Introduction to the Conventions chapters

Transcription

Introduction to the Conventions chapters
The English A: Literature course will include the study of different types of literature. These
types, commonly referred to as ‘genres’, include drama, fiction, poetry and prose other (also
known as non-fiction). Each of these genres requires different things of you as a reader,
and it is important to know what these requirements are so that you can approach your
reading with confidence. The key to analysis and interpretation relies on a clear and precise
knowledge of each genre’s conventions. Conventions, quite simply, are the established ‘rules’
that writers use. If we read with a clear understanding of these conventions, then we can
know what is expected of us as readers and can consider the text before us as representative
of a particular genre.
It is critical to understand that each genre has its own particular set of conventions, or
expectations. The writers of fiction, for example, use certain strategies to create their
narratives. These narrative strategies, or narrative techniques, are particular to the writing
of the short story and the novel. As a confident reader, you can approach any work of
fiction and come to appreciate that work in terms of its genre. That appreciation comes
about through the ability to measure one text in terms of the conventions of that genre.
Being aware of these conventions will allow you to respond to the effects of a particular
text. It is your awareness of these effects that forms the basis of your analysis and/or
interpretation of a text.
The next four chapters will introduce each of the four genres individually and will provide
you with knowledge of their conventions. From these chapters, you will learn what each
genre expects from you as a reader, what strategies you can expect to encounter as you read,
and how these expectations will provide you with a basis for understanding, analysing, or
interpreting a text.
Each Convention chapter includes three sections: Knowledge and Understanding,
Appreciation and Insight:
• In the Knowledge and Understanding section you will learn about the conventions of the
genre and the strategies that are available to the writer. These conventions and strategies
comprise the expectations that you will have as a reader of the genre;
• In the Appreciation section you will apply those expectations by examining samples
from specific textual exercises;
• And in the Insight section you will find a series of summary questions that can guide
your reading and, subsequently, your analytical approach to the genre.
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CONVENTIONS OF FICTION
Learning outcomes
Knowledge and Understanding
• Understand what it means to be an active, close reader
• Appreciate the importance of a writer’s choice of point of view
• Appreciate the variations of characterization
• Understand the function of setting
• Appreciate the importance of plot and structure
• Understand theme
• Appreciate tone and its relationship to voice.
Appreciation and exercises
• Identifying the nuance of a speaker
• Identifying details that create effect
• Specifying images that contribute to tone
• Analysing tone
• Determining point of view
• Analysing characterization within text
• Evaluating stylistic features in fiction
• Identifying irony within text.
Knowledge and Understanding
When we read prose fiction, whether a short story or a novel, we most often read alone and
in private. The images associated with reading prose – a comfy chair, a quiet space – speak
to the nature of the form itself. This genre creates a writer’s world bit by bit, over time,
through a voice that speaks to the silent reader. The readers’ ability to shut out their own
world and immerse themselves in the world of prose fiction often determines whether the
reading experience is a satisfying one.
The world created within a novel can encompass a range of emotions, from terrifying to
amusing, but the satisfying experience of every prose fiction text is built on engaging the
reader emotionally, or intellectually, or both. Engaging a reader involves many strategies,
and no two novels or short stories are alike in creating the kind of hermetic seal that keeps
the world of the reader at bay for those minutes or hours of reading. Short stories are often
read in one sitting simply due to their length, but reading novels requires more than one
sitting. Novels are picked up and laid aside, sometimes for periods of weeks. Because of
variations in the reading itself, novelists structure their texts to accommodate this process.
Sections, chapters and interstices (white space or gaps on a page) function as natural breaks
for the reader, and novelists can use these breaks as part of their narrative strategy.
Short story writers and novel writers share many of the same narrative strategies in creating
the worlds of their fiction. Features used by authors of all prose fiction to bring these worlds
to life include:
setting
• point of view
• voice
theme
• characterization
time
• plot
structure.
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In private moments or shared
moments, reading on a park
bench or in bed, fiction has
the power to transport us into
fictional worlds
Thinking vs. feeling
When we experience a fiction text, we open ourselves to the effects of the text. Sometimes
those effects trigger an emotional response in the reader, and other times the effect is
intellectual. Active reading, reading that makes the reader ‘work,’ challenges the reader to
focus beyond the ‘story’ and our emotional responses to it. A full and satisfying experience
incorporates both thinking and feeling. As readers of a genre, we need to be aware of our
reactions but also what triggers them. Being conscious of your responses, your reactions,
requires close reading of the text. In close reading you focus not only on the literal meaning
of the words but on the subtlety of a writer’s style – the use of descriptive language, the
pace of sentences, the rhythm of dialogue, all influence a reader’s emotional and intellectual
responses. Understanding the nuance, or subtlety, of a writer’s style will only be possible
if you read closely, with an eye to the effect of the fiction writer’s choices. The more you
practice close reading, the better close reader you become. The more attuned you become to
the strategic choices that writers make, the more you will be able to appreciate each fictional
text as a purposeful, unified creation whose effects on readers are specific and intentional.
Read now what the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Toni Morrison, says about reading.
Her essay, ‘The Reader as Artist,’ defines the process of active reading. In this course you
are expected to read, as Morrison says, by ‘surrender[ing] to the narrator’s world while
remaining alert inside it.’ By remaining ‘alert’ you can ‘dig for the hidden, questioning and
relishing the choices the author made.’ Active reading is the guiding principle for the
English A: Literature course.
Far too often, young readers assume that they are reading for the ‘story’ and nothing more.
So, when asked to evaluate the ‘story’ their response is either ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn’t like it.’
Morrison’s perspective in this essay is that it doesn’t matter if you ‘like’ the text. What
matters is that you can read closely and observe your reactions to the subtleties of the
text – you can, in Morrison’s words, ‘think the text.’
Aspire to be an active,
rather than passive, reader.
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‘The reader as artist’ by Toni Morrison
Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared
at the floor boards – the color of silver – and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might
have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving
mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a
dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive
as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head’s trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an
almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant …
The above opening to a short story by Flannery O’Connor is, to readers content with
grasping information, straightforward enough. It introduces a character, Mr. Head,
waking up at night and noticing moonlight. To readers who enjoy the practice of
reading, the opening is much, much more.
Two approaches seem to me the difference between reading as a skill and reading as an
art. The first is quite enough. From knowing what STOP means through understanding
a scholarly essay or a legal brief, the necessary skill varies greatly, can always be refined,
and lets us negotiate life with some measure of control. Reading as art, not Art (once,
depressingly called ‘critical’ reading) is another matter. Like the avid devotion to other arts,
it develops over time in any number of ways, takes all sorts of routes, and has many origins.
My own reading skills were enhanced in schools, but my pleasure in, my passion for
the art of reading came long before. It came in childhood and it began with listening.
Not only was I a radio child who grew up in the decades when radio was paramount,
when being mesmerized by the dramas and reenactments from a speaker box was
commonplace, I was also surrounded by adults who told stories, reshaped and solicited
them from each other as well as their children. The result was a heavy reliance on my
own imagination to provide detail; the specific color of things, the feel of the weather,
the space characters occupied, their physical features, their motives, why they behaved
as they did, and especially the sound of their speech, where so much meaning lay.
Listening required me to surrender to the narrator’s world while remaining alert inside
it. That Alice-in-Wonderland combination of willing acceptance coupled with intense
inquiry is still the way I read literature: slowly, digging for the hidden, questioning or
relishing the choices the author made, eager to envision what is there, noticing what is
not. In listening and in reading, it is when I surrender to the language, enter it, that I see
clearly. Yet only if I remain attentive to its choices can I understand deeply. Sometimes
the experience is profound, harrowing, beautiful; other times enraging, contemptible,
unrewarding. Whatever the consequence, the practice itself is riveting. I don’t need to
‘like’ the work; I want instead to ‘think’ it.
In the opening sentences of Flannery O’Connor’s story, she chose to direct her readers
to Mr. Head’s fantasy, his hopes. Lowly pillow ticking is like brocade, rich, elaborate.
Moonlight turns a wooden floor to silver and ‘cast[s] a dignifying light’ everywhere.
His chair, ‘stiff and attentive,’ seems to await an order from him. Even his trousers
hanging on its back had ‘a noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung
to his servant.’ So, Mr. Head has strong, perhaps unmanageable, dreams of majesty,
of controlling servants to do his bidding, of rightful authority. Even the moon in his
shaving mirror pauses ‘as if it were waiting for his permission to enter.’ We don’t really
have to wait (a few sentences on) to see his alarm clock sitting on an ‘overturned bucket,’
or to wonder why his shaving mirror is five feet away from his bed, to know a great
deal about him – his pretension, his insecurity, his pathetic yearnings – and anticipate
his behavior as the story unfolds. In the accuracy of the ‘ear’ of the story, its shape, its
supple economy and sheer knowingness, it seems to me virtually flawless and deliciously
demanding. Which is to say, I can read it again and again, step into its world confident
that my attentiveness will always yield wonder.
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You’re on the porch with the broom sweeping the same spot, getting the same sound –
dry straw against dry leaf caught in the loose-dirt crevice of the cement tiles. No phone,
no footfalls, no welcome variation.
In the prologue to Toni Cade Bambara’s novel Those Bones Are Not My Child, a routine,
even humble chore signals alarm, which continues to build. The narrator, distracted,
sweeps the same spot, helplessly, unable to free dead leaf and straw from cement. She
writes ‘you’ but we know she means ‘I’ and we know she means any mother, any parent,
anyone. There is no sound, except the sound of the broom. The quiet is eerie.
Your ears strain, stretching down the block, searching through schoolchild chatter for
that one voice that will give you ease. Your eyes sting with the effort to see over bushes,
look through buildings, cut through everything that separates you from your child’s
starting point – the junior high school.
I see the woman – no, I invent her: from fingers clenched on a broomstick to the sandals
I’m sure she is wearing. Flip-flops, maybe. She wears a skirt – not jeans. The porch is old
cement with crevices and cracks where soil gathers and the fall wind is always blowing
leaves … she can’t get them out; they’re stuck, like she is. The street is tree lined, houses
hedged, brick ones, pale clapboard with wide yards. A hose is curled on yellowing grass.
A pair of skates that should have been put away? Or a bicycle? The silence is not total—
there is traffic beyond, birds—but it is nevertheless disturbing because the single voice
needed to calm me is not there. I know that fear. Even when I’m told there is no reason
for it. Especially then.
The terror is over, the authorities say. The horror is past, they repeat every day … You
want to believe. It’s 3:23 on your Mother’s Day watch. And your child is nowhere in
sight.
I can do this again: read it and be there once more, anytime I like. Sifting, adding,
recapturing. Making the work work while it makes me do the same. Just like leaning into
the radio; or sitting cross-legged at the feet of grandparents.
Skill is enough, but I prefer the art.
O, The Oprah Magazine, July 01, 2006
QUESTIONS
1
Explain how listening to stories as a child prepared Morrison to read as an artist.
2
Would Morrison say there is a difference between imagining a scene and inventing it?
3
What does Morrison mean by ‘making the work work’?
4
How does Morrison differentiate reading as a skill and reading as an art?
5
What does Morrison mean by the practice of reading?
Close reading and active
reading are synonymous.
When Morrison says that
‘the words on the page are
only half the story’, what
does she mean?
SUMMARY
To read as an artist means that you bring a willingness to engage with the words on the page.
When you open yourself to the writer’s language, you allow yourself to imagine the fictional world
that the writer has created. Envisioning means just that – you see the characters, hear them speak,
and watch their actions. You step into the world of the fiction, yet you are fully conscious of the
choices the writer makes. For example, you know that your sympathy or lack thereof is directly
influenced by the writer. Your job as an analyst of the fiction, as someone who reads as an artist, is
to determine what makes you feel and think as you do about a specific moment within the text.
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Considering point of view
Prose fiction writers decide on the manner and method of presenting their text. The
primary consideration is just how much information they want to reveal or how much
they want to conceal. Point of view is the perspective a writer determines for his reader –
something like choosing a camera angle or lens. The choice is significant.
