried there. While Harvey's family and the townspeople were something he had to escape in order to fulfill his purpose as a sculptor, in death, the pull of home is more powerful than the memories of a brutal boyhood. Asserting life's cyclical nature, Cather implicates that Harvey Merrick was bound to return home after his death. - Climax: Jim Laird confronts the townspeople and defends Harvey Merrick at the end of the story. - Summary: "The Sculptor's Funeral" relates the story of a sculptor's return to his hometown—a town he fled as a young man to pursue his art—to be buried. Jetting through calm meadows blanketed by snow, the night train carrying Harvey Merrick's body disrupts the "soft, smoke-coloured" stillness, arriving at the station in Sand City, Kansas. Only Harvey's devoted apprentice, Henry Steavens, accompanies his body home from Boston. Steavens is surprised to see that a company of men from town, not Harvey's friends or family, await the casket's arrival. Unwilling to part with his master's body, Steavens drives up to the Merrick family home in the hearse. Before the pallbearers can even bring the coffin into the house, Harvey's mother rushes outside in an exaggerated performance of her grief, "shrieking" about her son's death. They bring Harvey's casket into the parlor, decorated with overstuffed furniture and a collection of gaudy knick-knacks, none of which resemble Harvey (or his life's work) at all. More embarrassed by his wife's overemotional display, Mr. Merrick can't bring himself to look in his child's coffin until she violently totters from the room. Tenderly touching his dead son's face, Martin Merrick laments to Jim Laird that Harvey was "always a good boy," but nobody was capable of understanding him. Jim Laird, resident drunk and cunning lawyer, shares with Steavens that Harvey's mother made his childhood miserable. Confirming Mrs. Merrick's propensity for abuse, the two men overhear her violently beating Roxy, the Merrick's household servant, with exacting cruelty. Growing nauseous as he envisions the horrors his master's childhood must have contained, Steavens wants to flee from the house with "what was left" of Harvey. Instead, he stares inquiringly at Jim's features, with the keen attention that only an artist has. The funeral progresses, and Jim asks Steavens if Harvey was always "an oyster," because as a boy he was shy and reserved. Discussing Harvey's general mistrust of others, his apprentice describes him as committed to his sculpting and to believing the best in others, even though he didn't seem interested in entangling himself with them. More than anything else, to the two men who might have known him best, Harvey is an artist requiring a category all his own. Anything Harvey touched, "he revealed its holiest secret," "liberat[ing]" the innate beauty of a piece of marble. After the family goes to bed, Jim leaves the parlor, giving Steavens a chance to experience what the people from Sand City are like. The townspeople crowd into the parlor, chatting amongst themselves about local happenings. Instead of going around telling warmhearted stories about Harvey as a precocious little boy, each of the townspeople shares their version of why Harvey wasn't such a "great man." To them, Harvey was bad with money, overeducated, impractical, inattentive, and a rumored alcoholic. Steavens listens to these unkind anecdotes in disbelief, wondering how these people could possibly believe that about his highly regarded master. In response to this flood of criticism about Harvey, Jim comes back into the parlor beginning his tirade against the townspeople. Jim recounts that at other funerals of Sand City locals, the townsfolk responded with similar scathing stories about the person who died. He and Harvey went to school in the East together—Jim came home to become the lawyer the town intended him to be while Harvey stayed in the East, becoming the artist he intended to be. Wanting Steavens to remember Harvey as truly he was, Jim speaks up against the townspeople's harsh defamation. Under the weight of his wasted potential, Jim denounces Sand City as a town upon "which may God have mercy." After this impassioned speech against the town, Jim shakes Steavens's hand and they depart. Steavens attempts to reach out to Jim and reconnect after the funeral, but never hears anything back from him. Jim catches a cold and dies while helping one of the banker's sons escape legal trouble after cutting government timber.

- Genre: Adventure Novel - Title: The Sea-Wolf - Point of view: First Person - Setting: The Pacific Ocean between San Francisco and Japan - Character: Humphrey Van Weyden. Description: Humphrey Van Weyden, the narrator of The Sea-Wolf, is a wealthy intellectual and literary critic in his thirties who. After a ferry collision leaves Van Weyden stranded at sea, Wolf Larsen, the fearsome seal-hunting captain of the Ghost, rescues Van Weyden, forcing him to join the Ghost's. Eventually, Van Weyden falls in love with Maud Brewster, a poet Wolf Larson also rescues from a wreck and forces to stay aboard his ship. At the beginning of the story, Van Weyden isn't used to hard, physical labor—he has notably soft hands , which contrast with the calloused hands of the sailors around him. He begins at the lowliest position on the Ghost, forced to take orders even from the cook, Thomas Mugridge. As time passes, however, Van Weyden becomes more skilled as a sailor and more confident in his abilities. Van Weyden has a strange relationship with Wolf Larsen. While Larsen's masculinity, strength, and surprisingly large collection of books fascinate Van Weyden, he's immensely fearful of Larsen's unpredictable bad moods. By the end of the book, the relationship between Van Weyden and Wolf Larsen has become openly adversarial, with Larsen trying to kill Van Weyden. Despite Larsen's actions, though, Van Weyden refuses to kill an unarmed Wolf Larsen when he has the chance. Despite learning self-reliance from Larsen, Van Weyden never assumes Larsen's level of viciousness. The book ends with Van Weyden using all the skills and ingenuity he's learned as a sailor to survive on a small island with Maud Brewster, which ultimately leads to their rescue from a passing vessel. Van Weyden represents how the wealthy can be disconnected with the rest of the world and the difficult work performed by the working class, but he also represents the capacity of people to change and adapt to their circumstances. - Character: Wolf Larsen. Description: The story's antagonist, Wolf Larsen is the captain of a seal-hunting vessel called the Ghost. He rescues Humphrey Van Weyden after spotting him adrift in the sea following a ferry wreck, then he forces Van Weyden to stay aboard the Ghost and work as a cabin boy. Wolf Larsen is powerfully built and handsome. The novel never mentions his real name—everyone refers to him by the nickname "Wolf," just as they refer to his brother (and rival) by the nickname "Death" Larsen. Wolf Larsen is largely self-taught, both at sea where he started out as a cabin boy and in the arts and sciences (he is well-read and keeps a large collection of books in his cabin.) One of Wolf Larsen's defining characteristics is his temperamental personality. At times, he is a gracious host to Van Weyden, capable of holding long philosophical discussions. At other times, however, he is cruel and even murderous. Wolf Larsen is a big believer in Charles Darwin's concept of "survival of the fittest"—he frequently instigates conflict among his crew to weed out weak crew members. At times, though, Wolf seems to enjoy cruelty for its own sake. Wolf Larsen is also noteworthy for his committed belief in materialism, the idea that there's no such thing as eternal life. Wolf's materialism puts him at odds with Maud Brewster and Van Weyden, who both believe in idealism and the existence of immortal souls. Though Wolf Larsen's uncompromising methods as a leader initially instill fear in his subordinates, by the end of the story, his whole crew abandons him, and his health rapidly declines. Even in his illness, however, Wolf remains vicious and uncompromising—when Van Weyden tries to steal the Ghost, for instance, Wolf Larsen tries to kill him. Wolf Larsen is a complex, morally ambiguous character. On the one hand, he represents the appeal of self-reliance and the power of strength and fear. On the other hand, his demise illustrates the limits of these philosophies, which can sometimes lead to misery and loneliness. - Character: Maud Brewster. Description: Maud Brewster is a poet. Wolf Larsen rescues her after a shipwreck leaves her stranded at sea, then he forces her to stay on his vessel, the Ghost. Brewster soon becomes the love interest of Humphrey Van Weyden, a literary critic who is familiar with Brewster's work, and who is also an unwilling passenger on the Ghost. The presence of a woman on board the Ghost is unusual, but although Wolf Larsen can be a cruel leader, he is often a surprisingly courteous host to Maud Brewster, holding long philosophical discussions with her and Van Weyden about the existence of the soul. One night, however, Wolf assaults Brewster, and soon after, she and Van Weyden steal a small boat to escape. Bad wind takes them to a small, deserted island that they name Endeavour Island. Though Brewster comes from a wealthy background, the harsh circumstances on the island force her to develop new survival skills, and she often surprises Van Weyden with her strength and determination. Their experience on the island helps the two of them grow closer together. Unlike Wolf Larsen, whose "survival of the fittest" instincts drive him to behave cruelly and immorally, the character of Maud Brewster suggests that it is possible to hold on to morality and culture even in life-or-death circumstances. - Character: Death Larsen. Description: Death Larsen is the brother of the seal-hunting captain Wolf Larsen and is reportedly even more ruthless in his methods as a leader. He is captain of the Macedonia (likely a reference to the famous Macedonian general, Alexander the Great). Though Death Larsen never appears as a character in the book, he sends his crew to harass Wolf's crew and claim the seal-hunting grounds for themselves. Wolf responds by sending out his own crew to capture Death's hunters and hunting boats. Though Wolf is initially successful, Death eventually tracks down Wolf, offers Wolf's crew better pay, and leaves Wolf marooned alone on the Ghost. Death Larsen shows how in a survival-of-the-fittest system, the most vicious competitor will usually win, and he represents the person Wolf might have become if he had never read books or studied philosophy. - Character: Thomas Mugridge. Description: Thomas Mugridge is the cook and one of the lowest-ranking sailors on Wolf Larsen's vessel, the Ghost. He is noteworthy for having a Cockney accent (associated with a working-class area of London). Mugridge is initially in charge of introducing Humphrey Van Weyden to life on the Ghost, and he treats Van Weyden cruelly, giving Van Weyden the worst tasks and stealing all his money. Soon, however, Van Weyden rises through the ranks, sending Mugridge back to the bottom. The other sailors don't respect Mugridge, and they often beat him. Mugridge illustrates how people who receive cruel treatment can turn cruel themselves. - Character: George Leach. Description: George Leach is a young sailor on Wolf Larsen's vessel the Ghost. He becomes dissatisfied with life aboard the Ghost, particularly after witnessing Johnson be severely beaten. Eventually, he and Johnson attempt a mutiny against Wolf Larsen, but it fails. Leach and Johnson try to escape, but Wolf Larsen catches them, leaving them behind to die at sea. - Character: Johnson. Description: Johnson is a sailor on Wolf Larsen's vessel, the Ghost. Unlike Johansen, Johnson is not loyal to Wolf and even attempts a mutiny with George Leach. Though Wolf does not immediately kill Johnson and Leach after the mutiny, he eventually leaves them behind to die at sea, illustrating the consequences of crossing Wolf Larsen. - Character: Johansen. Description: Johansen is a sailor on Wolf Larsen's vessel, the Ghost. He is of Scandinavian heritage. When Humphrey Van Weyden joins the Ghost, the previous mate has just died, and Johansen has received a promotion to fill his role. Johansen remains loyal to Wolf Larsen until near the end, unlike Johnson, who attempts a mutiny with George Leach earlier in the book. Johansen represents how people can get ahead by going along with cruelty rather than trying to resist it. - Character: The Red-Faced Man. Description: The red-faced man is a passenger on the same ship as Humphrey Van Weyden that sinks off the coast of San Francisco. He is much more experienced on the sea than Van Weyden, and his expertise helps highlight just how much of a novice at sea Van Weyden is at the beginning of the book. - Theme: Self-Reliance and Maturation. Description: Jack London's The Sea-Wolf is the story of a rich intellectual named Humphrey Van Weyden who, over the course of a long stay on a seal-hunting vessel called the Ghost, learns how to do the hard manual labor that working on a ship requires. Though many of the new skills Van Weyden learns are physical, perhaps even more significant is the mental change that occurs in him as he learns how to better survive in the world without the help of others. Van Weyden's mentor for many of these lessons is Wolf Larsen, the ship's fearsome but surprisingly well-read captain. Wolf Larsen alternates between praising Van Weyden and treating him cruelly, all supposedly with the goal of helping Van Weyden to "stand on [his] own legs" instead of the "dead man's legs" of his wealthy father, who provided Van Weyden with an inheritance that ensured Van Weyden didn't have to work. While Van Weyden becomes more self-reliant over the course of the book, he also becomes more comfortable with violence, at one point personally clubbing several small seals. Crucially, however, Van Weyden never goes as far as Wolf Larsen—at the end of the book, when Van Weyden has a chance to shoot an unarmed Wolf Larsen, he chooses not to do so, even though he knows Wolf Larsen would shoot him if their roles were reversed. This demonstrates how, as Van Weyden nears the end of his journey to maturation, he has learned to step beyond the teachings of his mentor and truly stand on his own. The journey of personal growth that Van Weyden undergoes in The Sea-Wolf shows how a person needs self-reliance to survive in a cruel world. At the same time, though, the book also suggests that maturation can also involve a loss of innocence—and even an embrace of cynicism, as embodied by Wolf Larsen and his melancholy moods. - Theme: Materialism vs. Idealism. Description: At the heart of Jack London's The Sea-Wolf is a conflict between the materialism of the fearsome captain Wolf Larsen and the idealism of his captives, the literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden and the poet Maud Brewster. In the book, materialism refers not to the selfish pursuit of material wealth, but to a philosopher theory that the material world is all that exists. As a materialist thinker, Wolf Larsen is essentially an atheist who doesn't believe in souls or eternal life—rather, he believes that the observable world is all there is and all there ever will be. By contrast, Maud Brewster's more closely align with philosophical idealism, which means that she does believe in souls and seems to be a committed Christian. Throughout the book, Wolf Larsen and Maud Brewster frequently argue about whether or not souls exist, and none of their debates ever has a clear winner. Though Humphrey Van Weyden's beliefs more closely align with Maud Brewster's idealism, in many ways. Van Weyden's philosophical stance falls somewhere between materialism and idealism. For instance, when Wolf Larsen and Maud Brewster are arguing about what causes humans to act as they do (Wolf suggests that desire drives action, while Maud suggests that soul drives action) Van Weyden proposes a compromise by saying that desire and the soul are just two ways of looking at the same thing. Ultimately, London seems to suggest that the extreme materialism of Wolf Larsen leads to misery, as Wolf suffers from a secret affliction throughout the book and ultimately dies, weakened and alone. Nevertheless, Wolf makes some powerful challenges to Van Weyden and Maud's ideas, raising philosophical objections and, when that doesn't work, sometimes resorting to physical violence. Ultimately, though, the back-and-forth nature of the conflict between Wolf's materialism and Van Weyden and Maud's idealism suggests that a full understanding of human nature requires elements of both materialism and idealism. - Theme: Survival of the Fittest. Description: In Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, the fierce seal-hunting captain Wolf Larsen is surprisingly well read for such a tough sailor, and one of the authors on his shelf is Charles Darwin. In the late 19th century to early 20th century (around when Jack London wrote The Sea-Wolf), there was a movement called Social Darwinism, which sought to apply Charles Darwin's biological theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest to the fields of sociology and politics (but which is today generally considered a racist pseudoscience). One may interpret Wolf Larsen as a fierce proponent of social Darwinism, since he encourages competition on his boat to weed out weak or unfaithful sailors, and he even sometimes uses language similar to Darwin, such as when he claims life is a "mess" where "the strong eat the weak [so] that they may retain their strength." But Wolf doesn't offer a wholly positive portrayal of social Darwinism—despite Wolf's early success as a captain, he is frequently cruel to his crew, and more often acts to satisfy his own whims instead of for the good of the whole ship. Ultimately, Larsen's cruelty and selfishness lead his crew to maroon him. Wolf Larsen is obsessed with power. His goal is to dominate others, and he forces many of his sailors, including Humphrey Van Weyden, to work for him under conditions that are comparable to slavery. Though London portrays some elements of Wolf's sheer strength in a positive light, he also shows Wolf's ruthless quest for domination as destructive—both for those around him, and for Wolf himself. In one instance, for example, Wolf escalates a rivalry with Death Larsen (Wolf's brother) and ends up losing his whole crew in the process. Jack London further challenges Wolf's ideas about survival of the fittest at the novel's end,  when Van Weyden—who, on the surface, is much less "fit" than Wolf Larsen—outsmarts the powerful Wolf Larsen. Ultimately, The Sea-Wolf challenges the tenets of Social Darwinism, using the demise of "fit" men like Wolf Larsen to argue that survival of the fittest is about more than physical strength, and that an unhealthy pursuit of strength and power often leads to grave consequences. - Theme: Love, Duty, and Choice. Description: Though primarily an adventure novel, Jack London inserts a romantic subplot into The Sea-Wolf when the crew of the Ghost rescues Maud Brewster, a poet who becomes the love interest of the narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden. Though the love story may seem like a departure from the sea adventures of the first part of the book, it serves as a logical continuation of Van Weyden's character arc, illustrating how he has changed from the helpless intellectual he was at the beginning of the book into a hardworking person who has the confidence and competence to uphold his responsibilities to himself and others. The turning point in Van Weyden's relationship with Maud is when the two of them escape from the Ghost, only to become stranded on an uninhabited island. Away from the Ghost, Van Weyden finds that he is responsible for Maud's wellbeing in a way that he's never been for another person before. Though Van Weyden delays confessing his love to Maud for a long time, their shared hardships and responsibilities to each other draw them closer together. By contrast, Wolf Larsen exemplifies a different sort of "love" and duty, employing violence, coercion, and manipulation to force his crew to remain dutiful and loyal to him. Yet once his health fails him and he can no longer force people to serve him, he loses everything and everyone, ultimately suffering an agonizing, lonely death. At the end of The Sea-Wolf, Humphrey Van Weyden and Maud Brewster manage to escape their small island, catch the attention of a passing American vessel, and return to safety. Larsen tries to force them to stay, but because Van Weyden's previous sense of duty toward Larsen was based on fear (rather than a moral obligation) Larsen cannot command duty and respect in the way he once did. Van Weyden's and Larsen's opposite attitudes toward duty, responsibility, and relationships, highlight the limitations of Larsen's coerced sort of "love" and responsibility. Meanwhile, the book's espousal of Van Weyden's approach to love suggests that choice and personal agency form stronger, more meaningful bonds. - Climax: Humphrey Van Weyden barely survives Wolf Larsen's final attempt to kill him. - Summary: On a passenger ship off the coast of San Francisco, the wealthy intellectual and literary critic (and the book's narrator) Humphrey Van Weyden is on his way to visit a friend. Suddenly, however, foggy conditions cause the passenger ship to collide with another ship, and Van Weyden's ship begins to sink. Van Weyden, who can't swim, is adrift at sea until Wolf Larsen, the captain of a seal-hunting vessel called the Ghost that is headed for hunting grounds in the waters near Japan, stumbles across Van Weyden and brings him aboard his ship. Van Weyden passes out from exhaustion. When he wakes up, he's wearing new clothes, and the sailor Johnson and the cook Thomas Mugridge are caring for him. He goes to Wolf Larsen and offers to pay a large sum of money for Wolf to turn the vessel back toward San Francisco. Wolf Larsen, however, refuses the offer, and forces Van Weyden to join the crew of the Ghost as a cabin boy instead. As a gentleman who hasn't ever had to work, Van Weyden struggles to adjust to life on the Ghost at first. He is bad at the tasks assigned to him, and soon after starting work, he injures his knee. At one point, however, he happens to be in Wolf Larsen's room and notices that the fearsome captain has a surprisingly large collection of books, including works by William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and Charles Darwin. Darwin in particular seems to be an influence on Wolf Larsen and his methods of leadership—he frequently implements his own version of Darwin's concept of "survival of the fittest" by pitting crew members against one other or by forcing crew members to undertake dangerous tasks to prove their toughness. Despite Wolf Larsen's cruelty, he and Van Weyden have some surprising similarities. Wolf Larsen enjoys discussing philosophy with Van Weyden, even though they disagree on important issues, such as the existence of an immortal soul (Van Weyden believes humans have souls, but Wolf Larsen doesn't). However, Wolf Larsen's outbursts of violence and cruelty often follow these periods of friendliness, reflecting Wolf's temperamental mood. At one point during stormy weather off the coast of Japan, the ghost encounters a small boat in need of rescue that contains four engineers and a poet named Maud Brewster who is not a sailor and was only traveling for her health. Although Brewster is an unusual presence on the Ghost, where there are no other women, Wolf Larsen seems to enjoy discussing philosophy with her and Van Weyden, at least on days when he's in a good mood. During seal-hunting season, Wolf Larsen gets into a competition with his brother, Death Larsen, who has a reputation for being even more ruthless a leader than Wolf. This competition seems to excite Wolf, and after initial aggression from Death, Wolf responds by stealing several of Death's boats and capturing some of his hunters. The evening after his victory, Wolf Larsen is in a good mood, but things take a turn when Van Weyden witnesses Wolf assaulting Maud Brewster. This motivates Brewster and Van Weyden to steal a boat and escape. They hope to make it to Japan, but an unfavorable wind pulls them toward an abandoned island that they call Endeavor Island. Van Weyden and Maud Brewster spend several weeks alone on the island. Their circumstances force them to learn new survival skills, and they bond over the experience. Van Weyden loves Maud Brewster, but he keeps his feelings to himself. One day, Van Weyden is surprised to see that the Ghost has landed off the coast of Endeavor Island. Van Weyden works up the courage to explore the Ghost and finds that most of its crew is gone—the only person left is Wolf Larsen, who has been marooned after Death Larsen tracked him down and offered better pay to Wolf's crew. In addition, Wolf Larsen is blind and in failing health. Maud Brewster and Van Weyden hatch a plan to repair the Ghost (which had its sails cut) and escape, but even in his blind, ailing state, Wolf Larsen resists their efforts and tries to stop them. Ultimately, however, despite Wolf Larsen's resistance, Van Weyden and Brewster manage to repair the Ghost and use it to escape the island. Though Van Weyden has many opportunities to kill Wolf, he chooses to spare his life. Wolf's health continues to decline until he is paralyzed and on the verge of death. Wolf remains defiant to his last breath, even when he can barely communicate. He dies from his ailment in the middle of a violent storm, and Van Weyden and Maud bury him at sea. Soon after, a U.S. ship encounters Van Weyden and Brewster and sends over a rescue boat to retrieve them. Before the ship can reach them, Weyden asks to kiss Brewster.

- Genre: Campus Novel - Title: The Secret History - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Hampden College in Vermont in the 1980s; Hampden is a fictional version of Bennington College. - Character: Richard Papen. Description: Richard Papen is the narrator of The Secret History. Richard attends Hampden College after deciding that he cannot stomach his pre-med classes or the stifling presence of his parents in California, where he's from. During his first semester at Hampden, Richard becomes a Greek student and meets Henry, Bunny, Charles, Camilla, Francis, and Julian. Richard spends much of the semester pretending to be wealthy to fit in with the other Greek students, who quickly become his friends. Richard enjoys the company of the other Greek students, particularly that of Charles and Camilla, though he knows that there is something that they are not telling him. During his second semester at Hampden Richard discovers that the other Greek students, excluding Bunny, accidentally killed someone during a bacchanal. The Greek students are worried that they will be caught because Bunny found out about the murder and is now blackmailing them. In response, the Greek students, along with Richard, murder Bunny by pushing him off a cliff. Once it is discovered that Bunny is missing, a manhunt takes place to find his body. During this time, Richard is incredibly stressed and racked with guilt. He tries to cope using sex and drugs, but his dreams continue to be filled with nightmarish images that relate to Bunny's death. Ultimately, Richard and his fellow Greek students get away with the murder, but Richard never fully recovers. He ends the novel in a sort of purgatory, unsure of how he can ever move on from the events of the past. - Character: Henry Winter. Description: Henry Winter is the leader of the Greek students, as well as Julian's favorite student. Henry admires Julian, and the two of them are very close. At first, Henry is skeptical of Richard, but he warms to him over the course of the semester. Although Henry is extremely knowledgeable about classical studies, he is completely unaware of contemporary events. He has a desire to live in the past, which leads him to try to induce Dionysian madness in himself. Eventually, he is successful, though he accidentally kills a man in a frenzied state. As the novel unfolds, Henry proves himself to be the most maladjusted of the Greek students. He comes up with and executes the plan to kill Bunny, all while staying relatively calm and collected. In retrospect, Richard wonders how much he was manipulated by Henry. Later, Henry reveals to Richard that he always felt emotionally dead inside until the first time he killed someone. Toward the end of the novel, Henry moves Camilla out of Charles's place, and it is implied that the two of them are dating. This angers Charles, who also worries that Henry is planning to kill him. However, during the climax of the novel, Henry sacrifices himself so that Charles, Camilla, Francis, and Richard can avoid prison. After his death, Henry haunts Richard's dreams, where both of them seem to be stuck in purgatory. - Character: Bunny (Edmund Corcoran). Description: Bunny is the first Greek student to show an interest in Richard and bring him into the group. Although Bunny has some reprehensible qualities, particularly his misogyny and homophobia, he largely endears himself to Richard. During Richard's first semester at Hampden, Bunny participates in the Dionysian rituals with the other Greek students. However, eventually he is kicked out of the group because he isn't taking the process seriously. Nonetheless, he manages to find out that the other Greek students killed a man. Upon learning this, he begins to blackmail the others into giving him money and taking him on expensive trips. Eventually, the other students decide they can't afford the risk of having him around anymore, so they decide to kill him before he tells someone what they've done. One day, while he is out on his usual hike, Bunny comes across Henry, Richard, Camilla, Francis, and Charles in the woods. When he asks them what's going on, Henry pushes him over a cliff, killing him. After his death, Julian finds a letter from Bunny, which reveals that the other Greek students killed a man. It also makes clear that Bunny is worried that he will be killed next. Although Bunny's intelligence is regularly mocked throughout the novel, Richard realizes in retrospect that his friend could be quite insightful. In addition, Bunny is the only member of the group who has a social life outside of the other Greek students. - Character: Charles Macauley. Description: Charles Macauley is the twin brother of Camilla Macauley, both of whom are Greek students. Of the Greek students, Charles and Camilla are Richard's favorites, and he often spends time with them during his first semester at Hampden. Like the other Greek students, Charles plays a prominent role in Bunny's death. While the authorities are looking for Bunny, Charles is regularly called in for questioning, a process he finds incredibly taxing. After Bunny's body is found, Charles is racked with guilt and anxiety, which he copes with by drinking heavily. Toward the end of the novel, it is revealed that Charles is in an incestuous relationship with Camilla. After Bunny's death, Camilla tells Richard that Charles regularly abused her, so she moved out of their shared apartment into a place that Henry is paying for. Enraged and paranoid, Charles thinks Henry is out to get him. Hoping to calm him down, Richard and Francis take Charles to Francis's country house. However, while there, Charles overhears a phone conversation between Richard and Henry. He thinks that everyone is planning to murder him, so he runs away. Later, he shows up at Camilla's apartment with a gun to shoot Henry. However, he fails and accidentally shoots Richard instead. After Henry's death, everyone loses contact with Charles, though Camilla tells Richard and Francis that he is living in Texas with a woman he met in rehab and that he still drinks heavily. - Character: Camilla Macauley. Description: Camilla Macauley is the twin sister of Charles Macauley, as well as one of Julian's students. Richard is infatuated with her beauty, although the two of them never end up in a relationship. Like the other Greek students, Camilla plays a role in Bunny's death. However, unlike the other members of the group, she handles herself quite well in the aftermath. Unfortunately for her, Charles begins to lose control of his drinking and his temper, which leads to him physically abusing her. As a result, Camilla moves out of their shared apartment and into a room at an inn, which Henry pays for. Around the same time, Richard discovers that Camilla and Charles were in an incestuous relationship. Now Charles is jealous because he thinks that Henry and Camilla are sleeping together. At the end of the novel, Camilla and Richard meet up one last time after Francis's suicide attempt. During their meeting, Richard asks Camilla to marry him, but she declines, citing her enduring love for Henry as the reason. - Character: Francis Abernathy. Description: Francis Abernathy is one of Julian's students and Richard's friends. Francis is gay and, like Henry, comes from a wealthy background, though he does not like to talk about it much. During Richard's first semester at Hampden, the Greek students spend much of their time at Francis's country house. Like the other Greek students, Francis plays a role in Bunny's death. After the murder, Francis's reactions are similar to Richard's; he copes with sex and drugs, but largely manages to keep himself together. In the second half of the novel, Francis proves to be a repository of information about the other Greek students. He tells Richard that Charles and Camilla are in an incestuous relationship and that he himself has slept with Charles on numerous occasions. In the years following Henry's death, Francis's grandfather discovers that he's gay and threatens to withhold his inheritance unless Francis marries a woman. In light of this, Francis attempts suicide but ultimately survives, resigning himself to the prospect of entering a loveless marriage. - Character: Julian Morrow. Description: Julian Morrow is the Greek professor at Hampden college. To take classes with Julian, one must ask him personally, and he is highly selective. In addition, Julian insists upon acting as his students' advisor and that the vast majority of the classes they take be with him. Much about Julian's past is shrouded in mystery and legend, although he supposedly knows many of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Julian is an unusual teacher in many ways, but also an effective one. His students all end up highly competent in Greek, with the notable exception of Bunny. However, Julian is also manipulative, and it becomes clear that he cares more about himself than his students. Toward the end of the novel, Julian finds a letter from Bunny, which talks about the bacchanal and Bunny's fear that Henry wants to murder him. Although at first Julian dismisses it as a fake, he eventually learns the truth. Rather than take any sort of moral stand, Julian flees the campus, never to be seen there again. This is heartbreaking to his students, especially Henry, who view him as a father figure. - Character: Judy Poovey. Description: Judy is one of the only non-Greek students with whom Richard spends a significant amount of time. Although Judy's primary activities are gossiping and taking drugs, she is kind to Richard and does what she can to help him. Richard regularly insinuates that Judy is romantically interested in him, but he does not reciprocate her advances. - Theme: The Human Capacity for Violence. Description: There are two murders at the center of Donna Tartt's The Secret History. The first is a random act of violence perpetrated by four college students while in a crazed state. The second is a premeditated murder carried out by those same students, this time with Richard Papen at their side. On the surface, it seems shocking and unexpected that such violence could be carried out by these students. Several of them are from wealthy backgrounds, they are all exceptional students, and none of them have a criminal record. However, as the novel develops, Tartt interrogates and eventually deconstructs these identity markers. She strips away the assumed link between intelligence, wealth, and morality to reveal a group of people who are surprisingly capable of heinous acts of violence. Perhaps the most shocking revelation of the novel is that Henry, the charismatic leader of the group (who is also from the most prestigious background), borders on psychopathy. In a climactic moment, he tells Richard that he enjoys killing and feels freer than he ever has before. Although the other Greek students are more remorseful than Henry, they are still culpable for committing morally reprehensible acts. What this reveals is that even an average person like Richard is capable of committing violent acts under the right circumstances. Though the thought of personally engaging in acts of extreme violence seems impossible to most people, The Secret History sets forth the unsettling idea that we are much more capable of committing such acts than we might realize. - Theme: Intellectual Pursuits and Reasonability. Description: The Secret History outlines the idea that seemingly important and serious philosophical pursuits can sometimes lead people astray and put them out of touch with rational life. Henry is a primary example of this phenomenon. Though he may be capable of speaking many languages and reciting large sections of poetry, he is completely unaware of the realities of the world around him. He is often cited as the most intelligent member of the Greek students, yet he is surprised to learn that men have walked on the moon. He also relies on ancient texts to teach himself about antidotes, until Richard insists that he check more recent sources—ultimately suggesting that his intelligence is, in many ways, tied to a certain bookish impracticality. Nevertheless, Henry thrives in discussions of all things Greek, making him Julian's prized student. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Bunny, who, despite studying Greek, isn't even that good at writing in English. In one of the novel's most comical moments, Bunny writes a paper on John Donne, Isaak Walton, and "Metahemeralism." The paper is completely incomprehensible, largely because "metahemeralism" is a made-up concept that Bunny is incapable of defining. The world of academia is completely anathema to Bunny's talents and who he is as person. However, unlike the other Greek students, Bunny is actually in touch with contemporary society. He has a girlfriend, often attends parties, and spends time with people who aren't Greek students. In addition, Bunny is the first one to show Richard kindness and invite him into the group. Though the Greek students often treat him like an idiot, the letter Julian finds after Bunny's death reveals that he was much more aware of the reality of his situation than he let on. In retrospect, Richard realizes that Bunny could be quite insightful at times, especially in regard to Julian. Perhaps surprisingly, then, the character in the novel who is the least intellectual ends up being the most rational, thus implying that sometimes an obsession with academia or erudite pursuits can cause people to lose sight of everything but a narrow-minded—albeit intellectual—worldview. - Theme: Guilt. Description: The latter half of The Secret History is primarily concerned with the repercussions of Bunny's death. Among other consequences, the Greek students are tortured by their guilty consciences, with the notable exception of Henry. Though their guilt is bad enough when lying alone in their rooms, it intensifies when they interact with those who cared for Bunny. Richard almost breaks down and apologizes to Mr. Corcoran, Bunny's father, when they are first introduced, and several of the Greek students attend Bunny's funeral drunk or high in fear that they will break down in front of everyone. Ultimately, their collective guilt leads to the death of Henry, a suicide attempt by Francis, a companionless life for Richard, and the destruction of Charles and Camilla's relationship. At the start of the novel, Richard states, "I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." This statement is, in essence, the novel's thesis on guilt. Guilt is overpowering; it supersedes all other emotions and can be life-defining if powerful enough. It is for this reason that Richard ends the novel exactly where he began: alone and still obsessing over the event that singlehandedly changed the trajectory of his life. - Theme: Manipulation and Paranoia. Description: In the second half of the novel, following Bunny's murder, the other Greek students begin to descend into varying states of paranoia. Only Henry manages to remain calm, largely because he is the one pulling the strings of many other characters in the novel. Meanwhile, Charles is on the opposite end of the spectrum; by the end of the novel, he is convinced that Henry wants to kill him, which may or may not be true. One of the compelling features of The Secret History is that it is told entirely from Richard's perspective and, as a result, there is much about Henry that is never revealed, including whether he plans to harm Charles. Even in retrospect, Richard cannot untangle whether he himself made certain decisions of his own accord or because Henry pushed him in a particular direction. Additionally, much of the behavior exhibited toward the end of the novel is fueled by drugs and alcohol, especially in relation to Charles. Also, Richard admits that many of his memories are foggy, making much of his narration unreliable. By using an unreliable narrator to tell her story, Donna Tartt recreates in the reader a similar condition to the one her characters are experiencing—one of uncertainty, paranoia, and vulnerability. By the end of novel, though certain facts are set in stone, many others are left open to interpretation. Like Henry, then, Tartt knows how to manipulate her readers, and she leaves just enough open-ended questions to create a feverish, paranoid reading experience. - Theme: Beauty and Terror. Description: Early in The Secret History, Julian gives a lecture on the relationship between beauty and terror. It is an idea that harkens back to Aristotle who, in Poetics, argues that objects that are terrifying in real life—such as a corpse—can be beautiful when elevated to the realm of art. Although this lecture occurs within the context of Richard's Greek class, it is also a commentary on the novel itself. With The Secret History, Tartt is interested in creating a work of beauty that it is also terrifying. In many ways, the novel is grotesque; the first murder the students commit is especially brutal, as are the ceremonies they engage in, particularly the one in which they slaughter a piglet and cover themselves in its blood. Though Tartt doesn't usually withhold descriptions from the reader, she often describes violent events briefly or impressionistically. Violence is a central part of The Secret History, but it is never overwhelming. What is overwhelming, however, at least for the novel's characters, are the consequences of violence. To that end, it is in the aftermath of violence that Richard and the other Greek students are confronted with genuine terror. This terror comes in the form of guilt, law enforcement, and unintended consequences. It also comes about because the Greek students have strayed from Aristotle's ideas about beauty and terror. After all, Aristotle only connects beauty and terror as a way to prove a broader argument about how humans naturally take pleasure in artistic representation. It's not that humans find corpses beautiful, then, but that they find artistic representations of corpses beautiful. Henry, however, gets hung up on the idea that beauty is terror. Therefore, the problem that arises for the Greek students in The Secret History is that they actually kill the farmer (and, later, Bunny). And though someone like Henry might hope to find beauty in this otherwise horrifying experience, such a viewpoint doesn't quite align with Aristotle's philosophy because it has nothing to do with art or representation—it's real, and thus full of nothing but terror. - Theme: Class and Identity. Description: Throughout The Secret History, Richard Papen tries to create a new identity for himself. Richard grows up in a working-class family from California. Unlike the other Greek students, he has no wealthy or romantic background to speak of. Richard is embarrassed about this, so he lies about it, even though the others eventually see through his façade of wealth and experience. In an attempt to blend in with his milieu, Richard buys expensive clothes and assumes a condescending attitude toward contemporary art and culture. Eventually, Richard cannot even bring himself to talk to his parents, and he rarely communicates with anyone on campus who isn't a Greek student. However, as the novel progresses, Richard's newfound identity becomes too difficult to maintain. Because he isn't actually wealthy, Richard is forced to live in dangerous conditions during winter break. In addition, his desire to be liked by the Greek students leads to morally dubious behavior and, ultimately, Bunny's death. The cruel irony of Richard's shift in identity is that it proves useless almost immediately. After Henry's death, he rarely communicates with the other Greek students and finds it difficult to connect with others. Unfortunately for Richard, the events of the past make him feel as though a new change in identity is no longer possible. As such, the novel serves as a warning about the mutability of identity. Though we may be able to change who we are, it is important to realize that some of those changes might have lasting consequences and, as a result, be permanent. As such, we should be careful and thoughtful about who we decide to be. - Climax: Charles bursts into Camilla's room with a gun and fires it, shooting Richard in the stomach. Henry then takes the gun from Charles and shoots himself twice in the head. - Summary: The Secret History begins with Richard Papen revealing that he and his friends have gotten away with killing someone named Bunny. The story he is about to tell promises to reveal how and why this happened. Richard grows up in Plano, California, the son of working-class parents. After deciding that he cannot stomach the pre-med classes at his local community college, Richard decides to apply to Hampden College, a private liberal arts school in Vermont. Richard is accepted at Hampden, where he decides to study Greek under the tutelage of Julian Morrow. Julian is an enigmatic and charismatic professor with peculiar teaching methods. He insists that he acts as academic advisor to all of his students—of which there are only six, including Richard—and that the vast majority of their classes be with him. After becoming Julian's pupil, Richard gets to know his fellow Greek students: Henry, Bunny, Francis, and Charles and Camilla (who are twins). Often throughout Richard's first semester, all the Greek students go to Francis's country house on the weekends. Richard has fond memories of these weekends, even though he will later learn that things are not entirely as they seem. Primarily, Richard spends his energy on learning Greek and hiding his background from his new friends. In particular, Henry and Francis are quite wealthy, and Richard is embarrassed about his working-class upbringing. During winter break, Richard lives for free in a warehouse while working at school. Unfortunately, he is ill-equipped to handle winter in Vermont, and he almost dies from the cold. Luckily, Henry comes back early from a trip to Italy and lets Richard live in his apartment until school starts. While living with Henry, Richard witnesses a number of odd exchanges between Henry, Bunny, and Francis. After some sleuthing, he eventually finds out that Henry has booked four plane tickets to South America, which depart right before the start of the semester. Additionally, he doesn't see or hear from any of the other Greek students leading up to the start of the semester. As such, Richard eagerly awaits the start of classes so that he can figure out what is going on. However, when classes start, everything appears normal. All of the other Greek students show up on time for class and greet him excitedly, albeit with some rather unconvincing excuses. Not long after classes begin, Henry decides to tell Richard the truth. He knows that Richard found out about the flight to South America and wants to explain what happened. As it turns out, Henry and the other Greek students spent most of the previous semester performing rituals and trying to induce Dionysian madness, which is a sort of pre-civilized euphoric state associated with the Greek god Dionysus. Because Bunny was not taking their attempts seriously, the other Greek students decided that he could no longer take part in their rituals. Then, once Bunny was out of the group, the Greek students succeeded in inducing Dionysian madness. However, in doing so, they accidentally killed a local man. They got away with the crime, but Bunny eventually learned what they did and is now blackmailing them for money (though in a rather casual, friendly way). Henry is worried that they will run out of money soon, which is why he and the other Greek students considered leaving for South America. He's also worried that Bunny will tell somebody what he knows. Not knowing what else to do, the Greek students decide to kill Bunny. They hide out in the woods where they know he likes to walk, and when he appears, they crowd around him and Henry pushes him into a ravine. After Bunny's murder, it takes the authorities 10 days to find his body. During that time, Henry and Charles are questioned by the FBI, but ultimately Bunny's death is ruled to be an accident. In the days following the recovery of Bunny's body, the Greek students go to stay at Bunny's parents' house and attend his funeral. In the weeks following Bunny's funeral, relationships begin to dissolve between the Greek students. Charles begins drinking heavily and one night he crashes Henry's car after the two of them get into a fight. Eventually it is revealed that Charles is jealous of Henry because Henry is in a secret relationship with his sister. Previously, Charles and Camilla were in an incestuous relationship with one another, but Camilla moved out of their shared apartment because Charles became abusive after Bunny's death. In addition, Charles worries that Henry wants to kill him, since Henry seems to think Charles might go to the police. Around the same time, Julian tells Richard and Francis that he's received a previously lost letter that purports to be from Bunny. The letter talks about the man that the Greek students murdered and Bunny's apparent fear that Henry wants to murder him. Julian dismisses the letter as fake, but Richard and Francis quickly realize that it's genuine and try to get it away from Julian before he figures out the truth. However, they fail to do so, and Henry is forced to explain to Julian everything that has happened over the past several months. In response, Julian gives Henry the letter and then flees from Hampden, never to be seen there again. After Julian's departure, the situation between Henry and Charles continues to escalate. In an attempt to calm Charles down, Richard and Francis take him to the country house. However, while there, Charles overhears a phone conversation between Richard and Henry that makes him paranoid. In response, he flees the country house, and no one is able to find him. Desperate for help, Richard and Francis go to the inn that Camilla is staying at, where they find Camilla and Henry. Shortly after their arrival, Charles bursts in with a gun and threatens to shoot Henry. The gun is wrestled away from him, but not before he pulls the trigger, causing Richard to be shot in the stomach. The gunshot creates an uproar at the inn, and the Greek students worry that they will end up in jail after all. However, as the innkeeper opens the door, Henry uses the gun to shoot himself twice in the head. The Greek students then use Henry's death to explain away the situation. They tell the authorities that Richard tried and failed to stop Henry from killing himself, which is how he sustained his gun wound. After Henry's death, Richard is the only one to return to Hampden the following semester where he eventually graduates with an English degree before returning to California for graduate school. While writing his dissertation, Richard receives a letter from Francis that essentially functions as a suicide note. Concerned, Richard flies to Boston, where he finds Francis recovering in a hospital from an attempted suicide. Camilla also shows up, and the three of them have a brief reunion. Camilla tells Richard and Francis that she no longer speaks to Charles, but she knows that he lives in Texas with a woman he met in rehab (though both of them continue to drink). Before leaving Boston, Richard asks Camilla to marry him, but she declines because she still loves Henry. The novel ends with Richard describing one of his recent dreams featuring Henry. He dreams that he and Henry are in a museum with an exhibit that morphs into various marvels of architecture. Henry tells Richard that he is not happy where he is but then says to Richard, "you're not very happy where you are either," before walking away down a "long, gleaming hall."

- Genre: - Title: The Secret Life of Bees - Point of view: Point of View:First person (Lily Owens) - Setting: Setting:Sylvan, South Carolina, 1964 - Character: Lily Owens. Description: The Secret Life of Bees is the story of how Lily, a 14-year-old girl from South Carolina, struggles to make sense of her relationship with her mother and father, the black community, and the people she meets in the course of her adventures. Impulsive and adventurous, Lily runs away from her cruel, abusive father (T. Ray Owens), and journeys to the town of Tiburon to find information about her dead mother, Deborah Fontanel Owens. During the course of her time in Tiburon, Lily truly comes of age. She overcomes her feelings of awkwardness and hostility to the black community, and also starts to embrace the values of Christianity. Much of Kidd's novel is concerned with Lily coming to terms with her mother, Deborah. Although at first Lily idolizes her mother, she's shocked to learn that Deborah abandoned her when Lily was a small child. Lily also struggles with the possibility that she may have accidentally killed Deborah as a child. With the help of August Boatwright and other inhabitants of Tiburon, Lily matures as a human being by forgiving her mother, forgiving herself, and accepting that no one is perfect. As the novel ends, Lily has come to accept August's Christian teachings: she learns to love others and love herself, overcoming her conflicted feelings about her parents. - Character: August Boatwright. Description: The head of the Boatwright house in Tiburon, South Carolina, August Boatwright is a strong, charismatic, and enormously wise woman. August raises bees and runs her own business selling honey and beeswax products, and she also acts as a surrogate mother to Lily Owens for much of the novel. Unbeknownst to Lily, August worked as a maid for Deborah Fontanel Owens years before, and considers it her duty to take care of Lily when she shows up in Tiburon. August teaches Lily important lessons about patience, love, and forgiveness. She also introduces Lily to the religion she practices with her sisters: an amalgam of Catholicism and African-American history. Although August Boatwright isn't a dynamic character, her calm leadership is an important source of wisdom for Lily as she comes to terms with her family. August teaches Lily to forgive herself for her imperfections, and to forgive others, as well—a lesson that proves invaluable in Lily's coming-of-age. - Character: Rosaleen. Description: Rosaleen is a proud, middle-aged woman who works as a maid for T. Ray and Lily Owens in Sylvan, South Carolina. Shortly after Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, Rosaleen goes into town to register to vote, setting in motion the events of the novel. Rosaleen is an extremely strong, confident woman, and her refusal to "back down" when confronted by racist whites causes her to go to jail, and eventually run away from Sylvan with Lily. Lily is extremely close with Rosaleen: in the absence of a mother, she regards Rosaleen as a maternal figure. Critics have pointed out that Rosaleen recedes from view in the second half of The Secret Life of Bees—while she's present for most of the key events in these chapters, it's hard to think of a single thing she does. Nevertheless, Rosaleen is an important influence on Lily in the novel: when Lily doubts herself, or feels afraid, she can always turn to Rosaleen for love and support. - Character: Deborah Fontanel Owens. Description: Deborah Owens is T. Ray Owens's wife and Lily Owens's mother. She's arguably the most complex character in the novel: because she died years before the time when the novel is set, she's available to the other characters only through memories and old possessions. For most of the book, Lily regards her mother as a kind, loving woman. Toward the end, however, we learn that the truth is more complicated: while Deborah loved Lily dearly, she abandoned Lily for three months to live with August in Tiburon, South Carolina. When Deborah returned to her family, intending to take Lily with her and away from T. Ray, there was a horrible accident, resulting in Lily accidentally shooting her mother. Overall, Deborah is a woman of contradictions: loving yet shockingly neglectful. As such, she's a perfect example of August's wise statement, "We all have flaws." - Character: T. Ray Owens. Description: T. Ray Owens is Lily Owens's father, a harsh, cruel man. Although T. Ray was once kinder and gentler, the sudden death of his wife, Deborah Fontanel Owens, throws him into depression and self-hatred, which he takes out on his daughter. Throughout the novel, Kidd shows T. Ray to be a petty, vindictive man, and she contrasts his small-mindedness with Lily's constantly evolving outlook on life. In the end, Lily's impressions of T. Ray haven't changed greatly: she still regards him as a foolish, mean old man. Nevertheless, Lily comes to feel sorry for T. Ray for his misfortunes in life—a clear sign of her maturation. - Character: May Boatwright. Description: The youngest and strangest of the Boatwright sisters, May is an odd, mentally disturbed woman who becomes deeply depressed whenever anything tragic happens to anyone. Whenever a tragedy occurs, May writes it down on a piece of paper and slips the paper into a stone wall near her house. In addition to being enormously sensitive, May is highly observant. In the end, she commits suicide by drowning herself in a nearby stream, unable to cope with Zach's arrest and imprisonment. Her suicide could be said to represent the psychological toll that racism has taken on the black community in America. - Character: Zachary Taylor / Zach. Description: A handsome, intelligent teenager who works for the Boatwrights. Zach is ambitious, and he plans to become a successful lawyer one day (even though he's black, and so has many more obstacles to face in achieving this goal). He wants to use his legal training to fight racism in the U.S. During the course of the book, Zach and Lily fall for one another, though as Zach explains, they can't be boyfriend and girlfriend yet, for fear that they'll be attacked by the racist townspeople. - Character: June Boatwright. Description: The sister of May, August, and April Boatwright. Like August, June is an intelligent, educated woman, but where August welcomes Lily into their home with open arms, June is suspicious and contemptuous of Lily—partly because Lily is white, and she is black. During the novel, June refuses marriage to Neil several times before accepting. In the end, June comes to accept Lily as her friend, and apologizes for her rudeness. - Theme: Race, America, and the 1960s. Description: The Secret Life of Bees takes place in 1964, immediately after the signing of the Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Civil Rights Act is often regarded as having ushered in a new era of American history. With it the U.S. government finally defended African Americans' legal and societal rights: black people could eat in restaurants, use public bathrooms, vote, and drive without fear of legal discrimination. But as Kidd makes very clear, black people's problems didn't end in 1964. On the contrary, after the Civil Rights Act, racist whites in many parts of the United States regarded it as their duty to continue harassing and excluding black people. Black people were beaten and murdered for registering to vote, bullied for eating in "all-white" restaurants, and sent to jail by racist sheriffs for trivial offenses. In her novel, Kidd examines the racism of the 60s America from the perspective of a white teenager, Lily Owens (partly because the novel is based on Kidd's own adolescence). It's important to understand some of the advantages and disadvantages of this narrative approach.As Lily sees it, African Americans are the victims of an endless series of tragedies. In the course of the book, black characters are arrested without grounds, beaten by the police, harassed by racist townspeople, etc. It's important to note that whenever black characters try to fight back against this injustice, they make their lives markedly worse (for example, when Rosaleen stands up to a group of bullying townspeople, she ends up in the hospital and charged with a crime). In the absence of any clear "solution" to their problems, most of the black characters in the novel turn to prayer and religion in an effort to find happiness. They can't eliminate the sources of racism, so they pray for a day when racism will end.If there is an antidote to racism in The Secret Life of Bees, it is understanding—specifically, the understanding of whites. The protagonist of the book is a young white woman who initially exemplifies many of the white community's prejudices about black people. Initially, Lily assumes that black people are lazy, foolish, and dishonest. But during the course of her adventures in Tiburon, South Carolina, she realizes how lazy her own stereotypes are: the wisest, most competent people she meets in the book are black. The implication is that if white people could come to experience black culture and community for themselves, racism would eventually fade away.At the same time, The Secret Life of Bees has been criticized in some circles for depicting the challenges of race and racism in America only from the point of view of a white character rather than a black one. One major limitation of this decision is that it seems to give the impression that racism would end if white people would just "try out" black culture for a few weeks—i.e., the problem is cultural and individual, more than political, historical, or economic. This is a narrow view of a large and complicated issue, but it's also a view that makes for an easier-to-handle story. Despite this limited perspective, Kidd does make a good point by telling her story from Lily's point of view: racism begins early on, sometimes in insidious, undetectable ways—and it's up to each individual to acknowledge their own prejudices and work to change them. By addressing one's racial prejudices early on, as Lily does, it's possible to become a better, more open-minded person. - Theme: Mothers and Daughters. Description: From the first chapter, Sue Monk Kidd makes it clear that she's writing a novel about the relationships between different kinds of women. Because the protagonist of her book is a young teenager who's lost her mother, and the majority of the other female characters are adult women, the most important kind of woman-to-woman relationship for the novel is that between the mother and the daughter. Lily travels to Tiburon, South Carolina, in search of information about her dead mother, Deborah, and she also admits to be looking for a maternal figure—a metaphorical mother—to replace Deborah. How does Kidd depict the mother-daughter relationship, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of this relationship?The first thing we notice about mother-daughter relationships in The Secret Life of Bees is that they're incredibly loving and nurturing. This is especially clear in the first chapters of the book, when Kidd contrasts Lily's relationship with her cruel, mean-spirited father, T. Ray, with Lily's fond memories of Deborah. Even more telling is the relationship between Lily and her black maid, Rosaleen: Rosaleen acts like a mother, baking Lily a birthday cake (T. Ray ignores her birthday altogether), and gives Lily comfort and support whenever she needs it. The metaphorical mother-daughter bond between Rosaleen and Lily is even stronger than the literal, biological bond between Lily and T. Ray—indeed, this bond is so strong that it breaks the "color line." Like Rosaleen, many of the women in the novel feel an instinctive need to love and protect children, especially girls. During the course of her time in South Carolina, then, Lily moves back and forth smoothly between many mother figures: Rosaleen, August Boatwright, May Boatwright, and even the Virgin Mary. All of these women provide Lily with different versions of the same things: love, support, affection, and wisdom. As Lily notes, "I have many mothers."The biggest strength of the mother-daughter relationship is also its greatest weakness, however. Because Lily can move back and forth between so many outstanding mother-figures, she keeps returning to her literal mother's neglectfulness. Indeed, it's Lily's most important mother-figure, August, who tells Lily the truth about Deborah: Deborah abandoned Lily for three months because of her depression. Even though Deborah tried to take Lily away from T. Ray after the depression subsided, Lily finds it almost impossible to come to terms with her mother's behavior: she's come to expect so much of her mothers that it's a genuine struggle for her to accept that her biological mother was anything less than perfect.For all the limitations of the maternal bond, Lily becomes a stronger, wiser person because of the influence of mother-figures like Rosaleen and August. Moreover, she's still learning from her mothers as the book ends. Unlike many of the canonical coming-of-age novels about a boy (for example, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), The Secret Life of Bees doesn't end with the child "going out into the world" and cutting off ties with his or her parents. Lily continues to live with Rosaleen and August and celebrate the importance of the mothers in her life. - Theme: Religion, Guilt, and Forgiveness. Description: It's easy to see that The Secret Life of Bees is a religious novel, even an explicitly Christian novel. The characters gain wisdom and happiness by gathering together to worship Christian figures like the Virgin Mary, and Lily Owens, the protagonist, has some of her most important insights while she's praying. And yet none of the characters have much respect for churches (indeed, the only priest in the book is portrayed as being foolish at best and racist at worst). This points to the fact that the characters believe in building a personal relationship with the Virgin Mary and the transcendent, outside of the tenets of organized religion. Most importantly, the characters use their religious faith to confront their own guilt, and learn how to forgive themselves and each other.The Secret Life of Bees begins with a quintessential Christian concept: sin. Lily hates herself because she believes that she was responsible for accidentally killing her own mother, Deborah. For most of the novel, Lily has a conflicted relationship with her mother: she wants to know more about her, but she's also terrified of what she might learn (for example, that she really did kill her mother). With August Boatwright's help, Lily learns about specific religious rituals and ceremonies (see the Ceremony and Ritual theme), but even more importantly, she learns how to use religion to address her own sense of guilt.August teaches Lily to accept tragedy and imperfection, both in herself and in other people. For Lily, this process must begin with accepting the love of other people. In an emotional scene, Lily repeats, "I am unlovable," only to hear August correct her: everyone loves her. By accepting that she's loved, Lily learns to love herself, including her own sins and mistakes. With this knowledge, Lily gains the courage to accept other people's sins. The big test of Lily's moral progress comes at the end of the book, when T. Ray comes to the Boatwright house to take Lily home. Instead of yelling or fighting back, Lily calmly apologizes to her father for running away, and feels sorry for him. Thanks to August's help, Lily has learned to be sympathetic, even to highly unsympathetic people: because she forgives herself for her own sins, she can forgive other people, too.Ultimately, sin, guilt, and forgiveness are parts of an ongoing process. Perhaps August's most important lesson for Lily is also her most explicitly Christian: although we'll never be perfect, the Virgin Mary is "inside" us all, helping us come to grips with our own mistakes. Faith and religion don't provide a one-time solution to Lily's problems—rather, they help her understand the complexities of life as she grows up. - Theme: Lying, Storytelling, and Confession. Description: One of the first things we learn about Lily Owens, the protagonist of The Secret Life of Bees, is that she's a gifted storyteller. Lily enjoys writing stories; moreover, she's good at inventing "stories"—in other words, lies—to get herself out of trouble. At several points, Lily's ability to concoct a convincing story saves her from jail (and moves the plot of the novel forward). But storytelling in The Secret Life of Bees is more than a plot device or an aspect of the protagonist's personality. There are many several kinds of storytelling in the novel, and by telling different kinds of stories, some fictional and some true, Lily makes sense of her life and matures as a person.In the first half of the book, Lily becomes an adult by telling stories, most of which are lies. She's forced to lie quickly and cleverly in order to keep Rosaleen out of jail. As she lies to her father, to police officers, and to nurses, Lily has a strange, "out of body" experience—she can't believe she's telling these lies so easily. The experience Lily describes is an important part of her development: although she's spent her entire life up to this point being yelled at by others (mostly her father), she realizes that she can fight back by crafting her own stories and presenting them as the truth. In the second half of the book, Lily switches from telling lies to telling true stories, reflecting her greater maturity and wisdom. After her friend Zach buys her a notebook and tells her to fill it with stories, Lily writes about her experiences in Tiburon, South Carolina: when there's a tragedy in her life, she takes control of the tragedy by turning it into a story. In these chapters, Lily experiences an epiphany that's familiar to any writer: she realizes that she can come to terms with the truth simply by writing it down.The crux of Lily's realization is that there's a fundamental difference between experiencing something and telling a "story" about it: by telling the truth about her pain, she can move past it. This idea is exemplified by May Boatwright, who has the practice of writing down any tragic thing she hears or experiences and putting the piece of paper into a stone wall. Another poignant example of this principle comes at the end of the novel, when Lily tells August Boatwright the story of her life: how she's always felt guilty for killing her mother; how she hates her father; how she's aspired to get out of Sylvan and explore the world. In this scene, Lily experiments with a new kind of storytelling: confession. Even though Lily thinks about her mother's death constantly, it's genuinely difficult for her to confess her feelings to another person. This demonstrates the value of confession: by telling (not just thinking about) the truth, Lily takes the crucial first steps in moving past her own guilt and anguish. By admitting her guilt, Lily begins to take control of it, much as she took control of other tragedies in her life through the act of writing about them. By the end of the novel, Lily has been through a great deal, but she's learned how to take control of her own feelings with the help of storytelling. - Theme: Ceremony and Ritual. Description: Some of the longest and most vivid passages in The Secret Life of Bees are about the elaborate religious ceremonies and rituals that take place at the Boatwright house. The three Boatwright sisters subscribe to a religion they've developed themselves, blending aspects of Catholicism and African-American history.The Secret Life of Bees makes it clear that rituals and ceremonies are bent and shaped according to the needs of the people who practice them. The Boatwrights, together with the so-called Daughters of Mary, practice a religion in which they worship the Virgin Mary, whom they depict as a black woman. Every week, the Daughters assemble around a small statue of the Virgin and pray to it. August Boatwright's explanation for the Daughters' ritual is that African-Americans need a religion that reflects their own culture, history, and even their appearance. According to the "history" of the Boatwrights' religion, the statue of the Virgin Mary was given to a slave (Obadiah) by Mary herself, inspiring the slave to break free from his chains. In this tradition, the black Daughters of Mary—who, quite rightly, believe that they're still the victims of white racism and oppression—obey a set of rituals that are designed to respect their own unique history and culture.This leads to one of Kidd's most important points about ritual: it's designed to build a strong community and sense of identity. By assembling in the same place every week, and worshipping a statue that explicitly represents black history, the Daughters of Mary aren't just reminding themselves of the importance of prayer and worship—they're reminding themselves that they are strong, and that they are a group bound together by their common history and heritage. Ceremony and ritual don't just reflect a community—they nurture it.One natural question, then, is whether or not the Daughters believe in the literal truth of their rituals. The answer is complicated. While the Daughters have great respect for the statue of Mary, and pray before it with a sense of awed reverence, they're also fully aware that the statue isn't literally a relic of the slave era, passed down from the Virgin Mary. August makes this clear when she tells Lily that the statue is actually a figurehead snapped off an old ship. The Daughters don't worship the statue because of its deep holiness—on the contrary, they give it this holiness in the act of worshipping it. (To emphasize this point, Kidd shows us that casual observers such as T. Ray find the statue of Mary ugly and worthless.) This points to the fact that ceremonies are meant to nurture a sense of holiness that's already within worshippers' souls. As August tells Lily, the Virgin Mary isn't a statue on a table—she's inside Lily already. Lily's goal when praying before the statue shouldn't be to find enlightenment in the statue itself. It should be to find this sense of enlightenment already within herself.Ultimately, Kidd suggests that rituals are designed to help worshippers find their own wisdom, not tell them what wisdom is. The best proof of this is the fact that Lily—a white teenager surrounded by middle-aged black women—is welcomed into the Daughters of Mary. Although worshipping a black Virgin Mary is designed to instill a sense of community in the Daughters, its ultimate purpose is also to help people be at peace with themselves. Lily isn't black, and hasn't gone through the same experiences as the Daughters, but because she's sincere in her desire to be enlightened and happy, she becomes one of the Daughters. - Climax: Climax:August Boatwright reveals that she knew Lily's mother - Summary: At the end of 1964, a 14-year-old white girl named Lily Owens thinks back on the eventful summer she's had. The narrative then jumps back to the start of the summer. Lily lives with her father, a cruel man named T. Ray Owens, in the town of Sylvan, South Carolina. Lily has vivid memories of the death of her mother, Deborah Fontanel Owens: when Lily was 4 years old, she remembers her mother packing a suitcase and arguing with her father. The next part of her memory is blurry, but she recalls holding a gun, followed by a loud explosion. Lily blames herself for Deborah's death. She keeps a small box full of her mother's old things, including a photograph of her, a pair of gloves, and a picture of the Virgin Mary depicted as a black woman. The words, "Tiburon, South Carolina," are scrawled on the back of the picture of the Virgin Mary, though Lily doesn't know why. In July 1964, Lily's maid, a black woman named Rosaleen, tells Lily she's going to go into town to register to vote, since the Civil Rights Act has just been passed. Lily, who's very close with Rosaleen, decides to go with her. As they walk into the center of town, Rosaleen gets in a fight with a trio of racist white men, who attack her and hit her in the head. Rosaleen is sent to jail for assault. Lily rushes back to her home, where she has a fight with her father. T. Ray tells Lily that her mother never loved her, and was planning to leave them both on the day she died. He also tells Lily that Rosaleen's life is in danger, since the trio of racists who attacked her will want to fight again. Furious, Lily decides to run away from home. She writes T. Ray a letter in which she tells him she doesn't believe what he said about her mother. Then she goes to the hospital where Rosaleen's injuries are being treated, and helps Rosaleen sneak out. Lily tells Rosaleen they're going to Tiburon to find out more about Deborah, and Rosaleen reluctantly agrees, since she knows she's in danger if she stays in Sylvan. Rosaleen and Lily hitchhike to Tiburon. They stop at a general store, where Lily notices jars of honey with the same image of the black Virgin Mary on them. She learns that a local black family, the Boatwrights, makes and sells this honey, and she and Rosaleen go to their house, hoping to learn more about Deborah. Rosaleen and Lily find that the Boatwrights are a trio of sisters: August (the oldest), June (a schoolteacher), and May (the youngest, and very "strange"). Lily lies and tells the Boatwrights that her parents are both dead, and that she and Rosaleen, her maid, are going to Virginia. August immediately tells Lily and Rosaleen that they're welcome to stay with them. Rosaleen and Lily quickly learn that August's life revolves around bees: she keeps a huge number of beehives, which she uses to make honey, candles, and other things. Lily also notices that the three Boatwright sisters keep a statue of the Virgin Mary, depicted as a black woman, which they call Our Lady of Chains. Finally, Lily learns that May had a twin sister named April, who shot herself. Ever since then, May has been odd and lonely—whenever she hears about something sad, she writes down a description of the event and slips it in a stone wall by the house. Lily becomes acquainted with Zachary Taylor, a black teenager who works for August. "Zach" is handsome and intelligent, and Lily finds herself developing a crush on him—something she'd always believed impossible. Lily also bonds with August, who's very wise and understanding. August tells Lily a story about a nun who runs away from her nunnery, and returns, years later, to find that the Virgin Mary has been "covering for her" all these years. Lily isn't sure what this story is supposed to mean. Lily learns that the Boatwright sisters hold weekly gatherings for a group called the Daughters of Mary—a makeshift religion that mixes aspects of Catholicism and African-American history. The Daughters pray before the statue of the Virgin Mary, which they claim was sent to the black people of America by God himself. Lily and Zach go to visit a friend of Zach's, the prominent white attorney Clayton Forrest. While in Forrest's office, Lily decides to place a phone call to T. Ray. T. Ray demands to know where Lily is, but Lily only asks him, 'What's my favorite color?" T. Ray ignores the question and threatens to beat Lily if she doesn't return—Lily hangs up the phone in tears. One day Lily makes a surprising discovery. She notices that May feeds marshmallows to cockroaches—something that Lily remembers Deborah doing years ago. Lily asks May if she ever knew a woman named Deborah, and May immediately replies that Deborah stayed with them years ago. Amazed, Lily decides to show August the photograph of her mother. Her plans are delayed, however, when Zach is suddenly arrested for allegedly participating in a fight with a trio of white men. Zach spends the next few nights in jail. When May hears about Zach's arrest, she's so devastated that she drowns herself in a nearby river. June and August are devastated by May's sudden death. When Zach returns from prison, having been freed by Clayton Forrest, the remaining Boatwrights hold a vigil for May. After the vigil, Lily asks Zach if he'd date her. Zach replies that he can't date a white woman—although he likes Lily, he wants to become a lawyer and change racist laws first. Lily finally confronts August about Deborah. She shows August the photograph of Deborah, and August immediately tells Lily the truth: August was Deborah's maid years before, when Deborah was only a child. August allowed Lily and Rosaleen to stay with them because she immediately recognized that Lily was Deborah's child. As August confesses this, Lily confesses that she's been lying to August: her father is still alive, and she and Rosaleen left Sylvan to keep Rosaleen out of jail. August tells Lily that Deborah was very depressed during her marriage to T. Ray, although she loved Lily dearly. When Lily was a small child, Deborah abandoned her family to stay with August in Tiburon. She came back to Sylvan to take Lily with her, and during this visit, she died. Lily is devastated by the news that Deborah abandoned her, as T. Ray said, despite the fact that Deborah was coming back to take her to Tiburon. August tells Lily that she must forgive Deborah. The best way for Lily to forgive Deborah, August explains, is to begin by accepting that Lily is loved. Although Lily struggles with this, she comes to accept that August, June, Rosaleen, and Zach love her dearly. In the coming weeks, she slowly begins to forgive Deborah. One day at the end of the summer, T. Ray shows up at the Boatwright house and demands that Lily come with him—he's traced Lily's whereabouts using the phone call she made to him from Forrest's office. Instead of fighting back, Lily calls T. Ray "daddy," and apologizes to him for running away from home. T. Ray begins to cry, and whispers that Lily looks just like Deborah. Lily tells T. Ray that she refuses to come back to Sylvan with him. As she says this, the Daughters of Mary enter the room, daring T. Ray to try to take Lily away. Angrily, T. Ray leaves the house. Before he drives off, Lily asks him if it's true that she killed Deborah. T. Ray replies that it is: although it was an accident, Lily shot her mother. In the following weeks, Lily and Rosaleen accept that they'll live with the Boatwrights from now on. Lily slowly forgives T. Ray and Deborah for how they've treated her. Meanwhile, she enrolls in the local high school with Zach. Lily concludes that she's extremely lucky: she has so many loving mothers, including Rosaleen, August, and the Virgin Mary.

- Genre: Short Story/Humor - Title: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - Point of view: Close third person - Setting: Waterbury, Connecticut, around the winter of 1938-1939 - Character: Walter Mitty. Description: The decidedly unheroic hero of the story, Mitty is a meek and henpecked husband who fantasizes about heroic acts in order to escape his mundane life and unhappy marriage. His alter egos—a naval commander, a renowned surgeon, a skilled gunman, a fighter pilot, and a prisoner in front of a firing squad—are brave, strong, mysterious men who command respect, control their lives, and always keep their cool in the face of death and danger. In reality, however, Mitty is inept with machinery, hypersensitive to embarrassment, and struggles to maintain a sense of control over his own life. - Character: Mrs. Mitty. Description: Walter Mitty's nagging wife. Domineering and demanding, she controls every aspect of her husband's behavior, from whether he wears his gloves to how fast he drives the car. While she believes she is acting for Mitty's own good—her insistence that he buy a pair of overshoes, for instance, is part of her ongoing concern about his health—her criticism is often unreasonable, and her tendency to attribute Mitty's unhappiness to physical illness shows her failure to understand his psychological needs. - Character: Parking-Lot Attendant and Grinning Garagemen. Description: Young, cocky men who, Walter Mitty feels, judge him for not being able to handle his car. The parking-lot attendant parks Mitty's car with what Mitty sees as "insolent skill," while the garagemen grin at Mitty as they remove his tire chains. Although Mitty's reaction to these characters groups them together, only the parking-lot attendant appears in the story's present; the garagemen are part of Mitty's memory and his plan to avoid embarrassment on future visits to the garage. - Theme: Heroism and Masculinity. Description: As Walter Mitty ferries his wife to her hairdresser's and then buys some overshoes, he falls into fantasies that cast him in heroic and traditionally masculine roles: a naval commander, an expert pistol shot, a daring surgeon, a fighter pilot. He is admired for macho qualities like strength, bravery, aggression, lack of emotion, and holding his liquor, and is easily able to dominate the all-male social groups where his imagination makes him a leader. In real life, however, he shrinks from conflict and feels ridiculed by both men and women. His car, and his limited ability to control it—the fact that his wife limits the speed and that the garagemen must park it and work on it for him—symbolizes his sense of not being manly enough. In his unhappy marriage, Mrs. Mitty is the dominating personality, a balance of power that conflicts with traditional gender expectations and places him in the historically ridiculed position of the "henpecked husband." Mrs. Mitty's constant nagging and bossy behavior mark her as stereotypically unfeminine and unappealing, as well as insensitive. In contrast, the two women briefly featured in the fantasies, a "pretty nurse" and "a lovely dark-haired girl" who appears suddenly in Mitty's arms, are defined by their looks and serve mainly as props to help Mitty exercise his heroics.While the Mittys' relationship dynamic helps to characterize them as individuals, it can also be seen as a comment on how suburban life and consumer culture minimize traditional masculinity. The story takes place on one of the couple's weekly trips to town for shopping and Mrs. Mitty's hair appointment—trips that Mitty hates because he is "always getting something wrong" on the shopping list and being scolded by Mrs. Mitty. In this way, while Mitty can fantasize about commanding masculine roles, his real circumstances place him—and the modern man he represents—in service to "feminine" concerns like appearance and household care. With doctors and garagemen around to take care of him, he has no opportunity nor any need to carry out heroic actions. And with traffic lights and parking garages governing his movements and Mrs. Mitty expecting him to drive her home, he has nowhere to escape but his imagination. - Theme: Illness and Mortality. Description: Mrs. Mitty is preoccupied with her husband's health and possible illness ("You're not a young man any longer," she reminds him, insisting he put on the gloves and overshoes he doesn't want to wear) and uses her concern to dismiss his feelings and assert control over his behavior. When she catches Mitty in the middle of a fantasy, she suggests he see the doctor, and when he asserts his right to be "sometimes thinking," she declares she will take his temperature once she gets him home. Mitty, whose age is part of his sense of weakness, resents these constant reminders of his mortality—in one fantasy scene, he is a surgeon who outperforms the very doctor his wife has told him to see. (The patient he saves is named Wellington, which also happens to be the name of a famous brand of rubber boots: not only is "Dr. Mitty" too healthy to need overshoes, but he can also restore overshoes themselves to health.) Yet, even so, death is always at the forefront of Mitty's "secret life": He defies death as a naval commander, stops death as a surgeon, deals death as a gunman, embraces the risk of death as a pilot, and finally, as a prisoner before a firing squad, dies courageously. This changing relationship to death in the fantasies—with death evolving from something he can control and overcome to something that he can only face defiantly as it comes for him—parallels Mitty's initial resistance and ultimate resignation to his boring, unsatisfying life. - Theme: Public Image and Embarrassment. Description: Walter Mitty is very anxious about how others perceive him: for instance, he is so fearful of the young garagemen's judgment that he plans to wear an unnecessary sling on his arm to avoid it, and he finds even the revolving doors of the hotel "faintly derisive." Most other characters, from Mrs. Mitty to the traffic cop to the woman who laughs at him for saying "puppy biscuit" aloud on the street, interact with Mitty only to criticize him, and he is frequently startled and flustered when their comments interrupt his fantasies. In contrast, his fantasies tend to include crowds of onlookers who marvel at his skill and bravery—such as the crew members who trust that "The Old Man'll get us through!" or the expert surgeons who look to him for help—and always present him as calm and collected in high-pressure situations. When his fantasy puts him on trial for his life, literalizing his sense of being judged by the parking garage attendant, Mitty undermines his own defense. Ironically, this repeats his real-life pattern of behavior (like forgetting to take his keys out of the car for the attendant), but it also shows his desire to be someone who does not fear public judgment. - Theme: The Overlap of Fantasy and Reality. Description: While at first glance Walter Mitty's dramatic "secret life" couldn't be more different from his mundane, routine reality, there are connections between the two lives. A newsboy's shout about an ongoing trial triggers Mitty's courtroom fantasy, and reading about aerial warfare turns him into a fighter pilot. More broadly, the themes and events in the fantasies are directly linked to the frustrations Mitty feels in reality, particularly his sense of not being in control of his own life. Through his fantasies, Mitty can escape his wife's nagging reminders to drive slowly and see the doctor; he can tear through hurricanes and firestorms against all advice to the contrary, demanding obedience from sailors and surgeons. His imagination can transform him from a man who struggles with tire chains to one who can fix an "anaesthetizer" with a ballpoint pen. However, a turning point comes when, at the point in the courtroom fantasy when Mitty would be condemned, the word "cur" reminds him that the real Mitty needs to buy puppy biscuit—though his imagination can offer a temporary escape, he remains imprisoned in reality. As the story progresses, the fantasy life and reality life blend together more and more: When Mitty goes to the store to buy the puppy biscuit, he is still self-identifying as "the greatest pistol shot in the world" as he wonders what brand of biscuit to buy. Similarly, in the final scene, Thurber transitions into Mitty's firing-squad fantasy without a paragraph break—a formal decision that shows just how much Mitty's two lives overlap in his mind. This sense of overlap is important for Mitty's character. He doesn't just dream of the exciting life he might have had; it's as if he truly lives the impossible adventures of his imagination, and this small but important distinction is what gives him at least a little bit of the strength and willpower he longs for. Mitty doesn't have much control over his life, but he does control his own interior world—he can prove his own worth, escape the confinements of his world, and be any kind of hero he wants to be, if only in his mind. - Theme: Concealment. Description: The real-life Walter Mitty keeps his true self hidden, literally and figuratively. Whether he's reluctantly putting on gloves and overshoes in obedience to Mrs. Mitty's concern about his health, or planning to wear a sling on his arm to save himself from embarrassment, he believes concealing himself is necessary for his own protection; revealing his true self in any way would mean a risk of exposing his flaws. In his fantasies, however, Mitty is completely in control of what he conceals or reveals, and concealment is always an example of his strength. His heroic alter egos are calm and cool, expert at controlling their feelings—in particular, the enigmatic fighter pilot Captain Mitty remains self-possessed even while drinking. But Mitty won't accept any concealment imposed by others. In the courtroom fantasy, he refuses to use the sling as a disguise even when it could potentially save him from conviction: he wants everyone to know the truth about him and his abilities. His declaration, "To hell with the handkerchief!" in the final scene is similar—in declining a handkerchief blindfold, not only does he refuse to show fear before the firing squad, but he also refuses to conceal his face. For "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last," this moment of pride and bravery is triumphant in spite of his death. Yet there's a sad irony to the fact that he remains "inscrutable"—that is, impossible for others to understand—up to the moment of his death, because this description applies to his real life as well as his fantasy. Just as his wife appears to be a stranger at the beginning, he will always be unknown and unknowable to her, and nobody will ever know what goes on in his secret life. - Theme: Humor. Description: One of the most striking characteristics of Walter Mitty's fantasies is their silliness. The fantasies may be heroic, but only melodramatically, cartoonishly so; from the fountain pen Mitty uses to replace a piston to the beautiful woman who materializes in his arms, they contain events and elements that couldn't possibly happen in reality, and read like exaggerated parodies of action movies or adventure stories. Like a child playing pretend, Mitty makes a pocketa-pocketa-pocketa sound effect for machines from airships to flamethrowers, and his vision of the machines is hazy beyond "complicated" dials and wires. His characters shout out nonsensical jargon: "Coreopsis is setting in," says the imaginary Dr. Renshaw, giving the surgical patient's condition the name of a daisylike flower. In some ways, Thurber's humor undermines Mitty even further; he is so pathetically far from having the skills he dreams of excelling in that his fantasies don't even make sense. Yet the real Mitty is also capable of wordplay—"toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum?" he muses at one point, free-associating with the items on his shopping list—and his real life can be darkly ridiculous too ("Don't tell me you forgot the what's-it's-name," Mrs. Mitty will often say). For that matter, Mitty and his wife are such cartoons of the proverbial henpecked husband and nagging wife that their real selves are hardly more dimensional than the characters Mitty imagines, which means that a less tongue-in-cheek rendition of his macho fantasies could come off as self-pitying or misogynistic. Mitty's secret life is what gives him depth—and the lighthearted, humorous tone of his fantasies is what makes both sides of his character sympathetic. - Climax: Walter Mitty stands before the firing squad in his fantasy - Summary: A naval commander is captaining a "huge, hurtling, eight-engined Navy hydroplane" through a terrible storm. Though his lieutenant fears he can't make it, the Commander insists on full speed ahead, and the admiring crew expresses its faith in his abilities. Suddenly, Mrs. Mitty calls out a warning not to drive so fast, and it is revealed that the naval commander was part of a fantasy Walter Mitty has been having as he drives his car. As Mitty's fantasy fades, Mrs. Mitty suggests that he see Dr. Renshaw for a checkup. Walter Mitty drops Mrs. Mitty off at the hair salon in Waterbury, Connecticut. As she gets out of the car, she reminds him to buy a pair of overshoes, cutting off his protest that he doesn't need them by saying, "You're not a young man any longer." Mitty puts on his gloves when his wife asks why he isn't wearing them, but takes them off as soon as she has gotten out of the car and he is stopped at a red light, out of sight. When the light changes, a cop snaps at him to hurry, and Mitty puts the gloves back on before he drives away. When he drives past the hospital, Mitty falls into another fantasy. A famous millionaire, Wellington McMillan, is suffering from "obstreosis of the ductal tract," and the doctors performing his surgery—including Dr. Renshaw and two visiting specialists—need Mitty's help. Mitty graciously accepts the specialists' compliments, and saves the day when a machine breaks down by replacing a faulty piston with a fountain pen. However, before he can make his first cut, a shout from the parking-lot attendant interrupts the fantasy: Mitty has driven into the exit-only lane. Dazed, he tries to correct his mistake, but the attendant takes over, re-parking the car "with insolent skill." As he walks along Main Street, Mitty remembers another incident in which he had tried to remove his car's tire chains, only to end up with them wound around the axles, and another "young, grinning garageman" had to come and help him. Ever since, Mrs. Mitty has made him drive to a garage whenever the chains need changing. Mitty plans to wear his right arm in a sling the next time he goes to a garage, so that the garageman will see that he couldn't have taken the chains off himself and will not grin at him. Mitty then buys the overshoes, but has trouble remembering what else Mrs. Mitty told him to buy. Hearing a newsboy shouting something about a trial, Mitty has a fantasy in which he is on trial for murder. When his attorney claims that he could not have committed the crime because his arm was in a sling, Mitty announces that he could have made the shot that killed the victim even with his left hand. As chaos breaks out in the courtroom, a beautiful woman appears in Mitty's arms, and the District Attorney attacks her. Mitty punches him, calling him a "miserable cur"… which reminds him, back in reality, that he was supposed to buy puppy biscuit. A passing woman laughs at Mitty for saying "Puppy biscuit" aloud to himself. Though Mitty is already near a grocery store, he is embarrassed by the woman's laughter and goes out of his way to request "some biscuit for small, young dogs," at a smaller store further up the street. Mitty makes sure to arrive first at the hotel where he will meet Mrs. Mitty after her hairstyling appointment, because she doesn't like to get there before him. While he's waiting at the hotel, he sees a magazine headline about whether Germany's air force can conquer the world and imagines himself as Captain Mitty, a British fighter pilot. Mitty's copilot is unable to fly, and so Mitty volunteers to fly alone. A young, deferential sergeant describes the danger of the mission and advises Mitty not to go, but Mitty (drinking several shots of brandy, to the sergeant's admiration) speaks carelessly about the possibility of death. Just as Captain Mitty is leaving the dugout to get into the plane, Mrs. Mitty arrives at the hotel and scolds her husband for sitting in a hard-to-find spot and for not putting on his overshoes yet. In a rare moment of defending himself, Mitty asks, "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" Mrs. Mitty says she will take his temperature once she gets him home. On the way back to the car, Mrs. Mitty asks her husband to wait while she buys something at a drugstore. While he leans against the wall, he imagines he is standing before a firing squad. Scornfully saying, "To hell with the handkerchief," Mitty bravely and proudly faces his imaginary death, describing himself as "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last."

- Genre: Short Story, Fairy Tale, Allegory - Title: The Selfish Giant - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The Giant's property and the surrounding neighborhood - Character: The Giant. Description: The main character of the story, the titular selfish giant owns a garden where local children have taken to playing while he is away on an extended vacation. At the beginning of the story, the Giant is selfish and hardhearted; he drives the children out of his garden upon discovering them there, and he builds a high wall to keep them out. Spring, Summer, and Autumn leave the garden as well, repulsed by the Giant's selfishness, leaving only the forces of Winter—the North Wind, the Snow, the Frost, and the Hail—to inhabit it year-round. For months thereafter, the Giant is miserable, unable to understand why Spring will not come. Springtime only returns to the garden when the children sneak inside to play. Softened by the months he spent deprived of warmth and cheer, the Giant realizes that he brought the winter upon himself with his selfishness, and immediately he wishes to make amends. His first gesture of kindness is to a little boy in the far corner of the garden, who is crying because he can't climb the tree there. The Giant raises the boy up into the tree, which at once bursts into bloom as the child embraces the Giant, kissing him. With this act, the Giant warms the rest of the children to him, and he knocks down the wall so as to share his garden with them forevermore. In the years that follow, as the Giant ages, his heart softens further still. He comes to cherish the children far more than the garden itself. Even so, he wishes that he could once again meet the little boy who kissed him, whom he loves best of all. The Giant's wish is granted only in his twilight years, when he is very old and feeble—the boy appears in the corner of the garden, transfigured, revealing himself to be the Christ Child. He then welcomes the Giant into heaven as reward for his kindness. This arc of redemption, from selfish sinner to selfless neighbor, ending in eternal Paradise, illustrates the Christian promise of redemption. The Giant's character is meant to teach this moral lesson as simply and straightforwardly as possible. - Character: The Children. Description: The children in the story are a group of local kids who play in the Giant's garden after school. Innocent and sweet, they attract the goodwill of nature—they are loved by the birds, the trees, and even the seasons themselves. Spring, Summer, and Autumn bless the children's playtime with good weather and cheer, sharing in their joy. When the Giant returns home from an extended vacation and cruelly drives the children out of his garden, the warmer seasons follow them out, leaving only Winter to inhabit the Giant's property year-round. Only when the children later manage to sneak through a hole in the wall does Winter thaw into Spring, so that the children can once again enjoy the garden. This entire sequence—Autumn into Winter, Winter into Spring, all following the children's movements—speaks to the children's innate power to transform the world around them, simply by virtue of their innocence. Beyond changing the garden for the better, they change the Giant himself. The sight of their renewed happiness is enough to melt the Giant's heart and make him see the error of his ways. Immediately he works to make amends. Initially the children flee from his approach, but his first kind gesture—raising a little boy into a tree that he had been trying to climb—warms them to him immediately. Wilde suggests that in their innocence, children are keenly perceptive to a person's true nature, and so these children can forgive the Giant quite readily. After the Giant knocks down the wall around his garden, the children play there ever after, treasured by their new friend. Looking at the story from a structural standpoint, the children provide the framework for the Giant's redemption; they create the situation which brings about change in him, and their wellbeing is the barometer for the Giant's moral progress. The story resolves with the children in a harmonious relationship with their giant neighbor, showing that he has truly redeemed himself. - Character: The Little Boy. Description: The little boy in the story is Christ in disguise, and he assumes this form so as to offer the Giant a chance at redemption. The Christ Child first appears among the many children who sneak back inside the Giant's garden through the hole in the wall, anonymous in the crowd. He is singled out not by his divine nature, which he conceals, but by the fact that he is the only child not enjoying the springtime. He huddles in the farthest corner of the garden, where the winter weather remains, crying because he is too small to climb the nearby tree. The Giant, eager to atone for his hardheartedness, raises the boy up into the tree—which at once bursts into bloom, as the child kisses his newfound friend. This act is how the Giant demonstrates his goodwill towards the children, and it begins about his reformation—and it happens, unbeknownst to the Giant, according to Christ's grand design. The idea that all-powerful beings test humankind by disguising themselves as ordinary mortals is a very old one, at least as old as the Greek myth of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple who unknowingly host the god Zeus for dinner. The Christ Child's first interaction with the Giant follows this age-old plot, while also hearkening to the famous Biblical passage, Matthew 25:40: "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." It underscores the Christian theme that a person's behavior towards their neighbor, and especially towards children and the poor, is a metric of their moral standing. At the end of the story, the Christ Child reveals his true identity—the wounds of the Crucifixion appear on his hands and feet, and the tree he had once tried to climb, symbolic of the cross, is transfigured in gold and silver. This is how he shows the Giant that his kindness to the children has redeemed his soul, and after this he welcomes the Giant into Paradise. - Character: Spring, Summer, and Autumn. Description: Spring, Summer, and Autumn are the seasons personified. At the beginning of the story, they bless the Giant's garden with good weather—until he ousts the children from his garden, at which point they leave, repulsed by the Giant's selfishness. The seasons' disfavor shows that the Giant's selfish ways go against the natural order and thus deserve punishment from above. - Character: The Forces of Winter. Description: The personified forces of Winter are the Snow, the Frost, the North Wind, and the Hail. They take residence in the Giant's garden because Spring, Summer, and Autumn have left it (along with the children), thus allowing an indefinitely long Winter to take their place. Though the Snow, Frost, Hail, and North Wind harbor no malice against the Giant, they delight in causing wintry mayhem around his home, damaging his property and making him miserable. This is the Giant's just punishment for being selfish and keeping his garden only to himself, showing that sin naturally brings consequences against the sinner. - Theme: Christian Charity. Description: "The Selfish Giant" is a lesson in Christian charity, as the titular Giant learns how to let go of his self-interest and love others. The Christian concept of "charity" is distinct from the common modern sense of the word, which has to do with money or aid for the disadvantaged. Christian charity, or caritas in Latin, refers to a perfectly unselfish kind of love. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines Charity as "the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God," but Wilde presents the Giant's selfish ways as the complete opposite of this kind of charity. At the beginning of the story, the Giant returns to his castle after a seven-year absence and is furious to find that a children have been playing in his garden. In his extreme selfishness, the Giant goes to great lengths to keep the children out—but having done so, he grows miserable. He only knows happiness once he has learned to love the children as his neighbors, and only through this unselfish love does he earn entry into Paradise. Through the Giant's reformation, Wilde argues that there is not only a reward to charity, but a moral imperative to practice it. He underscores this point by framing the matter in Christian terms, as a conflict between wealthy and poor, adult and child, neighbor and neighbor. The children are uniquely positioned to be the subjects of charity, in the Catholic sense of the word. Through them, Wilde very deliberately constructs the narrative framework for a parable about specifically this kind of charity. First of all, these children are quite literally the Giant's neighbors: they attend school near his castle, and they play in his garden every day after lessons. The word "neighbor" occupies a very important place in Christian thought. It refers not just to people living in close proximity to oneself, but to people potentially impacted by one's actions, who are therefore owed kindness and love. In creating this fable about Christian love, writing on a level that even young children can comprehend, Wilde makes a point to present the Giant's "spiritual neighbors" as his literal, actual neighbors. He leaves no ambiguity about the matter. The second indication that the children are subjects of Christian charity has to do simply with the fact that these are children with whom the Giant is dealing. This is a reference on Wilde's part to the famous biblical passage, Matthew 19:14: "Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs." In the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus Christ points to children—and one's behavior towards children—as a moral example. The way a person treats children, the weakest and most innocent members of a community, is indicative of that person's moral character, and kindness to children allows someone to learn the childlike qualities that allow them to enter heaven: openness, kindness, trust, and generosity. By having the Giant interact only with children, Wilde brings this Christian argument to the forefront of the story. This culminates in the revelation that the little boy who once tried to climb the Giant's tree is actually the Christ Child, Jesus himself in the form of a child. The "wounds of Love" on his hands and feet, evidently left by nails, identify him as such. For the Giant's kindness, the Christ Child welcomes him into Paradise. This ending underscores the value of charity in an eternal, spiritual sense. Of all the children who visited his garden, the Giant is said to have "loved him [Christ] the best," and longed to see him again. This precisely mirrors how the virtue of Charity is outlined in Catholic theology: supreme love of God which then prompts love for one's neighbor. It is love for Christ which leads the Giant to love all the other children, and this in turn merits his eternal reward. Bearing this in mind, Wilde's reader can easily see how the Giant is written to reflect the Christian virtue of charity—first as a negative example, the very opposite of charity, and then as a positive example. True to the story's title, the character begins as "a very selfish Giant," keeping the neighborhood children out of his garden simply because it is his. The Giant's sole justification for walling off his garden is that, as he puts it, "My own garden is my own garden […] and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself." He thinks only of his rights as the owner of the property, failing to consider the just application of those rights. The sign he places on the wall, "TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED," speaks to this—as it is simply preposterous that anyone would prosecute a child. The sight of the children returned to his garden—and specifically the sight of one miserable child in the corner, the boy revealed to be Christ in the end—is what changes the Giant's stubborn, selfish ways. He is moved to a perfectly unselfish act of kindness, helping the boy climb a tree, and this one act cascades into other acts of charity towards his young neighbors. The Giant breaks down the wall, opens his garden to the children, and cherishes their company for years afterward. In other words, love of Jesus Christ begins the Giant's new life of charity to those around him, just as described in the Catholic Catechism. The story is a very short and simple one, spanning only a few pages in any edition, yet this is because Wilde was molding it as closely as he could to the theological definition of charity. His aim was to communicate this Christian lesson in a clear, earnest, straightforward manner, such that anyone of any age could grasp it. - Theme: Divine Providence. Description: Divine Providence is a Christian theological concept that is fundamental to understanding the logic of "The Selfish Giant." Divine Providence, or simply "Providence," is the belief in a world justly ordered by God. It states that the natural world, from plants to animals to weather, exists in accordance with God's will, and that God will intervene through nature if he deems it just. Oscar Wilde presents this idea through a kind of fairy tale logic—the trees, the Spring, Summer, and Autumn, and the forces of Winter all speak as if they were sentient people—yet it remains faithful at its core to Christian values and thought. Nature smiles upon the children and the garden, and the natural course of seasons is shown to be pleasant and good. The Giant's selfishness, however, brings an unnaturally long winter upon his home, as the divine order of the universe punishes him for his hardhearted ways. In more general terms, the natural world around the Giant's garden changes according to what he deserves morally, which reflects both the Giant's character and the idea of Providence. Through the Giant and the garden's twinned transformations, Wilde argues that the natural world abides by God's just will, meting out punishments and rewards as they are due. When the Giant returns to his property after many years' absence, the natural order of the seasons is disrupted—a harsh winter settles upon the garden, staying well past the natural span of the season, because his cold-hearted nature deserves only cold and misery in kind. Before his arrival, though, the garden is an idyllic paradise, complete with "soft green grass," "beautiful flowers like stars," birds singing sweetly, and so on. The peach trees, which blossom in "pink and pearl" before bearing "rich fruit" through the autumn, show that each change of seasons brings new joys to the garden. Moved by this natural splendor, the children rejoice, "How happy we are here!" This echoes the recurring line in the Book of Genesis, "God saw that it was good," which follows each of God's creations as he looks upon them. In the Christian tradition on which "The Selfish Giant" is founded, humans, like their creator, find happiness in nature's beauty. This belief is foundational to the idea of Divine Providence. When the Giant returns home and drives the children away, the garden's beauty and bounty also vanish, further supporting the idea that the natural world submits to God's just will. As the children flee, and so do the songbirds—and this, in turn, leads the trees to "[forget] to blossom." The warmer seasons keep away because the Giant is, in the Autumn's words, "too selfish" to deserve good weather. The Giant's selfishness attracts only cold, harsh, unseasonable weather. The North Wind, invited into the garden by the Snow and the Frost, calls it "a delightful spot," and invites the Hail as well. In themselves, these forces are not malicious, nor do they show any intent to punish the Giant, but nonetheless they are drawn to his cold heart as the other seasons were drawn to the children's joy. It is simply their nature to avoid warmth and seek cold. In other words, the long, miserable winter is merely the natural consequence of the Giant's bad behavior—yet this natural order is itself willed by God. Punishment for a selfish heart is built into the very fabric of nature that God created. However, just as punishment is built into the natural order, so too is reward—as evidenced by the blossoming of spring when the Giant mends his ways. The children bring good weather back to the garden when they sneak inside, but it is specifically Giant's loving gesture towards the Christ Child which dispels the long winter for good. One corner of the garden remains trapped in winter until the Giant, of his own free will, helps the little boy who is struggling to climb a tree there. It should be noted that when the other children notice the Giant's approach, they flee, and "the garden [becomes] Winter again." Only when the Giant raises the boy Christ into the tree do the springtime blossoms return again. This is the moment at which the good weather becomes the consequence of the Giant's character, not just the children's. In the years that follow, as the Giant welcomes the children into his garden each day, the garden resembles its former state. It blossoms with flowers, and birdsong is heard overhead. Nature returns to its normal course because of the Giant's kindness, and he enjoys its bounty and beauty as rewards. Once again, God's justice manifests through the natural world. At every stage of the story, this cycle of retribution comes about through the natural world, in accordance with the Christian doctrine of Divine Providence. Though Wilde personifies the plants, birds, weather, and seasons, their activities still abide by a sense of cosmic justice, at the head of which is Jesus Christ. "The Selfish Giant," like many fairy tales and religious parables, teaches its reader that their actions and attitudes have moral weight, and that a higher power will reward or punish them accordingly. - Theme: Redemption. Description: The theme of redemption occupies a special and distinct place in "The Selfish Giant." The redemptive arc of the Giant's character is what drives the plot forward—but more than this, redemption of the soul is a core promise of Christianity, and Wilde's fairy tale communicates this promise in clear and decidedly Christian terms. At the end of the story, the first child the Giant befriended, the little boy, is revealed to be the Christ Child, identifiable by the wounds of his Crucifixion. He offers the Giant eternal life in Paradise as reward for overcoming his selfishness and letting the children play in his garden. Thus the Giant's spirit moves on to a happy afterlife, following Jesus Christ. Christianity teaches that anyone who repents of their sins can earn eternal reward in heaven, and "The Selfish Giant" illustrates precisely this idea through the titular Giant. For a person to be redeemed, they must first be a sinner; redemption comes in the acknowledgment of sin, followed by genuine contrition for it. Wilde sets up the Giant as an example of this very process: the character goes from selfishness to kindness, with recognition of his selfishness as the crucial middle step between these points. First Wilde establishes that the Giant's sin is selfishness. The title, "The Selfish Giant," is already straightforward enough, but it is only the first of many explicit signposts. After the Giant builds his wall, declaring, "My own garden is my own garden," the narrator simply states outright: "He was a very selfish Giant." Later he is called "the Selfish Giant" in the body of the text, and the personified Autumn says of him, "He is too selfish." Over and over, in the style of most fables with morals, the singular point of the Giant's selfishness is pressed. Then, when the Giant realizes the error of his ways, he identifies his sin and the reason behind his suffering: "'How selfish I have been!' he said: 'Now I know why Spring would not come here.'" As the narrator remarks, "He was really very sorry for what he had done." This sequence of thoughts closely follows the Catholic concept of contrition. In Catholic theology, a truly repentant person first feels recognition, then guilt, then contrition—a feeling which is not just remorse for one's sins, but also abhorrence for the sin. In the Catholic sacrament of Penance, the contrite person then performs some action which makes up for the sins they have committed, and redeems their soul. True to this, the Giant's next thought is to undo the bad effects of his selfishness: "I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children's playground for ever and ever." The redemption of the Giant's soul takes an even more explicitly Christian tone at the story's end, when the Christ Child welcomes him into heaven. This scene references two major points of Catholic doctrine, both of them having to do with the redemption of souls. The appearance of Jesus Christ before the Giant is likely a reference to Catholic teachings on the Second Coming. The Catholic Church teaches that at the end of the world, Christ will return in the flesh, and bring all the dead back to life, to live in a heaven that is physical as well spiritual. Although the Giant's body dies and remains dead, the physical presence of Christ before the dying seems to recall the Catholic doctrine. More importantly, the tree in the Giant's garden is a stand-in for the cross, a Christian symbol of universal redemption. "Tree" is often used as a poetic term for the cross or crucifix, and the appearance of the Christ Child beside the Giant's tree leaves little doubt that this is Wilde's intent here. Nearly all Christian denominations view Christ's self-sacrifice upon the cross as a redemptive act on the behalf of all people. They teach that this act freed all people from the certainty of death, and granted them the chance to enter heaven by rejecting sin. The tree in the Giant's garden takes on all this symbolic meaning when context—the boy Christ, the wounds on his hands and feet, the tree's gold bark and silver fruit like the adornments of Catholic crucifixes—identifies it as the cross. The once-selfish Giant's redemption is completed in front of a symbol for humankind's supreme redemption. - Theme: The Power of Children. Description: Children occupy a special place in the discussion posed by "The Selfish Giant." By the late 19th century, it had become common opinion among Victorians that children are naturally disposed to goodness, not wickedness—and in "The Selfish Giant," Wilde proposes that this natural goodness can have a transformative effect on the world. By opening their eyes to the simple perspective of children, and by using their needs as a moral compass, adults can make a fair, kind, just world. The Giant does exactly this when he realizes how his selfishness has harmed the children and makes amends to them by opening his garden to all. Even before this moment, however, the children show an almost magical power to effect goodness in the world, even the natural world. This, together with the appearance of Christ as a child—in the form of the little boy—suggests that the purity of children is a heavenly gift, and that children have the capacity to be powerful transformers of the corrupt world around them. It's significant that the Giant becomes kinder solely because of the children's innocence, goodness, and helplessness. After an unnaturally long winter, the Giant is roused from his bed by the sound of birdsong outside his window, and overjoyed at the sights of springtime—but when he spies the one corner of the garden where it is still winter, and the little boy suffering there, "his heart [melts]," and he realizes that his selfishness is what brought the winter in the first place. Pity for the children—and especially that tiny child in the corner, who is struggling to climb into a tree—is what sets him on the path to redemption, and encourages him to intervene. The Giant is inspired by this child who "stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant's neck, and kissed him" in a gesture of innocent affection. The children forgive the Giant as readily as they ran from him, accepting his reformed nature once he has shown it. In return, the Giant breaks down walls, both physical and emotional, opening himself up to new friendships. Spending time with the children in the years to come, the Giant only benefits further, and he comes to appreciate the children as far more precious than any property he owns. As he remarks in his twilight years, "I have many beautiful flowers […] but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all." Judging by this drastic change in the Giant's character, it seems that children have some innate power to foster good in the world—that this is some special quality inherent to being a child. Wilde argues that this is a holy, almost supernatural quality. Furthermore, pleasant weather comes and goes with the children, and the animals and plants respond to them more directly than they ever respond to the Giant, again suggesting that children have an almost supernatural goodness to them. The birds sing specifically for the benefit of the children, because the children stop to listen. The tree in the still-wintry corner of the Giant's garden even talks to the boy who is stuck there, and "[bends] its branches down as low as it could" for the child's benefit. Wherever the natural world is most like a fairy tale, it is around the children. Through these miraculous changes that follow in the children's wake—not just the state of the Giant's garden, but also his personality and the state of his soul—Wilde illustrates how children, simply by virtue of their gentleness and innocence, are imbued with a profound power to improve the world around them. Still more tellingly, Christ disguises himself as a child to the Giant, and maintains this form even when he reveals his true divine nature. The appearance of the Christ Child transforms the tree with "lovely white blossoms," golden bark, and silver fruit, not unlike the Transfiguration of Christ in the Christian Gospels. Just as these goodhearted children alter the people and the world around them, so too does the appearance of the most good, most holy child alter the world in kind. Christ welcomes the Giant into Paradise while wearing this appearance—and as heaven is commonly understood in Christianity to be spiritual model of Christ's future kingdom on Earth, the reader can infer that this boy Christ symbolizes the childlike qualities of innocence, openness, and kindness that will characterize his kingdom. - Climax: The Giant knocks down the wall around his garden, and welcomes the children back inside. - Summary: Every day after school, a group of local children play in the Giant's garden. There they enjoy fresh fruit, beautiful flowers, and sweetly singing birds, as well as a comfortable open space for their play. Their idyllic playtime does not last, however—the Giant returns home from a seven-year vacation, and in his shock and outrage at finding intruders in his garden, drives the children away. Selfishly, he proclaims that the only person who should play in his garden is himself, and he enforces this with a high brick wall around his property. On this wall he hangs a sign which reads, "TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED." The children, despondent, try playing in the street instead, but to no avail. They find themselves continually drawn to the garden where they used to play, and they spend their afternoons simply loitering around the walls, wishing they could return to how things used to be. The Giant, meanwhile, is also miserable, because his property is locked in a perpetual winter. Spring, Summer, and Autumn, displeased by the Giant's selfishness, withdraw from the garden entirely, leaving it to the forces of Winter to make their new playground. The Snow, the Frost, the North Wind, and the Hail make mischief all over the Giant's property, disturbing his peace and keeping his garden lying dormant year-round. After about a year of this terrible winter, the Giant is awoken by the sound of a linnet singing outside his window. He looks out to see that he children have returned to the garden, having sneaked inside through a hole in the wall. They have brought springtime with them, and the garden is flourishing once more. Moved by this sight, the Giant realizes the error of his ways and wishes to make amends to the children. He spies a poor little boy in the furthest corner of the garden, crying as he fails to climb the tree there. The child's misery is so intense that it remains winter in that small part of the garden. His heart melting with pity, the Giant approaches—inadvertently driving the other children away, as they still fear him—and places the child up in the tree's high branches. No sooner than he does this, the tree blossoms all over, and the little boy kisses the Giant affectionately. The other children, realizing that the Giant now means no harm, return to the garden, ecstatic. The Giant knocks down the wall around his garden, and thenceforth his property is open to the neighborhood children. Every day after their lessons, the children go to their new friend's garden for hours of play. Over time, the Giant comes to cherish the children far more than anything he owns, even his garden. He has benefited from their friendship, and in his old age he finds no greater pleasure than watching them play from the comfort of his armchair. He never stops wondering, however, what happened to his first little friend, the boy who embraced and kissed him. This child has never been seen since. The Giant finally receives his answer when, one morning, he sees the child once more beside the tree in his garden—the child is evidently no older than he had once been, and the tree has been transformed into gold and silver. The boy's hands and feet have been wounded by nails driven through them, and after an initial moment of confusion the Giant realizes that this is no ordinary child, but the Christ Child. Christ commends the Giant for his kindness of years ago, and for the life of kindness he'd lived since. As reward, he welcomes him into Paradise. That afternoon, the children discover the Giant's body beneath the tree, covered in white blossoms.

- Genre: Satire - Title: The Sellout - Point of view: First person from the perspective of the unnamed narrator, who is the book's central character - Setting: Dickens, a fictional city in Los Angeles - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is the main character of the book. We never learn his first name, although we know that his last name is Mee, that his childhood nickname was "Bonbon," and that Foy Cheshire calls him "The Sellout." The narrator was born and raised in Dickens by a single father, a psychologist who performed strange and cruel experiments on his son. The narrator's mother was a woman named Laurel Lescook. When the narrator's father is killed by the police, the narrator struggles to live up to his legacy. His decision to rescue Hominy from hanging himself puts him in the reluctant position of being Hominy's slaveholder, a role he eventually comes to accept, even if he never embraces it, because it makes Hominy happy. The narrator is tried for slaveholding at the Supreme Court in a case called Me v. the United States of America; at the end of the novel, he is acquitted and returns to a "Welcome Home" party in Dickens that resembles one of the happy memories of his childhood. The narrator is often presented as meek, unassuming, and plagued by uncertainty. He asserts that he is "no one special" and is less egotistical than several of the characters, such as his father and Foy. However, the narrator comes into his own through his mission to bring back Dickens. His efforts to re-segregate the city and put it back on the map end up allowing him to win back his childhood sweetheart, Marpessa Dawson. He also has a strange ability to grow almost magically-delicious fruit, and his satsumas play a crucial role in winning over Marpessa as well. At the end of the novel, the narrator remains rather lost and mystified by the bizarre world around him, but is nonetheless happy to have brought back Dickens and been reunited with Marpessa. - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The narrator's father is a psychologist, the founder and only practitioner of a school of thought he calls "Liberation Psychology." He is dedicated to improving the lives of black people, and is known as "the Nigger Whisperer" in Dickens for the role he assumes in crisis intervention, talking to members of the community who are in a bad way. The narrator's father is shown to be a genuinely innovative researcher (though this often means treating his son, who is his guinea pig, in cruel and strange ways), but his work is never rewarded—he remains "Interim Dean" of the psychology department of West Riverside Community College for the narrator's entire life. This is no doubt in part because Foy Cheshire steals all his ideas. The narrator's father and Foy have a contentious relationship; they are the cofounders of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, and although Foy continually uses and betrays the narrator's father, the narrator's father remains loyal to Foy. Like his son, we never learn the narrator's father's first name. He is killed by the police during an altercation at an intersection in Dickens. He dies with his hand clenched into a fist, the gesture symbolizing Black Power. - Character: Marpessa Delissa Dawson. Description: Marpessa is the narrator's childhood sweetheart and on/off girlfriend. She grew up in Dickens and, like the narrator, enjoyed going to Hominy's house to watch Little Rascals movies as a child. She is three years older than the narrator, and when she begins to date boys as a teenager, the two lose touch. She marries MC Panache and has a baby when she is still young, which helps propel her into her career as a bus driver. The narrator involves Marpessa in his plan to give Hominy "racism" for his birthday by getting her to put up a sign on her bus asking passengers to give up their seats for white people. During this project and the ensuing re-segregation of Dickens, Marpessa decides to get back together with the narrator. The end of the novel sees them happily reunited. - Character: Foy Cheshire. Description: Foy Cheshire is an academic, "fading TV personality," and the cofounder of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. He is extraordinarily vain, and although his work centers around black people, he seems more interested in becoming rich and famous than fighting for racial equality. Furthermore, he explicitly tries to avoid confronting stereotypes and racism directly—thus taking the opposite approach to the narrator and the narrator's father—by rewriting classic literature to remove any racial slurs or references to slavery. Foy stole the narrator's father's ideas and pretended they were his own, yet still called on the narrator's father when he had a mental health crisis years later. Foy dislikes the narrator, who he calls "the sellout." He believes that the narrator is on "the wrong side" because he embraces segregation, yet refuses to understand that the narrator is only doing this in an effort to bring back Dickens. At the end of the novel, Foy has another crisis and threatens to shoot himself, before ultimately shooting the narrator. He escapes prison time on grounds of insanity. - Character: Hominy Jenkins. Description: Hominy is an elderly man and extreme manifestation of the "Uncle Tom" figure (a reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin). A former child actor and the last living member of the "Little Rascals," Hominy has spent his life playing racist caricatures. As a result, he appears to have internalized racism to the point that he attempts to lynch himself; when the narrator saves his live, Hominy voluntarily enslaves himself to him. Hominy is not a very good worker, and the part of slavery he seems to like is simply the subservience itself. He is enthusiastic about the narrator's plans to re-segregate Dickens. Although Hominy is an odd figure, he is beloved by the narrator, Marpessa, and other residents of Dickens. At the end of the novel, Hominy quits slavery and promises that he and the narrator will need to discuss reparations. - Character: The Black Justice. Description: The black Justice on the Supreme Court is never named, but only identified by his race. He is horrified by the idea of the narrator keeping a slave because he believes in progress and "the system." However, the Justice himself is hypocritical, because he has gained an enormous amount of money and power through presiding over a legal system that discriminates against black people. - Character: Laurel Lescook. Description: Laurel Lescook is the narrator's mother. He grew up not knowing her, and the only information he had about her was from an article in Jet magazine when she was named "Beauty of the Week." When he eventually tracks her down, she remembers the narrator's father as a creepy man who harassed her. - Theme: Progress vs. Regress. Description: The Sellout challenges the idea that the story of the contemporary United States is one of racial progress in any straightforward sense. Many things that are supposedly confined to the past—including slavery, segregation, and blackface—appear in the novel, suggesting that these parts of history are not really over, but instead linger in different forms in the present. Examples of progress and regress (that is, going backwards) become completely mixed up, indicating that progress is never a direct linear phenomenon but rather is always accompanied by backlash, regress, and the return of pieces of history that were presumed long gone. The novel begins and ends with the narrator's Supreme Court case, Me vs. the United States of America. The narrator places this case in a lineage that includes Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson, two cases in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of upholding racial discrimination. The story of the Civil Rights movement is often told through the series of Supreme Court cases that dismantled racial discrimination, but Dred Scott and Plessy remind us that not all cases led to progress. The narrator's own case, in which he—a black man—is charged for owning a black slave, takes this idea of regress to absurd, comic proportions. In the novel, then, the Supreme Court (and the U.S. government as a whole) is not posited as an instrument of justice, but rather an institution that has inhibited the path to progress at least as much as it has enabled it. The character of Hominy Jenkins is one of the most important ways in which the novel explores the idea of regress. Hominy is an elderly man who tries to hang himself in a scene that bears a strong resemblance to lynching. Instead of being lynched by a mob, however, Hominy attempts to lynch himself, thereby introducing the fact that he is bizarrely determined to resurrect the worst elements of America's treatment of black people and inflict them on himself. This continues when, after the narrator saves Hominy's life, Hominy insists on enslaving himself to the narrator, who he begins calling "Massa." The idea that a black man would voluntarily lynch or enslave himself is obviously absurd, but the novel uses this comic absurdity to challenge understandings of racial progress. The trauma of America's historical treatment of black people lingers in the present, causing black characters like Hominy to behave in nonsensical, self-sabotaging ways. Another major example of regress in the novel is the narrator's effort to re-segregate the city of Dickens. Following Dickens' removal from the map, the narrator decides that the only way to reinstate the city is to re-segregate it. This again challenges the idea that progress is linear. The narrator's desire to bring back Dickens is a desire to bring back something that already existed but was taken away—but it's an open question whether or not this counts as a desire for progress or regress. Hominy hopes that re-segregating the city will encourage white people to move to it. He points out that this is the opposite of "white flight," what he humorously calls "Ku Klux Influx." White flight might be considered part of a regress narrative, as it is a sign of increased racial segregation that leads to the economic depression of areas that white people have left. On the other hand, the "Ku Klux Influx" the narrator seeks is arguably just another name for gentrification, a very real phenomenon that also defies easy categorization as either progress or regress. Gentrification means increased economic prosperity, but it also involves the destruction of existing communities (usually those of people of color). As the narrator's actions show, it is also closely tied to racial re-segregation. The narrator's explicit efforts to re-segregate Dickens may initially appear absurd, but in fact these efforts reflect the impact of gentrification in real life. This shows that the desire for economic prosperity and white "influx"—which some people would consider indicators of progress—are directly tied to the regression of racial equality. The narrator's ambivalence about the inauguration of Barack Obama at the end of the novel encapsulates the text's relation to the tension between progress and regress. As Foy Cheshire celebrates Obama's inauguration with a sudden display of patriotism, the narrator looks on in bemusement. The implication of this is that unlike Foy, the narrator is not convinced that Obama's presidency is proof that America has progressed to a point of racial equity. When Foy tells the narrator that he'll "never understand" and the narrator agrees, the narrator appears to resign himself to the nonsensical combination of progress and regress that defines life in America. He refuses to join in with Foy's celebration of the apparent progress of Obama's election because he knows that pure progress is not possible. - Theme: Blackness, Origins, and Home. Description: When the narrator is a child, his father teaches him to ask himself two questions: "Who am I? And how may I become myself?", pointing out that this is "basic person-centered therapeutics." The narrator returns to these questions throughout the novel, and they take on a number of different meanings. Following his father's death and the removal of Dickens from the map, the narrator is left feeling lost, without a sense of identity and home. The search for one's origins is a common literary trope and is particularly prevalent in African American writing, due to the severing of identity and ancestry that occurred during slavery. In The Sellout, this search takes a comic turn through the literal way the narrator's hometown is erased from the map. However, questions over the author's identity and the concept of blackness more broadly are nonetheless a serious dimension of this comic novel, but the book ultimately leaves them as questions rather than providing any real answers. One of the central ways that the novel explores the narrator's origins and identity is through the figure of his father. As with the narrator, we never learn the father's first name, and their last name, "Mee," is comically generic due to its proximity to the word "Me" (and the narrator even adopts the spelling "Me" for his Supreme Court case Me vs. the United States of America). Both the narrator and his father are in this sense identity-less. Indeed, the withholding of their names could be understood as a reference to the practice of renaming enslaved people. During slavery, the enslaved were not allowed to use their original African names, and were usually given the surname of the slaveholder. This aimed to erase the identity of the enslaved, and prevented both the enslaved and their descendants from tracing their ancestry. The narrator did not know his mother; the only information he has about her is from the biographical note under her "Beauty of the Week" feature in Jet magazine. This reverses the stereotype of the absent black father, though it preserves the idea that the narrator is prevented from knowing his origins through the absence of one parent. Any connection the narrator has to his origins through his father is in turn broken when his father is killed by the police. The narrator's father's death demonstrates how ongoing racism and police brutality damage black families, creating absences and leaving people feeling lost. In general, "home" is a difficult concept in the novel. The narrator's hometown, Dickens, is a ghetto that is viewed with such disdain by the wider world that it is literally deleted from the map. This is a comically extreme example of the poor treatment to which majority-black communities in America are subjected. Dickens' erasure suggests that the hatred directed toward black ghettoes is so intense that many people would rather that they simply did not exist. Dickens' rejection is not limited to the borders of the United States, either. When the narrator attempts to match Dickens with a "sister city" from another country in order to put it back on the map, the matchmaking service indicates that it is most compatible with Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa, three cities known for being especially violent and undesirable places to live. However, even these cities do not want to associate with Dickens. Crucially, representatives from Kinshasa reject Dickens because it is "too black." The fact that an African city calls Dickens "too black" indicates that blackness is not simply a marker of African descent. Rather, blackness is produced by the diasporic spread of people of African descent and, in particular, by slavery. Indeed, the trauma and identity erasure caused by slavery can be understood as why Kinshasa refuses to associate itself with American blackness. Just as the narrator feels lost and disconnected from his origins and home, so does he feel confused and ambivalent about what it means to be black. Toward the end of the novel, when he witnesses a black comedian kick a white couple out of his show by claiming: "This is our thing," the narrator wants to ask: "So what exactly is our thing?" Here the narrator appears to be jealous of the comedian's understanding of blackness. Rather than achieving any certainty about his own home, origins, and racial identity, the narrator ends the book even more lost about these questions than he starts it. - Theme: Stereotypes and Absurdity. Description: The Sellout satirically manipulates stereotypes to the point of absurdity in order to challenge our understandings of race, gender, sexuality, psychology, history, and other serious, complex topics. In doing so, it forces the reader to confront their own assumptions and indirectly critiques the norms of representation, particularly when it comes to issues of race and blackness. By exaggerating stereotypes to the point of absurdity and scandal, The Sellout illuminates how nonsensical these stereotypes really are. In the prologue, the narrator references a large variety of stereotypes about black men. For example, the novel opens with the narrator's claim that the reader will be surprised to learn that he has never participated in criminal activity. By explicitly presuming that the reader holds stereotyped views, the novel forces the reader to confront the expectations and stereotypes that they might have. Later in the prologue, when the narrator discusses having a large penis and smoking marijuana inside the Supreme Court, the reader is again forced to reflect on the stereotypes that circulate around black men. The beginning of the novel may be shocking and absurd, but it is also familiar, because these stereotypes are deeply ingrained in the public imagination. While we as readers might disavow that we believe in these stereotypes, they remain recognizable and therefore meaningful, showing the harmful effect that they carry despite their ridiculousness. The abundance of stereotypes in the novel suggests that the best way to fight them is not necessarily to avoid them altogether. At one point, while looking at photos of Butterfly and her sorority sisters in various forms of blackface and other stereotypical racial costuming, the narrator observes that the problem with stereotypes isn't necessarily inherent to stereotypes themselves—it is that people constantly return to the same very small number of them. This flattens the reality of different races and cultures by limiting them to only a handful of stereotypes, rather than acknowledging the diversity within any particular group. Indeed, we could read The Sellout as emphasizing this diversity through its display of so many different stereotypes, many of which contradict one another. In this way, the novel directly confronts stereotypes, pushing them to their extremes while simultaneously undermining their power. The danger of turning away from stereotypes completely is especially emphasized by Foy Cheshire's efforts to erase them. Foy rewrites children's books in order to make them less racist, and the narrator suggests that Foy and the other Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals would "disinvent the watermelon" if they could (referencing the stereotype that black people love watermelon). The narrator believes that attempting to ignore and erase stereotypes is not a viable solution to the problem of racism. After all, problems persist even if we pretend they do not exist. Of course, irony, satire, and absurdity also play a crucial role here. By deploying stereotypes satirically, the novel is able to confront stereotypes while demonstrating how ridiculous they are. Indeed, exaggerating stereotypes to the point of absurdity is one way of investigating how stereotypes operate and what role they serve. If various types of prejudice and bigotry are inherently absurd at their core—since they involve flattening different groups into ridiculous parodies of their true humanity—then an especially powerful way to highlight this absurdity is through the medium of extreme satire, as Beatty employs throughout the book. - Theme: Criminality, Authority, and the Law. Description: The Sellout explores the tense relationship between black people and legal authority, highlighting the often-absurd nature of the American legal system. Due to its discriminatory treatment of black people, the law is shown to be an arbitrary, destructive force that has drifted far from its supposed goal of implementing justice. The novel also explores how, because of the criminalization of ordinary black people in America, the idea of criminality has taken on an inherent racial inflection. Yet just as the text emphasizes that racism will not be solved by ignoring racial stereotypes, it suggests that simply attempting to be respectable and law-abiding will similarly not defeat discrimination. In the prologue, the narrator explores the impact of legal discrimination on the psychology of black people. He suggests that "the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief." Although there is an edge of irony and humor to this statement, the overall point is actually serious. Because simply existing as a black person is so often treated as a criminal act, black people are left with a profound sense of "cognitive dissonance" wherein they are made to feel guilty and paranoid even when they have done nothing wrong. While it may be an exaggeration to say that going to jail is a relief, it is in fact plausible that, for some people, this is actually true. The legal system targets black people in such a way that—particularly for those without resources and opportunities—jail can sometimes seem inescapable. The seeming inevitability of being sent to prison thus means that, when it actually happens, it can indeed be something of a "relief." The novel features many references to ways in which black people's existence has been criminalized in America. For example, the narrator's father takes him to Mississippi to participate in "reckless eyeballing" in order to prove that racism still exists. "Reckless eyeballing" refers to when black men look at white women in an apparently desirous manner—a simple and innocent act that has in many cases been punishable by death. The word "reckless" indicates that something as ordinary as looking at another person becomes a charged and dangerous act for black men. The example of reckless eyeballing also shows how black people must navigate the dual threats of a discriminatory criminal justice system and the vigilante acts of racist individuals. Although lynching is sometimes posited as a thing of the past, The Sellout is haunted by the ongoing threat of lynching and other forms of violence against black people. Indeed, there is a connection drawn between vigilante acts and the unjust, inhumane treatment of black people by the police, most notably the shooting of the narrator's father. While not a lynching in the traditional sense, the father's death could be considered a form of lynching insofar as it was an act of brutality inflicted on him simply because he was black. The lack of accountability and responsibility associated with the police in the book suggests that there is no meaningful difference between police officers and random racist members of the public in this sense. Aware of the extent to which black people's mere existence is treated as criminal, the narrator at times chooses to embrace criminal activity. Perhaps the most comic and absurd example of this is when he chooses to smoke marijuana inside the Supreme Court, reasoning that the more serious crime he is charged with (holding a slave) will mean that nobody cares about something as minor as pot smoking. In a sense, the narrator's decision to smoke marijuana also suggests that there is no point in taking great effort to avoid engaging in criminal activity when one will be treated as a criminal regardless. Although the scene in which he smokes marijuana is comic, it is serious in its rejection of respectability and conformity to the law as solutions to the mistreatment of black people by legal authority. - Theme: Gender, Sex, and Hypersexualization. Description: Alongside exploring racial stereotypes, The Sellout also confronts stereotypes relating to race and gender. In particular, it explores the hypersexualization imposed on black people—meaning the racist stereotype that black people are aggressively or excessively sexual—and the way this affects their experience of their own sexuality. As a black man, the narrator is perceived as sexually aggressive by the outside world. While the only woman the narrator has sex with in the novel is Marpessa, his childhood sweetheart, he does at times appear to have internalized stereotypes about his own hypersexuality and sexual aggressiveness. At other times, his behavior directly contradicts these assertions, for example when he calls himself "frigid." Overall, the novel subtly critiques both the hypersexualization of black people and the sexual aggression often associated with masculinity. In parts of the novel, the narrator acknowledges and even appears to embrace sexual stereotypes about black men. The prologue is filled with phallic imagery, and in the first paragraph the narrator refers to "my gigantic penis." Elsewhere, he notes that in Dickens, "penis envy doesn't exist because sometimes niggers just got too much dick." This suggests that perhaps sometimes people are happy to embrace stereotypes that are positive or advantageous to them. On the other hand, there is certainly irony in the narrator's tone here. Rather than truly embracing stereotypes about black men's large penises, he is arguably making fun of these stereotypes and taunting those who feel threatened by them. After all, stereotypes about black men's penises arguably reveal far more about the insecurities and fantasies of nonblack people than they do about black men themselves. However, stereotypes about male sexual aggression are sometimes shown to be more plausible. The narrator's father, for example, is presented as a lothario who had a habit of sleeping with his students. The narrator's mother, Laurel Lescook, remembers his father as a creepy man who harassed her. Similarly, Foy Cheshire is said to have blown all his money on drugs and women. For both the narrator's father and Foy, fame and success are ways of getting women to sleep with them. Indeed, the narrator's father has a particular penchant for young women, including his own students and teaching assistants. In this way, the narrator's father is shown to be rather predatory. Similarly, at one point in the novel the narrator admits: "like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I'm bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages." Even Hominy, who is otherwise meek and emasculated (he even requests that the narrator cut off his penis and stuff it in his mouth, as was sometimes done during lynching), enthusiastically flirts with Butterfly, the sorority girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Almost all the men in the novel display some kind of sexually aggressive behavior, often directed at women much younger than them, and these details suggest that there may be some truths in stereotypes about male sexual aggression. At the same time, masculinity is subject to critique in the novel, through the book's depiction of how masculinity forces the narrator to conform to a way of being that feels alien to him. Toward the end of the novel, he admits to being "frigid," using this word in the same "obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women." This sentence shows how society's idea of masculinity can be an oppressive force that attempts to mask "inadequacies" through the imposition of negative stereotypes about others. By applying these sexist negative stereotypes to himself, the narrator embraces his own "inadequacies" while suggesting that there is no room within masculinity for him to admit these openly. The only way to express his feelings of insecurity is by comparing himself to a woman. Despite the narrator's self-deprecating analysis of his frigidity, Marpessa assures him that she likes that he is not as aggressively masculine as other men. She confesses that she fell in love with him when they went out to eat together and, unlike the other black men she knows, the narrator did not insist on sitting facing the door. Marpessa finds it appealing that the narrator does not feel the need to aggressively assert his own masculinity and appear tough and dangerous. Furthermore, her love of the narrator's satsumas and her use of his childhood nickname, "Bonbon," indicate that she prefers the sweet, nurturing side of the narrator, qualities that are typically associated with femininity more than masculinity. Both sexual stereotypes about black people and masculinity are under critique in the novel. As a result, it can sometimes appear that the narrator accepts stereotypes about black men as true—however, the reality is more complex. Sometimes the narrator embraces such stereotypes ironically in order to lampoon the insecurities that created the stereotypes in the first place. However, at other points the novel critiques black masculinity not as a specific phenomenon but as a part of masculinity in general, showing how the demands of masculinity can have a constricting, damaging effect on both men and women. - Climax: When Foy Cheshire shoots the narrator - Summary: In the prologue, the narrator admits that, though this may be surprising to hear from a black man, he has never committed a crime. Nonetheless, he now finds himself handcuffed inside the Supreme Court after receiving a letter informing him that his case was selected to be heard. He spent the previous day walking around Washington, DC. Now, sitting in the Supreme Court, he smokes marijuana from a pipe, reasoning that the crime he has been charged with is so extreme that he will not be prosecuted for anything as minor as pot smoking. After inhaling, he exclaims: "Equal justice under the law!" The court session begins. The narrator's case is named "Me v. the United States of America." In Chapter One, the narrator explains that his father was a social scientist and the founder of something he called Liberation Psychology. They lived in Dickens, a "ghetto community" on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The narrator's father spent decades as interim dean of the Psychology department at West Riverside Community College, and would use the narrator in his experiments. The narrator's father was known as "the Nigger Whisperer" because of his habit of spending time on the streets, encouraging his down-on-their-luck neighbors to improve their lives. When the narrator was young, he assumed he would lead an average life and stay in Dickens. However, both his father and Dickens disappear, leaving him with no idea who he is. The narrator's father is killed by the police. At first, the narrator feels sure that his father is going to leap back to life and explain his death as just another way of teaching his son about the plight of the black race. Growing up, the narrator did not know his mother; he tracks her down later in life and learns that her name is Laurel Lescook. The narrator is granted a $2 million settlement after the wrongful death of his father at the hands of the police. He feels relieved on the day of his father's burial. He reflects again on the difficulties facing black people, and concludes: "fuck being black." Five years after the narrator's father's death, Dickens is quietly removed from the map of California. Signs announcing the town's existence are also removed. The narrator takes over his father's role of "Nigger Whisperer," however he isn't very good at it. He studies agricultural science at UC Riverside in the hope of turning his father's land into an ostrich farm. When Dickens disappears, the narrator goes to help an elderly man named Hominy Jenkins. The narrator is also having an affair with a woman named Marpessa Delissa Dawson who he has known since childhood. Hominy tries to hang himself, but the narrator cuts him down. In gratitude for having saved his life, Hominy then starts calling the narrator "Massa" and acting like his slave. The narrator tries to free Hominy several times, but Hominy refuses to be freed. The narrator pays some white dominatrices to whip Hominy for over $200 an hour. The narrator decides to put Dickens back on the map, and reinstalls a sign announcing the city's existence. He attends the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, a group his father founded. The "lead thinker," Foy Cheshire, tells the group that he rewrote Huckleberry Finn, excising the N-word in order to read it to his grandchildren. During roll call, Foy never uses the narrator's name but instead refers to him as "The Sellout." The narrator and Foy argue about the use of the N-word. The narrator thinks it's ridiculous that Foy and the other Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals want to ban the N-word, "disinvent the watermelon," and erase the existence of all other racist ideas and stereotypes. The narrator announces that he's "bringing back the city of Dickens," and everyone laughs at him. However, one member, King Cuz, takes the narrator aside and admits that he is in favor of the proposal. Foy accuses the narrator of trying to take over the Intellectuals and swears that he will not let the narrator "fuck my shit up." The narrator decides to paint boundary lines around Dickens, and as soon as his neighbors realize what he is doing, they all start to help. A police officer teases the narrator, giving him a missing poster she's made for the city of Dickens. The narrator thanks her and sticks it up with a piece of chewing gum. The narrator recalls the development of his romance with Marpessa. When he was 17 and she was 21 they rekindled their childhood friendship; she was his date to his high school prom. Marpessa has a child whose middle name is Bonbon, which was the narrator's childhood nickname. On April 2, Hominy's birthday, the narrator and Hominy are on a public bus that Marpessa is driving. Marpessa tells the narrator she dumped him because he is a "sellout." Later, they talk about why they first fell in love. The narrator has signed Dickens up to Sister Cities Global, a matchmaking service for cities. Ms. Susan Silverman, a "City Match Consultant" for the company, calls the narrator and tells him she can't find Dickens on the map, but that this doesn't matter. She tells him that the three cities with which Dickens would be most compatible are Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa. The narrator says he accepts all three, but Ms. Silverman replies that all three cities rejected the match, including Kinshasa, because Dickens is "too black." Hominy is so disappointed that he attempts to sell himself, but nobody buys him. The narrator ends up choosing to match Dickens with three cities that also no longer exist, including Döllersheim, Austria, known as "the Lost City of White Male Privilege." The narrator goes to Chaff Middle School for Career Day to teach a group of students at Chaff Middle School about agriculture, giving them a lesson on castration. He suggests to his friend Charisma, who is a teacher there, that the school be racially segregated. Charisma tells him to "go ahead," but adds that "there's too many Mexicans." Hominy loves the idea of re-segregating the school, hoping that it will encourage white people to move to Dickens. The narrator once "foolishly" told his father that there was no racism in America. In response, the narrator's father took him on a trip to a random small town in Mississippi, where they linger by a gas station and engage in "reckless eyeballing." The narrator's father ends up having sex with a white woman he'd been ogling, and while he is gone the narrator is forced to pee outside after being turned away from the gas station bathroom. The narrator goes to Marpessa's house; King Cuz is standing outside along with Marpessa's brother Stevie, who has just gotten out of prison and is also a feared gangster. The narrator puts up a sign announcing that The Wheaton Academy Charter Magnet School of the Arts, Science, Humanities, Business, Fashion, and Everything Else will soon be constructed in Dickens. The image the narrator attaches features only white students. When Foy sees the image, he declares it is the work of "the forces of evil," adding: "This is war." The narrator and Marpessa have sex, and the two of them begin going on dates again. However, Marpessa also makes the narrator perform stand-up comedy, telling him she will only have sex with him if he makes her laugh. Eventually he is successful. Marpessa tells him that Charisma believes the re-segregation policy is working out successfully. At the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, Foy announces that he has a "secret weapon" to be used against the Wheaton Academy: a book called Tom Soarer, which he calls a WME: "Weapon of Mass Education." Foy inscribes a copy for the narrator, addressing it: "To the Sellout, Like father, like son…" The narrator realizes that even if Dickens were to be recognized as a city again, there would be no fanfare—barely anyone would even notice. Still, over the next few months the narrator enjoys re-segregating the city. He invents an event named "Whitey Week," a celebration of white contributions to the "world of leisure." He feels slightly nervous about segregating the hospital, as he knows this likely will lead outsiders to notice his work for the first time. The narrator goes to watch Hominy perform at the LA Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation. The audience finds Hominy, who is completely deadpan and sincere, hilarious. Later, the narrator asks himself who he is, and realizes that he is "as lost as I ever was." Nobody attends the next meeting of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. Foy stages a protest outside the Wheaton Academy, singing We Shall Overcome and then shooting the white students' school bus with his gun. Foy points the gun at the narrator, then at his own temple, and then, finally, shoots the narrator. Hominy cries and attends to the narrator while he bleeds. The narrator is picked up by an ambulance, and when asked who his lawyer is he points to an advertisement for Hampton Fiske. At the grand jury indictment, Judge Nguyen tells the narrator that his case will go the Supreme Court. The narrative then jumps forward again to the session of the narrator's Supreme Court case in Washington, DC. Fiske is wearing a bell-bottom jumpsuit, and gives a speech about what it means to be black. The narrator tries to smoke another joint, and he decides to leave the room while Fiske continues speaking. He sits on the steps of the Supreme Court and makes a pipe out of a soda can. He reflects that "Unmitigated Blackness" means accepting that "sometimes it's the nihilism that makes life worth living." In the end, Foy is found innocent of attempted murder, but the narrator wins his civil suit against him. Hominy kisses the narrator and tells him that he's "quitting" slavery, and that they will discuss reparations the next day. Marpessa and the narrator watch TV, and during the weather report Dickens is included along with the other cities in the area. The narrator is so happy that he cries. On the anniversary of his father's death, he and Marpessa go to open-mike night at Dum Dum Donuts. The black man performing standup chases out a white couple, calling them "honkies" and telling them: "this is our thing." The narrator closes with a memory of the day "the black guy" is inaugurated as president. Foy drives around Dickens waving an American flag. When the narrator questions him about it, Foy tells him he'll "never understand," and the narrator agrees.

