read chapters 4-7 and answer discussion questions.review all attachments

Exploring Literary Concepts in Short Stories “A story is not like a road to follow . . . it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and dis - covering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space.” —Alice Munro, Nobel Prize winner 7 © VideoBlocks Learning Objectives After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Identify and describe elements of plot and point of view in a work of literature.

• Analyze the themes and concepts presented in this chapter's literary selections.

• Identify the use of irony in characters and plot development.

• Identify the theme or themes and symbols present in a work of literature, describing plot and character details that support those themes.

• Recognize the use of existential thought in a work of literature. Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 This brief anthology provides an opportunity for you to read additional stories, explore the liter- ary concepts and techniques that we have considered, and gain life-applicable insights through engagement in the imaginative world that each one presents.

7.1 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View In “How I Met My Husband,” even the title hints at the importance that events and decisions are likely to have in the development of the story. But, because the narrator is looking back at situa - tions and actions, her insights and feelings are also prominent, creating a reflective tone. Alice Munro (1931—) Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, a small town in southern Ontario, Canada. She began publishing short stories when she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. Since then, she has published seven collections of her stories, three of which received the Governor General’s Award for fiction. Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 in rec- ognition of her distinctive craft and contributions to short story writing.

Much of her work reflects perceptions she gained from observing the ordi- nary happenings and relationships of people in her small town and its rural surroundings. Speaking subtly to realities in today’s world, Munro’s work has a “looking back” quality, developed not with nostalgia but with clarity, humor, and insight, especially about women. ASSOCIATED PRESS/Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press How I Met My Husband Alice Munro (1974) We heard the plane come over at noon, roaring through the radio news, and we were sure it was going to hit the house, so we all ran out into the yard. We saw it come in over the tree tops, all red and silver, the first close-up plane I ever saw. Mrs. Peebles screamed.

“Crash landing,” their little boy said. Joey was his name.

“It’s okay,” said Dr. Peebles. “He knows what he’s doing.” Dr.

Peebles was only an animal doctor, but had a calming way of talk - ing, like any doctor.

This was my first job —working for Dr. and Mrs. Peebles, who had bought an old house out on the Fifth Line, about five miles out of town. It was just when the trend was starting of town people buy - ing up old farms, not to work them but to live on them.

We watched the plane land across the road, where the fairgrounds used to be. It did make a good landing field, nice and level for the old race track, and the barns and display sheds torn down for scrap lumber so there was nothing in the way. Even the old grandstand bays had burned.

“All right,” said Mrs. Peebles, snappy as she always was when she got over her nerves. “Let’s go back in the house. Let’s not stand here gawking like a set of farmers.” Note that this story uses a first-person point of view.

Everything is seen through the eyes of a woman who is looking back at an experi- ence she had as a teenager. 5 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 She didn’t say that to hurt my feelings. It never occurred to her.

I was just setting the dessert down when Loretta Bird arrived, out of breath, at the screen door.

“I thought it was going to crash into the house and kill youse all!” She lived on the next place and the Peebleses thought she was a country-woman, they didn’t know the difference. She and her hus- band didn’t farm, he worked on the roads and had a bad name for drinking. They had seven children and couldn’t get credit at the HiWay Grocery. The Peebleses made her welcome, not knowing any better, as I say, and offered her dessert.

Dessert was never anything to write home about, at their place. A dish of Jell-O or sliced bananas or fruit out of a tin. “Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,” my mother used to say, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently.

Loretta Bird saw me getting the can of peaches.

“Oh, never mind,” she said. “I haven’t got the right kind of a stomach to trust what comes out of those tins, I can only eat home c a n nin g .” I could have slapped her. I bet she never put down fruit in her life.

“I know what he’s landed here for,” she said. “He’s got permis - sion to use the fairgrounds and take people up for rides. It costs a dollar. It’s the same fellow who was over at Palmerston last week and was up the lakeshore before that. I wouldn’t go up, if you paid me.” “I’d jump at the chance,” Dr. Peebles said. “I’d like to see this neighborhood from the air.” Mrs. Peebles said she would just as soon see it from the ground.

Joey said he wanted to go and Heather did, too. Joey was nine and Heather was seven.

“Would you, Edie?” Heather said.

I said I didn’t know. I was scared but I never admitted that, espe - cially in front of children I was taking care of.

“People are going to be coming out here in their cars raising dust and trampling your property, if I was you I would complain,” Loretta said. She hooked her legs around the chair rung and I knew we were in for a lengthy visit.

After Dr. Peebles went back to his office or out on his next call and Mrs. Peebles went for her nap, she would hang around me while I was trying to do the dishes. She would pass remarks about the Peebleses in their own house.

“She wouldn’t find time to lay down in the middle of the day, if she had seven kids like I got.” She asked me did they fight and did they keep things in the dresser drawer not to have babies with. She said it was a sin if they did. I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about. 10 15 20 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 I was fifteen and away from home for the first time. My parents had made the effort and sent me to high school for a year, but I didn’t like it, I was shy of strangers and the work was hard, they didn’t make it nice for you or explain the way they do now. At the end of the year the averages were published in the paper, and mine came out at the very bottom, 37 percent. My father said that’s enough and I didn’t blame him. The last thing I wanted, anyway, was to go on and end up teaching school. It happened the very day the paper came out with my disgrace in it, Dr. Peebles was staying at our place for dinner, having just helped one of our cows have twins, and he said I looked smart to him and his wife was looking for a girl to help. He said she felt tied down, with the two children, out in the country. I guess she would, my mother said, being polite, though I could tell from her face she was won- dering what on earth it would be like to have only two children and no barn work, and then to be complaining.

When I went home I would describe to them the work I had to do, and it made everybody laugh. Mrs. Peebles had an automatic washer and dryer, the first I ever saw. I have had those in my own home for such a long time now it’s hard to remember how much of a miracle it was to me, not having to struggle with the wringer and hang up and haul down. Let alone not having to heat water. Then there was practically no baking. Mrs. Peebles said she couldn’t make pie crust, the most amazing thing I ever heard a woman admit. I could, of course, and I could make light biscuits and a white cake and a dark cake, but they didn’t want it, she said they watched their figures. The only thing I didn’t like about work - ing there, in fact, was feeling half hungry a lot of the time. I used to bring back a box of doughnuts made out at home, and hide them under my bed. The children found out, and I didn’t mind sharing, but I thought I better bind them to secrecy.

The day after the plane landed Mrs. Peebles put both children in the car and drove over to Chesley to get their hair cut. There was a good woman then at Chesley for doing hair. She got hers done at the same place Mrs. Peebles did, and that meant they would be gone a good while. She had to pick a day Dr. Peebles wasn’t going out into the country, she didn’t have her own car. Cars were still in short supply then, after the war.

I loved being left in the house alone, to do my work at leisure. The kitchen was all white and bright yellow, with fluorescent lights.

That was before they ever thought of making the appliances all different colors and doing the cupboards like dark old wood and hiding the lighting. I loved light. I loved the double sink. So would anybody new-come from washing dishes in a dish pan with a rag- plugged hole on an oilcloth-covered table by light of a coal-oil lamp. I kept everything shining.

The bathroom too. I had a bath in there once a week. They wouldn’t have minded if I took one oftener, but to me it seemed like asking too much, or maybe risking making it less wonderful.

The basin and the tub and the toilet were all pink, and there were glass doors with flamingoes painted on them, to shut off the tub.

The light had a rosy cast and the mat sank under your feet like 25 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 snow, except that it was warm. The mirror was three-way. With the mirror all steamed up and the air like a perfume cloud, from things I was allowed to use, I stood up on the side of the tub and admired myself naked, from three directions. Sometimes I thought about the way we lived out at home and the way we lived here and how one way was so hard to imagine when you were living the other way. But I thought it was still a lot easier living the way we lived at home, to picture something like this, the painted flamingoes and the warmth and the soft mat, than it was for anybody knowing only things like this to picture how it was the other way. And why was that?

I was through my jobs in no time, and had the vegetables peeled for supper and sitting in cold water besides. Then I went into Mrs.

Peebles’ bedroom. I had been in there plenty of times, cleaning, and I always took a good look in her closet, at the clothes she had hanging there. I wouldn’t have looked in her drawers, but a closet is open to anybody. That’s a lie. I would have looked in drawers, but I would have felt worse doing it and been more scared she could tell.

Some clothes in her closet she wore all the time, I was quite famil- iar with them. Others she never put on, they were pushed to the back. I was disappointed to see no wedding dress. But there was one long dress I could just see the skirt of, and I was hungering to see the rest. Now I took note of where it hung and lifted it out. It was satin, a lovely weight on my arm, light bluish-green in color, almost silvery. It had a fitted, pointed waist and a full skirt and an off-the-shoulder fold hiding the little sleeves.

Next thing was easy. I got out of my own things and slipped it on.

I was slimmer at fifteen than anybody would believe who knows me now and the fit was beautiful. I didn’t, of course, have a strap - less bra on, which was what it needed, I just had to slide my straps down my arms under the material. Then I tried pinning up my hair, to get the effect. One thing led to another. I put on rouge and lip - stick and eyebrow pencil from her dresser. The heat of the day and the weight of the satin and all the excitement made me thirsty, and I went out to the kitchen, got-up as I was, to get a glass of ginger ale with ice cubes from the refrigerator. The Peebles drank ginger ale, or fruit drinks, all day, like water, and I was getting so I did too. Also there was no limit on ice cubes, which I was so fond of I would even put them in a glass of milk.

I turned from putting the ice tray back and saw a man watching me through the screen. It was the luckiest thing in the world I didn’t spill the ginger ale down the front of me then and there.

“I never meant to scare you. I knocked but you were getting the ice out, you didn’t hear me.” I couldn’t see what he looked like, he was dark the way somebody is pressed up against a screen door with the bright daylight behind them. I only knew he wasn’t from around here.

“I’m from the plane over there. My name is Chris Watters and what I was wondering was if I could use that pump.” 30 35 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 There was a pump in the yard. That was the way the people used to get their water. Now I noticed he was carrying a pail.

“You’re welcome,” I said, “I can get it from the tap and save you pumping.” I guess I wanted him to know we had piped water, didn’t pump ourselves.

“I don’t mind the exercise.” He didn’t move, though, and finally he said, “Were you going to a dance?” Seeing a stranger there had made me entirely forget how I was dressed.

“Or is that the way ladies around here generally get dressed up in the afternoon?” I didn’t know how to joke back then. I was too embarrassed.

“You live here? Are you the lady of the house?” “I’m the hired girl.” Some people change when they find that out, their whole way of looking at you and speaking to you changes, but his didn’t.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you you look very nice. I was so sur- prised when I looked in the door and saw you. Just because you looked so nice and beautiful.” I wasn’t even old enough then to realize how out of the common it is, for a man to say something like that to a woman, or some - body he is treating like a woman. For a man to say a word like beautiful . I wasn’t old enough to realize or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away. Not that I didn’t like him, but just that it upset me so, having him look at me, and me trying to think of something to say.

He must have understood. He said good-bye, and thanked me, and went and started filling his pail from the pump. I stood behind the Venetian blinds in the dining room, watching him. When he had gone, I went into the bedroom and took the dress off and put it back in the same place. I dressed in my own clothes and took my hair down and washed my face, wiping it on Kleenex, which I threw in the wastebasket. r The Peebleses asked me what kind of man he was. Young, middle- aged, short, tall? I couldn’t say.

“Good-looking?” Dr. Peebles teased me.

I couldn’t think a thing but that he would be coming to get his water again, he would be talking to Dr. or Mrs. Peebles making friends with them, and he would mention seeing me that first afternoon dressed up. Why not mention it? He would think it was funny. And no idea of the trouble it would get me into.

After supper the Peebleses drove into town to go to a movie.

She wanted to go somewhere with her hair fresh done. I sat in my bright kitchen wondering what to do, knowing I would never 40 45 50 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 sleep. Mrs. Peebles might not fire me, when she found out, but it would give her a different feeling about me altogether. This was the first place I ever worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you aren’t dishonest, that isn’t enough. They like to feel you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on. I don’t mean they weren’t kind to me, because they were. They had me eat my meals with them (to tell the truth I expected to, I didn’t know there were families who don’t) and sometimes they took me along in the car.

But all the same.

I went up and checked on the children being asleep and then I went out. I had to do it. I crossed the road and went in the old fair- grounds gate. The plane looked unnatural sitting there, and shin - ing with the moon. Off at the far side of the fairgrounds, where the bush was taking over, I saw his tent.

He was sitting outside it smoking a cigarette. He saw me coming.

“Hello, were you looking for a plane ride? I don’t start taking people up till tomorrow.” Then he looked again and said, “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t know you without your long dress on.” My heart was knocking away, my tongue was dried up. I had to say something. But I couldn’t. My throat was closed and I was like a deaf-and-dumb.

“Did you want a ride? Sit down. Have a cigarette.” I couldn’t even shake my head to say no, so he gave me one.

“Put it in your mouth or I can’t light it. It’s a good thing I’m used to shy ladies.” I did. It wasn’t the first time I had smoked a cigarette, actually.

My girlfriend out home, Muriel Lowe, used to steal them from her b r o t h e r.

“Look at your hand shaking. Did you just want to have a chat, or what?” In one burst I said, “I wisht you wouldn’t say anything about that dress.” “What dress? Oh, the long dress.” “It’s Mrs. Peebles’.” “Whose? Oh, the lady you work for? Is that it? She wasn’t home so you got dressed up in her dress, eh? You got dressed up and played queen. I don’t blame you. You’re not smoking the cigarette right. Don’t just puff. Draw it in. Did anybody ever show you how to inhale? Are you scared I’ll tell on you? Is that it?” I was so ashamed at having to ask him to connive this way I couldn’t nod. I just looked at him and he saw yes.

“Well I won’t. I won’t in the slightest way mention it or embarrass you. I give you my word of honor.” 55 60 65 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 Then he changed the subject, to help me out, seeing I couldn’t even thank him.