Imagine the difference in shooting a film from high atop a cliff a mile away from the
action, as opposed to shooting the same scene from five metres away. Details in the closeup version would be sharp and clear, but the greater area where the scene plays out would
be unseen. At the same time, the view from the cliff top would offer a perfect view of the
panorama but details would be lost. In the same way, a prose fiction writer judiciously
selects the angle of vision dependent upon the effects that he or she wants to create for
the reader. How close will the writer allow the reader to get to the story? How much will
the reader ‘know’? How much will the reader have to assume or surmise? Will there be
information that the reader will never know? A writer’s decision as to the point of view is
perhaps the first, and most significant, choice to make.
A chosen angle of vision,
just as in point of view,
limits what we see as well
as what we know. While the
close-up angles focus on the
gargoyle, only the panoramic
angle provides the context,
the knowledge that this
gargoyle is atop Notre Dame
overlooking Paris.
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Types of point of view
•
•
•
•
First person
Third person omniscient
Third person limited omniscient
Objective
First person point of view is the perspective of one of the characters (either major or
minor) in the text.
Example: I knew from the moment that I saw her, that my life, as I knew it, would be
changed forever.
Why would a writer choose
one point of view over
another?
Is first person point of view
always more engaging
than a third person
perspective?
Third person omniscient point of view is the perspective of a narrator outside the action
of the story who knows what the characters think and feel and why they behave as they
do. This narrator can potentially tell the reader everything about the characters and the
situations of the text, but does not have to.
Example: When they met, they exchanged pleasantries. Susan smiled and grabbed the
other’s hands, as if she had met an old, dear friend while the other nodded and wrinkled
her nose the way she always did when she was nervous. They both knew that their meeting
may have been by chance but felt fated nonetheless.
Third person limited point of view is similar to the perspective of the third person
omniscient narrator, but only with regard to a single character. This narrator can enter the
mind and heart of that character and virtually knows everything about this character, but
cannot tell us what other characters are thinking and feeling.
Example: When Susan saw her, there, standing there, looking that beautiful, she knew that
she had to say something. Stop, get her attention, say something stupid. Anything. This
meeting had to happen sometime and today was destined to be the day. She knew it.
The objective point of view is often called ‘the fly on the wall’ perspective. This narrator
observes and describes but does not judge or offer insight into characters or situations
within the text.
Example: They stopped suddenly, smiled, and stood aside. One talked. One didn’t. The sun
was glaring, hot. A hand to the forehead, a smile, gestures offered and denied. They stood
together, a part of the crowd.
SUMMARY
Point of view is the most significant choice a fiction writer makes because it directly influences
how a reader perceives a text. Writers understand that a reader may find particular subject
matter alienating, or even disturbing. By choosing to present this material in first person point
of view, the writer is directly challenging the reader’s sensitivity, if not tolerance. Presenting this
sensitive material in third person point of view can allow the reader some distance from which
to view it. For example, a violent scene could be described less graphically from the perspective
of an omniscient narrator – someone who knows what happened as opposed to the first-hand
knowledge of the perpetrator.
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Considering voice
Narrative voice is wholly dependent upon the writer’s choice of narration. The voice can
be engaged in the action of the text or detached from it. The tone of the narrator’s voice is
a critical narrative feature. While a title may grab the attention of a reader, the voice in the
opening paragraph can engage the reader so intensely that they don’t want to stop reading.
Consider the following example:
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for
something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted
their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.
I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which
I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of
my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with:
That I am nobody by myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
– From Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man
In first person narration, like the example above, the voice of the narrator is the voice of
the character. While engaging, this voice is subjective, has bias, and is not always believable.
Naïve narrators are those too young, or too inexperienced, to understand fully the context
of events or the motivations of characters. Unreliable narrators, while initially believable,
prove to be untrustworthy as the plot progresses.
To identify a naive or unreliable narrator, the reader must be alert to clues that indicate that
the narrator is unaware of the reality of a situation.
In Dom Cassmuro by Machado de Assis, the unreliable narrator’s rants and ravings
throughout the text provide evidence for his unreliability.
I escaped from the dependent, I escaped from my mother by not going to her room, but
I did not escape from myself. I ran to my room, and came in after myself. I talked to
myself, I chased after myself, I threw myself on the bed and rolled around with myself,
weeping and stifling sobs on the edge of the sheet.
Third person narrators, because they have some degree of omniscience, either full or
limited omniscence, are accepted as trustworthy because we believe that they offer honest
insights into character thought and feeling and unbiased assessments of event and situation,
when in fact, they may hold biases. The voice of the narrator appears direct and confident –
we trust this perspective because the narrator seems familiar with the characters, the setting
or the events. It is important, however, to examine the narrator’s voice for clues to bias.
Information can be revealed sympathetically or disdainfully and the reader’s judgment of
character and situation is always directed by narrative voice.
As you can see in the following example, the voice of the third person narrator describes a
character in such detail that we accept the description at face value.
She stood, feet slightly apart, looking directly at him. Not nineteen, but sure of herself.
A little paler, a little less healthy that he had first thought. And on closer scrutiny her
bright clothes, attractive from a distance, had seen better days.
– From Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War
In the example below, the narrative voice makes a judgement of the character based on
what appears to be close observation over a period of time. This voice is self-assured and is,
therefore, believable.
When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on
springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite
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often. He had a slight stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get words out
quickly enough, he would use his fists. He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He
had had no patience with his father.
– From Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
The voice of an objective narrator is often mechanical and disembodied, and lends
itself to texts where information is revealed matter-of-factly without opinion or
bias. This voice simply reports what it sees.
SUMMARY
Narrative voice cannot be distinguished from narrator. The ‘tone of voice’ that we associate with
any speaker can be used to describe the narrative voice of any fiction text. When we determine
voice, we, in a sense, embody the narrator. If that narrator is first person, we have a character, a
body, on which to hang that voice. In third person, however, the disembodied voice of the narrator
is not without understanding and not without judgement or bias. The only narrative voice that
does not judge, that is not embodied, is the objective point of view.
The choice of point of view
is purposeful and strategic.
A narrator’s distance from
the action determines the
reader’s response to that
action.
Appreciation
EXERCISE 1
The following four passages are openings of novels. Examine the speaker of each piece and
see how many of the following points you can determine for each. Keep in mind that you will
need to read the words carefully, but you may also need to speculate on the information that
is presented subtly ‘between’ the lines. Often, the connotations and images within specific
word choice can contribute to the tone.
•
•
•
•
•
Who is the speaker?
What do you know about the speaker?
Can you determine what the speaker feels or what the speaker knows?
Can you determine what situation is the cause of these feelings or this knowledge?
What do you see when you read this opening? Do you invent details? What are these
details?
Passage 1: the opening to The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
Now she sits alone and remembers.
She sees, over and over, the specters of Tomas Arroyo and the moon-faced
woman and the old gringo cross her window. But they are not ghosts. They have
simply mobilized their old pasts, hoping that she would do the same and join
them.
But for her it took a long time.
First, she had to stop hating Tomas Arroyo for showing her what she could be
and then forbidding her to ever be what she might be. And he knew that she
could never be that, and in spite of knowing it, he let her see it.
He always knew that she would return home. But he let her see what would
become of her if she remained. She had to purge herself of this hatred. It took
her many years to do so. The old gringo was no longer there to help her. Arroyo
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was not there. Tom Brook. He might have given her a child by that name. She
had no right to think this. The moon-faced woman had taken him with her
toward their nameless destiny. Tomas Arroyo was over.
So the only moment she had left was when she crossed the border and looked
back at the two men, the soldier Inocencio and the boy Pedrito. Behind them,
she now thought she saw the dust marshaling itself into some kind of silent
chronology that told her to remember; she had come back to her land without
memory, and Mexico was no longer available,
Mexico had disappeared forever, but across that bridge, on the other side of the
river, a memorious dust insisted on marshaling itself for her, on crossing the
frontier and sweeping over the shrub and the wheat fields, the plains and the
smoky mountains, the long deep green rivers that the old man had pined for,
right up to her walk-up apartment in Washington D.C., on the shores of the
Potomac, the Atlantic, the center of the World.
The dust blew and told her that she was alone.
She remembers.
Alone.
Passage 2: the opening to The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer
Clustered predators round a kill. It’s a small car with a young woman inside
it. The battery has failed and taxis, cars, minibuses, vans motorcycles butt and
challenge one another, reproach and curse her, a traffic mob mounting its own
confusion. Get going. Stupid bloody woman. Idikazana lomlungu, le! She throws
up hands, palms open, in surrender. They continue to jostle and blare their
impatience. She gets out of her car and faces them. One of the unemployed black
men who beg by waving vehicles into parking bays sidles his way deftly through
fenders, signals with his head—Oka-y, Oka-ay go inside, go!—and mimes
control of the steering wheel. Another like him appears, and they push her and
her car into a loading bay. The street hustles on. They stand, looking musingly
beyond her while she fumbles for her purse, An expert’s quick glance at what
she has put in his hand assures the street boss that it is more than adequate. She
doesn’t know how to thank them enough, etc. He hitches his body to get the
money stowed in trousers cut to fit somebody else and smiles with his attention
on the lookout for the next vehicle seeking a place to park. A woman wearing a
towel as a shawl, enthroned on a fruit-box before her stock of hair combs, razor
blades, pumice stones, woolen caps and headache powders, yells out to him what
must be a teasing remark in a language the young woman doesn’t understand.
There. You’ve seen. I’ve seen. The gestures. A woman in a traffic jam among
those that are everyday in the city, any city. You won’t remember it, you won’t
know who she is.
But I know because from the sight of her I’ll find out—as a story—what was
going to happen as the consequence of that commonplace embarrassment on
the streets; where it was heading for, and what. Her hands thrown up, open.
Passage 3: the opening to Accident by Christa Wolf
On a day about which I cannot write in the present tense, the cherry trees will
have been in blossom. I will have avoided thinking, ‘exploded,’ the cherry trees
have exploded, although only one year earlier I could not only think but also say
it readily, if not entirely with conviction. The green is exploding. Never would
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such a sentence have been more appropriate in describing the progress of nature
than this year, in this spring heat, following the endlessly long winter. I knew
nothing yet of the warnings that would circulate much later about eating the
fruit, still invisible on the branches of the blossoming trees, on the morning
when I was annoyed, as I am every morning, by the bustlings of the neighbor’s
chickens on our freshly seeded lawn. White leghorns. The only good thing you
say about them is that they react to my clapping and hissing with fear, if also
confusion. Still, most of them scattered in the direction of the neighboring
property. There’s a good chance you’ll be able to hang on to your eggs now, I
thought spitefully, and I intimated to that authority who had begun early on
to watch me alertly from a very distant future—a glance, nothing more—that I
would not feel bound by anything anymore. Free to do and, above all, not to do
as I pleased. That goal in a very distant future toward which all lines had run till
now had been blasted away, was smoldering, along with the fissionable material
in a nuclear reactor. A rare case . . .
Passage 4: the opening to Cracking India by Bapsi Sidwa
Shall I lament the nightingale, submissively lending my ear?
Am I the rose to suffer its cry in silence year after year?
The fire of verse gives me courage and bids me no more to be faint.
With dust in my mouth, I am abject: to God I make my complaint.
Sometimes You favor our rivals then sometimes with us You are free.
I am sorry to say it so boldly. You are no less fickle than we.
– Muhammad Iqbal: ‘Complaint to God’
My world is compressed. Warris Road, lined with rain gutters, lies between
Queens Road and Jail Road: both wide, clean, orderly streets at the affluent
fringes of Lahore.
Rounding the right-hand corner of Warris Road and continuing on Jail Road is
the hushed Salvation Army wall. Set high, at eight-foot intervals, are the wall’s
dingy eyes. My child’s mind is blocked by the gloom emanating from the wire
mesh screening the oblong ventilation slits. I feel such sadness for the dumb
creatures I imagine lurking behind the wall. I know it is dumb because I have
listened to its silence, my ear to the wall.
Jail Road also harbors my energetic Electric-aunt and her adenoidal son . . .
large, slow, inexorable. Their house is adjacent to the den of the Salvation Army.
Opposite it, down a bumpy, dusty, earth-packed drive, is the one-and-a-halfroom abode of my godmother. With her dwell her docile old husband and her
slavesister. This is my haven. My refuge from the perplexing unrealities of my
home on Warris Road.
A few furlongs away Jail Road vanishes into the dense bazaars and Mozang
Chungi. At the other end a distant canal cuts the road at the periphery of my
world.