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Los Angeles, New York City, and the southern coast of Spain between the 1940s and 2010s - Character: Evelyn Hugo. Description: Evelyn Hugo is the novel's protagonist and the subject of reporter Monique Grant's interviews. At 79, Evelyn, one of the biggest stars of Old Hollywood, convinces Monique to write her biography—but without disclosing why she chose the low-level reporter specifically. This manipulative, opaque behavior is characteristic of Evelyn, who has sacrificed her name, identity, and morals to achieve fame and success. For instance, Evelyn got married seven times—not for love, but for a greater chance at fame and success. Evelyn's husbands and daughter, Connor, have all died by the time she gives her interview, however, and being all alone has forced her duality as a loving, caring woman whose ambition leads her to act cruelly and pragmatically. Evelyn's care for the women who help in her home—first Luisa, then Grace—suggests she holds deep respect for working-class people due to her own childhood of financial insecurity. The challenges of having a same-sex partner in the mid- and late-1900s, building genuine relationships despite the predatory nature of the media, and grieving many deep losses in secret all contribute to Evelyn's character development. At 79, Evelyn is now vulnerable enough not only to tell the world her whole life story, but to inform Monique of the reality of Monique's father's death (Evelyn's best friend, producer Harry Cameron, killed him in a drunk driving accident). Evelyn's transformation can also be seen in her eventual decision to stop acting and move to Spain with Celia, her true love, which is only possible after Evelyn realizes that love and honesty make her happier than wealth and fame. - Character: Monique Grant. Description: Monique Grant is a low-level reporter who jumps at the chance to interview Evelyn Hugo, though at first, she doesn't understand why Evelyn has specifically requested her. Monique gains Evelyn's trust by reassuring Evelyn that she'll make every effort to interpret her story with care. Over the many days of interviews, Monique realizes that she has much in common with Evelyn, particularly her ambition, which Monique's father encouraged in her before his early death, and her attitude toward her divorce, which she learns is less about heartbreak and more about the disappointment of having failed at her marriage. As the interviews progress, Monique reveals her capacity to demand what she wants, both from Evelyn and from her boss, Frankie, and she begins to admire Evelyn for demonstrating this same capacity throughout her life. Eventually, Evelyn reveals to Monique why she chose Monique to interview her: Evelyn was instrumental in covering up the circumstances of Monique's father's death. Learning this allows Monique to come to terms with the complicated duality that she and Evelyn share: though she's angry with Evelyn, she knows she might've done something just as morally dubious to ensure the safety of her loved ones. - Character: Celia St. James. Description: Celia St. James is an actor and the love of Evelyn's life. Celia intimidates Evelyn with her superior acting talent in rehearsals for Little Women, but eventually the two form a mutually beneficial relationship when Celia offers Evelyn acting coaching in return for Evelyn making public appearances with her. Though Celia is less cunning than Evelyn, her appetite for fame and success is almost as keen. Eventually, Celia and Evelyn begin a romantic relationship which reveals Celia to be naïve and idealistic in the face of Evelyn's pragmatic realism (Celia was born rich and has never had to struggle financially, whereas Evelyn came from nothing). The couple breaks up twice, both decisions stemming from Celia's disapproval of Evelyn prioritizing public admiration and success over their relationship. Though the couple endures hardship due to Evelyn's obsession with her public image and the dangers of being openly gay, Celia never relinquishes her desire for happiness. Toward the end of her life, Celia asks Evelyn to move to a small town in Spain with her, where they can live anonymously and be together romantically in their later years. Not long after retiring to Spain, Celia dies of a pulmonary disease. - Character: Harry Cameron. Description: Harry Cameron is a film producer who is Evelyn's first and best friend when she arrives in Hollywood; they eventually marry and have a child (Connor) together. Though Harry tries to stay somewhat detached from Evelyn, not wanting his secret identity as a gay man to jeopardize her hopes of success, he eventually builds up the courage to tell her about his relationship with Celia's husband John Braverman. Being married to Evelyn allows Harry to secretly continue his relationship with John (while Evelyn and Celia continue their own secret relationship). But John's early death leaves Harry heartbroken, and his alcohol addiction worsens. Still, Harry is devoted father, caring for Connor even as he grieves, and he remains committed to Evelyn's success. He takes Evelyn's side at almost every juncture, admiring her pragmatism and ambition—qualities he shares with her. Harry dies after driving drunk, and his lover (who turns out to be Monique's father) also dies. At the end of the novel, it's revealed that Evelyn removed Harry from the car and claimed he died of an aneurysm to protect Harry's image. - Character: Don Adler. Description: Don Adler is Evelyn's second husband. The son of actors, Don feels a huge pressure to also become a huge film star, so he's really sensitive when he receives poor reviews. Though Evelyn loves him and considers their relationship genuine, Don begins to physically abuse her soon after they marry. His tendency to hit and push Evelyn surfaces in moments of stress, particularly when Evelyn threatens (knowingly or accidentally) to endanger his reputation or make him seem less powerful in front of influential people. Evelyn's growing stardom also intimidates Don, and so he tries (unsuccessfully) to force her to take his last name, quit acting, and start a family with him. He continues to exert his influence over Evelyn's life when the terms of their divorce include a stipulation forbidding her to discuss their relationship with the press. Don eventually apologizes to Evelyn for the way he treated her during their marriage, though it takes him a few decades for him to do so. - Character: Connor Cameron. Description: Connor Cameron is the daughter of Evelyn and Harry. She grows up between their apartments in New York City. In her early teenage years, she begins to withdraw from her parents, particularly Evelyn, and when Harry dies, Connor's behavior spins out of control: when she's 14, Evelyn finds her having a threesome with two friends, and an article in a tabloid notes her tendency to frequent clubs around the city and take drugs. After moving to Spain to live with Evelyn, Celia, and Robert, Connor warms to her mother again, focuses on academic work, and gains admission to an Ivy League school. Though she begins a career in finance, she realizes she's happier as a teacher. Connor's illness and death due to breast cancer, along with Evelyn's matching diagnosis, motivate Evelyn to donate to breast cancer research. - Character: John Braverman. Description: John Braverman is Celia's husband and Harry's lover. He marries Celia around the same time Evelyn marries Rex North, but Harry eventually tells Evelyn that John is his lover and that John's marriage to Celia is merely a marriage of convenience. John lives in New York with Celia, Evelyn, and Harry for a long time, and though he has a reputation as a tough football player, he's the most softhearted one of the four. When he dies at the age of 50, he leaves Harry and Celia heartbroken, suggesting that though his romantic relationship was with Harry, he was nevertheless a devoted husband and friend to Celia. - Character: Max Girard. Description: Max Girard is a French New Wave film director and Evelyn's sixth husband. After meeting Evelyn, who immediately captivates him, he casts her in his films Boute-en-Train and Three A.M. on the condition that she agrees to film nude scenes. Max and Evelyn's relationship becomes sexual and romantic after their film, All for Us, wins them each an Oscar. But though Evelyn feels genuine affection for Max, she soon realizes he is more interested in her as a celebrity than as a person, and he'd rather use her to boost his public image. This becomes even clearer when Max finds the letters Celia wrote to Evelyn and threatens Evelyn that he'll reveal her sexuality to the media. When he eventually does so, after Evelyn files for divorce, it's apparent from the media reaction labelling him "bitter" that he's less respected in Hollywood than she is. - Character: Robert Jamison. Description: Robert Jamison is Celia's brother and Evelyn's seventh, and final, husband. He agrees to move to Spain with Celia, Evelyn, and Connor. Though Evelyn allows him to have as many romantic entanglements as he wants, he bonds with Connor and becomes a father figure and mentor to her. He's wracked with grief when Celia dies, lying down to weep beside Evelyn instead of attempting to comfort her. Evelyn's marriage to Robert allows her to inherit Celia's money and belongings after he dies. - Character: Mick Riva. Description: Mick Riva is a pop star and Evelyn's third husband. Mick makes his attraction to Evelyn public by expressing his desire to marry her during interviews, suggesting he's an extremely confident man who can imagine Evelyn reciprocating his interest. When Evelyn decides to elope with Mick to grab media attention, she understands that he's an ego-driven man who wants to always have the upper hand. Mick's preoccupation with glamour and physical beauty becomes even clearer the night after his elopement with Evelyn when, after a night of deliberately lackluster sex on her part, he immediately tires of her and suggests an annulment. - Character: Rex North. Description: Rex North is Evelyn's fourth husband. The similarities he shares with Evelyn—namely his pragmatism, which includes changing his name to succeed as a film star just as Evelyn did—endear him to her and lay the grounds for a mutually beneficial (though almost completely loveless) marriage. His opportunistic nature is evident in his decision to marry Evelyn in order to help their film succeed at the box office. Ultimately, though, Rex reveals his romantic side when he informs Evelyn of his romance with Joy Nathan. - Character: Monique's Father/The Passenger. Description: Monique's father is also Harry's lover and the man Evelyn finds dead in the passenger seat of the car Harry crashes while driving drunk. Monique has grown up believing that her father was the driver, but at the end of the novel, Evelyn reveals that she manipulated the crash site to protect Harry's image. Monique's father is a persistent influence in Monique's life even after his early death; he constantly encouraged Monique to find a joyful career, advice she follows perhaps even more closely due to his absence. Monique's father hid his sexuality from Monique and Monique's mother, and though he loved Harry, the letter Evelyn found in Harry's pocket on the night of his death reveals that Monique's father loved and treasured his wife and daughter too much to leave them for Harry. - Character: Ruby Reilly. Description: Ruby Reilly is one of the first actors Evelyn forms a relationship with in Hollywood. She stars alongside Evelyn and Celia in Little Women and seems more threatened by Celia than Evelyn does, suggesting both that Evelyn's relationship with Celia is particularly close, and that Ruby is hungry for fame and success. Evelyn refers to Ruby as a "fair-weather friend," meaning that Ruby will help and support Evelyn only when it suits Ruby to do so. Nevertheless, Ruby's help is integral to Evelyn's plan to have paparazzi photograph her and Harry passionately kissing. Ruby marries Don after he and Evelyn divorce, and when she tells Evelyn that Don abused her just as he abused Evelyn, Evelyn realizes that by not telling Ruby about Don's behavior, she unintentionally put Ruby in harm's way. - Character: Ernie Diaz. Description: Ernie Diaz is Evelyn's first husband. Though his marriage to Evelyn allows her to get to Hollywood and begin her acting career, he pays little attention to her interests and expects her to behave like a typical housewife of the 1950s. When Evelyn leaves him at the advice of Sunset Studio's producers, Ernie is heartbroken, revealing that he was completely oblivious to Evelyn taking advantage of him. - Character: David. Description: David is Monique's husband. At the beginning of the book, the couple is separated, and David is living in San Francisco. The separation allows Monique to reassess her relationship with him, and she ultimately realizes that she's not all that sad about the marriage ending—in fact, David was a safe option for a partner, and he never truly fulfilled her. - Character: Evelyn's Mother. Description: Evelyn's mother emigrates to the United States from Cuba with Evelyn's father when she's 17 years old. She performs in off-Broadway productions and attempts to save enough money to leave Evelyn's father and go to Hollywood with Evelyn—a dream that she passes on to Evelyn after her early death. Evelyn's mother is a motivational figure in Evelyn's life, which Evelyn demonstrates when she expresses her desire for her new name to bear a resemblance to the name Evelyn's mother chose for her. - Character: Luisa. Description: Luisa is the maid Evelyn hires to replace Paula. Evelyn respects Luisa and takes good care of her financially, which demonstrates Evelyn's empathy for working-class people. When she begins working for Evelyn, she insults Evelyn in Spanish while speaking to mother on the telephone, not realizing Evelyn can understand what she's saying. Lucia's surprise at Evelyn's ability to speak Spanish reminds Evelyn how much of her Latin American identity she sacrificed to achieve fame. - Character: Ari Sullivan. Description: Ari Sullivan is a film producer. Evelyn quickly understands that Ari is a powerful figure at Sunset Studios, and he proves himself to be corrupt and lecherous when he agrees to give Evelyn roles in films only after she allows him to orally pleasure her. He further demonstrates his corrupt nature when he agrees to Don's request to blackball Evelyn from an Oscar nomination after her divorce from Don. - Theme: Ambition vs. Morality. Description: Evelyn Hugo, the novel's titular protagonist, must frequently choose between furthering her career and honoring her values. In her early teens, she realizes one of the only sources of power she has is her body, so she very quickly becomes accustomed to using it in order to get what she wants, justifying her actions based on their outcomes. When Evelyn divorces Ernie Diaz, her first husband, she does so because she knows she'll gain more attention as a single woman, dating film stars, than as a married one. When she allows producer Ari Sullivan to orally pleasure her, she's able to soothe her own physical discomfort with the idea that this situation will lead to the vital beginnings of a career on screen. Indeed, early in the novel, it's hard to tell whether Evelyn has any morals at all, given that she's able to justify even the most extreme situations and decisions by assessing how they'll contribute to her personal success. Soon, though, Evelyn's pragmatic actions begin to jeopardize her relationships with the people she holds most dear. Her decision to film an explicit sex scene for the film Three A.M. without first asking Celia, her partner, how it'd make her feel leads to her relationship with Celia crumbling, demonstrating that when Evelyn prioritizes her soaring career over her respect for her friends and loved ones, she'll lose what truly makes her happy. Because Evelyn started out in Hollywood with nothing, feeling no strong connection to anyone—not even her husband—it's difficult for her to realize that a successful career is no substitute for happiness. Once she does realize this, however, she's able to bow out of her career in order to care for her daughter, Connor, and Celia in a remote part of Spain, and finally to share her story with Monique, a reporter, despite the repercussions that telling her story may have on her legacy when specific details come to light. In the end, it's through Evelyn's deepest relationships that she learns what her true morals are: love, respect, and honesty—and that honoring these morals gives her far more satisfaction than wealth or success. - Theme: Femininity, Sexuality, and Power. Description: Throughout the novel, Evelyn constantly uses her feminine beauty and sexuality to secure success in a world run by men. Though at first, she's frustrated that what many people admire about her—her appearance—is something she did nothing to earn, she quickly learns to use her sexuality to her advantage. Many of Evelyn's early-career successes arise from situations where she uses her body to convince men to give her what she wants, whether that's through marrying Ernie Diaz in order to move to Hollywood with him or allowing producer Ari Sullivan to pleasure her so that he'll agree to give her lead roles in films. Evelyn understands what men want from her and decides to take something from them in return, effectively using her femininity as a weapon. Throughout her career, she continues to marry—and divorce—tactically, based on what each man can offer her, whether it's a job or media approval. However, the power Evelyn wields by using her sexuality and exploiting her femininity has its limits. For example, although she succeeds in eloping, marrying, and annulling her marriage with popstar Mick Riva, she finds herself carrying an unwanted pregnancy from their single sexual encounter. Though her plan succeeds, she's still unable to control every element of it, and even though she uses her body to tempt Mick, she's essentially powerless to control what he does with it. Ultimately, this means her plan—which was to draw media attention to her failed marriages so that they'd ignore her relationship with Celia—fails. When Evelyn tells Celia about the pregnancy (Celia didn't know Evelyn planned to have sex with Mick to entice him to marry her), she loses the relationship with Celia she was working so hard to preserve. Similarly, though Evelyn and her second husband, Don, both deliver admirable performances in Max Girard's movie Three A.M., Don is awarded an Oscar while Evelyn is refused a nomination because the sex scene between them was too explicit, proving that though Evelyn's success depends on her willingness to share her body with individuals and audiences, she's also punished for her sexuality. Ultimately, though Evelyn consistently finds ways to subvert the power that men have over her by using the very thing they desire the most—her body—she can never truly overcome the limits a male-dominated industry imposes on her due to her gender. - Theme: Truth and Identity. Description: Throughout her life, Evelyn's desire to uphold a favorable public image with the media and her fans causes her to lie about herself and her relationships. For instance, her fear of public backlash motivates her to keep her romantic relationship with Celia St. James a secret; Evelyn's secrecy causes lasting damage to her relationship with Celia, and it also prevents her from fully embracing her identity as a bisexual woman. The novel drives home the media's role in Evelyn's life by punctuating several of its chapters with clippings from tabloids that have spread rumors about Evelyn, her friends, and her loved ones. Whether these articles misconstrue or accurately depict Evelyn's public appearances and lifestyle changes, the one thing they have in common is their tendency to report the story that's most likely to get people talking. Evelyn capitalizes on the fickleness of the media in many instances, like when she asks her friend Ruby to alert a photographer to her tryst with Harry in order to deliberately start rumors about their relationship and take the focus off her romance with Celia, using rumor as a shield. Eventually, though, Evelyn's constant obsession with the media and public opinion causes her to concoct ridiculously complex plans to distract people from seeing her real life. For example, her elopement with Mick Riva—a highly public stunt she created to deter rumors about her and Celia's relationship—backfires when Celia realizes the lengths Evelyn went to in order to make the situation seem authentic (Evelyn had sex with Mick), ultimately viewing the sex as a betrayal and breaking up with Evelyn. Evelyn eventually begins to resent the power the media has over her life, which contributes to her almost immediate distaste for Max Girard, whose obsession with Evelyn as a star rather than a person comes to light as soon as she marries him. Ultimately, Evelyn realizes that in her obsessive quest for public admiration and approval, she has sacrificed her personal relationships—and lost a lot of herself in the process, too. As Evelyn nears death, her decision to share her true story to the world in the biography she tasks Monique with writing shows that her priorities have shifted. Ultimately, Evelyn realizes that in order to live a happy life and cultivate genuine relationships, she must prioritize her true desires and the needs of her loved ones above public approval. - Theme: Family. Description: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo illustrates that a strong family bond does not come from marriage or blood relation, but from the depth of connection two or more people share. Though Evelyn is raised by Evelyn's father, she realizes as a young adult that she needs to put as much distance as possible between herself and him if she wants to succeed in life, suggesting that, despite his blood relation to her, Evelyn's father is not a vital part of her family. However, Evelyn's connection with Harry, a Hollywood producer with no blood relation to her, is built on a foundation of honesty and trust, and Evelyn understands that when she's with him, she feels as if she's with family. Evelyn's family structure becomes further complicated when it involves four people—Celia, John, Harry, and herself (the four characters act as a pair of straight couples in public but are involved in gay relationships with each other in private). Things become even more complicated when Evelyn's daughter, Connor, comes along. Despite these complications, the love the characters share for one another creates a familial bond unlike the one Evelyn had with her father. When all of these people have died, the loss crushes Evelyn: this found family meant more to her than any wealth or admiration she acquired throughout her life. With this illustration of a radically non-traditional family unit, in which each member commits to protecting the others from media attention and out of which arises many celebrations and acts of care, the book suggests that kindness, love, and self-sacrifice are more important elements of a family than any amount of shared DNA. - Climax: Evelyn reveals to Monique that Harry's deceased lover was Monique's father - Summary: Evelyn Hugo, a movie star of the 1960s and 1970s, is now 79 years old. As she prepares to sell 12 of her most famous dresses at auction, she reaches out to Vivant, a prominent magazine, to request an interview with one of its reporters, Monique Grant. Neither Monique nor her editor, Frankie, can work out why Evelyn requested to speak to Monique, a lower-ranked reporter. Monique leaps at the opportunity to distract herself from her separation from David, her husband. She throws herself into researching Evelyn's life, most notably her seven husbands, and ends up with one burning question: "Who was the love of Evelyn's life?" When Monique arrives at Evelyn's apartment for the interview, Evelyn soon tells her that, instead of an interview for Vivant, she wants Monique to write her biography and sell it after Evelyn's death. Though Monique presses her for more details, Evelyn only tells her that she'll understand everything once the interview is over. Monique begins interviewing Evelyn daily, starting with the subject of Evelyn's first husband. From there, the novel jumps back and forth between Evelyn's past and Monique's present. When Evelyn is just 15 years old, she marries Ernie Diaz, a man in her Hell's Kitchen apartment building, because she knows he's moving to Hollywood, and she can escape with him. She has no intention to be Ernie's housewife, however, and instead spends every day at a diner where she attempts to attract the attention of producers. Eventually, a young producer, Harry Cameron, notices her and signs her to Sunset Studios. After struggling to land roles that offer her more than one line of dialogue, Evelyn eventually exerts enough influence at Sunset Studios to convince Harry and Ari Sullivan, another producer, to cast her as Jo in an adaptation of Little Women. To appeal to the widest possible American audience (Evelyn is Latina), Evelyn transforms her appearance by dyeing her hair blond, changing her name, and divorcing Ernie. Evelyn stars in a few generic romantic comedies and falls in love with and marries Don Adler. But a few weeks after their wedding, Don begins to physically abuse Evelyn. Meanwhile, in the present, Monique receives a package from Monique's mother: a box of Monique's father's photographs from his days working on movie sets (Monique's father died when she was a young girl). Monique reflects on the challenges of her parents' biracial marriage and her father's advice to find a job she loves. Evelyn's history picks up on the set of Little Women, which has finally started shooting. Evelyn and her co-star Celia St. James strike up a mutually beneficial relationship: Evelyn will help Celia get noticed around town, and in return, Celia will give Evelyn acting lessons. A tabloid article spreads the rumor that Evelyn would rather spend time with celebrities like Celia than start a family with Don. When Evelyn realizes the story came from her maid, Paula, she fires Paula and plants a false story about having a miscarriage to restore her image through public sympathy. At the premiere of Little Women, Evelyn realizes Celia's performance has overshadowed everyone else's, but she's happy, not jealous. At the afterparty, Evelyn's friend Ruby tells her that Celia is a lesbian and that Don is cheating on Evelyn. When Evelyn sees Celia, she kisses her. After she finds Don with another woman in a bedroom at the party, she asks Harry to take her home. Harry takes Evelyn to his house, and the next day, she returns home to see that Don has already left. Evelyn stays with Celia, where Harry delivers her the divorce papers from Don. The papers stipulate that, though Evelyn will keep the house and half of her and Don's money, she's not allowed to discuss their marriage with the media. In addition, Sunset Studios will drop Evelyn and blackball her from an Oscar nod. Later, Evelyn and Celia have sex for the first time. Celia attends the Academy Awards while Evelyn watches on the TV. When Celia wins the Oscar for best supporting actress, Evelyn kisses the TV and chips her tooth. After the Hollywood studios lose interest in Evelyn, she meets French director Max Girard, who casts her in a movie called Boute-en-Train; the films features a topless shot of her. The movie's release turns Evelyn into an international sensation. Meanwhile, to quash rumors about her close relationship with Celia, Evelyn elopes with popstar Mick Riva. Evelyn has sex with Riva to seduce him, but the couple annuls their marriage the next morning. Later, Evelyn discovers she's pregnant. Celia, who didn't realize Evelyn was willing to go as far as sex to ensure a successful elopement, breaks up with her. Evelyn marries Rex North to generate interest in Anna Karenina, the adaptation they are starring in together. After a few years of marriage, Rex tells Evelyn he's in love with someone else and needs to divorce Evelyn. Evelyn stages a false affair with Harry, who is gay. When both Evelyn and Celia lose in the same category of the Oscars that year, they find each other in the bathroom and forgive each other. Evelyn marries Harry and moves to Manhattan with him, allowing her and Celia, as well as Harry and Celia's husband John (who is also gay, and seeing Harry), to live out their secret relationships under the cover of heterosexual marriages. When Evelyn turns 36, she realizes her marriage with Harry is the longest of all her marriages. She and Harry agree to have a baby together, and Evelyn gets Celia's consent. A year later, Evelyn and Harry have a daughter, Connor. Celia encourages Evelyn to film another movie with Max. Evelyn will have to act alongside Don in the movie, so she meets with him to make peace. Max convinces Evelyn to film an explicit sex scene, which Evelyn agrees to and shoots without asking Celia. When she tells Celia about the scene, Celia leaves her and files for divorce from John. A few years later, John dies of a heart attack. To distract Harry from his grief, she convinces him to produce Max's next film, which she'll also star in. After she, Harry, and Max all win Oscars for the film, Max asks Evelyn to marry him. Meanwhile, in present-day New York, Monique arrives at her apartment after a day of writing to find David waiting there for her. He asks her to keep working at their marriage, but she tells him the relationship is over. Evelyn's history picks back up the day after her Oscar win. She and Harry agree to get a divorce. Evelyn marries Max, who she soon realizes is more interested in her beauty and celebrity status than her real personality. Evelyn begins to exchange letters with Celia. Eventually, Celia agrees to meet Evelyn and tells her she's dying of a pulmonary disease. The two rekindle their relationship. Evelyn divorces Max and tries to convince Harry to move to Spain with her and Celia, but Harry suggests they move to LA instead, where he's found someone he wants to have a future with. Later that evening, Evelyn finds Harry unconscious in a crashed car with a dead passenger beside him. Harry dies after Evelyn takes him to the hospital. Six months after Harry's death, Connor's unruly behavior gains press attention, and Evelyn knows she has to get Connor out of town. Evelyn and Connor move to Spain with Celia and Celia's brother, Robert, who becomes Evelyn's seventh husband. In Spain, Connor refocuses on her schoolwork while bonding with Robert. Meanwhile, Celia's health deteriorates, and she dies a few years later. Evelyn and Robert move back to New York City where Evelyn spends her time fundraising. Robert dies 11 years later. Connor is diagnosed with breast cancer and dies at age 41. Evelyn realizes that people will only understand the whole truth of her story, particularly her romantic relationship with Celia, if she tells the story herself, in the form of this biography. She asks Monique to emphasize that she no longer cares about wealth or celebrity—she just wants to be with the people she loves. Finally, Evelyn reveals to Monique that the passenger who died in the car crash with Harry was James Grant, Monique's father. She gives Monique the letter that Monique's father wrote to Harry, explaining that he could never leave Monique or Monique's mother, even though he loved Harry. Monique, enraged, asks Evelyn when she can publish the book—in other words, when Evelyn will die. Evelyn reveals she has late-stage breast cancer. Monique returns to Evelyn's apartment the next morning for a cover shoot for Vivant's article about Evelyn. After the photographers leave, Evelyn says goodbye to Monique, and Monique understands that Evelyn has chosen to die on her own terms, and that she's saying goodbye forever. Evelyn dies soon after, and Vivant publishes an article by Monique which reveals Evelyn's bisexuality and includes an excerpt from her upcoming biography.

- Genre: Christian Fiction - Title: The Shack - Point of view: Second person - Setting: Pacific Northwest, United States - Character: Mackenzie Allen Phillips. Description: The protagonist of the novel, Mack is a nondescript everyman who has long struggled to reconcile his faith in God with the daily reality before him. As a child, Mack's father, a violent alcoholic, terrorized the family. When Mack turned thirteen, he ran away from home after poisoning every bottle of alcohol in the house. Now living in the Pacific Northwest, Mack still grapples with those memories but has found great happiness with his wife Nan and his five children. Like Nan, Mack believes in God and thinks of religion as a major force in his life. Nevertheless, he can't shake a sense of uneasiness towards God, and has never been able to call him by the familiar name "Papa" as Nan does. That mistrust is deepened when Mack's youngest child, Missy, is kidnapped and murdered during a family camping trip. After Missy's death, Mack feels disconnected from faith, confused about how God could allow such a terrible thing to happen, and wracked by guilt and grief. These feelings take the form of The Great Sadness, an overwhelming depression that keeps Mack from feeling or enjoying anything. Over the course of the book, he is pushed to confront his feelings about Missy's death, and to challenge his preconceived notions about the nature of God. After meeting Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu in the shack, Mack is able to overcome his trauma and rebuild a loving relationship with God. - Character: Papa/Elousia. Description: Papa is one facet of the three-part God depicted in the novel (the others being Jesus and Sarayu). Papa also calls herself "Elousia," which Jesus explains means "the Creator God. She fills the role of "the father" in the trinity, but challenges many of the conventions of that role. Initially, Papa appears as a middle-aged black woman, quick to make jokes and jabs—much to the surprise of Mack, who has always pictured God as an aloof, Gandalf-esque old white man. Papa says she has assumed the familiar name used by Mack's wife Nan to help Mack identify her with God, but has taken on an unexpected appearance to help Mack get around some of his assumptions about religion. Further challenging Mack's assumptions, Papa does not use shame, guilt, or violent punishment. Instead, she encourages Mack and all human beings to recognize her love and to trust that, though she can create positive outcomes from tragedies, she does not cause tragedies to happen. Papa has scars on her wrists from Jesus's crucifixion, which she explains are due to the fact that all three personas of God are always together and always with humans. - Character: Sarayu. Description: Sarayu fulfils the role of the "Holy Spirit" in the three-part version of God seen in the novel (the other parts being Jesus and Papa). Jesus explains to Mack that her name means "a common wind" in one human language. The exact nature of that role and even her specific characteristics are intentionally mysterious, and she seems to be the embodiment of some of the seemingly supernatural elements of God, such as his ability to be all-knowing and ever-present. She appears as an Asian woman with a shimmering, almost transparent cast to her body that makes her slightly difficult to look at. In part by taking him to a garden representing his wild yet ordered soul, Sarayu attempts to help Mack to understand the nature of his innermost spiritual self as well as how to comprehend and manage his feelings. - Character: Jesus. Description: Jesus is "the son" in the tri-part God depicted in the novel (the other parts being Papa and Sarayu). In some ways, he most closely aligns with Mack's preconceived image: he is a kind Middle Eastern man who enjoys woodworking and helps Mack to literally walk on water. With kindness and humor, he helps Mack to understand new ideas about faith over the course of the weekend, including talking through Mack's ideas about what he expects God to look and act like. He also tells Mack that the church is simply a bureaucratic institution created by humans, and he prefers for those who follow him to try to form more personal, direct connections rather than being distracted by the trappings of religion. - Character: Missy. Description: Missy, Nan and Mack's youngest child, is a lively six-year-old girl who enjoys asking questions and spending time with her family. She is fascinated by stories of sacrifice like those of Jesus and that of the Multnomah princess, a Native American who sacrificed herself by jumping off of a waterfall in order to save her tribe. When Missy is kidnapped and murdered during a camping trip, it sends Mack into depression and a crisis of faith. - Character: Nan Phillips. Description: Nan, Mack's wife, is an oncology nurse who uses her strong sense of faith to help patients facing terminal illness. She has a uniquely personal relationship with God, calling him by the familiar name "Papa." Like Mack, Nan was devastated by Missy's death, and is concerned by how her daughter Kate has retreated in the wake of the tragedy. - Character: Sophia. Description: Sophia, the personification of God's wisdom, is a beautiful, commanding woman who forces Mack to realize that in judging other people, his is actually, by extension, judging God for allowing evil to exist in the world. Jesus later explains that Sophia is not a distinct part of the trinity, but instead "part of the mystery surrounding Sarayu." - Character: Willie. Description: Willie is an old friend of Mack's. He serves as a narrator for the prologue and epilogue of the book, and is possibly a stand in for the novel's real author, William Paul Young. He frames The Shack by writing that he is relating the story of the weekend as told to him by Mack. Willie also enables the events in the story by lending Mack his truck so that Mack can go to the shack for the weekend. - Character: Mack's Father. Description: A violent alcoholic who abused Mack and other members of his family. Before running away from the family farm, Mack fills all the alcohol bottles he can find with poison. When Sarayu gives Mack the ability to see as God does, Mack sees his father; the man has forgiven him for poisoning him and seeks forgiveness for his behavior as a father. - Theme: Independence from God. Description: The Shack tells the story of Mackenzie Allen "Mack" Phillips, who, after his daughter Missy is brutally murdered on a family camping trip, bitterly turns away from God. Everything changes when Mack eventually returns to the shack where his daughter was killed and finds himself face to face with three surprising manifestations of the Christian Trinity: God is a black woman named Papa, the Holy Spirit is an Asian woman named Sarayu, and Jesus is a Middle-Eastern carpenter in keeping with biblical tradition. Together, Sarayu, Papa, and Jesus teach Mack that one of the core reasons he cannot trust God or understand His ways is because all of humanity has chosen independence from God. This choice, the novel argues—to center their own judgments and rules instead of trusting in God's—has come at a great cost to human beings: they can no longer see the purpose behind anything they perceive as bad or evil, and, it follows, can no longer trust that God is able to create purpose from everything. In the novel, God has given human beings the choice of whether or not to trust his love because love of God is only meaningful if it comes freely. Evil and suffering, Papa tells Mack, exist specifically because of this independence—they arise when humans actively choose to turn away from God's plan. For example, Papa didn't cause Missy to die—that was a choice her killer made. Papa has helped Mack to learn much as a result of Missy's death, but Papa explains that just because she is able to create purpose out of tragedy does not mean that she causes or wants these things to happen. Sophia, a manifestation of God's wisdom, then challenges Mack's judgment of evil by asking how far back the punishment of Missy's killer should go: should it extend to the killer's father, and his father before him, all the way back to Adam and even back to God? It follows that judgments of evil are actually judgments of God for creating and not intervening in human life. Furthermore, Sarayu, Papa, and Jesus teach Mack that the judgments he has used to determine good and evil in his own life are predicated on subjective beliefs. Making these judgments is just another way of choosing independence from God, the novel argues, because it puts humans in a position of authority over one another—an authority that should be reserved for God. The human ideas of rights, laws, and even the rules of the scripture are all human-created and human-enforced laws created in response to evil, which nonetheless divide people and keep them from trusting judgment to God alone. Judgments make people feel superior and justified in violence towards others. Relying on these rules, then, allows humans to judge and punish one another with impunity. Mack, for example, determines right and wrong based on his own internal value system and how things affect him personally. In this way, humans who try to judge right and wrong for themselves instead of leaving that judgment to God make themselves arbiters of good and evil. Ultimately The Shack argues that because people must be able to freely choose to love God, they also have the option to commit evil acts. It is important to recognize, however, that such acts are not part of God's plan. And although humans may create rules and exact judgment to cope with such evil, these are simply another way of declaring dangerous independence from God. This sense of independence keeps humans from trusting that God is present in dark times and will find a sense of purpose in tragedies, even those he does not cause. God, ironically, has given people the choice for independence so that they may actively choose to put their entire faith in God. - Theme: Love and Relationships. Description: Nan, Mack's wife, has always had a close relationship with God, as is exemplified by her affectionate nickname for him: Papa. It takes Mack much longer to realize that he, too, can relate to God on such a deep and intimate level. Over the course of his weekend at the shack, Mack has many conversations and special moments with the three incarnations of God, from gardening with Sarayu and cooking with Papa to stargazing with Jesus, that help him start to build a closer relationship with God. As Mack does so, he also learns about the true meaning and importance of relationships. Many human relationships are marred by the presence of power struggles or hierarchies, the novel argues. By embracing open, honest relationships built on love, humans are able to recreate the relationship that God hopes to have with all people. As the three parts of God tell Mack, power has no place in relationships. Instead, relationships should always center love. Mack is confused by the relationship between the three personas of God at first, and asks them which one is in charge—a question they find baffling. Sarayu explains that authority and hierarchy are simply human inventions that infect relationships with abuse and power dynamics, and, more broadly, lead to hate and war. Misguided power dynamics are further reflected by gender: Jesus tells Mack that God intended for men and women to be equal, but, over the course of human history, men turned to work and women turned to relationships and sought protection from men. This led to men feeling superior to women, which has marred their relationship. Instead, both men and women should prioritize their relationship with God. Papa further encourages Mack to embrace a love based on genuinely knowing another person. Just as Mack's love expands to encompass each of his children because his relationship with each is unique, God is "especially fond" of each of his children and forgives them when they do wrong. Love is not predicated on expectations of reciprocity, but awareness and openness. It follows that another way to remove power dynamics from relationships is by openly and actively forgiving others. Failing to forgive infects relationships with power imbalances and expectations. Mack observes the love between Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu that is clearly present at all times—even in moments when Mack might turn to tension and fighting in his own relationships. For example, when Jesus drops a heavy bowl in the kitchen, everyone begins to laugh and help one another. Mack wonders if he could bring that same spirit of forgiveness to his own relationships. More dramatically, forgiving those who have done serious wrongs is a way of removing the pressure of judgment from relationships and restoring a trusting relationship with God. By forgiving Missy's killer, Mack relinquishes his own exhausting feelings of judgment in favor of a sense of peace. By forgiving his father, Mack is able to let go of the lingering pain he felt about his childhood. By judging Missy's killer and his father, Papa argues, Mack had been attempting to take on the role of God, creating an exhausting imbalance of power. Forgiving Missy's killer allows Mack to accept that God will judge the man. In this way, Mack can restore some of his trust in God. Indeed, over the course of his weekend at the shack, Mack learns from the trinity that his spiritual relationship to God suffers from many of the same imbalances that plague his earthly relationships. As with his relationships to other people, Mack's relationship to God will improve if he frees it of judgments, rules, and expectations. In this way, Mack's encounter with God is surprising in how little it resembles his Christian upbringing. Strict religious doctrine and institutions like the church, Mack learns, are simply other ways of applying rules and value judgments to relationships—in this case, one's relationship with God. Likewise, the "devotion" that Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus perform after dinner one night surprises Mack because it bears little resemblance to the recitation of scriptures he remembers from his youth. Papa explains that devotion is about appreciation and honesty, not ritual. Similarly, Jesus explains that the institution of the church as Mack knows it is simply a human invention. All humans can form a direct connection to Jesus without bureaucratic intervention. Instead of religious practice, the actual way to achieve closeness with God is recognition of and trust in God's love. One reason that Mack has been unable to connect with God, then, is that he doesn't understand what it truly means to be in a relationship with God. The Shack illustrates how this relationship, like all healthy relationships, centers love, knowing, and forgiveness over hierarchies, power struggles, and judgment. - Theme: Grief and Emotion. Description: At the beginning of the novel, Mack suffers under the weight of The Great Sadness, the depression he feels at the loss of his youngest daughter, Missy, who was murdered on a family camping trip. Understandably, Mack wants negative emotions about her death to vanish. But when Mack spends a weekend with incarnations of God, the son, and the Holy Spirit in the form of Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, he learns to face his emotions rather than bury them. God helps Mack see that "bad" emotions, including sadness, are necessary, and that working through emotions is a worthwhile process. It is necessary for Mack to talk about and embrace his pain in order to understand and appreciate his joy. In the novel, the suppression of emotions is a defense mechanism for dealing with tragedy. However, the only way to begin the process of healing is to address these underlying emotions, even if doing so is painful. Mack experiences the loss of his daughter as an overwhelming force that he calls The Great Sadness, which keeps Missy's memory—but also Mack's sense of guilt over her death—alive. The stifling nature of The Great Sadness keeps Mack from experiencing a full range of emotions, and, it follows, from enjoying beautiful things like a snowy day or the moon's reflection on a lake. Kate, Mack's oldest daughter, is experiencing a depression of her own, believing she caused Missy's death because she had distracted Mack when Missy was kidnapped. Notably, it is only when Mack confronts Kate and forces her to get those emotions out in the open that she starts to heal. Mack, too, is able to lift The Great Sadness only when he addresses and combats the underlying issues that are causing it, including his sense of guilt over Missy's death. At first, however, as The Great Sadness lifts, Mack begins to feel a surge of negative emotions that he wishes he could suppress. But with Papa's help, Mack begins to see that these emotions can provide useful insights into understanding why he has made certain choices and how he relates to those around him. For example, initially, Mack wishes he could avoid nightmares and even considers suicide as an escape from the sadness he feels. But slowly, when he starts to talk about his feelings with Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus, he starts to see that it is necessary for him to wade into and process these negative emotions in order to begin the process of healing.  Mack also avoids talking about emotions with those he loves, which creates distance between them. Indeed, Mack initially tells himself that he didn't tell Nan that he was returning to the shack, the place Missy was murdered, because he didn't want to worry his wife. But with Papa's help, Mack realizes that he lied to Nan in order to avoid having talk about the sense of doubt and hope that they both would have felt about receiving a message from God inviting them to return to the scene of the crime. Mack also apologizes for crying so much over the course of the weekend with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, saying that he hates that he is so full of tears. However, Papa says that tears are an important part of life and can be signs of joy as well as sadness. In these ways, God encourages Mack to face emotions that may be difficult. In addition to allowing himself to feel a full range of emotions, it is important for Mack to try to understand why he feels what he does. Sarayu impresses upon Mack that part of the reason emotions can be so confusing is that they flow from perceptions, which are in turn shaped by certain paradigms or deeply-held beliefs. In order to understand why some emotions feel bad and to trust those that are useful, it is necessary for Mack to think about his own beliefs; he must learn to stop parsing what is "good" or "evil," and instead leave such judgments to God. Sarayu later gives Mack the ability to see as God sees, at which point he observes a group of human beings filled with light—children emit a white light, while a circle of adults surrounding them emit lights of various colors, reflecting their more complex range of emotions. One being's light is particularly erratic, reflecting his volatile emotional state; this turns out to be Mack's father, and only upon acknowledging the guilt and pain both men feel are they able to embrace and forgive each other. Over the course of the weekend, Mack goes from feeling numb, to wishing he could eradicate the onrush of negative emotions he has excavated surrounding Missy's death, to realizing that it is necessary to feel, think about, and analyze the source of such negative emotions in order to turn them into something useful. After spending the weekend with Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus, Mack is able to do just that—to see the source of his emotions, both positive and negative, and understand how they influence his relationships and choices. - Theme: The Nature of God. Description: When Mack's daughter Missy is kidnapped and murdered, Mack can't stop thinking that God has abandoned him in his time of greatest need. A big part of why Mack initially suffers so much and feels so disconnected from God is that he labors under a number of false assumptions about the nature of God: he assumes that God is unsympathetic to Mack's life; he assumes that God abandons people in their times of need; and he assumes that God is calculating and vengeful, shaming and punishing people when they do wrong. By presenting himself in the unlikely form of three friendly strangers—God as a black woman named Papa, the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman named Sarayu, and Jesus as a carpenter—God breaks down those assumptions and shows Mack that God is a benevolent force that will always be with him and will never abandon him. Mack is surprised to see God (Papa) as a black woman, because Mack had always vaguely pictured God as an old white man. Papa explains that it is important to break down his assumptions of what God looks like so Mack can move past his association of God with religious practices, which he has always felt uncomfortable with, and instead connect to God directly. Mack is similarly surprised that Jesus isn't more handsome. In response, Jesus says that attractiveness, like race and gender, is just a tool that Mack and other people use for judging one another. In this way, God points out that Mack's discomfort with God stems from preconceived notions about what God is like that mostly come from external sources, like his religious upbringing and society in general. The challenging of those notions starts to open the door for Mack to have a more personal relationship with God. Mack also initially believes that God is cold and all-powerful, sometimes abandoning humans in their times of need. By appearing as three complementary personas, however, God challenges those assumptions. Papa explains that it is necessary for God to exist as three components so that love and relationships can exist within God. In this way, Young again shows that the way to achieve oneness with God is by embracing relationships, because God himself is comprised of a relationship between three beings. The Trinity of God is also significant because it points to the way that God lives in human beings at all times. Mack always thought that God had abandoned Jesus when he was crucified on the cross, just as God had abandoned Missy. However, the nature of the three-part God is that these parts are never really separate from one another. Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus demonstrate this notion over the course of the weekend by showing Mack that a conversation he has with one of them is simultaneously perceived by the others. Furthermore, Papa has scars on her hands from when Jesus was nailed to the cross, demonstrating that God does not abandon humans in times of crisis. Papa's constant presence in Jesus is a way of demonstrating that God lives in humans and is with them always. Because it is impossible for Papa to abandon Jesus, the human embodiment of God, it is impossible for God to abandon humans. Mack is at first mistrustful of God because he perceives God as being an angry and vengeful force. Instead, God explains that he operates from a place of forgiveness, not vengeance. Mack worries that Missy's death was punishment for Mack poisoning his own father when he was young, and also that Papa caused Missy's death in order to teach Mack about faith. Papa explains that in both these cases, she is able to use pain for good—but that she doesn't cause such pain. When Mack asks Papa if she enjoys punishing those who disappoint her, she is adamant that her power doesn't work in that way. She tells Mack that the basis of God's relationship to all humans is love, not shame or vengeance. At the beginning of The Shack, Mack does not trust God or let him into his life. However, this is largely because Mack misunderstands the nature of God, assuming that he is a vengeful, powerful force who punishes all who anger him. During his weekend at the shack with Papa, Sarayu, and Jesus, Mack comes to understand that God actually exists in three complementary parts, and that the basis of God is love and relationships. By having God deliberately appear in ways that challenge Mack's mental image of him, the novel highlights the misconceptions that Mack holds and argues that overcoming such narrow-minded or misguided assumptions is vital to understanding and embracing the true nature of divinity. - Climax: Law enforcement, led by Mack, recover Missy's body from the cave - Summary: Willie, the story's narrator, introduces his friend Mackenzie Allen Phillips. Mack had a difficult childhood; his father, a violent alcoholic, terrorized Mack and his family. As an adult, Mack is still haunted by those memories, but he has found happiness with his wife Nan and their five children. The main story opens on a snowy day. Mack watches the snow from his home office, though the beauty of nature mcan't lift his depression, which he thinks of as The Great Sadness. Mack goes to the mailbox to find a note inviting him up to the shack next weekend, signed "Papa." It sends Mack a chill of anger and fear. Nan calls to say that she's worried about Kate, the couple's oldest daughter, who has been distant. Nan says she is praying to Papa—her nickname for God—for answers. Three years earlier, Mack took his children Kate, Josh, and Missy—then six—on a camping trip. On the way, the family stopped at Multnomah waterfall, where Mack related a favorite story of Missy's. In the story, a Native American princess sacrifices herself by jumping off of the waterfall in order to save her tribe. Later that night, Missy tells Mack that the story reminds her of Jesus, and asks if God will ever ask her to jump off a waterfall to save her family. Touched, Mack reassures her that she will never have to do anything like that. All goes well until the last morning of the trip, when Kate and Josh go to play in a canoe. Missy colors at a picnic table while Mack watches. Kate tries to wave at Mack from the canoe, but it capsizes, trapping Josh below. Mack runs to help his son, but his relief upon saving Josh is quickly overshadowed when he sees that Missy is gone. A camper tells Mack that he saw a little girl in the back of a truck crying as the truck left the campsite. Police officers arrive on the scene, and one, Tommy Dalton, goes with Mack to look over the campsite. There they find a ladybug pin that matches a signature left by a serial killer known as "Little Ladykiller." The next day, the truck is spotted near a national forest and Mack joins officers in canvassing the area. Sam asks Mack to identify something in a dilapidated shack. When Mack sees the object, he breaks down: it is Missy's dress, torn and bloodstained. In the present, the family has struggled to recover from Missy's death. Kate has become withdrawn, and Mack feels himself drifting from God. He can't stop thinking about the note in the mailbox, so when Nan says that she is thinking of taking the kids to see her family, Mack jumps at the chance to go to the shack alone. Mack borrows Willie's truck and drives to the forest. Feeling sick and overwhelmed, he enters the dismal shack and breaks down at the sight of the bloodstain on the floor. He leaves the cabin, but the forest starts to transform around him, blooming with the new life of spring. He turns to see the shack transformed into a beautiful cabin beside a lake. As he approaches, the door is swept open by an African American woman who introduces herself as Papa. Behind her is a small Asian woman named Sarayu and a middle Eastern man who introduces himself as Jesus. They explain that, together, they are God, which makes a strange kind of sense to Mack. Inside, Mack talks with Papa as she prepares dinner. She says she will try to help him understand that he is loved, and that God is always with him. Mack and the three parts of God enjoy dinner together, talking about Mack's family and the importance of relationships based on respect and love rather than hierarchy and power. After the meal, Papa leads a devotion. Mack is surprised that it does not involve scripture or any formal ritual, but instead is a moment for Jesus to express his sincere love for Papa. After the meal, Jesus explains that Papa is the creator God, Jesus is her son and human incarnate form, and Sarayu is the Holy Spirit. That night, Mack has a nightmare about Missy. Upon waking he asks Papa if she ever punishes her children, but she says that is not her nature. After breakfast, Sarayu invites Mack out into a beautiful garden, and together they clear a patch of flowers. As they work, Sarayu talks to Mack about good and evil, warning that using subjective measures of right and wrong can lead to unfair judgement of others. It is important to leave judgement to God instead. Mack then goes to join Jesus for a picnic lunch. Jesus invites Mack to walk across the surface of the lake, which startles Mack. But with a little encouragement, he finds that he can easily walk across with Jesus by his side. As they eat, Jesus again emphasizes the danger of hierarchies in relationships. He sends Mack down a path beside a waterfall, saying someone is waiting for him. Mack follows the path into a large cavern. Inside is a tall, serious woman standing behind a desk. She tells Mack that he is there for judgement—not his own, but to judge God and all humanity. Provoking Mack's anger by reminding him of his daughter's killer, the woman asks if God is to blame for what happened. Full of grief and pain, Mack says that God is responsible. The woman tells Mack that if he judges God, he judges all of humanity by extension. She then tries to force Mack to choose only two of his five children to join God in heaven, but he refuses. The woman says that being faced with this choice helps Mack understand Papa. She also explains that horrible things like Missy's death are not part of God's plan, but a result of humans choosing to be independent rather than loving and trusting God. The world is broken, and the way to fix it is to give up judgement and independence and trust in God. Suddenly, Mack hears children's laughter. One wall of the cavern becomes transparent and he is able to see all of his children, including Missy, playing by the lake with Jesus. Although they cannot see or hear him, Missy seems to know that he is there, and runs over to sign "I love you" and blow him a kiss. As Missy returns to the other children, a waterfall crashes down in front of Mack, obscuring his view. Walking back to the lake afterwards, Mack realizes that The Great Sadness has lifted. He meets up with Jesus, who explains that the woman in the cave was Sophia, a personification of Papa's wisdom. Jesus says that he, Papa, and Sarayu were with Missy throughout her ordeal, because God never truly leaves anyone. He also explains that the church as Mack knows it is just a human institution or bureaucracy that gets between Jesus and his believers. Mack joins Papa on the porch for conversation and some fresh scones. Thinking of the waterfall and the legend of the Multnomah princess, Mack asks if Missy had to die so that Papa could teach him. Papa is disappointed, saying that just because she can create purpose and positivity out of tragedies does not mean that she causes those tragedies. She also says that Mack is afraid of facing his own emotions, which is why he lied to Nan about coming to the shack. Mulling this over, Mack takes a canoe out on the lake. Sarayu appears in the canoe and invites Mack to return to the cabin for dinner. She tells him that emotions, whether positive or negative, are necessary to experience the full range of what life has to offer. She encourages Mack not to suppress his emotions but to think about their origins. At dinner, Sarayu explains that humans follow rules, laws, and commandments in order to make themselves feel independent and in control, and to judge one another. After the meal, Sarayu touches Mack's eyes so that he can see as the three of them see. When he opens his eyes, Mack finds himself on a small hill overlooking a clearing. The world glimmers with light emanating from every living creature. The clearing fills with a group of children glowing with inner white light, and then a circle of adults shining with more complicated colors, and finally a circle of angels glowing blue. One man's light is volatile. Sarayu explains that the colorful lights are a representation of emotions, and that the man is Mack's father. Overcome, Mack runs towards him and they embrace and forgive one another. Jesus emerges and individually greets each assembled person. The next morning, Papa, now appearing as a man with a silver ponytail, shakes Mack awake and makes him breakfast. Sarayu gives Mack a tightly rolled mat full of flowers and herbs from the garden. Mack and Papa begin walking through a path in the woods marked by the sign of a red arc drawn on certain trees and rocks. When they arrive at a clearing, Papa says that Mack must forgive Missy's killer so that he can let go of his pain. Tearfully, Mack says out loud that he forgives the killer. Papa then leads Mack into a cave marked by the red arc, where they find Missy's body under a sheet. Mack wraps her in the scented mat from Sarayu and they head back to the cabin. There, Jesus shows Mack a beautifully carved coffin he has prepared for Missy, decorated with scenes of her with her family. They carefully place Missy inside and take the coffin to the space in the garden that Mack and Sarayu cleared the day before. Back inside, Papa tells Mack that he has the choice of staying in the cabin, where he will continue learning from God, or returning to his life. Sarayu says that if he returns home, he can choose to keep making the world better by being kind. Mack decides to go back. Sarayu also says that Kate believes she is to blame for Missy's death, a revelation that Mack hopes will allow him to reconnect with Kate and begin the healing process. After changing into his old clothes, Mack falls asleep on the floor of the cabin. When he wakes up, he is back in the dilapidated shack, and God is gone. He feels excited to apply the lessons he learned over the weekend. On the drive home, however, another driver slams into Mack's car. He is airlifted to a nearby hospital and drifts in and out of consciousness over the next several days. Willie visits as Mack is becoming more lucid and asks about the shack. Mack is reminded of all that has happened, and soon tells Nan everything. He calls Kate to his bedside to tell her that Missy's death is not her fault. Kate is overcome with emotion but also clearly relieved. After about a month, Mack and Nan go with Tommy Dalton to the area near the shack. Tommy doesn't believe Mack's fantastical story until he leads them to the cave where Missy's body is. Experts descend on the scene, and soon they have enough evidence to find and convict the serial killer who killed Missy. In an afterword, Willie says that Mack has changed dramatically since his weekend at the shack. The Great Sadness has lifted, and Mack is quick to love and forgive. He hopes that everyone can connect with Jesus, Sarayu, and Papa.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Shawl - Point of view: First person - Setting: Anishinaabe ancestral land, now known as the northern United States and Southern Canada, around the Great Lakes - Character: Narrator. Description: The narrator of "The Shawl" lives in the same Anishinaabeg lands that his ancestors lived in (in the region of the United States and Canada roughly around the Great Lakes). His mother died when he was young, so as an adolescent and early teenager he grew up with his father, who for a time drank a lot and was abusive, and his younger twin siblings, Raymond and Doris. He develops strategies to deal with his father's behavior: stashing away food for himself and the twins so that their father can't sell it, taking off his father's belt when he's passed out drunk and hiding it so that he can't use it to beat them, and slipping money from his father's sock to provide for himself and his siblings. By age 13, he feels big enough to fight his father, and so one night rather than hiding when his father returns home drunk, he brawls with and overcomes his father. Afterward, his father suddenly seems sober, and for the first time shares that he had a younger sister who died and his own (and therefore the narrator's) connection to the story of the nine-year-old daughter who Aanakwad threw to the wolves in order to save herself and her infant. As an adult, the narrator lives near his father and his siblings, but he lives alone, while everyone else has found a partner. He connects his chosen solitude to the relatively recent era wherein his people, after being forced off their land and into towns by the United States government, experienced widespread alcoholism and depression. Though things have improved, his generation still bears the aftereffects of that difficult period, and it's possible that his solitude is a symptom of this inheritance. The narrator is influenced by stories of the Gete-anishinaabeg, the older generation of his people who are said to have been generous and kind. He eventually suggests to his father that perhaps his sister was this kind of person, and thus that she may have sacrificed herself to save her mother, Aanakwad, and the others. In so doing, the narrator suggests that the legacy his family has inherited may not be one of shame and sorrow, but rather of heroic sacrifice and deep cultural connection. - Character: Aanakwad. Description: Aanakwad is the narrator's grandmother, and the mother of the narrator's father. Her name means "cloud," a word that also describes her changeable temperament. When the narrator's father was young, Aanakwad had a child by a man whom she loved but who was not her husband, and she became so depressed that it was arranged for her to leave the husband and live with this other man instead. After arguing about it, Aanakwad and her husband decide to split up their own children: their nine-year-old daughter and the infant will leave with her, while their five-year-old son (the narrator's father) will stay with her husband. The other man's uncle fetches Aanakwad, the daughter, and the infant in his horse-drawn cart. Not long after they set off, they are attacked by wolves. The husband arrives at the scene of the attack not long after and can see from the remains that the daughter has been eaten by the wolves. He believes that Aanakwad threw their daughter to the wolves in order to save herself, her baby, and the uncle, and passes on this version of events to his son. At the end of the story, the narrator suggests that perhaps Aanakwad didn't throw the daughter, but that the daughter jumped and sacrificed herself instead. This version of the story, to some extent, redeems Aanakwad in her son and grandson's eyes. - Character: Son/Father. Description: The narrator's father is an Anishinaabeg man who experiences several tragedies in his life. When he is five years old, his mother, Aanakwad, has a child by a man who is not her husband and ends up leaving the family as a result. When the other man's uncle comes to fetch Aanakwad, the son is meant to stay with his father while his sister, the daughter, leaves with their mother and her infant. The son, dismayed that he is being left behind, tries to jump on the departing wagon, and then chases it desperately through the snow as fast as he can. Eventually he loses consciousness, but not before seeing some gray shapes approach the trail that the cart is on. He later finds out from his father that the shapes were wolves, and that his sister was eaten by them, with only a scrap of her plaid shawl remaining. His father assumes that Aanakwad fed her daughter to the wolves in order to save herself and her infant, an idea that haunts the son. As an adult, he struggles through the difficult period when the U.S. government moves the Anishinaabeg people from their reservation into towns and public housing. His wife dies during this time and he turns to alcohol, neglecting his three children—the narrator, Raymond, and Doris—and beginning to beat them when he comes home drunk. Eventually, when the narrator, his oldest son, is 13, the two get into a fight in which the narrator knocks down and bloodies his father. After this fight, the father reveals the story of his sister for the first time, and his drinking and abuse seem to stop. The father remains sober, and eventually begins a new romantic relationship. Some time later, the narrator and his father discuss the events that led to his sister's death again. The narrator suggests to his father that rather than continue to carry around his sister's shawl, he should burn it in accordance with their people's traditions, and the father agrees to do so. The narrator also suggests to the father that his current understanding of his sister's death—that she was thrown to the wolves—might not be what actually happened. It's possible, he tells his father, that his sister instead sacrificed herself to save her family, suggesting that the father's sense of loss and shame at his family legacy might just as easily be reinterpreted into a sense of pride and heroism. - Character: Daughter. Description: Aanakwad's daughter is pushed into taking on adult responsibilities at the age of nine, when her mother's depression over her romantic situation becomes so overwhelming that she cannot take care of her infant or of her household duties. Her daughter takes this labor on instead, and even becomes something of an intermediary between Aanakwad and her husband, the girl's father. When it is decided that Aanakwad will go to live with her lover, the other man, the daughter goes with her. After the son tells his father about the grey shapes he saw on the trail as he chased the cart that was carrying his mother and sister, the husband investigates and finds that wolves have eaten the daughter. He takes home a piece of her plaid shawl and, years later, tells his son what he thinks happened: the wolves attacked the cart and Aanakwad threw the daughter to them in order to save herself, her infant, and her lover's uncle, who was driving the cart. The son is deeply disturbed by this story, and it is suggested that his sense of shame and sorrow corrupt his life. But after the son reveals the story to his son, the narrator, the narrator in turn suggests that, given that the daughter had been such a good person, a Gete-anishinaabeg, it's also possible that she sacrificed herself. While the daughter's story could be seen as one exemplifying shame and sorrow, the narrator's reinterpretation of it suggests that the story—and perhaps history more generally—can also be reinterpreted to offer hope, strength, and cultural connection. - Character: Husband. Description: Aanakwad's husband recognizes that she loves not him, but rather the other man, with whom she has just had a baby. Eventually, as their family life becomes untenable due to her despair, the husband sends for the other man's uncle to come pick up Aanakwad and take her to live with her lover. The separation is painful for him, especially because they are splitting up the two children they had together — their daughter will go with Aanakwad, while their son will stay with him. When the uncle arrives, the husband stops up his ears to avoid having to listen to their departure, so he doesn't notice at first that his son is chasing the cart through the snow as it leaves. When he does realize and goes to get his son, his son tells him about the gray shapes he saw on the trail, the husband goes to investigate. He then discovers that his daughter was eaten by wolves and assumes that Aanakwad threw the daughter to the wolves in order to stave them off and save herself, her infant, and her lover's uncle. The husband takes a scrap of his daughter's plaid shawl from the scene of the attack but initially keeps the story of what happened to himself. When, years later, he begins to weaken from tuberculosis, he tells this story to his son, and then begins to tell it to everyone, whenever he can. - Character: Uncle. Description: When Aanakwad's husband realizes that they cannot go on living as a family because of her despair at being apart from her lover, he sends for the other man's uncle to come and fetch Aanakwad. At the time, there are no roads, only trails, so the uncle lives a long trip away. When he arrives, he takes Aanakwad, her daughter, and the infant she had with the other man in his cart. The group is attacked by wolves on the trail, but it is assumed that everyone other than the daughter survives. - Character: Raymond. Description: Raymond is the narrator's younger brother. He is one of a set of twins — Doris is his twin sister. Both Doris and Raymond are cared for by the narrator after their mother dies and their father devolves too far into drinking to parent them. They regularly hide in the woods when they hear their father coming home to avoid his drunken beatings. As adults, Raymond and Doris marry a set of siblings, and they continue to live near the narrator and their father. Sometimes, they discuss their childhoods. These conversations occasionally reveal new information: for example, it is through this kind of comparison of memory that the narrator learns that Raymond once saw him hiding their father's belt. - Character: Doris. Description: Doris is the narrator's younger sister. She is part of a pair of twins, the other being Raymond. After their mother's death, Doris and Raymond are cared for primarily by the narrator, since their father turns drunk and violent. With her siblings, Doris gets in the habit of sneaking out of the house to hide in the woods when their father returns from his binges. When they grow up, Doris and Raymond marry another pair of siblings, and live near their brother and their father. - Character: Other man. Description: The events in the story are set off by Aanakwad having an affair with this other man, who is not her husband. The affair produces an infant. Aanakwad cannot bear to care for the baby or attend to her other children because of her despair over not being with the other man, whom she loves. Eventually, Aanakwad's husband sends for the other man's uncle, and Aanakwad, her daughter, and the baby leave their home to go live with the other man. - Theme: Inheritance, Reinterpretation, and Personal and Cultural Legacy. Description: Louise Erdrich's story "The Shawl" is a story about inheritance—of stories, material items, and traumas. The narrator begins by sharing an anecdote told among the local Anishinaabeg (a name that refers to several related Native American tribes that live around the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada) about a mother named Aanakwad, who leaves her husband for a different man, taking her nine-year-old daughter and infant with her while leaving her five-year-old son behind with her husband. During the trip, Aanakwad and her children are attacked by wolves. Afterward, at the grisly scene, Aanakwad's husband finds a torn piece of his daughter's shawl and assumes that Aanakwad threw their daughter to the wolves in order to save herself and her infant. After the narrator moves on in the story to describe his own childhood with an alcoholic and abusive father, it is revealed that his father has the shawl and is in fact the younger brother of the girl who was thrown to the wolves. As the narrator and his father later revisit the story of the sister's death, the narrator wonders whether the girl was not thrown at all, but rather sacrificed herself to the wolves in order to save her mother and the infant. Through this reinterpretation of the anecdote, Erdrich suggests that inheritance is not simply something static that you receive passively, but rather something you can reshape. From the beginning of the story, Erdrich emphasizes things that are passed between and among family members and communities. The shawl referenced in the story's title is the most literal instance of something being passed down. It first appears on the girl in the anecdote—a "red and brown plaid shawl" that she wraps herself in as she sleeps. After the girl has been killed by wolves, her younger brother notes that it is kept in the house where now only he and his father live. By the end of the story, it reappears after the narrator finally fights and defeats his abusive father, and then use "this piece of blanket that my father always kept with him for some reason" to wipe away his father's blood. The shawl, then, has traveled from being a significant object to Aanakwad's daughter to being one to Aanakwad's grandson. For Erdrich's characters, stories are also an inheritance. The anecdote that opens this story, about the girl who was fed to the wolves, is framed in the very first sentence of "The Shawl" as something that "is told ... among the Anishinaabeg" people, of whom the narrator is one. In other words, it is a shared story, something that has been passed through the community. Later, the narrator reveals that he first heard this story from his father, further demonstrating the path the anecdote travels among generations. But for Erdrich, just as one can inherit a shawl or a formative story, one can also inherit traumas and sorrows from their family or community. Erdrich implies that the narrator's father's abusive behavior is tied to his sorrow about what he understands his mother to have done to his sister. When, as a young boy, the narrator's father learns what happened to his sister, "he knew that this broken place within him would not be mended." Later, when the narrator finally fights back against his father's drunken physical abuse and is able to overpower him, the father becomes subdued and suddenly sober. At this moment, he tells the narrator the story of the shawl and the sister to whom it originally belonged: "Did you know I had a sister once?" The father here acknowledges that his drunken rages were the result of the trauma he inherited, a trauma he has been passing down to his own children. Inherited sorrow is not limited to the narrator's immediate family, though. It's something that afflicts his entire community. The narrator describes how, when the United States government moved people from his and related tribes into towns, "it seemed that anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself." Even though this period of "despair" is over by the time the narrator is telling this story, its effects still linger in the existing generation: "We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, sorrows to handle in addition to our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget them." Despite all this, "The Shawl" does offer the hope that such cycles of inherited trauma can be disrupted through the story of what happens after the narrator's father finally reveals what happened to his sister. After sharing the story of his sister, the narrator's father suddenly speaks in "the new sober voice I would hear from then on." The father doesn't just become sober for that moment, but instead remains sober from then on, suggesting that in sharing the trauma with others, the pain and rage—if perhaps not the sorrow—induced by that long-ago tragedy is eased. Further, once he learns of the origin of the shawl—the literal symbol of a thing passed down—the narrator tells his father that "we never keep the clothing of the dead. Now's the time to burn it…. Send it off to cloak her spirit." The father agrees, which indicates that he is letting go of this manifestation of the sorrow from his sister's death that he'd been holding onto his whole life, and which had cut him off from his people's traditions. Not only does the narrator convince his father to let go of the shawl, the physical embodiment of the terrible story about his father's sister, but he also reinterprets the story itself. Instead of the story the father had always believed, that his mother Aanakwad had been so selfish as to feed his sister to the wolves in order to save herself, the narrator proposes another possible reading: What if his sister, known to be dutiful and loving to her mother and the infant, was similar to the old Anishinaabeg people in her remarkable kindness and had sacrificed herself in order to save everyone else? What if it had been her decision? Notably, the narrator offers this reinterpretation in the form of a question. The reader doesn't see the father's response, and thus Erdrich ends "The Shawl" without explicitly saying whether one or the other interpretation is true or even considered plausible among the characters. Yet the truth of what happened to the daughter is ultimately not important. Instead, the story's ending demonstrates how the narrator and his father might be able to reinterpret the story they inherited, rather than passively accepting the sorrow passed on to them. In doing so, they transform their history from a legacy of victimhood and shame to one of heroism that connects them to the profound kindness inherent in their Anishinaabeg cultural legacy. That "The Shawl" connects the daughter's story to the despair of the larger Anishinaabeg community further implies that such reinterpretation might offer not just the narrator and his father a path forward, but also it might give the entire Anishinaabeg community the ability to view their own cultural legacy not with shame but with pride. - Theme: Communal Storytelling. Description: The narrator of the "The Shawl" begins his story by sharing another story told "among the Anishinaabeg" about a woman named Aanakwad. This tale, in addition to being well known within the area where the narrator lives, is important for the narrator's grandfather (Aanakwad's husband), his father, and the narrator himself, making it clear that, for Erdrich, storytelling is a powerful force. As different stories are told throughout "The Shawl," it becomes evident that part of storytelling's power is the way it can enable the sharing of emotional trauma, a curative process inherent to the very act of telling. However, this curative power is not only born of the act of passing a burden onto someone else, but also in the revelations that can be found in sharing the role of narration itself with another person. For Erdrich, storytelling must be communal in order to be meaningful. Throughout "The Shawl," Erdrich shows how the simple act of telling a story can be curative or therapeutic.  Aanakwad's story is widely known among the Anishinaabeg people, as the first line of "The Shawl" indicates. The narrator suggests that this may be because, after finding his daughter's remains and realizing what must have happened to her, Aanakwad's husband "had to tell what he saw, again and again, in order to get rid of it." Telling the story of something disturbing is a way to "destroy its power." This vision of storytelling as a way to lighten the burden of a terrible experience or memory is reinforced later in "The Shawl," when the narrator and his father get into a physical fight. Before the fight began, the father was drunk and violent. By the end of the fight, after the narrator has stopped striking his father and offered him the shawl to clean up his blood, the father becomes not just subdued but sober. In this moment, he tells his son, for the first time, the story of his sister, Aanakwad's daughter who was eaten by wolves: "Did you know I had a sister once?" After this revelation, the father remains sober and his relationship with the narrator improves, the implication being that the act of telling the story was enough to address the rage the father was carrying that made him drunk and violent.  Erdrich also emphasizes the way that storytelling can be communal, an exchange of perspectives rather than the mere transmission of a story from one person to a listener or reader. The narrator describes how, once he and his two siblings Raymond and Doris have grown up, they continue to live near each other and get together often. He notes that, while their story of paternal drunkenness and abuse isn't a rare story, it's still useful for them to discuss their childhoods with each other because "it helps to compare our points of view." In fact, for Erdrich, the therapeutic properties of storytelling do not simply come out of the act of unburdening oneself, but are actually a result of the communal nature of storytelling. When the narrator describes the sharing of perspectives with his siblings, he explains why it is helpful by providing the example of the fact that, without this kind of comparison, he wouldn't have known that his brother saw him the first time he hid their father's belt so that their father couldn't beat them with it. In other words, the narrator thought he'd experienced something profoundly difficult in solitude—taking complete responsibility at a very young age for protecting himself and his siblings from their father—and that he was the only possible narrator of that story. But through the process of sharing stories with his siblings, he is able to realize he was not alone in the story and so he does not bear its weight alone now. The most significant instance of communal storytelling in "The Shawl" is the evolution of the story of Aanakwad, the story that opens Erdrich's piece. For the father, who heard the story from his father, it is a story of his mother's betrayal by throwing the daughter to the wolves to save herself. But for the narrator, it has the potential to be something else—the story of the daughter's brave sacrifice of herself to save those whom she loves. It is through sharing stories with others that they can change, influenced by the perspectives and experiences of these other people. In Erdrich's formulation, a story is not a private, singular thing, but a co-created, living thing, The implications of this perspective on storytelling are potentially enormous: history, as the ultimate "story," is, in the mainstream, traditionally told from one perspective—that of the powerful. In the case of the history of Native peoples in the United States, history as it concerns them is traditionally told from the perspective of the settlers and, eventually, the U.S. government. Erdrich is pointing to the necessity of a more communally composed history—one that allows the Native peoples to reclaim the interpretation of their past for themselves—and is in fact offering a sort of alternative history herself through her writing. - Theme: The U.S. Government, the Anishinaabeg, and the Consequences of Interference. Description: One of the underlying narratives in "The Shawl" is that of the Anishinaabeg people and their relation to the U.S. government. Louise Erdrich's narrator describes the profoundly negative effects of the government's effort to force a specific way of life onto his people by moving them from their traditional living situations into towns, which led to alcoholism, suicide, and general despair among the Anishinaabeg. For the narrator, these consequences were personal, as it was during this period of despair was when his mother died and his father began drinking and became violent. Yet while the efforts of the U.S. government to control the Anishinaabeg sits at the heart of the story in "The Shawl," it isn't the only example of such efforts at control. The conflict Erdrich depicts in the story is not just one between an oppressed people and the government, but also a more general one between what she frames as a state of untamed but natural balance in conflict with an artificial effort to control and organize. Through the story of what happened when the government pushed the Anishinaabeg into towns, Erdrich demonstrates the negative consequences of U.S. governmental interference in the culture and lives of the Anishinaabeg. The story's narrator describes how the Anishinaabeg used to live spread out on the reservation. This is indicated in Aanakwad's story too—the uncle arrives to fetch Aanakwad in a wagon with sled runners, because at that time, "people lived widely scattered along the shores and in the islands, even out on the plains." When the U.S. government disrupted this way of life and "moved everybody … onto roads, into towns, into housing … it all went sour." This effort by the government was a kind of interference in traditional Anishinaabeg culture and society, such that the members of that culture lost their sense of self and "anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself." Though the narrator describes the depths of that "term of despair" as having now passed, the negative impact of the governmental interference extends beyond just the people who were moved. The narrator notes that the survivors and their descendants "still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, sorrows to handle in addition to our own, and the cruelties lodged where we cannot forget them." The disruption to the Anishinaabeg people is not just a brief interruption but rather a crisis with far-reaching and radiating effects, a fact that underscores Erdrich's critique of interference. The impact of interference on the Anishinaabeg way of life is also clear in the way their relationship with their land and its animals changes. In Aanakwad's story, the wolves attack the cart carrying Aanakwad, her daughter, and her infant because, at that time, "guns had taken all [the wolves] food for furs and hides to sell." This brief explanation is loaded with a history of contact between Native Americans and Europeans. The Anishinaabeg people came into possession of guns through European merchants and settlers. They hunted small animals (the wolves' prey) in order to participate in the fur trade, an economy imposed on them by the Europeans who invaded their land. The fact that the result of this contact was at odds with an "old agreement between [wolves] and the first humans" implies that things had once been different for the Anishinaabeg people, that they had once had a harmonious and balanced relationship with these wolves who are now hunting them. This balance was disrupted by outside interference, specifically by the European invaders who eventually founded the United States. This means that there is a direct line between the wolves' hunting of Anishinaabeg people and the despair brought on by the government forcing the people to move into towns. When the narrator describes the government effort to move the Anishinaabeg into towns, he specifies that they are moved "onto roads"—something they did not have in the past when Aanakwad's story took place. A road (as opposed to trails traversable by wagons and sleds) is presumably built according to an organizing logic that connects a place (in this case the reservation) to a larger network of roads, making it accessible and comprehensible for outsiders. From the perspective of the merchants, settlers, or the U.S. government, this kind of interference may have looked like necessary, if violent, progress—giving the Native Americans technology in the form of guns, sometimes letting them participate in the dominant European economy, later forcing them to organize their living situations according to a logic the government recognized as valid. But through the destructive impacts that these changes had on the Anishinaabeg people, Erdrich shows how these imposed changes were in fact incredibly damaging. Though Erdrich illustrates the long-term disruptions caused by such impositions, she also seems to indicate that it is possible to restore the way of life that once existed. She illustrates this possibility with the story of the father's nose. The narrator says that his father's nose is perfectly straight, but this straightness is a result of it having been punched out of place during a drunken fight, and then punched back into alignment during another drunken fight. In other words, his nose may look straight from the outside, but it is like that because of his awful personal state. In the story's climax, when the narrator and his father fight, the narrator's blows make his father's nose crooked again. This, however, is not represented as a bad outcome. Rather, the re-breaking of the father's nose comes at the moment when the father suddenly becomes sober and then reveals for the first time the story of his dead sister, which begins the healing in the narrator's family. The story presents the restoration of what looks like disorder as the solution to the disease of artificially imposed order. - Climax: The narrator's abusive father comes home drunk and the two get into a physical fight - Summary: The narrator of "The Shawl" begins by introducing a story told among the Anishinaabeg people: a woman named Aanakwad has a child by a man whom she loves but who is not her husband. She already has two other children with her husband—a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. When Aanakwad gives birth to this third child, she is so overcome by her love for the baby's father, and her despair that she does not love her husband, that she neglects the child. Instead, the daughter cares for the infant. As Aanakwad's despair deepens to the extent that she stops cooking or cleaning, the daughter takes on those tasks too. Because of this, the young girl is often exhausted, and sleeps deeply every night wrapped in a red-and-brown plaid shawl. Eventually, the husband is forced to acknowledge that his marriage is no longer working. He sends for the other man's uncle, who comes in a horse-drawn wagon to pick up Aanakwad and take her to the other man. Aanakwad and her husband decide to split the children: the infant and the daughter will leave with their mother, and the son will stay with the husband. The son, desperately wanting to prevent his mother from leaving him, chases after the wagon until he collapses. Before losing consciousness, he sees some gray shapes entering the trail ahead from the surrounding woods. When the husband collects the young boy, the son tells him about the shapes, and the husband travels on the trail to investigate. He finds wolf tracks, and from the terrible scene left behind puts together that the daughter was thrown to the wolves in order to protect the woman, the infant, and the uncle driving the wagon. The brings home a torn piece of his daughter's plaid shawl. After a few years, as the husband is weakening from tuberculosis, he reveals the story to the son, who is deeply disturbed to imagine his mother throwing his sister to the wolves. The narrator then tells the story of his own childhood. He describes how his father became an alcoholic after his mother died. The narrator cares for himself and his younger twin siblings, Doris and Raymond. The children get in the habit of leaving the house and hiding in the woods when they hear their father coming home drunk, because otherwise he will beat them. One night, when the narrator is 13, he decides he is now big enough to take on his father and they fight. The narrator overwhelms his father and knocks him to the ground. When the fight is over, the narrator sees that his father is bleeding, and reaches for a nearby cloth his father keeps around—a piece of a red-and-brown plaid blanket. The father suddenly seems sober and reveals to the narrator that he once had a sister. At this point, the reader understands that the father is the five-year-old son from Aanakwad's story. The narrator provides further detail about his father's drinking: he notes that it began during a difficult time for his people, the Anishinaabeg, after they were forced by the government to move into towns and housing, instead of living in the spread-out way they were used to. This change led to widespread drinking, suicide, and general despair among the people. This is the context in which the narrator's mother died, his father's drinking got bad, and his father began to abuse him and his siblings. Though things have begun to get better for the survivors of this era, the aftereffects of the despair remain, passed down from ancestors who endured it. Eventually, some years later, the narrator and his father again discuss the shawl and the father's sister's death. The narrator convinces his father to burn the shawl instead of holding onto it, as it is the tradition of their people not to hold onto the relics of the dead. The narrator also suggests a possible revision to the father's understanding of what happened to the sister: What if, instead of being thrown, the sister had sacrificed herself out of her love for her mother and her infant sibling?

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber - Point of view: The story's focalizing presence is a third person omniscient narrator. Hemingway also includes internal monologue from both Francis Macomber and the hunter Robert Wilson. Little to no internal monologue is provided for either Margot Macomber or the Swahili-speaking servants and guides. - Setting: Generalized Africa, 1930s - Character: Francis Macomber. Description: The protagonist of the story, Francis Macomber is a wealthy, thirty-five-year-old American man on safari in Africa. The story begins with Macomber's crucial failure to hunt down and kill an African lion, which terrifies him and causes him to panic and flee. Though, at a glance, the fit, handsome Macomber is in the prime of his life, he is clearly also a man who lacks conviction and power. He can afford to organize a safari and hire hunters and guides, and to keep a beautiful wife (who, it is suggested, remains with him only because of his wealth), but Macomber does not have the courage to follow through with the task at hand—to dominate the beasts he encounters on the safari. Meanwhile, Macomber's wife Margot has likely cheated on him on multiple occasions, suggesting that Macomber is neither a rugged man of action like his rival, the "white hunter" Robert Wilson, nor an adequately authoritative husband. (Keep in mind that this story is set in the 1930s, a period characterized by pervasive, conservative notions of gender dynamics.) Macomber's seemingly miraculously transformation—from cuckold and coward to a "true man"—forms the story's center, connecting two mirrored threads of narrative: the lion hunt and the buffalo hunt. Embarrassed by his apparent defeat at the hands of Margot, the lion, and Wilson, each of whom seem to draw attention to his own inadequacy, Macomber resolves to try again. At the buffalo hunt, he gains courage and fierceness, resisting Margot's domination and proving himself as adept a hunter—and thus, as powerful a man—as Wilson. Yet Macomber dies at the end of the story (due to Margot's perhaps accidental, perhaps purposeful gunshot), suggesting that his achievement of "true" masculinity is ultimately for naught. - Character: Margot Macomber. Description: Margot Macomber is Francis Macomber's "extremely handsome and well-kept" wife, a socialite and former model (she once commanded five thousand dollars" to endorse "a beauty product which she had never used)" who clearly understands her power over men. Though she has been married to Francis Macomber for eleven years, she flirts persistently and eventually sleeps with Robert Wilson, and it is suggested that she has had affairs with other men as well. She and Francis seem to have an unspoken agreement: Margot can have affairs, but she will never leave her husband, since she is "not a great enough beauty any more" to do better. Margot grows increasingly nervous throughout the story as her husband gains confidence in himself as a man and a hunter, and, subsequently, begins to treat her more coldly; and as Wilson, who regards her scornfully in his inner monologues as a woman "enameled in that American female cruelty," turns his attention toward the "reborn," newly courageous Macomber. Critics have pointed to Margot as an archetypal "female predator," a dangerous, promiscuous woman who defies standards of passive femininity by boldly asserting her own sexuality and pursuing wealth instead of love. Yet the ambiguous ending of the short story unsettles this portrait of Margot. Though Wilson is convinced that she has murdered Macomber by shooting at him from the car from which she witnesses the hunt, it is also possible that she intended to shoot the buffalo he and Wilson had been hunting. Margot's potential motivations are numerous. She may have wished to dominate Macomber, threatened by his transformation to "man of action"—but she also may have wished to defend him from the advancing buffalo, either out of respect for his newfound masculine courage or to protect the wealth he provides her. In the end, however, Margot is rendered pathetic, and her fate without Macomber, who sustains her lifestyle and well-being, seems dismal. The reader is reminded that for all her charm and "female cruelty," Margot's role in society is ultimately limited, and she is thus more fallible than dangerous. - Character: Robert Wilson. Description: A British hunter hired by Francis Macomber to facilitate the safari, Robert Wilson is often described as Hemingway's alter-ego in the story, or at least an alter-ego for Hemingway's own image of himself. Hemingway, himself a hunter and explorer, was a strong proponent of virile masculinity, and he frequently held himself to high standards for traditional masculine conduct that Wilson reflects. Throughout the story, he appears stoic and emotionless in the face of potential danger and violence (perhaps because he is a World War I veteran and has experienced worse). Moreover, he indulges hedonistically in sex with his clients' wives (including Margot), all the while remaining detached from the affairs, which he justifies as mere financial gains. Yet Wilson's breezy conduct has consequences. His moral judgment seems innately flawed, since he is willing to ruin other individuals' relationships for his own benefit. Additionally, his commentary on Macomber and his wife reflect a severely limited, reductive understanding of gender: to Wilson, Macomber's weakness and Margot's cruelty are traits connected directly to masculinity and femininity. Perhaps most importantly, at the end of the story, Macomber suggests to Margot that he will help conceal Macomber's death—which he believes to be a murder. Thus, Wilson's masculine heroism conflicts constantly with his deeply imperfect view of the world, morality, and other individuals. - Character: Kongoni and the Swahili guides, gun-bearers, and servants. Description: Lurking discontentedly in the background of the text are the Swahili-speaking men who assist with the safari and preparation for the hunt: cooks, gun-bearers, guides, and other servants, some only young boys. (Only one, "Kongoni," is directly named, perhaps because he is the most senior of the servants.) But none of these characters, including Kongoni, receive any dialogue, internal or external. These figures are subject to violent punishment from their superiors, the white hunters, and general scorn and disgust. Both Robert Wilson and Francis Macomber demonstrate indifference and even downright cruelty toward the natives. "The hell with him," Macomber says, referring to a boy who "understands a little English," after complaining about the "filthy food" the servants have offered. Wilson, for his own part, discusses beating the servants—showing no remorse for these violent actions—and notes that "you don't want to spoil" the servants by giving them large tips. As a result, the Swahili servants are often described as bearing sullen or downtrodden expressions. These brief expressional details are the only characterization of the servants available to readers. It could be suggested that by diminishing these figures, Hemingway is pointing to the way in which the British empire treated African natives: as mere bodies or objects. However, it is also possible that their silence within the text reflects Hemingway's own colonialist views. Their voices and struggles, it seems, are not as valuable to Hemingway as the perspectives and problems of the spotlighted white characters—even in the context of the natives' own country and hunting traditions. - Theme: Masculinity, Dominance, and Courage. Description: A hotly-pursued African lion in "The Short Life of Francis Macomber," one of Hemingway's most famous and controversial works, roars "in a deep-chested moaning, suddenly guttural," unsettling his would-be hunter, Francis Macomber. Macomber's subsequent, panicked flight from the animal causes his hunting party—which includes his bitter wife Margot and leader Robert Wilson—to deem him a coward. Only upon later successfully standing his ground against a charging buffalo is Macomber able to reassert his manhood—to transform himself, in Wilson's words, from one of the "great American boy-men" into "a man." In specifically linking masculinity to courage and dominance, Hemingway suggests that only by exerting power over both the natural world and women does one truly become a man. However, even as the story presents this stereotypical (and what modern readers would certainly deem sexist) vision of gender—a common trope in Hemingway's works—the tale's tragic ending undermines the validity of such a narrow conception of manhood. Hemingway initially presents Francis Macomber as a sort of man-child, evidenced by both his failure to prove himself in the African savannah and to stand up to his apparently domineering wife. After fleeing from the charging lion, Macomber must be carried back to his tent—further underscoring his lack of "manly" self-reliance. Macomber's boyishness is made all the more pathetic for its contrast with Wilson's stoic masculinity. Wilson is the archetypal self-made man, rugged and disinterested. He is repeatedly referred to as "the white hunter," a moniker that suggests dominance over the world around him. His cool demeanor and expertise contrasts with the nervous Macomber, whose inelegant, panicked shooting leads to his fateful encounter with the lion in the first place by wounding rather than killing it. In the purview of the story, Macomber comes across as a pathetic figure, at fault for his own misfortune because he fails to boldly assert his dominance. Francis's lack of masculine virality is further reflected by his wife Margot, who displays distinct disdain for her husband following—and, it's implied, before—his "cowardly" retreat from the lion. Real men, at least in the confines of Hemingway's story, control the women in their lives—making Margot's taunting behavior all the more emasculating. Though seemingly hypersexual and cruel, however, it's important to note that Margot may not be as villainous and domineering as Wilson and Macomber believe her to be—not least because she receives far less dimension and description as a character than do Wilson and Macomber, both of whose internal monologues dominate the story. For all of Margot's lurid and unabashed flirtations with Wilson, Macomber knows that his wife is "not a great enough beauty any more […] to be able to leave him and better herself." Without Macomber, Margot is powerless, possibly destitute. Yet she persistently flirts with the notion of leaving—and thereby emasculating—him, and he provides her with a degree of sexual freedom by tacitly permitting her affairs. Of course, this "permission" is also reflective of his inability to assert himself as the man—and thus, in the world of the story, the leader—of their marriage. Yet Macomber is given a crucial opportunity to confront fear—in the form of the menacing buffalo at the story's end—and prove himself as strong and virile as his rival Wilson. By standing his ground against the buffalo, Macomber earns the latter's respect, and Macomber's transformation is notably defined by both courage and dominance: upon observing the change, Wilson thinks to himself, "Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man […] No bloody fear." Wilson notably believes this means "the end of cuckholdry too." Indeed, Margot suddenly becomes "very afraid," something Wilson attributes to her awareness that she can no longer exert independence from and control over her husband. It is left up to the reader to decide if Margot, threatened by Macomber's apparent transformation from cuckold to man of action, kills her husband in order to demonstrate her ultimate power over him (and, symbolically, over masculinity). It is also possible that Margot intended to kill the buffalo charging at Macomber, either because she hoped to protect her husband—whom she may have come to recognize as a "true man"—or to prove to the men around her that she, too, can wield violent force. Regardless, Macomber's pivotal transformation to "true manhood" is fleeting. Though Wilson sees Macomber's sudden acquisition of courage and confidence as a belated "coming to age," a rebirth, Hemingway's title reminds us, crucially, that this new life is both "happy" and "short." Macomber does not live long enough to experience much more than a few of moments of euphoria, and Margot (quiet and "bitter" at the scene of the hunt) refuses to openly acknowledge the change, never validating his newfound masculine prowess. Additionally, in the shootout that ensues at the narrative's climax, the buffalo's killer is left ambiguous. In spite of his development, then, Macomber may not have accomplished, or conquered, anything. His death might therefore be seen as tragic and meaningless, not freeing or glorious. The story, then, implicitly questions the same masculinity its characters value. Perhaps standing in the path of a wild animal is folly, rather than courage; and perhaps attempting to dominate the world leads only to bitterness and destruction. In "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," Hemingway suggests that masculinity is intimately tied to power, using the safari as a site where this connection is explored and borne out. Yet because Macomber's "new life" is tragically cut short, Hemingway seems to conclude that masculine fortitude may not lead to triumph or freedom. Even though the narrative initially upholds patriarchal conventions about relationships between men and women—and between masculinity, dominance, and violence—its shocking, deadly ending upsets these conventions by intimating that male power and "courage" can have dangerous, undesirable ends. - Theme: Race, Violence, and Empire. Description: Written in 1936, a time when much of the African continent remained under European colonial rule, the specters of capitalism and empire move quietly through "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The native Africans assisting the safari excursions remain nameless, personality-less characters, subject to orders and punishments from white game hunters. Though only briefly mentioned—for the narrative focuses mainly on the love triangle implicating its three white main characters—the maltreatment of the Swahili guides suggests that racial violence, subjugation, and colonialism are inextricably linked. To the white settlers in Africa, native people seem to be no better than the animals they hunt, targeted and oppressed for profit. Early in the narrative, Wilson threatens Francis Macomber's "personal boy" for "looking curiously at his master" (who has just fled from the lion) with "fifteen lashes," presumably to punish the Swahili boy for his supposed insolence toward Macomber. The detached and flippant way in which Wilson explains this violence to Macomber suggests that brutal punishment, inflicted on members of a "lower" racial caste, is standard behavior in the colonized world. Threatened with "lashes," the boy turns away "with his face blank." Violence seems to instill passivity in the natives, shaping them into effective tools for exploitation. Indeed, in Wilson's view—as a white colonizer and a representative of the British empire—racial violence is economically advantageous for imperialism. A loosely-structured system of compensation for servitude facilitates the safaris. The natives are paid for the physical labor they perform and the services they provide: their knowledge of the African landscape and its animals is vital information for the white hunters and their clients, who are not native to this land. The natives' (presumably low) pay is similarly invaluable in that it allows them to live somewhat comfortably—and with some independence—in their fractured, colonized home country, where their own sovereignty is heavily contested. "It's their shauri," Wilson tells Macomber, explaining why the gunbearers must help kill the wounded lion, though the animal's injury poses a threat to the hunters (and indeed, frightens them: "[Macomber] looked at the gun-bearer and he could see the gun-bearer was suffering too with fear"). Adds Wilson, "You see, they signed on for it." Because they have agreed to compensated work, the natives are beholden to the hunt (which Wilson describes as a "shauri," or a problem to be solved), its regulations, and its officiators—the white hunters. Wilson explains that the only alternative to "lashes" are "fines," docked from the natives' pay. By maintaining the Swahili guides' salaries—and using violence to enforce obedience instead—white hunters guarantee the natives' service, which facilitates successful safari tours and draws a steady stream of white tourists to colonized Africa. Despite the natives' crucial contributions to imperial economy, they are silent, unobtrusive, and ultimately oppressed figures who hover in the background of Hemingway's story. Though the hunted lion receives a personality and emotional depth, the gun-bearers, guides, and servant boys—who assist in the lion's killing—are mute and somber. (Only one character is named, and this name is given once: "Kongoni," "the old gun-bearer.") These figures are present merely to prepare the hunt by cooking, helping to shoot and dispose of animal bodies, and providing valet services for the hunters and their clients. Moreover, the violence Macomber and Wilson exact on the lions and buffalo they pursue is careful and tempered. Wilson cautions Macomber against acting "murderous" toward the wounded lion by sending "beaters" to him. It is clear, though, that the white hunters afford no such respect to the natives, whom they beat and threaten publicly. Even during the hunt, where the natives are most valuable, Wilson treats them cavalierly. "We lost a gun-bearer. Did you notice it?" he remarks casually to Macomber about a gun-bearer who "fell off" the convoy during the buffalo hunt and returns, "gloomy-faced and disgusted looking," to the hunting party—as if resigned, hopelessly, to the "shauri" at hand. Thus, within the colonial sphere, the natives are not only dehumanized—for as characters, they are far less complex than the white male characters who give the story psychological shape—but also made to seem less significant (and more disposable) than animals. Hemingway's failure to flesh out the Swahili characters might indicate that race is a secondary narrative concern in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Yet it also seems possible that Hemingway is pointing to the ways in which empire violently subjugates its colonized subjects on the basis of race, simultaneously turning a profit from their labor. - Theme: Guilt and Morality. Description: Different sorts of moral codes conflict and create tension in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," specifically visible in the character of Wilson. Though Wilson emphasizes the importance of limiting the hunted animals' suffering, this firm esteem for the natural world counters his own lack of respect for other human beings within the world of the hunt—and for the social and legal regulations that organize human life. Wilson's ambiguous and often outright contradictory morality demonstrates that man is often in conflict with his own world and misled by his own faulty inner reasoning. It also suggests that a moral code constantly shifted to accommodate the situation is not really morality at all. First, Wilson feels no remorse about sleeping with Margot (or with the wives of past clients), despite the conflicts and tensions that follow from his indiscretions. Wilson's attitude toward adultery is solely self-centered. He keeps a "double size cot on safari to accommodate any windfalls he might receive," or to cater to women attracted to the glamor of sleeping with "the white hunter," thus earning their respect and money. Wilson "made his living by [women], and their standards were his standards as long as they were hiring him": motivated by his own economic interests and disregarding societal boundaries, Wilson replicates his clients' own immoral behavior without guilt—only viewing the women as a "nuisance" and wondering vaguely about Macomber's desire for revenge ("'Hope the silly beggar doesn't take a notion to blow the back of my head off,' Wilson thought to himself"). This emotionless behavior contrasts significantly with the high standards he upholds about killing animals and disrupting the natural world they inhabit: "he had his own standards about the killing," Hemingway writes, adding that Wilson's clients "could live up to them or get some one else to hunt them." Wilson repeatedly refers to animals as "fine," admirable creatures ("Hell of a fine lion," "hell of a good bull") who must be hunted according to careful rules and rituals. "Don't shoot unless it's close enough so you can make sure," Wilson instructs Macomber as he faces the lion, encouraging his client to shoot the animal only if he can kill it instantly. To shoot merely to injure would be "murderous," cruel, and would prolong the creature's suffering. Furthermore, though Macomber cannot comprehend the lion's courage—which drives the animal forward toward his hunters, even after Macomber's first shot—Wilson knows "something about it," suggesting that Wilson identifies with and highly values the natural world. Wilson's feelings toward the human world, however, are hardly similar. He openly and guiltlessly admits to having the Swahili servants whipped, though this is illegal and ethically wrong. As with his participation in adultery, which he justifies as economically advantageous, Wilson justifies his violence by claiming that the natives "prefer" lashes to being fined. "Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?" he asks Macomber, adding, "We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another." Wilson's confused moral compass—at odds with social and legal regulations, and weakly justified—leads him to equate the brutality that colonized people face to the brutality of the white man's "every day" life. This flawed comparison only serves to emphasize the fact that Wilson cannot understand humans and human suffering in the same way that he understands animals and their suffering. Even Wilson's notion of sportsmanship, part of his "high standards" for hunting, is subject to equivocation, as when he informs the Macombers that he is not supposed to be using a car during the buffalo hunt. According to Wilson, chasing animals from cars is illegal, but he quickly explains to the Macombers that it is both "sporting" and more dangerous—and thus more courageous and admirable—to pursue prey from their vehicle; "Seemed sporting enough to me," he says, "Taking more chance driving that way across the plain full of holes and one thing and another than hunting on foot." Once again, Wilson's hurried self-defense draws attention to the fact that he does not value the law in the same way that he values the hunt and the animals he stalks. Wilson is playing fast and loose with his own reputation. He knows that he could lose his license for using cars while hunting, and that Margot, who disapproves of the act, could run him out of business by reporting him to the other hunters. Yet once more his own self-interest and perverse logic overruns social and legal pressures. Man, Hemingway suggests, is always in thrall to his own stubborn beliefs, however wrong they may be. Wilson's breezy justifications for his immoral, unethical, and illegal actions, then, suggest a fundamental discord between man's moral reasoning and social and legal regulations—a discord made brutally clear by the suspect politics of the safari. - Theme: Men and Nature. Description: Equipped with potent technology—guns, cars, and the like—the hunters in this story are capable of exercising control over nature. Yet Wilson, Francis Macomber, and the Swahili guides regard the natural world with awe and veneration. They seem to recognize that despite their own forceful, dangerous weapons, the beasts they target are similarly powerful and dangerous, and thus are worthy of respect. Furthermore, since Hemingway highlights the perspectives of both the male hunters (Wilson and Macomber) and the hunted (the lion)—and because Macomber is himself shot and killed like a hunted animal—Hemingway suggests an ultimate equivalence between human beings and the animals they hunt. The hunters approach their task with excitement and fervent nervousness. Macomber trembles while loading his rifle to approach the lion, whose "impressive" roar is a source of both trepidation and wonderment. This suggests that, to Macomber and the others, the hunt is equal parts ritual and mystical encounter, since the animals they target are wholly majestic beasts, not entirely powerless to human technology. "The lion looked huge," Hemingway writes, "silhouetted on the rise of bank in the gray morning light, his shoulders heavy, his barrel of a body bulking smoothly." The author's descriptive language here evokes both traditional masculinity ("heavy," "bulking") and weaponry ("barrel of a body"), suggesting that the lion is a powerful rival to both man and his technology. Moreover, guns on their own are not enough to kill the creatures the hunters encounter. Wilson instructs Macomber to shoot the buffalo "straight into the nose," or "into his chest, or, if you're to one side, into the neck or the shoulders." This reveals that it takes focused precision to dominate nature, not blind force, since animals are innately strong and can resist even the most powerful of hunting weapons. (The lion, though severely wounded, is able to tighten "into an absolute concentration for a rush," Hemingway writes, "all of him, pain, sickness, hatred, and all of his remaining strength.") Additionally, Hemingway moves smoothly between the lion's perspective and that of the hunters, giving voice and interior life to both humans and animals—imbuing the animals with a sense of personhood and further suggesting man's innate connection to the natural world. During the lion hunt and within the space of a few sentences, Hemingway transitions into third-person omniscient narration and plunges into the lion's mind: "Macomber stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat […] The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-rhino." Here, the animal is again posited as an equal to both technology (the car appears like a "super-rhino," animal-like) and man, whose psychological depth the lion shares. Like man, the lion feels pain ("he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through is stomach") and experiences fear and hatred—emotions Macomber himself experiences in the story, even as he claims to lack an understanding of animals and the natural world. Though "Macomber did not know how the lion had felt before he started his rush, nor during it when the unbelievable smash of the .505 […] had hit him in the mouth," Macomber has felt both terror and anger already in the story (toward Wilson, his wife Margot, and his own apparent cowardice), and he is thus on some level the lion's counterpart. Perhaps most significantly, Macomber and the buffalo he hoped to kill die in the same way, and both are registered by Wilson as equivalent in death. Macomber and the buffalo die by shots to the head, described by Hemingway with the same kind of precision: "Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns […] and Mrs. Macomber, in the car […] had hit her husband about two inches up a little to one side of the base of the skull." Though earlier in the narrative, the hunters only directed precise force toward animals—they seem to beat the Swahili guides indiscriminately—this concluding moment indicates that man and beast are similarly fallible. Furthermore, Wilson regards the dead buffalo as a "hell of a good bull […] a good fifty inches, or better," and then calls for a driver to "spread a blanket over the body." This "body" is in reference to Macomber's, but Hemingway's ambiguity in language suggests that it could be the buffalo's—especially given Wilson's self-avowed reverence for nature. The story's concluding image is of two lifeless bodies, both utterly passive and physically similar. Macomber's head is "crew-cropped," while the buffalo's belly is "thinly-haired," suggesting that both creatures are in some way close to earth and nature, unprotected by layers of hair. In death, as in life, man and animal are united. Though Hemingway in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" initially seems to create a strict dichotomy between man and nature, framing each as foe to the other—locked in a struggle to the death, symbolized by the hunt—this dichotomy quickly collapses, replaced by a more cohesive understanding of humans and animals. Despite their immediate differences, men and beasts are intimately connected, both to the natural world and to each other. - Climax: Francis Macomber encounters and attempts to kill the buffalo - Summary: In a safari camp somewhere in generalized Africa, the wealthy American Francis Macomber, his wife Margot Macomber, and their hired white hunter, a British man named Robert Wilson, have gathered to celebrate the hunt from which they have just returned. Though at first it seems as if Macomber has successfully killed a­ lion, it gradually becomes clear that he in fact "bolted like a rabbit" when the moment to shoot arrived, too cowardly to face the creature head on. All three characters are roundly embarrassed and bicker while they drink; eventually, Margot stalks off, seemingly humiliated and upset. When Margot later returns to the men, they discuss a second hunt—this time for buffalo, and an opportunity for Macomber to redeem himself. Flashing back to the night before the original hunt, Macomber hears the lion's roar, which he deems "frightful"; upon confronting the lion on the hunt the next day, he hits it twice but fails to kill it. When Macomber, Wilson, and the African natives assisting them subsequently seek out the wounded creature to finish the job, Macomber panics, running away "wildly" and leaving Wilson to kill the lion on his own. That night, Margot—impressed by Wilson's skills, especially contrasted with her husband's cowardice—visits Wilson's tent and the two sleep together. Hours later she returns to her own tent with Macomber, who has been awake for some time; she does not bother to deny her tryst. The following morning, Wilson, Macomber, and Margot again bicker about the hunt, their vitriol exacerbated by the previous day's events. In an internal monologue, Wilson explains that he sleeps with clients' wives as a service—and that he treats his affairs as "windfalls." The buffalo hunt proceeds nonetheless. Macomber, suddenly emboldened and feeling "wholly without fear," kills two of them. Similar to the first hunt, one of the buffalo is only wounded. This time, however, Macomber goes after it eagerly. Wilson observes that his client has undergone a transformation, "more of a change than any loss of virginity": though he was once an "American boy-man," he has suddenly become a true man. Margot is alarmed by Macomber's transformation and by his newfound comradery with Wilson, who is suitably impressed by his client. Macomber, Wilson, and the native guides approach the wounded buffalo and begin to shoot at it. They still fail to kill it, and Macomber stands his ground as the angry animal charges toward him until he suddenly feels a blinding pain in his head. Margot has shot "at the buffalo" with a rifle from the car, where she has been watching the hunt, but she has hit her husband instead. Both the buffalo and Macomber lie dead on the ground. Wilson observes Macomber impassively, while calling the buffalo a "hell of a good bull." He then mocks a traumatized Margot, who he seems to believe has killed her husband purposefully. He asks her why she didn't "poison him" instead, simultaneously suggesting that he will help her to cover up the crime. Margot, miserable, entreats him to "please, stop it." Wilson, sinister and scathing, acquiesces: "Please is much better. Now I'll stop."

- Genre: Middle-Grade Novel, Historical Fiction, Bildungsroman - Title: The Sign of the Beaver - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Rural Maine in 1768 - Character: Matt. Description: - Character: Attean. Description: - Character: Saknis. Description: - Character: Matt's Father. Description: - Character: Matt's Mother. Description: - Character: Sarah. Description: - Character: Attean's Grandmother. Description: - Character: Ben. Description: - Theme: Survival and Indigenous Knowledge. Description: - Theme: Colonialism, Land Rights, and Entitlement. Description: - Theme: Nature. Description: - Theme: Friendship and Respect. Description: - Theme: Coming of Age and Manhood. Description: - Climax: Attean refers to Matt as his "brother." - Summary: It's the summer of 1768, and 12-year-old Matt has been left in charge of his family's new homestead in rural Maine. Matt and his father arrived several months ago to clear the land and build a cabin, and now Matt's father has returned to Massachusetts to fetch Matt's mother, Matt's sister Sarah, and the new baby, who will be born before the family is reunited. Matt's father left him with his good rifle and passed along his precious watch before leaving. He'll be back in six or seven weeks. Matt will turn 13 while his father is gone. After a few days, Matt is thrilled with his solitary life. He relishes his freedom to do his chores without annoying commentary, and there's more than enough work to keep him busy. He fears Native Americans are watching him from the woods, but Matt can't be sure. A few weeks in, a white man named Ben appears in the clearing. Ben invites himself to stay for supper and ends up spending the night in the cabin. He tells Matt all about his youth spent with local Native tribes and fighting in the various wars between the Native Americans and colonial powers. When Matt wakes up in the morning, he realizes that Ben took the rifle with him. Matt now must rely on fish for meat. After Ben leaves, Matt's life finds a rhythm again—until he forgets to bar the cabin door, and a bear ransacks the cabin. It eats all of Matt's dry goods and molasses. Soon after, Matt decides to try to take honey from a wild beehive. The bees chase him into a pond after stinging him incessantly. A Native man rescues Matt from the pond, removes the bees' stingers, and tends to Matt for a few days while he recovers. When Matt is well again, the man introduces himself as Saknis and brings his grandson, Attean, to visit. Attean is a little older than Matt, and he clearly detests Matt. To thank Saknis for his kindness, Matt offers him his copy of Robinson Crusoe. Saknis can't read, but he strikes a deal with Matt: Attean will bring Matt meat, and Matt must teach Attean to read. This way, Attean will be able to read treaties and can refuse to sign away his tribe's hunting grounds. The reading lessons go poorly. Matt finally tries to capture Attean's interest by reading Robinson Crusoe to him, which works—until he reads the passage where Crusoe rescues and then enslaves the Native man Friday. Attean is so offended that he storms out. Matt has to confront that perhaps his favorite novel isn't presenting a realistic view of Native people, since Matt knows now that Native people are intelligent. He begins censoring the book, reading only the exciting parts to Attean and omitting anything boring or offensive. Attean begins taking Matt into the woods after their reading lessons, where they fish and hunt. Attean shows Matt how to make fishhooks out of twigs and snares out of tree roots. He also shows Matt a beaver dam and how to recognize trail markers and territory markers—his beaver clan can only hunt where trees are marked with beavers, while they must stay out of territory where the turtle clan has marked trees with turtles. This is difficult for Matt to grasp, especially when the boys find a fox struggling in a turtle hunter's iron trap one day. Attean insists they can't save or take the fox for themselves. He also explains that more tribes these days are using European hunting methods, like iron traps, to trap animals for pelts. The animals that were once plentiful in the forest are now almost gone because of this. Attean also helps Matt make a proper bow and arrows. One day, when Matt and Attean are in the woods, they come across a bear cub and must kill the mother bear before it attacks them. Attean is able to shoot it with an arrow because Matt momentarily distracts the bear by throwing a dead rabbit at it. To thank him for his help, Saknis invites Matt to join the tribe for a feast. Matt is nervous at first, but he happily dances, eats, and stays the night with the tribe. As Attean leads Matt home the next morning, Attean makes it clear that Matt won't be welcome back to the village: since bounty hunters murdered Attean's mother just to take her scalp, Attean's grandmother hates all white people. Attean's father never returned when he left to avenge his wife's death, which is why Attean lives with his grandparents. However, when Matt finds Attean's beloved dog stuck in a turtle iron trap one day, he knows he must go back to the village so he can get help and free the dog (the dog doesn't trust white people and has never liked Matt). Attean isn't around, but Attean's grandmother allows Attean's little sister, Marie, to help Matt. Together, he and Marie save the dog. This incident gives Attean's grandmother newfound respect for Matt, and Matt accepts an invitation to spend a day in the village. He plays and roughhouses with Attean and Attean's friends. To his surprise, it feels like being back at home—and Attean's dog finally acts like it likes Matt. One day, Attean visits and says he's going away for a while. It's time for him to undergo his tribe's ritual to become a man, wherein a boy must live alone in the woods without eating until their "manitou," or spirit, appears. When he finds his manitou, he'll get a rifle so he can hunt moose this winter. Matt hopes Attean finds his manitou. A few weeks later, in the late fall, Attean and Saknis enter the clearing—and as Attean's hair is now cut in an adult style and he holds a rifle, Matt realizes he found his manitou. Saknis explains that he's come because Matt's father was supposed to return weeks ago, so he'd like to invite Matt to join the tribe when they go north soon. Matt can be his grandson and Attean's brother. On one hand, Matt wants to go, but he insists he must stay. Saknis shakes Matt's hand and Attean follows him away. Attean returns a few days later with gifts from his grandparents: snowshoes and maple sugar. He also has a gift for Matt himself: he's going to leave his dog for Matt. Attean says he respects Matt's decision to stay and wait for his father, and he'd make the same choice if his father was still alive. As a parting gift and as a token of their friendship, Matt gives Attean his father's watch. In parting, Attean calls Matt his brother. Matt and the dog spend the next weeks preparing for winter. They chop wood, hunt as much as they can, fish, and gather various roots and berries to dry. Using what he learned from Attean, Matt makes himself fur mittens and a hat to keep warm. When it snows heavily for the first time, Matt enjoys using the snowshoes. A few days later, after another heavy snowfall, the dog starts barking: Matt's father, mother, and Sarah are walking up the frozen river with a sled. They're so late because the whole family had typhus, and they were late leaving Massachusetts. They are very surprised to learn that Matt befriended Native Americans, and Matt learns that his baby sibling died a few days after birth. When Matt's father tells Matt he did a man's job at the cabin, Matt feels like an adult—and he believes that his feelings of pride are exactly what Attean must've felt when Attean found his manitou. Though Matt is a bit sad to learn that several families are planning to settle in the area—meaning he will no longer have free reign over the woods—he's ready to move forward and continue to support his family.

- Genre: Detective Fiction - Title: The Sign of the Four - Point of view: First person - Setting: London - Character: Sherlock Holmes. Description: Sherlock Holmes, the story's protagonist, is the infamous detective and occupant of 221b Baker Street. He has a supreme, almost superhuman intelligence that allows him to solve difficult cases. This intelligence is based on his deeply held belief in the power of rationalism—essentially, any problem is solvable if looked at clearly and logically enough. Holmes' mindset is distinctively Victorian, showing an affiliation with the ideas of Charles Darwin and encompassing certain elements of outdated pseudoscience that results in a discomforting belief in the superiority of white people over other races. Because of Holmes' intellectual and deductive abilities, Miss Morstanasks him to help her solve the case of her missing father, Captain Morstan, which subsequently draws in the mystery of the Agra treasure too. Likewise, Athelney Jones, the Scotland Yard detective, is fully aware of Holmes' abilities and relies upon him for help in his own work (though doesn't always give Holmes the credit he deserves). Holmes, for his part, takes on cases for the thrill of it—not because he wants fame or fortune. This thrill-seeking also contributes to the darker side of Holmes' character: his drug-taking. Holmes' mind needs stimulation and, when he doesn't have a case to work, he turns to cocaine, which greatly concerns his assistant, Dr. Watson. Ultimately, the entire novella functions at the pace of Holmes' thoughts. When Holmes is stuck on an aspect of the case, the action slows to a halt; when he has a breakthrough, the action picks up again. - Character: Dr. John Watson. Description: Dr. Watson is the narrator of the story and Sherlock Holmes' loyal assistant. He is a doctor by profession and has a background as a surgeon in the British Army. Over the course of the novella, Watson falls in love with Miss Morstan, finally asking her to marry him. Watson aids Holmes throughout the story, though the major breakthroughs in the case are always the result of Holmes' brilliant mind. Watson functions as a kind of counterpart to Holmes; the detective frequently uses him as a sounding board for his ideas, and in his inability to see problems as clearly as Holmes, Watson is representative of the general reader. That is, Watson is a kind of everyman figure of decent—but not Holmes' level—intelligence. Watson is more emotional than Holmes and is frequently concerned for the latter's wellbeing, especially when it comes to Holmes' drug use. But Watson is in awe of Holmes' abilities, which is why he decides to preserve them for posterity by writing them down. In his powers of observation about the more emotional side of life, Watson actually possesses something that Holmes lacks—an ability to understand people and the way that they feel. - Character: Miss Mary Morstan. Description: Miss Morstan comes to Sherlock Holmes to see if he can help her find out what happened to her father, Captain Morstan, who disappeared a few years previously. She has also been receiving a pearl once a year in the post and been told to go to London's Lyceum Theater in the evening of the day she comes to see Holmes. She therefore acts as the catalyst for the entire story, providing Holmes with a much-needed problem to solve. She is generally portrayed as quite passive, but is also virtuous, especially in her apparent lack of concern about her share of the Agra treasure (she is more interested in knowing what has happened to her father). Over the course of the novella, Miss Morstan falls in love with Dr. John Watson; at the end, she agrees to marry him. She lives with Mrs. Forrester, serving as her governess. She is described as beautiful and is around twenty-seven years old. - Character: Athelney Jones. Description: Athelney Jones is the hapless detective from Scotland Yard, the official police agency. He is described as a fat and bumbling man and is in a position of high authority. He functions as a counter-example to Sherlock Holmes' genius, frequently coming up with the wrong theories about the case and even arresting the wrong man (Thaddeus Sholto). Ultimately, Jones knows Holmes is superior to him in intellect and resorts to asking for help from the great detective. Jones is happy to take credit for Holmes' work, though does also express his gratitude for the assistance. - Character: Jonathan Small (The Wooden-Legged Man). Description: Jonathan Small is the wooden-legged man who seeks vengeance on Major Sholto for the theft of the Agra treasure. He is one of "the four" original men who acquired the treasure. He has lived a tough life, having lost his leg to a crocodile while serving as a soldier in India for the British Army. While guarding the Agra fortress during the Indian Mutiny, Small was brought in on a plan to acquire the treasure with Abdullah Khan and Mahomet Singh, who were guards under his command (the fourth man, Dost Akbar, was the foster brother of Abdullah Khan). Small was sent to a penal colony on the Andaman Islands for his role in the killing of the merchant who had possession of the Agra treasure. On the islands, Small met Captain Morstan and Major Sholto, letting them in on the secret about the treasure in exchange for help with his escape. Sholto, however, double-crossed the others and fled to England with the treasure. Small managed to escape the Andaman Islands with his companion, Tonga, and searched for Sholto, eventually managing to recover the treasure from Pondicherry Lodge, the Sholto family home. His victory doesn't last long, however, as Holmes soon catches up with him and brings about his imprisonment. Small scatters the jewels of the Agra treasure into the Thames to prevent anyone else from enjoying their riches. - Character: Tonga. Description: Tonga is a native of the Andaman Islands who was aided by Jonathan Small when suffering from ill health. This made him feel a sense of loyalty towards Small, which explains why he accompanies him in attempting to recover the Agra treasure. Tonga's portrayal in the book is extremely problematic: he is described as a savage "black cannibal," painted more as an animal than a human being. He thus represents the deep racial prejudices of the Victorian era. Tonga uses poisonous blow darts as a weapon, killing Bartholomew Sholto with one and almost hitting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson too. Tonga dies when Holmes and Watson shoot him during the boat chase. Notably, Tonga is given no dialogue at all throughout the entire novella, again reflecting the racial prejudice that his character embodies. - Character: Thaddeus Sholto. Description: Thaddeus Sholto is one of Major Sholto's sons, brother to Bartholomew Sholto. He is an eccentric character with an anxious manner. Thaddeus is the one who decides to contact Miss Morstan, feeling that she has been treated unfairly and deserves her share of the Agra treasure (a view also expressed by Major Sholto on his deathbed). Thaddeus has been sending pearls each year to Miss Morstan and it is him who contacts her to try and reunite her with her share of the riches. According to Thaddeus, his brother would have preferred to cut out Miss Morstan altogether. - Character: Bartholomew Sholto. Description: Bartholomew Sholto is one of Major Sholto's sons and lives at the family home, Pondicherry Lodge. Thaddeus Sholto, Bartholomew's brother, takes Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and Miss Morstan to Bartholomew with the intention of dividing up the Agra treasure. It transpires, however, that Bartholomew has been killed by a poisonous blow dart. His face is locked in a frozen grimace when he is discovered. Bartholomew differs from Thaddeus in that he disagreed with his brother's intentions to honor Miss Morstan's share of the treasure—he would have preferred them to greedily keep it for themselves. - Character: Captain Morstan. Description: Captain Morstan was an officer in the British army who served in India. He is Mary Morstan's father, and his unexplained disappearance is the catalyst for the novella's plot. He was friends with Major Sholto and had agreed with him to facilitate Jonathan Small's escape from the Andaman Islands penal colony—where he and Sholto were working—in exchange for a share of the Agra treasure. Sholto deceives him and takes the treasure for himself. According to Thaddeus Sholto—which in turn is according to Major Sholto—Captain Morstan died from a heart attack during an argument with Sholto. Sholto then hid his body to avoid suspicion and the detection of the treasure. - Character: Major Sholto. Description: Major Sholto is the father of Bartholomew and Thaddeus Sholto and was a friend to Captain Morstan, with whom he served in India. Jonathan Small relates how he brought Sholto into the Agra treasure scheme, hoping to secure his release from the Andaman Islands penal colony where Sholto was an authority figure. Sholto, suffering from gambling debts, double-crossed Small and Captain Morstan and took the treasure for himself. On his deathbed, he had a slight change of heart and instructed his sons to share the treasure with Miss Morstan—but he died before revealing the treasure's location after seeing the face of Jonathan Small at the window. - Character: McMurdo. Description: McMurdo is the doorman at Pondicherry Lodge, the Sholto family home. When Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Miss Morstan and Thaddeus Sholto arrive, he is unwilling to let anyone but Thaddeus into the house (under orders from Bartholomew Sholto). However, his attitude soon softens when Holmes realizes that the two have met before in an amateur boxing match. - Character: Abdullah Khan. Description: Abdullah Khan is an Indian man and one of the signatories of "the sign of the four" and the man who told Jonathan Small about the Agra treasure. The plan to kill the merchant carrying the treasure was mostly Abdullah's idea, but he was imprisoned for the murder before he could enjoy his riches. - Theme: Empire and Imperialism. Description: The Sign of the Four is the second story in the world-famous Sherlock Holmes detective fiction series. The novella is set in the late nineteenth century, a time when the British Empire was immensely powerful and wide reaching under the reign of Queen Victoria. The Empire is a significant presence in the book, both informing the particular details of the mysterious story, which are centered around the Agra treasure hidden in British-controlled India, and in the attitudes of its central characters, who portray a racist attitude towards "the East," considering it a place of intrigue and suspicion. While setting the story within the Imperialist context is a deliberate move on Arthur Conan Doyle's part, the racist attitudes are more likely a reflection of the times rather than an attempt on the author's part to offer any implicit critique. The first key way in which The Sign of the Four reflects the Imperialist mindset is in the plot itself. The story revolves around the Agra treasure, a bedazzling array of jewels that originates in India. This association of "the East" with luxury and riches ripe for the picking is typically Imperial; for the British Empire and its subjects, "the East" was a place of mystery and luxury. The treasure at the heart of the story originally belongs to an Indian rajah (a prince-like figure), and neither the thieves nor Sherlock Holmes ever consider whether the treasure should be returned to its original owner. Instead, Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson, try to track it down in order to give it to Miss Morstan. Her father, Captain Morstan, was involved in the second stage of the original theft (the first was Jonathan Small and three Sikh soldiers). If Holmes and Watson can find the treasure, Miss Morstan will be rich for life. In this way, then, the story itself mimics the power dynamic at play during the British Empire. That is, foreign lands like India were plundered for their riches, considered fair game because they were populated by inferior peoples. Of course, this is a simplified account of a complicated state of affairs, but the general operation of infrastructures like the British East India Company saw the exploitation of resources from "the East" for the Empire's gain. The novella also embodies problematic imperialist ideas about race and superiority. In essence, those from "the East" are seen as inferior to those from the West, and are frequently presented as morally treacherous, intellectually defective, and savage. This is not limited solely to "the East," but extends to black people throughout the book. Imperialist attitudes toward race are best exemplified through the character of Tonga. He is a native of the Andaman Islands and described as a "black cannibal." Of Tonga, Watson says, "never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty," and describes him as "half-animal." There is a clear link here between Tonga's blackness and his "otherness"— he is typecast as an evil, inferior human. This reflects the dominant Eurocentric attitude of the British Empire, which views the "other" as distrustful and morally compromised in comparison to the Western man. Though frequent mention is made of Tonga, at no point in the novella does he speak. In that sense, the way in which he is disenfranchised reflects the attitude of the British colonizers to the peoples they colonized. Tonga is further dehumanized when, in the last chapter, the imprisoned Jonathan Small tells his life story. He explains his relationship to Tonga: "He was staunch and true, was little Tonga. No man ever had a more faithful mate." The relationship between Tonga and Small is portrayed as more like that between man and dog than two human beings. The central role of "Tonga" as the novella's main source of evil, then, is highly troublesome for a contemporary reader. It's important to remember the context in which the book was written, in which the problematic attitudes above were much more entrenched and expected. But it isn't just Tonga who typifies the racist attitudes within the novella. Practically any mention of non-white people appears in a negative and demeaning light. Jonathan Small discusses the existence of the treasure with Captain Morstan and Major Sholto, as told during the last chapter's recollection. Jonathan Small was originally part of a group with three Indian men—whom Doyle mistakenly gives Arabic names—that hatched a plan to seize the treasure. He wants to remain loyal to his other partners, but Major Sholto can't see why. He asks, "What have three black fellows to do with our agreement?" Being black, then, is seen as inherently inferior to being white. Though these words come from a particular character's mouth—and the novella as a whole is told by Watson—they are fundamentally uncomfortable for a modern reader. Though problems relating to Empire and Imperialism are rife through the book, they serve as an accurate reflection of the times and give the reader a sense of the Victorian mentality. - Theme: Wealth. Description: Central to The Sign of Four is the idea of wealth and opulence—the Agra treasure at the heart of this Sherlock Holmes story represents a life-changing amount of riches. The book asks whether this kind of wealth equates to happiness, and whether it is right to pursue wealth at all costs. Different perspectives are presented by the life stories of different characters, ultimately culminating in a sense that being rich does not mean being happy. Miss Morstan's main motivation for contacting Holmes is to try and find out what happened to her father, Captain Morstan. But a knock-on effect looks likely to be that, if Holmes is successful in cracking the case, Miss Morstan will inherit a large share of the treasure and be catapulted into the upper class by virtue of her newfound wealth. Through Dr. Watson and Miss Morstan's developing relationship, Doyle examines what effect this wealth might have. In the fourth chapter, "The Story of the Bald-headed Man," Holmes, Watson and Miss Morstan go to visit Thaddeus Sholto. He is the son of Major Sholto, who was a friend of Miss Morstan's father. He reveals the story of the treasure, and that his brother, Bartholomew, had discovered it hidden in the family home after their father died. Thaddeus reveals the immense worth of the treasure, which sets up the plot point that, if the treasure is found, Miss Morstan's life will be changed beyond recognition by her new riches. This makes Watson uneasy. As the novella progresses and his feelings towards Miss Morstan intensify, he is afraid to mention them because he feels that she will assume he is hoping for a part of the fortune. Watson assesses that Miss Morstan's impending wealth will make her part of the upper classes and, essentially, put her out of his league. Wealth, then, is intimately linked to social status, and social status defines who can fall in love with whom. When Watson takes the box of treasure to Miss Morstan towards the novella's end, they are both relieved to learn that it is empty—the life-changing treasure is nowhere to be seen. This gives Watson the confidence to confess his love, which Miss Morstan reciprocates. Wealth, then, was a kind of threat hanging over their heads rather than an indicator of happiness; with that threat removed, they are allowed to give an honest account of how they feel. In the case of Miss Morstan, then, wealth is linked to upper-class superiority and exclusivity. The slightly glib point suggested by Doyle is that love is the "true" treasure of the novella. It's up to the reader to decide if the novella's love affair is convincing or not, given that it is relatively undeveloped (though keen Sherlock Holmes fans will note that Miss Morstan appears as Watson's wife in later stories). Alongside the question of whether wealth can lead to happiness is whether or not it is a good idea to actively pursue wealth. In truth, all of the characters associated with the treasure—those that want to possess it—meet a bad end one way or another. Doyle thus suggests that the pursuit of wealth itself can become a kind of sickness, corrupting the very lives of those who wish to benefit from its potential riches. The treasure seems to act as a kind of curse throughout, both in the main narrative and in Jonathan Small's retelling of his life story. Because it holds such promise of wealth, it possesses a deadliness of equal intensity. For example, the merchant tasked with looking after the treasure is killed by Small and his accomplices. Captain Morstan dies from a heart attack in an argument about the treasure. Likewise, the deaths of Major Sholto and his son, Bartholomew, are a direct result of the treasure. Bartholomew's face is stuck with a rictus grin, suggesting something of the paradox of the supposed happiness of wealth versus the deadliness of its pursuit. Jonathan Small's life has been ruined by pursuit of the treasure, and all of his efforts have been in vain. The best he has managed is to cast the treasure into the Thames river, thereby denying anybody else the wealth that he feels was his due. Tonga, his accomplice, dies too. Not a single character in the novella, then, ever actually benefits from the treasure; in fact, most of them die or have their lives ruined. The happiest ending is reserved for Watson and Miss Morstan, who never once seems truly concerned about the finding the treasure—she only wants to know what happened to her father. Doyle, then, seems to equate the pursuit of wealth with unhappiness and ill fortune—the exact opposite of what the treasure promises to others. - Theme: Rationality vs. Emotion. Description: Doyle presents Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of a particular kind of intelligence, which is razor-sharp, individual, and untainted by emotion. Holmes himself makes this divide clear, frequently expressing the view that emotions merely get in the way of his kind of work. This division plays out throughout the book, making the novella in part a kind of tussle between cold, unflinching rationality on the one hand and emotional life on the other. This spoke strongly to the novella's Victorian readership, who were living at a time of immense scientific progress through figures like Charles Darwin. In terms of literature, Victorian tastes were moving away from the emphasis on emotions and the imagination touted by Romantic writers like William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley. Holmes thus represents a kind of superhero of rationality—superior to all other modes of thought—which in part explains his great popularity at the time and ever since. Throughout the novella, Sherlock Holmes is presented as a kind of singular intelligence. Athelney Jones, who is Scotland Yard's detective and thus a figure of the establishment, can't get close to Holmes in terms of his detective abilities. Whenever Holmes figures out a part of the case, he frequently delights in revealing the logic behind his thinking, demonstrating how he operates on a different level from everyone else in the book. He is cast as a kind of detective superhero with heightened powers of rationality. Furthermore, he actively feeds on exercising these powers—other pursuits don't interest him. Holmes describes his own mind as thus: "[It] rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work." This mirrors the relationship between the novella and its readers, whose minds are excited—like Dr. Watson's—by witnessing Holmes's powers of logic at work. Holmes therefore operates less out of a sense of moral duty than as a kind of addict of problem-solving. As he says, "I cannot live without brain-work." Sherlock Holmes can be considered as an embodiment of Victorian ideals of rationality and logic, taking them to their furthest extreme. This both enables him to perform the incredible mind work and deduction that amaze the other characters, and sets him apart as an isolated figure. This isolation is entrenched by Holmes' attitude towards other people. He lacks empathy and emotion, with Doyle offering his readers the opportunity to examine Holmes' extreme rationality. Holmes abhors "the dull routine of existence." While he mostly combats this with his work, the novella opens and closes with Holmes injecting cocaine. Though this wasn't illegal at the time, it does horrify Watson, who sees the habit as self-destructive and dangerous. Holmes' drug use further paints him as an outside figure, showing that normal existence is simply not enough for him. Holmes actually sees his drug use as helping him to be more perceptive and mentally alert, in the same way that artists at the time thought it would enhance their creativity. Holmes' detective work and his drug use are therefore explicitly connected, two parts of the same solution to what he sees as the problem of modern life. The character of Watson presents the counter-argument to Holmes' extreme rationality. He is more in tune with emotional life and looks on his boss with a mixture of concern and awe. Watson is a more sensitive soul that Holmes. In fact, as the novella progresses, his main concern shifts from solving the case to proposing to Miss Morstan. His emotionality creates a tension with Holmes' rationality. This tension is put starkly when Watson exclaims to Holmes, "You really are an automaton—a calculating machine." Watson, as the narrator, gives voice to the readers' own attitude towards Holmes. Like them, he is fascinated by Holmes' coldly rational abilities but also unable to understand his complete denial of the world of emotion. This tension reaches its peak at the novella's close. Here, Watson tells Holmes that he and Miss Morstan have agreed to marry. Instead of offering his congratulations, Holmes gives a "dismal groan," lamenting that "love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment." Holmes therefore sees rationality and emotions as completely incompatible. This incompatibility is tied in with the Victorian ideals of progress. Holmes sees rationality as superior to emotionality—a kind of evolutionary advancement. Rationality and emotion are thus set against each other in The Sign of the Four. Holmes represents the extreme of the former, while Watson and Miss Morstan represent a more emotional (and human) way of life. The reader is asked to question the price that Holmes has to pay in being so devoted to rationality and logic at the expense of emotions. Holmes embodies a particularly Victorian thesis—that an increase in rationality represents a superior way of being—and the reader has to weigh up whether that idea rings true. - Theme: The Victorian Gothic. Description: Doyle makes use of conventions from the Victorian gothic genre to lend his detective novella a heightened atmosphere of mystery and fearfulness. Though the novella is undoubtedly in the detective genre, ideas from the Victorian gothic imagination function as a theme throughout, informing the gloomy London setting and the function of the plot itself. Doyle uses elements from the gothic genre for two principal—and overlapping—reasons. Firstly, the story's gothic elements inform and enhance the sense of mystery in the novella, giving an atmospheric rendering of the case's own strangeness and lack of resolution. Secondly, with a Victorian readership that would have been familiar with many of the tropes of gothic literature, Doyle plays with the reader's expectations, transposing elements of the gothic into the detective genre, unsettling the readership and thus conjuring a sense of the uncanny—which only serves to reinforce the sense of mystery at the heart of the story. The Sign of The Four takes place in London and its suburbs, only giving the reader a sense of another location when Jonathan Small tells his story in the final chapter. London is conjured in an expressly gothic atmosphere, intensifying the story's sense of mystery and danger. The city is painted as an obscure, foreboding place, shrouded in "dense drizzly fog," with the lamps casting "splotches of diffused light." The setting in this instance mirrors the set-up of the story itself. The low visibility on the London streets represents the mystery of the case at the heart of the novella—Sherlock Holmes is literally trying to bring light to the unknown through his detective work. The city is further characterized as having "monster tentacles." This speaks to the Victorian gothic idea of the monstrous and uncanny, in turn characterizing the story of the treasure and those who wish to attain it as outside of the norms of society. With Pondicherry Lodge, the home of the deceased Major Sholto, Doyle ramps up the sense of gothic horror. This draws the reader deeper into the story, suggesting that there is much more going on than meets the eye. As with the gothic genre, the darker elements of the story build a sense of foreboding and danger. Pondicherry Lodge follows conventions of Gothic horror. Holmes, Dr. Watson, Miss Morstan and Thaddeus Sholto arrive there at night, with only the moon to provide illumination. The house is situated inside a "very high stone wall" and is accessed by an "iron clamped door."  This feeling of inaccessibility, like the London setting discussed above, can be read as a direct representation of the story more generally. Holmes and Watson, at this point in the story, are "outside" of the knowledge required to solve the mystery of the sign of the four, trying to figure out a way in. Once inside, Holmes leads his fearful entourage through the cavernous building using a lamp. As they go deeper into the house, the sense of foreboding increases—in keeping with the gothic technique of building tension through the traversing of passageways. At the end of this journey into this house, Holmes discovers the body of Bartholomew Sholto, which is stuck grotesquely in a grinning pose. They find him in a laboratory setting which seems to gesture towards that of Frankenstein's lab in the novel of the same name. Doyle deliberately introduce elements from the Victorian gothic imagination into the setting of The Sign of the Four, developing the irresolution which requires Holmes' expertise and introducing a sense of the uncanny—a common element in gothic literature—into the detective fiction genre. Finally, perhaps Doyle's use of Victorian gothic ideas can go some way to explaining the character of Tonga. Gothic convention dictates that the story needs some kind of supernatural embodiment of evil. Though Tonga is human, Doyle's descriptions of him make him only just human and imbue him with a strong sense of the uncanny. Tonga's strange appearance—he is grotesque and extremely short—sets him out as different from the other characters. Furthermore, his mysterious origin story and his use of blow darts as a lethal weapon mark him out as even more alien to the culture of Victorian England. This plays on Victorian fears of "the other," which essentially expresses suspicion of the unknown. It's worth pointing out the association in the Victorian imagination between "savagery" and the practice of witchcraft; that is, there is a link between the Victorian fear of "the other" with the gothic trope of the supernatural. Elements of the gothic genre, then, are blended with Doyle's detective fiction to intensify the atmosphere of mystery and intrigue. This played to a particularly Victorian psychology, but also explains why readers are still enticed and intrigued by The Sign of the Four today. - Climax: Holmes and his crew take part in a boat chase to catch the criminals and secure the treasure. - Summary: The Sign of the Four begins at the Baker Street home of the infamous detective, Sherlock Holmes, and his assistant, Dr. John Watson. Holmes is a little bored, having no case to work on, and is injecting himself with cocaine—Watson disapproves of this bad habit. Soon enough, the beautiful Miss Mary Morstan arrives at the flat asking for Holmes' help. She outlines her case. Her father, Captain Morstan, had been an officer in the British Army and was stationed in India; she was at boarding school in Scotland. Ten years ago, he came back on leave, but as soon as he arrived in London he disappeared without a trace. A few years ago, she started receiving pearls in the mail once a year after answering an advert in the paper calling for her address. The pearl she has recently received came with a note, instructing her to go to the Lyceum Theater in London's West End that evening, where somebody will come to meet her. Holmes and Watson agree to accompany her. Throughout Miss Morstan's story, Watson can't help but admire her. Later that evening, Holmes, Watson and Miss Morstan head to the meeting point. On their way, Miss Morstan shows Holmes a paper she found in her father's desk. It appears to be a map, with a red cross drawn on it. Beside the cross, the paper reads: "the sign of the four – Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar." At the Lyceum Theater a carriage is waiting for them and takes them to the house of the anxious Thaddeus Sholto, the son of Major Sholto, who was Captain Morstan's friend and colleague in India. Thaddeus explains that Captain Morstan is dead; he died from a heart attack when arguing with Major Sholto about the Agra treasure. Thaddeus explains that this treasure, part of which he says is rightfully is Miss Morstan's, is an immense collection of jewels. His father fell ill a few years previously after receiving a letter from India that caused him a great shock. Thaddeus notes that his father had a fear of men with wooden legs. On his deathbed, Major Sholto was about to reveal the location of the Agra treasure when a bearded man appeared at the window; the shock killed Major Sholto. The next day, Thaddeus and his brother, Bartholomew, discovered that Sholto's belongings had been searched and a note reading "the sign of the four" was left on the body. Just before he died, Major Sholto instructed his sons to share some of the treasure with Miss Morstan and gave them pearls to send to her. Thaddeus then informs his visitors that Bartholomew has located the treasure at the family home, Pondicherry Lodge; all they need to do now is head over there and divide it up. When the group arrives at Pondicherry Lodge, they find the housekeeper, Mrs. Bernstone, in an agitated state. She says that Bartholomew has not left his attic laboratory all day. Holmes and Watson look through the keyhole and see Bartholomew's face grinning back at them, unnaturally still. They break in and confirm that Bartholomew is dead; he seems to have been killed by a poisonous blow dart. Holmes investigates the scene, concluding that the assailants are a wooden-legged man and a short accomplice. The treasure, too, is nowhere to be seen. Holmes suspects the main culprit to be Jonathan Small, one of the "sign of the four" signatories. As Athelney Jones, the hapless Scotland Yard detective, arrives, Holmes sends Watson to fetch Toby the hound so that they can track a scent from the scene—it appears that the wooden-legged man stepped in creosote in his rush to escape. Watson drops Miss Morstan at home on his way, feeling his affections towards her increasing. Holmes and Watson trek around London, following Toby the hound. At one point, the dog leads them to a pub's creosote store, much to their amusement. Toby then picks up the original scent again and leads them to the Thames. Holmes talks to a local woman and gleans that the criminals must have hired a boat from Mordecai Smith called the Aurora—a speedy steam launcher. He tricks her into giving a description of the boat. In order to trace the vessel, Holmes hires a group of street urchins to search London. They have no luck, so Holmes, increasingly agitated at the lack of progress, disguises himself as a sailor and makes his own inquiries around London. When he has a breakthrough, he instructs Athelney Jones to meet him at his flat. Jones waits for Holmes in Watson's company, before the two are interrupted by an old man who claims to know the solution to the case. The old man is only willing to speak to Holmes and makes to leave when he learns that Holmes is elsewhere; Jones and Watson entrap him in the flat. Suddenly, the old man reveals himself to be the delighted Holmes in disguise. Holmes explains that he has tracked the Aurora down to a shipyard, where it awaits Jonathan Small and his accomplice, who will attempt to escape that evening with the help of Mordecai Smith. Later that night, Holmes, Watson, Jones and some police officers board a police boat in order to give chase to the Aurora. Holmes has stationed a boy at the shipyard who will give a signal when the Aurora is leaving. Soon enough, Small and his accomplice, Tonga, attempt to escape with Mordecai Smith at the helm. Holmes and the others begin the chase; when Tonga, a small "black cannibal," prepares to shoot at them with a blow dart, Holmes and Watson fire the guns at him. Tonga, dead, falls into the river. The Aurora runs aground and Jonathan Small is captured. The Agra treasure appears to have been recovered, so Watson delivers the treasure chest to Miss Morstan, only for them to discover that it is empty. Watson is relieved because he feels that Miss Morstan's riches would have made her inaccessible to him. Miss Morstan is not upset about the treasure, and they embrace. Jonathan Small is taken back to Baker Street and asked to tell his story at Holmes' request. Before he does so, he explains that he has scattered the treasure in the Thames; if he can't have it, he doesn't want anyone else to. Small then tells his story. He was stationed in India with the British Army. Soon after arriving there, his leg was bitten off by a crocodile. When the Indian Mutiny began (the locals rose up against their British authorities), Small worked as a guard at the ancient fortress of Agra. He was in charge of two men, Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan, who convinced him to join with them in seizing treasure from a merchant acting on behalf of an Indian prince. Along with Abdullah's cousin, these men made up the "sign of the four" and pledged allegiance to each other. They killed the merchant and acquired the treasure, a rich bounty of various jewels. It was then hidden in the Agra fortress to be retrieved when the country had calmed down a little. Though the tensions did die down soon enough, Small and the others were arrested for killing the merchant and subsequently sent to a prison camp on the Andaman Islands. At the prison camp, Small made the acquaintance of the overseers Major Sholto and Captain Morstan, and hatched a plan to share the treasure with them in exchange for his escape. Sholto double-crossed everyone and took the treasure for himself back to England. During this time, Small befriended Tonga, a native of the island, nursing him when he was sick. Tonga became extremely loyal to Small and helped him to escape. The two men eventually made it back to England, where for a time they survived by displaying Tonga in freak shows. Small tracked down Sholto just before he died and left the note on the Major's body. He had an inside contact at Pondicherry Lodge who informed him that the treasure had been discovered. With this knowledge, he and Tonga went to the house to get the treasure; Tonga entered the house first, killing Bartholomew without checking with Small first. Holmes is satisfied he has learned all there is to know about the case. Athelney Jones thanks him for his help and leads Jonathan Small away. Watson informs Holmes that Miss Morstan has agreed to marry him. Rather than offer congratulations, Holmes explains that he believes "love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things." Holmes reaches for his own comfort: the cocaine bottle.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Signalman - Point of view: First Person - Setting: A signalman's train station, tunnel, and box - Character: The Narrator. Description: The unnamed narrator, a cheerful and logical man, befriends the signalman at the start of the story. Because he was sheltered for much of his life, the narrator is now interested in the "great works" of the railroad industry. He's fascinated by the signalman's many duties, which include monitoring and directing passing trains, and shocked by his dismal working conditions underground. The narrator's surprise implies that he is likely upper class and wealthy; the signalman has many responsibilities, but the narrator seems to have very few. Maybe because of his interest in industry, the narrator is highly observant of the signalman, even noticing that he's distracted while working. But once the signalman tells the narrator that a ghost is haunting him, skepticism becomes the narrator's most significant characteristic: he doesn't believe the signalman's story and thinks the signalman is losing his mind. Though the signalman insists that the narrator is somehow involved in the hauntings—the ghost at one point spoke the narrator's exact greeting of "Halloa! Below there!"—the narrator remains certain that this is only a coincidence. After trying and failing to convince the signalman that the ghost is a figment of his imagination, the narrator nobly decides to take responsibility for the situation the same way the signalman takes responsibility for his passengers. The narrator plans to accompany the signalman to a hospital before he can accidentally hurt anyone, but before the narrator can do so, the signalman is killed by a passing train. As the train passed, its driver, Tom, yelled, "For God's sake, clear the way!"—the same words the narrator earlier assigned to the ghost's movement, but never spoke out loud. The coincidence hints at supernatural involvement, and the narrator's earlier skepticism fades away. That the narrator thinks the ghost might be real after all suggests that he no longer believes he can singlehandedly control events—there are forces, perhaps even supernatural forces, at work in the world that are out of his control. At the end of the story, he seems to accept his own helplessness in the face of the unknown. - Character: The Signalman. Description: The signalman, a "dark sallow" man who reluctantly befriends the narrator, monitors trains passing through a tunnel: he's responsible for guiding them safely and preventing major accidents. While speaking to the narrator, he often breaks off conversation to attend to his duties, suggesting that he understands the life-and-death importance of his job. His position means that he's working class, but he wasn't always—he's well educated and once studied natural philosophy, but he squandered his professional opportunities. The signalman seems to willingly accept his bleak situation, which requires spending most of his time underground, believing that he's helpless to change his fate. As he later explains to the narrator, this unhappy fate includes the supernatural: the signalman thinks he's being haunted by a ghost, who stands by a nearby red light and warns of impending accidents on the rail line. Without more details about where or when these accidents will occur, the signalman is powerless to prevent them, but he still feels responsible for the casualties. As a result, he believes there must be a deeper meaning to the hauntings and wants to figure out why they're happening. Before he can, a passing train hits him while he's standing near the tunnel, which implies that he may have gone looking for the ghost, or may have believed he was supposed to die and allowed the train to hit him. This confirms his helplessness to avoid a dismal fate, and it disproves his belief that he could understand the supernatural—in fact, this belief may have inadvertently caused his death. - Character: The Ghost. Description: The ghost is a mysterious figure that haunts the signalman (or so he claims), always appearing by the red light near the tunnel and always covering its face, either with its hands or by waving. After the first haunting, there was a train accident on the signalman's line; after the second, a young woman died in a passing train. When the signalman meets the narrator, he's being haunted by the ghost in "fits and starts." At first, the signalman even mistakes the narrator for the ghost; when they first meet, the narrator greets the signalman using the exact same phrase ("Halloa! Below there!") that the ghost once uttered to the signalman. At the end of the story, a passing train kills the signalman, suggesting that the final haunting foretold his own death. While the ghost's purpose is to warn about accidents, it doesn't seem to want to prevent them—as the signalman explains to the narrator, the ghost's information is never specific enough to shut down the rail line (the signalman doesn't know where or when they'll happen), so the warnings do nothing but torment the signalman. In every haunting, the ghost waves to get the signalman's attention; at the end of the story, the engine-driver, Tom, mimics this movement right before his train kills the signalman. Like the narrator's repetition of the ghost's greeting, the ghost's gesture is ultimately unhelpful—Tom can't get the signalman's attention, so his waving arms serve only to disturb the narrator the same way the narrator's greeting disturbed the signalman. Because of its unclear motivations, the ghost personifies the supernatural and unknown—Charles Dickens never clarifies whether or not the ghost was real, and he implies that it's better to be uncertain. - Character: Tom. Description: Tom is the engine-driver whose train kills the signalman. Tom tells the narrator that he attempted to warn the signalman of the train's approach by yelling and waving his arms, but the signalman didn't seem to hear him. Tom eerily spoke the narrator's own thoughts out loud as the train passed, yelling "For God's sake, clear the way!" Earlier in the story, the narrator assigned this phrase to the ghost's waving gesture, which the signalman demonstrated. Tom appears confused about the signalman's death, which seems to have been preventable. However, his choice of words implies that the supernatural was involved. - Theme: Responsibility and Guilt. Description: In "The Signalman," an unnamed narrator strikes up an acquaintanceship with a railroad signalman, whose job is to monitor trains passing through a station. Although the narrator is impressed by the signalman's commitment to keeping people safe, the signalman feels guilty about accidents that have occurred on his watch; even though these tragedies were seemingly random, he feels somehow responsible for them. Later, when a passing train hits and kills the signalman, the narrator questions whether he himself responsible for the signalman's death. By leaving the consequences of the characters' actions unclear, Dickens questions the extent to which anyone can shoulder responsibility for another person's well-being. The story seems to suggest that it's impossible to take full responsibility for other people's lives, and that doing so only leads to inevitable failure and guilt. At the beginning of the story, the signalman seemingly has a clear-cut duty to keep train conductors and passengers safe. The narrator, who admits that he's been sheltered and free of responsibility for his whole life, has a "newly-awakened interest" in the signalman's duty to keep train passengers safe. During their first conversation, the signalman tells the narrator that his job is to monitor and direct all the trains that come through his station, which sets him up as a character with an immense responsibility to protect other people's lives. The signalman acknowledges that "exactness and watchfulness" are required for his job, and he indeed proves himself to be extremely watchful. He sacrifices a lot to monitor the station, working long hours below ground and constantly listening for trains with "redoubled anxiety" whenever he leaves his post. As the signalman speaks to the narrator, he simultaneously displays flags and speaks to conductors, even dropping off in the middle of a sentence to do his work. The narrator is impressed by the signalman's commitment to the job, calling him "exact and vigilant." But it's not always possible for the signalman to protect people, which suggests that even the most dutiful person can't always take full responsibility for others—and that trying to do so will inevitably lead to guilt. The signalman tells the narrator that recently, a ghost appeared near the end of the train tunnel and mysteriously warned him to "Look out." When this happened, the signalman believed that it was his responsibility to prevent an accident. He telegraphed a warning to other stations, asking if anything was wrong, but they responded that everything was okay. Just six hours later, however, a train accident happened anyway, which the signalman was unable to prevent despite upholding his duties and following protocol. Seven months later, the ghost reappeared—and the next day, a young woman died in a train as it passed the signalman's station. The signalman tried to get the train to stop, noticing the woman waving through the window, but he was too late to prevent her death. He must have been watching the train carefully in order to spot her, but his sense of responsibility couldn't save her. Still, the signalman seems to blame himself (at least partially) for these two tragedies, and he feels incredibly guilty and upset about them. The signalman explains to the narrator that he can't heed the ghost's warnings, which continue even now: none of the workers at other stations will listen to the signalman if he asks trains to be shut down for an accident that hasn't happened yet, and he'd be fired for the false alarm. If he's fired, he won't be able to help anyone. It's an impossible situation with no clear solution—and although the narrator doesn't believe the signalman's ghost story, he notes that the signalman is "oppressed […] by an unintelligible responsibility." In other words, the signalman's responsibility to keep everyone safe is perhaps unrealistic—it leads to the signalman feeling "oppressed" by his duties, since even the ghost's forewarnings about the accidents can't prevent them from happening. As the story progresses, the narrator becomes responsible for the signalman—and this switch-up of duties further complicates the question of how much responsibility any one person can take on. Having heard the signalman's bizarre story about the ghost that seemed to foretell train accidents, the narrator assumes that the signalman is losing his mind. And because monitoring trains is important work, the narrator decides that, "for the public safety," he has to escort the signalman to a mental institution. By making this decision, the narrator effectively assumes responsibility for the safety of the all the passengers who come through the signalman's station. The next day, when the narrator sees a crowd at the signalman's post, he worries that people died because he left the signalman unattended—and thus, that he failed at his self-appointed duty to keep the train passengers safe. But instead, the narrator learns that the signalman was hit and killed by a train. The narrator took on the wrong responsibility: it wasn't the passengers who needed protection, but the signalman himself. The narrator, like the signalman, tried to take on the immense responsibility of protecting other people's lives—but he inevitably fails and ends up feeling guilty. The story doesn't provide any definitive judgment about the narrator's responsibility for the signalman's death: although he perhaps misjudged the signalman's mental health, there's no clear indication that the narrator could have foreseen the accident that occurred the following day. Readers are thus left wondering whether the narrator was, however indirectly, responsible for the signalman's death—and whether the signalman was, indirectly, responsible for the deaths that the ghost warned of. By leaving the ending ambiguous in this way, Dickens implies that it's not always possible to determine what a person is and isn't ethically responsible for—and that trying to do so often leads to uncertainty and guilt. - Theme: Helplessness, Fate, and Death. Description: Throughout the story, the signalman feels helpless: it's his job to keep train passengers safe, yet he couldn't prevent the mysterious accidents that recently happened on the railway. In contrast, the narrator believes that he can help both the signalman and the train passengers who depend on him. But the narrator soon learns that he was always as helpless as the signalman, as he's unable to prevent the signalman's death at the end of the story. Furthermore, the railway accidents—including the signalman's own death—may have been predetermined. By implying that neither the signalman nor the narrator had a chance of preventing the accidents in the story, Dickens suggests that everyone is equally helpless in the face of death—and that believing otherwise is tempting fate. The signalman understands and accepts his own helplessness, though he wishes he could change it. According to his conversation with the narrator, helplessness has always been part of the signalman's life. He was once a philosophy student, but he squandered his educational and professional opportunities. Instead of trying to change his situation, he believes that "he had made his bed, and he lay upon it." The signalman seems to accept his bleak fate willingly instead of fighting against it. This helplessness also forms the basis of the signalman's relationship with the narrator. The narrator's first appearance shocks him, as the signalman later reveals that a ghost recently greeted him the same way that the narrator did—yet the signalman doesn't prevent the narrator from approaching him. The narrator notices that the signalman watches him with "expectation," suggesting that the signalman knows he can't prevent whatever mysterious fate the ghost represents, although he's frightened of it. The signalman tells the narrator that the ghost seems to be warning him about something—and indeed, tragic accidents have occurred on the railway both times the ghost appeared. However, the ghost's warnings haven't been specific enough to warrant the signalman sounding an alarm. Furthermore, the signalman isn't powerful enough to shut down the train line on his own; if he did, he'd be fired. Thus, he's forced to watch the deaths happen, and he can't do anything more. In fact, he questions whether the accidents were preventable at all: he wonders why the ghost doesn't show him how the crises "could be averted—if it could be averted," meaning he thinks that they might be fated to happen and thus impossible to prevent. The narrator, on the other hand, doesn't believe that either he or the signalman are truly helpless. Just as the signalman's background explains his helplessness, the narrator's background explains why he doesn't feel helpless. He's presumably wealthier than the signalman and seems to have had an easy life—which is why he's shocked by the long hours and weighty responsibilities that the signalman's job requires. The narrator can't imagine that the signalman is helpless or weak in any way, given how "exact and vigilant" he is in carrying out his many duties. Perhaps because of the signalman's sharp mind and competence at his job, the narrator doesn't buy into the ghost story—or, by extension, the signalman's helplessness to remedy the situation. Instead, the narrator tries to solve the signalman's problem by attributing the ghost sightings to mental illness, saying that the signalman's "imagination misleads [him]" and that he shouldn't "allow much for coincidences" when evaluating the situation. Although the signalman refuses to be dissuaded from his story, the narrator still believes he can help him: he plans to have the signalman institutionalized. This is both for the signalman's benefit and for the good of the public, who depend on the signalman for their safety. This decision is the narrator's way of taking control of the situation and proving that he has some level of agency over what's going on. But ultimately, Dickens suggests that all the events in the story were predetermined from the start, meaning that neither the narrator nor the signalman could have changed them. The reason the signalman was afraid of the narrator at their first meeting was because the narrator cried, "Halloa! Below there!" which were the same words that the ghost uttered. The signalman doesn't think this is a coincidence—he suggests that the words may have been "conveyed" to the narrator in a "supernatural way." This suggests that the narrator was fated both to meet the signalman and to say these words, and that the ghost predicted this in advance. Soon after this, the engine-driver, Tom, whose train hit the signalman tells the narrator that, in an attempt to warn the signalman to move out of the train's path, he yelled "For God's sake, clear the way!" The narrator remembers how, earlier, he himself imagined that the ghost uttered this same phrase. However, the narrator never spoke this phrase out loud—and this mysterious, supernatural connection again suggests that the signalman's death was somehow predetermined or fated to happen. This time, the narrator's own thoughts came before the catastrophe rather than after (unlike his use of "Halloa! Below there!")—but this doesn't stop the signalman's death, which the ghost seems to have warned about through the narrator's thoughts. The narrator was indeed helpless to prevent the signalman's death all along; the control he tried to exert over the situation was illusory. Flipping the order of events in this way implies that the order doesn't actually matter—the signalman's death couldn't have been prevented either way. The narrator believed that he could help the signalman, but he was always equally helpless, his fate equally sealed. And although the supernatural events of the story may seem far-fetched, Dickens's underlying implication—that people are powerless in the face of death—is very much real. After all, everyone is fated to die, and no one knows exactly when or how their death will occur. The story's morbid ending sends the rather fatalistic message that trying to overcome this helplessness will only usher in what's fated to happen. - Theme: The Supernatural and the Unknown. Description: The titular signalman in the story is responsible for keeping people safe by monitoring the trains that come through his station. However, two mysterious train accidents occurred before the events of the story, which the signalman believes were caused by supernatural forces—a ghost supposedly warned him about the accidents in advance. But the narrator doesn't believe the signalman's ghost story, instead assuming that the signalman has lost his mind. At the end of the story, however, the signalman is killed by a passing train, and the details surrounding the accident suggest that the ghost may have predicted his death as well. Readers are thus left to wonder whether the signalman's death was a simple tragedy or a supernatural event. By leaving room for both possibilities, Dickens suggests that the supernatural is fundamentally unknowable, and that trying to understand and analyze it does more harm than good—doing so may have even caused the signalman's death. Although the narrator doesn't believe him, the signalman is certain that supernatural forces caused the deaths on the train line—and he wants to find out how and why. The signalman's certainty is based on compelling evidence: he tells the narrator that a ghost appeared at the end of the train tunnel six hours before a train accident occurred nearby. Then, the ghost appeared a second time, just one day before a woman died on a train passing through the signalman's station. Furthermore, when the narrator first meets the signalman, he apparently repeats the same words that the ghost uttered ("Halloa! Below there!")—so if the ghost story is true, then the narrator is part of the haunting, which validates the signalman's belief in the supernatural. The signalman is already certain that the ghost is real, so he confides in the narrator in hopes of figuring out why the hauntings are happening. He tells the narrator that "what troubles [him] so dreadfully is the question: What does the spectre mean?" In other words, the signalman hopes that the narrator will help him better understand the supernatural, demonstrating his belief that the supernatural can be understood. But instead of confirming the signalman's belief, Dickens provides alternative explanations through the narrator, who is certain that the supernatural is not involved. The narrator seems to be a trustworthy source of information; though he can be condescending, he judges the signalman fairly, praising his "exact and vigilant" nature and paying close attention to his story. As a result, the narrator's later skepticism seems credible and unbiased: he acknowledges the strangeness of events, saying that the train accidents are a "remarkable coincidence." However, he denies that this coincidence is significant. Because of the narrator's logical nature, his disbelief casts doubt on the signalman's certainty. The narrator explains away the hauntings by claiming that the deaths are a coincidence, and that the wind in the train tunnel mimicked the sound of a cry. Later, he determines that the signalman has lost his mind as a result of his dismal living situation and high-stress job. The narrator is as certain about the signalman's mental state as the signalman is about the ghost, and both men provide evidence to prove their point, attempting to analyze the situation according to their own beliefs. Rather than explaining the true cause of events, Dickens suggests that both the signalman and the narrator's efforts to understand the situation are futile—and even harmful. Because the narrator is certain that the supernatural is not involved in the railway accidents, he leaves the signalman alone overnight, planning to return the next day to take him to a mental institution. But before he can, a passing train kills the signalman. Though his death may or may not have been an accident, the narrator's certainty led to a false sense of security, which could have allowed the ghost to harm the signalman in the narrator's absence. On the other hand, the signalman's certainty that the supernatural was involved in the accidents could also have caused his death. After all, his death doesn't fit the pattern he described to the narrator: the first two accidents came almost immediately after the ghost appeared, but this time, the ghost returned a week before the signalman died. The signalman's manner of death was also different: he didn't move out of the way after multiple warnings from the engine-driver, Tom, and he died in the same spot the ghost always appeared. It's possible that the signalman interpreted the ghost's warnings to mean that he was supposed to die and allowed the train to hit him. Alternatively, the signalman may have been searching for the ghost, too distracted to notice the train. In both cases, his belief that he understood the supernatural, or his belief that he could understand it, may have indirectly led to his death. In the story's final paragraph, the narrator explains that the engine-driver whose train hit the signalman spoke his own thoughts out loud: earlier in the story, the narrator assigned the phrase "For God's sake, clear the way!" to the ghost's gesture, and the driver yelled this phrase to the signalman. Despite the suspicious coincidence, the narrator chooses not to "dwell on any one of [the] curious circumstances," never clarifying whether or not he now believes the signalman. Yet he provides no other explanation, implying that he's uncertain about the truth. By ending the story with a logical character's uncertainty, Dickens suggests that supernatural events are impossible to understand, like the signalman tried to, or to explain away, like the narrator tried to—neither man's certainty was beneficial. Instead, accepting uncertainty may be the proper course of action when it comes to the unknown. - Climax: The narrator learns that the signalman was killed by a passing train. - Summary: At a rail station, an unnamed narrator cheerfully greets a train signalman by yelling down to him, "Halloa! Below there!" Though the signalman is initially stoic and unfriendly, he reluctantly allows the narrator to approach him at his post in a trench below ground. The narrator immediately notices how dismal the signalman's working conditions are: the signalman can barely see the sunlight and has to face a red light near a tunnel all day. Because he's newly interested in the railroad industry, the narrator questions the signalman about his job, but the signalman seems frightened—he believes he's met the narrator before, which the narrator denies. After this, the signalman then grows friendlier, inviting the narrator into his box (the small room he works inside near the train tracks) and describing his duties. The narrator wonders why the signalman is so well educated, and the signalman explains that he was once a natural philosophy student but squandered his professional opportunities. He has no resentment about this and explains that "he had made his bed, and he lay upon it." After watching the signalman work, the narrator believes that he's "exact and vigilant" in attending to his duties. However, the signalman also seems distracted, twice looking to the red light even when no trains are there. The signalman tells the narrator that if he comes back the next night, he'll explain why. As promised, when the narrator returns, the signalman reveals the full story. The reason he was unfriendly when the narrator first appeared, and the reason he thought they'd met before, is that the narrator's greeting ("Halloa! Below there!") yesterday was identical to the greeting of a ghost who visited the signalman months before. Standing near the red light by the tunnel, the ghost waved its arm across its eyes, a gesture the narrator thinks is akin to saying "For God's sake, clear the way!" The signalman telegraphed an alarm to other stations, who replied that nothing was wrong. But just six hours after the haunting, there was a fatal rail crash. Half a year later, the ghost appeared at the red light again, this time silently covering its face in what the narrator describes as "an action of mourning"—the next day, a young woman collapsed and died in a passing train. And the hauntings still aren't over. The ghost reappeared a week ago, and the signalman has been haunted in "fits and starts" ever since. This explains why he was so distracted yesterday: he kept seeing the ghost by the tunnel. The narrator, always logical, tells the signalman that the hauntings are all in his head, but the signalman isn't convinced. Instead, he wants the narrator to help him figure out what the hauntings mean, particularly because a third accident will surely occur. He's especially confused about why the ghost is coming to him—the warnings are never specific enough to prevent an accident, and if he sounded a vague alarm, he'd be fired. He believes it's a "cruel haunting": he's forced to know about disaster ahead of time, but he's helpless to stop it. As a result, he feels responsible for the deaths of others. Convinced that the signalman has lost his mind, the narrator realizes that the man may be a danger to the passengers on his rail line: if he's distracted and unable to do his job properly, an accident could occur. After leaving the signalman, the narrator decides that he'll offer to bring him to a doctor the following evening "for the public safety." But when he returns, a crowd of workers tell him that the signalman was killed by a passing train near the tunnel. Moments before the crash, the engine-driver, Tom, had yelled at the signalman, "Below there!" and "For God's sake, clear the way!" Hearing these events recounted, the narrator is alarmed to remember that he's connected to both of these phrases: he used the first to greet the signalman when they first met, and he assigned the second to the ghost's gesture. However, he never spoke the second phrase out loud—he only thought that was what the ghost looked like it was saying. He decides to end his story without "dwell[ing] on any one of its curious circumstances."

