Prejudice and Racism The prejudice that Puss has for African Americans is one of the major components of the story. Even before Puss speaks of his dislike for the black boy whom his granddaughter has befriended, his racism is apparent. He sees all the boys who make a living pushing chairs along the boardwalk as…
Tag: Short Stories
Black Boy by Kay Boyle – Characters
Black Boy The black boy and the narrator are friends. The black boy has a job pushing people in chairs to see the sights along the boardwalk. He lives on the beach and is quite poor. Despite his poverty, he has an active fantasy life. With his imagination, he can create a beautiful world in…
Black Boy by Kay Boyle – Summary
“Black Boy” begins with an unnamed narrator remembering an accident she had when she was about 10 or 12 years old and living with her grandfather in a seaside city. The girl likes to ride her horse along the beach while her Grandfather Puss likes to ride in the chairs along the wooden boardwalk, which…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Analysis
One of the unique things about Jason Brown’s “Animal Stories” is the inclusion of animal and nature videos, watched by Jamie’s mother and others in her hospital room. The videos provide a bit of comic relief in the story of Jamie’s mother’s impending death, as well as something Mom can react to. She is continually…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Setting
Brown wrote this story in the early 1990s, a period of great social and political change in the United States. For example, personal computers and everyday use of the Internet were becoming more commonplace. By the early 1990s, the number of deaths from AIDS began increasing at an alarming rate, and calls became louder for…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Literary Devices
Use of Time Brown freely switches back and forth between different years in the story, even within the same section. For example, one section begins with Jamie referring to the summer of 1977, when “we stayed inside and drew the shades.” A few paragraphs later, but still in the same section, he is back in…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Themes
Memory and Forgetting Both Jamie and his mother wrestle with their memories of the past in a way that almost minimizes present time. Although the scenes in the hospital are told in present tense, Jamie frames the story of his mother’s stay in the hospital as if it were being told as a memory. Near…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Characters
Alice Alice is a former girlfriend of Jamie’s, who once agreed to marry him if he would change. During the summer of 1977, Alice moves in with Jamie, Jamie’s mother, and Tom. According to Jamie, she has an IQ of 165 and, while they lived together in his mother’s house, she needed to have sex…
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Summary
“Animal Stories” opens with Jamie rushing to the hospital because he has just found out that his mother has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He notes that he drives recklessly, which he gets from his mother. “Any man’s mother is a source of grief until she dies,” he says. Jamie arrives at the hospital…
Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant – Analysis
In ‘‘Two Friends’’ Maupassant presents two contradictory and unresolved tendencies. On the one hand he deals with war as a universal evil for which government (as a structure—not any specific government) is responsible and of which the common man is the victim. But he just as insistently portrays the Germans as cruel, warlike savages. It…