“What do you think of this sign?” It was a board sign lying practically at my feet. SEE THE WORLD FROM THE SKY. ADULTS $1.00, CHILDREN 50¢. QUALIFIED PILOT.

“My old sign was getting pretty beat up, I thought I’d make a new one. That’s what I’ve been doing with my time today.” The lettering wasn’t all that handsome, I thought. I could have done a better one in half an hour.

“I’m not an expert at signmaking.” “It’s very good,” I said.

“I don’t need it for publicity, word of mouth is usually enough. I turned away two carloads tonight. I felt like taking it easy. I didn’t tell them ladies were dropping in to visit me.” Now I remembered the children and I was scared again, in case one of them had waked up and called me and I wasn’t there.

“Do you have to go so soon?” I remembered some manners. “Thank you for the cigarette.” “Don’t forget. You have my word of honor.” I tore off across the fairgrounds, scared I’d see the car heading home from town. My sense of time was mixed up, I didn’t know how long I’d been out of the house. But it was all right, it wasn’t late, the children were asleep. I got in bed myself and lay think- ing what a lucky end to the day, after all, and among things to be grateful for I could be grateful Loretta Bird hadn’t been the one who caught me. r The yard and borders didn’t get trampled, it wasn’t as bad as that.

All the same it seemed very public, around the house. The sign was on the fairgrounds gate. People came mostly after supper but a good many in the afternoon, too. The Bird children all came with - out fifty cents between them and hung on the gate. We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn’t excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be out on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.

“Why don’t you come over? I’ll take you up in my plane.” “I’m saving my money,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“For what? For getting married?” I shook my head.

“I’ll take you up for free if you come sometime when it’s slack. I thought you would come, and have another cigarette.” 70 75 80 85 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 I made a face to hush him, because you never could tell when the children would be sneaking around the porch, or Mrs. Peebles herself listening in the house. Sometimes she came out and had a conversation with him. He told her things he hadn’t bothered to tell me. But then I hadn’t thought to ask. He told her he had been in the War, that was where he learned to fly a plane, and now he couldn’t settle down to ordinary life, this was what he liked. She said she couldn’t imagine anybody liking such a thing. Though sometimes, she said, she was almost bored enough to try anything herself, she wasn’t brought up to living in the country. It’s all my husband’s idea, she said. This was news to me.

“Maybe you ought to give flying lessons,” she said.

“Would you take them?” She just laughed. r Sunday was a busy flying day in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits. We were all sitting out watching. Joey and Heather were over on the fence with the Bird kids. Their father had said they could go, after their mother saying all week they couldn’t.

A car came down the road past the parked cars and pulled up right in the drive. It was Loretta Bird who got out, all importance, and on the driver’s side another woman got out, more sedately. She was wearing sunglasses.

“This is a lady looking for the man that flies the plane,” Loretta Bird said. “I heard her inquire in the hotel coffee shop where I was having a Coke and I brought her out.” “I’m sorry to bother you,” the lady said. “I’m Alice Kelling, Mr.

Watters’ fiancée.” This Alice Kelling had on a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top. Her bust looked to me rather low and bumpy.

She had a worried face. Her hair had had a permanent, but had grown out, and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face.

Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her. But you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or edu- cated, or both.

Dr. Peebles stood up and introduced himself and his wife and me and asked her to be seated.

“He’s up in the air right now, but you’re welcome to sit and wait.

He gets his water here and he hasn’t been yet. He’ll probably take his break about five.” “That is him, then?” said Alice Kelling, wrinkling and straining at the sk y.

“He’s not in the habit of running out on you, taking a different name?” Dr. Peebles laughed. He was the one, not his wife, to offer iced tea. Then she sent me into the kitchen to fix it. She smiled.

She was wearing sunglasses too. 90 95 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 “He never mentioned his fiancée,” she said.

I loved fixing iced tea with lots of ice and slices of lemon in tall glasses. I ought to have mentioned before, Dr. Peebles was an abstainer, at least around the house, or I wouldn’t have been allowed to take the place. I had to fix a glass for Loretta Bird, too, though it galled me, and when I went out she had settled in my lawn chair, leaving me the steps.

“I knew you was a nurse when I first heard you in that coffee shop.” “How would you know a thing like that?” “I get my hunches about people. Was that how you met him, nursing?” “Chris? Well yes. Yes, it was.” “Oh, were you overseas?” said Mrs. Peebles.

“No, it was before he went overseas. I nursed him when he was stationed at Centralia and had a ruptured appendix. We got engaged and then he went overseas. My, this is refreshing, after a long drive.” “He’ll be glad to see you,” Dr. Peebles said, “It’s a rackety kind of life, isn’t it, not staying in one place long enough to really make friends.” “Youse’ve had a long engagement,” Loretta Bird said.

Alice Kelling passed that over. “I was going to get a room at the hotel, but when I was offered directions I came on out. Do you think I could phone them?” “No need,” Dr. Peebles said. “You’re five miles away from him if you stay at the hotel. Here, you’re right across the road. Stay with us. We’ve got rooms on rooms, look at this big house.” Asking people to stay, just like that, is certainly a country thing, and maybe seemed natural to him now, but not to Mrs. Peebles, from the way she said, oh yes, we have plenty of room. Or to Alice Kelling, who kept protesting, but let herself be worn down. I got the feeling it was a temptation to her, to be that close. I was trying for a look at her ring. Her nails were painted red, her fingers were freckled and wrinkled. It was a tiny stone. Muriel Lowe’s cousin had one twice as big.

Chris came to get his water, later in the afternoon just as Dr.

Peebles had predicted. He must have recognized the car from a way off. He came smiling.

“Here I am chasing after you to see what you’re up to,” called Alice Kelling. She got up and went to meet him and they kissed, just touched, in front of us.

“You’re going to spend a lot on gas that way,” Chris said.

Dr. Peebles invited Chris to stay for supper, since he had already put up the sign that said: NO MORE RIDES TILL 7 P.M. Mrs. Peebles wanted it served in the yard, in spite of bugs. One thing strange 100 105 110 115 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 to anybody from the country is this eating outside. I had made a potato salad earlier and she had made a jellied salad, that was one thing she could do, so it was just a matter of getting those out, and some sliced meat and cucumbers and fresh leaf lettuce.

Loretta Bird hung around for some time saying, “Oh, well. I guess I better get home to those yappers,” and, “It’s so nice just sitting here, I sure hate to get up,” but nobody invited her, I was relieved to see, and finally she had to go.

That night after rides were finished Alice Kelling and Chris went off somewhere in her car. I lay awake till they got back. When I saw the car lights sweep my ceiling I got up to look down on them through the slats of my blind. I don’t know what I thought I was going to see. Muriel Lowe and I used to sleep on her front veranda and watch her sister and her sister’s boyfriend saying good night.

Afterwards we couldn’t get to sleep, for longing for somebody to kiss us and rub up against us and we would talk about suppose you were out in a boat with a boy and he wouldn’t bring you in to shore unless you did it, or what if somebody got you trapped in a barn, you would have to, wouldn’t you, it wouldn’t be your fault.

Muriel said her two girl cousins used to try with a toilet paper roll that one of them was a boy. We wouldn’t do anything like that; just lay and wondered.

All that happened was that Chris got out on one side and she got out on the other and they walked off separately—him towards the fairgrounds and her toward the house. I got back in bed and imag- ined about me coming home with him, not like that.

Next morning Alice Kelling got up late and I fixed a grapefruit for her the way I had learned and Mrs. Peebles sat down with her to visit and have another cup of coffee. Mrs. Peebles seemed pleased enough now, having company. Alice Kelling said she guessed she better get used to putting in a day just watching Chris take off and come down, and Mrs. Peebles said she didn’t know if she should suggest it because Alice Kelling was the one with the car, but the lake was only twenty-five miles away and what a good day for a picnic.

Alice Kelling took her up on the idea and by eleven o’clock they were in the car, with Joey and Heather and a sandwich lunch I had made. The only thing was that Chris hadn’t come down, and she wanted to tell him where they were going.

“Edie’ll go over and tell him,” Mrs. Peebles said. “There’s no p ro b l e m .” Alice Kelling wrinkled her face and agreed.

“Be sure and tell him we’ll be back by five!” I didn’t see that he would be concerned about knowing this right away, and I thought of him eating whatever he ate over there, alone, cooking on his camp stove, so I got to work and mixed up a crumb cake and baked it, in between the other work I had to do; then, when it was a bit cooled, wrapped it in a tea towel. I didn’t do anything to myself but take off my apron and comb my hair.

I would like to have put some makeup on, but I was too afraid 120 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 it would remind him of the way he first saw me, and that would humiliate me all over again.

He had come and put another sign on the gate: NO RIDES THIS P.M. APOLOGIES. I worried that he wasn’t feeling well. No sign of him outside and the tent flap was down. I knocked on the pole.

“Come in,” he said, in a voice that would just as soon have said Stay out.

I lifted the flap.

“Oh, it’s you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.” He had been just sitting on the side of the bed, smoking. Why not at least sit and smoke in the fresh air?

“I brought a cake and hope you’re not sick,” I said.

“Why would I be sick? Oh—that sign. That’s all right. I’m just tired of talking to people. I don’t mean you. Have a seat.” He pinned back the tent flap. “Get some fresh air in here.” I sat on the edge of the bed, there was no place else. It was one of those fold-up cots, really; I remembered and gave him his fiancée’s message.

He ate some of the cake. “Good.” “Put the rest away for when you’re hungry later.” “I’ll tell you a secret. I won’t be around here much longer.” “Are you getting married?” “Ha ha. What time did you say they’d be back?” “Five o’clock.” “Well, by that time this place will have seen the last of me. A plane can get further than a car.” He unwrapped the cake and ate another piece of it, absent-mindedly.

“Now you’ll be thirsty.” “There’s some water in the pail.” “It won’t be very cold. I could bring some fresh. I could bring some ice from the refrigerator.” “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. I want a nice long time of saying good-bye to you.” He put the cake away carefully and sat beside me and started those little kisses so soft I can’t ever let myself think about them, such kindness in his face and lovely kisses, all over my eyelids and neck and ears, all over, then me kissing back as well as I could (I had only kissed a boy on a dare before, and kissed my own arms for practice) and we lay back on the cot and pressed together, just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way. It was lovely in the tent, that smell of grass and hot tent cloth with the sun beating down on it, and he said, “I wouldn’t do you any harm for the world.” Once, when he had rolled on top of me and we were sort of rocking together on the cot, he said softly, 125 130 135 140 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 “Oh, no,” and freed himself and jumped up and got the water pail. He splashed some of it on his neck and face, and the little bit left, on me lying there.

“That’s to cool us off, miss.” When we said good-bye I wasn’t at all sad, because he held my face and said, “I’m going to write you a letter. I’ll tell you where I am and maybe you can come and see me. Would you like that?

Okay then. You wait.” I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone. r No consternation at first about the plane being gone. They thought he had taken somebody up, and I didn’t enlighten them.

Dr. Peebles had phoned he had to go to the country, so there was just us having supper, and then Loretta Bird thrusting her head in the door and saying, “I see he’s took off.” “What?” said Alice Kelling, and pushed back her chair.

“The kids come and told me this afternoon he was taking down his tent. Did he think he’d run through all the business there was around here? He didn’t take off without letting you know, did he?” “He’ll send me word,” Alice Kelling said. “He’ll probably phone tonight. He’s terribly restless, since the war.” “Edie, he didn’t mention to you, did he?” Mrs. Kelling said, “When you took over the message?” “Yes,” I said. So far so true.

“Well, why didn’t you say?” All of them were looking at me. “Did he say where he was going?” “He said he might try Bayfield,” I said. What made me tell such a lie? I didn’t intend it.

“Bayfield, how far is that?” said Alice Kelling.

Mrs. Peebles said, “Thirty, thirty-five miles.” “That’s not far. Oh, well, that’s really not far at all. It’s on the lake, isn’t it?” You’d think I’d be ashamed of myself setting her on the wrong track. I did it to give him more time, whatever time he needed. I lied for him, and also, I have to admit, for me. Women should stick together and not do things like that. I see that now, but didn’t then. I never thought of myself as being in any way like her, or coming to the same troubles, ever.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. I thought she suspected my lie.

“When did he mention this to you?” “ E a r l i e r.” “When you were over at the plane?” “ Ye s .” 145 150 155 160 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 “You must’ve stayed and had a chat.” She smiled at me, not a nice smile. “You must’ve stayed and had a little visit with him.” “I took a cake,” I said, thinking that telling some truth would spare me telling the rest.

“We didn’t have a cake,” said Mrs. Peebles rather sharply.

“I baked one.” Alice Kelling said, “That was very friendly of you.” “Did you get permission,” said Loretta Bird. “You never know what these girls’ll do next,” she said. “It’s not they mean harm so much, as they’re ignorant.” “The cake is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Peebles broke in. “Edie, I wasn’t aware you knew Chris that well.” I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m not surprised,” Alice Kelling said in a high voice. “I knew by the look of her as soon as I saw her. We get them at the hospital all the time.” She looked hard at me with her stretched smile.

“Having their babies. We have to put them in a special ward because of their diseases. Little country tramps. Fourteen and fif- teen years old. You should see the babies they have, too.” “There was a bad woman here in town had a baby that pus was running out of its eyes,” Loretta Bird put in.

“Wait a minute,” said Mrs. Peebles. “What is this talk? Edie. What about you and Mr. Watters? Were you intimate with him?” “Yes,” I said. I was thinking of us lying on the cot and kissing, wasn’t that intimate? And I would never deny it.

They were all one minute quiet, even Loretta Bird.

“Well,” said Mrs. Peebles, “I am surprised. I think I need a ciga - rette. This is the first of any such tendencies I’ve seen in her,” she said, speaking to Alice Kelling, but Alice Kelling was looking at me.