- Genre: Novel, Historical Fiction - Title: The Silence of the Girls - Point of view: First Person and Third Person - Setting: The Trojan plain - Character: Briseis. Description: - Character: Achilles. Description: - Character: Patroclus. Description: - Character: Agamemnon. Description: - Character: Thetis. Description: - Character: Priam. Description: - Character: Nestor. Description: - Character: Odysseus. Description: - Character: Ajax. Description: - Character: Chryseis. Description: - Character: The Priest of Apollo. Description: - Character: Alcimus. Description: - Character: Helen. Description: - Character: Iphis. Description: - Character: Tecmessa. Description: - Character: Ismene. Description: - Character: Uza. Description: - Character: Hector. Description: - Theme: Mythology and Oppressed Perspectives. Description: - Theme: The Effects of Misogyny. Description: - Theme: Honor and Violence. Description: - Theme: Slavery and Dehumanization. Description: - Theme: Grief and Revenge. Description: - Climax: Briseis chooses to return to Achilles's compound after attempting to escape in Priam's cart. - Summary: Briseis, the young Trojan queen of Lyrnessus, hears the battle cry of Greek warrior Achilles outside the city walls. She and the other women hide in the citadel while the men go out to fight. From the citadel roof, Briseis sees Achilles kill her husband, King Mynes, and her youngest brother. Shortly thereafter, the Greeks take Lyrnessus. They slaughter all the men and boys and enslave the women. Back in the Greek camp, Briseis and several other young, attractive women are separated from the other enslaved women as special "prizes" for important Greek warriors. Achilles claims Briseis as his prize. In Achilles's compound, his companion Patroclus brings Briseis wine, trying to make her feel better. Shortly thereafter, Achilles summons Briseis and rapes her. The next morning, Briseis goes down to the sea to wash Achilles' semen out of her and sees Achilles himself talking to the sea, saying a word that sounds like "Mummy." Briseis's only duties are to serve Achilles sexually and to serve his dining companions wine. She distrusts Patroclus because she doesn't understand why he keeps trying to be kind to her, an enslaved woman. One night, she goes swimming before going to bed with Achilles, and the seawater on her skin seems to drive him wild, causing him to suckle her breasts passionately. Briseis also befriends other "trophy" enslaved women, including young Chryseis, the "trophy" of Greek high commander Agamemnon. One day, Chryseis' father, a priest of Apollo, travels to the Greek camp to ransom his daughter. After Agamemnon scorns the priest's offer, Briseis overhears the priest praying to Apollo for vengeance and recalls that Apollo is the god of plague as well as of healing. Briseis begins praying to Apollo to curse the Greeks with plague. One night, Patroclus invites Briseis to sit with him while Achilles goes swimming. Briseis, unnerved, asks Patroclus why he is always kind to her. Patroclus explains that he knows what it's like to be given as a gift to Achilles against one's will: when Patroclus was 10, he killed his best friend after the friend accused him of cheating at dice. Patroclus's father, a king, sent his princely son into exile at the court of Achilles' father, King Peleus. Achilles' mother, the sea goddess Thetis, had just abandoned the family, and Achilles was refusing to eat. Patroclus and Achilles were unexpectedly good for each other although, Patroclus admits to Briseis, he still cried every night for the first year of his exile. Later, Patroclus goes to the seashore to check on Achilles, and Briseis sees them touching foreheads in a posture of extreme intimacy. Meanwhile, the rats in the Greek camp start to die strangely, vomiting blood. Soon, the Greek soldiers begin to die of plague. One night, Briseis overhears Achilles ranting about Agamemnon to Patroclus, blaming the plague on Agamemnon's refusal to give Chryseis back to her father the priest. After Achilles storms out, Patroclus suggests to Briseis that he could convince Achilles to marry her and fantasizes that they could all travel "home" together. Briseis, though wishing she could point out that the Greeks destroyed her home, can't help but think that marrying Achilles would make her a free woman again. Achilles calls an assembly, where a seer prophesies what all the Greeks already believe: Agamemnon needs to give Chryseis back to her father to stop the plague. Agamemnon, infuriated, agrees to return Chryseis but demands Achilles's prize—Briseis—as compensation. Achilles announces that if Agamemnon takes his prize, then he won't fight for the Greeks any longer. Agamemnon's men send Chryseis home and take Briseis from Achilles's compound. That first night, Agamemnon rapes Briseis and sends her away. Afterward, he leaves her alone sexually but insists that she serve wine in his compound every night—a symbol of his power and authority over the other Greek fighters. Meanwhile, the plague dies down, but without Achilles, the Greeks lose ground to the Trojans on the battlefield. As more and more Greek soldiers suffer serious wounds, they begin muttering that Agamemnon should give Briseis back to Achilles. One night over wine, Greek kings Odysseus and Nestor convince Agamemnon to return Briseis—and Agamemnon says he'll swear he never touched her. Odysseus and Achilles's cousin, the warrior Ajax, bring Briseis to Achilles's compound but leave her outside Achilles's room while they negotiate. When Achilles is indifferent to Agamemnon's offers of treasure, Patroclus asks after Briseis. Odysseus drags her into the rooms, saying that Agamemnon never touched her. Achilles stares at Briseis—who, unable to lie, says nothing. Achilles realizes that Odysseus is lying and says Agamemnon can "fuck" Briseis if he wants—Achilles isn't taking the deal. Patroclus hurries Briseis from the room, pours her wine, and apologizes to her. Later, Odysseus and Ajax collect her and return to Agamemnon's compound, where Nestor suggests that if Achilles won't fight, they should convince Patroclus to lead Achilles's men—while wearing Achilles's armor, to frighten the Trojans. Later, Agamemnon rapes Briseis again. While Patroclus is checking on a wounded friend in a hospital tent, Nestor finds him and convinces him to petition Achilles to let Patroclus lead his men and wear his armor. Later, he sees Briseis working in the hospital tent with a split lip and bruised face. When he asks her what happened, she says that Agamemnon blamed her for Achilles's rejection of his offer. Patroclus returns to Achilles's compound furious and in tears and demands that Achilles fight. When Achilles says that he can't, Patroclus asks to lead Achilles's men while wearing his armor. Achilles grudgingly agrees—provided that Patroclus turn back early and avoid fighting the Trojans' best warrior, Prince Hector. The next morning, Patroclus goes out to fight in Achilles's armor leading Achilles's men, while Achilles watches the battle from the prow of one of his ships. Patroclus fails to turn back early, fighting long into the afternoon, and eventually Prince Hector kills him. When news of Patroclus's death reaches Achilles, he collapses in grief. His goddess mother, Thetis, emerges from the sea to comfort him. He tells her that Patroclus's death is his fault—he should have been fighting—and that his sole remaining goal in life is to kill Hector. When Thetis reminds him of a prophecy that he'll die soon after Hector does, Achilles says he'll be glad to die once he's killed Hector. Thetis promises him to bring him new armor the next morning, as the Greeks were able to recover Patroclus' body only after the Trojans stripped Achilles's armor from his corpse. Achilles summons the Greeks to an assembly. He says that he is ashamed that he and Agamemnon fell out over a girl and that he will return to the fighting. In reply, Agamemnon promises to give Achilles all the treasure with which he tried to bribe Achilles earlier—Briseis included. The next day, Achilles receives new armor from Thetis and goes into battle, massacring every Trojan warrior he encounters. After five days of slaughter, Achilles finally kills Hector outside Troy's gates. He returns to the Greek camp with Hector's corpse tied to the back of his chariot. With Hector dead, Achilles cremates Patroclus's corpse and holds his funeral games. Later, Achilles summons Briseis to bed, but he can't get an erection—all he can think about is Patroclus. Every morning, he has been defiling Hector's corpse, tying it to his chariot and driving it around Patroclus's burial mound, yet every evening, the corpse is restored to pristine condition again as if by divine intervention—while the marks of defilement briefly show on Achilles's own face. One night at dinner in Achilles's compound, Hector's father, King Priam of Troy, walks into the feasting hall disguised as a poor man, drops to the floor in front of Achilles, and begs Achilles to return Hector's corpse. Achilles hurries Priam to his private rooms and tells his closest living companions, Alcimus and Automedon, to keep his men from telling the other Greeks that Priam has snuck into their camp. He orders Briseis to make up a bed for Priam, and Priam vaguely recognizes her: her older sister Ianthe is married to one of Priam's sons, and Briseis spent several years in Troy as a young girl. After Priam is in bed, Achilles and Briseis go wash and wrap Hector's corpse. While washing the corpse, Achilles mentions to Briseis that he could end the war if he took Priam hostage and traded him to the Trojans in exchange for Helen, the Greek queen whom the Trojan prince Paris, abducted, starting the war—but he won't take Priam hostage because it would be dishonorable: Priam is his guest. Later, Achilles rapes Briseis and then throws his arm around her. The next morning, Briseis wakes Priam and begs him to take her back to Troy with him when he leaves. Priam refuses to "dishonor" his host Achilles by "stealing" a woman who belongs to him. Suddenly, Achilles appears to check on them, perhaps having overheard their hurried conversation. Then he, Alcimus, and Automedon bundle Hector's corpse into a cart for Priam. Finally, Achilles asks Priam how long a cessation of battle Priam will need for Hector's funeral games; Priam asks for 11 days. When the men go back to Achilles's rooms to drink a parting cup of wine, Briseis hides in the back of the cart beside Hector's corpse. Yet once Priam begins driving the cart toward the Greek camp's gates with Achilles walking beside him, Briseis realizes that her actions are irrational: even if she does reach Troy, Troy will soon fall to the Greeks now that Hector is dead. When the cart stops at the gates, Briseis sneaks from the cart and walks back toward Achilles's compound. Later, Achilles returns and asks Briseis why she came back. Briseis is shocked that Achilles knew she was escaping and planned to let her. During the 11 days that battle is suspended, Briseis begins to suspect that Achilles has impregnated her. One morning, he finds her vomiting, and she shares her suspicions. A few nights later, Achilles gets Alcimus alone. He tells Alcimus that Briseis is pregnant and asks him to marry her and take care of the child if Achilles dies. He agrees. The morning the Greeks return to battle, Achilles brings a priest into Briseis' bedroom and has the priest marry Briseis and Alcimus. Later that afternoon, Achilles dies in battle—shot in the back with an arrow. Shortly thereafter, Troy falls. Agamemnon, terrified of Achilles's ghost, sacrifices King Priam's youngest daughter Polyxena on Achilles and Patroclus's shared burial mound as a propitiation. After the sacrifice, Briseis returns to the mound and removes the gag from Polyxena's mouth. Then she says goodbye to Achilles and Patroclus, preparing to leave Achilles's story and enter her own.

- Genre: Crime Novel, Psychological Thriller - Title: The Silence of the Lambs - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Baltimore, Maryland and Quantico, Virginia in 1983 - Character: Clarice Starling. Description: Clarice Starling is the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs, an agent in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico. One of her superiors at the FBI, Jack Crawford, puts Starling on a case to help the FBI catch the serial killer Buffalo Bill. Starling is an intelligent and capable woman who jumps at any chance she gets to work in the field. She is careful and thoughtful about every decision she makes regarding her career because she knows that women who work for the FBI often get saddled with desk work. Starling wants to break the mold and become a field agent by whatever means necessary. As such, she engages in several conversations with Hannibal Lecter, an imprisoned psychiatrist turned serial killer who enjoys Starling's company but also likes to toy with her. He gets her to reveal personal details, like the death of her father when she was 10 and a traumatic childhood experience where she tried in vain to save some lambs from being slaughtered. As intelligent as Lecter is, Starling always holds her own during their verbal sparring. Ultimately, she gets just as much out of him as he does her. Throughout the novel, her femininity proves to be an asset rather than a hindrance like many of her male colleagues presume. Because Buffalo Bill's victims are women, Starling relates to them in ways her male counterparts cannot. As such, she is often more effective when performing searches and interviewing victims' families. Despite her many capabilities, Starling does have her insecurities. In addition to her self-conscious position regarding her gender, Starling is also insecure about her class background. Starling grew up in the South with lower-class parents, a fact she usually tries to disguise. Starling loves her parents, but most of her current colleagues are from coastal cities and grew up quite wealthy. This insecurity is something Starling never entirely gets over, though she manages to tackle it head-on when Lecter confronts her with it. - Character: Hannibal Lecter. Description: Hannibal Lecter is a renowned clinical psychiatrist turned serial killer who cannibalizes his victims. In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter is imprisoned in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and FBI agents Jack Crawford and Clarice Starling hope that Lecter can provide insight that will help them apprehend the serial killer Buffalo Bill. Getting Lecter to cooperate proves difficult, though, because he is brilliant and nearly impossible to deceive. According to Crawford, Lecter's only weakness is his ego, which Starling and Crawford do their best to exploit. What is terrifying about Lecter is his intimate understanding of human psychology. The first time he meets people, including Starling, he can tell a lot about them; very few details escape his notice. However, as Starling mentions in one of their conversations, it is unclear whether he will turn his insights back on himself. In general, Lecter despises the idea that it is possible for someone else to neatly explain another person's psychology. Any explanations others have ventured about him, he rejects. He considers himself entirely unique, and perhaps he is. One interesting aspect of Lecter's personality is that he has a sense of decorum despite being a serial killer. Lecter abhors rude people and behavior and displays gratitude towards those who treat him well. He is also genuinely interested in Starling and shares a bond with her that neither of them can adequately explain. Although Lecter is behind bars for most of the novel, he eventually escapes and becomes a free man. - Character: Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill. Description: Jame Gumb—also known as Buffalo Bill—is a serial killer who skins his victims and places moth cocoons in their throats. According to Hannibal Lecter, Gumb mistakenly believes he is transsexual. Because he was denied surgery at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic for not matching the proper criteria for transsexuality, Gumb begins killing women and making a suit for himself out of their skin. Gumb perceives this process as a transformation, which is why he puts cocoons in his victim's throats: like Gumb, the pupa in the cocoon is undergoing a transformation. Harris writes several chapters in the novel from Gumb's perspective. In these scenes, it is clear that Gumb does not think of his victims as human beings. Instead, they are objects to be played with, stripped for materials, and then discarded. The only human Gumb shows affection for is his mother. He keeps a VHS tape that he watches repeatedly of his mother winning a beauty pageant. In reality, Gumb never knew his mother because she gave him up for adoption. Gumb also cares about his dog, Precious, and talks to her like a baby. Ultimately, Gumb is a monstrous but tragic figure with no stable sense of identity or morality. - Character: Jack Crawford. Description: Jack Crawford is the head of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI. He recruits Starling, an agent in training, to help him with the Buffalo Bill case because he believes she shows promise. Everyone who works under Crawford likes him and sees him as a great leader. However, he is not always straightforward about his objectives. For instance, he sends Starling to meet Hannibal Lecter under a false pretense, which he only tells her about after the fact. Nonetheless, Starling cannot help but look up to Crawford and treat him like a father figure. The Buffalo Bill case is a difficult time in Crawford's life not only because the FBI is under intense scrutiny, but also because his wife, Bella, is dying of a terminal illness. While trying to catch Buffalo Bill, Crawford spends many sleepless nights by Bella's side. Over the course of the novel, Bella becomes unresponsive and eventually dies, which is difficult for Crawford to endure. Many of his superiors believe he should not be working the Buffalo Bill case, and they eventually take him off of it. However, Crawford still works the case from behind the scenes. - Character: Dr. Chilton. Description: Dr. Chilton is the head of the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He is a bitter, rude, and lonely man driven by his ego. Although he is kind to Starling initially, it is only because he is sexually interested in her. When Starling does not reciprocate his advances, he shuts down and acts like a child. Throughout the novel, Chilton is constantly a thorn in Starling's side. Chilton does not help her when she asks, and he tells Lecter when she lies to him. Additionally, Chilton is the primary figure responsible for allowing Lecter to escape. He takes Lecter to Tennessee and does not take proper security measures. As a result, Lecter kills several people and becomes a free man. - Character: Catherine Baker Martin. Description: Catherine Baker Martin is the daughter of Senator Ruth Martin. Jame Gumb kidnaps her and holds her in his basement. After some time, Catherine realizes who kidnapped her and does everything she can to escape. Eventually, she resorts to capturing Gumb's dog, Precious, and threatening the animal's safety. Luckily, Starling manages to get to Catherine before Gumb can harm her. - Theme: Sexism and Law Enforcement. Description: Clarice Starling, the lead character in The Silence of the Lambs, is a woman working in a sexist and heavily male-dominated context. She is one of only a handful female agents in training at Quantico, and strangers constantly remind her that her gender does not match her occupation. Early in the novel, Starling takes a trip with Jack Crawford, a higher-up at the FBI, to examine the body of one of Buffalo Bill's victims. Quickly, Starling realizes that the local law enforcement—all of whom are men—have no respect for her. To make matters worse, Crawford makes a sexist comment about Starling in front of the other officers. Crawford does not mean what he says—he only uses the remark to get one of the officers alone. However, as Starling tells Crawford later, everything he says matters because the other officers look up to him and use him as a model for their behavior. Indeed, nearly everywhere Starling goes, someone remarks on her gender. Men such as Dr. Chilton and Pilcher flirt with Starling when they are supposed to be engaging with her as a fellow professional. Chilton is particularly heinous because he makes it his life's goal to make Starling's investigation difficult because she spurned his advances. Many of the men throughout the novel treat Starling as though her gender is detrimental to the case she is pursuing. However, throughout the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that the exact opposite is true. For instance, Clarice's gender is the only reason Hannibal Lecter is willing to talk to her in the first place. Additionally, her knowledge of stereotypically feminine skills and subjects, such as sewing and clothing sizes, helps her piece together Buffalo Bill's identity and motivation. By showing the many hurdles that Clarice has to jump through in order to simply do her job, then, the novel takes a critical look at the outdated and sexist mindsets that not only inhibit individual women in the workforce but also hold back entire fields. - Theme: The Nature of Evil. Description: There are two notably evil people in The Silence of the Lambs: Jame Gumb and Hannibal Lecter. Gumb (also known as Buffalo Bill) is a serial killer who imprisons women and skins them. The novel presents him as fundamentally unlikeable and irredeemable. For all intents and purposes, he is evil incarnate, and he functions as the novel's primary villain. Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, is a different beast. Unlike Gumb, Lecter looks and often acts like a civilized human being. He is incredibly intelligent and verbally proficient. His interests range from human psychology to classical music and literature. Despite herself, Starling cannot help but feel drawn to Lecter, and she even feels a certain bond to him that she cannot explain. However, like Gumb, Lecter is quite evil. He is a cannibal who is responsible for multiple murders, and he delights in the pain and suffering of others. Notably, Lecter is not fascinating because he is highly intelligent and charismatic—he is fascinating because he is all of that and evil. Through the juxtaposition of Gumb and Lecter, the novel poses an interesting question: are these two people fundamentally the same? If not, what separates them? Throughout his conversations with Starling, Lecter provides his answer to this question. He hates the FBI's classifications of the psychology of serial killers because they are oversimplified and intellectually lazy. Similarly, he dismisses Starling's broad theory that the definition of an evil person is someone dedicated to bringing about chaos. After all, although Lecter enjoys chaos, he has others interests as well. Gumb also is not dedicated to chaos. If anything, the murders he commits are attempts to bring order to his life, which has been in disorder for as long as he can remember. Ultimately, then, what Harris shows in this novel is that evil does not have a precise definition or personality type. It can exist among all types of people and in any kind of community. - Theme: Class and Shame. Description: During her many conversations with Hannibal Lecter, Starling's class background slowly comes into focus. The first time Lecter meets Starling, he immediately notices the way she is dressed. He remarks that she looks like a "rube" who is trying to appeal to a sophisticated class of people but is only pulling off a poor imitation. Lecter's comments cut deep for Starling because she does feel embarrassment about how she grew up. Later in the novel, Starling tells Lecter the story of how her father died; she claims he was a town marshal, and two people addicted to drugs shot him while he was on duty. Eventually, she admits that he was little more than a security guard and that she played up her description of him to impress Lecter. Again, Starling's behavior suggests she is ashamed of where she came from, even though she has great love and respect for her father. Over the course of the novel, Starling never resolves her inferiority complex. However, the novel also shows the reader that Starling has nothing to be ashamed of because her Southern, rural background often helps her while working the Buffalo Bill case. She knows how to talk to her fellow Southerners when trying to get them to do what she wants. In this way, she stands in stark contrast to someone like Crawford, who is not as effective as Starling when dealing with people in the South. As such, the novel ultimately advocates for the importance of class diversity, especially in a field like law enforcement, in which it is necessary for agents to deal with people from wide and varied backgrounds. - Theme: Manipulation. Description: Manipulation is an important tool for all of the main players in the novel. The plot starts with Crawford manipulating Starling into speaking with Hannibal Lecter. Crawford tells Starling that he wants Lecter to fill out a questionnaire, knowing full well that Lecter will never agree to it. In reality, Crawford wants information on the Buffalo Bill case, but he knows he will never get it if he sends Starling in with that goal in mind. Additionally, Starling and Lecter's conversations are full of manipulations, as each party tries to get information out of the other. Starling goes into her conversation with Lecter with a particular goal in mind and Lecter does the same, although his goal is often opposite Starling's. As such, they try to manipulate the conversation to meet their own ends. For instance, Starling often plays to Lecter's ego, allowing him to think he has figured out information about the Buffalo Bill case before the FBI. Meanwhile, Lecter slowly convinces Starling to give up personal information about herself, which he knows makes her uncomfortable. In addition to these subtle conversational acts of manipulation, Buffalo Bill and Lecter perform violent manipulative acts. Buffalo Bill tricks women into thinking he is injured so they will let their guard down around him. Meanwhile, Lecter pretends to be a dying police officer so he can escape from captivity. Although manipulation is a term that can carry negative moral weight, The Silence of the Lambs demonstrates that it is not inherently moral or immoral. Starling manipulates Lecter because she is trying to save lives and her lies are inconsequential. Meanwhile, Lecter's manipulations involve actively killing innocent people. As such, the novel argues that although manipulation always requires a victim—that is, the person being manipulated—it ultimately exists on a wide and often ambiguous moral spectrum. - Climax: Starling unwittingly enters Jame Gumb's house and chases after him in the basement. While in complete darkness, Starling shoots and kills Gumb after she hears him cock his gun. - Summary: Jack Crawford, head of the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI, sends Clarice Starling, an agent in training, to meet with Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter. Lecter is a renowned psychiatrist turned serial killer. Crawford wants Starling to get Lecter to complete a questionnaire regarding his psychological profile. In reality, Crawford hopes Starling will get information from Lecter regarding Buffalo Bill, an active serial killer who skins his victims. Starling meets with Lecter at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter immediately realizes why Crawford sent Starling, and after picking her apart psychologically, he gives her a vague lead to help with the Buffalo Bill case: he advises her to "look in Raspail's car." Starling takes Lecter's advice and visits a storage unit owned by Benjamin Raspail, who was one of Lecter's patients before Lecter murdered him. In the unit, she finds a severed head, though she does not know who it belongs to or what it has to do with the Buffalo Bill case. Starling repeatedly returns to Lecter for more information. He tells her that the severed head belongs to Raspail's former lover—during one of his therapy sessions with Lecter, Raspail confessed to killing him. Lecter also repeatedly implies that he knows who Buffalo Bill is, though he does not share his information with Starling. Instead, he asks Starling personal questions about herself. The more Starling tells Lecter, the more he shares with her. While Starling pursues the case, Buffalo Bill—who, unbeknownst to the FBI, is a man named Jame Gumb—kidnaps Catherine Baker Martin, the daughter of a United States Senator. Because Catherine Baker Martin is a high-profile person, the FBI faces more pressure and scrutiny than ever to solve the case quickly. So, Crawford sends Starling to Lecter with a fake deal: if Lecter helps them capture Buffalo Bill before he can kill Catherine Baker Martin, he will get transferred to a better facility where he will have more freedom. At this point, Lecter reveals more information than before, though he still does not give Starling a name. He tells Starling that Buffalo Bill is killing women because he thinks he is transsexual, and he wants to make a body suit for himself out of women's skin. But Lecter clarifies that he is not truly transsexual; this is just one of many ways Buffalo Bill has tried to transform himself throughout his life. After Starling leaves, Dr. Chilton, who oversees Lecter, tells him that Starling's deal was fake. However, Chilton is in contact with Senator Ruth Martin, Catherine's mother, and promises to get Lecter a real deal if he cooperates. Chilton takes Lecter to Tennessee, where they meet with Senator Martin. Lecter gives the Senator what he claims is Buffalo Bill's real name, but he lies. Around the same time, Starling is also in Tennessee pursuing a lead. However, her superiors at the Department of Justice take her off the case. Before returning home, Starling goes to the Memphis Courthouse, where the Tennessee authorities are holding Lecter in a cage. She lies her way into the building and speaks to Lecter one final time. Lecter asks Starling for information about herself in return for information about the case. Starling tells Lecter about one of her childhood memories. After her father's death, Starling went to live with her relatives on a ranch. She became close with the animals and was horrified when she learned her relatives slaughtered them as part of their business. Starling woke one night to the sound of lambs crying as her relatives slaughtered them. Starling still hears that sound in her dreams. Before she can get answers from Lecter, Chilton arrives and takes her away from him. However, before she goes, Lecter hands her back her case file, which he had been looking over. After Starling leaves Tennessee, Lecter breaks out of his cage by murdering the police officers looking after him. He poses as one of the officers by using a pocket knife to carve one of their faces off and place it on his own; he also changes into the man's clothes. Then, he calls an ambulance for himself and gets carried out by EMTs. By the time the authorities realize what has happened, Lecter has killed the EMTs and is nowhere to be found. Following Lecter's escape, Crawford finally gets a breakthrough in the Buffalo Bill case that sends him and his team to an address in Illinois. Meanwhile, Starling travels to Ohio to look at one of the old Buffalo Bill crime scenes, hoping that she will find something to help her find the case. Crawford's lead ends up being a bust. However, as Starling interviews people around town, she unwittingly finds herself in Jame Gumb's home, where he is holding Catherine. At first, Starling does not recognize Jame Gumb as the suspect she's looking for. However, while in Gumb's house, she spots a rare Death's Head Moth in the house. Suddenly, she realizes she is speaking to Buffalo Bill because the killer shoves the cocoons of this exotic moth into his victims' throats. Starling tries to arrest Gumb, but he runs down into his basement. Starling chases after Gumb, and she eventually shoots and kills him. Luckily, Catherine is still alive, and Starling saves her from the pit Gumb was holding her in. Following Gumb's death, the FBI scours his basement and discovers several bodies they did not know about. Starling discovers that Lecter knew about Gumb because he was friends with Raspail. Gumb is also the one who actually killed Raspail's lover, Klaus, whose head Starling found in Raspail's storage unit. After the Buffalo Bill case is closed, Lecter sends Starling a letter. Although he does not say so to Starling, he has undergone a lot of plastic surgery and changed his identity. In his letter, Lecter asks Starling to have the newspapers publish something about whether the lambs from her dream have gone silent. Lecter suspects they have for the time being, but they will start up again eventually. Meanwhile, Starling sleeps soundly next to Pilcher, an entomologist she met while on the Buffalo Bill case, who she is now dating.

- Genre: Psychological Thriller, Mystery - Title: The Silent Patient - Point of view: Theo Faber is the story's first-person narrator, though his account is intercut with excerpts from Alicia Berenson's diary. - Setting: The Grove, a London psych ward; various locations in London, Cambridge, and Surrey, England - Character: Theo Faber. Description: Theo Faber, the first-person narrator of The Silent Patient, is a skilled psychotherapist. Having been raised by an abusive father, Theo finds solace in talk therapy; he so idolizes Ruth, his psychologist, that he trains to follow in her footsteps. Though Ruth allows him to find a brief period of happiness, in which he meets and marries his wife Kathy, Theo soon falls back into his old patterns, torturing himself with obsession and self-loathing. After becoming intrigued by the scandalous story of Alicia Berenson's murder, Theo gets a job in the psych ward where Alicia resides, hoping to gain insight into this unreadable public figure. In his effort to understand Alicia, Theo transgresses both professional and personal boundaries, reaching out to Alicia's former friends (like Jean-Felix Martin) and family members (like Max Berenson). Indeed, Theo's empathy for Alicia extends to such a degree that his colleagues begin to worry for him: "you're in deep with Alicia," clinic director Diomedes warns, "your feelings are bound up with hers like a tangled ball of wool." Ultimately, however, Theo's ability to recognize his transgressions does not prevent them: he feels that from the moment he met Alicia, his "fate was already decided—like in a Greek tragedy." In addition to reflecting the tragic form of the novel, Theo also embodies The Silent Patient's fascination with dishonesty. Though he is the narrator, Theo does not always play fair with his readers; instead, he manipulates timelines, casts unnecessary suspicion, and conceals crucial facts. - Character: Alicia Berenson. Description: Nearly every other character in the novel is in some way connected to Alicia Berenson. She is wife to Gabriel and sister-in-law to Max; she is Vernon and Eva Rose's daughter, Lydia Rose's niece, and Paul Rose's older cousin; and she has complicated, one-sided friendships with her gallerist Jean-Felix Martin and her neighbor Barbie Hellman. But perhaps Alicia's most important, most complex bond is with her therapist Theo Faber, who shows an almost obsessive desire to understand Alicia's inner secrets and motivations. Once famous as a talented painter of photo-realistic art, Alicia gains worldwide notoriety when she shoots Gabriel in the face five times, seemingly without any motivation. In the years following the murder, Alicia falls completely silent, communicating only through a self-portrait titled Alcestis, after the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides. Alicia's silence reflects her lifelong sense of betrayal: first her father and then Gabriel tell her that they are willing to sacrifice her life for someone else's, and each of these exchanges feels to Alicia like a kind of "psychic murder." But though Alicia is in great pain, she is also incredibly sharp, possessed of a keen intellect and a great deal of willpower. That strength is especially evident in her relationship with Theo—after recognizing Theo from her life before the murder, Alicia is able to hold him off and condemn him for his crimes, all from behind the walls of a psychiatric ward. - Character: Gabriel Berenson. Description: Gabriel Berenson is Alicia's husband, Max's younger brother, and Kathy Faber's secret lover. As a professional fashion photographer, Gabriel lives a glamorous, artistic life; like many of the people around him, Alicia finds herself almost irresistibly drawn to him. But in addition to his harmful affair, Gabriel conceals a secret, second self. He keeps a gun in the house, which makes Alicia feel as if she is "living with a stranger," and he values his own life above all else, as is evident in his willingness to sacrifice Alicia to save himself. Ultimately, both Theo and Alicia believe that Gabriel's treatment of his wife is of a piece with the abuse Alicia suffered at the hands of her father, Vernon Rose. - Character: Kathy Faber. Description: Kathy Faber is Theo's wife. Having met when they were both dating other people, Kathy and Theo fell in "love at first sight"; Theo is enchanted by Kathy's warmth and laughter, and he feels that she is teaching him a kind of happiness he had never known before. However, Kathy betrays Theo with Gabriel, having a passionate affair behind her husband's back. Theo often feels (in an opinion backed up by his therapist Ruth) that Kathy's status as a professional actor makes her more skilled at "pretending" in daily life. Fascinatingly, Kathy's trajectory throughout the novel illustrates the complicated dichotomy between silence and speech: while Kathy begins as one of the most talkative, open characters, by the end of the story, she is almost totally silent, wrapped up in a quiet depression of her own. - Character: Max Berenson. Description: Max Berenson is Alicia's lawyer, Tanya's boss and husband, and Gabriel's adopted older brother. While Gabriel is handsome and effortlessly charming, Max is physically unattractive, traditional, and somewhat frightening. Max claims to be straightforward and law-abiding, but in fact, his protestations that he "loathed" Alicia cover up his lust for her; on more than one occasion, he tries to sexually assault her while Gabriel is in the next room. Though Max offers Theo some help in his investigation, pointing him towards Dr. West and providing insight into Alicia's relationship with Gabriel, he is also one of the first characters to publicly call Theo out for transgressing professional boundaries. - Character: Jean-Felix Martin. Description: Jean-Felix is Alicia's gallerist—and her oldest friend. In the weeks leading up to Gabriel's murder, however, Alicia tries to cut ties with Jean-Felix, explaining that she feels that he is using her for her artistic reputation; Jean-Felix refuses to hear this, instead blaming Gabriel for driving a wedge between them. Years later, when Theo is trying to understand what happened, Jean-Felix proves to be a key source of information: he was the one who introduced Alicia to Euripides's play Alcestis, and he is the one who suggests to Theo that Alicia should be allowed to paint while at the Grove. But despite his helpfulness, Theo deeply distrusts Jean-Felix, feeling that he is too self-involved to be a real friend to Alicia. - Character: Paul Rose. Description: Paul Rose is Alicia's younger cousin, Lydia's son, and Vernon's nephew. Though as a young boy he adored Alicia, in recent years, Paul has lost touch with his cousin—the only time he reaches out to her is when he needs money, having fallen into debt because of a gambling problem. Lydia Rose's lifelong manipulation of her son has kept Paul fairly homebound, leaving him without friends or the semblance of an adult life; both Alicia and Theo continually note that Paul is "stunted." Though Paul seems frightening at first, Theo eventually comes to realize that he is harmless and sad, occupied only with his gambling and his innocent crush on Tanya Berenson. - Character: Lydia Rose. Description: Lydia Rose is Alicia's aunt, Paul's father, and Vernon's sister. Lydia is physically fearsome and very overweight; her weight becomes a subject of caricature in Alicia's painting, and the resulting artwork drives a deep wedge between aunt and niece. But Lydia and Alicia have never been close, in part because Lydia is an angry and manipulative woman and in part because she believes that Alicia is an ungrateful "bitch." In the novel, Lydia is shown to be emotionally abusive to her son Paul, making him attend to her every whim and thus stunting his growth. - Character: Vernon Rose. Description: Vernon Rose is Alicia's father and Lydia Rose's brother. Vernon was deeply devoted to his wife Eva, Alicia's mother—and when Eva killed herself, Vernon told Alicia that he wished she had died instead. To both Alicia and Theo, Vernon's cruelty is a kind of "psychic infanticide"; Theo sees a direct line between Vernon's emotional abuse and Alicia's later murder of Gabriel. For the rest of her life, Alicia openly "hates" her father, so much so that after his death she experiences a kind of psychotic break. Vernon embodies Theo's belief that "we are shared and completed by unseen, unremembered forces; namely, our parents." - Character: Eva Rose. Description: Eva Rose is Alicia's mother and Vernon Rose's wife. Always troubled (and often dependent on alcohol), Alicia killed herself when she was 32 years old by driving into a brick wall—with a young Alicia in the passenger seat. Though Alicia has some happy memories of her mother, she also fears that she has inherited Eva's instability—and sometimes wonders if her mother meant to kill them both in the car wreck, instead of just herself. - Character: Ruth. Description: Ruth is Theo's long-time therapist, whom he met in college. Ruth helps Theo work through his traumatic upbringing, shedding the tears Theo cannot when he describes his father's abusive behavior. Years after their therapeutic relationship has ended, Ruth remains a resource—and a friend—to Theo; after he learns that Kathy has cheated on him, he seeks out Ruth's advice (though he ultimately ignores her suggestion to end things with Kathy). Above all else, Ruth emphasizes the value of honesty in both a therapist and a partner. Ruth also teaches Theo how to empathize with his patients without blurring the lines: "you must be receptive to your patient's feelings," she instructs, "but you must not hold onto them—they are not yours." In accordance with the tragic form of the novel, Ruth often acts as a voice of dramatic irony—her advice might save Theo, if only he would take it. - Character: Lazarus Diomedes. Description: Professor Diomedes is the head of psychology at the Grove, which means he also acts as supervisor to Theo, Christian, Indira, and Yuri. Diomedes is known for his slightly unconventional embrace of group therapy, a costly approach that puts the Grove in constant danger of being shut down. Diomedes often finds himself at odds with the Grove's manager Stephanie, but for the most part, he acts as a peacekeeper between the various therapists and patients at the ward. He is an especially important mentor to Theo: he encourages him to embrace his cigarette-smoking ("we're all a little bit crazy"), and also cautions Theo against confusing his own feelings with Alicia's. Because Diomedes is Greek, Theo turns to him for help with interpreting the Greek tragedy Alcestis. - Character: Christian West. Description: Christian is one of the therapists at the Grove; he also worked with Theo in his previous job at the Broadmoor clinic. Christian often antagonizes Theo, implying that his relationship with Alicia is inappropriate ("borderlines are seductive," he likes to say) and emphasizing medication over talk therapy. Ultimately, Christian is revealed to be the mysterious Dr. West, Gabriel's psychiatrist friend who treated Alicia in the weeks leading up to the murder. In one of the many examples of dishonesty throughout the text, Christian conceals this fact—and that lie, combined with his standoffish demeanor, makes it easy for Theo to frame him for the attempted murder of Alicia. - Character: Indira Sharma. Description: Indira Sharma is one of the therapists at the Grove. She is the person who interviews Theo for his new job, and as such, she often acts as an informal mentor and guide. Indira supports Theo's dogged focus on helping Alicia, and she helps Theo push back against Christian's more medication-based approach. - Character: Yuri. Description: Yuri, an immigrant from Latvia, is the kindly head nurse at the Grove. He is particularly fond of Alicia, and he tends to act as a go-between for Alicia and Theo. Yuri is one of the first people to urge Theo against his obsession with Alicia, warning that Theo should "go home to Kathy, who loves you…and leave Alicia alone." Despite Yuri's lovely demeanor, however, he also reflects the novel's focus on the gap between presentation and reality—towards the end of the story, Theo notices that Yuri is working with Elif to deal drugs in the ward. - Character: Elif. Description: Elif is one of the patients at the Grove. She is a physically imposing, erratic woman; Theo quickly learns that she has been placed in the Grove for suffocating both her sister and her mother to death. She has a particularly tense relationship with Alicia, whom she constantly taunts, especially about her closeness with Theo. After defacing one of Alicia's paintings by writing the word "slut" over it, Elif is attacked by Alicia, who stabs her in the eye with a paintbrush. Elif exemplifies Theo's theory that childhood trauma informs adult behavior: "Elif made you feel repulsion and hatred," he explains, "because that was how her mother had made her feel." - Character: Barbie Hellman. Description: Barbie Hellman is a wealthy American divorcee. She lives next door to Alicia and Gabriel Berenson at the time of the murder, and she is the one who hears gunshots and calls the police. Though Alicia cannot stand Barbie's endless, self-absorbed chatter, she does confide in Barbie that she fears a mysterious man is following her. Later, Barbie uses this information to claim that she and Alicia were close confidantes. Theo sees Barbie as the ultimate narcissist, a stark contrast to his own, more empathetic method of relating to others. - Character: Tanya Berenson. Description: Tanya Berenson is Max Berenson's receptionist and wife; they met when she started working in his office and married in the aftermath of Gabriel's tragic death. Theo notices that Tanya is "afraid" of Max, in part because she seems to be aware of his strong feelings for Alicia. Tanya is pretty, sweet, and nervous, and her demure demeanor makes her an object of affection for Alicia's cousin Paul Rose. - Character: Stephanie Clarke. Description: Stephanie Clarke is the manager of the Grove, who arrives a few months before Theo does. Diomedes distrusts Stephanie, believing her to be "in league" with the wealthy Trust that helps to fund the Grove. But though Stephanie is stern and rigid in her methods, over time, she reveals her primary focus to be the patients' safety and health. She is responsible for much of the increased security at the Grove. - Character: Rowena Hart. Description: Rowena Hart is the art therapist at the Grove. Though she is technically one of Alicia's therapists, she resents her, in part because she is jealous of Alicia's superior skill as a painter. Theo thinks of her as a "plumber," or a therapist without any real skill: all she does is prod patients for information without offering insight or solace. - Character: Chief Inspector Steven Allen. Description: Chief Inspector Steven Allen is the detective in charge of solving the attempted murder of Alicia Berenson. Though he initially suspects Christian West of the crime, after he reads Alicia's diary, Inspector Allen shifts his attention to Theo. In the closing scene of The Silent Patient, Allen arrives at Theo's house, presumably to arrest him. - Theme: Empathy, Identification, and Boundaries. Description: Over and over again in Alex Michaelides's thriller The Silent Patient, Theo Faber—the book's first-person narrator and a trainee psychotherapist—insists that the goal of his job is to feel his patients' pain for them. He recalls his own beloved therapist, Ruth, shedding the tears he himself was unable to as a young boy; later, in his own practice, he takes on his patients' mystifying rage or thumping headaches. And while he prides himself on his ability to feel other people's pain, he is consistently disdainful of his friends' and colleagues' self-involvement, of their narcissistic monologues and thoughtless behavior. Empathy, Theo suggests, is the essential ingredient of any meaningful relationship, therapeutic or otherwise; to fail to see others' perspectives is to fail to care for them. But when Theo takes on the troubled Alicia Berenson as his patient, he becomes far too obsessive about entering her mind—about trying to absorb her emotional state as his own. Theo's determination to empathize with Alicia is so obvious that one fellow therapist warns him he is "over-identifying." And indeed, by the end of the novel, Theo will feel unable to distinguish himself from Alicia. Whether it's "crashing through every last boundary between therapist and patient" or entering her marital home because it reminds him of his own, Theo transgresses every personal and professional line between himself and Alicia. Thus even as The Silent Patient calls for empathy, it also calls for distance—because if identifying with someone's pain can be healing, blurring the boundaries between self and other can only do harm. - Theme: Tragedy and Destiny. Description: Much of the plot of Alex Michaelides's book The Silent Patient revolves around the play "Alcestis," a Greek tragedy by Euripides. But even as the novel references the plot of that specific play, it also embraces the form of Greek tragedy, in which a talented person falls to their doom through a combination of hubris (over-confidence) and destiny. As a psychotherapist, Theo spends much of his time trying to understand the links between adult behavior and youthful trauma, suggesting that his patients' futures are often predetermined by the events of their past. Similarly, Greek tragedies emphasize the inevitability of pain and suffering; famous characters like Oedipus and Antigone are predestined for horrible ends, unable to alter the sad fate in front of them. And as Theo embarks on his own tragic journey, his obsession with a patient named Alicia Berenson, he begins to explicitly link his behavior to the behavior of a tragic hero. For example, when he calls Alicia's family and friends, in violation of standard therapeutic practice, Theo knows that what he is doing is wrong—"but even then it was too late to stop. My fate was already decided—like in a Greek tragedy." On the one hand, then, The Silent Patient bills itself as a "psychological detective story," in which therapists try to unlock their patients' minds just as police officers might survey a crime scene. But on the other hand, the novel finds a formal link between therapy and Greek tragedy, as therapists work to uncover the childhood circumstances that determine their patients' destinies. - Theme: Honesty vs. Deception. Description: "Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist," advises Ruth, one of the many psychologists in Alex Michaelides's thriller The Silent Patient. "We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, […] admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?" But despite the high value Ruth—and the rest of the novel's therapists—place on honesty, nearly every character in the narrative is a liar. Kathy is cheating on her husband Theo, the book's narrator; Yuri, the kindly head nurse of the psych ward where the novel is set, sells drugs to patients; Max, a well-respected lawyer, secretly assaults his brother's wife. And in each case, the betrayal has disastrous, sometimes literally fatal consequences. Whether it is in the bedroom or the therapy room, The Silent Patient demonstrates the need for real honesty as a vital part of human safety and security. But despite the focus on honesty, deception is built in to both the story's content and its form. For as Theo, a therapist, walks readers through his first-person perspective on the events of the psych ward, he is also obscuring the truth of his own circumstances. More than adding intrigue, then, the novel's final twist allows readers to experience the kind of betrayal the characters have been struggling with all along. And in upending its readers' expectations, The Silent Patient forces its audience to search for clues like any good detective (or therapist)—to pry open the gaps between professed honesty and practiced deception. - Theme: Childhood Trauma. Description: Theo Faber, a psychotherapist and the first-person narrator of Alex Michaelides's book The Silent Patient, believes that pain and rage originate "in the land before memory, in the world of early childhood, with abuse and mistreatment"; thus, to solve the mystery of an adult's psyche, Theo opines, one must retrace their history. It is unsurprising, then, that when Theo decides to help a troubled painter named Alicia Berenson, the first thing he writes down on his notepad is the word "CHILDHOOD." Over the course of the narrative, Theo revisits Alicia's childhood home—"the roots of her adult life," he reflects upon arrival, "were buried here"—and obsesses over her relationships with her parents. But while Theo pries into the details of his patient's childhood, he also struggles to break free from his own youthful traumas. As a young boy, Theo's father made him feel worthless; as an adult, he seeks out the same feeling, choosing a wife (Kathy) who makes him believe he is "useless, ugly, worthless, nothing." And even in smaller ways, Theo's childhood patterns repeat themselves: the book begins with a young Theo catching snowflakes on his tongue, and it ends with the adult Theo trying desperately to do the same. Ultimately, through both Theo and Alicia, The Silent Patient shows the importance that childhood trauma and joy play in adult life—and the impossibility of ever fully shedding one's past. - Theme: Silence vs. "The Talking Cure". Description: Alicia Berenson, the titular silent patient of Alex Michaelides's novel The Silent Patient, never speaks; for six years after the murder of her beloved husband Gabriel (which she may or may not have committed), Alicia is entirely mute, communicating only through the occasional painting or act of violence. For a therapist like narrator Theo Faber, Alicia's lack of communication is an almost impossible challenge to solve—without speech, how can therapy, which Theo calls the "the talking cure," ever work? More than that, as someone who himself had been healed through talking about past traumas, Theo sees silence as the ultimate barrier to mental peace and safety. But fascinatingly, Alicia's own trajectory through therapy complicates this simple dichotomy. Alicia is an artist, and her artwork often communicates her contradictory feelings just as clearly as any speech would; as her gallerist and friend Jean-Felix puts it, Alicia's "refusal to comment" is her real message. And when Alicia does finally speak, with a voice "like a creaking gate," the story she tells Theo is quickly revealed to be a lie. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Theo feels that "the talking cure itself" has failed—and the book's readers have come to be suspicious of all speech, from Alicia's falsified therapy monologue to the very words on the page in front of them. For even as The Silent Patient affirms the value of therapy, it also emphasizes that silence can be its own form of communication—and that there are some forms of pain that can never be fully captured by language. - Climax: Therapist Theo helps his patient Alicia make sense of the man who, many years ago, kept following her—before revealing that he himself was that man. - Summary: Theo Faber, a respected psychotherapist, describes a sensational murder from six years earlier. Late one August night, Alicia Berenson, a renowned painter, shot her husband Gabriel five times in the face. After the murder, Alicia was tried, found guilty, and institutionalized at the Grove, a psychiatric ward. Through it all, she never said a word—earning herself the nickname "the silent patient." Her only comment is a self-portrait entitled Alcestis. After a period of intense media attention, most people lose interest in the case. But Theo is so drawn to Alicia that he leaves his job to work at the Grove, taking her on as a patient. At the Grove, Theo connects with Lazarus Diomedes, the head of psychiatry, with nurse Yuri, and with fellow therapist Indira. But he spars with Christian, an old colleague who prefers to prescribe medication rather than talk through issues. As Theo begins to treat Alicia, he reflects on his own troubled childhood. Theo had an abusive father and an ineffectual mother; his only happy memory from childhood is of playing in the snow by himself. Though he was able to get out of his home and go to college, Theo was so haunted by his father's mistreatment that he tried to kill himself. Fortunately, after a failed suicide attempt, Theo found solace in his therapist Ruth, whose warmth and wisdom inspired him to become a therapist himself. In the present, Theo digs into Alicia's file, learning about her relationships in and outside of the Grove. He discovers she was in a violent altercation with a woman named Elif, one of the ward's most fearsome patients. He also introduces himself to Alicia's former gallerist Jean-Felix Martin. Though Theo realizes he is obsessing over Alicia, he feels that he is powerless to stop himself from going deeper: "his fate was already decided—like in a Greek tragedy." Meanwhile, in a series of diary entries from the summer of the murder, Alicia describes her relationship with Gabriel. She loves him so much that it scares her—she even wants to paint him as Jesus Christ. Alicia is also haunted by memories of her mother's suicide. Theo reflects on his relationship with his wife Kathy, a lovely, energetic actress. One night, however, Kathy accidentally leaves her laptop open—and Theo discovers she has been having an affair. Theo visits his old therapist Ruth, who encourages him to leave Kathy, but Theo ignores her advice. Instead, he focuses more on work, promising Alicia that he wants to help her "see clearly." Suddenly, in a fit of rage, she attacks him. Despite the attack, Theo only tries to get closer to Alicia. To learn more about her, he goes to meet Gabriel's brother Max Berenson and his receptionist-turned-wife, Tanya. Whereas Gabriel was handsome and charismatic, Max is unattractive and frightening. Max tells Theo that Alicia has a long history of mental illness: after her father died, she had tried to kill herself. When Theo calls Max to follow up, Max complains to Diomedes. The novel returns to Alicia's diary entries. She reveals that Gabriel keeps a gun in their house, a topic of much conflict between the couple. Even more shockingly, Alicia reveals that Max is secretly in love with her—on multiple occasions, he has forcibly assaulted her, kissing and groping her while Gabriel is in the next room. Theo then travels to Alicia's childhood home, where he meets her adoring younger cousin Paul and her angry, morbidly obese Aunt Lydia. Lydia has always hated Alicia, and Theo finds himself overcome with pity and disgust for the whole family. Theo visits Jean-Felix, Alicia's gallerist, and studies several of Alicia's paintings. Jean-Felix insists that Alicia's silence is her message, and he urges Theo to read a copy of Euripides's Alcestis, the play on which Alicia's self-portrait is based. In the play, Alcestis's husband Admetus asks his wife to sacrifice her life for his own. Though Alcestis is eventually revived and brought back to earth, she never speaks again. Through diary entries, Alicia reveals that, in the weeks leading up to the murder, Paul had asked to borrow money—he had a serious gambling problem, and he was in debt. And just a few days before Gabriel's death, Alicia had severed her professional relationship with Jean-Felix, much to his despair. In the present, Jean-Felix suggests that Theo should allow Alicia to paint as a way to express her feelings; Theo thinks this is a wonderful idea. Back at home, Theo follows Kathy, but he is unable to catch her in the act of betrayal. His only moment of relief comes when Alicia, still refusing to speak, gives Theo her diary to read. In the diary, Alicia explains that she has started to notice a man following her and watching the house. She tells Gabriel, but he dismisses her, claiming either that the man is Jean-Felix or that she is hallucinating things. Alicia also tells her narcissistic neighbor, Barbie Hellman. Gabriel, fearing that Alicia is going insane, forces her to see a therapist friend of his: Dr. West. Dr. West prescribes Alicia more pills, but she secretly refuses to take them. Theo connects the dots—Dr. West is Christian West, his colleague. Theo confronts Christian with his knowledge, assuring Alicia that he is trying to protect her. Alicia finishes her picture, which depicts the Grove on fire. In the painting, Theo and Alicia stand in the doorway, and it is unclear whether Theo is rescuing Alicia or throwing her into the flames. After work, Theo follows Kathy to a park, and this time, he sees her with a man. He listens to them have sex in the woods, and he resolves to kill the man. But after following the man home, Theo decides that he is not a murderer—instead, he will have to do something "cleverer." As he continues to spy, he notices that Kathy's lover has an adoring wife of his own. Theo returns to Alicia's childhood home, where he learns a disturbing story: after her mother died, Alicia's father Vernon told her he wished Alicia had been killed instead. Theo feels that he has unlocked the key to Alicia's psyche—and sure enough, she soon starts speaking, telling him her life story. However, when she describes the night of the murder, Theo is convinced she is lying. The next morning, Alicia is hospitalized, having been found comatose. Diomedes thinks she has overdosed, but Theo suspects murder. The police arrive, and Theo reveals that he thinks Christian is the culprit. Theo returns to Kathy's lover's house, and he sees the man's wife again. Theo then breaks into the house, and the wife turns around, revealing herself to be Alicia Berenson. Readers discover that Theo has willfully manipulated the timelines of the novel: Kathy's affair with Gabriel happened years ago, before the murder, and Theo has been the man watching Alicia all along. In a final diary entry, written just before sinking into a coma, Alicia tells the entire truth of what happened with Theo. He had entered the house, taken Gabriel's gun, and told Gabriel to choose whether to die or whether to sacrifice Alicia. Gabriel chose his own life over Alicia's—and though Theo left before enacting any violence, Alicia, horrified at the betrayal, then shot her husband five times. In the present day, Theo and Kathy have moved to Surrey, outside of London; Kathy is depressed, and the two almost never speak to each other anymore. Chief Inspector Allen, the man in charge of Alicia's case, arrives at Theo's house. The inspector reveals that Alicia has written a final diary entry, one which almost certainly incriminates Theo. In the closing scene, Theo tries to catch snowflakes on his tongue as Inspector Allen reads the entry aloud.

- Genre: Verse Novel - Title: The Simple Gift - Point of view: First Person (alternating between the views of the three main characters) - Setting: A small town in Victoria, Australia in 1998 - Character: Billy Luckett. Description: Billy Luckett is a 16-year-old Australian boy who runs away from his abusive and alcoholic dad. After he arrives in Bendarat, he falls in love with Caitlin Holmes and becomes a surrogate son to Old Bill. Billy is streetwise—as demonstrated by his ability to fend for himself on the road and living on the margins of society in his train car. He's also intelligent—although he frequently skips classes before dropping out of high school altogether, he reads voraciously, and he thinks deeply about the books he encounters. The neglect and physical and emotional abuse Billy experienced from his father did not destroy Billy's kind and sensitive soul. He's quick to understand that Old Bill, slowly dying of a broken heart over the tragic loss of his family, needs companionship. And he provides it, befriending Old Bill over shared breakfasts and encouraging him to stop drinking and to slowly begin to deal with his past. Billy accepts and loves Old Bill unconditionally, despite Old Bill's alcoholism, battered appearance, and impoverished existence. This is one of the ways in which Billy shows his maturity, despite his youth. Furthermore, Billy has a mature, philosophical understanding of value. In contrast to Caitlin's family, which measures itself by material possessions, Billy knows that true value in life lies beyond material possessions. He finds value in the beauty of nature, personal freedom, and the joys of friendship. - Character: Caitlin Holmes. Description: Caitlin Holmes is a 17-year-old girl living in Bendarat where she attends a private high school and works at the local McDonald's. It is there that she meets Billy Luckett, with whom she develops a friendship that later turns into a romance. Though her wealthy parents make sure she has more material things than anyone could need, they fail to give her the love and acceptance she craves. Thus, although she initially responded to Old Bill's poverty and desperation with repulsion, Caitlin ultimately finds herself more comfortable with Billy and Old Bill than with her family or her friends Kate and Petra. She repeatedly demonstrates a desire to push herself outside her comfort zone, first by befriending Billy instead of turning him in, and then by inviting Old Bill and Billy to dinner at her house. Although she comes from wealth, like Billy she understands that love, friendship, and the beauty of nature mean so much more than fancy electronics and nice computers. At the end of the novel, she prepares to introduce her parents to Billy and begins creating her future on her own terms rather than giving in to her parents' dreams for her. - Character: Old Bill. Description: Old Bill is a middle-aged man who lives in a train car on the outskirts of the Bendarat train station. He used to be a successful lawyer with a family, a dog, and a house in the nice part of town. However, he chose to abandon his home and live a wandering lifestyle after a pair of tragedies: first, his daughter Jessie fell out of a tree to her death, then his wife died in a car accident a year later. At the beginning of the novel, Old Bill embodies desperation and loss; his traumas have driven him to the margins of society and to excessive drinking. But he finds redemption in the friendship he develops over shared breakfasts with Billy. Eventually, Billy becomes a surrogate son to Old Bill, and Old Bill eventually offers his empty house to the teenager as a place to stay while he figures out his next steps in life. Old Bill also finds redemption in the figure of Caitlin, who learns to see beyond his circumstances and recognize his humanity despite the disarray of his life when she meets him. Bolstered by his relationship with the teenagers, Old Bill finds the strength to quit drinking. By the end of the novel, he has begun to lay the ghosts of his family to rest. - Character: Jessie. Description: Jessie is Old Bill's daughter. When she was 10 years old, she fell out of a tree to her death. This tragedy upended Old Bill's life and led him to where the beginning of the novel finds him: living on the margins of society and wasting his life on bouts of drinking. Through Old Bill's memories of his daughter, the reader sees who Old Bill was before his tragedies—a loving, if somewhat distant, father. - Character: Ernie. Description: Ernie is the conductor of the train that Billy Luckett jumps when he runs away from home. Ernie treats Billy with kindness and compassion rather than calling the authorities on him. In this way, he—like Irene Thompson—contrasts with Billy's abusive father and offers a pointed reminder that the truly valuable things in life are relationships with others. - Character: Irene Thompson. Description: Irene Thompson is the chief librarian in Bendarat. When unhoused teenager Billy Luckett begins to spend his afternoons reading books in the library instead of school, she treats him with kindness and compassion. Like Ernie, she shows how people can support and care for each other. Instead of turning him in, she supports his reading habit by talking with him about the books. And, later, she encourages Billy to consider going back to school with government assistance. - Character: Kate. Description: Kate is a friend of Caitlin Holmes and Petra. Caitlin talks with Petra and Kate about her growing relationship with Billy rather than her parents because she has a deeper connection with her friends than her family. At one point, Kate admits describes her underwhelming first experience with sex. Her romantic life thus contrasts with Caitlin and Billy's, helping to emphasize the importance of building strong relationships. - Theme: Riches and Poverty. Description: When teenager Billy Luckett leaves his abusive, alcoholic Dad, he has only $50, a few changes of clothes, and a handful of apples to his name. Being poor and unhoused aren't easy: without money, Billy gets out of town by jumping on a freight train on which he nearly freezes and he survives on stolen table scraps from McDonald's. But Old Bill and even the town of Bendarat—now only a ghost of its former self due to economic changes—show how easy it is to slide between wealth and poverty. Caitlin's experience demonstrates that being wealthy doesn't necessarily make a person happy, either. Her parents can afford a big house and more clothes and makeup than Caitlin knows what to do with. But they can't give her the things she really wants: love and acceptance. And while Old Bill loved his wife and child deeply, he realizes too late that the pursuit of wealth through his job as a lawyer kept him away from them during the brief time the family had to be together. For him, being rich in time stands at direct odds with accumulating monetary wealth. Thus, while always acknowledging how precariously Billy lives (and thus not glamorizing poverty or becoming unhoused), The Simple Gift clearly argues that money cannot provide the things that are truly valuable in life: freedom, companionship, and love. Billy values his freedom more than money. And his simple lifestyle allows him to take advantage of many free things, from the river where he washes his clothes, bathes, and finds solace in nature to the public library where he can leave Bendarat and his life behind just by immersing himself in a book. He eats fruit plucked from the trees of the local orchards for breakfast. Having money means having to make more choices—including bad ones like Old Bill drinking his wages away—and facing more stress and anxiety. And not having money doesn't prevent Billy from making friends, including Ernie the train conductor, Irene Thompson the librarian, and Caitlin. Every time Caitlin visits Billy in his tidy but small train car, she (and the book) directly contrast the growing richness of their emotional intimacy with Billy's impoverished circumstances. It doesn't matter to Caitlin that Billy is poor because he is smart, kind, and he loves her. In the end, these qualities have far greater value than a big house, fancy belongings, or money in the bank. - Theme: Redemption. Description: In The Simple Gift, runaway teenager Billy meets Old Bill at the "Bendarat Hilton," the abandoned freight train cars where each secretly lives. Billy gained freedom by leaving his abusive, alcoholic Dad in search of life on his own terms. In contrast, Old Bill fell into the life of an unemployed, unhoused alcoholic after the accidental death of his daughter, Jessie, who fell out of a tree, and his wife, who died in a drunk driving accident a year later. When Billy meets him, Old Bill vacillates between holding onto the ghosts of his family and drinking heavily to blunt the full pain of his loss. Bereft of a sense of purpose and direction in his life, Old Bill begins to rediscover these after his accidental meeting with Billy. And as he stops drinking and starts to forgive himself for the past, he discovers redemption and a renewed sense of purpose. In exploring the growing friendship between Billy and Old Bill (and to a lesser extent, between Caitlin and Old Bill), the book shows how the love and acceptance in relationships can lead to redemption. Billy is around the same age that Jessie would have been if she had lived, and he quickly becomes a surrogate son to Old Bill, who wants to share his knowledge of living on the margins of society with the youngster. Likewise, Billy comes to treat Old Bill like the loving father-figure he never had. Even Caitlin participates in Old Bill's character growth when she acknowledges his humanity by inviting him to dinner at her house along with Billy. There, Old Bill finds relief from his ghosts and for a few brief hours finds himself reminded of how pleasant it is to spend time with friends. His desire to repay Caitlin's and Billy's simple but priceless gift of normalcy leads to the enormous gift he later gives Billy in the form of his empty house as a place to stay. As long as he was able to keep himself isolated, Old Bill remained stuck in his grief and trauma. But when he allows himself to grow close to Billy, he begins to think of others besides himself and his ghosts. In becoming interested in Billy's future, he finds a purpose in his own life and begins to move on from the tragedies that marked him. - Theme: Love and Family. Description: None of The Simple Gift's trio of main characters and narrators has a functional family at the beginning of the book. Billy never mentions his mother, and his Dad is a physically abusive alcoholic; Old Bill's daughter Jessie and wife both died tragically; and although Caitlin lives with both her parents, she finds her relationship with them distant and unfulfilling. Yet by the end of the book, their lives have become entwined. Old Bill can leave town to quiet his ghosts knowing that Billy and Caitlin look after his house; the house gives Billy a place to live without having to return to his Dad; and Caitlin finds love and acceptance in Billy's arms. Thus, while illustrating the importance of friendship for a person's wellbeing, the book also shows various ways in which a person can create their chosen family. Billy and Old Bill adopt each other in the places of father and son; the fact that they share a name makes this feel even more natural. Old Bill takes "the kid" under his wing, and Billy renews the sense of purpose Old Bill lost when his daughter died. Likewise, a shared sense of rootlessness and desperation draws Caitlin and Billy quickly into a friendship and romance. Neither has found love and acceptance in their families of origin, but they offer these to each other unconditionally—despite their differences. Most importantly, their desire to be kind and good people unites them: Billy unselfconsciously takes care of Old Bill from their first meeting, and while Caitlin is initially repelled by the unkempt, unhoused old man, she pushes herself to see and treat him as a human being. When the three of them sit on the floor in her house eating dinner, they fill an empty brick shell with love and companionship. It's this moment that cements their relationships for the rest of the book—the gift of Caitlin's and Billy's companionship directly foreshadows and instigates Old Bill's gift of the house to them—and shows how important and powerful it can be to forge a family on one's own terms. - Theme: Rules and Freedom. Description: Billy Luckett's life has taught him to be self-reliant and suspicious. He distrusts living by the rules, because they didn't protect him from his alcoholic Dad. Caitlin lives unhappily by her parents' stifling rules. Old Bill followed the rules when his daughter Jessie was alive, but working overtime kept him from his family, a loss he feels with acuity after his wife and daughter both tragically die. Subsequently, all three exempt themselves from the rules: Billy by running away, Old Bill by becoming an alcoholic, Caitlin by getting a protest job at McDonald's. But their freedom doesn't come at the price of morality; all three continue to operate according to their internal moral compasses. Old Bill still takes care of the yard around his old house, while Billy keeps his train car scrupulously clean. Likewise, when her parents leave for the weekend, Caitlin hosts a small dinner for Billy and Old Bill, not a raging party with all her friends. In The Simple Gift, freedom means self-determination and the ability to live life on one's own terms. And the book shows how this self-determination provides the space necessary for each character to heal from his or her respective traumas and trials enough to face the future. With Billy and Old Bill, Caitlin finds the acceptance and love she longs for. After four years living down and out in the freight yard, Old Bill recovers enough to go visit places he never got to take his daughter. Free from the threat of being returned to his father, Billy seriously considers going back to school. Early in the book, Billy expresses distrust for those who break the rules and those who make rules for others. He decides to avoid the rules entirely, and by honoring his own self-determination in this way, he finds his right place in the world. - Climax: Old Bill gives Billy a chance to stay in his house and convinces the local welfare officer to leave the young runaway alone. - Summary: At just 16 years old, Billy Luckett loads his backpack with some clothes and food and writes a goodbye note to his alcoholic, abusive dad before running away. He jumps a freight train, hiding in a boat strapped to one of its cars. Ernie, the conductor, discovers him during the long, cold night and treats him compassionately, offering him a warm place to rest and food in the guard's car. In the morning, Billy disembarks in Bendarat. He spends his first day at the local library, reading under the watchful but kind eye of chief librarian Irene Thompson. That night, he establishes camp in an abandoned freight train car near the train station. The next day, Billy visits the local McDonald's at dinnertime, where he quietly helps himself to uneaten fries and other scraps left behind by other patrons. His actions draw the attention of Caitlin, a local teenager who works there. Caitlin comes from a wealthy but emotionally cold family. She feels as out of place in her world as Billy seems to be in his. She chooses not to report him to her manager, and the two become friends. Billy wakes up early one morning to the sound of shattering glass. He stumbles outside where he meets Old Bill. Old Bill has lived in the train yard—or, as he calls it, the "Bendarat Hilton"—for four years, between bouts of drunkenness. Over months of shared meals, Old Bill and Billy grow close. Eventually, Billy learns Old Bill's tragic story: five years earlier, his twelve-year-old daughter Jessie fell out of a tree to her death. Within a year, his wife also died in a drunk driving accident brought on by her grief. Old Bill quit his job as a lawyer, abandoned his house, and moved to the train yard. He drinks to dull his grief, but he also clings to the memory of his family. Eventually, Caitlin and Billy become romantically involved, and Caitlin meets Old Bill. Billy fears that he will have to leave his adopted home, Old Bill, and Caitlin after a police officer suspects that he's an underage runaway. But Old Bill invites Billy to live in his house then convinces the welfare officer to leave Billy alone. Caitlin and Billy prepare to live in Old Bill's home while Billy figures out if he wants to go back to school or find a job, and Old Bill leaves to travel the country, visiting places he never got to take Jessie.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Singing Lesson - Point of view: Third person limited, focused on Miss Meadows's perspective - Setting: A girls' school, likely in England - Character: Miss Meadows. Description: Miss Meadows is a thirty-year-old singing teacher at a girls' school who is engaged to marry Basil. She arrives at school on the day of the story feeling despair because Basil has left a note breaking their engagement. Miss Meadows seems to be a sensitive person who can feel a great connection to both the weather and music, but she also responds to her unhappiness by becoming cruel to others, spreading her despair to the students. For instance, her sadness causes her to ignore her favorite student, Mary Beazley, and even dictates her choice of songs for her students to sing. As Miss Meadows becomes increasingly emotional about the end of her relationship with Basil, though, her memories of the actual relationship makes it clear that she is sadder about being single at thirty than she is about losing Basil himself. When Miss Meadows later gets a casual, chatty telegram from Basil saying that she should ignore the break-up letter and that he has bought a hat-stand for their future home, Miss Meadows is not angry at him for thinking so little of her emotions. Instead, she is overwhelmed with joy—a joy that, as with her sadness, seems more motivated by the prospect of avoiding becoming an unmarried spinster than it is about actually being married to Basil. - Character: Basil. Description: Basil is Miss Meadows's fiancé. At the start of the story, he has sent Miss Meadows a letter breaking off their engagement because, while he "loves her as much as he could love any woman" the idea of marriage "fills him with—" and he has written the word "disgust," crossed it out, and written in "regret." Miss Meadows believes that his failure to fully remove the word "disgust" shows how little he cares about her, underscoring his general disregard for her feelings. A reader from Mansfield's time would see many hints in the story that Basil is gay and is marrying Miss Meadows to cover this up. He is vain about his appearance and overly concerned with furniture, which were stereotypes for gay men in the early 20th century. Furthermore, when he proposes to Miss Meadows (rather dispassionately), he touches the end of her ostrich feather boa rather than touching Miss Meadows herself. Their engagement surprises Miss Meadows herself and the people at her school, because he is twenty-five and handsome, where she is thirty, which would have been considered old for a single woman. While both he and Miss Meadows seem to be marrying one another primarily to live up to the expectations of their communities rather than out of love, Basil is quite cruel to Miss Meadows, seeming not to consider her feelings at all when he leaves her a cold note ending their engagement, and then sending a casual, lighthearted telegram renewing their engagement without ever apologizing for—or even acknowledging—the pain he has caused. That he takes Miss Meadows for granted and doesn't seem all that committed to their engagement suggests rough times ahead. - Character: The Science Mistress. Description: The Science Mistress is another teacher at the school where Miss Meadows works. She is pale with honey-colored hair and has a sweet manner that Miss Meadows believes is insincere. She and Miss Meadows have a conversation about the chilly autumn weather at the beginning of the story that Miss Meadows interprets as a hostile and smug inquisition about Miss Meadows's emotional state. When Miss Meadows remembers getting engaged to Basil, she particularly recalls the Science Mistress being surprised that a handsome young man like Basil would want to marry Miss Meadows. When Miss Meadows imagines it becoming known at the school that Basil has broken off their engagement, she particularly dreads having the Science Mistress know what has happened. She believes it would be better to quit her job and disappear entirely rather than face whatever judgment the Science Mistress and the girls would have for her once it is known that her engagement is broken. While Miss Meadows paints the Science Mistress as being cruel, judgmental, and insincere, Mansfield never confirms that Miss Meadows's impression of the woman is accurate—it's possible that the science teacher is perfectly nice and Miss Meadows is projecting her fears. - Character: Mary Beazley. Description: Mary Beazley is Miss Meadows's star student, who gives Miss Meadows a yellow chrysanthemum each day at the start of class. Mary's long, curling hair is a signal of a well-groomed young girl, and Since Miss Meadows is conscious of her own age, these small signals of Mary's youth are significant in the story. On the day of the story, Miss Meadows refuses Mary's flower for the first time, humiliating and wounding Mary in front of the class. Later, when Miss Meadows directs the girls to sing sadly, Mary is very much affected by the mood of the music and the tone of Miss Meadows's voice. As Miss Meadows herself is very sensitive to the mood of music and grew up to be a singing teacher, it seems possible that Mary is similar to how Miss Meadows herself was as a girl. When Miss Meadows returns to the class after receiving her telegram from Basil resuming their engagement, Miss Meadows picks up the flower Mary gave her and uses it to hide her smile when she assigns the girls a new, cheerful summer song. - Character: Miss Wyatt. Description: Miss Wyatt is the headmistress at the school where Miss Meadows teaches. She is likely an older woman, as she wears glasses and often has difficulty getting them untangled from the lace of her clothing. When Basil sends Miss Meadows a telegram at work to renew their engagement, Miss Meadows goes to Miss Wyatt to collect the telegram. Mansfield describes Miss Wyatt as being very kind with Miss Meadows at first, seeming to expect that the telegram will contain bad news. Once she discovers that the telegram contains good news, Miss Wyatt is annoyed and tells Miss Meadows that she can only receive telegrams at work in an emergency. Mansfield subtly suggests that Miss Wyatt might have relished Miss Meadows receiving bad news, and her reprimand of Miss Meadows might come from a place of bitterness, since Miss Meadows emphasized the note was from her fiancé. In this era, it was rare for women to keep a teaching job after marriage, so the fact that Miss Wyatt has been promoted to headmistress of the school and still goes by "Miss" suggests that she is likely older than Miss Meadows, and still unmarried, the very condition that Miss Meadows fears. As Mary Beazley echoes a younger version of Miss Meadows, Miss Wyatt appears to show a possible future for Miss Meadows if she stays in her job and does not marry. Miss Wyatt may have a higher-ranking job within the school, but she is a bitter person that is only shown taking joy in the possibility of other people's pain. - Character: Monica. Description: Monica is a student at the girls' school. When Miss Meadows is teaching the singing class, Monica interrupts and enters the classroom to say that Miss Wyatt has a telegram for Miss Meadows. While she walks up the aisle of the classroom, she is "hanging her head, biting her lips and twisting the silver bangle on her red little wrist" which appear to be anxious gestures, but Miss Meadows describes her walking "fussily," which suggests a lack of sympathy from Miss Meadows in her despair. - Theme: Despair and Cruelty. Description: After her fiancé Basil leaves a cruel note ending their engagement, Miss Meadows despairs. She feels wounded and hopeless about the future, but mostly she dreads the judgment of others—people who will scorn her for being thirty and single once more. In her despair, she is cruel with her music students, who then begin to despair themselves, weeping openly in class. In this way, "The Singing Lesson" shows cruelty and despair to be interlinked—despair leads to cruelty which leads to more despair. And even though the story ends with Miss Meadows' engagement restored, Mansfield's implication is that Miss Meadows' happiness is built on a lie and is therefore unsustainable: despair and cruelty will return. By depicting despair as the story's predominant emotion, and by showing how it spreads via cruelty, Mansfield paints life as a chain reaction of suffering in which despair is inevitable. From the very first line—in which Miss Meadows has "cold, sharp despair" "buried deep in her heart like a wicked knife"—despair is the story's defining emotion. The severity of Miss Meadows's despair is noteworthy: she is described as "bleeding to death" because her heart has been "pierced" by Basil's letter. While recalling snippets of this letter, she asks her students to rehearse a sad song about youth and happiness disappearing, which emphasizes the magnitude of her grief. The story's setting also contributes to Miss Meadows's sense of despair. The story is set in late autumn, when the weather is so cold that it "might be winter." As the students "wail" while rehearsing their sad song, Mansfield describes the willow trees outside with their leaves mostly gone and the wind and rain blowing against the windows. Between Miss Meadows' own expressions of grief, the mournful song her students sing, and the stormy autumnal setting, Mansfield depicts a world that is saturated in despair, in which despair seems to be the natural state of everyone and everything. The story implies that the source of this pervasive despair is cruelty. This is clearest when Miss Meadows is cruel to her students and they quickly descend into a despair that matches Miss Meadows's own. Mansfield initially describes the students as "rosy" and "bubbling over" with "gleeful excitement," but then Miss Meadows is cruel: she ignores one student's gesture of kindness (Mary Beazley handing her a yellow chrysanthemum), is brusque in her rehearsal instructions, and encourages them to put their saddest emotions into the song. This leaves many of the students in tears, which is a startling example of how cruelty makes others feel profound despair—even young students who were, moments ago, joyful. But Miss Meadows is not arbitrarily cruel: her own despair is rooted in the cruelty of others, both her fellow teachers and Basil. While a broken engagement should be grounds for sympathy and compassion, Miss Meadows expects only judgment and scorn from her colleagues at school. This leads her to such despair that she feels she will have to abandon her job entirely rather than face her cruel colleagues. Her despair is also due to Basil's cruelty, as the way he breaks their engagement is particularly cruel: he leaves her a note instead of speaking to her in person, and the note itself is inconsiderate, especially because he initially wrote that marrying her would fill him with disgust. While he crossed out "disgust" and replaced it with "regret," he didn't bother to cross it out well enough that she couldn't read it. This hurts Miss Meadows profoundly and makes her know that Basil doesn't love her. Even Basil's cruelty, however, seems rooted in despair. Mansfield implies several times that Basil is gay (most strongly through the portion of the letter where he essentially says that it would be impossible for him to love a woman), and this was a time in which a gay man would not, in general, have been accepted socially. While his letter to Miss Meadows is unacceptable, Basil is in a difficult position and it seems as though his waffling over their engagement reflects an internal conflict over whether to follow his heart or submit to a marriage that isn't what he wants. It's easy to imagine this causing despair, which leads him to be cruel to Miss Meadows, setting off a chain reaction of cruelty and despair that ends in her music students crying. The ending of the story, at first glance, offers an interruption to the cycle of cruelty and despair: Basil restores their engagement, and Miss Meadows is joyful. However, Mansfield implies that this joy is baseless and that despair and cruelty will return. After all, Basil's telegram reversing their breakup is brief and feeble. He does not explain himself or acknowledge the distress he has caused, which shows his lack of compassion and suggests that their marriage will not be a kind or happy one. Also, the casual way he changes his mind suggests that he might not be totally committed to getting back together—he could reverse himself again at any time, once again causing Miss Meadows to despair. The joyful fervor, then, with which Miss Meadows resumes her music class seems almost dangerously disconnected from reality, making the story's ending ominous. Despair, it seems, would be a more natural emotion for the situation, and Mansfield implies that soon reality will come home to roost. While Miss Meadows's despair is rooted in real, serious issues—loneliness, disappointment, fear of judgment, heartbreak—it's noteworthy that, throughout the story, Mansfield depicts both despair and joy in exaggerated ways that are almost comical. Miss Meadows's despair (coupled with the sad song and the dreary setting) seems somewhat over-the-top for the situation: she has been dumped by someone who never loved her, which is certainly sad, but perhaps doesn't merit her assertion that she feels like she is "bleeding to death" after being "pierced to the heart." The melodrama of Miss Meadows' despair, and the frightening intensity of her misplaced joy in the end, seems to mock both of these emotions. Perhaps if Miss Meadows were slightly less sensitive to what other people think and slightly more pragmatic or realistic about her circumstances, then she could avoid this ridiculous emotional rollercoaster altogether. - Theme: Gender, Sexuality, and Social Pressure. Description: In "The Singing Lesson," Miss Meadows and Basil seem to be marrying not out of love, but due to social pressure. Miss Meadows is ashamed of being single at thirty, and Basil—who is implied to be gay—seems eager to appear heterosexual. Due to this era's pressures on women to be married and its pervasive stigma against homosexuality, this pair seems willing to accept a loveless, unhappy marriage simply to avoid the cruelty and judgment of others. Mansfield depicts this choice as tragic and ill-advised, and the story is an indictment of the misogynistic, heteronormative social pressures that keep people from being true to themselves and seeking fulfilling lives. Throughout the story, it's clear that Miss Meadows' feelings for Basil are lukewarm; her real concern about their broken engagement is that others will judge her for being single. When Miss Meadows reflects on Basil, she recalls him as young and handsome, but doesn't seem to think much of him beyond that. In fact, she clearly implies that he doesn't matter to her when she argues with him in her mind, saying she doesn't care if he doesn't love her—implying that she only cares about being married. She describes their engagement as "a miracle, simply a miracle," but only because of their ages, because he is only twenty-five (and would presumably have other prospects) while she is thirty. In that era, a woman of thirty would think she had little chance of marrying a desirable man, if she married at all. Being single through adulthood was much less respectable for a woman than a man, even if she had a good job. Miss Meadows is amazed and relieved that a handsome man who is younger than she is asked to marry her at her age. Her shame at being single again is such that Miss Meadows thinks, after the breakup, "she could never face the Science Mistress or the girls once it got known. She would have to disappear somewhere," which suggests that losing Basil is less significant to her than losing the appearance of his love within the school community. The effect of her broken engagement on her relationship to her peers is so important to her that she feels that she would have to disappear entirely—and lose her livelihood—to avoid their judgment. Basil doesn't appear to love Miss Meadows either; Mansfield seems to suggest that he wants to marry Miss Meadows to hide the fact that he is gay. Mansfield uses many stereotypes about his vanity and his interest in furniture that readers of the time would take as implications that he is gay. Beyond that, he says in his break-up letter that he loves her as much as he could love any woman, suggesting that he could love someone who is not a woman more. His use of the word "disgust" to describe his feelings about marriage also suggests that he does not want to have a sexual relationship with a woman, and this seems borne out in his feeble proposal to Miss Meadows. In proposing, he told her "you know, somehow or other, I've got fond of you," which suggests that he is surprised that he has become "fond" of a woman at all. He also touches her ostrich feather boa instead of touching Miss Meadows herself, suggesting a lack of sensual connection between the two characters. Even though Basil and Miss Meadows clearly don't care for one another, they consent to be married because they believe that their communities won't tolerate them otherwise. The truth about Miss Meadows is that she is a woman of thirty who is not in love, who supports herself as a singing teacher. The fact that this is seen as shameful, even within a community of teachers (who are traditionally self-supporting unmarried women), suggests how powerful the norm of marriage was for women in that time. However, while Mansfield portrays this pressure to be married as somewhat tragic, she also suggests that it is absurd. This is clearest in her melodramatic depiction of Miss Meadows' emotions: her over-the-top despair when her lackluster engagement ends, and her feverish joy when her engagement is feebly renewed. By depicting these emotions as comically intense and unbefitting of the situation, Mansfield seems to be poking fun at people who assume that following social norms is so high-stakes. Mansfield herself openly lived with female lovers, so she lived the message of this story: that sacrificing happiness and fulfillment to follow social norms isn't worth it. But while Mansfield bucked social norms and faced the consequences, her characters don't at the end of the story: Miss Meadows and Basil decide to renew their engagement and obey the expectations of people they dislike, rather than living according to their true feelings. The decision to marry could be seen as tragic—and it is, to some extent—but Mansfield's mocking tone suggests that she thinks these characters are too foolish and cowardly to imagine and pursue more authentic lives. - Theme: Aging. Description: After Miss Meadows's fiancé leaves her, she sees evidence of her advancing age everywhere. While she is surrounded by young girls who appear to enjoy the autumn, she connects the cold weather and dropping leaves with her loss of youth and the diminishment of her future possibilities. The fact that she was finally engaged had protected her from the full sense of growing older, but once Basil ends their engagement, Miss Meadows must face the fact that she is thirty years old and single—at that age, in that time, she would have had little prospect of ever being engaged again. Miss Meadows's despair over her age, and her association of aging with autumn and death, suggests the tragic inevitability of life passing her by. Miss Meadows already feels herself to be old at thirty, as she shows by the degree of her surprise that Basil wants to marry her at all—she calls this "a miracle, simply a miracle." It is not only her own perception that she is too old to be loved by a handsome young man like Basil, since she recalls that the Science Mistress would not believe that they were engaged at first. When she thinks of her future if Basil does not marry her, she connects her despair to the song lyric "passes away," which is a euphemism for death, and she describes the girls' quiet voices while they sing this lyric as beginning "to die, to fade…to vanish." While thirty does not seem old enough to worry about death immediately, Miss Meadows evidently feels that there will be nothing but fading and dying in her future if she does not marry. Miss Meadows also associates her dread of aging with the autumn. As she mourns her lost engagement, she observes that the willow trees have lost half their leaves. This suggests that her sorrow at the break-up is connected to the feeling she has that her own romantic appeal is fading, just like the willow trees losing their leaves. When she hears the girls sing the words "Fast fade the Roses of Pleasure," she can "scarcely help shuddering" as she recalls that Basil once wore a rose in his buttonhole to visit her. The image of a rose fading as time passes evidently connects to the loss of her relationship with Basil, and also to her own sense that the possibility of happiness and pleasure will diminish as she grows older.  While Miss Meadows connects the fall to her advancing age and bleak future, the young students, who are not yet worried about life passing them by, are full of energy and joy, symbolized by the fall-blooming yellow chrysanthemum Mary Beazley offers Miss Meadows. At the start of the story, the students are "bubbling over with gleeful excitement" as they run to school in the cool air. As they absorb Miss Meadows's mood, first from her unkind rejection of Mary's chrysanthemum and then later from singing the sad words of the autumn song with the sad expression she asks them to use, they become increasingly subdued and even begin to cry. When she leaves the classroom to go to Miss Wyatt's office, she asks them to talk quietly, showing that they would ordinarily have a more vivacious mood if they were left in a classroom without a teacher on an autumn day. Their energetic mood before class begins shows that it's Miss Meadows's attitude—and not the weather or the season—that has made them too sad to do anything but talk quietly when she walks out of the room. Mansfield appears to be showing that Miss Meadows finds the fall to be a tragic time mainly because she fears growing older, since the more she ages, the less chance she has of living even a shadow of the life of which she once dreamed. Miss Meadows is old enough already not to naïvely dream of true love—she simply wants to be married to any man at all so that she can fit into her community—but even that seems to be beyond her reach after Basil breaks up with her and she's left single at thirty. The loss of even a shallow, unkind connection with Basil makes Miss Meadows confront that her youth is gone and even her most meager hopes for the future are unlikely to be fulfilled. - Climax: Miss Meadows is called into the headmistress's office to read a telegram from Basil - Summary: Miss Meadows, a singing teacher, comes to school feeling great despair because she has received a letter from her fiancé Basil breaking off their engagement. When the Science Mistress asks if Miss Meadows is cold in the chilly autumn weather, Miss Meadows tries to hide her unhappiness and feels hatred toward the Science Mistress. At the start of the singing lesson, her student Mary Beazley offers Miss Meadows a yellow chrysanthemum and Miss Meadows ignores her gesture, deeply wounding the girl's feelings. As Miss Meadows begins to teach, she instructs the girls to sing a sad, autumnal song. She asks them to add sorrowful emotion to their voices, and the weather outdoors appears bleak to Miss Meadows as she recalls the cruel letter Basil sent her. Their engagement seemed like a miracle to her, specifically because she is a woman of thirty, which she feels is nearly too old to have romantic prospects. Miss Meadows despairs of the humiliation and judgement she will face within the school when it is known that Basil has broken their engagement off. She thinks that she will have to leave her job and disappear from the school community altogether rather than face the Science Mistress and the students once they learn what happened. She asks the girls to sing so sorrowfully, and many of the girls begin crying. Miss Meadows is called out of the class and Miss Wyatt, the headmistress, gives Miss Meadows a telegram from Basil. He says she should ignore his previous letter, saying he "must have been mad" to end their engagement, and he says he has bought a hat-stand. Despite the coldness of this telegram, Miss Meadows is overcome with joy—even while Miss Wyatt scolds her for receiving a telegram that isn't urgent bad news during the school day. When she is back in her classroom Miss Meadows assigns the students a triumphant summer song, and Miss Meadows herself sings the song louder than any of the students.

- Genre: Short Story, Modernist, Avant-garde - Title: The Sisters - Point of view: First-Person Limited - Setting: Dublin, Ireland - Character: The Narrator. Description: The story's unnamed narrator and protagonist, who is a young boy. The narrator has a close relationship with Father Flynn, a local priest, who is on the brink of death at the beginning of the story. While the narrator is, for the most part, upset that the priest who taught him so much about Catholicism is going to pass away, he also thinks about Father Flynn's death with an excited sort of anticipation. Before Father Flynn has died, the narrator passes his house every day to see whether the priest has finally passed, specifically curious to see the effects of paralysis on the older man's body. Additionally, once the narrator learns that Father Flynn has died, he isn't entirely upset. He feels he has been liberated from something, and recalls that during their lessons, the priest would often complicate what the narrator had originally thought of as simple. The narrator also remembers being made uncomfortable by Father Flynn's sloppiness when he would help the older man to open snuff packets. At the wake, the narrator notices and details Father Flynn's grotesque appearance as he lies in his coffin and seems not to know how to respond to the death of someone who on the one hand taught him so much but on the other made him so uncomfortable. Indeed, the narrator's discomfort around the priest serves as one of several hints that the priest may have been pedophilic. Old Cotter, a friend of the narrator's aunt, implies that the narrator should spend less time with the priest and more time with people his own age, which also suggests that there is something strange about the relationship between the two given their difference in age. Ultimately, however, Joyce leaves the nature of the narrator and Father Flynn's relationship up to interpretation. - Character: Father James Flynn. Description: The narrator's friend and mentor. At the time the story begins the elderly priest has already suffered two strokes and is in deteriorating health. A third and final stroke kills the priest, and over the course of the story the characters reckon with his death and their complicated feelings around his character. While the narrator and the priest's sisters, Eliza and Nannie, seem to have at least some positive memories of Father Flynn and are upset about his death, the other characters have more negative impressions of the old man. The narrator reports having spent hours with the priest learning Latin and about the Catholic tradition, recalling the Father Flynn often made even the simplest rites and rituals very complicated. Father Flynn had a snuff habit, and the narrator would often help him to remove the snuff from the packet. In the process of using snuff, Father Flynn would sully his "ancient priestly vestments," and this was one of many ways in which his remarkable inelegance is at odds with the divine authority that one might expect a priest to emanate. Nannie and Eliza claim not to have been bothered by caring for the elderly priest, but they imply that, in the time leading up to his death, he was in extremely poor health and going mad, sharing memories of him laughing to himself at night in a chapel or breaking a chalice. The narrator himself believes that the priest may have been engaged in the illicit practice of simony, or the purchase of entrance into heaven. The most damning characterization of Father Flynn comes from Old Cotter, who worries about a young man like the narrator spending so much time with the priest and implies that the Father Flynn may be pedophilic. Though Joyce leaves this unresolved, the narrator's own memories of how Father Flynn made him uncomfortable add some weight to the Old Cotter's suggestion. As Father Flynn represents the Catholic Church more broadly, the problematic aspects of his character symbolize the problematic aspects of the Church as Joyce saw them. - Character: Old Cotter. Description: Old Cotter lives with the narrator and the narrator's aunt and uncle. He is only present in the story at the very beginning, when the narrator first learns that Father Flynn has died. Old Cotter expresses marked disapproval of the narrator's relationship with the priest, saying that a young man should spend time with people his own age, and should focus more on things like exercise than on religious or esoteric studies. Notably, Old Cotter also seems to imply that Father Flynn may be pedophilic. He says that there was "something queer" about the priest, and that he thinks it was "it was one of those…peculiar cases…" implying that the priest has engaged in some sort of immoral activity. Old Cotter's comments about Father Flynn irritate the narrator, who thinks to himself that Old Cotter is a "tiresome old fool." However, not long after this, the narrator admits to himself that Father Flynn did make him somewhat uncomfortable, which leads readers to question if Old Cotter's suspicions may have been merited. - Character: The Narrator's Uncle. Description: Like Old Cotter, the narrator's uncle lives with him. And, also like Old Cotter, the narrator's uncle believes that his nephew should not have spent so much time with Father Flynn. The uncle is the one who breaks the news to the narrator that the old priest has passed away and joins Old Cotter in his comments about the type of education that young men should receive: namely, one that is practical rather than religious. Joking about the amount of time the narrator dedicated to religious studies with Father Flynn, the narrator's uncle calls him a Rosicrucian, referring to a cult of individuals dedicated to esoteric and spiritual study. - Character: Eliza. Description: Father Flynn's sister. Eliza took care of Father Flynn in his old age along with their other sister, Nannie. While Nannie immediately falls asleep when the narrator and his aunt join her and her sister after the wake, Eliza remains awake and begins to share memories of Father Flynn. She comments that he had a "beautiful death" and was a "beautiful corpse," although the narrator's descriptions are ample evidence to the contrary—when he sees Father Flynn in the coffin, he describes the priest's face as "very truculent, grey and massive." She shares stories about Father Flynn's deteriorating health in his last days—particularly notable is her recollection that she went to give him soup and found him lying back with his mouth open and his breviary fallen to the floor. Since the breviary is an important text for the priests to read and recite every day, Father Flynn allowing it to fall to the ground suggests that he was no longer able to successfully complete the responsibilities of priesthood. Eliza and her sister seem to believe, superstitiously, that Father Flynn's poor health began when he broke a chalice, a belief that characterizes both her and Nannie as somewhat irrational and superstitious in their religiosity. - Character: Nannie. Description: Father Flynn's sister. Nannie and her sister, Eliza, both took care of Father Flynn in his old age. Nannie goes to greet the narrator and his family when they arrive at Father Flynn's wake, and the narrator notices that her skirt is clumsily tied in the back, which distracts him from praying. This moment suggests that the narrator is unable to use religious ritual to deal with or overcome the ugliness of death. Presumably exhausted from having to care for the old man and deal with the logistics of his death, Nannie falls asleep soon after everyone sits down to talk after the wake. - Character: The Narrator's Aunt. Description: The narrator's aunt goes with him to Father Flynn's wake. When she gathers with the narrator, Nannie, and Eliza after the wake, she speaks highly of Father Flynn, and praises the two sisters for having cared for him. Her seemingly unquestioned high opinion of the old priest suggests that she may not have shared the suspicions of the narrator's uncle or Old Cotter, who seem to think that Father Flynn was corrupt and had an inappropriate relationship with the narrator. - Theme: The Utility of Education. Description: In James Joyce's "The Sisters," the narrator is a young man dealing with his complex emotional response to the death of Father Flynn, a local priest, who served as a mentor to him. While the narrator seems to have, for the most part, admired and enjoyed the company of Father Flynn, other members of the community didn't seem to have had the same respect for the elderly priest. The narrator's family members disapprove of him spending time with Father Flynn, believing that the young man should be educated in ways that are more practical and less esoteric. In the story, then, Joyce presents two conflicting views about the ways that young people should be raised and educated—while one school of thought prioritizes religious education through the Catholic Church, the other espouses a form of education rooted in real-world practicality. Over the course of the story, the characters are far more critical of religious education, which Joyce portrays as full of superficial, esoteric rites that are unrelated to people's real-world needs. Readers are first introduced to disapproval of Father Flynn when Old Cotter, who lives with the narrator and his aunt and uncle, begins to talk about the narrator's relationship with the priest. Old Cotter seems to think that Father Flynn's religious lessons don't prepare the narrator for success in the real world. While Old Cotter acknowledges that Father Flynn taught the narrator "a great deal," he is quick to add that he wouldn't want his own children "to have much to say to a man like [Father Flynn]." The narrator's uncle agrees, referring to the narrator as a Rosicrucian, and emphasizing the importance of physicals exercises in a young man's routine. As an afterthought, he adds, "Education is all very fine and large…'" In this moment of dialogue, the adult male figures in the narrator's life other than Father Flynn demonstrate their distaste for formal, religious education. Rather than book smarts, they seem to value physical fitness and resilience. In referring to his nephew as a Rosicrucian, the narrator's uncle references a 17th- and 18th-century secretive group dedicated to studies of alchemy—the magical process of converting one substance to the other—and the metaphysical, or studies related to God and other supernatural beings. These branches of study are about as far from physical exercises as it gets. The men's disapproval of Father Flynn seems to stem from the belief that his religious teachings aren't practical for the real world, and therefore, aren't suitable for a young man to be learning. While the narrator does grieve Father Flynn's death and seems to have fond memories of him, he also doesn't seem to have received a useful education from the priest. In some ways, the education the narrator receives from the priest seems to unnecessarily complicate things rather than clarify them. In one moment, the narrator writes that "[Father Flynn's] questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain intuitions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts." Father Flynn's style of imparting knowledge to a young person stands in stark contrast to Old Cotter and the narrator's uncle's views on the ways that young people should be raised. Rather than basing his lessons in what is practical, Father Flynn seems to prioritize making what initially seems practical more complicated than it is at a first glance. At no point does the narrator imply that being exposed to this level of complexity is beneficial to his studies. Rather, Father Flynn seems to simply confuse the narrator rather than teaching him anything worthwhile. What's more, Father Flynn seems to value the complexity, and therefore the inaccessibility, of the Church's teachings. He tells the narrator that "fathers of the Church had written books as thick as the Post Office Dictionary, and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper." The choice to emphasize the spacing of the lines underscores the extent to which Father Flynn equates complexity with intellectual value. There is no reason for anyone to brag about lines being close together other than to highlight the literal density of the text, the quantity of words written. Joyce casts Flynn's view of education as archaic, and silly in its superficiality. While the narrator claims to have enjoyed spending time with Father Flynn, his unemotional reaction to the priest's death betrays the possibility that he, too, may not have found a great deal of meaning in Father Flynn's lessons. Immediately before divulging the details of Father Flynn's lessons, the narrator admits that "neither [he] nor the day seemed in a mourning mood," suggesting that he is not as sorry as he thought he would be at the priest's death. Because this admission immediately precedes the narrator's discussion of his education, there is an implication that the narrator is relieved to be rid of these long-winded, archaic lessons. Joyce and many of his contemporaries were highly critical of the Church's corruption and its teachings that were inaccessible to common people. While Joyce does not do much to support Old Cotter and the narrator's uncle in their strong advocation for a practical, secular education, he does heavily criticize and question the value of the religious education that the narrator receives from Father Flynn. - Theme: Authority and Corruption. Description: In "The Sisters," James Joyce follows the young unnamed narrator and his community as they deal with the death of Father Flynn, a local priest. However, the local people have mixed feelings about the priest's passing: he was a divisive figure in the community, largely because many characters no longer see value or even integrity in the Catholic Church. While on the one hand the narrator admired Father Flynn, he also felt uncomfortable around him at times, which raises the question of if the priest's character was immoral. By illustrating Father Flynn's incompetence as a religious leader, as well as his implied spiritual corruption, Joyce undermines the authority of the Catholic Church more broadly, implying that it is no longer able to provide the support that Irish communities need. The descriptions Joyce provides of Father Flynn while he was alive lead readers to believe that he was an ineffective religious leader. While alive, Father Flynn constantly used snuff as he gave the narrator his religious lessons. Because the priest is elderly, he isn't able to use snuff gracefully—the narrator observes, "Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look…" In this moment, the way the priest's clumsiness is described is vulgar, and causes readers to feel embarrassed for him. The word "dribble" in particular characterizes the priest as particularly helpless and infantile, which, in an old man, is disturbing to observe. The narrator's conclusion that this is what spoils Father Flynn's "ancient garments" subtly undermines the priest's authority. While the garments are meant to be beautiful, inspiring respect and admiration from observers, Father Flynn's are ugly and covered in snuff. In addition, Father Flynn undermines his religious or spiritual authority through his addiction to something in the material world. At times, Father Flynn's crudeness makes the narrator feel uncomfortable. The narrator describes that when the priest would smile, "he used to uncover his big discolored teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip – a habit which had made me feel uncomfortable in the beginning of our acquaintance before I knew him well." This description of Father Flynn is also grotesque, and his lack of awareness of his own body, and of how to present himself, further undermines his authority. His behavior causes the narrator to feel secondhand embarrassment, rather than admiration. Joyce doesn't stop at implying that the priest's work is ineffective: there are several implications in the story that Father Flynn is a corrupt leader, both in terms of the way he relates to the narrator specifically and in the way he leads his church. When the narrator's family members tell him that the priest has died, they don't seem too upset about Father Flynn's passing. The narrator walks in on a conversation in which Old Cotter, "returning to some former remark of his," says, "No, I wouldn't say he was exactly … but there was something queer … there was something uncanny about him […] I think it was one of those … peculiar cases …" Old Cotter's trailing off and exaggerated beating around the bush in this instance subtly points to the implication that the priest may have been pedophilic. The uses of the word "queer" in particular speaks to this, as at the time it was already used as a pejorative term for homosexual relationships. Old Cotter goes on to suggest that the narrator ought to spend more time with people his own age, which further supports the idea that communities suspect Father Flynn of pedophilia. The fact that the narrator is young shouldn't necessarily mean that there would be anything wrong with his spending time with a priest—unless, of course, that priest is rumored to violate the young people who he spends time with. There is also an implication in the story that Father Flynn takes advantage of his parishioners. In a dream that the narrator has after the priest has died, he sees Father Flynn's smiling face and feels "that [he] too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin." Simony refers to the illicit practice of buying entrance to heaven. The implication that Father Flynn may have been engaged in this practice, which is explicit in its corruption, serves to further criticize his character and moral authority. This, in turn, undermines the authority of the Catholic Church. Through his use of grotesque language to describe the priest and through subtly describing the other characters' aversion to him, Joyce effectively casts Father Flynn as a suspicious, potentially corrupt character, and in doing so undermines the authority of the Catholic Church in the story's community. However, his criticism of Catholicism doesn't stop just at the local level; Father Flynn lives on Great Britain Street, which adds a layer of political corruption to the spiritual and moral corruption that is already present in the story. Great Britain only granted Ireland their independence in the early 1900s, around the time the story was written. Father Flynn is then linked, symbolically, to a force that oppresses and abuses the Irish people. This expands upon the implication that he takes advantage of, and maybe even abuses, the people in his local community and parish. - Theme: Death, Grief, and Mourning. Description: "The Sisters" is the portrait of a young man and his community as they navigate the death of Father Flynn, a local priest who was admired by some and distrusted by others. And because Father Flynn was such a polarizing figure, people respond to his death in a whole host of ways. All of those who mourn the priest equally struggle with feelings of relief, disgust, and other emotional responses to death that are not traditionally associated with mourning. Through presenting all of the complexities of the characters' reactions to death, Joyce creates an honest portrayal of human grief and mourning. At the very beginning of the story, the narrator anticipates Father Flynn's death not only with fear, but also with a nervous sort of excitement. The narrator observes, "Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softy to myself the word paralysis […] It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work." Here, the narrator reveals both an expected and an unexpected emotional response to death. Readers can reasonably expect that a character would be afraid of paralysis, but not that he would experience a voyeuristic and perverse longing to witness its effect on the body. This ending to the opening passage sets readers up for an exploration of human responses to death that goes beyond simple grief. Indeed, as the story progresses, the narrator admits to feeling relief that Father Flynn has passed, further complicating the story's portrayal of grief and mourning. After he hears the news that the priest is dead, the narrator thinks to himself, "I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death." This reaction is surprising, because at the beginning of the story the narrator thinks about the priest as if they had been very close. Additionally, other characters comment on the close relationship—even the strangely close relationship, which other characters seem to think may have been pedophilic—that existed between Father Flynn and the young man. However, in admitting that he feels freed by the older man's death, the narrator demonstrates a more complex emotional relationship to death. He draws readers' attention to the possibility that the narrator's growth was in fact inhibited by Father Flynn's influence, and that the priest's death doesn't only present him with occasion to mourn, but also the opportunity to grow in ways he hadn't been able to while the older man was alive. When the narrator and the other characters are paying their respects to Father Flynn in his coffin, Joyce makes it clear that none of them are sure how to act in the situation. They aren't able to acknowledge the raw ugliness of death, and thus attempt to disguise this ugliness with performative religious rites and nostalgia. The narrator describes Father Flynn's corpse as "solemn and copious, vested as for the altar […] His face was very translucent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils." In doing so, he paints a horrifying portrait of the dead body. However, Eliza, one of the women who took care of the priest in his old age, later says Father Flynn made a "beautiful corpse." Here, Eliza's blatant exaggeration—if not outright lie—betrays her own tremendous discomfort with acknowledging the reality of death. While the narrator seems to have the emotional bandwidth to acknowledge even the most disturbing elements of death, the other characters try to ignore this discomfort, masking it with an appreciation of Father Flynn and his corpse that they imagine is appropriate. The narrator then approaches the coffin at the altar, where he sees that Father Flynn's "face was very translucent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur. There was a heavy odor in the room — the flowers." In this moment, Joyce's description of Father Flynn's body is extraordinarily grotesque. The language "fur" and "cavernous" make it seem like an animal rather than a human being is the object of the description. At the moment of the funeral, Father Flynn has been dressed in his best robes, and yet this was still not enough to mask the grotesque ugliness of a dead, aged body. The last sentence perfectly captures the attempt and failure to beautify death: odor is a word used to describe unpleasant smells, and yet the flowers, presumably, were placed at the altar to beautify and perfume the space. Description of them as an odor epitomizes the failure to make beautiful what is intrinsically grotesque. The grotesque style that Joyce employs in narrating the story serves both to expose the ugly, dark, reality of death and, by contrast, to highlight the average person's aversion to it. Through this contrast, Joyce is able to portray both an honest illustration of death itself and a thorough representation of human response to it. What's more, death as it's portrayed in the story isn't only a bad thing. The narrator himself directly says the he feels "freed" by Father Flynn's passing. Indeed, in many ways Joyce paints death as a liberating force, one that frees the local community from a man who espouses a type of religion that no longer serves them. Rather than portraying death as something to be mourned and dreaded, Joyce casts it as something to be honored when the right time has come. Not only are some of the characters relieved to be rid of Father Flynn; the priest himself laughs more and more often as his health deteriorates. This implies that rather than seeing death as something that is purely negative, the characters are able to see it as force that liberates humanity from what no longer serves it. - Theme: Paralysis, Deterioration, and the Obsolete. Description: While the narrator and other characters are genuinely upset at Father Flynn's passing, in some ways, they are also relieved. This is because the elderly Father Flynn is characterized as a relic from the past, whose influence on young people and religious teachings are no longer relevant. The death of the priest, then in some ways represents the death of the brand of Catholicism that he espoused. James Joyce himself was a lifelong critic of the Catholic Church, particularly the teachings and practices that he considered obsolete. Through portraying Father Flynn as old fashioned, overly esoteric, and physically deteriorating, Joyce argues that the teachings of the Catholic Church are obsolete and that, like the priest himself, the time has come that they cease to exist. Father Flynn is characterized as being someone whose beliefs and practices are not relevant to the time period in which he lives. When the narrator learns of the priest's death, he feels a sense of "freedom, as if [he] had been freed from something by his death" even though the priest "had taught me a great deal. He had studied in the Irish college in Rome and had taught me how to pronounce Latin properly." Here, the narrator's chooses to share that the priest had taught him Latin immediately after admitting that he is, in some ways, relieved that Father Flynn has died. It is as though the narrator is trying to convince himself that he should feel worse that Father Flynn has passed, because he learned so much from the older man. However, it is clear that the narrator does not necessarily value the lessons he learned with Father Flynn, because those lessons weren't necessarily useful. This is made evident by the choice to give Latin as an example. Indeed, at the time the story was written, Latin itself was already a dead language. At first glance, it seems that the narrator is remembering the Latin lessons in the context of feeling grateful for the priest and everything he taught him. However, upon further analysis, it seems that the link between learning Latin and the priest's death is that both the language and the person have become obsolete. After Father Flynn has died, the sisters who looked after him share stories about his old age that subtly link the deterioration of Father Flynn's body with the process of his view on religion becoming obsolete. Eliza, one of the man's sisters, shares that when she brought Father Flynn his soup, she'd "find him with is breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open." Here, it is clear that Father Flynn's old age has caused him to lose control over his body. However, Eliza first mentions the breviary—a book of recitations to be practiced daily, mandated by the Catholic Church—which draws readers' attention to the deterioration of Father Flynn's religious practice before they notice the deterioration of his physical body. The fact that these two things are linked together suggests that Father Flynn's perspective on the Catholic faith was perhaps as obsolete, as ready to die, as his physical body was. Father Flynn's strokes caused him to become paralyzed at the end of his life, which is deeply symbolic in the story. Joyce chooses paralysis because it implies the end of movement. Since Father Flynn is the symbolic embodiment of the Catholic Church in the story, his paralysis represents the Catholic Church's inability to move with the times, its inability to evolve in order to remain relevant. There is also the implication that the Catholic Church can paralyze those that become involved with it. The narrator, for example, feels "freed from something by [Father Flynn's] death." This implies that Father Flynn, who connected the narrator to the Catholic faith, had a paralyzing effect on the narrator's life. Catholicism, the story implies, kept him stuck. This analysis is further supported by the symbolism of the chalice in the story. Eliza mentions that she and her sister, Nannie, really noticed that Father Flynn's health was deteriorating when he accidentally broke a chalice. This moment also has superstitious overtones: Nannie didn't just notice that the priest's health was deteriorating because he broke the chalice, but also believes that his poor health may have come as a superstitious sort of consequence for breaking the chalice. This, in turn, paints the Catholic faith as superstitious and irrational. The priest has also been buried with "his hands loosely retaining a chalice." The detail that he is loosely holding the chalice invites readers to draw a parallel between the loose grip Father Flynn has on the chalice in death and the time that he dropped it while he was alive, demarcating the beginning of his illness. Because the chalice is such an important instrument in Catholic rituals, this symbolism links Father Flynn's physical death with his inability to function as a religious leader. In Roman Catholicism, chalices are used as the cup in communion ceremonies and in Mass. Thus, the idea that his hold on the chalice is loose suggests that his hold on the Catholic faith is loose—and, by extension, that the grip that Catholicism has on Irish culture is loosening as well. Father Flynn's death is met with such a complex, largely ambivalent emotional reaction because it is, so to speak, his time to pass. But not only does this idea refer to his physical body; the education he provides for young people, his approach to Catholicism, and his religious ideologies were no longer suitable for the time in which he lived. Towards the end of his life, Father Flynn was not only physically deteriorating, but also mentally unstable. The narrator and the women who took care of him refer to moments when he was smiling or laughing to himself seemingly for no reason. For example, towards the end of his life, the priest had the delusional idea to "go out for a drive one fine day" to see the house where he was born. By characterizing Father Flynn not just as physically unwell but as having lost his mind, Joyce drives home his criticism of the Church. If Father Flynn is the symbolic embodiment of Catholicism, then the religion is not only obsolete, but is so nonsensical that it is as mad as the priest himself. - Climax: The narrator visits Father Flynn's house and sees his dead body. - Summary: Father Flynn, a local priest with whom the narrator has a close relationship, has suffered several strokes and is likely to pass away soon. Every day, the young narrator passes by the church where the old priest lives to see whether he is still alive. While he does care for Father Flynn, the narrator also anticipates the priest's death with a sort of excitement, as he is curious to see the effects of paralysis on Father Flynn's body. One day, the narrator's uncle and Old Cotter explain to the narrator that, after suffering a third and final stroke, Father Flynn has finally passed away. Of all of the members of the narrator's family, he is the only one who seems upset. Old Cotter and the boy's uncle think Father Flynn was a "queer" old man. Old Cotter especially disapproves of the relationship the narrator had with the priest, saying that young men should explore the outdoors or spend their time with people their own age rather than dedicating themselves to religious studies, as the narrator did with Father Flynn. The narrator feels frustrated as he listens to the older man criticize his relationship with Father Flynn. Later, though, when he has the opportunity to reflect upon the priest's death, the narrator himself doesn't seem to upset about it. Indeed, he admits to himself that he feels he has been freed of something—even though Father Flynn taught him many things about Catholicism, the priest made the narrator feel uncomfortable sometimes. The narrator recalls in particular that he had to help Father Flynn to open his snuff packets, as the old man's strokes reduced his mobility. What's more, the narrator was never certain that what he was learning from Father Flynn was really useful. It seemed like Father Flynn liked to complicated teaching about the Catholic Church that the narrator had thought were really simple. When the narrator and his aunt arrive at the wake, the narrator observes a poorly dressed woman praying, and, as he approaches the coffin, tries to pray himself, but finds that he is distracted by the sound of the other people's prayers. Peering into the coffin, the narrator notices that Father Flynn's face is grey and almost translucent, surrounded by hair that looks more like white fur. The priest is loosely holding a chalice, and the narrator imagines that he is smiling softly—but is startled to see that the priest is not, in fact, smiling. The narrator and his aunt talk with Nannie and Eliza, the two sisters that looked after Father Flynn in his old age. Contrary to the grotesque image the narrator paints of the priest's corpse, the sisters comment several times that he had a "beautiful death" or was a "beautiful corpse." They express their grief over Father Flynn's death, saying he was really no trouble for them to care for—although they had noticed prior to his death he was beginning to lose his mind. Nannie thinks the priest's poor health all started when he broke a chalice. Eliza shares that she once went to give the priest his soup and found him sitting up with his mouth open, his breviary fallen to the floor. She also remembers that the end of his life, Father Flynn had the idea to get a carriage and drive back to the house where he grew up. The narrator, uncomfortable with all of the stories, listens closely in the house to hear if anyone else is walking around, but then remembers that the priest is still in his coffin. Eliza resumes her story, explaining how she once came across Father Flynn wide awake and laughing to himself in his confessional in the chapel, and that that was when she knew "that there was something gone wrong with him."

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Sniper - Point of view: Third person limited (Republican Sniper) - Setting: Dublin, Ireland - Character: Republican Sniper. Description: The Republican sniper begins the story concerned only with his most immediate problems—his hunger, his desire to light a cigarette, and his desire to survive and defeat his enemies. He ends up being confronted by the question of the destructive divisiveness of war. The sniper contends with his glee and eagerness to kill his enemy even as he also feels remorse and loss at the inhumanity of war. His human impulse to identify the man he has killed at the end of the story leads him to discover that he is very intimately aware of his enemy's humanity, as his enemy is also his brother. - Character: Enemy Sniper. Description: The enemy sniper is in no real way differentiated by O'Flaherty from the Republican sniper—that is, other than the fact that the two men lie on the opposite ends of the ideological battle raging at the moment, and on opposite roofs facing off against each other. The enemy sniper and the Republican sniper seem to mirror each other, each trying to shoot at the other and each trying to trick the other. The enemy sniper does not succeed and gets killed, and in the end the Republican sniper discovers that the enemy sniper is actually his brother. - Character: Man in the Armored Car. Description: The man in the armored car by chance drives up the street after the Republican sniper has flashed his lighter and the enemy sniper has fired at him. After the old woman informs the man in the armored car about the Republican sniper, but before the man can act on the information, the sniper shoots him dead. - Theme: Divisions. Description: "The Sniper" abounds with all sorts of divisions, both figurative and literal. The story takes place just before dawn, the moment of division between night and day. Up until the end, all the action takes place on the rooftops of Dublin, where a Republican sniper and an enemy sniper face each other on roofs across the street from one another, another literal division. The story takes place during the early weeks of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), itself a great divisive event, which erupted when two factions of Irish Republicans who had been allies during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) disagreed and went to war with each other over whether to accept the terms of the treaty with England that had ended the Irish War of Independence. At the end of the story, when the Republican sniper realizes that the man he just killed was also his brother, the reader understands the full extent and cost of the divisions that have ripped apart Ireland, where even brother conceivably might fight brother for political reasons. The divisions also extend to O'Flaherty's description of the Republican sniper, who at once has "the face of a student" while his eyes hold "the cold gleam of a fanatic"; he is both sympathetic and destructive, a regular young man and a cold-blooded killer. Additionally, he also has to contend with the fact that he feels glee and enthusiasm about killing the enemy and in the immediate aftermath of that killing also remorse and sadness at taking human life. The intensity of the situation, however, makes it difficult for him to bridge the gap between all these divisions. He must readily kill and be violent for the sake of the war, and he has to forget, momentarily, his enemy's humanity in order to kill him and save himself. The story thus dramatizes the way divisions cause violence to proliferate, how people on separate sides can become blind to the shared humanity of those they face. - Theme: War, Violence, and Enmity. Description: "The Sniper" is a war story, and it explores questions of violence and enmity and how they affect the people who participate in and are caught up in the war. The Republican sniper kills three people over the course of the story: the man in the armored car, the old woman, and the enemy sniper. The Republican sniper does not have much of a choice: for him it is either kill or be killed. He must kill even the old woman, for if she gets away she might inform one of his enemies about him. In this way, the story shows how war blurs the line between civilians and warriors become blurred, so that even an old woman is bound into the fight and becomes a threat. Consequently, war creates a situation in which human beings lose their ability to see other people as full and nuanced humanity. Everyone becomes either an ally or an enemy, either people who will help the Republican sniper or people who will hurt him. When, at the end of the story, the sniper realizes that he has killed his own brother, he must face firsthand how forced violence and the enmity of war create a situation in which individual identities become clouded over. In fact, almost nothing in the story actually differentiates the two snipers besides their supposed ideological opposition—of which we hear nothing about. They do not have names: they are one Republican and one Free Stater. The violent politics around them subsumes their individuality, and the final revelation demonstrates the degree to which the categories of "enemy" and "ally" are simplifications – fatal simplifications – generated by the enmity of war. - Theme: Chance and Ingenuity. Description: "The Sniper" demonstrates how both chance and ingenuity are essential components to war—how sometimes they go hand in hand, and sometimes they do not. The eponymous sniper is both lucky and clever in his survival and his defeat of the enemy sniper. From the start, the sniper understands that chance plays a large part in the ultimate survival of any soldier. He decides to take the risk of lighting the cigarette, despite the fact that his enemy might see the flash—as the enemy actually does. When he does get shot shortly afterwards, it is due only to chance that he is not hit in a more vital part of his body than his arm, just as it is chance that the old woman sees him just as the man in the armored car rolls down the street. Still, the soldier in war does not exist entirely at the whims of chance without control of any sort, and it is ingenuity that allows the sniper to trick the enemy soldier into thinking that he has been killed. However, in going to investigate the enemy sniper, the sniper gives himself to chance once more. It is chance that allows him to survive the gunfire that follows him down the street, and finally also chance that the man that he has killed is his brother—an irrevocably cruel act of chance, but one perhaps no more unlikely than any of the others. O'Flaherty, consequently, demonstrates how war often happens as a series of chance results that one after the other lead either to continued life or to death. That two specific people end up facing each other in war is also a matter of chance, for the enemy sniper could have been nearly any young man from Ireland. Though ingenuity clearly plays a part in the sniper's survival, it is mostly chance—and a chance decision—that leads him to survival even as he happens to kill, in his lucky fight against his enemy, his very own brother. - Theme: Pain and Perseverance. Description: The sniper goes through a lot of physical pain in "The Sniper"—he gets shot in the arm, he uses a painful antiseptic to protect the wound from infection, he drags himself from the roof of a building and manages even to run across the street—but by the end of the story the reader understands that the greatest pain that he will experience will be the emotional pain of having killed his brother, the enemy sniper. However, as a symbol, this brother represents more than merely the sniper's actual kin, but also the larger circle of people who make up the Irish nation—from the man in the armored car to the old woman who informs the man in the armored car about the sniper's whereabouts. The Irish Civil War was an incredibly divisive moment in the history of Ireland, particularly as it came directly after the unifying and galvanizing Irish War of Independence, and involved allies from the former war suddenly becoming bitter enemies. The physical and emotional pain that the sniper experiences is an individual microcosm that reflects the civil violence suddenly erupting in a young country only recently independent from its English colonizers. Both the Republicans and the Free Staters think they know what is best for the new country, and part of the country's first real test is how it can persevere past the pain caused by the newfound divisions that emerge from Ireland's birth. For the snipers, this means, most immediately, destroying the enemy before the enemy destroys them, but in the long term, by the end of the story, we understand that the story suggests that the only way the country will persevere and survive is if the two sides do not destroy one another in the process and can find ways to forgive one another—or at least if the two sides can recognize their share humanity as Irishmen—once the war ends. - Theme: Humanity and Remorse. Description: Despite the enmity between combatants, the story also shows that a strand of human curiosity, of desire to understand and connect with the enemy, is present still. The Republican sniper proves himself to be not totally bloodthirsty, despite the surge of joy he feels upon killing his rival. Rather, after the adrenaline and drama of battle, the Republican sniper immediately understands that his rival was a person, and that the killing of a person is a tragedy and a waste. In fact, the Republican sniper is so overcome by his sense of the now dead enemy sniper's humanity, that he feels the need to see the man he has killed.The war, then, does not completely cause the sniper to lose his sense of humanity. The final twist that the enemy sniper is his brother, of course, hammers home how war can make bitter enemies of anyone, but the sniper's urge to go and see the enemy out of remorse suggests that there is a fundamental humanity that continues to exist even within war, and gives some hope that it will continue to exist after the war as well. - Climax: The Republican sniper finds out the enemy sniper is his brother - Summary: "The Sniper" begins just before dawn in Dublin, Ireland, during the Irish Civil War. A Republic sniper sits on a roof and lights a cigarette despite knowing that the flash of his lighter might tip off his enemy. It does, and an enemy sniper, a Free Stater, sends a bullet flying overhead. The enemy is just across the street on the roof opposite the Republican sniper. At the same time an armored car comes down the street, and an old woman comes around the corner and informs the man in the armored car about the Republican sniper. Before the man in the armored car can shoot at the Republican sniper, though, the Republican sniper shoots the man dead. He shoots the woman dead, too, as she tries to run away. Distracted for a moment, the Republican sniper gets hit in the arm by the bullet of the enemy sniper. In tremendous pain, he can't hold his rifle anymore. He pours an antiseptic over his wound, which is also extremely painful. In order to escape, he puts his rifle on the edge of the roof with his cap on its end; the enemy sniper shoots at it, and the Republican sniper ingeniously makes it look like he has been killed. The enemy sniper, thinking he is safe, stands up on his roof, and with a surge of pride and joy the sniper shoots him dead with is revolver. However, now that the adrenaline of battle is over, and the Republican sniper feels safe, "the lust of battle died in him. He became bitten by remorse." He throws his revolver "with an oath", finishes all the whiskey in his flask, and begins to go down to street level to report to his commander. However, reaching the street, he feels "a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed." Dodging gunfire behind him, he reaches the corpse and throws himself at it, as if he has been killed, too. Finally "the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face."

- Genre: Short story, modernist fiction - Title: The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Point of view: Third person - Setting: African plains - Character: Harry. Description: Harry is an American writer who has spent his recent years married to various rich women in order to live a life of luxury. Stranded while on safari in Africa with his current wife Helen, a thorn scratch leads to his leg becoming infected with gangrene. The infection ultimately takes his life, with story's narrative focusing on his quarrels with his wife and his death-bed musings until that point. While bedridden, Harry spends his waking hours bickering with the dutiful Helen about whether a plane will come to rescue him and whether he should have an alcoholic drink, while also antagonizing her about her wealth. At times he looks at her with admiration, while at other times he treats her with contempt. His inconsistent manner with Helen reflects his own inner turmoil, as he looks back on his life unsatisfied and seeks someone to blame. In a series of flashbacks, the reader sees that Harry has lived an eventful life but has not written all the stories he had saved up to put down on paper. He experienced the trenches of World War I, spent time living in Paris in poverty and later as a well-financed socialite, and has hunted in woodlands and mountains across continents. At first, he blames his wife and her money for distracting him from his calling. But in the end, Harry decides if it was not her it would have been someone else, and he had destroyed his own talent by living in unproductive comfort and wasting his opportunities. Harry's life and career bear similarities to Hemingway's own, and so he is often seen as a reflection of the real-life writer's own concerns with his unfulfilled potential. Indeed, Hemingway once told a friend that "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a study of what could have happened to him had he given in to a life of comfort, like Harry had. - Character: Helen. Description: Helen is Harry's wife, a wealthy woman who likes to drink, shoot, and make love. Her first husband died while she was relatively young. Struggling to bear the weight of the loss, she turned to lovers and drink, though neither satisfied her. Afterward, one of her two children also died in a plane crash and she decided to start life afresh, fearing loneliness. She pursued and married Harry, whom she loves and respects. She has given him access to all her money and followed his whims around the world. Nevertheless, Harry quarrels with her often, even as she is typically the voice of reason seeking to calm him. He tells her he has never loved her, calls her a "rich bitch," and fires insults at her to alleviate his anger with himself and his situation. These cut her to her core, as she loves Harry deeply, but she takes them in stride, believing he is a better person than he lets on. She shoots a ram to make him a broth and constantly expresses optimism the plane will come to rescue him. Although Harry resents her, it is clear he also admires Helen for her strength of character, which shines through despite the story being told from her husband's point of view. - Character: Compton. Description: "Compie" turns out to be a character in Harry's deathbed hallucinations, as he never left his cot by Helen's side at the camp. A friend of Harry and Helen's, Harry imagines Compie flying in to rescue him. At first, Compie plans to fly to a hospital, but later he redirects the plane to Mount Kilimanjaro, where Harry realizes he will lay to rest (though this all only takes place in Harry's mind). - Theme: Ever-present Death. Description: In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Harry is on safari in Africa when an untreated thorn scratch turns into gangrene in his leg. Stranded without access to medical care, the leg slowly rots away, and Harry knows that he will soon die. As he awaits his end, he thinks about the death of his writing career, which will also be extinguished when he dies. Through Harry's regret over his wasted life and talent, Hemingway suggests that one should make the most of life, as death is ever-present and could strike at any time. Throughout the story, as Harry lays on his cot, death is a physical presence, and the constant stench of Harry's lethal infection is the story's clearest manifestation of death. In the first conversation that Hemingway depicts between Harry and his wife, Harry apologizes for the odor, since he believes it must bother Helen. Later in the story, the smell takes on a more psychological role, becoming part of Harry's hallucinations as he feels that "death had come … and he could smell its breath." The smell of death pervading both the story's real and imagined scenes makes clear that death is inescapable, but the hyena lurking around the campfire also gives death a physical presence. Hyenas are scavengers, and the animal's presence implies that Harry is close enough to death to begin scavenging for his remains—in fact, when Harry dies, it's the hyena's call that alerts Helen. The hyena is both literally there (Helen notices it, calling it a "filthy animal") and part of Harry's thoughts about his death. When he feels death approaching, he imagines "a rush of … evil smelling emptiness" and notes that "the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it." The beast's symbolic significance intertwines with reality in Harry's mind, giving death physical form—one that is notably threatening and always lurking. As Harry reflects on his many varied experiences, it becomes clear that death has in always been a dramatic force invading his life. For instance, Harry remembers a WWI bombing officer called Williamson who died caught in the wire lining the trenches. Having been hit by a German bomb, he screamed for Harry to shoot him as his bowels fell out and tangled in the wire. The deeply unsettling image is clearly one that has haunted Harry for a long time, revealing that he is no stranger to human mortality. Harry also recalls a hotel owner in Triburg whose livelihood had been ruined by inflation. The money he had worked hard to save became worthless, and he hanged himself. While economic powers beyond the man's control drove him to his hopeless end, Harry has been living comfortably off others' money. Since both men blunder into doom, the story suggests that luck and circumstance cannot thwart encroaching death. Now that Harry is approaching his own end, he realizes he never learned to use the time and talent given to him. It is not so much his death itself that weighs heavy on Harry's heart, but rather his wasted life and opportunities. Hemingway notes that the gradual decay of Harry's writing career began years earlier: "each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all." The focus here is on Harry's willful inaction, as the fault is clearly his own. Hemingway encourages readers to "despise" Harry for this through his harsh, scornful language throughout the story. It is often Harry's own voice that uses such language against himself, underscoring his frustration. This serves as a stark warning from a character that has experienced such regret first hand. Given the evidence Hemingway has provided of Harry's experiences with the untimely and often gruesome deaths of others, his unwillingness to write—that is, to make the most of his life and talent—is presented as a great moral failing: "He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would." In this way, Hemingway shows that Harry has not only let himself down, but also betrayed those whose stories will now also die with him. Death is ever-present in this short story, as it is in life. Hemingway paints many varied pictures of the way death has invaded Harry's eventful life and his psyche as he approaches his own end. But Harry, though intimately acquainted with human mortality, has not heeded warnings of death's simultaneous unpredictability and inevitability and has not completed his life's work in time. Ultimately, the story makes the case for living life and striving toward personal goals while the opportunity remains, as no one can predict the time or nature of their own end. - Theme: Comfort vs Calling. Description: In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Hemingway examines why and how an artist can fail in his calling. At first, Harry (who is a writer) finds various excuses for his lack of achievement—primarily the distractions of his romantic entanglements and living among the rich. Harry had told himself he would experience the high life and eventually write about the very wealthy, casting himself as a "spy in their country." Ultimately, however, he is seduced by a life of comfort at the cost of his artistic output. In contrast, he sees his earlier life among the poor as the best source material for his craft. In this way, Hemingway suggests that excessive comfort is the enemy of art. From the outset, Hemingway characterizes a life of ease as antithetical to creative output. Harry's example shows how prosperity distances a writer from both the desire and ability to produce meaningful work, noting that "each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all." Here, comfort is set in direct opposition to a healthy work ethic and instead presented as an active force chipping away at Harry's talent. Harry directs anger at his rich wife, Helen, for drawing him into this world of plenty: "Your bloody money," he remarks early in the story, and repeatedly refers to his wife in his head as a "rich bitch." This aggression reveals that he sees her money as an enemy to his aspiring talent, further reflecting his association of comfort with a lack of creativity. In the end, Harry regrets his years spent socializing with wealthy people: "The rich … were dull and they were repetitious." Hemingway's dismissive attitude toward the luxury in which Harry has spent his later years suggests that such a lifestyle cultivates creative impotence, given its lack of stimulus. On his deathbed, Harry wishes he had time to write about the struggling poor people he once lived among, whose experiences—unlike those of the rich—provided a well of inspiration. For instance, he describes at length his time in the slums of Paris and laments never writing about the suffering of the ordinary people that he witnessed there: "No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about." Harry spends far more time at the very end of his life recalling those tougher, grittier experiences than he does reflecting on any of the high society parties he later attended. The implication is that writers should focus on that which moves them, and that writers have to be on the ground, living in hardship, to produce anything of consequence: "There was so much to write. He had seen the world change … He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would." Because Harry chose comfort over calling, the meaningful stories of those people will die along with him, which Hemingway presents as a major betrayal of purpose and a moral failing. On greater reflection, Harry accepts that he cannot blame anyone but himself for the fact he has fallen into the temptations of a life of comfort. He decides that his wife and the lifestyle she provided him are not to blame for him not writing, but rather his own choices are: "He had destroyed his talent himself," he thinks. "Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well?" Upon accepting his responsibility, Harry reflects that "he had traded away what remained of his old life. He had traded it for security, for comfort too." The fault lies with Harry for allowing the allure of comfort to undermine his work. The two cannot be pursued side by side, and so the writer must make his choice. In this way, Hemingway points the finger squarely at artists to ensure their lifestyles are conducive to meaningful output. By exploring Harry's regrets, Hemingway argues that choosing comfort over calling is a selfish act that provides no sense of fulfilment. Harry's life is a great waste: he has let down those whose stories will now go untold, whose lives and deaths will not be recorded for posterity. It is an artist's choice, then, to decide if their life's work is to be meaningful, and Hemingway suggests making this choice will take great passion and presence of mind. Hemingway further demonstrates for the reader, via Harry's unsuccessful career, how true artists should experience the "real" world, which, the author suggests, is the only world worth writing about. - Theme: Deathbed Memories. Description: At first, Hemingway takes pains to separate Harry's flashbacks from the story's current events and Harry's personal inner monologue. However, as Harry grows weaker, the distinction begins to fade, and his memories overwhelm and infiltrate his consciousness. The sum total of Harry's life flashes before his eyes on his deathbed, overwhelming him as he remembers, regrets, and wishes to record the memories he has failed to put into writing. Hemingway suggests that memories overwhelm Harry's grasp on the present because, in facing death, he desperately wants to relive—or to record—the experiences of his life. With lines breaks, italicized text, and long, rambling sentences that evoke a stream of consciousness, Hemingway offsets Harry's flashbacks from his interactions on the African plains. Breathless sentences containing Harry's remembrance of the past run together as Harry's memories crowd in on him, fighting for space in his mind and on the page. For example: "Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat." This creates two images of Harry: the aloof front that he presents to his wife and others, and his frustrated inner self hurtling through layers of long-distant past. The passages narrating the present also include Harry's thoughts and memories, but they are far more ordered. Sentences are shorter, and Harry offers succinct analysis of his past: "It wasn't this woman's fault. If it had not been she it would have been another. If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it." This is the introspection of a sane and conscious man in control of his faculties, and it contrasts greatly with the rushing narrative of the flashback portions. As Harry's condition deteriorates, however, he finds this line between past and present harder to maintain. The memories that have been consuming his private contemplation spill unfiltered into his interactions. As the gangrene in his leg progresses, Harry begins to forget whether he is thinking or speaking. Coming back from a reverie about life on a ranch and all the stories "from out there," he demands that his wife, Helen, answer the question he had just wordlessly asked himself (that is, why he'd never written those stories): "'You tell them why,' he said. 'Why what, dear?'" Harry's mask begins to slip as his remorse outweighs his conscious front. Events and regrets from long ago increasingly absorb him as he approaches his death, making him progressively less concerned with actual, current conversations. Harry's memories are all he has to show of his life, and his failure to write—in a sense, his failure to record the world he knew—while he had the chance, has consumed him. On emerging sleepily from yet another memory (this time the grizzly death of a fellow soldier in the trenches during WWI), Harry says to his wife, "I've been writing … But I got tired." Lying in a sick bed, immobilized by his gangrene, he is now unable to write all he had planned to. His desperation drives him to resort to reliving his past as a last-ditch attempt to record his life. Approaching his final breaths, Harry cannot look back on a life well lived, one in which his goals were met and his potential achieved. He re-lives key moments of his past in a race against the clock to symbolically preserve his experiences—something he failed to do with the time given him. Harry is finally, in a way, writing all those stories he never did—even if the only reader is himself. - Theme: A Man's View of Women. Description: In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Harry has dysfunctional relationships with women. He typically sees them as nothing more than a means to an end, since he uses their money to live a life of luxury. Though at times he is cruelly dismissive of his own wife, Harry does occasionally display genuine respect for Helen by acknowledging the strength she has shown in the face of great emotional hardships. In his inconsistent attitude toward women, the reader sees Harry's insecurities. As a kept man, he is not fulfilling the typical gender roles of the era in which men were expected to provide for their wives, creating a sense of inadequacy which he projects onto the women who keep him. Hemingway doesn't disprove or challenge Harry's view that relationships require a leader and that the man ought to lead; however, by framing Harry's resentment as rooted in his own anxiety about manhood, the story implicitly highlights the reductive and restrictive nature of stereotypical gender roles. Harry sees the role of women in his life as functional rather than romantic. He has used wealthy women to maintain a lifestyle that suits him. Harry depicts his relationship with Helen (and by implication his previous lovers) as purely transactional, noting to himself that "it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money." Their partnership is more related to business than romance, though he feigns the latter to ensure his pay check. Harry also paints his wife as the "hostess" at the end of a party. This dismissive depiction further reveals his view of her as only a bit part within a wider story—which is, of course, his own story.  Rich women have been instrumental to Harry's pursuit of a quality of life beyond his means. He resents these women, however, deflecting his frustration that he needs their money and is not self-sufficient. From the very beginning of the story Helen's money comes between them, revealing more about Harry's own insecurities than her value as a person. Harry's first exchange with his wife, for instance, leads to bickering over Helen's "bloody money" and his references to her "own people." He holds her wealth against her, despite the fact she considers it his wealth, as well: "It was always yours as much as mine." Helen has opened her life up to him, but he responds with bitterness at his subordinate social standing. Furthermore, Helen is not the only woman Harry has used in this way, as a string of women have kept him in the life of comfort to which he has become accustomed: "It was strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one?" He notes that lying to these women about loving them is how he "made his bread and butter." His cynical tone highlights his resentment of his dependence, his distaste revealing a self-awareness of his deficiencies. He ought to be the breadwinner, but instead he has chosen a life reliant on women's wealth, fostering his sense of inadequacy. Yet, at other times Harry reveals deep respect for his wife, as well as his previous partners. His frustrations are rooted in his own insecurities, and his changing attitude further reveals that his viewpoint is not objective. After yet another round bickering, Harry reflects on Helen's many qualities, such as her strong spirit and shooting skills, with a depth of feeling akin to a truly loving husband. When leaving aside his resentment over her higher social status, Harry clearly has high regard for his wife as an individual, revealing a more layered treatment of women in the story than the couple's first argument would suggest. Without his own self-doubt, he can simply admire the strong woman standing before him. Helen is a well-rounded character in her own right in the story. She goes out to hunt by herself, notably bringing back a male antelope. Her backstory involves personal loss, emotional hardship and self-assured independence—she did not need Harry, but sought him out for herself. "The steps by which she had acquired him," Hemingway writes, "were all part of a regular progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life." While Harry respects her strength, he sees her independent spirit as mutually exclusive to his own. According to his world view, one half of the couple must lead, and Harry has traded away his normative gender role (and thereby his own independence and self-respect) to defer to her. In this first-person narrative, the protagonist's view of women is limited by his own insecurities, in particular his sense of emasculation. Even as Hemingway gives depth to Helen's character with a detailed and dramatic back story, she serves a subordinate role because she is seen only through the lens of Harry's subjective perspective. That Hemingway doesn't flatly reject Harry's viewpoints, however, doesn't mean that the story inherently supports or disagrees with them. What it does show is that men of the era saw women primarily through the prism of their own—perhaps insecure—masculinity. - Climax: Harry's plane flies toward Mount Kilimanjaro - Summary: Stranded on safari in the African plains, Harry apologizes to his wife Helen for the stench of the gangrene eating its way up his leg. The two of them watch the carrion birds that have encircled the camp, waiting for his death. The couple bicker over how to handle his illness, how to pass the time, and whether to get a drink from the servant, Molo. Harry, a writer, begins to ponder his situation, regretting that now he'll never have the time to write everything he had planned to. Helen wishes they had never come on safari, and the two quarrel again over how they ended up in this situation. Frustrated, Harry declares that he's never loved Helen. In a series of flashbacks, Harry remembers various moments from his past—overhearing diplomat Fridtjof Nansen's fateful underestimation of the Bulgarian mountain snows while traveling on the Orient Express; helping a deserter with bloody feet while living in a woodcutter's house in Austria; Christmas day in Austria, when the snow was so bright it hurt the soldier's eyes; and skiing, drinking, and hunting across European mountains. Coming back to the present, Harry goads his wife into another argument, taunting her about her money and mocking the life of luxury they lived in Paris. He tells her it's amusing to hurt her this way. Seeing that he's made her cry, he says that he does truly love her, but he thinks to himself that this is the familiar lie by which he makes his bread and butter. He quickly insults her again and falls asleep. Waking up from his nap, Harry discovers that Helen has gone hunting, so he is left alone with his thoughts. He muses on his life with her and among the rich, and how wasted the time has been. He had come on this safari to try to wean himself off the good life, to get back to the rougher lifestyle he had once pursued. Helen is a good and strong woman, but he does not truly love her. He has distracted himself from the more important task of writing by seducing a series of rich women for their money. Helen returns with a ram she has shot to make a broth for Harry. Reflecting more about his wife's past, losses, and pursuit of him, Harry makes more of an effort to be civil. Helen repeats her belief a plane will soon arrive to take him to a hospital. Harry seems less sure, asking why she thinks it will. A hyena crosses the edges of the firelight as they settle in for the evening, and while he has his first pang of realization that death is coming for him, he hides his dread. Harry slips into another flashback, this time about the women he has loved and lost: the first woman he loved who had left him, a previous wife, and time he had spent "whoring" and fighting in Constantinople. He then remembers life on the front during WWI, full of military blunders and panic-stricken retreats. Later, he had met irrelevant intellectuals at cafes in Paris and quarreled more with his wife at the time. He had never written about any of it, even though he saw it as his duty to write it all. Coming back to reality, Helen offers Harry some broth. It's terrible. He looks with admiration at Helen anyway, and he feels death come again. He becomes more desperate to write, but Helen does not know how to take dictation, and he realizes the opportunity to write has passed for good. In another flashback, he recalls scenes from the mountainside, including his Grandfather's log house and a trout stream they rented in a Black Forest valley. He thinks back in detail on his time spent in the slums of Paris and the struggles of the poor there. Harry has a brief conversation about drinks with Helen, but he falls asleep once more, the flashbacks coming thick and fast as he weakens. He thinks about a ranch where a "half-wit" boy had killed a trespasser, and Harry had taken him to the police. He had never written these stories either. Briefly awake, Harry has a confused conversation with Helen and repeats to himself he would never write of her or her kind of people. He remembers Williamson from the WWI trenches who had died in horrific circumstances, and back in the present he thinks his own death is comparatively easy—he's even bored with how it's dragging on, as he gets bored with everything. Then, death comes for him a final time. Harry can feel its head on his cot, drawing closer, and he loses the ability to talk. In the morning, a friend called Compton comes in a small plane to take Harry to hospital. On the way, they steer off course toward the bright white snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, and Harry realizes he won't make it to the hospital but will instead lie in peace on the mountainside. None of this, however, is real: back on the plain, Helen is awakened by the distant cries of the hyena, and she discovers a lifeless Harry beside her.