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EXERCISE 2
Each of the following passages from several novels demonstrates a wide range of points
of view and voice. Determine the type of narrative point of view for each passage. Then,
determine all that you can about the narrator, including age, gender and tone of voice. Can
you sense if the tone of voice of the narrator is sympathetic, detached or indifferent? What
specific words or phrases indicate the narrator’s attitude toward the subject matter?
What information does the narrator reveal? Is there any evidence that would support the
claim that some information is purposely concealed? Identify the specific words and phrases
that would support your claims.
1
Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect
resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It
was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. He fell in love, as
men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and an
ardor which left nothing to be desired. He pleased her; his absolute devotion
flattered her. She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between
them, in which fancy she was mistaken.
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening
2
Papa was walking toward Jaja. He spoke entirely in Igbo now. I thought he would
pull at Jaja’s ears, that he would tug and yank at the same pace as he spoke,
that he would slap Jaja’s face and his palm would make that sound, like a heavy
book falling from a library shelf at school. And then he would reach across
and slap me on the face with the casualness of reaching for the pepper shaker.
But he said, ‘I want you to finish that food and go to your rooms and pray for
forgiveness,’ before turning to go back downstairs. The silence he left was heavy
but comfortable, like a well-worn, prickly cardigan on a bitter morning.
– Chimamanda Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
3
Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in,
wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the
rhythm of heartbeat. He would like to believe he is still asleep.
– Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
4
The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but
he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches
beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been
tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had
occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins
felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They
passed notions through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
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5
All of this happened a long time ago. But not so long ago that everyone who
played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark old rooms with nurses
in attendance. They look at you and rearrange their thoughts. They say, ‘I don’t
remember.’ The occupants of memory have to be protected from strangers.
Ask what happened, they say: ‘I don’t know.’ Mention Robert Ross—they look
away. ‘He’s dead,’ they tell you. This is not news. ‘Tell me about the horses,’you
ask. Sometimes, they weep at this. Other times they say: ‘that bastard!’ Then
the nurses nod at you, much to say—you see? It’s best to go away and find your
information somewhere else. In the end, the only facts you have are public.
– Timothy Findley, The Wars
6
She had always known the day would come when she would be exposed before
the world because of that child of hers. Many a night she had lain awake
preparing herself for that day and going over what she would say. In the Kloof
over the years everyone, white and Coloured, had had to give way before her
tongue; she had made them keep out of Wolwekraal’s affairs. The Kloof had got
used to the child being with her.
– Dalene Matthee, Fiela’s Child
7
People in delirium rise and sink, rise and sink, in and out of lucidity. The
swaying, shuddering, thudding, flinging stops, and the furniture of life falls into
place. The vehicle was the fever. Chattering metal and raving dance of loose bolts
in the smell of the children’s car-sick. She rose from it gradually for longer and
longer intervals. At first what fell into place was what had vanished, the past.
– Nadine Gordimer, July’s People
8
Lord Warburton not only spent the night at Gardencourt, but he was persuaded
to remain over the second day; and when the second day was ended he
determined to postpone his departure till the morrow. During this period
he addressed many of his remarks to Isabel, who accepted his evidence of his
esteem with a very good grace. She found herself liking him extremely; the first
impression he had made on her had weight, but at the end of an evening spent
in his society she scarce fell short of seeing him – though quite without lucidity
– as a hero of romance.
– Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
9
I knew I was not in Saigon. I was not a hospital volunteer. It was not 1968 but
1978. Yet I also knew, as I passed a wall of smoked-glass windows, that I would
see the quick movements of green camouflage fatigues, and I knew. I knew
the medic insignia on his uniform and I knew, I knew, what I would see next.
His face, not the face before the explosion, but the face after, motionless in the
liquefied red that poured from a tangle of delicate veins. ‘Oh God, oh God,
oh my God!’ people cried. The doctor, the medic, and the operating-room
crew killed in a cramped, battered room reinforced by rows of military-green
sandbags. The calm of Saigon had always been unreliable, narcotically unreal.
Who could have known before the man was cut up that an unexploded grenade,
fired from a launcher—not a dead bullet—had lodged in the hollowness of his
stomach.
– Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge
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1
10
So it was Cash holding to the horse when it come splashing and scrambling up
the bank, moaning and groaning like a natural man. When I come to it it was
just kicking Cash loose from his holt on the saddle. His face turned up a second
when he was sliding back into the water. It was gray, with his eyes closed and a
long swipe of mud across his face. Then he let go and turned over in the water.
He looked just like a old bundle of clothes kind of washing up and down against
the bank. He looked like he was laying there in the water on his face, rocking up
and down a little, looking at something on the bottom.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
EXERCISE 3
Go back to the Considering Point of View section in this chapter (pages 38–39) and, using the
ideas about camera angles and narrative perspective, choose the type of camera angle (such
as close up, standard, wide angle or panoramic view) that would work best in filming each of
the ten passages above. Be prepared to defend your choices with at least three details from
each passage.
Considering characterization
There are two methods of characterization in prose fiction – direct and indirect.
Direct characterization relies on the narrator’s descriptions and judgments about a specific
character. If a narrator describes a character as tall and thin with a slight limp, we classify
that method as direct characterization. If the narrator tells us that a character dislikes small
children and avoids them at every opportunity, once again, we have direct characterization.
But, if we witness a character struggling up a narrow staircase, or holding his hands over
his ears and moving nervously aside when small children run past him screaming with
delight, we experience indirect characterization. If another character describes a character
as ‘skinny as bean pole and not a friend to children,’ we classify this observation as indirect
characterization as well.
Characters may either be dynamic or static in terms of their presentation within fiction.
Dynamic characters change within the text. Experiences affect these characters and they
may act or think differently because of these experiences. The world of the fiction in which
these dynamic characters reside, like the world of the reader, challenges pre-established
beliefs and provokes reflection, action and reaction. Static characters, on the other hand,
do not change, although the reader’s perception of such a character can change over time.
Static characters encounter the opportunity for change through their experiences, but these
experiences never provoke change within the character.
Is it possible for a
static character to be a
protagonist?
A narrator’s bias regarding
a character must be
evaluated in terms of
textual evidence to
support the truth or falsity
of that bias.
EXERCISE 4
In Alice Walker’s story, ‘Roselily’, characterization is masterfully developed via an internal
monologue. In this monologue, Walker uses direct and indirect characterization. Through
Roselily’s thoughts, observations and actions, the reader gains insight not only into her
character but her groom’s character as well.
As you read this story, note by the paragraphs following each portion of the marriage vow,
what you come to know about both characters.
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For example, in the opening section, the paragraph following ‘Dearly Beloved’, we learn
indirectly that the bride feels like a small girl as she moves with great slow-motion effort
across the porch to stand next to the man she is marrying. We also learn, directly, that this
man, her groom, does not like the fact that they are marrying on a front porch next to a busy,
noisy highway.
‘Roselily’ by Alice Walker
Dearly Beloved,
She dreams; dragging herself across the world. A small girl in her mother’s white
robe and veil, knee raised waist high through a bowl of quicksand soup. The
man who stands beside her is against this standing on the front porch of her
house, being married to the sound of cars whizzing by on highway 61.
we are gathered here
Like cotton to be weighed. Her fingers at the last minute busily removing dry
leaves and twigs. Aware it is a superficial sweep. She knows he blames Mississippi
for the respectful way the men turn their heads up in the yard, the women stand
waiting and knowledgeable, their children held from mischief by teachings from
the wrong God. He glares beyond them to the occupants of the cars, white faces
glued to promises beyond a country wedding, noses thrust forward like dogs on
a track. For him they usurp the wedding.
in the sight of God
Yes, open house. That is what country black folks like. She dreams she does
not already have three children. A squeeze around the flowers in her hands
chokes off three and four and five years of breath. Instantly she is ashamed and
frightened in her superstition. She looks for the first time at the preacher, forces
humility into her eyes, as if she believes he is, in fact, a man of God. She can
imagine God, a small black boy, timidly pulling the preacher’s coattail.
to join this man and this woman
She thinks of ropes, chains, handcuffs, his religion. His place of worship. Where
she will be required to sit apart with covered head. In Chicago, a word she hears
when thinking of smoke, from his description of what a cinder was, which
they never had in Panther Burn. She sees hovering over the heads of the clean
neighbors in her front yard black specks falling, clinging, from the sky. But in
Chicago. Respect, a chance to build. Her children at last from underneath the
detrimental wheel. A chance to be on top. What a relief, she thinks. What a
vision, a view, from up so high.
in holy matrimony.
Her fourth child she gave away to the child’s father who had some money.
Certainly a good job. Had gone to Harvard. Was a good man but weak because
good language meant so much to him he could not live with Roselily. Could not
abide TV in the living room, five beds in three rooms, no Bach except from four
to six on Sunday afternoons. No chess at all. She does not forget to worry about
her son among his father’s people. She wonders if the New England climate will
agree with him. If he will ever come down to Mississippi, as his father did, to try
to right the country’s wrongs. She wonders if he will be stronger than his father.
His father cried off and on throughout her pregnancy. Went to skin and bones.
Suffered nightmares, retching and falling out of bed. Tried to kill himself. Later
told his wife he found the right baby through friends. Vouched for, the sterling
qualities that would make up his character.
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1
It is not her nature to blame. Still, she is not entirely thankful. She supposes New
England, the North, to be quite different from what she knows. It seems right
somehow to her that people who move there to live return home completely
changed. She thinks of the air, the smoke, the cinders. Imagines cinders big as
hailstones; heavy, weighing on the people. Wonders how this pressure finds its way
into the veins, roping the springs of laughter.
If there’s anybody here that knows a reason why
But of course they know no reason why beyond what they daily have come to know.
She thinks of the man who will be her husband, feels shut away from him because
of the stiff severity of his plain black suit. His religion. A lifetime of black and white.
Of veils. Covered head. It is as if her children are already gone from her. Not dead,
but exalted on a pedestal, a stalk that has no roots. She wonders how to make new
roots. It is beyond her. She wonders what one does with memories in a brand-new
life. This had seemed easy, until she thought of it. ‘The reasons why . . . the people
who’ . . . she thinks, and does not wonder where the thought is from.
these two should not be joined
She thinks of her mother, who is dead. Dead, but still her mother. Joined. This is
confusing. Of her father. A gray old man who sold wild mink, rabbit, fox skins to
Sears, Roebuck. He stands in the yard, like a man waiting for a train. Her young
sisters stand behind her in smooth green dresses, with flowers in their hands and
hair. They giggle, she feels, at the absurdity of the wedding. They are ready for
something new. She thinks the man beside her should marry one of them. She feels
old. Yoked. An arm seems to reach out from behind her and snatch her backward.
She thinks of cemeteries and the long sleep of grandparents mingling in the dirt.
She believes that she believes in ghosts. In the soil giving back what it takes.
together,
In the city. He sees her in a new way. This she knows, and is grateful. But is it new
enough? She cannot always be a bride and virgin, wearing robes and veil. Even
now her body itches to be free of satin and voile, organdy and lily of the valley.
Memories crash against her. Memories of being bare to the sun. She wonders what
it will be like. Not to have to go to a job. Not to work in a sewing plant. Not to
worry about learning to sew straight seams in workingmen’s overalls, jeans, and
dress pants. Her place will be in the home, he has said, repeatedly, promising her
rest she had prayed for. But now she wonders. When she is rested, what will she
do? They will make babies – she thinks practically about her fine brown body,
his strong black one. They will be inevitable. Her hands will be full. Full of what?
Babies. She is not comforted.
let him speak
She wishes she had asked him to explain more of what he meant. But she was
impatient. Impatient to be done with sewing. With doing everything for three
children, alone. Impatient to leave the girls she had known since childhood, their
children growing up, their husbands hanging around her, already old, seedy.
Nothing about them that she wanted, or needed. The fathers of her children
driving by, waving, not waving; reminders of times she would just as soon forget.
Impatient to see the South Side, where they would live and build and be respectable
and respected and free. Her husband would free her. A romantic hush. Proposal.