“Loose little bitch.” Tears ran down her face. “Loose little bitch, aren’t you? I knew as soon as I saw you. Men despise girls like you.

He just made use of you and went off, you know that, don’t you?

Girls like you are just nothing, they’re just public conveniences, just filthy little rags!” “Oh, now,” said Mrs. Peebles.

“Filthy,” Alice Kelling sobbed. “Filthy little rag!” “Don’t get yourself upset,” Loretta Bird said. She was swollen up with pleasure at being in on this scene. “Men are all the same.” “Edie, I’m very surprised,” Mrs. Peebles said. “I thought your par - ents were so strict. You don’t want to have a baby, do you?” I’m still ashamed of what happened next. I lost control, just like a six-year-old, I started howling. “You don’t get a baby from just doing that!” “You see. Some of them are that ignorant,” Loretta Bird said.

But Mrs. Peebles jumped up and caught my arms and shook me. 165 170 175 180 185 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 “Calm down. Don’t get hysterical. Calm down. Stop crying. Listen to me. Listen. I’m wondering, if you know what being intimate means. Now tell me. What did you think it meant?” “Kissing,” I howled.

She let go. “Oh, Edie. Stop it. Don’t be silly. It’s all right. It’s all a misunderstanding. Being intimate means a lot more than that. Oh, I wondered.” “She’s trying to cover up, now,” said Alice Kelling. “Yes. She’s not so stupid. She sees she got herself in trouble.” “I believe her,” Mrs. Peebles said. “This is an awful scene.” “Well there is one way to find out,” said Alice Kelling, getting up.

“After all, I am a nurse.” Mrs. Peebles drew a breath and said, “No. No. Go to your room, Edie. And stop that noise. This is too disgusting.” I heard the car start in a little while. I tried to stop crying, pulling back each wave as it started over me. Finally, I succeeded, and lay heaving on the bed.

Mrs. Peebles came and stood in the doorway.

“She’s gone,” she said. “That Bird woman too. Of course, you know you should never have gone near that man and that is the cause of all this trouble. I have a headache. As soon as you can, go and wash your face in cold water and get at the dishes and we will not say any more about this.” r Nor we didn’t. I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from. Mrs. Peebles was not very friendly to me afterward, but she was fair. Not very friendly is the wrong way of describing what she was. She never had been very friendly. It was just that now she had to see me all the time and it got on her nerves, a little.

As for me, I put it all out of my mind like a bad dream and concen - trated on waiting for my letter. The mail came every day except Sunday, between one-thirty and two in the afternoon, a good time for me because Mrs. Peebles was always having her nap. I would get the kitchen all cleaned and then go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. I was perfectly happy, waiting. I for - got all about Alice Kelling and her misery and awful talk and Mrs.

Peebles and her chilliness and the embarrassment of whether she had told Dr. Peebles and the face of Loretta Bird, getting her fill of other people’s troubles. I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn’t the day. The mailman was a Carmichael. I knew by his face because there are a lot of Carmichaels living out by us and so many of them have a sort of sticking-out top lip. So I asked his name (he was a young man, shy, but good humored, anybody could ask him anything) and then I said, “I knew by your face!” He was pleased by that and always glad to see me and got a little less shy. “You’ve got the smile I’ve been waiting on all day!” he used to holler out the car window. 190 195 Exploring Plot and First-Person Point of View Chapter 7 It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come.

I believed in it coming just like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. I just put off my hope from day to day, and there was the goldenrod out around the mailbox and the children gone back to school, and the leaves turning, and I was wearing a sweater when I went to wait. One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full- blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me: No letter was ever going to come. It was an impossible idea to get used to. No, not impossible. If I thought about Chris’s face when he said he was going to write to me, it was impossible, but if I forgot that and thought about the actual tin mailbox, empty, it was plain and true. I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn’t have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.

Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mail - boxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to get gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that. So I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be. Even though there might be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still is better.

I was surprised when the mailman phoned the Peebleses’ place in the evening and asked for me. He said he missed me. He asked if I would like to go to Goderich, where some well-known movie was on, I forget now what. So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry.

He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy. “How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro (1974) (7,247 words), fr\ om Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro, Random House. RESPONSE AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS Exploring Point of View 1.

T his story is told in the first person by a woman who is looking back at an experience she had as a teenager. What are the strengths and limitations of such a narrator?

2.

E die makes this statement in the opening of the last section of the story: “I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from.” What does this statement reveal about her reliability as a narrator, especially in regard to Chris?

Exploring Plot 3.

T he arrival of Chris and his plane initiates the action, and his appearance at the window while Edie is dressing up in Mrs. Peebles’s clothes provides a jolting start to their relationship. What other means does Munro use to advance the plot? 200 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 7.2 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony “The Diamond Necklace” illustrates how irony can be used as the central element in developing plot in a story. Particular assumptions that the protagonist makes about social acceptance and about personal sacrifice create drama, reveal character, and provide ironic surprise. Guy de Maupassant (1850 –1893) Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy, France, to wealthy parents. He studied law at the University of Paris. Gustave Flaubert, one of France’s most prominent novelists, was a close friend of de Maupassant’s mother and a strong influence on the writer, inviting him into the literary community. De Maupassant, considered one of the fathers of the short story form, was a prolific writer. In addition to six novels, he wrote plays and poetry—and nearly 300 short stories. “The Diamond Necklace” was first published in 1884 in Le Gaulois , a French daily newspaper. © adoc-photos/Historical/Corbis The Diamond Necklace Guy de Maupassant (1884), Translated by Albert M. C. McMaster, B.A.; A.E. Henderson, B.A.; Mme. Quesada; and others The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved, married by any rich and distinguished man; so she let herself be married to a little clerk of the Ministry of Public Instruction.

She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but she was unhappy as if she had really fallen from a higher station; since with women there is neither caste nor rank, for beauty, grace and charm take the place of family and birth. Natural ingenuity, instinct for what is elegant, a supple mind are their sole hierarchy, and often make of women of the people the equals of the very greatest ladies.

Mathilde suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries. She was distressed at the poverty of her dwelling, at the bareness of the walls, at the shabby chairs, the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her despairing regrets and bewildering dreams. She thought of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, illumined by tall bronze candelabra, and of two great footmen in knee breeches who sleep in the big armchairs, made drowsy by the oppressive heat of the stove. She Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 thought of long reception halls hung with ancient silk, of the dainty cabinets containing priceless curiosities and of the little coquettish perfumed reception rooms made for chatting at five o’clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire.

When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth in use three days, opposite her husband, who uncov- ered the soup tureen and declared with a delighted air, “Ah, the good soup! I don’t know anything better than that,” she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of tapestry that peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest; and she thought of delicious dishes served on marvellous plates and of the whispered gallantries to which you listen with a sphinxlike smile while you are eating the pink meat of a trout or the wings of a quail.

She had no gowns, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that. She felt made for that. She would have liked so much to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after.

She had a friend, a former schoolmate at the convent, who was rich, and whom she did not like to go to see any more because she felt so sad when she came home.

But one evening her husband reached home with a triumphant air and holding a large envelope in his hand.

“There,” said he, “there is something for you.” She tore the paper quickly and drew out a printed card which bore these words:

The Minister of Public Instruction and Madame Georges Ramponneau request the honor of M. and Madame Loisel’s company at the palace of the Ministry on Monday evening, January 18th.

Instead of being delighted, as her husband had hoped, she threw the invitation on the table crossly, muttering:

“What do you wish me to do with that?” “Why, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had great trouble to get it.

Every one wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there.” She looked at him with an irritated glance and said impatiently:

“And what do you wish me to put on my back?” He had not thought of that. He stammered:

“Why, the gown you go to the theatre in. It looks very well to me.” He stopped, distracted, seeing that his wife was weeping. Two great tears ran slowly from the corners of her eyes toward the cor - ners of her mouth.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” he answered. 5 10 15 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 By a violent effort she conquered her grief and replied in a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:

“Nothing. Only I have no gown, and, therefore, I can’t go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I am.” He was in despair. He resumed:

“Come, let us see, Mathilde. How much would it cost, a suitable gown, which you could use on other occasions—something very simple?” She reflected several seconds, making her calculations and won- dering also what sum she could ask without drawing on herself an immediate refusal and a frightened exclamation from the eco - nomical clerk.

Finally she replied hesitating:

“I don’t know exactly, but I think I could manage it with four hun - dred francs.” He grew a little pale, because he was laying aside just that amount to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting next summer on the plain of Nanterre, with several friends who went to shoot larks there of a Sunday.

But he said:

“Very well. I will give you four hundred francs. And try to have a pretty gown.” The day of the ball drew near and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy, anxious. Her frock was ready, however. Her husband said to her one evening:

“What is the matter? Come, you have seemed very queer these last three days.” And she answered:

“It annoys me not to have a single piece of jewelry, not a single ornament, nothing to put on. I shall look poverty-stricken. I would almost rather not go at all.” “You might wear natural flowers,” said her husband. “They’re very stylish at this time of year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses.” She was not convinced.

“No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.” “How stupid you are!” her husband cried. “Go look up your friend, Madame Forestier, and ask her to lend you some jewels. You’re intimate enough with her to do that.” She uttered a cry of joy:

“True! I never thought of it.” 20 25 30 35 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 The next day she went to her friend and told her of her distress.

Madame Forestier went to a wardrobe with a mirror, took out a large jewel box, brought it back, opened it and said to Madame Loisel:

“Choose, my dear.” She saw first some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian gold cross set with precious stones, of admirable work- manship. She tried on the ornaments before the mirror, hesitated and could not make up her mind to part with them, to give them back. She kept asking:

“Haven’t you any more?” “Why, yes. Look further; I don’t know what you like.” Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb diamond necklace, and her heart throbbed with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it round her throat, outside her high-necked waist, and was lost in ecstasy at her reflection in the mirror.

Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anxious doubt:

“Will you lend me this, only this?” “Why, yes, certainly.” She threw her arms round her friend’s neck, kissed her passion - ately, then fled with her treasure.

The night of the ball arrived. Madame Loisel was a great success.

She was prettier than any other woman present, elegant, grace - ful, smiling and wild with joy. All the men looked at her, asked her name, sought to be introduced. All the attaches of the Cabinet wished to waltz with her. She was remarked by the minister himself.

She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her suc - cess, in a sort of cloud of happiness comprised of all this homage, admiration, these awakened desires and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman’s heart.

She left the ball about four o’clock in the morning. Her husband had been sleeping since midnight in a little deserted anteroom with three other gentlemen whose wives were enjoying the ball.

He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought, the mod - est wraps of common life, the poverty of which contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress. She felt this and wished to escape so as not to be remarked by the other women, who were envelop - ing themselves in costly furs.

Loisel held her back, saying: “Wait a bit. You will catch cold out - side. I will call a cab.” But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the stairs.

When they reached the street they could not find a carriage and 40 45 50 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 began to look for one, shouting after the cabmen passing at a distance.

They went toward the Seine in despair, shivering with cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient night cabs which, as though they were ashamed to show their shabbiness during the day, are never seen round Paris until after dark.

It took them to their dwelling in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they mounted the stairs to their flat. All was ended for her. As to him, he reflected that he must be at the ministry at ten o’clock that morning.

She removed her wraps before the glass so as to see herself once more in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She no longer had the necklace around her neck!

“What is the matter with you?” demanded her husband, already half undressed.

She turned distractedly toward him.

“I have — I have — I’ve lost Madame Forestier’s necklace,” she cried.

He stood up, bewildered.

“What!—how? Impossible!” They looked among the folds of her skirt, of her cloak, in her pock- ets, everywhere, but did not find it.

“You’re sure you had it on when you left the ball?” he asked.

“Yes, I felt it in the vestibule of the minister’s house.” “But if you had lost it in the street we should have heard it fall. It must be in the cab.” “Yes, probably. Did you take his number?” “No. And you— didn’t you notice it?” “N o.” They looked, thunderstruck, at each other. At last Loisel put on his clothes.

“I shall go back on foot,” said he, “over the whole route, to see whether I can find it.” He went out. She sat waiting on a chair in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, without any fire, without a thought.

Her husband returned about seven o’clock. He had found nothing.

He went to police headquarters, to the newspaper offices to offer a reward; he went to the cab companies— everywhere, in fact, whither he was urged by the least spark of hope.

She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this terrible calamity.

Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face. He had discov - ered nothing. 55 60 65 70 75 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 “You must write to your friend,” said he, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it mended. That will give us time to turn round.” At the end of a week they had lost all hope. Loisel, who had aged five years, declared:

“We must consider how to replace that ornament.” The next day they took the box that had contained it and went to the jeweler whose name was found within. He consulted his books.

“It was not I, madame, who sold that necklace; I must simply have furnished the case.” Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other, trying to recall it, both sick with chagrin and grief.

They found, in a shop at the Palais Royal, a string of diamonds that seemed to them exactly like the one they had lost. It was worth forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

So they begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days yet. And they made a bargain that he should buy it back for thirty-four thousand francs, in case they should find the lost necklace before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He would borrow the rest.

He did borrow, asking a thousand francs of one, five hundred of another, five louis here, three louis there. He gave notes, took up ruinous obligations, dealt with usurers and all the race of lenders.

He compromised all the rest of his life, risked signing a note with- out even knowing whether he could meet it; and, frightened by the trouble yet to come, by the black misery that was about to fall upon him, by the prospect of all the physical privations and moral tortures that he was to suffer, he went to get the new necklace, laying upon the jeweler’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

When Madame Loisel took back the necklace Madame Forestier said to her with a chilly manner:

“You should have returned it sooner; I might have needed it.” She did not open the case, as her friend had so much feared. If she had detected the substitution, what would she have thought, what would she have said? Would she not have taken Madame Loisel for a thief?

Thereafter Madame Loisel knew the horrible existence of the needy. She bore her part, however, with sudden heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it. They dismissed their servant; they changed their lodgings; they rented a garret under the roof.