- Genre: Realist - Title: The Son’s Veto - Point of view: Third-person omniscient, but most often following Sophy's perspective - Setting: London and the surrounding countryside (particularly the village of Gaymead) - Character: Sophy Twycott. Description: Sophy is the protagonist of "The Son's Veto." A working-class woman from the village of Gaymead, England, she starts out as a parlor-maid in the household of Mr. Twycott, alongside her friend Sam, the gardener. She almost marries Sam, but after they quarrel, she decides against it. While taking care of Mr. Twycott, she falls down the stairs and injures her foot for life. Soon after, Mr. Twycott asks her to marry him, and she accepts. However, Sophy struggles to fit into the upper-class London society to which her husband belongs. Her son, Randolph, becomes increasingly contemptuous of Sophy's lower-class mannerisms, such as her imperfect use of grammar. Sophy is troubled by her relationship with her son, and she feels isolated and unhappy in this social milieu, especially after her husband's death. As a widow, she starts up a relationship with her old friend Sam. She longs to marry him and establish a simpler, more carefree lifestyle in their old hometown. But she is torn because of the disapproval of her son, who believes that having a father-in-law of such low social standing will destroy his own reputation. Ultimately, Sophy chooses obedience to her son's wishes over her own happiness and freedom, a choice that perhaps contributes to her premature death at the end of the story. Overall, Sophy is often a remarkably passive protagonist, with the other three male characters initiating all the major events of her life—her first near-marriage to Sam, her marriage to Mr. Twycott, her renewed relationship with Sam, and her final disappointment brought about by her son's harsh "veto." Throughout the story, her personality is depicted as simple and pure; she has no desire for social advancement and sees through the artificial pretensions of elite society, desiring only an honest, happy life. But because she never truly manages to break free from the constraints that have been imposed on her, always subsuming her own desires beneath the wishes of others, she never attains the simple happiness that she yearns for. - Character: Randolph Twycott. Description: Randolph is the son of Sophy and Mr. Twycott. He receives the best education that England has to offer and is destined to follow in his father's footsteps by becoming an ordained Anglican priest. As he grows older, he becomes more and more infatuated with the world of elite society and preoccupied with being perceived as a "gentleman." As a result, he becomes increasingly disdainful of his mother's humble origins and her inability to fully fit into the expectations of upper-class society. When Sophy tells Randolph that she wants to marry Sam, he rejects the possibility, believing that Sam's low social status will "degrade" his own status in the eyes of other "gentlemen." Randolph remains unrelenting in his sacrifice of his mother's happiness for the sake of his own social prestige. Throughout the story, he scarcely returns or even acknowledges the love that his mother has for him, caring only about his own social advancement. Even at his mother's funeral, he does not show the genuine grief that Sam displays, but rather seems preoccupied with his bitterness at Sam for presuming to want to marry his mother. Randolph's choices demonstrate the destructive consequences of valuing social prestige over human relationships and emotions such as happiness or love. - Character: Sam Hobson. Description: Sam is Sophy's love interest. When they were younger, both Sam and Sophy worked in the household of Mr. Twycott (Sam as a gardener, Sophy as a parlor-maid). On the day of Mr. Twycott's first wife's death, Sam casually, half-jokingly hints at the possibility of marriage with Sophy. Although Sophy dismisses the possibility at first, the two ultimately do make plans to marry. But after an argument, Sophy calls off the engagement and later marries Mr. Twycott instead. Sam loses contact with Sophy as she and Mr. Twycott move to London. In the years that follow, Sam continues to work as a gardener for other households, but he never quite forgets Sophy. When he sees the notice of Mr. Twycott's death in the newspaper, he is drawn to the area where Sophy lives in hopes of meeting her again, taking up a job as the manager of a market-garden in London. One day, Sophy sees him passing by, and the two characters quickly revive their relationship, with a much greater passion than before. Sam tells her of his hopes to become a greengrocer in their hometown and asks Sophy to marry him. When she hesitates, uncertain of whether her son Randolph would approve, Sam urges her to follow her heart instead of worrying what her son might think. Sam fulfills at least part of his dream, opening up his grocery store back in Gaymead, but years pass as Sophy vacillates and eventually swears to her son that she will not marry Sam. In the end, Sam is devastated by the sight of Sophy's funeral procession passing his store. Throughout the story, Sam is an embodiment of the simple, rural, working-class lifestyle that Sophy has left behind by marrying Mr. Twycott. Sam's occupation as a gardener, then as a greengrocer, not only determines his class status; it also situates him close to nature, in contrast to the highly spiritual nature of Mr. Twycott's and Randolph's calling. Sam is portrayed as a pure, kind-hearted character, much like Sophy herself. In sharp contrast to Randolph, Sam seems to genuinely care about Sophy's happiness, and to put it above his own interests, even when that means waiting many years as she tries to decide between Sam and her son. - Character: Mr. Twycott. Description: Mr. Twycott, often referred to simply as "the vicar" or "the parson," is Sophy's husband and Randolph's father. He is a high-ranking clergyman in the Anglican church and wealthy enough to possess multiple large homes, hire multiple servants, and secure a prestigious education for his son. When his first wife dies, he recognizes his affection for Sophy and asks her to marry him, even though he knows that by doing so he is committing "social suicide." But he still cares enough about his social image to take steps to limit the negative impact of his marriage to Sophy, including moving to London (to escape from everyone who knew that Sophy had once been his maid) and investing in Sophy's education in an effort to eliminate her working-class mannerisms. Despite their differing backgrounds, however, Sophy and Mr. Twycott seem to have a relatively happy marriage; it is only after Mr. Twycott dies, and as her son grows older, that Sophy's troubles begin. Mr. Twycott's major flaw is his tendency to treat Sophy as a "child" (he is 20 years older than her), which creates considerable problems for Sophy after his death, as she is left with virtually no control over the estate, her son's education, or even her own life. Even so, Mr. Twycott is, overall, a sympathetic character in the novel; his willingness to marry Sophy in spite of the potential damage to his social status stands in sharp contrast to his son's refusal to accept Sophy's desire to marry Sam. - Theme: Social Class vs. Human Flourishing. Description: The distinctions of social class—and the accompanying invisible rules that govern how people within each class are expected to act—shape the lives of each character within "The Son's Veto." Mr. Twycott, an Anglican parson, must uproot his life to avoid potential societal scorn for marrying Sophy, his former servant. After her marriage to Mr. Twycott, Sophy must confront a complex set of social expectations that she is unprepared to meet, making her isolated and miserable. Later, after Sophy is widowed, her relationship with her youthful love interest, Sam, cannot be fulfilled without violating the invisible yet unavoidable barriers of social class. Sophy's son Randolph eventually loses all his human feelings and sympathy for his own mother in his obsessive desire to be seen as a gentleman, sacrificing her happiness to his social ambition. Through its depiction of these three characters, "The Son's Veto" suggests that social class can serve as a limitation on human potential, and in some circumstances can even destroy the natural bonds of human relationships. At first, Mr. Twycott's marriage to Sophy suggests that he has overcome some of the limitations of social expectations, yet he is ultimately quite constrained by them—even willing to uproot his entire life simply to escape from the possibility of social censure. He leaves behind his parish in Gaymead to move to London in an attempt to escape the scrutiny of everyone who knew Sophy had once been his maid. His willingness to "abandon their pretty country home […] for a narrow dusty house in a long, straight street" suggests that, because of the constraints imposed by social expectations, Sophy and Mr. Twycott's marriage will not thrive. Although Mr. Twycott has great affection for Sophy, he is not content to simply accept her as she is, with all her "deficiencies" in upper-class manners. He invests in her education, trying to erase the traces of her working-class roots and turn her into a proper lady. At some level, then, Mr. Twycott is anxious to fit his new wife into the mold of upper-class society, suggesting he is still self-conscious about having married a rural, working-class woman. Unlike Mr. Twycott, Sophy seems relatively immune from concern over her social status—but because of her son's desire for social propriety, she is ultimately constrained by these expectations more than any other character. As a young woman, Sophy is content with her working-class lifestyle, marrying Mr. Twycott only because of her respect for him rather than a desire for social advancement. Although this marriage propels her upwards in English society, it scarcely seems to make her any happier. Unable to fully shed the traces of her humble origins (especially her working-class speech), she is disrespected by other members of her husband's social circle and—most painfully for her—even disdained by her own son for failing to fulfill their social expectations. This is evident from the beginning of the story, when Randolph rebukes her "with an impatient fastidiousness" when she makes a minor grammatical mistake. The trivial nature of Sophy's perceived "deficiencies" highlights the pettiness of the society that judges her so harshly for them, while ignoring all the positive aspects of her character. Later, in widowhood, Sophy rekindles her romantic interest in Sam, the man she once almost married, and their relationship comes to embody her hopes of regaining her lost happiness. Sophy does not truly care about how society would perceive her remarriage to Sam, but she does care about its effect on her relationship with her son; and Randolph, afraid of how the marriage would affect his own social standing, makes her swear not to marry Sam. Sophy's dilemma, caught between Sam and her son, suggests that she is sacrificing her happiness to a set of arbitrary social conventions. Randolph, out of all the characters in the story, is most in bondage to the constraints imposed by social expectations, valuing his social status even above his relationship with his mother. By sacrificing her happiness to his social ambitions, he also damages his own humanity. Randolph adopts these social expectations out of his own desire for advancement and his preoccupation with the glamorous world of London high society. As he grows older, he limits his interests more and more narrowly to a "population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people." Randolph's lack of interest in the world outside of elite society causes him to "drift further and further away" from Sophy and, implicitly, from his humanity. The ultimate outcome of Randolph's single-minded desire for social advancement is his growing cruelty towards his mother, especially his refusal to let her marry Sam. He seems to scarcely notice the love that his mother has for him, focusing instead on the "infinitesimal sins" that have stemmed from her social origins. When Sophy tells him of her desire to remarry, he seemingly does not even consider her hopes for happiness, caring only about the social status of his prospective father-in-law. The narrator notes that "his education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him quite firm," suggesting that Sophy's happiness is not the only casualty of Randolph's obsession with social status; he has also given up some of his own humanity in the process, forever forgoing the possibility of a loving relationship with his mother. Mr. Twycott, Sophy, and Randolph are all constrained in different ways by the expectations of class distinctions. Sometimes, as with Mr. Twycott and Randolph, these expectations are internalized by the characters themselves, who are blind to the ways in which they are limiting their own happiness and human potential; and sometimes, as in Sophy's case, the expectations are imposed wholly from without, but are equally unavoidable and crushing in their effects. Through its depiction of these three storylines, "The Son's Veto" suggests that conformity to social conventions can limit our potential to achieve true happiness or develop fulfilling relationships with other human beings. - Theme: Family Duty vs. Desire. Description: The primary conflict in "The Son's Veto" is between Sophy's desire for happiness, embodied in her relationship with Sam, and her sense of duty, embodied in her maternal relationship with her son Randolph. Sophy's revived romantic relationship with Sam, the man she almost married in her youth, offers her a glimpse of happiness and freedom that had seemed impossibly out of reach when she became widowed. But Randolph, who is obsessed with his social standing, refuses to accept the idea that his mother will remarry a man whose social class is as low as hers once was. Both her romantic relationship with Sam and her familial relationship with her son are genuine expressions of love, and the fact that Sophy is forced to choose between them makes her miserable. She ultimately chooses family obligations, in the form of obedience to her son's wishes, but retains a faint hope in the possibility of romantic fulfilment and the happiness she believes it will bring with it. Meanwhile, Randolph is faced with a potential conflict between his familial duty to his mother and his own desire for social advancement. Through its depiction of the choices of these two characters, "The Son's Veto" suggests that when family duty and personal desire conflict, it is impossible to satisfy both. After she resumes her romantic relationship with Sam, Sophy feels torn between her desire to live a carefree married life with Sam in the countryside and her desire to salvage her relationship with her son. Sophy hesitates to imagine a happier future with Sam because she knows that this future would only bring about increased estrangement from her son. Early on in their renewed relationship, Sophy tells Sam: "I long for home—our home!" But she quickly catches herself and explains that this can only be a "momentary feeling," because she has a son. She tells Sam that though she is not a lady, Randolph is "a gentleman, and that—makes it—O how difficult for me!" With this lament, Sophy hints at the unhappiness that her son's disdain is causing her. Later, she asks Sam to wait as she tries to work up the courage to tell Randolph that she wants to marry Sam, hinting at the misery caused by her estrangement from her son, and her worry that fulfilling her desire would irreparably damage an already fragile relationship. When Sophy finally does tell Randolph, he bursts into tears, distraught by the prospect that his own social status will be lowered on account of the social class of his prospective father-in-law. Moved by her son's distress, Sophy says that she must be in the wrong. She even gives in when Randolph insists she swear not to marry Sam without his consent, "thinking he would soften as soon as he was ordained and in full swing of clerical work." She still naively believes that these two contradictory desires—to achieve happiness with Sam, and to maintain her duty to her son—can somehow be reconciled. But as the years drag on, and it becomes clearer that her son will not change his mind, she still honors her vow, showing that on some level she has chosen family duty over desire—although this is a choice she continues to second-guess, and until her dying day, she continues to ask herself why she shouldn't just marry Sam. Randolph himself is faced with a potential conflict between family duty and his own desire for happiness, in the form of social prestige. However, he never faces the same degree of internal conflict that Sophy faces, seeming not even to recognize any duty he owes to his mother. At first, Randolph sees the prospect of Sophy's remarriage as a reasonable idea, until he realizes that she plans to marry someone of a low social status. His initial reaction to this news suggests that his foremost concern is his desire for social prestige: "It will ruin me!" he exclaims. Years later, when he makes Sophy swear not to marry Sam, Randolph casts his objection in terms of duty to his dead father. It is left ambiguous whether Randolph's primary motivation for making Sophy swear not to marry Sam really is his sense of duty to his father, or simply his own desire for social prestige. Although this ambiguity suggests that Randolph, like Sophy, may be acting out of a sense of family duty, it is ultimately clear that Randolph chooses the family duty that aligns most conveniently with his own personal desires. He does not even seem to entertain the possibility that he might owe a duty to his mother, perhaps because to admit this would force him to also recognize his selfish cruelty in sacrificing his mother's happiness. It is far more comforting to convince himself that, in fulfilling his own personal desire, he is also simply carrying out a duty to his late father. Both Sophy and Randolph face conflicts between their desire for happiness and their family relationships, but while Randolph sidesteps this conflict by failing to recognize his duty to alleviate his mother's unhappiness, Sophy faces a prolonged internal conflict that she never manages to fully resolve. In both situations, however, the duty to one's family members, and the desire for personal fulfillment, are impossible to fully reconcile. - Theme: Freedom vs. Immobility. Description: In "The Son's Veto," Sophy's life is starkly divided between two halves: her early life as a working-class maid, and her later life as a "lady," after marrying (and then being widowed by) Mr. Twycott. The dividing line between those two halves is her foot injury. Her collapse on the stairs while taking care of Mr. Twycott, incapacitating her for life, is the event that first changes her life irrevocably, making it impossible for her to continue her old lifestyle as a maid and inspiring Mr. Twycott to ask for her hand in marriage. In this way, Sophy's social mobility, her entrance into a higher social class, is paradoxically accompanied by her physical immobility, a constraint on her freedom which she is never fully able to recover from. This loss of physical mobility parallels the limiting nature of Sophy's new social status; as she gains the status of a "lady," she loses the freedom to determine her own path in life. Sophy's marriage to Mr. Twycott, paralleling the effects of her physical injury, forces her to give up her earlier freedom and independence. Sophy recognizes that her foot injury will prevent her from continuing her occupation as a parlor-maid, but she responds to this by planning to take on another job. Before Mr. Twycott proposes marriage to her, she hints that she will take up work as a seamstress, a job that will allow her to adapt to the limitations on her physical freedom of movement while maintaining her fundamental independence. But from the moment that Mr. Twycott proposes marriage to Sophy, she seems to lose much of her agency. Because she admires Mr. Twycott so much, she feels as if she has no choice but to accept his proposal. Then, it is Mr. Twycott who decides to move to London and to educate Sophy as a "lady," apparently leaving Sophy with little say in these decisions that shape her life for the next two decades. After Mr. Twycott's death, Sophy's sense of confinement increases, owing both to her physical inability to walk, as well as the lack of freedom and control she is given over her dead husband's estate. In her late husband's will, Sophy is "treated like the child she was in nature though not in years"; she is left with no control over her husband's estate, owing to his fears that her "inexperience"—in other words, her working-class background—might cause her to manage it badly. Alone in the villa that Mr. Twycott leaves her, while her son Randolph continues his education, Sophy is left with nothing to occupy her time. Wishing she could escape from the monotony of her life as a widow, Sophy starts to yearn for the freedom and independence of working-class life, even though she knows that it is impossible for her to return to this life, both on account of her injury as well as societal expectations and her duty to her son. In the years following her husband's death, Sophy develops a habit of looking out from the villa to the country roads leading into London, which become a symbol of the freedom that now seems impossibly out of her reach. Her life becomes "insupportably dreary," as she is unable to walk anywhere and has no interest in traveling anywhere. She simply sits and watches the country roads, thinking of how she'd like to go back and work in the fields of her old village. Sophy longs for the independence she had enjoyed in her youth, even if it means giving up the social status she's acquired through marriage; but the daydream is an impossible one on account of her injury, which makes it difficult for her to walk, much less work on a farm. Sophy's romantic relationship with Sam gives her a taste of renewed mobility, and her desire to marry Sam hints that, ironically, giving up her status as a "lady" would grant her greater freedom in daily life. Soon after she renews her friendship with Sam, Sophy feels "sorrow […] that she could not accompany her one old friend on foot a little way." Her physical injury, as well as social propriety, seem to limit her time with Sam to brief conversations as he passes by her house. When he invites her for a ride on his produce wagon, Sophy refuses Sam's invitation at first, perhaps indicating how accustomed she has become to the limitations imposed on her, both in terms of her physical immobility as well as social expectations. But she quickly changes her mind and, "trembling with excitement," she seems to suddenly regain some of her mobility, "sidling downstairs by the aid of the handrail," and Sam lifts her onto the wagon. Her ride with Sam through the city streets, and her renewed intimacy with him, makes her exclaim how happy she is, in contrast to the loneliness she feels in the villa. This brief moment of freedom with Sam suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the limitations imposed by Sophy's physical injury, and that she might overcome her immobility in some sense through Sam's care and companionship; but it is the social constraints, embodied in her son's refusal to allow her to remarry, that place a far greater burden upon her. Through the apparently paradoxical relationship between physical immobility and social advancement, "The Son's Veto" suggests the way in which high social status, especially for women, can actually reduce rather than augment one's freedom. - Theme: Regret. Description: "The Son's Veto" is ultimately a story about the unfulfilled possibilities of Sophy's life. It is a story of "what ifs": what if Sophy had married Sam, as she had originally planned? What if she had chosen to keep working after her foot injury, rather than marrying Mr. Twycott? What if she had disregarded her son Randolph's wishes and married Sam after her husband's death? As her life becomes increasingly unhappy, Sophy is troubled by all of these lost possibilities, and tries, unsuccessfully, to find some way to recover them. Even her relationship with Sam is perhaps motivated not so much by her love for Sam himself—after all, she chose not to marry him in the first place because she did not truly love him—but rather by a desire to recover a certain kind of life that she has now lost. Through this depiction of Sophy's regrets about the choices she has made, the story suggests that no choice in life can be made without costs, since the opening of one door always leads to the closing of another—and that one might not know which trade-off is the right one to make until it is already too late.  Even before the death of her husband, Sophy seems to feel some latent regret over her marriage, wondering about the alternate paths that her life might have taken. In the first scene at the concert, Randolph's cruelty in correcting his mother's grammar prompts her to wonder "if she had done wisely in shaping her life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this"—hinting at her awareness that she could have made choices that would have set her life in a quite different direction. This reflection suggests that the distance between her and her son has prompted her to question her marriage to Mr. Twycott. Part of Sophy's regret may stem from the fact that she "did not exactly love" Mr. Twycott; she had agreed to marry him out of a "respect for him which almost amounted to veneration," rather than out of romantic desire. As a result, Sophy and Mr. Twycott's marriage is characterized more by friendly companionship than by true love—a circumstance that might naturally lead Sophy to wonder what might have happened if she had married someone she truly loved. After her husband's death, Sophy's regret grows, sparked by her misery and isolation as a widow, her growing estrangement from her son, and her renewed relationship with Sam, which reminds her of how her life could have been different. In the loneliness of her life in the villa left to her by her dead husband, Sophy often finds herself looking out at the country roads leading into London, pining for her home village. Her desire to go back to Gaymead indicates a longing to retrace her life, undoing the past fourteen years and going back in time just as easily as one might travel from the city to the countryside. One day, staring out at the road like this, Sophy spots Sam, the man she almost married in her youth. Throughout her marriage Sophy had occasionally thought of Sam, and wondered if she might have been happier if she had married him; now, her interest in him has increased on account of her present misery. Sophy's renewed relationship with Sam is motivated, at least in part, by her desire to regain a possibility in her life that had been lost through her marriage to Mr. Twycott. The contrast between the misery of her present life and the carefree happiness she recalls from her youth causes her to love Sam far more passionately than she had loved him before. Sophy's regret for leaving behind the life she once led in her youth is accompanied by her regret over the distance between her and her son. She wishes that her son had been brought up in a different way, with a different set of values, a worldview that would not create such a rift between them: "If Randolph had not appertained to these," Sophy thinks, referring to the rich spectators at a cricket match, "has not centred all his interests in them, had not cared exclusively for the class they belonged to, how happy would things have been!" But of course, Randolph is simply adopting the values of the world he grew up into; if Sophy had married someone else, from a different social world, she might have had a son who loved her, instead of one who is ashamed of her. The unfulfilled promise of Sophy's renewed relationship with Sam causes a new source of regret for her, and to the moment of her death, she is left wondering how her life might be different if she could bring herself to defy her son's wishes and marry Sam. After swearing not to marry Sam, Sophy spends the remaining years of her life "pining her heart away," thinking of alternate possibilities as she stares out at the country roads. She wonders to herself: "Why mayn't I say to Sam that I'll marry him? Why mayn't I?" Unlike her earlier regrets, which were about past choices she cannot undo, this regret is about a choice that she could still reverse, but she never quite works up the courage to do so. The ending of the story, with the scene of Sophy's funeral procession, represents the final cutting off of all her life's alternative possibilities. It implies that Sophy pined her life away until she died of regret. In the end, it is impossible for Sophy to know whether she truly would have been happier if she had married Sam when she was younger; but it is precisely the fact that she will never know, will never be able to experience those alternate paths, that is the source of her tragedy. - Climax: At Randolph's insistence, Sophy swears that she will not marry Sam. - Summary: "The Son's Veto" is the story of a working-class woman's marriage to a high-ranking Anglican church official, her widowhood, her fraught relationship with her son, and her unfulfilled romantic relationship with a youthful love interest. The story begins with the protagonist, Sophy, at an outdoor concert with her adolescent son Randolph. The author provides some initial hints of Sophy's backstory, including her use of a wheelchair, and her imperfect grammar, which sparks a stern rebuke from her son. The story flashes back to the events leading up to Sophy's marriage to her current husband, Mr. Twycott. Sophy worked as a parlour-maid in Mr. Twycott's household, in a country village near London called Gaymead, along with a young man, Sam Hobson, who worked as a gardener. Soon after the death of Mr. Twycott's first wife, Sophy and Sam make plans to marry. Sophy tells Mr. Twycott she is planning to leave so she can marry Sam, but after having an argument with Sam, she changes her mind and stays. As she takes care of Mr. Twycott during an illness, Sophy falls down the stairs and permanently injures her foot. She tells Mr. Twycott that she must leave, but Mr. Twycott recognizes his affection for Sophy and asks her to marry him; she says yes, despite not truly loving him. Mr. Twycott, aware that he is potentially destroying his social status by marrying Sophy, moves from the countryside to London and invests in Sophy's education, hoping to offset her working-class background. They have a son, Randolph, who is provided with the best possible schooling. After 14 years of marriage, Mr. Twycott dies of an illness. His will leaves Sophy with only a modest personal income and little control over the estate, and she becomes increasingly isolated and dissatisfied. Her relationship with her son grows more and more strained as he grows up and becomes increasingly contemptuous of her humbler origins. One day, she encounters Sam as he transports produce to a market in the city, and the two revive their old relationship. They make plans to marry and live together in their home village of Gaymead, but Sophy hesitates, fearing Randolph's disapproval. When she works up the courage to tell her son, he refuses to accept it, fearful that Sophy's remarriage to a working-class man will damage his own social status. For four or five years, Sophy tries to persuade her son to let her marry Sam, but he makes her swear not to do so without his consent. Hoping that Randolph might one day change his mind, Sophy spends the next four years pining away, wondering why she shouldn't marry Sam. The story ends with a scene of Sophy's funeral procession in Gaymead; Sam, looking on from his grocery store, sobs in grief, while Randolph glares darkly at Sam.

- Genre: Historical Fiction, War Novel - Title: The Sorrow of War - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Vietnam during the Vietnam War - Character: Kien (The Writer). Description: The protagonist of The Sorrow of War, Kien is a former soldier for the North Vietnamese Army. He spent 10 years fighting in the Vietnam War, and though he was on the victorious side, he feels at a loose end in postwar Vietnam. As such, he decides to write about his experiences, creating a disjointed and fragmentary novel that winds through some of his most traumatic memories—memories of seeing friends die, of getting injured, and of succumbing to the violent urges of wartime. But the stories he writes aren't all sad—he also writes about Phuong, the love of his life. He and Phuong were romantically involved in high school, before Kien joined the army. His memories of her from this period are powerful, as he thinks back to their last night together before the war, when she tried to convince him to have sex—but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Later, Phuong ended up traveling with him toward the frontlines in a dramatic and terrifying entrance to the war that left their relationship dangling without any sort of emotional closure, as Kien set off to battle without knowing where, exactly, he and Phuong stood with each other. For the next 10 years, Kien often thought about Phuong in moments of hardship, and this helped him make it through some of the worst and most painful times of his life. Upon returning to Hanoi, he and Phuong resumed their relationship, but so much had changed that they were unable to make things work. After Phuong left him once and for all, Kien turned his attention to writing, drinking heavily and staying up late to pen his novel. When he finally finished, he left his apartment and never came back. A "mute girl" living in his building ended up giving the chapters to a former soldier, who compiled them into a wide-ranging, nonlinear novel. - Character: Phuong. Description: Phuong is the love of Kien's life. A young woman living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, she and Kien dated as teenagers. While everyone around her was very patriotic in the lead up to the war, Phuong remained skeptical of the violence and calamity to come. She saw herself as a free spirit who didn't fit into the gung-ho, patriotic attitude of wartime. Because of this outlook, she connected with Kien's father, a painter who bemoaned how everyone in Hanoi had gotten swept up in the war. Phuong understood Kien's father and even watched him burn his paintings shortly before he took his own life—an experience she didn't talk about until the last night before Kien left for training, when they were lying on the banks of a lake. She wanted to have sex on this night, but Kien was too nervous. Still, Phuong tried to point out that they might not have another chance, revealing her early grasp of just how much the Vietnam War would divert their paths in life. Later, Phuong ended up riding with Kien on a freight train toward the frontlines during an air raid. In the chaos of the bombs, she and Kien got separated, at which point a group of men surrounded Phuong and took turns raping her. By the time Kien found her, she was with a large man who wanted her to stay with him, forcing Kien to beat him with a pipe. The entire ordeal put a strain on Phuong and Kien's relationship, though they still thought of each other quite often in the ensuing 10 years of the war. To support herself, Phuong made money as a sex worker while Kien was gone—something Kien had a hard time accepting upon his return. In the end, Phuong left Kien after trying to rekindle their relationship in the postwar years. In her absence, Kien tried to find happiness in the happy memories they shared before the war. - Character: Kien's Father. Description: Kien's father was a painter who refused to conform to the artistic style prevalent in North Vietnam in the 1960s. At that time, Communist ideals upheld that paintings should be accessible to everyone, including people with working-class backgrounds. But Kien's father was interested in more abstract, highbrow artwork, and he refused to change his aesthetic style. The art community therefore shunned him, though this didn't stop him from painting. He considered himself a free spirit who didn't belong in the patriotic wartime climate of Hanoi in the 1960s. Phuong felt the same way, so they developed a close relationship—closer, even, that Kien's own relationship with his father. Eventually, though, Kien's father grew tired of life and decided to kill himself, though not before burning all of his paintings. Phuong watched him burn them, but she didn't tell Kien about the experience until years later. When Kien returned from Vietnam, he started working on his novel in the very same attic where his father used to paint, suggesting that he felt a connection to the old man while in the throes of agonized artistic creation. - Character: Hoa. Description: Hoa was a young Vietnamese woman who helped guide Kien and his men toward the Cambodian border in 1968. Most of the soldiers traveling with Kien were injured, making their group vulnerable to attack. Kien didn't know Hoa well, but he had to trust her because he didn't know the area very well. However, Hoa mistakenly brought the group to the edge of Crocodile Lake, putting them in a very dangerous situation with no escape route. Kien was so incensed that he almost killed Hoa, but he gave her a second chance. While the group stayed by Crocodile Lake, he and Hoa went back through the woods. They found the landmark Hoa had been looking for, at which point they took a break and got to know each other. Hoa was only 19, and Kien quickly came to like her. But their friendship was cut short when they spotted a group of American soldiers. Hoa sacrificed herself by shooting their hunting dog and running in the other direction, drawing the soldiers away from Kien and the wounded group at Crocodile Lake. Kien could hear the Americans raping Hoa, and though he wanted to come to her aid, he realized it would be futile. - Character: Hien. Description: Kien met Hien on the train back to Hanoi after the North Vietnamese Army won the war. Like Kien, Hien was a soldier for the North—unlike Kien, though, she didn't escape the war without lasting physical injuries. For the several days it took the train to make its way through Vietnam, Kien and Hien got to know each other. Every night, Kien would pick Hien up and place her in his hammock. They would then spend the night kissing and whispering to each other, enjoying some fleeting happiness after years of violence and turmoil. When the train reached Hien's village outside Hanoi, Kien wanted to get off with her, but she told him not to, saying that it was time for them to go their separate ways—the war was over, she told him, so now they had to return to their civilian lives on their own. - Character: Can. Description: In the last year of the war, Can was one of the soldiers in Kien's platoon. A sensitive person, Can was terribly impacted by all the horror he'd seen throughout his years of combat—so impacted, in fact, that he decided to leave the army and become a deserter, which was punishable by execution. He told his plans to Kien right before leaving, trusting that Kien wouldn't stop him or tell the higher-ups when he left. Kien tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. Army officials found Can several days later; he hadn't gotten very far, but he was already dead. Nobody knows how, exactly, he died, and though everyone quickly forgot about him, Kien still sometimes thinks about him and how profoundly the war troubled him. - Character: The Mute Girl. Description: The "mute girl" is how the novel refers to a woman who lives in Kien's apartment building in Hanoi and who doesn't speak. (It's worth noting that "mute" is no longer an accepted term for nonspeaking people.) As Kien writes his novel in the years after the Vietnam War, he often seeks out the company of the "mute girl." When he finishes writing late into the night, for instance, he will drunkenly find her so that he can speak aloud whatever story he has just written, apparently feeling some kind of cathartic release simply by confiding in someone else. The novel implies that the "mute girl" is deaf but that she can read lips, so she seems to understand the vast majority of Kien's stories. When Kien finishes his novel, he decides to burn it (just like his father burned his paintings), but the "mute girl" stops him. Later, she and Kien finally have sex, but Kien leaves before dawn and never returns to the apartment. The "mute girl" understands that he has left his apartment for her, and she keeps his stack of pages safe until eventually giving them to a former soldier who compiles them into a book. - Character: Hanh. Description: Hanh was a young woman who lived in Kien's building when he was growing up. She was very pretty and eventually took an interest in Kien. One day, she asked him to help her dig a small bomb shelter beneath her bed. As he helped her, they stood close to each other in the ditch they'd dug, and though Kien was nervous, he found himself kissing her neck and pushing against her. Hanh hesitated, and then Kien felt out of control and tore himself away, running from the room. Hanh told him to return after he collected himself, saying that she wanted to tell him something—but he couldn't bring himself to open her door when he came back. He pressed himself against her door and sensed she was doing the same on the other side, but he couldn't bring himself to open it. They never spoke of the incident again, nor did they spend time together anymore, and by the time Kien joined the army, Hanh had already joined the Youth Brigade. Throughout the war, Kien often wondered what Hanh had wanted to tell him, feeling a sense of remorse for what he lost by not opening up to her. - Character: Ky. Description: Ky was a soldier for the North Vietnamese Army who crossed paths with Kien at the very beginning of the war. At the time, Kien was frantically looking for Phuong. The other men in Ky's unit teased him by claiming that she was off having sex with other soldiers. Kien was so enraged that he pulled a gun on the man who made this joke and then ran off in search of Phuong. Ky and Kien encountered each other later in the war, but Kien didn't recognize Ky, and Ky didn't want to shake his focus by mentioning anything about their last meeting. Later, though, Ky wrote to him and informed him that Phuong had come looking for him shortly after Kien ran off. His letter brought Kien great hope for reuniting with Phuong after the war. - Character: The Second Narrator. Description: A second narrative voice enters the novel in the final pages of the book. This secondary voice belongs to a former soldier whose path briefly intersected with Kien's at the very beginning of the war. After the war, he often saw Kien walking around Hanoi and knew that he was a reclusive writer. When Kien finished his novel and left his apartment once and for all, the second narrator eventually came into possession of the unfinished manuscript and was drawn in by Kien's writing. He ultimately decided to compile the many stories and try to organize them in a way that made sense, presenting the book as a jumbled and fragmentary collection of tales about war, loss, and love. - Character: Lan. Description: Kien first met Lan when he was in training as a soldier. He and his battalion were stationed in the small hamlet where Lan's family lived, and the men got to know their hosts fairly well. Lan was just a young girl at the time, but she remembers Kien when he returns for a visit after the war—he's the only soldier to ever come back. Before he leaves again, she tells him that he's welcome to come back whenever he wants: if he doesn't find another way to live, they could be together and lead a peaceful existence on her family's tranquil land. - Character: The Green Coffee Girl. Description: "Green Coffee Girl" is a term used in postwar Vietnam to refer to sex workers who often frequented coffeeshops. While on a walk one day after the war, Kien sees a man abusing a "Green Coffee Girl," so he goes to her aid and fights off her aggressor. Later, he realizes that he knew her brother from the war—in fact, Kien was the one to deliver the news of her brother's death. The "Green Coffee Girl" offers to have sex with Kien as a way of thanking him for his protection, but he simply gives her a place to rest and some money before seeing her out. - Character: Oanh. Description: Oanh was one of Kien's fellow soldiers in the Vietnam War. Kien watched him get shot to death by a Southern Vietnamese female soldier. Oanh had spared the woman by deciding not to shoot her, but she shot him as soon as he turned his back. The incident suggested to Kien that it can be very dangerous to show mercy and kindness in war. - Character: "Lofty" Thinh. Description: "Lofty" Thinh was one of Kien's fellow soldiers in the Vietnam War. "Lofty" once shot and killed an orangutan in an abandoned village. When he and the other men skinned the animal, though, it looked like the corpse of a human woman, so they didn't eat it. Still, "Lofty" and the others felt like the corpse haunted them for the rest of the war—sure enough, "Lofty" died a violent death not long after the incident. - Character: Tu. Description: Tu was a soldier who fought alongside Kien in the Vietnam War. He died on the very last day of the war. That very morning, he sensed that he wouldn't survive, so he gave Kien a deck of cards that they often used to use with their other friends, all of whom had also died in battle in the previous few days. Just as he predicted, Tu died that day while attacking the Saigon airport. The war ended mere hours after his death. - Theme: Memory, Trauma, and Moving On. Description: The Sorrow of War explores how trauma can impact memory, suggesting that disturbing recollections of violence and destruction can reorder how a person thinks. For Kien, a former soldier for North Vietnam, traumatic memories of the Vietnam War cause him to constantly relive the worst days of his life, as he frequently loses himself in vivid scenes from his past—scenes that make it impossible for him to find peace and contentment in his postwar life. Instead of trying to run from these memories, though, Kien ends up embracing them by writing a novel about his wartime experiences. The novel itself (which is, for all intents and purposes, The Sorrow of War) is extremely fragmented, as Kien's memories blend together and present themselves without a clear timeline. This lack of order or chronology, it seems, is a byproduct of Kien's trauma: his memories are so overwhelming that they surge up in the most unlikely moments, drowning out the present with their intensity. For instance, Kien will describe the experience of looking for dead bodies as part of a Remains-Gathering Team at the end of the war, but then a ghostly sound in the jungle will suddenly send him reeling back to a troubling memory from the early years of the war, making it clear that he's powerless in the face of such visceral recollections. And yet, reliving these harrowing experiences also offers Kien a certain kind of comfort. Of course, it's torturous to revisit these emotional wounds, but looking back also means thinking about the happiness, hope, and optimism he used to have as a young soldier. In particular, memories of his prewar romance with Phuong—his high school sweetheart—bring him a genuine sense of happiness. In fact, these memories are so rewarding that Kien comes to take comfort in his ability to revisit them. The future, he feels, has been ruined by the horrors of war, but he can still revel in the memory of his own prewar happiness. In turn, the novel presents a bittersweet portrait of what it means to move on from intense trauma, ultimately suggesting that happy memories can sometimes be as powerful as traumatic ones. - Theme: Love in Times of Hardship. Description: Although The Sorrow of War focuses on the horrors of violent conflict, the novel is also a love story—though not necessarily a happy one. The first half of the novel mainly spotlights Kien's terrifying and traumatic time in the Vietnam War, but the narrative also gradually reveals that his entire wartime experience is wrapped up in matters of the heart. In fact, he even faces his first taste of true violence and destruction with Phuong (his girlfriend) at his side, since she travels toward the frontlines with him at the very beginning of the war. Even though the subsequent years of bloodshed seemingly have nothing to do with romance, Kien's life as a soldier is nevertheless intertwined with his relationship with Phuong. To that end, it doesn't matter that they eventually part ways so he can continue to the front: the mere thought of her sustains him through many terrible moments, especially when he's injured and imagines her caring for him. The novel closely examines Kien's capacity to feel such romantic feelings in the midst of war, exploring both the cognitive dissonance and the emotional reward of clinging to "delirious romantic joy in extraordinary circumstances." However, Kien and Phuong find themselves unable to have a successful relationship in the aftermath of the war, which means that the very thing that helped them through the war is ultimately incapable of flourishing in the absence of such hardship. In turn, the novel underscores the idea that although love is powerful and can help people through the worst moments of their lives, it can also be very delicate and fickle, blossoming in unlikely circumstances but then wilting in the reality of everyday life. - Theme: Coping Through Writing. Description: As a novel about a former soldier who deals with his postwar trauma by writing a novel of his own, The Sorrow of War explores the act of writing and its potential to be cathartic or therapeutic. Returning to Hanoi after fighting for the winning side of the Vietnam War, Kien has trouble putting the violence and horror of combat behind him, so he turns to writing. Of course, composing a novel about war isn't necessarily the best way to forget about the experience, but that's not why Kien writes the book—after all, it's clearly impossible for him to forget the disturbing things he witnessed in his 10 years of combat. Rather than putting these memories out of his mind, though, he completely surrenders himself to them, intentionally reliving some of the most trying times of his life and writing them down in a frenzied state, as if the emerging novel has "its own logic" and "flow." In doing so, he effectively refuses to hide from his own emotions. And though the process of writing about such difficult experiences is undoubtedly painful, it actually allows him to take a certain amount of ownership over his trauma. Instead of passively letting it eat away at him, he manages to assert a form of control over his sorrow by actively participating in it, even if doing so counterintuitively requires him to completely give himself over to it. In the end, he feels as if writing is a way to purge himself, thinking, "I must write! To rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest […]." In the world of The Sorrow of War, then, writing has therapeutic effects not because it helps writers forget their troubles, but precisely because it forces them to face those troubles head-on. - Theme: Patriotism, Sacrifice, and Skepticism. Description: - Climax: Having been separated from his unit, Kien tries to catch up with his fellow soldiers by hopping on a freight train with Phuong during an intense air raid carried out by American bombers. - Summary: In The Sorrow of War, a writer named Kien struggles to process his traumatic experience in the Vietnam War. A former soldier for the North Vietnamese Army, he has trouble finding happiness in postwar Vietnam, even though he fought for the winning side. Kien's life has been completely turned upside down by the war, and he finds himself unable to stop thinking about the horrible things he witnessed. Tormented by the violence of his past, he starts writing about his experiences, creating a nonlinear, fragmented narrative that begins right after the war ended in 1975. In the months after the North's victory, Kien was part of a Remains-Gathering Team searching for the many people who had gone missing in action. This required him to return to a place known as the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where he personally witnessed many horrific things over the 10 years he served as a soldier. While working with the Remains-Gathering Team, Kien often heard howls in the jungle at night. The noises caused him to remember an experience he had years before, when he and his men were stationed in the Jungle of Screaming Souls and he began to sense ghostly figures in their camp. As time went on, he slowly realized that the specters that came in and out of the camp weren't ghosts, but three young women living on a farm nearby. Three of his soldiers had developed romantic relationships with these women, and though Kien knew he should put an end to their nightly meetings, he couldn't bring himself to do it—he could never get in the way of love. One day, the three soldiers were distraught because they couldn't find the women from the farm. When Kien helped them look, they discovered that the three women had been taken by South Vietnamese soldiers. Kien and the others tracked these soldiers down, but they had already killed the women. Even though Kien didn't know the women himself, he flew into a rage and ordered the soldiers to dig their own graves, preparing to shoot them when they finished. At the last minute, one of his own men suggested that he put off executing the enemy soldiers, at which point Kien turned on him and threatened to shoot him, too. In the end, though, he spared the South Vietnamese soldiers. As part of the Remains-Gathering Team, Kien thought a lot about his time with the 27th Battalion. He was one of only 10 people in the battalion to survive a gruesome battle in 1969, and he's haunted by the memory of his many friends and fellow soldiers who lost their lives. He himself almost died in that battle, but he managed to drag himself to a shoddy field hospital, where he spent the next several months on the verge of death. He thought the nurse tending to him was Phuong, the love of his life. He didn't know it at the time, but he narrowly escaped death at this field hospital—a soldier who was with him told him years later that he and Kien were transferred to a bigger hospital just a few hours before the tents were bombed. The nurse who treated Kien had surely died. Kien's thoughts often drift back to Phuong, as he recalls their time together before and after the war. They were in love as teenagers, and Phuong even had a close relationship with Kien's father—arguably closer than the bond Kien himself shared with his father. Both Phuong and Kien's father saw themselves as free spirits who didn't fit into the culture of wartime patriotism that defined North Vietnam in the 1960s. Kien's father was a painter, but his artwork was somewhat highbrow, so most people shunned it at the time, since communist art was supposed to be accessible to everyone. Kien didn't understand his father, even though he lived with him alone, since his mother had left years before (and died not long thereafter). His father spent hours painting in the attic of their apartment building. One day, though, he decided to kill himself, and he chose to burn all of his paintings beforehand. Phuong was there when he burned them, but she didn't tell Kien about this until years later. It was the night before Kien left for military training that Phuong told him about watching his father burn the paintings. She and Kien were lying on the banks of a lake in Hanoi after having skipped school, where they were supposed to be digging trenches with the rest of the students in preparation for the inevitable attacks on the city. Phuong wore a bathing suit underneath her clothes that day and convinced Kien to sneak away. They swam and then lay together on the banks late into the night. Phuong wanted to have sex, but Kien couldn't bring himself to do it. Slightly frustrated, she criticized his devotion to his upcoming life as a soldier, trying to help him see that he might be gone for a very long time—if, that is, he came back at all. Still, though, he couldn't bring himself to have sex with her, though they came close. He often thought about that night later in the war. After leaving for training, Kien passed through Hanoi one last time on his way to the frontlines. His superior told him and the other soldiers they could visit their families before getting back on the train and going to the frontlines. If they were late to come back, though, the train would leave and they would be considered deserters, which was punishable by execution. Kien rushed back to his building but then learned from a neighbor that Phuong's university was evacuating, so he rushed back to the train station, where he found her with another man. When Phuong saw Kien, she let the other man ride away on the train without her. She was overjoyed to see Kien; they rented a bicycle taxi and returned to their building. Just as they arrived, though, an air-raid siren started blaring, so their cab driver ran to the nearest shelter. Not wanting to waste their time together, they decided to commandeer the bicycle taxi, which they rode back to the station, laughing the whole way. They knew Kien was already in danger of missing his train, but they still had a good time. Upon reaching the station, they saw that the train had already left, so Phuong convinced Kien that they should hitchhike to the next station, where he could reboard the train. But when they finally reached that station, there was only a cargo train travelling behind the train Kien actually needed. It was nighttime by then, so they snuck onto the cargo train in the dark, settling down in a pitch-black car full of other stowaways. They lay close to each other, feeling the thrill of being together in such extraordinary circumstances, though Kien still couldn't bring himself to have sex with Phuong, which disappointed her. During the trip, however, more serious matters arose, as American bomber planes flew overhead and started targeting the railroads. The train Kien was supposed to be on was decimated by bombs, and even the cargo train sustain severe damage. In the chaos, Kien was separated from Phuong, at which point a group of men surrounded her and took turns raping her. It wasn't until much later that Kien was able to find her again. She was battered and bloody, but he was able to get her to stand up. However, there was a large man in the cargo car who didn't want Phuong to go anywhere. He had apparently stopped the other men from continuing to rape her, and now he wanted to sleep with her as his reward. As bombs fell all around them, Kien had to fight this huge man, eventually knocking him to the floor by bashing him on the head with a pipe. While doing so, Kien called Phuong a "whore" in a state of frenzied anger. When they finally made it away from the cargo train, she had little desire to go on, but Kien picked her up and found a bicycle, which he used to transport them to a safe place nearby. After resting for a bit, Kien and Phuong went to a small hamlet where there was an abandoned school. Phuong spoke unflinchingly about how doomed their relationship clearly was, acknowledging that they had a very dim future ahead of them and suggesting that they should probably accept that they would be going their separate ways. Kien was deeply troubled by what she said, but she fell asleep before the conversation ended. When Kien himself fell asleep, he didn't wake up until much later—only to find that Phuong was no longer by his side. He anxiously searched the premises, discovering groups of North Vietnamese soldiers camped out in other parts of the abandoned school. He approached one group and asked if they'd seen Phuong, and they teased him by claiming that she was having sex with several other soldiers on the outskirts of the grounds at that very moment—a joke Kien didn't take well, pulling out his gun and pointing it at the man who said it. He then ran to the edge of the property and peered inside some armored trucks, but Phuong wasn't there. Kien dropped to the ground and put his gun to his head, ready to end his life. Just then, more American planes appeared on the horizon, and the sounds of gunfire broke out everywhere. Kien's gaze happened to fall on Phuong, who was naked and bathing in a nearby stream. Watching Phuong, Kien put down his gun. She seemed unbothered by the commotion, slowly drying off and then running right by him without seeing him. He heard her calling his name as she went back to the school. Instead of going to her, though, he walked in the other direction, making his way toward the highway so that he could continue on toward the frontlines. Years later, Kien received a letter from a soldier named Ky, who explained that they had fought alongside each other several years ago and that he had recognized Kien at the time. He didn't say anything then, though, because he didn't want to shake Kien's concentration. But now he had something to tell him: he was with the soldiers who had mocked Kien on that day at the school. Shortly after Kien left, Phuong came back and was frantically looking for him. She looked for so long and then, the next day, refused to leave the school. Ky wanted Kien to know it was clear she loved him. This letter buoyed Kien's spirits and gave him hope, which sustained him through the rest of the war. These days, Kien and Phuong are no longer together. They rekindled their relationship in the years immediately after the war, but it didn't work out. Phuong had supported herself throughout the war by earning money as a sex worker, which added a complicated layer to their relationship. And Kien, for his part, had come back from war a much different person. Eventually, Phuong decided to leave Hanoi once and for all. Kien was distraught, but he let her go and then focused on writing his novel, drinking heavily and working on the book late into the night. When he finally finished, he left Hanoi, too, leaving the manuscript with a "mute girl" who lived in his building. She kept the pages for a long time and then gave them to a former soldier (the second narrator), who arranged them and compiled them for publication.

- Genre: Modernist Fiction, Southern Gothic Fiction - Title: The Sound and the Fury - Point of view: First person in the first three chapters (each chapter from the viewpoint of a different person), third person omniscient in the last chapter - Setting: Jefferson, Mississippi and Cambridge, Massachusetts - Character: Benjamin (Benjy) Compson. Description: The first narrator of the book, a mute, mentally disabled man. Benjy was originally named "Maury" after his uncle, but Caroline changed his name when she discovered his disability. Benjy has no understanding of time, cause and effect, or morality, and experiences life as a muddled blur of sensations. Despite this, Benjy is able to sense things that the other Compsons can't – he moans when Damuddy dies, and understands the moment that Caddy loses her virginity. The three things Benjy loves most are his sister Caddy, his pasture (which was sold to a golf club), and fire. He was castrated as a teen after trying to talk to a passing schoolgirl about Caddy who had just gotten married; his efforts were perceived as an attack. - Character: Quentin Compson. Description: The oldest Compson child and the novel's second narrator, Quentin is close with his father and Caddy. He feels the constant burden of his family's past greatness and its present decline. This turns into an obsession with time and his place within it, and Quentin carries his grandfather's watch everywhere. He also connects Caddy's promiscuity with the loss of the family honor. There is implied sexual tension between Quentin and Caddy, and he is certainly very possessive of her sexuality and "honor." Quentin is intelligent and sensitive, but he is never able to protect (or influence) Caddy or act on his ideas – like his suicide pact with Caddy or his attempt to attack Dalton Ames – except in his suicide. - Character: Jason Compson IV. Description: Jason is the only one of the four siblings—Quentin, Caddy, Benjy, and himself—to receive Mrs. Compson's affection, but he grows up into a bitter, loveless man. As an adult Jason feels like the world is against him, and he has a strong hatred of women, black people, and Northerners. Like the other brothers, Jason is also preoccupied with Caddy, but for him she is another source of bitterness, as her husband, Herbert Head, offered Jason a job at a bank, but then retracted it when he divorced Caddy (because of her illegitimate child). Jason hates Caddy for "losing" him the job. He works at a farm supply store and steals the money Caddy sends to Miss Quentin, and fears and respects no one except Dilsey. - Character: Candace (Caddy) Compson. Description: The only Compson daughter and arguably the novel's most important character, as she is the object of her brothers' obsessions. Caddy is the only Compson who seems capable of loving truly, as she cares for Benjy as a child and is very close with Quentin. She becomes sexually active at an early age, trampling on the notion of the chaste Southern lady. It is her promiscuity that leads to most of the novel's tension, as her "loss of honor" drives Quentin to suicide, and her illegitimate child Miss Quentin leads to Caddy being divorced, disowned, and disgraced. She later sends money to Miss Quentin, though Jason steals it. - Character: Mr. Compson. Description: Jason Compson III, the father of the family, a cynical, philosophical man who spends all day drinking whiskey and reading Greek and Roman literature instead of caring for his children or working. Mr. Compson instills the importance of the family honor into Quentin, but in practice he seems to ignore it, saying that Caddy's virginity is a meaningless concept. - Character: Ms. Quentin Compson. Description: Caddy's illegitimate daughter who is raised without knowing her mother's name. Quentin becomes promiscuous like Caddy, but she does not feel any shame for her actions. She is also partly raised by the cruel Jason so she grows up in a home without love. She ultimately escapes with the money Jason had stolen from her and disappears. - Character: Dilsey Gibson. Description: The most positive character of the book, the matriarch of the family of Compson servants. She is the only stable force in the lives of the Compson children, and raises them despite Mrs. Compson's incompetence. She retains the old Southern values like family, courage, and religious faith, but avoids the corruption of the Compsons' self-absorption. In this she symbolizes Faulkner's hope for the South. - Theme: Time, Memory, and the Past. Description: Faulkner deals with the concept of time in a unique way in The Sound and the Fury. Benjy, the book's first narrator, is mentally disabled and completely lacks a sense of time. Faulkner creates the sensation of Benjy's perceptions by shifting the narrative years backwards or forwards mid-paragraph, as certain words and sensations remind Benjy of past experiences. This allows Faulkner to make surprising and poignant connections between past and present events. Quentin, the next narrator, is the opposite of Benjy – Quentin is obsessed with time, and cannot seem to escape its inexorable passing. Quentin's main preoccupation is with the lost glory of his family (as represented by Caddy's lost virginity), so the constant chiming of clocks and the ticking of his grandfather's watch becomes a symbol of the decline he cannot escape. Among the main characters, Dilsey has the only healthy relationship with time and the past, as she is able to step back and see herself and the Compson family as a small piece of history – she has seen the beginning, and now she sees the end.The title of the novel itself, The Sound and the Fury, comes from a monologue in Shakespeare's Macbeth, where the speaker laments the pointlessness of an individual life within the relentless march of time and history. This theme then becomes generally symbolic of the overarching decline of the Compson family, as well as its individual members. The characters are unable to forget the past and move into the modern world. They cannot see themselves without pride and self-absorption, even as time marches on and leaves them broken behind it. - Theme: Decline and Corruption. Description: One of the overarching themes of the book is the decline of the Compson family, which also acts as a symbol of the decline of the South itself. The family was once a model of the wealthy, slave-owning Southern aristocracy before the Civil War. By the time of the novel, however, the Compsons have lost most of their wealth and land, despite their feeble attempts to halt their downward spiral. They sell off most of their land to pay for Quentin's education at Harvard – itself an attempt to maintain their social status – but this too backfires with Quentin's suicide. By the end of the novel and the appendix, Jason, the last male Compson, has sold everything and lives above a farm supply store.The Compson decline manifests itself physically, mentally, and morally: Jason III is an alcoholic, Caroline is a self-obsessed hypochondriac, Benjy is severely mentally disabled, Caddy is disgraced and disowned, Quentin is suicidal, and Jason IV is bitter, greedy, and cruel. The Compson line literally ends with The Sound and the Fury, as Jason is incapable of loving and so seems unlikely to get married and have legitimate children.This theme also applies to the "Southern values" held dear by the Compsons, and extends to the Old South itself. Faulkner shows how the aristocracy declined after the Civil War, when the slave-based wealth of the upper-class whites was destroyed, but old families like the Compsons still clung to outdated systems and traditions. Caddy tramples on the ideal of the chaste Southern lady, and Quentin's suicidal obsession with his sister's chastity is a perversion of the chivalrous, honorable Southern gentleman. Only Dilsey seems to preserve the old Southern values – honor, kindness, hard work, and religious faith – without the corruption of self-absorption. This is significant in that Dilsey is also the main black character in the novel, a servant to the Compsons and not actually part of the family. Yet her character is Faulkner's only hint at redemption for the South – that by holding onto purer versions of its original values, the South might someday heal itself. - Theme: Words and Language. Description: Faulkner's innovative and often confusing language is the most unique part of The Sound and the Fury. Each section of the book is told in a different narrative style, where the writing itself blends with the themes and stories it describes: Benjy's section is muddled and subjective, while Jason's is clear but brutal. The winding sentences and stream-of-consciousness style mirror the struggles of the narrators as they try to make sense of a past that seems as real as the present. Within the plot itself, repeated phrases and memories are important to each character, like Caddy's name to Benjy.While the writing is original and beautiful, the style and use of multiple narrators actually seems to point to the failure of language, especially in its ability to capture the truth of an emotion or event. Different points of view, perspectives of time and memory, and narrative styles are needed to properly tell the story of The Sound and the Fury, but even then they can only hint at the truths Faulkner is trying to express. The tortured stream of consciousness of sections like Quentin's creates the feeling of struggle, of trying to work through memory and suffering through thoughts and words. In this way Faulkner is both telling the story and offering a meditation on the failure of language to truly capture life. - Theme: Sin and Sexuality. Description: For a traditional Southern lady, sexuality is associated with sin and virginity with innocence, but Caddy tramples on "Southern chastity" by becoming sexually active at an early age. The association of sexuality with sin and "uncleanness" is symbolically foreshadowed by Caddy's dirty underwear as a child. Though sexuality is a personal subject and not inherently sinful – except in this traditional Southern worldview – all of Caddy's brothers become obsessed with Caddy's promiscuity. Quentin's guilt involves what he allowed to happen (and how it stained the family honor) but also his own possessive love for Caddy herself. His obsession with her chastity is so tormenting to him because it stems from both a desire to protect her and a repressed desire to have her for himself. Jason, however, sees Caddy's sexuality as a personal affront and another opportunity for bitterness, as her divorce cost him a potential job at a bank.Miss Quentin, Caddy's illegitimate daughter, inherits her mother's promiscuous nature, but Miss Quentin feels no shame for her actions, as she no longer subscribes to the notion of sex as inherently sinful. Indeed, when compared to Quentin's obsessions and Jason's bitter rage, Caddy and Miss Quentin become two of the more positive characters in the book. They at least, in comparison to the other Compsons, are capable of love. - Theme: Race and Class. Description: The setting of The Sound and the Fury is Mississippi in the early 1900s, when slavery was still a recent memory, and the Compson family has black live-in servants who are basically slaves in all but technicality. Slavery ended with the Civil War in the 1860s, but African-Americans remained as second-class citizens. Most of the policies of reparations and equal rights failed, which left the wealthy, slave-owning aristocracy broken but the former slaves themselves not much better off than before. This left an ever-present tension between blacks and whites in everyday society. Within the novel, the black servants are scorned by the Compsons, but it becomes clear that the Gibsons are more sane and capable than the Compsons themselves, as they have not been corrupted by their own family pride and slave-owning history. The Compson family ends with the novel, but the Gibsons "endured." The Compsons also see themselves as superior to the other whites of Jefferson, clinging to their glorious past and blind to their present corruption.Dilsey, the matriarch of the Gibsons, is the strongest positive character of the book and has her own section, though she isn't given a narrative voice like the Compson brothers. Instead, the novel's most progressive accomplishment is simply treating the Gibsons with the same unsympathetic, deeply human characterization as the Compsons. Nothing is sentimental or idealized, and it is only Dilsey's calm fortitude in the face of corruption and madness that can endure the tragedy of the Compsons' world. - Climax: Miss Quentin steals Jason's money and flees - Summary: The novel's first narrator is Benjy, a mute, mentally disabled man who experiences time as a series of muddled perceptions. He is one of four children of Jason Compson III and Caroline Compson, along with Quentin, Jason IV, and Caddy. The Compsons are an old, aristocratic Southern family from Jefferson, Mississippi. After the Civil War the Compsons declined in wealth, morality, and sanity: Jason III is a philosophical but ineffective alcoholic and Caroline is a self-obsessed hypochondriac, and their children have a host of problems. The central tension of the story involves the three brothers' individual obsessions with Caddy. The first section occurs on Benjy's thirty-third birthday, the day before Easter 1928. Benjy and his teenaged black caretaker, Luster, hang around a golf course where many things remind Benjy of his past, including the death of his grandmother, Quentin and Caddy playing in a stream, Benjy's attack on a passing school girl, Caddy first kissing a boy and first wearing perfume, and her wedding. In the present action, Benjy interrupts Miss Quentin, his niece and Caddy's illegitimate daughter, kissing a man with a red tie. Luster then takes Benjy home for dinner, where his brother Jason scorns him but Dilsey, the Compsons' servant, treats him kindly. The second section is narrated by Quentin, and takes place at Harvard eighteen years before, on the day Quentin committed suicide. Quentin's narrative is also interrupted by memories and musings. Quentin is haunted by the constant ticking of his grandfather's watch, which he connects to the Compson family pride. Quentin pinpoints the loss of the Compson honor on the loss of Caddy's virginity. He is tormented by memories of Caddy's promiscuity, and Quentin himself lying to his father, saying he and Caddy had committed incest. He remembers his own encounters with Caddy's first lover and then her husband, and his father saying virginity is a meaningless concept. In the present action, Quentin breaks his watch, which still keeps ticking, and stands on a bridge thinking about death. Later he buys bread for a young Italian girl, gets beat up by her brother, and gets a ride with a swaggering, promiscuous Harvard boy, whom Quentin then attacks. When he returns to his dorm room at Harvard, Quentin leaves his watch behind and goes out. Jason IV narrates the next section, which is the day before Benjy's narration. The bitter, cruel Jason works at a farm supply store and steals money that Caddy, who is disgraced and disowned by the family, sends to Miss Quentin, the daughter she has never met. Jason bitterly dwells on the past and Caddy, as Caddy's husband had offered Jason a bank job, but then retracted it when they divorced because of Caddy's illegitimate child. In the present action Jason argues with Miss Quentin, his boss, and his mother, and bullies Quentin into signing a money order. Later he chases Miss Quentin and her lover, but they eventually leave him stranded miles away from town. Jason makes his way home, torments Dilsey and Luster, and gets in another argument with Quentin over dinner. The last section begins by following Dilsey as she gets the household ready on Easter Sunday, the day after Benjy's section. Jason wakes up to discover that Miss Quentin has run away and stolen all his money – most of which he himself had stolen from her. Jason rushes off and Dilsey, Luster, and Benjy go to an Easter church service. Meanwhile the police refuse to help Jason, so he pursues Quentin to another town, where he is attacked by an old man and fails to find Miss Quentin. Meanwhile Luster takes Benjy on a carriage ride, but he deviates from the usual course and Benjy starts howling. Jason appears and strikes Luster and Benjy. When Luster returns to the usual path Benjy grows calm, feeling everything is back in order. In the Appendix, Faulkner describes the history of the Compson family and their fates after the novel. After Caroline dies, Jason sends Benjy to an asylum and sells the Compson house. Years later a librarian sees a picture of Caddy in a magazine, and she brings it to Dilsey, but Dilsey has no desire to "save" Caddy, as she is better off away from Jefferson.

- Genre: Science Fiction; Short Story - Title: The Sound Machine - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: An unnamed English town during the summer - Character: Klausner. Description: The protagonist—and perhaps antagonist—of the story and inventor of the titular machine. Despite being described as a small and frail "moth of a man," he is intensely dedicated to his research into the "world of sound" unavailable to human ears, displaying a painstaking attention to detail and an impassioned disposition. He becomes incredibly animated and passionate when he is asked about it, a quality that is off-putting to those around him, with both the local Doctor and his neighbor Mrs. Saunders questioning his mental state. Klausner's background is largely unknown; an occupation is eluded to but never expounded upon (the Doctor makes a comment about Klausner working with sound for his job), perhaps putting his credibility into question. As the story develops and Klausner becomes convinced that plants can feel pain, his scientific interest slowly begins to morph into abject revulsion and his obsession with the machine is coupled with a newfound sense of empathy for the tree he cut with an axe to test his theories. Despite this remorse, though, he continues to gouge the tree with the axe in the hopes that the Doctor will also hear the tree's pained cry. That Klausner continues to afflict pain on plants even while appearing genuinely regretful of his actions highlights the corrupting influence that some scientific discoveries can have on humankind. Klausner destroys nature and his own innocence just for the sake of learning, and Dahl implies that Klausner's discover is simply not worth it. By the end of the story, when Klausner forcefully commands the Doctor to tend to the mangled tree as if it were a human patient, the Doctor begins to fear Klausner becoming violent and views him as a madman. To this end, Klausner can also be said to represent the mad scientist archetype common in science fiction stories of the period. - Character: The Doctor / Scott. Description: An average country doctor who comes to check on Klausner's sore throat. He quickly takes note of the man's preoccupation with the strange contraption he is making and asks about the machine's purpose, coming to believe there is an "immense, immeasurable distance" between Klausner's mind and body as he listens to the man's frenzied explanation of his research. The Doctor dismisses Klausner's hypotheses as "not very probable" and promptly leaves him to his work. He is only convinced to lend Klausner and his ideas more attention when he hears Klausner's "frantic, almost hysterical" tone of voice on the phone, one he recognizes as "the same note he was used to hearing in the voices of people who called up and said 'There's been an accident. Come quickly.'" In the aftermath of Klausner's test and the machine's destruction by a falling tree branch, the Doctor claims not to have heard the tree make any sound, though the irritability and nervousness he displays upon being questioned casts some doubt upon the truth of this. It's unclear, then, if the Doctor did hear the tree's cry, or if his strange behavior stems from a place of fear, as the erratic Klausner is still holding an axe at this point. Feeling threatened by Klausner's increasingly unhinged manner, he complies with his demands to dress the tree's wound with iodine and "gently [takes] [Klausner] by the arm" and leads him away from the scene—much like he would a patient or a child, suggesting that perhaps Klausner has gone mad. - Character: Mrs. Saunders. Description: Klausner's neighbor. Her character is significant for her role in Klausner's discovery, as she is tending to her garden and trimming roses at the time of the first test of his new and improved machine. It is through this bit of happenstance that he is first able to hear that plants feel pain. His attempts to get her to aid him by cutting more roses, coupled with the breathless, frenzied explanation he gives regarding his findings, cause her to think her already "peculiar" neighbor has gone "completely crazy" and even consider alerting her husband about him. She instead politely humors him before abruptly excusing herself and rushing back to the safety of her home. - Theme: Scientific Advancements and Forbidden Knowledge. Description: By posing a simple hypothesis, Roald Dahl's 1949 short story "The Sound Machine" effectively reminds the reader why the genre is called speculative fiction. The prospect of being able to hear higher and lower pitches may not immediately strike one as particularly important. But the horrific discovery that Klausner makes in the story—that plants and trees cry out in pain when cut or axed—has a dark and insidious undercurrent, raising the question of if he truly was meant to uncover those findings. As the story unfolds and Klausner grapples with the weight of his discovery, Dahl implies that some knowledge is better left unknown, simultaneously placing limitations on both the utility of science and humankind's ability and right to keep up with it. Dahl's description of the machine that Klausner uses to access hidden sounds, as well as the way that people interact with the machine, keys the reader into its underlying sinister nature. This can be seen from the first physical description of the machine, as it is compared to "a child's coffin," suggesting that the machine will have a corrupting influence on whoever uses it. Furthermore, the way that Klausner interacts with the machine demonstrates how the contraption incites dangerously fervent fascination. Klausner is absorbed in it entirely, paying meticulous attention to every detail with "an air of urgency about the way he worked, of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement." The machine has a similarly captivating effect on the Doctor, who comes to check on Klausner's sore throat. Notably "intrigued by the remarkable complexity of its inside," the Doctor asks his patient about the device, admitting, "You've made me inquisitive." Despite this excitement, both men also seem anxious and wary about the machine. The Doctor plainly states that it is a "rather frightening-looking thing," suggesting that the machine is perhaps not such a harmless contraption. However it is Klausner's own fear that "the machine might not work"—and "also of what might happen if it did"—that truly illuminates the idea that there may be consequences to unlocking the secrets the machine is designed to reveal. The question of whether humans are worthy of some knowledge becomes central to the story as Klausner first uses the machine and makes the discovery that plants can feel pain. With this, Dahl seems to be recognizing that obtaining new knowledge doesn't always make life easier, sometimes presenting ramifications that humans may not be equipped to contend with. In doing so, he levies a criticism of science and the danger some of its advancements may represent, hinting at this idea rather directly as Klausner turns the machine on and feels as if his "ears are going up and up toward a secret and forbidden territory, a dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before and had no right to be." The idea that this revelation is too much for humanity to come to grips with continues to take root in the way other characters in the story perceive Klausner as a raving lunatic, with the Doctor noting that Klausner exhibits "a quality of […] immense, immeasurable distance, as though the mind were far away from where the body was" and neighbor Mrs. Saunders believing that Klausner has catapulted from merely "peculiar" to "completely crazy." This notion of insanity is also recurrent in Dahl's diction, as Klausner frequently describes the machine's potential secrets as capable of "driv[ing] us mad if only our ears were tuned to hear the sound." With these characterizations, Dahl suggests that Klausner is, in fact, mad for trying to unlock secrets that humans have no right to know. Despite being written off as insane by those around him, Klausner remains dedicated in his pursuit of ever more information, which Dahl suggests is a dangerous game. Though initially terrified of the machine and his newfound discovery, Klausner quickly readopts the energetic, inquisitive nature he had in the story's beginning and decides to test the theories himself by taking an axe to a tree despite dreading "the thought of the noise" that it would make. This rapid shift from fear right back to cold clinical analysis reveals Dahl's implicit criticism of science's callous form of desensitization. However, Klausner does deviate from the mad scientist stereotype in the way he appears to grow through the rest of the story, becoming greatly shaken by the thought that all plant life, even fruits and vegetables, may be just as sentient and capable of feeling pain as humans are. Even still, Klausner pushes through these feelings and continues to harm a beech tree in the park to prove to the Doctor that plants indeed make sound and feel pain, suggesting that science lacks moral boundaries. The ramifications of Klausner's discovery raise some serious questions regarding the nature of mankind's relationship to science and knowledge. The allure of the unknown may be attractive, but it is all too possible that our natural inclination towards curiosity may open up knowledge we were far better off without. Noting the story's 1949 publication date, it is likely that World War II was still quite fresh on Dahl's mind, which provides an interesting way of interpreting his exploration of the intersection of humanity's ambition and arrogance. This is perhaps best seen in Klausner's reductive statement that his machine is "just an idea." The very same could be said of gas chambers, tanks, fighter jets, and atomic bombs. By painting a small-scale situation in which science asks "could it?" instead of "should it?" all too late, Dahl may be touching upon very timely fears. - Theme: Denial and Rationalization. Description: The presence of a healthy amount of skepticism is often considered integral to a scientist's success in their field, but what happens when that guarded empirical nature is put up against a discovery that shakes them to their core? Dahl explores this question through the ways in which both Klausner and the Doctor react to the machine's capabilities, examining their similar attempts to rationalize and dismiss the sounds they hear. In doing so, he characterizes the characters' denial as a mistake humankind is all too prone to making, and notes that their refusal to believe or acknowledge any information that makes uncomfortable is ultimately fruitless. As the machine's inventor, Klausner goes through a range of emotions attempting to process the discovery it allowed him to make, shifting from excitement to fear to cold rationalization. Though he is characterized as a wispy "moth of a man," Klausner is said have an intense investment in his work on the machine, so much so that he causes the Doctor and Mrs. Saunders to actively worry about not only his mental state, but their own safety around him as well. This kind of devotion to his work momentarily tempers Klausner's initial fear of the machine after it allows him to hear Mrs. Saunders' roses cry out for the first time, as his inquisitive scientific mind quickly converts the sound they make from a "frightful, throatless […] cry of pain" to "just a cry, a neutral, stony cry" born from some fantastical feeling humans can't understand called "toin or spurl or plinuckment, or anything you like." With this, Klausner attempts to sidestep the idea that plants feel pain and thus avoid the fear and guilt bound up in such a discovery. This attempt to rationalize the "curiously inanimate" sounds through the lens of science ultimately proves to be fruitless in the wake of the horrible images Klausner now imagines, however. His frenetic yet calculated curiosity meets its limits as he ponders what humans would feel in the tree's place, or at the combined sound of "Five hundred wheat plants screaming together." The image of him regretting the deep cuts he made in the tree and "touching the edges of the gash, trying to press them together to close the wound" is certainly far removed from his previous detached, scientific interest. When he asks the Doctor to apply the iodine to the tree's cuts nightly at the story's end, he now seems to be entirely absorbed by guilt and empathy, viewing it just as he would an injured person. Though he is noted to possess a degree of interest in Klausner and his strange machine, The Doctor's curiosity regarding this invention of his "strange patient" does not seem to be nearly as zealous, with him quickly writing off his ideas as "not very probable" and the man himself as little more than crazy. It is only upon hearing the "hysterical note" in Klausner's voice on the phone that the Doctor is motivated to give Klausner's findings any kind of further attention. However, when the Doctor straps on the headphones and listens as Klausner strikes a tree with an axe, part of the tree topples over, and the Doctor rips off the headphones and flees to safety. When Klausner asks if he heard the tree cry out, the Doctor turns nervous and shifty. While it's possible that the Doctor's nervousness stems from his newfound fear of Klausner—who is still holding an axe at this point and has grown increasingly unstable and excitable—the Doctor's awkward dismissal that he heard anything may signify his denial that Klausner's machine actually works. By writing off Klausner as crazy and denying having heard anything, the Doctor may be trying to keep himself free of guilt, or at least avoid directly facing the horrors that the discovery entails. But the lingering seed of the "idea" that Klausner planted in him may never be able to be repressed. His outright denial that he heard anything may very well stem from his inability to cope with the horror of that knowledge, something Dahl represents as both pointless and reductive, seeming to suggest that the Doctor will still have to continue living with this knowledge despite his attempts to ignore it or rationalize it as the ravings of a madman. By portraying two men of science in their respective battle and failure to process such a significant discovery, Dahl makes an implicit argument regarding the nature of humankind's ability and willingness to comprehend the mysteries the world has to offer, potentially suggesting that some discoveries have an impact that cannot stand up to rationalization or dismissal. - Theme: Passion vs. Madness. Description: While the image of an individual hard at work on something they care very deeply about is not necessarily meant to invoke feelings of unease, the way Klausner's intense preoccupation with his machine and its abilities changes throughout the story carries with it a much more insidious nature. By following his character as he embarks on this fraught journey of discovery, Dahl showcases how extreme passion and unbridled curiosity, when left unchecked, can all too easily bleed into obsession and madness. Right from the story's beginning, Klausner exhibits a fervency for his work on the machine that portrays him as a dedicated and passionate man. His meticulous attention to both the machine's complicated innerworkings and his own diagrams and frequent mutterings to himself contribute to his characterization as a man driven by a passion for knowledge, as does the "air of urgency […] of breathlessness, of strong suppressed excitement" that defines the way he conducts his work. These qualities at first appear to be trampled upon by the arrival of the Doctor, who has come to check on Klausner's sore throat, an illness he now dismisses as "quite cured." This interruption makes the absorbed Klausner rather uptight, so much so that even the Doctor notes the "feeling of tension in the room." He recognizes Klausner's intense concentration on the machine, noting that Klausner has even forgotten to take his hat off. It is only when the Doctor questions Klausner about his project that his spark of passion fully returns, with the "moth of a man" suddenly launching into a discussion of his hypothesis so animated and detailed that the Doctor promptly excuses himself, noting the dreamy "quality of distance" displayed in the man's eyes. As the story goes on and Klausner tests his machine, however, this impassioned professional curiosity begins to give way to a far more sinister form of unhealthy fixation. For one thing, it becomes clearer and clearer that Klausner is prioritizing his work over his own well-being, as the frail man is at one point described as resembling "an ancient, consumptive, bespectacled child." And while his earlier dismissal towards his sore throat may not represent a cause for alarm by itself, but this characterization continues to portray his health as something he may be neglecting in favor of his commitment to his research. Furthermore, the way Klausner interacts with the people around him calls into question his grip on reality. He watches his neighbor, Mrs. Saunders, in her garden "without thinking about her at all" due to his fixation with the machine. It is only when he realizes that her roses are the source of the "inhuman shriek" he heard through his earphones that he engages her presence, his intense, excited demeanor making her thoroughly uncomfortable and questioning his sanity much like the Doctor had previously. His call to the Doctor after testing the machine on a tree is also quite revealing of his deteriorating mental state. His plea for the Doctor to come quickly is imbued with the same urgency as someone who is battling a life-threatening illness or had a fatal accident, suggesting that Klausner's obsession has perhaps bled into a kind of sickness. By the end of the story, Klausner's curiosity has finally evolved into an all-consuming obsession that renders him on the brink of abject madness. His previously impassioned hypotheses about the wealth of sounds out of human reach takes a turn as he now considers the ramifications of his discovery with horror instead of excitement. This newfound horror grows into a new obsession with taking care of the tree he has hurt. Even though his hypothesis was wrong, the intensity he approached it with has effectively been carried over to the tree. Klausner's concern for the tree and its wounds as if it were another person signifies the depths of his mania. It's interesting to note that he displays more care for it than he does his own health at the beginning of the story, to the point where he even asks the Doctor to come back to tend to it again the next day. This is certainly a far cry from the brusque dismissal he gave the Doctor when questioned about his sore throat. In addition, the "curious, almost […] threatening tone" Klausner takes on when directing the Doctor to dress the tree's axe wound compounds with the way he holds the axe to make the Doctor feel in danger of a violent outburst. Short of running away, he sees no other option but to comply with his demands and placate him in much the same way he would an unstable patient. The "distance" he once saw in the man's eyes has now thoroughly consumed him. To this end, Klausner's journey from diligent scientific mind to a broken and obsessed shell of a man highlights the pitfalls of unchecked ambition and drive. By portraying him in such a way, Dahl spins a cautionary tale with Klausner at the center, showcasing just how easily one can be swept away in the currents of passion and jeopardize their own health and safety, potentially even losing their very sanity in the process. - Climax: Klausner tests the machine by cutting into a tree with an axe and hears a prolonged cry, confirming his hypothesis that plants feel pain. - Summary: On a summer evening, Klausner hurries back to his workshop to continue tinkering with a small black box full of complex wires. He works excitedly on the machine with intense focus for some time before being interrupted by a visit from the town physician, Scott. After Klausner distractedly dismisses the man's concern for his sore throat, the Doctor soon takes notice of the object of Klausner's attention and questions him about its purpose, whereupon Klausner launches into an emphatic discussion of his research into translating pitches too low or high for the human ear into audible levels. The Doctor is amused but thinks the idea is implausible. As he leaves the man to his work, the Doctor silently questions Klausner's mental state. After spending some more time tinkering with the machine and muttering to himself, Klausner brings his machine to working order and decides to test it in his garden. He has the feeling that he shouldn't be trying this experiment—that he is veering into "forbidden territory, a dangerous ultrasonic region where ears had never been before and had no right to be." Despite this feeling, Klausner presses on. When he slides on his headphones, he hears a terrifying shriek, but sees no possible source except for his neighbor, Mrs. Saunders, who is peacefully tending to her roses. He soon realizes the noises correspond with the cutting of the roses, and in horror deduces that plants emit small screams of pain inaudible to human ears. He frantically alerts Mrs. Saunders to this discovery, greatly worrying her in the process—she has always found him a bit odd, but now she is certain that he is outright mad. Klausner leans over the fence and whispers frantically to her about his discovery, Mrs. Saunders decides to dart back into the house for her own safety. The next morning, unconvinced of the true nature behind the sound the roses made (whether it was truly a cry of pain or some other sensation or feeling humans don't have a word for), Klausner sets out to test his hypothesis further by taking an axe to a tree, which results in him hearing a prolonged growl of agony. Now fully convinced, the terrified Klausner breaks down, apologizing to the tree for hurting it and attempting to heal its wound. On the heels of this discovery, Klausner calls the Doctor and begs him to come quickly, even though it's only 6:30 a.m. The Doctor senses something frantic and even mad in Klausner's voice and agrees to head over promptly. While waiting for the Doctor, Klausner dwells on the implications of this new knowledge, considering what humans would feel if someone took an axe to them and wondering which fruits and vegetables are free to eat without guilt. The Doctor arrives and Klausner brings him to the tree, giving him the machine's earphones so he may hear the tree's cry as well. When Klausner goes to strike the tree this time, however, he feels a shifting of the ground beneath him and a branch falls from above after the axe hits, destroying his machine and nearly hitting both him and the Doctor. When questioned, the Doctor denies having heard anything in the earphones—after all, he ripped them off of his ears and began to ran away the second he saw the tree tipping over—and Klausner interprets the man's skittish demeanor as a sign that he may be holding back the truth. He firmly directs the Doctor to dress the tree's wound. The Doctor, now in fear of a possible violent outburst from the man, complies, assuring him he will come back to tend to the tree again the next day if need be before gently leading him back home.

- Genre: Spy fiction - Title: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany; London, England; The Hague, Amsterdam; East Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR) - Character: Alec Leamas. Description: A tough, hard-drinking man of fifty, Alec Leamas has worked for the British secret service – the Circus – since World War Two. During his wartime service, he saw many innocent people killed, and he hides how traumatized he was by his experiences behind a tough exterior. He had a wife and two children, but left them many years before the novel's beginning. He lived in the Netherlands as a child and speaks Dutch and German, but, unlike most of the members of the Circus, comes from a working-class background. He dislikes what he sees as the impractical politeness and pretension of the British upper class. At the start of the novel, Leamas has worked as the head of the Berlin station for ten years, from 1951 to 1961, building up a network of spies, most importantly Karl Riemeck, who supplied him with information about the East German state and their secret service, the Abteilung. - Character: Hans-Dieter Mundt. Description: A former member of the Nazi party, current member of the Abteilung, and secret British agent, Hans-Dieter Mundt is a cynical, cold-blooded killer and anti-Semite. Before the action of the novel, he worked as an East German spy in London, was involved in a murder, and tried to kill George Smiley. After returning to Berlin, he was promoted to lead the Abteilung, although he only escaped being captured by the British after pledging to be a British double agent. Over the next two years, he supplies the British with excellent information, using Karl Riemeck as an intermediary. He kills other East German British agents as soon as he feels they may be a threat to his position. In collaboration with Control, who wants to shift suspicion away from Mundt, Mundt prepares to discredit Leamas in an East German court by showing that Leamas was sent by Britain to frame him. Mundt is the antagonist of the novel, and clearly has no allegiance to either side he works for or the ideologies they represent. - Character: Liz Gold. Description: A trusting, sensitive, and intelligent Jewish woman in her early twenties, Liz Gold is a member of the Communist party. She becomes Leamas's lover after meeting him at the library where they both work. Later, she receives a visit from George Smiley and a lease for an apartment in the mail, which she believes come from Leamas or his friend. She is invited by the Communist party to a Branch meeting in East Germany, but this is only a pretext to get her to the country so that she can be brought to a tribunal to give testimony that proves that the British sought to frame Mundt. - Character: Fiedler. Description: The second-in-command at the Abteilung, Fiedler is a Jew and a true believer in the Communist cause. As a child, he fled the Nazis with his parents, but returned to join the Communist political movement in East Germany after the war. Although the crimes of Stalin are being publicized at this time, Fiedler remains a dedicated Stalinist, who believes that individuals may be killed in order to make progress towards Communism. Fiedler has begun to suspect Mundt of being a British agent, which is why Control sends Leamas on his mission. Leamas believes that his target is Mundt, but he is actually supposed to discredit Fiedler, who prosecutes the case against Mundt. Fiedler comes to like and trust Leamas, who he sees as a simple operator, lacking in analytical skills. - Character: Karl Riemeck. Description: A member of the East German government, Riemeck becomes a spy for the British. Riemeck is a member of the Secretariat and the Praesidium, which gives him access to documents that he photographs and gives to the British. Riemeck tells his lover, Elvira, a great deal, and Leamas believes that this is what gets him killed. Riemeck is killed by Mundt after he comes under suspicion of spying for the British. It is revealed at the end of the novel that Riemeck was actually Mundt's intermediary, whom Mundt killed to protect himself. - Character: Control. Description: The head of the British secret service, or "the Circus," Control is a member of the upper class, whose polite and banal manner conceals his deep cynicism and manipulative intelligence. Control convinces Leamas, who he sees as expendable, to go on a mission to frame Mundt. In fact, Control wants Leamas to be brought to trial and discredited in East Germany in order to protect Mundt and discredit Fiedler. - Character: George Smiley. Description: A former agent for the Circus, Smiley is retired when the novel begins. In 1959, before the action of the novel, Smiley worked on a case involving Mundt, who was then a spy in England and tried to kill Smiley. He plays a shadowy role in Control's plot to save Mundt, and it is never made clear whether he really wanted to see Mundt killed or saved. Smiley is a central character in many of Le Carré's other works. - Character: Peter Guillam. Description: An agent in the Circus who worked on Mundt's case with George Smiley in 1959, before the action of the novel, Peter Guillam works in a department called Satellite Four. Leamas says that he believes this department works on economic issues in East Germany, but Fiedler believes that it's responsible for coordinating Mundt's activity spying for the British. - Character: Ashe. Description: A low-level Communist spy working in London, Ashe makes contact with Leamas as soon as he gets out of prison, then introduces him to his superior, Sam Kiever, who, in turn, brings Leamas to Holland to meet with the Russian interrogator Peters. Ashe also goes to Liz's branch meetings of the Communist party, takes Liz out to coffee afterwards, and asks her questions about herself and her love life. - Character: Elvira. Description: Karl Riemeck's mistress, Elvira is suspected of having revealed that Riemeck was spying for the British to the East Germans, leading to his assassination by Mundt. Later, she is assassinated in West Berlin. Leamas believes that Mundt must have had her killed, but the fact that she dies in West Berlin suggests that the British were involved in her death. - Character: Mr. Pitt. Description: A man who works at the Labor Exchange and sets Leamas up with a series of jobs, finally sending him to work at the Bayswater Library for Psychic Research so that he will meet Liz Gold. Pitt is working for the Circus, and Leamas vaguely recognizes him, but when Leamas asks Control who Pitt is, Control says he does not know. - Character: George Hanby. Description: The treasurer of Liz's local Communist association, Hanby witnesses the altercation between Leamas and Ford. He talks to a man in spectacles (probably George Smiley) who tells him how spontaneously the fight occurred, and he reports this to the local Communist newspaper, where an article on the incident is printed. - Theme: Ideology and Morality. Description: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold takes place at the height of Cold War tensions, when the competition for dominance of Europe between the Communist Soviet Union and the Capitalist West was at its fiercest. Most of the novel's characters are spies on one side or the other of this ideological divide. But the novel is less interested in answering the ideological question of whether the right system for running human society is a Communist one or a Capitalist one than it is in examining the ways in which the two battling systems justify the loss of innocent lives that results from their war for supremacy. The spies on the Western side—Leamas, Control, and Smiley—are ostensibly fighting to defend liberal democracy, a system which values the rights of individuals and seeks to protect their freedoms from state oppression. This system prizes its ability to function democratically and according to the rule of law (the principle that the law applies to all members of a society equally). The rights of the individual are not meant to be sacrificed in the name of a larger goal set by the state. The East German spies like Fiedler and Mundt defend an entirely different set of principles. They hope to spread Communism, an ideology that promises to bring peace and prosperity to all people by redistributing wealth. Communist doctrine says that, to create this fairer, better world for the vast majority of people, it may be necessary to kill certain enemies that get in the way. Each side sees its actions as justified by its principles, but as it spies on its enemy and works to uncover and stop agents spying in its territory, each acts with inhuman cruelty, disregarding the loss of innocent lives and the human instinct to remain loyal to specific people instead of organizations or ideas. Communists like Fiedler see these sacrifices as worth it: after all, it is part of the Communist ideology that the transition from Capitalism to Communism will require the deaths of both enemies and innocents. They are aware of the many innocent people whose murder has been justified ideologically by Communist leaders like Stalin, and they intend to continue to be just as merciless in carrying out the killing they see as necessary. Others, like Mundt and Leamas, are cynics, working as spies not because they believe in a cause. For Leamas, spying is one of the only jobs he is good at, so he pledges his life to it, despite feeling disgust for the bloodshed he sees. Mundt, on the other hand, has been a Nazi, but becomes a Communist who betrays Communism and spies for the British. He is the novel's true villain. Although the novel holds up Communists' insensitivity to the value of human life as despicable, the novel shows its true message – that each side is capable of equal evil – by having the coldblooded killer Mundt fight on the British side of the Cold War battle. Liz Gold, the one protagonist who is not involved in intelligence collection, is a member of the Communist party because she believes in fairness, peace, and equality. Like many Communists of that era, she is still largely unaware of the acts of state violence and genocide that have been committed in the name of Communism. During this time, the knowledge of Stalin's crimes was only just starting to spread to those outside of the Soviet Union, and Liz is shocked to see the evidence of this attitude toward human life when she is in East Germany, especially during her conversation with the Prison Wardress—but she also sees the British willingness to allow Mundt to arrange for her to be brought to East Germany for the trial as perhaps a more terrible abuse. Liz looks back at the way she was manipulated and feels sure that any ideological justification for what was done to her would ring hollow. The novel suggests through Liz's character that individual morality should trump ideology. The novel compares the two systems: one which believes that the deaths of innocents may be necessary for the greater good, one which claims that there is no excuse for extralegal killings. But it shows that these two systems operate in much the same way. Although in Britain, state-sanctioned violence is not used against domestic political opponents, but to defend the political system against foreign enemies seeking to undermine liberal democracy, the spies responsible for defending this system often break with the principles they are defending by killing innocents and rejecting the truth­­­. For the other side, ideas are considered more important than people, and so the death of an innocent person can always be justified as necessary for the greater good of society, no matter how farfetched this seems. In Le Carré's harsh worldview, both systems are thus ultimately characterized by inhumanity, hypocrisy, and a cynical view of the value of human life and social progress. - Theme: Alienation and Connection. Description: Alec Leamas, the middle-aged, world-weary spy who is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold's protagonist, is deeply alienated from other people and from society. During World War II and after, he has seen a great deal of violence that has made him suspicious of human nature and afraid to get close to anyone. He divorced his wife and has not had contact with his children in many years. But although he presents the figure of a broken man—traumatized, self-destructive, and anti-social—the novel suggests that these very qualities make him an ideal agent for the spying mission he is sent on. The state of mental toughness required of spies while undercover is referred to as "being out in the cold." Because spies must often pretend to be people they are not and must often betray those they're close to in order to complete their missions, a kind of impersonal detachment is important to their work. This, paradoxically, can lead to the state of mind that Leamas finds himself in: sacrificing his entire life to protect a society from which he feels alienated. To "come in from the cold" is given two different meanings in the novel, with each usage emphasizing the importance of alienation to spy work. First, "to come in from the cold" means to give up spy work, thereby ceasing to work in the inhospitable "cold" of enemy territory. While operating undercover, as Leamas does throughout his final mission, he cannot take anyone into his confidence or unburden himself of the anxieties that his work entails. There is no one who can sympathize with him, no source of human warmth for him to rely on. He hopes that after this mission, he will give up spy work and return to Liz Gold, with whom he felt a human connection for the first time in a long time. The second meaning of "coming in from the cold" relates to this choice of human connection over alienation. Leamas disapproves of how his agent Riemeck has told his mistress Elvira about his intelligence work. He feels betrayed by Riemeck because he trusted Riemeck to trust no one and reveal no secrets, to "stay out in the cold" as a spy by staying detached from human connection. In the first chapter, when Leamas leaves the checkpoint to speak to Elvira about Riemeck, he steps out into an "icy October wind" and then returns to the checkpoint hut "in from the cold." These repeated descriptions of the cold weather are no coincidence. Falling in love with someone and telling them everything, putting an intimate connection ahead of operational work, is the second sense in which a spy can "come in from the cold." Leamas himself "comes in from the cold" in this second sense, too. First, when he feels a human connection to Liz, he hopes that he will be able to return to her when he completes his mission and gives up spy work: when he "comes in from the cold" in the first sense. Although he never tells her the details of his operation, he hints that he will be going away to do a job. Telling Liz even this much represents a failure to place the mission above his personal life. In the end, when Liz is killed, Leamas "comes in from the cold" by refusing to obey Smiley's command to leave her behind and choosing to die with her. He climbs back down to her corpse, where he is shot, thereby "coming in from the cold" by prioritizing his connection to her over his mission and the alienation from other people that it demands of him. With Leamas's decision to die with Liz, the novel shows that the world of espionage is so brutal and dangerous that the spy's ultimate choice is not just between connection to other people and alienation from them for the sake of the mission, but also a choice between alienation from other people and death. - Theme: Identity and Autonomy. Description: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold explores the emotional experience and outward behavior of an individual who attempts to perform an assumed identity. Even for a spy, attempting to stick to a role is mentally exhausting and can make the individual easy to manipulate. Both the Circus, the British spying headquarters, and its East German counterpart the Abteilung use this to their advantage. The novel tracks the process by which Alec Leamas loses track of his actual identity, making him more easily manipulated by the large organization he works for. Alec Leamas is asked by the head of British intelligence, Control, to perform the identity of a gruff, anti-social, burnt-out alcoholic for an operation, which he believes is meant to frame the East German agent Hans-Dieter Mundt. This identity, however, is not too different from Leamas's actual identity. Leamas is already emotionally battered by the death of so many of his agents at Mundt's hands. His assumed identity is actually then just a speeding up of the process of his own physical and mental deterioration, as he accentuates his own worst qualities, drinking like a fish and lashing out violently. Control leads Leamas to believe that by assuming this identity he will be able to lure the East German side to recruit him as a defector, at which point he will give evidence that will lead the East Germans to try Mundt as a traitor. But unknown to Leamas, Mundt is working for the British, and Control means for Leamas's plot to be discovered. Control wants the East Germans to believe that Leamas has been sent by the British to frame Mundt, because if the East Germans believe they have uncovered a British plot to discredit Mundt, this will assure them that Mundt is, in fact, a loyal agent. As his assumed and "true" identities blur more and more, Leamas becomes all the less likely to suspect that he is being manipulated himself. He views his own mental collapse as if it is a necessary part of his job, a masterful performance, when it is actually playing into the hands of his bosses. The novel also explores the feelings and behavior of an individual who wishes to put on a performance, but does not know what kind of performance to choose. Unlike Leamas, who believes he is assuming an identity to serve a mission, when Liz Gold is summoned to testify in an East German court, she does not know what the case is about or how she should act to protect Leamas. She flounders helplessly, trying to discover the right way to answer the lawyer's questions, and whether she ought to lie or tell the truth. Liz is extremely disturbed by the feeling that everyone in the courtroom is learning a secret from her testimony that she does not herself understand. She wants to have control over the impression she makes, but, since she does not know what information the lawyer is hoping to get from her testimony, she does not know how to fabricate a story. She has lost her autonomy and she knows it. Leamas believes he is in control of his identity, while Liz hates her lack of control of the impression she is creating, but in the end, both Leamas and Liz are pawns in the hands of the intelligence services. Neither can autonomously control the effect their behavior has on others. In fact, Liz has a firmer grasp of where she really stands than Leamas does. Once she understands how British Intelligence used her to pursue its goal, she sees that it is illogical that she be allowed to survive. Leamas, on the other hand, is too broken down by trying to play a role whose purpose he never understood to recognize that Liz will be killed on the Berlin Wall. The novel suggests that autonomy is impossible when the individual's identity is being manipulated by a large, impersonal organization like the Abteilung or the Circus. - Theme: Loyalty and Betrayal. Description: Loyalty or the lack thereof is a defining quality of the characters in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Each character presents a unique combination of loyalties: some are most loyal to organizations and ideologies, while others are dedicated to moral principles and to other people. Some characters, however, are willing to betray anyone or anything for their own gain. Loyalty to an organization is of the utmost importance for spies and intelligence operators, but it does not guarantee that the organization will show loyalty to the spy in return. Leamas is loyal to the Circus, the British Intelligence Organization. In giving his loyalty to this organization, he cuts himself off from other people, knowing that, if push came to shove, he would betray them in order to stay loyal to his work. But despite his efforts to isolate himself from others, Leamas does care about other people. He is sickened by the deaths of the agents he leads in Berlin. He has harrowing memories of refugees he saw killed during War World II and of nearly killing a carful of children while speeding on the Autobahn. Although Leamas seems too alienated to fall in love with Liz the way she falls in love with him, he does feel loyalty towards her. In the end, the Circus finally goes one step too far in its betrayal of him by orchestrating Liz's death, and Leamas chooses loyalty to Liz over the organization, as he decides to die with her. Control may seem to be loyal to the Circus, the organization he runs, but he is not loyal to anyone who works there, only to the organization's mission, and, by extension, only to his own success in leading that mission. Control has no qualms volunteering Leamas for a harrowing experience in East German prison and court, where he faces possible execution. But his betrayal of Leamas goes deeper than exposing him to this physical danger. This is because of the way Control misleads Leamas about the nature of the mission. Leamas had been eager to go on the mission to frame Mundt and see him killed, not only out of loyalty to the Circus, but also to avenge the deaths of the many agents he had supervised and Mundt had murdered. In forcing Leamas to unwittingly risk his own life to protect Mundt's, Control forces Leamas to violate his sense of loyalty and connection to the agents whom Mundt killed. Mundt is only loyal to himself, and perhaps to the defeated Nazi cause. An ex-Hitler youth, current East German spy chief, and British double agent, Mundt is a cold-blooded killer seemingly lacking in loyalty. Rather than helping agents, who, like him, are East Germans spying for the British, to escape from East Berlin, he kills them as soon as it seems like they are suspected by the East Germans and could expose his own role in spying for the British. Mundt is an unreformed Nazi. As he interrogates and tortures Fiedler, he whispers anti-Semitic taunts in his ear. Loyal only to a failed political ideology that preached his own racial superiority to other people, Mundt now cynically provides his services as a spy to whichever secret service will protect him and pay him well. Loyalty to loved ones goes together with loyalty to moral principles, as displayed in the character of Liz Gold. Although she believes herself to be a loyal Communist, as she begins to see the moral compromises that Communist authorities make, she is repulsed. Liz, like Leamas, is betrayed by the organization she has pledged loyalty to when the Communist party organization lures her to East Germany on a false pretense to have her undermine Leamas's testimony in court. But although Liz is a Communist party member, she is mainly interested in the party as a method to promote peace and protect people. When she is urged to remain loyal to the Communist cause when testifying in court where she believes Leamas—a person she loves—to be in danger, she feels nothing but a desire to protect Leamas. Liz does not live long enough to denounce Communism. But although she is more disgusted by the callousness of the British in protecting Mundt than she is by the way the Communist side used and manipulated her, she is also chilled by hearing the Prison Wardress glorify killing for ideology's sake. It seems likely that if she had made it over the Berlin Wall, Liz would have reassessed her Communist loyalties. In this way, Liz is typical of this moment in Cold War history. Her character represents the possibility to reprioritize and change one's loyalties, a possibility that many Communist party members outside of the Soviet Union faced as knowledge of Stalin's genocidal crimes spread abroad in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Total loyalty to an ideology leads characters to act immorally and to ultimately compromise their own survival. Fiedler, a Jew who returned from Canada to Germany to work in the Communist East German special services, is a true believer in Communism. But by moving into a work environment full of unreformed Nazis like Mundt, he opens himself up to being attacked by those who hate him because he is Jewish. Fiedler is a somewhat sympathetic character. He is a true believer in Communism and dedicates his life to trying to build a fair and peaceful world. He also shows kindness to Liz in the courtroom. But Fiedler is so loyal to Communism that he buys into the theory that the deaths of innocents are allowable if it moves society closer to Communism. And, whereas Mundt is an unreformed Nazi, Fiedler is an unreformed Stalinist. In the end, Fiedler himself becomes the innocent killed senselessly by the system whose right to commit senseless murders he has defended. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold paints a bleak picture of the cost of being loyal in this environment of Cold War struggle. Although the novel portrays those characters with strongly felt loyalties in a sympathetic light, it suggests that loyalty to anything outside of one's own interests can lead the individual down a path to being humiliated, manipulated, and ultimately killed by those who are willing to betray anyone and anything. And, once more, this characteristic is not unique to either the Communist or Capitalist system in particular, but yet another way in which they are alike in their brutality. - Theme: Elites and Others. Description: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is not only concerned with the Cold War tensions between the Communist and Capitalist systems—it also looks at tensions between haves and have-nots in both societies, tensions stretching back far into their histories. In particular, the novel points to the way social class and religious identity can define an individual's opportunities in each society. And, once again, the novel finds more similarities than differences between East and West than the ideologists of either side would wish to admit. The British intelligence service, the Circus, is mainly run by members of the Christian upper class. These men and women speak, dress, and think differently from the protagonist, Alec Leamas, who grew up abroad and comes from a working-class background. Leamas despises what he sees as the snobbishness of the people with whom he works, and there are some indications that they also dislike him. Although Leamas's boss Control is too polite to ever express his prejudice against Leamas, by sending Leamas on a dangerous mission that he can predict will entail a great deal of physical and mental suffering he betrays how little value he places on Leamas's life. The impression that Control, along with the rest of the British society that he is charged with protecting, cares less about those outside his own social sphere is also suggested by his decision to use Liz as a pawn in his scheme to save Mundt. Liz is not only poor; she is also Jewish and a Communist. This makes her life worth even less to Control than Leamas's. On the East German side, despite an ideology that calls for equality and fairness under Communism, a continuity between past and present has preserved the position of elites at the top, including Nazis. Hans-Dieter Mundt rose through the ranks as a Nazi, and has been able to—seemingly easily—switch over to become a Communist. He, like the upper-class agents of the Circus, is an elite who can rise to the top of his society's organizations. Although East Germany's ally the Soviet Union fought the Nazis, it did not do so in order to protect Jews. Both the Nazi past and the Soviet-influenced present encourage anti-Semitism among the East German intelligence agencies. In this society, anti-Semitism sometimes seems so prevalent as to override other ideologies entirely. The Russian agent Peters, Mundt, and the Prison Wardress all express anti-Semitic views. In this environment, Fiedler is entirely unmatched to face down Mundt. When Mundt's lawyer Karden brings Liz into the tribunal to discredit Leamas, Fiedler can point out why the proof that Leamas was sent to frame Mundt is also, simultaneously, evidence that Mundt is a British agent. But, because this tribunal is full of people who see themselves in Mundt and are rooting for him because he is like them, Fiedler's logic goes unheard. In the end, the tribunal would rather kill Fiedler because he is Jewish than listen to his logic, which would lead them to kill Mundt because he is a traitor. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold shows the unfair and ugly treatment of those outside of religious and class elites in both societies. This is yet another way that the novel creates the impression that both Communist East Germany and the Capitalist West are equally morally bankrupt societies that treat individuals unfairly and inhumanely. - Climax: Karden calls Liz as a witness at the Tribunal on Mundt's spying. - Summary: As the novel begins, Alec Leamas, the head of the Berlin station for the British secret service, waits at a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall for his agent Karl Riemeck, whose cover has been blown, to cross over to safety in the West. Riemeck's mistress Elvira, who Leamas believes knows too much about the spy operation, crosses into West Berlin and tells Leamas that Riemeck will cross soon. As Leamas watches, Riemeck is shot and killed by the East German sentries. Riemeck is the last of Leamas's agents in Berlin to be killed off by Hans-Dieter Mundt, the head of the East German secret service, the Abteilung. Leamas is summoned back to London by Control, the head of the British intelligence agency called "the Circus." Control tasks Leamas with one final mission before retiring: to kill Mundt. Leamas goes to Control's house and meets with Peter Guillam and George Smiley, an agent and a former agent who worked on Mundt's case back in 1959, when Mundt was a spy in London. Together the men hatch a plan. To carry out the plan to kill Mundt, Leamas takes on a double identity. He is demoted to work in the banking department, where he becomes an alcoholic wreck, then disappears from the Circus entirely after being accused of stealing. Rumors circulate at the Circus that Leamas's pension will be small, because of an interruption in his service after World War Two. After leaving the Circus, Leamas lives in a squalid apartment, drinking too much and not socializing with anyone. He is sent by Mr. Pitt, a man at an employment agency whom he thinks he recognizes, to work at a library. There he meets a young Jewish woman and member of the Communist party named Liz Gold. They have an affair and Liz falls in love with Leamas. One night, she can tell that he is preparing to do something and that they must say goodbye. The next day, Leamas punches Ford, a grocer who refuses him credit, and goes to jail for three months. When Leamas gets out of prison, he is approached by East German spies in London, Ashe and Kiever, who recruit him as a defector. They say he will get fifteen-thousand pounds now and another five thousand in a year for information he gives about his service. Leamas travels to The Hague, where he is interviewed by a Russian agent named Peters. Leamas tells Peters about how he first made contact with Karl Riemeck and about the intelligence Riemeck provided. Peters is skeptical that Riemeck would have had access to so much information. Leamas learns from Riemeck that Elvira was killed in West Germany, which puzzles him. The next day, Leamas tells Peters about a special system for paying an agent that he worked on while in the Banking Department. For this operation, called Rolling Stone, Leamas opened joint accounts in Helsinki and Copenhagen. In each city, he deposited money into a joint account for himself under an alias and an agent who could collect it under an alias. On the third day in Holland, Peters arrives late, so Leamas takes a walk on the beach. He thinks about Liz and how she made him remember what it feels like to take pleasure in life. He hopes to return to her. When Peters arrives, he tells Leamas that there is a wanted ad in the London papers for Leamas's arrest. Leamas accuses Peters of having revealed his defection to London to force him to stay, but he actually suspects that Control is behind this. Peters tells him he must go to the East for his own safety and to be interrogated further, and they fly to Berlin. Back in London, George Smiley and another agent visit Liz. They ask her questions about her relationship with Leamas. Smiley leaves Liz his card and tells her to be in touch if she needs anything. Meanwhile, at a lodge outside Berlin, Leamas meets Fiedler, the second in command at the Abteilung and its best interrogator. Leamas is familiar with Fiedler's dossier, and knows him to be merciless about killing to defend his Communist ideology. In planning to destroy Mundt, Control is counting on Fiedler to collect the evidence about Mundt (once Leamas frames him) and prosecute a case against his boss. Fiedler and Leamas spend days walking through the hills, during which Fiedler asks Leamas about the details of his service and about his philosophy. Leamas steadfastly denies that he believes in anything. Fiedler is sure that Rolling Stone was meant to pay a spy working for the British in East Germany, but Leamas says that it would have been impossible for the British to run an agent there without his knowing. To try to determine which agent was paid through the Rolling Stone operation, Fiedler has Leamas write to the two banks to inquire about the accounts. He gets word back that the money was withdrawn from the bank in Copenhagen on days when Mundt traveled to that city. Back in England, Liz receives an invitation to travel to Leipzig on a cultural exchange with another branch of the Communist party. She finds it odd that the Party would take special notice of someone as insignificant as her, but puts her doubts aside, hoping that the trip will take her mind off Leamas. Leamas and Fiedler return to the lodge, after a drive during which Fiedler tells Leamas that he suspects Mundt of being a British agent. When they arrive they are arrested. Leamas resists arrest and kills a German sentry before being knocked unconscious. He wakes up in a prison, badly beaten and tied up. Mundt interrogates him, demanding to know the details of the British plot to frame him. Mundt says that Leamas could be shown mercy for murdering the sentry, if he testifies that Fiedler is part of a British plot to frame Mundt. Leamas does not confess. Mundt asks him over and over when the last time he saw George Smiley was, when suddenly a number of people rush into the room. Mundt is arrested and Leamas is brought to a hospital. When Leamas wakes up, Fiedler is standing at his bedside. Fiedler tells him that he had already submitted a report on his suspicions about Mundt to the Praesidium (legislative committee) when Mundt had them arrested, and now there will be a Tribunal to determine if Mundt is a British spy. Leamas will have to testify. Meanwhile, in Leipzig, Liz is enjoying her visit until she is disappointed by how sparsely attended the Branch Meeting is. After the meeting, a man named Holten comes and tells Liz that her itinerary has changed and that he will bring her to a special meeting on the Polish border. Liz goes with him. The Tribunal takes place in a small courtroom, overseen by three members of the Praesidium. First Fiedler presents the case against Mundt, explaining that Mundt was caught by the British while in London and turned into a British spy. He calls on Leamas to testify, but first explains that Mundt recruited Riemeck to be his intermediary with Leamas, so Leamas is unaware that Mundt was a British agent. Fiedler calls for Mundt to be sentenced to death. Next, Mundt's defender, Karden, speaks. He contends that Leamas was sent by the British to bring down Mundt with Fiedler's help. He calls on Leamas to testify and asks whether he was friendless and penniless when he defected. Leamas affirms this. Karden asks if George Smiley might have wanted to help him and Leamas says no. Karden then asks for his witness to be brought in. To Leamas's shock and horror, Liz enters the courtroom. Liz is terrified and wants to protect Leamas, but she does not know what the trial is about. She testifies that George Smiley visited her after Leamas went away, and provides evidence that Leamas was not as broke as he says he was. Karden says that this proves that Leamas's defection was staged by London. Leamas is flabbergasted that London compromised his mission by contacting Liz. To try to save Fiedler and Liz, he testifies that Karden is right: the whole thing was a set-up. It is not until he has finished his testimony that he realizes the truth: Mundt really is London's man, and London sent him on this mission to frame and kill Fiedler, who suspected Mundt, and to protect Mundt. Later that night, Mundt comes to the prison cell where Liz is being held and ushers her out into the night, where Leamas is waiting by a car. They drive towards Berlin. Leamas explains to Liz the way London used them to achieve its end, and Liz is horrified. They pick up a man who gives them instructions for how to climb over Berlin Wall without being shot by the sentries. Liz wonders why she has been let go: she is a Communist who knows the Circus's secrets. At the Berlin Wall, Leamas climbs to the top and then reaches back down to lift Liz over. Then searchlights come on, and Liz is shot several times. From the Western side of the Berlin Wall, Leamas hears George Smiley calling for him to come across. Instead, Leamas climbs back down to the Eastern side, where Liz lies dead, and he too is shot by the sentries.

- Genre: Thriller, Suspense, Satire - Title: The Stepford Wives - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: The fictional suburban town of Stepford, which is based on Wilton, Connecticut - Character: Joanna Eberhart. Description: The novel's protagonist, Joanna Eberhart, is a semi-professional photographer and a feminist willing to challenge sexist cultural norms. After living for years in New York City, she moves to the suburban town of Stepford with her husband, Walter, and their two kids, Kim and Pete. Because she's an adamant advocate for gender equality, she's put off by the fact that seemingly all of the women in Stepford are uninterested in anything but housework. Joanna resents the idea that she should spend all of her time cleaning the house and providing for her husband. Before long, Joanna makes friends with Bobbie, who is the only person in Stepford who seems to share her feminist beliefs, and they decide to form the female equivalent of the exclusive Men's Association in Stepford—but nobody will go along with their idea. Disheartened, both Joanna and Bobbie begin to suspect that something strange is going on, which Joanna all but confirms when Bobbie herself suddenly undergoes a transformation and becomes exactly like the other women in Stepford. Eventually, Joanna correctly guesses that the men of Stepford have been turning their wives into robots, but Walter and his friends manage to convince her that she's crazy before she can escape. Made to feel irrational and "hysterical," she stops trying to run away—a decision that seals her fate as a subservient robot. - Character: Walter Eberhart. Description: Walter Eberhart is Joanna's husband and Kim and Pete's father. He has made a successful career for himself working at a law firm, and he thinks that moving to Stepford is the right choice for his and Joanna's family. Joanna, for her part, views Walter as a feminist ally, proudly talking at the beginning of the novel about how Walter supports the Women's Liberation Movement. In this way, the novel presents Walter as an enlightened and progressive man. He even promises to help change the Men's Association in Stepford so that it's coed and more inclusive. This, however, proves to be an empty promise, as Walter ends up working with the other Stepford men to turn Joanna into a robot designed to do his bidding. It's never made clear whether or not this was Walter's original intention, or if he gradually came around to the idea of subjugating Joanna. It's possible that he slowly became enticed by the power available to him as a man living in the sexist community of Stepford. Either way, he betrays Joanna and purposefully makes her feel crazy when she figures out what's going on—a good illustration of how men can hide behind supposedly progressive values while still behaving in sexist, manipulative ways. - Character: Bobbie Markowe. Description: Bobbie Markowe is Joanna's best friend in Stepford. Like Joanna, she's a feminist who's put off by the fact that the other women in Stepford only care about housework and pleasing their husbands. Along with Joanna, she tries to find women who might be interested in forming an all-female club, and when this doesn't work, she starts thinking about moving. She even wonders if there's something in the town's drinking water that makes women passive and subservient. Before she manages to move out of town, though, her husband, Dave, turns her into a robot with the help of the other members of the Men's Association. Because Bobbie was even more outspoken and scornful of housework than Joanna was, her transformation into a traditional and passive housewife is all the more shocking, ultimately prompting Joanna to do whatever she can to save herself from the same fate. - Character: Dave Markowe. Description: Dave Markowe is Bobbie's husband. In the same way that Joanna believes Walter shares her feminist views, Bobbie thinks Dave is unlike the other men in Stepford—she thinks he values her for who she is and doesn't care about things like housework. In reality, though, Dave is just like all the other husbands in Stepford, which he proves by turning her into an obedient and docile robot designed to do little more than please him. - Character: Dale Coba. Description: Dale Coba is the president of the Men's Association in Stepford. Joanna immediately dislikes him when she meets him, since he talks to her in an incredibly condescending manner—she can just tell he doesn't value her as a human being. She eventually learns that Dale used to work at Disneyland, where he helped design very lifelike robots that looked, moved, and spoke like past presidents. Putting two and two together, Joanna realizes that Dale has applied this skill in Stepford by working with the other members of the Men's Association to turn all of the women into robotic housewives. - Character: Ike Mazzard. Description: Ike Mazzard is a famous magazine illustrator who lives in Stepford. Like the other men in town, he belongs to the Men's Association. Ever since she was a young girl, Joanna has seen Ike's drawings and felt inferior to them, since he always draws unrealistically beautiful women. When she first meets him, he sketches her without her permission, and though she wants him to stop, he ignores her. However, she ends up feeling flattered by the final product, which she frames. She later learns that Ike Mazzard has sketched every woman in Stepford. All of the drawings are exaggerated to make the women more stereotypically attractive than they are, and the implication is that these drawings are used to design the robotic bodies that will eventually be used to replace the women themselves. - Character: Dr. Margaret Fancher. Description: Dr. Margaret Fancher is a therapist Joanna sees after insisting to Walter that they need to move because of the nefarious things happening in Stepford. Walter forces her to see a therapist to make sure she isn't being "hysterical," and though Joanna is hesitant, she ends up going to Dr. Fancher because she's a woman who doesn't live in Stepford. Although Dr. Fancher is sympathetic and doesn't necessarily think Joanna is crazy, she thinks her strong desire to move is simply due to the fact that she feels torn between "old conventions" and "the new conventions of the liberated woman"—that is, she thinks Joanna is simply bored by her new domestic lifestyle. In the end, she prescribes Joanna tranquilizers and advises her not to make any drastic life decisions before coming back for a few more sessions. - Character: Ruthanne Henry. Description: Ruthanne Henry is the author of a well-known children's book that Joanna likes to read to Kim. Joanna meets Ruthanne in the library shortly after Ruthanne moves to Stepford with her husband and children. Ruthanne—who is Black—tells Joanna that she suspects the women in Stepford are racist, since they've been so flat and unwelcoming. Joanna, however, suggests that this isn't necessarily because the women are racist but because they oddly don't care about anything other than housework. She explains her and Bobbie's theories about what turns the women in Stepford into such passive, subservient people, but Ruthanne insists that nothing could possibly force such a transformation on her. Later, at the very end of the novel, Ruthanne sees Joanna in the supermarket and is stunned to discover that she has become just like all of the other lifeless, passive women in town. Still, she doesn't think much of it, though the novel makes it clear that Ruthanne will be the next woman to be turned into a Stepford robot. - Character: Charmaine. Description: Charmaine is one of the only women in Stepford who's uninterested in housework and the usual trappings of a domestic lifestyle. For this reason, Bobbie and Joanna are thrilled to meet her, and Joanna starts playing tennis on Charmaine's court on a regular basis. Charmaine isn't necessarily a dedicated feminist, but she has no interest in becoming like all the other women in Stepford—instead, she likes to spend her time thinking about astrology and playing tennis, leaving the housework to a hired cleaner. She's extraordinarily attractive, and her husband is enamored of her, but she doesn't seem to like him very much—until, that is, she undergoes an abrupt transformation and suddenly becomes obsessed with housework and pleasing her husband. This change is what first alerts Bobbie and Joanna to the possibility that there's actually something happening in Stepford that changes free-thinking women into passive, subservient housewives. - Character: Claude Axhelm. Description: Claude Axhelm is one of the members of the Men's Association in Stepford. He claims to be working on a personal project that involves recording the voice of everyone in town. According to him, building up a database of voice samples might eventually be useful for law enforcement or something of that nature, though he frames the entire endeavor as little more than a pet project. In reality, though, the novel implies that Claude is collecting voice samples from the women in Stepford so that the robots that will eventually replace them will have their voices. - Character: Kit Sundersen. Description: Kit Sundersen is one of Joanna's neighbors. When Joanna goes around town asking women if they'd like to form a female equivalent of the Men's Association, Kit Sundersen tells her that she's too busy to do such a thing. Later, however, Joanna finds out that Kit Sundersen used to be the president of Stepford's Women's Club, which disbanded around the same time that the Men's Association was formed. The fact that Kit doesn't say anything about her former interest in gender equality makes Joanna all the more suspicious about what's going on in Stepford. - Theme: Sexism and Power. Description: The Stepford Wives highlights the stifling nature of sexist, male-dominated societies. The novel dramatizes the experience of living in such restrictive patriarchal systems by placing Joanna Eberhart—a strong-willed feminist—in the insular community of Stepford, where men replace their wives with robots designed to look pretty and serve their domestic (and presumably sexual) needs. The idea is that what these men really care about when it comes to marriage has nothing to do with who their wives are as people—rather, it has to do with a sexist desire for women to be completely subservient. Rather than these men wanting to live with real humans, the novel implies that men in patriarchal societies unfortunately tend to prioritize the idea of authority and power over all else: they want wives they can basically force into servitude without having to feel guilty about doing so. The novel doesn't necessarily disparage the domestic lifestyle, it just suggests that there are many lifestyles available to women and that women should be able to decide for themselves what they want to do. And yet, women do not have this choice in Stepford, where men actively fight against the idea of female independence by doing everything in their power to subjugate their wives. Through this dystopian premise, the novel hints that sexist men living in patriarchal societies often feel empowered to strive for total power and control over women. - Theme: Equality and Societal Change. Description: In many ways, The Stepford Wives is about a community unwilling to embrace change. The novel takes place in the 1960s or the early 1970s—a period that was important in the struggle for gender equality, as organizations like the Women's Liberation Movement challenged sexist cultural norms. When she first moves to Stepford, Joanna proudly talks about her involvement in the Women's Liberation Movement, clearly already sensing that her interest in feminism will stand out in a town that still clings tightly to traditional gender roles. In other words, Joanna is aware early in the novel that her progressive worldview is at odds with the outdated and sexist traditions at play in Stepford. To that end, her one likeminded friend, Bobbie, calls Stepford "the Town That Time Forgot," since she and Joanna are the only women even remotely interested in forming a female equivalent of the town's prominent Men's Association. What's interesting, though, is that both Joanna and Bobbie fail to see that their own husbands are just as sexist and traditional as the other men in town. Joanna speaks proudly in the beginning of the novel about how Walter is a big supporter of the Women's Liberation Movement. Throughout the book, then, Joanna—and, in turn, readers—see Walter as a refreshingly enlightened man. He even gives Joanna the impression that he's going to help change the Men's Association "from the inside" by joining and then convincing the others to make it co-ed. In the end, though, Walter turns Joanna into a subservient robot designed to do whatever she's told (though it's never made clear if this was Walter's original intention or if the other men convinced him to turn against Joanna). By highlighting Walter's betrayal of Joanna, the novel shows how difficult it is to change sexist power structures when even supposedly open-minded, progressive men appear unwilling to work toward equality. - Theme: Secrecy, Doubt, and Uncertainty. Description: In The Stepford Wives, the secrecy surrounding what goes on in Stepford makes it possible for the town's men to get away with their twisted schemes: nobody outside the town's Men's Association knows they have been turning their wives into subservient robots. This secrecy makes it that much harder for women like Joanna and Bobbie to protect themselves, even though they can clearly see that something is amiss in Stepford. The community at large is exceptionally good at hiding the sexist horrors that are just waiting to antagonize the women who move there, and it is precisely because of this secrecy that such horrors are able to exist in the first place. This dynamic is a good representation of the reaction many Americans in the mid-20th century had to the Women's Liberation Movement and the push for gender equality: many people denied the significance of gender inequality, arguing that there wasn't a problem with society's sexist cultural norms. Instead of recognizing the injustice at play, many men—and even many women—criticized the people calling for change, ultimately trying to frame them as crazy or unrealistic. Similarly, Walter and the other members of the Men's Association try to make Joanna feel crazy by suggesting that her theories about robots are outlandish and silly—Walter even says she's being "hysterical" at one point. The men thus throw her into a state of uncertainty, causing her to doubt herself and suspect that she has "spun into […] madness." This is a tactic (known as "gaslighting") often used by people in positions of power to force others to second-guess legitimate concerns about their own mistreatment. Joanna, of course, was right all along, but because Walter and the other men were able to throw her into uncertainty, they ultimately succeed in getting her to let her guard down—at which point they kill her and turn her into a robot. In this way, the novel spotlights the unsettling way that sexist, male-dominated societies often undermine women's attempts to protect and advocate for themselves by framing them as crazy and irrational. - Theme: Female Ambition vs. Societal Expectations. Description: The Stepford Wives examines the resistance that American society in the mid-20th century showed toward female ambition. Joanna is a semi-professional photographer, and though she certainly isn't famous or celebrated for her work, she has had some success selling her pictures to well-known magazines. And yet, it's very clear that her artistic career has been placed on the backburner and that she's not so sure about moving from New York City to Stepford—she worries the move will "diminish[]" rather than "enrich[]" her life. Once the Eberhart family has settled in the suburbs, Joanna struggles to make time for her photography, and the implication is that her life in the city was more conducive to her artistic work. Her husband Walter, on the other hand, is surrounded in Stepford by other career-oriented men, many of whom work at law firms—just like he does. Joanna soon realizes just how hard it will be to hold onto her personal ambitions in Stepford, where women are expected to aspire to little more than housework. In fact, Joanna learns that most of the wives in Stepford used to care about things like gender equality, but something about living in Stepford has depleted their ambitions outside of the household. It's later revealed that the women have lost these ambitions because they've been turned into robots, and though this is a farfetched, dystopian plot point, the novel ultimately emphasizes the pressure that American society placed on women in the mid-20th century to abandon their interests and goals in order to focus exclusively on domestic concerns. - Climax: Realizing that the men in Stepford are planning to turn her into a robot, Joanna makes a mad dash for freedom through deep snow, only to be cornered by three men and coaxed into her friend's house. - Summary: Joanna Eberhart has just moved from New York City to the suburban town of Stepford with her husband, Walter, and their two kids. The houses here are beautiful, but the women who live here are all old-fashioned and emotionally distant, and they only seem to care housework and pleasing their husbands. Joanna is a member of the National Organization for Women, and she's used to spending time with likeminded feminists. Walter is also quite involved in the feminist movement. Joanna is surprised, then, when Walter announces that he'll be joining the local Men's Association. Joanna thought he agreed that all-male clubs are outdated and sexist, but he promises to change the organization from the inside. After trying and failing to connect with the women in Stepford, Joanna meets Bobbie, who—like her—is perplexed by how cold and strange their neighbors are. Bobbie and her husband, Dave, are also new to Stepford. Though Dave has also joined the Men's Association, Bobbie suggests that he also thinks Stepford is behind the times when it comes to gender equality. Bobbie and Joanna decide to go around the neighborhood asking if the local women want to start a female equivalent of the Men's Association, but they all say they're either too busy with housework or they simply aren't interested. Only one woman, Charmaine, who is open to the idea. She moved to Stepford a month before Bobbie and is excited when Joanna agrees to play tennis with her weekly at her home tennis court. While going through some old things her house's previous owners left behind, Joanna finds a scrap of newspaper. The scrap contains part of an article about a Women's Club in Stepford. Joanna is shocked, since such an organization clearly doesn't exist anymore. Even stranger, though, is that Kit Sundersen, one of the women Joanna spoke to about forming a new club, is listed in the article as the president of the Women's Club. When Joanna spoke to her, Kit didn't mention this. One night, Walter brings home members of the Men's Association. He tells Joanna that she should sit with them in the living room—it might be good for the men to see she can bring good ideas to the table. She agrees. Everything goes well, as all of the men seem to appreciate her input—except for Dale Coba, the president of the Association. Dale seems condescending and doesn't even look at Joanna when she speaks. At one point, Joanna she realizes that Ike Mazzard, a famous magazine illustrator, is sketching her. She asks him to stop, but he doesn't. When Ike finishes his drawing, Joanna's feelings change: she's flattered by the portrait and is delighted when he signs it and gives it to her. One day, Charmaine calls to reschedule her and Joanna's weekly tennis game. She explains that her husband has gotten it into his head that they need a weekend alone—something she's not terribly thrilled about. They make plans to play tennis a few days later, but when Joanna shows up at Charmaine's house, Charmaine has forgotten their plans and claims she doesn't have time for tennis, since she needs to clean the house. Joanna is confused—Charmaine usually has her housekeeper do the cleaning. But Charmaine explains that she let the housekeeper go, saying she was too sloppy. She also says she has lost interest in tennis, and when Joanna says she doesn't believe this, Charmaine takes her to the back window. Joanna sees that men are ripping up the tennis court, and Charmaine explains that they're installing a putting green, since her husband likes golf more than tennis. She then goes on about how great her husband is and how devoting herself to doing housework is the least she can do. Unsettled by Charmaine's transformation, Joanna leaves and tells Bobbie about this change in their friend. Bobbie visits Charmaine and confirms that something strange has happened. She forms a theory that there's something in Stepford that makes women become subservient and domestic. She cites a recent news story about a town in Texas where chemicals made residents easygoing and subdued. There might be something similar in the water in Stepford, she guesses, so she starts drinking bottled water. She also says that she's going to talk to Dave about moving to a neighboring town, where things are a bit more modern and relaxed. She urges Joanna to do the same. That night, Joanna, and she tells Walter about what Bobbie said. He thinks it sounds far-fetched, but he also wants to make sure Joanna is happy. For this reason, he says he would be open to moving at the end of the school year if Joanna were to decide that's what she wants. She's relieved, and though she starts accompanying Bobbie on house-hunting tours, she doubts she'll actually end up wanting to move herself. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Joanna watches one of Bobbie's children for the weekend—she and Dave have decided they need a weekend alone. At the end of the weekend, she's glad to see how refreshed Bobbie looks. As she, Bobbie, Dave, and Walter stand by the front door and talk, Joanna is impressed by Bobbie's radiance, though she's also surprised that Bobbie doesn't offer any funny comments like she normally would. When they say goodbye, Walter hesitates for a moment before kissing Bobbie on the cheek. Later, Joanna and Walter make plans to have a weekend of their own after Christmas. In the coming days, Joanna doesn't hear from Bobbie. Usually, Bobbie calls every day, but this time Joanna is the one to reach out. On the phone, Bobbie seems preoccupied. She has been busy grocery shopping and cleaning, she says. When Joanna visits her the next day, she's horrified to see that her friend has undergone the same transformation as Charmaine: she says she doesn't have time to do anything except clean, and she goes on at length about how great Dave is. She has been lazy and neglectful, she says, and now she wants to honor her husband by devoting herself to being a better wife. Terrified, Joanna rushes home and calls Walter at the office. She tells him that she can't stay in Stepford. She wants to sell the house as soon as possible, but he tells her to calm down and that she shouldn't do anything drastic until he gets home. When they hang up, though, Joanna calls Bobbie's real estate agent and says she's interested in making a fast purchase of a house they recently toured. She also calls her own broker and prepares to list her house. But then Walter gets home and accuses her of being "hysterical." He claims that Bobbie must have simply decided to start putting some effort into her life and appearance—something he thinks Joanna could do, too. He tells her he will go along with her idea to move if she goes to see a therapist to make sure she's not having a breakdown. She books an appointment with a female therapist who practices out of town. At her appointment, Joanna explains her concerns to Dr. Margaret Fancher, who listens kindly and doesn't make her feel crazy. She thinks it's normal for Joanna to feel stifled by her domestic lifestyle in Stepford, but she doesn't think Joanna's theories are realistic. She prescribes her medication and encourages her to come back for another session. Before going home, though, Joanna goes to the library and goes through archives of the local paper. She learns that the Women's Club was extraordinarily active but then suddenly disbanded around the same time that Dale Coba founded the Men's Association. She also learns that Dale Coba used to work at Disneyland as one of the people who designed the lifelike robots made to look and act like American presidents. Suddenly, she realizes what has been happening: the women in Stepford are all robots. It takes four months for the Men's Association to get ready to turn the women into robots, which is why Charmaine changed a month before Bobbie. And Bobbie moved to Stepford a month before Joanna, which means Joanna has a little less than a month before her own transformation. Joanna speeds home and insists that she's leaving with the children, but Walter reveals that he sent them elsewhere. He won't let her leave, insisting that her theory about robots is crazy. She pretends to rest in their bedroom, and then she then tries to slip out the window, but she's unable. As she tries, she hears Walter making a phone call and realizes he's calling the other men. While he's on the phone, she creeps downstairs and out into the wintry cold. She tries to make her way through the neighborhood undetected, but a group of men eventually corners her. She fends them off with a broken branch, but they soon make her feel foolish, claiming they don't have the intelligence to turn humans into robots. One of them suggests that maybe she would believe them if she saw a Stepford woman prick her finger—if she bled, then Joanna would know she's not a robot. Joanna agrees to go with them to Bobbie's house, already feeling absurd. Once they reach Bobbie's house, the men wait on the doorstep while Joanna goes into the kitchen with her friend. She tells Bobbie that she doesn't really have to make herself bleed, but Bobbie doesn't mind. She stands over the sink and pulls out a knife, which is unnecessarily large. She coaxes Joanna forward, saying, "The men are waiting." The narrative cuts to the supermarket. Ruthanne Henry—a new Stepford resident—encounters Joanna in one of the aisles. The two women became friends several weeks ago, but now Ruthanne is astonished to see that Joanna is completely different. She looks extremely good, but her personality is different, and she seems to only care about housework. Unsettled, Ruthanne goes home and tries to get some work done on the book she's writing, hoping to finish before the weekend, which she and her husband have planned to spend together in privacy.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Stoat - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Strandhill, Ireland - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator is a medical student who is spending August in Strandhill with his father and Miss McCabe, his father's girlfriend. The narrator claims that he's not upset about his father moving on from his deceased mother and finds it silly that his father has him acting as a chaperone to his courtship with Miss McCabe. The narrator was both amused and horrified by his father's method of looking for a wife by placing an ad in the newspaper, though he didn't openly express this. Indeed, throughout the story, the narrator tells his father what he wants to hear rather than giving his honest opinion. The father and son struggle to genuinely connect, and as a result, the narrator sees his uncle as a sort of stand-in father figure whom he can confide in. The narrator clearly admires his uncle, who is a surgeon, but also finds him intimidating. However, the narrator is defensive of his father when his uncle criticizes him, suggesting that he cares for his father despite their strained relationship and perhaps wants to be closer to him. Nevertheless, when Miss McCabe has a health scare and his father decides to sneak away and leave her and the narrator behind, the narrator is ashamed of him and comes to the conclusion that his father is like the rabbit he founded while playing golf. Attracted by its cries, the narrator discovered the rabbit fatally wounded by a stoat. After imagining the rabbit's journey to this point, the narrator killed the rabbit out of mercy, and he imagines his father on the same journey of fleeing from the inevitable (death). - Character: The Narrator's Father. Description: The narrator's father is a schoolteacher who rents the same cottage in Strandhill every August. He asked the narrator to accompany him and his girlfriend, Miss McCabe, to Strandhill because this makes their courtship seem more proper—and because the next summer the narrator will be a doctor and too busy for the trip. The narrator's father has a habit of reading death notices in the newspaper to see if anyone he knows has died, always reading them twice in case he missed someone the first time. It's implied that this is because his first wife, the narrator's mother, is dead, and he has subsequently become fixated on and afraid of death. He has decided he wants to remarry, though, and after receiving the narrator's permission, he posts a personal ad in the newspaper. He gets a lot of replies and goes on to meet many of these women in hotel lounges. He is greatly disappointed by the women he meets in all aspects, but he finds one woman he considers to be at least a decent person: Miss McCabe. However, when Miss McCabe has a mild heart attack, he decides she is not "rooted enough," though it actually seems that he's afraid she'll die. Despite the narrator's approval of Miss McCabe and their previous plans to be engaged at the end of this trip, his father chooses to flee, complaining that Miss McCabe only thinks of the future. So, he packs quickly, and after instructing the narrator on what to do if he sees Miss McCabe, he drives home. The narrator realizes that his father is like the rabbit he found who tried to flee from the stoat, trying in vain to avoid the inevitable. - Character: Miss McCabe. Description: Miss McCabe is the narrator's father's girlfriend and is a teacher like him. He found her by posting a personal ad in the newspaper; she is the only woman whom he met through this method whom he found to be a decent person. They have been together for many months when they go to Strandhill for the month of August together, and they're planning to get engaged if the trip goes well. The narrator describes Miss McCabe as a small, frail, and generally nervous woman who seems like a young girl in that she loves being in love. Despite this, he expresses his approval of her to his father. During her first visit to the narrator and his father's cottage, she praises the food and wine but hardly consumes any. She is completely absorbed in what the narrator's father says, but the narrator's father seems concerned that she's only trying to appease him. After this dinner, she has a mild heart attack at the hotel. After getting checked out by a doctor, she wants to see the narrator's father, still anticipating their engagement and looking forward to the future. But the narrator's father, seemingly afraid of illness and death after losing his first wife, abandons Miss McCabe in Strandhill and returns home. - Character: The Narrator's Uncle. Description: The narrator's uncle is a surgeon who lives in Dublin. He is confident, distinguished, and thus intimidating to the narrator. As well as doing postgraduate work for him, the narrator spends Easter with him and tells him about his father's method of finding a new wife by putting a personal ad in the newspaper. Upon hearing that he wants to remarry, the narrator's uncle remarks that one would think boring the narrator's mother to death was enough, implying a dislike of the narrator's father and his treatment of the narrator's mother. He finds the narrator's father's method of using the newspaper hilarious and notes that at least the narrator's father remarrying would mean that he would leave the narrator alone. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: The narrator's mother is deceased and assumably has been for some time, as the narrator is unsentimental about her death and doesn't object to his father wanting to remarry. The narrator's uncle remarks that the narrator's father bored the narrator's mother to death, suggesting that their relationship didn't fulfill her. - Theme: Fear, Flight, and Futility. Description: The story opens with the narrator discovering a terrified rabbit that has been mortally wounded by a stoat (a weasel-like creature). He imagines that the rabbit ran from the stoat all night and then finally gave up, sitting down to allow the predator to kill it. The rabbit's failed escape suggests the futility of running from what is frightening and implies that to flee is only to prolong one's fear and suffering. This mirrors the retreat of the narrator's father at the end of the story, only unlike the rabbit who fears its own demise, the narrator's father fears losing other people. When his girlfriend, Miss McCabe, has a mild heart attack, the narrator's father becomes convinced that he cannot marry her, specifically because she is not "rooted enough" and does not have "her feet around the ground." Initially, these seem to be concerns about her personality. However, his certainty that she lacks these traits arises specifically in the context of her medical emergency, making these concerns seem more about her literal rootedness on Earth, or how long she might remain alive. Thus, this health scare—which likely reminds the narrator's father of his late wife's death—sends him running for the hills. Choosing to flee and leave Miss McCabe behind, the narrator's father's flight is just like the rabbit's, in that it will not ease his fear. He cannot have relationships without risking loss, and no matter how much he fights it, death inevitably arrives for everyone. This is emphasized in the final paragraph, which repeats back to the reader the third paragraph of the story, describing the rabbit's flight and demise. This goes to show that running truly gets the rabbit nowhere: it is trapped in an inescapable cycle, and the rabbit's fear will always come true in the end. It is the same cycle the narrator's father is trapped in: fear, flight, failure, repeat. And because the narrator's father rents the same cabin every August, one could imagine that every summer from here on out might repeat this sequence of events, and that just like the rabbit, his flight will never save him from what he fears. - Theme: Relationships and Loneliness. Description: The narrator of "The Stoat" is notably distant from his family members. He and his father seem to want a close relationship: his father seeks his son's approval and asks him for advice, and although the narrator seems annoyed by his father, he's deeply hurt when his father eventually abandons him at their vacation home. The father and son can't close the emotional distance between them, and as a result, the narrator relies on his uncle to be a kind of surrogate father figure whom he can confide in. In addition, the narrator isn't particularly sentimental about his late mother, assuring his father that he doesn't care if his father essentially replaces her by marrying his new girlfriend, Miss McCabe. Together, the narrator's hollow relationships suggest that having a family doesn't guarantee that a person will feel supported and loved—even among relatives, it's easy to still be lonely or to fail to connect at all. Furthermore, the narrator's father's dating life implies that this failure to connect isn't limited to the narrator's family. He receives an overwhelming number of responses to his personal ad in the newspaper, and the narrator marvels at all of the "unfulfilled longing," suggesting that the world is full of lonely people looking to connect with someone. This reality is also evident in Miss McCabe's desperation to impress the narrator and his father, and her and the father's willingness to initially overlook each other's flaws to continue their relationship. When Miss McCabe has a minor heart attack, and the narrator's father flees—seemingly because he's afraid of losing her like he lost his wife—the narrator is ashamed, suggesting that it's immoral (but nonetheless common) for people to abandon one another like this. The beginning of the story, when the narrator witnesses a stoat catching and killing a rabbit that's tried to flee, can thus be read as an allegory for human relationships. People obsessively seek and flee one another, and the moments in which they do connect are characterized by suffering rather than communion. - Theme: Communication and Dishonesty. Description: In "The Stoat," the dialogue between the narrator and his father consists almost entirely of his father asking for his approval. However, because of the emotional distance between them, the narrator chooses to say what his father wants to hear rather than what he necessarily thinks. In this way, the narrator's seeming approval of his father's choices are actually lies by omission. For example, the narrator notes to himself that his father's girlfriend, Miss McCabe, is frail and nervous, yet he simply says that she seems like a good person when his father asks. In addition, the narrator is only in Strandhill because his father asked him to be there. Yet he doesn't put up a fight when his father asks if it is alright for him to go home early, abandoning Miss McCabe after her heart attack and leaving the narrator alone in Strandhill. His father's decision deeply offends the narrator, and this outcome could arguably have been avoided if the narrator had been honest by discouraging his father's relationship with Miss McCabe and saying no to coming to Strandhill in the first place. The story thus portrays human communication as something performative rather than genuine, as people tend to seek others' approval rather than their honest opinions and tell others what they want to hear in lieu of telling the truth. This tendency is further reflected in the relationship between the stoat and the rabbit that the narrator observes: the stoat only catches the rabbit when it sits down and waits for the stoat's arrival. This behavior seems to imply that the rabbit is allowing the stoat to catch it, but actually, the rabbit does not really choose to sit down and wait for the stoat—rather, it's exhausted itself trying to flee the stoat and can't run any further. The narrator seems to feel like the rabbit in relationship with his father, as though being honest isn't an option and he has no choice but to appease his father and suffer as a result. - Climax: The narrator realizes that his father is like the rabbit. - Summary: While golfing, the narrator comes across a rabbit that a stoat has fatally wounded. The narrator imagines how the rabbit must have desperately fled from the stoat before finally giving up and awaiting its doom. He kills the rabbit to put it out of its misery, before finishing up his game and heading home to the cottage his father rents every August in Strandhill. The narrator takes the dead rabbit with him, so the stoat follows him along the way. When the narrator gets back to the cottage, his father is looking for people he knows in the death notices in the newspaper, something he does frequently. His father asked him to come to Strandhill with him and his girlfriend, Miss McCabe, to make their vacation together seem more proper as well as to seek the narrator's approval of her. Miss McCabe and his father plan to get engaged if the vacation goes well. The narrator finds his supervision of his father and Miss McCabe's courtship odd, but he agreed, nevertheless. He was originally planning to spend the summer in Dublin with his uncle, who is a surgeon, doing postgraduate work. All of this started because last summer, his father decided he wanted to remarry—the narrator's mother having died some time ago—and posted an advertisement in the newspaper to find a new wife. He asked the narrator if he minded before he did this, and the narrator said he didn't. The ad received many replies, and the narrator's father met all of the women in different hotel lounges, finding them overall very disappointing except for one woman he deemed to be a decent person: Miss McCabe. When the narrator met Miss McCabe the first time, he found her nervous and frail, but he told his father that he thought she was nice. When the narrator last visited his uncle, he'd laughed at the narrator's father's method of finding a wife. His uncle, whom the narrator both admires and finds intimidating, had suggested that the narrator's father bored the narrator's mother to death, but the narrator defended his father. His uncle suggested that at least the narrator's father would leave the narrator alone if he got remarried, but the narrator replied that he was used to his father. Thus far, the vacation has gone on for a week without a hitch. The narrator and his father have had several casual outings with Miss McCabe, who is staying in a nearby hotel, but tonight she'll visit the cottage for the first time. The narrator's father doesn't know how to cook, so the narrator makes dinner. Miss McCabe dresses up and hangs onto every word the narrator's father says, but she eats and drinks very little. Despite her enthusiasm for his admiration of the sea, the narrator's father finds her comments concerning and once again asks the narrator what he thinks of her after she leaves. The narrator again tells him that he approves of Miss McCabe. That night, Miss McCabe has a minor heart attack, causing the narrator's father to decide she is not the one for him. He decides to leave Strandhill before having to interact with her again. The narrator realizes his father is like the rabbit, running from something he cannot escape. He is ashamed of his father, and as he watches him drive away, he once again images the rabbits flight and ultimate demise.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Storm - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: An unnamed small town in southern Louisiana - Character: Calixta. Description: The protagonist of the story, Calixta is Bobinôt's wife, Bibi's mother, and Alcée Laballière's former girlfriend. The story details Calixta's transformation from overworked, "over-scrupulous" housewife to a cheerful, reinvigorated woman, which is the result of a chance sexual encounter with Alcée. When Alcée spontaneously drops by the house in search of shelter from the thunderstorm while Bobinôt and Bibi are out, the two former lovers use the opportunity to briefly rekindle their love affair. Before she has sex with Alcée, Calixta is stressed out from all of her household duties. She's introduced sewing clothes for her family, so focused on her work that she hardly realizes a storm is approaching. In contrast, Alcée remembers that, in her youth, Calixta was a passionate young woman. As they have sex, Alcée watches Calixta let go of her stress, and she rediscovers the passion of her youth. For the first time in the story, Calixta appears happy—smiling, laughing, and feeling pleasure. Through sex with Alcée, Calixta re-engages with the sensual part of her personality, which allows Calixta to act as a generous and loving person to both herself and Alcée. Furthermore, after Calixta has sex with Alcee, Calixta is far more thoughtful and pleasant towards family, highlighting the story's overarching claim that love only breeds more love. - Character: Alcée Laballière. Description: Calixta's former boyfriend (a relationship detailed in the story's prequel, "At the 'Cadian Ball"), Clarisse's husband, and the father of at least two children. Alcée is the catalyst for Calixta's transformation, as the pair's sexual encounter reconnects Calixta with her younger self and makes the stressed-out woman more lighthearted and joyful. Chopin uses Alcée's qualities as a gentleman to frame the illicit encounter, writing that as a younger man, "[his] honor forbade" him from having sex with young Calixta. Likewise, with the thunderstorm picking up outside, Alcée hesitates to put himself alone with Calixta, and only asks to enter Calixta's porch when the rain intensifies and he must take refuge inside for his safety. Taken together, Chopin presents Alcée as someone who's not actively seeking an opportunity to be alone with Calixta. Alcée is likewise described as a loving, albeit distant, husband and father in regards to his own family: when he leaves Calixta, Alcée writes a tender letter to his wife. In that letter, he permits his wife to stay longer on her trip (presumably her preference), indicating that with his sexual needs meet elsewhere, he's willing to give his wife more affection and more freedom. - Character: Bobinôt. Description: Bobinôt is Bibi's father and Calixta's dutiful but perhaps clueless husband. A minor character, Bobinôt appears at the very beginning and towards the end of the story. His absence, stranded at a general store with four-year-old Bibi during the titular storm, means that Alcée and Calixta have the privacy to rekindle their romance. When the rain begins, and Bibi expresses concern for Calixta's well-being, Bobinôt thinks to purchase a gift for Calixta—a single can of shrimp. However well-intended, the present is mostly a chore, as Calixta will need to prepare the shrimp for dinner, and thus reflects that Bobinôt sees his wife as an extension of the home rather than a full person. Moreover, at the beginning of the storm, Bobinôt demonstrates a sort of cluelessness Calixta's day-to-day life: he doesn't even know if the family's hired help, Sylvie, is on duty on the day of the storm until Bibi tells him otherwise. But while Bobinôt might be clueless, he is polite and wants to please his wife. In particular, on the way home, Bobinôt takes great care to scrape the mud off his and Bibi's clothes, extending his uncomfortable journey in an attempt to accommodate his wife's preference for a tidy home. - Character: Bibi. Description: Calixta and Bobinôt's four-year-old son, Bibi, has a somber personality. Bobinôt talks with Bibi as if the young boy were an adult, indicating that Bibi is extremely mature for his age. Chopin likewise describes Bibi as "wise," and calm in the face of the thunderstorm, which would likely be terrifying for most four-year-old children. Bibi also demonstrates thoughtful insight into his surroundings. Specifically, Bibi appears to know more about Calixta's life than his father, Bobinôt, as indicated by his knowledge of Calixta's schedule (Bibi tells Bobinôt that the maid, Sylvie, came to help Calixta the day before). Like his father, Bibi anticipates that Calixta's anger over his dirty clothes on the way home, indicating that Bibi is aware of Calixta's efforts keeping the house clean. - Character: Clarisse Laballière. Description: Clarisse is Alcée's wife and a minor character, appearing only in story's conclusion. Although she's a loving wife, she's happy to have some time away from Alcée, and the story implies that she doesn't like being physically intimate with him. Like Calixta, Clarisse uses the time away from her husband to tap into the youthful side of her personality, as she's vacationing near many old friends. However, as an inverse to Calixta, it's the absence of sex with Alcée that allows Clarisse to feel young and happy again. - Theme: Sex, Gender, and Liberation. Description: Kate Chopin's "The Storm" tells of a brief, passionate encounter between Calixta and Alcée, two former lovers who reunite as a thunderstorm rages outside Calixta's home. Alcée stops at Calixta's house seeking shelter from the rain, which has also momentarily prevented Calixta's husband, Bobinôt, and young son, Bibi, from returning home. The separation from her family grants Calixta and Alcée time to be alone. Calixta and Alcée subsequently have sex, allowing Calixta the opportunity to reignite the passionate side of her personality that she's repressed as part of her role as a wife and mother. At the time Chopin wrote "The Storm" in 1898, women (like Calixta) were expected to lead one-dimensional lives as wives and nothing more. For the most part, Calixta embodies this ideal, rigid expectation of womanhood; indeed, if one were to subtract the adulterous sex scene from the story, Calixta is a delicate and wholly self-sacrificing character. But through her encounter with Alcée, Calixta transcends conventional notions of womanhood, tapping into a sensual side to her personality. As such, the sex at the center of "The Storm" is transgressive not just because of the extramarital affair; the sex is transgressive because it allows Calixta to act outside of the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. In many ways, Calixta embodies the ideal of loving wife and mother. When Calixta first appears, she's so immersed in her wifely duties—sewing clothes for her husband and son—that she barely notices an epic storm on the horizon. Even then, Calixta's first response to the darkening sky is to think of her family's laundry hanging outside to dry. Calixta's behavior falls in line with the gender expectations of the era, during which women were seen mainly as an extension of their husbands rather than people in their own right. Further, the fact that Calixta's husband and young son are out at the time of the storm while she is at home also reflects genders roles of the time, as men were expected to provide for their families, while women tended to the domestic sphere. Taken together, each of these elements demonstrates traditionally material elements of Calixta's personality. Thus, although the story ultimately climaxes with a betrayal of the marital agreement when Calixta and Alcée have sex, Calixta is nonetheless portrayed as a good wife and mother. Yet Chopin takes care to show that, even though she is now a wife and mother, Calixta maintains the passion of a young woman. Calixta is notably introduced unbuttoning the "white sacque at the throat." Chopin immediately establishes her protagonist as a passionate woman who cannot be contained by her restrictive, feminine dress. That this clothing is white—traditionally the color of purity—further suggests that Calixta bristles against the pressure to maintain a sense of propriety. The appearance of Alcée reminds Calixta of her life before she was a wife and mother. He asks her if she remembers a town called Assumption, where "he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her," revealing that the two have a romantic history. This story is, in fact, a sequel to an earlier story by Chopin, "The 'Cadian Ball," which detailed more of the relationship between Alcée and Calixta. Knowledge of that earlier tale is nevertheless unnecessary to recognize that the relationship with Alcée reflects that Calixta has had an entire life filled with experiences beyond the confines of her marriage. Sex with Alcée allows Calixta to libertate her sensual self and merge her younger, passionate self with her more mature, dutiful self. When Alcée first encounters Calixta, she's described as "a little fuller of figure than five years before when she married; but she had lost nothing of her vivacity." In other words, Calixta's former self is still present under the surface of an older body. Sex with Alcée further provides Calixta an opportunity to reengage her sensual self that, as a wife and mother, she is expected to have lost. When Alcée and Calixta first begin their physical encounter, Alcée reminisces about the person Calixta once was, remembering her as a "passionate" young woman. But, as they continue to embrace, Calixta reveals she still contains a "generous abundance of passion." It's important to note that the presence of the sensual part of Calixta's personality does not erase her sense of self as a wife and mother; after the encounter with Alcée ends and Calixta's family returns home, Calixta meets her family with an open heart, having "nothing but satisfaction at their safe return." As a character, she thus contains multitudes: sensuality, generosity, passion, and capacity for maternal love. However, just as Calixta is renewed by sex with Alcée, Alcée's wife, Clarisse, is restored by the absence of sex with Alcée. When Clarisse receives Alcée's kind letter, encouraging her to stay on her vacation as long as she'd like, she thinks fondly towards her husband and is also grateful for the break from having to be physically intimate with him. Thus, while the sex with Alcée renewed Calixta, the absence of sex with Alcée has the same effect on Clarissa. Readers get the sense that Clarisse is a good wife (Chopin describes her as "devoted") who simply needs a break. For example, Clarisse describes sex with Alcée (the couple's "intimate conjugal life") as "something which she was more than willing to forego for a while." For Clarisse, the time away from her husband is the "free breath" which allows her to recapture a bit of herself before she became a wife. "The Storm" did not appear in print until 1968, long after Chopin's death; Chopin assumed that the sexually explicit content meant no editor would publish the now-classic short story. She likely was right: stories about women's sexual pleasure—particularly stories authored by women—were rare to see in print during Chopin's lifetime. Yet what makes "The Storm" risqué is more than the sex itself. "The Storm" suggests that women are more than wives and mothers, and as such can—and perhaps must—look outside their families to find fulfillment and happiness. - Theme: Sex and Nature. Description: "The Storm" details two parallel events: a tremendous thunderstorm and a passionate sexual encounter between Alcée and Calixta. The thunderstorm is so intense that all characters must take shelter. This leaves Calixta alone at her home with her former lover Alcée, who is traveling nearby when the storm breaks. Meanwhile, the thunderstorm leaves Calixta's son, Bibi, and husband, Bobinôt, stranded at a store. Beyond serving as a plot device for situating each character, the thunderstorm also allows for a brief encounter between Alcée and Calixta to naturally emerge. Chopin uses the downpour as a narrative frame for sex between the two former lovers; as the thunderstorm intensifies, so does the physical action between Alcée and Calixta. Then, when the storm rolls out, the two lovers go their separate ways. In drawing a parallel between the sex and the storm, Chopin develops an allegory through the thunderstorm in which she implicitly argues that sexual desire is a part of human nature. Further, Chopin describes Calixta's body through metaphors of nature, putting a fine point on the naturalness of women's sexuality in particular. Sex between Calixta and Alcée occurs in stages alongside the stages of the concurrent thunderstorm, with particular attention to how Calixta embodies each stage. "The Storm" details the normal stages of a thunderstorm: heat followed by cool gusts of wind with large droplets of water that intensify to sheets of rain before giving way to sunshine. Calixta's body likewise runs through each of these stages alongside the storm itself: as the storm gathers, Calixta feels "very warm" and sweaty. When first encountering Alcée, Calixta is affected by both the wind and the sound of Alcée's voice, breaking her from the heat "as if from a trance." As the storm begins to intensify and Alcée first embraces her, Calixta's body is described as "palpitating." As the storm "roars," Calixta laughs in delight of sexual pleasure. At each stage of the story, the changes in weather mirror a change in Calixta's body. If the reader accepts that weather events are a natural part of life, they may also understand Calixta's desire and pleasure as likewise natural. Chopin also deploys weather-related metaphors to describe sex between Alcée and Calixta and nature-related metaphors to describe Calixta's body. For instance, Chopin describes the act of sexual intercourse as the "crashing torrents," or violent rainfall. The storm clears, with "growl of the thunder was distant and passing away," just as the two lovers finish and slide into a state of "drowsiness and sleep." After the storm, as Alcée rides away, Chopin describes how "sun was turning the glistening green world into a palace of gems" such that it mirrors Calixta's "beaming face." Chopin describes Calixta's skin is a "creamy lily," her passion "a white flame," her eyes like "water," and lips a "pomegranate." While not exactly related to storm allegory, these descriptions fall in line with the general theme of sexual desire as a part of natural life. Again, if a reader accepts that weather occurs without any means of control, they may accept that sex between Calixta and Alcée is likewise an uncontrollable (and perhaps not immoral) consequence of human nature. Moreover, the story implies that because Calixta and Alcée are creatures within nature, the pair's actions are simply a part of the natural order. In "The Storm," Chopin uses a thunderstorm as a plot device to bring two former lovers alone for a sexual encounter. By situating Alcée and Calixta within the event of the storm, Chopin implicitly argues that the sex between the two, even though they are married to other people, is a natural event. In other words, sex, like weather, is an uncontrollable expression of human nature. As such, through allegory, Chopin makes a broader comment on the naturalness of desire and sex. As Chopin ties the stages of the storm particularly close to Calixta's feelings of attraction and describes her aroused body through metaphors of nature, Chopin stresses that women's sexuality is a natural part of life. - Theme: Marriage and Infidelity. Description: "The Storm" details a passionate encounter between former lovers Calixta and Alcée. Set long after the pair share a kiss in a different Chopin short story, "The Storm" tells the story of two people with unrequited sexual chemistry. At this point in their lives, Calixta has a husband, Bobinôt, and Alcée has a wife, Clarisse. Both are also parents to young children. When Alcée seeks shelter at Calixta's home during a thunderstorm, the pair rekindle their romance. Thrown together by a chance encounter, Calixta and Alcée revisit the passion they both felt as younger people. The experience leaves both Calixta and Alcée with increased tenderness towards their families which, in turn, leaves "everyone was happy." "Everyone" here refers to both married couples: Alcée and Clarisse, as well as Calixta and Bobinôt. When readers first met Calixta, she prioritizes her home and family over her own well-being. Leading up to her sexual encounter with Alcée, Calixta is working hard to maintain the family home, sweating profusely over a sewing machine. She responds to the storm not by seeking safety for herself, but rather by attempting to gather laundry left outside. When lightning strikes violently nearby, shaking the "very boards" Calixta and Alcée stand on and splitting a nearby tree, Calixta responds by fretting about her son, Bibi, who happens to be safer than herself. As such, it's clear that Calixta is completely preoccupied with maintaining the home at the risk of her own safety. The storm triggers an outburst from Calixta, who's initially unable to handle the stress of it. She is so distraught, she begins to cry, unable to "compose herself." Without Alcée's assistance, it's unclear if Calixta could face the storm at all. Taken together, these details reveal that Calixta is clearly stressed out. Fixated on keeping up her home, Calixta is quickly thrown into a frenzy over the developing storm. Because she's so single-minded in this regard, she's unable to handle the thunderstorm without Alcee's help. As a result, she places herself in a dangerous situation. Without taking care of herself first Calixta is unable take care of anyone. Readers get the sense that Calixta's level of stress is generally high, leading her to snap at her family over minor infractions. As they trek back through wet fields, both Bobinôt and Bibi are preoccupied with Calixta's reaction to tracking mud into the house, "expecting the worst." The stress causes Bibi to carry a sense of "pathetic resignation," while Bobinôt is the "embodiment of serious solicitude." The pair expect Calixta—as an "over-scrupulous housewife—to respond with anger when they return home. Due to Bobinôt's fear of Calixta's anger, he stops to periodically scrape mud from their clothes, even though they are tired and soggy. Bobinôt and Bibi's general displeasure to return to Calixta indicates a high level of tension within the home, with Calixta ready to snap at any disruption in the cleanliness of her domain. As they have sex, Calixta and Alcée focus on their own happiness rather than the service of their families. Afterwards, they are kinder to their spouses. The moment of intimacy allows Alcée and Calixta to escape the daily grind as the two take a moment to "swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery." With Calixta, Alcée accesses new "depths of his own sensuous nature." Afterwards, the once-stressed Calixta is left in a much better mood, "beaming" and "laughing." As a happier woman, Calixta is kinder to her family; when Bobinôt and Bibi return, Calixta appears renewed, with "nothing but satisfaction at their safe return." Alcée also appears driven by consideration keep his family healthy and happy. This motivation inspires Alcée to send a "loving letter, full of tender solicitude" to his wife, Clarisse, encouraging to take a longer vacation if she'd like, and reminding her that her happiness and well-being is a priority for him. Attending to their own sexual desires appears to spark an expression of love and care from Alcée and Calixta towards their families. At the end of the story, both Clarisse and Alcée and their respective families are happy. At the center of Clarissa and Alcée's good moods is the fact that the both took the time to tend to their own personal desires. Through its happy ending, Chopin's story of an extramarital affair makes the radical claim that sex outside of marriage isn't as sinful or shameful as readers may think. Instead, both Calixta and Alcée appear devoted as ever to their respective spouses and exhibit a clear sense of generosity of spirit following their sexual encounter. Thus, rather than destroying relationships, love breeds more love. - Climax: Calixta and Alcée, former lovers who are now married to other people, have sex during an intense thunderstorm. - Summary: As thundercracks overhead, Bobinôt and his young son, Bibi, take a seat inside a general store. Bobinôt tells his son that they should wait until the storm ends to return home. Young Bibi asks if his mother, Calixta, will be afraid of the thunderstorm. Bobinôt says that while the rain will frighten his wife, she will be fine because she has the company of the family's maid, Sylvie. Bibi politely corrects his father, explaining that Sylvie is not on duty today. With the news that his wife is all alone in the storm, Bobinôt purchases a can of her favorite shrimp as a gift before returning to sit with a remarkably peaceful Bibi. However, although her family assumed she would be frightened, Calixta doesn't even notice the incoming storm as she's too busy sweating over her sewing. Calixta only notices the clouds when the room she's sewing in turns dark. At the sight of the thick black clouds, Calixta rushes outside together the family's laundry hanging up to dry. As she struggles to seize laundry swept up in strong winds, Calixta notices a man approaching on horseback. To her surprise, it's Alcée Laballiere, whom she knew as a young woman but had not encountered much since. With drops of rain plopping from the sky, Alcée asks if he can wait out the storm on Calixta's porch. The very sound of Alcée's voice sparks a bit of arousal from Calixta. When it's clear that the porch won't provide Alcée adequate protection from the storm, Calixta invites him to follow her into the house. Once inside, the pair work together to quickly fortify the house's windows and cracks from pooling water. As they work side-by-side, Alcée notices Calixta's good looks held up over the years. Alcée joins Calixta by the window to watch the storm. As the rain gathers outside, she grows increasingly nervous for her son and husband's well-being. Alcée attempts to soothe Calixta with kind words about her family and a hug. With each crash of thunder or bolt of lightning, Calixta jumps with fear and settles more snuggly into Alcée's arms. The closeness of their bodies reminds Alcée of their time together in a town called Assumption. With Calixta in his arms and Assumption on his mind, Alcée grows increasingly aroused. When he takes a moment to look into Calixta's eyes, Alcée notices Calixta is also aroused. When Alcée asks Calixta if she remembers Assumption, breaking the conversation Calixta's family in the storm, Calixta leans in for a kiss. The kissing then leads to sex. As the two enjoy a tender embrace, Alcée admires Calixta's beautiful white skin, and then leaves as the storm rolls away. Meanwhile, Bobinôt and Bibi start the journey home. As they trudge through mud, both worry how Calixta will react to their filthy clothes. However, to their surprise, Calixta greets them with open arms when they return. With Calixta happy to see her family and the gift of shrimp, all three enjoy each other's company over dinner. Elsewhere, Alcée writes a sweet letter to his wife, Clarisse, encouraging her to stay longer on her vacation if she so desires, noting that her well-being is his top priority. The tender correspondence pleases Clarisse. Even though Clarisse loves her husband, she's she pleased to have a break from her wifely duties, particularly as they pertain to sex. The story concludes: "the storm passed, and every one was happy."

