Contemporary writers arrive on the literary scene with a force of history behind them. They arrive after major literary movements and eras and are sometimes compared to the romantics, the humanists, the southern school, or the Victorians. Sometimes a writer fits neatly into a category or the melding of a few categories. Anne Tyler, in…
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Average Waves in Unprotected Waters – Essay
Like most of her short stories, Anne Tyler’s ‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ has been largely ignored by literary critics. Though very little has been written about the text, the story does encapsulate the Tyler reading experience as it focuses on themes of family, self-discovery, and the elevation of the ordinary to writers’ material. Broad…
Average Waves in Unprotected Waters – Setting
When ‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ appeared in the New Yorker in the winter of 1977, it arrived in a climate of economic instability and social sobriety. The 1970s, the post-Vietnam years in America, were marked by feelings of disillusionment. Working-class people lost faith in government, believing that their vote would not make a difference,…
Average Waves in Unprotected Waters – Literary Devices
Setting Throughout ‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters,’’ the settings of different scenes augment the plot by mirroring Bet’s feelings. Bet Blevins’s apartment is crumbling and provides the ‘‘feeling of too many lives layered over other lives, like the layers of brownish wallpaper.’’ The description of the place mirrors Bet’s feelings of suffocation and loneliness. Though…
Average Waves in Unprotected Waters – Summary
‘‘Average Waves in Unprotected Waters’’ begins at first light on the day Bet Blevins, the story’s protagonist, is to institutionalize her mentally handicapped son, Arnold. At the age of nine, Arnold has become too difficult for Bet to manage. In the shabby, one-room apartment, Bet wonders, as she prepares Arnold’s things and dresses him one…
The Aleph – Analysis
In 1995, Bill Gates, the world-renowned founder of Microsoft and personal computing visionary, published The Road Ahead, his study of computing history and examination of the ways in which computers will transform the lives of people all over the world. His enthusiasm for what is now commonly called the Information Age is found on every…
The Aleph – Setting
Argentine Politics and Art In 1940, Roman Castillo replaced President Roberto Ortiz. Like many Argentines at the time, Castillo admired Hitler and Mussolini; like many citizens of Germany and Italy, many Argentines yearned for the order that fascism would presumably impose on their nation; like many of their European counterparts, many Argentines lacked the foresight…
The Aleph – Literary Devices
The Story’s Epigraphs The two epigraphs that precede ‘‘The Aleph’’ serve as introductions to the story’s plot as well as short commentaries on its issues. The first, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is said by the title character to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘‘O God! I could be bound in a nutshell, and count myself a…
The Aleph – Themes
The Nature of Memory In his parable ‘‘The Witness,’’ Borges imag[1]ines the last man to have witnessed pagan rituals dying in Anglo-Saxon England and remarks, ‘‘with him will die, and never return, the last immediate images of these pagan rites.’’ Because of this, ‘‘the world will be a little poorer,’’ since it will have lost…
The Aleph – Characters
Borges ‘‘The Aleph’’ is narrated by Borges, a fictional stand-in for the author, which allows him to foster a sense of realism. Like the author, the narrator is an Argentine writer who detests pretentious authors like Daneri and who was also passed by for the National Prize for Literature. The narrator is a man haunted…