She came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her dainty fin - gers and rosy nails on greasy pots and pans. She washed the soiled linen, the shirts and the dishcloths, which she dried upon a line; 80 85 90 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 she carried the slops down to the street every morning and carried up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, a basket on her arm, bargaining, meeting with imper- tinence, defending her miserable money, sou by sou.

Every month they had to meet some notes, renew others, obtain more time.

Her husband worked evenings, making up a tradesman’s accounts, and late at night he often copied manuscript for five sous a page.

This life lasted ten years.

At the end of ten years they had paid everything, everything, with the rates of usury and the accumulations of the compound interest.

Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the woman of impoverished households—strong and hard and rough. With frowsy hair, skirts askew and red hands, she talked loud while washing the floor with great swishes of water. But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down near the win - dow and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so admired.

What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace?

Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

But one Sunday, having gone to take a walk in the Champs Elysees , 1 to refresh herself after the labors of the week, she sud - denly perceived a woman who was leading a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still charming.

Madame Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, cer - tainly. And now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it.

Why not?

She went up.

“Good-day, Jeanne.” The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain good-wife, did not recognize her at all and stammered:

“But—madame!— I do not know—You must have mistaken.” “No. I am Mathilde Loisel.” Her friend uttered a cry.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!” “Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great poverty—and that because of you!” “Of me! How so?” “Do you remember that diamond necklace you lent me to wear at the ministerial ball?” 1 A prestigious avenue in Paris. 95 100 105 Exploring Plot, Third-Person Point of View, and Irony Chapter 7 “Yes. Well?” “Well, I lost it.” “What do you mean? You brought it back.” “I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us ten years to pay for it. You can understand that it was not easy for us, for us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad.” Madame Forestier had stopped.

“You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?” “Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very similar.” And she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her hands.

“Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most only five hundred francs!” This selection is in the public domain. RESPONSE AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS Exploring Plot 1.

A re the events in the plot plausible? Or does the plot seem contrived to illustrate the narrator’s opening observation about fate, which allowed Mme. Loisel, “as if by a mistake of destiny,” to be born into a family of clerks?

2.

P lot is developed through conflict—either external conflict, when one person opposes another, or internal conflict, when a person must make a difficult choice between his or her own oppos- ing aspirations or ideals. At what points in the story is the plot driven by internal conflict? By external conflict?

Exploring Point of View 3.

D e Maupassant uses a third-person point of view with limited omniscience to give the reader an intimate look at what’s happening in Mme. Loisel’s mind. What evidence suggests that the narra- tor’s point of view is sympathetic toward Mme. Loisel? Unsympathetic to her?

4.

H ow is this point of view used effectively to provide insights on happiness, on beauty, on materialism?

Exploring Irony 5.

D iscuss de Maupassant’s use of irony in the following instances:

a . T he diamonds in Mme. Forestier’s necklace being fake b . T he invitation to the ball c . M me. Loisel’s decision to pay the debt (“She took her part, moreover, all of a sudden, with heroism.”) 6.

E xplain the author’s use of irony in the story’s masterful ending. How does he use irony to make serious observations? 110 115 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 7. 3 Exploring Theme and Symbolism As you read Raymond Carver’s short story, consider how the major symbol, the cathedral, serves to illuminate the theme. Consider, too, the role of blindness, sight, and insight. Raymond Carver (1938–1988) Carver was born in Oregon and worked with his father in sawmills before graduating from Humboldt State College in California. Carver began writ- ing while in college, worked in the publishing field, and taught at various universities. He was widely praised as a fiction writer, particularly for his skill in short story writing. His struggle with alcoholism limited his productivity for extended periods. After meeting the American poet Tess Gallagher, he changed his life patterns. Where I’m Calling From, a collection of 37 stories, was published in 1988. Carver died of cancer when he was 50. His poem “Gravy,” etched on his gravestone, includes these lines: N o other word will do. For that’s what it was. Grav y. Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman. Excerpts from "Gravy" from A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1988 by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1989, 2000 by Tess. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC and of Grove/Atlantic, I\ nc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is pr\ ohibited.© Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/ Corbis Cathedral Raymond Carver (1981) This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in laws’.

Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago.

But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of tire summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either.

But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc.

She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED — Reading to Blind Man , and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot. She’d worked with this blind man all sum - mer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing.

She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose — even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it.

She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened t o h e r.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to- be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So, okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life.

She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military.

She told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another.

She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving-around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?— came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on a tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writ- ing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation.

On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about 5 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know. And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude —” But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!” I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife.

Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.

“Was his wife a Negro?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or some - thing?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?” “I’m just asking,” I said.

Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place.

Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beulah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wed - ding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word, inseparable— Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and holding on to her hand, They’d married, Theme: The narrator, a self- absorbed person, admits his own “blindness” (lack of insight) about blind people. 10 15 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure —and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compli- ment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better.

Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears— I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty-peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic.

So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait—sure, I blamed him for that— I was having a drink and watching the T V when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.

I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amaz - ing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talk - ing all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the T V. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my hus - band. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand. I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go.

“I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.

“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife was guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert.

That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.” I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But I didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say something else, small-talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How 20 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 going to New York, you should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left-hand side.

“Did you have a good train ride?” I said. “Which side of the train did you sit on, by the way?” “What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which side?” she said.

“I just asked,” I said.

“Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now,” he said. “So I’ve been told, anyway. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind man said to my wife.

“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said, “Robert, it’s just so good to see you.” My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.

I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy.

He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move round in the sock - ets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be.

I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.” “Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice.

“Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.” He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that.

“I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said.

“No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go up.” “A little water with the Scotch?” I said.

“Very little,” he said.

“I knew it,” I said. 25 30 Theme: Narrator notices how some conventional attributes of a blind person are not evident in Robert. 35 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that fellow. When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop.

I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it.

When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink.

My wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped pota- toes, green beans. I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for you.” I swallowed some of my drink.

“Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table.

We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of but - tered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.

We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined in.

I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feeling left out. They talked of things that had hap - pened to them—to them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: “And then my dear hus - band came into my life”—something like that. But I heard nothing of the sort.

More talk of Robert. Robert had done a little of everything it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all trades. But most recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I 40 45 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 gathered, they’d earned their living, such as it was. The blind man was also a ham radio operator. He talked in his loud voice about conversation he’d had with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if he ever wanted to go visit those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present posi- tion? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the T V.

My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a T V?” The blind man said, “My dear, I have two T Vs. I have a color set and a black-and white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the T V on, and I’m always turning it on, I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?” I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what the announcer was saying.

“This is a color T V,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.” “We traded up a while ago,” I said.

The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He posi - tioned his ashtray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.

My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched.

She said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfort - able,” she said.

“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.

“I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said.

“I am comfortable,” the blind man said.

After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes.

“I’ll try some with you,” he said.

“Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.” 50 55 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fin- gers. He took it and inhaled.

“Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the first thing.

My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink slippers.

“What do I smell?” she said.

“I’ve thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said.

My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.” He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t feel anything yet.” “This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you can reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.” “Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed.

My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her the number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I can hardly keep my eyes open as it is.

That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.” “It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,” he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head.

“There’s more strawberry pie,” I said.

“Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said.

“Maybe in a little while,” he said.

We gave our attention to the T V. My wife yawned again. She said, “Your bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.” She pulled his arm, “Robert?” He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes, doesn’t it?” I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers.

He inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing it since he was nine years old.

“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m beginning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife.

“Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and passed it to me.

“I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with my eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it bothers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made 60 65 70 75 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you up when you’re ready. You wake me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.” She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that her robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to draw her robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again.

“You say when you want some strawberry pie,” I said.

“I will,” he said, I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed?

Are you ready to hit the hay?” “Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right.

I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening.” He lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter.

“That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.” And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up from one of them, my heart going crazy.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the T V.

Not your run-of-the-mill T V fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me.

Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning some- thing. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said.

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set.

Very disconcerting. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils. The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrating the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening. 80 85 Theme: Blindness and insight. “I’m always learn- ing something.” This state- ment prepares the way for the discussion of the cathe- dral and the insights that both Robert and the blind man gain from it. 90 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 “Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded.

The T V showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one.

Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its fly- ing buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.

There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals, or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say something. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gargoyles. Little statues carved to look like mon - sters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yeah, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.” “Are those fresco paintings, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink.

I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. “You’re asking me are those frescoes?” I said.

“That’s a good question. I don’t know.” The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?

What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you know the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?” He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hun - dreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The T V was showing another cathe - dral now. This one was in Germany. The Englishman’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.” I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the T V. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else. 95 Symbol: A cathedral is a symbol of great human achievement and spiritual devotion, the result of a community effort, coopera- tion, and trust. Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these sup- ports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.

He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. “They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be closer to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.” “That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way reli - gious? You don’t mind my asking?” I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything.

Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?” “Sure, I do,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.” The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.

I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me.

Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night T V. That’s all they are.” It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said. “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea.

Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do 100 105 110 Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs.

I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet. He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.” He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.” I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The T V station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the blind man said.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.” I didn’t answer her.

The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now.

You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us some- thing here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. 115 Symbol: Their joined draw- ing effort, like the intention in building a cathedral, is purposeful. 120 Theme: Commentary on the theme: The narrator has sight but also has limitations. Exploring Theme and Symbolism Chapter 7 “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?” My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing?

What’s going on?” “It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.” “They’re closed,” I said.

“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.” So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?” But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?” My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

“Cathedral” from Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983 by Raymond Carver, used with permission by The Wylie Agency, LLC and by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. RESPONSE AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS Exploring Theme 1.

T he writer uses the characters’ conversations about blindness to explore the story’s theme of self- absorption. Identify particular references to physical, social, and emotional blindness that draw attention to this theme.

2.

I n writing about this story, Ewing Campbell observed that instead of presenting a person who experiences change through struggle and pain, “‘Cathedral’ lets us see a narrator who discovers a life-affirming truth without the pain.” Do you think that this structure—and its casual unfold- ing—is effective? Does it make the achievement of insight seem less significant? Why?

3.

“ My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them.” How does this statement by the narra- tor, as he goes upstairs to get a pen to draw the cathedral, relate to the theme of the story?

4.

W riters sometimes end a story with an epiphany (a sudden realization of meaning or profound insight). How effective is the narrator’s epiphany in conveying the story’s theme?

Exploring Symbolism 5.

E xplain how blindness, as a symbol, is linked to seeing life anew.

6.

I n what ways are the tapes important as a symbol?

7.

A c athedral is a symbol of strength and acceptance. Describe a specific instance in the story where Carver uses the cathedral symbol for these purposes.

8.

C an spiritual awareness be associated with the cathedral symbol in this story? When asked if he is religious, the narrator (near the end of the story) answers, “I don’t believe in anything.” 9.

W hat does this story say about who is truly blind and who truly sees? 125 130 135 Theme: In ways he had never considered before, the self-centered narrator realizes that blindness may be a physical handicap, but it has no spatial barriers. A blind man’s insight can be profound. Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 7. 4 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes “Story of the Lost Son,” commonly known as “The Parable of the Prodigal Son,” (Gospel of Luke) and “A Father’s Story” (Andre Dubus): The first story is a parable, a literary form in which the story exists for the purpose of making a point or expressing a truth. In both stories, a child away from home becomes entangled in problems of his or her own making, eventually returning home and coming clean about his or her offenses. Honesty is always fascinating and ennobling, but these stories pull us beyond the regretful disclosures of the son and the daughter and demon- strate the capacity of fathers to love, accept, and forgive their children. These stories are about the adequacy of fathers’ love—and about the immeasurable obligations that forgiveness requires if it is to be authentic in human and spiritual relationships.

Story of the Lost Son Luke, a first-century writer and physician, is considered the author of the Gospel of Luke, the third book in the New Testament, where this parable attributed to Jesus of Nazareth is found. Story of the Lost Son Gospel of Luke There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, “Father, I want right now what’s coming to me.” So the father divided the property between them. It wasn’t long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any.

That brought him to his senses. He said, “All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I’m going back to my father. I’ll say to him, Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.” He got right up and went home to his father.

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: “Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.” But the father wasn’t listening. He was calling to the servants, “Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We’re going to feast! We’re going to have a wonderful time! My son is here — given up for dead and now alive!

Given up for lost and now found!” And they began to have a won - derful time.

All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day’s work was done he came in. As he approached the house, he heard 5 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, “Your brother came home.

Your father has ordered a feast—barbecued beef!—because he has him home safe and sound.” The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. The son said, “Look how many years I’ve stayed here serv- ing you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!” His father said, “Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!” Story of the Lost Son from the Gospel of Luke, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (509 words), trans. By Eugene H. Peterson, NavPress Publishing Group A Father’s Story Andre Dubus (1936 –1999) Andre Dubus was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and completed his early education in a Catholic school. Writing with precision and deep compassion for his characters, he won recognition for his short stories, including the PEN/Malamud Award. He was a guest lecturer at several American universi- ties. He lost a leg in a traffic accident when he stopped to help other motor- ists. The movie In the Bedroom, which was nominated for five Academy Awards in 2001, was based on his story “Killings.” Associated Press/ Marion Ettlinger A Father’s Story Andre Dubus (1983) My name is Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve north - west of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the win - dow. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey- haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.

My real life is the one nobody talks about anymore, except Father Paul LeBoeuf, another old buck. He has a decade on me: he’s sixty-four, a big man, bald on top with grey at the sides; when he had hair, it was black. His face is ruddy, and he jokes about being a whiskey priest, though he’s not. He gets outdoors as much as he can, goes for a long walk every morning, and hunts and fishes with me. But I can’t get him on a horse anymore. Ten years ago I could badger him into a trail ride; I had to give him a western saddle, and he’d hold the pommel and bounce through the woods with me, and be sore for days. He’s looking at seventy with eyes that are younger than many I’ve seen in people in their twenties.