Promises. A new life! Respectable, reclaimed, renewed. Free! In robe and veil.
or forever hold
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She does not even know if she loves him. She loves his sobriety. His refusal
to sing just because he knows the tune. She loves his pride. His blackness and
his gray car. She loves his understanding of her condition. She thinks she
loves the effort he will make to redo her into what he truly wants. His love of
her makes her completely conscious of how unloved she was before. This is
something; though it makes her unbearably sad. Melancholy. She blinks her
eyes. Remembers she is finally being married, like other girls. Like other girls,
women? Something strains upward behind her eyes. She thinks of the something
as a rat trapped, cornered, scurrying to and fro in her head, peering through the
windows of her eyes. She wants to live for once. But doesn’t know quite what
that means. Wonders if she has ever done it. If she ever will. The preacher is
odious to her. She wants to strike him out of the way, out of her light, with the
back of her hand. It seems to her he has always been standing in front of her,
barring her way.
his peace
The rest she does not hear. She feels a kiss, passionate, rousing, within the
general pandemonium. Cars drive up blowing their horns. Firecrackers go off.
Dogs come from under the house and begin to yelp and bark. Her husband’s
hand is like the clasp of an iron gate. People congratulate. Her children press
against her. They look with awe and distaste mixed with hope at their new father.
He stands curiously apart, in spite of the people crowding about to grasp his free
hand. He smiles at them all but his eyes are as if turned inward. He knows they
cannot understand that he is not a Christian. He will not explain himself. He
feels different, he looks it. The old women thought he was like one of their sons
except that he had somehow got away from them. Still a son, not a son. Changed.
She thinks how it will be later in the night in the silvery gray car. How they will
spin through the darkness of Mississippi and in the morning be in Chicago,
Illinois. She thinks of Lincoln, the president. That is all she knows about the
place. She feels ignorant, wrong, backward. She presses her worried fingers into
his palm. He is standing in front of her. In the crush of well-wishing people, he
does not look back.
Considering plot
If a friend asks you to tell them what a movie was about, you would probably give them a
quick summary of the main events of the film. Those main events, linked together through
time, create a unified whole – in this example, a film. Aristotle, in his Poetics, wrote about
plot in this way. He said that plot is the ‘imitation of an action’ and ‘the arrangement of the
incidents.’ This arrangement would have to be unified: it would have a beginning, middle
and an end, and each part could be recognized within a chain of causality better known
as cause and effect. Stories have beginnings, and middles, and ends, so is a story the same
thing as a plot?
E.M. Forster distinguishes between a story and a plot. He says that a story is ‘a narrative of
events arranged in their time sequence.’ Plot, he continues, ‘is also a narrative of events, but
the emphasis falls on causality.’ He gave this example:
‘The king died, and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died
of grief,’ is a plot. Causality takes precedence over time sequence in plot. Time sequence is
still there, but it is secondary to cause and effect.
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1
Novels are developed in such a way that they may have more than one plot. These subplots
have a number of functions. They can deepen suspense, serve as ironic contrast to the main
plot, or function as a means to develop character. The intricacy of plot within a text is one
of the many narrative strategies that fiction writers have at their disposal; they can create
simple, unified plot lines, or they can interweave plot and subplot, creating a tangle of
action.
Considering setting and time
To render a setting is to create
a fictional world that readers
can envision.
Settings, like plots, can be complex or simple. The setting of a novel, for example can be
limited to a single place, or more than one place dependent upon the aims of the writer.
What is perhaps most important, however, is not the number of settings, but what we might
call the ‘rendering’ of setting within a text. Setting includes the geographical, historical
and social background in which the action takes place. In some fiction, setting can take
on the significance of character or theme. For example, a wall could take on thematic
significance if a character witnesses a crime through a crevice in that wall. Every time that
character sees that wall, the memory of what he saw or heard is relived; or, perhaps with the
passing of time, the wall crumbles like the memory itself.
What issues does an
unfamiliar setting present
to a reader?
Fiction writers create and manipulate setting because it comprises the fictional world where
their characters reside. All action takes place within a setting, but the setting can change
with the passage of time.
Time, then, or rather the passing of time within a work of fiction, is relative to other
conventions of fiction. What this means is that many aspects of fiction—the characters,
the plot, the setting, the revelation of theme, even the structure of a text – relate to the
passing of time. Some writers unfold their text as a strict chronology while others break
the sequence of time from past to present and to future. One tool writers use to do this
is flashback, where the present tense of the action of a text is suspended, to reveal some
moment in the past. The significance of such a moment may or may not be apparent when
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it occurs. As a close reader, your ability to recognize the flashback is key, but even more
important is your ability to consider the effect of the flashback. Does that effect inform
your understanding of some aspect of the present tense of the text? Is your understanding
of a character enhanced through the flashback? Would a series of flashbacks work as a
progressive understanding of character in the present tense of the text?
Considering theme
Theme is best understood as a lesson about human nature that emerges from the action
and interaction within a text. A work of fiction is not limited by the number of themes
that can unfold as you read a text. Essentially there are two types of themes, those that are
explicitly stated and those that are subtly implied.
Explicit themes are stated outright by a narrator or a character. In children’s literature,
explicit themes abound because writers want the message to be absolutely clear, spelled
out directly for the child to consider. In more sophisticated reading, the themes are seldom
explicit.
Implicit themes are inferred by the reader over time. These messages about human
nature are subtle, rather than didactic, and are
discovered through examining character action
and interaction. At best, the convention of theme
emerges as the text unfolds.
The messages, or themes, in
children’s literature are always
clearly stated
Considering structure
The structure of a novel or short story is a
narrative strategy that can greatly affect the
reader’s understanding of a text. Alice Walker’s
structuring of ‘Roselily’ is a case in point. Enabling
the reader to be inside the mind of the character
as her wedding vows are being spoken allows for
great understanding of the character, her situation,
her fears, and her hopes. Irony is also heightened
through the connection of Roselily’s thoughts to a
particular segment of the vow. The structure of the
story creates very specific effects on the reader.
So, if a writer chooses to switch point of view
every other chapter, or to use the present time
of the novel for the odd numbered chapters and
flashbacks for the even numbered chapters, they
would do so to create very specific effects for the
reader. Always consider the structure of a novel –
the number of chapters and the use of groupings
of chapters within sections of the text may seem
arbitrary considerations, but they are not. They are
purposeful manipulations of the convention with
intended results.
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1
Considering tone
Every work of fiction has an associated tone. Tone is the writer’s attitude toward his or
her subject matter. This attitude is revealed through the action and situation of the text as
well as the reactions of characters. A writer’s tone, then, is his emotional and intellectual
perspective on his characters, the actions they perform and witness, and the situations that
prompt reaction. The writer’s tone directly affects the reader’s perception. Just as tone of
voice can soften the effect of a reprimand, the writer’s tone can modify or direct a reader’s
response to a character, action or situation.
EXERCISE 5
Using the ten samples in Exercise 1, assess the tone of each passage. Consider the possibilities
of tone as a range of emotion from detached and objective to reflective, sincere, matter of
fact, sympathetic or even ironic.
EXERCISE 6
Read these two short stories, ‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World’, by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, and ‘A Small, Good Thing’, by Raymond Carver, and apply the Insight observations
which are listed on page 71. Explore each author’s narrative choices, his strategies to engage
his readers both emotionally and intellectually. Determine the stylistic features common to
each piece and compare the effects created for the reader.
‘The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The first children who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the
sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or
masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they
removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish
and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man.
They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and
digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm
in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he
weighed more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a
horse, and they said to each other that maybe he’d been floating too long and
the water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the floor they said he’d
been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him
in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after
death was part of the nature of certain drowned men. He had the smell of the
sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was the corpse of a
human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales.
They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a
stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had
stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a
desert like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the
fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years
had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and
bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned
man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.
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That night they did not go out to work at sea. While the men went to find out
if anyone was missing in neighboring villages, the women stayed behind to care
for the drowned man. They took the mud off with grass swabs, they removed the
underwater stones entangled in his hair, and they scraped the crust off with tools
used for scaling fish. As they were doing that they noticed that the vegetation
on him came from faraway oceans and deep water and that his clothes were in
tatters, as if he had sailed through labyrinths of coral. They noticed too that he
bore his death with pride, for he did not have the lonely look of other drowned
men who came out of the sea or that haggard, needy look of men who drowned
in rivers. But only when they finished cleaning him off did they become aware
of the kind of man he was and it left them breathless. Not only was he the tallest,
strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though
they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination.
They could not find a bed in the village large enough to lay him on nor was there
a table solid enough to use for his wake. The tallest men’s holiday pants would
not fit him, nor the fattest ones’ Sunday shirts, nor the shoes of the one with the
biggest feet. Fascinated by his huge size and his beauty, the women then decided
to make him some pants from a large piece of sail and a shirt from some bridal
linen so that he could continue through his death with dignity. As they sewed,
sitting in a circle and gazing at the corpse between stitches, it seemed to them
that the wind had never been so steady nor the sea so restless as on that night
and they supposed that the change had something to do with the dead man.
They thought that if that magnificent man had lived in the village, his house
would have had the widest doors, the highest ceiling, and the strongest floor, his
bedstead would have been made from a midship frame held together by iron
bolts, and his wife would have been the happiest woman. They thought that he
would have had so much authority that he could have drawn fish out of the sea
simply by calling their names and that he would have put so much work into his
land that springs would have burst forth from among the rocks so that he would
have been able to plant flowers on the cliffs. They secretly compared him to their
own men, thinking that for all their lives theirs were incapable of doing what he
could do in one night, and they ended up dismissing them deep in their hearts as
the weakest, meanest and most useless creatures on earth. They were wandering
through that maze of fantasy when the oldest woman, who as the oldest had
looked upon the drowned man with more compassion than passion, sighed: ‘He
has the face of someone called Esteban.’
It was true. Most of them had only to take another look at him to see that he
could not have any other name. The more stubborn among them, who were
the youngest, still lived for a few hours with the illusion that when they put his
clothes on and he lay among the flowers in patent leather shoes his name might
be Lautaro. But it was a vain illusion. There had not been enough canvas, the
poorly cut and worse sewn pants were too tight, and the hidden strength of his
heart popped the buttons on his shirt.
After midnight the whistling of the wind died down and the sea fell into its
Wednesday drowsiness. The silence put an end to any last doubts: he was
Esteban. The women who had dressed him, who had combed his hair, had cut
his nails and shaved him were unable to hold back a shudder of pity when they
had to resign themselves to his being dragged along the ground. It was then that
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1
they understood how unhappy he must have been with that huge body since it
bothered him even after death. They could see him in life, condemned to going
through doors sideways, cracking his head on crossbeams, remaining on his
feet during visits, not knowing what to do with his soft, pink, sea lion hands
while the lady of the house looked for her most resistant chair and begged him,
frightened to death, sit here, Esteban, please, and he, leaning against the wall,
smiling, don’t bother, ma’am, I’m fine where I am, his heels raw and his back
roasted from having done the same thing so many times whenever he paid a
visit, don’t bother, ma’am, I’m fine where I am, just to avoid the embarrassment
of breaking up the chair, and never knowing perhaps that the ones who said
don’t go, Esteban, at least wait till the coffee’s ready, were the ones who later on
would whisper the big boob finally left, how nice, the handsome fool has gone.
That was what the women were thinking beside the body a little before dawn.
Later, when they covered his face with a handkerchief so that the light would not
bother him, he looked so forever dead, so defenseless, so much like their men
that the first furrows of tears opened in their hearts. It was one of the younger
ones who began the weeping. The others, coming to, went from sighs to wails,
and the more they sobbed the more they felt like weeping, because the drowned
man was becoming all the more Esteban for them, and so they wept so much,
for he was the more destitute, most peaceful, and most obliging man on earth,
poor Esteban. So when the men returned with the news that the drowned man
was not from the neighboring villages either, the women felt an opening of
jubilation in the midst of their tears. ‘Praise the Lord,’ they sighed, ‘he’s ours!’
