Point of View “Debbie and Julie” opens with the image of Julie looking in the mirror and closes with her private thoughts as she drifts off to sleep, suggesting that the story is centrally concerned with Julie’s consciousness and self-perception. It is narrated from a third-person point of view. The narrator is not a participant…
Tag: Short Stories
Debbie and Julie – Themes
Knowledge and Ignorance ”Debbie and Julie” tells of the knowledge that is earned through the trials of life experience. Julie, its teenage protagonist, runs away from her conservative parents in order to hide her pregnancy from them. She is taken in by a kind prostitute and survives the terrifying ordeal of giving birth alone in…
Debbie and Julie – Characters
American Man When Julie goes into labor, Debbie is not there to help her as she had promised. Instead, she has extended a trip with a client, an American television producer, who seems like a promising prospect. Debbie has always wished for “just one regular customer” or “just one man.” Anne Anne is Julie’s mother….
Debbie and Julie – Summary
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…