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‘The Mutes’ is built around an event which is so much a part of our urban
culture that no serious heed is paid to it. Women, the target of unsavoury
attention, often dismiss it with lady-like disregard. If, however, they experience
revulsion, they either eschew it or occasionally resort to a sharp rebuke. This
too common and familiar incident is analysed by Denise Levertov from various
perspectives, leading to startling and relevant indictment of our decadent
culture.
The first stanza describes the incident and the next two problematises it by
raising a serious question. The poet muses about “Those groans men use/
passing a woman in the street’ or elsewhere. A street scene with a far too
familiar spectacle of harassment of women is immediately conjured. The use of
the demonstrative pronoun “those” makes the groans specific, the kind men use
only when they are excited by a woman and want “to tell her that she is a
female/ and their flesh knows it”. There are two key words in the second stanza,
“female” and “flesh”. The word ‘female’ is disagreeable as it introduces a
gender bias with its attendant functions – in the present context she is seen as an
agent of sexual arousal. And man’s response to her is purely physical (of the
flesh). Her human identity is submerged by her function as a female. Levertov
hints at all this but instead of resorting to the conventional moral censure, she
sees the problem as an abuse of the faculty of speech. The groans to her sound
like an ugly song “sung/by a bird with a slit tongue” which “is meant for
music”. Tongue, one of the organs of speech, which could be effectively used to
produce musical notes in praise of a woman’s beauty has lost its function and
can only produce groans to suggest how men have become emotionally and
intellectually inarticulate. The men who stand at street corners are seen as
objects of pity for they are the deafmutes of our culture. The groans are in a
sense a muffled cry for attention apart from being a sort of ugly tune. They fail
to realize that between a man and a woman there can be more enduring and
mutually gratifying ties than mere casual copulation.
Having psychoanalyzed men, Levertov directs her attention to women’s
response to the “groans men use”. Her comment is forthright and candid: “yet a
woman, in spite of herself, / knows it’s a tribute”. A woman is regarded not as a
warm human being but a “warm hole”. Being aware of the implications of the
sub-text of groans, the woman “wants to/ throw the tribute away,” because it is
no tribute to her good looks, but to her function in bed.
“Life after life goes by/without poetry,/ without seemliness,/ without love.” The
lines very vividly capture for us the bleak and empty lives of individuals who
lack aesthetic sensibility and love. In that sense the poem is an indictment of our
culture that fosters spiritual, intellectual and emotional barrenness.
The line “Life after life goes by” records with profound regret the absence of
the growth of finer feelings. In the absence of poetry, seemliness and love, life
is lived at a very primitive level – seeing everything in terms of sexual
gratification and having no concern for finer fellow feelings. Thus, a woman is
seen only as “a warm hole.”
In ‘The Meadow Mouse’, the speaker expresses his feeling about the little
meadow mouse he had picked up, and how he cared for it as if it was his child.
A clear image and description of what he is feeling and thinking is presented to
the readers.
The speaker describes the way the mouse acted towards him when he found him
for the first time – “trembled and shook” with fear. The speaker uses parental
words like “baby”, “cradled”, “little” and “puppy”. The readers would be able
to tell that the speaker treats and looks at the meadow mouse as if he is looking
at his own baby. Further, the reader also could feel the care and love that the
speaker has for this particular meadow mouse. The poet brought the baby
meadow mouse “cradled “in his hand” which shows the great care and
gentleness in handling it. Then it is put “in a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon
stocking” which projects the idea of warmth and safe being. The speaker has
provided the little mouse with shelter and “five kinds of cheese” draws the
attention of the readers to the love and the pampering. When the mouse is full,
it “lays it one corner…his bat-like ears twitching, tilting toward the least sound”
shows that the speaker pays undistracted attention on this mouse because he
notices even the finest twitch of the mouse’s ears. He observes every movement
of the meadow mouse and this again shows the motherly love the person felt
towards this mouse that he found in the meadow.
“Do I imagine he no longer trembles when I come close to him?” The speaker
asks himself whether the mouse is still trembling but he is not sure. He wanted
to give the mouse a feeling of safety and protection. The speaker assumes that
he had offered the mouse enough love and protection that the mouse now trust
and feels safe with him. The speaker assumes that the mouse had settled in and
is no longer afraid of him and had perhaps even developed a better relationship
with him.
