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…
Tag: Average Waves in Unprotected Waters
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…