The men thought the fuss was only womanish frivolity. Fatigued because of the
difficult night-time inquiries, all they wanted was to get rid of the bother of the
newcomer once and for all before the sun grew strong on that arid, windless
day. They improvised a litter with the remains of foremasts and gaffs, tying it
together with rigging so that it would bear the weight of the body until they
reached the cliffs. They wanted to tie the anchor from a cargo ship to him so
that he would sink easily into the deepest waves, where fish are blind and divers
die of nostalgia, and bad currents would not bring him back to shore, as had
happened with other bodies. But the more they hurried, the more the women
thought of ways to waste time. They walked about like startled hens, pecking
with the sea charms on their breasts, some interfering on one side to put a
scapular of the good wind on the drowned man, some on the other side to put a
wrist compass on him, and after a great deal of get away from there, woman, stay
out of the way, look, you almost made me fall on top of the dead man, the men
began to feel mistrust in their livers and started grumbling about why so many
main-altar decorations for a stranger, because no matter how many nails and
holy-water jars he had on him, the sharks would chew him all the same, but the
women kept piling on their junk relics, running back and forth, stumbling, while
they released in sighs what they did not in tears, so that the men finally exploded
with since when has there ever been such a fuss over a drifting corpse, a drowned
nobody, a piece of cold Wednesday meat. One of the women, mortified by so
much lack of care, then removed the handkerchief from the dead man’s face and
the men were left breathless too. He was Esteban. It was not necessary to repeat
it for them to recognize him. If they had been told Sir Walter Raleigh, even they
might have been impressed with his gringo accent, the macaw on his shoulder, his
cannibal-killing blunderbuss, but there could be only one Esteban in the world
and there he was, stretched out like a sperm whale, shoeless, wearing the pants of
an undersized child, and with those stony nails that had to be cut with a knife.
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They only had to take the handkerchief off his face to see that he was ashamed,
that it was not his fault that he was so big or so heavy or so handsome, and if
he had known that this was going to happen, he would have looked for a more
discreet
place to drown in, seriously, I even would have tied the anchor off a galleon
around my neck and staggered off a cliff like someone who doesn’t like things
in order not to be upsetting people now with this Wednesday dead body, as you
people say, in order not to be bothering anyone with this filthy piece of cold
meat that doesn’t have anything to do with me. There was so much truth in his
manner that even the most mistrustful men, the ones who felt the bitterness
of endless nights at sea fearing that their women would tire of dreaming about
them and begin to dream of drowned men, even they and others who were
harder still shuddered in the marrow of their bones at Esteban’s sincerity.
That was how they came to hold the most splendid funeral they could ever
conceive of for an abandoned drowned man. Some women who had gone to get
flowers in the neighboring villages returned with other women who could not
believe what they had been told, and those women went back for more flowers
when they saw the dead man, and they brought more and more until there were
so many flowers and so many people that it was hard to walk about. At the final
moment it pained them to return him to the waters as an orphan and they chose
a father and mother from among the best people, and aunts and uncles and
cousins, so that through him all the inhabitants of the village became kinsmen.
Some sailors who heard the weeping from a distance went off course and people
heard of one who had himself tied to the mainmast, remembering ancient
fables about sirens. While they fought for the privilege of carrying him on their
shoulders along the steep escarpment by the cliffs, men and women became
aware for the first time of the desolation of their streets, the dryness of their
courtyards, the narrowness of their dreams as they faced the splendor and
beauty of their drowned man. They let him go without an anchor so that he
could come back if he wished and whenever he wished, and they all held their
breath for the fraction of centuries the body took to fall into the abyss. They did
not need to look at one another to realize that they were no longer all present,
that they would never be. But they also knew that everything would be different
from then on, that their houses would have wider doors, higher ceilings, and
stronger floors so that Esteban’s memory could go everywhere without bumping
into beams and so that no one in the future would dare whisper the big boob
finally died, too bad, the handsome fool has finally died, because they were going
to paint their house fronts gay colors to make Esteban’s memory eternal and
they were going to break their backs digging for springs among the stones and
planting flowers on the cliffs so that in future years at dawn the passengers on
great liners would awaken, suffocated by the smell of gardens on the high seas,
and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform,
with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the
promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look
there, where the wind is so peaceful now that it’s gone to sleep beneath the beds,
over there, where the sun’s so bright that the sunflowers don’t know which way
to turn, yes, over there, that’s Esteban’s village.
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1
‘A Small, Good Thing’ by Raymond Carver
Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking
through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she
ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with
a spaceship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet
made of red frosting at the other end. His name, SCOTTY, would be in green
letters beneath the planet. The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck,
listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight
years old next Monday. The baker wore a white apron that looked like a smock.
Straps cut under his arms, went around in back and then to the front again,
where they were secured under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his apron
as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk.
He let her take her time. He’d just come to work and he’d be there all night,
baking, and he was in no real hurry.
She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake
would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time
for the child’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no
pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary
information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While
he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse
features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides
be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her
that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age-a man old enough to be her
father-must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and
birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was
abrupt with her-not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with
him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden
table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end; and beside the table a metal
container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was
playing country-western music.
The baker finished printing the information on the special order card and
closed up the binder. He looked at her and said, ‘Monday morning.’ She thanked
him and drove home.
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On Monday morning, the birthday boy was walking to school with another
boy. They were passing a bag of potato chips back and forth and the birthday
boy was trying to find out what his friend intended to give him for his birthday
that afternoon. Without looking, the birthday boy stepped off the curb at an
intersection and was immediately knocked down by a car. He fell on his side
with his head in the gutter and his legs out in the road. His eyes were closed, but
his legs moved back and forth as if he were trying to climb over something. His
friend dropped the potato chips and started to cry. The car had gone a hundred
feet or so and stopped in the middle of the road. The man in the driver’s seat
looked back over his shoulder. He waited until the boy got unsteadily to his feet.
The boy wobbled a little. He looked dazed, but okay. The driver put the car into
gear and drove away.
The birthday boy didn’t cry, but he didn’t have anything to say about anything
either. He wouldn’t answer when his friend asked him what it felt like to be hit by
a car. He walked home, and his friend went on to school. But after the birthday
boy was inside his house and was telling his mother about it – she sitting beside
him on the sofa, holding his hands in her lap, saying, ‘Scotty, honey, are you sure
you feel all right, baby?’ thinking she would call the doctor anyway, he suddenly
lay back on the sofa, closed his eyes, and went limp. When she couldn’t wake him
up, she hurried to the telephone and called her husband at work. Howard told
her to remain calm, remain calm, and then he called an ambulance for the child
and left for the hospital himself.
Of course, the birthday party was canceled. The child was in the hospital with a
mild concussion and suffering from shock. There’d been vomiting, and his lungs
had taken in fluid which needed pumping out that afternoon. Now he simply
seemed to be in a very deep sleep – but no coma, Dr. Francis had emphasized,
no coma, when he saw the alarm in the parents’ eyes. At eleven o’clock that
night, when the boy seemed to be resting comfortably enough after the many
X-rays and the lab work, and it was just a matter of his waking up and coming
around, Howard left the hospital. He and Ann had been at the hospital with the
child since that afternoon, and he was going home for a short while to bathe and
change clothes. ‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he said. She nodded. ‘It’s fine,’ she said.
‘I’ll be right here.’ He kissed her on the forehead, and they touched hands. She
sat in the chair beside the bed and looked at the child. She was waiting for him to
wake up and be all right. Then she could begin to relax.
Howard drove home from the hospital. He took the wet, dark streets very fast,
then caught himself and slowed down. Until now, his life had gone smoothly and
to his satisfaction – college, marriage, another year of college for the advanced
degree in business, a junior partnership in an investment firm. Fatherhood. He
was happy and, so far, lucky – he knew that. His parents were still living, his
brothers and his sister were established, his friends from college had gone out
to take their places in the world. So far, he had kept away from any real harm,
from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man
if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned. He pulled into the driveway and
parked. His left leg began to tremble. He sat in the car for a minute and tried to
deal with the present situation in a rational manner. Scotty had been hit by a car
and was in the hospital, but he was going to be all right. Howard closed his eyes
and ran his hand over his face. He got out of the car and went up to the front
door. The dog was barking inside the house. The telephone rang and rang while
he unlocked the door and fumbled for the light switch. He shouldn’t have left the
hospital, he shouldn’t have. ‘Goddamn it!’ he said. He picked up the receiver and
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said, ‘I just walked in the door!’
‘There’s a cake here that wasn’t picked up,’ the voice on the other end of the line
said.
‘What are you saying?’ Howard asked.
‘A cake,’ the voice said. ‘A sixteen-dollar cake.’
Howard held the receiver against his ear, trying to understand. ‘I don’t know
anything about a cake,’ he said. ‘Jesus, what are you talking about?’
‘Don’t hand me that,’ the voice said.
Howard hung up the telephone. He went into the kitchen and poured himself
some whiskey. He called the hospital. But the child’s condition remained the
same; he was still sleeping and nothing had changed there. While water poured
into the tub, Howard lathered his face and shaved. He’d just stretched out in
the tub and closed his eyes when the telephone rang again. He hauled himself
out, grabbed a towel, and hurried through the house, saying, ‘Stupid, stupid,’ for
having left the hospital. But when he picked up the receiver and shouted, ‘Hello!’
there was no sound at the other end of the line. Then the caller hung up.
He arrived back at the hospital a little after midnight. Ann still sat in the chair
beside the bed. She looked up at Howard, and then she looked back at the child.
The child’s eyes stayed closed, the head was still wrapped in bandages. His
breathing was quiet and regular. From an apparatus over the bed hung a bottle of
glucose with a tube running from the bottle to the boy’s arm.
‘How is he?’ Howard said. ‘What’s all this?’ waving at the glucose and the tube.
‘Dr. Francis’s orders,’ she said. ‘He needs nourishment. He needs to keep up his
strength. Why doesn’t he wake up, Howard? I don’t understand, if he’s all right.’
Howard put his hand against the back of her head. He ran his fingers through her
hair. ‘He’s going to be all right. He’ll wake up in a little while. Dr. Francis knows
what’s what.’
After a time, he said, ‘Maybe you should go home and get some rest. I’ll stay here.
Just don’t put up with this creep who keeps calling. Hang up right away.’
‘Who’s calling?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know who, just somebody with nothing better to do than call up people.
You go on now.’
She shook her head . ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’
‘Really,’ he said. ‘Go home for a while, and then come back and spell me in the
morning. It’ll be all right. What did Dr. Francis say? He said Scotty’s going to be
all right. We don’t have to worry. He’s just sleeping now, that’s all.’
A nurse pushed the door open. She nodded at them as she went to the bedside.
She took the left arm out from under the covers and put her fingers on the wrist,
found the pulse, then consulted her watch. In a little while, she put the arm back
under the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where she wrote something
on a clipboard attached to the bed.
‘How is he?’ Ann said. Howard’s hand was a weight on her shoulder. She was
aware of the pressure from his fingers.
‘He’s stable,’ the nurse said. Then she said, ‘Doctor will be in again shortly.
Doctor’s back in the hospital. He’s making rounds right now.’
‘I was saying maybe she’d want to go home and get a little rest,’ Howard said.
‘After the doctor comes,’ he said.
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‘She could do that,’ the nurse said. ‘I think you should both feel free to do that, if
you wish.’ The nurse was a big Scandinavian woman with blond hair. There was
the trace of an accent in her speech.
‘We’ll see what the doctor says,’ Ann said. ‘I want to talk to the doctor. I don’t
think he should keep sleeping like this. I don’t think that’s a good sign.’ She
brought her hand up to her eyes and let her head come forward a little. Howard’s
grip tightened on her shoulder, and then his hand moved up to her neck, where
his fingers began to knead the muscles there.
‘Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes,’ the nurse said. Then she left the room.
Howard gazed at his son for a time, the small chest quietly rising and falling
under the covers. For the first time since the terrible minutes after Ann’s
telephone call to him at his office, he felt a genuine fear starting in his limbs. He
began shaking his head. Scotty was fine, but instead of sleeping at home in his
own bed, he was in a hospital bed with bandages around his head and a tube in
his arm. But this help was what he needed right now.
Dr. Francis came in and shook hands with Howard, though they’d just seen each
other a few hours before. Ann got up from the chair. ‘Doctor?’
‘Ann,’ he said and nodded. ‘Let’s just first see how he’s doing,’ the doctor said. He
moved to the side of the bed and took the boy’s pulse. He peeled back one eyelid
and then the other. Howard and Ann stood beside the doctor and watched. Then
the doctor turned back the covers and listened to the boy’s heart and lungs with
his stethoscope. He pressed his fingers here and there on the abdomen. When he
was finished, he went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted the
time, scribbled something on the chart, and then looked at Howard and Ann.
‘Doctor, how is he?’ Howard said. ‘What’s the matter with him exactly?’
‘Why doesn’t he wake up?’ Ann said.
The doctor was a handsome, big-shouldered man with a tanned face. He wore a
three-piece blue suit, a striped tie, and ivory cuff links. His gray hair was combed
along the sides of his head, and he looked as if he had just come from a concert.
