“Heart of Darkness” begins with the “frame” narrator’s description of a group of men relaxing on a private yacht one evening. One of the men, Charlie Marlow, a sailor, commences to tell his friends a tale of one of his adventures as the captain of a steamboat going down the Congo River. The rest of…
Tag: Summary
Goodbye, Columbus – Summary
Neil Klugman is twenty-three and Jewish. He works at a public library and lives with his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max, as his parents have moved to Arizona because of their asthma. Neil first meets Brenda Patimkin, also Jewish, a student at Radcliffe College in Boston, Massachusetts, at a country club swimming pool, to which…
Fountains in the Rain – Summary
The story opens with a young man and a young woman walking through the rain. The girl, Masako, is crying incessantly. The boy, Akio, has recently broken off their relationship while they were having tea. Akio had pursued the relationship only in order to break up with her. Once he did so, however, Masako began…
The Feathered Ogre – Summary
A king falls ill and is told by his doctors that the only way he can be cured is by obtaining a feather from the ogre that eats every human being it sees. No one of his subjects is willing to go on a quest for one of the ogre’s feathers, until one attendant bravely…
The Erlking by Angela Carter – Summary
The story opens with a long descriptive passage depicting the stark and gloomy atmosphere of the woods in late October. These woods are characterized as entrapping and menacing, not so much because of any physical danger they present as because of their ability to undermine human identity: “It is easy to lose yourself in these…
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 – 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 – 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 – 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…
Resurrection of a Life by William Saroyan – Summary
“Resurrection of a Life” consists mainly of the narrator’s recollections of his life as a ten-year-old paperboy in 1917. He sold newspapers by standing on busy public sidewalks and shouting the headlines to passersby. As a result of this work, he was faced daily with the events of World War I. In addition, he was…