In the fourth stanza the speaker finds that the shoe box which contained the
mouse “is empty”. He wonders what had happened to it; “had it gone to live by
courtesy of a snake?” “Run under the eye of the owl” or “ran under the wing of
the hawk?” All these are enemies of a mouse and can be fatal predators to a
mouse, especially one as young as the one the speaker had picked up. The
speaker fears for the mouse and this feeling is passed to the reader, fearing for
the little mouse’s faith and life.
The last stanza is all the possibilities the speaker thinks has happened to his
mouse, “nestling fallen into the deep grass”; “turtle gasping in the dusty rubble
of the highway” are all horrifying images of helpless animals whose lives are at
stake. At this point, the speaker is referring to his lost baby mouse who is out
there somewhere on his own, unprotected by the speaker, who had tried
everything to put the mouse under his wings of protection.
Roethke makes a human correlation, a discovery about human conditions and
parental worries over a child. Even though the world is fraught with danger, in
the natural scheme of things, every parent knows their child will leave the safe
environment of home to seek his or her own fortune in this dangerous world;
and even though the dangers are real, a parent must let the child go.
The narrator distinguishes between madness and sanity: the beliefs of the
majority constitute sanity, whereas those who dissent are considered insane.
This poem states that what is often declared madness is actually the most
profound kind of sanity when viewed by someone with a ‘discerning Eye’.
What is often called sense or sanity is in fact not just madness but profound
madness and it is only called ‘sense’ not because it is defined by reason, but by
what the majority thinks.
Since the majority rules, the act of agreeing, no matter to what, means that you
are, in the public mind sane. If one disagrees, or even hesitate in his/her assent,
he/she is not only declared crazy, but dangerously so. The act of disagreeing
with the majority leads to a loss of freedom, thus one can either be physically
free, but ruled by the majority, or imprisoned with their own beliefs.
This poem is not just concerned with the judgement of ‘madness’ or ‘sense’,
however, but with the prospect of any judgements that have important
ramifications, and with who has the power to make them. In this poem, the
judgement of a person’s insanity is made ‘straightway’, and only because this
person chooses to ‘demur’ from the majority. The diction here, especially in the
contrast between the extremes of these two words: ‘straightaway’ is as fast as a
decision can be made, while ‘demur’ is a rather weak form of objection, as
opposed to, say, a rebellion.
There is no slow, steady, rational process of judgment before this person is
labeled insane and “handled with a Chain,” it is instead simply a kneejerk
reaction, yet one that takes away the insane person’s freedom. The use of the
word “Chain,” too, has a hint of violence to it, so it is not just a loss of freedom,
but potentially a violent one. Dickinson throughout her poems is very concerned
with the issue of truth, and the fact that it is almost impossible to ever really
find it. If this is the case, then passing judgment in any fair way is inherently
impossible, and to do so quickly is a horrifying crime.
Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’
The speaker says that “the Soul selects her own Society—” and then “shuts the
Door,” refusing to admit anyone else—even if “an Emperor be kneeling / Upon
her mat—.” Indeed, the soul often chooses no more than a single person from
“an ample nation” and then closes “the Valves of her attention” to the rest of the
world.
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” takes a playful tone to the idea of reclusiveness
and privacy, the tone of “The Soul selects her own Society—” is quieter,
grander, and more ominous. The idea that “The Soul selects her own Society”
(that people choose a few companions who matter to them and exclude
everyone else from their inner consciousness) conjures up images of a solemn
ceremony with the ritual closing of the door, the chariots, the emperor, and the
ponderous Valves of the Soul’s attention.
Essentially, the middle stanza functions to emphasize the Soul’s stern and
uncompromising attitude towards anyone trying to enter into her Society
once after the metaphorical door is shut—even chariots, even an emperor,
cannot persuade her. The third stanza then illustrates the severity of the Soul’s
exclusiveness—even from “an ample nation” of people, she easily settles on one
single person to include, summarily and unhesitatingly locking out everyone
else. The concluding stanza, with its emphasis on the “One” who is chosen,
gives the poem, the feel of a tragic love poem, although we need not reduce our
understanding of the poem to see its theme as merely romantic. The poem is an
excellent example of Dickinson’s tightly focused skills with metaphor and
imagery; cycling through her regal list of door, divine Majority, chariots,
emperor, mat, ample nation, and stony valves of attention, Dickinson
continually surprises the reader with her vivid and unexpected series of images,
each of which furthers the somber mood of the poem.