I do not remember ever feeling the way they seem to; but I was lucky, because even as a child I knew that life would try me, and I must be strong to endure, though in those early days I expected to be tortured and killed for my faith, like the saints I learned about in school.

Father Paul’s family came down from Canada, and he grew up speaking more French than English, so he is different from the Irish priests who abound up here. I do not like to make general state- ments, or even to hold general beliefs, about people’s blood, but the Irish do seem happiest when they’re dealing with misfortune or guilt, either their own or somebody else’s, and if you think you’re not a victim of either one, you can count on certain Irish priests to try to change your mind. On Wednesday nights Father Paul comes to dinner. Often he comes on other nights too, and once, in the old days when we couldn’t eat meat on Fridays, we bagged our first ducks of the season on a Friday, and as we drove home from the marsh, he said: For the purposes of Holy Mother Church, I believe a duck is more a creature of water than land, and is not rightly meat. Sometimes he teases me about never putting anything in his Sunday collection, which he would not know about if I hadn’t told him years ago. I would like to believe I told him so we could have philosophical talk at dinner, but probably the truth is I suspected he knew, and I did not want him to think I so loved money that I would not even give his church a coin on Sunday.

Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.

I don’t feel right about giving money for buildings, places. This starts with the Pope, and I cannot respect one of them till he sells his house and everything in it, and that church too, and uses the money to feed the poor. I have rarely, and maybe never, come across saintliness, but I feel certain it cannot exist in such a place.

But I admit, also, that I know very little, and maybe the popes live on a different plane and are tried in ways I don’t know about.

Father Paul says his own church, St. John’s, is hardly the Vatican.

I like his church: it is made of wood, and has a simple altar and crucifix, and no padding on the kneelers. He does not have to lock its doors at night. Still it is a place. He could say Mass in my barn. I know this is stubborn, but I can find no mention by Christ of main - taining buildings, much less erecting them of stone or brick, and Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 decorating them with pieces of metal and mineral and elements that people still fight over like barbarians. We had a Maltese woman taking riding lessons, she came over on the boat when she was ten, and once she told me how the nuns in Malta used to tell the little girls that if they wore jewelry, rings and bracelets and necklaces, in purgatory snakes would coil around their fingers and wrists and throats. I do not believe in frightening children or tell- ing them lies, but if those nuns saved a few girls from devotion to things, maybe they were right. That Maltese woman laughed about it, but I noticed she wore only a watch, and that with a leather strap.

The money I give to the church goes in people’s stomachs, and on their backs, down in New York City. I have no delusions about the worth of what I do, but I feel it’s better to feed somebody than not. There’s a priest in Times Square giving shelter to runaway kids, and some Franciscans who run a bread line; actually it’s a morning line for coffee and a roll, and Father Paul calls it the conti - nental breakfast for winos and bag ladies. He is curious about how much I am sending, and I know why: he guesses I send a lot, he has said probably more than tithing, and he is right; he wants to know how much because he believes I’m generous and good, and he is wrong about that; he has never had much money and does not know how easy it is to write a check when you have everything you will ever need, and the figures are mere numbers, and repre - sent no sacrifice at all. Being a real Catholic is too hard; if I were one, I would do with my house and barn what I want the Pope to do with his. So I do not want to impress Father Paul, and when he asks me how much, I say I can’t let my left hand know what my right is doing.

He came on Wednesday nights when Gloria and I were married, and the kids were young; Gloria was a very good cook (I assume she still is, but it is difficult to think of her in the present), and I liked sitting at the table with a friend who was also a priest. I was proud of my handsome and healthy children. This was long ago, and they were all very young and cheerful and often funny, and the three boys took care of their baby sister, and did not bully or tease her. Of course they did sometimes, with that excited cru - elty children are prone to, but not enough so that it was part of her days. On the Wednesday after Gloria left with the kids and a U-Haul trailer, I was sitting on the front steps, it was summer, and I was watching cars go by on the road, when Father Paul drove around the curve and into the driveway. I was ashamed to see him because he is a priest and my family was gone, but I was relieved too. I went to the car to greet him. He got out smiling, with a bottle of wine, and shook my hand, then pulled me to him, gave me a quick hug, and said: “It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Let’s open some cans.” With arms about each other we walked to the house, and it was good to know he was doing his work but coming as a friend too, and I thought what good work he had. I have no calling. It is for me to keep horses. 5 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 In that other life, anyway. In my real one I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of morning. While making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and moods, as a prayer of thanksgiving, and for Gloria and my children and my friends and two women I made love with after Gloria left. This morning offertory is a habit from my boyhood in a Catholic school; or then it was a habit, but as I kept it and grew older it became a ritual. Then I say the Lord’s Prayer, trying not to recite it, and one morning it occurred to me that a prayer, whether recited or said with concentration, is always an act of faith.

I sit in the kitchen at the rear of the house and drink coffee and smoke and watch the sky growing light before sunrise, the trees of the woods near the barn taking shape, becoming single pines and elms and oaks and maples. Sometimes a rabbit comes out of the tree line, or is already sitting there, invisible till the light finds him.

The birds are awake in the trees and feeding on the ground, and the little ones, the purple finches and titmice and chickadees, are at the feeder I rigged outside the kitchen window; it is too small for pigeons to get a purchase. I sit and give myself to coffee and tobacco, that get me brisk again, and I watch and listen. In the first year or so after I lost my family, I played the radio in the mornings.

But I overcame that, and now I rarely play it at all. Once in the mail I received a questionnaire asking me to write down everything I watched on television during the week they had chosen. At the end of those seven days I wrote in The Wizard of Oz and returned it. That was in winter and was actually a busy week for my televi - sion, which normally sits out the cold months without once warm - ing up. Had they sent the questionnaire during baseball season, they would have found me at my set. People at the stables talk about shows and performers I have never heard of, but I cannot get interested; when I am in the mood to watch television, I go to a movie or read a detective novel. There are always good detective novels to be found, and I like remembering them next morning with my coffee.

I also think of baseball and hunting and fishing, and of my chil - dren. It is not painful to think about them anymore, because even if we had lived together, they would be gone now, grown into their own lives, except Jennifer. I think of death too, not sadly, or with fear, though something like excitement does run through me, something more quickening than the coffee and tobacco. I suppose it is an intense interest, and an outright distrust: I never feel certain that I’ll be here watching birds eating at tomorrow’s daylight. Sometimes I try to think of other things, like the rabbit that is warm and breathing but not there till twilight. I feel on the brink of something about the life of the senses, but either am not equipped to go further or am not interested enough to concentrate. I have called all of this thinking, but it is not, because it is unintentional; what I’m really doing is feeling the 10 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 day, in silence, and that is what Father Paul is doing too on his five-to-ten-mile walks.

When the hour ends I take an apple or carrot and I go to the stable and tack up a horse. We take good care of these horses, and no one rides them but students, instructors, and me, and nobody rides the horses we board unless an owner asks me to. The barn is dark and I turn on lights and take some deep breaths, smelling the hay and horses and their manure, both fresh and dried, a com- bined odor that you either like or you don’t. I walk down the wide space of dirt between stalls, greeting the horses, joking with them about their quirks, and choose one for no reason at all other than the way it looks at me that morning. I get my old English saddle that has smoothed and darkened through the years, and go into the stall, talking to this beautiful creature who’ll swerve out of a canter if a piece of paper blows in front of him, and if the barn catches fire and you manage to get him out he will, if he can get away from you, run back into the fire, to his stall. Like the smells that surround them, you either like them or you don’t. I love them, so am spared having to try to explain why. I feed one the carrot or apple and tack up and lead him outside, where I mount, and we go down the driveway to the road and cross it and turn northwest and walk then trot then canter to St. John’s.

A few cars are on the road, their drivers looking serious about going to work. It is always strange for me to see a woman dressed for work so early in the morning. You know how long it takes them, with the makeup and hair and clothes, and I think of them waking in the dark of winter or early light of other seasons, and dressing as they might for an evening’s entertainment. Probably this strikes me because I grew up seeing my father put on those suits he never wore on weekends or his two weeks off, and so am accustomed to the men, but when I see these women I think something went wrong, to send all those dressed-up people out on the road when the dew hasn’t dried yet. Maybe it’s because I so dislike getting up early, but am also doing what I choose to do, while they have no choice. At heart I am lazy, yet I find such peace and delight in it that I believe it is a natural state, and in what looks like my laziest periods I am closest to my center. The ride to St. John’s is fifteen minutes. The horses and I do it in all weather; the road is well plowed in winter, and there are only a few days a year when ice makes me drive the pickup. People always look at someone on horseback, and for a moment their faces change and many drivers and I wave to each other. Then at St. John’s, Father Paul and five or six regulars and I celebrate the Mass.

Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the Mass.

Each morning I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though:

the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contempla - Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 tion, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own fail- ures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue- tied man a ceremony of love. And, while my mind dwells on break - fast, or Major or Duchess tethered under the church eave, there is, as I take the Host from Father Paul and place it on my tongue and return to the pew, a feeling that I am thankful I have not lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty. Or the certainty of peace. One night Father Paul and I talked about faith.

It was long ago, and all I remember is him saying: Belief is believ - ing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you. That is the excitement, and the peace; then the Mass is over, and I go into the sacristy and we have a cigarette and chat, the mystery ends, we are two men talking like any two men on a morning in America, about baseball, plane crashes, presidents, governors, murders, the sun, the clouds. Then I go to the horse and ride back to the life people see, the one in which I move and talk, and most days I enjoy it.

It is late summer now, the time between fishing and hunting, but a good time for baseball. It has been two weeks since Jennifer left, to drive home to Gloria’s after her summer visit. She is the only one who still visits; the boys are married and have children, and sometimes fly up for a holiday, or I fly down or west to visit one of them. Jennifer is twenty, and I worry about her the way fathers worry about daughters but not sons. I want to know what she’s up to, and at the same time I don’t. She looks athletic, and she is: she swims and runs and of course rides. All my children do. When she comes for six weeks in summer, the house is loud with girls, friends of hers since childhood, and new ones. I am glad she kept the girl friends. They have been young company for me and, being with them, I have been able to gauge her growth between summers.

On their riding days, I’d take them back to the house when their lessons were over and they had walked the horses and put them back in the stalls, and we’d have lemonade or Coke, and cook - ies if I had some, and talk until their parents came to drive them home. One year their breasts grew, so I wasn’t startled when I saw Jennifer in July. Then they were driving cars to the stable, and beginning to look like young women, and I was passing out beer and ashtrays and they were talking about college.

When Jennifer was here in summer, they were at the house most days. I would say generally that as they got older they became qui - eter, and though I enjoyed both, I sometimes missed the giggles and shouts. The quiet voices, just low enough for me not to hear from wherever I was, rising and falling in proportion to my dis - tance from them, frightened me. Not that I believed they were planning or recounting anything really wicked, but there was a female seriousness about them, and it was secretive, and of course I thought: love, sex. But it was more than that: it was womanhood they were entering, the deep forest of it, and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little dif - ference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that 15 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about in it like birds. So hearing Jennifer and her friends talking so quietly, yet intensely, I wanted very much to have a wife.

But not as much as in the old days, when Gloria had left but her presence was still in the house as strongly as if she had only gone to visit her folks for a week. There were no clothes or cosmet- ics, but potted plants endured my neglectful care as long as they could, and slowly died; I did not kill them on purpose, to exorcise the house of her, but I could not remember to water them. For weeks, because I did not use it much, the house was as neat as she had kept it, though dust layered the order she had made. The kitchen went first: I got the dishes in and out of the dishwasher and wiped the top of the stove, but did not return cooking spoons and pot holders to their hooks on the wall, and soon the burn - ers and oven were caked with spillings, the refrigerator had more space and was spotted with juices. The living room and my bed - room went next; I did not go into the children’s rooms except on bad nights when I went from room to room and looked and touched and smelled, so they did not lose their order until a year later when the kids came for six weeks. It was three months before I ate the last of the food Gloria had cooked and frozen: I remem - ber it was a beef stew, and very good. By then I had four cook - books, and was boasting a bit, and talking about recipes with the women at the stables, and looking forward to cooking for Father Paul. But I never looked forward to cooking at night only for myself, though I made myself do it— on some nights I gave in to my daily temptation, and took a newspaper or detective novel to a restaurant. By the end of the second year, though, I had stopped turning on the radio as soon as I woke in the morning, and was able to be silent and alone in the evening too, and then I enjoyed my dinners.

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. That is what Father Paul told me in those first two years, on some of the bad nights when I believed I could not bear what I had to: the most painful loss was my children, then the loss of Gloria, whom I still loved despite or maybe because of our long periods of sadness that rendered us helpless, so neither of us could break out of it to give a hand to the other. Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I know now, and we had performed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and perhaps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love. I know this from my distractions during Mass, and during everything else I do, so that my actions and feelings are seldom one. It does happen every day, but in proportion to everything else in a day, it is rare, like joy. The third most painful loss, which became second and sometimes first as months passed, was the knowledge that I could never marry again, and so dared not even keep company with a woman. Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 On some of the bad nights I was bitter about this with Father Paul, and I so pitied myself that I cried, or nearly did, speaking with damp eyes and breaking voice. I believe that celibacy is for him the same trial it is for me, not of the flesh, but the spirit: the heart longing to love. But the difference is he chose it, and did not wake one day to a life with thirty horses. In my anger I said I had done my service to love and chastity, and I told him of the actual physical and spiritual pain of practicing rhythm: nights of striking the mattress with a fist, two young animals lying side by side in heat, leaving the bed to pace, to smoke, to curse, and too passionate to question, for we were so angered and oppressed by our passion that we could see no further than our loins. So now I understand how people can be enslaved for generations before they throw down their tools or use them as weapons, the form of their slavery—the cotton fields, the shacks and puny cupboards and untended illnesses—absorbing their emotions and thoughts until finally they have little or none at all to direct with clarity and energy at the owners and legislators. And I told him of the trick of passion and its slaking: how during what we had to believe were safe periods, though all four children were conceived at those times, we were able with some coherence to question the tradition and reason and justice of the law against birth control, but not with enough conviction to soberly act against it, as though regular satisfaction in bed tempered our revolutionary as well as our erotic desires. Only when abstinence drove us hotly away from each other did we receive an urge so strong it lasted all the way to the drugstore and back; but always, after release, we threw away the remaining condoms; and after going through this a few times, we knew what would happen, and from then on we submitted to the calendar she so precisely marked on the bedroom wall. I told him that living two lives each month, one as celibates, one as lovers, made us tense and short-tempered, so we snapped at each other like dogs.