‘He’s all right,’ the doctor said. ‘Nothing to shout about, he could be better, I
think. But he’s all right. Still, I wish he’d wake up. He should wake up pretty soon.’
The doctor looked at the boy again. ‘We’ll know some more in a couple of hours,
after the results of a few more tests are in. But he’s all right, believe me, except for
the hairline fracture of the skull. He does have that.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ann said.
‘And a bit of a concussion, as I said before. Of course, you know he’s in shock,’ the
doctor said. ‘Sometimes you see this in shock cases. This sleeping.’
‘But he’s out of any real danger?’ Howard said. ‘You said before he’s not in a coma.
You wouldn’t call this a coma, then – would you, doctor?’ Howard waited. He
looked at the doctor.
‘No, I don’t want to call it a coma,’ the doctor said and glanced over at the boy
once more. ‘He’s just in a very deep sleep. It’s a restorative measure the body is
taking on its own. He’s out of any real danger, I’d say that for certain, yes. But
we’ll know more when he wakes up and the other tests are in,’ the doctor said.
‘It’s a coma,’ Ann said. ‘Of sorts.’
‘It’s not a coma yet, not exactly,’ the doctor said. ‘I wouldn’t want to call it coma.
Not yet, anyway. He’s suffered shock. In shock cases, this kind of reaction is
common enough; it’s a temporary reaction to bodily trauma. Coma. Well, coma
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1
is a deep, prolonged unconsciousness, something that could go on for days, or
weeks even. Scotty’s not in that area, not as far as we can tell. I’m certain his
condition will show improvement by morning. I’m betting that it will. We’ll know
more when he wakes up, which shouldn’t be long now. Of course, you may do
as you like, stay here or go home for a time. But by all means feel free to leave
the hospital for a while if you want. This is not easy, I know.’ The doctor gazed at
the boy again, watching him, and then he turned to Ann and said, ‘You try not
to worry, little mother. Believe me, we’re doing all that can be done. It’s just a
question of a little more time now.’ He nodded at her, shook hands with Howard
again, and then he left the room.
Ann put her hand over the child’s forehead. ‘At least he doesn’t have a fever,’ she
said. Then she said, ‘My God, he feels so cold, though. Howard? Is he supposed to
feel like this? Feel his head.’
Howard touched the child’s temples. His own breathing had slowed. ‘I think he’s
supposed to feel this way right now,’ he said. ‘He’s in shock, remember? That’s
what the doctor said. The doctor was just in here. He would have said something
if Scotty wasn’t okay.’
Ann stood there a while longer, working her lip with her teeth. Then she moved
over to her chair and sat down.
Howard sat in the chair next to her chair. They looked at each other. He wanted
to say something else and reassure her, but he was afraid, too. He took her hand
and put it in his lap, and this made him feel better, her hand being there. He
picked up her hand and squeezed it. Then he just held her hand. They sat like that
for a while, watching the boy and not talking. From time to time, he squeezed her
hand. Finally, she took her hand away.
‘I’ve been praying,’ she said.
He nodded.
She said, ‘I almost thought I’d forgotten how, but it came back to me. All I had to
do was close my eyes and say, ‘Please God, help us – help Scotty,’ and then the rest
was easy. The words were right there. Maybe if you prayed, too,’ she said to him.
‘I’ve already prayed,’ he said. ‘I prayed this afternoon – yesterday afternoon, I
mean-after you called, while I was driving to the hospital. I’ve been praying,’ he
said.
‘That’s good,’ she said. For the first time, she felt they were together in it, this
trouble. She realized with a start that, until now, it had only been happening to
her and to Scotty. She hadn’t let Howard into it, though he was there and needed
all along. She felt glad to be his wife.
The same nurse came in and took the boy’s pulse again and checked the flow
from the bottle hanging above the bed.
In an hour, another doctor came in. He said his name was Parsons, from
Radiology. He had a bushy moustache. He was wearing loafers, a western shirt,
and a pair of jeans.
‘We’re going to take him downstairs for more pictures,’ he told them. ‘We need to
do some more pictures, and we want to do a scan.’
‘What’s that?’ Ann said. ‘A scan?’ She stood between this new doctor and the bed.
‘I thought you’d already taken all your X-rays.’‘
‘I’m afraid we need some more, he said. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about. We just
need some more pictures, and we want to do a brain scan on him.’
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‘My God,’ Ann said.
‘It’s perfectly normal procedure in cases like this,’ this new doctor said. ‘We
just need to find out for sure why he isn’t back awake yet. It’s normal medical
procedure, and nothing to be alarmed about. We’ll be taking him down in a few
minutes,’ this doctor said.
In a little while, two orderlies came into the room with a gurney. They were
black-haired, dark-complexioned men in white uniforms, and they said a few
words to each other in a foreign tongue as they unhooked the boy from the tube
and moved him from his bed to the gurney. Then they wheeled him from the
room. Howard and Ann got on the same elevator. Ann gazed at the child. She
closed her eyes as the elevator began its descent. The orderlies stood at either
end of the gurney without saying anything, though once one of the men made a
comment to the other in their own language, and the other man nodded slowly
in response.
Later that morning, just as the sun was beginning to lighten the windows in
the waiting room outside the X-ray department, they brought the boy out and
moved him back up to his room. Howard and Ann rode up on the elevator with
him once more, and once more they took up their places beside the bed.
They waited all day, but still the boy did not wake up. Occasionally, one of them
would leave the room to go downstairs to the cafeteria to drink coffee and then,
as if suddenly remembering and feeling guilty, get up from the table and hurry
back to the room. Dr. Francis came again that afternoon and examined the boy
once more and then left after telling them he was coming along and could wake
up at any minute now. Nurses, different nurses from the night before, came in
from time to time. Then a young woman from the lab knocked and entered the
room. She wore white slacks and a white blouse and carried a little tray of things
which she put on the stand beside the bed. Without a word to them, she took
blood from the boy’s arm. Howard closed his eyes as the woman found the right
place on the boy’s arm and pushed the needle in.
‘I don’t understand this,’ Ann said to the woman.
‘Doctor’s orders,’ the young woman said. ‘I do what I’m told. They say draw that
one, I draw. What’s wrong with him, anyway?’ she said. ‘He’s a sweetie.’
‘He was hit by a car,’ Howard said. ‘A hit-and-run.’
The young woman shook her head and looked again at the boy. Then she took
her tray and left the room.
‘Why won’t he wake up?’ Ann said. ‘Howard? I want some answers from these
people.’
Howard didn’t say anything. He sat down again in the chair and crossed one leg
over the other. He rubbed his face. He looked at his son and then he settled back
in the chair, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
Ann walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot. It was night, and
cars were driving into and out of the parking lot with their lights on. She stood
at the window with her hands gripping the sill, and knew in her heart that they
were into something now, something hard. She was afraid, and her teeth began to
chatter until she tightened her jaws. She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital
and someone, a woman in a long coat, get into the car. She wished she were that
woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere
else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of
the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms.
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In a little while, Howard woke up. He looked at the boy again. Then he got up
from the chair, stretched, and went over to stand beside her at the window. They
both stared out at the parking lot. They didn’t say anything. But they seemed to
feel each other’s insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in
a perfectly natural way.
The door opened and Dr. Francis came in. He was wearing a different suit and
tie this time. His gray hair was combed along the sides of his head, and he looked
as if he had just shaved. He went straight to the bed and examined the boy. ‘He
ought to have come around by now. There’s just no good reason for this,’ he said.
‘But I can tell you we’re all convinced he’s out of any danger. We’ll just feel better
when he wakes up. There’s no reason, absolutely none, why he shouldn’t come
around. Very soon. Oh, he’ll have himself a dilly of a headache when he does, you
can count on that. But all of his signs are fine. They’re as normal as can be.’
‘It is a coma, then?’ Ann said.
The doctor rubbed his smooth cheek. ‘We’ll call it that for the time being, until
he wakes up. But you must be worn out. This is hard. I know this is hard. Feel free
to go out for a bite,’ he said. ‘It would do you good. I’ll put a nurse in here while
you’re gone if you’ll feel better about going. Go and have yourselves something to
eat.’
‘I couldn’t eat anything,’ Ann said.
‘Do what you need to do, of course,’ the doctor said. ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you
that all the signs are good, the tests are negative, nothing showed up at all, and
just as soon as he wakes up he’ll be over the hill.’
‘Thank you, doctor,’ Howard said. He shook hands with the doctor again. The
doctor patted Howard’s shoulder and went out.
‘I suppose one of us should go home and check on things,’ Howard said. ‘Slug
needs to be fed, for one thing.’
‘Call one of the neighbors,’ Ann said. ‘Call the Morgans. Anyone will feed a dog if
you ask them to.’
‘All right,’ Howard said. After a while, he said, ‘Honey, why don’t you do it? Why
don’t you go home and check on things, and then come back? It’ll do you good.
I’ll be right here with him. Seriously,’ he said. ‘We need to keep up our strength
on this. We’ll want to be here for a while even after he wakes up.
‘Why don’t you go?’ she said. ‘Feed Slug. Feed your-self.’
‘I already went,’ he said. ‘I was gone for exactly an hour and fifteen minutes. You
go home for an hour and freshen up. Then come back.’
She tried to think about it, but she was too tired. She closed her eyes and tried
to think about it again. After a time, she said, ‘Maybe I will go home for a few
minutes. Maybe if I’m not just sitting right here watching him every second,
he’ll wake up and be all right. You know? Maybe he’ll wake up if I’m not here. I’ll
go home and take a bath and put on clean clothes. I’ll feed Slug. Then I’ll come
back.’
‘I’ll be right here,’ he said. ‘You go on home, honey. I’ll keep an eye on things
here.’ His eyes were bloodshot and small, as if he’d been drinking for a long time.
His clothes were rumpled. His beard had come out again. She touched his face,
and then she took her hand back. She understood he wanted to be by himself for
a while, not have to talk or share his worry for a time. She picked her purse up
from the nightstand, and he helped her into her coat.
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‘I won’t be gone long,’ she said.
‘Just sit and rest for a little while when you get home,’ he said. ‘Eat something.
Take a bath. After you get out of the bath, just sit for a while and rest. It’ll do you
a world of good, you’ll see. Then come back,’ he said. ‘Let’s try not to worry. You
heard what Dr. Francis said.’
She stood in her coat for a minute trying to recall the doctor’s exact words,
looking for any nuances, any hint of something behind his words other than
what he had said. She tried to remember if his expression had changed any when
he bent over to examine the child. She remembered the way his features had
composed themselves as he rolled back the child’s eyelids and then listened to his
breathing.
She went to the door, where she turned and looked back. She looked at the child,
and then she looked at the father. Howard nodded. She stepped out of the room
and pulled the door closed behind her.
She went past the nurses’ station and down to the end of the corridor, looking for
the elevator. At the end of the corridor, she turned to her right and entered a little
waiting room where a Negro family sat in wicker chairs. There was a middle-aged
man in a khaki shirt and pants, a baseball cap pushed back on his head. A large
woman wearing a housedress and slippers was slumped in one of the chairs. A
teenaged girl in jeans, hair done in dozens of little braids, lay stretched out in
one of the chairs smoking a cigarette, her legs crossed at the ankles. The family
swung their eyes to Ann as she entered the room. The little table was littered with
hamburger wrappers and Styrofoam cups.
‘Franklin,’ the large woman said as she roused herself. ‘Is it about Franklin?’ Her
eyes widened. ‘Tell me now, lady,’ the woman said. ‘Is it about Franklin?’ She was
trying to rise from her chair, but the man had closed his hand over her arm.
‘Here, here,’ he said. ‘Evelyn.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ann said. ‘I’m looking for the elevator. My son is in the hospital, and
now I can’t find the elevator.’
‘Elevator is down that way, turn left,’ the man said as he aimed a finger.
The girl drew on her cigarette and stared at Ann. Her eyes were narrowed to slits,
and her broad lips parted slowly as she let the smoke escape. The Negro woman
let her head fall on her shoulder and looked away from Ann, no longer interested.
‘My son was hit by a car,’ Ann said to the man. She seemed to need to explain
herself. ‘He has a concussion and a little skull fracture, but he’s going to be all
right. He’s in shock now, but it might be some kind of coma, too. That’s what
really worries us, the coma part. I’m going out for a little while, but my husband
is with him. Maybe he’ll wake up while I’m gone.
