Eveline by James Joyce:
At the beginning Eveline is tired. She has spent her whole life working hard and doing as she promised her mother and holding the house together after she passed away. But now she has the opportunity to leave and break free of this life, she is exhilarated at the prospect of adventure and new happiness. James Joyce then spends the rest of the short story causing Eveline to back away from this new life and the risk it offers. Eveline has many flashbacks and fond memories that are brought up throughout the story, and although some of these memories don't come off as pleasant ones there is no tone of resentment in Eveline when she thinks on these events. Instead each memory that she thinks of causes her to rethink her current decision and to realize that her life at home has some level of comfort that she is reluctant to leave. As the story progresses it flip flops back and forth between the flashbacks Eveline has of her life at home, for example remembering the field she used to play in; and what the future could possibly hold for her in Buenos Aryes. This shows the obvious conflict that Eveline is experiencing between wanting to experience new and exciting things, or staying behind in her old comfort that she realized did bring her happiness. This is the conflict that is laced throughout the story and the parallel structure between old memories and new possibilities is how Joyce reveals this conflict to the reader.
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/959/
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/959/
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway
During the course of reading A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway the paragraph that begins with "Goodnight," caught my attention. This paragraph is a large chunk of non-dialogue text which sets it apart from the rest of the story and gives a syntactical significance to what is said within that paragraph. The older waiter in the story is talking to himself in this paragraph as the younger waiter has left the cafe. The topic of nothingness permeates this paragraph more than the other parts of the story and reveals the central theme to Hemingway's piece. That some men and women experience a fear of the nothingness that surrounds human life; that everyone is an insignificant speck of dust in the course of time. In the second half of the paragraph the older waiter recites two Catholic prayers, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary, but inserts the spanish word nada for all references to God and heaven. In placing this within his story and the context of the older waiter, who empathizes with the older patron, Hemingway reinforces the concept that even religion is lost in the nothingness of life.
http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
A & P by John Updike
What caught my attention in John Updike's A & P was how Updike referred to the customers in the store as various farm animals throughout the story. This created a contrast between the three girls and the store workers and the other customers that were shopping. This dehumanizes the customers to the reader and caused me to think of them as mindless drones; in contrast with the in depth description of the three girls and the close look into Sammy's inner thoughts. The contrast emphasizes Sammy and the girls as the main characters in the story. Especially in the case of the three girls the effect of the mindless farm animal description raises them above the other customers even more so than their clothing does. They are daring, young, and full of color, whereas the other customers are common and drone-like, the three girls startle the other customers with their presence. In a way the girls represent the people who go against the norm of society and hold their heads high while doing it.
The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence
The mention of a Freudian interpretation of the "Rocking-Horse Winner" by Derek intrigued me to look closer at this theory during the course of reading the story. I found that there are some aspects of the story that relate to a possible Oedipus complex that the boy has, and it's relation to his riding his rocking-horse. The beginning of the story reveals that the son, Paul, adores his mother to no end, and dreads the "whispering's" of the house not having enough money. I think that Paul takes these "whispering's" and his mother's disappointment with their "unlucky" father as a task to help out his mother. Paul seeks to fill the shoes of his father who, as the mother puts it, is unlucky and does not fulfill their needs and her needs. The way Paul fulfills his mothers desire for "more money" is by secretly betting on horse races in which he has an uncanny ability to tell who is going to win. It is revealed later in the story that Paul rides his rocking-horse "like a madman" until he knows who is going to win. This riding of the rocking-horse can be taken as a sexual parable between sex and the act of riding the rocking-horse. In his desire to please his mother and win her love, Paul's acts of riding the rocking-horse can be related to pleasing her sexually, and it is only until Paul has rode his rocking-horse enough that the winner of the race is revealed to him, ie: the sexual climax during intercourse. This climax is what brings his mother satisfaction and thus brings him satisfaction.
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/rockwinr.html
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/rockwinr.html
The Signalman by Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens lived during the time that most major European powers were industrializing and rapidly growing, the living conditions of these growing industrial centers were very slum-like and detrimental to the residents health. The description of the industrialized setting that Dickens creates in "The Signalman" caught my attention immediately. It fascinates me that the era of industrialization was seen in such a uniform motif, as being dingy, gloomy, dirty and full of despair. The dungeon-like or other-worldly diction that Dickens uses effectively conveyed this motif to me. The description of the station the signalman is at gave me the feeling that his post did not reside in the natural world, it had a far more hellish or purgatory feeling. I believe that Dickens' description of the signalman's post reveals his adverse and uneasy feelings towards how the Industrial Revolution would affect people's health and mental stability, as their human rights and healthy living were being ground under the boot of progress and economic gain. The deterioration of mental stability is shown through the fact that the signalman assumed that he had seen an apparition appear at his post previous nights, and that after he witnessed this apparition a terrible accident occurred. The apparition turns out to be the train engineer, as revealed at the end of the story. The signalman, lost, lonely and trapped in his semi-hellish station confused the engineer for a ghost, eventually leading to his death when he approached the apparition, the train and engineer, and was run over. Dickens diction about the state of the industrialized setting evokes negative feelings towards the changes happening in society; which I believe to be an underlying theme to the story.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/BranLine.shtml
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/BranLine.shtml