- Genre: Realistic fiction - Title: The Story of an Hour - Point of view: Third-person omniscient - Setting: The domestic realm of the late 19th century. - Character: Louise Mallard. Description: A woman troubled by a heart condition who is told that her husband, Brently Mallard, has died in a train accident. Due to her heart problem, she is not supposed to become overly excited, but—unlike how other women of the time period might react—she responds to this bad news with intense, wild grief. However, as she is grieving alone in her room for her husband, with whom she had shared a good marriage, Louise soon finds herself overjoyed at the prospect of the independence of widowhood, at the prospect of never again being dependent on a husband or in any way influenced, explicitly or implicitly, to do anything other than exactly what she wants to do. As she savors this newfound freedom she is flooded by joy, a joy that is snuffed out when she dies of a heart attack upon seeing her husband, who had in fact not been in the accident at all, walk through the front door. Her death suggests the actual impossibility of the sort of freedom she had briefly imagined. - Character: Brently Mallard. Description: Louise Mallard's husband, who is incorrectly reported to have died in a train accident. When he returns home that day, he has no idea that anybody thinks he has died. Brently is a kind and loving husband to Louise, but despite that is an impediment to Louise's freedom simply through the institution of marriage. - Character: Josephine. Description: The sister of Louise Mallard. Aware of Louise's heart troubles, she breaks the news of Brently's death to Louise using a calm demeanor. She actively worries about her sister's health and tries to protect her from herself. Wheareas Louise is a women who, in her moment of grief, sees how society entraps and controls women, Josephine is more traditional and shows no such insight. In fact, her character seems to show how both men and women of society control and entrap other women. - Theme: Women in 19th-Century Society. Description: In the late 19th century, much of American society held to the deep-seated belief that women were inferior to and should remain dependent upon husbands and other male figures. On the whole, women were expected to accommodate their husbands by cooking, cleaning, and generally maintaining the household. Any employment available to them offered wages significantly less than what men earned, and women were expected to conduct their lives according to their husbands' wishes. Most women had little or no financial or other independence, as they (and their finances) were essentially passed from their fathers to their husbands upon marriage. At the same time, the second half of the 19th century saw the rise of the first organized women's rights movements, marked most notably by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. "The Story of An Hour" was published in 1884, only one year after the first U.S. state granted women the right to vote, but still almost three decades before women would get the federal right to vote through the 19th amendment in 1919. Like much of Kate Chopin's work, "The Story of an Hour" revolves around the idea of female independence and its obstacles. The story is especially concerned with examining how a nineteenth-century woman was expected to behave in highly emotional circumstances. Louise Mallard's heart condition renders her physically weak, further enforcing the time period's prevailing sentiment that women should remain passive and unexcited. At the same time, one might argue that it is the diagnosis of the heart condition itself that enforces a kind of weakness on Louise based on the assumptions about women inherent in the diagnosis. More particularly, though, through the sudden death of Louise's husband in an accident, the story portrays a woman on the cusp of true independence in the only way that was truly available to women at the time: through the death of a wealthy husband, leaving the woman with her own fortune and no need to remarry to maintain her station in life. And so, despite her real grief at her husband's unexpected death, Louise feels intense joy at the exceedingly rare prospect being granted to her as a woman: the chance to be "free, free." And yet, the story also implies the way that society, and perhaps even the world itself, resists any woman having such freedom. It does so most obviously through its literal shock ending, in which Louise's husband turns out not to have been in the accident after all and walks through the front door, a revelation that stops Louise's heart. But the story also makes this implication more subtly, as when Louise's sister worries that Louise is making herself sick by remaining isolated in her room (though in truth Louise is reveling in her freedom). Both men and women of the society around Louise intervene in her life, ultimately proving that her freedom is impossible to hold. - Theme: Freedom and Independence. Description: In "The Story of an Hour," freedom and independence—not love, not friends, not family, not honor or glory or anything else—are held up as what make a life worth living. Though Louise is at first genuinely upset by the news of Brently's death—and though she makes it clear that she will greatly mourn the loss of her husband—over the course of the hour in which she believes him to be dead, she comes to see the incredible gift she has been given in the form of the freedom she will have as an unmarried (and well-off) woman. She delights in the fact that without a husband she will be able to spend the remainder of her days exactly as she pleases. While Louise's delight in her freedom is closely tied to her status as a woman in nineteenth-century American society, it is important to note that the story doesn't limit its idea of the preeminent importance of independence only to women. As Louise herself thinks, "There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature." In Louise's conception, it is both women and men who lack freedom; it is both women and men who, in all their interactions with each other, steal freedom from each other.Yet, just as the story indicates society and the world's resistance to female empowerment, so does it imply the impossibility of actual human freedom or independence. It is no coincidence that Louise's sense of the possibility of freedom only comes to her when she is locked, entirely alone, within her room. As her own thoughts about how men and women take each other's freedom suggests, any social interaction or connection impinges upon freedom. And so it is further no coincidence that Louise's dream of freedom, along with Louise herself, dies almost as soon as she leaves the solitary ecstasy of her room. - Theme: Love and Marriage. Description: You might reasonably guess, if you were told that a woman became deliriously excited soon after her husband's sudden death, that the marriage was not a very good one. However, "The Story of an Hour" makes it clear that Louise and Brently's marriage was perfectly loving or, at the very least, normal. After all, Louise's initial reaction to her husband's death is completely authentic and powerful: she goes alone to her room not to plot her path to freedom but because, in her grief, she can't bear to be with anyone else. And even as she begins to recognize the freedom that Brently's death promises, she thinks of his "face that had never looked save with love upon her" and knows that she will weep with sadness when she looks upon his "kind, tender hands folded in death. The basic goodness of Louise and Brently's marriage is crucial because it means that Louise's joy at her newfound freedom isn't a critique of her marriage to Brently, but rather a critique of the entire institution of marriage. In her "moment of illumination," she describes marriage as centered around "that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature." Louise believes love and marriage restrict freedom and that, as such, they are institutions in which the benefit does not equal the cost. - Climax: Having accepted and rejoiced in her newfound freedom, Louise exits her bedroom only to find her husband coming through the front door, a sight that fatally shocks her heart with a "joy that kills." - Summary: Louise Mallard has a weak heart that puts her at risk if she becomes too animated. After hearing from Richards—a friend of the family—that Louise's husband Brently Mallard has died in a train accident, her sister Josephine takes great care to break the news to Louise in a gentle, measured way. Despite Josephine's best efforts, though, Louise is inconsolable with grief. She weeps intensely into her sister's arms before fleeing into her bedroom, shutting and locking the door behind herself. In her bedroom, she collapses into a chair facing a window and, exhausted by her own sobbing, stares outside at a collection of newly blossomed trees and various stretches of blue in the sky. Life on the streets below goes along like normal, and as Louise sits motionless in the chair, she begins to sense with fear that something—some feeling—is approaching her. She is unable to define or name the approaching sensation because it is too abstract, too vague. Scared, she tries to keep the feeling at bay, but it's no use because everything—the new spring life outside, the smell of rain, the expansive sky—seems to embody the sensation, and she feels it reaching toward her. Suddenly she lets her guard down and finds herself mouthing the word "free" over and over again. No longer passive, her heart beats fast and her rushing blood enlivens her. Joy floods her and she imagines the life ahead of her with complete excitement and happiness: despite the fact that she and her husband enjoyed a stable, loving marriage, she is flooded with ecstasy by the prospect of no longer being required to live dependent upon her husband, upon anyone. Now the remainder of her life belongs only to her, and she is overjoyed at the idea of this freedom. Worried that Louise is making herself sick by staying in her room alone, Josephine kneels on the ground and speaks through the door's keyhole, imploring her sister to let her in. After uttering a quick prayer that her new life will be long, Louise rises and confidently strides out of the bedroom. Together with her sister, she starts walking down the steps toward where Richards waits at the bottom. The sound of keys fiddling in the front door travels into the house, and suddenly the door opens and Brently Mallard nonchalantly enters. Apparently he had been nowhere near the train accident that had supposedly killed him. In an effort to protect Louise from the utter shock of seeing her living husband, Richards quickly tries to obscure Brently, but to no avail, and Louise lets out her final sound: a sharp scream that startles and mystifies her husband. When the doctors inspect Louise's dead body, they decide that she died because her heart was too excited—too overjoyed—to see her husband.

- Genre: Philosophical novel - Title: The Stranger - Point of view: First person (Meursault is the narrator.) - Setting: Algiers, Algeria - Character: Meursault. Description: A young French Algerian living in colonial Algiers and working as a shipping clerk, Meursault is passionless, disaffected, and without ambition. His primary priority is his own physical comfort. Convinced of the world's indifference to him and to everyone else, Meursault himself is indifferent towards those around him and has only superficial relationships. His relentless honesty and refusal to subscribe to conventional belief systems or to social niceties alienate Meursault from society. - Character: Raymond Sintès. Description: Meursault's neighbor who adopts Meursault as a friend by enlisting him to help sort out a conflict with his mistress. Though exposed in court as a pimp, Raymond is cagey about his profession and tends to talk around the truth or to lie outright in order to present himself in the best light, showing a concern for public opinion that's at odds with Meursault's perennial honesty and disregard for social reputation. - Character: Marie Cordona. Description: Once a typist in Meursault's office, Marie is young, beautiful, easy going, and openhearted. Her romantic feelings for Meursault seem authentic and she is genuinely discouraged when Meursault confirms he doesn't love her as an individual, that he'd marry any woman like her. Still, she is remarkably resilient and is able to cultivate closeness and happiness with Meursault in spite of his chilly attitudes. - Character: The Prosecutor. Description: Determined to portray Meursault as a cold-blooded, premeditating murderer and soulless monster unfit for society, the prosecutor builds his case around Meursault's insensitive attitude towards his mother, evidence that shouldn't properly be relevant. Still, the prosecutor is passionate, articulate, and convincing. Even Meursault notes that he is a talented lawyer. - Character: The Defense Lawyer. Description: Meursault's lawyer who tries to defend Meursault's character, to present his crime as an accident, and to disassociate Meursault's behavior at his mother's funeral from the murder. He is exhausted by Meursault's unyielding impassiveness and by his self-sabotaging lack of savvy about public opinion. A less talented lawyer, in Meursault's opinion, than the prosecutor. - Theme: Meaninglessness of Life and the Absurd. Description: From Meursault's perspective the world is meaningless, and he repeatedly dismisses other characters' attempts to make sense of human. He rejects both religious and secular efforts to find meaning. From the director at the old people's home who arranges a religious funeral for Madame Meursault to the examining magistrate who tries to guide Meursault towards Christian faith to the chaplain who lectures Meursault about repentance and the afterlife, Meursault is often advised to embrace religion and place his faith in a divine world beyond this one. Meursault, though, is adamantly atheist, and insists he believes only in this life and physical experience. Efforts to engage Meursault in secular structures of meaning are equally futile. When Meursault's boss offers Meursault a position in Paris, he expects Meursault to embrace the opportunity for career advancement. Meursault, though, lacks all ambition and turns down the boss' offer without considering it. As a student, Meursault recalls, "I had lots of ambitions…But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered." When Marie asks Meursault whether he wants to marry her, she expects him to take the institution of marriage seriously. Yet Meursault is indifferent towards it, thinks "it didn't mean anything" to love a person, and agrees to marry Marie simply because she wants to marry him. Though he grows fond of her, he doesn't cultivate any attachment to her more meaningful than superficial attraction. Throughout his trial, Meursault is equally bemused by the meaninglessness of the justice system and finds its attempts to impose rational, meaningful structure on his actions ridiculous. He considers the guilty verdict he eventually receives entirely arbitrary, and describes its "certainty" as "arrogant."Meursault's unwavering nihilism frustrates those who try to convert him to their ways of thinking and they often experience Meursault's perspective as a threat to their own ideas. "Do you want my life to be meaningless?" the examining magistrate bellows when Meursault refuses to accept his faith in God. The prosecutor passionately describes "the emptiness of a man's heart" as "an abyss threatening to swallow up society," casting Meursault as a threat to social order. This tension between Meursault's sense of life's meaninglessness and other characters' persistent efforts to impose structures of meaning demonstrates the main tenet of Camus' own philosophy of Absurdism. Absurdism holds that the world is absurd and that looking for order or meaning of any kind is a futile endeavor. Humans must accept the absolute indifference of the world towards human life. Ironically, it is only the thought of imminent death that leads Meursault to acknowledge anything like meaning or importance in life. Though he still spurns the notion of essential meaning, Meursault's impending execution fills him with an overwhelming, heart-felt desire for life that contradicts his stated goal of being "level-headed" and considering life and death as equal possibilities. - Theme: Chance and Interchangeability. Description: Meursault considers all experience interchangeable, arbitrary, and essentially meaningless. "One life was as good as another," he tells his boss, explaining his indifference towards the opportunity to move to Paris. To him, it's only a matter of chance that events turn out as they do. His thoughts on the beach steps as he decides whether to return to Masson's bungalow or to go back down to the beach could summarize his attitude towards every life choice: "to stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing." (Expressing this attitude at that particular instance is, of course, highly ironic as his choice to go back down to the beach leads to the murder that changes his life dramatically.)Meursault remains convinced of the arbitrariness of events throughout his imprisonment and trial. Hearing street noises he recognizes beyond the court, he reflects that's is as if "familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent." Meursault's primary contention with judicial procedure is its certainty, its unwillingness to embrace chance. After being condemned, Meursault thinks how the verdict may as well have been the opposite, as all the factors leading up to it were entirely arbitrary. He fantasizes a new form of capital punishment which would work nine out of ten times, leaving the condemned a chance for hope and eliminating the unyielding certainty of death by guillotine. Likewise, Meursault treats human relationships as chance arrangements, believing that any person could substitute for any other in a relationship without causing any difference. He tells Marie that he would marry any other women with whom he had the same relationship he has with her. He kills the Arab without any personal motive: the man may as well have been anybody. Thus, though "the stranger" of the title refers primarily to Meursault's own estrangement from society, it also refers to the man Meursault kills, a chance stranger whom the novel never names. Contemplating his own death, Meursault reminds himself that it doesn't matter when one dies, since "other men and women will naturally go on living" far into the future. Yet none of the people around Meursault see events as the fluid, interchangeable occurrences Meursault sees. Throughout the trial, the prosecutor repeatedly portrays Meursault's murder as a premeditated crime, fundamentally connected to Meursault's prior behavior. The prosecutor's determination to prove the deliberate malice of Meursault's actions reaches its highest pitch when his closing argument equates Meursault's disengagement at his mother's funeral to the act of another criminal who murdered his own father. - Theme: Indifference and Passivity. Description: The novel opens with Meursault's indifference at his mother's funeral and the consternation it provokes among the people around him. This dynamic recurs much more starkly at the trial, where the account of Meursault's "insensitivity" towards his mother's death proves to be what ultimately turns the jury against him. People's surprise and dismay at novel's start implied they were judging Meursault based on his indifferent attitude. The court scene in the second half of the novel makes those judgments explicit.Meursault is equally indifferent towards Marie, who, of all the characters, shows him the most warmth. Although he is fond of her and enjoys her company, he is indifferent towards her essential being and is not in love with her as a unique individual. When Marie asks Meursault whether he wants to marry her: "I said it didn't make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't love her…She just wanted to know if I would have accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way. I said, 'Sure.'" In prison later on, he fantasizes about women without imagining Marie specifically. Conversely, when Marie stops writing, he is not at all disturbed to imagine she may have taken up with a new man or be dead. Meursault's emotional indifference contributes to his general passivity. Lacking goals and desires of his own, Meursault rarely seems to care how events turn out and acts simply to satisfy his immediate physical needs, allowing his life to flow by as it will. His passive people-watching from the balcony in Chapter 2 provides a possible model for his life philosophy. He stands by and observes others without acting. Even the crucial act of his murder is described in passive terms: "the trigger gave." As the prosecutor elaborates, Meursault's passive indifference threatens society because it can't be assimilated into social life (a life premised on care for relationships, careers, friendships, family, etc.). Thus, Meursault himself is the primary "stranger" of the title – he is a stranger to the social fabric of his world. Meursault begins and ends the novel in a state of indifference, yet his indifference at novel's end is achieved after enduring the grueling frustration he experiences in prison trying to outsmart "the machinery of justice." Where his indifference at novel's start seemed like numb apathy, his indifference at the end seems to be a kind of enlightenment. He embraces indifference as an active choice, opening himself to the indifference of the world itself. The English translations of the novel differ critically in their characterization of this larger indifference. The first translation by Stuart Gilbert translates, "I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe," while the second by Joseph Laredo translates, "I laid my heart open to the gentle indifference of the universe." Matthew Ward's most recent translation reads, "I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world." Still, despite their differences, each of these translations conveys the world's indifference as harmless, as something to embrace and be "happy" amidst, rather than something to despise and fear. - Theme: Importance of Physical Experience. Description: As Meursault explains to his lawyer, "…my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings." Indeed, throughout the novel, Meursault experiences physical sensations and pains/pleasures much more acutely than he experiences emotional/psychological ones. As a narrator, he constantly supplies physical details without analyzing their emotional or psychological import. The most extreme example of this can be found in his account of killing the Arab. Meursault initially shoots because of the uncomfortably bright glare reflected off the Arab's knife and later explains to the courtroom he shot "because of the sun." Likewise, Meursault observes the mourners at his mother's funeral coolly, unmoved to empathize with the grief their actions attest to. Later, Meursault ignores much of the argument at his own trial (including critical speeches by his lawyer and the prosecutor), preferring to focus instead on the sounds of the street outside. At novel's end, this way of life is actually presented as a positive, vivid alternative to religious life. He who lives a religious life lives for the sake of a world to come but Meursault wants to live for the sake of this life. When the chaplain insists Meursault must have "wished for another life," Meursault insists that any other life should still be embodied and sensual, "…of course I had, but it didn't mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth...he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I shouted at him, "'One where I could remember this life!" The chaplain (and anyone who believes in an afterlife) is, to Meursault's mind, "living like a dead man." The memory exercises Meursault develops to pass the time in prison by recalling every detail of his old apartment likewise convey a profound trust in the richness of physical experience: "…the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored." - Theme: Relationships. Description: Throughout the novel, Meursault remains unable to experience deep, complex relationships to the people in his life. All of his relationships – from the filial relationship he had with his mother to his friendship with Raymond to his romantic relationship with Marie – are passionless, determined much more by incidental, superficial impressions than by deep-felt emotional bonds. His casual attitude towards these relationships enables him to treat the people in his life according to his own desires without feeling any sense of duty or loyalty towards them. Once he no longer has anything to talk with his mother about, he sends her off to an old people's home and is puzzled to hear his neighbors disapprove of the decision. At his mother's vigil, he drinks coffee and smokes as usual, not feeling obliged to act differently out of respect.Though fond of Marie, Meursault does not feel bound to her as a unique individual and freely admits he isn't in love with her. Though he helps Raymond by writing the letter to his mistress and by testifying to her infidelity at the police station, Meursault does not feel these actions to be any sort of burden on himself and performs them in a spirit of indifference. Ironically, Meursault's murder could be considered a tremendous sacrifice made for a friend's wellbeing (it is Raymond, after all, who has a problem with the Arab, not Meursault). Yet the Arab's connection to Raymond is, to Meursault's mind, entirely incidental and he shoots the Arab without even thinking of Raymond. Meursault's cool detachment from relationships is juxtaposed by several passionate bonds between other characters, including the tender warmth between Thomas Pérez and Madame Meursault, the volatile resentment between Raymond and his mistress, and the excruciating love/hate relationship between Salamano and his dog. Though Meursault remains just as unattached to others at novel's end as he was at the start, he glimpses the possibility of a deeper connection to others several times in Book II. The first occurs after Céleste's testimony on the witness stand when Meursault feels for "the first time in my life I…wanted to kiss a man." The second occurs is in the final chapter when Meursault realizes "why at the end of her life [Maman] had taken a 'fiancé.'" In the novel's last sentence, Meursault sees even his estrangement from society as capable of giving companionship, thinking that "to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. - Climax: Meursault shoots the Arab. - Summary: Meursault is a shipping clerk living in a decrepit Algiers apartment he shared with his mother before he sent her to an old people's home he rarely visits. The novel opens when he receives a telegram saying his mother has died. Meurseult isn't upset. Meursault meets with the director of the home who quells Meursault's inner defensiveness about sending his mother away by assuring him she was happier at the home than she would have been in Algiers. He tells Meursault he's arranged a religious funeral, in accordance with her wishes, though Meursault reflects privately that his mother wasn't religious. Meursault goes to the mortuary and surprises the caretaker by declining to see his mother's body. They drink coffee and smoke together, then sit vigil over the coffin with his mother's friends, whose crying irritates the unemotional Meursault. Next morning, the funeral procession is joined by Thomas Pérez, Mme. Meursault's closest friend (and rumored fiancé). They walk across the hot, shimmering landscape to church for the funeral, which Meursault barely remembers. Saturday, Meursault goes to the beach and runs into Marie. They swim, flirt, go to a comedy, and go home together. Marie is startled to hear Meursault's mother just died. Monday, Meursault's neighbor Raymond invites him to dinner and recounts his thirst for revenge on his mistress. He gets Meursault to write a letter luring her back to shame her. Pleased, Raymond now considers Meursault his friend. Next Saturday, Meursault and Marie hear Raymond beating his mistress. A policeman frees her, shaming Raymond. Later, Meursault agrees to Raymond's request that he testify to her infidelity. He meets Salamano who is heartbroken after losing the dog he's always pretended to hate. At work, Meursault declines a transfer to Paris since "nothing mattered." When Marie asks if he wants to marry her, he says it makes no difference but he will if she wants. Sunday, Marie, Meursault, and Raymond go to Masson's bungalow. Raymond worries he's being followed by the Arab, his mistress' brother. At the beach, Meursault and Marie are happy. Meursault, Masson, and Raymond walk on the beach, running into the Arab and his friend. Raymond starts a fight but surrenders when cut by the Arab. Furious, Raymond insists on returning to the beach. Meursault follows. They meet the Arabs but Meursault has Raymond give him his gun. The Arabs retreat. Dizzy with heat, Meursault wanders alone along the "dazzling, red glare." He is "surprised" to meet the Arab again, who draws his knife. At the "dazzling spear" of sun reflecting off it, Meursault shoots the man.In prison, the examining magistrate attempts unsuccessfully to Christianize Meursault. Marie visits once, but is barred from visiting again. Meursault acclimates to prison and spends his days remembering his apartment. A year passes.The trial is blown up by the press and the courtroom is packed. Much is made of Meursault's insensitivity at his mother's funeral and the director and caretaker testify to Meursault's coldness. After Meursault's lawyer makes progress, Marie inadvertently cripples the defense by recounting her first date with Meursault the day after his mother's funeral. Meursault's lawyer attempts to rescue the case – "is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?" – but the prosecutor connects the funeral and the murder, portraying Meursault as a soulless monster premeditating murder at his mother's grave. Throughout the trial, Meursault is mostly calm, only rankling when he feels excluded from the proceedings. In closing remarks, the prosecutor equates Meursault's crime with the parricide being tried in court next day, claiming Meursault is "morally guilty of killing his mother." Meursault is sentenced to death. Meursault files for appeal. Obsessed by the arbitrariness of his verdict and the certainty of death by guillotine, he fantasizes a justice system that would give the condemned "a chance." He tries to be levelheaded, imagining both possible outcomes of his appeal, but feels "delirious joy" whenever he thinks of living. The chaplain visits and lectures Meursault on the afterlife. Meursault screams that there's no existence but this one, that all people are equally privileged and condemned. He feels "rid" of "hope" and is "happy." He "opens…to the gentle indifference of the world," and thinks he need only be accompanied by "cries of hate" "to feel less alone."

- Genre: Post-war; expatriate; modernist - Title: The Sun Also Rises - Point of view: First person; Jake tells the story in the past tense - Setting: Paris, France; Pamplona, Spain; and various other Spanish and French towns in 1924. - Character: Jake Barnes. Description: The narrator of The Sun Also Rises. At the start of the novel, he is an expatriate working as a journalist in Paris. He served in World War I, in which he suffered an injury that made him impotent. This hinders his otherwise very close relationship with Brett Ashley. He typifies the Lost Generation, always seeking escape and finding no meaning in life after the horrors and intensity of the war. - Character: Robert Cohn. Description: An ex-boxer from Princeton and a writer. He is the only one of the male characters who is not a veteran of the war. He is divorced, and at the beginning of the novel is in a relationship with Frances Clyne, though he drops her after publishing a novel. He believes in love, romance and the ideals he finds in literature but he gets on the nerves of most of the other men in the novel by the way he pathetically hangs around Brett and with his "superior, Jewish" way. He becomes a target for the other men's dissatisfaction. - Character: Lady Brett Ashley. Description: A British, charismatic, and independent woman with a drinking problem. She is the love of Jake's life and she loves him too, but she (and Jake) both see his impotence as an impossible obstacle to a relationship and she leads a promiscuous life of romantic adventures. She is waiting to get divorced from the aristocrat from whom she got her title, and then plans to marry Mike Campbell. She is terminally unhappy and always wanting someone else. She falls in love with Romero at the bullfight and becomes his inspiration at the ring. - Character: Bill Gorton. Description: Jake's buddy from the war. A writer who moved back to America after the war, he is a joker, using humor to hide from and disguise the horrors of his experiences of the war. He goes along with the group, unattached to Brett but getting caught up in the romantic business anyway, alternately peace-making and joining in with the fighting. - Character: Pedro Romero. Description: A young, good-looking bullfighting prodigy who is so skillful and beautiful that Brett falls in love with him. His skill and subtlety in the bull-ring impress everybody and create genuine emotion in the crowd. He seems at times to be at one with the bulls. When Cohn learns of Romero's effect on Brett, he fights him. Romero and Brett run away together but Brett leaves him soon after when he tries to turn her into a traditional woman. - Character: Montoya. Description: The owner of the hotel in Pamplona where Jake and his friends, as well as the best bullfighters, stay. He tries to protect Romero's integrity and values the pure passion of the aficionados (those who are truly appreciative and knowledgeable about bullfighting) over everything else, which is why he shares a special bond with Jake. - Theme: The Lost Generation. Description: Though seldom mentioned, World War I hangs like a shadow over the characters in The Sun Also Rises. The war devastated Europe, wiping away empires and long-standing governments. Similarly, its brutal trench warfare and machine-driven killing made clear to all of its participants that the long-standing ideals of honor, courage, and stoicism were hollow and meaningless, as were the national identities that drove the countries of Europe to war in the first place. In short, the war changed all those who experienced it, and those who came of age during the war became known as "the lost generation." Through Jake and his friends and acquaintances, The Sun Also Rises depicts members of this lost generation. Jake and his friends believe in very little. While in some ways this is liberating, it is also depicted as a loss. In losing their belief in the ideals, structures, and nationalism that drove self-identity in the time before the WWI, they seem to have lost some core of themselves. The characters are always restless, always wandering, looking for a constant change of scenery, as if looking for an escape. They would prefer to live in America than Europe, but for some reason they don't leave. The characters have made themselves expatriates, disconnected from their home, sampling the cultures of Europe without ever joining them. There is a sense that Jake and his generation don't belong anywhere. Though many of Jake's friends have occupations, in writing and editing, these jobs don't seem to have regular hours and none of them are accountable to any boss or location. The characters spend their time socializing, drinking, dancing, and playing games. Though these activities are usually seen as youthful pursuits, in such endless repetition they become empty and wearying, and part of a vicious cycle in which the characters are always thinking of the next escape. Of all the characters, only Cohn seems to not fit this description of a lost generation. He has an identity forced on him: he's Jewish. And he has ideals—romantic, perhaps silly ideals—but still ideals. It's not a coincidence that he is the only male character in the novel not to have experienced the war first hand. Yet in the course of the novel even Cohn betrays his ideals, suggesting that while the loss of belief in the old systems is a terrible personal loss, it also just may be a more accurate view of the world. - Theme: Sport. Description: From Robert Cohn the boxer to Pedro Romero the bullfighter, the characters of The Sun Also Rises compete and combat in various sporting events for honor and to impress the insatiable Brett. Whenever a trip is proposed, there is usually some sporting reason—Jake and Bill Gorton travel to Spain to fish, and the whole crowd is drawn to the bullfighting at the fiesta. Sport provides an escape for Jake and his friends from what they see as the meaninglessness of the rest of their lives. Sports have rules, and those rules define winners and losers, define beauty and skill. And yet, like World War I erupting from the carefully balanced tensions of Europe in the 1910s, for the characters of The Sun Also Rises, the matches spill over from the arenas onto the streets of Pamplona, into the bars and cafes. Violence that should be controlled becomes threatening. A man is killed by a bull outside Pedro Romero's bullfight. And the male characters' competition over the careless, rule-breaking Brett turns them into sportsmen of sorts, competitors for her love. Rules, tactics, and victories in the form of insults or emotional injuries become "moves" in the game of social power. When Robert Cohn boxes at Princeton, he refuses to fight anyone outside of the ring. He follows the rules of sport and honor. But as Robert becomes unhinged by his obsession with Brett, he starts a brawl. - Theme: Masculinity and Insecurity. Description: There is only one main female character in The Sun Also Rises, and the men circle around Brett like bees to honey, creating an atmosphere of rivalry between the male characters. The competition between the men is won and lost in different, often unpredictable, ways. Sometimes it is physical vigor that wins out, in the case of Romero. But sometimes physical strength is a liability. Robert Cohn strikes out at Mike, Bill and Romero, overpowering them physically, but later is found alone and crying. For men in The Sun Also Rises, to win seems impossible. In this way, The Sun Also Rises shows how men have been changed by the experience of war, and World War I in particular. Honor, courage, stoicism, glory—none of these traditional masculine traits meant a thing huddled in the trenches as mortars fall from the sky. There was no glorious clash of skill between two warriors. There were just men getting cut down by machine gun fire in a futile effort to move their trench forward another inch. All of the men have been damaged by the war, their sense of selves demolished because none of what they were taught about themselves as men seems to apply any more, and they are all made so insecure by this loss that they can't even discuss it. The cruelty of the men toward Cohn emerges not just because Cohn is so obviously acting in non-manly ways in his desperate pursuit of Brett, but rather because the men know that they themselves, secretly, are just as unmanned. Jake himself is a symbol of all of these dynamics of masculinity and insecurity. He has literally, physically been emasculated by a genital injury in the war, but that injury is never directly mentioned by anyone. Brett's behavior further brings into play the idea or value of manliness. Just as the men display traditionally feminine behavior, Brett, with her short haircut, bantering conversation, and constant desire for sex, is the most traditionally "masculine" character in the novel, and the fact that she comes off as something of a heartless monster raises questions about whether those traditional manly virtues were even virtues at all. And yet, without them, what are the men? - Theme: Sex and Love. Description: The romantic partners in The Sun Also Rises change suddenly and frequently. The relationships are made and broken along the journey from country to country and, though marriage is sometimes mentioned, it is never actually attempted other than Cohn's disastrous and unhappy first marriage. The characters do not establish domestic lives for themselves. The nightly drinking parties and long leisurely meals in public places serve as the primary domestic activity of the novel. The occupations and movements of the characters are aimless and restless. So, too, is love. It is avoided and ignored. But while the insecurities of the male characters cause them to avoid love and sex, Brett excels as a sexual being. She is healthy, charismatic, and lives like the ideal bachelor. She has sex without being married and without feeling ashamed. The typical attitudes of men and women have been troubled and upturned by the changes of wartime. The men have been shackled. Brett has been liberated. At the same time, in her last lines of the novel, even Brett is revealed to yearn for love, with Jake. At numerous points in the novel it seems that Jake and Brett share a real love, and could be a true couple, if only Jake did not have the injury that made him impotent. And yet Jake, in his response, "Isn't it pretty to think so," dashes even that idea. In his response he is saying that the only reason Brett, Jake himself, or anyone else could imagine that their love might be perfect, might be an answer to all the meaninglessness of postwar life, is because his injury makes it impossible. If Jake was not injured and a relationship between he and Brett were possible, he is saying, it wouldn't end any better than any of her other relationships. And so The Sun Also Rises ends with the suggestions that just like all the other ideals obliterated by World War I, love, too, is no answer to the emptiness of the lost generation and perhaps, more broadly, to the emptiness of life. - Theme: Nature. Description: The social scene in The Sun Also Rises takes place mostly in bars, cafes and restaurants. Between the meals and drinks are journeys along Parisian streets and across the square in Pamplona. For most of the novel, there is a noticeable lack of natural landscape. The action is urban and repetitive. There are descriptions of drinking and dialogue instead of the sky or the weather. There is also a sense that since the war, civilization has been moving away from nature and from natural experiences. The characters are dissatisfied with city life and suggest trip after trip to try to find satisfaction, but these urban rituals keep repeating themselves, until Jake's brief excursions into nature, which give momentary peace and escape. There are several of these excursions, including the bullfight, with its display of the violence of nature, and Jake's trip to the sea, where he steps out into the water and finds simple pleasure in being able to see only the sky around him. Then there is also the fishing trip that Jake takes with Bill, which Hemingway describes in language that lacks the undercurrents of emptiness and dissatisfaction present in the city scenes. "This is country," says Bill as they arrive in the beautiful area they have chosen for their fishing – both men feel that the natural landscape has something real and essential in it that the town does not have. - Climax: Cohn fighting with Jake and Mike during the fiesta in Pamplona - Summary: Jake Barnes, the narrator, describes his friend, Robert Cohn. Cohn, like Jake, is an American expatriate living in Paris, although unlike Jake he did not fight in World War I. He's a Jewish writer who has recently published a novel and was a middleweight boxing champion in college at Princeton. Cohn lives with a woman named Frances Clyne, who was originally using him for his money but now that she's older wants to make him marry her. After reading a book that romanticizes travel Cohn has come to the conclusion that he's wasting his life, and one day he visits Jake, who is a journalist, at his office to ask him to take a trip with him to South America. Jake refuses, on the grounds that the only people who don't waste their lives are bullfighters. That night, while out with Cohn and others, Jake runs into Lady Brett Ashley. Brett is an independent, tomboy-ish, soon-to-be-divorced wife of an English lord who as a volunteer during the war helped to treat Jake for a war wound he received. While she was treating him, they fell in love. Brett confesses to Jake that she is miserable and still loves him, just as he loves her. But though they never say it explicitly, the conversation implies that Jake's injury made him impotent, and that Brett is unwilling to give up sex, so they can't be together. Still, they make plans to see each other the next afternoon. Jake has lunch with Cohn the next morning. Cohn is smitten by Brett, and is upset when Jake describes her in less-then-positive terms (and also when he learns that she's soon to marry a Scottish war veteran named Mike Campbell). Brett stands Jake up for their afternoon plans. But in the middle of the night she appears at his apartment along with Count Mippipopolous, a rich Greek man who really knows how to enjoy life. In a moment when they are alone, Brett tells Jake that it's too hard for them to be near each other and that she's leaving the next day to go to San Sebastian, a beach town in Spain. Cohn also leaves Paris around this time to spend time out in the country. A few weeks later, a writer and army-friend of Jake's named Bill Gorton arrives in Paris. They plan to go fishing in Spain and then to go to the fiesta and bullfights in Pamplona, and to join up with Cohn along the way. That afternoon, Jake runs into Brett, who has returned from San Sebastian and is with her fiancé Mike. Mike and Brett also want to come to Pamplona. Brett privately asks Jake if Cohn is also coming, revealing that she was actually with Cohn in San Sebastian. Bill and Jake meet Cohn in Bayonne, France, and then all three travel to Pamplona. Brett, however, falls ill while traveling to Pamplona with Mike. Cohn decides to stay in Pamplona to wait for her while Jake and Bill head out into rural Spain to fish. For five blissful days Jake and Bill fish, play cards, drink, and remember their days and friends from the army. But on the fifth day they learn that Brett and Mike will be arriving in Pamplona that night, and they immediately head back. In Pamplona, they stay at a hotel owned by Montoya, a man who loves bullfighting and appreciates Jake's own love of the sport. Jake, Bill, Cohn, Mike, and Brett all meet up. They go to watch the unloading of the bulls, and see a bull kill a steer. Afterward, Mike compares Cohn to the steer because Cohn won't stop following Brett around. The fiesta begins, and Pamplona is filled with drinking and dancing. During the bullfights on the first day, a nineteen-year-old bullfighter named Pedro Romero especially stands out. Brett is mesmerized by the violence of the fight (while Cohn is made ill by it). Brett is also particularly taken with Romero. Brett eventually gets Jake to introduce her to Romero, much to Montoya's dismay because he thinks she will corrupt the boy. Mike again verbally attacks Cohn, and they almost fight before Jake pulls them apart. Later that night, Brett asks Jake to help her find Romero. He does, and she and Romero go off together. Later that night, while Jake is out with the drunken Mike and Bill, Cohn arrives and demands to know where Brett is. After Jake refuses and insults fly, Cohn knocks down Mike and knocks Jake out cold. When Jake comes to and returns to the hotel, he finds Cohn weeping in his room. Cohn begs Jake's forgiveness. After some resistance, Jake gives it. Cohn says he is leaving Pamplona. The next morning, a man is killed by a bull outside the bullfighting stadium. Soon after, Jake learns from Bill and Mike that the night before Cohn also beat up Romero, but Romero wouldn't back down. Cohn gave in, and asked Romero to forgive him, but Romero just punched him. At the bullfight that afternoon, a bullfighter who had come out of retirement named Belmonte fails to live up to his reputation and is jeered by the crowd. But Romero fights magnificently, and the crowd adores him. Later that night, Jake learns from Mike that Romero and Brett have left Pamplona together. The fiesta ends the next day. Jake, Mike, and Bill leave Pamplona together, then go their separate ways. Jake decides to lay low in San Sebastian rather than return to Paris. But he soon gets a telegram from Brett saying she needs his help in Madrid. He goes immediately, and learns that Brett has left Romero because she feared corrupting him but also because he wanted her to act like a more traditional woman. As they ride in a taxi through Madrid, Brett sadly comments that she and Jake could have had such a good time together. Jake says, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?"

- Genre: Magical Realism, Ironic Comedy - Title: The Swimmer - Point of view: 3rd person limited - Setting: a suburban town in the 1960s - Character: Neddy Merrill. Description: Neddy, the story's protagonist, is an athletic man, probably in his 30s or 40s, who lives in an unnamed suburb. At the beginning of the story, Neddy lives a comfortable, prosperous life with his wife Lucinda and his four daughters. One glorious summer Sunday, while out on a social call, he resolves to swim all the way to his house using only his neighbors' swimming pools. As Neddy swims, Cheever reveals that his most significant quality is his inability to face difficult emotions. He has almost totally repressed any unpleasant memories, instead engaging with life only on a physical level, reveling in the summer weather and the feel of the water. However, as Neddy gets closer to home, time seems to accelerate (a single afternoon stretches into seasons and years), and his life disintegrates—he has lost his wife and daughters, his finances are a mess, and even his body begins to degrade as his strength flags and he begins to seem old. Cheever suggests that Neddy's singleminded focus on swimming home through pools—a vain and ridiculous pursuit meant to preserve the exquisite pleasure of a summer moment—embodies his whole approach to life, which causes him to lose his family, his youth, his money, and his friends. - Character: Lucinda. Description: At the beginning of the story, Lucinda is Neddy Merrill's wife, but, by the end, she and their four daughters have left him. Neddy collectively names the series of swimming pools he swims "the Lucinda River," perhaps in an unconscious act of contrition for his failures as a husband and father. - Character: Mrs. Graham. Description: As Neddy swims across the county, he emerges into the backyard of Mrs. Graham (one of his more distant neighbors) to swim through her pool. Mrs. Graham greets Neddy by exclaiming "what a marvelous surprise" in a way that feels insincere. In that way, she's similar to Mrs. Bunker, both of whom embody the social affectations that Cheever suggests are typical among suburban residents. While Neddy is in Mrs. Graham's backyard, two "carloads of friends" arrive, setting the tone that suburban life is mostly about entertaining. - Character: Mrs. Bunker. Description: Mrs. Bunker is another of Neddy's neighbors. She's hosting a party as Neddy arrives, and she's surprised to see him, as Lucinda had previously called to tell her they weren't coming. Mrs. Bunker speaks with hyperbolic insincerity, telling Neddy, "When Lucinda said that you couldn't come I thought I'd die." Although Neddy seems indifferent to Mrs. Bunker, he enjoys the party, as it's another occasion for him to get a drink. - Character: Mrs. Levy. Description: Mrs. Levy is a neighbor who isn't home when Neddy arrives, but there are signs everywhere that she was just entertaining and left suddenly. While the Levys have a "private property sign," Neddy spends time in their backyard anyway, taking liberties with their home that would presumably make them uncomfortable. Mrs. Levy owns a set of Japanese lanterns from Kyoto, which is one of the first occasions for Neddy to question his extremely unreliable memory. - Character: The Welchers. Description: The Welchers are neighbors who have moved away by the time Neddy arrives at their house. While he doesn't remember that they've left, he intuits it from the "for sale" sign on their property and their drained pool. Neddy's inability to remember that the Welchers have moved is one of the first clear indications of his complete repression of uncomfortable realities. - Character: Mrs. Halloran. Description: An older woman who is one of the wealthier residents of their town. Mrs. Halloran and her husband are known eccentrics: they are often naked in their backyard, and she takes pleasure in local speculation about her communist politics (although Neddy notes that she's merely a "reformer"). Mrs. Halloran is closer to Neddy than the other neighbors, and she's the only neighbor to explicitly offer comfort and try to get Neddy to confront his painful memories. - Character: Helen. Description: Helen is the Hallorans' only daughter, and she lives right next to the Hallorans in a house they built for her. Cheever implies that Helen is close with her parents, both personally and financially. As a result of her husband, Eric Sachs, having health issues, they don't keep alcohol in the house, which frustrates Neddy when he needs a drink. Neddy isn't really interested in Helen's company, which he demonstrates by leaving them with an insincere and vague invitation to get together. - Character: Mrs. Biswanger. Description: Mrs. Biswanger, one of Neddy's neighbors, is having a party as Neddy arrives in her backyard. For years, she has invited Neddy and Lucinda to dinner regularly, but they have turned her down every time because her parties consist of boring professionals who talk constantly about "the price of things." While Neddy believes that he will be welcomed at the Biswangers' party, Mrs. Biswanger insults Neddy in a way that shows she was clearly hurt by his refusal to attend her previous events. This episode illustrates Neddy's self-absorption, as he assumed he could continue to be respected and admired despite his poor treatment of others. - Character: Shirley Adams. Description: Neddy's former mistress. Neddy had broken up with her after what he thought was a lighthearted affair, but she had "wept," showing that Neddy is too focused on his own pleasure to understand how badly he hurt her. After his rejection at the Biswangers, Neddy seeks Shirley out to restore his spirits. He wants not "love," but rather "sexual roughhouse" in order to bolster his mood. Shirley (of course) is confused and hurt to see him, and she punctures Neddy's self-delusion by telling him to "grow up. - Theme: The Natural vs. The Artificial. Description: As Neddy Merrill swims across the county, he tries to make a wilderness out of the well-kept pools of suburbia, reimagining them as a unified body of water. His progress across the county shows him tapping into a more elemental, less civilized part of himself as he soaks in the physical sensations of the day and removes his clothing, but the effort falters badly as he's diverted across a highway and through a public pool with enforced rules and deadening chemicals. Afterwards, he can't recapture the feeling of beating a new path through uncharted territory, so he turns in desperation to the modern comforts of a drink, a party, and a mistress. In this way, Cheever suggests that suburban men, in order to consider themselves virile and powerful in an environment tailored to their comfort, must emphasize the natural over the artificial to the point of delusion and vanity. The journey of the story begins with an inaugural act of imagination: Neddy "seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county." It's this powerful metaphor—insisting that the pools make up a river winding through the suburbs—that creates a wilderness out of the neighborhood and enables Neddy's notion of himself as a legendary explorer. Alongside Neddy's delusions of grandeur, swimming home allows him to delight in embracing a more basic human nature, one seemingly divorced from the rules and responsibilities of suburban life. Neddy thinks of himself as an Edenic, prelapsarian man: at the beginning of the journey, swimming "was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition." Furthermore, Neddy's desire to be naked ("He would have liked to swim without trunks, but this was not possible") emphasizes his need to throw off the confinements of propriety and engage with life on a purely physical plane. But all too quickly, modern life catches up to Neddy. Like Robinson Crusoe returning to Europe from his life on an island, Neddy re-enters society in a painful way when he encounters a drained pool and must cross a highway. Cheever describes him "standing barefoot in the deposits of the highway—beer cans, rags, and blowout patches—exposed to all kinds of ridicule," as if the world is determined to tear down the fantasy that he is a pioneer traversing an uncharted landscape. Afterwards, descriptions of chemicals—"chlorine" and the "reek of suntan oil"—follow him as he attempts to cross the public pool. Here, it takes an extra effort of will to persist in his imagined world: "he reminded himself that he was an explorer, a pilgrim, and that this was merely a stagnant bend in the Lucinda River." However, it's not just a "stagnant bend in the Lucinda River"; even at Neddy's most ecstatic, the artificial elements of modern life follow him in the form of social dictates. He observes that "his life was not confining," but even before he starts his journey, he's hemmed in by the norms of his suburban neighborhood, from his understanding that he must keep his swim trunks on to his acquiescence to using the crawl (a swimming stroke that is considered proper, but which is not good for swimming long distances). From the beginning, then, his attempt to make a wilderness of the suburbs is colored by his awareness of what is "customary." His language of "domestication" in reference to the crawl provides further evidence that he sees his life as something natural and wild which has been hemmed in by the world around him. This constriction escalates as the story continues and he encounters more and more signs that limit his movement ("PRIVATE PROPERTY" or "FOR SALE"). At the public pool, Neddy meekly agrees to wash his feet just as the sign directs him. By repeatedly pointing to the ways that the modern world intervenes into the untrammeled landscape of Neddy's imagination, Cheever casts Neddy's attempt to "explore" this suburb as a doomed, even pathetic undertaking. Furthermore, Cheever seems to suggest that any effort to reawaken a more primal self in the suburbs will meet the same failure. The pools that Neddy wants to imagine as a rushing river weaving through the uncharted parts of the map are, in the end, just pools. In fact, pools are a sign that the natural world has been completely domesticated, as they enclose water—a powerful element in its natural state—into tidy, privately-owned rectangles. In the suburbs, people have tried to recreate the garden of Eden—a world of untroubled beauty and pleasure—but artifice, especially in the form of rules and norms, is always present. - Theme: Delusion and Repression. Description: At the beginning of the story, Neddy's life seems wonderful: he and his wife, Lucinda, are sitting around his neighbor's pool on a glorious summer day, and he's so happy that he wants to "gulp into his lungs the components of that moment." However, over the course of Neddy's swim across the county, this wonderful life unravels without clear cause: the weather sours and then turns autumnal while Cheever gives clues that Neddy has suffered "misfortunes," including the dissolution of his family, money troubles, alcohol abuse, and a fall from social grace that makes him unwelcome in his community. Cheever allows for some ambiguity as to what has happened: Neddy's swim seems to take only a few hours, but the seasons turning and the significant changes in Neddy and his neighbors' lives suggest that much more time has passed than just a summer afternoon. One interpretation of this ambiguity is that Neddy's fixation on swimming across the county represents his tendency to live immersed in delusion, pursuing pleasure while refusing to grapple with pain and difficulty. Therefore, his afternoon of swimming stands in for an adult life of repressing pain and chasing pleasure, a vain and immature attitude that causes his life to devolve without him being able to acknowledge it, let alone prevent it from happening. Throughout the story, Cheever makes clear that Neddy is ruled by the pursuit of pleasure. His swim across the county comes from his desire to prolong a moment of poolside bliss, which shows the lengths to which Neddy will go to maintain a good feeling. Furthermore, Neddy's sense of self is entirely driven by his feelings in the moment. If the weather is pleasant and the water feels good, he's happy—but if his thoughts turn to unpleasant memories or if there's a chill in the air, he falls into despair. Likewise, his appetite for the pleasure of a drink sometimes determines his path and his mood. When "a smiling bartender he had seen at a hundred parties [gives] him a gin and tonic," he's happy. But later, when he feels he needs a drink—"a stimulant"—and cannot get one, he almost falls apart. Neddy is perpetually looking for the one pleasure that will end any malaise. In a moment of desperation, as his swimming begins to sour, he concludes that "love—sexual roughhouse in fact—was the supreme elixir, the pain killer, the brightly colored pill," and he seeks out his former mistress. The way he thinks about her as just another pleasure to relieve his anguish reveals his constant need to escape from the discomfort of his reality, as well as the immature way in which he sees other people as instruments of escape or pleasure, rather than as full people. Neddy's inability to empathize with others is related to his pursuit of pleasure, as fully grappling with the desires and hardships of others would undermine Neddy's selfish quest to experience only delight. For example, when a plane passes overhead while a thunderstorm is brewing, "it seemed to Ned that he could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure." Encountering a situation in which someone would reasonably feel terror—flying through a coming storm—Neddy decides only to see carefree pleasure. His inability to understand the pain of others also extends to the mistress he abandoned: "It had been, he thought, a lighthearted affair, although she had wept when he broke it off." The tension between those two halves of the sentence is further proof that Neddy is as unwilling to grapple with others' pain as his own. In this light, when Cheever presents the mysterious reversals of fortune among the neighbors or the deterioration of Neddy's own family, readers might assume that Neddy was so selfishly unable to empathize with those around him that his relationships fell apart without him acknowledging it. Over the course of the story, Cheever becomes more explicit that Neddy has sabotaged himself through his repression of any unpleasant knowledge or feeling. At first, his inability to acknowledge unpleasant aspects of reality simply deprives him of the information he needs to make choices: confused that he can't swim through the empty pool in the house his neighbors have apparently vacated, Neddy asks "Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?" It seems as though the latter is true, and as the story progresses, Neddy's inability to acknowledge the pain he has caused others begins to put him in situations that are humiliating and unpleasant. For example, despite that Neddy deeply hurt the Biswangers' feelings by rejecting their invitations, he approaches their house thinking "They would be honored to give him a drink, they would be happy to give him a drink." And even after they humiliate and rebuff him, he assumes the same implausible goodwill of the mistress he dumped. Neddy also seems immune to redemption. When Mrs. Halloran makes probably the only authentic attempt to console Neddy, he rebuffs her, claiming not to recall having sold his house, because the alternative is engaging with his pain. This insistent refusal to engage with unpleasant realities leads Neddy to return to his house only to find it abandoned and dark. His self-delusion, rather than preserving a façade of contented family life, has caused him to lose it forever. Neddy has studiously avoided the "unpleasantness" in his life, such that when he's finally forced to look his life in the face, he finds it a smoking wreck. Neddy Merrill is a perfect creature of the suburbs that Cheever so bitterly criticizes: he chases comfort and pleasure while suppressing any of the difficulties of life, to the ruin of himself and others. Cheever's conclusion is that people feel pain for a reason: it's an indicator of issues that need to be addressed and resolved before they wreak destruction on people's lives. - Theme: Suburban Alienation. Description: When Cheever wrote "The Swimmer," suburban life—which promised blissful and affordable living after the horrors of the Second World War—was booming. The suburbs of "The Swimmer," however, do not enable the characters to live an ideal life. Neddy Merrill views his suburban neighbors almost uniformly as obstacles and inconveniences. Indeed, as the story progresses, readers begin to see suburban life as nothing more than an exhausting progression of façades and obligations: invitations are extended and rejected, drinks are drunk, small talk is made, and appearances are maintained. The pettiness and despair of the suburban neighborhood Cheever depicts suggests that the things people expect to make them happy—such as money, friendly relationships, and social cohesion—are often what causes the deepest despair. Cheever uses repetition to emphasize the monotony and homogeneity of the suburbs and its residents. As the story opens, everyone speaks versions of the same phrase: "I drank too much." This repetition extends to nearly every aspect of life in Cheever's suburbs—the sequence of pools, the identical conversations, the bartender Neddy has seen "a hundred" times at other parties—and it numbs both residents and the reader. Furthermore, the bewildering catalogue of neighbors (Westerhazy, Halloran, Levy, Biswanger) come too fast for the reader to make much distinction between them, suggesting that residents of the suburbs themselves are basically clones of one another without significant distinguishing features. In fact, even the neighbors who differ from the norm seem to do so superficially and for entertainment, rather than out of authentic eccentricity. For example, the Hallorans "seemed to bask in the suspicion that they might be Communists," although Cheever suggests that they aren't communists—they're typical suburban residents who are titillated by the air of subversion that communism gives their lives. Neddy seems to know everyone, which appears to be a benefit of life in the suburbs, but these relationships are shallow and they fail to make him happy. For example, most of the conversations Cheever depicts aren't attempts to communicate honestly. The neighbors who receive Neddy with variations of the same phrase ("what a marvelous surprise") seem to be saying the pleasantries expected of them, but these statements seem neither specific to Neddy nor genuinely felt. Furthermore, Cheever uses italics to call attention to the hyperbole and insincerity of suburban speech, as when Enid Bunker tells Neddy, "When Lucinda said that you couldn't come I thought I'd die." Neddy himself speaks this way: he tells Helen (obviously insincerely) that "Lucinda and I want terribly to see you…We're sorry it's been so long and we'll call you very soon." The shallow insincerity of these friendships becomes most apparent in the fact that only one neighbor—Mrs. Halloran, the least traditionally suburban of all—seems to offer genuine sympathy for Neddy's plight. Clearly, this is a community that is not caring for one another, a trend Neddy himself embodies, as he cannot even remember the misfortunes of his neighbors. Finally, Cheever suggests that wealth is a defining feature of the suburbs that alienates suburbanites instead of making them happy. While all the characters are clearly wealthy (everyone, for example, has a pool and a lawn), suburbanites are clearly supposed to display their wealth but never speak of it. Those who violate this social code (such as the Biswangers, who talk about "the prices of things") are considered crass and worthy of contempt. This shows that, while wealth can buy a house in the suburbs, it cannot buy entry into suburban social life, which also requires fluency with upper-class cultural norms. Furthermore, wealth is an unstable condition, and when people's fortunes fall (as Neddy's do), they quickly lose membership in suburban society, no matter how respected they once were. This becomes clear at the Biswanger's party, where Neddy is ridiculed for having violated the behavioral norms of suburban life by showing up drunk and begging for money. Instead of having compassion for Neddy's clear desperation, his neighbors are disgusted that he would speak of money outright, particularly in the context of needing it. Cheever therefore suggests that conformity, wealth, and social obligation give rise to relationships that are more performative than caring. The suburbs are a place with lots of talk, but little dialogue; lots of wealth, but not enough security; and many neighbors, but few friends. Perversely, the things that were supposed to alleviate alienation (wealth, social relationships, and homogeneity) give rise to monotony, personal disconnection, and insincerity, an alienating—and peculiarly suburban—combination. - Theme: Time. Description: "The Swimmer" depicts the passage of time at three superimposed levels. One is the course of a single Sunday—the "real" timeline on which the story plays out. Another is the accelerated passage of seasons, as the story begins in high summer and then descends into fall and winter. The third (and most important) timeline is the course of Neddy's adult life. Cheever uses these superimposed timelines to emphasize how subjective the feeling of time passing can be, and how quickly an entire life can pass by, especially when it's spent in pursuit of shallow pleasure. Despite being a middle-aged man, Neddy begins his journey with the "slenderness of youth." During his first few laps in the pool, he showcases his virility and strength, jumping headlong into the water and vaulting out on the other side. This vitality gives the sense that the story opens near the beginning of Neddy's life, when possibilities are still open to him and he can still seize his own destiny. However, by playing on the association of summer with youth and winter with old age, Cheever troubles Neddy's apparent youth. As Neddy performs his morning routine, Cheever observes ominously that "he might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one." This line echoes the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Despite summer's association with youth and beauty, Shakespeare's poem engages themes of impermanence and decay, since the defining characteristic of summer is that its beauty is fleeting. Even at the outset, Cheever plants the seeds of Neddy's old age and frailty—readers shouldn't be surprised, then, that Neddy begins to feel his age (his limbs becoming rubbery and weak until his swimming becomes a desperate struggle) just as "Leaves were falling down around him and he smelled wood smoke on the wind." Even as Neddy's body ages swiftly, however, Cheever maintains that, emotionally speaking, Neddy is still a child. This mismatch between his physical and emotional age is the source of his suffering. Like a child, Neddy bounces from delight to delight and seems to lack emotional maturity or the capacity for self-reflection. After noticing that the Welchers have moved away, for instance, Neddy has the opportunity to reflect on the fact that his life is passing and his neighbors are experiencing misfortune, but instead he gets distracted: "in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis game. This cheered him, cleared away all his apprehensions." Furthermore, even as his body ages, Neddy continues to rely on his boyish optimism and naiveté, which is off-putting and even unacceptable in a middle-aged man. By clinging to his youthful emotions, he confuses and frustrates those close to him by behaving without empathy (towards the Biswangers, for instance), neglecting his responsibilities to his family, and engaging in ridiculous pleasures, such as swimming across the county. Indeed, when he tells his spurned mistress Shirley that he has come to her house unannounced in order to swim home, she says, "Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?" It's perfectly reasonable that she would be frustrated that a childish and pointless game is more important to him than protecting her emotional wellbeing by avoiding her yard after breaking up with her. More broadly, Neddy's swim home—with its invented constraints and dubious achievements—is a way of avoiding the pressing concerns of adulthood. While Neddy is immersed in swimming home, the home that is ostensibly his destination is disintegrating without his knowledge: his wife and daughters leave him, he goes broke, and he loses his house. Neddy's aging body might have been a clue that, in the course of his swim, he should have reconsidered whether his youthful quest was still worthwhile—whether "this prank, this joke, this piece of horseplay" should fill all his time—but he never seriously engages the question. As a result, by the time he reaches home, he's an elderly man, "stooped, holding on to the gateposts for support," and left with only a "vague" sense of triumph and an empty house. In this light, Cheever's superimposed timelines—the seasons changing and an adult life passing, all in the course of a summer afternoon—show how quickly a person's problems can get the best of them if they fail to grapple with those problems as they arise. Neddy's own mismatched personal timeline (his emotional immaturity coupled with his aging body) leaves him unable to seize the important parts of his life, focusing instead on youthful pleasures that leave him with no lasting sense of meaning or adult accomplishment. - Climax: Neddy's return home - Summary: On one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around complaining that they drank too much the night before, Neddy Merrill sits by his neighbor's pool. He's described as a man in youthful middle-age who is energetic and athletic. Neddy savors the summer day, basking in the pleasures of physical exertion, water, and the sun's warmth. Neddy notes that his own house is eight miles away, where his four daughters will have just finished lunch, and he realizes that he might be able to return home by water. He imagines the backyard pools from here to his house as a line of uninterrupted water, a river that he names the "Lucinda River" after his wife. Imagining himself as an explorer, he congratulates himself for his creativity and sense of adventure. Neddy dives into the water, noting that the long-distance stroke he would otherwise use is not socially appropriate in suburban pools. He thinks of the water as his natural condition, and his life outside it as an interruption. When Lucinda asks where he's going, he tells her he's swimming home and disappears behind a hedge. Neddy plots his course in his mind, listing many neighbors whose pools he will soon traverse. It's a beautiful day, which Neddy thinks of as a gift, and he starts out in a spirit of optimism. He passes into the Grahams' backyard, where Mrs. Graham is having a party; she greets him cheerfully, but insincerely. Neddy thinks of the backyard party as being full of benevolent "natives" whose customs he must diplomatically respect as he makes his way. Neddy swims through a few more pools until he reaches the Bunkers' property, where Mrs. Bunker—in the midst of a party—greets him in the same insincere way that Mrs. Graham did. Neddy extricates himself from the party as quickly as possible and makes his way to the Levys' backyard. The Levys aren't home, which delights Neddy, and after thoughtlessly ignoring their "private property" sign, he swims the pool in their backyard. By this time, a thunderstorm is brewing, and Neddy finds this exciting. He shelters in the Levys' gazebo until it passes. Afterwards, the air is chilly and Neddy sees a sign of fall in a blighted tree with red and yellow leaves. Making his away across a few more yards, he notes that a few neighbors seem to have gone away. He's surprised that the Welchers are gone for good; their house is boarded up and their pool has been drained, interrupting the Lucinda River. Bewildered by the Welchers' absence, he notes that he's "disciplined in the repression of unpleasant facts" and it seems to be affecting his memory. To continue his journey, Neddy has to pass a busy, dirty road. Passing drivers mock and jeer at him, and it's a long and arduous task to cross the road safely. He's so unnerved by the experience that he begins to question why he set out on this quest at all, but he resolves to continue since he's come so far. Next, Neddy has to cross a public pool, which he finds unpleasant: the rules, the chemically treated water, the jostling swimmers, and the lifeguards inspecting him for identification bother him. He tries to imagine it as just a "stagnant stretch" of the Lucinda river. Afterwards, Neddy crosses into a more secluded, wooded area where Mr. and Mrs. Halloran live. The Hallorans, an extremely wealthy older couple, are eccentrics: they're rumored to have Communist politics and they spend time in their backyard completely naked. Their pool is fed by a brook, which is more to Neddy's taste than the public pool. Seeing Neddy, Mrs. Halloran expresses her condolences that he lost his house and his daughters, but Neddy responds that he can't remember anything at all about that. Clearly unsettled, Mrs. Halloran doesn't pursue the subject. After swimming the Hallorans' pool, Neddy becomes depressed. He feels as if his strength has entirely given out, and the air is cold with an unseasonable hint of woodsmoke. He resolves to find a drink to restore him, so he walks to the house that the Hallorans' daughter Helen shares with her husband Eric. Helen apologizes that she has nothing in the house to drink because of Eric's operation three years ago—this is another unpleasant fact that Neddy seems to have forgotten. He's repelled by the scar on Eric's stomach because it hides his navel, which Neddy sees as an interruption in the chain of life. For a drink, Helen points Neddy towards the Biswangers' party, and Neddy heads that way after extending an insincere invitation to have Helen and Eric over sometime. He notes that the Biswangers constantly invite him and Lucinda over for dinner, but Neddy and Lucinda always refuse because the Biswangers are boring and distasteful, always discussing the "price of things." Neddy approaches their house thinking he'll be welcomed, but Mrs. Biswanger calls him a "gate crasher" and insults him. He continues into the party, and a bartender serves him coldly. Neddy can hear people talking behind his back about a time when he showed up drunk and asked for money. The next pool belongs to Shirley Adams, his old mistress, and he thinks the best thing to restore his energy will be a tryst with her. He remembers that Shirley wept when he broke off their affair, but from his perspective it was casual and lighthearted. Neddy approaches Shirley in her backyard, but she's confused and hurt to see him. When he tells her about his quest to swim across the county, she tells him to "grow up." Leaving Shirley's place, Neddy is more dispirited than ever. He looks up and sees winter constellations on a summer day, and he begins to cry in despair and bewilderment. He's wounded by his treatment at the Biswangers' party and the feelings of pain, exhaustion, and age in his body. Neddy swims the last pool on his way home, but he's so tired that he can barely make it across. He hobbles up the driveway to his house like an old man, and he's surprised to see that the house is dark; it's locked and appears abandoned. As Neddy shouts and bangs on the doors, he looks inside and sees that it's empty.

- Genre: Fantasy; Fairy Tale; Children's Novel - Title: The Tale of Despereaux - Point of view: Third Person Omniscient - Setting: A castle in the fictional Kingdom of Dor - Character: Despereaux Tilling. Description: The protagonist of the novel, Despereaux is a tiny mouse who lives in a castle. From the moment he's born, Despereaux doesn't fit in with his fellow mice: he's the only baby in his litter to survive, he has unusually large ears, and he's born with his eyes open (normally, mice are born blind). With his open eyes, Despereaux can see a spot of light from Antoinette's mirror reflected on the ceiling—and this begins Despereaux's obsession with light and beauty. As Despereaux grows, he remains small and sickly, and he also struggles to fit into mouse society. Rather than expressing interest in crumbs, scurrying, or nibbling paper, Despereaux becomes enchanted by the light coming through stained-glass windows, reading a story about a knight who rescues a beautiful maiden, and music. His love of music in particular leads him to break several rules of mouse conduct when, in order to listen to the human King Phillip playing the guitar and singing for his daughter the Princess Pea, Despereaux shows himself to humans. When Despereaux allows the Princess Pea to touch him, he falls deeply in love with her and breaks the most important mouse rule forbidding mice from speaking to humans. For this, Despereaux is banished to the dungeon, where the rats are guaranteed to eat him. This causes Despereaux to question everything he knows, specifically whether "happily ever after," like in the story he loves, actually exists. The jailer Gregory helps rescue Despereaux from the dungeon. In the 24 hours after returning upstairs, the serving girl Mig cuts Despereaux's tail off, and she and the rat Roscuro kidnap the Pea and imprison her in the dungeon. Though Despereaux searches for a knight to rescue the princess, he ultimately decides that he must be brave and be a knight himself. With the threadmaster's gift of a spool of thread and a needle, as well as some nourishing soup from Cook, Despereaux returns willingly to the dungeon. The story ends with Despereaux and the Pea as friends—and Despereaux seemingly living happily alongside her, rather than with the other castle mice. - Character: Chiaroscuro "Roscuro". Description: Arguably one of the novel's antagonists, Chiaroscuro (or Roscuro) is a rat who lives in the castle dungeons. Unlike most rats, which love pain, suffering, and darkness, Roscuro discovers early on that he craves light and beauty. Though his mentor Botticelli Remorso tries to encourage Roscuro to be a good rat and make people suffer, Roscuro ultimately finds that being cruel to prisoners doesn't bring him joy—so he decides to go upstairs. Initially, while wandering the castle, Roscuro feels right at home and in awe of the beauty around him. But when the Princess Pea notices him hanging from a chandelier and calls him a rat, Roscuro realizes how ugly a word "rat" is—and he decides he doesn't want to be one anymore. The shock of this realization causes Roscuro to fall into the queen's soup bowl, and the queen dies moments later of shock. Roscuro's heart breaks and heals "crookedly" after this, as he looks back while fleeing the party and sees the princess giving him a dirty, angry look. Following this, Roscuro becomes obsessed with revenge. Several months later, he hatches a plan to manipulate a serving girl, Mig, into kidnapping the princess; he plans to imprison the bright, shining princess in the dungeon forever so he can have some light for himself. However, when Despereaux arrives and when Mig cuts Roscuro's tail off, Roscuro admits that he just wants some light. The Princess Pea forgives Roscuro, invites him to eat soup with her, and ultimately gives him free run of the castle's upstairs floors. To try to atone for his misdeeds, Roscuro also reunites Mig with her father, who was imprisoned in the dungeons and whom Roscuro tormented. In art, chiaroscuro refers to the play of lights and darks in a painting or drawing to create form and drama. In Roscuro's case, his name's meaning embodies the novel's insistence that life, and people, are made up of both light and dark elements, and that this is what makes life interesting. - Character: Miggery Sow "Mig". Description: Miggery Sow is a young girl who eventually becomes a castle servant and helps Roscuro carry out his plan to exact revenge on the Princess Pea. She's not very intelligent, and for most of the novel, nobody cares what Mig wants. When Mig is a young child, her mother dies and her father (who named her after his favorite sow) sells her to a man for a tablecloth, a hen, and some cigarettes. The man who purchases Mig makes him call her Uncle; he regularly hits her ears. This causes Mig to become deaf. Things begin to look up for Mig when, on her seventh birthday, she witnesses the royal family riding near Uncle's house and begins to hope that she could one day become a princess, like the Pea. Her hope and her admiration for the princess sustain her for the next five years, until a soldier arrives to confiscate Uncle's soup-making supplies and Mig as well (slavery is illegal in the Kingdom of Dor). Mig is brought to the castle to work as a paid servant. When Mig is sent to take Gregory the jailer his meal in the dungeon, Mig sings a song about wanting to be the Princess Pea—something that piques the rat Roscuro's interest. Roscuro decides to manipulate Mig to bring the Pea to the dungeon. Mig is led to believe that she and the princess will then switch places, so Mig is distraught when Roscuro reveals that he won't let either girl leave the dungeon. But when the Pea asks Mig what she really wants, Mig shouts that she wants her mother. This leads Mig and the Pea to form an alliance against Roscuro. Once they leave the dungeon, Roscuro, seeking forgiveness, reunites Mig with her father, who was imprisoned in the dungeon. Mig's father treats her like a princess for the rest of her life to atone for selling her. - Character: The Princess Pea. Description: The princess of Dor is King Phillip and Queen Rosemary's daughter. She's a beautiful girl who seems to radiate light, and this effect is amplified by the fact that she often wears glittery or sequined dresses. The Pea is the only one to notice Roscuro hanging from the chandelier at a banquet, and she shouts that there's a rat in her mother's soup—which ultimately leads to the queen dying of surprise. The look that the Pea gives Roscuro as he leaves the banquet—one that says clearly that he belongs in the dungeon—is what causes Roscuro's heart to break and to heal crookedly. The Pea, however, is unaware of the effect she had on him until much later. In the months after her mother's death, the Pea befriends Despereaux—and days after they meet for the first time, Roscuro manipulates Mig into kidnapping the Pea. While the Pea is frightened and angry at Roscuro, the narrator also insists that Pea is extremely empathetic. So, she feels great sympathy for Mig, who wants to be a princess so badly that she's susceptible to Roscuro's manipulation. Her empathy is why, once Roscuro reveals what his true plan is, the Pea asks an angry, confused Mig what she really wants. The girls connect over the fact that they've both lost their mothers, and they refuse to work against each other after this. Once Despereaux arrives to rescue the Pea, the Pea agrees to forgive Roscuro for kidnapping her and for his role in the queen's death. She invites him upstairs to eat soup and after this, she gives him permission to come upstairs to the castle's light, bright main floors whenever he wants. - Character: King Phillip. Description: The king of Dor is the Princess Pea's father and Queen Rosemary's husband. Though he's nearsighted and not the most intelligent ruler, his greatest quality is that he loves with all his heart. However, this leads to some interesting consequences when the king experiences loss. Being a king, he can make whatever ridiculous rules he wants—so after the queen dies while eating soup, King Phillip outlaws soup and all soup-making and soup-eating implements, as well as rats (the rat Chiaroscuro fell in the queen's soup, frightening her to death). The narrator notes that this does practically nothing except make life difficult for people who once relied on soup for nourishment, but it allows the king to show his love for the queen. Later, when the Pea vanishes, the king refuses to listen to Despereaux when Despereaux attempts to share where she went. The King, like Lester Tilling, has a very specific idea of how things should go—and he's unwilling to associate with any rodents, let alone listen to one. So while the king is irrational and sometimes wields his power in strange ways, he remains motivated by love and grief first and foremost. - Character: Queen Rosemary. Description: Queen Rosemary was King Phillip's wife and the Princess Pea's mother until her death not long before Despereaux's birth. She was a straightforward woman who loved her family most of all—and after that, she loved soup. Because of this, Cook served soup for every meal and elevated her soup recipes to the level of art. The queen died when the rat Roscuro fell into her soup, startling her to death. Following her death, King Phillip outlaws soup, soup-making, and soup-eating implements in the Kingdom of Dor. - Character: Lester Tilling. Description: Lester is Despereaux's father and Antoinette's husband. He's also a member of the Mouse Council, and he's very concerned with ceremony, tradition, and making sure that all mice follow the rules of proper mouse conduct. This is why, when he hears that Despereaux has shown himself to the Princess Pea and allowed her to touch him, he calls the Mouse Council and votes to send Despereaux to the dungeon—following the rules matters more to him than protecting his own son. However, Lester cries as he does so and later, he comes to regret his role in sending Despereaux to the dungeon. When Despereaux returns from the dungeon alive, Lester begs his son for forgiveness. Though the narrator explains that Despereaux forgives his father to save his own heart (rather than to benefit Lester), Lester is blown away by the gesture. To the end of the novel, he remains in awe that he was granted forgiveness. - Character: Antoinette Tilling. Description: The French mouse Antoinette is Despereaux's mother and Lester's wife. She's vain, dramatic, and the word "disappointing" is one of her favorite words. When Despereaux is the only living baby of his litter, she declares that she won't have any more babies—they ruin her looks. Antoinette takes a dim view of her husband's involvement with the Mouse Council, but she also refuses to stand up for Despereaux when the Mouse Council banishes him to die in the dungeon. - Character: Furlough Tilling. Description: Furlough is one of Despereaux's older brothers. Like his father, Lester, Furlough is very interested in following the rules that guide mouse behavior. When Despereaux is little, this leads to Furlough going out of his way to teach Despereaux to scurry properly. But later, this takes a sinister turn when Furlough sees Despereaux allowing the Princess Pea to touch him—and alerts their father to this crime. Furlough is one of the hooded mouse guards who escort Despereaux to the dungeon. He refuses to protect his brother from certain death, and he's the one to shove Despereaux down the dungeon stairs. - Character: Merlot Tilling. Description: Merlot is one of Despereaux's older sisters. When Despereaux is little, she attempts to teach him how to nibble paper in the library. But like Lester and Furlough, Merlot believes that mice should act in very specific ways—so she's aghast when Despereaux seems to be speaking to the paper and refuses to eat it (unlike most mice, Despereaux can read the story in the book he's supposed to be eating). This leads her to believe that Despereaux is mentally unwell. - Character: The Most Very Honored Head Mouse. Description: The Most Very Honored Head Mouse is the head of the Mouse Council. He's an old mouse whose job it is to make sure that all mice who live in the castle are following the rules of mouse conduct exactly. The Head Mouse is unwilling to see nuance or consider anything that isn't black and white, so when Despereaux is brought before the Mouse Council, it doesn't matter to the Head Mouse that Despereaux broke the rules for good, noble reasons. - Character: The Threadmaster/Hovis. Description: The threadmaster, a mouse named Hovis, is the castle mouse with the ceremonial role of protecting the supposedly sacred spool of red thread and fastening red thread around condemned mice's necks before they're sent to the dungeon. Hovis acts like he takes his job seriously, but he's the only mouse who gives Despereaux any hope that things might turn out okay when Despereaux is banished to the dungeon. He tells Despereaux to be brave for the Princess Pea, and later, he agrees to help Despereaux in his quest to return to the dungeon and rescue the princess. - Character: Gregory. Description: Gregory is the jailer in the castle dungeon—though he's also a prisoner there. An old man who keeps himself from getting lost in the maze-like dungeon thanks to a rope tied around his ankle, Gregory has a tenuous truce with the rats (they mostly agree to not chew on his rope). When he hears Despereaux telling himself a story, Gregory picks Despereaux up and agrees to save him in return for Despereaux sharing his story. Stories, Gregory says, are light—they can give people hope and purpose. Just after Gregory saves Despereaux, though, Roscuro chews through Gregory's rope, causing the old man to die. This way, Gregory can't thwart Roscuro's plan to imprison the Princess Pea in the dungeon. - Character: Botticelli Remorso. Description: One of the novel's main antagonists, Botticelli is an elderly rat who lives in the dungeon; he's Roscuro's best friend and mentor. He always carries a locket stolen from a prisoner, hung on a rope made of mouse whiskers. Botticelli tries very hard to get Roscuro to behave as rats should—he tries to convince Roscuro that Roscuro doesn't care about light and beauty, and instead that Roscuro should focus on causing people pain, fear, and suffering. Hope and love, in Botticelli's opinion, are only useful in that they sometimes give his mouse victims better flavor—mice who die hopeful and in love, he suggests, taste better. Ultimately, Botticelli is unsuccessful in getting Roscuro to be a proper rat, and he loses interest in eating Despereaux after witnessing "too much forgiveness," which ruins a mouse's flavor. - Character: The Prisoner/Mig's Father. Description: Mig's father sells her to a man called Uncle when Mig is only six years old; in exchange he gets a red tablecloth, a hen, and some cigarettes. Years later, he's imprisoned in the castle dungeons for stealing six cows—and Roscuro steals his red tablecloth, which he still has and which reminds him of his betrayal of Mig. By this point, Mig's father deeply regrets his actions. At the end of the novel, the Pea has Mig's father released from the dungeon, and Roscuro reunites him with Mig. Mig's father treats her like a princess for the rest of his life to make up for betraying her. - Character: Cook. Description: The head chef at the castle, Cook is a strict, difficult woman who's known for her amazing soup recipes and her hatred of mice. She believes firmly in the healing and community-building power of soup, so she's devastated when King Phillip outlaws soup following Queen Rosemary's death. When it comes to those working under her, Cook demands perfection and obedience—and she's willing to hit her subordinates if they can't perform. When the Princess Pea goes missing, Cook defies the law and makes soup to comfort herself. She also rethinks her hatred of mice and shares some of her soup with Despereaux. - Character: Uncle. Description: Uncle is the man who purchases Mig from her father. He's not her uncle, but he insists she call him "Uncle." Uncle tasks Mig with cooking, cleaning, and looking after his sheep, and he regularly gives Mig "a good clout to the ear" for various, often invented reasons. This causes Mig to eventually lose her hearing. When the soldier arrives to confiscate Uncle's soup-making implements and share the news that soup has been made illegal, he takes Mig from Uncle and informs Uncle that slavery is illegal in the Kingdom of Dor. - Theme: Good vs. Evil. Description: In The Tale of Despereaux, the titular protagonist—a small mouse who lives in a castle—falls in love with the human Princess Pea, and Despereaux eventually takes on the monumental task of rescuing the princess from the dungeon after the evil rat Chiaroscuro kidnaps her. On the surface, The Tale of Despereaux is a simple story about good triumphing over evil, but the novel's message is far more complex. It proposes that good and evil (symbolized by sources of light like candles and stained-glass windows, and dark places like the dungeon) are both necessary to give the world and the story depth and meaning, and that good and evil coexist inside all people. For instance, throughout the novel, the narrator details the contents of each character's heart, pointing out the parts that are light, bright, and good—such as the Pea's kindness and her capacity to feel empathy—and the parts that are sad, or angry, or hateful, as when it describes the heart of Lester, Despereaux's father, as he condemns his son to being banished to the dungeon. And more broadly, the novel suggests that while it is of course nice when good triumphs and happy things occur, life is only interesting because there's a constant interplay between light and dark, good and evil. Just as a visually interesting dark shadow is only possible thanks to the light of a candle, the narrator makes it clear that the story they tell in The Tale of Despereaux only happens because dark and evil forces like fear, intolerance, and sadness exist alongside joy, empathy, and love. - Theme: Love, Forgiveness, and Absurdity. Description: At its heart, The Tale of Despereaux is a love story: that of the love that the mouse Despereaux feels for the human Princess Pea, and the lengths Despereaux's love causes him to go to when the rat Chiaroscuro (Roscuro) imprisons the Pea in the dungeon. Love, the narrator says, is extremely powerful, if a bit absurd—it's ridiculous that a mouse falls in love with a human princess, but that love causes Despereaux to believe he's actually capable of rescuing his love from the dungeon. The narrator characterizes forgiveness similarly: it's absurd, the narrator suggests, to think that Despereaux could forgive his own father for voting to banish him to the dungeon early in the novel, where Despereaux is guaranteed to be eaten by rats. But the novel suggests that despite the absurdity, love and forgiveness are absolutely necessary if people (or mice) mean to hold onto their humanity and not fall prey to evil. Roscuro, for instance, turns to evil (in the form of kidnapping the princess) because he's led to believe that things like love, beauty, and forgiveness will never be available to him. And as they forgive those who have harmed them, both the Pea and Despereaux realize that being willing to forgive is the only way to avoid ending up miserable like Roscuro. Forgiveness, in other words, benefits the person being forgiven as much as it benefits the person forgiving. - Theme: Principles, Courage, and Growing Up. Description: In many ways, The Tale of Despereaux details the titular mouse protagonist's process of growing up and learning to stand up for what he believes is right. Despereaux doesn't fit in with other mice, but this is largely because he believes in things that he suggests are far more meaningful and important than what most mice value: he values love and honor, rather than eating and being afraid. His values lead him not only to speak to and fall in love with the human Princess Pea, but to survive banishment to the dungeon—and to later return to the dungeon to rescue the princess when the rat Chiaroscuro kidnaps her and hides her in the dungeon's darkness. Despereaux's principles, the novel suggests, motivate him to become far more mature and far more moral than his fellow mice are. Part of Despereaux's maturation, though, is connected to his realization that good won't happen in the world if he and his fellow mice only sit around and wait for it to happen—he must act on his principles, even if doing so is frightening. Despereaux makes this realization as he dreams that the knight in shining armor from a story he loves to read is actually just an empty suit of armor, and as he then realizes that perhaps it's empty so that he can wear it and be a knight himself. Essentially, as Despereaux loses his innocent and youthful belief that good things will just happen in the world, he gains the armor—or the courage—he needs to be a force for good in his own right. - Theme: Conformity. Description: The narrator of The Tale of Despereaux remarks at one point that "an interesting fate […] awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform." The mouse Despereaux, for his part, is thrown in the dark, rat-infested dungeon as punishment for his failure to conform to mouse rules of behavior—his love of the human Princess Pea and his love of music prove too strong for him to want to stay hidden, afraid of humans, and interested only in feeding himself. But while Despereaux's nonconformity helps him feel brave and ultimately triumph over his circumstances to later rescue the Pea from her imprisonment in the dungeon, other characters' nonconformity leads them down far darker paths. The rat Chiaroscuro, for instance, is unusual for a rat in that he's extremely interested in the light, rather than rejecting it entirely and embracing the darkness of the dungeon where he lives. But he becomes so disillusioned and full of self-hatred after his single disastrous trip upstairs to the castle's light, bright main floor that his nonconformity leads him instead to carry out monstrous actions—kidnapping the Princess Pea and imprisoning her in the dungeon so he alone can possess her radiance—rather than making him noble and good. The novel shows how mice, rats, and people alike experience major pressure to conform to whatever their society deems is appropriate. The consequences for not conforming, Despereaux's story shows, can be grave and even deadly—but they can also create situations where unsuspecting heroes, like Despereaux, can triumph. - Climax: When Miggery Sow discovers that Roscuro has no intention of helping her become a princess, Princess Pea asks Mig what she wants—and Mig shouts that she wants her mother. - Summary: The mouse Despereaux is born in a castle under unusual circumstances: his ears are very large, and unlike normal baby mice, he's born with his eyes wide open. His parents, Antoinette and Lester, are sure he'll die like the other mice in his litter—but though Despereaux is sickly, he lives. His siblings Furlough and Merlot try to teach Despereaux how to be a proper mouse, but Despereaux isn't interested in being a proper mouse. Instead, he enjoys music, pretty light, and reading a book in the library about a knight rescuing a beautiful maiden. One day, Despereaux is so desperate to hear the human King Phillip play and sing a song for his daughter, the Princess Pea, that he leaves his hole and sits at the king's feet. The princess touches his head—and at this moment, Furlough sees what's happening and runs to tell Lester. So he doesn't see the Pea pick Despereaux up, or see Despereaux fall in love with the princess. The king yells at Despereaux to go away, so Despereaux breaks the most important mouse rule and speaks to the Pea. He tells her he honors her, just like the knight says in the library book. Lester summons the Mouse Council and shares what Furlough saw, and the Mouse Council calls for Despereaux. For his crimes, Despereaux is sent to the dungeon and to the rats, with a red thread tied around his neck by the threadmaster to indicate his criminality. Furlough is the mouse to kick Despereaux down the stairs into the dungeon, where Despereaux tries to comfort himself by telling himself a story. The human jailer, Gregory, picks Despereaux up and agrees to save Despereaux's life in exchange for a story. Stepping back in time a few years, a rat named Chiaroscuro and nicknamed Roscuro is born in the dungeons. Unlike most rats, which love darkness and suffering, Roscuro becomes obsessed with light. Though his mentor, Botticelli Remorso, tries to convince Roscuro to be a good rat and torture a new prisoner, Roscuro discovers after stealing the prisoner's red tablecloth that he doesn't like torturing people. He wants light. To satisfy his craving, he goes upstairs and invites himself to a party that the king and queen are throwing. But the Princess Pea sees Roscuro hanging from a chandelier. She shouts that there's a rat, and hearing the word "rat" causes Roscuro to feel intense self-loathing. He falls into the queen's soup, causing her to die of surprise, and then leaves the room. But as he does, he looks back—and the angry look on the Pea's face causes Roscuro's heart to break and heal incorrectly. He steals the queen's spoon on his way out and vows to get revenge on the princess. The king, meanwhile, outlaws rats, soup, and all soup-making and soup-eating implements after his wife's death. The story steps back in time again, to when a poor girl named Miggery Sow is six years old. Nobody cares what Mig wants, so after her mother dies, her father sells her to a man called Uncle for a red tablecloth, a hen, and cigarettes. Uncle hits Mig's ears so hard she eventually becomes deaf, and her ears resemble cauliflower. When Mig is seven years old, she witnesses the royal family riding past Uncle's sheep field and begins to hope that one day she can be a princess, just like the glittering Princess Pea. When Mig is 12, a soldier comes to Uncle's house to confiscate his soup supplies, as the queen has just died. When he learns that Uncle owns Mig, he insists on taking her as well—slavery is illegal in the Kingdom of Dor. Mig becomes a paid servant at the castle, meets the princess, and fails at most jobs assigned to her. The three storylines converge on the day that Cook tasks Mig with taking Gregory the jailer's meal to him. On the way down to the dungeon, Mig sings a song about wanting to be a princess. After eating, Gregory sneezes into his napkin, surreptitiously hiding Despereaux in it. Roscuro, having heard Mig's song, hatches a plan to get revenge on the princess by manipulating Mig—and on the way back upstairs with the supposedly empty tray, he invites Mig to work with him. Despereaux hears Roscuro describe his plan. Back in the kitchen, Cook reaches for the napkin on Mig's empty tray—and Despereaux falls into a cup of oil. Mig fishes him out and attempts to cut his head off with a knife, but instead, she just cuts his tail off. Despereaux flees to the pantry, where he sleeps on a bag of flour and dreams about the knight in shining armor. But the suit of armor in the dream is empty, and Despereaux cries. Despereaux sleeps for a full 24 hours and while he's asleep, Roscuro puts his plan into action. After chewing the rope Gregory uses to keep from getting lost in the maze-like dungeon (which leads to Gregory's death), he and Mig go to the Pea's room at night with a kitchen knife. They tell the princess that they're going to the dungeon. There, Mig explains, the two girls will switch places so Mig can be a princess and the Pea can be a servant. Seeing no choice but to give in, Pea puts on the glittery dress Roscuro asks her to and follows Mig to the dungeon—but she empathizes with Mig, who clearly wants to be a princess more than anything. Once they're in the dungeon, however, Roscuro reveals that he won't let either girl return upstairs; Mig will never be a princess. The Pea, seeing how devastated Mig is, asks what Mig wants. This is the first time anyone has ever asked Mig this, and Mig shouts that she just wants her mother. The Pea also wants her mother, so the girls refuse to work against each other anymore. They sit with Roscuro for a day and a night. The king sends men to the dungeon to look for the Pea, but they only discover Gregory's body. At this point, Despereaux wakes up after overhearing Cook and another servant talking about what's happened, and he realizes he's too late. While wandering the castle in search of the king, Despereaux walks in on the Mouse Council. Lester begs Despereaux to forgive him for his role in sending Despereaux to the dungeon—and Despereaux does. Despereaux then attempts to tell the king where the Pea is, but the king refuses to listen to a rodent. Despereaux realizes that he can be the knight in shining armor himself. Despereaux seeks out the threadmaster, who agrees to give Despereaux a spool of red thread (so Despereaux can find his way through the dungeon) and a needle to use as a sword. It takes Despereaux hours to roll the spool through the castle, and he reaches the kitchen at midnight. There, he finds Cook illegally making soup—and she sees Despereaux. But rather than kill him, she gives him a saucer of the soup and opens the dungeon door for him. As Despereaux makes his way down the dungeon stairs with the spool, the spool rolls away from him. At the bottom of the stairs, Botticelli Remorso meets Despereaux and agrees to lead him to the princess; secretly, he plans to eat Despereaux once they reach the princess. But as Despereaux runs for the Pea, Roscuro gets in his way—and to save Despereaux, Mig tries to kill Roscuro but ends up cutting his tail off. Despereaux considers killing Roscuro, but realizes doing so won't fix anything. And smelling the soup on Despereaux's whiskers, Roscuro admits that he just wants some light for himself. The Pea forgives Roscuro and invites him upstairs to eat soup. After this, the Pea gives Roscuro access to the castle's main floors, and seeking to atone for his misdeeds, Roscuro reunites Mig with her father—the prisoner he tortured. Despereaux and the Pea don't get married, but they do become friends.

- Genre: Fiction; psychological thriller; suspense; mystery; international crime - Title: The Talented Mr. Ripley - Point of view: Third person narrative which closely tracks the thoughts and feelings of Tom Ripley - Setting: New York, NY; Italy; France; Greece - Character: Tom Ripley. Description: Tom Ripley, who is simultaneously the novel's protagonist and antagonist, has a gift for forgery, impersonation, and imitation, and he uses these skills to his advantage at every available opportunity. Slick and slippery, Tom mirrors the tastes and affectations of whatever company he keeps. After being sent to Italy to retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a casual acquaintance who has run away to live a life of bohemian luxury, Tom becomes obsessed with befriending Dickie. When Dickie's friend and oft-spurned romantic devotee Marge Sherwood suggests to him that Tom's motivations are devious at best and dangerous at worst, Dickie pulls away from Tom, sending Tom into a jealous spiral that leads him to murder Dickie and overtake his identity, using his cunning to remain one step ahead of the law for the remainder of the book. Tom's gifts for imitation and impersonation belie a deep set of insecurities. Orphaned and raised by his cruel Aunt Dottie, Tom has always felt like a burden to others and has never felt secure in the value of his own personality. In this way, his need to transform into Dickie in order to feel worthy of acceptance and love shows that self-hatred is one of his primary motivations. Another motivation, which is never explicitly revealed, is his potential homosexuality, which he has never accepted in himself. Perhaps, Highsmith implies, Tom killed Dickie because it was the next best thing to loving him, an act Tom could not allow himself. - Character: Richard "Dickie" Greenleaf. Description: Dickie Greenleaf, an acquaintance of Tom Ripley's, is the cool, vain heir to a shipbuilding company who has absconded to Italy in order to live a life of luxury far from the watchful gaze of his overbearing parents. Dickie barely remembers Tom upon his arrival, but he nonetheless invites Tom to join his and his girlfriend Marge's small social circle in Mongibello. Dickie's luxurious, bohemian life is filled with lavish dinners, parties, trips, and possessions, which inspires awe and jealousy in the naïve, covetous, and sexually conflicted Tom. Tom's obsession leads him to murder Dickie on a boat in San Remo, sink his body, and assume his identity by claiming his valuable clothes and rings. Though he feels no remorse for the murder, Tom is vaguely haunted by visions of Dickie, drenched and alive, screaming, "I swam!" Dickie is physically absent for a sizable portion of the novel, but his presence inhabits nearly every page, and his influence over Tom, even in death, creates a whirlpool of deceit and greed. Dickie embodies themes of wealth, luxury, excess, and escape. - Character: Marjorie "Marge" Sherwood. Description: An expat, writer, and resident of Mongibello, Marge Sherwood is Dickie's on-and-off romantic interest and Tom's major rival for Dickie's affections. Marge is creative and kind, but hopelessly lovesick for Dickie, and she often allows herself to be treated unfairly at his hands. When she senses an attachment between Tom and Dickie, she reveals her suspicions about Tom to Dickie, which creates a rift between the two men and leads Tom to resent Marge. After Tom murders Dickie, he returns to Mongibello and writes to Marge as Dickie, describing his need to distance himself from her so that he can ascertain how he really feels about her. As Marge and Tom correspond throughout the novel—with Tom alternately writing to her as Dickie and as himself—the text reveals Marge to be a sharp and rightly defensive woman whose strong moral compass and sure sense of intuition fall on deaf (or dead) ears. - Character: Frederick "Freddie" Miles. Description: One of Dickie's expat acquaintances, Freddie is an "overweight American [with] carrot-red hair" who is "the son of an American hotel-chain owner" and a "self-styled playwright." Freddie's extravagant manner and off-putting looks make him hateful to Tom, though his love of revelry and excess is what draws Dickie and Marge to him. Freddie inadvertently drives a wedge between Tom and Dickie through his plans for a "bang-up" ski trip to Cortina, from which Tom is excluded. After Tom murders Dickie and moves to Rome in order to overtake his identity, Freddie tracks "Dickie" down. When Freddie begins to piece together the truth of the situation, Tom murders him. Freddie's murder then becomes a popular news item in the Italian and European press, and the unending, high-profile coverage is what eventually forces Tom to abandon his life as Dickie and return to his own identity. - Character: Herbert Greenleaf. Description: Dickie's father, and the owner of a shipbuilding company specializing in "small sailing boats." Herbert pays Tom's way as he travels to Italy, hoping that Tom will convince Dickie to return home to helm the family business and be near his dying mother. Through Herbert's letters to Tom, readers watch as Herbert's demeanor goes from hopeful to despondent, and eventually cold and disappointed. When "Dickie" disappears, Herbert travels to Europe in order to aid in the investigation. His love for his son and his desire to be reunited with him is, in many ways, a catalyst for the entirety of the novel's events, and it's Herbert's kind, generous nature which makes him easy prey in Tom Ripley's game. - Character: Aunt Dottie. Description: Tom's much-loathed Aunt Dottie raised him in Boston after his parents' death, though she constantly complained about it. She teased and taunted Tom cruelly, and often called him a "sissy," comparing him to his father, whom she insisted had also been a "sissy." She sends Tom infrequent checks and he occasionally writes letters to her. - Character: Cleo Dobelle. Description: One of Tom's friends in New York, a painter of miniatures who lives in her parents' large home on the Upper East Side. Though Tom and Cleo are close and have "taken to each other from the very first night," there are no sexual or romantic undertones between the two of them. - Theme: Obsession, Identity, and Imitation. Description: At the start of the novel, Tom Ripley is unhappy in every aspect of his life. He lives in a rundown apartment, which is the latest in a long series of rundown apartments, and he is working as a low-level con man. He is ashamed of and embarrassed by every aspect of his existence, and he feels that he deserves more from life. Tom's gifts as a forger, as well as his ingenuity and cunning as an impersonator, grow out of this deep insecurity in his own personal identity. As a result, Tom's obsession with Dickie provokes him to reject his own identity and claim Dickie's identity, thereby gaining the life, wealth, and possessions that Tom has come to believe are rightfully his. The word "obsession" does not appear once in the novel, but the book is saturated with questions of what creates obsession and what calamity can come of it. Tom's difficult childhood, spent under the watchful eye of his cruel Aunt Dottie, has rendered him "naïve" in many ways and without "enough time to learn and grow." This contributes to Tom's sponge-like persona, and his ability—or even desperation—to absorb the knowledge, qualities, and characteristics of others, such as Herbert, Marge, and Dickie. Through Tom, Highsmith is constructing a cautionary tale regarding the dangers—to oneself and to others—of not ever forming a true or concrete identity. Without a clear identity, Highsmith suggests, the individual has no choice but to consume the identities of others, to dangerous and maddening ends. Throughout the novel, Marge repeatedly calls into question the true nature of Tom and Dickie's relationship, believing their connection to each other to be toxic and obsessive, and perhaps more than platonic. Dickie tells Tom "clearly" that he is "not queer," though Marge believes Tom is "queer," and, as Dickie and Tom grow closer, Marge's suspicions only deepen. The sexual tension between Tom, Dickie, and Marge throughout the novel fuels each character's obsession and vanity. Tom's obsession with Dickie creates within Dickie an obsession regarding his own appearance, and causes Marge to fixate on her own rejection. This triumvirate of obsessions, all linked and all centered on Dickie, is engineered by Highsmith to illustrate not just the danger of obsession with another, but also obsession with the self—just as it's important to have a self, it's equally important not to worship the self, because it makes fools of Marge and Dickie, blinding them to their dangerous circumstances. Highsmith often makes reference to the uncanny physical similarities between Tom and Dickie. She creates this doppelganger effect between the two men both for the sake of narrative convenience (Tom can easily convince people that he is Dickie) and narrative intrigue (seeing themselves reflected in one another creates tension, curiosity, and mutual attachment). However, this confusion of Dickie and Tom's identities sets the stage for the novel's central tragedy. As soon as Tom feels that Dickie is becoming distant, the magnitude of his panic leads him to the extreme conclusion that "he could become Dickie Greenleaf." In a way, this is simultaneously an attempt to make sure he isn't ever completely cast off by Dickie, and a way to soothe his bruised ego after Dickie's rejection by becoming someone he considers to be better than himself. The doppelganger effect confuses and deepens the motives and desires that lead Tom to become Dickie; is Tom trying to protect Tom, destroy Tom, or both? The line between the two men is so fine and so porous that crossing it becomes, to Tom, a kind of deadly game in which the rewards of winning are as alluring as the thrill of the charade itself. - Theme: Wealth, Luxury, and Excess. Description: Highsmith's descriptions of Tom and Dickie's romps through Europe are alluring—they are some of the most lushly-worded parts of her book—and they make clear that wealth enables Dickie to do whatever he pleases. His life as a "painter" in Mongibello comes with a home, servants, and lavish lunches, dinners, and trips across Europe—often on a whim. By creating a portrait of excess and allowing readers to view it through the eyes of a poor man (Tom Ripley), Highsmith both venerates and decries life lived in the lap of luxury. Highsmith renders Dickie's existence in Europe in such high detail that the prose becomes overwhelmed and saturated with luxury; she creates excess in her writing the same way Dickie experiences excess in his life. The beautiful prose and the glut of detail invite readers into a relationship with wealth and excess that mirrors Tom's. Just as Tom is overwhelmed and entranced by Dickie's life, the reader is inundated by alluring details and pulled into an admiration of luxury through Highsmith's gorgeous descriptions. In addition, the many privileges of Dickie's life are rattled off in a blur, so that none of the details alone even seem to matter—this formless ambiance of wealth and materialism attracts Tom more than any individual aspect of Dickie's life does. The way privilege is taken for granted—by Dickie, by Marge, and, eventually, by Tom himself—is Highsmith's tongue-in-cheek indictment of the blindness of the upper class to their own privilege and to the plight of those who are worse off. Her portrait of luxury also reveals the wastefulness, pettiness, and false sense of security that wealth, in Highsmith's estimation, can create. As the novel unfolds, Tom's covetousness and sense of entitlement become a large part of how he justifies Dickie's murder, and how, once the murder is done, he assumes Dickie's life and identity while feeling remarkably little regret or remorse. Toward the end of the novel, when it seems as if Tom is about to be caught in his enormous lie, he wonders: "Supposing they got him and gave him the electric chair—could that death equal in pain, or could death itself, at twenty-five, be so tragic, that he could not say that the months from November until now had not been worth it? Certainly not." Even on the verge of a death sentence, Tom feels that his murderous, deceitful ways are "worth it" in order to glimpse, for even just a few months, the luxurious life of Dickie Greenleaf. Highsmith highlights this egregious immorality as a way to demonstrate the corrupting power of wealth, and she allows Tom to go unpunished to reveal the unfair protective powers wealth can bestow. Tom is so beholden to wealth and greed that he does unspeakable things in pursuit of it—it's a double bind for justice, then, that once he becomes wealthy through murder, his wealth protects him from facing the consequences of his reprehensible actions. Tom's ability to sneak by his acquaintances and the authorities is Highsmith's indictment not just of Tom's actions in pursuit of wealth, but of the vapid, destructive, and unjust underbelly of wealth itself. - Theme: Appearance vs. Reality. Description: Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Mr. Ripley. Tom's principal talent is presenting himself as other than he is, and this is the act from which he derives the most joy in his life. That shapeshifting quality, however, makes readers rightly suspicious of the outward appearances of several of the novel's major characters and settings. Tom Ripley inspires intrigue, suspicion, unease, and disorientation at every turn and, through the lens of his experiences, Highsmith argues that secrecy and deception and the gulf they create between appearance and reality are integral components of society and the self. Throughout the book, Highsmith charts Tom Ripley's constantly escalating rejection of himself and his need to convince individual after individual that he is other than what he truly is. Tom represents himself as an IRS agent to the individuals he's casually defrauding at the novel's start, and he falsely represents himself as a close friend of Dickie's to Dickie's father, Herbert (though, in reality, they're only acquaintances). This contributes to the sense that characters' statements and appearances should not be taken at face value. Sometimes, however, Tom even uses the truth to be manipulative: upon his arrival in Italy, he admits to Dickie that Herbert has sent him, thereby manipulating Dickie into accepting him by invoking his father (and implying that Tom made the trip out of familial concern, rather than a desire for Herbert's financial compensation). This further confuses the issue of appearance and deception, as even the truth is not off limits to manipulative twisting. The outward appearance of Dickie's life is one of luxury, intrigue, and a certain undeniable sensual allure. However, Highsmith imbues Dickie's apparently charmed life with a sense of burden. He is the unwilling heir to his father's shipping business—a burden he feels he must flee to Italy to escape—and his mother Emily is ill with leukemia. His abandonment of his family in their time of need is cruel, but Dickie's inability to cope with the expectations of his family shows that the appearance of ease and luxury does not encompass the full picture of Dickie's life and troubles. Furthermore, though he insists he's "not queer," Dickie's lack of interest in Marge—and lack of more than a passing interest in any woman—combined with his tumultuous, codependent friendship with Tom belies a sexual insecurity, and perhaps even a repressed sexual identity. The undercurrents of Dickie's personality—his need for solace, his moods, his apparent struggle with the implications of his close relationship with Tom—are shoved down, only perceptible to readers due to Tom Ripley's watchful eye and careful intuition. The deception necessary in order for Dickie to keep up appearances drives a wedge between him and Tom and ultimately leads to Dickie's demise. In a novel preoccupied with its characters' deceptions perpetrated for the sake of appearances, it's important to consider the manipulations Highsmith makes in addition to—or alongside—those of her characters. Highsmith couches her somewhat anarchic, insidious tale of the vindication of a murderous, manipulative villain within the structure of a thriller or suspense novel—a genre in which she'd established herself as a master. Though the novel takes on the appearance of a suspense story, it wrestles with deeper questions of deception, secrecy, obsession, and denial, and it manipulates its readers into sympathizing with a sociopath. The novel itself, then, uses the slick appearance of a thriller novel to conceal the reality that it is a dark meditation on greed, violence, and human nature. Highsmith is using all the forces at her disposal to remind readers to be discerning about the disjunction between appearance and reality, lest—like Tom—we slip into complacency and become unable to discern the truth of either. - Theme: Escapes. Description: Every major character in Mr. Ripley is running from something: Dickie Greenleaf flees a life in New York that he doesn't want, Tom Ripley runs from his poverty and self-loathing by escaping from his own identity, and Marge Sherwood escapes the realities of the writing life and the fear that her book won't ever be published. Furthermore, by allowing Tom Ripley to make the ultimate escape at the novel's end—an escape from justice—the novel configures escape as a moral question. Though readers are meant to root for Tom Ripley's escape, Highsmith intentionally raises the question of what rooting for such a despicable person means—does it shirk responsibility, accountability, and decency? Thus, one of the novel's central questions is whether a physical escape can ever equate with a moral one. "His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them," Highsmith writes of Tom. Tom's escape into the stories he creates in order to cover up his abduction of Dickie's life and identity demonstrates his ability to persuade himself of fiction upon fiction. He is such a seamless impersonator because he is able to use his vivid and twisted imagination to escape into a reality in which his falsehoods are truths—in other words, he comes close to actually believing that he is Dickie. However, this escape attempt fails when he is forced to return to living as Tom. Highsmith's unwillingness to let Tom fully escape into Dickie's identity forces Tom to grapple, to some extent, with what he has done. He must acknowledge that a part of his plan has failed, but instead of this accountability leading him to a moral revelation, it propels him into another means of escaping his own half-formed, loathsome identity: the thrill of creating another web of deception in which he lives as himself and covers up his previous actions while continuing to amass Dickie's wealth. Toward the novel's end, it seems as if the jig is up and Tom's capture by the authorities is imminent. When he arrives in Greece, Tom sees policemen waiting on the docks, and he accepts his fate—but the policeman do not pay him any attention. Thrilled by the realization of his final, ultimate escape from justice, Tom hails a cab and directs the driver to take him to the best hotel in town. The conventions of heist narratives, hero's journeys, and neat resolutions have conditioned readers to root for this escape. Therefore, by allowing Tom to escape without facing justice for his crimes, Highsmith makes readers—who are on Tom's side—complicit in supporting his immorality. Highsmith then holds readers accountable by forcing them to have the moral reckoning that Tom does not—what does it say about them that they have rooted for this villain against all common sense and decency? Furthermore, Highsmith subtly hints that Tom's reckoning may come, too. Despite having pulled off his final escape, Tom is haunted by the prospect that he'll see policemen—real or imagined—waiting for him wherever he goes. His conscience is not a healthy engine or a reliable one, but it exists nonetheless, and despite having physically escaped accountability for his crimes, readers are left with the impression that Tom will never truly escape from the magnitude of all the destruction he has caused. - Climax: Tom Ripley murders his acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf off the coast of San Remo in order to adopt Dickie's identity as his own. - Summary: Tom Ripley lives in a shabby brownstone in New York City and works as a casual extortionist when he meets Herbert Greenleaf. Herbert, the father of Tom's onetime acquaintance Dickie Greenleaf, is desperate for Dickie to return from Europe, where he's living as a painter in a small Italian village called Mongibello. Herbert offers to pay Tom's way if Tom will travel to Europe and convince Dickie to come home. Tom, who grew up poor and who remains envious of the lifestyles of the wealthy people he meets in New York, accepts the offer and boards a boat bound for Europe. In Italy, Tom orchestrates a casual run-in with Dickie. Dickie and Marge Sherwood are the only two Americans in Mongibello, and Tom, though sensing a strained sexual tension between the two of them, attempts to embed himself into their world. At first, Dickie is cold and standoffish. However, Tom confesses to Dickie that he's been sent by Herbert, and Dickie, amused by Herbert's desperation, accepts Tom as a friend. Together, the two travel around Italy, and become incredibly close. Tom moves into Dickie's home, and Dickie lends Tom his clothes and even calls him "Mr. Greenleaf" jokingly. Marge, upset and perturbed by the two men's sudden closeness, confronts Dickie, and Dickie's coolness toward Tom returns. Tom, realizing that his luxurious and carefree existence in Italy may be coming to an end, decides to murder Dickie and assume his identity. As a gifted forger and impersonator, Tom believes that the feat will be a simple one. On a trip to San Remo, Tom and Dickie take a boat out into the bay and, while they are at sea, Tom kills Dickie by striking him with an oar and sinking his body. After sinking the boat, Tom returns to shore and begins to cover up his crime and take the steps needed to become Dickie Greenleaf. Tom absconds to Rome, where he slightly changes his appearance, rents an apartment under Dickie's name, and spends Dickie's money. He wears Dickie's clothes and expensive rings, and luxuriates in his decadent new life. He writes letters to Marge, explaining that he has had to move away and cannot see her in order to figure out his feelings toward her, and to Dickie's parents, explaining his decision to remain in Italy after all. When another American, Freddie Miles, obtains "Dickie's" address and arrives for a visit, Tom answers the door as himself and narrowly avoids being found out, though Freddie is suspicious—after all, Tom is dressed in Dickie's clothes and is wearing Dickie's jewelry. Tom puts Freddie off, assuring him that Dickie is just downstairs at a nearby café, but, on his way out, Freddie encounters "Dickie's" landlady, who insists that "Signor Greenleaf" is the only resident of the apartment and is, in fact, right upstairs. When Freddie returns to investigate, Tom murders him as well, and, after staging a scene of drunken revelry, drives Freddie's body out to a cemetery and abandons it behind a headstone. When the police discover Freddie's body, they question "Dickie," believing unquestioningly that he his who he says he is. Tom is relieved, but soon encounters a newspaper headline which describes the discovery of a bloodstained boat in the San Remo bay. Realizing that if a body is found in the water as well it will be assumed to be that of Tom Ripley—since Tom has been living as Dickie and has left no trail of his "own" whereabouts—and "Dickie Greenleaf" will be a suspect in not just one but two murders—that of Freddie Miles, and that of Tom Ripley. Marge arrives in town, and Tom speaks to her over the phone as himself, assuring her that everything is all right, before leaving for Sicily as Dickie in order to abandon the trail of Dickie's identity there and return to Italy as Tom Ripley. After several days of "behaving" once again as Tom Ripley, he sends two suitcases of Dickie's belongings ahead to Venice, in case he wants to claim them sometime in the future, and returns to Rome as himself. When he does, the newspapers describe the search for a "missing" Dickie Greenleaf. A search ensues, and garners more and more attention in the Italian press. Tom moves to Venice, where he attends parties and fields questions as to Dickie's whereabouts. Soon, Marge arrives in town, and, after spotting Dickie's rings in Tom's apartment, comes to the conclusion that Dickie must have committed suicide—he would never, she insists, be without his rings. Herbert arrives in Italy as well, with an American investigator, but "Dickie's" trail has gone cold. Tom, in one brazen, final act of deceit, composes a letter from "Dickie" which bequeaths his entire estate unto Tom. Though nervous to go through with such a huge endeavor, Tom forwards the letter to Herbert, then embarks on a journey to Greece. However, after the discovery of Dickie's trunks at the American Express in Venice, Tom fears that he will be found out when the authorities obtain his fingerprints. Upon docking in Greece, Tom notices policemen on the shore, and is sure that his streak of luck and deceit has run out. However, the police do not stop him when he disembarks the ship. Confused, Tom heads to the American Express to collect his mail—a letter from Herbert has arrived, acquiescing to "Dickie's" wishes that Tom be the sole inheritor of his estate and confirming that the funds will be transferred to Tom shortly. Relieved, Tom hails a cab, and instructs the driver to take him to the finest hotel in town.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Taste of Watermelon - Point of view: first person - Setting: A small agricultural town in the rural American south - Character: The Narrator. Description: The story's narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy who has just moved to a rural Southern community, and the story traces his coming of age. In the beginning, he still feels like an outsider to his town, and he's trying to fit in with his new friends, Freddy Gray and J.D. who seem skeptical of him. Like his two friends, he has a crush on Willadean, his sixteen-year-old neighbor. One late summer night, in a youthful act of bravado, the narrator decides to rebel against the terrifying Mr. Wills, Willadean's father, who he thinks is a cruel and irrationally angry man. He does so by stealing Mr. Willis's prized "seed watermelon," the biggest watermelon the community has ever seen. Only after eating the watermelon with his friends does the narrator begin to understand the consequences of his actions; Mr. Willis is so distraught that he destroys the rest of his crop before revealing that he had planned to give the watermelon to the ailing Mrs. Wills in order to cheer her up. Ashamed, the narrator retreats to his room and realizes that he stole the watermelon out of an immature desire to fit in with his friends and impress Willadean. The next morning, the narrator decides to try to repair the damage, and he collects the watermelon seeds and gives them back to Mr. Wills, despite his fear of Mr. Wills's anger. Mr. Wills forgives him and asks that the narrator make amends by working on his farm the next year, and the narrator readily agrees. By the end of his character arc, the narrator has learned the importance of thoughtfulness, hard work, and honesty. - Character: Mr. Wills. Description: Mr. Wills is the best and most intimidating farmer in the community. While he can grow anything on his land, his method of farming involves yelling and "fight[ing] the earth." Combined with his large physical stature, this behavior makes him seem terrifying to his neighborhood, including the narrator and his two best friends. The summer the story takes place, Mr. Wills is growing the biggest watermelon the community has ever seen, and he is very protective of it, standing guard over it every night with his shotgun instead of letting teenage boys raid his watermelon patch as the other farmers do. The narrator's parents criticize him for watching over the watermelon more than his own wife, who is sick and rarely ever leaves the house. The community also gossips that he fills his shotgun with buckshot, which could kill, rather than the salt pellets farmers usually use. However, after the narrator steals Mr. Wills's watermelon, Mr. Wills reveals the reason for his vigilance over the melon: he had planned to give it to Mrs. Wills, who in turn had planned to give it out to the entire neighborhood in an effort to make friends. In a devastated rage, Mr. Wills destroys the entire watermelon patch. But the next morning, when the narrator apologizes for stealing the watermelon, Mr. Wills is no longer angry. Instead, he expresses how hurt he is by the narrator's actions, and he admits his own shame at having destroyed the rest of the watermelons the night before. He then asks the narrator to help out on his farm next year, since the narrator's own father does not farm. In this way, Mr. Wills becomes a role model for the narrator by the end of the story, showing the importance of not judging people too quickly. - Character: Willadean. Description: Willadean is the narrator's sixteen-year-old neighbor, a tall, slender girl who, in the past year, has begun to mature. Freddy Gray remembers how the year before, Willadean had played children's games. But this year, she refrains from those games, and instead walks in a way that fascinates the narrator and his friends. All three of the friends are secretly vying to take her out on a date, but none of them can build up the courage to ask, because they're scared of her father, Mr. Wills. The narrator realizes that part of the reason he feels like an outsider with Freddy Gray and J.D. is that they are afraid Willadean might like him more than them, because he is new to the neighborhood. So, partly in order to prove himself to Willadean, the narrator steals her father's prized watermelon. But when he sees Willadean and her mother standing in the kitchen doorway, watching Mr. Wills destroy the melon crop, he realizes that he has not won Willadean's approval at all. The next morning, she answers the door when the narrator comes to apologize to her father, and he can't bear to look at her; when he finally does, he can't figure out how she feels about him. But when he agrees to work for Mr. Wills, he sees that her eyes are smiling. Emboldened, he says he would be "willing to set on the porch with Willadean anytime," and she blushes in response but doesn't seem angry. In this way, the narrator has won Willadean's approval—not through his rash bravado, but through his braver qualities of honesty and compassion. Their small interaction at the end of the story holds the potential for a deeper relationship, in which the narrator treats Willadean as a person instead of an object. - Character: Freddy Gray. Description: Freddy Gray is one of the narrator's new friends in the neighborhood. Along with J.D., the three teenage boys form a "bunch." Their relationships to each other are still childish: they are "still young enough" that they need the bunch to feel secure, rather than acting independently as adults, and they are not able to communicate about the dynamics "under the surface" of their relationship. One of these dynamics is that the narrator is new to their rural community, having moved from town, so the two boys don't totally trust him yet. Before the narrator steals the watermelon, Freddy Gray seems to be the unofficial leader of the group. He speaks with more authority than the others, and he is the first one to jump in the water when they go swimming. He is also the one to challenge the narrator to steal the watermelon. Afterwards, though, the narrator assumes leadership of the group, as he digs into the watermelon first and then graciously offers that the two others "help themselves" to his stolen prize. In this way, the narrator wins himself more belonging in the group by stealing the watermelon, although that belonging comes with the steep price of shared guilt for their actions. - Character: Mrs. Wills. Description: Mrs. Wills is Mr. Wills's wife. She has been sick all year, and as a result, she is a very thin woman with pale skin. She sometimes sits on the porch for an hour or two, but she never visits with anyone else in the neighborhood. After the narrator steals the giant watermelon, Mr. Wills reveals that Mrs. Wills loves watermelons and had asked him about the progress of the "seed melon" every day. It was a symbol of hope for her, as she looked forward both to the meat of the melon itself and to enjoying the crop of giant watermelons that the melon's seeds would bring the next year. Later, when the narrator apologizes to Mr. Wills, he learns that Mrs. Wills had not wanted the melon all for herself, but was instead hoping to share the melon with the whole neighborhood. This caring gesture suggests that people are not always what they appear. While the Wills family had appeared antisocial out of choice, Mrs. Wills had actually craved connection with her community. - Character: The narrator's father. Description: The narrator's father does not farm like the other fathers. Instead, he still works in the town the family moved from. He seems to have grown up in a similar rural community, as he fondly remembers raiding watermelons as a rebellious teenage rite of passage. When Mr. Wills destroys his watermelon patch after finding out his prized watermelon has been stolen, the narrator's father models a brave, caring masculinity by trying to stop Mr. Wills's destruction, despite being smaller than him. His reaction to learning that the narrator has stolen the watermelon also demonstrates thoughtfulness and care, as he does not angrily reprimand his son, but instead goes over to the Wills house to help his son apologize. - Theme: Coming of Age and Masculinity. Description: In "The Taste of Watermelon," the 16-year-old narrator comes of age, particularly by finding a way to belong to the world of men. At the beginning of the story, the narrator and his two friends are still boys. They're interested in dating their neighbor, Willadean Wills, but they never talk to her because they are afraid of her father. And they are "still young enough" that they seek the security of belonging in a "bunch" of friends, rather than having the maturity to strike out after their individual desires on their own. But one night, after swimming with the boys at the creek, this changes. The narrator decides to defy his friends' protests and steal a giant watermelon from Willadean's father, Mr. Wills. The watermelon is both a stand-in for Willadean herself (whom he intends to impress by stealing the watermelon), and a way to differentiate himself from the boys and earn their respect as a man. However, after successfully stealing the melon only to waste most of it, the narrator returns home to find out from a devastated Mr. Wills that the watermelon was supposed to cheer up the ailing Mrs. Wills, who had looked forward all summer to sharing it with the community. Rather than feeling like a man, the narrator feels foolish and ashamed. To make amends, he brings the watermelon seeds to Mr. Wills the next morning, apologizes for his crime, and makes a plan to work on the Wills farm the next year. After the conversation, the narrator looks up to see the smiling eyes of Willadean; what won her over wasn't foolishly stealing the watermelon in an act of misguided bravado, but having the courage to apologize and return the seeds. The narrator's coming of age moment is therefore not his rebellious stand against Mr. Wills, but his much braver act of finding compassion for the man he feared, owning up to his mistakes, and committing himself to the hard work of repairing the damage. In this way, the story suggests that true maturity and masculinity lie not in rash rebellion but in the more thoughtful qualities of honesty, compassion, and hard work. - Theme: Rushing to Judgment. Description: Through the hidden kindness of Mr. Wills, "The Taste of Watermelon" suggests that people are not always what they seem. The sixteen-year-old narrator and his family have recently moved next door to Mr. Wills, an intimidating and talented farmer. He is a big man who seems quick to anger, and he never visits with anyone in the community, which others find weird. For this reason, when Mr. Wills obsessively guards an especially large watermelon growing on his farm, the narrator's family judge him for acting selfishly, assuming that he's being needlessly possessive and that, by devoting himself to his melon, he's neglecting his sick wife. Finally, when the narrator hears a rumor that Mr. Wills's shotgun holds lethal bullets instead of the salt pellets farmers normally use, he feels sure that Mr. Wills is a cruel tyrant, overly protective both of his watermelon patch and his attractive teenage daughter. This motivates him to steal Mr. Wills's prize melon, partly to rebel against his perceived cruelty. However, the events of the story show that the narrator was wrong to assume that Mr. Wills was unkind and tyrannical. After stealing the enormous watermelon, the narrator learns that Mr. Wills was growing the watermelon for his sick wife, who was planning on sharing it with the entire neighborhood. Far from acting selfishly, Mr. Wills's devotion to the watermelon was an act of love for his wife and an act of hope that they might become woven into the wider community. The family's antisocial nature turns out to be due to Mrs. Wills's illness and Mr. Wills's overwork, as he does not have a son to help out on the farm. Ultimately, when the narrator admits to his crime, Mr. Wills forgives him readily, reveals that his gun was only filled with salt pellets, and suggests that the narrator repay him by helping him farm next year. In this way, the story reveals that superficial judgments often hide a more complex truth—perceived villains might simply be misunderstood. - Theme: Exclusion, Cruelty, and Belonging. Description: Many characters in "The Taste of Watermelon" struggle to feel included in the rural farming community where the story is set. The sixteen-year-old narrator feels like an outsider even among his two best friends, as he moved there only a year before the events of the story, and his friends still seem skeptical of him. The Wills family also seem to be outsiders in the community, as they do not socialize much with their neighbors. But each of these characters longs to belong to their community: the narrator wants to earn the acceptance of his friends, and the Wills family turns out to be trying to get friendlier with their neighbors. A big question of the story, then, is how one can successfully belong. The narrator's initial quest for acceptance comes at a huge cost: to impress his friends, he steals the giant watermelon from Mr. Wills's farm. But after destroying the watermelon, the narrator and his friends quickly part ways, feeling guilty and depressed and not particularly connected to one another. Worse, the narrator then learns that Mr. Wills was growing the melon to cheer up his chronically ill wife, who was looking forward to sharing the watermelon with the neighborhood. By stealing the watermelon to fit in with his friends, the narrator crushed the Wills's plans for acceptance in the community. Not being accepted himself, he knows that he's done something grave. But the narrator redeems himself in a way that helps both him and the Wills family feel more connected: he apologizes to Mr. Wills and agrees to work on the Wills farm the next year to help make up for this year's loss. In doing so, he builds a relationship with the Wills family, finally linking these neighbors together. The narrator's initial attempt to belong—stealing the watermelon—backfired because it was rooted in cruelty, which doesn't bring people together. By contrast, the narrator's sincere apology and offer of help begins to weave him into the community. In this way, the story suggests that community can only be built on kindness and sincerity, not bravado and cruelty. - Theme: Morality. Description: "The taste of Watermelon" examines the morality of a small farming community. At the beginning of the story, the narrator believes that his neighbor, Mr. Wills, is acting immorally, because he won't allow teenage boys to steal watermelons from his field, a commonly accepted "rite of passage" in the community. The narrator's parents support this notion, criticizing Mr. Wills for protecting his watermelon patch so obsessively. However, after stealing Mr. Wills's giant watermelon, the seeds of which Mr. Wills intended to use for planting next year's crop, the narrator realizes that he is the one who disobeyed the town's moral code: in stealing the "seed melon," the narrator not only wasted the bulk of the fruit, which should have been shared with the community, but also stole the seeds that would have made the community the site of "the greatest melon crop in the world." As such, the story's morality centers the good of the community rather than the benefit of any individual. The normal theft of watermelons is not seen as crime because it is an outlet for teenage boys' rebelliousness, and as such, is good for the community. But the narrator's theft of the seed watermelon is a crime, not because it is theft of private property, but because it places the narrator's individual desires over the benefits that the watermelon would have brought to everyone. Ultimately, the narrator rights his transgression by bringing the seeds back to Mr. Wills and promising to work on the Wills farm next year, thus re-committing himself to the communal good. In this way, the story suggests that individual profit should be second to communal benefit. - Theme: Illicit Sexuality and Acceptable Romance. Description: In "The Taste of Watermelon," the narrator navigates his budding sexuality within the strict moral codes of the farming community where his family has recently relocated. The narrator and his two friends share a common romantic interest in Willadean, a neighbor whose father, Mr. Wills, terrifies them. In part to impress Willadean, the narrator steals Mr. Wills's "seed watermelon," the biggest watermelon ever grown in the community, and his two friends eat the watermelon illicitly, hiding in the woods behind Mr. Wills's house. The watermelon and Willadean are parallel objects of sexual and romantic interest throughout the story: they both attract male attention, and Mr. Wills feels the need to protect both of them from that attention. Furthermore, the descriptions of the narrator's desire for the watermelon are highly sexual: the narrator imagines "the sweet red juices oozing over his tongue," and once he has stolen the watermelon, his pocketknife "penetrate[s] the thick green rind," splitting the watermelon so that it "l[ies] open before" the three boys. However, this implied illicit sexuality results in moral catastrophe, as the narrator and his friends feel disgusted by their actions and realize the harm they have brought to the Wills family. By contrast, when the narrator apologizes to Mr. Wills for his crime, he and Willadean commence a much more acceptable romantic relationship within the community's moral code, with the tacit approval of the adults present. The narrator offers to "set on the porch with Willadean anytime," making Willadean blush and the two teenagers' fathers laugh. By comparing these two opposing sexual and romantic experiences, the story suggests that teenage romance is acceptable, but only within the context of honesty (and with permission from adults). - Climax: The narrator apologizes to Mr. Wills - Summary: The sixteen-year-old narrator wants to fit in with his new community. Although he is friends with Freddy Gray and J.D., they don't completely trust him yet, because his family has just moved to their rural community the year before. The three boys want to date the narrator's neighbor, Willadean Wills. But they are afraid of her father, Mr. Wills, who is a talented and intimidating farmer. He grows watermelons behind his barn, and he is more protective of those melons than anything else. Even though it's a well-known rite of passage for teenage boys in the community to sneak melons from farmers' fields, Mr. Wills won't let anyone near his. This summer, Mr. Wills is growing the biggest watermelon anyone has ever seen, and he plans to save its seeds for next year. One night, the boys go swimming under a full moon and sit on the river bank and talk about Mr. Wills, who has guarded his "seed melon" every night with a shotgun. According to Freddy Gray and J.D., Mr. Wills loads his gun with lethal buckshot, instead of the salt pellets farmers usually use. The narrator, astounded that Mr. Wills would go to such lengths for a melon, surprises himself and his friends by announcing that he plans to steal the melon that very night. Freddy Gray and J.D. protest, telling him that it's too risky under the bright full moon, but the narrator's mind is made up. So the trio sneak over to the woods behind Mr. Wills's watermelon patch. Mr. Wills is sitting at his post, his gun gleaming in the moonlight. The narrator crawls the 200 yards over to the giant watermelon, covered by the tall grass in the patch. After finally reaching the melon, he lies down in the field and contemplates carving his name into the melon instead of stealing it, but he decides that in order to prove himself to Mr. Wills and Willadean, he must take the melon. He then laboriously rolls the melon out of the patch, terrified of getting shot. But he makes it out unscathed, and the three boys carry the melon back to the creek. They haven't eaten half of it by the time they are full, so they destroy the rest of the melon, depressed at the waste, but unable to share the leftovers with anyone. They say goodbye sullenly. The narrator returns home in time to see Mr. Wills realize that the melon is missing. The farmer runs up and down the patch, destroying all the other melons in an animalistic rage that horrifies the narrator. Ashamed, the narrator runs up to his room, and contemplates his crime until dawn. He feels terrible that he stole the melon with so little thought of the consequences, and he knows he has to try to repair the damage he caused. In the early morning light, he goes back to the creek and collects the watermelon seeds. He then knocks on Mr. Wills's door and offers him the seeds. Mr. Wills reveals that his sick wife had planned on inviting the neighborhood over to eat the melon. When the narrator apologizes, Mr. Wills admits that he is also ashamed of destroying the rest of the watermelon patch. He then asks the narrator to help out on his farm next year. The narrator agrees, looking up to see the smiling eyes of Willadean behind her father. Finally, he asks Mr. Wills if he had buckshot in his gun, and the farmer shows him that the gun was only filled with salt pellets. Assured of Mr. Wills's good character, the narrator commits himself to working hard for him next year.

