“Immortality” is told in the first person plural by a narrator who represents an entire Chinese town over the course of the twentieth century. The narrator begins by going back to the time of the Chinese imperial dynasties, when members of the imperial family were served by eunuchs who attended to their every need. Eunuchs…
Tag: Summary
Great Day by David Malouf – Summary
“Great Day” opens early on the morning of Audley Tyler’s seventy-second birthday, which is the same day as a national Australian holiday. Angie, Audley’s daughter-in-law, sits gazing out to sea while nearby, Audley is fishing. When Angie walks back to the house, she is greeted by her son, Ned, who informs her that Fran is…
The Good Doctor by Adam Haslett – Summary
Set in the barren prairie of northeast Nebraska, “The Good Doctor” tells the story of an at-home interview between psychiatrist Frank Briggs and Mrs. Buckholdt, a patient who has been using sedatives and antidepressants for four years and who has recently missed several of her clinic appointments with her regular doctor. Young and somewhat idealistic…
Fish by Jill McCorkle – Summary
“Fish” begins with news that a man, sixty-four years old, has just found out that he is dying. The cause—whether cancer or something else—is never given. Family and friends gather to comfort the man, including a woman who nursed him back from pneumonia when he was two years old. She saved him then but cannot…
The English Pupil – Summary
“The English Pupil” begins outside the town of Uppsala, Sweden, on a very cold late December afternoon in 1777. Carl Linnaeus, the famous naturalist, who is now seventy years old and dying, is riding in a horse-drawn sleigh. He orders his coachman to take him to his country estate, Hammarby, which lies beyond city limits….
The Canal by Richard Yates – Summary
“The Canal” starts at a cocktail party in 1952. Two couples, the Millers and the Braces, are in the middle of a long conversation that has already been going on for about an hour when the story begins. Lew Miller and Tom Brace work for the same advertising firm. As the story opens, Lew Miller…
Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle – Summary
Robert Olen Butler does not establish a setting at the start of “ Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle”; nor does he establish who is talking. Instead, he starts the story with the narrator, whose name will much later be given as Margaret, telling her story, leaving the situation for the reader to piece together….
A Silver Dish by Saul Bellow – Summary
Saul Bellow begins “A Silver Dish” by focusing on Woody Selbst, the protagonist, at age sixty. He is a successful businessman, the owner of a tile distribution company, living alone in an apartment on the top floor of his company warehouse. It is Sunday morning, and the bells are ringing in churches all around the…
Rosa by Cynthia Ozick – Summary
The story “Rosa” is set in 1977, the same year in which it was written. “Rosa” is written in the third person limited point of view, but the reader is allowed only Rosa’s viewpoint on events; letters in the story are, of course, written in first person. Because Rosa’s mental state is unstable, her perceptions…
The Pearl by John Steinbeck – Summary
Chapter 1 The Pearl begins as Kino, a Mexican pearl diver in the village of La Paz on the gulf of California, awakes before morning. His wife Juana and child Coyotito lie nearby in their brush house. Kino contentedly listens to the waves on the beach and declares “it was very good.” His ancestors had…