To have endured that, to have reached a time when we burned slowly and could gain from bed the comfort of lying down at night with one who loves you and whom you love, could for weeks on end go to bed tired and peacefully sleep after a kiss, a touch of the hands, and then to be thrown out of the marriage like a bun- dle from a moving freight car, was unjust, was intolerable, and I could not or would not muster the strength to endure it. But I did, a moment at a time, a day, a night, except twice, each time with a different woman and more than a year apart, and this was so long ago that I clearly see their faces in my memory, can hear the pitch of their voices, and the way they pronounced words, one with a Massachusetts accent, one Midwestern, but I feel as though I only heard about them from someone else. Each rode at the stables and was with me for part of an evening; one was badly married, one divorced, so none of us was free. They did not understand this Catholic view, but they were understanding about my having it, and I remained friends with both of them until the married one left her husband and went to Boston, and the divorced one moved to Maine. After both those evenings, those good women, I went to Mass early while Father Paul was still in the confessional, and Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 received his absolution. I did not tell him who I was, but of course he knew, though I never saw it in his eyes. Now my longing for a wife comes only once in a while, like a cold: on some late after- noons when I am alone in the barn, then I lock up and walk to the house, daydreaming, then suddenly look at it and see it empty, as though for the first time, and all at once I’m weary and feel I do not have the energy to broil meat, and I think of driving to a restaurant, then shake my head and go on to the house, the refrig - erator, the oven; and some mornings when I wake in the dark and listen to the silence and run my hand over the cold sheet beside me; and some days in summer when Jennifer is here.

Gloria left first me, then the Church, and that was the end of reli - gion for the children, though on visits they went to Sunday Mass with me, and still do, out of a respect for my life that they manage to keep free of patronage. Jennifer is an agnostic, though I doubt she would call herself that, any more than she would call herself any other name that implied she had made a decision, a choice, about existence, death, and God. In truth she tends to panthe - ism, a good sign, I think; but not wanting to be a father who tells his children what they ought to believe, I do not say to her that Catholicism includes pantheism, like onions in a stew. Besides, I have no missionary instincts and do not believe everyone should or even could live with the Catholic faith. It is Jennifer’s woman - hood that renders me awkward. And womanhood now is frank, not like when Gloria was twenty and there were symbols: high heels and cosmetics and dresses, a cigarette, a cocktail. I am glad that women are free now of false modesty and all its attention paid the flesh; but, still, it is difficult to see so much of your daugh - ter, to hear her talk as only men and bawdy women used to, and most of all to see in her face the deep and unabashed sensuality of women, with no tricks of the eyes and mouth to bide the pleasure she feels at having a strong young body. I am certain, with the way things are now, that she has very happily not been a virgin for years. That does not bother me. What bothers me is my certainty about it, just from watching her walk across a room or light a ciga - rette or pour milk on cereal.

She told me all of it, waking me that night when I had gone to sleep listening to the wind in the trees and against the house, a wind so strong that I had to shut all but the let windows, and still the house cooled; told it to me in such detail and so clearly that now, when she has driven the car to Florida, I remember it all as though I had been a passenger in the front seat, or even at the wheel. It started with a movie, then beer and driving to the sea to look at the waves in the night and the wind, Jennifer and Betsy and Liz. They drank a beer on the beach and wanted to go in naked but were afraid they would drown in the high surf. They bought another six-pack at a grocery store in New Hampshire, and drove home. I can see it now, feel it: the three girls and the beer and the ride on country roads where pines curved in the wind and the big deciduous trees swayed and shook as if they might leap from the earth. They would have some windows partly open so they could feel the wind; Jennifer would be playing a cassette, the 20 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 music stirring them, as it does the young, to memories of another time, other people and places in what is for them the past.

She took Betsy home, then Liz, and sang with her cassette as she left the town west of us and started home, a twenty-minute drive on the road that passes my house. They had each had four beers, but now there were twelve empty bottles in the bag on the floor at the passenger seat, and I keep focusing on their sound against each other when the car shifted speeds or changed directions.

For I want to understand that one moment out of all her heart’s time on earth, and whether her history had any bearing on it, or whether her heart was then isolated from all it had known, and the sound of those bottles urged it. She was just leaving the town, accelerating past a night club on the right, gaining speed to climb a long, gradual hill, then she went up it, singing, patting the beat on the steering wheel, the wind loud through her few inches of open window, blowing her hair as it did the high branches alongside the road, and she looked up at them and watched the top of the hill for someone drunk or heedless coming over it in part of her lane. She crested to an open black road, and there he was: a bulk, a blur, a thing running across her headlights, and she swerved left, and her foot went for the brake and was stomping air above its pedal when she hit him, saw his legs and body in the air, flying out of her light, into the dark. Her brakes were scream- ing into the wind, bottles clinking in the fallen bag, and with the music and wind inside the car was his sound, already a memory but as real as an echo, that car-shuddering thump as though she had struck a tree. Her foot was back on the accelerator. Then she shifted gears and pushed it. She ejected the cassette and closed the window. She did not start to cry until she knocked on my bed - room door, then called: “Dad?” Her voice, her tears, broke through my dream and the wind I heard in my sleep, and I stepped into jeans and hurried to the door, thinking harm, rape, death. All were in her face, and I hugged her and pressed her cheek to my chest and smoothed her blown hair, then led her, weeping, to the kitchen and sat her at the table where still she could not speak, nor look at me; when she raised her face it fell forward again, as of its own weight, into her palms.

I offered tea and she shook her head, so I offered beer twice, then she shook her head, so I offered whiskey and she nodded. I had some rye that Father Paul and I had not finished last hunting season, and I poured some over ice and set it in front of her and was putting away the ice but stopped and got another glass and poured one for myself too, and brought the ice and bottle to the table where she was trying to get one of her long menthols out of the pack, but her fingers jerked like severed snakes, and I took the pack and lit one for her and took one for myself. I watched her shudder with her first swallow of rye, and push hair back from her face, it is auburn and gleamed in the overhead light, and I remem - bered how beautiful she looked riding a sorrel, she was smoking fast, then the sobs in her throat stopped, and she looked at me and said it, the words coming out with smoke: “I hit somebody.

With the car.” Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 Then she was crying and I was on my feet, moving back and forth, looking down at her, asking Who? Where? Where? She was point- ing at the wall over the stove, jabbing her fingers and cigarette at it, her other hand at her eyes, and twice in horror I actually looked at the wall. She finished the whiskey in a swallow and I stopped pacing and asking and poured another, and either the drink or the exhaustion of tears quieted her, even the dry sobs, and she told me; not as I tell it now, for that was later as again and again we relived it in the kitchen or living room, and, if in daylight, fled it on horseback out on the trails through the woods and, if at night, walked quietly around in the moonlit pasture, walked around and around it, sweating through our clothes. She told it in bursts, like she was a child again, running to me, injured from play. I put on boots and a shirt and left her with the bottle and her streaked face and a cigarette twitching between her fingers, pushed the door open against the wind, and eased it shut. The wind squinted and watered my eyes as I leaned into it and went to the pickup.

When I passed St. John’s I looked at it, and Father Paul’s little white rectory in the rear, and wanted to stop, wished I could as I could if he were simply a friend who sold hardware or something.

I had forgotten my watch but I always know the time within min - utes, even when a sound or dream or my bladder wakes me in the night. It was nearly two; we had been in the kitchen about twenty minutes; she had hit him around one-fifteen. Or her. The road was empty and I drove between blowing trees; caught for an instant in my lights, they seemed to be in panic. I smoked and let hope play its tricks on me: it was neither man nor woman but an animal, a goat or calf or deer on the road; it was a man who had jumped away in time, the collision of metal and body glancing not direct, and he had limped home to nurse bruises and cuts. Then I threw the cigarette and hope both out the window and prayed that he was alive, while beneath that prayer, a reserve deeper in my heart, another one stirred: that if he were dead, they would not get Jennifer.

From our direction, east and a bit south, the road to that hill and the night club beyond it and finally the town is, for its last four or five miles, straight through farming country. When I reached that stretch I slowed the truck and opened my window for the fierce air; on both sides were scattered farmhouses and barns and some - times a silo, looking not like shelters but like unsheltered things the wind would flatten. Corn bent toward the road from a field on my right, and always something blew in front of me: paper, leaves, dried weeds, branches. I slowed approaching the hill, and went up it in second, staring through my open window at the ditch on the left side of the road, its weeds alive, whipping, a mad dance with the trees above them. I went over the hill and down and, opposite the club, turned right onto a side street of houses, and parked there, in the leaping shadows of trees. I walked back across the road to the club’s parking lot, the wind behind me, lifting me as I strode, and I could not hear my boots on pavement. I walked up the hill, on the shoulder, watching the branches above me, hear - ing their leaves and the creaking trunks and the wind. Then I was at the top, looking down the road and at the farms and fields; the 25 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 night was clear, and I could see a long way; clouds scudded past the half-moon and stars, blown out to sea.

I started down, watching the tall grass under the trees to my right, glancing into the dark of the ditch, listening for cars behind me; but as soon as I cleared one tree, its sound was gone, Its flapping leaves and rattling branches far behind me, as though the great- est distance I had at my back was a matter of feet, while ahead of me I could see a barn two miles off. Then I saw her skid marks:

short, and going left and downhill, into the other lane. I stood at the ditch, its weeds blowing; across it were trees and their mov - ing shadows, like the clouds. I stepped onto its slope, and it took me sliding on my feet, then rump, to the bottom, where I sat still, my body gathered to itself, lest a part of me should touch him.

But there was only tall grass, and I stood, my shoulders reaching the sides of the ditch, and I walked uphill, wishing for the flash - light in the pickup, walking slowly, and down in the ditch I could hear my feet in the grass and on the earth, and kicking cans and bottles. At the top of the hill I turned and went down, watching the ground above the ditch on my right, praying my prayer from the truck again, the first one, the one I would admit, that he was not dead, was in fact home, and began to hope again, memory telling me of lost pheasants and grouse I had shot, but they were small and the colors of their home, while a man was either there or not; and from that memory I left where I was and while walking in the ditch under the wind was in the deceit of imagination with Jennifer in the kitchen, telling her she had hit no one, or at least had not badly hurt anyone, when I realized he could be in the hos - pital now and I would have to think of a way to check there, some - thing to say on the phone. I see now that, once hope returned, I should have been certain what it prepared me for: ahead of me, in high grass and the shadows of trees, I saw his shirt. Or that is all my mind would allow itself. A shirt, and I stood looking at it for the moments it took my mind to admit the arm and head and the dark length covered by pants. He lay face down, the arm I could see near his side, his head turned from me, on its cheek.

“Fella?” I said. I had meant to call, but it came out quiet and high, lost inches from my face in the wind. Then I said, “Oh God,” and felt Him in the wind and the sky moving past the stars and moon and the fields around me, but only watching me as he might have watched Cain or Job, I did not know which, and I said it again, and wanted to sink to the earth and weep till I slept there in the weeds. I climbed, scrambling up the side of the ditch, pulling at clutched grass, gained the top on hands and knees, and went to him like that, panting, moving through the grass as high and higher than my face, crawling under that sky, making sounds too, like some animal, there being no words to let him know I was here with him now. He was long; that is the word that came to me, not tall. I kneeled beside him, my hands on my legs. His right arm was by his side, his left arm straight out from the shoulder, but turned, so his palm was open to the tree above us. His left cheek was clean-shaven, his eye closed, and there was no blood. I leaned forward to look at his open mouth and saw the blood on it, going down into the grass. I straightened and looked ahead at the wind Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 blowing past me through grass and trees to a distant light, and I stared at the light, imagining someone awake out there, wanting someone to be, a gathering of old friends, or someone alone lis- tening to music or painting a picture, then I figured it was a night light at a farmyard whose house I couldn’t see. Going , I thought.

Still going . I leaned over again and looked at dripping blood.

So I had to touch his wrist, a thick one with a watch and expansion band that I pushed up his arm, thinking he’s left-handed , my three fingers pressing his wrist, and all I felt was my tough fingertips on that smooth underside flesh and small bones, then relief, then certainty. But against my will, or only because of it, I still don’t know, I touched his neck, ran my fingers down it as if petting, then pressed, and my hand sprang back as from fire. I lowered it again, held it there until it felt that faint beating that I could not believe. There was too much wind. Nothing could make a sound in it. A pulse could not be felt in it, nor could mere fingers in that wind feel the absolute silence of a dead man’s artery. I was mak - ing sounds again; I grabbed his left arm and his waist, and pulled him toward me, and that side of him rose, turned, and I lowered him to his back, his face tilted up toward the tree that was groan - ing, the tree and I the only sounds in the wind. Turning my face from his, looking down the length of him at his sneakers, I placed my ear on his heart, and heard not that but something else, and I clamped a hand over my exposed ear, heard something liquid and alive, like when you pump a well and after a few strokes you hear air and water moving in the pipe, and I knew I must raise his legs and cover him and run to a phone, while still I listened to his chest, thinking raise with what? cover with what? and amid the liquid sound I heard the heart, then lost it, and pressed my ear against bone, but his chest was quiet, and I did not know when the liq - uid had stopped, and do not know now when I heard air, a faint rush of it, and whether under my ear or at his mouth or whether I heard it at all. I straightened and looked at the light, dim and yel - low. Then I touched his throat, looking him full in the face. He was blond and young. He could have been sleeping in the shade of a tree, but for the smear of blood from his mouth to his hair, and the night sky, and the weeds blowing against his head, and the leaves shaking in the dark above us.