- Genre: Fantasy; horror - Title: The Thing in the Forest - Point of view: Third person omniscient - Setting: The story begins at a house in the English countryside in the 1940s, and concludes at that same house in 1984 - Character: Penny. Description: One of the two main characters, Penny is a young girl at the beginning of the story who is evacuated from London with a group of children to escape the German bombing of London during World War II. She ventures into the woods with her new friend, Primrose, and together the two see the Thing in the forest (i.e., the loathly worm). They survive the encounter, and by the time Penny is returned to her family, her father has died. Her mother withdraws after this, leaving Penny to feel emotionally abandoned. She grows up to become a child psychologist specializing in children with severe autism. People with autism are often withdrawn, as Penny herself was, and she hopes that, by reaching out to them, she can help them in a way that no one helped her. She returns as an adult to the woods where she once encountered the loathly worm in the hopes that, by confronting the terror from her childhood, she can diminish its power over her and, in doing so, overcome her childhood trauma. Penny is a scientist, someone who relies on observation, data, and her five senses. When she does not encounter the worm on her return to the forest, she returns a second time, determined to draw the worm to her so that she can see it. She finally hears the worm approaching, and in this moment seems to be at peace, her "nerves relaxed" and her "blood slowed." Byatt leaves it unclear whether Penny survives this second meeting with the worm. Because the worm is such a clear symbol of trauma and loss, this ending implies that Penny is ultimately destroyed by her grief surrounding her childhood trauma. - Character: Primrose. Description: One of the two main characters, Primrose is a young girl at the beginning of the story who is evacuated from London with a group of children to escape the German bombing of London during World War II. She ventures into the woods with her new friend, Penny, and together the two see the Thing in the forest (i.e., the loathly worm). Like Penny's father, Primrose's father is also killed in the war, and her mother remarries, having five more children whom Primrose has to help raise. This robs her of a carefree childhood—something which the evacuation and her encounter with the loathly worm had already jeopardized. Thus, Primrose grows up to lead a carefree adulthood, working odd jobs and living in an austere apartment. Her one talent is storytelling, and she does this for a living, entertaining children at parties and at a local shopping mall. Her life is only carefree on the surface, however, for Primrose was also traumatized by her childhood, and cannot forget her encounter with the loathly worm. When she returns to the forest as an adult and does not find the worm, this bothers her less than it bothers Penny. Unlike Penny, who feels she must come face-to-face with the worm to overcome her trauma, Primrose relies on her imagination, recasting herself as confident and self-reliant, and the forest as a place of "glamour" rather than terror. After revisiting the forest as an adult, Primrose returns to her life with a sense of closure. In the final scene, she tells a group of children a story about "two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest," thereby opening herself to the possibility that she had only imagined the worm. Primrose overcomes her trauma by looking inward rather than outward, and by relinquishing her need to find a clear answer to the question of whether or not the worm was real. - Theme: Trauma and Loss. Description: Fairy tales, despite being thought of as stories for children, are often full of trauma. Especially in stories that deal with the process of "coming of age," experiences of trauma and loss often spur characters to come to terms with the reality that the world can be a harsh, unforgiving, and scary place. Penny and Primrose deal with literal and figurative loss along their journey to make sense of their encounter with the Thing in the forest. The characters' pursuit of truth should be healing for them, yet the story's ending suggests that Penny is destroyed by her search, which has become an obsession (she went into the forest twice, after all). Byatt seems to encourage confrontation with the losses and traumas of the past while warning that there is no guarantee that such confrontations will ultimately be healing. Penny and Primrose suffer various traumas in their childhoods. Apart from the general trauma of the war (and their evacuation as a result), each of their fathers dies during the war, leaving their mothers to hold together their fragmented families. However, Byatt suggests Penny and Primrose's mothers each fail their daughters in different ways, setting the stage for the girls' eventual return to the forest as adults. In the wake of her husband's death, Penny's mother "embraced grief, closed her face and her curtains." This withdrawal no doubt reinforces the loneliness and abandonment Penny felt when she was sent to the country mansion during the evacuation, as well as when her father died. Thus, by returning to the forest to confront the loathly worm, Penny is also confronting that feeling of abandonment. Primrose's mother, by contrast, marries again, has numerous children, and lives a hard life, developing "varicose veins and a smoker's cough." Primrose likewise has an unsettled adulthood, doing "this and that," mirroring the ways in which her childhood was unsettled by the war, the loss of her father, and by the appearance of five new siblings. By returning to confront the worm, Primrose is also confronting that feeling of chaos. Consciously or unconsciously, the loathly worm seems to symbolize, for the characters, the traumas of their childhood. Part of growing up is facing those traumas and overcoming them. Byatt illustrates just how frightening and difficult this process is through Penny and Primrose's fear of the loathly worm—a fear that stays with them as they grow into adults. Penny and Primrose encounter the loathly worm as children. This exposure to something nightmarish leaves them "shaking with dry sobs" and unable to escape the memory of it. The encounter is an external representation of the dread of war and loss—as well as the fear and uncertainty that many children feel when they learn the harsh truths of life. As adults, Penny and Primrose speculate on the death of the younger child, Alys, who had wanted to go into the woods with them. Her death symbolizes the way the loathly worm "finished off" young Penny and Primrose. In other words, if the worm is a symbol of trauma—whether it's the devastation of war or the loss of a parent—then Alys represents the girls' innocence, which the worm destroyed without leaving a trace. As adults, Penny and Primrose return to the woods in search of the worm. After attempting to suppress their memories of it for years, the women realize that making that journey again to confront the worm is the only way to overcome the traumatic experiences of their childhoods. They approach the confrontation in different ways, with different results. In this way, Byatt suggests that each person processes trauma in unique ways. Primrose does not meet the worm when she returns to the forest. Instead, her mind wanders as she thinks of toys her mother gave her, and the stories she made up featuring herself and those toys. She leaves feeling a sense of closure. Later, she turns her experience of the worm into a story that she tells to amuse children. Thus, Primrose's approach to trauma is to enter the world of imagination—an approach which seems to heal her. After Penny returns to the forest and does not find the worm, she returns a second time, determined to "look it in the face." She does not merely tell herself a story like Primrose and then walk away. Instead, Penny—a psychologist—feels a need to analyze her childhood trauma closely, firsthand. She needs to see and hear it. Byatt alludes to the risks of this approach through suggesting that Penny, like Alys, is ultimately destroyed by the worm—consumed by the trauma of her childhood. Encountering the loathly worm is a childhood trauma that Penny and Primrose carry with them into adulthood. They return to the forest to confront the worm as well as their own pasts. Confrontation and closure are, for Byatt's characters, necessary parts of the years-long process of healing from trauma. Byatt cautions, however, that the need for closure can be the thing that prevents healing. - Theme: Reality vs. Fantasy. Description: "The Thing in the Forest" takes place in the real world, but the story has supernatural elements, and therefore blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy. This blurring effect is heightened by Penny and Primrose's frequent questions about whether they really saw anything in the forest as children. One of the reasons they return as adults is to clarify for themselves what is real. As they seek to confront the loathly worm, they are, on some level, seeking to answer deeper questions for themselves about what is real and what is imagined. Their confusion is often shared by the reader, and is further highlighted by Byatt's use of magical realism. Byatt describes the forest as a place of mystery and enchantment, a place where reality bends into fantasy and illusion. Penny and Primrose wonder what is real, and after seeing the loathly worm, they repeatedly question what they saw, giving them a motive for returning to the forest as adults. The story's first sentence—"There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest"—establishes that the forest is a place of uncertainty and confusion. This uncertainty provides the main conflict of the story: the girls return to the forest to verify, and confront, a terror from their past. The forest is described as "inviting and mysterious," "a source of attraction and discomfort, shading into terror," and a place where "something that resembled unreality had lumbered into reality." This language suggests that feelings of terror and excitement are often interrelated, just as fantasy often contains elements of reality and vice versa. When she returns to the forest as an adult, Primrose remembers stories she told herself as a child, which comfort her, leading her to abandon her search for the loathly worm. In the final scene, she begins to tell the children about the worm, relegating it to the realm of fiction, where she has power over it. In this way, she takes advantage of the blurred line between fantasy and reality to triumph over her trauma. Penny is a psychologist specializing in children who are autistic—and who often have trouble sharing their dreams, expressing their imaginations, or reporting on their senses. All of this poses the challenge, for Penny, of determining how to access the realities and experiences of these children. This problem echoes the question that has haunted Penny all these years—the question of what, if anything, she saw in the forest as a child. The need to answer that question is what drives Penny back to the forest as an adult. The central question of the story is in many ways the question of whether Penny and Primrose actually saw the loathly worm. Byatt uses several elements beyond the women's own uncertainty to further weaken the boundary between fantasy and reality. When Penny and Primrose return to the mansion as adults, they notice that "there was all that history, but no sign that they […] had ever been there." The thought strengthens the women's resolve to return to the forest, as much in an effort to prove their own reality as in an effort to prove the reality of the worm. Penny and Primrose discuss Alys, "that little one," who they suppose was killed by the worm. They have no evidence she existed, noting that "nobody ever asked where she was or looked for her," yet they think she did, just as they think they saw the loathly worm. Thus, Byatt uses Alys's character to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. The question of whether the worm is real—and of whether the two girls actually saw it—is ultimately left unresolved. Speaking about the worm, Penny says that "there are things that are real—more real than we are—but mostly we don't cross their paths, or they don't cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they're doing in ours." In this way, although the worm's reality is in question until the story's end, it remains, in the mind of Penny at least, more real than reality—a seeming paradox. Although Primrose seems able to resolve this paradox and leave behind the nagging questions about the reality of what she saw in the forest as a child, for Penny the worm remains not only a source of confusion about the boundary between reality and fantasy, but a reminder that fantasy can have a kind of power over individuals that renders even objective reality irrelevant. - Theme: Relationships. Description: Penny and Primrose share a traumatic experience as children, and perhaps as a result they grow up to be lonely adults. Their trauma is worsened, then, by their having no one to lean on, no relationships to enrich their lives. In this way, Byatt depicts relationships as an integral part of life, fundamental to the processes of healing and maturation. The story begins with children being evacuated from war-torn London—an experience which puts a strain on those children's relationships with their families, as the children would be scared and worried about being away from home. This separation heightens the overall feeling of dread in the story. The narrator notes that Penny and Primrose "did not even know why they were going," and they wondered whether it was "a sort of punishment." Such a strain on the girls' familial relationships put each of them in a more fearful frame of mind, in turn heightening their sense of terror when they eventually encounter the loathly worm. Each girl's father was killed during the war. The girls "found it hard, after the war, to remember these different men." Death is the ultimate separation, and it furthers the girls' sense of loneliness and alienation, which they maintain into adulthood. Their careers, both of which involve building and nurturing relationships with children, are extensions of their personalities, which have been shaped by their individual responses to a shared traumatic experience. Penny is a psychologist who specializes in autistic children; her patients are often uncommunicative and closed off from the world, unable to share their dreams with Penny. She sees her patients as lonely and isolated like herself, and wants to help them. Primrose tells stories to children, so her career requires creativity and imagination, but it is less demanding than Penny's career—which aligns more generally with Primrose's rootless, carefree existence. Yet her stories seem to enable her to form deeper connections with children than Penny's therapy practice. These connections perhaps account for Primrose's ability to move on from her search for the loathly worm as she realizes she no longer needs to confront it. The story is built around Penny and Primrose's relationship, which consists of just two meetings, each a coincidental one in which they happen to be in the same place at the same time. The friendship is not a strong one, which is no doubt part of the reason why each woman goes into the forest alone when they return as adults. The need of each woman to confront the loathly worm on her own reinforces their loneliness as well as the isolating nature of trauma and the experience of recovery. After seeing the worm as children, the two girls walk back to the mansion, after which they "[do] not speak to each other again." Their friendship is a weak alliance, one born of extreme circumstances but not nurtured through time. Byatt suggests that the girls' relationship is insubstantial—as tenuous as their memories of the worm itself. As adults, Penny and Primrose discuss their experience as children, with a goal of making sure that what they remember really happened. They are comforted by the assurance that they are able to give one another. "Well, we know we're not mad," Primrose says after their conversation. Yet they don't become true friends, as evidenced by the fact that, although they make dinner plans for the following night, neither of them shows up. The uncertain nature of their girlhood friendship has extended into adulthood, reinforcing their feelings of alienation and dread, and giving each one the incentive to return to the forest to confirm her own experience and confront her own terror alone. A network of strong relationships can be an asset when dealing with loss and hardship. Penny and Primrose each felt abandoned as children in different ways, and they carry that sense of loneliness with them into their adult lives. While Penny is plagued by feelings of alienation until the very end of the story, Primrose manages to find human connection through storytelling, and Byatt suggests that she ultimately recovers from the horror of witnessing the Thing in the forest, whereas Penny seems to implode under the weight of her emotions and loneliness. In this way, Byatt seems to confirm the essential nature of relationships and human connection to the process of growth and self-fulfillment. - Climax: An adult Penny returns to the forest a second time - Summary: Penny and Primrose are two girls who are evacuated with a group of children to a mansion in the English countryside during World War II. They are evacuated to escape the Nazi bombing of London (i.e., the Blitz), which took place from 1940-41. Penny is tall, thin, pale, and possibly older than Primrose, who is plump with curly blond hair. They become friends on the train, discussing their bewilderment over their evacuation, wondering "whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort of punishment." The girls arrive, along with a group of many other children, at the mansion—a big, eerie place surrounded by a forest. They are anxious and scared, thinking of themselves as orphans. Some of the children cry themselves to sleep that first night. The next morning, after breakfast, Penny and Primrose decide to explore the forest. A younger child, Alys, wants to go with them, but they tell her no, saying she is too little. Creeping into the forest, the two girls hear a "crunching, a crackling, a crushing, a heavy thumping, combining with threshing and thrashing," plus a host of other noises. They also smell a stench like that of "maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, blocked drains, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding." Finally, they see a giant, fleshy caterpillar-like creature trundling through the forest, crushing foliage in its path and wailing terribly as it passes. When the thing is gone, the frightened girls return to the mansion. The next day, they are sent to stay in separate places for the rest of the evacuation. They can't forget what they saw, though they don't discuss it with anyone. After the evacuation, the girls return to their families, which the war has altered. Primrose's father has been killed on a troop carrier in the Far East, and afterwards her mother remarries, having five more children. Penny's father dies in a fire in London. The years pass, and Penny goes to university, studying developmental psychology. Primrose struggles in school, due to having to babysit her younger siblings. Penny becomes a child psychologist, while Primrose holds a series of odd jobs before settling down as a children's storyteller. In 1984, Penny and Primrose, having had no contact during the forty years since they saw the thing in the forest, travel separately to the country mansion, which has been turned into a museum. They run into each other while looking at an old book on display. The book tells the story of the Loathly Worm, a giant creature that, according to legend, had once terrorized the countryside around the mansion. Delighting at their reunion, the women have tea and talk about their lives. Neither is married, and neither has children. Finally, they discuss the day they met the loathly worm in the forest. "Did you ever wonder," Primrose asks, "if we really saw it?" Penny replies, "Never for a moment." They discuss the horror of that day, and how their lives have been affected. They wonder what happened to Alys, the child who had wanted to go with them into the forest, and agree that the worm must have killed her. After the discussion, the women feel better, realizing that they aren't crazy. Penny and Primrose agree to have dinner together the next evening, but neither of them shows up. On the following day, they set out separately for the forest surrounding the mansion. Primrose hikes for a while, then sits on a tree trunk, thinking of her mother, who used to make stuffed animals to give to her. Primrose hadn't realized the animals were handmade, and when she eventually found this out, she was disappointed. Standing up, she resumes walking, telling herself a story about "staunch Primrose" (herself) bravely walking through the forest. She stops again, remembering more about her dead father and her "sniveling" mother with her "dripping nose." She considers the difference between reality and imagination, and decides that the imagination is, to her, more real than reality. Finally, she walks out of the forest. Penny is in a different part of the forest, trying to find the spot where she and Primrose had seen the loathly worm as children. She finds evidence of the worm: "odd sausage-shaped tubes of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs." Finding a spot to sit down, Penny reflects on her career as a psychologist, realizing that her encounter with the worm all those years ago "had led her to deal professionally in dreams." She hears a rumbling and thinks it is the worm returning, but she sees nothing. She thinks about her own dead father. After a while, when night falls, she leaves the forest. Penny and Primrose both return home, but Penny can't stop thinking about the worm, so she travels back to the forest once more, deciding she needs to confront the worm. Finding the same spot, she waits and silently calls to the worm, which she then hears approaching. Penny is ready for whatever happens. Primrose does not return to the forest, going instead to one of her storytelling sessions in a shopping mall. She smiles at her students and tells them about two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.

- Genre: War Novel - Title: The Things They Carried - Point of view: - Setting: Vietnam; Minnesota; central Iowa - Character: Elroy Berdahl. Description: The man that Tim O'Brien considers to be his "life hero." Berdahl takes O'Brien in after O'Brien attempts to dodge the draft and head for Canada. O'Brien stays with Berdahl for a week at The Tip Top Lodge, where Berdahl offers him money and the opportunity to flee while they're out on a boat ride. - Character: Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Description: The Lieutenant of the Alpha Company. He never wanted to go to war, nor did he want to have to lead men. Instead he's preoccupied with how much he's in love with a girl named Martha from home. This infatuation lasts long after the war, though they never get together. - Character: Martha. Description: The love interest of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. They went on a single date in college. She sent him letters in the war and a pebble for good luck. After Vietnam, they see each other again at a college reunion. She never marries and spends her time during and after the war abroad, working as a nurse. - Character: Norman Bowker. Description: Awarded seven medals in the war. He returns from Vietnam tortured with guilt about the death of Kiowa and feels responsible. He hides this guilt under the regret that he didn't win the Silver Star. He asks O'Brien to write a story about how great of a soldier he was. He hangs himself in his hometown YMCA after the war. - Character: Dave Jensen. Description: A soldier who becomes so plagued with guilt and fear of retribution after he breaks Lee Strunk's nose during an argument, that Jensen breaks his own nose. Strunk and Jensen become friends and make a pact to kill off the other if they become wheelchair bound. When Strunk dies after losing a leg, Jensen is relieved to not have to follow through. - Character: Lee Strunk. Description: Accuses Dave Jensen of being crazy for breaking his own nose to make them "square" after Jensen shattered Strunk's nose. Becomes close with Jensen soon after and signs a pact that promises one will kill the other if either of them is wounded enough in battle that they are wheelchair bound. Strunk dies in a medic chopper after most of his right leg is blown off. Before leaving, he begs Jensen not to kill him. - Theme: Mortality and Death. Description: The threat, even expectation, of death hangs over all of the soldiers in The Things They Carried. Even before he reaches Vietnam, Tim O'Brien (both the author of the collection and the frequent first person narrator) meditates on the inevitability of his death after he is drafted in "On The Rainy River," and considers dodging the draft and fleeing to Canada. The collection is haunted by the deaths of O'Brien's comrades—Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Kiowa. The thoughts of the soldiers and the narrative itself circle around and around these soldiers deaths, trying and failing over and over to process and understand what happened, and showing how the deaths impact the thoughts and actions of the soldiers who remain both during and after the war. The Things They Carried depicts death during the Vietnam War as being completely arbitrary, with the difference between those who survive and those who die being nothing more than luck. Death can come at any time, from any direction, and no manner of precaution (in Ted Lavender's case, it was always carrying an extra magazine of ammo on his gun) and no amount of faith (Kiowa carried the New Testament in his backpack) could keep a man alive. Death came as a random bullet for Lavender, a hidden trap for Lemon, and unexpected mortar fire for Kiowa. The soldiers, unable to either predict when death might come or protect themselves against it, come to anticipate dying at any moment, at every moment, to the point that it drives some of them mad, such as Rat Kiley. From brushes with death (O'Brien being shot twice, nearly dying the second time), the value of life—of still being alive after battle—becomes majestically amplified. - Theme: Social Obligation. Description: In The Things They Carried, O'Brien often focuses on how the men in his stories, even if they volunteered to fight, joined the army because of the unspoken pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers. These social obligations range from that of wider society (government, city/town) and narrows to the nuclear (family, friends, personal reflection). After being drafted in "On the Rainy River," Tim O'Brien runs from his hometown and ends up spending six days with a reticent old stranger, Elroy Berdahl, who takes O'Brien fishing so close to the Canadian border that he could have jumped out of the boat and escaped into Canada.O'Brien returns home, though, because he cannot bear to think of the town grumbling about his cowardice for not fulfilling his duty, nor can he handle the thought of his family believing him to be a coward. He admits that he goes to the war to avoid the embarrassment that would have resulted from thwarting this legal and social obligation. Similarly, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in "In The Field" never wanted to be a commander, and only joined the reserves because his friends at college were doing it. Ultimately, O'Brien depicts how his characters did what was expected of them as men and as citizens, but how in reality they are all still so young, are still boys—just kids at war. Perhaps the most extreme example of this theme of social obligation occurs in "Speaking of Courage," which tells the story of Norman Bowker after the war. Like the other soldiers, Bowker joined the war out of feelings of an obligation to society, and then, once in the war, he felt the pressure from popular culture (such as. the heroism on display in movies and TV) to impress his father and his town with medals and honors. And he succeeded, receiving seven medals, nearly every medal other than the highest, the Silver Star for Valor—though the constant emphasis is that he could easily have been awarded that too. When he returns home, though, there is little fanfare, and Bowker becomes haunted by the one medal (the Silver Star) that he failed to receive. In addition, he finds that in accepting the social obligation to fight in the war he has been so changed that he is incapable of meeting the social obligations of being a citizen: holding down a job, maintaining relationships, etc. The war mandated patriotic obligation, an obligation to make one's family proud, but by the time the soldiers returned home, many discovered they could no longer operate within the norms of the society they had been charged to protect. - Theme: Morality. Description: Within the stories in The Things They Carried the characters tell many stories to each other, and the question always asked of the storyteller is "What's the moral?" In "How to Tell a True War Story," Mitchell Sanders tells O'Brien about a company who has to lie dormant and watchful in the pitch-blackness over a village. They begin to have auditory hallucinations: champagne glasses clinking, music playing, a full chamber orchestra. They aren't supposed to call in an airstrike unless they are under attack but they can no longer bear the sounds and they call in the attack and watch the city burn. Yet even after there's just scorched earth, they all can still hear the music. Sanders keeps trying to tease out a moral, and O'Brien ultimately points out that the moral never amounts to much more than a perfunctory "Oh." Ultimately, The Things They Carried suggests that, in war, the conventions of good and evil in civilized society fall by the wayside. After Rat Kiley loses his best friend, Curt Lemon, to a booby trap he tortures a baby water buffalo as everyone else looks on. No one tries to stop it. Mitchell Sanders says that in Vietnam there are new sins created that have never existed before. War re-defines morality, it changes the definition. Even the purpose of being there is lost on the soldiers when they are down in their foxholes. When O'Brien eventually returns with his daughter to Vietnam in "Field Trip" and she asks why there was a war, O'Brien says it's because "some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing," and all he wanted was to stay alive. The Things They Carried challenges the reader to think about whether or not truth exists, whether or not there is such a thing as right v. wrong, and finally whether the idea of morality is flexible based on the context (in this case, in the fields of Vietnam). - Theme: Storytelling and Memory. Description: Storytelling in The Things They Carried operates on multiple levels: at the level of the book itself, the stories within stories, and the reflections on the value of these stories both in the context of the war and then post-war. "The Lives of the Dead" speaks to O'Brien's belief that stories have the power to give an entire life to those who have passed on. He refers to his childhood love Linda who passed away from a brain tumor when they were nine, and how he spent his nights inventing stories and false futures to ease his grief. O'Brien does the same thing with the man that he killed with a grenade in "The Man I Killed," which is not a story about the act of killing as much as it is inventing a past and future for the unnamed, skinny man who perished at O'Brien's hands. The collection further explores the very role and purpose of "war stories," and how they can be told "correctly" and how to tell whether or not one is "true." There is a rhythm to war stories; there is a level of detail to be expected. O'Brien establishes rules for telling war stories, which presents a poignant irony given the fact that war exists in a space that largely lacks rules. The role of these war stories during the war was to keep the soldiers' minds off of their obligations, off of death, and after the war to give words to experiences that are unspeakable—that do not make sense to people that were not there. A war story provides an account that speaks to the bond of the men who fought and died together, while recognizing that the greatest truth of a war story is the visceral feeling it fosters in the listener/reader. O'Brien's collection argues that "stories," due to their complexity, their amorality, and their ability to give a voice to the voiceless, are the most authentic medium to accurately communicate wartime experiences—factual or not. - Theme: Shame and Guilt. Description: Shame and guilt are constant and often inextricable themes in The Things They Carried. Soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of embarrassing themselves, their families, and their towns if they fled. This embarrassment is bolstered by the guilt of not being "masculine" enough—not being brave, heroic, and patriotic enough. O'Brien reflects on how he thought he had a secret reserve of bravery and heroism stored away, waiting for the moment when he would be called to war—if that day ever came—in the story "On The Rainy River," and how in reality no such reserve existed. The feelings of shame and guilt follow the soldiers into the war as well, and make them do irrational and crazy things. In "The Dentist," Curt Lemon faints when an army dentist treats him, much to his own shame. To prove to the men in his Company, as well as to himself, that he's man enough and brave enough to see the dentist (and, by extension, fight in the war) he goes to the dentist's tent in the middle of the night and demands that he pull out some of Lemon's perfectly healthy teeth. Survivor's guilt haunts many of O'Brien's friends, as well as O'Brien himself. Norman Bowker can't shake the shame of not winning The Silver Star of Valor because he thinks that he would have won it if he had not failed to save Kiowa's in "Speaking of Courage." Shame and guilt follow Bowker with such intensity that he eventually hangs himself.In "In the Field," it's revealed that O'Brien is shaken by a similar shame and guilt over Kiowa, believing that he's the one that was actually responsible for Kiowa's death. Meanwhile, the other soldiers in the company blame Lieutenant Jimmy Cross in "In the Field" for stationing them in such a vulnerable position. Even Cross wavers between blaming himself (he first wants to write a letter to Kiowa's father commending how great of a soldier his son was) and blaming the cruelty of war (resolving not to write the letter). The war created impossible situations where death was inevitable, but that didn't stop those who survived from blaming themselves for the deaths of their friends—maybe if they'd just been a little braver, a little faster, a little smarter, they could have done something to save their comrade, and so they can't ever escape the guilt.The solders even feel guilt about the deaths of the enemy. In "The Man I Killed" O'Brien throws a grenade into the path of an anonymous young man, killing him, and then tries to "un-kill" him by creating a history and future for the man—O'Brien, after seeing his own friends die, can't help but understand that the man he killed is just that, a man, just like O'Brien himself. Every story in The Things They Carried is riddled with feelings of shame and guilt. It is a feeling that no soldier in the collection, and as O'Brien insinuates, no soldier in Vietnam, was able to escape. - Climax: - Summary: The Things They Carried is a collection of twenty-two stories chronicling the author, Tim O'Brien's, recollections of his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. While O'Brien admits in the book to often blurring the line between fact and fiction, the names of the characters in the book are those of real people. Since it is a collection of stories rather than a novel, there is not a traditional narrative arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Yet, the entire collection functions as a self-contained work because it is so loyal to its themes and characters. "The Things They Carried:" This story introduces the reader to O'Brien's platoon leader, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. The story travels between Cross' infatuation with a girl named Martha that he's in love with based on a single date in college, the death of the soldier Ted Lavender, and an itemized chronicle of what the men carried at war, from supplies, to tokens of luck, to emotions. "Love:" Jimmy Cross visits Tim O'Brien long after the war has ended and they swap war stories over a bottle of gin. The topic of Martha comes up, and Cross confesses that he still loves her. He tells the story of how he saw Martha at a college reunion after the war. She had never married. Cross asks O'Brien to write a story about him that makes him appear to be the best platoon leader ever, hoping Martha would read it and find him. "Spin:" A story of Tim O'Brien's fragmented memories from the war. Mitchell Sanders sends his body lice to his hometown draft board. Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins play checkers every night. O'Brien's daughter, Kathleen, says he should stop writing so many war stories. O'Brien recalls Kiowa teaching Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen a rain dance. Ted Lavender adopted a puppy that Azar blew up. Kiowa told O'Brien he had no choice but to kill the armed man on the path. O'Brien says he must write stories because that's all that's left when memory is gone."On the Rainy River:" Before going to Vietnam, Tim O'Brien decides to dodge the draft, and he drives north to Canada but stops near the border at The Tip Top Lodge, owned by an old man named Elroy Berdahl. O'Brien credits Berdahl with being "the hero of his life." O'Brien spends six days at the Lodge, trying to decide whether or not to flee. Berdahl takes him out on a boat so he's only yards away from Canadian soil. O'Brien feels forced to go to war for fear of embarrassing himself and his family, more than he fears death. "Enemies:" Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get in a brutal fight over a stolen jackknife where Jensen breaks Strunk's nose. After Strunk returns from a few days in medical care, Jensen becomes paranoid that Strunk will retaliate by killing him. Jensen isolates himself for a week, and eventually loses it and starts shooting his gun in the air until he's out of ammo. Then he breaks his own nose with a pistol and asks Strunk if they're even. Strunk says they are. "Friends:" Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk become friends after their fight and start doing everything in pairs. They make a pact and sign it that reads one is obligated to kill the other if one is harmed so badly in battle that they would be wheelchair bound. Later that month, Strunk gets most of his right leg blown off in combat. As the soldiers wait for a medic chopper, Strunk comes in and out of consciousness begging for Jensen not to kill him. Jensen promises he won't. Strunk dies in the chopper, and Jensen appears relieved. "How to Tell a True War Story:" O'Brien writes that war stories have no moral, they are often not true (at least completely), and if a story is true you can tell by the kinds of questions a story gets after it's told. O'Brien tells the story of Rat Kiley's reaction to Curt Lemon's death as an example, as well as Mitchell Sanders' story about a platoon of soldiers that started having auditory hallucinations. When O'Brien tells the story of Lemon's death, usually an older woman will say it's too sad, and O'Brien resolves he has to keep telling the stories and adding to them to make them truer. "The Dentist:" Curt Lemon, a soldier that Tim O'Brien didn't particularly because of his hyper-macho personae, is eulogized in a quick story. Lemon enjoyed combat and was known for his dangerous antics, but he was terrified of the Army dentist that all of the soldiers had to see. When the dentist touched him, Lemon fainted. When he came to, he spent the rest of the day in a stupor, cursing himself. In the night, Lemon woke the dentist and forced him to pull out a perfectly healthy tooth. "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong:" O'Brien tells a story that Rat Kiley told him from when he was stationed in an isolated area. There was so little action there that one soldier, Mark Fossie, snuck his girlfriend Mary Anne Bell in by helicopter. Things don't go as Fossie planned, though, because Bell becomes infatuated with the war, leaves Fossie, and joins the Green Berets in battle. "Stockings:" Henry Dobbins, a loveable, gentle-giant, had a peculiar ritual of wrapping his girlfriend's stockings around his neck before dangerous missions. At first Dobbins was made fun of, but then the platoon started to believe in the power of the stockings because Dobbins was never hurt in battle, even when he was standing in open fire and stepped on a mine that didn't go off. When Dobbins' girlfriend breaks up with him, he still wears the stockings and says the magic didn't leave. "Church:" The platoon uses a pagoda where two monks live as an operations base for a week. The two monks like the soldiers, but they particularly love Henry Dobbins. Dobbins tells Kiowa he might become a monk after the war, but confesses he could never be a minister because he can't answer the hard questions about life and death. Kiowa, who always carries the New Testament, doesn't feel that it's right that they're using a church as a base. Dobbins agrees. "The Man I Killed:" The story goes back and forth between O'Brien's memories of the corpse of the young, armed man he threw a grenade at on a path outside of My Khe and the invented history O'Brien has created of the dead man as a mathematician, scholar, and terrified soldier. Kiowa keeps insisting that O'Brien quit staring at the body and talk to him. "Ambush:" O'Brien's daughter, Kathleen, asks him if he's ever killed anyone. He lies and says he hasn't, but then addresses the story to an adult Kathleen and promises to give the truth. He recalls the image of the young man outside of My Khe and how the memory haunts him still, but in his memories the young man keeps walking down the path and survives. "Style:" A young Vietnamese girl dances in the charred remains of her village. Azar keeps asking why she is dancing. From where her house was, the soldiers find the corpses of the girl's family. She continues to dance. Later, when the soldiers have left the village, Azar dances like the girl in a mocking way. Henry Dobbins picks up Azar and holds him over a well, threatening to drop him if he won't stop and "dance right." "Speaking of Courage:" Follows Norman Bowker at home after he returns from the war to the Unites States on the Fourth of July. Bowker drives repeatedly around a lake in his hometown, reminiscing about the night Kiowa died. He remembers seeing Kiowa's boot and trying to pull but Kiowa was too stuck so Bowker fled. Bowker has convinced himself he would have won the Silver Star if he had pulled Kiowa out, and that Kiowa would still be alive. Bowker feels like he has no one to talk to, and imagines telling his father that he was a coward. He imagines his father consoling him with the many medals he did win. Bowker wades into the lake and watches the fireworks. "Notes:" A post-script for the story "Speaking of Courage." O'Brien tells the background of how "Speaking of Courage," came to be when Norman Bowker sent him a seventeen page letter, ultimately asking him to write a story about a man like him who feels he died after the war. O'Brien feels guilty and compelled to oblige, and writes a version of "Speaking of Courage" that he publishes, sends to Bowker, but is not truly proud of. Bowker doesn't react well to the story because it was doctored to fit into O'Brien's novel and lacks the truth of what happened to Kiowa in Vietnam. O'Brien hopes the story will speak to his failure to protect Kiowa and to Bowker's courage. "In the Field:" Chronicles the search to find Kiowa buried under the muck after enemy mortar rounds killed him. The story is split between Lieutenant Jimmy Cross' guilt fueling his conviction to write Kiowa's father a letter, the young soldier (O'Brien) who feels he killed Kiowa by turning on his flashlight in the dark to show him a picture of his girlfriend, and the men of the platoon who eventually pull Kiowa out. "Good Form:" O'Brien toys with the function of Truth in storytelling, and how there are different kinds of truth in a story, particularly a war story. There is story-truth and happening-truth. He claims he wouldn't be lying if he said he killed the young man outside of My Khe but he also wouldn't be lying if he claimed he did not kill him. "Field Trip:" O'Brien takes his ten-year-old daughter Kathleen with him to Vietnam. With a translator, they visit the field where Kiowa died. The field looks different than O'Brien remembers. He wades out into the water and buries the pair of Kiowa's moccasins where he believes Kiowa's rucksack was found. His daughter Kathleen asks about the old farmer staring at O'Brien and thinks he looks angry, but O'Brien says that's all over. "The Ghost Soldiers:" O'Brien recalls the two bullets he caught in Vietnam. Rat Kiley immediately treated the first bullet, while the second nearly killed him because the new medic, Bobby Jorgenson, was in shock while the platoon was under fire. O'Brien wants revenge on Jorgenson, but only Azar will help him try to scare the medic. They try to terrify Jorgensen one night by pretending to be the enemy, but Jorgenson doesn't scare and O'Brien is forced to let go of his grudge when they agree they're even. "Night Life:" A second-hand account of how Rat Kiley shot his own foot to get out of the line of duty. The platoon had heard rumors of an imminent enemy attack, and only operated by walking at night. Everyone was affected, but Rat Kiley started to lose it. After he shot his foot, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross told the chopper that carried him away it had been an accident. "The Lives of the Dead:" O'Brien compares his Vietnam wartime experiences with the death of his childhood sweetheart, Linda, who died of a brain tumor when she was nine. Hers was the first dead body O'Brien ever saw. He says that stories keep their subjects alive, and in this way Linda can live forever.

- Genre: Literary Fiction, Realism, Asian American Fiction - Title: The Third and Final Continent - Point of view: First person - Setting: Boston, Massachusetts - Character: Narrator. Description: The narrator is an Indian man who was born in Calcutta, the younger of two sons. His father dies when the narrator is sixteen and his mother suffers from psychiatric illness as a result. This makes him very emotionally reserved. In 1964, after his mother's death, the narrator goes to London, to study. He embraces his bachelorhood but in 1969, when he is 36, his marriage is arranged by his brother and his wife. Around the same time, he is offered a job as a librarian in Boston. While his new spouse, Mala, stays in Calcutta, the narrator moves to America alone. Their separation is not difficult for him as he does not really know his wife. The narrator adapts to the American currency, work, diet, and city life. He rents a room from the elderly Mrs. Croft. Although initially irritated by her repetitive questions and orders, he politely listens to her talk most nights about the "splendid" moon landing. He offers small kindnesses to her, like personally handing her the rent so she doesn't have to retrieve it from her atop her piano where she had initially asked him to leave it. When he learns Mrs. Croft is over a century old, the narrator is filled with admiration at her resilience. However, when Mala's passport is approved, he must move out in order to live with his wife. At first, the narrator feels only duty to his more traditional Indian wife. He slowly adjusts to Mala's presence but doesn't feel any emotional connection until he takes Mala to visit Mrs. Croft. The narrator is pleased to see his former landlady and they fall into old rituals. However, when she evaluates Mala, the narrator feels a new sympathy for his wife and the strangeness of her experience. The narrator's relationship with Mala then becomes more intimate and he lets down his emotional defenses. Thirty years in the future, the narrator has become a loving husband and father. He still visits Calcutta and tries to pass on some traditions to his son but is now an American citizen. He is amazed at his life, his happy marriage, and how he has navigated his "third and final continent." - Character: Mrs. Croft. Description: Mrs. Croft is the narrator's elderly landlady. When the narrator meets her, he notes that age has "battered her features" and that she wears an old-fashioned dress that goes to her feet. Her home is filled with "claw-footed" furniture, but she has a radio on which she listens to the news. She is very concerned about propriety and does not approve of unchaperoned women or miniskirts. Perhaps because of her age, Mrs. Croft often repeats herself and it's not clear if she can see well enough to read. She doesn't move around much, staying on the piano bench near the entryway of her house, and she sometimes falls asleep after talking. Mrs. Croft orders the narrator about and expects him to respond to her without complaint. Mrs. Croft is both fascinated by the recent moon landing and proud of what that accomplishment signals about the United States, remarking often in "disbelief and delight" that there's an American flag on the moon and insisting the narrator agree that this is "splendid." Mrs. Croft's daughter Helen reveals to the narrator that Mrs. Croft is 103 and that after her husband died, Mrs. Croft taught piano lessons for forty years to support her family. In this way, just as the narrator's immigrant status makes him like a kind of "astronaut" to this new country he now calls home, Mrs. Croft can be seen as a kind of "astronaut" who has journeyed from the past into the present, and greets this new world with "disbelief and delight." It is this resilience and wonder that come to define Mrs. Croft. When the narrator brings his wife Mala to visit, it turns out that Mrs. Croft has broken her hip but is proud of herself for calling the police to help her. Further, Mrs. Croft has, likely, never seen a woman in a sari before, but remarks that Mala is a perfect lady, looking at her with "disbelief and delight." - Character: Mala. Description: Mala is the arranged Indian wife of the narrator. She is younger than her husband by nine years. Mala knows how to cook, knit, embroider, sketch, and recite poetry, but she is not conventionally beautiful, and her family feared she might never get married. Her laugh is described as full of kindness, her eyes bright—but during the brief time she and the narrator spend together in Calcutta before his immigration to Boston, she weeps nightly, missing her parents. As she waits for her green card to be ready, she writes a letter to the narrator. She writes in English in "preparation" for her new life but also expresses loneliness and worries about Boston's cold weather. She follows the traditions of a new bride: wearing decorative dye, a bindi on her forehead, and draping her sari over her head to indicate bridal modesty. The narrator worries about her naiveté and emotional vulnerability, sometimes worrying she might be like his emotionally fragile mother. Yet Mala proves herself generous—bringing her new husband homemade gifts like knitted sweaters—and polite, complimenting the apartment and the egg curry he has made. She is dedicated to creating a more comfortable and clean home. adding traditional Indian touches, but also listens to the narrator's preferences, even if they might be strange to him. It is when Mala is being regarded by Mrs. Croft that the narrator is able to connect his own feelings of alienation and awkwardness as an immigrant with what his new wife must be feeling, and this begins to lower the barriers between them, a fact indicated by the smile they share after Mrs. Croft announces that Mala is "a perfect lady." Over the ensuing years, she and the narrator grow closer and she becomes more comfortable in America. Eventually, she becomes an American citizen, and no longer drapes her sari or weeps for her parents. She does worry about her son and tries to keep alive some Indian traditions within him, and she can't remember a time when she and her husband were strangers. At the end of the story, she is "happy and strong." - Character: Helen. Description: Helen is the 68-year-old daughter of Mrs. Croft, who delivers groceries to her mother on Sundays. She is short, thick-waisted, wears fashionable clothing, and pink lipstick, but has a bad knee. Helen is the source of major information for the narrator about Mrs. Croft. In general, Helen seems to be a kind, loving, and dutiful daughter who at the same time is willing to stand up to ideas of her mother's that she considers to be over-the-top or out-of-date. For instance, Helen refuses to accept it when Mrs. Croft scolds her for being upstairs alone with the narrator, for revealing her age, and for wearing a dress "so high" above the ankle, all of which Mrs. Croft considers to be improper. These testy, though loving exchanges also help to make clear just how old Mrs. Croft is, and how her age is not simply a number but also gives Mrs. Croft certain cultural beliefs that are no longer applicable to American society. - Character: The Narrator's Mother. Description: The narrator's mother is traditional Indian wife, who wears her sari over her head as is the custom until her husband's death in 1949. After his death, she never adjusts and sinks "into a world of darkness" that neither the narrator, his family members, or professional psychiatrists can help her escape. The narrator, only sixteen, cares for her, but she loses her ability to be function in polite society: she burps and expels gas in front of people and "wanders off half-naked to the tram depot." In 1963, the narrator watches his mother die in a tiny room, and she is cremated. His mother's inability to cope deeply affects the narrator's own ability to connect with other people through much of the story. - Character: The Narrator's Brother. Description: The narrator's older brother lives in Calcutta. When their father dies, the brother "abandons his schooling" and goes to work in a jute mill to "keep the household running." Eventually, he becomes the manager of the mill. Along with the narrator, the brother does try to help their mother when she falls into depression and mental illness. When their mother dies, though, the brother cannot perform the duty of the eldest son in the cremation ritual because he can't "bear it," so the narrator does it instead. The brother's failure to fill this role also seems play a role in the narrator's distrust of emotion and of people's abilities to cope with pain, sadness, or loss. - Theme: The Ordinary and Extraordinary. Description: Over the course of "The Third and Final Continent," the narrator comes to see that much of the ordinary world is, in fact, extraordinary. At first, the narrator is notable in part because he is unimpressed with events others find amazing, including the 1969 moon landing, to which he reacts with indifference. Much of his life is centered on the logical and the routine. However, once he meets his landlady Mrs. Croft, his feelings shift. Mrs. Croft at first seems to him like a typical elderly woman, until he learns that she's 103. The simple fact that she's lived for more than a century fills the narrator with awe. Each day she lives, he realizes, is "something of a miracle." His growing ability to see the world with wonder becomes particularly important after Mala, his wife from an arranged marriage, joins him in the United States after her green card is approved. He starts to realize that his life is filled with people and things which are quite ordinary, but that life itself is a spectacular gift. This openness allows for his and Mala's growing attachment and successful marriage. Years later, he's become an American citizen, has a pleasant home and garden, a successful son, and a happy marriage. He acknowledges that many people have lived lives like his—seeking their "fortune far from home"—but he cannot help but feel awed by his experience. The story comes full circle as he reflects on the astronauts' 1969 moon landing, as he recognizes both the incredible achievement and experience of that journey, but recognizing at the same time that his own 30 year journey in America which is just as miraculous. "The Third and Final Continent" begins in 1969, when the narrator flies to America for his new job in Boston, on the very same day as the moon landing. Although, the landing is later described as "man's most awesome achievement," the narrator isn't particularly impressed. While several men cheer and one woman prays when the landing is announced, he himself doesn't have an outward reaction. Although the narrator is coming to a new continent himself—staking a claim in a new world—he doesn't see the parallel to himself and the astronauts. He is, instead, more concerned with navigating his daily life in Boston: finding a place to live, learning what side of the road to drive on, getting used to the food, new currency, and what to call daily items. Later, he reads that the astronauts have traveled "farther than anyone in the history of civilisation" but what strikes him, instead, are the practicalities of their adventure. He notes the astronauts explored the moon for a few hours and "gathered rocks in their pockets." Consumed by trying to get a handle on living everyday life, the narrator's focus is entirely on the ordinary—he sees even the extraordinary in ordinary terms. After the narrator begins living as a boarder in the home of the elderly Mrs. Croft, his perspective subtly changes, helping him to see that the ordinary itself can be extraordinary. Mrs. Croft is amazed by the moon landing, constantly describing it as "splendid." She expresses "equal measures of disbelief and delight" when she talks about it, and insists that the narrator agree with her. Rather than disappoint her, he begins to call it splendid too. When he reads that the American flag that the astronauts planted on the moon fell over before the astronauts had even flown home, he doesn't "have the heart" to tell Mrs. Croft. While he can't quite embrace the idea of the extraordinary yet, he won't diminish it for her. The key moment of change for the narrator occurs when Mrs. Croft herself becomes something of a miracle to him. Her ordinary existence becomes extraordinary to him when he learns of her age and overcome. He's amazed by the fact she's 103, by what she's seen over that time, and by the fact that she endured the death of her husband and was still able to provide for her family by working as a piano teacher. The narrator's own mother was driven "insane" when she was widowed by the death of the narrator's father, so Mrs. Croft's strength in a similar situation is a revelation to the narrator. When, later in the story, Mrs. Croft is proud of saving herself by calling the police after she injures herself in a fall, the narrator tells her that what she's done is "splendid." In echoing the word that Mrs. Croft used to describe the moon landing, he makes clear that, through his relationship with Mrs. Croft, he's come to see that an ordinary life can in fact be extraordinary. The narrator's original focus on the pragmatic is on display in regards to his feelings about his arranged wife Mala's imminent arrival to join him in America, which he sees as being "something inevitable, but meaningless." But in this, too, Mrs. Croft shifts his view such that he sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. The narrator's feelings of resentment are captured in how he thinks about setting up a place to live for him and his wife. He focuses on how it is a duty to move out of Mrs. Croft's and get an apartment for the two of them. When Mala does arrive, the narrator struggles with how little he knows her—since the marriage was arranged—and with her more traditional Indian customs. He feels he is now more Americanized and has trouble connecting with her. All this changes, however, when he has a realization about what he learned from Mrs. Croft's approach to life. When the narrator introduces Mala to Mrs. Croft, Mrs. Croft scrutinizes Mala from "head to toe." The narrator speculates that Mrs. Croft has never seen a woman wearing a sari before and worries about what she will "object to." Instead, Mrs. Croft, in "equal measure of disbelief and delight," declares Mala a "perfect lady." Mrs. Croft's demeanor—her disbelief and delight—connects Mala with the extraordinary event of the moon landing, and causes the narrator to see his wife as extraordinary as well: he suddenly understands his wife's bravery and loneliness in coming to this foreign world, to a largely unknown husband, and begins to feel connected to her. As the story ends, it's clear that Mrs. Croft has shaped the narrator's way of seeing the world. He looks at his life with amazement, grateful to have a job, his own home, a happy marriage, and a successful son. Although he thinks "his achievement is quite ordinary" since he is not "the only man to seek his fortune far from home," he notes also how much of his life is wondrous. Unlike the astronauts who spent "mere hours" on the moon, he's been in America for thirty years. "As ordinary as it all appears," he says, it is also "beyond [his] imagination." Rather than see the extraordinary in the ordinary, as he did back in 1969, he now sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. - Theme: Immigration. Description: The story's narrator grows up in India and attends school in England, living there as an immigrant with several other Bengali bachelors. When he gets a job in Boston, North America becomes the third continent on which he lives. As the story depicts the narrator's journey from India to England and then his transition to America, it naturally portrays his experiences as an immigrant, and of his efforts to acclimate to his new home and define and find himself. The story also shows the immigrant experience through the narrator's fears and expectations regarding his arrange wife, Mala, as she comes to join him in the United States. The narrator is originally fearful about how Mala's arrival might stunt his own ability to assimilate as well as concerned about whether she herself will be able to emotionally handle the transition. Yet they do successfully make a home in Boston. At the end of the story, thirty years have gone by, and the narrator and Mala are happy with the life they've built, though they worry their college-aged son may not hold onto any Bengali culture at all once they die. Over its course, the story depicts the complexities of immigrant life: the balance and struggle between maintaining traditions, the alienation of being alone in a foreign land, and the pride of building a new life. Through the contrast of the narrator's life in London and then Boston, the story captures different sorts of immigrant experiences. In London, the narrator lives with several other Bengali bachelors. All are "penniless" and "struggling to educate and establish themselves abroad." Yet by having each other, they continue to maintain the traditions of Bengali life: eating egg curry with their hands, drinking tea, and lounging barefoot in drawstring pajamas. On the weekends, they socialize with other Bengalis, watch cricket, and listen to Bollywood songs. In Boston, in contrast, the narrator lives alone at the YMCA, and has no Bengali community. He reads the newspaper cover to cover in order to "grow familiar with things." He works, but doesn't socialize. The narrator still wears his drawstring pajamas, drinks four cups of tea each day, and does not consume beef or alcohol, all according to his Bengali customs. Yet, in the midst of this time of loneliness, the narrator also changes. For instance, he gives up eating rice for breakfast and instead has cornflakes—a small change, perhaps, but culturally significant, and indicative of the possibility for change that immigration offers. When the narrator rents a room from the elderly Mrs. Croft, his experience as an immigrant shifts again. Now he no longer lives alone, and must put up with Mrs. Croft's rather overbearing demand that he agree that the landing of American astronauts on the moon—which he doesn't care about at all—is "splendid." Yet he also discovers that traits that he saw as setting himself apart—his formality and polite deference—are traits that Mrs. Croft sees as being the sign of a "gentleman," an exemplar of American polite society. Through Mrs. Croft's eyes, the narrator in this moment can see himself in a new way, as fitting into, being a part of, and offering something to American society in a way he previously had not. Yet the narrator's feelings about and experience of immigration are complicated by his fears about the arrival of Mala, his new wife. When during a walk around his neighborhood the narrator sees an Indian woman's sari grabbed by a dog on the street, he worries about how Mala will cope in Boston. This worry is not mere compassion. Rather, he feels the burden of having to protect Mala. Whereas earlier the narrator was a new immigrant trying to find his place, now that he feels more comfortable he is worried about how associating with other immigrants—even his own wife—will affect his own life and growing assimilation. When the narrator picks Mala up at the airport, and she is dressed in a traditional sari, with red decorative dye on her feet, the narrator doesn't "embrace her, kiss her, or take her hand." In part, he acts this way because he doesn't know her well, but it is also because he now rejects the traditional Bengali lifestyle that she represents. The knitted sweaters she gifts him are "tight under the arms," which again indicate how the reemergence of this traditionally Bengali way of life now feels constrictive to him. Once again, Mrs. Croft helps to shift the narrator's perception by allowing him to emotionally understand his wife, and to realize he can weave Indian and American culture together. When the narrator brings Mala to meet Mrs. Croft, the elderly woman assesses Mala's appearance. The narrator suddenly remembers his own immigration to London and feels a deep sympathy for his wife. "Like me," he notes, "Mala had traveled far from home, not knowing where she was going, or what she would find." In seeing his wife being assessed, he recognizes her bravery in immigrating at all, and the way that he and his wife are connected in this bravery and experience. When Mrs. Croft declares Mala a "perfect lady," just as she once described the narrator as a gentleman, the narrator is further able to see himself in his wife. Seeing through Mrs. Croft's eyes, he realizes their Indianness is not a thing to be left behind but, in fact, embraced as they make a home in this new country. As the narrator and Mala grow closer in the following months, the couple embrace both their heritage and their new life. They meet other Indian immigrants and buy traditional spices like "bay leaves and cloves." However, they also embrace new things like watching sailboats and eating ice cream cones. At the end of the story, the narrator and Mala live on a tree-lined street, twenty miles from Boston, and their son is enrolled at Harvard. They can't remember a time when they were strangers, either to each other or to the world they now know. They still visit Calcutta and, when they do, they bring back Darjeeling tea and drawstring pajamas. They also know that though their son will go into the adult world "alone and unprotected," possibly forgetting some of his heritage. Still, the narrator believes his son can successfully navigate any adventure with their support. After all, having lived in Massachusetts for thirty years, he and Mala have proved a new world can eventually become home. - Theme: Isolation and Connection. Description: As the Indian narrator of "The Third and Final Continent" begins a new job in Boston in 1969, he seems profoundly isolated. Both of his parents are dead and he's lived away from his older brother for several years. His marriage has been arranged and his wife Mala, a decade younger, is literally and emotionally a stranger. As Mala stays in India waiting for her green card, he initially immigrates to America alone. Mrs. Croft, his elderly landlady, has little in common with him since she belongs to a different race, culture, and era. However, over the course of the story, the narrator starts to connect with Mrs. Croft through small acts of care and respect. Later in the story, when Mrs. Croft looks over Mala in her Indian sari, the narrator suddenly realizes that his wife is isolated, too. This wave of empathy lets him connect with Mala and build a foundation for their decades-long marriage. In this way, the story portrays the pain of isolation, but also suggests that a sense of isolation is itself a universal condition. As such, the story shows how a recognition of isolation can itself become a foundation for connection. As the story begins, the narrator is isolated from those around him, showing little outward connection to anyone. The narrator has been living away from India for quite some time when the story starts. And the narrator, it appears, experienced a profound isolation even before moving to England. His father died when the narrator was a teenager, and his death drove the narrator's mother "insane." The narrator's brother, who lives in Calcutta, has a family of his own. In contrast, Mala, the narrator's new wife, comes from a close-knit family. In the first nights of their marriage, she weeps, missing her parents, an emotion with which he cannot fully sympathize. The narrator, embedded in his own familial isolation, does not at this point expect that he and his wife will ever be more than strangers. When he moves to Boston, the narrator's isolation becomes even more stark. He ceases to have any connection to a Bengali community. He must learn to adjust to new currency, food, noise, and even to how milk is delivered. Even simple words set him apart: what he knows as a "flask" in America is called a "thermos." To combat this foreignness, he develops the routine of going to work, returning home, and reading the newspaper to "grow familiar with things." But that very routine is defined by how solitary his days are. When he moves into a room of Mrs. Croft's house, the narrator appears to share almost nothing in common with her. Mrs. Croft is 103 while the narrator is in his 30s. She has lived in America her whole life, while he has traveled to three continents. She is delighted by the recent moon landing, while he doesn't think about it much at all. Initially their interaction is largely transactional: Mrs. Croft wants the narrator to do something, like say that the moon landing is "splendid," and he does it. Yet their relationship shifts when the narrator recognizes how physically isolated Mrs. Croft is. He decides to hand her his rent check directly, rather than leave it in the appointed spot, so that she will not have to struggle with her cane to walk over and get it. Mrs. Croft is touched by the narrator's kindness—which is a physical act of connection through handing her the check—and a bond forms between them. The way that a mutual recognition of isolation can lead to connection is even more clearly portrayed in the narrator's relationship with Mala. When Mala first comes to join him in the United States, the narrator sees her as a burden. He worries about her ability assimilate, is annoyed by her traditional Bengali ways, and just generally can't find a way to connect to her or get used to having her around. But when he brings Mala to meet Mrs. Croft, and Mrs. Croft scrutinizes Mala "head to toe," the narrator realizes that his wife's experience of moving to America must be just as isolating and alienating as his own experience. In this mutual experience of isolation, he feels the first connection with her, and realizes he will grow to love her, and she him. Soon after this experience, the narrator begins to share his emotions with Mala, and opens up to her in an act of trust. Over the next thirty years, the narrator and Mala build a life in Boston together. They have a son, buy a home, and become American citizens. They build a broad and deep connection, and a happy marriage. But the foundation for that happiness is the initial realization of shared experience: a shared experience of what it feels like to be isolated. - Theme: Fragility and Resilience. Description: In "The Third and Final Continent," the Indian narrator's encounters with his elderly landlady, Mrs. Croft, allow him to believe in the human capacity for tenacity and resilience in the face of life's challenges. As a young man in Calcutta, the narrator takes care of his mother after she suffers an emotional and mental breakdown in the wake of his father's death. His mother's helplessness at navigating the hardships of her life makes the narrator quietly fearful that both he and others will be unable to handle traumatic events, and so he protects himself from the potential pain of losing someone to such a failure by avoiding connections in the first place. As a thirty year old man, he continues to shy away from people who react emotionally, holding himself back or going stoically about his daily life. He worries that Mala, his wife from his arranged marriage, who is soon to join him as an immigrant in Massachusetts, will be too emotional to be resilient. However, observing Mrs. Croft, who is over a century old, subtly teaches him how to be both stoic and flexible. Through her profound example of admirable resilience, he comes to see that resilience is possible, and as a result is better able to navigate his own emotional world as well as aid Mala when she arrives. Because of his mother's inability to adjust to widowhood, the narrator comes to believe that being emotional leads to a loss of control. Therefore, he hides his feelings and takes refuge in practical tasks. When the narrator is sixteen, his father dies. His mother then sinks "into a world of darkness from which neither [he], nor [his] brother, nor concerned relatives, nor psychiatric clinics" could save her. The narrator's brother then, in turn, can't face their mother's death, and abandons his customary role as the eldest child during her funeral preparations and ceremony. The narrator takes on the burden of both becoming his mother's caretaker in life and performing the necessary funeral rites, which takes a heavy toll on him. He seems to get through it by focusing on practical things, like cleaning his mother's fingernails, but the story implies that this focus blocks him off from an emotional interaction with others and with the world: he neither connects with other people, nor can he appreciate the immensity of the successful moon landing. The narrator also becomes suspicious of others who show strong emotion, particularly his wife Mala, who he fears is fragile like his mother. When they spend their first five days together, Mala cries each night because she misses her parents. Rather than console her, he avoids her by doing a practical thing: he reads a "guidebook by flashlight," preparing for his move to Boston. Later, when he receives a letter from Mala in which she tells him she's lonely, he is "not touched"—he seems to have no capacity at this time to sympathize with the pain or hurt of another person. His resistance to connecting with Mala is partly because they're literal strangers, but also because he connects her with traditional women, especially his mother. When Mala cries at night, he directly thinks of how his mother died. When she arrives in Boston, he notes that she wears her sari with "bridal modesty over her head, just as it had draped my mother until the day my father died." This connection highlights his fear that Mala, like his mother, won't be able to cope with the difficulties of life. However, Mrs. Croft offers the narrator a different example—of strength and resilience—and this example allows him to broaden his understanding of how people may be able to cope with hardship. As he lives with Mrs. Croft, the narrator learns that she is 103 years old and that after her own husband died she found a way to support her family by giving piano lessons for so long that they eventually ruined her hands. The narrator specifically contrasts Mrs. Croft with his own mother. He notes that widowhood "had driven my own mother insane." Mrs. Croft, however, not only adjusted and found a way to survive, but still finds delight in the word, as exemplified by her reaction to the moon landing that she constantly describes as "splendid." The narrator is further impressed by the fact that, when Mrs. Croft falls and breaks her hip, she has the presence of mind to call the police for assistance. In this moment, the narrator tells Mrs. Croft that what she did was "splendid," equating her deed with the moon landing as a way to show how much he truly admires her resilience. Mrs. Croft's resilience inspires the narrator's epiphany regarding his own approach to life. A meeting with Mrs. Croft and Mala proves pivotal in showing him that one can be emotional without falling apart. When the narrator brings Mala to meet Mrs. Croft, and Mrs. Croft scrutinizes his wife, the narrator feels a wave of sympathy at his wife getting evaluated as a stranger, at her bravery in immigrating to this new country where she will face so much scrutiny just to be with him. The narrator becomes aware in this moment that Mala came to Boston for no other reason than "to be my wife." He suddenly recognizes that her death would affect him and his death would affect her. This is a breakthrough: he is able to feel emotional connection even in the knowledge of eventual loss. After this revelation, the narrator lets himself be emotional with Mala. They discover "pleasure and solace in each other's arms." He shares stories about his life with her and when he tells her about his mother, she weeps. She also consoles him when Mrs. Croft dies. Thirty years later, the narrator has a strong marriage, and Mala is "happy and strong." At the end of the story, the narrator sees himself as strong and resilient, too. He proudly notes he is "still living" and that he has "remained in this new world for nearly thirty years." But his strength does not arise from hiding from emotion. Instead, he looks around at the now familiar world of Boston, and at his aging wife, and successful son, and brims with emotion. He is "bewildered" at "each mile," "each meal," "each person," and "each room" he has encountered. He, unlike his mother, has adjusted to the challenges of life, and can feel a connection with the world even as he knows that such connections will inevitably lead to loss in the face of death. - Climax: Mala is assessed by Mrs. Croft, and the narrator feels sympathy for Mala for the first time. - Summary: In 1964, the unnamed Indian narrator of the story moves to London to study. There, he lives with a group of Bengali bachelors in the house. In 1969, two significant events happen to change his life: he gets a job in Boston and his family arranges his marriage. While his wife, Mala, waits to receive a green card, the narrator flies to America alone. He arrives in Boston on July 20, the same day as the moon landing. In America, he must navigate his own new world, adjusting to changes in currency, driving patterns, shopping, and diet. At first, he stays at the YMCA, but it proves noisy and stuffy. When he sees an advertisement for a room for rent, he decides to go look at it. The house is on a quiet, tree-lined street. Mrs. Croft, the landlady, is very elderly and the narrator initially is put off by her eccentricity. She has several rules—and emphatically insists he call the moon landing "splendid!" Still, the room is nicer than the one he has, so he rents it. Chatting with Mrs. Croft after work becomes part of his daily routine. She is touched by his attention to following her rules and how he places the rent money in her hands, instead of leaving it on the piano. At the end of the first week, Helen—Mrs. Croft's daughter—comes to deliver her mother cans of soup. Helen tells the narrator that Mrs. Croft thinks he's a "gentleman." She also reveals that Mrs. Croft is 103. The narrator is chagrined. He thought Mrs. Croft was younger due to her strong personality. Due to her age, he starts to see Mrs. Croft as more vulnerable. At the same time, he is amazed that she has survived so long and seen so much. As the weeks pass, He gets used to his daily habits at Mrs. Croft's. At the end of six weeks, the narrator rents an apartment for himself and Mala, whose green card has been approved. He moves out of Mrs. Croft's room. Outwardly, she seems indifferent to his departure and the narrator is somewhat hurt. When Mala arrives, he finds they have little in common. She's more traditionally Indian in dress, attitude, and taste, while he's had time to become Americanized. Although Mala tries to make their apartment homey, he feels they remain strangers. The narrator takes Mala to visit Mrs. Croft. Helen answers the door and explains that her mother injured her hip in a fall and cannot move from the parlor. Mrs. Croft's personality is still intact, however, and the narrator knows he's supposed to say it's splendid when Mrs. Croft tells him she was able to call the police herself after her accident. Mrs. Croft curiously looks Mala over, assessing her. This moment of evaluation causes the narrator to sympathize with Mala and her immigrant experience, which reminds him of his own. Mrs. Croft approves of her, calling her a "perfect lady." The narrator laughs, and he and Mala share smiles. The barrier between them starts to come down. The new couple grow closer, exploring new activities in Boston and learning to rely on each other emotionally. When the narrator notices Mrs. Croft's obituary in the newspaper, Mala consoles him. Thirty years later, the narrator and Mala are American citizens, living in town outside of Boston. Their son goes to Harvard. They still visit Calcutta and maintain some Indian rituals, but realize that as time passes, their son may not do so. The narrator worries about his son but feels there is no obstacle he can't overcome. After all, unlike the astronauts who spent only few hours on the moon, the narrator has lived on his "third and final continent" for thirty years. He's amazed by his successful journey.

- Genre: Short Story, Science Fiction - Title: The Third Level - Point of view: First Person - Setting: New York in the 1950s and Galesburg, Illinois in 1894 - Character: Charley. Description: - Character: Charley's Psychiatrist (Sam). Description: - Character: Louisa. Description: - Theme: Modernity and Nostalgia. Description: - Theme: Escapism. Description: - Theme: Reality vs. Imagination. Description: - Theme: The Trauma of War. Description: - Climax: After Charley gives up on his search for the third level, his friend Sam disappears. Charley then finds a letter from him in his stamp collection, indicating that Sam has traveled to 1894—the story then reveals that Sam was Charley's psychiatrist. - Summary: "The Third Level" is set in 1950s New York, largely in Grand Central Station. Even though Grand Central Station only has two levels, the protagonist, Charley, believes that it has a secret third level. Although his psychiatrist believes Charley imagined the event due to his dissatisfaction with modern society, Charley disagrees with this assessment, claiming that everyone is dissatisfied with modern society and, thus, that he is not uniquely vulnerable to escapist daydreaming. Charley's psychiatrist—as well as his other friends—point to Charley's penchant for collecting stamps as evidence of his escapist nature, but Charley disagrees with this as well, since his grandfather grew up in peaceful times but started Charley's current stamp collection. To prove his point, Charley recounts his experience of discovering the third level. He describes himself as a perfectly ordinary man. His only reason for being in Grand Central is to get home quickly to his wife, Louisa. However, in attempting to catch his train, he gets lost. While recounting this experience, Charley muses about the size and convoluted structure of the station and confesses that sometimes he believes the station is continuously growing new corridors like roots of a tree, with many tunnels that people don't even know about. Eventually, though, Charley reaches the end of the corridor he's in, where he discovers the third level. Charley quickly realizes that the third level is unusual, owing to details such as open-flame gaslights, old-style attire, and an old locomotive. He checks the newspapers on the level and discovers that he's been transported back to the 19th century—specifically, the year 1894. Immediately, Charley realizes that buying tickets on the third level can transport him to the past permanently. He resolves to buy two tickets to Galesburg, Illinois—one for him, one for Louisa—since he loves the town in the present and imagines it will be even more lovely in 1894, back when people were friendlier and the World Wars were still many years away. However, when he attempts to buy the tickets, his modern currency is rejected by the suspicious clerk, and Charley quickly leaves to avoid arrest. Afterwards, Charley spends $300 to obtain $200 of old currency, more than enough to live comfortably in 1894. Unfortunately, however, he is unable to find the third level again. While Louisa initially discourages him from pursuing it, both she and Charley resume the search after their friend Sam disappears. Charley suspects Sam made it to 1894 and is proven correct when, one night, he finds a letter in his stamp collection addressed to his grandfather. Charley opens it to find a letter from Sam, who says he's living in 1894 Galesburg and loves it. Later, Charley discovers that Sam bought the equivalent of $800 in old currency, which is more than enough money to fulfill his dream of opening a business. Sam, according to Charley, can't continue his modern-day job in 1894, since it doesn't exist yet. This, Charley reveals, is because Sam was his psychiatrist.

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: The Three-Body Problem - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Beijing, China - Character: Ye Wenjie. Description: As a bright young scientist who came of age during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, Ye Wenjie has lived through the unspeakable. Her mother, Shao Lin, and her sister Ye Wenxue betrayed her father, Ye Zhetai, to the communist authorities, and Ye Wenjie was forced to watch as her father was beaten and tortured to death for his beliefs. Having seen the evil humans are capable of, Ye—a brilliant astrophysicist—decides to turn against humanity by collaborating with the alien invaders of Trisolaris. Later in life, she enters into a somewhat loveless marriage to her coworker Yang Weining and they give birth to a baby girl named Yang Dong. But motherhood does not soften Ye; instead, she murders Yang Weining to protect her secret communication with the aliens and collaborates with American heir Mike Evans to found the mysterious Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO). Only in old age (after losing Yang Dong) does Ye seem to experience any regret for her actions. Toward the end of her life, she finds moments of tenderness with her friend Wang Miao, and she tries to moderate the more extreme forces in the ETO. Primarily, though, Ye's trajectory throughout the novel shows the cyclical nature of harm: her own experience of trauma and betrayal at a young age causes her to betray humanity to the Trisolarans, reenacting her own private trauma on the entire human race. - Character: Wang Miao. Description: Wang Miao is a mild-mannered scientist who is one of the world's foremost experts on a new technology called nanomaterial. After being pulled into the Frontiers of Science by his colleague Shen Yufei, Wang becomes an important asset in the battle against the Trisolaran alien invaders. In his quest to understand and infiltrate the ETO, Wang often acts as the novel's protagonist. He is always motivated by decency and compassion, and as someone who works on applied science, he bridges the gap between theoretical abstraction and real-life problem solving. Perhaps most importantly, Wang makes room for life outside complex academia. He has a range of hobbies, including landscape photography, that allow him to look at the world through a new vantage point; he also has a beloved wife and young son named Dou Dou, and he treats both of them with attention and great care. So unlike most of his colleagues, when Wang finds himself struggling to understand forces beyond human comprehension, he seeks solace not in equations but in other people, like his new friends Shi Qiang and Ye Wenjie. On the other hand, however, his great sympathy for others makes the knowledge of the Trisolaran invasion—and the destruction that is sure to follow—even more unbearable for him than it is for most. - Character: Shi Qiang. Description: Shi Qiang (affectionately known as Da Shi) is a police officer in Beijing. Whereas most of the other characters in the novel have doctorates or important military credentials, Shi lacks a four-year college degree, having only gone to vocational school. Because of his different credentials, he often feels excluded or talked down to by other members of the anti-Trisolaran forces. Yet what Shi lacks in academic expertise, he more than makes up for with practical experience and an ability to think outside the box. Often, he is the only character who is able to solve complex problems, a skill he learned from trying to catch criminals. And while his behavior frequently borders on rude, he is also deeply caring and thoughtful, as can be seen in his friendship with Wang Miao. Lastly, while most of the other characters give up after learning the extent of the Trisolarans' plans, Shi continues to approach the situation with fortitude and wit. Shi embodies the novel's idea that life experience is just as important as theory, and that philosophical questions can get in the way of real-world solutions. As Shi puts it, "when I work at night, if I look up the sky, the suspect is going to escape." - Character: Wei Cheng. Description: Though Wei is first introduced to Wang Miao as the spaced-out husband of Shen Yufei, he is actually a visionary mathematician. After Wei accidentally stumbles on what he calls an "evolutionary" approach to the three-body problem, he becomes a point of fascination (and combat) for the warring factions of the ETO. In addition to his genius mathematical abilities, Wei's most distinctive characteristic is his apathy. Though abstract theories interest him, he feels too "lazy" to think about real-life situations and relationships. - Character: Shen Yufei. Description: Shen Yufei, a renowned Japanese physicist, introduces Wang Miao to the mysterious organization known as the Frontiers of Science. After the environmentalist Pan Han assassinates Shen, Wang discovers that Shen was intimately involved in the ETO. She led the Redemptionist faction of the organization, which views the Trisolarans with a kind of religious fervor. Shen hoped humanity would be saved—and not destroyed—by alien life. So, she encouraged her husband, Wei Cheng, to keep solving the three-body problem, hoping that Trisolarans will be able to save their own planet rather than taking over Earth. - Character: Pan Han. Description: Pan Han is a prominent environmentalist whose predictions of various natural catastrophes are so accurate that many believe he came from the future. He believes that human progress is actually a "cancer," and that humans cannot control or contain the technologies they invent. Therefore, in Pan's mind, what seems like creation is actually destruction. He is a prominent member of the Adventist faction of the ETO, which hopes to work with the Trisolaran invaders to bring about the death of human civilization. After Pan murders Redemptionist Shen Yufei, the ETO's leader Ye Wenjie has Pan executed. Pan gives voice to the book's thematic questions about progress, technology, and humanity's self-destruction. - Character: Mike Evans. Description: Born to a wealthy oil baron, Mike Evans's passion for the environment sprouted in opposition to his family's values. After witnessing the consequences of an oil spill on marine birds, Evans pioneered the theory of "pan-species communism" (in which the idea of universal human rights is extended to all forms of life on Earth). Later in life, Evans joined forces with Ye Wenjie, using his father's money to create the ETO. But while Ye hopes humanity can be helped by alien intelligence, Evans has lost all faith in people and therefore wants the Trisolarans to destroy humanity entirely. He therefore becomes the leader of the Adventist faction of the ETO, which is headquartered on his ship Judgment Day. - Character: Listener 1379. Description: As one of the many listeners on Trisolaris, Listener 1379 lives an isolating, monotonous life—until he receives Ye Wenjie's communication from Earth. Unlike most Trisolarans, this listener does not feel that mere survival is a satisfying purpose in life; instead, he dreams of art, culture, and community. Because of these aspirations, and because he sees a chance to "make his own humble life glow," the listener replies to Ye Wenjie's message, urging her not to reply and thus to keep Earth's location secret from the Trisolarans. Eventually, the listener's brave actions inspire a larger movement of pacifism across Trisolaris. The listener embodies the novel's exploration of the role individual actions (and legacies) play in history as a whole. - Character: The Princeps of Trisolaris. Description: The princeps is the leader of Trisolaris as the alien society prepares to set out for Earth. Having evolved to survive the trauma and instability of Chaotic Eras, he prides himself on his "calmness and numbness" in the face of disaster. However, this same numbness allows him to commit acts of violence without hesitation, whether putting thousands of his soldiers to death or plotting to destroy all of human civilization. The princeps is thus particularly horrified by the listener's sense of empathy and moral obligation. - Character: Ye Zhetai. Description: Once a respected physics professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University, by the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, Ye Zhetai has become a pariah for his supposedly anti-communist beliefs. Though his wife, Shao Lin, and younger daughter Ye Wenxue turn against him, his elder daughter Ye Wenjie remains loyal. Ye Zhetai is particularly notable for his conviction that "truth emerges from experiences." He therefore embodies the novel's thematic suggestion that theory is meaningless unless it is informed by life. - Character: Shao Lin. Description: Shao Lin, herself a prominent physicist, is also Ye Zhetai's wife and the mother of Ye Wenjie and Ye Wenxue. Unlike her husband, Shao is capable of bending her scientific beliefs to conform to the political standards of the day. Over and over again, she chooses personal opportunism over ideological purity or community ties, as can be seen when she joins her husband's torturers or forbids Ye Wenjie to ever talk about their shared traumatic past. - Character: Ye Wenxue. Description: The novel first introduces Ye Wenxue as a passionate, nameless, young member of the communist Red Guard. Only later is it revealed that she is also Ye Wenjie's little sister and Ye Zhetai and Shao Lin's younger daughter. Ye Wenxue's decision to put ideological loyalty over loyalty to her family—even going so far as to inform on her father—represents one of the great betrayals of Ye Wenjie's life. At the age of 15, Ye Wenxue is killed in a skirmish between various young communist revolutionaries. - Character: The Revolutionary Girls. Description: Though they are never named, the four teenaged girls who lead the public torture of Ye Zhetai are important figures in the novel. When Ye Wenjie first encounters them, they represent the dangers of mob mentality: rather than keeping an open mind when Ye Zhetai questions their beliefs, the girls turn to deadly violence in the face of uncertainty. Years later, when Ye Wenjie tracks them down, the girls—now women—have all suffered in the Cultural Revolution, despite their commitment to it. And in fact, it is her exchange with these women, now broken by the very movement they devoted their lives to, that cements Ye's lack of hope for humanity. - Character: Bai Mulin. Description: As a reporter in Inner Mongolia, Bai Mulin and Ye Wenjie meet when they are both working for the Chinese Production and Construction Corps. Having been authorized by the government to read Rachel Carson's environmentalist book Silent Spring, Bai becomes motivated to write to communist leadership in protest of mass deforestation. But when his plan backfires, he frames Ye, setting in motion the events that eventually lead her to wind up at Red Coast Base. In addition to being one more person who betrays Ye's trust, Bai is notable for his fairly regular life; though his betrayal had an incredible impact on history, Bai himself is hardly memorable. - Character: Commissar Lei. Description: Lei Zhichang is the Political Commissar at Red Coast Base. He is a good scientist but an even better politician, and he embraces communist ideology and political symbolism in every aspect of his work. Though he initially leads the search for alien life, when Ye Wenjie actually gets a message from the Trisolarans, Lei forbids her from responding. To ensure that her secret is safe, Ye takes advantage of Lei's willingness to do dangerous tasks and kills him while he is out fixing a wire. - Character: Yang Weining. Description: Once a student of Ye Zhetai's, Yang Weining has always successfully avoided getting in any political trouble. As a leader at the Red Coast Base, Yang Weining pushes to reveal the base's true purpose (the search for extraterrestrial life) to Ye Wenjie. Eventually, close collaboration with Ye causes Yang to fall in love with her, and their marriage soon leads to the birth of a daughter, Yang Dong. Unfortunately, however, Yang's romantic feelings were never reciprocated, as Ye felt that their marriage was "the loneliest time" of her life. Ultimately, Ye murders Yang along with Lei in an attempt to keep communicating with the Trisolarans. - Character: Yang Dong. Description: Yang Dong is Ye Wenjie and Yang Weining's daughter. Born and raised near Red Coast Base, Yang grows up to be a brilliant, beautiful, and closed-off physicist. Having loved abstract theory from a young age, Yang struggles to cope—and ultimately commits suicide—when experimental data ceases to align with her theoretical expectations. As her mother Ye puts it, Yang Dong's "world was too simple" and abstract, so she could not ever handle the messiness of real life. - Character: Ding Yi. Description: Though he is a respected physicist in his own right, Ding is known to most of the characters as Yang Dong's boyfriend. Ding had hoped to settle down with Yang Dong, but she was always more interested in theory than in domestic life. After Yang's death, Ding befriends Wang Miao, and the two men work together to balance abstract, scientific thinking with meaningful everyday experience. - Character: King Zhou. Description: Historically, King Zhou was an ancient Chinese ruler who lived during the 10th century B.C.E. and is widely considered to have been a brutal and erratic king. The book presents King Zhou as a computer-generated leader in the game Three-Body, where he rules over the first level of the game. Like the other game leaders that will follow him (namely Mozi, Pope Gregory and Qin Shi Huang), Zhou is violent, impatient, and obsessed with his own grandeur. - Character: King Wen. Description: King Wen is a computer-generated character in the Three-Body game, likely based on the historical King Wen who served in King Zhou's court. Using the ancient Chinese oracle the I Ching, he makes the game's first prediction of the sun's movement. When Wen's guess is proven incorrect, Zhou has him executed. - Character: Mozi. Description: Mozi was a Chinese philosopher who lived and worked in the 5th century B.C.E. (during the Warring States Period). In one of the video game's many anachronisms, however, Mozi appears in Three-Body during the Han Dynasty period, where he has become a kind of philosopher-king. Although he is the ruler of this level of the game, Mozi also tries to predict the sun's movement. Ultimately, he is so convinced of his own theory that he ignores all contradictory evidence, even when it is right in front of him (like the flying stars). - Character: Pope Gregory. Description: In reality, Pope Gregory was a 15th-century leader famous for commissioning a standardized calendar (hence the name Gregorian calendar). In the novel, he appears as a computer-generated character in the medieval Europe version of the Three-Body game, where he serves a similar function—in this game, too, he is trying to predict the sun's motion and create a reliable calendar. However, the Pope Gregory of the game is also (like Zhou and Mozi before him) a brutal, almost maniacal leader, with a penchant for killing those who displease him. - Character: Galileo Galilei. Description: Galileo Galilei was a scientist during the Italian Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. He is considered to have founded modern physics and modern astronomy, in addition to pioneering the concept of gravity. Like Pope Gregory, he is a character in the medieval level of the Three-Body game. In the video game, he emphasizes the need for observation and experiment while also dismissing all Eastern thought as unscientific. He thus undercuts his argument for rationality with his irrational prejudice. - Character: Leonardo da Vinci. Description: In the real world, da Vinci was a prominent painter and engineer and a contemporary of Galileo. In the novel, he is another person whom Wang meets in the medieval Europe version of the Three-Body game. Perhaps because he is an artist, the story presents da Vinci as more patient and open-minded than some of his crueler colleagues. - Character: Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Description: As a historical figure, Qin Shi Huang was the founder of the Qin Dynasty, which ruled over China from 221 to 206 B.C.E. Emperor Qin was widely known for his violent method of rule, a history that is reflected in the novel. For example, he orders several hundred soldiers to be executed simply because they fail to perform a complicated flag-waving maneuver correctly. Qin also harbors immense anger and antipathy toward the West, foreshadowing an East-West divide that the novel explores in a Cold War context. - Character: Albert Einstein. Description: In reality, Einstein was a brilliant physicist best known for formulating the theory of relativity. In the novel, he makes two appearances. First, though Einstein become a much-hated figure in the Cultural Revolution, Ye Zhetai remembers stories of the great scientist's earlier visit to China. Rather than engaging in theoretical conversation, Einstein was preoccupied with more human problems (like starvation) that he encountered on the ground. Second, Wang Miao meets a computer-generated version of Einstein in his final trip through the Three-Body game—and here, too, Einstein despairs, focusing not on science's possibilities but on its limits. - Character: General Chang. Description: General Chang is the leader of the Battle Command Center, which is readying Earth to fight back a potential invasion from Trisolaris. Chang is often the first to introduce critical information, whether that is knowledge about the rash of suicides in the scientific community or the existence of the sophon. Though he frequently spars with lower-ranking members of the team like Shi Qiang, Chang is open to collaborating with whomever has the best idea. - Character: Colonel Stanton. Description: A high-ranking officer in the United States, Colonel Stanton works alongside General Chang to try and fight back against the impending Trisolaran invasion. Stanton has lived through many important historical events, but this new threat completely shifts his perspective, as he tells Wang Miao that "it all seems so insignificant now." - Character: Fu Xi. Description: Fu Xi is one of the computer-generated characters who appears the first time Wang plays Three-Body. In the game, he is a black-clad figure who incorrectly believes that the son is an angry god, one who could be hypnotized by swinging pendulums. When Fu Xi's theory proves incorrect, King Wen puts him to death. - Character: Feng. Description: Feng, who is Hunter Qi's daughter-in-law, meets Ye Wenjie when she is recuperating at the hunter's house. The two women have babies around the same time, and Feng helps nurse and care for the infant Yang Dong. Feng is tender and unintellectual, and she becomes a rare soothing presence in Ye Wenjie's life. - Character: Sha Ruishan. Description: Sha Ruishan is a former student of Ye Wenjie to whom Wang goes in order to try to monitor the shift in the cosmic background radiation. Sha tells Wang a bit about Ye Wenjie's life. He is also skeptical this sort of shift in the cosmic background radiation is even possible, and astonished when it actually occurs. - Theme: Technology, Progress, and Destruction. Description: Over the course of The Three-Body Problem, various characters develop mind-boggling new technologies: protagonist Wang Miao creates a razor-sharp, invisible, new substance known as nanomaterial, for example, while astrophysicist Ye Wenjie figures out how to use the sun's rays to contact alien life. But even as the book dives deep into the mechanics of human invention, it also suggests that every new technology has the potential for violence and destruction. Wang's nanomaterial is used to saw a ship's entire crew into pieces, for example, while Ye's decision to contact extraterrestrials eventually heralds the end of human civilization. Over and over again, what initially seems like technological advancement or ideological progress is actually more harmful than beneficial. Or as Ye Wenjie puts it, "I started the fire, but I couldn't control how it burnt." Progress, as the book's environmental scientist Pan Han likes to say, is often a "cancer"—people can invent a machine or conceive of an idea before they can fully understand (or control) the impact of their invention. On one level, then, the novel functions as a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, as what seems like human progress can actually lead to terrible destruction. But the reverse is also true: for the characters in The Three-Body Problem, moving technologically backward can allow for emotional growth. When Ye Wenjie gets to know the villagers in a small mountain community, for instance, she learns to feel a sense of responsibility for others. Similarly, when Wang Miao spends time with his friends and talks to them over drinks about humanity's troubles, he returns with a new sense of purpose and clarity. Therefore, just as technological advancement doesn't always lead to progress, the novel hints that a retreat from technology does not always lead to decline. - Theme: Scientific Discovery and Political Division. Description: The Three-Body Problem follows the United States, the USSR, and Communist China racing to find extraterrestrial life at the height of the Cold War. Although these different superpowers share a common scientific goal, science acts not as a unifying force but as something that only sows more division among the powerful governments. In China, where the novel is set, the government is clear in its intention to recruit aliens as allies against the Russians and Americans, and people across the globe agree that the "significance" of even symbolic contact with extraterrestrials "would be comparable to an overwhelming advantage in military and economic power." On a geopolitical level, then, the governmental thirst for power ends up overshadowing the broader value of scientific discovery. But the same is true on a smaller scale, as individual scientists—even those who resent or oppose their governments—find that policies they may not even believe in disallow or alter their work. As a scientist during the Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie has to disavow theories or discard useful experiments simply because those experiments have the wrong kind of "political symbolism." And when inventor Wang Miao finds himself obsessed with a virtual reality astronomy game, he learns that even in the alternate reality of the game, his scientific theories have to be altered or rejected based on ideological context. Ultimately, then, The Three-Body Problem suggests that seemingly objective scientific discovery is always shaped by human beliefs. Rather than creating a set of shared facts, scientific discovery therefore often acts as fodder for political strategy that ultimately leads to an even more divided reality. - Theme: Trauma and Cyclical Harm. Description: Throughout The Three-Body Problem, characters who have been traumatized and betrayed (especially as young people) reenact that trauma on the people around them. During the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals inform on one another in order to avoid violence themselves. American oil scion Mike Evans, who has had a terrible relationship with his father, copes with that pain by plotting for the destruction of humanity. And though astrophysicist Ye Wenjie betrays the entire human race, giving the alien civilization of Trisolaris information about how to find and conquer her home planet, she only does so because trauma and loss have shaped her own life. As a teenager, she witnessed her father, Ye Zhetai, get bludgeoned to death after her mother and sister reported him to the authorities. And later in life, when Ye allowed herself to trust her new friend Bai Mulin, he, too, betrayed her to the communist authorities. Each new heartbreak caused Ye to lose faith in other human beings, and without a family or a confidante to rely on, these various betrayals and losses "dissolved into her blood, where they would stay with her for the rest of her life." Therefore, when Ye endangers all of humanity by collaborating with the Trisolarans, her choice to do so stems from her inability forget the hardships that she herself has suffered. Through Ye, Evans and others, the novels suggests that betrayal literally lives in peoples' "blood," highlighting just how thoroughly the effects of a traumatic past can impact how one moves through the world. The Three-Body Problem thus demonstrates the cyclical nature of harm: people hurt humanity because humanity has hurt them, and an individual's trauma (especially trauma suffered at a young age) can have a lasting impact on society at large. - Theme: Theory vs. Lived Experience. Description: Many of the characters in The Three-Body Problem spend their lives thinking about abstract theory, but many of them then struggle to merge these theories with the complexity of the real world. Scientist Ye Wenjie comes from three generations of theoretical astrophysicists. Mathematician Wei Cheng devotes his life to solving the impossible problem of the book's title. And, finally, protagonist Wang Miao spends all of his free time on a video game that asks players to theorize the rules of another planet's solar system. Each of these thinkers is able to conceive of brilliant new ways of looking at the world. But thinking of these theories in practical, everyday terms proves difficult—especially during the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when certain communist ideas were supposed to apply to both everyday life and scientific fact. All of the novel's characters must then struggle with the question posed by Ye Zhetai, Ye Wenjie's father, at the beginning of the book: "should philosophy guide experiments, or should experiments guide philosophy?" Arguably, The Three-Body Problem answers this question in the figure of Shi Qiang, a crafty policeman without a college education. When faced with the threat of alien attack, many of the world's most acclaimed theoretical minds cannot respond to the crisis at hand. But Shi, who boasts of his ability to focus only on what's in front of him, is able to rise to the occasion. And as other characters like Wang Miao follow Shi's lead, they begin to realize that abstract ideas are actually complicated and enriched by the messiness of everyday life. Indeed, theory is meaningless unless it incorporates fact, observation, and experiment. The novel thus shows that paying attention to lived experience is a scientific necessity. - Theme: History and Legacy. Description: The characters in The Three-Body Problem aspire to shape the course of history. On a geopolitical level, China, the United States, and the USSR (the three superpowers at the heart of the Cold War) all hope to prove that they alone are "the heroes […] of history." Part of their impetus to search for aliens in the first place is to find a neutral party who will validate this view. And perhaps most tellingly, even extraterrestrials are not immune from the desire to leave behind a legacy, which the book suggests is quite literally universal. For example, listener 1379—a creature on the alien planet of Trisolaris—becomes obsessed with getting a "chance to make his own humble life glow." But while regular human beings, political leaders, and extraterrestrials alike all want to leave their mark on history, none of these figures can predict how their attempts to shape the world will actually play out. Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who makes humanity's first contact with extraterrestrials, is vilified, China faces certain destruction at the hands of the aliens it has summoned, and the alien listener's work is completely undone by the humans he communicates with. Thus, even as The Three-Body Problem explores the powerful desire to leave a legacy, it also makes clear that, while it's possible to impact the course of history, it's not necessarily possible to control it. - Climax: Having made contact with alien life, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie decides to knowingly betray the human race by inviting the aliens to Earth. - Summary: It's the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and for college student Ye Wenjie, the world is falling apart. Her father, a theoretical physics professor named Ye Zhetai, has been tortured to death for his allegedly anti-Communist beliefs, and her mother, Shao Lin, was among his torturers. A few years later, Ye Wenjie has been sent to a Mongolian labor camp, where she spends her days cutting down trees. When she befriends reporter Bai Mulin, Ye learns that humans are rapidly destroying Earth's environment. Bai wants to write to the Chinese government and urge them to slow the rate of their deforestation, and Ye offers to transcribe the letter for him. However, the letter backfires, drawing the government's ire, and a panicked Bai frames Ye for the entire thing. Ye expects to be tortured for the letter, but to her surprise, she instead is brought to a mysterious mountain called Radar Peak. The peak, named for the giant antenna on top of it, is home to the Red Coast military base. At Red Coast, scientist Yang Weining, one of Ye's father's former students, greets her. Yang explains that if Ye works as a researcher on Radar Peak, she will be spared punishment—but once she enters the military base, she can never leave it. Without hesitation, Ye joins Red Coast. The story jumps four decades. Wang Miao, an expert in a brand-new technology known as nanomaterial, has recently received an invitation to join a secretive group called the Frontiers of Science. Soon after, Wang is summoned to China's Battle Command Center. To his surprise, he learns that all of the nations of the world are working together to fend off some outside threat. Though the nature of the danger remains unclear, it has something to do with a rash of recent suicides in the scientific community. After being pushed by a rude police officer named Shi Qiang—and after learning that a respected physicist called Yang Dong has taken her own life—Wang agrees to join the Frontiers as a spy. The next day, Wang begins to see an inexplicable countdown behind his eyelids. At first, Wang believes he is hallucinating, but gradually he realizes that the numbers he is seeing really do exist—he just has no clue what happens at the end of the countdown. In search of answers, Wang visits Shen Yufei, the physicist who introduced him to the Frontiers of Science. At Shen's house, Wang meets her husband Wei Cheng; he also notices that Shen is playing a virtual reality game called Three-Body. Shen correctly informs Wang that if he stops working on nanomaterials, the countdown will cease. Now even more baffled, Wang logs on to the Three-Body website. In the game, players are transported to other eras in history, from China's Warring States period to Medieval Europe. But in the game world, the sun does not rise and set consistently. Instead, time is separated into Stable Eras (when the sun is predictable) and Chaotic Eras, when the sun might vanish for weeks or suddenly get so close to Earth that everything is scorched. Wang learns that the goal of Three-Body is to predict the sun's movement by correctly understanding the game planet's solar system. Back in the real world, Wang continues to seek answers, befriending Shi Qiang and meeting with Yang Dong's mother—who is none other than Ye Wenjie. Ye reveals to Wang that the true purpose of Red Coast Base was to try to make contact with alien life, but she claims that no such contact was ever achieved, so the base was shut down. Wang logs in to Three-Body again. Having studied the sun's movement and having tracked the flying stars that sometimes show up in the night sky, Wang concludes that the game's planet has three suns. However, because each of the suns has its own gravity, "their movements are unpredictable—the three-body problem." The next day, Wang and Shi meet with Wei Cheng. Wei tells his life story, explaining that he accidentally came up with a brilliant method of solving the three-body problem. Now, a famous environmentalist named Pan Han is threatening him: Pan has told Wei that he must stop trying to solve the problem or face certain death. Sure enough, when Wang and Shi arrive at Wei's house, they discover that Pan murdered Shen. Through all of this, Wang continues to log into the virtual reality game. He learns that the planet of Three-Body (now known as Trisolaris) is in constant danger of being swallowed by one of its suns. The Trisolarans have therefore decided to abandon their planet and search for another home in the galaxy. At Shi's urging, Wang attends several meet-ups of Three-Body players. Over the course of these meetings, Wang is shocked to learn that Trisolaris is real, and that its residents are actually coming to Earth. Even more surprising, however, is the fact that Ye Wenjie leads a society known as the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), which aims to help these aliens in their conquest. The ETO is divided into two factions: Adventists, who believe that the Trisolarans should completely destroy humanity, and Redemptionists, who believe that humans and Trisolarans can work together to form a better world. Ye explains that at Red Coast, she had secretly sent a message into space—and had received a reply from a Trisolaran pacifist known only as listener 1379. Though the listener had warned Ye Wenjie that if she replied, the Trisolarans would be able to track her location and invade Earth, Ye had replied anyway. After all, human beings had killed her father; what did she owe humanity? Ye then explains how she had partnered with Mike Evans, the son of an American oil baron, to form the ETO. But in recent years, Evans has split off, hoarding communication with the Trisolarans on a special ship known as Judgment Day. At Shi's suggestion, the generals of the Battle Command Center agree they will intercept Evans's ship at the Panama canal—and then slaughter the ship's crew, using a net made out of Wang's nanomaterials (a project they call Operation Guzheng). The operation is successful, and the generals learn the reality of the Trisolaran threat. The Trisolarans will arrive on Earth in 450 years; to ensure that humans cannot fight back, the Trisolarans have figured out a way to cease all human scientific progress. Specifically, scientists on Trisolaris were able to create four super-intelligent protons known as sophons, which could jam up all the particle accelerators on Earth. These faulty machines then created theoretical chaos and thus prompted all the scientists' suicides. Before Wang can lose hope entirely, Shi takes him to a small, locust-infested town. Shi points out that though humans have better technology than locusts, locusts have nevertheless survived human attacks for thousands of years. Wang resolves to get back to work.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Three Day Blow - Point of view: Third-Person Omniscient - Setting: A cabin in rural Michigan around 1916. - Character: Nick. Description: Nick is the story's protagonist and Bill's close friend. He is a young man who is visiting Bill at Bill's father's cottage in Michigan, around 1916, just as an early fall storm is blowing in. Like Bill, Nick is fond of literature, baseball, and fishing. As they drink whisky, Bill and Nick toast to their favorite writers and talk about the virtues of being free and independent men who are untethered by worries like marriage, saving money, and the shallow chatter of domestic life. As the young men get increasingly drunk, Nick becomes eager to show Bill that he can hold his liquor like a "real" man and tries to prove this by doing "practical" tasks like fetching logs for the fire. Although he tries to appear traditionally masculine, masking his emotions and trumpeting the value of independence, Nick's inner monologue reveals that he is heartbroken over his breakup with a girl named Marjorie. Although Nick was the one who broke up with her—he was hesitant about committing to married life and its social demands—he feels like he made a mistake. Bill, however, is convinced that Nick dodged a bullet by avoiding a commitment to Marjorie. Nick agrees with Bill outwardly, but internally, he is distraught about losing Marjorie, comparing the brutality of his loss to the fierceness of the storm outside. He wistfully thinks of the plans they had made to travel together in Europe. As the story unfolds, Nick wrestles with his love for Marjorie and his desire to appease Bill, a conflict that is reflected in the difference between his internal monologue and his external dialogue. As Bill continues to denigrate marriage and warns Nick to not get back into a relationship with Marge, Nick is suddenly heartened, realizing that no end is final and no break is irreparable. With this realization, Nick secretly vows to go into town—presumably to visit Marjorie and make amends—the following week. He says nothing about this to Bill, perhaps not wanting to seem vulnerable and thus unmanly in front of his friend. - Character: Bill. Description: Bill is Nick's close friend. Like Nick, Bill is passionate about literature, fishing, and drinking—all activities that Bill thinks "real" men enjoy. Like Nick, he is eager to show off how much he knows about these topics, and that he can handle his liquor. Bill is the dominant character in the dialogue, as he bosses Nick around and drives the conversation as the pair drinks whisky. Bill's father is a painter who's also fond of drinking. Nick's father, on the other hand, is a doctor who doesn't drink. Both agree that Nick's father missed out on a lot in life, though Bill darkly notes that his father can be "wild." This provides insight into the kinds of male role models both young men have in their lives: the temperamental artist and the sensible doctor. The character's fathers seem to represent the two types of lives the boys are weighing up when Bill brings up the topic of Nick's recent breakup with Marjorie. Bill feels strongly that relationships with women are trouble. He thinks that marriage makes men weak and unmanly, and that it pushes them into dull lives focused on the daily grind of work, saving money, and entertaining extended family. Instead, he thinks men should be free and independent to drink, read, write, and fish. Bill expresses his views to Nick, saying it was a good thing that Nick broke up with Marjorie, or Nick would have ended up like that, too. Bill is oblivious to the fact that Nick is secretly heartbroken but is clearly uncomfortable expressing his true feelings to Bill, no doubt because he doesn't want to seem emotionally vulnerable, and therefore unmanly. Hemingway uses the contrast between Nick's internal distress and dismissive outward demeanor to reflect the way young men in this time feel pressured to repress their emotions and embrace a stoic, masculine demeanor. After warning Nick not to get mixed up with Marjorie again, Bill feels satisfied that he has given Nick solid advice, even though internally Nick is planning to do the exact opposite and try and get Marjorie back. - Character: Marjorie ("Marge"). Description: Nick's ex-girlfriend. Although Marjorie is not physically present in the story, Nick and Bill talk about her as they drink, and she consumes Nick's thoughts. Nick called off his relationship with Marge because he was hesitant about committing to the social demands of married life, such as having to see her mother all the time. Bill thinks marriage "ruins" men and is adamant that Nick did the right thing by avoiding an engagement. And although Nick says he agrees, internally he is heartbroken. When Bill cautions Nick against getting mixed up with Marjorie again, Nick suddenly realizes that their breakup perhaps wasn't as final as he thought. Buoyed by this new hope, Nick secretly vows to go into town next week, presumably to visit Marjorie and see if he can make amends. - Character: Bill's Father. Description: Bill's father is painter who drinks heavily and "gets a little wild sometimes." Like Bill, he also enjoys shooting, and he is outside shooting for the duration of the story. He appears to be a fairly lax father, as lets his son drink alcohol freely as long as he only drinks from bottles that are already open. The boys idealize the type of life Bill's father lives as an artist who drinks and engages in outdoorsy activities like shooting, though Bill is aware that his father has had a "rough" time. - Character: Nick's Father. Description: Nick's father is a doctor who claims to have never consumed alcohol in his life. Nick and Bill agree that Nick's father has "missed a lot" from his sensible life choices. These types of life choices are exactly what Nick and especially Bill worry will drain the meaning from their lives. Nick's worry about living a sensible life is what pushes him to break things off with Marjorie, despite being in love with her. - Character: Ida. Description: Ida is a girl who "works for the Strattons" that Bill mentions in passing when cautioning Nick that Marjorie wasn't the sort of girl he should marry. Similarly, Bill thinks Ida would not be a suitable match for himself, noting that "oil and water" don't mix. It's not entirely clear why Bill looks down on these young women, though it's implied that they seem like small-town girls who would tie both young men down to practical, boring lives. - Theme: Masculinity, Independence, and Vulnerability. Description: In "The Three-Day Blow," Bill is a young man who idealizes manliness as independence from the commitments of marriage, money, and work. Bill celebrates fishing, writing, and above all, holding his liquor as he drinks whisky with his friend Nick, the story's protagonist. Nick seems to agree on the surface. However, as Nick becomes more intoxicated, he realizes that this picture of manliness feels meaningless, and he is regretful in the face of his grief at ending his relationship with a girl named Marjorie. Nick is hesitant to verbalize these thoughts, though, opting to remain silent when Bill declares that Nick did the right thing by breaking up with Marjorie. Nick's relief at being able hide his true thoughts and desires, along with Bill's emphasis on personal agency, suggest that both characters think emotional stoicism and independence are essential components of a man's ability to feel secure in his masculinity. By exposing the dissonance between Nick's genuine feelings and his desire to appear manly, Hemingway demonstrates that upholding such a narrow image of masculinity often requires young men to mask their vulnerability by devaluing romantic relationships and repressing their emotions. Nick and Bill idealize manliness as being free to fish, read, write, and drink. Both characters are eager to be seen like this in each other's eyes. They idealize literature and fishing when toasting to writers like Walpole and Chesterton as they drink. Bill wonders if Chesterton likes to fish, and Nick responds, "Sure," before continuing, "He must be about the best guy there is." This implies that the boys see writing and fishing as admirable activities that they associate with manliness. Bill and Nick are also eager to prove their masculinity to each other by showing that they can handle their liquor. They do so by demonstrating that they are capable of performing "practical" tasks like fetching logs for the fire while drunk. Likewise, Hemingway describes how proud Nick is that he can pick up spilled apricots while drunk. This tongue-in-cheek passage juxtaposes Nick's feelings of pride and bravado with achieving a comically simple task. This reminds the reader that although the boys aspire to be seen as "real" men, they are really still just boys pretending to embody the vision of masculinity they idealize. Nick and Bill's conversation about married life shows that their idea of masculinity is incompatible with their understanding of marriage. This makes Nick realize that he cannot be seen as ideally masculine while expressing his love for Marjorie. Bill also makes it difficult for Nick to voice his feelings, as he associates the burdens of married life with "ruin." Hemingway uses profanity in Bill's dialogue to emphasize how passionately Bill associates manliness with independence, and marriage with its downfall. Bill declares, "Once a man's married he's absolutely bitched" and "He hasn't got anything more. Nothing. Not a damn thing," suggesting that a man's ability to maintain his individuality is a crucial part of being masculine. Bill's description of married men as taking on a "sort of fat married look" physically reinforces his portrait of the married man as unmanly. Discussing Nick's breakup, Bill points out, "If you'd gone on that way we wouldn't be here now." Nick tacitly agrees, noting in his head (perhaps more with regret than relief) that if they were still together, he would have moved nearer to Marjorie by now. Bill's declaration reinforces the notion that relationships with women limit manly independence. This attitude makes Nick feel that he is betraying his true feelings for Marjorie and stifling his emotions in favor of appearing stoic and masculine. Nick's inner monologue explicitly reveals the conflict between his feelings for Marjorie and the outward expression of manliness that Nick and Bill have been celebrating. Nick realizes his fear of losing Marjorie as Bill denigrates marriage; however, instead of saying anything, Nick merely becomes quiet. His participation in the conversation recedes from the occasional "sure" to nothing at all. Nick's reaction shows that he is uncomfortable sharing his emotional vulnerability with Bill because he thinks it will make him seem unmanly. Through Nick's tepid responses to Bill's sweeping pronouncements about the dangers of marriage, Hemingway suggests that there is no room for emotional depth in the view of masculinity the boys have been idealizing. When Bill warns Nick that he should be careful not to slip back into the relationship again, Nick inwardly expresses hope at the prospect, but says nothing to Bill. Nick's ironic phrase "There's always a chance" implies agreement with Bill's worry that it would be a mistake for Nick to get back with Marjorie, whilst simultaneously betraying Nick's inward hope to do so. Ultimately, Nick hides his feelings, opting to put the "Marge business" out of his mind, at least for now. Here, Hemingway implies that Nick is only appeasing Bill so that he does not appear unmanly, and that his inner conflict will continue as long as he forces himself to conform to this stoic masculine persona rather than be honest about his feelings. Hemingway thus uses the juxtaposition of Nick's internal monologue and his actual interactions with Bill to portray a conflict between acknowledging emotions and wanting to appear masculine. Hemingway's use of humor and irony underscore this dissonance between narrow perceptions of manhood as dependent on independence and emotional stoicism, and the very real emotions that young men often feel forced to repress. - Theme: Loss and Hope. Description: In "The Three-Day Blow," Nick, the protagonist, is drinking with his friend Bill at Bill father's cabin. Their drunken conversation betrays little substance, as they rotate through superficial topics like baseball, alcohol, and the weather. However, Nick's feeling of powerlessness in the face of adulthood are evident beneath the surface of the trivial matters they are discussing. He thinks despondently about his recently ended relationship, implicitly comparing it to the brutal nature of the storm outside, but he is pacified by the thought that although the chaotic nature of life brings about abrupt endings, it carries with it the possibility that anything can happen. This idea is echoed throughout the story with descriptions of the cyclical nature of existence, like the "second-growth" logs piled in front of the trees outside the cabin. Thus, the narrative asserts that feelings of futility in the face of loss still give cause for optimism, because no ending is absolute: another storm could blow through and shake everything up again. Nick despairs about his breakup with Marjorie when comparing its finality to the brutality of the storm. His feelings of futility in the face of his recent breakup are captured in his comparison of the "sudden" nature of the relationship's end and the devastation of storms like the "three-day blow." Nick says, "All of a sudden everything was over," before continuing, "Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees." This comparison shows that Nick feels as powerless about the breakup as he does the storm, despite having chosen to end the relationship. Nick's shock at his relationship with Marjorie being over is captured in the word "gone," which he repeats throughout his internal monologue. The repetition conveys Nick's shock at the finality of his breakup with Marjorie much in the way that tree branches can be full of leaves until a storm blows through: the leaves are suddenly ripped off and cannot be put back in place. Despite Nick's feelings of loss and hopelessness, Bill inadvertently prompts him to realize that this ending has triggered the possibility of a new beginning. When Bill warns Nick to avoid slipping back into the relationship, Nick is suddenly comforted by the realization that no ending is final. Nick's realization is captured in his reflection that "Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost." The realization is paired with an explicit shift in mood from despair to optimism in Nick's internal monologue. Rather than viewing the breakup as a tragedy, Nick's shift in perspective suggests that an individual's view of their circumstances comes down to choice, and that even situations that seem "lost" can be reframed as a new beginning. Hemingway narrates, "He felt happy now. There was not anything that was irrevocable." This idea is visually reflected in the "second-growth" logs piled in front of the trees outside the cabin. These logs, which signify regrowth after a timber harvest, represent Nick's newfound hope in starting again and having another chance with Marjorie. This is also reflected in the way that Nick and Bill depict the fall storms in a positive light. Nick says, "It's good when the fall storms come, isn't it?" This subtly questions the finality that Nick later associates with the storm. Storms, like seasons, come and go, and things continue to exist and grow despite the initial destructive changes that the storms bring about. By the end of the story, the power of the storm is reframed as a positive, rather than destructive thing: Nick is relieved that the wind has metaphorically blown his worries about Marjorie out of his head. This symbolizes Nick's shift in mood from despair and worry to hope and peace of mind. Hemingway draws a comparison between the "three-day blow" of the storm and Nick's feelings of loss and desolation in order to convey the sense of destruction and powerlessness that can occur in the midst of a breakup. But by extending this association to encompass the regrowth that a storm often facilitates, the story posits that there is always a choice to reframe loss as something positive, as it ultimately opens up new opportunities for an individual. - Theme: The Lost Generation. Description: In "The Three-Day Blow," Hemingway's detailed descriptions of the setting connote a palpable sense of time and place. Such details from the narrative reflect Hemingway's characteristic fusing of autobiographic details about his life with fictional characters. In effect, "The Three-Day Blow" (much like Hemingway's other writing) not only serves to tell a specific story about two young men, but it also extends beyond the characters and their particular situations to connote the generational angst of the Lost Generation. This generation of youths, including Hemingway himself, came of age in between World War I and World War II and became disillusioned with traditional American values because these conventions seemed hollow, materialistic, and devoid of meaning after the wartime atrocities they had witnessed. Without such values to ground their life choices, many felt aimless, and therefore "lost," much like Nick, who feels confused and aimless in the story. By including autobiographical details of his own life and portraying common struggles of disillusionment and unfulfillment through Nick and Bill in the narrative, Hemingway uses the story as a small-scale representation of the issues that plagued the Lost Generation. At the outset of the story, Hemingway sets up the narrative with descriptive details that place the story in the Northeastern United States in approximately 1916, lining up geographically and historically with the youths of the Lost Generation, including Hemingway himself. Geographic signposts include Nick picking a "Wagner" apple on his way to Bill's cottage and putting it in the pocket of his "Mackinaw" coat. The apple and type of coat are typical of the Michigan region. This is reinforced by Nick's reference to "Ten Mile Point," which is on the shores of Lake Michigan. Thus, the story's setting is established as quintessential to the American Northeast, making it familiar and relatable to audiences in the United States. Soon after, the story is also placed in time—approximately in 1916—through Nick and his friend Bill's discussion about major league baseball games from that era, and actual novels (such as Walpole's 1906 The Dark Forest). Although published after World War I, setting the story in 1916 establishes it as a World War I narrative, in which Nick and Bill can be inferred to be struggling with the same issues of confusion, discontentment, and alienation that affected youths during this difficult era in history. Similarly, aspects of the narrative—such as Nick's almost denting the fire grate with his big feet—connote memoir-like associations with Hemingway himself, who was known for having large feet, as well as the use of the name Marjorie for the character of Nick's ex-girlfriend. Hemingway also had a relationship with a girl named Marjorie in his youth. The story thus grounds a fictional story in the historical context of the Lost Generation, including Hemingway himself. In this way, Hemingway allows the reader to see the interactions between Nick and Bill as fiction, yet also representative of general experiences that the Lost Generation's young men might have had. The story deals with two issues commonly associated with the Lost Generation: disillusionment with the conventions of work and married life (represented in Bill's dialogue), and the search for meaning and emotional fulfillment in life (captured in Nick's inner monologue). Thus, the story extends beyond the fictional context of two specific characters to communicate more universal social themes and worries that preoccupied the Lost Generation. Bill considers marriage problematic because it carries with it the burden of working in order to save for marriage, and presumably a house and children. Nick tacitly agrees, reflecting in his internal monologue that if he was still with Marjorie, he would have had to look for a job and stay in Charlevoix, where Marjorie lives. Whereas previous American generations glorified hard work and upheld the nuclear family structure, Bill and Nick's unenthusiastic attitudes reflect the Lost Generation's struggles to make sense of antiquated traditions in a war-torn, rapidly shifting, and modernizing society. Bill also implies that the social chatter of domestic life is repetitive and tedious. He says, "Imagine having them around the house all the time and going to Sunday dinners at their house, and having them over to dinner and her telling Marge all the time what to do and how to act." Nick agrees when he says, "I'm sorry as hell about her but what could I do? […] You know what her mother was like!" Nick exposes his reluctance to embrace the social demands of a marriage with Marjorie as the reason why he ended the relationship (despite being in love with her), further emphasizing the cynicism and lack of commitment present among young men of the Lost Generation. Yet when Nick fantasizes about being with Marjorie, he wistfully imagines them traveling to Italy, having fun, and exploring new places. This juxtaposition implies that Nick wants to acknowledge his feelings for Marjorie but is hesitant to take on the conventions of domestic life that romantic commitment demands. This suggests that members of Lost Generation like Nick desired the emotional fulfilment of romantic relationships, but the trauma they experienced as youths growing up in wartime likely left them feeling that settling down, getting married, and working day jobs to pay the bills would be unmeaningful and unfulfilling. Hemingway includes personal and characteristically American details in "The Three-Day Blow" in order to establish it as a narrative that broadly tells the story of an entire generation, rather than merely the story of two young men. He leverages Nick's internal distress to capture the conflict between seeking emotional fulfilment in love while being disillusioned with the demands of conventional domestic life. Through the ambivalent voices of Bill and Nick, Hemingway thus communicates the issues that the Lost Generation's young men typically wrestled with when emerging from adolescence into adulthood. - Climax: Nick and Bill, both drunk, head out of the cabin to go shooting. Nick is hopeful, having secretly resolved to seek a reconciliation Marjorie, but decides to put the issue out of his mind for now. - Summary: The story's protagonist, Nick, arrives at his friend Bill's cabin. It's the beginning of fall, and an early fall storm is starting to blow in. Nick picks a Wagner apple and puts it in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat. The pair sit down by the fire and drink whisky. Bill notices that Nick isn't wearing socks, and he fetches some, warning Nick not to dent the fire grate with his big feet. The boys talk first about baseball, discussing the current season, including the trade of Heine Zim to the Giants. Soon the conversation switches to focus on activities that both boys love: reading, fishing, and drinking. They talk about new books they are reading as they refill their glasses several times. They toast to their favorite writers, including Chesterton and Walpole, and agree that if the writers were here they would take them fishing. The boys discuss their fathers. Bill thinks his father, who is a painter has had a bit of a tough time in life. Nick thinks that his father, who is a doctor that doesn't drink, has missed out on a lot in life. Both boys are keen to show they can handle their liquor, so they perform practical tasks. Nick fetches a log for the fire, and when he knocks some apricots on the floor he picks them up. He's proud of himself for being practical. Bill weighs in on which logs Nick should bring, also proud of himself that he's being practical. Despite their bravado about drinking, both characters are becoming more intoxicated—so intoxicated, in fact, that when Nick walks by a mirror he cannot recognize his own reflection. Bill switches topics to Nick's recent breakup with a girl named Marjorie, saying that Nick was wise to call off the relationship. Nick halfheartedly agrees, but sits quietly as Bill goes on to explain that commitments like marriage undermine a man's freedom. Once a man is married, Bill argues, he has to work all day to support his family, and he has to socialize with his in-laws all the time. While Bill is talking, the viewpoint of the story shifts to Nick's internal perspective. Though he hasn't said anything to Bill, Nick is secretly distraught about losing Marjorie. He dwells on how hard it is to face this loss, comparing the pain of the relationship being over to the violence of the storm outside. Nick explains to Bill that the breakup felt very sudden, and he's sorry about it but he felt like he had no choice because of Marjorie's overbearing mother. Bill agrees and warns Nick not to get involved with Marjorie again. Suddenly, Nick feels hopeful. He had not thought about this before, and the possibility makes him feel better. He thinks about going into town on Saturday, but says nothing about this to Bill. Bill is confident that he has advised Nick well to stay away from Marjorie, while Nick's mood is elevated by the prospect of getting her back. The pair head outside for some shooting, and Nick decides to put off thinking about what he will do for the moment, feeling that the wind blew his worries out of his head.

- Genre: Swashbuckler, Historical Novel - Title: The Three Musketeers - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Paris, France and London, England; 1625–1628 - Character: D'Artagnan. Description: D'Artagnan is a young man from Gascony who leaves his childhood home for Paris to become a musketeer. D'Artagnan is handsome, intelligent, and brave, which makes him a perfect candidate for M. de Tréville's musketeers. However, before he can become a musketeer, he must prove himself worthy. Before long, d'Artagnan gets entangled with all manner of political intrigue along with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Despite his young age, d'Artagnan often acts as the leader of the group. Although he's largely a heroic character, d'Artagnan is not without his faults. He can be selfish and manipulative, as when he uses Kitty's affection for him to get revenge on Milady. However, for much of the novel, d'Artagnan is a classic hero and his trials and tribulations eventually earn him the title of musketeer. Like his fellow musketeers, love is constantly on d'Artagnan's mind, and he eventually finds love with Madame Bonacieux. After performing a daring feat on Madame Bonacieux's behalf, d'Artagnan starts a formal romance with her, although the two of them are separated for the majority of the novel. Eventually, d'Artagnan is reunited with his love, but he arrives a moment too late: Milady has already poisoned Madame Bonacieux and she dies. As such, d'Artagnan's narrative arc ends on a depressing note; unlike most heroes he does not save the damsel in distress, and in the story's closing pages, he is left feeling isolated. - Character: Athos. Description: Athos is a musketeer whose real name is Comte de la Fère. Despite his aristocratic origins, Athos obscures his identity and refuses to tell anyone about his past. Of the musketeers, Athos is the dourest and there are often stretches of times where he drinks nonstop. Despite his occasional bouts of alcoholism, Athos is the wisest member of the group and is the most likely of the friends to act as a leader along with d'Artagnan. During one of Athos's binge drinking sessions, he accidently reveals to d'Artagnan that he used to be married to a woman who he killed after he saw a fleur-de-lis on her shoulder. Evidently, Athos's attempt to murder his former wife failed because she is still alive, and in the present she's known as Milady de Winter. Although Athos usually keeps his emotions under control, he nurses a deep hatred for Milady and is the only one who seems genuinely happy after her death. Additionally, Athos is the best swordsman in the group, and he has the best military mind. He is often the musketeer who is matched up with more than one enemy at once in combat and he always manages to come out unscathed. - Character: Aramis. Description: Aramis is a musketeer whose real name is René d'Herblay. He is said to be an attractive man, although he largely avoids discussing women. Aramis is constantly torn between his life as a musketeer and his desire to join the church. Although the other members of the group are skeptical Aramis will ever leave the musketeers, he proves them wrong by becoming an abbé at the end of the novel. However, for much the story, Aramis is far from the perfect priest. Like the other musketeers, he is interested in drinking, gambling, and women. His mistress is Madame de Chevreuse, although he largely manages to keep their relationship a secret. Though his friends suspect he has a mistress, only d'Artagnan suspects her true identity. Additionally, Aramis is a skilled writer, and his talent gets the musketeers out of several binds. In particular, Aramis's writing comes in handy when the musketeers need to write secret letters, which must be worded perfectly so they cannot be understood by the enemy should they be intercepted. - Character: Porthos. Description: Porthos is a musketeer whose real name is M. du Vallon. Of the musketeers, Porthos is the most concerned with his looks; he dresses fancifully and orders his servant, Mousqueton, to do the same. Porthos also acts as the novel's comic relief. He is always the last one to catch on to a plan and he often needs things overtly explained to him. Additionally, Porthos is the easiest musketeer to read. Although he attempts to conceal secrets, such as his affair with Madame Coquenard, he fails to do so effectively. Unlike the other musketeers, Porthos doesn't have a dramatic arc that stretches across the novel. Instead, the chapters that focus on him largely deal with his comical relationship with Madame Coquenard and his propensity for gambling. A great lover of money, Porthos finally gains his fortune at the end of the novel by marrying Madame Coquenard after her husband dies. - Character: Milady de Winter. Description: Milady de Winter is an agent of the cardinal, as well as Athos's former wife. As a young woman, she was branded with a fleur-de-lis because she stole sacred objects from a church. Later, she married Athos and did not disclose her criminal status. When Athos found out, he tried to kill her. Eventually, she also married Lord de Winter's brother-in-law while still she was still technically married Athos. Shortly after their marriage, Lord de Winter's brother-in-law died, and Lord de Winter suspects foul play may have been involved. Milady is very beautiful, and she successfully seduces many characters throughout the novel and gets them to do her bidding. This includes John Felton, a stoic and religious man who she eventually convinces to kill the Duke of Buckingham. The only person who gets the better of Milady is d'Artagnan, who tricks her into thinking that he is the Comte de Wardes. D'Artagnan's betrayal fuels Milady's desire for revenge and ultimately leads to the deaths of both the Duke of Buckingham and Madame Bonacieux (whom she poisons). Throughout the novel, Milady relies on her intelligence and beauty to get by. Although she has allies in high places who she tries to please, her actions are entirely self-serving. Ultimately, her selfishness leads to her downfall. In the climax of the novel, the musketeers and Lord de Winter sentence her death and then execute her. - Character: Cardinal Richelieu. Description: Cardinal Richelieu is the religious leader of France who wields enormous power. He is a cunning man who will go outside the bounds of traditional morality to get his way. However, he is not wholly evil, and he has great respect for d'Artagnan and the musketeers. Additionally, he treats both the king and M. de Tréville as his rivals, and many of his schemes are attempts to gain power over them. - Character: Lord de Winter. Description: Lord de Winter is Milady's brother-in-law. After fighting a duel with d'Artagnan, the two become friends and allies. D'Artagnan writes to Lord de Winter to warn him that Milady wants him and the duke dead. In response, Lord de Winter imprisons Milady, though he fails to save the duke's life. - Character: King Louis XIII. Description: King Louis XIII is the king of France. He is a jealous man who is difficult to please. Although the cardinal and M. de Tréville often try to manipulate him, the king is often more astute than either of them expects. Although he is cruel to his wife, Queen Anne, the king appreciates the musketeers, especially when they win victories over the cardinal's men. - Character: Queen Anne. Description: Queen Anne is the wife of King Louis XIII. She is a lonely woman whom her husband treats harshly. Although she loves the Duke of Buckingham, she refuses to be with him because she is worried about the scandal it will cause. Additionally, she is fiercely against the war between the French and the English, and she urges the duke to put an end to it. - Character: The Duke of Buckingham. Description: The Duke of Buckingham is the leader of England who is in love with Queen Anne. Although he is a handsome, charismatic, and generally kind man, he is also selfish and starts a war with France because he is angry that Louis XIII is keeping him away from Queen Anne. At the end of the novel, John Felton assassinates him. - Character: Madame Bonacieux. Description: Madame Bonacieux is one of the queen's servants and d'Artagnan's mistress. At the beginning of the novel, she remains loyal to her husband until Monsieur Bonacieux becomes an agent of the cardinal. Realizing her husband has betrayed her, Madame Bonacieux turns to d'Artagnan for help and eventually falls in love with him. Because she is loyal to the queen, Madame Bonacieux is regularly persecuted by the cardinal and eventually has to hide in a convent outside of Paris. Just before she and d'Artagnan are reunited, Milady poisons Madame Bonacieux. She dies in d'Artagnan's arms. - Character: Rochefort. Description: Rochefort is one of the cardinal's best men. D'Artagnan meets him at the beginning of the novel and challenges him to a duel, not realizing who he is. Although he is allied with the cardinal and in love with Milady, Rochefort is generally good-hearted. At the end of the novel, he and d'Artagnan develop a mutual respect for each other. - Character: M. de Tréville. Description: M. de Tréville is the leader of the musketeers and the cardinal's rival He acts as a father figure for his men and does whatever he can to get them out of a bind. He is cunning and often two steps ahead of the cardinal. Toward the end of the novel, he makes d'Artagnan a musketeer. - Character: John Felton. Description: John Felton is one of Lord de Winter's soldiers. Lord de Winter chooses him to guard Milady, thinking he is incorruptible. However, Milady manages to seduce Felton by playing off of his religious beliefs. Not only does Milady get Felton to help her escape from Lord de Winter, but she also convinces him to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham. - Character: Monsieur Bonacieux. Description: Monsieur Bonacieux, a middle-aged merchant, is D'Artagnan's landlord and approaches D'Artagnan for help when he believes his wife, Madame Bonacieux, has been abducted. When he is arrested by Cardinal Richelieu's men for alleged treason, he proves to be cowardly and willing to say whatever will please the authorities, even when it eventually means betraying his wife by spying for the cardinal. - Theme: Friendship and Loyalty. Description: D'Artagnan befriends his fellow musketeers by siding with them against the cardinal's men in a battle. Together the men succeed in combat and their experience forms the basis of their friendship. It is a friendship based on the group's mutual loyalty, which in turn is characterized by their ability to compromise their individual needs and desires for the good of their group. This attitude is summed up in the famous motto of D'Artagnan and his friends: "All for one, one for all!" This phrase doesn't sacrifice the individuality of the members of the group, but it does demand a sort of collective accountability. It does not expect group members to act selflessly at all times, but it does require sacrifices on occasion. There are many examples of this mentality on display throughout the novel. For instance, the musketeers always back up one another in battle. Throughout the novel, d'Artagnan and his friends often get themselves involved in duels. Any time an individual member accepts a duel, the rest of the groups act as seconds and fight alongside their friend. Because of their ability to coordinate and work together, the musketeers win all of their duels. Additionally, this group dynamic is exemplified by the manner in which the musketeers handle their finances. Whenever one of the musketeers or D'Artagnan receives a hefty sum of money, it is always dispersed among the other members of the group in accordance with their individual needs. Likewise, should a member of the group fall on hard times, the other members do their best to support him. For instance, the musketeers often buy one another meals. However, in doing so, they are not merely acting selflessly. One musketeer supports the others because he knows he will need their support in return sometime in the future. - Theme: Honor. Description: Honor is a concept that is central to the musketeers' way of life. The musketeers only act in ways that they believe are honorable and do their best to never bring dishonor on themselves or their friends. However, it is sometimes difficult to know what counts as an honorable action and what counts as a dishonorable action. Clearly, one way for the musketeers to act honorably is to fight well in battle. This is exemplified in the scene where d'Artagnan and his friends eat breakfast while holding off several waves of English soldiers who attack the bastion they are sitting in. Each time d'Artagnan and his friends are victorious, they are hailed with cries of approval from the watching French army, confirming that their actions are honorable from their countrymen's perspective. After the battle is over, the cardinal is so impressed by d'Artagnan's courage that he suggests to Monsieur de Tréville that d'Artagnan be promoted. Battle is a straightforward example of how the musketeers bring honor upon themselves. However, the novel often complicates the notion of what counts as an honorable action. The notion of honor is defined by the musketeers' cultural context, meaning that some degree of social agreement is necessary—especially from people in power—to make the concept of honor meaningful. For example, the musketeers only manage to receive honor from battle because those around them agree that what they are doing is valuable. However, honor gets more complicated when thinking about issues such as d'Artagnan's relationship with the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke of Buckingham is the leader of England, which makes him an enemy of France. Nonetheless, d'Artagnan does what he can to save the duke's life. However, in the eyes of his countrymen, it is not clear that this is an honorable action. In fact, it could very well be considered dishonorable and treasonous. In this case, honor and morality feel quite far apart from one another. D'Artagnan does what he thinks is right, rather than what he thinks is honorable. Although the novel speaks highly of honor, it is careful never to confuse honor with morality. - Theme: Class and Power. Description: Class is a notable factor throughout The Three Musketeers. Class divides can clearly be seen when examining the relationships between the musketeers and their servants, and even among the musketeers themselves. However, the largest class divides in the novel—those between monarchs and their subjects—prove to be the most important. The Three Musketeers depicts the ruling powers as rather selfish entities who plunge their entire kingdoms into war and strife because of their own whims and desires. For instance, the Duke of Buckingham declares war on France largely because he is angry that Louis XIII won't let him see Queen Anne. Similarly, Louis XIII knows the true reason for the war and does nothing to stop it. The cardinal is no better. He, too, wants to kill the Duke of Buckingham because he was once rejected by Queen Anne and wants to see her suffer. While the royals play out their petty romantic drama, the people actually involved in the war suffer. Many thousands die because of the romantic rivalry between the Duke of Buckingham and Louis XIII. In particular, many of the citizens of La Rochelle are forced to die of starvation because of a siege that is part of the war effort. At several points throughout the novel, d'Artagnan stops and thinks about how his life and the lives of his friends are largely determined by the whims of two or three powerful individuals. As such, the novel emerges as a harsh critique of powerful monarchical systems and their excesses, often caused by the most trivial of matters. - Theme: The Secrets of the Past. Description: In The Three Musketeers, the past never stays buried. Several prominent characters carry the secrets of the past around with them. By the end of the novel, these secrets are exposed and the characters who keep them are worse off for having done so in the first place. This especially applies to Lady de Winter and Athos, whose secrets are inextricably linked to one another. Eventually, d'Artagnan and the other musketeers learn that Lady de Winter and Athos were once married. Athos married Lady de Winter because he thought she was a respectable girl, albeit from a modest background. However, one day he learns that she has a fleur-de-lis branded on her back. The fleur-de-lis marks Lady de Winter as a criminal and so, feeling betrayed, Athos tries (and fails) to kill her. Of course, these events themselves are bad enough, but matters become even worse because both parties try to keep their true identities and pasts a secret. For Athos, this results in a lifetime of heavy drinking and regular bouts of depression. Meanwhile, Lady de Winter hides her true identity from everyone and this works against her later in the novel, especially when Lord de Winter discovers her true identity anyway and imprisons her. Although the novel doesn't disavow keeping secrets altogether—after all, certain political secrets are necessarily kept throughout the novel—it does demonstrate the chaos that can ensue if one keeps one's true identity a secret. Among other things, The Three Musketeers is a novel about putting one's trust in others; those who resist doing so until the bitter end—such as Lady de Winter—do not receive a happy ending. - Theme: Seduction and Romance. Description: Seduction and romance appear throughout The Three Musketeers, as nearly all of the major characters are involved or were involved in a romantic relationship that affects the plot. Most notably, the Duke of Buckingham and Queen Anne are romantically interested in one another, and their interest leads to a war between England and France. Likewise, d'Artagnan's love for Madame Bonacieux, one of the queen's servants, leads him on several quests that take him all over France and even into England. Notably, although the novel's characters value romantic love—and the novel's intended audience would've as well—on the whole, it does not lead to positive outcomes. In addition to the war that begins due to Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham's romantic interest, d'Artagnan's romance ends in his lover's death after Milady poisons her. Similarly, Athos's marriage to Milady ends tragically because Athos discovers she is branded with a fleur-de-lis and tries to kill her. Seduction, meanwhile, proves temporarily useful, but also ends in disaster. For instance, D'Artagnan successfully seduces Milady only to be attacked by her moments later after he sees the fleur-de-lis brand. Milady herself is the primary seductress in the book and using her abilities, she convinces John Felton to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham. In addition, she manages to secure successful marriages with two noblemen, although neither marriage ends happily. Although seduction provides Milady a chance to advance her social and political goals, all of her successes are only temporary, and she is eventually killed for her transgressions. Ultimately, the novel's view of romantic and sexual relationships is quite pessimistic. The only main character who ends the novel married is Porthos and he only marries Madame Coquenard because of her money, not for romance. Meanwhile, the relationships that come about as a result of seduction end almost as soon as they begin. As such, the novel suggests that love is an impossibility for an active musketeer, while lust is a dangerous distraction. - Climax: The four musketeers, Lord de Winter, and an executioner track down Milady. Together, they hold a trial, declare her guilty, and execute her. - Summary: The Three Musketeers is the story of d'Artagnan, a young man from Gascony who dreams of becoming a musketeer (a soldier who carries a rifle). At the beginning of the novel, he sets off from his hometown and makes his way to Paris where he plans to introduce himself to M. de Tréville, the king's righthand man and the leader of the musketeers. On his way to Paris, he picks a fight with a Rochefort, one of the cardinal's best men, although d'Artagnan doesn't know who he is at the time. Upon arriving in Paris, he makes his way to M. de Tréville, who gets him started on the path to becoming a musketeer. Shortly after his meeting with M. de Tréville, d'Artagnan challenges three different musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—to a duel, not realizing any of them are friends. When d'Artagnan shows up to his duel with Athos, he is surprised to see that Athos brought Porthos and Aramis as his seconds. However, before their duel can begin, the cardinal's men interrupt them and pick a fight with the musketeers. Realizing that his issues with the musketeers are silly, d'Artagnan decides to ally himself with them against the cardinal's men. D'Artagnan and the musketeers easily win the battle against the cardinal's men and from that moment on, the four men become great friends. Shortly after his battle with the cardinal's men, d'Artagnan becomes embroiled in a plot to save the queen from one of the cardinal's schemes. Simultaneously, he falls in love with a woman named Madame Bonacieux who works for the queen. She asks d'Artagnan to deliver a letter to the Duke of Buckingham in England. Although d'Artagnan doesn't know it, the queen gave the Duke of Buckingham some diamond tags (jewelry) as a token of her affection, but now, the queen needs them back—otherwise, the cardinal plans to humiliate her in front of the king by revealing her affair with the duke. Wanting to win Madame Bonacieux's favor, d'Artagnan heads to London with Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and their servants by his side. On the way to London, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis stay behind at various points in the journey to deal with the cardinal's traps. D'Artagnan makes it to London and gives the duke the letter. The duke returns the tags to d'Artagnan, who swiftly takes them back to Paris and gives them to the queen. Although this is a great success for d'Artagnan, it puts him on the cardinal's radar. Because of this, M. de Tréville tells d'Artagnan that he must watch his back. Not long after d'Artagnan returns from Paris, the cardinal kidnaps Madame Bonacieux, who now loves d'Artagnan in return. M. de Tréville promises to help d'Artagnan find her, but in the meantime, d'Artagnan must find out what happened to the musketeers. As quickly as he can, d'Artagnan sets off to find each of his friends. He does so without too much trouble, although ach of his friends is in a terrible emotional state that d'Artagnan must snap them out of. Athos, in particular, is in a bad mood and drinks a lot. One night while drunk, Athos tells d'Artagnan a story about his "friend" (who is clearly Athos himself). This friend apparently married a beautiful woman and then killed her after he found out she was branded with a fleur-de-lis. This story horrifies d'Artagnan, though he doesn't know what to make of it. Eventually, the musketeers make their way back to Paris. For the next few weeks, they prepare for the upcoming war against the English. Additionally, d'Artagnan becomes acquainted with Milady de Winter, a woman who he knows is friendly with Rochefort. At this point, d'Artagnan thinks Rochefort had something to do with Madame Bonacieux's kidnapping and wants to find out more details. Although he initially plans to use Milady to get to Rochefort, d'Artagnan quickly finds himself falling in love with Milady. Eventually, d'Artagnan goes to bed with Milady after promising to fight a duel on her behalf. While in bed with Milady, d'Artagnan admits he's been dishonest with her, and she gets angry with him. As he tries to calm her down, d'Artagnan rips Milady's nightgown, revealing a fleur-de-lis on her shoulder. This revelation causes Milady to go berserk; she tries to stab d'Artagnan, who barely escapes with his life. He tells Athos about the encounter and though neither man says it out loud, both know that Milady is Athos's wife. Not long after this incident, d'Artagnan and the musketeers ride off to war. Because d'Artagnan is not a musketeer himself, he doesn't fight alongside his friends. While at war, d'Artagnan feels isolated and afraid. He knows Milady might try to take revenge on him and indeed she does. She sends several assassins his way as well as some poison wine. Luckily, d'Artagnan foils her plans and is eventually reunited with his friends. Not long after d'Artagnan and his friends are reunited, the musketeers overhear a conversation between the cardinal and Milady. The cardinal tells Milady that he will allow her to kill d'Artagnan with impunity if she assassinates the Duke of Buckingham. The musketeers tell d'Artagnan about Milady's plan and the four of them decide to write one letter to the queen and one letter to Lord de Winter, Milady's brother-in-law, warning them about Milady's plan. Lord de Winter is d'Artagnan's friend as well as a close confidant of the Duke of Buckingham. D'Artagnan knows Lord de Winter doesn't like Milady and suspects that she wants him dead so that she can steal his money. Milady sails to London, where she is promptly abducted by one of Lord de Winter's men, John Felton, and taken to a castle. There, Lord de Winter explains that he plans to send Milady to a penal colony as soon as he can get a letter from the duke granting him permission. Until then, Milady must wait in captivity. During that time, John Felton, a highly religious man, watches over her. Slowly, Milady seduces Felton and wins him over to her side. She tells him an elaborate (and false) story about how the Duke of Buckingham raped and unfairly branded her, which makes Felton, who already despises the duke because of his religious beliefs, hate him even more. Just before Milady can be sent away, Felton breaks her out of her cell and takes her to London on a boat. While in London, Felton goes by himself to find the duke and kills him. He is captured in the process. Milady makes her way back to France and eventually ends up in a convent. There, she meets Madame Bonacieux, who managed to escape the cardinal and has been hiding in the convent for some time. When Milady learns that Madame Bonacieux is d'Artagnan's mistress and that d'Artagnan is coming to rescue her, she poisons her as an act of revenge. D'Artagnan finds Madame Bonacieux just in time to watch her die. Realizing what happened, d'Artagnan, who is now a musketeer himself, tracks down Milady with his friends' help. They also bring along a local executioner who Milady wronged in the past. Together, the group holds a trial for Milady and declares her guilty. The executioner then beheads her. Everyone heads back to Paris. The war is over for the time being and the cardinal makes d'Artagnan a lieutenant of the musketeers for his service. Although the cardinal does not like that d'Artagnan foiled some of his plans, he still got what he wanted, and he has great respect for d'Artagnan. He also introduces d'Artagnan to Rochefort and forces the two men to promise to get along. D'Artagnan and Rochefort comply, although clearly a rivalry still exists between the two of them. In the years after, d'Artagnan serves as a lieutenant for the musketeers. Gradually, all of his friends retire to marry and explore their passions.