‘That’s too bad,’ the man said and shifted in the chair. He shook his head. He
looked down at the table, and then he looked back at Ann. She was still standing
there. He said, ‘Our Franklin, he’s on the operating table. Somebody cut him.
Tried to kill him. There was a fight where he was at. At this party. They say he was
just standing and watching. Not bothering nobody. But that don’t mean nothing
these days. Now he’s on the operating table. We’re just hoping and praying, that’s
all we can do now.’ He gazed at her steadily.
Ann looked at the girl again, who was still watching her, and at the older woman,
who kept her head down, but whose eyes were now closed. Ann saw the lips
moving silently, making words. She had an urge to ask what those words were.
She wanted to talk more with these people who were in the same kind of waiting
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she was in. She was afraid, and they were afraid. They had that in common. She
would have liked to have said something else about the accident, told them more
about Scotty, that it had happened on the day of his birthday, Monday, and that
he was still unconscious. Yet she didn’t know how to begin. She stood looking at
them without saying anything more.
She went down the corridor the man had indicated and found the elevator. She
waited a minute in front of the closed doors, still wondering if she was doing the
right thing. Then she put out her finger and touched the button.
She pulled into the driveway and cut the engine. She closed her eyes and leaned
her head against the wheel for a minute. She listened to the ticking sounds the
engine made as it began to cool. Then she got out of the car. She could hear the
dog barking inside the house. She went to the front door, which was unlocked.
She went inside and turned on lights and put on a kettle of water for tea. She
opened some dog food and fed Slug on the back porch. The dog ate in hungry
little smacks. It kept running into the kitchen to see that she was going to stay. As
she sat down on the sofa with her tea, the telephone rang.
‘Yes!’ she said as she answered. ‘Hello!’
‘Mrs. Weiss,’ a man’s voice said. It was five o’clock in the morning, and she
thought she could hear machinery or equipment of some kind in the background.
‘Yes, yes! What is it?’ she said. ‘This is Mrs. Weiss. This is she. What is it, please?’
She listened to whatever it was in the background. ‘Is it Scotty, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Scotty,’ the man’s voice said. ‘It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do with Scotty, that
problem. Have you forgotten about Scotty?’ the man said. Then he hung up.
She dialed the hospital’s number and asked for the third floor. She demanded
information about her son from the nurse who answered the telephone. Then she
asked to speak to her husband. It was, she said, an emergency.
She waited, turning the telephone cord in her fingers. She closed her eyes and felt
sick at her stomach. She would have to make herself eat. Slug came in from the
back porch and lay down near her feet. He wagged his tail. She pulled at his ear
while he licked her fingers. Howard was on the line.
‘Somebody just called here,’ she said. She twisted the telephone cord. ‘He said it
was about Scotty,’ she cried.
‘Scotty’s fine,’ Howard told her. ‘I mean, he’s still sleeping. There’s been no change.
The nurse has been in twice since you’ve been gone. A nurse or else a doctor. He’s
all right.’
‘This man called. He said it was about Scotty,’ she told him.
‘Honey, you rest for a little while, you need the rest. It must be that same caller
I had. Just forget it. Come back down here after you’ve rested. Then we’ll have
breakfast or something.’
‘Breakfast,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any breakfast.’
‘You know what I mean,’ he said. ‘Juice, something. I don’t know. I don’t know
anything, Ann. Jesus, I’m not hungry, either. Ann, it’s hard to talk now. I’m
standing here at the desk. Dr. Francis is coming again at eight o’clock this
morning. He’s going to have something to tell us then, something more definite.
That’s what one of the nurses said. She didn’t know any more than that. Ann?
Honey, maybe we’ll know something more then. At eight o’clock. Come back here
before eight. Meanwhile, I’m right here and Scotty’s all right. He’s still the same,’
he added.
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‘I was drinking a cup of tea,’ she said, ‘when the telephone rang. They said it
was about Scotty. There was a noise in the background. Was there a noise in the
background on that call you had, Howard?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘Maybe the driver of the car, maybe he’s a psychopath
and found out about Scotty somehow. But I’m here with him. Just rest like you
were going to do. Take a bath and come back by seven or so, and we’ll talk to the
doctor together when he gets here. It’s going to be all right, honey. I’m here, and
there are doctors and nurses around. They say his condition is stable.’
‘I’m scared to death,’ she said.
She ran water, undressed, and got into the tub. She washed and dried quickly,
not taking the time to wash her hair. She put on clean underwear, wool slacks,
and a sweater. She went into the living room, where the dog looked up at her and
let its tail thump once against the floor. It was just starting to get light outside
when she went out to the car.
She drove into the parking lot of the hospital and found a space close to the front
door. She felt she was in some obscure way responsible for what had happened
to the child. She let her thoughts move to the Negro family. She remembered the
name Franklin and the table that was covered with hamburger papers, and the
teenaged girl staring at her as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Don’t have children,’ she
told the girl’s image as she entered the front door of the hospital. ‘For God’s sake,
don’t.’
She took the elevator up to the third floor with two nurses who were just going
on duty. It was Wednesday morning, a few minutes before seven. There was a
page for a Dr. Madison as the elevator doors slid open on the third floor. She
got off behind the nurses, who turned in the other direction and continued the
conversation she had interrupted when she’d gotten into the elevator. She walked
down the corridor to the little alcove where the Negro family had been waiting.
They were gone now, but the chairs were scattered in such a way that it looked
as if people had just jumped up from them the minute before. The tabletop was
cluttered with the same cups and papers, the ashtray was filled with cigarette
butts.
She stopped at the nurses’ station. A nurse was standing behind the counter,
brushing her hair and yawning.
‘There was a Negro boy in surgery last night,’ Ann said. ‘Franklin was his name.
His family was in the waiting room. I’d like to inquire about his condition.’
A nurse who was sitting at a desk behind the counter looked up from a chart in
front of her. The telephone buzzed and she picked up the receiver, but she kept
her eyes on Ann.
‘He passed away,’ said the nurse at the counter. The nurse held the hairbrush and
kept looking at her. ‘Are you a friend of the family or what?’
‘I met the family last night,’ Ann said. ‘My own son is in the hospital. I guess he’s
in shock. We don’t know for sure what’s wrong. I just wondered about Franklin,
that’s all. Thank you.’ She moved down the corridor. Elevator doors the same
color as the walls slid open and a gaunt, bald man in white pants and white
canvas shoes pulled a heavy cart off the elevator. She hadn’t noticed these doors
last night. The man wheeled the cart out into the corridor and stopped in front
of the room nearest the elevator and consulted a clipboard. Then he reached
down and slid a tray out of the cart. He rapped lightly on the door and entered
the room. She could smell the unpleasant odors of warm food as she passed the
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cart. She hurried on without looking at any of the nurses and pushed open the
door to the child’s room.
Howard was standing at the window with his hands behind his back. He turned
around as she came in.
‘How is he?’ she said. She went over to the bed. She dropped her purse on the
floor beside the nightstand. It seemed to her she had been gone a long time. She
touched the child’s face. ‘Howard?’
‘Dr. Francis was here a little while ago,’ Howard said. She looked at him closely
and thought his shoulders were bunched a little.
‘I thought he wasn’t coming until eight o’clock this morning,’ she said quickly.
‘There was another doctor with him. A neurologist.’
‘A neurologist,’ she said.
Howard nodded. His shoulders were bunching, she could see that. ‘What’d they
say, Howard? For Christ’s sake, what’d they say? What is it?’
‘They said they’re going to take him down and run more tests on him, Ann. They
think they’re going to operate, honey. Honey, they are going to operate. They
can’t figure out why he won’t wake up. It’s more than just shock or concussion,
they know that much now. It’s in his skull, the fracture, it has something,
something to do with that, they think. So they’re going to operate. I tried to call
you, but I guess you’d already left the house.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Oh, please, Howard, please,’ she said, taking his arms.
‘Look!’ Howard said. ‘Scotty! Look, Ann!’ He turned her toward the bed.
The boy had opened his eyes, then closed them. He opened them again now. The
eyes stared straight ahead for a minute, then moved slowly in his head until they
rested on Howard and Ann, then traveled away again.
‘Scotty,’ his mother said, moving to the bed.
‘Hey, Scott,’ his father said. ‘Hey, son.’
They leaned over the bed. Howard took the child’s hand in his hands and began
to pat and squeeze the hand. Ann bent over the boy and kissed his forehead
again and again. She put her hands on either side of his face. ‘Scotty, honey, it’s
Mommy and Daddy,’ she said. ‘Scotty?’
The boy looked at them, but without any sign of recognition. Then his mouth
opened, his eyes scrunched closed, and he howled until he had no more air in his
lungs. His face seemed to relax and soften then. His lips parted as his last breath
was puffed through his throat and exhaled gently through the clenched teeth.
The doctors called it a hidden Occlusion and said it was a one-in-a-million
circumstance. Maybe if it could have been detected somehow and surgery
undertaken immediately, they could have saved him. But more than likely not. In
any case, what would they have been looking for? Nothing had shown up in the
tests or in the X-rays.
Dr. Francis was shaken. ‘I can’t tell you how badly I feel. I’m so very sorry, I can’t
tell you,’ he said as he led them into the doctors’ lounge. There was a doctor
sitting in a chair with his legs hooked over the back of another chair, watching
an early-morning TV show. He was wearing a green delivery room outfit, loose
green pants and green blouse, and a green cap that covered his hair. He looked at
Howard and Ann and then looked at Dr. Francis. He got to his feet and turned
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off the set and went out of the room. Dr. Francis guided Ann to the sofa, sat
down beside her, and began to talk in a low, consoling voice. At one point, he
leaned over and embraced her. She could feel his chest rising and falling evenly
against her shoulder. She kept her eyes open and let him hold her. Howard went
into the bathroom, but he left the door open. After a violent fit of weeping, he
ran water and washed his face. Then he came out and sat down at the little table
that held a telephone. He looked at the telephone as though deciding what to do
first. He made some calls. After a time, Dr. Francis used the telephone.
‘Is there anything else I can do for the moment?’ he asked them.
Howard shook his head. Ann stared at Dr. Francis as if unable to comprehend his
words.
The doctor walked them to the hospital’s front door. People were entering and
leaving the hospital. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Ann was aware of
how slowly, almost reluctantly, she moved her feet. It seemed to her that Dr.
Francis was making them leave when she felt they should stay, when it would be
more the right thing to do to stay. She gazed out into the parking lot and then
turned around and looked back at the front of the hospital. She began shaking
her head. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave him here, no.’ She heard herself say that
and thought how unfair it was that the only words that came out were the sort
of words used on TV shows where people were stunned by violent or sudden
deaths. She wanted her words to be her own. ‘No,’ she said, and for some reason
the memory of the Negro woman’s head lolling on the woman’s shoulder came
to her . ‘No,’ she said again.
‘I’ll be talking to you later in the day,’ the doctor was saying to Howard. ‘There
are still some things that have to be done, things that have to be cleared up to our
satisfaction. Some things that need explaining.’
‘An autopsy,’ Howard said.
Dr. Francis nodded.
‘I understand,’ Howard said. Then he said, ‘Oh, Jesus. No, I don’t understand,
doctor. I can’t, I can’t. I just can’t.’
Dr. Francis put his arm around Howard’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry. God, how I’m
sorry.’ He let go of Howard’s shoulders and held out his hand. Howard looked at
the hand, and then he took it. Dr. Francis put his arms around Ann once more.
He seemed full of some goodness she didn’t understand. She let her head rest on
his shoulder, but her eyes stayed open. She kept looking at the hospital. As they
drove out of the parking lot, she looked back at the hospital.
At home, she sat on the sofa with her hands in her coat pockets. Howard closed
the door to the child’s room. He got the coffee-maker going and then he found
an empty box. He had thought to pick up some of the child’s things that were
scattered around the living room. But instead he sat down beside her on the
sofa, pushed the box to one side, and leaned forward, arms between his knees.
He began to weep. She pulled his head over into her lap and patted his shoulder.
‘He’s gone,’ she said. She kept patting his shoulder. Over his sobs, she could hear
the coffee-maker hissing in the kitchen. ‘There, there,’ she said tenderly. ‘Howard,
he’s gone. He’s gone and now we’ll have to get used to that. To being alone.’
