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…
Tag: Analysis
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…
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…
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…
The Red Convertible – Analysis
In Erdrich’s story “The Red Convertible,” Henry Lamartine makes three memorable journeys off the Chippewa reservation. The first journey, which he takes with his brother Lyman, is a pleasure-filled jaunt around the western part of the United States. The next time he leaves the reservation he is sent to fight in the Vietnam War. His…
Night by Tatyana Tolstaya – Analysis
One of the most startling events in Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Night,” a tale filled with amazing and surprising images, is Alexei’s apparently sudden interest in becoming a writer. Alexei is a middle-aged retarded man whose occupation as a builder of cardboard boxes keeps him and his mother, Mamochka, housed and fed—not a typical candidate to pursue…
The Last Lovely City – Analysis
Not until the middle of “The Last Lovely City” does Alice Adams explicitly mention the word mask, but the element that holds the fabric of this story together is Adams’s implicit exposure of the masks behind which her characters hide. Beginning with the first paragraph, in which Adams has her main character, Dr. Benito Zamora,…
Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov – Analysis
Anton Chekhov is regarded as a master of the short story for his innovative structural techniques and his treatment of important themes. In ‘ ‘Gooseberries,” Chekhov demonstrates both by using a specific structure to help convey a theme. ”Gooseberries” contains a story within a story; the main character relates a tale about his brother to…
The Eskimo Connection – Analysis
Hisaye Yamamoto’s “The Eskimo Connection” is told through the eyes of Emiko Toyama, a poet who self-deprecatingly refers to herself simply as “an aging Nisei widow” with very little to offer a young prison pen pal. She never directly calls herself a poet in the story, although art and writing have certainly played an important…
Don’t Look Now – Daphne du Maurier – Analysis
Daphne du Maurier’s short story, or novella, “Don’t Look Now” is a tale of the supernatural, full of mysterious premonitions, blind soothsayers, and messages from the next life. Critics refer to it as a fine example of contemporary romantic horror writing, and the film made from the story sent chills up the spines of many…