Darly Darly is Pace’s sixty-eight-year-old ranch hand. Like Hattie, he comes from the East Coast. Darly inadvertently causes Hattie to break her arm, but he never apologizes for his mistake. Throughout the story, he and Hattie are seen as behaving antagonistically toward each other, each annoyed by the others’ tacit accusations of being a drunk….
Tag: Short Stories
Leaving the Yellow House – Summary
As the story opens, seventy-two-year-old Hattie has lived in the old yellow house in the practically deserted community of Sego Desert Lake, Utah, for years. Born and bred on the East Coast, Hattie came out West after a failed marriage to a Philadelphia blueblood. She used to have a lover named Wicks. He was a…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Analysis
In naming her story “Kew Gardens,” Woolf chose a specific space to present the melancholy scenes of the characters’ conversation. While the garden might connote an Edenic space in which human beings realize a natural completeness or contentment, Woolf s Kew Gardens transforms, as the story progresses, into a mere screen across which pass the…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Setting
World War I Before World War II, the First World War was simply known as the Great War. As the twentieth century began, Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary intensely guarded their international territorial and economic interests, even to the point of threatening war. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Literary Devices
Point of View and Narration The narrator is an omniscient third person. The narrator sets the scene and is able to delve into each character’s private thoughts. The true narrative insight appears not so much in what is said or illustrated but in the demonstrated inadequacy of the characters’ conversations. The narrator illustrates the garden…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Themes
Loneliness and Alienation Each human character in the story seems lost in his or her own reminiscences. Despite walking with someone in Kew Gardens, the narrator emphasizes ways in which their thoughts are their own. Some of the characters are merely alone with their thoughts, like the first couple who remember by themselves and then…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Characters
Eleanor The wife of Simon and the mother of two children (Caroline and Hubert), Eleanor walks through the garden chatting with her husband who tells her of his failed marriage proposal to Lily years before in Kew Garden. Eleanor remembers herself as a little girl, painting by the lake with five other girls. As Eleanor…
Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf – Summary
The story begins by setting the garden scene: a mild, breezy, summer day in July with ”perhaps a hundred stalks” of colorful flowers, petals unfurled to meet the sunlight. The light hits not only the flowers in an “oval-shaped flower-bed” but the brown earth from which they spring and across which a small snail is…
Goodbye, Columbus – Analysis
”Goodbye, Columbus” is a coming-of-age story, in which the twenty-three-year-old protagonist, Neil Klugman, grapples with his sense of self, particularly in relation to his Jewish identity. The event that that precipitates this identity crisis is meeting Brenda Patimkin, with whom he has a relationship over the course of a summer. While Brenda and Neil are…
Goodbye, Columbus – Setting
Jewish Holidays Toward the end of the story, Neil and Brenda agree to spend the weekend of the Jewish holidays together. Specifically, it is during the Jewish High Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year and usually occurs in mid to late September. As the end of summer had indicated the…