Emerson’s ‘Hamatreya’
The poem addresses the question of ownership – whether humans own the land
or the land owns the humans. By specifically naming each of the landlords
–“Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,” and their agricultural
products – “Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood,” Emerson
demonstrates the dependence that humans have upon the earth. However,
because the landlords work upon the land, they come to see their crops as a
result of their own work, rather than a result of nature’s processes, and they
develop a sense of ownership of the land. These landlords do not consider that
death comes for every person, and that it returns them to the soil which they
claim to own. The founders took satisfaction in their ownership of the trees and
hills, and believed that the land would belong to them and to their descendants
forever. The speaker asks where they are now and answers “Asleep beneath
their grounds”, suggesting a kinship with the earth quite different from that
which the founders thought they possessed. He writes of the Earth laughing at
her “boastful boys” who were so proud of owning what was not actually theirs,
but who could not avoid death. The speaker enumerates the ways in which they
altered their land. These men appreciated the stability of their property as they
sailed back and forth across the ocean, never dreaming that the land that awaited
their return would outlast their claims to it. They did not realize that death
would transform each of them into “a lump of mould”, turning them back into
the land they owned.
In the third section of the poem, the speaker of the poem states that the Earth-
Song took away his bravery and avarice, “Like lust in the chill of the grave,”
thus ending the poem on a note of sober awareness.
Emerson drew on a passage in the VishnuPurana in writing ‘Hamatreya’. The
origin of the poem’s title is unclear, because there is no Hindu word or name
‘Hamatreya’. Edward Waldo Emerson noted in his annotations to the poem in
the Centenary Edition of his father’s writings that ‘Hamatreya’ appears to be an
adaptation of ‘Maitreya’, one of the characters in the Hindu text. In the original
passage, Maitreya is engaged in a dialogue with the deity Vishnu. Vishnu tells
Maitreya about the Hindu kings who mistakenly believed themselves possessors
of the Earth. But the kings have disappeared, while the Earth endures. Vishnu
recites the chant of the Earth, who laughs at and pities the egotistical kings and
their blindness to their mortality. He tells Maitreya that the Earth’s song will
cause proud ambition to melt away.
The theme of the poem is Lenore, the beautiful mysterious maiden who
died very young with whom the poet was deeply in love. The very name
conjures in the poet sorrowful flights of fancy, on a dismal wintry night of dark
December, the season of decay and cold death, chilling in its suggestive
loneliness and haunting aloofness. The embers falling out of the hearth in
ghostly shadows, the silken rustle of the pink curtains, suggestive of unknown
fears, the mild tapping at the chamber door, half-heard at midnight hour by the
poet whose mind is on the borderland of sleepiness, fill the atmosphere with a
sense of foreboding. The poet is sorrowladen with memories of beloved Lenore,
no more on earth; but in his make-believe, as belonging to the world of angels
and hailed as one among them. This heavy air of foreboding is given a further
denseness in the manner of the advent of the Raven, the very symbol of ill
omen.
The Raven takes over as the titular hero of the poem’s narration from here, as
though the motif of the great grief of the poet for Lenore were a preparation for
its arrival. Lenore, the symbol of the poet’s soul in agony of separation over a
length of time, meets with another symbol of the raven in a dimension of the
spiritual world, concretised in awful majesty. The pompous stealth with which it
makes its presence known by rapping at the window, the manner of its entry as
of right, fluttering majestically to occupy its accustomed place on the bust of
Pallas Athene as one expected at that midnight hour, adds to the ominous
quality of the visit.
The Raven becomes the centre of attraction. It comes to occupy the central
place in the poem. The poet’s thoughts are centred round the bird. The mystery
that surrounds the radiant maiden Lenore is overlaid with the equally
mysterious appearance of the Raven. It is a bird of yore who belongs to the
Hades, the world of Plutus, whose appearance spells doom.