- Genre: Science Fiction - Title: The Time Machine - Point of view: Though the book has a first person narrator who is not the Time Traveller, the story is mostly told as the Time Traveller's first person account of his voyage. - Setting: Victorian-era England, and England in the year 802,701 - Character: The Time Traveller. Description: Though he is not the narrator of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller is the book's protagonist. He is an eminent but eccentric British scientist, and his particular interest in time travel leads him to build a time machine that transports himself into the future. Much of the Time Traveller's character is revealed through his observations and storytelling—for instance, the fact that he values intelligence above all other human traits becomes clear as a result of his obsessive disappointment that the humans of the future are stupid and uncurious. The Time Traveller thinks like a scientist, always forming hypotheses about the world and adjusting them based on his observations, even if he doesn't like what these observations suggest about humanity. The other notable characteristic of the Time Traveller is that, while he is a member of the British elite (as evident by the company he keeps at dinner parties), he is not at home with them. The other elites view him as far too clever and, for that reason, suspect. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The narrator of The Time Machine is all but absent from the book. He is one of the Time Traveller's dinner companions, which suggests that he is also a member of the British elite, but his profession is not named and he does not figure into any of the Time Traveller's story about the future, which comprises the bulk of the book. The narrator is notable, though, for seeming less skeptical of the Time Traveller's story than the other dinner guests. However, the narrator does not seem to be able to fully absorb the lessons of the Time Traveller's story, even though he does believe that it happened. The narrator, unable to overcome his desire for future humans to have improved on the conditions of the present, prefers to live with the assumption that future humans will have better lives than he will. This makes him unable to fight to change the Victorian social conditions that led to the Eloi and the Morlocks in the first place, which makes the narrator a rather ineffectual vehicle for the Time Traveller's story. - Character: The Eloi. Description: The Eloi are humanlike creatures who are small, unintelligent, uncurious, weak, and also, importantly, benevolent and happy. They are the evolutionary descendants of the British elite, who exploited the British poor for so long that the poor evolved into a race of humanoids called the Morlocks. While the centuries of exploitation of the Morlocks complicates the picture of the Eloi as essentially good, they are a species characterized by kindness, and the Time Traveller becomes affectionate towards them on his travels. The Eloi face no adversity in their lives except that they are likely being raised for food by the Morlocks, who come to the surface of the earth at night and eat vulnerable Eloi. - Character: The Morlocks. Description: The British poor toiled in dark conditions for so long that they evolved into a subterranean race of humans who could no longer see in the daylight. While they once likely ate animals like rats that they found underground, this food supply ran out and the Morlocks became cannibalistic, preying on their evolutionary cousins, the Eloi.While the Eloi faced no adversity for centuries, thereby losing their strength and intelligence, the Morlocks (as a result of their harsh conditions) retained much greater capabilities. The Morlocks are seen by the Time Traveller as an evil species, and their clammy, pale bodies and enormous eyes certainly contribute to their menacing aura, but it's important to note that the Morlocks prey on the Eloi out of necessity. They have no other food, and they have been exploited by the Eloi for centuries, which makes their moral position complex. Nonetheless, the Morlocks are the antagonists of The Time Machine, and part of the book's pessimism is its conclusion that the Morlocks are on their way to ruling the earth. - Character: Weena. Description: Weena is an Eloi woman whom the Time Traveller saves from drowning. Though he does not expect gratitude or recognition in return for his bravery, Weena surprises and charms the Time Traveller by following him everywhere from then on and adorning him constantly with flowers as a sign of gratitude and affection. The Time Traveller learns important things from Weena (including that fear is, after all, a pervasive feeling among the Eloi), and it is through her companionship that he begins to feel that this strange future is his home. Nonetheless, he is conflicted about how human she really is—she's not particularly intelligent, but, as the Time Traveller says, "She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human." Thus Weena is a being defined by kindness, and her death in a forest fire that the Time Traveller inadvertently started is a tragedy. - Theme: Inequality and Social Class. Description: The Time Machine, written in Britain in 1895, is the product of an era of great anxiety about social class and economic inequality. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had generated incredible wealth in Britain, but that wealth went almost entirely to the upper classes instead of being equally distributed to the lower-class workers whose labor was instrumental to industrial prosperity. Moreover, the economic writings of Karl Marx (who died just before The Time Machine was written) inspired widespread critique of the exploitation of the poor by the rich. This class anxiety of the late nineteenth century was particularly pronounced in Britain because of the rigidity of the social hierarchy there—it was very hard under any circumstances for a person to escape the conditions of the class into which they were born, which H. G. Wells, having grown up poor, knew well.Thus, The Time Machine, though it is primarily set hundreds of thousands of years in the future, is truly a cautionary tale about the social conditions of Victorian England. This is most apparent in the differences between the Eloi and Morlocks, the two humanlike species of the year 802,701. The Eloi are the descendants of the British elite, who, through exploitation of the poor, have created living conditions so easy and idyllic that the species has actually regressed, losing the intelligence and strength that characterize present-day humans. Meanwhile the Morlocks, the descendants of the British working class, have toiled underground for so long that they've lost their ability to see in the daylight and have resorted to cannibalism. Wells uses the distinctions between these two species to posit that the divisions between social classes in Victorian England are so stark and harmful that they could lead the human species to split into two different species, each embodying some of the worst characteristics of humans. The fear and violence that characterizes the relationship between the Eloi and Morlocks is also meant to echo the tensions between workers and elites in Victorian Britain. Wells asks readers to consider that this relationship, if not reconciled, could evolve into something much nastier.The very structure of the narrative of The Time Machine is also reflective of the theme of inequality. The Time Traveller recounts his journey into the future to a room full of social elites (an editor, doctor, journalist, psychologist, etc.), both because these are his friends and also because they are the people who have power to effect change in British society, and the Time Traveller expects his account to be impactful. While the Time Traveller is a respected scientist, he seems not quite at home in these circles: the others view him as an eccentric and he's uncomfortable with servants (he "hates to have [them] waiting at dinner"). So the Time Traveller occupies a complicated class position that, perhaps, makes him uniquely suited to reflect on the class distinctions he encounters in the future. It's also notable that, in Wells' vision, even the Time Traveller's movement hundreds of thousands of years in the future does not allow him to transcend his class. The Time Traveller is more at home with the Eloi than the Morlocks, just as he was socializing with elites in Victorian England. The science fiction world of 802,701 then, is a dystopian projection into the future based on inequality between Victorian social classes, but it is also simply an exaggeration for emphasis of the social conditions that were contemporary with Wells' writing. - Theme: Technology and Progress. Description: The Time Machine opens with the Time Traveller explaining to his dinner guests the underlying scientific principles that make his invention, the time machine, possible. This immersion into mathematical concepts and scientific language is meant to give readers a taste of the intelligence, creativity, and ambition that fuel technological development. In contrast, the Eloi of the future lack language, technology, and even physical strength—they are presented as a lazy species that naps and frolics and eats copious amounts of fruit. The Eloi's living conditions are so idyllic that they do not struggle to meet their basic needs, and the Time Traveller interprets this, at first, as a realization of technological utopia free from worry or deprivation. However, the presence of the Morlocks—who have resorted to cannibalism because their basic needs have not been met—makes it clear that technology has not been a liberating force for everyone. While many works of science fiction revel in the complex and exciting technologies of the future, The Time Machine takes an opposite approach, positing that the Victorian era could be the technological pinnacle of humankind, followed by a deterioration of the technological and cultural progress that many people expect to continue indefinitely into the future. Writing on the heels of the industrial revolution, Wells was immersed in a society saturated by the promise and peril of new technology. Suddenly new goods were available, and once-arduous tasks were made easier, but there were also new dangers like rampant pollution and industrial accidents, not to mention exacerbations of social divisions based on new wealth and poor labor conditions. Interestingly, Wells does not imagine that this Victorian technological boom would continue indefinitely, nor does he imagine a world imperiled by a technology-related disaster. Instead, he imagines something more complex: that technological progress could create living conditions so idyllic that human progress and intelligence disappear, and so disastrous that humans could resort to cannibalism. Technology in The Time Machine is then directly linked to both progress and to intellectual decay and violence.Wells is consistently ambivalent about the role of technology in human society; the differences between the lives of the Eloi and Morlocks are more broadly symbolic of the dueling promise and peril of technological innovation, and this directly reflects the social conditions of Victorian England in which technology created ease, wealth, and freedom for the upper class, and punishing working and living conditions for the lower classes. This duality is seen, too, in the time machine itself, which is both liberating (in that it makes time travel possible, which could before only be imagined) and perilous (for instance, the Time Traveller could materialize inside a solid object in the future, or he could be stranded in dangerous conditions). Thus, Wells does not find an easy answer to whether technology is good or bad for humanity. On the one hand, technological progress can improve lives, but, on the other hand, technology can destroy the very conditions that make humans vibrant and capable, and it can exacerbate social divisions. The key to technology might, then, be found in the Time Traveller himself, who uses technology not to wield power over others, but to ask questions about the status quo and bring back knowledge that could help humanity. In other words, the Time Traveller can be seen as emblematic of science itself—he relentlessly forms hypotheses about the future and then readjusts them based on observation in order to generate knowledge, which mirrors the scientific method. If the Time Traveller represents science free of corrupting social forces, then Wells is suggesting that the Time Traveller's tale, with all of its implications for social justice, is what technology can offer at its best. - Theme: Humans, Nature, and the Universe. Description: One of the most radical aspects of The Time Machine is that it questions the centrality of human beings to history by challenging the notion that humans will endure in their present form forever. Written about thirty-five years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin's seminal text on evolution, The Time Machine takes Darwin's theory of evolution seriously and explores its possible consequences. In The Time Machine, present-day humans have diverged into two different species, neither of which is stronger, smarter, or more moral than contemporary people. The Eloi are helpless, the Morlocks are cannibals, and both species have lost the language and intelligence that characterize contemporary humans. In the late nineteenth century, when The Time Machine was written, many thinkers were trying to make sense of Darwin's new theory, which led to a proliferation of different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas. Wells embraced some of those—the idea of natural selection itself, obviously, and the idea that struggle is what produces strength—but he rejected social Darwinism, a set of ideas positing that the human species could be improved by selecting only the "best" humans to reproduce. The Eloi, who are the descendants of the British elite (and thus the people whom social Darwinists would prefer to reproduce) have degenerated into a silly and helpless species, which challenges both the idea of the inherent superiority of the upper classes, and the notion (a misinterpretation of Darwin's actual ideas) that natural selection means that humans will naturally improve forever. In fact, a rigorous reading of Darwin suggests only that a species adapts to the conditions with which it is presented—as in The Time Machine, the technology-enabled ease of the Eloi leads them to evolve in a way that present humans would consider regression, an adaptation consistent with Darwin's ideas.In addition to showing a future in which humans have evolved into different species, Wells also shows a future in which humans do not exist at all. Chapter Eleven finds the Time Traveller on a beach in the distant future in which the only signs of life seem to be giant crustaceans and algae that has washed ashore. Wells' descriptions of the changed sky—there is no moon, the constellations are different, the atmosphere is thin, and the sun is dying—are reminders that the human species is but a blip when considered in the scale of geologic time. The universe is much, much older than humans—so, too, the Earth—and both will endure long after humans are unrecognizable or gone. This, in tandem with Wells' treatment of Darwinism, serves as a reminder of the limited power of human beings to control their own fate and the fate of the world at large. While the time machine itself is a feat of technology and innovation that seems to promise mastery of humans over natural processes, the end of The Time Machine shows this notion to be hubristic. The time machine is but an impressive tool—it cannot, itself, change the power or destiny of human beings, or enhance their relatively minor role in the universe. - Theme: Fear and Kindness. Description: Throughout The Time Machine, Wells shatters several common assumptions of human thought (for example, the belief in the inevitable progress of the species, the notion that technology will make human life better, and the insistence that people are at the center of the universe and will endure forever). However, two aspects of humanity whose value Wells does not question are the experience of fear and the ability to feel kindness. These qualities are roughly symbolized by the Eloi, who are peaceful and kind, and the Morlocks, who are strong and capable because of the hardship and fear with which they live.For Wells, a large part of what makes humans special is their intelligence, ambition, and creativity, but Wells rejects the notion that these are qualities inherent to humankind. He writes, "It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble." Since the Eloi live in a world without the motivating forces of adversity and fear (except for the threat of the Morlocks, before which the Eloi are helpless), the Eloi have become less than human. Conversely, the Morlocks (the descendants of the British poor) live in difficult conditions and are fearful of one another due to the practice of cannibalism. As such, the Morlocks are a much more capable (though less moral) species than the Eloi. This is a direct challenge to the kind of utopian thinking that would consider a world without struggle to be the ultimate achievement of humankind. If struggle and fear are part of what makes us human, then living in a utopia would, paradoxically, rob human beings of their defining characteristics. An ideal world for Wells, then, is one in which humans must work, strive, and take risks, but not to the point that they become depraved like the Morlocks.Wells presents kindness as a characteristic even more definitive of human beings than fear. Indeed, the endurance of kindness is, perhaps, the only redemptive aspect to an otherwise bleak book. Wells writes in the epilogue (referring to the Time Traveller's Eloi friend Weena's kindness), that the narrator was comforted to know that in the future "even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man." This is a fitting ending for the book, as kindness is at the heart of the Time Traveller's own mission. His trip into the future is not for the purposes of gaining power or wealth (which one could easily imagine as an alternate storyline), but rather for obtaining knowledge. Once the Time Traveller realizes the dark truth of the future, he returns to his own time in order to raise the alarm to the people who might have the power to effect meaningful change. This, itself, is an act of kindness and empathy on behalf of all people, and it embodies Wells' idea that kindness is the quality that redeems humanity from its depravities.It's worth noting, too, that Wells wrote The Time Machine at a moment when Freud's ideas of the subconscious were becoming widespread, and part of the eeriness of the world of 802,701 is its evocation of the human psyche. Above ground, which can be seen as a parallel to the conscious mind, the Eloi are kind and fun-loving and they live in harmony with one another. Underground, which parallels the subconscious, the Morlocks are depraved and cannibalistic. The structure of the world 802,701 (in which the Eloi and Morlocks are in conflict with one another but also interdependent) suggests that the kindness of the Eloi and the fear and depravity of the Morlocks are inseparable in the human psyche, which is another way of talking about the complexities of human nature. - Climax: When the Time Traveller escapes the Morlocks by taking the time machine into the future - Summary: The Time Machine is a work of science-fiction that imagines how the social conditions of Victorian England have evolved in the year 802,701. The story opens on a dinner party at the home of an eminent scientist, the Time Traveller, who is explaining to his assembled guests (including the narrator telling the story) principles of science and math that support the possibility of traveling across time, just as one would travel across space. His guests are upper class British men—a doctor, a psychologist, a journalist, etc.—and they greet his pronouncements with skepticism. To demonstrate the validity of his ideas, the Time Traveller brings into the living room a small model of a machine. The psychologist, ever skeptical, depresses a lever and the machine disappears. The Time Traveller then reveals that he has almost completed a life-sized machine that will transport him through time. He shows the machine to the guests, but they remain skeptical. At dinner the following week, the Time Traveller is not there to greet his guests. He has left a note instructing them to proceed with dinner if he is late, and partway through their dinner the Time Traveller staggers into the house looking disheveled and injured. Once the Time Traveller has washed up, he agrees to tell his story in full on the condition that nobody argues with him or asks questions, since he is terribly exhausted. The Time Traveller says that the previous week he finished his machine and took a voyage into the future. He arrived in the year 802,701 on the spot where his laboratory once stood—it had become a garden of strange flowers beside a large white Sphinx statue. He saw small humanlike beings (whom Wells later reveals are called the Eloi), and they seemed feeble and much less intelligent than he hoped the people of the future would be. The Time Traveller continues his tale: the beings are friendly to him, and he begins to explore the landscape for clues to what has happened. There seems to be no adversity, fear, or labor in this world, and the Time Traveller hypothesizes that this is a communist utopia of the future, in which all social problems have been solved. He believes that this explains the weakness and stupidity of the beings—there is no need for force or intelligence in a world of peace and plenty. The Time Traveller is briefly delighted, but, despite thinking that all problems are solved, he still feels disappointed that future humans are not smarter or more curious. When the Time Traveller returns to the garden where he landed he realizes that his time machine is gone. He briefly goes into a rage-fueled panic, and then decides that the rational course of action is to study this new world, learn its ways, and let this knowledge lead him back to the time machine. Seeing grooves in the grass leads him to believe that the machine has been hidden behind a metal panel in the pedestal of the Sphinx statue, but it won't give when he tries to open it. The Time Traveller begins learning the language of the Eloi (which is very simple) and he explores the landscape, noticing a strange network of dry wells and towers, which suggests a large underground ventilation system. He also notices that the Eloi never seem to do any work, but their sandals look new and their clothes are not frayed. This observation, combined with his having felt something touching him at night and having caught a glimpse of a strange white animal, leads him to determine that his original utopian explanation is inadequate. Later that day he rescues a drowning Eloi. Her name is Weena, and she begins giving him flowers and following him everywhere to express her gratitude. Weena's agony whenever he leaves her and her fear of the dark make the Time Traveller realize that the Eloi are not without fear and danger. One morning while seeking shelter from the heat he sees a white ape dash down the shaft of one of the wells he had previously observed. The Time Traveller concludes, feeling disgusted, that the Eloi are not the only species that have evolved from humans of his day: the Morlocks, as the ape beings are called, are human descendants, too. The Time Traveller determines that the Eloi and Morlocks evolved as such because of the entrenched class divisions of Victorian England. The Eloi are the descendants of the British elite, and the Morlocks the descendants of the British poor—the Eloi, the Time Traveller believes, have been exploiting the Morlocks for centuries, and, as a result, have easy lives. Meanwhile, the Morlocks, toiling underground for the Eloi, can no longer bear to be in the light—their eyes have evolved in a way that light pains them. Knowing that knowledge of the Morlocks might lead him to his time machine, the Time Traveller descends into one of the wells where he sees a room full of Morlocks and machines. He sees them eating meat, which tells him they are carnivorous, unlike the Eloi. When several Morlocks attack him, he uses matches to fend them off and barely escapes. He has a sense that the Morlocks are evil. To search for weapons against the Morlocks, the Time Traveller and Weena voyage to a large green building that the Time Traveller had seen in the distance. On the way, Weena puts flowers in the Traveller's pocket, as a kind gesture. He realizes while walking that the Morlocks are cannibals—they eat the Eloi—and this is the source of Weena's great fear. The trip takes two days, but the green building turns out to be an abandoned museum, and inside it he finds a preserved box of matches and an iron bar he can use as a weapon. He and Weena head back for the garden with the goal of retrieving the time machine from the Sphinx statue. The Time Traveller knows he will have to stop somewhere for the night, so he gathers kindling as they walk in order to start a fire that will keep them safe from Morlocks. Walking through a thick wood, the Time Traveller feels the Morlocks grabbing at him, so he puts his kindling down and sets it ablaze to protect them as they walk on. Outside the sphere of light, though, the Morlocks return and Weena faints. The Time Traveller starts a fire and falls asleep. When he wakes up the fire is out, Weena is gone, and the Morlocks are attacking him. He fends them off with the iron bar and then realizes that his previous fire had started a forest fire, and the Morlocks are fleeing the blaze rushing towards him. The Time Traveller runs, too—he escapes, but Weena dies, and his matchbox disappears. He only has a few loose matches in his pocket as tools to get his time machine back. Back at the Sphinx, the Time Traveller sleeps. When he awakens, the panels on the pedestal are open and he sees his time machine in plain sight. He casts aside his iron bar and enters the Sphinx, but as soon as he does the panels close and he is left in darkness with the Morlocks. Moreover, his matches don't work because they are the kind that must be struck on the box. He fights them off enough to get on his time machine and pull the lever, barely escaping into the future. The Time Traveller finds himself thousands more years in the future on a desolate beach where menacing giant crabs roam. He moves farther into the future to escape them, noticing the sun getting larger, the earth getting colder, and the air getting thinner. As signs of life wane, the Time Traveller gets scared and decides to return home. He pulls the lever and travels back to his dinner guests, disheveled and injured from his adventures. While his guests remain skeptical of his adventures—his only evidence is that his time machine is dirty and dented and he has the strange flowers from Weena in his pocket—the narrator is inclined to believe. The narrator returns the next day and finds the Time Traveller preparing for another voyage. The Time Traveller tells the narrator to wait for him for a half hour, but the narrator says, sadly, that it has been three years and the narrator has not returned.

- Genre: Novel, Science Fiction, Romance - Title: The Time Traveler’s Wife - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Illinois and Michigan - Character: Henry DeTamble. Description: - Character: Clare Abshire. Description: - Character: Alba DeTamble. Description: - Character: Jan "Gomez" Gomolinski. Description: - Character: Charisse Gomolinski. Description: - Character: Richard DeTamble. Description: - Character: Annette Lyn Robinson. Description: - Character: Kimy/Mrs. Kim. Description: - Character: Dr. David Kendrick. Description: - Character: Ingrid Carmichel. Description: - Character: Celia Attley. Description: - Character: Lucille Abshire. Description: - Character: Philip Abshire. Description: - Character: Mark Abshire. Description: - Character: Ben. Description: - Character: Alicia Abshire. Description: - Character: Jason Everleigh. Description: - Character: Grandma Meagram. Description: - Character: Matt. Description: - Character: Roberto. Description: - Character: Isabelle. Description: - Theme: The Here and Now. Description: - Theme: Love and Absence. Description: - Theme: Free Will vs. Determinism. Description: - Theme: Language and Art. Description: - Theme: Self-Love. Description: - Climax: Henry dies in a time-traveling accident on New Year's Eve. - Summary: Protagonists Henry and Clare each give their perspective on Henry's time-traveling disorder. Henry expresses his frustration at being pulled from the present into often uncomfortable and even dangerous situations in other timelines. In these other timelines, he must steal and lie to survive, and he never knows how long it'll be until he returns to the present—the place he longs to be most. Henry knows that his wife, Clare, is forced to wait and worry until he returns. Clare, meanwhile, compares herself to a wife watching sea for her husband's return. The narrative shifts to 1991. Clare visits the Chicago's Newberry Library and runs into Henry. While Clare immediately recognizes Henry, she is a stranger to him. Still, Henry agrees to go to dinner with her. At the restaurant, Clare tells Henry that she knows about his time travels. She explains that Henry began visiting her in the meadow behind her parents' home when she was a child. Henry does not recognize her because he won't make those visits until he is older. After dinner, they go back to Henry's apartment and have sex. Clare finds another woman's lipstick in the bathroom, but Henry assures her that his ex-girlfriend Ingrid is in the past. Through flashbacks, Henry remembers his early time traveling experiences. His first time-traveling trip occurs on his fifth birthday when he time travels to the Field Museum of Natural History after hours and meets an older version of himself who has come to explain Henry's strange condition. In a separate time traveling trip, 36-year-old Henry finds himself in the meadow of Clare's family home. Six-year-old Clare arrives and is startled when she sees Henry for the first time. Henry tries to explain his time traveling condition, but Clare is unconvinced until he vanishes before her eyes. Other time-travel episodes recount the times that older versions of Henry meet up with his younger self to teach him valuable skills and lessons related to his disease, like pickpocketing. He also explains to his younger self that while time traveling helps him know what will happen, it doesn't allow him to change the results. Flashbacks to Clare's childhood highlight the effects Henry's visits from the future have on her as she grows up. As Clare comes into her teenage years, her infatuation with Henry grows. Henry and Clare discuss how Henry, despite his best efforts to withhold the most impactful details of the future, may be shaping Clare's identity when he mentions aspects of Clare's future personality and preferences. On one of Henry's visits to young Clare, Clare wakes before dawn to the sound of someone shouting her name. When she goes outside, she finds Henry standing with her brother Mark and her father Philip in their hunting gear. Henry motions for her to stay quiet while her father ushers her inside. Another visit to Clare occurs on Christmas Eve, which is the anniversary of his mother Annette's death. Because she died when Henry was only six, Henry understands that his condition gives him extra opportunities to witness her alive and happy. Clare arrives home in the middle of Henry's reflections on his mother, and he decides it is time to tell her about his mother. He describes the car accident that led to her death and would have killed him too if he hadn't time traveled away from the car at the last moment. A flashback reveals Henry on another Christmas Eve night, where his grief drives him to drink until he ends up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. In the novel's present (the timeline that begins with Henry meeting Clare at the library), Henry and Clare continue to date. She introduces him to her roommate, Charisse, and Charisse's boyfriend, Gomez. While Charisse loves Henry, Gomez is suspicious of him and overly protective of Clare. And Clare herself has doubts about Henry after Celia, the friend of Henry's ex-girlfriend Ingrid, warns Clare about Henry's pattern of disappointing women. Shortly after this, an older version of Henry visits Clare from the future and tells her that present-day Henry needs Clare's help to become a better person. That Christmas, Henry goes home with Clare to meet her family and childhood friends. Henry manages to make a good impression despite the family's internal struggles. A few months later, Henry goes to his father, Richard, to ask for Henry's mother's rings to give to Clare. They fight, but Richard eventually admits he needs to seek help for his alcoholism and gives Henry his mother's rings. Henry proposes to Clare on her 21st birthday, and she agrees to marry him. The following week, she meets Richard and Kimy, a family friend who helped raise Henry. As the wedding approaches, Henry attempts to find a treatment that will prevent him from time traveling on his wedding day. When nothing works, Clare insists that Henry stop trying, and he agrees. On their wedding day, Henry has a time-traveling episode, but an older version of himself comes from the future to fill his role during the ceremony. Clare and Henry try their best to adjust to married life despite the conflicts that arise now that they live together. Clare grows frustrated by the way their small apartment limits her art—her paper sculptures, which usually depict birds, tend to be large, but she can only make miniatures now. Seeing Clare's unhappiness, Henry uses his knowledge of the future to win the lottery. The couple uses Henry's winnings to buy a house with a separate studio space for Clare. Henry's episodes start to happen more frequently, so he and Clare track down Dr. Kendrick, a geneticist who future-Henry told them will become his doctor. Once they convince Dr. Kendrick that time traveling is real, he begins working on sequencing Henry's genes in hopes of finding a cure. Clare and Henry experience more setbacks, including several tragic miscarriages and the death of Clare's mother. After Clare's mother's death,. When Clare and Henry return home following the death of Clare's mother, they resume trying to conceive. Clare remains determined, but Henry begins to believe that the risks of pregnancy are too great and gets a vasectomy without telling Clare. She eventually gets pregnant anyway after she has sex with a version of Henry who visits from the past. Toward the end of the pregnancy, Clare and Henry pick out a name for their daughter that means "white" and symbolizes a clean start: Alba. Through his time traveling, Henry learns that he will die when Alba is five, but he doesn't share this the information about his death with Clare. Two weeks later, Alba is born perfectly healthy. After Alba's birth, Clare grows to appreciate the time she gets to herself when Henry is away time traveling. It gives her space to bond with her daughter and focus on her art. Meanwhile, Henry's time travels become even more frequent and end often in injuries. One day, Alba (who can also time travel) comes from the future to visit her younger self. Clare can tell from future Alba's emotional reaction to seeing Henry that something will happen to him. Henry admits the truth, which stirs Clare's memory of the morning in her childhood when she woke up to someone calling her name. She tells Henry that she believes that may be where and when he dies. Not long after their conversation, Dr. Kendrick tells Henry that he is simply too old and immunocompromised for any kind of treatment, though he agrees to continue working on a cure of Alba. Months later, Henry has a particularly bad time-traveling episode. In it, Henry is exposed to the cold for an extended period, resulting in the amputation of both his feet. He sinks into a depression and rarely leaves his bed. In an effort to process her own frustration and grief, Clare makes a giant set of red and black paper wings for Henry. When he sees them, he finally breaks out of his sadness. Because the loss of his feet means Henry can no longer run from dangerous situations when time traveling, however, he feels his death must be approaching. On New Year's Eve, Henry and Clare have a party. They invite all their friends and family, and Henry sees in them a representation of his whole life. Later in the evening, Clare finds Henry alone on their front porch. He tells her that the time has come, and they lie together until Henry vanishes. When he reappears in the living room, he finds that he has been shot in the stomach. He bleeds to death. After Henry's death, Clare is inconsolable. She reads the final letter Henry wrote her before his death. In it, he reminds her how much he loved her and thanks her for guiding him through life. He expresses his wish that, after a lifetime of waiting for him to appear, Clare can now live life fully in the present now that he's gone. But he also tells her that he knows that a past version of himself will visit her one more time in the future when she is very old. Clare tries her best to live as Henry asked. As time goes on, she makes art to cope with her grief over losing Henry. In a flash forward, 43-year-old Henry finds himself in strange place where he encounters an old woman. When she turns to face him, he realizes it's Clare and reaches out for her. The narrative switches to Clare's perspective just before the encounter. Clare sits by the window and considers all the years she has waited for Henry to return one last time. She wonders if that means he'll never come—but she waits, nonetheless.

- Genre: Short Story, Psychological Horror - Title: The Tower - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Florence, Italy - Character: Caroline. Description: - Character: Neville. Description: - Character: Giovanna di Ferramano. Description: - Character: Niccolo di Ferramano. Description: - Theme: Patriarchy, Control, and Freedom. Description: - Theme: Fear, Psychological Torment, and Uncertainty. Description: - Theme: Intuition and Self-Preservation. Description: - Theme: Art, Culture, and Pretense. Description: - Climax: A bat frightens Caroline, and she flees down the tower's stairs. - Summary: "The Tower" takes place near Florence, Italy in the 1950s. Caroline—a young, recently married Englishwoman—is driving around the Italian countryside. This is her first solo trip, as she is usually accompanied by her husband Neville. As a member of the British Council, Neville has a keen interest in Italian art and culture, and Caroline is hoping to impress him with her tale of today's cultural excursion. Using an Italian guidebook, Caroline has managed to see several cultural landmarks and is hoping to add one more to the list. In the present, she reads an entry about the Tower of Sacrifice, built in 1535 by Niccolo di Ferramano, which houses 470 steps. The village surrounding the tower was destroyed in 1549, leaving it the sole building in a desolate landscape. While debating whether she has time to see the tower, Caroline is struck by the name Niccolo di Ferramano. It brings to mind a portrait of a man with dark eyes set in a thin white face. After a moment, she remembers where she has seen this portrait, and slips into a flashback. Since coming to Florence, Neville has taken Caroline to many obscure private galleries, wanting to show off his knowledge of Italian culture. In one such gallery, Caroline is feigning interest in Neville's latest "dissertation" when a portrait of a young woman catches her eye. The woman is Giovanna di Ferramano, who—Caroline is shocked to discover—was married and dead by the age of 18. The portrait beside hers contains the pale, dark-eyed man that triggered this memory; it is labeled Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman. Neville tells Caroline this is Giovanna's husband, Niccolo, whose family will no longer speak his name due to his alleged dealings with the occult. Caroline says she does not like him; moving back to Giovanna's portrait, Neville remarks that the young dead woman looks a bit like Caroline. Back in the present, Caroline decides she has enough time to visit the tower. An urgent voice in her head tells her to return to Florence for the sake of safety, but she disregards it. The tower is built of red brick, with narrow slits for windows and a platform encircling the top. She enters the tower and begins to climb the staircase, counting the steps as she goes. The staircase spirals up toward a circle of sky, protected on the inside by only a rusty railing that eventually disappears altogether. Several times, Caroline debates going down, but she convinces herself each time to keep climbing. Reaching the top, Caroline steps out onto the narrow platform that surrounds the tower, where she has the sudden impulse to hurl herself toward the ground. She steps back inside the tower to find the steps leading down into utter darkness; she screams that she cannot go down. For some time, Caroline remains immobile, the voice in her head repeatedly telling her that the only way down is to jump. When she finally steels herself and begins the descent, she only makes it two steps before collapsing back into terrified paralysis. She sits down and makes it down several more stairs before trying to stand again. Something brushes against her face—likely a bat—and frightens her into movement. Quickly, she descends the dark tower, scraping her hand bloody along the wall, counting steps all the while, "knowing nothing but fear." The story ends as she counts the 504th step.

- Genre: Absurdism/Expressionism/Existentialism - Title: The Trial - Point of view: Third-person limited omniscient narrator - Setting: An unspecified city, likely in central Europe, in the early 1900s - Character: Josef K.. Description: The novel's protagonist. Josef works as the chief clerk of a bank and appears poised for success—until an unexplained arrest and protracted trial consume his life, and eventually leads to his execution. Though Josef is an arrogant, calculating, and judgmental man, his failed struggle to understand a byzantine justice system provokes the reader's sympathy. - Character: Fraulein Burstner. Description: A young woman who lives across the hall from Josef's room in Frau Grubach's boardinghouse. Josef goes to her room one night for a brief conversation and ends up kissing her. Afterwards, Josef tries to contact her repeatedly, but she ignores his advances. Josef thinks he spots her when he is being marched to his execution, but he doesn't bother to speak to her. - Character: Titorelli. Description: A painter commissioned to make portraits of court officials. His position has given him an insider's knowledge of the judiciary, and he is willing to use it to help Josef. When Josef visits the painter's squalid apartment, Titorelli explains the court's hopelessly dysfunctional acquittal system, and the fact that no one ever gets acquitted. On the way out, Titorelli sells three identical landscape paintings to a bewildered Josef. - Character: Block. Description: Block is a client of Herr Huld's who has been on trial for five years. His obsession with his trial has led him to enlist the services of five different lawyers. Huld finds Block irritating and treats him contemptuously, rarely deigning to speak to him. However, Block is so desperate to consult with the lawyer that he will grovel at Huld's bedside, and often sleeps in Huld's house in the hopes of being seen. - Character: The Doorkeeper. Description: A character in the parable Josef hears from the prison chaplain. The doorkeeper guards a gate to the law; behind him, more powerful doorkeepers guard other gates. A man comes seeking access to the Law, but the doorkeeper refuses to let him past, even though the man waits in front of the gate for his entire lifetime. When the man dies, the doorkeeper closes the gate and reveals that the gate existed for that man alone. - Theme: Justice vs. The Law. Description: The central conflict of The Trial is Josef K.'s struggle against The Law. He stands accused of an unknown crime, and his trial is supposedly required for justice to be served. However, there seems to be little justice in the treatment Josef receives. By most standards, he is denied anything resembling a fair trial: he is never informed of how he has broken the Law, he is forbidden from learning essential details of his case, and he is eventually executed without any deeper understanding of how his conviction was reached or what he could have done to oppose it. More than anything, the actions carried out against Josef seem to epitomize injustice.Ironically, then, the very Law designed to ensure justice is what generates the greatest injustice. This is the opposition nested at the core of Kafka's judiciary. The lofty, unattainable goal of absolute justice is muddled by worldly attempts to enforce it: the human impulse to institutionalize the concept of justice has created a corrupt and actively counterproductive judiciary, a judiciary that perpetrates injustice. In The Trial, this uncompassionate bureaucracy is so pervasive that individuals have begun to mistake the system of justice for the ideal of justice. Josef is repeatedly given the paradoxical assurance that whatever treatment he receives from the system will be the just treatment; the system has become the arbiter of what is just, completely separate from any ideal of justice. The system conceives of itself as that arbiter, and therefore considers anything it does to be naturally just. This pernicious feedback loop moves human understanding continually further from the true apprehension and attainment of justice. - Theme: The Absurd. Description: The word "absurd" derives from the Latin word for "deaf," and, fittingly, the absurd universe of The Trial is utterly deaf to any character's attempts to influence or understand it. Josef's protracted mission to understand the Law never culminates in any larger comprehension. The more Josef explores the system that holds him captive, the less that system appears to be undergirded by any logical, predictable structure whatsoever. Accordingly, there is nothing any individual—defendant, lawyer, and functionary alike—can do to influence the justice system. For the accused, every course of action is equally ineffective: Block's wretchedness shows that even the most obsessive devotion to one's trial provides no advantage. The absence of discernible logic forces defendants to seek meaning in bizarre rituals and superstitions, such as trying to foretell a defendant's verdict from the shape of his lips. Moreover, Titorelli's explanation of the three sorts of acquittal illustrates that the struggles of the defendant are almost certainly in vain. Of the three sorts of acquittal he explains, only one, "absolute acquittal," actually restores the defendant to the status he had before being accused—and this exoneration has never actually been granted. The plight of the accused is Sisyphean: defendants strive endlessly, but never achieve any progress. - Theme: The Unknowable and Interpretation. Description: The fundamental absurdity of Josef K.'s world is a consequence of its inscrutability: there is no decisive way to make sense of Josef's situation. Because there is no unequivocal truth in The Trial's universe, every fact can be recast in conflicting ways. Moreover, the facts themselves are often dubious or altogether inaccessible. This theme is evident from the very first words of the book: "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K." This vague and unsatisfying conjecture is the closest the text ever comes to explaining Josef's arrest. As Josef navigates (or fails to navigate) the judicial system, crucial information is withheld at every step. Court documents, legal proceedings, and even the text of the Law that determines his fate are all forbidden to Josef, and oftentimes to the officials or court functionaries that control and dominate him as well. Like the doorkeeper in the prison chaplain's parable, each functionary simply fulfills a role without regard for the purpose of that role or the logic of the larger system that contains it. Indeed, the chaplain's allegory, which serves as a preface to the Law itself, illustrates the many possible interpretations of The Trial's world. The parable is so ambiguous that the chaplain can make equally compelling arguments for two opposing interpretations. Just as the chaplain's story lacks a definite interpretation, so does the Law itself. This obscurity is what disturbs Josef so deeply. At the close of the book, Josef voices a series of unresolved, and likely unresolvable, questions. Even in his last moments of life, Josef is unable to ascertain a definitive meaning to his story. Similarly, The Trial itself resists unequivocal readings. Is the novel meant as an idealistic indictment of oppressive governance, or a pessimistic characterization of humankind in general? Does Kafka aim to make a political point, an existential one, or both? It is very possible that the text deliberately frustrates these questions, so that The Trial's overall ambiguity complements Josef's vexing experience with the Law. - Theme: Alienation and Control. Description: There is no collaboration or camaraderie in The Trial. Every individual acts as an isolated agent, and people are focused on controlling themselves and others in order to fulfill personal desires. Josef K.'s interpersonal interactions are governed by hierarchy and ambition. He obsessively tabulates his status relative to others, and calculates how he can use this positioning to his greatest benefit. Josef worries about how he may be manipulated and constantly devises ways to manipulate others to his advantage. Every decision he makes at work is a stratagem in his power-jockeying rivalry with the bank's deputy director. One of Josef's few uncalculated actions is his spontaneous kissing of Fraulein Burstner, and even this moment of passion only ends in alienation. Josef never speaks to the fraulein again, and when he sees her at the novel's close, he cares so little—or has been so ground down—that he doesn't bother to stop walking.In spite of his efforts, Josef comes nowhere close to controlling his life. He is at the mercy of the Law, his business superiors, and anyone else who might gain some sort of leverage over him. And the ladder of alienation and control extends ever higher: even the individuals who hold power over Josef, like his judge, are in the end nothing more than powerless cogs in a larger machine. This fact is reinforced by the chaplain's parable: while the first doorkeeper may have authority over the man who seeks to access the Law, the doorkeeper himself is subject to other doorkeepers whose power lies beyond his understanding. Each of these doorkeepers is in turn subordinate to the next. In the same way, individual obsessions with control lead each character to conceptualize his interactions on a hierarchical scale, which in turn leads to further alienated individuals and more exaggerated power dynamics. Ultimately, then, no single person is autonomous or sovereign in The Trial. This is the ironic consequence of fetishizing individual agency and dominance. - Theme: Sex and Seduction. Description: The Trial is rife with overt sexuality. A large fraction of the female characters, like Leni, try to seduce Josef or are regarded by him as potential sexual conquests, like Fraulein Burstner. However, this lustfulness is hollow and insincere. Just like nearly every other interaction in the book, romantic encounters are depicted as individuals' attempts to use others to achieve their goals, rather than as moments of tenderness, vulnerability, and connection. Josef is obsessed with controlling his paramours, and the women he associates with seem drawn to him because of his power and status. The closest thing to a loving relationship in Josef's pre-trial life is his weekly engagement with his call girl, Elsa, which is undoubtedly more transactional than affectionate. For the women of The Trial, physical intimacy is something of a bargaining chip. The court's custodian, for example, obliges the sexual demands of the law student and the judge because she understands that they hold power over her livelihood. The impersonal nature of sex in the novel further affirms that The Trial's universe is devoid of any sort of meaningful interpersonal connection. - Climax: Josef's confrontation with the prison chaplain in the cathedral - Summary: On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, two policemen come to Josef K.'s boardinghouse and inform him that he is under arrest. Josef, a successful chief clerk of a bank, is not informed of his wrongdoing. After a confusing interrogation, he is told to go to work as usual. Late that night, he goes to the room of another boarder, Fraulein Burstner, whom he kisses unexpectedly. Josef is assigned a date for his first hearing. He travels to his courtroom, located in a poor tenement building. At his hearing, he stands before a large audience and lambasts the legal system. As Josef leaves, the judge informs him that his conduct will deprive him of the benefits these hearings generally confer. The next week, Josef is not notified of another hearing, but he turns up at the courthouse anyway. He finds it empty save for its young stewardess, who flirts with him until a law student carries her off to see a judge. Soon afterwards, her husband, a court usher, arrives. He shows Josef around the legal offices. The oppressive air in the offices stifles Josef, and he becomes so faint that he must be led to fresh air. Josef tries repeatedly to contact Fraulein Burstner, but she ignores him. A few days later, Josef hears moaning sounds as he prepares to leave work for the evening. He opens a supply closet to discover the policemen who arrested him being brutally whipped. They claim they are being punished because Josef denounced their conduct in his hearing. Josef is deeply disturbed but shuts the door and leaves to avoid detection by a coworker. Josef's Uncle Karl visits him at work. Karl is has gotten wind of Josef's trial and is concerned. He takes Josef to see Herr Huld, a friend of his who works as a lawyer. At Huld's house, they meet the lawyer, who is ill and bedridden. A high-ranking court official also happens to be present, but he ignores Josef, and Josef leaves the room to flirt with Huld's maid, Leni. Afterward, Karl tells Josef that his indecorous absence has damaged his case. At work, Josef dwells on his trial and neglects important clients. Finally, he sees one, but is so absent-minded that Josef's rival, the bank's deputy director, takes over the case—a blow to Josef's career ambitions. The client, having heard of Josef's trial, recommends he meet a court portraitist named Titorelli. Josef takes the painter's address and leaves work, letting his rival take on his other clients as well. Josef finds Titorelli's apartment in a wretched cluster of tenements. The painter offers to help Josef and explains the types of acquittal Josef may receive. Titorelli's explanation reveals that no accused ever seems to gain a meaningful acquittal; trials either continue interminably or end in conviction. Increasingly preoccupied about his lack of progress, Josef decides to fire his lawyer. He goes to Huld's, where he meets another of the lawyer's clients, a tradesman named Block. Block is obsessed with his legal proceedings, which have gone on for five years. When Josef tells Block and Leni that he plans to fire Huld, they try to restrain him, but he reaches Huld's office. Huld tries surprisingly insistently to win Josef back, but Josef is not swayed. At the end of their meeting, Huld summons Block, who grovels at the lawyer's bedside. It is revealed that the pathetic tradesman often sleeps at Huld's in the hopes of getting an audience with the lawyer. Josef agrees to give a tour of the local cathedral to an important Italian client of the bank. However, the Italian does not show up. Instead, a priest climbs to the pulpit and addresses Josef by name. The priest reveals that he is the prison chaplain, and had Josef summoned to the cathedral to speak about his trial. The chaplain tells Josef a mysterious parable about multiple gatekeepers guarding the way to the Law, which is intended to characterize the Law. On the eve of Josef's thirty-first birthday—one year after his arrest—two men come to his room. They escort him to a quarry on the outskirts of town, where they thrust a knife into his heart. Josef, ashamed of his own death, utters the final phrase, "Like a dog!"

- Genre: Novella; Ghost Story - Title: The Turn of the Screw - Point of view: First person - Setting: England's Countryside - Character: The Governess. Description: The book's protagonist and main narrator, the governess is the young woman who has been assigned to take care of the education and supervision of Miles and Flora at their uncle's country estate, Bly. Born to a family of humble means in the English countryside, the governess lived a sheltered life until she left for London to pursue the employment opportunity she settled on at Bly. She is a strong-willed and intelligent but emotionally volatile character, and she takes her position as the children's caretaker with a seriousness that can seem either overbearing or admirably protective. Her emotional volatility calls into question the reality of the ghosts she eventually claims to see, and because no other character claims to see the ghosts, her stability remains an unsettled question. - Character: Mrs. Grose. Description: The governess's key confidante throughout the story, Mrs. Grose is a longtime servant at Bly. She has known the children for much longer than the governess, and her love for the two causes her occasionally to deny the accusations the governess makes against the children's character and behavior. Mrs. Grose respects the governess and listens willingly to her claims to see ghosts and her concerns about Bly. Sometimes, though, Mrs. Grose seems to withhold information from the governess; she often stops short of full disclosure about such matters as the histories of the children and the estate's past. The governess thinks of Mrs. Grose as her confidante, but she does not seem certain that an entirely honest relationship exists between them. - Character: Miles. Description: The ten year-old boy for whom the governess isresponsible,Miles is a precocious and charming "young gentleman". When the governess arrived at Bly, she received a letter saying that Miles had been expelled from his school, though the note does not give a reason for this expulsion. The governess's relationship with Miles is colored by this suspicious past, because it implies that there is a kind of devious or even evil side of him which she cannot reconcile with what she perceives to be his immaculate behavior. The governess further assumes that Miles meets regularly with the ghost of Peter Quint, or that he is at least under his influence. - Character: Flora. Description: The eight year-old girl for whom the governess is responsible, Flora is a beautiful and pleasant young girl. At first, the governess speaks highly of Flora's charmingly childish grace and innocence. Eventually, though, the governess begins to suspect that Flora meets secretly with Miss Jessel, and she thinks that Flora's outward displays of innocence and beauty intentionally conceal a dark inner life. - Character: The uncle. Description: The children's uncle—the man who hired the governess—is a wealthy resident of London who became the guardian of Flora and Miles when his brother, their father, died. After facing difficulties raising the two children, he sent them to Bly, his estate, where they were taken care of by Mrs. Grose and other servants and help at Bly. The governess has a deep respect for him and his opinion of her capabilities as the children's caretaker. - Character: Peter Quint. Description: Formerly the valet at Bly, Quint is the first ghost the governess encounters at the estate. According to Mrs. Grose, he was something of a scoundrel while alive, and apparently a bad influence on the children, Miles in particular. Mrs. Grose also says that he had a scandalous relationship with Miss Jessel. - Character: Miss Jessel. Description: The children's deceased governess, Miss Jessel is the second ghost the governess encounters at Bly. Mrs. Grose says that Miss Jessel had been a lady (she had a good upbringing, and dressed well) and she had a controversial affair with Peter Quint. The governess eventually comes to believe that Flora meets secretly with Miss Jessel. - Character: Douglas. Description: The man who follows Griffin's story by adding a "turn of the screw" to Griffin's shocking story when he reads the governess's manuscript to the partygoers, a story that involves two ghosts and two children.The governesswas Douglas's sister's governess, and the way Douglas speaks of the governess implies that he had once been in love with her. - Theme: The Supernatural. Description: To call this a theme may seem a little ridiculous, given that this is a ghost story—of course there are supernatural events. But the theme of the supernatural, in Henry James's hands, is worth thinking about. The supernatural is important because it brings into the story an essential, richly complex element of ambiguity: given the evidence, it is possible that the ghosts are there and equally possible that they are not there at all. The governess claims she sees them, but no other characters ever admit to seeing them. If we believe the governess's account, then the other characters seem to be withholding from her important truths about Bly and its history. But if we believe the other characters in the story, then there are no ghosts, and the governess seems unaware of being obsessive and unhinged.The story is best appreciated when readers acknowledge the possibility that each of these two ways of reading the book are equally true, given the evidence. The logic that guides this theme is crucial to understanding what's great about The Turn of the Screw. The reader can choose to sympathize with the governess, who sees the ghosts and tells us they're real, or the reader may sympathize with the other characters in the story, none of whom ever seem to see what the governess claims she sees. But the reader would be best off to try not to conclude either way, and to work to explore the viewpoints of each character, and what those divergent viewpoints may imply about the characters wrapped up in all this confusion.The supernatural is thereby the key to some of the book's deepest insights about the difficult relationships we have with other people's minds and experiences. It can sometimes be impossible to figure out whether what we see in other people is something we've invented with our own imaginations, or if we're seeing other people as they really are. We can be convinced that we're seeing the truth—say, that someone is sad—but if they deny what we claim to see, either we've invented what we see, or some secret is being kept. Occasionally we're correct, and the ghosts we see haunting other people are really there. On the other hand, we could be misreading the ghosts we see, and they may be our own thoughts, feelings, or histories. (Psychologists call this phenomenon "projection.") In The Turn of the Screw it is impossible to tell whether the ghosts are only haunting the governess, or if they are some key to the true histories, feelings, and thoughts of the children she's taking care of. It is this impossible division that makes the supernatural an important theme. - Theme: Exterior vs. Interior. Description: This theme is closely related to the supernatural, since the basic question here is: do external impressions obscure internal realities? But this theme does not necessarily have anything to do with the supernatural. This is about discrepancies more rooted in everyday happenings, and the important question that these discrepancies implies: can external appearances (the clothes a person wears, or the smile they have) ever provide us with enough evidence for us to make conclusions about internal truths (the quality of a well-dressed person's life, whether or not that person smiling is in fact happy)? The Turn of the Screw suggests that the external world can easily deceive us and that upon closer inspection the internal, true story that lurks beneath the surface may be revealed.Consider, for example, the governess's confused initial impressions of Bly. When she firsts arrives she thinks it is a beautiful place, with its expansive countryside setting, the bright flowers surrounding the home, the open windows and fresh curtains. It is a place that is much nicer than what the governess is used to after her more humble upbringing. But it does not take her long to begin experiencing the place as a "big ugly antique." The house eventually becomes for her a place of horror instead of a place of beauty. Bly is an estate with a dark history, at least as far as the governess can tell.Similarly, both Miles and Flora strike her initially as almost overwhelmingly beautiful. Miles is a little gentleman, impeccably put together. Flora is an equally impressive, beautiful, and apparently innocent young girl. Eventually, though, the governess perceives in these children something more sinister, less innocent, less beautiful. Her immediate perception of these children as graceful and beautiful young innocent children is undermined by her experience of them. - Theme: Storytelling. Description: The Turn of the Screw explores the relationship between storytelling and the reality stories depict: can stories be trusted as representations of reality; does the telling of a story always imply some separation or distance from reality; can stories tell something true without telling explicitly the truth? These are not questions the book explicitly answers. But an argument can be made that part of Henry James's agenda here is to argue that stories—even fictional stories—can powerfully influence the realities they depict.The structure of this book is a good entry point into what The Turn of the Screw says about the power stories have. The Turn of the Screw begins in one setting—the old home in England where storytellers have gathered to scare each other on Christmas Eve—and then ends in a different setting, at Bly. What happened to the storytellers? Why did Henry James leave them out of the ending? This book is a fiction, so this may seem trivial. But this change from beginning to end is not due to Henry James's carelessness as a novelist. Rather the change can be read in light of the book's message about stories: the story in the manuscript Douglas read from overtook the reality of the gathered storytellers the book created at the beginning. James has taken an old literary technique, called a "frame narrative", in which stories are nested within stories by a series of storytellers, and he uses this technique to show how some stories (such as the governess's manuscript), if they are sufficiently powerful, can overtake the frames they are placed within (such as the Christmas Eve storytelling party).The letter the governess receives from Miles's head-master provides another good example of how stories can complicate and influence reality. The letter is an incomplete story about Miles: it says that he has been expelled from his school but it offers no explanation, and no character in the book seems willing or able to explain to the governess why Miles may have been expelled. This mysterious letter and the stories about Miles that it implies color the governess's relationship with Miles throughout the story. Why was he expelled? Is he evil or good? Was the letter the result of a false accusation? Because she has no evidence to answer these questions, the stories this letter spawns in her mind take place in the realm of speculation. In other words, they are fiction, but they still come to define her relationship to Miles. - Theme: Secrecy. Description: Each character in The Turn of the Screw withholds some crucial bit of personal information from each of the other characters. This tendency to repress, lie, and conceal personal information—to create and enforce an atmosphere of secrecy—is presented in this book as something capable of thwarting the development of meaningful and healthy relationships with others and with ourselves. The governess, for example, cannot openly discuss with the children her concerns about their wellbeing because of the unbridgeable gap that seems to exist between her and the children about their times spent with Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. This secrecy between the governess, Miles, and Flora eventually leads to serious trouble. When it has built up to unbearable intensity, that is, in the two scenes when the governess sees the ghosts while the children are there with her, and the governess implores them to be honest with her, Flora has an emotional breakdown and is forced to leave Bly, and Miles dies. It is not clear whether or not the children do see the ghosts here, but the violence in these scenes—especially between the governess and the children—shows how powerfully secrecy can break down personal relationships.The secrecy between the governess and Mrs. Grose is also important. Here secrecy is not the perhaps understandable silence that emerges between adults and children. Instead, this is a different kind of secrecy, one consisting of confused allegiances, the occasional leakage of half-truths, and the refusal to confront reality head-on. Mrs. Grose divulges some important information about the children, about their uncle, about Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. But she only confides through the filter of secrecy, and these half-revelations are almost as destructive as the total reticence the children show. Mrs. Grose's secrecy is a bit more adult, a pretended openness that allows lies and truths to be confused. Mrs Grose's refusal to be open with the governess suggests that this secrecy has affected her own ability to see what's truly going on at Bly. - Theme: Youth and Innocence. Description: The Turn of the Screw explores and complicates the relationship between youth and innocence. Youth and innocence are difficult to pin down in the book: the children seem precocious and (in the governess's words) wicked, but at the same time they are presented as innocent and honest victims of a difficult situation. Henry James was known to have had an interest in the inner lives of children, as both precocious and mature members of the world, and as innocent victims of that same world. He is sometimes said to have spoken for the children of the upper-class in the same way Charles Dickens spoke for the children of the lower class. Miles and Flora are orphans who were more or less abandoned by their assigned caregiver, their uncle. They are thus forced to develop their own sense of family, one consisting of moving parts, such as new governesses, and frustrated head-masters. When the governess requests that Flora be taken away from Bly, and when later Miles's heart stops in the final scene, we see how sharply Henry James has drawn the children as innocent victims of adult concerns.At the same time, though, the children's victimhood—their difficult pasts with Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, their abandonment by almost all adults in their lives—grants them a kind of seriousness and maturity not typically associated with innocently youthful children. This can be read as part of what is so frustrating for the governess about the children she's taking care of. Flora and Miles both have about them a kind of maturity and worldliness that the governess lacks. She cannot access them because she is unable to see them for what they are: not innocent, but experienced. - Climax: Miles death at the end of the novel - Summary: The book opens with an unnamed narrator's description of a party held one Christmas Eve in England at which some friends have gathered to share ghost stories. One of the partygoers, Douglas, says that he knows a particularly sinister ghost story about a governess's time spent taking care of a wealthy Londoner's niece and nephew at a country estate haunted by two ghosts. He has access to the governess's written account of her experience, and he offers to go get it and read it to the partygoers. The partygoers excitedly accept his offer, and the following night he reads to them the governess's story, at which point the narration shifts to the governess's point of view. The governess worries that she may have made the wrong decision when she accepted the position, but when she sees the estate for the first time, she falls quickly in love with its beautifully put together exterior. Her first meeting with Flora, the beautiful and well-mannered young girl for whom she would be responsible at Bly, calms her worries still more. She also takes comfort in the welcoming demeanor of Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper at Bly who eventually becomes the governess's trusted confidante. The night she arrived at Bly, the governess received a letter announcing that Miles, the boy for whom she was responsible, was expelled from school. The letter does not specify the circumstances of his expulsion. The governess has not yet met Miles at this point—he hadn't yet come home from school—so her relationship with him begins on a mysterious and sour note, and this colors her relationship with the boy throughout her time at Bly. When she meets him, the governess decides he's as well-behaved as his impressively good sister. One evening while out for a walk, the governess spots a strange man looking down at her from one of the home's towers. She doesn't mention the meeting to anyone, but when she sees the man again one afternoon staring at her through the window from outside the room she's in, she tells Mrs. Grose about these sightings. Mrs. Grose tells the governess that the man she's seen is Peter Quint, the estate's now deceased former valet. The governess eventually encounters a second stranger. This time she is by the estate's lake with Flora when she sees a somber-looking woman dressed in black staring from a distance at her and Flora. The governess tries to find some hint in Flora's face that she too sees the woman, and she is certain that the girl is aware of the woman but intentionally keeps this hidden from the governess. The governess describes this woman to Mrs. Grose. Mrs. Grose tells the governess she's seen Miss Jessel, the previous governess who also had died. The governess believes Miss Jessel and Quint pose a threat to the children, so she asks Mrs. Grose to tell her about the time at Bly when they were alive. Mrs. Grose tells the governess that Quint had been "too free" with everyone at the estate. She says that he and Miss Jessel had a sexual relationship. She also says that Quint and Miles had maintained a dubious relationship—possibly a sexual one—and she tells the governess that the boy tried to lie about their time together. The governess is convinced that the children are secretly continuing their relationships with these two. One day while Miles plays piano for the governess, Flora leaves the home unattended. The governess believes the two children conspired to make this possible, that Miles distracted her with his piano playing so that Flora could leave to meet Miss Jessel. She and Mrs. Grose head to the lake, and they find Flora there. The governess sees Miss Jessel across the lake, and she yells to Mrs. Grose and Flora, convinced that the two also see her. They say they do not see her, and the governess accosts Flora, saying she sees Miss Jessel but refuses to admit that she does. This upsets Flora greatly, and she asks to be taken away from the governess. The girl falls ill, and the governess tells Mrs. Grose to take her away from Bly to her uncle's place in London. The book concludes with a dramatic final scene in which the governess and Miles are together alone in the home. The governess sees Quint outside through the window, and she grasps Miles in an effort to protect him from the man. She tells Miles she "has him" now, that he will never have to meet with Quint again. The boy's heart stops.

- Genre: Short story/Science fiction/Fantasy - Title: The Veldt - Point of view: Omniscient narrator - Setting: The Happylife Home, a futuristic suburban house - Character: George Hadley. Description: George is the patriarch of the Hadley family. He is more authoritative than his wife, Lydia, and attempts to take control of his children's addiction to the nursery. While he initially admires the Happylife Home and the "genius" of the nursery, he comes to see their technology as a genuine threat to the happiness and cohesiveness of his family. - Character: Lydia Hadley. Description: Lydia is George's wife. She is the first to perceive the negative effects of the Happylife Home, and wishes she once again had a "purpose", which she feels the fully-automated house has stolen from her. She is also genuinely frightened by the realistic power of the nursery. While she is the one who encourages George to take definitive action and shut off the Happylife Home, she also has a soft spot for her children that results in her and her husband's ultimate demise. - Character: Wendy Hadley. Description: Wendy is the Hadleys' daughter, and Peter's sister. The two siblings are extremely similar, and are almost like robots: they appear a little too perfect, sometimes speak in unison, and don't display much emotion. They are spoiled children who care more about the Happylife Home and the nursery than their own parents. They will stop at nothing to retain the comforts of automated life and to remain in their own imaginary world. - Theme: Consumer Culture and Technology. Description: "The Veldt" portrays a futuristic society in which things, especially consumer goods, have gained a life of their own. In the name of convenience and contentment, technology fulfills people's every need, reducing humans to passive beings who only eat, breathe, and sleep. Bradbury, who wrote this story in 1950, was responding to the post-World War II consumer culture that was rapidly developing as the U.S. economy boomed. It's remarkable how closely his extrapolation of American culture at that time resembles our world today. In 2015, motion-sensing lights and doors exist in every developing city. More sophisticated technologies have replaced human labor in the job market. In other words, "The Veldt" satirizes a consumerist culture that has since grown to fulfill much of its author's prophecy.In the story, the Hadleys are coddled by the technology in their HappyLife Home, so much so that they begin to feel dependent on it. One might argue that this dependence becomes a kind of addiction. Through the Happylife Home, the Hadleys have all of their needs and desires at their fingertips. But they (and especially their children) can no longer imagine life without a mechanical mediator enhancing every experience. Lydia, the mother, is the first to view the Happylife Home as a threat. She begins to feel "unnecessary," and wants to experience the sensation of performing normal human tasks once again, so she suggests that they take a "vacation" and shut off the Home for some time. The mechanization of life makes the Hadley parents not only feel useless, but also inhuman. Without their daily routines to perform, they find that the Happylife Home has taken away the purpose and, therefore, the joy of their lives. George refers to the family as having "mechanical, electronic navels," and implies that they are not truly living when under the influence of the Happylife Home.The assumption that convenience leads to happiness is one of the story's major critiques of the consumerist, technological society that it depicts. The Happylife Home, which does everything for the Hadleys, including cutting their food, is designed with the belief that making life easier—so easy that its residents don't have to lift a finger—will make those residents happier individuals. This assumption posits technology as the answer to many of our "first-world" concerns. But in "The Veldt," we see the Happylife Home have the opposite effect on the Hadley family. Instead of feeling happier and more fulfilled, the parents experience their lives drained of meaning as they essentially cease to be necessary as parents. The children, for their part, don't even understand that their lives have lost so much meaning. They are so dependent on the Happylife Home that their own parents—that relationships to other people in general—are rendered valueless to them. - Theme: "Too Real" Reality. Description: In Bradbury's story, virtual reality has powerfully altered the Hadley family's perception of reality. In the Happylife Home, this technology takes the form of a "nursery", a room for the Hadleys' children that immerses them in any scene the can imagine. For the children Wendy and Peter, the power of virtual reality reaches the point where they would much rather interact with the nursery than with the real world. As George points out, "They live for the nursery." So much so, in fact, that they kill their parents in order to keep using it.Bradbury's nursery presents us with a paradox. In "The Veldt," the Hadley children are completely dependent on the nursery. As the psychologist in the story, David McClean, comments, the nursery has become their new mother and father. Yet within its walls, the nursery grants them a frightening amount of power. Able to create anything they can imagine, they are essentially little gods. But these are gods without morals: the story strongly implies that the children use the nursery to kill their parents. But some questions linger, unanswered. How conscious are Wendy and Peter of the severity of their actions? Has virtual reality dulled their sense of real consequence?"The Veldt" raises important questions about reality that are most pressing today, as companies are actually developing vivid renderings of virtual reality. What should our relationship to this kind of technology be? Will virtual reality actually become powerful enough to trick us into thinking that it's completely real (think The Matrix)? If so, will we lose control? And how far should we let our imaginations run? Perhaps there are certain ideas in our heads that should remain in our heads. The phrase "too real," which occurs several times in this story, is loaded with these concerns. The power of the nursery gives George and Lydia a sense of unease; they come to realize that they cannot distinguish between virtual reality and their reality. Virtual reality becomes too real to be virtual; indeed, it ultimately becomes reality itself. The blurry line between the Hadleys' experiences and the experiences generated by the nursery forces the reader to ask the question: if a machine-generated world is just as real as our own world, what meaning does our own world have?The phrase "too real" also implies a culture of overstimulation that plagues society. It is perhaps the incredible vividness and intensity of the nursery that makes the Hadley children unable to enjoy the real world any longer. Like a drug, the nursery demands that one get high on images, on fantasies, and remain that way. Bradbury wrote this story in a time when television was exposing its first generation of consumers to image and information overload. Today, it is not only easy to imagine but almost impossible not to see a child's or adult's eyes peeled to a screen of some sort, oblivious to what is going on around them. This overstimulation—and the resulting need for even more overstimulation—leads Peter to say: "I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?" But, as the reader knows, there are other things to do, things that make people human: thinking, caring, and loving, among others. - Theme: Human Nature. Description: The Happylife Home is Bradbury's futuristic vision of technology nearing its zenith. It may seem strange, then, that the predominant image in the story is that of an African veldt. The juxtaposition between advanced technology and this quintessential image of nature merits investigation. Technology and Nature are usually imagined as polar opposites. The development of technology, we might say, has allowed us to become masters of nature. In "The Veldt," the nursery allows the Hadley children to create any environment imaginable. In an interesting twist, though, Bradbury shows that the power of the nursery's technology actually becomes a conduit for the expression of basic human nature.It is significant that Wendy and Peter repeatedly imagine a barren landscape populated by vultures and menacing lions. The veldt is an emanation from their minds that aims to fulfill their desire—the death of their parents. George reflects that the children are too young to think about death, but then corrects himself: "Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else." David McClean confirms the children's fascination with death when he observes that the nursery, instead of providing the children with a fantastic diversion, has "become a channel toward destructive thoughts." The psychologist's diagnosis of the nursery implies that the veldt represents deep and dark tendencies in the Hadley children. Bradbury may be referencing the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, who believed that children had unconscious drives to have sex with and kill their parents. Here, of course, the latter wins over, as George and Lydia, without realizing it, hear the children rehearsing their parents' violent deaths over and over again in the nursery.Bradbury's depiction of human nature has moral as well as psychological implications. Bradbury wrote "The Veldt" shortly after World War II, when the public was intensely concerned about the implications of the Holocaust. What did the atrocities of the war imply about human nature? In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram would conduct a famous psychology experiment that showed that humans were quite willing to inflict a significant amount of pain on other human beings. It appeared that human nature was more amoral than most would like to think. "The Veldt" appears to reflect on human nature in a similar way. The Hadley children, having killed their parents, do not seem emotional about it at all. In fact, they act like civilized people, drinking tea, having accomplished their goal. Bradbury wants us to ask ourselves what we would do if we had complete control over a technology like the nursery. Would we be as selfish and destructive as the Hadley children?The veldt pictured in the nursery can ultimately be read as a mirror of the barrenness that life is reduced to in the mechanization of humanity. You might expect the most advanced technology in the house to look sophisticated, but the opposite is true. Bradbury gives us a glimpse of the loneliness, savagery, and meaninglessness that has governed human history and that may be even more palpable today. Underneath all the sophistication, we are still animals, as viciously human as ever. - Theme: Death of the Family. Description: On the most basic level, "The Veldt" is about a family going through the typical problems that arise in family life. George and Lydia are parents who spoil their children, and then try to discipline them by taking away the toys they originally spoiled them with. In response, Wendy and Peter begin to hate their parents. The difference between the Hadleys and a real family is that the Hadley children's toys are much more powerful than the toys that children usually play with. Eventually, the children's hatred ends in a rebellion and their parents' death. Bradbury's story is a study in how technology disrupts normal family relations.George and Lydia want the best for their children. So they purchase the Happylife Home, a home designed to make Peter and Wendy happy and fulfilled. Indeed, it does its job, but it does that job too well. George and Lydia become concerned about their role as parents in the Happylife Home; they feel as if they're being phased out by their technology. As David McClean says, they have let the Happylife Home become more important to the children than their own parents. In a normal household, parents in this situation might be able to fix their family troubles. But in this case, Peter and Wendy are so obsessed with the nursery that they would rather kill their parents than part with it. Their new reality far surpasses a reality in which their dreams never come true. And the technology is so powerful that George and Lydia can't compete with it. You can confiscate a video game, but not the nursery: it will find a way to get rid of you.Perhaps George and Lydia are bad parents. On the other hand, perhaps consumer technology is just too powerful and addictive. Bradbury's story might as well describe today's culture, in which children and parents alike watch TV during dinner, text message during conversations, and are constantly distracted by their technology. One would rather be in front of a screen than another human being.To Bradbury, the power of technology spells the end of family, and the end of meaningful human relations. If everyone has a nursery to create his or her own world, there may no longer be any need to have real conversations, to foster real relationships, with real people, in the shared, real world. In portraying the destruction of the Hadley family, Bradbury is voicing a fear that the consumerist world we are building will result in the destruction of the very idea of family and all of the values—love, respect, loyalty, companionship—that make possible our humanity. - Climax: Wendy and Peter murder their parents - Summary: George and Lydia Hadley think something is wrong with the "nursery" in their expensive Happylife Home. The Happylife Home is a futuristic house that automates almost every human routine: it cooks and cleans, turns lights on and off, transports the Hadleys to their bedrooms via an "air closet," and even rocks them to sleep. As the kitchen automatically makes dinner for them, Lydia asks George decide to take a look at the nursery, or call a psychologist to examine it. The Hadley parents walk to the nursery, which turns out to be a virtual reality environment—a room that can immerse users (in this case, the Hadley's children) in a virtual world of their own imagining. It does this by receiving "telepathic emanations" from the children's minds. In the nursery, a perfect, three-dimensional rendering of an African veldt surrounds George and Lydia. They observe vultures above and lions in the distance, feeding on something. Lydia hears a scream, but George, in awe of the "mechanical genius who had conceived this room," doesn't notice. The lions approach George and Lydia, "feverishly and startlingly real." As the lions break into a run toward the couple, Lydia screams and they both run out of the nursery. While Lydia cries in terror, George laughs and consoles her, saying that none of it is real. But Lydia replies that it feels too real. She demands that George lock the nursery and tell the children, Wendy and Peter, to stop reading about Africa. George agrees and locks the door; he suggests that Lydia has been working too hard and needs to rest. Lydia replies that, on the contrary, she hasn't been working at all. She proposes that they shut off the Happylife Home and take a vacation. She expresses the desire to perform normal human tasks again, to once more feel "necessary." Later, George enters the nursery again and reminisces about the times when his children would imagine wonderful fantasy scenes. Now, the veldt that they have created doesn't feel as good. He reflects that there is too much death in the veldt, and it can't be good for the children to get in the habit of imagining death (while at the same time musing that children naturally think about death without really understanding it). He tells the nursery to make the veldt go away, but it doesn't respond. The parents confront their children about the African veldt, but Wendy and Peter play dumb, insisting they don't know about any veldt. Wendy manages to run to the nursery and change the scene before George and Lydia can see it again. They send the kids off to bed. Then George finds one of his old wallets in the nursery, chewed up and bloody. He locks the nursery door. In the middle of the night, George and Lydia talk and agree that their children are openly disobeying them; they have been spoiled, and must now be disciplined. They decide to invite their friend, psychologist David McClean, to take a look at the nursery. Then they hear eerily-familiar screams coming from the nursery, and realize the children have broken in through the locked door. The next day, Peter asks George not to lock up the nursery. George tells him that he and Lydia are considering turning the whole house off and for a month. Peter thinks this is an awful idea, saying that he hates the prospect of tying his own shoes and grooming himself. He issues a vague threat to George before going back to the nursery. David McClean arrives to look at the nursery, and says that it doesn't "feel good." He recommends that they destroy the room and bring the children to him for treatment. He explains that the nursery "'has become a channel toward destructive thoughts,'" and that it has become more important to Wendy and Peter than their actual parents. Together, David and George turn off the nursery. Wendy and Peter become extremely upset. As George turns off the rest of the Happylife Home, turning it into "a mechanical cemetery," the children cry and beg for one more moment in the nursery. George acquiesces, and the children go in, momentarily appeased. George and Lydia are upstairs changing when they hear their children calling for them. They run into the nursery and the children, having set a trap, lock them inside. The parents scream as the lions in the nursery kill and eat them. David McClean arrives to help the family settle into their "vacation" from the Happylife Home, but instead sees Wendy and Peter in the veldt, having tea.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The Vendor of Sweets - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Malgudi, a fictional town in southern India - Character: Jagan. Description: - Character: Mali. Description: - Character: Grace. Description: - Character: The Cousin. Description: - Character: The Bearded Man. Description: - Character: Ambika. Description: - Theme: Communication vs. Fear. Description: - Theme: Generational Difference. Description: - Theme: Commerce, Taste, and the Good Life. Description: - Theme: Religion. Description: - Theme: India vs. the U.K. and the U.S.. Description: - Climax: Jagan refuses to become involved in Mali's court case, instead insisting that he will retreat from society at a religious shrine. - Summary: Jagan, who was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian struggle for independence when Jagan was a young man, is now an older man running a sweet shop. However, Jagan himself has given up added salt and sugar. In the sweet shop, his cousin asks him why he continues to work so hard when he lives an austere life. One morning, Jagan's son Mali announces that he doesn't want to attend college anymore. Jagan feels that he should order Mali to continue in school but, afraid of upsetting his son, doesn't. That evening in the sweet shop, the cousin stops in. When Jagan explains his worries about Mali, the cousin suggests that Jagan have a frank conversation with Mali. Instead, Jagan manipulates the cousin into finding out for him why Mali wants to quit school. That night, Jagan and the cousin meet up, and the cousin shares a discovery: Mali wants to become a writer. Later, Jagan asks Mali whether he needs a nicer table for his writing. When Mali asks how Jagan knows about his writing, Jagan dodges the question and asks what Mali is working on currently. Mali explains that he plans to write a novel for a competition, which closes at the end of September, with a 25,000-rupee prize. Mali is offended and insists he can write the novel in the few months he has left. After September comes and goes, Jagan has no idea whether Mali finished his novel. When he expresses his concerns to his cousin, the cousin again suggests that Jagan has a conversation with Mali—and Jagan again convinces the cousin to find out the information for him instead. Later, the cousin tells Jagan that Mali wants to study creative writing in the U.S. He also reveals that Mali has stolen money from Jagan's secret home stash to pay for his passport and plane ticket. Jagan is offended by Mali's desire to learn writing in the U.S., yet he is oddly proud of the can-do spirit revealed by Mali's theft. Mali sends Jagan many letters from the U.S.—all about American culture, with no personal details. After Mali has been in the U.S. for three years, he sends word that he is returning home with a guest. When Jagan and his cousin meet Mali at the train station, Mali introduces them to his Korean American wife, Grace. Jagan is initially uncomfortable with Grace, whom Mali never mentioned in his letters. As Grace and Jagan get to know each other, Jagan learns that Grace, not Mali, wrote the letters that Mali sent from the U.S. One day, Mali corners Jagan to have a business discussion with him. At the time, Mali is wearing socks with sandals—and Jagan, who thinks socks are an unhealthy Western peculiarity, becomes so distracted by Mali's socks that he fails to hear anything Mali says. Later, at the sweet shop, the cousin asks what Jagan thinks of Mali's business idea. Jagan, pumping the cousin for information, discovers that Mali plans to start a business selling story-writing machines. The next morning, Jagan goes to ask Mali how story-writing machines work; Mali points out that he already explained the machines to Jagan—but then shows one such machine to Jagan. Jagan mentions that the great Indian epics were composed orally, not written down at first—but Mali interrupts, saying that India needs to compete with modern countries' art and literature industries. Then he says that he needs to raise $51,000 himself to get backing from U.S. investors. At the sweet shop, Jagan discovers from the cousin that Mali expects Jagan to provide the investment money for his business. Jagan begins avoiding Mali and Grace at home. Meanwhile, Mali buys a used green car for traveling to his business ventures, much to Jagan's displeasure. One morning, Mali and Grace corner Jagan at home and ask whether he has decided about investing in Mali's business. Jagan claims not to have the money but offers Mali his sweet-shop business. Later in the day after Mali contemptuously rejects this offer, Jagan he abruptly tells the cousin that he's going to lower his prices—he has enough money, and he wants poor children to be able to buy his sweets. After Jagan lowers his prices, he begins selling out his wares every day. Shortly thereafter, he receives a visit from the owner of the Ananda Bhavan restaurant, the owner of the canteen near the law courts, and a strange bearded man. The Ananda Bhavan owner and canteen owner insinuate that they want Jagan to raise his prices again so that his erratic behavior doesn't impact their businesses. Afterward, the bearded man introduces himself as the former disciple of a genius carver of Hindu gods and offers to take Jagan to his former master's shrine sometime; Jagan agrees to the trip. The next day, Jagan and the bearded man travel to the master image-maker's remote shrine, where the bearded man reveals that his master wanted to carve the goddess Gayatri for a particular space in the shrine but died before the statue was completed. Jagan and the bearded man pull the stone the image-maker chose for Gayatri out of a pond near the shrine, and the bearded man reveals that his sole goal before he dies is to finish carving the statue of the goddess. Abruptly, he asks Jagan to purchase the shrine and help him install the statue. Jagan hesitates, though he would like a religious retreat. When Jagan returns home, Mali corners him again and asks for a final answer about the story-writing machines. Jagan asks what will happen if he refuses to fund the business, and Mali says that Grace will have to return home, as she has nothing to do in India without the business. Shocked, Jagan says that wives must stay with their husbands. Mali contemptuously retorts that that was only true in Jagan's day. A couple days later, Grace abruptly tells Jagan that Mali wants her to leave—and that she and Mali aren't married, though Mali had promised to marry her once they came to India. Jagan, horrified that Mali and Grace are unmarried, flees to his shop. When the cousin stops in, Jagan tells him that Mali and Grace aren't married and asks what he should do. Though at first the cousin tells Jagan that Mali and Grace's marital status is their business, he eventually suggests that he can arrange a fast wedding for Mali and Grace. Jagan, feeling unclean due to Mali and Grace being unmarried, locks the doors between his part of the house and theirs. Later, when Mali corners Jagan again about funding his business, Jagan says that Mali and Grace must marry. Mali claims that Jagan was too cheap to send Grace back to the U.S. and that Grace needs psychiatric help; then he leaves. That evening after work, Jagan stops by a statue near his house and recalls his own arranged marriage to Mali's now-deceased mother Ambika: how their first meeting was arranged by their families, how they fell in love at first sight, and how they were barren for the first 10 years of their marriage, until Jagan's father insisted they go to the Badri Hill shrine to pray for fertility. While reminiscing, Jagan falls asleep on the statue pedestal. When Jagan wakes up early the next morning, he decides to start a new phase of his life, going on a religious retreat until his death. He enters the house, packs a bag, and begins to walk away. As he's leaving, his cousin rushes up and tells him that Mali has been arrested under the Prohibition Act for having alcohol in his car and that they need to prepare a defense for his trial. Jagan gives the cousin money to bail Mali out of jail and offers to buy Grace a plane ticket back to the U.S. if she asks. But he refuses to involve himself in the trial, insisting that he will go on a religious retreat to the bearded man's shrine.

- Genre: Sentimental Novel, Satire, Picaresque - Title: The Vicar of Wakefield - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Rural England - Character: Dr. Charles Primrose. Description: - Character: Mr. Burchell (Sir William Thornhill). Description: - Character: Squire Thornhill. Description: - Character: George. Description: - Character: Olivia. Description: - Character: Sophia. Description: - Character: Mrs. Deborah Primrose. Description: - Character: Ephraim Jenkinson (A Distinguished Old Man). Description: - Character: Miss Arabella Wilmot. Description: - Character: Moses. Description: - Character: Dick. Description: - Character: Mr. Wilmot. Description: - Character: The Town Ladies (Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs). Description: - Character: The Butler (The Well-Dressed Gentleman). Description: - Character: Flamborough. Description: - Character: Farmer Williams. Description: - Character: Timothy Baxter. Description: - Character: The Primroses' Cousin. Description: - Character: The Young Aristocrat. Description: - Character: The Prisoners. Description: - Character: The Officers of Justice. Description: - Theme: Humility in the Face of Adversity. Description: - Theme: The Possibility of Redemption. Description: - Theme: Family and Society. Description: - Theme: Equality, Justice, and the Law. Description: - Theme: Travel, Home, and Belonging. Description: - Climax: Sir William confronts Squire Thornhill in the prison - Summary: Dr. Primrose, a vicar in the idyllic country parish of Wakefield, chooses a steady, dependable wife, and together they raise a happy family. The Primroses' older two sons George and Moses are gifted at scholarship and business, respectively, and their daughters Olivia and Sophia are beautiful and musically talented. They soon have two more young boys, Dick and Bill. However, a combination of circumstance and pride soon threatens the family's happiness. Dr. Primrose is unable to hold back his strong theological opinions, causing him to pit himself against Mr. Wilmot, the father of George's fiancée Arabella. Then the merchant holding the Primrose fortune runs off with the Primroses' fortune, leaving them destitute and causing Mr. Wilmot to break off the marriage. The Primroses relocate to a parish owned by Squire Thornhill, where they will live in comparative poverty; the family sends George London to make his own way in the world. On the way to their new home, the family meets a kind stranger named Mr. Burchell, who quickly develops a mutual attraction to Sophia. Despite their hardships, the family feels welcome and happy in their new home. They soon meet the Squire, who is frivolous, materialistic, and dependent on his better-liked uncle, Sir William, for his fortune, but he is kind to the Primroses and quickly becomes close to the family. He showers attention on Olivia in particular, leading Mrs. Primrose to hope for a marriage. He also introduces the Primrose daughters to two highly cultured town ladies, but the ladies' intention to bring the daughters with them to London for the winter is foiled after someone spreads malicious, anonymous rumors spread about the family. Fate continues to disappoint the Primroses, as both Moses and Dr. Primrose after the same man in disguise cheats them out of money they make from selling their horses. Later, the family learns that Mr. Burchell is responsible for spreading rumors about them, causing them to end their relationship with him. Mrs. Primrose continues to scheme new ways to pair off Olivia and the Squire but is unable to induce him to propose to her. Things get even worse when Olivia elopes with an unknown man. Dr. Primrose sets off in pursuit of her, initially suspecting that the Squire is Oliva's mystery suitor. However, people along the way who saw Olivia describe an abductor resembling Mr. Burchell. Eventually, Dr. Primrose loses the trail and prepares to head home in defeat. Along the way, a well-dressed gentleman invites Dr. Primrose to dinner, and they get into a heated argument about liberty and the monarchy. Dr. Primrose soon discovers that the supposed gentleman is only a butler in disguise after the man's master, Mr. Arnold, returns home, along with Arabella Wilmot, Mr. Arnold's niece. Dr. Primrose then accompanies them to a play, where he is shocked to find George cast in the leading role. George then tells his father, Mr. Arnold, and Arabella of his travels. After failing as a Grub-street hack writer in London, he served none other than Squire Thornhill, fighting a duel on his behalf. While he hoped to find a career by taking the Squire's recommendation to Sir William, he was angrily rebuffed for serving the Squire in such an immoral capacity. George then traveled across Europe, selling art, tutoring, and singing for a living before returning to England. At that very moment the Squire, who is now pursuing Miss Wilmot, arrives. He generously procures an officer's commission for George, telling Dr. Primrose he will consider it a loan. Dr. Primrose then sets off for home. Along the way, he encounters Olivia at an inn, and she reveals to him it was the Squire, not Burchell, who abducted her. Moreover, the town ladies were also a plot of his and were only sex workers in disguise; Burchell's letter, it turns out, was an attempt to protect her and Sophia from the Squire. Olivia also recounts how the Squire had a fake priest "marry" him to Olivia before promptly abandoning her. Dr. Primrose assures Olivia the family will forgive her and takes her home. Upon Dr. Primrose and Olivia's return, the Primrose house catches fire, leaving the family destitute. The Primroses also learn that the Squire and Miss Wilmot are engaged. Soon the Squire visits them, and Dr. Primrose angrily confronts him, telling him he will never consent to the Squire marrying anyone but Olivia. The Squire retaliates by threatening to demand his loan be repaid, and two days later officers of justice come to take Dr. Primrose to the gaol. Though an angry crowd of parishioners attempts to free him, Dr. Primrose calls them off and goes to prison willingly. There he meets Jenkinson, the man who cheated him and Moses. Jenkinson is now reformed and apologetic. Dr. Primrose sets about reforming the other inmates, preaching to them and encouraging them to live morally and productively; to everyone else's surprise, his efforts eventually succeed. Though his family and Jenkinson try to convince Dr. Primrose to submit to the Squire and give the marriage his blessing in the hope that he will be released, he refuses to do so. They also attempt to petition Sir William but receive no reply. Olivia, weak and depressed after her ordeal, dies. After Olivia's death, Dr. Primrose finally relents and asks the Squire to be released, but the Squire refuses. The Primroses then learn that unknown assailants have kidnapped Sophia. The family then receive word from George, who is happy and well, and Mrs. Primrose reveals she asked George to duel the Squire; thankfully, however, the happy tone of George's letter suggests that he never got Mrs. Primrose's message. Just then. However, George is brought to the prison, charged with wounding the men the Squire sent to fight him, confirming that he did receive his mother's letter after all. Suddenly, Mr. Burchell enters with Sophia, who he has been rescued, though her kidnapper escaped. Burchell then strongly admonishes George for dueling and reveals himself to be Sir William. After hearing a description of Sophia's kidnapper, Jenkinson recognizes him as a criminal named Timothy Baxter and leads the officers to him. At that moment, the Squire arrives. His uncle and the Primroses confront him, and soon Jenkinson returns with Baxter, who helped the Squire abduct Olivia. As the Squire's guilt comes to light, Miss Wilmot too enters the prison and breaks off her engagement in horror; unfortunately, the Squire has already taken possession of her fortune, but she gladly gives it up to marry George instead. It's then revealed that Olivia is in fact alive—the family only told Dr. Primrose she was dead to convince him to submit to the Squire and, hopefully, lead to his release. Moreover, Jenkinson actually brought the Squire a real priest for the supposedly fake marriage in order to blackmail the Squire, making Olivia the Squire's lawful wife. In the end, Miss Wilmot regains her fortune, and Sir William gives Olivia the allowance he gave the Squire. At Dr. Primrose's request, the Squire isn't punished for his actions. Sir William also chooses to marry Sophia, and Dr. Primrose marries them along with George and Miss Wilmot. Dr. Primrose then learns his original fortune has been recovered. As the family's life becomes idyllic once more, he reminds himself to remain as grateful in happiness as he was patient in suffering.

- Genre: Short story - Title: The Village Schoolmaster - Point of view: First-person - Setting: An anonymous provincial village - Character: The Schoolmaster. Description: The elderly headmaster of the small, unnamed village school, and one of the story's two protagonists. The story revolves around his interest in an abnormally large mole that once appeared in his village, and whose appearance he takes as an opportunity to earn notoriety and wealth. He tries to cash in by publishing a small pamphlet about the mole's existence, by selling the pamphlet to tourists, and by trying to catch the interest of the scientific community. When everyone ignores him, however, he grows bitter and inordinately obsessed with the mole, claiming that only he understands its true significance and spending years trying to make the subject relevant. The bulk of the plot has to do with his misunderstanding and resentment of the narrator's attempts to help him bring the mole to wider public attention. By the end of the story, when he reveals the absurd level of fame he had hoped to achieve by writing about the mole, it seems that his years of obsession have made him delusional. Kafka withholds the schoolmaster's name and almost all biographical information, apart from the fact that he is poor and struggles to support his wife and children. The schoolmaster comes across opportunistic and stubborn, but also not without dignity and a sense of dedication that the narrator finds admirable. - Character: The Narrator. Description: The anonymous narrator, whose probing reflections, psychological analysis, and hindsight characterize Kafka's story. The story offers few biographical details about the narrator, beyond the fact that he is a businessman who lives in an unnamed city not too far from to the schoolmaster's village. After hearing of the schoolmaster's ill treatment by a scholar, the narrator decides to help the man in his quest to raise awareness among the scientific community of the existence of a freakishly large mole. The narrator is precise and thorough both in his assessment of the schoolmaster's psychology and of his own efforts to help. But these qualities ironically sabotage those very efforts: the narrator's thoroughness leads him to over-investigate the mole's appearance, leading to the schoolmaster's fierce jealousy. What's more, in his wish to remain unbiased by initially refraining from contacting the schoolmaster or reading his pamphlet, the narrator only breeds confusion and misunderstanding between himself and the older man. Alongside his brief account of the falling-out between them, the narrator conjectures about and describes in detail their varying motives for getting involved with the mole case. The narrator also recounts a strange mixture of his growing obsession with the case and his deepening disillusionment with the schoolmaster himself. By the end of the story, after an undisclosed amount of time, the narrator gives up on his efforts; he requests that all copies of his own pamphlet be returned, and has completely lost sight of his original motives. - Character: The Scholar. Description: With difficulty, the schoolmaster secures a meeting with the unnamed scholar in hopes of raising awareness about the existence of the mole. The scholar dismisses the schoolmaster's fixation on the mole, however, jokingly explaining away its supposed size as the result of good soil. The scholar's insulting treatment of the schoolmaster later prompts the intervention of the narrator in the mole affair, after the schoolmaster writes of the affront. The scholar only appears briefly in the story, but is nevertheless a significant character; he symbolizes academia and the scientific community at large, a community whose attention the schoolmaster desperately wishes to catch. His curt dismissal of the schoolmaster, therefore, represents the schoolmaster's broader failure to attract the respect and attention he craves. - Theme: Obsession and Desire. Description: Although Franz Kafka's short story "The Village Schoolmaster" is often subtitled "The Giant Mole," the titular oversized mole, whose appearance briefly catches the attention of a small village, never actually appears in the story. Instead Kafka focuses on a provincial schoolmaster's mission to prove the existence of the abnormal creature—and the narrator's deepening obsession with proving the schoolmaster's credibility. As both men spiral into obsession over the mole episode—an episode that the villagers have already forgotten—Kafka gradually indicates that neither man cares much about the mole at all; the teacher obsesses over his own hopes and dreams, while the narrator's object of obsession is left ambiguous. In artfully swapping the mole for messy psychological motives, Kafka suggests that the desires fueling obsession are never as straightforward as they seem. While the story, at first, seems to revolve around the mole, Kafka indicates that the animal itself is less important than the psychological drama it inspires. One indication that the mole itself isn't very important is the speed with which everyone else in the small village forgets the whole episode. This suggests that the mole might be justifiably forgettable, and it makes the schoolmaster seem odd and eccentric for clinging to the story. Furthermore, as the story progresses, Kafka reduces the mole's importance by suggesting that the schoolmaster's obsession isn't actually about the mole. The story ends in an argument between teacher and narrator, in which the schoolmaster reveals his elaborate vision of becoming wealthy and famous for his discovery of the mole. The mole itself hardly comes up—it's clear that the mole was never as important to the schoolmaster as his vision of what writing about the mole might bring. It's especially clear that the mole is somewhat irrelevant when Kafka reveals that the schoolmaster has never seen the creature firsthand. The mole—ostensibly the object of the schoolmaster's obsession—might not even exist, which suggests that the mole was always just a vehicle for his unrelated obsessions. Just as the schoolmaster's obsession isn't actually with the mole, Kafka shows that the narrator's obsession with the schoolmaster is not what it seems. Near the beginning of the story, the narrator describes a scholar cruelly dismissing the schoolmaster's claim about the giant mole. This episode, the narrator says, inspired him to research the giant mole in order to write a defense of the schoolmaster's credibility. However, the narrator's obsession with vindicating the schoolmaster is, from the beginning, strange. After all, the narrator seems to find the whole episode unimportant. He calls the schoolmaster "honest but uninfluential," and he describes the mole episode with belittling language: "trivial," "small," "transient," and even "tiny little." This suggests that even the narrator himself finds the incident unworthy of attention, which makes his own obsession with it mysterious. Furthermore, while the narrator claims that his goal is to vouch for the schoolmaster's credibility, he doesn't bother to read the schoolmaster's pamphlets—the very claims that need defending—before writing a defense. One would think that reading the pamphlets in question would be the first order of business in defending the schoolmaster's credibility, so it casts serious doubt on the narrator's motives that he didn't read the claims he was ostensibly defending. Finally, Kafka gives ample evidence that the narrator himself doesn't understand his mysterious motives, since the narrator is inconsistent in describing what fuels him. At first, the narrator claims that his motive is to defend the "honesty" of the schoolmaster, but then he clarifies that he's proving the schoolmaster's "good intentions" (which, of course, is not the same thing as honesty). Next, the narrator writes in his pamphlet that his intention is to give "the schoolmaster's pamphlet the wide publicity it deserves," but then he admits that he "was trying to belittle the discovery" of the mole—two statements that are clearly in conflict. Near the end of the story, the narrator he claims to the teacher that "I wanted to help you," but the teacher rejects this notion and the narrator agrees that it's "probably" untrue.  When the narrator finally admits near the end of the story that he himself does not know why he tried to defend the schoolmaster's honesty, it seems to be the first time he's said something believable about his motives. This calls into question the entirety of his involvement as the reader is invited to go back through the story, searching for any scrap of sincerity in the narrator's motives. - Theme: Misunderstanding and Miscommunication. Description: In "The Village Schoolmaster," the schoolmaster and the narrator are allegedly allies in a common cause: the schoolmaster sets out to prove to the world that a freakishly enormous mole exists, while the narrator vows to prove the schoolmaster's honesty. But at nearly every stage, this partnership goes awry. From the beginning, the two men have inadequate information—indeed, almost no information—to carry out their missions: neither has even seen this mole, the narrator tries to back up the schoolmaster without reading his pamphlets, and the men never communicate with one another. Throughout the story, the schoolmaster—confused about the narrator's motives—is convinced that the narrator is out to steal his fame and is therefore hostile toward his attempts to help. Meanwhile, the narrator (who never asks the schoolmaster how he might be useful) undermines and offends the schoolmaster instead of helping. In plaguing his characters with miscommunication and factual ignorance, Kafka draws attention to the power of misunderstanding to isolate people from one another and to impede even the simplest relationships. The schoolmaster and narrator separately take up their causes with almost no concern for facts. This is the first warning sign that they're living in separate realities and will therefore find collaboration impossible. The schoolmaster's eyewitness account of the mole is questionable from the beginning. Early on, Kafka reveals that the schoolmaster has never even seen the mole whose existence he devotes his life to proving. His estimation of the mole's length (two yards) is an exaggeration, which casts doubt on all his other assertions. Because of this clear credibility issue, the narrator's task of proving the schoolmaster's honesty seems immediately doomed. Even worse, just as the schoolmaster tries to prove the existence of a mole he's never seen, the narrator tries to prove the schoolmaster's credibility without ever investigating whether the schoolmaster actually is credible. In fact, the narrator writes his pamphlet defending the schoolmaster without having read the schoolmaster's pamphlet. And when the narrator finally does read the teacher's pamphlet, he finds that "we actually did not agree on certain important points," despite the men's persistent belief that "we had proved our main point, namely, the existence of the mole." His failure to communicate with the schoolmaster from the start has undermined whatever philanthropic benefit he might have offered. In addition to both men being unconcerned with clearly establishing fact, they are unfocused and unqualified for the tasks they've chosen, which further undermines their credibility. The narrator conducts interviews and claims to have "correlated the evidence," but readers are never told of the nature of this evidence. Whatever this mystery evidence is, the narrator admits to having collected it "unsystematically." The narrator—a businessman—repeatedly admits that he has no credentials to qualify his investigations into the schoolmaster's veracity. He says that his lack of credentials is probably why his inquiries were doomed from the start. Even the men's published conclusions are unreliable. The teacher is said to spend more time fretting over the narrator's attempts to help him than composing effective arguments for his own pamphlets. In a review of the narrator's pamphlet, an academic journal calls its arguments unintelligible, which gives the reader a sense that the wider scientific community considers the men's pursuits to be amateur and half-baked. And the narrator himself admits that his and the schoolmaster's writings, even if they were true, would be impossible for average readers to follow—unintelligibility which only added to the public's confusion surrounding the mole episode. To these failures of personal knowledge, Kafka adds a rift in the men's understanding of each other. The two men communicate exceptionally poorly. Although he claims to want to help the schoolmaster, the narrator refuses to contact him at first. The schoolmaster discovers the narrator's involvement in the mole case only through "intermediaries," which causes him to become suspicious of the narrator's intentions. The schoolmaster admits that he initially had had high hopes for the narrator's success. He had dreamed that, with the support of a businessman from the city, he could have won fame, fortune, and respect. Yet all the while he has deliberately placed "obstacles" (the narrator does not specify what kind) in the narrator's path. He does so, the reader is told, because he believes the narrator wants to rob him of credit for the mole discovery. In the final passage, the men claim drastically different visions for the fruits of their mole inquiries: the schoolmaster desired fame, riches, and a ceremonial relocation to the big city, while the narrator claims to have wanted to improve the teacher's sense of self worth by earning him a bit of recognition. The disparity in these vision shows just how different their quests have been all along. It is this distance that causes the narrator to abandon the project altogether and to call it a mistake. The teacher wanted riches and recognition, while the narrator professes a humanitarian desire merely to help the teacher. When the teacher presses him, however, the narrator admits a total ignorance of his real motives. This scene depicts not only isolation between men but fundamental self-ignorance. - Theme: The Futility of Pride and Ambition. Description: "The Village Schoolmaster" is the story of two men wasting their energy on quests they fail to complete. The schoolmaster wants to win fame and fortune by proving to the world that an enormous mole exists, while the narrator wants to prove that the schoolmaster is credible. Both tasks are impossible, both men make fools of themselves, and throughout their labors, they both seem to have an inkling that what they're doing is futile. By telling a story of obsessive quests that have no hope of success, Kafka explores the psychology of chasing futile ambitions. Kafka's exploration centers on the men's growing attention to each other: because no one else cares about their efforts, the men increasingly treat each other as outlets for their vanity and ambition. Through this, the story shows the sheer depth and durability of human pride. Kafka focuses his psychological portrait on the men's thwarted efforts in order to suggest that ambition, in the absence of a meaningful goal or an audience that is invested in one's achievements, is ultimately futile. Both the schoolmaster and the narrator begin by trying to prove a point to the outside world, but Kafka suggests that their audience is small, or possibly nonexistent. This sets the stage for the men's turn toward each other. The nature of the men's plea for attention is public: they publish pamphlets for people to read, they seek audiences with the wider scientific community, and they have wild hopes about the social impact of their efforts. But Kafka thwarts these public efforts at every turn. The few people who seem to read the pamphlet are explicitly unmoved by its ideas: a yawning scholar dismisses the schoolmaster and the agricultural journal dismisses the narrator's pamphlet in an obscure back-page notice. Only one reader keeps the narrator's pamphlet—as an oddity—when the narrator recalls all copies. This gives readers the sense that the mole affair could only possibly matter to the two protagonists. Without an audience for their obsessions, their quests seem quite clearly to be motivated by proving themselves right. Additionally, to emphasize that their quests have no significant impact, Kafka depicts the outside world in the story as essentially nonexistent. The village in which the story takes place is never named, is not accessible by train,  and is never described socially or geographically.  No character in the story is named either, and Kafka details almost nothing of the protagonists' private lives or backstories. The schoolmaster is known to have a family but mention of them—when he leaves them shivering in the snow while he debates the mole with a dismissive scholar—is brief enough to suggest that obsession with proving the existence of the rodent is more important to him than his wife and children are. Any potential influence the schoolmaster and the narrator might have in the wider world is therefore portrayed as nonexistent, and it's clear that the men's efforts are futile and ultimately detrimental to themselves and their love ones. While both men are ostensibly obsessed with proving something to the world, they both seem to understand that they'll never be able to do so. Nearly everyone in the schoolmaster's village has forgotten about the large mole's appearance. That even the people who saw the mole have forgotten it indicates that the quest to make the mole relevant is useless. The schoolmaster is the first to understand the futility of trying to sway public attention back toward the mole. He sees that his "fragmentary labors" are "basically without value." The reader is told that he is accustomed to strangers' lack of interest. He calls the mole affair a "thankless business." When the narrator enters the picture, he immediately taps into the same sense of powerlessness that has gripped the schoolmaster. The narrator calls the schoolmaster "uninfluential," yet describes his own abilities as "far from sufficient to effect a change" on public opinion. He describes his "useless labors on this wearisome question," using words like "obscurity" and "desuetude" to describe the reception of their efforts. He recognizes that "enough time had elapsed to exhaust the trivial interest that had originally existed." That the schoolmaster and narrator are aware of how fruitless their endeavors are serves to highlight just how powerful—and perhaps delusional—of an effect pride and ambition can have on individuals. Despite knowing that their labors are futile, the narrator and the schoolmaster's vanity pushes them to carry on in response to each other. After the narrator enters the picture, the schoolmaster becomes jealous, an emotion that develops into a central motive for him. The schoolmaster grows protective of the mole and is said to show a "keener penetration" into the narrator's interventions than into his own arguments regarding the mole. This obsessiveness shows that the schoolmaster regards intrusion on the subject as a personal affront—which, in turn, underscores that he's driven as much by pride as by scientific curiosity. Going forward, the schoolmaster concerns himself less with public opinion and more with the narrator. He responds to the narrator's pamphlets with personal attacks and spirited complaints. Similarly, the narrator's original intention was to improve the schoolmaster's reputation in the public sphere, but the only audience he mentions reaching is the schoolmaster himself. Throughout the story, the narrator describes conversations and accusations between himself and the schoolmaster, suggesting that their real forum is one-on-one debate—not at all a dialogue with the broader scientific community, as they once alleged. In confining the schoolmaster and narrator to a bizarre competition with each other, Kafka adds a nuanced psychological evolution to the men's original assertion of hoping to change public opinion. In the absence of a real readership for their pamphlets, the men end up treating each other as their audience instead. Rather than portraying this as some sort of admirable display of perseverance and dedication, though, the story ultimately portrays both men's efforts as borne from pride and ultimately futile. - Climax: After years of failed collaboration, the narrator and the schoolmaster have an argument on Christmas Day and part ways. - Summary: Several years before the beginning of this story, the narrator says, a giant mole appeared in a remote provincial village. The mole briefly attracted the attention of some locals at the time, and even some visitors from the surrounding area, but most people soon lost interest. The one man who did not was the elderly schoolmaster of the village, who took it upon himself to prove the mole's existence to the wider scientific community. He published pamphlets and met with a scholar to drum up awareness of the mole, but his efforts were routinely ignored or derided. Meanwhile, the narrator, living in a nearby city, has heard of the schoolmaster's struggle and takes pity on him. He finds the schoolmaster's rejection by the scholarly community to be unfair and makes it his mission to help the schoolmaster's cause. The first step, the narrator decides, is to publish a pamphlet of his own that will defend the schoolmaster's credibility. But the only attention the narrator seems to arouse is that of the schoolmaster, who becomes distracted by the appearance of an intervener in the mole episode and starts to grow suspicious of the narrator's intentions—believing that the narrator wants to take credit for the mole's discovery. The schoolmaster's jealousy deepens over the years, even as the men end up meeting each other on several occasions and trying to collaborate. Instead of collaborating, however, the schoolmaster spends his time complaining about the lack of public interest in the mole and blaming the narrator for his failed efforts to help. Simultaneously, the narrator describes the slow shift in his own interests: from a philanthropic urge to support the helpless teacher, toward an interest in the actual mole itself. He starts investigating the original appearance of the mole—interviewing witnesses and gathering so-called "evidence." This shift in the narrator's interest is viewed by the schoolmaster as a transgression on his territory. The schoolmaster's jealousy deepens and his accusations grow more personal. As an undisclosed number of years and pamphlets go by, the public still proves uninterested in the mole. The narrator reaches his breaking point when a jeer at the men's efforts appears in the obscure back pages of an agricultural journal. The narrator decides to wash his hands of the affair and tries to recall all the copies of his pamphlet he had sent to various scholars. Just as the copies start to arrive, the schoolmaster comes to visit him in town over Christmas. Immediately, the schoolmaster launches into a diatribe on the agricultural journal's notice, and an argument erupts between the two men. In this argument, the men reveal the motives that have pushed them all along. The schoolmaster describes, in minute detail, the great fame and fortune that he hoped to achieve from his scientific discovery. The narrator, incredulous at the schoolmaster's delusion, tries to talk some sense into him by positing a more realistic hypothetical outcome: the schoolmaster might have been recognized locally, but his discovery would have been absorbed into the broader scientific community and would cease to belong to him. In describing this possible outcome, the narrator reveals that his own motives for becoming involved with the mole episode—while once thought to be philanthropic in nature—have actually been unclear to him all along. The men conclude at a standoff; though the narrator plans to turn out the schoolmaster then and there, he cannot bring himself to do so.

- Genre: Science fiction short story - Title: The Visitor - Point of view: Third person - Setting: Mars - Character: Saul Williams. Description: A man exiled to Mars after contracting "blood rust," Saul is deeply bored and lonely. He desperately longs to return to Earth, or, really, for any intellectual stimulation whatsoever amidst the desolate Martian landscape. A lover of ancient philosophy, early in the story Saul attempts to engage the man on the blanket in conversation to no avail. He is the first to greet Leonard Mark upon his arrival and becomes elated upon learning of Mark's telepathic abilities. After Mark allows him to mentally visit a beloved childhood creek, Saul begins to imagine all of the places make will allow him to go—such as ancient Greece and Rome—and the long-dead philosopher's he'll be able to talk to. Upon noticing the other Martian exiles approaching, Saul quickly grows desperate to keep Mark—and his abilities—for himself. Despite their initial friendliness, he violently attacks Mark and brings him to an isolated cave. By the time Saul realizes how misguided he and the other men have been in their greedy desire to possess Mark, it is too late, and Mark is dead. At the end of the story, Saul cries himself to sleep, understanding that in his selfishness he has lost the chance of returning home for good. Saul represents the way the dangerous, misguided avarice of humankind will spell its doom. - Character: Leonard Mark. Description: The story's titular visitor, Leonard Mark is a young, relatively healthy arrival to Mars, with the fantastical ability to implant visions in others' minds. Upon meeting Saul for the first time, Mark makes New York City spring up around them, and later transports Saul to a beloved childhood creek. Mark explains his telepathic and hypnotic abilities as likely being the result of the "blow-up" of 1957, implying that there has been a nuclear explosion on Earth. He refuses payment for his services, saying that he simply enjoys making others happy. At the same time, Mark insists upon his freedom to use his power as he wishes, and that he, as a human being, does not belong to anyone. After Saul kidnaps him and brings him to a cave to hide him from the other Martian exiles, Mark mocks Saul's greed and asserts that his selfishness has ruined what he would have freely given. Later, when other men arrive, Mark suggests a schedule that would allow for the equal sharing of his abilities; the men refuse, however, and when Mark points out that one of them, Johnson, has a gun, chaos erupts. Johnson accidentally shoots and kills Mark in the subsequent fight. With the loss of Mark comes the loss of the potential for escape from the lonely drudgery of the men's Martian existence. Mark more broadly represents the Earth itself, whose resources human beings have selfishly and greedily depleted. - Character: Johnson. Description: A Martian exile with blood rust who, along with four other men, finds Saul and Mark hiding out in a cave. When Mark suggests a schedule to share his abilities with all of the men equally, it is Johnson who quickly rejects the idea in favor of instead forcing Mark to do whatever the men want, even if this means brutally torturing him. Johnson is carrying a gun, and in the resultant chaos shoots and kills both Smith and Saul. - Character: The Man on the Blanket. Description: A Martian exile with blood rust who is far more along in his illness than is Saul. Early in the story, Saul tries to engage the man in conversation, but he proves too exhausted for social interaction. The man then asserts that, soon enough, Saul will also want to do little else besides sleep. - Theme: Selfishness and Greed. Description: Ray Bradbury's "The Visitor" is above all an allegory about the corrosive nature of greed. In the story, men who have contracted "blood rust"—a contagious and incurable terminal disease—have been sent to live out their final months on Mars. When the arrival of Leonard Mark, the titular visitor, offers an escape from the desolate isolation of their quarantine, every man grows eager to keep this new "treasure" for himself—yet in their violent selfishness, they end up destroying the very thing they're fighting over. Beyond condemning men's short-sighted selfishness, Bradbury's story ultimately argues that humankind's inability to share resources will spell its end. Through a combination of telepathy and hypnotism, Mark is able to immerse others in illusions indistinguishable from real life—a highly desirable power for men forced to leave their homes and end their days in foreign solitude. When Saul, one of the Martian exiles, first learns of Mark's ability, he immediately begins to imagine all the things that the newcomer will do for him—from conjuring images of his childhood home, to allowing him to converse with ancient philosophers. So consumed is Saul by visions of how he will use Mark, that he overlooks the fact that Mark is an independent human being, and not Saul's personal plaything. Upon seeing the others flock toward the visitor, Saul insists that they run off to protect Mark from the others' ravenous greed: "They'll kill each other—kill you—for the right to own you," Saul warns. Of course, Saul really just wants to keep Mark to himself, and the visitor is notably unfazed: "Oh, but I don't belong to anybody," he says, before looking at Saul pointedly and adding, "No. Not even you." Saul realizes he "didn't even think of that," underscoring the way in which intense focus on one's own needs can deny others the right to self-determination. Despite this realization, Saul refuses to give up his prize. Instead, he viciously knocks Mark out and carries him to an isolated cave away from the other men. He then ties Mark up, refusing him freedom unless he promises not to run away. In response, Mark mocks Saul's obvious avarice: "Oh, a fine marriage this is—your greed and my mental ability." Mark refuses to play along, again insisting, much to Saul's frustration, that he is a "free agent" who doesn't "belong to anybody." Soon enough, other men find the cave, and their subsequent "arguments and ferocities" ensue until dawn. Mark conjures a marble table, around which sit these "ridiculously bearded, evil-smelling, sweating and greedy men, eyes bent upon their treasure." Bradbury's language in this moment highlights the men's pathetic desperation, depicting them as having grown feral in their selfish desires. They, like Saul, deny Mark his humanity, viewing him instead only as a "treasure" to be won. Mark rationally suggests creating a schedule so that each man gets an hour with him per week, and which also leaves Mark with some time for himself. Rather than accept this deal—which Mark points out "should be better than nothing"—one man, Johnson, declares that they should simply make Mark do whatever they want, even if that means torturing him. The problem is, however, in addition to sowing violence, greed robs men of trust. Mark angrily declares that, one by one, the men will kill each other out of the need to be the sole possessor of Mark's abilities: "This is a fool's conference," he says. "The minute your back is turned one of the other men will murder you." Greed and selfishness have not only blinded the men to the humanity of that which they desire, but also to one another's; trust, reason, and empathy, the story argues, cannot co-exist with the single-minded brutality that greed fuels. Indeed, Mark's assertion immediately proves correct. The men begin to fight, and in the ensuing chaos accidentally kill Mark. The irony, of course, is that Mark had been prepared to give his talents freely, explicitly telling Saul he desired no reward for his services and simply wanted to bring others joy: "You wanted me all to yourself," he says. "You were afraid the others would take me away from you. Oh, how mistaken you were. I have enough power to keep them all happy. You could have shared me, like a community kitchen." In their greedy inability to share this joy, however, the men have destroyed it altogether. Bradbury's story is not simply a condemnation of interpersonal squabbles. The tale is more broadly an allegory for the depletion of natural resources and disrespect of the planet—which provide the real versions of everything Mark conjures, and yet which human beings treat with no more respect than the men do their telepathic would-be savior. Indeed, Bradbury subtly hints at the way the Martian drama plays out on a planetary level through Mark's backstory: Mark implies his abilities are the result of the "blow up" of 1957, ostensibly in reference to a nuclear explosion. This would suggest that those on Earth, like those on Mars, have refused to share resources (resulting in nuclear war), or have used them to their own ends without regard to the potential danger to the planet. "Blood rust" itself could, like Mark's telepathy, even be a byproduct of environmental degradation and nuclear fallout. The human tendency toward greed and selfishness, then, creates a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that will ultimately spell humankind's doom. - Theme: Isolation, Loneliness, and Home. Description: Saul Williams's first thought upon waking up to another quiet Martian morning is "how far away" the Earth is. Well before Leonard Mark's arrival, Bradbury establishes the incredible sense of isolation that Saul—and all the Martian exiles—must feel, having been torn from the familiarity not simply of their individual homes, but of their entire home planet. By emphasizing the men's intense longing for Earth and desperate wish for meaningful social interaction, Bradbury argues for the importance of both home and human contact. Life without either, the story suggests, not only drives men to dangerous extremes, but is, in fact, not really life at all. The desolation of Mars is immediately evident in Bradbury's bleak description of the landscape outside Saul's tent, which is "still" and "silent," the sky "empty." Underscoring the sense of stifling monotony and hopelessness is the detached, straightforward prose used to describe Saul's morning routine, which makes even his attempts to kill himself seem utterly mundane: "Later in the morning Saul tried to die," Bradbury writes. "He lay on the sand and told his heart to stop. It continued beating." The extreme dreariness of life on Mars contrasts sharply with the vibrancy of that on Earth, which Bradbury later describes as "explod[ing] in electric color." That Saul wants Earth "so bad it hurts […] more than food or women or anything" further imbues the concept of home with the importance of any other basic human need. Saul's first request of Mark—the place he would like to be "most of all" in that moment—is notably a beloved childhood creek. Though he ultimately harbors ambitions of visiting places of grand historic importance through Mark's power, of primary importance is the comfort and familiarity of home. Without this comfort, the story implies, men grow weak and listless. Saul recalls that, at first, the Martian exiles would gather around a campfire and talk wistfully about nothing but Earth. Yet as their sickness progressed, even this grew too taxing. Now, illness has robbed the men of the ability to interact at all; instead, the sickest huddle across the dead sea "like so many emptied bottles flung up by some long-gone wave […] all of them sleeping alone […] each grown into himself, because social converse was weakening and sleep was good." Not only have the men been cut off from Earth, but they have also been completely isolated from one another. That they are lying on a dead sea bottom symbolically reflects that, unable to communicate or even dream of the homes they've lost, the men themselves are already dead. It is no wonder, then, that Saul is repeatedly referred to (and refers to himself) as "lonely." Such loneliness is "an affliction of the rusted ones," a nearby man lying on a blanket tells Saul when the latter tries to strike up a conversation. Because of their illness, the men are completely devoid of genuine human contact. Even when the healthy-looking Mark arrives, Saul notes that his carriers wear "protective germicide suits" and depart quickly, physically connoting their separation from and aversion to the doomed Martian exiles. Only upon having established the devasting bleakness of the men's situation does Bradbury reveal their bloodthirsty greed. Saul calls the other exiles "insane," to which Mark responds, "Isolation and all make them that way?" After Saul later kidnaps Mark, the visitor accuses Saul himself of having been driven "insane with loneliness." Bradbury underscores that the men's selfish desperation is fueled by their intense isolation and longing for connection with a world that has cast them aside like so many "emptied bottles." The real tragedy of blood rust, it seems, is not simply that it kills its victims, but that it forces them to die alone—tossed off like trash to another planet, to spend their days "bleeding all the time, and lonely." That's why Mark's death proves so devasting to Saul, as he realizes he has lost all hope of reconnecting with, and will spend his final, painful days searching for, a home he will never see again: "He would rise every morning and walk on the dead sea looking for it, and walk forever around Mars, looking for it, and never find it," Bradbury writes. "And finally lie, too tired to walk, trying to find New York in his head, but not finding it." Bradbury's judgment is not reserved for the men of Mars, but also targets those on Earth who sent the infected off to Mars in the first place. Men are not meant to spend their final days rotting in a foreign atmosphere, the story argues, and treating human beings like refuse is at once maddening and inhumane. In sending these men to Mars, the people of Earth have abandoned those in need and denied them basic decency and comfort at their end of their days. Bradbury's story argues that such unfeeling quarantine is cruel because, in denying men their homes and human contact, it effectively denies them their humanity. - Theme: Meaning and Imagination. Description: Despite being terminally ill, the exiled Martian men seem not to fear death itself so much as the lack of mental stimulation that their long, drawn out dying entails. Mars is distinctly devoid of opportunities for intellectual stimulation, a fact that proves especially challenging for the philosophy-loving Saul Williams. Saul rejects desire for bodily pleasures like women and food, instead insisting that all he wants is Earth, "a thing for the mind and not the weak body." His despair comes not only from intense homesickness, but also from the fact that "intellectuals never get the blood rust and come up" to Mars, and that his fellow exiles have grown too ill to talk at all, let alone discuss Plato and Aristotle. As the sick men find themselves unable to think of anything "but sleep and more sleep," Bradbury suggests that their existence itself begins to lose any sense of meaning or purpose. "The Visitor," then, is an argument for the importance of the life of the mind. For Saul, there is little joy to the mundane monotony that being on Mars entails. "Another morning," he remarks early in the story, suggesting a certain bored pattern to his days that is further reflected in the oppressive stillness of the Martian landscape. In the opening line of the story, Saul awakens to "the still morning." Everything is "quiet" and the dead sea-bottom is "silent—no wind on it." Before Leonard Mark's arrival, Saul attempts to engage in conversation with a man lying on a blanket nearby, but the man is too sick to do anything other than sleep. Saul even longs for the day when he, too, will be too sick to care about anything other than sleep because, though this will mean he is closer to death, it would be preferable to staring down a seemingly endless stretch of empty, boring Martian days. Leonard Mark, then, is a sort of messiah figure, come to deliver the exiles from their monotonous Martian hell and into an imagined heaven. For Saul, Mark presents the opportunity not only to see home once again, but to explore worlds Saul never knew: "We'll be in Greece, he thought. In Athens. We'll be in Rome, if we want, when we study the Roman writers. We'll stand in the Parthenon and the Acropolis. […] To sit and talk with Nietzsche in person, with Plato himself...!" Saul notably calls such imagined opportunities better than life on Earth ever was, again suggesting that intellectual pursuits instill life with an invaluable sense of wonder. Notably, Mark cannot cure the men, nor can he actually, physically return them to the homes they so sorely miss. He can only offer vibrant images of a world beyond their immediate surroundings. He calls this, in part, hypnosis, underscoring the fact that it isn't real. Indeed, when Saul believes himself to be swimming in a beloved childhood creek, to Mark it looks simply like he is flailing about in the Martian sand. In a moment of anger, Saul calls Mark's conjuring "a lie," and Mark himself refers to it as "a mirage." Nevertheless, these images—these possibilities for mental removal from the Martian emptiness—prove powerful enough to drive the men to kidnapping and murder in their attempt to access them. Such a profound desire for an imagined escape raises the question of whether reality is more important than illusion. For these men, it doesn't matter that the scenes Mark conjures aren't real; all that matters is their experience of them, their ability to remove themselves from the simultaneous existential terror and numbing drudgery of their lives in exile. The story does not offer an answer as to whether such escapism actually grants life meaning or, on the contrary, is a mask for the ultimate meaningless of life itself. What is clear in Bradbury's tale, however, is that when the characters reach the point of illness where they can do nothing but sleep—that is, when they can no longer engage in the life of the mind—they have ceased to live. Saul knows this will happen to him, too; after Mark's death, he envisions the shape his final months will take, realizing that he will "finally lie, too tired to walk, trying to find New York in his head, but not finding it." As he drifts to sleep, he hears the figurative "tremendous crash of metal and golden mist and odor and color and sound," as "New York collapsed, fell, and was buried." The implication is that Saul, like all the rest, will become too weary to even dream of the world he has left behind. And without such dreams, he has, in effect, already been buried in the Martian soil. - Climax: While struggling for possession of Johnson's gun, Saul Williams accidentally shoots and kills Leonard Mark. - Summary: Saul Williams wakes to another quiet morning on Mars, and laments being so far from Earth. He wants nothing more than to be home, but he knows that, because he has "blood rust," this is impossible. He tries to imagine himself once again in New York City, yet his efforts prove futile. Saul wants to die but lacks the nerve to kill himself. Instead, he naps, and awakens with a mouth full of blood; "blood rust" is terminal and incurable, causing its victims to die over the course of a year. Those suffering have all been quarantined on Mars. Desperate for intellectual stimulation, a lonely Saul attempts to strike up a conversation about ancient philosophers with a man lying on a filthy blanket. The man is too sick for social interaction, however, and tells Saul that he, too, will soon not care about anything other than sleep. Saul looks out across the bottom of the dead Martian sea, where many other sick men are sleeping alone. Saul remembers that, upon first arriving, they had all huddled around campfires and talked about their intense longing for Earth. Just then, a rocket lands on the dead sea floor. A man emerges, accompanied by two figures in protective suits. After setting up a tent for the man, the figures re-board the rocket and leave. Saul runs to meet the newcomer, who looks young and relatively healthy. The man introduces himself as Leonard Mark. Saul asks Mark how things are in New York City, and suddenly the city itself seems to erupt all around him. At first Saul is confused and terrified, but as the city fades and the desolate Martian landscape returns, he realizes that Mark had somehow created the vision in Saul's mind. Saul joyously grabs Mark's hand and expresses how happy he is that Mark has come. Mark later tells Saul that he was born with his telepathic abilities, likely because his mother was pregnant during the 1957 "blowup" of London. His visions affect all the senses at once, and at Saul's request, Mark makes him believe he is swimming in a beloved creek near his childhood hometown. So delighted is Saul after this that he attempts to pay Mark with his last bar of chocolate, but Mark refuses to accept it; he grants his visions solely because they make people happy. Saul eagerly imagines all the places Mark will take him, as well as all the long-dead philosophers he'll be able to talk to. Such imaginative possibilities, Saul thinks, are even better than being healthy back on Earth. His musings are interrupted, however, by the realization that that other sick men have noticed Mark and are slowly walking toward them. Saul tells Mark they must head to the mountains, insisting that the others are insane and will kill each other, or even Mark, in order to "own" Mark and his abilities. Mark coolly responds that he doesn't belong to anyone, including Saul, and refuses to leave. Angry and desperate to keep Mark for himself, Saul smashes at the visitor's chin, knocking him out, and then carries him to a cave in the mountains. Later, Mark awakens tied up in the cave and calls Saul a man driven crazy by loneliness. Saul says he will untie Mark only if he promises not to leave, but Mark again insists that he is a free man and belongs to no one. He adds that he had been perfectly willing to share his talents among all the men, but Saul, in his greed, has ruined everything. Soon enough, five other men reach the cave. They argue ferociously though the night, each determined to keep Mark—"their treasure"—for themselves. Determined to settle things, Mark proposes a schedule in which each man gets an hour with him per week, while Mark is also allotted plenty of time for himself. Though at first the men appear to agree, one of them, Johnson, proposes that they instead force Mark to perform for them whenever they want and torture him if he refuses. To this Mark responds that Johnson is crazy, and that he'll simply kill the others one by one. In fact, none of the men can trust the others not to murder them. What's more, Mark adds, one of the men has a gun. At this news, the men all jump up, and a chaotic tussle ensues. Johnson pulls the gun from his jacket and begins shooting wildly. Mark screams at him to stop and begins to conjure New York City around them. Saul tackles Johnson to the ground, at which point the image of New York begins to collapse. The men turn to see Mark standing with a bloody hole in his chest and then toppling to the ground, dead. As the cave grows cold, the men begin to bury Mark. Saul, extremely weak, lies on the ground and attempts to conjure New York in his mind, but it's no use. It is gone forever, he realizes, and cries himself to sleep.

- Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Adventure/Coming of Age Novel - Title: The Wanderer - Point of view: The novel is told from two first-person perspectives—Sophie and Cody—in the form of their individual diary entries. - Setting: The crew of The Wanderer sets sail from Connecticut, makes stops at Block Island and Martha's Vineyard, moves along the southeast coast of Canada (stopping at Grand Manan), and then crosses the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean to arrive at England. - Character: Sophie. Description: Sophie, the central character of The Wanderer, is a thirteen-year-old girl who's anxious to sail across the ocean from New England to England in order to see her grandfather, Bompie. Sophie's diary entries are one of two first-person narratives (the other being Cody's) that tell the story of The Wanderer. In the beginning of the book, we learn that Sophie was adopted—yet there's something mysterious about this detail. Sophie seems to think that her foster parents are her original, biological ones, and whenever she's asked about who her first parents were, she seems unable to really answer the question. At the end of the novel, we learn (along with Sophie) that her parents died in a tragic accident at sea, and that Sophie has been blocking this painful memory from her awareness for quite some time. Sophie's journey to see Bompie is a quest to uncover the truth of her past, even though she may not realize it at first. Braving the sea is a way for her to put herself back in the situation that spelled her parents' death, and to come to grips with her fear of the ocean. When she finally meets Bompie, she must come to terms with the fact that she had confused her own story with Bompie's—it was not Bompie's parents who died, but rather Sophie's. Sophie is a dreamer at heart. Though she blocks out the truth of her past and to a great extent dreams her world—that she's a biological member of her foster family, for example—she also instinctively thinks in an exotically imaginative, dreamy way, which sometimes confuses and shocks the other members of the crew. Sophie is also an adventurous spirit. She proves herself to be more than capable as a shipmate on The Wanderer, despite the doubts of her uncles and cousins, who all think that, because she's a girl, she doesn't have the skills and strength to brave the ocean. - Character: Cody. Description: Cody's log entries make up one half of The Wanderer's narration, with Sophie's diary being the other. Cody's journey across the ocean is less defined than Sophie's—whereas Sophie know she wants to see Bompie, Cody just seems to be along for the ride. The way he acts aboard the ship fits this description, too, since he never seems to take anything too seriously, always calling different parts of the boat by the wrong name (sometimes deliberately, it seems, to frustrate Brian) and goofing off in general. This gets him in trouble with his father, Mo, quite often. Cody's relationship with Mo transforms, however, aboard The Wanderer. While Mo begins the book constantly yelling and bickering at Cody, after the crew encounters a nearly fatal wave on the ocean, Mo begins to ease up on his son. Cody is also changed by the wave; shocked by the kindness his father begins to show him, Cody starts to see his father in a new light, as someone he doesn't really know all that well, and as a fellow human being with his own unique history, not merely a brooding, cold authority figure. Cody's own sense of identity—his sense of self-worth and independence—changes when his relationship to his father evolves. - Character: Bompie. Description: Though Bompie physically appears in the novel only for a short amount of time, he is present throughout The Wanderer's entire journey in Sophie's thoughts and the stories she tells of him. When Bompie became Sophie's adoptive grandfather, he began sending her letters, first welcoming her to the family, and then telling her stories about his life. Bompie's letters fascinate Sophie, and she grows to become very fond of him, saying that he always understands how she's feeling. Bompie plays a pivotal role in the novel not only through his stories, but also when he meets Sophie in person for the first time. When Sophie retells all the stories he'd sent her in his letters, she adds one which he doesn't recognize—when his parents died in an accident at sea. Bompie tells Sophie: "That's your story, honey," and Sophie breaks down and cries. Before this, Bompie had served as a way for Sophie to distance herself from her past. While she greatly identified with Bompie, this was perhaps due to the fact that she had transferred her own history onto Bompie. Sophie's changed relationship with Bompie—when she realizes that the story about the accident at sea is her own—therefore begins to change her own sense of identity. Bompie, then, serves partly as a vehicle for Sophie to achieve a truer relationship with her past. - Character: Brian. Description: Brian, cousin to Sophie and Cody and son of Stew, is in many ways the polar opposite of Cody's personality. Whereas Cody is laid-back and not very serious most of the time, Brian is always meticulously organized, obsessed with order, and almost grimly serious. Brian constantly checks his watch, makes lists of the crewmembers' duties, and barks orders at Sophie and Cody. It's very apparent that Brian is highly intelligent, but he lacks interpersonal skills and is very guarded about displaying his feelings. After the crewmembers aboard The Wanderer encounter the nearly fatal wave at sea, however, Brian begins to lighten up. He even surprises Cody by making a joke out of the wave. While Brian is a relatively static character compared to Sophie and Cody—who go through more substantial changes—Brian lets go of some of his seriousness, and begins to relate to Sophie and Cody more by the end of the book. - Character: Mo. Description: The father of Cody, brother of Dock and Stew, and uncle of Sophie and Brian, Mo begins The Wanderer having a poor relationship with his son. Constantly yelling at and scolding Cody, Mo has practically given up on trying to reach out and forge a better, healthier relationship with his son. Mo also is characterized from the start of the novel as lazy and out of shape—preferring to watch everyone else work while he sits back and pretends to be in charge. While Mo's laziness doesn't really change throughout the novel, his relationship with Cody does. After the crewmembers of The Wanderer have a run-in with a nearly fatal wave, Mo comes to appreciate the fragility of life more, and tells Cody that he has been a bad father. The two begin to repair their relationship, and mend the wounds they had at the beginning of the novel. Mo is also a talented artist, and, though he may not be the most helpful shipmate, he draws pictures for everyone aboard The Wanderer and gives them out as gifts in England. - Character: Dock. Description: Uncle to Sophie, Cody, and Brian, and brother to Stew and Mo, Dock is the most level-headed of the uncles. While Mo is often grouchy, constantly yelling at Cody, and getting into fights with Stew, Dock often attempts to diffuse the tension aboard the boat. Sophie calls him "the good uncle," and claims that he's always calm and easygoing, never being fazed by any accidents that happen aboard the ship. The path The Wanderer takes along the eastern coast of the United States and Canada is largely inspired by Dock's desire to find and/or get news about an old lover, Rosalie. Dock's past with Rosalie isn't described in any great detail in the book, but we can infer that their split caused Dock great pain, and that he misses her deeply. Though Dock is reunited with Rosalie in England, it's not for long. He proposes to her, but she declines, saying that it's too soon, and that she has other plans. Dock ends up deciding to stay in England in order to look after Bompie. - Character: Stew. Description: The father of Brian, brother of Dock and Mo, and uncle of Sophie and Cody, Stew shares his son's keen intellect and obsessive sense of organization. He's always saying that nobody tells him anything, and Sophie describes him as someone who's always worrying. Like his son, Stew is a more static character when compared to his peers (his brothers), but The Wanderer's encounter with the wave does shake him up a bit and change him a little. After the wave hits, Stew remarks how, when you have children, you reach a certain point where all you can do is pray that they'll be okay, since you have to give up trying to protect and control them all the time. Like others of the crew, Stew comes to understand that life is fragile, and not entirely controllable. - Character: Rosalie. Description: Not much is known about Rosalie, except that she used to be Dock's lover. In the middle of the book, Dock recounts how the two had a very close and special relationship, but that she nonetheless decided to marry someone else. Rosalie appears in England, however, and briefly reunites with Dock. Still infatuated with her, Dock proposes to Rosalie, but she declines, saying that it would be too soon and that she has other plans. - Character: Frank. Description: A friend of Dock's, Frank lives in Grand Manan, where the crew stops before they finally set off across the ocean towards Bompie. Frank irritates Sophie when he assumes that, because she's a girl, she must be the one who does all the cooking on The Wanderer. Frank takes the crew of The Wanderer clamming, and also to his grandson's baptism, which freaks Sophie out—seeing the people being baptized—getting dunked in the water—greatly discomforts her. - Character: Joey. Description: Joey, Rosalie's brother, lives in Martha's Vineyard, where the crew stops before they get to Grand Manan. Dock, still infatuated with Rosalie, presumably wants to stop at Joey's in the hopes of either seeing Rosalie or getting information about how she's doing or where she is. In Martha's Vineyard, Dock finds out from Joey that Rosalie's husband died. Joey also has a nice boat which he refurbished and partly built entirely by himself—and its luxurious and top-notch quality makes Dock jealous. - Theme: The Passage of Time. Description: The Wanderer makes its readers think about what "time" really is—if it exists "out there" in the world, or if it's just something we make up in our heads. For example, when the crew has docked at Block Island soon after setting sail from Connecticut, Sophie says that, even though she's on land again, the world around her already feels more fluid. She wants to get out into the open ocean soon, though—for out in the ocean, she says, all time is connected. The open ocean therefore represents, for Sophie, a place where our normal ideas of time become undone. Everything out there seems interconnected, whereas in our everyday lives on land, things seem divided: moments follow one after the other, and it doesn't feel as if the world is one, whole, undivided place. Later in the trip, as the crew sets sail for Nova Scotia before heading directly to England, Sophie begins to question the ways we normally think about time. She starts to feel as if the words "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow" don't really mean anything—as if they're all talking about the same time. She even asks "what is tomorrow?" and says that time must all be "now, one huge big present thing." In this way, The Wanderer questions the concept of time by making us think about its passage not in the sense of past-to-present-to-future, but rather as a never-ending, all-encompassing present. Then, as the crew sails towards England, they pass through several time zones; consequently, they must shift their clocks forwards an hour for each time zone they cross, and Cody says he wonders where the hours they lose "go." Because we have to shift our watches forwards or backwards between time zones, but still feel the same way we did in the previous zone, it seems like time is something we humans make up. Our bodies—which are in a biological rhythm with the external world—don't gain or lose energy when we change our clocks forwards or backwards, when we manually change what time it is. The idea that the outer world itself passes from past to future—that the outer world is connected with our way of organizing time—therefore just seems to be something invented by our minds, when truly time is just a huge present we can't entirely fathom. - Theme: Men and Women. Description: Sophie constantly battles the otherwise all-male crew's perception of her as a female throughout the book. Because she's a girl, they think she's somehow unfit for the hard work demanded by sailing across the ocean, and that she's too weak to face the potential hardships they could face along the way. Though the rest of the crew seems determined to discourage Sophie from joining them in their trip, she refuses to back down. She's very enthusiastic about braving the ocean, and insists that she has a real purpose in visiting Bompie in England. The male members of the crew, especially the older uncles, are worried that she'll interfere with the "manly" atmosphere on the boat (they think themselves to be fearless of the ocean, more competent when it comes to performing manual labor/boat repairs, and more in touch with the rugged, "masculine" side of life which they see their adventure embodying). In general, Sophie proves wrong the stereotype which the male crewmembers have of women/girls. Sophie knows her fair share about boats. She's well-read on how sailboats work and proves very useful when fixing up The Wanderer, having knowledge of how to make basic to somewhat advanced repairs. While everyone expects her only to be useful for cleaning, she shows that she's skilled in what's traditionally considered "manly" work. Sophie also embodies courage and bravery that the other crewmembers simply lack sometimes. For example, when Brian and Cody refuse to climb the tall spire to the bosun's chair to change a broken light—Brian being nauseated by the sheer thought of doing so—Sophie excitedly volunteers. Unafraid of the height of the chair, she climbs the spire effortlessly and gets the job done.Sophie's presence on The Wanderer, therefore, challenges the stereotype of "girliness" and all the baggage that comes with it—the qualities of weakness, timidity and frailty, and the maid-like tasks associated with feminine work. The book shows how Sophie—and girls like her—can feel unfairly forced to prove themselves to the men around them. - Theme: Dreaming vs. The Real World. Description: Throughout the book, Sophie's accounts of her past—who her real parents are, how she came to hear Bompie's stories—contrast with the crew's views of her. Sophie is already quite the dreamer by heart, but she also seems to make up a lot about her past—she always finds ways to avoid answering questions about who her "real" parents were, and what happened to them.For instance, whenever Brian or Cody bring up or ask about Sophie's past—such as who her "real" parents were—she either avoids answering altogether, or starts to tell a story about a "little kid" whose parents left her to go to heaven. It seems that Sophie has deliberately forgotten about her past—the death of her parents—in order to feel as if her foster parents were her real ones, to feel like an original member of her new family, and to shield herself from the pain of remembering her parents' death. Whenever Sophie talks about the "little kid," she's talking about herself in the third-person—this shows how deeply ingrained Sophie's way of forgetting her past is in her mind. The difference between dreaming and the real world is therefore a bit blurred for Sophie. She lives in a dream to a large extent, believing that she was born into her foster family, having wanted to forget the pain of her original parents' tragic accident. Her dream protects her from feeling sadness and pain. At the end of the book, we find out that Sophie adds something to Bompie's stories (which he had written about in his letters to her) whenever she retells them: Bompie always encounters or falls into a body of water and struggles in it. Yet when Sophie finally meets Bompie and retells all his stories to him, after each story he says that he doesn't recall the part about struggling in the water. Finally, Sophie tells him a story that he doesn't remember at all: when he went on a sailing trip with his parents, who were swept away and drowned by a big wave. He says he doesn't remember that story, and Bompie and Cody conclude that, in fact, the story is Sophie's—the tragic accident of her parents' death, a memory from her past which she's blocked from her mind. Sophie was really the one who had suffered in the water. When she hears this, she bursts into tears.Beyond the idea of dreaming as fantasy or repression, literal dreams also play a prominent role in The Wanderer. Sophie is haunted by a recurring dream in which a giant wave ("The Wave") towers over her and threatens to crash upon her—but she always wakes up just before it does. Sharon Creech also blends the distinction between dream and reality in Sophie's mind by having her call the nearly fatal wave that crashes upon The Wanderer in real life by the same, capitalized name ("The Wave"). In this way, it's as if, for Sophie, the same wave in her dreams has happened in her real, waking life.The Wanderer, therefore, mainly explores the division between dreaming and the real world through the way the division works in Sophie's own mind. She has in many ways created her own dream world and lost touch with the real one, trying to forget about her painful past. - Theme: Family and Personal Identity. Description: At the core of The Wanderer is an exploration of family relationships—particularly the father-son relationship between Mo and Cody and the relationship Sophie has with her foster family. The book explores how individuals—particularly Sophie and Cody—partly form their identities based on the relationships they have with their family.Though Sophie's life seems to be at the core of the book, Cody's log entries also feature prominently throughout. One of the main topics Cody's entries focus on is his relationship with his father. Mo and Cody's relationship starts out pretty rocky. Mo is constantly criticizing Cody for goofing off and not taking things very seriously. Compared to the seriousness of Brian, Cody's casual and joking attitude about the crew's voyage comes off as carefree and lacking in commitment to the hard work sailing requires. Throughout the book, though, Mo begins to view and treat Cody differently, and vice-versa.For example, after the Wanderer is struck by a wave that nearly spells the whole crew's death, Mo begins to be less critical of his son. He starts to appreciate the fragility of life, and realizes that he has been taking his relationship with his son for granted. Cody writes about this change in his father's attitude with amazement—he's simply not used to being treated so kindly by his dad. Cody also realizes just how little he knows about his father—he says he comes to see Mo in a totally different way. He views his father as another human being, and not some brooding, inhuman figure of authority.Sophie's relationship with her family is also complicated, because she technically has two of them—her old deceased parents, and her new foster family. Her relationship with her foster grandfather, Bompie, evolves throughout the story and has complications as well. In a way, The Wanderer is not just about a trip across the ocean—it's about how its crewmembers navigate their own personal problems (which, in the book, largely have to do with an individual's relationship to his or her family) in a vast sea of chance and possible danger. Sophie is certainly no exception to such family issues. She's lost the memory of her old parents from her conscious mind, forgetting their tragic death and thereby believing herself to be an original member of her new family. Her journey to England results in her unraveling the truth of her own family history.At the beginning of the book, Sophie says that the sea is calling her—though she doesn't know exactly why. The call just feels instinctual. Yet, by the end of the book, we find out that Sophie's voyage across the ocean was a way for her to relive the trauma of her parents' death and come to terms with it. Sophie's understanding of her relationship with her foster family comes full circle: she realizes, at least to an extent she hasn't before, that her original parents died in an accident at sea. While it's not clear whether Sophie finally understands that "the little kid" she talks about is actually herself, she nonetheless starts on the path to forming a truer relationship with her past and with her current family—Sophie starts to realize her true identity. The Wanderer therefore explores the dimension of family life in its characters' psyches, and how a sense of being in a family and related to others is at the very core of our identities. - Theme: The Mysteries of Life and Death. Description: The Wanderer raises a lot of questions about the purpose and meaning of life, as well as the relationship between life and death—what death is really like, and whether it truly provides a path out of life. Perhaps one of the most profound moments of the book is when Sophie and Cody discuss life and death after "The Wave" almost kills them. Sophie and Cody wonder if whether, when you almost die, you actually do die—but you just automatically are reborn and continue living your life as if nothing happened. Further, they wonder if people live their lives on millions of different "planes"—if when one life dies, another life branches out, as if from a central life-trunk (owned by one person) with millions upon millions of different life-branches—like millions of different lives of the same individual. This scene between Sophie and Cody exposes the psychological intensity behind their trip across the ocean. The trip from Connecticut to England is not merely a geographical journey; it's a mental one, as well. Faced with death, and with a wide-open sea that seems totally detached from ordinary, everyday life, Sophie and Cody (and the rest of the crew) are almost forced to ask these big questions about the nature of existence. In one of his diary entries, Cody raises an interesting question about human identity and the mystery of life: why don't we notice how we change through time, but rather have these random moments when we suddenly realize that we're entirely different than we were before? In other words, if we're always changing, what about us stays the same, and why don't we notice ourselves changing? This question highlights the way in which time on the ocean has changed Cody's thinking: taken out of his ordinary life and thrust onto the seas, Cody starts wondering about the nature of existence—things that we take for granted in our daily lives.Another instance where the characters contemplate the mysteries of existence occurs after the crew has departed from Nova Scotia, when Sophie is partnered with Dock on night-watch. Dock asks Sophie "What's it all about?" Sophie wonders what Dock is talking about, and he replies that, by "what," he means "life" itself. It seems as if Dock is called by something that he cannot give words to—he can only use the word "it" at first to describe what's calling him, then chooses the word "life." It's as if Dock's mind has been brought to a basic mystery that is at the heart of The Wanderer, a mystery that makes the book into not a geographical journey, but a psychological one as well.While The Wanderer never reaches any solid conclusions that give answers to the mysteries of life and death, working rather to explore a moment in its characters' lives where they are forced to confront them, the book nonetheless shows how being confronted with such mysteries—encountered, in the book, during a time of great danger—can bring people together. The crew becomes closer, and its members begin to appreciate one another more, at the advent of their traumatic encounter with the nearly fatal wave. Further, the book emphasizes the importance of owning one's own story, and of discovering it amidst the mysteries that life throws at us. Sophie's journey across the ocean is a journey into an immense mystery, yet she comes out of it with a fuller knowledge of herself and her history. - Climax: - Summary: The Wanderer begins with Sophie describing how the ocean is calling her, and her intense longing to get out on the open seas, but this admiration and passion for the ocean is quickly undercut when she recounts a nightmare she's had. In it, a massive, lethal wave looms over Sophie, and right before it's about to fall upon her and destroy her, she wakes up. Sophie feels instinctually pulled to the ocean, yet from the beginning of the book we get the sense that there's also something very troubling and dangerous about her relationship with the water—she fears it, to some extent. Sophie's three uncles—Dock, Mo, and Stew—and her cousins Brian and Cody are planning to take a trip across the ocean in Dock's boat ("The Wanderer") to see Bompie, Sophie's grandfather, who lives in England. Sophie wants to join them on the trip, partly because of her desire to get out on the open seas, but also to see Bompie, who everyone thinks is nearing the end of his life. The otherwise all-male crew is reluctant to let Sophie join because they think that, because she's a girl, she'll cramp the manly vibes of their trip, and that she's not cut out physically and emotionally for the hard work and potential dangers involved in sailing a ship. She has her parent's permission, however, and resists her fellow crewmembers' complaints enough such that she gets herself involved in the trip, whether they like it or not. After the crew make the necessary repairs to The Wanderer where it's stationed in Connecticut, they get on their way towards England. In Connecticut (and during the trip in general) Sophie shows herself to be skilled at making repairs, and not nearly as useless as her crewmembers had thought. As The Wanderer gets on its way, a mystery about Sophie's past makes itself apparent. The parents she's been talking about all this time are actually her foster parents. What happened to her original parents? This is the question constantly on the tip of Cody and Brian's tongue, and when they ask Sophie, she either avoids answering altogether or talks about a "little kid" whose parents died—but she never identifies herself as the little kid. Further, Sophie is always telling stories about Bompie's life, but the rest of the crew thinks she's just inventing them, since she's never actually met him before. After making stops at Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, and one of the Fundy Islands in New Brunswick (Grand Manan), they finally get out on the open sea, heading straight for Bompie in England. On the way the entire crew is nearly killed, as an almost-deadly wave—resembling that from Sophie's nightmare—strikes The Wanderer. Everyone survives, yet no one comes out of the experience the same. The Wanderer is largely a tale of how the crewmembers aboard the ship change from before the wave to after. In general, they become warmer to each other and more connected, whereas before they had taken their lives and their actions for granted. When the crew arrives in England, they're ecstatic to be back on land. They make their way to Bompie's house, and it's revealed that Bompie had sent Sophie letters telling her stories about his life—she hadn't been making them up. Sophie then chats with Bompie, retelling to him all the stories he'd sent her—but there's one which he does not recognize: when, as a child, he was at sea with his parents and they were swept away by a wave and drowned. Cody suggests that this story isn't Bompie's, but Sophie's, and Bompie agrees. Sophie breaks down and cries, but she's reached the end of her journey: she's uncovered the truth of her past. She's come to a more authentic and complete understanding of her history. By braving the ocean and surviving a wave similar to that which killed her parents, and coming to understand her identity better in relation to her old and new families (being finally able to tell them apart), she frees herself from the grips of a past which she had blocked out from her mind. Having discovered the truth, she can begin a new life.