In a little while, Howard got up and began moving aimlessly around the room
with the box, not putting anything into it, but collecting some things together
on the floor at one end of the sofa. She continued to sit with her hands in her
coat pockets. Howard put the box down and brought coffee into the living room.
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Later, Ann made calls to relatives. After each call had been placed and the party
had answered, Ann would blurt out a few words and cry for a minute. Then she
would quietly explain, in a measured voice, what had happened and tell them
about arrangements. Howard took the box out to the garage, where he saw the
child’s bicycle. He dropped the box and sat down on the pavement beside the
bicycle. He took hold of the bicycle awkwardly so that it leaned against his chest.
He held it, the rubber pedal sticking into his chest. He gave the wheel a turn.
Ann hung up the telephone after talking to her sister. She was looking up another
number when the telephone rang. She picked it up on the first ring.
‘Hello,’ she said, and she heard something in the background, a humming noise.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Who is this? What is it you want?’
‘Your Scotty, I got him ready for you,’ the man’s voice said. ‘Did you forget him?’
‘You evil bastard!’ she shouted into the receiver. ‘How can you do this, you evil
son of a bitch?’
‘Scotty,’ the man said. ‘Have you forgotten about Scotty?’ Then the man hung up
on her.
Howard heard the shouting and came in to find her with her head on her arms
over the table, weeping. He picked up the receiver and listened to the dial tone.
Much later, just before midnight, after they had dealt with many things, the
telephone rang again.
‘You answer it,’ she said. ‘Howard, it’s him, I know.’ They were sitting at the
kitchen table with coffee in front of them. Howard had a small glass of whiskey
beside his cup. He answered on the third ring.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Who is this? Hello! Hello!’ The line went dead. ‘He hung up,’
Howard said. ‘Whoever it was.’
‘It was him,’ she said. ‘That bastard. I’d like to kill him,’ she said. ‘I’d like to shoot
him and watch him kick,’ she said.
‘Ann, my God,’ he said.
‘Could you hear anything?’ she said. ‘In the background? A noise, machinery,
something humming?’
‘Nothing, really. Nothing like that,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t much time. I think
there was some radio music. Yes, there was a radio going, that’s all I could tell. I
don’t know what in God’s name is going on,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘If I could, could get my hands on him.’ It came to her then.
She knew who it was. Scotty, the cake, the telephone number. She pushed the
chair away from the table and got up. ‘Drive me down to the shopping center,’
she said. ‘Howard.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘The shopping center. I know who it is who’s calling. I know who it is. It’s the
baker, the son-of-a-bitching baker, Howard. I had him bake a cake for Scotty’s
birthday. That’s who’s calling. That’s who has the number and keeps calling us.
To harass us about that cake. The baker, that bastard.’
They drove down to the shopping center. The sky was clear and stars were out. It
was cold, and they ran the heater in the car. They parked in front of the bakery.
All of the shops and stores were closed, but there were cars at the far end of the
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lot in front of the movie theater. The bakery windows were dark, but when they
looked through the glass they could see a light in the back room and, now and
then, a big man in an apron moving in and out of the white, even light. Through
the glass, she could see the display cases and some little tables with chairs. She
tried the door. She rapped on the glass. But if the baker heard them, he gave no
sign. He didn’t look in their direction.
They drove around behind the bakery and parked. They got out of the car. There
was a lighted window too high up for them to see inside. A sign near the back
door said THE PANTRY BAKERY, SPECIAL ORDERS. She could hear faintly a
radio playing inside and something creak-an oven door as it was pulled down?
She knocked on the door and waited. Then she knocked again, louder. The radio
was turned down and there was a scraping sound now, the distinct sound of
something, a drawer, being pulled open and then closed.
Someone unlocked the door and opened it. The baker stood in the light and
peered out at them. ‘I’m closed for business,’ he said. ‘What do you want at this
hour? It’s midnight. Are you drunk or something?’
She stepped into the light that fell through the open door. He blinked his heavy
eyelids as he recognized her. ‘It’s you, he said.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Scotty’s mother. This is Scotty’s father. We’d like to come in.’
The baker said, ‘I’m busy now. I have work to do.’
She had stepped inside the doorway anyway. Howard came in behind her. The
baker moved back. ‘It smells like a bakery in here. Doesn’t it smell like a bakery in
here, Howard?’
‘What do you want?’ the baker said. ‘Maybe you want your cake? That’s it, you
decided you want your cake. You ordered a cake, didn’t you?’
‘You’re pretty smart for a baker,’ she said. ‘Howard, this is the man who’s been
calling us.’ She clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep
burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself, larger than
either of these men.
‘Just a minute here,’ the baker said. ‘You want to pick up your three-day-old cake?
That it? I don’t want to argue with you, lady. There it sits over there, getting stale.
I’ll give it to you for half of what I quoted you. No. You want it? You can have it.
It’s no good to me, no good to anyone now. It cost me time and money to make
that cake. If you want it, okay, if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I have to get back to
work.’ He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth.
‘More cakes,’ she said. She knew she was in control of it, of what was increasing
in her. She was calm.
‘Lady, I work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living,’ the baker said.
He wiped his hands on his apron. ‘I work night and day in here, trying to make
ends meet.’ A look crossed Ann’s face that made the baker move back and say,
‘No trouble, now.’ He reached to the counter and picked up a rolling pin with
his right hand and began to tap it against the palm of his other hand. ‘You want
the cake or not? I have to get back to work. Bakers work at night,’ he said again.
His eyes were small, mean-looking, she thought, nearly lost in the bristly flesh
around his cheeks. His neck was thick with fat.
‘I know bakers work at night,’ Ann said. ‘They make phone calls at night, too. You
bastard,’ she said.
The baker continued to tap the rolling pin against his hand. He glanced at
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Howard. ‘Careful, careful,’ he said to Howard.
‘My son’s dead,’ she said with a cold, even finality. ‘He was hit by a car Monday
morning. We’ve been waiting with him until he died. But, of course, you couldn’t
be expected to know that, could you? Bakers can’t know everything-can they, Mr.
Baker? But he’s dead. He’s dead, you bastard!’ Just as suddenly as it had welled in
her, the anger dwindled, gave way to something else, a dizzy feeling of nausea. She
leaned against the wooden table that was sprinkled with flour, put her hands over
her face, and began to cry, her shoulders rocking back and forth. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she
said. ‘It isn’t, isn’t fair.’
Howard put his hand at the small of her back and looked at the baker. ‘Shame on
you,’ Howard said to him. ‘Shame.’
The baker put the rolling pin back on the counter. He undid his apron and
threw it on the counter. He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly.
He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts,
an adding machine, and a telephone directory. ‘Please sit down,’ he said. ‘Let me
get you a chair,’ he said to Howard. ‘Sit down now, please.’ The baker went into
the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. ‘Please sit
down, you people.’
Ann wiped her eyes and looked at the baker. ‘I wanted to kill you,’ she said. ‘I
wanted you dead.’
The baker had cleared a space for them at the table. He shoved the adding
machine to one side, along with the stacks of notepaper and receipts. He pushed
the telephone directory onto the floor, where it landed with a thud. Howard and
Ann sat down and pulled their chairs up to the table. The baker sat down, too.
‘Let me say how sorry I am,’ the baker said, putting his elbows on the table.
‘God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be
anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human
being. I’ve forgotten, I don’t know for sure. But I’m not any longer, if I ever was.
Now I’m just a baker. That don’t excuse my doing what I did, I know. But I’m
deeply sorry. I’m sorry for your son, and sorry for my part in this,’ the baker said.
He spread his hands out on the table and turned them over to reveal his palms. ‘I
don’t have any children myself, so I can only imagine what you must be feeling.
All I can say to you now is that I’m sorry. Forgive me, if you can,’ the baker said.
‘I’m not an evil man, I don’t think. Not evil, like you said on the phone. You got
to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it
would seem. Please,’ the man said, ‘let me ask you if you can find it in your hearts
to forgive me?’
It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his
coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and
then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some
switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffee-maker. He put
a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.
‘You probably need to eat something,’ the baker said. ‘I hope you’ll eat some of
my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a
time like this,’ he said.
He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny.
He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat
down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll
from the platter and began to eat. ‘It’s good to eat something,’ he said, watching
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them. ‘There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in
here.’
They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were
warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began
to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they
listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak
of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him
in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years.
To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party
food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding
couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just
imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He
was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better
smell anytime than flowers.
‘Smell this,’ the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. ’It’s a heavy bread, but rich.’
They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse
grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark
bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into
the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not
think of leaving.
INSIGHTS INTO FICTION
So what are the conventions of fiction and what expectations should you have as a reader?
The world of fiction is a world with its own time and place. It has its own weather, its own
history and its own moral code. The characters that inhabit these worlds are not to be
confused as real people, but they may amuse and frighten or surprise us in much the same
way and for many of the same reasons that people do. Fiction writers invite their readers
into their worlds and hold them there with stories and characters that engage a reader
intellectually and emotionally. When we experience the world of a text, when we engage
with it, when we willingly immerse ourselves in that world, we read actively. It is only
through active reading that we can experience a text.
1
Determining point of view, the perspective through which a story is told, is critical. Once a
reader is aware of perspective, he understands the limitations that the point of view may
intrinsically provide. A first person perspective, while immediate and engaging, cannot
provide the range of information, and consequently, understanding of a situation and the
characters in that situation that an omniscient narration can provide. What is important to
realize is that the writer may not want to reveal a range of information about a situation or
a range of understanding about a character. Writers make conscious choices dependent
upon the effects that they want to create for how the text is read as well as how a text is
understood. Only a naive reader would assume that every writer should tell his or her story in
the same way with a straightforward, chronological, omniscient narration.
2
Voice is an essential element of point of view. While point of view is the angle of vision, the
perspective from which a story is told – the voice of the narrator – informs that perspective.
What this means is that the speaker’s tone of voice and attitude directly influence how the
reader receives the narration. For example, imagine a sarcastic narrator’s account of a serious
car accident. Now imagine the same account told by a witness, the mother of the driver.
Would the account detailed by a television reporter embrace a substantially different tone?
Voice makes a substantive difference in any fiction text.
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1
3
When you examine the structure of a work of fiction, you are actually examining other aspects
as well. The structure of the plot relates to the presentation of time within the work as well
as the presentation of place. Are events revealed slowly over time? Is the ordering of events
chronological? Are chapters within a novel arranged purposefully to accommodate plot? Or,
are chapters arranged seemingly at random? In fiction, the text is always purposefully rather
than arbitrarily arranged.
4
Consider the writer’s development or lack of development of characters. Stereotypical
characters, flat as opposed to round characters, stock characters such as evil villains or
innocent maidens, are created with specific purposes in mind. Dependent on the writer’s
intention, characters may not engage the reader at all. They may function as representations
of character types, or they may function symbolically. Do characters change? Do they
differentiate themselves from each other? Are characters vehicles for thematic understanding
or social commentary?
5
While it is important to consider the purpose of a fictional text, the themes, messages
and lessons about the nature of our world and ourselves are often addressed as simplistic
platitudes that have little bearing on the text itself. Assuming that a theme will emerge
full blown at the end of a text is absurd. Thematic ideas must always be differentiated from
theme. To say that the theme of the story is love is a misstatement. While love, and the ways
that we respond to it, may be considered a subject of theme, it is not a theme. A theme is
a statement, a complete idea, stated in a complete sentence or two or three or more. For
example, the theme that love is a gift we give ourselves is a complex statement that requires
explanation and elaboration. Themes that are simplistically stated are, more often than not,
forced observations that are based on false assumptions about the characters and situations
of the fiction.
6
A writer’s style is determined by his or her use of language and syntax (sentence structure).
Figurative language, language that creates additional meaning in the mind’s eye of the
reader (as opposed to the literal, denotative meaning of words), creates imagery, develops
symbol and evokes connotation and comparison through the expression of simile, metaphor
and personification. Syntactic patterns, the use of complex sentences or even the use of
fragments, are also important to note. Is there a prose rhythm created by the pattern of
sentences? Does the prose rhythm speed up or slow down as a way to underscore, or
emphasize, the fictional situation?
7
Are there any ironies within the fiction? Does the title have a literal as well as figurative
meaning? Is this meaning ironic? Consider the function of irony within the text. Is there
situational or verbal irony? Does the irony function to underscore character, theme or both?
72
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Introduction to the Conventions chapters

Transcription

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