The story opens with Julie, the pregnant teenager who is its protagonist, looking at herself in the mirror. She is in the London apartment of Debbie, a prostitute who took her in five months earlier, when she ran away from home to hide her condition from her parents. Julie is now in labor, and Debbie,…
The Beginning of Homewood – Analysis
Like William Faulkner does in his novels and stories set in the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha, Wideman creates a complex landscape in “The Beginning of Homewood” that allows him to enmesh his characters in webs of moral ambiguities. The community of Homewood founded by runaway slave Sybela Owens, the narrator’s great-great-great-grandmother, is certainly not an…
The Beginning of Homewood – Summary
The story opens as the narrator tries to explain how the story came into being. It began, he says, as a letter to his brother, which he ”began writing on a Greek island two years ago, but never finished, never sent.” Addressing his absent brother, he then proceeds to tell “the story that came before…
Town and Country Lovers – Analysis
In “Town and Country Lovers,” Gordimer sets up two dichotomies. The first is suggested in the title; there are two stories in two settings, both presenting interracial love affairs. The other dichotomy is between the men and women in the stories. The men are both members of the white ruling class, and the women are…
Town and Country Lovers – Summary
Part 1 “Town and Country Lovers” is a two-part story about interracial lovers who suffer the consequences of breaking the rules forbidding such relationships. In the first story, solitary geologist Dr. von Leinsdorf meets a young, colored (mixed-race) African girl who is a cashier at the grocery store across the street from his apartment. When…
Small Change by Yehudit Hendel – Analysis
Yehudit Hendel’s “Small Change,” a harrowing tale of familial disintegration and the impact one generation can have on succeeding ones, presents pictures of mental disturbance so gripping that to find a grain of reality among all of the hallucinatory images might seem a daunting task. However, to read this work simply as a story of…
Small Change by Yehudit Hendel – Summary
“Small Change” is told alternately through the voice of a female narrator and the voice of the main character, Rutchen. Rutchen relates what happened to her in a Swiss jail and tells about the troubled relationship she had with her father, who is dead at the time she tells her tale. The story is not…
Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan – Analysis
From the first sentence of ”Resurrection of a Life” to the last, William Saroyan incorporates numerous contrasting images, ideas, and feelings. The story opens with the narrator stating: “Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends, moment after moment, yourself inhaling, and exhaling, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, moving, sleeping, waking, day after day…
Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan – Themes
Facing Reality In “Resurrection of a Life,” Saroyan explores the experiences of a ten-year-old boy facing the realities of life in a big city during World War I. Some of these experiences were quite harsh, while others were not as bad as they seemed to the boy at the time. In any case, this boy…
Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan – Summary
“Resurrection of a Life” consists mainly of the narrator’s recollections of his life as a ten-year-old paperboy in 1917. He sold newspapers by standing on busy public sidewalks and shouting the headlines to passersby. As a result of this work, he was faced daily with the events of World War I. In addition, he was…