- Genre: Young Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction - Title: The Wave - Point of view: Third-person - Setting: - Character: Laurie Saunders. Description: Laurie Saunders, the protagonist of the novel, is an intrepid and bright-eyed high schooler and editor-in-chief of her school paper, The Gordon Grapevine. Laurie is sunny but thoughtful, and she takes her editorial duties and her studies very seriously. Laurie is popular and well-liked throughout school—but harbors anxiety about the future of her relationship with her self-centered boyfriend David and her friendship with the overly-competitive Amy. When her history teacher, Ben Ross, shows Laurie and her class a documentary about the Holocaust, Laurie is deeply emotionally affected by the footage of the concentration camps, and she begins to ponder deep questions about how ordinary people could commit such terrible atrocities—or merely stand by while they occurred. Mr. Ross creates The Wave as an attempt to get his students to see how easily groupthink can take over a community, but as the experiment grows more and more out of control, Laurie is horrified by how The Wave transforms her classmates, and indeed her teacher as well. Laurie resists being part of The Wave, even as her classmates—and David—pressure and intimidate her to join its ranks. Laurie uses the Grapevine as a platform to investigate and explore the more sinister effects of the wave, and even exposes a violent attack on a Jewish student as Wave mania sweeps the halls of Gordon High. Laurie's dedication to truth, individuality, and doing the right thing separates her from her classmates—and serves as a testament to the power of a single person's free will in the face of intimidation, fear, and corruption. - Character: Ben Ross. Description: Ben Ross is a young, popular history teacher whose devotion to his students is sincere, if sometimes obsessive. Ross wants to engage with the things he's teaching his students, not just spew facts at them—and so when the time comes to study the Holocaust, Ross struggles to come up with a way to explain the atrocities of the Nazis. When Ross finds himself unable to answer a student's question as to why ordinary Germans would put up with, participate in, or turn a blind eye to the Nazi party's brutality, he gets the idea for an exercise that will show his students how easy it is to get swept up in groupthink. Ross creates The Wave—a movement whose motto is "strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action." The Wave begins as a mini-experiment among his high school seniors, and the students enjoy the new, regimented classroom rules Ross implements—and the novel sense of camaraderie they feel as they follow them together. Soon all of Gordon High is drawn to The Wave. Athletes, outcasts, underclassmen, and upperclassmen alike pass out membership cards and arm bands, and even create a Wave salute. Ross realizes that his experiment is growing beyond his control—but there is a part of him that is too fascinated by what his students are doing to stop them. When Wave members begin using violence to recruit members and intimidate non-members, however, Ross calls a giant Wave rally at school, and tells the students that he is about to show them a video announcement from the leader of the Wave movement—only to unveil a recording of Adolf Hitler himself. At the end of the novel, Ross is shaken by what his experiment has revealed: that groupthink, intimidation, and violence can transform even the healthiest of societies into fascist machines, and that total equality comes at the steep price of individuality. - Character: David Collins. Description: Laurie Saunders's boyfriend David is a tall, good-looking running back on the Gordon High football team. Athletic, popular, bright, and more than a little self-centered, David has trouble feeling empathy for other people and struggles to focus on issues that don't affect him personally. After seeing the Holocaust film in Ben Ross's class, he isn't nearly as affected as Laurie is, and tells her that he sees the events of World War II as "a piece of history" that can't be changed—or repeated. David is easily swept up in The Wave, enjoying the solidarity, camaraderie, and "power" it creates throughout the school. He leaps at the chance to bring The Wave to the football team in hopes of inspiring teamwork and discipline, but even when his plan fails to bring the team glory, he retains faith in The Wave's power. One night, when trying to recruit Laurie to join The Wave, David lashes out in anger when she refuses and pushes her to the ground. The violence he himself inflicts on the person he loves brings him to his senses—and together, he and Laurie decide to take matters into their own hands and demand an end to The Wave's destruction. Over the course of the novel David, a shallow and self-concerned person, comes to understand just how dangerous it can be to blindly follow along with the status quo—and to forget the lessons of history. - Character: Amy Smith. Description: Laurie's best friend Amy is a fun and free-spirited teenager with a rebellious streak. Petite and pretty with "Goldilocks hair," Amy is nonetheless insecure about how she measures up to Laurie, and desperate to emulate her more popular friend. Laurie feels nervous about the occasionally competitive nature of their friendship, and hyperconscious of how Amy's desire to constantly one-up Laurie keeps them from being truly close. Laurie is surprised when Amy gets swept up in The Wave, and as Amy gets sucked deeper and deeper into the movement, Laurie has trouble connecting with her friend. Eventually, Amy admits to Laurie that the reason she is so supportive of The Wave is because it "means that nobody is better than anyone else"—and admits that her constant feelings of jealousy for Laurie have driven her into the rhetoric of The Wave's equalizing force. Smart and wily but deeply emotional and impressionable, Amy—one of the students most affected by the screening of the Holocaust documentary in Ben Ross's class—forgets the dangers of groupthink and gets swept up in the idea of a uniform, conformist society. - Character: Robert Billings. Description: Widely regarded as the "creepy" class loser amongst the seniors at Gordon High, Robert Billings is a painfully introverted young man who is growing up in the shadow of his beloved, successful older brother, a popular Gordon alum. As The Wave movement takes hold of the school, Robert comes out of his shell for the first time ever—and Ben Ross and the others students alike are surprised and even charmed by the changes in Robert's personality as he becomes more outgoing and confident. When Robert is made a monitor, however, the power goes to his head—and he becomes one of the most regimented, even dangerous members of The Wave movement. When Ben Ross puts the movement to a stop, Robert is devastated and sits in the auditorium weeping alone long after the other students have cleared out and decided to try to "forget" about how intensely The Wave took hold of their school. - Character: Brian Ammon. Description: Brian is David's best friend and a quarterback on the football team who, in spite of his popularity, is unsuccessful academically at Gordon High. Hotheaded and desperate to prove himself, Brian throws himself headfirst into The Wave—and once he becomes an official "monitor," he starts taking his Wave responsibilities deadly seriously. - Character: Carl Block. Description: Along with Alex Cooper, Carl is one of the "biggest practical jokers" at Gordon High. Tall and lanky with blond hair, Carl is an investigative reporter for The Grapevine. Carl is skeptical of The Wave from the start, and is one of the few Gordon High students to never join up at all. - Character: Brad. Description: A student at Gordon High who takes special pleasure in "tormenting" Robert Billings. After The Wave takes off, however, he finds himself grateful for the "community" values the movement instills within the school, and he stops picking on Robert so much. As The Wave takes hold of the school, Brad seems to begin questioning it—but complies with protocol and orders anyway. - Character: Principal Owens. Description: Principal Owens is the imposing but genial principal of Gordon High. He is a large, towering man who frequently smokes a pipe and is never seen in anything less than a three-piece suit. Owens, who is usually open to new ideas and experiments in furthering his students' education, is initially skeptical of The Wave when Ben Ross brings him the idea—but Owens has faith in Ross as an educator, and admires Ross's goal of teaching his students an important moral lesson. As the movement gets out of control, though, and Owens has to field more and more phone calls from and meetings with concerned parents, he warns Ross that if he doesn't bring the movement to a swift, calm end, Ross will have to resign. - Character: Norm Schiller. Description: Norm Schiller is the Gordon High football coach. He takes his students' success on the field—or lack thereof—deeply personally, and he is excited when The Wave seems to be shaping his players up into a more cohesive, powerful team. He is disappointed, however, when The Wave ultimately doesn't help the players win the game, and begins talking badly about the movement and Ben Ross as well. - Character: Mrs. Saunders. Description: Mrs. Saunders is Laurie's mother, a "perceptive" worrywart who is always overly concerned and overly involved in Laurie's friendships, problems, and school escapades. Laurie finds her mother annoying at the start of the novel—but as The Wave takes over the school, Laurie begins confiding in her mother about how scary things are becoming. - Theme: Groupthink and Coercion. Description: Todd Strasser's The Wave fictionalizes the true story of a high school history class's social experiment gone wrong. When Ben Ross struggles to explain to his students, perturbed by their studies of the Holocaust, how ordinary Germans could have allowed themselves to be swept up in the violence and hatred of the Nazi Party, he decides to show his seniors firsthand just how powerful groupthink can be. As Ross's experiment slides off the rails, Strasser argues that groupthink and coercion, when deployed hand-in-hand, can steer even the most well-intended individuals in the direction of cruelty and blind conformity. The Wave experiment starts innocently enough—as an exercise in the power of groupthink and collective focus. Ben Ross conceives of The Wave as a simple classroom exercise that demands discipline and conformity. He wants to show his students how thinking and moving as a group or unit is appealing, and how the mindlessness of groupthink dulls individuals to their collective's actions. He urges them to stand beside their desks and address him as "Mr. Ross" before and after answering a question, and also runs drills with them to see how fast they can file out of the classroom and then file back into it and find their seats at their desks. The students are seemingly grateful for the discipline, and work together to impress Ross and implement his rules beyond the bounds of the classroom. As Ross realizes the effect the experiment is having on his students' productivity and attentiveness as the days go by, he decides to expand The Wave by printing membership cards and implementing a Wave "salute." Even as the experiment veers frighteningly close to resembling the Nazi Party in earnest, Ross is proud of how his students are tearing down the social boundaries and cliques that once defined their high school and seemingly pursuing a collective good over individual glory. Before long, however, the groupthink and collective action that define The Wave begin to give way to mindless cruelty and blind pursuit of total conformity—and Ben Ross realizes before even his students do that he has answered their questions about just how Nazis were able to thoughtlessly perpetrate violence, cruelty, and murder. When Wave members begin harassing non-Wave members into joining—and even don armbands bearing the Wave logo to more easily identify themselves to one another—it becomes clear that things have gone too far. Ross, however, fears he will be unable to stop the literal and metaphorical "wave" he has created. When a Jewish student at Gordon High is beaten and called a "dirty Jew," Ross admits to himself that he's unsure whether the attack was Wave-related or simply a random act of violence—and the thought that it could be the former shakes him to his core. Ross sees clearly just how powerful The Wave has become, and how his students have veered from collective action into coercion and, ultimately, into violence without even realizing the groupthink at the heart of their school's rapid shift. Some students, like Laurie Saunders, notice that the experiment is out of control—as she begs her best friend Amy to renounce her "obsession" with The Wave, she tries to point out that "No one is thinking for themselves anymore," and Gordon High's students have become "a flock of sheep." Amy revealingly confesses that she sees what's happening—and likes it. She's happy that for the first time, "no one [at Gordon] is better than anyone else." This twist in the narrative shows that it's not that groupthink sneaks up on people, infiltrating their brains without their permission or attention—rather, it's that the strategic advantages of groupthink are, for some people, more appealing than acting as an individual or doing what's right. Coercion and violence become a tool of the collective as they pursue maintenance of the status quo. After revealing to his students the true "leader" of The Wave—Adolf Hitler himself—Ross suggests that the most violent and effusive Wave participants showed themselves to be susceptible to the kind of blind obedience that defined the Nazi Party and other soulless regimes like it throughout history. As Ross's final Wave rally draws to a close, he urges his students to take responsibility for their actions, to "always question what [they] do rather than blindly follow a leader," and to "never, ever allow a group's will to usurp your individual rights." - Theme: History and the Past. Description: When Ben Ross shows his senior history students a film about the Holocaust, their differing reactions demonstrate that while some of them are affected and even disturbed by the dark shadows of history, others see the unspeakable atrocities of the past as contained, faraway events. As Ross attempts to impress upon his students just how recent the events of World War II were—and how fragile the present moment still is—Strasser argues that forgetting or minimizing the past makes the future more vulnerable to repetitions of the errors of history. In many ways, Ben Ross's classroom screening of a difficult-to-watch Holocaust documentary is The Wave's inciting incident. The reactions the film sparks throughout his senior history class vary greatly, from abject sadness to disturbed anxiety to passive indifference. Ross realizes that some of his students recognize history as a living, breathing thing—but also sees that others are blind to the importance of remembering the more painful lessons history has to teach. After Ross screens the holocaust film for his students, he is "pleased" to see that it deeply affects many of them. Amy Smith and Laurie Saunders have visible emotional reactions, and Amy even cries. Both girls ask incisive questions about how the Nazi Party could have committed such atrocities—and how the rest of the German population could have turned a blind eye. Some students, like Eric, are more outraged than emotional—they feel angry that no one in Germany "notic[ed]" what was going on right under their noses. Other students, however, like David Collins, have little or no reaction to the film at all. They see the events it depicts as so disconnected from their experience of the present-day—and so obviously atrocious—that they hardly even register as real. After the screening, at lunchtime, when Laurie asks David how it's possible that the film didn't bother him, he answers her by saying: "That was a long time ago, Laurie. To me it's like a piece of history. You can't change what happened then." David's blasé reaction shows that he sees history as far away and fixed—he doesn't understand how even the most evil, shameful parts of history can repeat themselves if society does not learn from the atrocities of the past. "It's not like we've forgotten about history," Laurie tells her mother when Mrs. Saunders expresses trepidation about the Wave experiment. Laurie wants her parents to believe that she and her classmates are going into the experiment fully aware of the historical context of what they're studying—and the pitfalls of groupthink and violence that allowed the Nazis to operate. Laurie, however, underestimates how willing her fellow classmates are to overlook the lessons of history. Soon, Wave members are holding rallies, wearing armbands, and cruelly or violently coercing non-Wave members into the experiment—it's clear that most of Gordon High's students have indeed "forgotten about history," or are willingly pushing aside the very lessons their history teacher is trying to instill in them. As Ross realizes his experiment has been a failure, he becomes desperate for a way to salvage it—to remind his students of the history they've repeated and replicated on a small scale in just a few heady, violent days, and to show them how without proper respect for the painful lessons of history, human beings will never grow and progress. Ross decides to hold one final rally to show the students the face of their true leader, drawing them to the auditorium under the pretense of introducing them to the person who is making The Wave a national movement. At the rally's climax, he reveals a picture of Adolf Hitler himself—thus showing the students just how blind they have been to their own actions, how easily they have forgotten relatively recent history, and how dangerous their willful amnesia really is. Ultimately, the students of Gordon High are left shattered and sobered by the realization that they have abandoned the lessons of history. Ben Ross chides his students for asking how the Nazis could have perpetrated such terrible violence—and for just days later, "deny[ing] their own histories" by participating in a movement that veered dangerously close to the Nazi Party itself. Ross tells his students that if they're "smart, [they] won't dare forget" the lessons The Wave has taught them about history, memory, and responsibility to the past. - Theme: Equality vs. Independence. Description: When Ben Ross's social experiment, The Wave, surges in popularity amongst the students of Gordon High, it becomes clear that part of The Wave's appeal is the ways in which it equalizes the student body and breaks down the barriers between cliques. Even the most popular kids, like Laurie Saunders and David Collings, find themselves reassessing their school's social organization and befriending outsiders like Robert Billings. As The Wave takes hold of the school in full force, however, it becomes clear to the few remaining non-members of The Wave that the price of total equality is the abandonment of independence and individuality. Strasser uses The Wave to suggest that while social equality is an admirable goal, the obliteration of independence is often a casualty of mandatory egalitarianism. There is a delicate balance in any microcosm of society between the good of the collective and what's best for that society's individuals. As The Wave takes over Gordon High, the school's students are entranced by how collectivism and community strengthen their student body—so entranced, in fact, that they don't notice when the scales tip, and their community's newfound equality and egalitarianism begin to erase all traces of individuality. Soon after Ben Ross introduces the Wave experiment to his senior history class at Gordon High, its message of strength through discipline, strength through community, and strength through action spreads through the school like wildfire. When operating as a collective and assuming the identity of members of a larger group, the students of Gordon High notice that the boundaries between cliques and the animosity between popular jocks and "creepy" nerds all dissolve. As social equality changes the landscape of Gordon High, it's not just outcasts like Robert who are grateful for the change—even more popular kids like David and Laurie find themselves grateful for the new social order and the chance to make new friends. The Wave makes everyone socially equal, which at first seems to be a good thing—but soon, it becomes clear that the simmering resentments between individual members of the student body will not be erased by The Wave's egalitarian message, and nor will the dangers of absolute collectivism. As the students of Gordon High begin seeing The Wave as a way of erasing social boundaries, strengthening school spirit, and uniting disparate groups of students together in pursuit of a common goal, many of them begin to value the collective over the individual—and shame one another for still pursuing individuality and personal glory. David Collins brings The Wave to his football team, and angrily urges his fellow players to see that "self-serving individuals don't make a team." As Amy Smith and Laurie Saunders fight over The Wave, Laurie tries to express how dangerous the movement really is—but Amy insists that Laurie just hates The Wave "because it means [she's] not a princess anymore." Laurie, long having possessed a reputation as the popular and brilliant golden girl of Gordon High, is stunned to hear such a criticism lobbed her way—and finds there's a part of her that worries she does resent The Wave for demonizing individuality and thus making her less special. As The Wave comes crashing to the ground and Ben Ross brings the ever-more dangerous experiment to a close, he chides his students at a mass rally for allowing The Wave to take over their lives and infringe on their freedoms. Ross accuses the students of using The Wave to further collectivism and community in name only—in reality, he suggests, they saw The Wave as an opportunity to feel "special" and "better than everyone" who was not affiliated with The Wave. Though The Wave was meant to bolster community and equality, equality soon become "superiority over non-Wave members," and obscured not just individual will but any expression of individuality at all. In other words, Ross is asserting—and Strasser is, as well—that total egalitarianism only comes at the price of individual freedoms. Over the course of The Wave, Todd Strasser shows how groupthink leads to cruelty and coercion—and goes even deeper as he asserts that collective equality often costs individuals their freedoms of speech, of self-expression, and of identity. A completely fair and equal society seems utopic at first glance—but Strasser ultimately suggests that there is a dark sacrifice at the heart of conformity. - Theme: Education. Description: The out-of-control social experiment at the heart of The Wave is one unorthodox educator's attempt to really connect with his students—and to teach them important life lessons they won't soon forget. Ben Ross doesn't want his students to memorize facts out of their textbook; he wants to truly educate them in the ways of the world. As Ross's experiment flies off the handle, however, and his students' feelings, reputations, and in some cases their lives come under threat, Strasser calls into question what the responsibilities of education are. Strasser ultimately suggests that while it is not enough to encourage students to do rote learning devoid of curiosity or practical understanding of the concepts they're studying, the role of a teacher is never one that justifies toying with the lives of students, even in the name of enriching their education. Ben Ross is, arguably, the primary antagonist of The Wave. Despite his good intentions and his fierce beliefs in the power of education, Ross takes his role as an educator a bit too far when he creates The Wave. The effects his experiment has on his students' lives are indelible—and ethically dubious. Ross is introduced as a teacher who truly loves teaching. He is a restless thinker and deeply inquisitive man who doesn't want to settle for just teaching his students facts out of a textbook—he wants them to engage with the world around them, consider deeply the lessons of history, and really think about how what they're learning applies to their lives and relationships. Ben's intentions are good—but his methods for pushing the boundaries of the role of the educator are faulty. Ben is an obsessive person whose wife Christy notes that he often gets "utterly absorbed in [things] to the point where he tend[s] to forget that the rest of the world exist[s.]" Whatever Ben's preoccupation of the month is—be it  playing bridge, investigating the history of Native Americans, or answering his students' complicated questions about the Holocaust—he reads, studies, and ponders it obsessively until the itch fizzles out. This is a major personality flaw in Ben Ross—but his obsession with getting to the root of his students' questions about the Nazis is the spark that lights the fire of The Wave. Ben Ross is excited by his students' emotional reactions to their unit on World War II and the Holocaust, and becomes determined to stoke their wide-ranging feelings and deep-seated questions about Hitler and the Nazis. By creating The Wave, Ross is attempting to show students how easily conformity, groupthink, and rigor can seize and transform a population—but he has no idea just how completely swept up his students will soon become. By subjecting his students to a social experiment, Ross flexes his unorthodox teaching methods and is "pleased" with the results—but he doesn't take the time to consider that the young, malleable minds entrusted to him each day are too impressionable for such a grave, serious exercise. As The Wave surges throughout Gordon High and begins engendering discord, cruelty, and even violence, Ross realizes what he's done—but is afraid he's powerless to stop the students' trajectory. In trying to expand the social construct of the student-teacher relationship, Ross has obliterated necessary boundaries and toyed with his students' minds and actions. They've taken his experiment and run away with it on their own—and like the young people in novels like The Lord of the Flies and The Chocolate War, a new social order run entirely by children has taken hold of Gordon High. As pressure from Principal Owens and the school's parents bears down on Ross, he knows that his experiment has gone much too far, and that he must try to reign it back in. If he can't, he faces losing not just his job but his reputation—and admitting to the fact that his educational ethos is flawed and volatile. At the end of the novel, after Ross successfully brings The Wave to a halt, Ross confides in Laurie Saunders that he is planning to "skip" the lesson of The Wave in "next year's course"—implying that he has learned from his actions and will not experiment with his students' lives again. Strasser uses Ross's anxiety and shame in the latter half of the novel—in stark contrast to the excitement, pride, and self-confidence he felt in the early days of The Wave experiment—to show that the code between students and their teachers is a sacred one. Teachers take on the responsibility of molding, shaping, and caring for students' minds and hearts alike—and in using them like lab rats in pursuit of one's own existential questions or obsessions, one violates that delicate boundary and may even put lives at risk. - Climax: Ben Ross calls a schoolwide rally to show the students of Gordon High, who have become fanatically obsessed with his social experiment, The Wave, the true face of their "leader"—Adolf Hitler. - Summary: On an ordinary day at Gordon High, Ben Ross shows his history class a film about the Holocaust as part of their unit on World War II. While some students—like the popular and bright Laurie Saunders, editor of the Gordon Grapevine, and her best friend Amy Smith—are moved by the film, other students like Laurie's boyfriend David Collins, a self-centered running back for the football team, barely bat an eye. The class "creep," Robert Billings, even falls asleep midway. Ben Ross is intrigued by his students' varied reactions to the film but perturbed when he finds himself unable to answer Laurie and Amy's questions about how ordinary Germans could have turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the Nazi Party—or worse, could have joined their ranks. At lunch the next period, Laurie and Amy remain disturbed by the images from the film, but David Collins and his best friend Brian Ammon wolf down their lunches, immune to what they've just seen. David tells Laurie that he sees the Holocaust as "a piece of history"—something that can't be changed, and certainly won't be repeated. Laurie and Amy's moods lighten over the course of the rest of the school day, and they laugh and joke in the Grapevine offices with the class clowns Alex Cooper and Carl Block. That night, Ross is determined to look through every history book on the second world war he can find to try and discern the answer as to how groupthink and coercion enabled the Nazis to gain so much indisputable power—but discouraged when he still can't find the answers. Ross begins to wonder if, perhaps, an experiment that replicates the conditions of Nazi Germany is the only way to find the answer—so he begins devising an exercise for class the next morning. Ross's wife Christy admires her hardworking husband and encourages him to search for the answers he needs, but secretly worries about his obsessive tendencies. The next day, Ross begins an experiment with his senior history class. He writes the words "STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE" on the board, institutes several new strict, militaristic classroom rules, and runs his students through physical and intellectual exercises like a drill sergeant. He is shocked when his normally sluggish, sloppy students are exhilarated and energized by the exercise. The next morning, Ross finds his history students sitting upright and silent in their seats when he walks in—he understands that they don't just tolerate but actually crave the discipline he's meting out to them, and decides to take the experiment one step further. He writes the words "STRENGTH THROUGH COMMUNITY" on the board, and urges his students to consider the fact that they can accomplish incredible things if only they work together. Ross leads the students in a recital of their class's new motto—"Strength through discipline, strength through community"—and then introduces a logo, a name, and a salute for the movement, which he has decided to call The Wave. As the students rehearse The Wave salute, Ross is impressed—and slightly nervous. As The Wave travels through the school, some students, like David Collins and his football buddies Brian and Eric, embrace its tenets of hard work, discipline, and community—while others, like Laurie Saunders, find The Wave a little "militaristic" and threatening to individuality. Ross wonders how far he should take the experiment, and ignores Christy's warnings against becoming a "guinea pig" in his own laboratory. Nevertheless, Ross pushes The Wave even further, passing out membership cards and appointing certain students to be monitors tasked with reporting disobedient Wave members directly to Ross himself. He introduces a third motto—"STRENGTH THROUGH ACTION"—and encourages Wave members to recruit new members from the lower grades, too. The social order at Gordon High begins to change—cliques break down, and even losers like Robert Billings are accepted by the more popular kids. Laurie begins feeling more and more skeptical of The Wave—though it makes everyone feel like equals, there's something "creepy" about how unthinkingly all of her classmates are going along with it. As the days go by, more and more students join The Wave. Ross's senior history class is prepared, on-time, regimented, and respectful, and though Ross is overwhelmed by the spread of The Wave, he wonders if his experiment could actually revolutionize schools. As students plan a Wave rally to "indoctrinate" new members, though, Laurie tasks her Grapevine staff writers with rounding up as many stories as they can about how Gordon High students really feel about The Wave. Ben Ross is summoned to a meeting with the school's principal, Principal Owens, who tells Ross he's skeptical of The Wave. Ross assures Owens that the movement is nothing but a class experiment, and Owens gives Ross the go-ahead to continue on with it—but reminds him that "there are limits" to such experiments. When Laurie discovers an anonymous letter to the Grapevine that describes the bullying tactics and threats used by members of The Wave in their recruitment of other students, she grows even more concerned. Robert Billings appoints himself Ben Ross's "bodyguard," and Ross, too, starts to wonder if The Wave has entered dangerous territory. As preparations for the Wave rally intensify, Laurie and David fight, and David accuses Laurie of hating The Wave because it means she's "not special anymore." Over the weekend, Laurie attends the football game in hopes of informing Amy of just how dangerous The Wave is—but she is forbidden from joining the member-only seating unless she performs the Wave salute. Laurie calls an emergency meeting of the Grapevine staff, and together they assemble an issue that seeks to expose the true face of The Wave. On Monday morning, Laurie finds Amy in the halls to tell her about the paper, which will be out at lunchtime—but Amy, who has always seen Laurie as her competition, echoes David's earlier accusations and dismisses Laurie out of hand. As the new issue of The Grapevine circulates throughout school, rumors and gossip abound—and Ben Ross, amidst his colleague's whispers that he has "brainwashed" the entire school, begins to worry about the moral compromises he's made for The Wave. That night, Christy confronts Ben about the beast he has created and begs him to put a stop to it. Ben insists that the students must be pushed even further—otherwise, they'll fall just short of learning "the most important lesson of their lives." Meanwhile, Laurie, who leaves the Grapevine offices late after celebrating the issue with her staff, finds the word "ENEMY" written on her locker. She hurries out of the halls to find David waiting for her outside the building. He confronts her about her demonization of The Wave, but Laurie insists that she'll write what she wants, when she wants. In a fit of anger, David grabs Laurie and throws her to the ground. He immediately realizes the gravity of what he's done and embraces Laurie, apologizing to her profusely. Meanwhile, at home, Ben Ross works on a solution to ending The Wave the next day. When Laurie and David knock on his front door, he's surprised, but lets them in. They beg him in earnest to stop The Wave, and he assures them he's going to—but asks for their trust for just one more day. The next day, Ross begs an irate Principal Owens for just a few more hours. Owens has been fielding frightened and angry calls from teachers and parents alike—and has even received a report of a Jewish boy being beaten up, allegedly by Wave members. Owens warns Ross that if the experiment isn't over by the end of the day, Ross will lose his job. Ross accepts Owens's condition, and heads to class to put a stop to the experiment. In history class, he announces that a special impromptu rally will be held that afternoon. He tells the class that a "National Wave Youth Movement" has begun, and the leader of the movement wants to thank the students of Gordon High for starting it. Laurie and David believe Ross has tricked them in his quest for power. Unable to bear being at school any longer, they decide to cut class. While sitting in a park, however, the angry Laurie is overcome by the need to see the "leader" of The Wave. Laurie and David return to school just as the rally is beginning. Ross tells the entire student body—who sport Wave armbands and fly Wave banners—that The Wave's leader will soon speak to them on the television. When the television remains blank and signal-less, however, some students accuse Ross of deceiving them, crying out that the movement has no leader. Ross exclaims that it does—and with the help of Alex and Carl, reveals a giant projector screen that bears the face of Adolf Hitler himself. Ross tells the stunned students that they would have made "good Nazis"—they followed a movement blindly, allowed others to make their decisions for them, and renounced their "individual rights" in the name of an equality that didn't actually exist, since Wave members discriminated against non-Wave members cruelly and violently. Ross begs the students to never forget the lessons they've learned through this experiment. As the stunned students file out of the auditorium, Ross apologizes personally to Laurie, David, Eric, Brian, and Amy. After they leave, the only student left in the room is Robert Billings, who sits weeping in his seat. Ross comforts Robert and offers to take him out for a meal, stating that the two of them have a lot to talk about.

- Genre: Short story, crime, macabre - Title: The Way Up to Heaven - Point of view: Third-person limited - Setting: New York City, Paris - Character: Mrs. Foster. Description: Mrs. Foster is the protagonist of the story. For thirty years of marriage, she has been a "good and loving wife" to her husband, Mr. Eugene Foster. She and Mr. Foster live in New York, while their only daughter lives in Paris. Mrs. Foster is meek, but kindhearted and loyal, and she has an "almost pathological" fear of being late. This fear drives her nearly to the point of hysteria, physically manifesting in a persistent eye twitch. At the beginning of the story, she is planning to board a plane to see her daughter in Paris and meet her grandchildren for the first time, but Mr. Foster is careless about being on time, as he always seems to be. As the story progresses, she begins to suspect more and more that he may be making her late on purpose to inflict a kind of psychological torture on her. This suspicion is confirmed when he runs into the house to look for their daughter's gift, but she finds it hidden in the seat of the car, presumably so that she would miss her flight. When Mrs. Foster runs to the door to tell him, she hears something that makes her return to the car and tell the driver to take her to the airport without her husband. At the end, Dahl implies that Mrs. Foster heard the sound of their elevator getting stuck between floors and she left anyway, knowing that her husband would die trapped there. This decision brings out a new confidence and satisfaction in Mrs. Foster, doing away with her prior nervousness. - Character: Mr. Eugene Foster. Description: Mr. Foster, whose first name is Eugene, is a domineering, cunning, and abrasive man who has retired from his "many enterprises," which allowed him to afford a private six-story house in Manhattan with several servants. He is generally unkind to his wife, often ordering her around, calling her "foolish" or "stupid," or speaking to her in a condescending tone. He is indifferent to his daughter and grandchildren, and to his wife's obvious distress at potentially arriving late for things. He refuses to allow the servants to continue their upkeep of the house in the couple's absence, because it would cost him more money, and he suspects they might get up to untoward things without them there, revealing his classist nature. The extent of his cruelty is clearest when Mrs. Foster finds that he hid the gift for their daughter in the seat of the car to purposely make her late for her flight to Paris, and his death, though gruesome, is justified. - Character: The Butler (Walker). Description: The butler, whose name is Walker, is sympathetic to Mrs. Foster's anxiety, reassuring her that she will make her flight and not indulging her fears the way Mr. Foster, his foil, does. As a neutral party, his reaction to Mrs. Foster's anguish seems a more normal one than her husband's, which raises the reader's suspicions against Mr. Foster early on. - Character: Their Daughter (Ellen). Description: Ellen is Mr. and Mrs. Foster's only daughter who married a Frenchman and relocated to Paris where she had three children. The Fosters have never met their grandchildren, although Ellen often sends photographs and Mrs. Foster often sends packages, which makes it seem that Ellen and her mother (though not her indifferent father) are close. In the story, Mrs. Foster makes the trip to Paris to visit Ellen and has a marvelous time, implying that she may relocate to be with her daughter once her husband is out of the picture. - Theme: Cruelty and Revenge. Description: The marriage at the center of "The Way Up to Heaven" is characterized by cruelty: for years Mr. Foster deliberately stokes Mrs. Foster's "pathological fear" of being late, so, ultimately, Mrs. Foster leaves her husband trapped in an elevator to die. This might seem an extreme overreaction by Mrs. Foster, but Dahl depicts Mr. Foster's persistent and malicious lateness as the crueler behavior—after all, it causes Mrs. Foster such distress that it leads her to effectively kill her spouse in order to free herself from suffering. By portraying Mrs. Foster's act not as unjustifiably cruel, but rather as righteous revenge, Dahl suggests that persistent and malicious cruelty (however subtle or trivial) can be worse than a single act of murder. When someone suffers at the hands of another, she is righteous, rather than cruel, to take action and escape her suffering. To justify Mrs. Foster's decision to leave her husband in the elevator, Dahl meticulously catalogues Mr. Foster's cruelties, particularly surrounding her planned trip to Paris. Her solo trip to Paris, to visit her daughter and grandchildren, is something Mrs. Foster wants dearly. Despite that it would bring her great happiness and it seems like a normal thing for Mrs. Foster to do, Dahl is clear that Mr. Foster does not want his wife to go. Mrs. Foster considers it a "miracle" that he's allowing her to go in the first place, and she suspects constantly—and with good reason—that he is trying to make her miss her flight in order to sabotage her trip. That Dahl never specifies why Mr. Foster opposes his wife's trip makes him seem pathologically controlling, and his attempts to make her late for her flight are doubly cruel, because they are simultaneously meant to ruin the trip while also needling her most acute anxiety, punctuality. All of this behavior is especially cruel, since Mrs. Foster has been a "good and loving wife" for several decades, who had "served him loyally and well." She has done nothing to bring about his cruelty; rather, it is unjustified and malicious, meant exclusively to torture and control a kindhearted woman. By contrast, Dahl portrays Mrs. Foster as a sympathetic character, even though she commits a monstrous act, because she is kind, relatable, and has experienced years of emotional torture at the hands of her husband. For many years, Mrs. Foster has given her husband the benefit of the doubt, allowing that his cruelty could possibly be accidental or careless. This shows her generosity of spirit, since she wants to assume the best in him. She's also shown to care deeply for her family. Of her grandchildren, Dahl notes, "She doted on them, and each time a new picture arrived she would carry it away and sit with it for a long time." All she wants is to "take them out for walks, and buy them presents, and watch them grow," a selfless and generous desire, but she worries that this desire is disloyal, as her husband does not want the same thing. Clearly, she puts others before herself, even though her husband doesn't deserve it. Mrs. Foster's kind personality and the acute suffering her husband is causing her (shown by her twitching eye and her profound anxiety) make her a sympathetic character, while Mr. Foster's callous and malicious behavior towards his wife makes him a villain. Because of this, when Mrs. Foster hears that Mr. Foster is stuck in the elevator and decides to go to the airport instead of rescuing him, readers see her not as behaving cruelly, but rather as claiming justified revenge on the man who made her suffer and stood in the way of her happiness. Therefore, while Mrs. Foster essentially murders her husband, she is much less cruel: after all, his own cruelty justified her behavior, while her sweet nature did not justify his. - Theme: Gender and Marriage. Description: In the 1950s, when "The Way Up to Heaven" was published, husbands were expected to be the heads of household, while their wives were meant to be comparatively passive. In "The Way Up to Heaven," Dahl pushes this unequal dynamic to its extreme. Mr. Foster is not simply controlling, but also sadistic: ordering Mrs. Foster around, exploiting her pathological fear of being late, and indirectly trying to stop her from going to visit their daughter. To make matters worse, strict 1950s gender roles dictate that Mrs. Foster must passively allow his cruelty and give his intentions the benefit of the doubt. Furthermore, while the rigid gender norms of the day exacerbate their mutual unhappiness, the strict social taboo against divorce keeps them in a volatile and miserable marriage. The characters' adherence to social and gender norms therefore leads to an absurd and outrageous outcome: when their dynamic becomes unbearable for Mrs. Foster, it seems more normal to her to leave her husband to die in an elevator than to simply leave their marriage. This is a clear critique of the norms of gender and marriage, which discourage Mrs. Foster from standing up for herself, encourage Mr. Foster to believe he can be sadistic with impunity, and ultimately lead Mrs. Foster to a state of murderous distress. For most of the story, Mrs. Foster adheres strictly to her socially-mandated role as a wife and mother. She is a dutiful wife who supports her husband, having "served him loyally and well" for over thirty years, and she is a good mother who thinks often of her daughter and her grandchildren, sending them presents whenever possible. Dahl describes her as "modest" and "faithful," traits that are not considered important in the same way for men. These traits of hers are exactly what Mr. Foster takes advantage of; his cruelty relies on her being a "good wife" who will not protest and who will always give him the benefit of the doubt. By contrast, Mr. Foster inhabits an extreme stereotype of the male role. He is clearly the family's breadwinner (although he appears to be retired from his "many enterprises"), and he is indifferent to family life, dismissing Mrs. Foster and ignoring altogether their daughter and grandchildren. Mr. Foster is in charge of the household, as he makes decisions without regard to his wife's desires or objections, such as sending the servants away on vacation while Mrs. Foster is gone, or forcing her to accompany him to the club before she catches her flight. Since having a command of the household was considered normal for men of that era, Mr. Foster's cruelty nearly passes as typical masculinity: perhaps his controlling behavior is simply good management of the household, and perhaps his inattention to punctuality is a result of having more important matters to attend. It's certainly part of Dahl's commentary on gender roles that Mr. Foster's cruelty is almost indistinguishable from socially normal male behavior. While Mr. and Mrs. Foster drive each other crazy, the two of them never contemplate divorce, as divorce was a social scandal in the 1950s. Since the Fosters are stuck together despite their suffering, Dahl paints marriage as a trap for both Mr. and Mrs. Foster: Mr. Foster seems miserable in the company of his wife, and Mrs. Foster explicitly contemplates that her life will be restricted as long as "her husband was still alive." So, with no way out of a bad marriage, Mr. Foster takes out his unhappiness on his wife by torturing her, and Mrs. Foster leaves her husband to die in an elevator, a fate that seems more socially normal to her than simply leaving her marriage. Therefore, Dahl critiques both the rigid gender roles that push Mrs. Foster essentially to murder, and the social conventions surrounding marriage that prevent Mr. and Mrs. Foster from finding fulfilling separate lives. - Theme: Propriety and Class. Description: In "The Way Up to Heaven," Mr. and Mrs. Foster behave with a strict sense of propriety. While propriety is normally associated with decency, Dahl parodies this notion by having propriety exacerbate the couple's cruelty. Mr. Foster uses upper-class propriety to his advantage by using his manners to conceal that he is being surreptitiously cruel to his wife. Meanwhile, Mrs. Foster is smothered by her sense of propriety, since she feels that it's not proper for her to accuse her husband of cruelty or make a fuss, so she remains silent and compliant even while he abuses her. However, Mrs. Foster ultimately finds her own way to be cruel while maintaining the illusion of propriety when she leaves him in the elevator to die, a deliberate act that will seem, to outsiders, like an accident—a tragic result of being rich enough to afford an elevator at home. By decoupling propriety from decency, then, Dahl demonstrates that class and manners have nothing to do with whether somebody is cruel or kind. In fact, sometimes those who are acting most properly have the most to hide. Mr. Foster is the epitome of propriety masking maliciousness. This is clearest in his behavior towards his wife, as he tortures her with a "manner so bland" that it's difficult to discern whether he is behaving normally or sadistically. He makes her late for things (exacerbating her anxiety over punctuality) by doing normal tasks, such as washing his hands, musing over the weather, fetching cigars, or searching for a gift. All of this behavior seems perfectly normal for an upper-class man, and yet this is what makes it so insidious: Mr. Foster's seeming normality and unflagging propriety allow him to get away with literally torturing his wife, and his upper-class status and manner give him an authority that his wife and servants would not dare question. While propriety frees Mr. Foster to behave badly, Mrs. Foster is smothered by propriety for most of the story. Part of being a good, upper-class wife is being passive and compliant in serving her husband's needs. This, of course, means putting his desires before her own, such as when she refuses to contemplate moving to Paris to be with her daughter since her husband would never want to do this, or when she agrees to drop her husband off at the club before going to the airport, even though this will make her anxious and might even make her miss her flight. Worse, Mrs. Foster's sense of propriety prevents her from pushing back when she suspects that her husband may be making her suffer on purpose. Even as evidence mounts that his lateness is deliberate, she gives him the benefit of the doubt until his cruelty is absolutely undeniable, because it would be improper for her to accuse him of bad behavior. Therefore, Mrs. Foster's propriety traps her in passive behavior, preventing her from prioritizing her own desires and from standing up for herself in the face of abuse. However, when Mrs. Foster finally discovers her husband's deceit and takes her opportunity to get revenge, she gets away with leaving him in the elevator to die because her behavior never seems improper. Mrs. Foster is alone when she hears Mr. Foster get stuck in the elevator, so nobody knows that she was aware he was trapped when she left for the airport. Furthermore, she continues to behave as a dutiful wife during her trip, writing letters to her husband weekly and returning home to him when the six weeks is up. Then, when she finds the house eerily empty, she takes the natural next step and calls the elevator repair company to fix her broken elevator, pretending not to know that anything is amiss. Mrs. Foster has plausible deniability that her behavior is normal rather than cruel, which mirrors the way her own husband used propriety to mask his malicious behavior. Furthermore, just as Mr. Foster's authority as an upper-class man made him immune from suspicion, Mrs. Foster evades suspicion by leaning into the role of helpless, elderly rich lady. She tells the elevator repair person to come immediately because she can't walk up stairs, which prepares the elevator repair person to feel sympathy towards her even before discovering her dead husband in the elevator. The norms of propriety that have smothered her for so long—the very norms that pushed her to this absurd act—are suddenly helping her to get away with her crime. Dahl therefore ridicules upper-class standards of decorum, showing how propriety can exacerbate and mask cruelty, snobbery, and neglect, allowing wealthy, well-mannered people to maintain moral authority while acting depraved. - Theme: Deception and Disloyalty. Description: Throughout most of "The Way Up to Heaven," Mrs. Foster is loyal and kind while Mr. Foster is cruel and dishonest, tormenting his wife psychologically while pretending that his behavior is careless rather than malicious. However, when Mrs. Foster discovers the extent of her husband's cruelty and deception, she herself takes on his qualities: she betrays him by leaving him to die in an elevator, and then acts deceptively when she pretends that all is normal. Therefore, Dahl depicts deception and disloyalty as feeding on themselves; once discovered, deceptive and disloyal acts initiate a vicious cycle of betrayal that, in this case, ends in death. Mr. Foster deceives his wife by pretending that his tardiness is accidental or careless, rather than deliberate psychological torture. The fact that he would torture his wife also marks his disloyalty to her, which is clear in his other cruel behavior, too. He speaks to her in a patronizing and chauvinistic way, calling her "foolish" and "stupid," and often bossing her around. Furthermore, he makes clear that he does not intend to write to her when she is away, and he has no feelings of loyalty or compassion toward their daughter or grandchildren, to whom he can't be bothered to write, let alone visit. By contrast, Mrs. Foster has "served [her husband] loyally and well" for over thirty years, caring for him, their child, and the household. She always gives him the benefit of the doubt (even though his behavior is suspicious and painful to her), and when she has moments of wishing that she could live in Paris with her daughter and grandchildren instead of remaining in New York with her husband, she immediately pushes those thoughts away because she fears they may be disloyal to Mr. Foster. Mrs. Foster is not deliberately deceitful or disloyal until she discovers, beyond a reasonable doubt, that her husband has betrayed and deceived her. When he makes her late for her plane by pretending to look in the house for a present for their daughter (a small box that Mrs. Foster finds hidden between the car seats), she deduces that his cruelty was deliberate all along. In light of this, when she then hears him get stuck in the elevator, she feels justified in betraying him by leaving him there, seemingly knowing that he will die. At this point, she feels no regret about her actions—only relief, since this single moment of disloyalty will end her suffering. Just as her husband pretended for years that his tardiness wasn't intentional, after Mrs. Foster leaves Mr. Foster trapped in the elevator, she pretends that all is well at home. She writes letters to him from Paris, and when she returns to a curiously empty house, she simply calls the elevator repair man as though the only thing amiss is a broken lift. Their deceptions, therefore, are mirror images of one another, as each Foster pretends that all is normal in order to be cruel to the other. Clearly, though, Mr. Foster was the corrupting influence on his long-suffering, kindhearted wife: without his misdeeds, she would never have betrayed or deceived him. As such, Dahl shows disloyalty, mistrust, and deception create a vicious, self-perpetuating, and toxic cycle that can spiral out of control. - Climax: Mrs. Foster leaves her husband trapped in the elevator - Summary: Mrs. Foster lives with her domineering husband, Eugene Foster, in a sixth-floor apartment in New York City. She is supposed to be boarding a plane to Paris to visit her beloved daughter and grandchildren, but her husband is running late to accompany her to the airport. She has a pathological fear of being late for things, as her husband well knows, but he nonetheless always waits to get ready until the very last minute. While this might be an accident, the narrator suggests that it's possible he is doing this on purpose, just to watch her suffer. They leave just a few minutes late, but Mrs. Foster and the driver are convinced that she can still get to the airport on time. Unfortunately, fog is rolling in and the plane is delayed for an indeterminate amount of time. Mrs. Foster is happy to stay at the airport alone because it means she won't miss the plane, but night falls and travelers are told to come back in the morning. Despite her fear that he will somehow keep her from boarding the flight, Mrs. Foster calls her husband. He insists that she stay at the house with him, even though the servants have already left for vacation. That night, he asks her to drop him off at the club on the way to the airport in the morning. She reluctantly assents, though she is beginning to suspect that he is going out of his way to keep her from going on her trip. The next morning, they get in the car on time, but at the last minute, Mr. Foster remembers that he left a gift for their daughter in the house. Mrs. Foster begs him to leave it so she can make it to her flight, but he insists and goes back inside. In the meantime, Mrs. Foster finds the gift that he described wedged in between the seats "as though with the help of a pushing hand." She tells the driver to go get her husband, but then realizes it'll be faster if she does it herself. As she starts to unlock the door, she hears some unexplained sound and stops. With an authoritative air and something changed about her, she turns around and tells the driver that they must leave immediately so as not to be late, and that her husband will simply get a cab to the club. She enjoys herself in Paris with her daughter and grandchildren, writing home once a week, and returns six weeks later. She finds the place deserted with a bad smell, but there is a "little glimmer of satisfaction on her face." She calls the elevator repair company and asks them to come fix their elevator: the implication is that her husband has been stuck in the elevator the whole time she was gone, and she left him to die.

- Genre: Novel - Title: The White Tiger - Point of view: - Setting: Modern day India - Character: Balram Halwai. Description: Born only with the name "Munna" – Boy – and by the end of the novel known as "Ashok Sharma," Balram is the novel's narrator and protagonist. The White Tiger is the story of his life as a self-declared "self-made entrepreneur": a rickshaw driver's son who climbs India's social ladder to become a chauffer and later a successful businessman. He recounts his life story in a letter to visiting Chinese official Premier Jiabao, with the goal of educating the premier about entrepreneurship in India. He describes his journey, from growing up poor in the rural village of Laxmangahr to living the life of a successful businessman in Bangalore, with dry and cynical humor. He proudly admits to the corrupt and sometimes murderous schemes and behavior that helped him climb to the top of Indian Society. In order to survive in modern India, he has chosen to live on his own terms, founded on his sense of himself as a "white tiger": a rare creature with superior intelligence subject, because of his specialness, to an alternative moral code that justifies any action that helps him get ahead. - Character: Mr. Ashok. Description: The Stork's son and Balram's master. Ashok recently returned from America and has a gentler, milder personality compared to his wealthy and entitled family members. He feels disillusioned by the widespread corruption in India and his family's role in it, but goes along with his relatives, handing out bribes to ministers and currying favor with politicians. Compared to the other wealthy people around him, Ashok demonstrates more outward signs of compassion for Balram, seeming to take an interest in his servant's welfare and trusting him entirely. Ashok becomes increasingly decadent and goes into something of a downward spiral after his wife, Pinky Madam, leaves him and goes back to America. Balram feels a strong, mysterious connection to his master, but after several months in his service concludes that Ashok is no less cruel and selfish than his father and brother, that the generosity he offers is not nearly what he could afford to give. - Character: Kusum. Description: The matriarch of Balram's family, his grandmother Kusum runs the household according to tough, traditional Indian family values. Primarily concerned with the family's short-term financial solvency, Kusum removes her young relatives from school prematurely to work and marries them off as children, compromising their long-term ability to support themselves and their families. Though she agrees to send Balram to driving school, she does so on the condition that Balram send home his earnings each month. Even after Balram moves away, Kusum exerts her influence from afar by sending him threatening letters and eventually his young cousin Dharam, who she demands he care for in Delhi. As Balram sees it, Kusum is completely dominated by the logic of the Rooster Coop: she has struggled her whole life to survive under the burden of such great oppression, that she does not know any better and unconsciously brings her family down with her. - Character: Pinky Madam. Description: Ashok's beautiful, Americanized wife. Pinky is a demanding, critical and cruel mistress to Balram. She is unhappy in India and eager to return to the US, which puts a strain on her marriage to Ashok. After killing a young child in a hit- and-run accident, Pinky, because she is rich, is able to evade any legal complications and flies back to America and abruptly ends her marriage. - Character: Wen Jiabao. Description: The Chinese Premier to whom Balram addresses his letter and narrates his life story. Jiabao is a visiting Chinese official who expresses interest in learning the secrets of Indian entrepreneurship, so he can return to foster entrepreneurship in China. Balram knows that Jiabao will only learn the official story of Indian business from the politicians he meets, which is why he takes it upon himself to tell Jiabao the truth about entrepreneurialism in his country by using himself as an example. - Character: Vikram Halwai. Description: Balram's father is a poor, illiterate rickshaw driver who dies of tuberculosis early in the novel. During his life, he fights to the best of his ability to fulfill his wife's wish that Balram be given an opportunity to finish his education and move up in the world. Balram traces his struggle for upward mobility to a wish his father once expressed: that although he himself spent his life being treated "like a donkey," he wants one of his sons to be able to live like a man. - Character: Balram's Mother. Description: Balram's mother dies when he is a young boy in Laxmangahr. Though she is a minor figure in the background of his life, Balram recounts that she had great ambitions for him, her favorite son, and insisted he finish his education. There was lifelong tension between Balram's mother and grandmother Kusum, who does not believe in helping Balram realize his potential. Witnessing his mother's funeral on the banks of the Ganges as a child, Balram understands the hopelessness and futility of her life, and resolves to make a better future for himself as she would have wanted. - Character: Kishan. Description: Kishan is Balram's older brother who cares for him after their father dies. Though Kishan is an influential, fatherly figure in Balram's life, Balram laments his brother's lack of "entrepreneurial spirit": in other words, his inability to stand up to Kusum and make his own decisions, as Balram does. Kishan allows Kusum to work him hard, take most of his wages, and arrange his marriage early in life, before he can support a family. - Character: Dharam. Description: Balram's young cousin, who Kusum sends to Delhi for Balram to mentor. Dharam's arrives at a crucial moment, complicating things just as Balram is devising his plan to murder Ashok and escape with his master's money. Balram eventually carries out the murder anyway and flees Delhi with Dharam, continuing to care for the young boy after establishing himself in Bangalore. - Character: The Stork. Description: One of the four animal landlords of Laxmangahr, father of Mr. Ashok and Mukesh Sir. He owns the river outside of Laxmangahr, and taxes any villager who fishes there or boats across it. The bulk of his family's fortune, however, comes from illegally selling coal out of government mines. He distributes generous bribes to political officials who turn a blind eye to his fraudulent dealings, and allow him to evade income tax. - Character: The Mongoose. Description: Ashok's brother, also referred to as Mukesh Sir. Mukesh Sir suspects that Balram is dishonest from their very first meeting, and disapproves of Ashok's lenient attitude towards his servant. Unlike Ashok who has recently returned from living abroad in the US, Mukesh Sir accepts India's dishonest political scene and participates willingly in his family's corrupt dealings. He visits Delhi regularly to help Ashok distribute bribes on schedule and, after Pinky Madam's departure, to comfort him in his loneliness. - Character: Ram Persad. Description: The Stork's "number one" family servant. Though he and Balram sleep in the same bedroom, they despise one another and compete in every aspect of their lives. When Balram first arrives, Ram Persad drives Ashok and Pinky Madam around in the luxurious Honda City, while Balram drives other members of the household in the humble Maruti Suzuki. Balram ultimately brings about Ram Persad's dismissal from the Stork's household when he discovers that Persad is a practicing Muslim, who has hidden his faith from his prejudiced masters with the help of Ram Bahadur. - Character: Vijay. Description: Balram's personal hero from his hometown of Laxmangahr. Balram admires Vijay for his ambition and entrepreneurial spirit: in particular, for his ability to swiftly and completely reinvent his identity in order to rise up in the world. Vijay was born a pig farmer's son, but through hard work (or, as Balram suggests is more likely, corrupt dealings with politicians) becomes a bus driver, then a political activist, and finally a prominent official in the Great Socialist's party. - Character: Great Socialist. Description: The Great Socialist has dominated the political scene in the Darkness for as long as Balram can remember. While the Great Socialist presents himself as a populist leader serving the poor, he and his corrupt ministers murder, rape, embezzle funds, and rig elections to stay in power. Balram's childhood hero Vijay supports the party, moving up through its ranks over the years to become one of its leading politicians. At the end of the novel, the Great Socialist gains a foothold in the national government, ousting the ruling party. As a result, even the Stork's wealthy and powerful family is forced to deliver bribes and curry favor with its leadership. - Character: Vitiligo-Lips. Description: The driver of another wealthy businessman who lives in Ashok's apartment complex. He has Vitiligo, a skin disease that results in the loss of skin pigmentation. Vitiligo-Lips takes a liking to Balram and attempts to help him adjust to Delhi. At first, his mentorship takes the form of supplying Balram with murder magazines and answering Balram's questions about city life. Later in the novel, Vitiligo-Lips helps Balram procure a prostitute and begin to cheat Mr. Ashok out of his money. - Character: Ram Bahadur (the Nepali). Description: A cruel Nepali servant in The Stork's household who torments Balram, while helping Ram Persad conceal his Muslim identity from his employers. When Balram discovers Ram Persad's secret and Ram Bahadur's role in covering up for his coworker, he blackmails Ram Bahadur into helping him become Ashok's number one driver in Delhi. - Theme: The Self-Made Man. Description: The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai's life as a self-declared "self-made entrepreneur": a rickshaw driver's son who climbs India's social ladder to become a chauffer and later a successful businessman. Balram recounts his life story in a letter to visiting Chinese official Premier Jiabao, with the goal of educating the premier about entrepreneurship in India. Though Jiabao is primarily interested in learning about entrepreneurship within the context of business and finance, Balram's broad understanding of entrepreneurial activity –and also the scope of his story— complicates this traditional sense of the term. He believes that any Indian who acts to take charge of his own social and economic destiny qualifies as a true entrepreneur.According to Balram, one primary characteristic of the self-made Indian man is his ability to repeatedly transform himself—to not only change his profession, uniform and outward presentation, but also his very identity. Balram believes that a fluid approach to identity is essential for successful entrepreneurship. He adopts a new name each time he moves up within India's social hierarchy—Munna, Balram, Ashok, The White Tiger—and describes with admiration his childhood hero Vijay, a pig farmer's son turned wealthy politician, for his versatile sense of self.Balram claims that self-made entrepreneurs are not only adaptable with respect to identity, but also subject to a more fluid legal and moral code. Throughout the novel he argues that entrepreneurs in India can only become successful by breaking the law, and that this fact justifies their criminal activity. As a servant who murders his master and rises in society without suffering any consequences, Balram embodies this principle. At the same time, his triumphant retelling of his crimes and minimal expression of remorse paints a bleak portrait of Indian society. It is a world in which rising to the top involves cultivating indifference to human suffering, particularly the suffering of one's inferiors. Balram's own experience of cruelty at the hands of his more powerful masters seems not to contribute to his sense of compassion, but rather to his desire to become a master himself. - Theme: Social Breakdown, Self-Interest, and Corruption. Description: Balram's rise within Indian Society takes place in the aftermath of India's liberation from British Rule (which lasted from 1858 to 1947) and the overthrow of India's traditional caste system. Though the caste system unjustly segregated India's population and restricted social mobility, locking each member firmly into a single way of life, Balram maintains that its abolition did nothing to improve inequality. Instead, he describes how India went from being an orderly "zoo" where each member of the thousand castes at least had his or her place, to being a jungle where only the law of predator or prey, eat or be eaten, applies. One either fights ruthlessly for self-advancement at the expense of others, or becomes a slave to those more powerful. This chaotic struggle for power and survival results in two parallel Indias: the Darkness (poor, rural India) and the Light (urban, wealthy, sophisticated India). The extremely wealthy people of Light India oppress the extremely poor people of Dark India to such a degree that those in the Darkness are not even conscious of their own oppression. Over the course of the novel, as Balram becomes increasingly aware of the corrupt forces that maintain this stark inequality, he develops the metaphor of the Rooster Coop: a system in which oppression of the poor is so complete that the oppressed internalize and perpetuate their own subjugation. In a country where the rules are stacked so overwhelmingly against the poor, Balram comes to believe that to create a better life and "break out of the Rooster Coop," one must be willing to sacrifice everything, including attachment to traditional ideas of good versus bad and even one's family. In short, individuals must willfully become radically independent and prioritize wealth and power over morals to escape the oppression of a corrupt society. Balram's escape from poverty and lack of consequences for his crimes result in a belief that the end justifies the means, and frees him from having to examine himself (or his world) more critically. - Theme: Education. Description: The White Tiger is a story about how education, formal and otherwise, shapes individuals. Balram first receives his nickname –The White Tiger—in a classroom setting. Though over the course of the novel he attempts to embody his name by cultivating a ruthless, cunning streak and competing in Indian society, he originally earned the description for academic promise and integrity. After being pulled out of school at an early age, Balram is left with only bits and pieces of a formal education. This leads him to refer to himself as a "half-baked" or "half-cooked" Indian. He sees his "half-cooked" education not as a weakness, but rather as one of the preconditions for an entrepreneurial spirit. He believes that having to take responsibility for one's own education requires and builds an inventive, resourceful mind, and responds to the abrupt end of his schooling by learning what he can on the job. He claims he is not an original thinker, but rather an original listener, and pieces together an understanding of India by eavesdropping at work, transforming dead-end, menial jobs into learning opportunities. As an adult, Balram respects traditional learning to a degree. He enjoys the proximity and physical presence of books, but also sneers at the musty, "foul taste" they leave in his mouth. Balram claims to learn more from "the road and the pavement"—from studying the constant changes of Indian society to cultivate the flexibility and adaptability he believes a self-made man should possess. In general, Balram emphasizes the importance of being attuned to one's surroundings. As a child, he alone out of all the villagers becomes fascinated with the Black Fort: a beautiful old building in his town constructed by a foreign power years ago. He claims that the other villagers "remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world," and that by contrast, his innate ability to find interest and beauty in his environment marked him early on as deserving of a better life. - Theme: Family. Description: Throughout the novel, Balram describes family as a destructive and burdensome part of Indian life, one that prevents its members from pursuing individual advancement and liberty. Balram's grandmother Kusum embodies this negative image of family in the story. She shortsightedly pulls both Balram and his brother Kishan out of school at a young age, and attempts to arrange both brothers' marriages early in life, before they are able to support families of their own. The rich are similarly burdened by familial obligation and interference. Even Balram's wealthy master Ashok complains of his father and brothers' attempts to exert control over his personal life.Balram further believes that the traditional Indian family unit keeps the Rooster Coop of social inequality alive. If a servant attempts to escape or disobeys his employer, the superior's family will punish the servant by murdering or brutally torturing his family. In this way, familial loyalty and love become weaknesses that can stop an individual from being able to advance. The arrival of Balram's young cousin Dharam in Dehli fits into this pattern. Just when Balram has resolved to murder his master Ashok, Kusum sends Dharam to live and work with Balram. For better or for worse, this new responsibility of caring for his relative initially prevents him from executing his plan and taking a radical step to alter his future. Ultimately, though, Balram does carry out his plan to murder Ashok, knowingly sacrificing his own family to brutal and probably fatal vengeance in the process. He cuts loose his own family in order to free himself. That the family plays this negative role in Balram's world is a reflection of the deeply corrupt and immoral state of Indian society, which transforms even the most sacred, intimate relationships between people into tools of oppression that someone like Balram feels he must escape in order to achieve freedom and success. - Theme: Morality and Indian Society. Description: The White Tiger portrays an India that has not only lost its traditional social structure, but also outgrown a conventional moral framework. Balram's description of the Light India versus the Dark India in the novel, which subverts usual associations of "Light" with virtue, and "Darkness" with immorality, reflects this upset of moral values. Light India is not virtuous at all. Rather, its members do whatever necessary to preserve their own wealth and power, acting morally only when it is convenient for them. They are "Light" primarily in the sense that they can actually see the "light" of wealth and luxury, much as a plant might grow tall enough to see the light of day and further its own growth. Meanwhile, Rooster Coop logic prevails over Dark India: men dutifully behave according to familial and religious values, but they do so because they are terrified into submission, not out of genuine desire to lead a good life. In both cases, people sacrifice morality as they fight for survival within India's cutthroat social landscape. Traditional Indian values founded on deep religious faith and the teachings of venerated national heroes like Gandhi are similarly comprised. Throughout the book, Balram goes through the motions of religious faith and prayer largely to impress his master with his devotion. Yet he argues that he is both "sly and sincere, believing and mocking" at the same time: that this fickle embrace of faith is typical of Indian culture. Indians have a deep yearning for their past, when their country strived so heroically to define the terms of morality for itself, and yet this attachment does not necessarily inspire them to uphold those time-honored values. In the midst of India's moral upset, Balram develops his own personal moral framework founded on his sense of himself as a "white tiger": a rare creature with superior intelligence who lives in the jungle but is exempt from its rules. His embrace of this notion that he is special and therefor deserves to exist outside legal and moral codes allows him to justify murdering his master Ashok, knowingly and callously exposing his own family to likely fatal vengeance, so that he can begin his first business—White Tiger Drivers—with Ashok's money. Balram jokes, "The devil was once God's sidekick until he went freelance." He believes that the struggle to escape social and economic subjugation in Indian society, to go "freelance" and achieve control over one's future, trumps traditional notions of good vs. evil, God vs. the devil, rendering actions the reader might consider immoral understandable, and yet also depicting the society that could make such actions understandable as brutally lost and corrupt. - Climax: - Summary: The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai's life as a self-declared "self-made entrepreneur": a rickshaw driver's son who skillfully climbs India's social ladder to become a chauffer and later a successful businessman. Balram recounts his life story in a letter to visiting Chinese official Premier Wen Jiabao, with the goal of educating the premier about entrepreneurship in India. Balram writes from his luxurious office in the city of Bangalore, but the story begins in his rural ancestral village of Laxmangahr. Throughout his childhood, Balram's destitute family lives at the mercy of four cruel, exploitative landlords, referred to as "The Animals": The Raven, The Stork, The Buffalo, and The Wild Boar. Despite the difficult life he is born into, Balram excels in school. His academic potential and personal integrity distinguish him from his classmates, bringing him to the attention of a visiting school inspector who nicknames him "the White Tiger," after the most rare and intelligent creature in the jungle. Balram's parents recognize his potential and want him to complete his education, but his grandmother Kusum removes him from school early on so that he can work to support the family. Balram is determined to continue his education however he can. When he and his brother Kishan begin working in a teashop in nearby Dhanbad, Balram neglects his duties and spends his days listening to customers' conversations. He overhears one customer speaking wistfully about the high earnings and easy life that India's private chauffeurs enjoy, and begs his grandmother to send him to driving school. Kusum agrees, but Balram must promise to send home his wages once he finds a job. His training complete, Balram knocks on the doors of Dhanbad's rich families, offering his services. By a stroke of luck, he arrives at the mansion of the Stork (one of Laxmangahr's animal landlords) one day after the Stork's son, Mr. Ashok, returns from America with his wife Pinky Madam. The family hires Balram to become Ashok's driver. In reality, Balram is more of a general servant to the family, while another servant, Ram Persad, has the privilege of driving them. Balram learns that the Stork's family fortune comes from illegally selling coal out of government mines. They bribe ministers to turn a blind eye to their fraudulent business and allow the family to avoid paying income tax. Unfortunately, the family recently had a disagreement with the region's ruling politician, referred to as the Great Socialist. The family dispatches Ashok and Pinky to Delhi, where Ashok will distribute more bribes to make amends. When Balram learns that the couple will need a driver in Delhi, he schemes to have Ram Persad dismissed, and goes in his place. Once in Delhi, Balram witnesses Pinky and Ashok's marriage rapidly fall apart. Pinky returns to the US and leaves her husband after she kills a young child in a drunken, hit-and-run accident. In her absence, Ashok goes out to bars and clubs, hiring a prostitute one night, and reconnecting with a former lover on another. Observing his master's gradual corruption and driving him through Dehli's seedier districts, Balram becomes disillusioned and resentful. Although Ashok is a relatively kind master, Balram realizes that whatever generosity Ashok has shown him is only a fraction of what he can afford. Ashok has no real interest in helping Balram achieve a better life, or in changing the status quo. Balram plans to murder Ashok and escape with the bag of the money that he carries around the city to bribe politicians. In addition to the risk of being caught, Balram must contend with the logic of "the Rooster Coop": the system of oppression in which India's poor, including Balram himself, are trapped. Balram knows that if he kills Ashok, Ashok's family will murder all his own relatives in Laxmangahr in retaliation. Balram is also held back by the arrival in Delhi of his young cousin Dharam, who Kusum sends from Dhanbad with the demand that Balram help raise him. Balram finally resolves to proceed with the murder, using a weapon he has fashioned out of a broken liquor bottle. One day as he drives Ashok to deliver a particularly large bribe, Balram pretends that there is a mechanical problem with the car. He pulls over, convinces Ashok to kneel down and examine the wheel, then brings the broken bottle down on Ashok's head. After killing his master, he returns to Ashok's apartment, collects Dharam, and escapes with his young cousin to Bangalore. Once Balram regains his nerves in Bangalore enough not to fear immediate capture, he begins wandering the city and listening to conversations in cafes –just as he did in the teashop in Dhanbad—to plan his next move. He soon learns that Bangalore's business world revolves around outsourcing, and that many large technology companies work on a nocturnal schedule. Balram creates a taxi company called White Tiger Drivers to bring call center workers home safely at night, and the venture is an enormous success. By the time he sits down to tell his story, Balram is a wealthy man who keeps to himself, still fearful that one day his crime will be discovered. However, he concludes his letter to Wen Jiabao claiming that even if he is found out, he will never regret his crime: it was worth committing simply because it enabled him to experience life as a free man rather than as a servant.

- Genre: Short Story, Feminist Fiction, Horror - Title: The Widow’s Might - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Denver, Colorado - Character: Mrs. McPherson. Description: Mrs. McPherson is the widow of the recently deceased Mr. McPherson and the mother of James, Ellen, and Adelaide. Mrs. McPherson spent most of her adult life—from her early 20s to her 50s—tied down by a sense of duty to sacrifice her own dreams and desires in service of her husband and children. Throughout her husband's funeral, she stays hidden behind a black mourning veil, and her children assume that behind it they'll find a sad old woman. When she uncovers her face, however, she reveals that she isn't saddened by her husband's death but instead excited to finally live a fully independent life on her own terms. Unbeknownst to anyone, she has already begun to live a more free and independent life in the last three years. Mr. McPherson signed all his property over to her, and she has been running their ranch ever since. She made sure he was cared for as his illness progressed, ultimately establishing and running a small, profitable hospital on the ranch. This business earned her an economic independence she never had before. This economic freedom, as well as her freedom from familial obligation, marks the true beginning of her own life. Rather than move in with her children, as they assume she will, Mrs. McPherson plans to use her hard-earned money to travel the world. - Character: James. Description: James is Mrs. and Mr. McPherson's son and Adelaide and Ellen's brother. He lives in New York with his wife, Maude, who everyone knows doesn't like Mrs. McPherson. Like his sisters, James always hated family life on their ranch in Colorado and wants to wrap up his father's affairs as quickly as possible so that he can return to his life back east. After the funeral, James makes empty offers that he and Maude would be happy to let Mrs. McPherson live in their home, though he would clearly prefer to provide financial support and nothing more. He is willing to pay for his mother's clothes, food, and other essentials, but he isn't willing to commit to the emotional labor of caring for her daily. This task, he thinks, is better suited for one of his sisters. James is seemingly more concerned with his inheritance and the value of his father's property than he is with his mother's well-being, as he calculates and re-calculates how much he expects everything will be worth. Rather than mourning his father's death, he regards the funeral as a business transaction. James is shocked and concerned when his mother announces her intentions to keep the ranch, which now belongs to her, and live independently. He condescendingly tries to convince her to instead sign the property over to him so that he can distribute it as was written in his father's will, and he's baffled when she refuses. - Character: Ellen. Description: Ellen is Mrs. and Mr. McPherson's daughter and James and Adelaide's sister. Ellen lives in Cambridge with her husband, Mr. Jennings, and her sickly children who demand a lot of her time and attention. Like her siblings, Ellen hated growing up in Colorado and wants to leave as soon as the funeral and her father's affairs are settled. She offers to take her mother in out of a sense of duty rather than out of true concern, but she does her best to look like a caring and concerned daughter. Ellen admits that their family wasn't a very loving or affectionate one and that they still aren't. Ellen is shocked by her mother's fierce determination to live independently, and it's only after she reveals these intentions that Ellen seems genuinely concerned for her well-being. - Character: Adelaide. Description: Adelaide is Mrs. and Mr. McPherson's daughter and James and Ellen's sister. Adelaide lives in Pittsburg with her husband, Mr. Oswald, who is well-off but unwilling to financially support Mrs. McPherson. She can't stand to be in Colorado and plans to depart with her siblings as soon as they've settled the inheritance. Adelaide admits what none of the three siblings want to say: that they aren't concerned about what happens to their mother because they love her, but because they feel duty-bound to her as her children. When she finds out that her mother owns all of the family's property, Adelaide suggests that she sign it over to James simply because she wants to get out of Colorado as fast as possible. - Character: Mr. McPherson. Description: Mr. McPherson is Mrs. McPherson's late husband and James, Ellen, and Adelaide's father. Before he passed, he signed his properties over to his wife for safekeeping. This means that his will—which originally split his assets into equal parts between his children—is null and void. Mr. McPherson meant well and did his best to care for his wife and children, but he didn't express love or affection for them. - Character: Mr. Frankland. Description: Mr. Frankland is the lawyer tasked with carrying out Mr. McPherson's will. He finds himself caught between the McPherson siblings and their mother. On the one hand, he defends Mrs. McPherson and her desire to remain independent, acknowledging that it's within her rights to do so and that she has always been an intelligent and capable woman. On the other hand, he's just as shocked as her children by her fierce and determined independence, which defies society's norms for women. - Theme: Societal Expectations and Female Independence. Description: "The Widow's Might" is a story about how 20th-century societal expectations surrounding caretaking and domesticity unfortunately tended to curb female independence and freedom. Siblings James, Ellen, and Adelaide expect that their recently widowed mother, Mrs. McPherson, will be weak and devastated in the wake of her husband, Mr. McPherson's, death. Although none of them want to take her in, they assume that she's incapable of living on her own and needs someone to look after her. James in particular pressures his sisters to let their mother live in their homes. While he's willing to provide for his mother financially, he assumes that his sisters should be the ones to take on the burdensome domestic role of caretaker—an indication that he clings to the patriarchal expectation that women should take on difficult domestic roles instead of men. However, the sibling's assumptions about their mother are soon proved wrong. Mrs. McPherson is stronger and more independent than ever. With her husband dead and her children grown, she is finally free of the domestic caretaker role that society assigns women. Additionally, and importantly, she has achieved the financial autonomy necessary to live as a fully independent person. When her husband signed his property over to her, he transferred to her a power typically reserved for men in the early 20th century (which is when the story was published). For the past three and a half years, Mrs. McPherson has managed a successful business on their ranch and amassed a small fortune that will allow her to spend the rest of her life independently pursuing her own dreams and interests. For Mrs. McPherson, this means traveling the world, literally leaving the confines and limitations of her old life behind. In this way, "The Widow's Might" illustrates that breaking free from the domestic caretaker role society forces on women—and managing to achieve financial autonomy—allows women to live fully independent lives in pursuit of their own dreams and desires. - Theme: Love vs. Duty. Description: "A Widow's Might" complicates the assumption that families are bound together by love. In the wake of their patriarch's death, the loveless McPherson family begins to crumble. The three McPherson siblings, James, Ellen, and Adelaide, openly acknowledge that they didn't really love their late father, Mr. McPherson, nor did he ever truly love them. They remember their family as affectionless, and they all hated living on the family's ranch. They are so happy to have escaped their childhood home that they were even reluctant to return for their father's funeral and can't tolerate spending even one night there, even though they made the long journey to be there. It's clear, then, that this family has always been bound together by nothing more than a sense of obligation and duty. Now that their father is dead, the siblings assume that the duty of caring for their mother will become theirs, and though none of them is excited by or even willing to take on this obligation, they see no other option, for to reject it would go against the idea that family members are expected to stand by one another—something they only seem willing to do in a cursory, compulsory sort of way, as if to keep up the mere appearance of familial love. When Mrs. McPherson rejects their empty offers to take her in, then, she dissolves the ties that have kept the family artificially bound together. In other words, she frees them all from the familial duty that none of them, including herself, want to uphold any longer. In turn, "A Widow's Might" suggests that families are not always held together by love; sometimes, the story implies, families stay united only out of a superficial sense of duty and obligation that, when it comes down to it, can have very little to do with affection or a sense of personal connection. - Theme: Death, Loss, and New Beginnings. Description: Rather than death amounting to no more than a tragic sense of loss, "The Widow's Might" suggests that the death of a loved one can actually give people new kind of freedom. Mrs. McPherson best illustrates this idea. In stark contrast to the sadness and devastation that her children expect will have consumed her in the wake of her husband's death, Mrs. McPherson is joyful and excited to live an independent life now that she is free from her role as a wife and mother. When she throws off her borrowed black veil and the black mourning clothes she wore to her husband's funeral, Mrs. McPherson reveals that her grief was a performance, a costume she wore to act out the emotional devastation that society expects of a woman when her husband dies. Underneath her mourning clothes, she wears a traveling suit, which represents the exciting new beginning of her independent life—a life she'll spend in pursuit of her own dreams and aspirations. In this way, her husband's death allows for her life to begin again. Similarly, the McPherson siblings, James, Ellen, and Adelaide aren't saddened by their father's passing, instead feeling relieved that it frees them from the childhood home and loveless family they always quietly despised. By focusing on how death gives way to new possibilities and renewed perspectives, then, the story challenges the conventional idea that this kind of loss has to be tragic and overwhelming. Instead, the story implies, losing a loved one can actually become a new beginning that frees rather than destroys. - Climax: Mrs. McPherson reveals that her husband's will is null-and-void because he transferred all his assets to her, which is why she doesn't intend to move in with any of her children. - Summary: Siblings James, Ellen, and Adelaide are reluctantly gathered in Denver, Colorado for their father, Mr. McPherson's, funeral. Their spouses have stayed behind on the East Coast, where they now have homes and families of their own. The story begins after the funeral has ended. The siblings discuss the fate of their now widowed mother, Mrs. McPherson, while they wait for the lawyer, Mr. Frankland, to arrive and help settle their father's will. They assume their mother is too old, weak, and devastated by her husband's death to continue living on her own, so the three debate back and forth about who should take their mother in, and, importantly, how much it will cost them. Each of the siblings make repeated offers to welcome her into their homes, although it's clear to all three that these offers are empty. They speculate about how much they'll inherit from their father, and how much his ranch and properties will be worth, comparing what they expect to earn from what they expect to spend on their mother's upkeep. Eventually, Ellen and Adelaide say what none of them wants to admit: all three siblings have offered to take their mother not because they love her, but because they feel trapped by a sense of familial obligation. In reality, they view their widowed mother as a burden, just as they view their father's funeral as an inconvenience. They also reflect that they all hated growing up on the ranch in Denver and that their family was never very affectionate or loving. Meanwhile, Mrs. McPherson is upstairs where she has asked to be left alone. The siblings become impatient. All have train tickets to get out of town that evening and want to settle the will as quickly as possible. Finally, Mr. Frankland arrives, and Mrs. McPherson emerges to announce that the will is null and void because Mr. McPherson signed his property over to her—and she has no intentions of selling it. The siblings and Mr. Frankland are all shocked. She explains that for the past three years she has run the ranch as her husband grew sicker, even establishing a miniature hospital on the property. She has been very successful and has made enough money to pay her children the money they would have received from the will and still have enough remaining for herself to live on and, eventually, pay for her own funeral. The siblings question her sanity, but Mr. Frankland defends her. Until this point, the siblings haven't seen their mother's face, which has been covered by a black veil. With a sense of drama and urgency, Mrs. McPherson opens the windows, filling the dark room with bright sunlight, and removes the veil as well as her black mourning cloak. Underneath, she wears a traveling suit. She explains that now that her husband is dead and her children are grown, she is done with familial duty and obligation. Instead, she intends to do what she has never done before: live her life in pursuit of her own passions and desires. The siblings, who now seem genuinely concerned for her, all make one final offer each to take her in, all of which she respectfully and firmly declines. She wants them to understand that she is a "Real Person" with her own interests and half a lifetime left to live out her new freedom and independence. She tells them she is going to travel the world and explore places as far as New Zealand and Madagascar. They all depart that night, the siblings traveling east while their mother heads west.

- Genre: Short Story - Title: The Wife of His Youth - Point of view: Third Person - Setting: Groveland, a Northern U.S. city, in 1890 - Character: Mr. Ryder/Sam Taylor. Description: Mr. Ryder is the protagonist of "The Wife of His Youth." At the start of the story, he is a middle-aged, mixed-race man living in a Northern city 25 years after the end of the American Civil War. He has worked his way up as a railroad clerk, educating himself and earning respect as a leading figure in the "Blue Veins" society, an organization of mixed-race people formed for the purpose of social advancement. He believes that mixed-race people should seek "upwards absorption" into whiteness, and for that reason, he looks down on people with darker skin or lower social statuses and excludes them from the Blue Veins. His desire for social advancement is the main reason why he wants to marry Molly Dixon, a younger woman with a higher social status than his own. But Mr. Ryder's chance encounter with his former wife, Eliza Jane, who he married during the time of slavery, forces him to reckon with his past. He was born free, with the name Sam Taylor, and was an apprentice on a plantation because he was an orphan. While working there, he married an older enslaved woman, Eliza Jane. When Eliza Jane warned him that the plantation-owner, Bob Smith, was planning to sell him into slavery, he escaped, promising that he would come back to free her. But he was not able to keep his promise, because she was sold away in retaliation for warning him, and there was no way he could find her. So, he went North to try to improve his social standing. Mr. Ryder sees himself as a man of honor, but even so, he hesitates when Eliza Jane encounters him after 25 years and tells him her story (without recognizing him as her husband). To acknowledge Eliza Jane would be to give up his planned marriage and his desire for upward advancement. However, Mr. Ryder is so moved by Eliza Jane's faith in him that he knows, after thinking over the matter, that he must acknowledge and reunite with her. In this way, Mr. Ryder overcomes some of his earlier, narrow-minded views and recognizes that love is more important than social status. - Character: Eliza Jane. Description: Eliza Jane is Mr. Ryder's long-lost wife, a formerly enslaved woman whom he married while apprenticing as a young man on a plantation. After overhearing a conversation between the plantation owner, Bob Smith, and his wife, Eliza Jane warned Mr. Ryder (whose name was Sam Taylor at the time) that the planter planned to sell him into slavery. He escaped and promised that he would return to free her soon. But the planter sold her away in retaliation for warning her husband, so that Sam couldn't fulfill his promise. After the Civil War, Eliza Jane searched incessantly for her husband, starting in the South and going to the North. Even after 25 years of searching, she is convinced that he still loves her, that she will eventually find him, and they will live happily together again. However, when Eliza Jane does finally encounter her husband, she does not recognize him because he has changed so much. The gap between their social status has widened significantly: while Mr. Ryder is modestly well-to-do, respectable, and self-educated, Eliza Jane has never been able to escape from a life of menial labor (she works as a cook) and her speech betrays her lack of formal education. But Eliza Jane is a heroic character in the story because of her tireless faith and devotion in searching for her husband. Her love and loyalty move Mr. Ryder so much that he undergoes a transformation, questioning his previously held values about race and class and abandoning his earlier plans to marry Molly Dixon. - Character: Molly Dixon. Description: Molly Dixon is the woman whom Mr. Ryder intends to marry before his chance reencounter with his former wife, Eliza Jane. She is much younger, lighter-skinned, and better-educated than him. Before coming to Groveland (the Northern city where the story is set), she taught at a school in Washington, D.C. She has "refined manners" and a "vivacious wit," and she has a decent income because of the life insurance money she received after the death of her husband, who had worked as a government clerk. Molly Dixon proves to be a sympathetic character when, despite her desire to marry Mr. Ryder, she is the first guest at the ball to say that Mr. Ryder should have acknowledged and reunited with Eliza Jane. Molly Dixon is Eliza Jane's opposite of in terms of social status, and therefore Mr. Ryder's planned marriage to her stands in stark contrast to his former marriage with Eliza Jane—making his choice between the two women all the more difficult and consequential. - Theme: Race and Class. Description: The story's protagonist, Mr. Ryder's, internal struggles reflect the complexity of race and class status in post-Civil War America. His transformation shows that even oppressed people can hold internalized racist and classist beliefs, but also that people can overcome these internalized prejudices. Mr. Ryder is a mixed-race man living in a Northern city 25 years after the end of the Civil War. He was born free and has a light skin tone, but society still considers him Black. He is the unofficial leader of a society called the "Blue Veins," which consists mostly of professional-class, light-skinned, mixed-race people and was formed for the purpose of social advancement. Even though Mr. Ryder himself is part Black, he's one of this organization's more conservative members and is prejudiced against people with darker skin and lower social statuses than his own. However, Mr. Ryder insists that he isn't prejudiced and is only looking out for mixed-race people's "self-preservation." He believes it would be a "backward step" for mixed-race people to marry people with darker skin tones, and that it is better to hope for "absorption" into the white race. One of Mr. Ryder's motivations for deciding to propose marriage to a younger, lighter-skinned woman, Molly Dixon, is precisely his desire for this "upward process of absorption." In this way, the story suggests that Mr. Ryder has internalized racism and classism because American society as a whole is racist and classist—and, in turn, people like him feel forced conform to these prejudices in order to survive and move upward in society. At the start of the story, Mr. Ryder fails to see how his obsession with race and class simply solidifies the prejudices of the society he lives in. However, he's forced to reassess his beliefs when he has a chance encounter with his long-lost wife, a formerly enslaved woman named Eliza Jane who has been searching for him since the war. She has had none of the advantages he has enjoyed due to her lack of education, lifetime of menial work, and darker skin. Yet her devotion to Mr. Ryder so deeply moves him that he decides to reunite with her, giving up his hopes of marrying Molly Dixon. Although the story does not directly reveal how Mr. Ryder's thoughts on race have changed, renouncing his earlier plans for marriage and reuniting with his former wife suggest that he has at least partly changed his earlier prejudiced views. Through Mr. Ryder's transformation, the story suggests that love transcends race and status, and that people can potentially overcome prejudice through close relationships with people of other skin colors and social classes. - Theme: Love, Loyalty, and Honor. Description: "The Wife of His Youth" centers on two key instances of love, faithfulness, and honor: first, Eliza Jane spends 25 years searching for her former husband, from whom she was separated when she was enslaved before the American Civil War. Second, Mr. Ryder (who turns out to be Eliza Jane's long-lost husband) decides to acknowledge and reunite with Eliza Jane as his former wife. This is significant because as a light-skinned, mixed-race man in post-Civil War America, being in a relationship with someone who has darker skin and a lower class status than him means letting go of his desire to be "absorbed" into the white race and rise up in society. Given the other characters' approval of his decision, the story suggests that choosing love over self-interest is the honorable choice and demonstrates the redemptive potential of devoting oneself to another person. When Eliza Jane first meets Mr. Ryder and tells him her story, she has complete faith that her husband will want to reunite with her. She dismisses all of Mr. Ryder's objections: that her husband might be dead, that he might have lost interest in her or remarried, or that she might not even recognize him if she saw him. She is certain that her husband will still love and accept her. But Mr. Ryder—who, unbeknownst to Eliza Jane, is her former husband—knows that her faith in him is not fully deserved. Whereas she has stayed loyal to him, he has almost forgotten her as part of what now feels like the distant past, and he's on the verge of proposing marriage to someone else. The fact that Eliza Jane doesn't recognize him emphasizes how much he's changed in the decades they've been separated, and he hesitates on the question of whether to even tell her who he is. But Mr. Ryder, with his strong sense of honor, is so deeply moved by her devotion that he knows, after overcoming his initial hesitation, that he must reunite with her. In doing so, he also overcomes his destructive beliefs in the supreme importance of skin color and social prestige, showing how love, loyalty, and honor can transform people for the better. - Theme: History and Identity. Description: "The Wife of His Youth" is, in one sense, a story about the impossibility of creating an identity that's divorced from the past. This is especially true in the context of post-Civil War America, in which slavery's legacy continued to profoundly shape people's identities and opportunities in society, despite former slaves being legally emancipated. Although Mr. Ryder was never enslaved, as an orphaned, mixed-race boy, his early life wasn't so different from enslaved people's lives, as he apprenticed on a plantation and only narrowly escaped being sold into slavery. Mr. Ryder seems to be ashamed of this aspect of his past, and so he has struggled to shape an identity for himself that's as distant as possible from who he used to be—by moving North, working his way up the social ladder, and winning the respect of the "Blue Veins" society (an exclusive  group of well-educated, middle-class, mixed-race people). Before his chance reunion with his former wife, Eliza Jane, Mr. Ryder seems to have deliberately forgotten everything about his own past. This desire to put history behind him might also be the source of his desire for mixed-race people like himself to "absorb" themselves into the white race, as this might (in theory) allow them to definitively put the legacies of racism and oppression behind them. However, Mr. Ryder's desire to escape from the past is challenged when he encounters Eliza Jane, a formerly enslaved woman who's been searching for him for 25 years, since the end of the Civil War. She does not recognize him, leaving him with a choice: either he can pretend not to know her and continue avoiding his own past, or he can acknowledge and reunite with her, and in this way recognize that the past is part of his identity. In the end he chooses the latter option, symbolizing his acceptance that history—slavery and the Civil War—has, in fact, shaped who he is. His choice is a recognition that the past must be faced, not ignored. - Theme: Community and Solidarity. Description: "The Wife of His Youth" demonstrates the importance of overcoming divisions to forge solidarity between oppressed people. The story centers around the fictionalized "Blue Veins" society, an exclusive association of middle-class, mixed-race people who band together to try to improve their social conditions. In late 19th-century American society, mixed-race people are considered Black and subjected to racial oppression, even if they have majority European ancestry and appear white. The existence of the Blue Veins society, which allows mixed-race people to come together over their common struggles, is an example of humans' fundamental need to form communities in which they feel accepted, especially when broader society shuns them. However, the Blue Veins members' sense of community comes at the expense of a severing of ties with people who have darker skin or a lower social status. They do so because they hope to be accepted into the white race and rise up in society—but this only reinforces the racism and classism, which damages the Blue Veins members just as it hurts those lower than them on the social ladder. But ultimately, Mr. Ryder (the unofficial leader of the Blue Veins) decides to acknowledge the formerly enslaved woman Eliza Jane as his former wife, even though this goes against his earlier class and racial prejudices because she's dark-skinned and working-class. Even more crucially, the other members of the Blue Veins society are deeply moved by Eliza Jane's story, and they approve of Mr. Ryder's decision to acknowledge her as his former wife when he asks them for guidance. This suggests that the Blue Veins society has come to recognize the importance of solidarity within the Black community, rather than differentiating themselves on the basis of skin tone and class status to try to get ahead. - Climax: Mr. Ryder announces Eliza Jane as the "wife of his youth," rather than proposing marriage to Molly Dixon, in front of the guests of his ball. - Summary: Mr. Ryder is a middle-aged, mixed-race man living in the Northern city of Groveland 25 years after the end of the American Civil War. He is one of the leading figures of the "Blue Veins" society, an association of mostly professional-class, light-skinned mixed-race people seeking social improvement. Mr. Ryder is one of the more conservative members, looking down on people with lower social statuses and darker skin and excluding them from membership in the society. He believes that mixed-race people should seek "upward absorption" into the white race. Mr. Ryder has decided to propose marriage to a woman, Molly Dixon, who is younger, lighter-skinned, and from a higher social status than him. He is planning a ball for members of the Blue Veins society as an occasion to propose to her. But on the day that the ball is scheduled to take place, Mr. Ryder has a chance encounter that causes a life crisis for him: a middle-aged Black woman, Eliza Jane, visits his house and tells him that she is looking for her husband, a mixed-race man named Sam Taylor. She tells him the story of their marriage and how they were separated. Sam was free-born, but he was an orphan and was apprenticed to work on the same plantation where Eliza Jane was enslaved. They married, although marriages made in slavery had no legal status. One day, Eliza Jane overheard a conversation that revealed the plantation owner, Bob Smith's, plans to sell Sam into slavery, and she warned Sam, allowing him to escape. He promised that he would return someday to free her. However, Smith discovered that Eliza Jane warned Sam, and in retaliation, he sold her away. After the Civil War, she returned to the plantation to see if she could find out where Sam was now, but she couldn't get any information about him, so she started to search everywhere for him, first in the South and then in the North. She has spent the last 25 years looking for Sam, certain that she will find him and that he will love her just as before. After Eliza Jane tells her story, Mr. Ryder asks to see a photograph of her husband, and she shows it to him. He tells her that he will give the matter some consideration and asks for her address so he can inform her if he finds out anything about her husband. Then, he goes into his house and stares at his reflection in the mirror. At the Blue Veins ball that night, Mr. Ryder gives a speech in which he recounts Eliza Jane's story to the attendees. Then, he asks them to imagine the following scenario: that a husband, soon after escaping being sold into slavery, had discovered his wife had been sold and unsuccessfully tried to find her. Then, the husband made his way to the North to improve his standing, and eventually he became a much more educated and respectable man, putting his humble past far behind him. Finally, he asks the audience to imagine that the man's former wife, who has been searching for him all these years, encountered him by chance, right before he was about to marry another woman. But the wife did not recognize him. The man could either choose not to acknowledge her, and continue his life as before, or he could acknowledge her and reunite with her, giving up his planned marriage to another woman. Mr. Ryder asks the audience which option this man should have chosen. The audience members realize that Mr. Ryder is, in fact, referring to his own situation—that he is Sam Taylor, the husband that Eliza Jane has been searching for all this time. Molly Dixon is the first to say that the man should've acknowledged his former wife, and the rest of the guests agree. Mr. Ryder says that this is the response he was expecting, and he leads Eliza Jane into the room, announcing that she is "the wife of [his] youth."

- Genre: Novel, Magical Realism - Title: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Point of view: First Person - Setting: Tokyo, Japan in 1984 - Character: Toru Okada. Description: Toru Okada is an average man who lives in Tokyo and enjoys an average life. Although his marriage is not perfect, he is reasonably happy, especially since quitting his job. However, his world gets turned upside down when he starts receiving phone calls from a mysterious woman, which are often of a sexual nature. Then Toru's wife, Kumiko, leaves him, and he is forced to go on a spiritual journey to discover what has gone wrong in his life. Though Toru is a generally easy-going man, he can also be reserved and introspective. In particular, he finds himself obsessed with the question of whether someone can ever truly know another person. For much of his life, he thought he knew Kumiko, but after she leaves him, he discovers that is not true. Throughout the novel, Toru finds himself feeling more and more socially isolated as the world around him gets increasingly bizarre. Not knowing what else to do, he seeks refuge at the bottom of a well where he can escape reality and meditate. There, he thinks about his relationship with Kumiko and the broader implications of recent events in his life. After a few days down in the well, Toru emerges from it with a mark on his face, which provides him with spiritual abilities similar to Malta and Mr. Honda. At the end of the novel, Toru uses his newfound abilities and understanding of the world to purge negative forces, which often appear in his dreams, from his life. When he wakes up from a dream in which he kills the shadow man—who may or may not be an alternate version of Noboru—he finds himself in a well full of water. As Toru emerges from the well, he is reborn as a new man who is ready to confront the world head on. - Character: May Kasahara. Description: May Kasahara is a teenager who lives in Toru's neighborhood across from the Miyawaki house. She promises to help Toru find his cat, though really, she seems more interested in companionship. As Toru gets to know May, he discovers she is obsessed with death and dying. Though sometimes outspoken to the point of being rude, May is mature for her age, and she genuinely seems to want to help Toru. However, in the middle of the story, she does almost kill Toru by leaving him down in the well. When Toru questions her about the incident, she gives him an explanation that is both sinister and seemingly borne out of genuine curiosity—she wanted to know what it would be like to have someone's life in her hands. Later in the novel, Toru discovers that May's erratic behavior likely stems from the recent death of her boyfriend, who died in a motorcycle accident for which she was largely responsible. Ultimately, Toru perceives May as a kindred spirit who is trying to find her way in the world just like him. - Character: Noboru Wataya. Description: Noboru Wataya is Kumiko's sinister older brother. From a young age, Noboru showed signs of being psychological disturbed. Kumiko believes he may have had a sexually fixation with her sister and then shifted his focus to Kumiko following their sister's death. Later, Creta reveals to Toru that Noboru raped her when she was a sex worker. Though she doesn't go into specifics about the exact nature of the assault, she, like Kumiko, believes that Noboru has cast some kind of nefarious spell over her. Despite his problems, Noboru is highly intelligent and capable. He's a public intellectual and eventually holds political office. Toru hates Noboru and thinks he is a destructive force who only cares about his own success. In Toru's mind, Noboru does not have any principles and will constantly change his positions as long as he ends up on top. According to Toru, Noboru's only political philosophy is that the weak will fail while the strong will survive. At the end of the story, Kumiko kills Noboru, turns herself in to the police, and goes to jail. - Character: Kumiko Okada. Description: Kumiko Okada is Toru's wife and Noboru Wataya's sister. Kumiko is not close to her family because she does not like her brother and because she spent most of her childhood with her grandmother. At the beginning of the novel, she regularly gets irritated with Toru, and it seems as though something is constantly on her mind. She is always busy at work and in the little time she is home, she is not happy to see Toru. Later, it's revealed that Kumiko and Toru's marriage has been strained ever since Kumiko unexpectedly became pregnant and had an abortion years before. One day, in the novel's present, she goes missing without saying a word to Toru. Later, it is revealed that Kumiko was having affairs with multiple men for reasons she cannot altogether explain. She still loves Toru but does not think she can be with him until she figures out herself. Toru suspects that the mysterious woman who calls him at home and whom he sees in the hotel room in his dreams is an alternate version of Kumiko, though he can never confirm his theory. At the end of the book, she decides that all of her problems stem from Noboru, and so she kills him and goes to jail. - Character: Creta Kano. Description: Creta Kano is Malta Kano's sister. She is a beautiful woman who resembles Kumiko. Like Malta, Creta has spiritual powers, which she employs to help Malta get inside the heads of her clients. As a child, Creta experienced a great deal of suffering, which made her suicidal. While working as a sex worker, Creta had Kumiko's brother Noboru as a client, he raped her. However, Creta won't go into detail about the exact nature of the assault when she tells Toru about it. As an adult, she is still attempting to find her place in the world. Shortly after meeting Toru, she decides the work she does for her sister is too overwhelming. As such, she decides to move away from Japan and asks Toru to come with her. She feels connected to Toru, even though they have only known each other for a short time. Ultimately, Toru declines her offer, though the two do have sex before she leaves. - Character: Malta Kano. Description: Malta Kano is Creta Kano's sister. She is a powerful psychic with strong intuitions about future events. Toru first meets Malta after Kumiko hires her to help find their missing cat. Unlike her sister, who is more personable, Malta is distant and self-absorbed. She also focuses on her work, which makes her good at what she does, even though she has little time for anything else. Early in the novel, Malta acts as Toru's spiritual guide, though she fades away as the novel progresses. - Character: The Mysterious Woman. Description: The mysterious woman is a woman who repeatedly contacts Toru on the phone and in his dreams. Her identity remains a mystery throughout the entirety of the novel. Though Toru identifies her as an alternate version of Kumiko, his theory in never confirmed. The mysterious woman desperately wants sex from Toru, and she becomes frustrated when he will not give it to her. Additionally, the mysterious woman is terrified of the shadow man, who bangs on her hotel room door in Toru's dreams. - Character: Tokutaro Mamiya. Description: Mamiya was a soldier in the Japanese Army before and during World War II. During the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, he went on a secret mission with Yamamoto, Hamano, and Honda where he watched Mongolian soldiers skin Yamamoto alive. After witnessing this horror, Mongolian soldiers threw Mamiya down a well. He almost died there, but Honda rescued him just in time. These experiences psychologically torture Mamiya for the rest of his life. He cannot find peace or hope in anything because the trauma of the war is always with him. Following Mr. Honda's death, Mamiya visits Toru to deliver the item Mr. Honda has left Toru. - Character: Mr. Honda. Description: Mr. Honda is a former member of the Japanese army who served with Mamiya. He and Mamiya witnessed Mongolian soldiers skin Yamamoto alive. Like Malta Kano, Mr. Honda possesses spiritual abilities and serves as a spiritual guide after his time in the war. As a young man, Toru never took Mr. Honda's advice seriously, but as an adult, he realizes that Mr. Honda is actually a prophet. Mr. Honda leaves Toru a gift after his death, which turns out to be an empty box. - Character: Nutmeg. Description: Nutmeg is a former fashion designer who now works as a spiritual healer. She helps wealthy women who feel emptiness in their hearts find a way to experience happiness. She started this business after her husband was brutally and mysteriously murdered. Nutmeg recruits Toru to help her with her business after she notices the mysterious mark on his face. Nutmeg is kind to Toru, and the two of them become good friends for the time that they work together. - Character: Cinnamon. Description: Cinnamon is Nutmeg's mute son. Although Cinnamon used to talk, he went mute after his father (Nutmeg's husband) was murdered. Like many characters in the novel, Cinnamon has spiritual abilities, which connect him to the dream world. He works alongside his mother at her company and keeps a file full of stories titled "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" on his computer. - Character: Boris the Manskinner. Description: Boris the Manskinner is a former Russian military officer who orders a Mongolian soldier to skin Yamamoto alive. Later, Mamiya encounters Boris in a Russian prison camp. While in the camp, Mamiya allies himself with Boris to stay alive. Before getting sent back to Tokyo, Mamiya tries and fails to kill Boris. In response, Boris can only laugh at Mamiya. He is a callous and cruel man with no value for human life. - Theme: Reality and Subjective Experience. Description: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle delves into the concept of reality and subjective experience, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical. Through the protagonist Toru Okada's journey, the novel challenges conventional understandings of reality and invites readers to question the link between perception and truth. In the novel, dreams, visions, and supernatural occurrences intertwine with the everyday, blurring the line between what is objectively real and what exists solely within the realm of subjective experience. After Mamiya describes achieving a state of enlightenment at the bottom of a well, Toru decides to sit in a well himself. He is not sure what he will get out of the experience when he starts, but soon his time in the well begins to warp his perception of reality. The more time Toru spends in the well, the more he starts questioning whether his reality is objectively "real." Toru repeatedly enters a dream space, though at certain points, he wonders if the space is not a dream at all and is instead a memory of something that really happened to him. Eventually, Toru decides that regardless of which reality is "real," he needs to find a way to make the realities cohere so that he can make peace with his life, which has begun to fracture. At the beginning of the novel, Toru starts receiving phone calls from a mysterious woman, and he eventually encounters her in the dream-reality he accesses via the well, too. Not long after the phone calls start, Toru's wife, Kumiko, leaves him and asks for a divorce. Several odd circumstances accompany Kumiko's request for a divorce, leading Toru to believe that Kumiko's sudden desire for a divorce relates to the strange distortions of reality he has been experiencing in his broader life. Through its shifting, surreal representation of reality, the novel suggests that reality is not a fixed entity, but a fluid construct that shifts according to people's perspectives and interpretations. Ultimately, Toru never determines whether the mysterious woman is an alternate version of Kumiko, and he never finds out the truth about what caused Kumiko to ask for a divorce. Faced with this ambiguity and with the broader absence of a stable, objective understanding of reality, Toru ultimately realizes that what's really important is not that he knows the truth—it's that he can make sense of this situation for himself. - Theme: Free Will. Description: The eponymous symbol at the center of the novel, the "wind-up bird," is a bird Kumiko and Toru hear in their neighborhood that has a mechanical quality to its chirps. Kumiko suggests that the bird is responsible for winding the spring of the world, meaning that it is winding up the world to move, as one might wind the spring of a wind-up toy. Symbolically, this idea suggests a lack of free will, with each living being's destiny merely being the consequence of that initial winding. Throughout the novel, Toru starts to notice patterns and seeming coincidences that he never did before, causing him to wonder if he controls his own destiny or whether his life is merely unfolding according to some predetermined plan. For instance, the two most important women in his life, his wife Kumiko and Creta, a psychic whom Kumiko hires to find her and Toru's missing cat, look strikingly similar. Moreover, Creta appears in his life as soon as Kumiko disappears. Additionally, he learns that Creta was connected to Noboru, Kumiko's sadistic elder brother. While all this could be a coincidence, Toru increasingly feels that something or someone else is controlling his life and the reality that surrounds him.   However, Toru soon discovers the frustrating paradox at the center of his conflict: he can never know with certainty whether he is acting of his own free will or due to the will of the metaphorical wind-up bird that winds the springs of the universe.  This issue frustrates Toru because it's not the potential lack of free will that bothers him—it's not knowing whether or not he's in control of his destiny. Ultimately, Toru finds peace in advice of that Mr. Honda, Toru's former spiritual guide, once gave him: that the only way to make peace with his present situation is simply to accept it. As Mr. Honda puts it, Toru should let the water carry him rather than trying to swim against it. Ultimately, then, the novel suggests that free will is a concept that should be dispensed with, as trying to prove its existence it raises more questions and problems than it can ever hope to solve. As such, people should simply go with the flow and make peace with their life and strive to find meaning in it, even if it is beyond one's ability to control. - Theme: Desire and Irrationality. Description: In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, desire and irrationality play a significant role in unraveling the complex relationships and motivations of the characters. As it explores these themes, the novel delves into the depths of human longing and the frequently self-destructive consequences of pursuing forbidden desires. Early in the story, Toru discovers that his wife, Kumiko, is having an affair with a man at work. When Kumiko describes the affair to Toru, she cannot explain why she had sex with another man—all she can say is that she had an irrational desire to have sex with him repeatedly. Later, Kumiko reveals that she has had sex with many men, not just one, due to the same irrational and uncontrollable desire. Kumiko knows that her behavior will damage her relationship with Toru, yet she chooses to act on her irrational impulses anyway. Noboru, Kumiko's brother, represents another, much more sinister example of the same phenomenon. He is a respected public intellectual turned politician who holds one of the highest offices in Japan, meaning his life is constantly subject to public scrutiny. Despite this, he repeatedly acts on his darkest impulses, which include rape, torture, and possibly incest. With Kumiko and Noboru, the novel sets up a dichotomy between two worlds: the external world of controlled, rational thought and social order, and the internal world of uncontrolled, irrational desire. When thinking rationally, both Kumiko and Noboru know that their behavior will likely bring about significant consequences, which could ruin their lives. However, in the moment when desire kicks in, their irrational side completely consumes them, and they act on their impulses, regardless of what consequences may come their way. Through Kumiko and Noboru, Murakami demonstrates the interconnectedness of desire and irrationality. Furthermore, the trajectory of the novel—which ends with Noboru dead and Kumiko alone—asserts the incompatibility of irrational desire and social order. In the novel, strong desires are often strongly irrational, will prevail over the rational, conscious thought, and are therefore dangerous. In order to function in society and maintain healthy relationships with others, the novel seems to suggest, it's necessary to keep one's irrational desires in check and maintain a healthy balance between irrational desire and rational discipline. - Theme: The Personal Impact of War. Description: War serves as a backdrop in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that shapes the characters' lives and experiences. Set against the historical context of the Nomonhan Incident and World War II, the novel explores the lingering effects of war on individual people and society. For instance, Mamiya, a former lieutenant in the Japanese army, shares his harrowing wartime experiences with Toru, revealing the atrocities he witnessed and the lasting psychological scars that haunt him. Through Mamiya's account, the novel presents war as a traumatic event that leaves indelible marks on those who endure it, reshaping their perceptions of the world and their place in it. After the war, Mamiya cannot live the way he did before. He is a changed man, and the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima wiped out his family. Toru is the first person Mamiya manages to connect with in decades, and even their relationship is not a close one. Mamiya isolates himself from the rest of society and nothing in his life makes him feel happy. He is a tortured man who constantly thinks about and relives his past, without ever being able to meaningly integrate himself into society. Other characters who suffer personal consequences because of the war include Nutmeg and Cinnamon, a mother and son who run a spiritual healing office and whom Toru eventually works with. Nutmeg tells Toru her harrowing experiences of witnessing World War II as a child, and she shares with him the stories of her father, who witnessed atrocities during the war. Later, Toru learns that Cinnamon, who was not alive during the war, is obsessed with his grandfather's involvement in the war, so much so that he has written detailed accounts of what he believes happened. Both Nutmeg and Cinnamon share a preoccupation with the war because it traumatized them; Nutmeg's trauma comes from direct personal experience, while Cinnamon inherits his trauma from his mother. Ultimately, the novel paints a bleak picture of the personal fallout from war. Although Mamiya, Nutmeg, and Cinnamon find some comfort in sharing their experiences with Toru, none of them ever overcome their trauma in any meaningful way. The novel examines the devastating psychological impact of war—and the Nomonhan Incident and World War II in particular—showing how even human connection and connection aren't strong enough to overcome the trauma that the horrors of war have caused. - Theme: Social Alienation. Description: Social alienation is a pervasive theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as many characters grapple with feelings of detachment, isolation, and a sense of disconnection from society. Toru Okada, in particular, is the archetype of the socially alienated person. After quitting his job, Toru becomes increasingly isolated from the outside world. He withdraws into a state of introspection and detachment, disconnected from the societal expectations and norms that once defined his identity. Because he does not follow societal norms, other characters repeatedly judge Toru. Although she does not mean to be especially hurtful, May Kasahara regularly comments on how "weird" Toru is because he socially isolated and regularly engages in behavior others would classify as odd, such as meditating in a well. Additionally, Toru's brother-in-law, Noboru, looks down on Toru and ridicules him because—according to Noboru—Toru has not made anything of his life. Meanwhile, Noboru himself is socially isolated. Despite being a powerful politician, Noboru does not have friends and family that he cares about or who care about him. He operates in his own alien world and never shows vulnerability to others. Various other characters also grapple with their own sense of displacement and disconnection. Toru's wife, Kumiko, becomes involved in secretive activities that distance her from Toru emotionally. Similarly, May exhibits a rebellious and withdrawn demeanor, which causes her to struggle to form meaningful connections with others. Later in the novel, readers learn that May's behavior is the result of a tragedy she witnessed, which ended in the death of her boyfriend. Each character's alienation is unique but shares a common thread of yearning for authentic human connection. The near-universal nature of alienation in this novel suggests that it is a fundamental part of the human experience. - Climax: In a dream state—which may or may not function as an alternate reality—Toru beats a shadowy figure to death with a bat. Afterward, he wakes up in a well full of water. - Summary: Toru Okada, an average man living in Tokyo, quits his job and becomes a househusband while his wife, Kumiko, works to support them both. At first, Toru enjoys his newfound freedom and is not in any hurry to return to work. One day, Toru's cat goes missing and he goes out looking for it while Kumiko is at work. While strolling through his neighborhood, he comes across the Miyawaki residence, an abandoned home with a dry well on the property. Across the road from the Miyawaki residence lives a teenager named May Kasahara, who is taking a break from school while she recovers from a motorcycle accident. Toru befriends May, who offers to help him find his missing cat. May is a rebellious and plain-spoken girl who is obsessed with death. Toru enjoys her company, though he does not know what to make of her. Ultimately, he and May fail to find the missing cat. Around the same time, Toru begins receiving a number of strange phone calls. One is from a mysterious woman who claims to know Toru. Toru tries to determine the mysterious women's identity, but she will not answer any of his questions and instead tries to engage him in phone sex. A few days later, Toru receives another call from a woman named Malta Kano, whom Kumiko hired to help locate the missing cat. Malta sets up a meeting with Toru, which Toru attends. At the meeting, Toru learns that Malta has psychic powers, which she plans to use to help find the cat. Additionally, Malta tells Toru that Toru's brother-in-law, Noboru Wataya, raped Malta's sister, Creta. This information disturbs Toru, though it does not surprise him. Toru despises Noboru and believes he is a mentally disturbed man, though Noboru is a popular public intellectual who is poised to become a major political player in Japan. Malta employs Creta to help Toru find the missing cat. Creta comes to Toru's house and collects water samples, which she claims will help. She then tells Toru part of her life story, describing her troubled childhood and attempt to die by suicide as a young adult. After the failed suicide attempt, she became a sex worker. During this period of her life, she met Noboru, though she does not elaborate on the specifics of their interaction. Following his interaction with Creta, Toru starts having sex dreams about her. After his meeting with Creta, Toru receives a letter from a man named Mamiya, who served in the Japanese Army with Mr. Honda, Toru's former spiritual advisor. Mamiya informs Toru that Mr. Honda passed away, and so Mamiya is delivering his keepsakes. Apparently, he left a keepsake for Toru, and Mamiya wants to know if he can bring it to him. Toru invites Mamiya to his house and asks him about his time in the war with Mr. Honda. Mamiya tells Toru about his experience in the Nomonhan Incident, which took place during the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. Mamiya and Honda were part of a secret mission that required them to cross into Soviet and Mongolian territory. However, their mission failed when the enemy (the Mongolians) caught them. Honda and Mamiya watched a Mongolian soldier skin their leader alive. Afterward, the Mongolians threw Mamiya down a dry well and remained there for three days before Honda rescued him. Mamiya tells Toru that the well was pure torture, though the experience did result in a brief sensation of enlightenment about his place in the world. Afterward telling Toru his story, Mamiya gives Toru his gift from Honda, which turns out to be an empty box. While Toru continues dealing with the issue of the missing cat, Kumiko is busy at work. She comes home later and later each day, always exhausted. She rarely makes time for Toru, and they bicker often. One morning, Toru notices that Kumiko is wearing a new perfume. He worries it might be a gift from a man Kumiko is having an affair with. That night, Kumiko does not come home from work. Toru tries to locate her but cannot. After a few days without hearing from Kumiko, Toru decides she must have run off with another man. Not long after Kumiko disappears, Malta contacts Toru and asks him to meet her at a hotel. Toru goes to the hotel where he finds Malta and Noboru. Noboru insults Toru—calling him a pathetic excuse for a man—and informs him that Kumiko has left him and wants a divorce. Toru is confused. He does not understand why Kumiko would leave him and why she would not talk to him herself. To find clarity, Toru goes to the Miyawaki residence and climbs down into their well, which is completely dried up. There, he begins meditating on his life, which has become increasingly fragmented and surreal. He thinks about the origins of his relationship with Kumiko and their early years together. He also contemplates the abortion Kumiko had when she became pregnant before they were ready for children. Toru wanted to keep the baby, but ultimately left the decision up to Kumiko. Kumiko aborted the child while Toru was away on a business trip. While Toru is down in the well, May Kasahara pays him several visits. Although May's tone is always playful, she takes away Toru's rope ladder and shuts the well's lid, leaving him in complete darkness and with no way to climb out. Toru wonders whether May will ever come back for him. After a few days, he begins to understand what Mamiya was talking about when he spoke of finding enlightenment, as he pushes himself to his physical limits. One day, he finds himself contemplating the wind-up bird, a bird in his neighborhood with a mechanical sounding chirp. The bird interests Toru because he has never actually seen it, and Kumiko says it winds the spring of the world. As Toru contemplates the bird, he finds himself feeling as though he has actually become it, and he flies around his neighborhood. Toru also begins having strange dreams while in the well. In the dreams, he is in a hotel where the new is always discussing Noboru. He makes his way from the hotel lobby to Room 208, where a mysterious woman—the same woman from the phone calls—is waiting for him. However, he never manages to get a look at her face. After spending three days in the well, Toru wakes up to find Creta looking down at him. She throws the rope ladder down to him. Allowing him to escape. When Toru gets home, he discovers that he developed a strange mark on his face while he in the well. He does not know what it is or how to get it off. That night, Toru wakes up and finds Creta in his bed, though neither of them knows how she got there. The next day, Creta tells Toru that she has been having the same dreams about him that he has been having about her. She explains that she works for Malta as a sort of mental sex worker and that her job is to search the minds of Malta's clients. She also promises Toru that she is working for him and not Noboru. Creta also tells Toru about what happened between her and Noboru. Noboru came to her as a client and violated her in a way she cannot explain. While she was not looking, Noboru stuck something inside of her, which caused her intense pleasure and intense pain. After finishing her story, Creta asks Toru if he will have sex with her. She does not want to be a "prostitute of the mind" anymore because it has exhausted her emotionally. Toru agrees to Creta's request. Creta also asks Toru if he will move away from Japan with her. Toru says he cannot. After Creta moves away, Toru does not hear from her or Malta. However, he randomly meets a woman named Nutmeg who works as a spiritual healer. Nutmeg recruits Toru to work her. She also buys the Miyawaki residence to use as their headquarters. Nutmeg can tell from the mark on Toru's face that he possesses spiritual healing powers from the well. She wants the Miyawaki residence so Toru can continue to draw spiritual energy from the well, which he can use to heal her clients. During this same time frame, Toru has a number of indirect interactions with Kumiko. She sends him a letter explaining that she was cheating on him with a man she works with. She apologizes and asks Toru for a divorce. Toru also interacts with Ushikawa, a shady individual whom Noboru has employed to handle Toru and Kumiko's divorce. Noboru wants to do everything he can to ensure the divorce does not become a public affair because he has become a prominent politician and does not want a scandal to disrupt his political career. Ushikawa tells Toru that he cannot meet with Kumiko in person. In response, Toru says he will not grant a divorce until he does. Toru starts spending all of his time down in the well, which functions as a portal to the hotel in his dreams. He decides that the only way to resolve his situation with Kumiko is determine the identity of the mysterious woman from the hotel. Eventually, he decides that the woman must be Kumiko herself. Toru confronts the woman in his dream and tells her his theory. The woman momentarily changes her voice to sound like Kumiko, but then changes it again to sound like someone else, leaving it ambiguous as to whether Toru is correct. Then, a loud banging comes from the door again. The mysterious woman urges Toru to leave, but he refuses. A shadowy male figure enters the room and begins fighting with Toru. Toru kills the man and then escapes the room. When he wakes up, he is in a well full of water, which Nutmeg helps him out of. Nutmeg tells Noboru that is in critical condition after suddenly collapsing in the street. Toru wonders if the actions that took place in his dreams resulted in Noboru's sudden collapse. Following Toru's latest trip down the well, the mark on his face disappears. Because of this, Nutmeg tells Toru that they can no longer work together. The following day, she leaves, and Toru never sees her again. Not long afterward, Toru receives another letter from Kumiko. Kumiko tells Toru that her first letter was a lie. She did not have sex with another man; she had sex with many other men. She does not know why she acted the way she did and is deeply ashamed of herself. She tells Toru that she thinks her problems stem from Noboru. Additionally, she says that she plans to go to Noboru's hospital room, shut off his life support, and turn herself in to the police. Sometime later, Toru takes a train to visit May, who is now working in a factory outside the city. He explains to May that he is waiting for Kumiko's jail sentence to end so the two of them can be together. After his visit with May, he returns to Tokyo on a train. On his way home, he falls asleep.

- Genre: Children's Novel - Title: The Wizard of Oz - Point of view: Third Person Omniscient - Setting: Kanas and The Land of Oz - Character: Dorothy. Description: Dorothy is a young girl from Kansas and the novel's protagonist. She lives with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, who are surprised that Dorothy can live so cheerfully on the gray Kansas prairies. When a cyclone carries her (and her dog Toto) to the strange Land of Oz, Dorothy immediately resolves to find a way back home. She also shows kindness and compassion to nearly everyone she meets, even as she finds herself stranded in a strange and often dangerous country. While her exact age is never specified, her open and trusting demeanor highlights her youthful innocence and implies that she's only a little girl. Despite this, Dorothy also shows remarkable bravery as she faces the frightening threats of Oz. Dorothy has a huge impact on her new friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. Each of them is unhappy with themselves when Dorothy meets them, but by the end of their quest, they've all discovered their confidence. But just like her friends, Dorothy also discovers her own capacity to create change and improve her life: her silver slippers, which she was given when she first arrived in Oz, have always had the ability to transport her home—she just needed to learn this about the shoes to achieve her goal. - Character: The Scarecrow. Description: The Scarecrow is the first travelling companion Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City. When Dorothy explains her intention to see the Wizard of Oz in the hopes that he can return her to Kansas, the Scarecrow asks if he can tag along and ask the Wizard for some brains. The Scarecrow is made of straw and can feel no pain, and the only thing he fears is fire. But because his head is full of straw, the Scarecrow assumes that he must not have a brain in his head, and this assumption makes him ashamed of himself. However, while he's convinced that he lacks intelligence, his actions during his journey with Dorothy confirm that he's mistaken. The Scarecrow consistently acts as the group's strategist, whether he realizes it or not. He comes up with several clever solutions to problems along the way, hinting at the possibility that he's had a brain the entire time. Regardless, his self-doubt persists until the Wizard fills his head with bran and tells him that it's brains. His boost of self-confidence at this point implies that the Scarecrow only needed a shift in perspective to recognize his own intelligence. His friendship with Dorothy also comes to define him after their adventure together, and he continues to help her get home even after his own wish has been granted. - Character: The Tin Woodman. Description: The Tin Woodman is the second companion Dorothy encounters on her way to the Emerald City. Upon hearing about Dorothy's and the Scarecrow's plan to see the Wizard of Oz and have their wishes granted, the Tin Woodman joins the two of them in order to ask the Wizard for a heart. Back when he was a person of flesh and blood, the Tin Woodman fell in love with a Munchkin girl, who promised to marry him once he'd saved enough money to build them a house. But a wicked witch intervened and cursed the Woodman's axe to slip. One by one, he lost his limbs and had them replaced with tin until he was made entirely of metal, and presumably became heartless as a result. Now, he desperately wants a heart again so that he can be loving and kind, but it becomes clear during his adventure that he's already a gentle and compassionate soul. He's easily one of the kindest members of Dorothy's group, shedding tears at the mere thought of harming an innocent creature. While the Tin Woodman functionally already has a heart, he still doesn't believe he does until the Wizard gives him a silk heart full of sawdust. This trinket makes the Woodman feel whole again at last, but he never seems to realize that he had what he wanted all along. - Character: The Cowardly Lion. Description: The Cowardly Lion is the third and final new companion Dorothy meets on her way to the Emerald City. While the Lion appears frightening and ferocious at first, it soon becomes clear that he believes himself to be a coward. Despite the other animals treating him as the king of the beasts, the Lion is secretly afraid of most of the creatures he encounters. He resolves to accompany Dorothy and her friends to the Emerald City, hoping that the Wizard of Oz can grant him the courage he believes he lacks. However, just like the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion constantly demonstrates that he already is courageous. The Lion voluntarily puts himself in harm's way to protect Dorothy and his other friends, despite his fears. By performing brave deeds such as jumping across a dangerous gorge and threatening the Wicked Witch of the West, the Lion proves he's anything but a coward. The Wizard tries to explain to him that courage isn't a lack of fear, but the Lion won't accept his own bravery until the Wizard gives him a drink and tells him that it's courage. The drink itself has nothing to do with the Lion's courage, but it nonetheless convinces him that he's fit to rule as the king of the beasts. Like Dorothy's other friends, the Lion can only find happiness after he's changed the way he sees himself. - Character: The Wizard of Oz. Description: The Wizard of Oz is the mysterious ruler of the Emerald City; he is generally believed to be incredibly powerful. In reality, he's merely a little old man from Omaha with no real magical powers whatsoever. Originally a circus performer, the Wizard landed in Oz in much the same way as Dorothy, although he arrived in a hot air balloon instead of a farmhouse. Ever since arriving in Oz, he's used illusions and trickery to make everyone in the Land of Oz believe that he truly is great and powerful, if only for his own amusement. The Wizard is a unique figure, as he's practically the only character in the novel who's morally gray. He isn't malicious or wicked, but he does deceive the entire Land of Oz and almost betrays his promise to Dorothy. He's essentially a fraud with no real power, but he nonetheless helps Dorothy and her friends as best he can. Notably, everyone still considers him to be a great wizard by the end of the novel, even when they know he's been deceitful. - Character: The Wicked Witch of the West. Description: The Wicked Witch of the West is the closest character the novel has to an antagonist, though she only appears in person in one chapter. Despite her limited appearances, the Wicked Witch makes a strong impression on Dorothy and company with her utter cruelty and malice. More than any other character in Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West represents pure evil of the sort usually only found in fairy tales. She serves as an intimidating obstacle for Dorothy and her friends, as the Wizard of Oz refuses to grant their requests until the Witch is dead. Just like when Dorothy killed the Wicked Witch of the East by happening to land on her upon arriving in Oz, Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch of the West by mistake by pouring water over her, which dissolves the Witch. This highlights Dorothy's childlike innocence, especially when contrasted with the Witch's pure, brutal evil. - Character: The Good Witch of the North. Description: Dorothy meets the Good Witch of the North in the Land of the Munchkins. She's the first character Dorothy speaks to after arriving in the Land of Oz, and functions as a guiding mentor figure. It's the Good Witch who sends Dorothy on her quest to the Emerald City in the first place, and she also explains a few details about Oz. The Good Witch of the North is the first sign that Dorothy has entered a magical place where good and evil witches are an everyday fact of life. The Good Witch also protects Dorothy by kissing her forehead and leaving a shining mark that protects Dorothy from anyone who would harm her. - Character: Glinda. Description: Glinda is the Good Witch of the South and the only witch in the novel who is named. Glinda is said to be the most powerful of the witches, and, unlike the Wizard, she truly lives up to her reputation. She clearly knows much about the Land of Oz, and she has the wisdom to know what to do with the problems Dorothy and her friends bring to her at the end of the novel. Glinda represents Dorothy's last hope of returning home to Kansas, and the Good Witch finally shows Dorothy the way. At the end of Dorothy's journey, Glinda serves as one final, benevolent mentor to guide her home. - Character: Aunt Em. Description: Aunt Em is Uncle Henry's wife, Dorothy's aunt, and a motherly figure in Dorothy's life. She lives on a farm on the gray prairies of Kansas. At the beginning of the novel, Aunt Em is described as a stern, hardworking woman whose joy and passion have dried up over the years. Despite Em's dour personality, Dorothy still longs to see her again throughout the novel, and she assumes that Aunt Em must be terribly worried about her. This suspicion is confirmed when Dorothy finally returns home from her long journey in Oz. Aunt Em is overjoyed to see Dorothy again. - Character: Uncle Henry. Description: Uncle Henry is Aunt Em's husband and Dorothy's stern father figure. He lives on a farm on the gray prairies of Kansas. Like his wife, he's described as being just as dull and harsh as his surroundings. Dorothy doesn't seem to be as attached to Uncle Henry as she is to Aunt Em, but she still cares for him and longs to return home to him. Uncle Henry also functions as a herald of Dorothy's adventure, as he's the first character to spot the approaching cyclone that whisks Dorothy away to Oz. - Character: Toto. Description: Toto is Dorothy's small, black dog. He and Dorothy have a close and loving relationship, and Dorothy is extremely loyal to him—she and Toto are whisked away to Oz in the first place because Dorothy decides to try to rescue Toto from the cyclone rather than leave him to his fate and join Aunt Em in the cyclone shelter. - Theme: Self-Doubt vs. Self-Confidence. Description: After Dorothy is swept away from Kansas and stranded in the bizarre Land of Oz, she meets three characters who wish to follow her and see the Wizard of Oz with her. But while Dorothy wants to ask the Wizard to send her back home, her new friends are more interested in changing something about themselves. Each of Dorothy's new companions doubts that they have everything it takes to be a complete person. However, it becomes clear throughout their journey that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion already possess what they think they lack. The Scarecrow wants a brain, but he's constantly devising clever plans and strategies for facing the deadly challenges of the Land of Oz. While the Tin Woodman claims to be heartless, his behavior throughout the adventure reveals him to be a kind and compassionate soul from the start. The Lion's cowardice isn't nearly as apparent as his bravery, as he voluntarily puts himself in dangerous and frightening situations to help his friends. Ultimately, the novel suggests that the only quality that any of them truly lacked was a willingness to rely on and believe in themselves. By assuming that only an external force like the Wizard of Oz can make them feel whole, they ignore what skills and qualities they already have in spades. Misunderstanding themselves in this way teaches a simple but effective lesson: that self-respect comes from within, not from without. Dorothy's companions didn't believe they were real people because they felt themselves lacking, but by relying on themselves during their adventure, they prove that they're just as real and as valuable as anyone else. The silver slippers themselves encapsulate this idea: Dorothy has had them on her feet since arriving in Oz but only finds out at the end of the novel that they've always been capable of transporting her back home. She simply needed to learn this about herself to accomplish her goal. - Theme: Home and Belonging. Description: Almost from the moment that a cyclone sends her to the strange Land of Oz, Dorothy is determined to find a way back home to Kansas and her Aunt Em. This highlights one of the novel's main points: that everyone has somewhere they truly belong. It's notable that Dorothy immediately wants to go home and even sheds tears at the thought of staying in Oz forever. Despite how magical and dazzling Oz seems to be, Dorothy still feels that she belongs back on the flat, gray prairies of Kansas. She expresses this sentiment again in her conversation with the Scarecrow. While he wonders why she'd want to leave a country as splendid as Oz, she explains that people always long for their home, no matter how beautiful other places might be. Put another way, feeling like she belongs and is at home is more important to Dorothy than marveling at Oz's many wonders. The way the Land of Oz is designed also illustrates the novel's insistence that every being has a specific place they belong, as each region of Oz is associated with a distinct direction and color. In symbolic language, Dorothy belongs on the gray Kansas prairies in the same way that the Munchkins dressed all in blue belong in the blue land of the East. Everyone has a neatly defined place somewhere that's perfect for them, even the tiny porcelain people who have a country just the right size for them. Dorothy's companions have also found their place in the world by the end of their adventure, and they seem delighted to start living in their new homes. Every displaced character, including the Wizard himself, has found a way home by the end of the novel. With this, The Wizard of Oz seems to suggest that it's not always immediately apparent where a person belongs—sometimes, as with the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, it's necessary for a person to search for and discover the place that feels the most like home to them. And for others, like Dorothy and the Wizard, traveling is a way to remind oneself that, as Dorothy famously says, "There's no place like home." - Theme: Good vs. Evil. Description: When a cyclone uproots Dorothy from her simple home in Kansas and carries her to the magical Land of Oz, she's dazzled by how different everything seems. Where the Kansas prairie is depicted as a gray and uniformly ordinary place, Oz is an exaggerated fairy tale world of opposites and extremes. One of the first things Dorothy learns about Oz is that its balance of good and evil is perfectly symmetrical; for instance, there are two good witches and two bad ones. The goodness or wickedness of the witches is never called into question, because their behavior speaks for itself. Morally (and literally, compared to Kansas), there are no shades of gray in Oz. As colorful and whimsical as the Land of Oz can often appear, it's equally defined by its unpleasantness. For every polite talking animal or benevolent witch, there's a gruesome beheading or a terrible witch who keeps an entire country enslaved. The sharp contrast between beautiful goodness and hideous wickedness reflects Dorothy's simple and childlike perspective. The extreme good vs. evil in Oz also heightens the tension and emphasizes Dorothy's childlike innocence by contrast. But even Dorothy participates in Oz's violence as she kills both wicked witches, though it's notable that both killings were accidental. It's also likely not a coincidence that the Wizard—arguably the only morally gray character in the novel—isn't native to Oz. Both Dorothy and the Wizard are from a "civilized" country, as the Witch of the North calls it: a place without witches, where good and evil aren't as clear-cut as they are in a children's story. In fact, in her longing to return to the gray, ordinary world of Kansas, Dorothy shows a remarkable maturity and willingness to face her complicated reality, rather than the simplicity that Oz offers. Part of growing up, this suggests, means learning to embrace shades of gray and a more nuanced understanding of good, evil, and morality, which Dorothy symbolically does when she returns to Kansas a more mature person than when she left. - Theme: Friendship. Description: Although she finds herself in the unfamiliar and often dangerous Land of Oz after being taken there by a cyclone, Dorothy soon finds comfort in the form of three new friends. As Dorothy travels towards the Emerald City in the hopes that the Wizard of Oz can send her back home to Kansas, she meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion along the way. They join together as a group while they discuss what they want the Wizard to give them, and their bond of friendship is ultimately what defines their adventure. When Dorothy meets these new companions, each of them feels inadequate and incomplete. But ironically, the Wizard's gifts aren't what brings out the best in them. Instead, their friendship with Dorothy and with one another makes them complete. While none of them can see the value in themselves, their journey together helps them see the good qualities in one another, as they test their mettle against Oz's many dangers. Before Dorothy encounters them, each of her companions are alone and friendless. The Scarecrow stands immobile and useless in the cornfield, the Tin Woodman is frozen by rust, and the Lion is too ashamed of his cowardice to befriend any of the other woodland creatures. Their loneliness makes it easy to look inward and focus on their perceived flaws, but they all find that joining Dorothy's party changes their perspective for the better. When they're traveling and facing dangers together, Dorothy's friends are compelled to look beyond themselves and use their talents to protect each other, which tends to bring out their best qualities. All in all, their friendship strengthens them and makes them better people, whether they realize it or not. This is especially evident towards the end of the novel, when all three of Dorothy's friends generously agree to continue to help her get home, even though their own desires have already been satisfied. This illustrates that friendship and caring for others can, somewhat ironically, offer a person opportunities for growth and development that are, perhaps, impossible to experience otherwise. - Climax: Dorothy and her friends discover that the supposedly great and powerful Wizard of Oz doesn't have any magical powers at all. - Summary: On the Kansas prairies, a young girl named Dorothy lives on a farm with her Aunt Em, her Uncle Henry, and her little black dog, Toto. While her surroundings are dull and gray, Dorothy still finds joy in playing with Toto. One day, a raging cyclone suddenly rolls through the prairie. Before Dorothy can join her relatives in the storm shelter, the force of the storm knocks her to the floor and picks up the entire farmhouse. Eventually, the house lands surprisingly softly, and Dorothy finds herself in a strange and beautiful country full of trees, rivers, and colorful flowers. Small people called Munchkins approach her, accompanied by an older woman: the Good Witch of the North. The Witch explains to Dorothy that she is now in the Land of Oz, and thanks her for killing the Wicked Witch of the East. Surprised at this remark, Dorothy notices that the farmhouse has indeed landed on someone wearing silver slippers. The Good Witch goes on to explain that the enchanted slippers belong to Dorothy now, and that the only remaining wicked witch in Oz is the Wicked Witch of the West. Dorothy expresses that she wants to go back home to Kansas right away, but the Good Witch of the North regretfully tells her that a vast, uncrossable desert surrounds Oz on all sides, and so Dorothy has no choice but to stay in Oz forever. Dorothy is distressed at this news, as she's sure that Aunt Em must be worried about her. Upon reflection, the Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy to travel to the Emerald City and see the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, who can surely send Dorothy back home. The Witch kisses Dorothy's forehead, which leaves a glowing mark. With this mark on her head, the Witch explains, no one would dare to harm Dorothy. After putting on the silver slippers and preparing for the journey, Dorothy sets off with Toto down the yellow brick road, which leads to the Emerald City. Along the way, she meets three strange new companions: the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion. The Scarecrow has a head full of straw, and he dearly wishes he had a brain. The Tin Woodman is a hollow man made of tin who wants a heart more than anything. The Cowardly Lion is a great beast who nonetheless seems to be afraid of everyone and everything, and he therefore desires courage. All three of them agree to accompany Dorothy on her quest in the hopes that the Wizard of Oz can grant them what they want as well as sending Dorothy home. The group encounters many perils on their way to the Emerald City, and each of Dorothy's new friends seems to display the quality they believe they lack, without even noticing. The Scarecrow comes up with clever plans, the Tin Woodman shows deep compassion for every innocent creature, and the Cowardly Lion displays a surprising amount of bravery. After many trials and tribulations, the four friends and Toto finally arrive at the gates of the Emerald City. The reclusive Wizard of Oz agrees to speak with each of them one at a time, and he assumes a different fearsome form during each meeting. One by one, he agrees to grant each of the travelers' requests, but only if they destroy the Wicked Witch of the West first. Disappointed and frightened by this idea, Dorothy and her friends set out for the west, hoping they can somehow accomplish what the Wizard has tasked them with. Using her magic eye, the Wicked Witch sees the travelers arrive in her country from afar. Furious, she uses her enchanted Golden Cap to send an army of winged monkeys after Dorothy and her friends. They destroy the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, and capture the Lion and Dorothy, whom the Wicked Witch decides to enslave. Eventually, after the Wicked Witch steals one of Dorothy's silver slippers to claim its power for herself, Dorothy furiously throws a bucket of water at the Witch, inadvertently melting her. A race of people called the Winkies, whom the Wicked Witch had enslaved, thank Dorothy for freeing them and agree to reassemble the ruined Scarecrow and Tin Woodman. With the group of friends reunited, Dorothy uses the Golden Cap to have the winged monkeys carry them all the way back to the Emerald City. After much waiting, the Wizard finally agrees to speak with Dorothy and her friends again. They tell him that they've killed the Wicked Witch, but he still orders them to return tomorrow. Just then, Toto accidentally knocks over a screen nearby, revealing the Wizard to be nothing but a small old man who's only been pretending to be a Wizard for years. The man tries to console Dorothy's friends by giving them what they desire, in his own "humbug" way. He gives the Scarecrow a brain of sorts, the Tin Man a silk heart, and he offers the Lion a drink that the Wizard insists is courage. The three of them are satisfied, as they now believe they have what they asked for. As for Dorothy, however, the Wizard has no choice but to fly her back to Kansas in a hot air balloon. The Wizard explains that he once lived in Omaha as a circus performer, and now longs to return anyway. On the day of the departure, the balloon takes off, but the Wizard accidentally leaves Dorothy behind, as she's busy trying to catch Toto in the watching crowd. The Wizard has no way of bringing the balloon back down, and Dorothy is stranded in Oz once again. As he leaves, the Wizard puts the wise Scarecrow in charge of the Emerald City. Dorothy's friends are still determined to see her get back home, so they decide to travel south and ask Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, for help. The group sets off on one last adventure, during which the Lion displays his bravery once again, killing an enormous spider and becoming the king of the beasts. At last, they arrive at Glinda's palace, where the Good Witch generously offers to help them. She explains to Dorothy that the silver slippers have the power to take the wearer anywhere they wish to go in an instant, so Dorothy could have gone home the entire time. Dorothy's friends remind Dorothy that they're all much better off for having known her, and they exchange heartfelt goodbyes as she prepares to leave Oz at last. Glinda promises to deliver the Scarecrow back to the Emerald City to rule there, the Tin Man to the west to rule over the Winkies, and the Lion back to the forest to live as king of the beasts. After one last goodbye, Dorothy activates the magic charm of the slippers and finally returns to Kansas, where Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have built a new house on the prairie. She runs into her aunt's arms, and Aunt Em is relieved to see Dorothy safe and sound. After her long journey, Dorothy is overjoyed to be home again.