I stood. Then I kneeled again and prayed for his soul to join in peace and joy all the dead and living; and, doing so, confronted my first sin against him, not stopping for Father Paul, who could have given him the last rites, and immediately then my second one, or I saw then, my first, not calling an ambulance to meet me there, and I stood and turned into the wind, slid down the ditch and crawled out of it, and went up the hill and down it, across the road to the street of houses whose people I had left behind for - ever, so that I moved with stealth in the shadows to my truck.

When I came around the bend near my house, I saw the kitchen light at the rear. She sat as I had left her, the ashtray filled, and I looked at the bottle, felt her eyes on me, felt what she was seeing too: the dirt from my crawling. She had not drunk much of the rye.

I poured some in my glass, with the water from melted ice, and sat 30 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 down and swallowed some and looked at her and swallowed some more, and said: “He’s dead.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, rubbed the cheeks under them, but she was dry now.

“He was probably dead when he hit the ground. I mean, that’s probably what killed—” “Where was he?” “Across the ditch, under a tree.” “Was he — did you see his face?” “No. Not really. I just felt. For life, pulse. I’m going out to the car.” “What for? Oh.” I finished the rye, and pushed back the chair, then she was stand- ing too.

“I’ll go with you.” “There’s no need.” “I’ll go.” I took a flashlight from a drawer and pushed open the door and held it while she went out. We turned our faces from the wind. It was like on the hill, when I was walking, and the wind closed the distance behind me: after three or four steps I felt there was no house back there. She took my hand, as I was reaching for hers.

In the garage we let go, and squeezed between the pickup and her little car, to the front of it, where we had more room, and we stepped back from the grill and I shone the light on the fender, the smashed headlight turned into it, the concave chrome staring to the right, at the garage wall.

“We ought to get the bottles,” I said.

She moved between the garage and the car, on the passenger side, and had room to open the door and lift the bag. I reached out, and she gave me the bag and backed up and shut the door and came around the car. We sidled to the doorway, and she put her arm around my waist and I hugged her shoulders.

“I thought you’d call the police,” she said.

We crossed the yard, faces bowed from the wind, her hair blowing away from her neck, and in the kitchen I put the bag of bottles in the garbage basket. She was working at the table: capping the rye and putting it away, filling the ice tray, washing the glasses, emp - tying the ashtray, sponging the table.

“Try to sleep now,” I said.

She nodded at the sponge circling under her hand, gathering ashes. Then she dropped it in the sink and, looking me full in the face, as I had never seen her look, as perhaps she never had, being for so long a daughter on visits (or so it seemed to me and still does: that until then our eyes had never seriously met), she crossed to me from the sink and kissed my lips, then held me so tightly I 35 40 45 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 lost balance, and would have stumbled forward had she not held me so hard.

I sat in the living room, the house darkened, and watched the maple and the hemlock. When I believed she was asleep I put on La Bohème, and kept it at the same volume as the wind so it would not wake her. Then I listened to Madame Butterfly, and in the third act had to rise quickly to lower the sound: the wind was gone. I looked at the still maple near the window, and thought of the wind leaving farms and towns and the coast, going out over the sea to die on the waves. I smoked and gazed out the window.

The sky was darker, and at daybreak the rain came. I listened to To s c a , and at six-fifteen went to the kitchen where Jennifer’s purse lay on the table, a leather shoulder purse crammed with the things of an adult woman, things she had begun accumulating only a few years back, and I nearly wept, thinking of what sandy foundations they were: driver’s license, credit card, disposable lighter, ciga - rettes, checkbook, ball-point pen, cash, cosmetics, comb, brush, Kleenex, these the rite of passage from childhood, and I took one of them—her keys—and went out, remembering a jacket and hat when the rain struck me, but I kept going to the car, and squeezed and lowered myself into it, pulled the seat belt over my shoulder and fastened it and backed out, turning in the drive, going for - ward into the road, toward St. John’s and Father Paul.

Cars were on the road, the workers, and I did not worry about any of them noticing the fender and light. Only a horse distracted them from what they drove to. In front of St. John’s is a parking lot; at its far side, past the church and at the edge of the lawn, is an old pine, taller than the steeple now. I shifted to third, left the road, and, aiming the right headlight at the tree, accelerated past the white blur of church, into the black trunk growing bigger till it was all I could see, then I rocked in that resonant thump she had heard, had felt, and when I turned off the ignition it was still in my ears, my blood, and I saw the boy flying in the wind. I lowered my forehead to the wheel. Father Paul opened the door, his face white in the rain.

“I’m all right.” “What happened?” “I don’t know. I fainted.” I got out and went around to the front of the car, looked at the smashed light, the crumpled and torn fender.

“Come to the house and lie down.” “I’m all right.” “When was your last physical?” “I’m due for one. Let’s get out of this rain.” “You’d better lie down.” “No. I want to receive.” 50 55 60 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 That was the time to say I want to confess, but I have not and will not. Though I could now, for Jennifer is in Florida, and weeks have passed, and perhaps now Father Paul would not feel that he must tell me to go to the police. And, for that very reason, to confess now would be unfair. It is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my best, in truth my only, friend. I have one from Jennifer too, but that is the nature of fatherhood.

Most of that day it rained, so it was only in early evening, when the sky cleared, with a setting sun, that two little boys, leav- ing their confinement for some play before dinner, found him.

Jennifer and I got that on the local news, which we listened to every hour, meeting at the radio, standing with cigarettes, until the one at eight o’clock; when she stopped crying, we went out and walked on the wet grass, around the pasture, the last of sun - light still in the air and trees. His name was Patrick Mitchell, he was nineteen years old, was employed by CETA, lived at home with his parents and brother and sister. The paper next day said he had been at a friend’s house, and was walking home, and I thought of that light I had seen, then knew it was not for him; he lived on one of the streets behind the club. The paper did not say then, or in the next few days, anything to make Jennifer think he was alive while she was with me in the kitchen. Nor do I know if we could have saved him.

In keeping her secret from her friends, Jennifer had to perform so often, as I did with Father Paul and at the stables, that I believe the acting, which took more of her than our daylight trail rides and our night walks in the pasture, was her healing. Her friends teased me about wrecking her car. When I carried her luggage out to the car on that last morning, we spoke only of the weather for her trip —the day was clear, with a dry cool breeze —and hugged and kissed, and I stood watching as she started the car and turned it around. But then she shifted to neutral and put on the parking brake and unclasped the belt, looking at me all the while, then she was coming to me, as she had that night in the kitchen, and I opened my arms.

I have said I talk with God in the mornings, as I start my day, and sometimes as I sit with coffee, looking at the birds, and the woods.

Of course He has never spoken to me, but that is not something I require. Nor does He need to. I know Him, as I know the part of myself that knows Him, that felt Him watching from the wind and the night as I kneeled over the dying boy. Lately I have taken to arguing with Him, as I can’t with Father Paul, who, when he bears my monthly confession, has not heard and will not hear anything of failure to do all that one can to save an anonymous life, of injus - tice to a family in their grief, of deepening their pain at the chance and mystery of death by giving them nothing—no one —to hate.

With Father Paul I feel lonely about this, but not with God. When I received the Eucharist while Jennifer’s car sat twice-damaged, so redeemed, in the rain, I felt neither loneliness nor shame, but as though He were watching me, even from my tongue, intestines, blood, as I have watched my sons at times in their young lives when I was able to judge but without anger, and so keep silent 65 Comparing Stories With Similar Themes Chapter 7 while they, in the agony of their youth, decided how they must act; or found reasons, after their actions, for what they had done.

Their reasons were never as good or as bad as their actions, but they needed to find them, to believe they were living by them, instead of the awful solitude of the heart.

I do not feel the peace I once did: not with God, nor the earth, or anyone on it. I have begun to prefer this state, to remember with fondness the other one as a period of peace I neither earned nor deserved. Now in the mornings while I watch purple finches driving larger titmice from the feeder, I say to Him: I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl.

And He says: I am a Father too.

Yes, I say, as You are a Son Whom this morning I will receive; unless You kill me on the way to church, then I trust You will receive me.

And as a Son You made Your plea.

Yes, he says, but I would not lift the cup.

True, and I don’t want You to lift it from me either. And if one of my sons had come to me that night, I would have phoned the police and told them to meet us with an ambulance at the top of the hill.

Why? Do you love them less?

I tell Him no, it is not that I love them less, but that I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons’ pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daugh- ter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

So, He says, you love her more than you love Me.

I love her more than I love truth.

Then you love in weakness, He says.

As You love me, I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn. From The Times Are Never So Bad by Andre Dubus. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright © 1983 by Andre Dubus. RESPONSE AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS 1. I n his talk with God at the end of “A Father’s Story,” Ripley says he had to make a choice between love and truth (i.e., between love and what is right /just). Explain his reasoning in making this moral choice. Does the father in “The Lost Son” make the same choice? Explain.

2.

T he theme of forgiveness is reflected through an ordinary father named Luke Ripley in “A Father’s Story” and through a father who is also a metaphor for God in the “The Lost Son” parable.

a . D oes one story present greater insight into the nature of forgiveness than the other?

b . T o what extent do Jennifer in the Dubus story and the older son in the parable understand the costs of forgiveness to the giver and to the receiver? 70 75 Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 7. 5 Exploring Existential Thought Who are we? Do we simply exist or do our lives have meaning? These questions are at the heart of existentialism. Existential thought—pondering the meaning of our existence—has always been a part of the human experience. In the mid-20th century, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) coined the term “existentialism” in reference to 19th- and 20th-century philoso- phers and writers who focused on questions of existence. Existentialists varied widely in their backgrounds, political views, and religious beliefs—some were Christians, others atheists.

Sartre’s definition of existentialism focused on the key similarity among this diverse group: They believed that human existence comes before essence. First, we are born—we exist. The rest of our lives are about creating who we are—our essence. Sartre believed that this philosophy was empowering, enabling us to be anything we choose. Creating our own essence carries the ulti - mate responsibility—each individual is solely responsible for what he or she makes of life.

Existential Themes in Literature: Abandonment, Despair, Anguish The responsibility of creating a meaningful life can be weighty, so weighty that 20th-century Algerian author Albert Camus (1913–1960) asked perhaps the most basic existential question:

Is this absurd life even worth living? Of course, Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered this nearly 400 years earlier in one of the most famous lines in literature: “To be or not to be, that is the question” (Act III, scene i).

Hamlet, though, cannot simply ponder the virtues of life over death. His uncle, Claudius, has just killed his father and married his mother. Hamlet must make a critical decision in the creation of his own essence: Should he kill Claudius to avenge his father’s death? In existentialist terms, he is not only free to choose, but he is required to choose because not choosing (inaction) is a choice in itself. Hamlet’s struggle to make this decision stirs the deep feelings Sartre would acknowledge as part of the human experience: abandonment (Hamlet must make this decision alone), despair (he feels the misery and hopelessness of alienation, the terrible aloneness of the human condition), and anguish (he is tormented by the need to make this choice, with no guarantees that it will be the right one). Hamlet is experiencing an existential crisis .

In the 19th century, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) explored these existential themes in his works Notes From Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866), although widespread literary focus on these themes would not take hold until humankind had experienced the horrors of modern warfare in World War I (1914–1918). Ernest Hemingway and other Lost Generation authors in Paris in the 1920s would explore abandonment, despair, and anguish in their search for meaning in a newly shaken world. The short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (Chapter 6) is an example of Hemingway’s treatment of the terrible aloneness in making deci - sions and creating one’s essence.

A Hunger Artist In “A Hunger Artist,” Franz Kaf ka’s central character is a relic from an earlier time when his craft of fasting was valued; his society now considers it a meaningless activity. The hunger artist expresses anxiety about this social change and experiences increasing loneliness in his internally driven pursuit of individual purpose. Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 Franz Kafka (1883–1924) Kafka, a Jewish Czech, had seen the ravages of World War I, and his writ- ing often reflected existentialist themes. Few writers have been more pas- sionate about using writing as a means of self-exploration than Kafka. He completed a law degree and worked as a civil service lawyer, but neither this occupation nor his family life brought happiness. Even though he feared his authoritarian father, he lived in isolation with his parents for most of his life, never marrying, and died of tuberculosis. In Kafka’s most famous story, “The Metamorphosis,” the protagonist awakens one morning to discover he has transformed into a giant, hideous insect—condemning him to unimaginable alienation. Many literary critics see the grotesque insect as an autobiographi- cal symbol of the nightmarish relationship Kafka had with his father. Associated Press A Hunger Artist Franz Kafka (1924), Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought sea - son tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children’s special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other’s hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground, sometimes giving a courte - ous nod, answering questions with a constrained smile, or perhaps stretching an arm through the bars so that one might feel how thin it was, and then again withdrawing deep into himself, paying no attention to anyone or anything, not even to the all-important striking of the clock that was the only piece of furniture in his cage, but merely staring into vacancy with half-shut eyes, now and then taking a sip from a tiny glass of water to moisten his lips.

Besides casual onlookers there were also relays of permanent watchers selected by the public, usually butchers, strangely enough, and it was their task to watch the hunger artist day and night, three of them at a time, in case he should have some secret recourse to nourishment. This was nothing but a formality, insti - tuted to reassure the masses, for the initiates knew well enough that during his fast the artist would never in any circumstances, not even under forcible compulsion, swallow the smallest morsel of food; the honor of his profession forbade it. Not every watcher, of course, was capable of understanding this, there were often Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 groups of night watchers who were very lax in carrying out their duties and deliberately huddled together in a retired corner to play cards with great absorption, obviously intending to give the hunger artist the chance of a little refreshment, which they sup- posed he could draw from some private hoard. Nothing annoyed the artist more than such watchers; they made him miserable; they made his fast seem unendurable; sometimes he mastered his feebleness sufficiently to sing during their watch for as long as he could keep going, to show them how unjust their suspicions were.

