Connie Fifteen-year-old Connie exhibits the confusing, often superficial behavior typical of a teenage girl facing the difficult transition from girlhood to womanhood. She is rebellious, vain, self-centered, and deceitful. She is caught between her roles as a daughter, friend, sister, and object of sexual desire, uncertain of which one represents the real her: “Everything about…
Tag: Short Stories
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been: Summary
Connie is a fifteen-year-old teenager growing up in suburbia in the 1960s. She is preoccupied with typical teenage concerns: her looks and popular music. She argues with her mother, makes fun of her older, plainer sister, and hangs out with her friends in restaurants, movie theaters, and shopping malls. During these summertime social ventures, she…
Through the Tunnel: Analysis
Doris Lessing is known for being a writer whose work affects people. She tackles political issues but refuses to limit herself to being a political writer, and is equally acclaimed for her essays, fiction, and even science fiction dealing with interests ranging from nature to the status of women. “Through the Tunnel,” which is ultimately…
Through the Tunnel: Setting
“Through the Tunnel” was first published by the New Yorker magazine in 1955. Lessing had moved from British-controlled Rhodesia in South Africa in 1949. Six years later, little had changed. Apartheid, a legal system of racial segregation structured every aspect of life for both black and white people there, and racism exploded violently in the…
Through the Tunnel: Literary Devices
Point of View “Through the Tunnel” is written in third-person limited point of view. The narrator describes the feelings of both Jerry and his mother but does not penetrate the thoughts of the local boys. This separation associates the reader more closely with the white tourists who are unfamiliar with the area. By telling the…
Through the Tunnel: Themes
In Lessing’s story, the eleven year-old Jerry braves an underwater tunnel while he and his mother are on vacation. The tunnel evolves, into an enormous challenge for Jerry, as he deals with his loneliness and his attempts at separating from his mother. Rites of Passage Jerry’s beach vacation becomes the site of an intense personal…
Through the Tunnel: Summary
In Doris Lessing’s “Through the Tunnel,” Jerry, a young English boy, and his mother are vacationing at a beach they have come to many times in years past. Though the beach’s location is not given, it is implied to be in a country that is foreign to them both. Each tries to please the other…
There Will Come Soft Rains: Analysis
John J. McLaughlin wrote that”much of the bulk of [Bradbury’s] fiction has been concerned with a single theme—the loss of human values to the machine.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bradbury’s collection of stories The Martian Chronicles. In this collection, as Edward Gallagher has pointed out, Bradbury has “dealt with the initial… attempts…
There Will Come Soft Rains: Setting
Aftermath of World War II Bradbury wrote “There Will Come Soft Rains” in the early 1950s. The memory of World War II was fresh in peoples’ minds, particularly the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August, 1945, which brought the war to an end. Though the Allies had won, an increasing tension arose…
There Will Come Soft Rains: Literary Devices
Irony Bradbury uses irony to great effect in the story. Irony in this case means presenting an outcome of a situation that is the opposite of what one would expect. Thus, it is ironic that the same technology which created a house that can cook and clean is also the technology which destroyed all the…