In Adam Haslett’s short story, “The Good Doctor,” setting is both an historical and a geographical context, the decades-long persistent local economic depression and a history of failure of the federally funded medical outreach program, sponsored by the National Health Service Corps, to respond effectively to local substance abuse needs. The chronic poverty and the…
Author: JL Admin
A collection of high-quality academic essays.
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Setting
National Health Service Corps According to its website, the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) was established in 1972, as a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a federally funded agency to address the medical and psychological needs of underserved populations, wherever they are found in the United States, from rural and…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Literary Devices
Setting “The Good Doctor” is set in northeast Nebraska, near the small towns of Atkinson, Tilden, and Ewing. The Buckholdt family lives in a “white fifties prefab, sagged on one side” with “empty prairie stretching miles in every direction.” The first thing Dr. Briggs notices on the property is “the skeleton of a Chevy Nova,…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Themes
Chemical Drug Use and Abuse “The Good Doctor” is much concerned with drug use and abuse. Life in this rural, economically depressed Nebraska prairie offers little opportunity or hope, and drugs become the means by which people dull disappointment and disillusionment. Jack Buckholdt promised his wife they would leave for a better life in California;…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Characters
Anne Anne is a psychiatrist who went through residency with Frank Briggs and visited him once in Ewing Falls, Nebraska. They had dated for six months but are now no longer a couple. Like Frank, Anne was trained in “biological psychiatry”; unlike him, she does not question this drug-based method for treating mental illness. Dr….
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Summary
Set in the barren prairie of northeast Nebraska, “The Good Doctor” tells the story of an at-home interview between psychiatrist Frank Briggs and Mrs. Buckholdt, a patient who has been using sedatives and antidepressants for four years and who has recently missed several of her clinic appointments with her regular doctor. Young and somewhat idealistic…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Analysis
McCorkle’s short story “Fish” is something of a memoir, capturing for the reader particular events in the lives of the narrator and her dying father. While the narrator’s theme is resurrection, her method is memory. The sequence of memories is not strictly chronological, and this story does not pretend to be the narrator’s autobiography. Autobiographies…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Setting
U.S. Economy in Twentieth Century “Fish” covers much of the twentieth century in the United States. One memory is from the father’s childhood in the early 1930s when the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. The Great Depression lasted for over a decade (1929–1941), ending with U.S. involvement in World War…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Literary Devices
Metaphor Metaphor is a figure of speech in which one subject is described in terms of a dissimilar subject, in order to suggest an analogy. McCorkle uses metaphor directly at the beginning of the story when the narrator describes her father’s “metaphor for life”: “You WERE TERRIFIED of the water, but you loved to step…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Themes
Resurrection Resurrection means to rise from the dead or to revive. Resurrection is the narrator’s primary theme in “Fish.” Many of the narrator’s memories over the course of the story are concerned with little moments in which resurrection has occurred or nearly occurred, for example, the father’s birth a year after his stillborn brother; his…