But that was of little use; they only wondered at his cleverness in being able to fill his mouth even while singing. Much more to his taste were the watchers who sat up close to the bars, who were not content with the dim night lighting of the hall but focused him in the full glare of the electric pocket torch given them by the impresario. The harsh light did not trouble him at all, in any case he could never sleep properly, and he could always drowse a little, even when the hall was thronged with noisy onlookers. He was quite happy at the prospect of spending a sleepless night with such watchers; he was ready to exchange jokes with them, to tell them stories out of his nomadic life, anything at all to keep them awake and demonstrate to them that he had no eatables in his cage and that he was fasting as not one of them could fast. But his happiest moment was when the morning came and an enormous breakfast was brought them, at his expense, on which they flung themselves with the keen appetite of healthy men after a weary night of wakefulness. Of course there were people who argued that this breakfast was an unfair attempt to bribe the watchers, but that was going rather too far, and when they were invited to take on a night’s vigil without a breakfast, merely for the sake of the cause, they made themselves scarce, although they stuck stub - bornly to their suspicions.

Such suspicions, anyhow, were a necessary accompaniment to the profession of fasting. No one could possibly watch the hun - ger artist continuously, day and night, and so no one could pro - duce first-hand evidence that the fast had really been rigorous and continuous; only the artist himself could know that, he was therefore bound to be the sole completely satisfied spectator of his own fast. Yet for other reasons he was never satisfied; it was not perhaps mere fasting that had brought him to such skeleton thinness that many people had regretfully to keep away from his exhibitions, because the sight of him was too much for them, per - haps it was dissatisfaction with himself that had worn him down.

For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world. He made no secret of this, yet people did not believe him. At the best they set him down as modest, most of them, however, thought he was out for publicity or else he was some kind of cheat who found it easy to fast because he had discovered a way of making it easy, and then had the impudence to admit the fact, more or less. He had to put up with all that, and in the course of time had got used to it, but his inner dissatisfaction always rankled, and never yet, after any term of fasting—this must be granted to his credit—had he left the cage of his own free will. The longest period of fasting was Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 fixed by his impresario at forty days, beyond that term he was not allowed to go, not even in great cities, and there was good reason for it, too. Experience had proved that for about forty days the interest of the public could be stimulated by a steadily increasing pressure of advertisement, but after that the town began to lose interest, sympathetic support began notably to fall off, there were of course local variations as between one town and another, but as a general rule forty days marked the limit. So on the fortieth day the flower-bedecked cage was opened, enthusiastic specta- tors filled the hall, a military band played, two doctors entered the cage to measure the results of the fast, which were announced through a megaphone, and finally two young ladies appeared, blissful at having been selected for the honor, to help the hunger artist down the few steps leading to a small table on which was spread a carefully chosen invalid repast. And at this very moment the artist always turned stubborn. True, he would entrust his bony arms to the outstretched helping hands of the ladies bending over him, but stand up he would not. Why stop fasting at this particular moment, after forty days of it? He had held out for a long time, an illimitably long time; why stop now, when he was in his best fasting form, or rather, not yet quite in his best fasting form? Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting lon - ger, for being not only the record hunger artist of all time, which presumably he was already, but for beating his own record by a performance beyond human imagination, since he felt that there were no limits to his capacity for fasting? His public pretended to admire him so much, why should it have so little patience with him; if he could endure fasting longer, why shouldn’t the public endure it? Besides, he was tired, and now he was supposed to lift himself to his full height and go down to a meal the very thought of which gave him a nausea that only the presence of the ladies kept him from betraying, and even that with an effort. And he looked up into the eyes of the ladies who were apparently so friendly and in reality so cruel, and shook his head, which felt too heavy on its strengthless neck. But then there happened yet again what always happened. The impresario came forward, without a word—for the band made speech impossible —lifted his arms in the air above the artist, as if inviting Heaven to look down upon its creature here in the straw, this suffering martyr, which indeed he was, although in quite another sense; grasped him around the emaciated waist, with exaggerated caution, so that the frail condition he was in might be appreciated; and committed him to the care of the blenching ladies, not without secretly giving him a shaking so that his legs and body tottered and swayed. The art - ist now submitted completely; his head lolled on his breast as if it had landed there by chance; his body was hollowed out; his legs in a spasm of self-preservation clung to each other at the knees, yet scraped on the ground as if it were not really solid ground, as if they were only trying to find solid ground; and the whole weight of his body, a featherweight after all, relapsed onto one of the ladies, who looking round for help and panting a little —this post of honor was not at all what she expected it to be —first stretched her neck as far as she could to keep her face at least free from contact with the artist, then finding this impossible, and her more Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 fortunate companion not coming to her aid, but merely holding extended on her own trembling hand the little bunch of knuckle- bones that was the artist’s, to the great delight of the spectators burst into tears and had to be replaced by an attendant who had long been stationed in readiness. Then came the food, a little of which the impresario managed to get between the artist’s lips, while he sat in a kind of half-fainting trance, to the accompani - ment of cheerful patter designed to distract the public’s attention from the artist’s condition; after that, a toast was drunk to the public, supposedly prompted by a whisper from the artist in the impresario’s ear; the band confirmed it with a mighty flourish, the spectators melted away, and no one had any cause to be dissatis - fied with the proceedings, no one except the hunger artist himself, he only, as always.

So he lived for many years, with small regular intervals of recuper - ation, in visible glory, honored by all the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously. What comfort could he possibly need?

What more could he possibly wish for? And if some good-natured person, feeling sorry for him, tried to console him by pointing out that his melancholy was probably caused by fasting, it could hap - pen, especially when he had been fasting for some time, that he reacted with an outburst of fury and to the general alarm began to shake the bars of the cage like a wild animal. Yet the impresario had a way of punishing these outbreaks which he rather enjoyed putting into operation. He would apologize publicly for the artist’s behavior, which was only to be excused, he admitted, because of the irritability caused by fasting; a condition hardly to be under - stood by well-fed people; then by natural transition he went on to mention the artist’s equally incomprehensible boast that he could fast for much longer than he was doing; he praised the high ambi - tion, the good will, the great self-denial undoubtedly implicit in such a statement; and then quite simply countered it by bringing out photographs, which were also on sale to the public, showing the artist on the fortieth day of a fast lying in bed almost dead from exhaustion. This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible. Time and time again in good faith he stood by the bars listening to the impresario, but as soon as the photographs appeared he always let go and sank with a groan back on to his straw, and the reassured public could once more come close and gaze at him.

A few years later when the witnesses of such scenes called them to mind, they often failed to understand themselves at all. For meanwhile the aforementioned chance in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that; at any rate the pampered hunger artist suddenly found himself deserted one fine day by the amusement seekers, who went streaming past him to other more favored attractions. For the 5 Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 last time the impresario hurried him over half Europe to discover whether the old interest might still survive here and there; all in vain; everywhere, as if by secret agreement, a positive revul- sion from professional fasting was in evidence. Of course it could not really have sprung up so suddenly as all that, and many pre - monitory symptoms which had not been sufficiently remarked or suppressed during the rush and glitter of success now came retrospectively to mind, but it was now too late to take any coun - termeasures. Fasting would surely come into fashion again at some future date, yet that was no comfort for those living in the present. What, then, was the hunger artist to do? He had been applauded by thousands in his time and could hardly come down to showing himself in a street booth at village fairs, and as for adopting another profession, he was not only too old for that but too fanatically devoted to fasting. So he took leave of the impre - sario, his partner in an unparalleled career, and hired himself to a large circus; in order to spare his own feelings he avoided reading the conditions of his contract.

A large circus with its enormous traffic in replacing and recruiting men, animals and apparatus can always find a use for people at any time, even for a hunger artist, provided of course that he does not ask too much, and in this particular case anyhow it was not only the artist who was taken on but his famous and long-known name as well, indeed considering the peculiar nature of his per - formance, which was not impaired by advancing age, it could not be objected that here was an artist past his prime, no longer at the height of his professional skill, seeking a refuge in some quiet corner of a circus, on the contrary, the hunger artist averred that he could fast as well as ever, which was entirely credible, he even alleged that if he were allowed to fast as he liked, and this was at once promised him without more ado, he could astound the world by establishing a record never yet achieved, a statement which cer - tainly provoked a smile among the other professionals, since it was left out of account the change in public opinion, which the hunger artist in his zeal conveniently forgot.

He had not, however, actually lost his sense of the real situation and took it as a matter of course that he and his cage should be stationed, not in the middle of the ring as a main attraction, but outside, near the animal cages, on a site that was after all eas - ily accessible. Large and gaily painted placards made a frame for the cage and announced what was to be seen inside it. When the public came thronging out in the intervals to see the animals, they could hardly avoid passing the hunger artist’s cage and stopping there a moment, perhaps they might even have stayed longer had not those pressing behind them in the narrow gangway, who did not understand why they should be held up on their way towards the excitements of the menagerie, made it impossible for anyone to stand gazing quietly for any length of time. And that was the reason why the hunger artist, who had of course been looking forward to these visiting hours as the main achievement of his life, began instead to shrink from them. At first he could hardly wait for the intervals; it was exhilarating to watch the crowds come streaming his way, until only too soon—not even the most Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 obstinate self-deception, clung to almost consciously, could hold out against the fact—the conviction was borne in upon him that these people, most of them, to judge from their actions, again and again, without exception, were all on their way to the menagerie.

And the first sight of them from the distance remained the best.

For when they reached his cage he was at once deafened by the storm of shouting and abuse that arose from the two contending factions, which renewed themselves continuously, of those who wanted to stop and stare at him—he soon began to dislike them more than the others—not out of real interest but only out of obstinate self-assertiveness, and those who wanted to go straight on to the animals. When the first great rush was past, the strag- glers came along, and these, whom nothing could have prevented from stopping to look at him as long as they had breath, raced past with long strides, hardly even glancing at him, in their haste to get to the menagerie in time. And all too rarely did it happen that he had a stroke of luck, when some father of a family fetched up before him with his children, pointed a finger at the hunger artist and explained at length what the phenomenon meant, telling stories of earlier years when he himself had watched simi - lar but much more thrilling performances, and the children, still rather uncomprehending, since neither inside nor outside school had they been sufficiently prepared for this lesson—what did they care about fasting?—yet showed by the brightness of their intent eyes that new and better times might be coming. Perhaps, said the hunger artist to himself many a time, things could be a little better if his cage were set not quite so near the menagerie. That made it too easy for people to make their choice, to say nothing of what he suffered from the stench of the menagerie, the animals’ rest - lessness by night, the carrying past of raw lumps of flesh for the beasts of prey, the roaring at feeding times, which depressed him continuously. But he did not dare to lodge a complaint with the management; after all, he had the animals to thank for the troops of people who passed his cage, among whom there might always be one here and there to take an interest in him, and who could tell where they might seclude him if he called attention to his exis - tence and thereby to the fact that, strictly speaking, he was only an impediment on the way to the menagerie.

A small impediment, to be sure, one that grew steadily less. People grew familiar with the strange idea that they could be expected, in times like these, to take an interest in a hunger artist, and with this familiarity the verdict went out against him. He might fast as much as he could, and he did so; but nothing could save him now, people passed him by. Just try to explain to anyone the art of fasting! Anyone who has no feeling for it cannot be made to understand it. The fine placards grew dirty and illegible, they were torn down; the little notice board telling the number of fast days achieved, which at first was changed carefully every day, had long stayed at the same figure, for after the first few weeks even this small task seemed pointless to the staff; and so the artist simply Exploring Existential Thought Chapter 7 fasted on and on, as he had once dreamed of doing, and it was no trouble to him, just as he had always foretold, but no one counted the days, not one, not even the artist himself, knew what records he was already breaking, and his heart grew heavy. And when once in a time some leisurely passer-by stopped, made merry over the old figure on the board and spoke of swindling, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world who was cheating him of his reward.

Many more days went by, however, and that too came to an end.

An overseer’s eye fell on the cage one day and he asked the atten- dants why this perfectly good cage should be left standing there unused with dirty straw inside it; nobody knew, until one man, helped out by the notice board, remembered about the hunger artist. They poked into the straw with sticks and found him in it.

“Are you still fasting?” asked the overseer, “when on earth do you mean to stop?” “Forgive me, everybody,” whispered the hunger artist, only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him. “Of course,” said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affa - bly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. “What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was continuing to fast.

“Well, clear this out now!” said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. Into the cage they put a young pan - ther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary.

The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away.

"A Hunger Artist" from The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, copyright © 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1954, 1958, 1971 by Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Group, a\ division of Random House LLC. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubl\ eday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 10 Summary Chapter 7 RESPONSE AND REFLECTION QUESTIONS 1. D o you believe that the hunger artist experiences abandonment, despair, and anguish? If so, pro-vide examples from the text to support your view.

2.

D o you believe that the hunger artist has created the life he set out to create? Provide examples.

3.

W hat is your opinion of the life that the hunger artist creates for himself?

4.

W hat does the hunger artist expect from his audience? To what extent are his expectations met?

5.

H ow does the panther fit into the idea of existence versus essence?

6.

C onsider and comment on the hunger artist’s final words, his stated reason for fasting: “Because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” 7.

K afka wrote this story in the year of his death, while he was in the last stages of tuberculosis, unable to eat. We have no definitive information on what this story meant to him personally.

Any ideas? Summary Chapter 7 provides an opportunity to read additional stories and explore the literary concepts and techniques that work to make those stories successful. Some of these literary techniques include plot, theme, point of view, irony, and symbolism. This chapter also offers an opportu - nity to compare two stories that share the same theme—“The Story of the Lost Son” and “A Father’s Story”—showing how the same main concept can be explored through different plots and through different literary techniques. Finally, the theme of existentialism is presented and explored through Kaf ka’s “A Hunger Artist,” including such questions as whether or not human life truly has meaning.