The popular superstition about the Raven being a thing of evil tidings is
exploited by the poet in this poem sustaining the theme of Lenore whose
whereabouts as a spirit is agitating his thoughts. The Raven ensconced
comfortably is questioned by the poet as to what tidings it has to convey from
the spirit world from where it has come.
The Raven, the black bird hailing from the black interiors of the netherworld,
belongs to the dark ages of yore. It keeps its distance in far off regions of long
ago, of dead souls and spirits, having access to dark secrets of dark world. The
awesome ugliness and grim smugness of The Raven is amusing at first, but
assumes the role of mystery when it repeats the word, “Nevermore” to every
anxious, agonized appeal of the poet to tell him where his beloved Lenore is.
The Raven assumes a more irritating, more grotesque and more ambiguous role
to the poet who is bewildered by its reply in one word repeatedly said as if that
one word, “Nevermore” were the very essence of its soul. The mystery adds
suspense. The poet tries to play down his fears watching the bird reclining on
the soft chair before it. Its eyes peer into the poet’s soul and burn it as it were.
The eyes are red as live coal reflecting the floss of the dim light. Its beak, the
poet feels, is pecking at his heart. His attempts to find out the implication of the
word ‘nevermore’ are frustrated. The bird is differently flattered by the poet as a
prophet come from Heaven or from the Hades to tell him if the sainted Lenore
is not hailed by the angels. The Ravens utters again the same word with an
agonizing monotony ‘Nevermore’. It adds fuel to the fire. In the name of God,
the poet asks if there is no balm or opiate that can drown his sorrow for Lenore,
which can be found in Gilead, near Palestine. The Raven should be aware, being
all-knowing. The allusion to Gilead is skillfully made to prove that the Raven,
against the popular conception as foreboding evil, is also a consecrated divine
bird, holy and wise, as it was the ravens that fed Elijah the saint of Gilead long
ago. In this faith, the poet flatters the bird as having a double attribute as
messenger of Heaven as well as of Hell. It has access also to Heaven. He
desperately asks for the last time if Lenore is not somewhere to be found in the
region of the Garden of Eden with the angels calling her by that name. The
maiden being a radiant girl, she cannot but be in Heaven with angels. But the
Raven replies ‘Nevermore’. The poet roused to indignation beyond control gets
hysterical and cries at it to vacate its usurped place above his door on the bust of
Pallas and leave no token of its terrifying undesirable visit and to return to the
netherworld, its real original habitation. It had better left his haunted house
alone. The poet is now convinced that the Raven is more of a thing of evil,
though a prophet, a harbinger of death and not a holy messenger from the
heaven. It is the devil. It should not leave even a single black plume behind. For
it has spoken a lie as black as its soul.
In this domestic epic, a man and woman converse on the porch of their
farmhouse. The man is just coming home in the evening; his wife meets him at
the door to warn him that Silas, the old hired hand, had returned that day. Silas
looked terribly ill, yet he didn’t ask for help. Instead, he told her he would cut
the upper pasture, and he kept inquiring about the college boy he worked with
on the farm a few years back. He and the boy argued all the time; now the old
man wants to "make things right." In the poem, Frost outlines the traditions of
duty and hard work that he explores in many of his other poems. Silas returns to
the farm so that he can fulfill his broken contract to Warren and die honorably.
It also signals the importance of the work that he performed on the farm as a
way to give his life meaning and satisfaction.
The husband shakes his head. No, he will not take Silas back. The old man
walked away one too many times. You can’t depend on him to stay and finish
the job when someone comes around offering him a little "pocket money" to go
elsewhere. Indeed, Silas’s brother is the president of a bank; why doesn’t he go
to his brother for help? At last the husband quiets down and goes in to see the
old man, who is presumably asleep beside the stove. A few moments later, he
returns to the porch. To his wife’s query, "’Dead,’ was all he answered."
The hired hand has returned "home" to die. Though kinship would suggest that
the old man’s rich brother ought to provide a home for him, Silas evidently feels
more at home with the farm couple, who have supported him over the years.
The poem presents two definitions of "home": " ’Home is the place where,
when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ / ’I should have called it
/ Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ "In this case Silas appears to
have come "home" by both definitions. Despite his initial refusal, it looks as if
Warren (the farmer) will have to take his old hand in, though Silas has done
nothing to deserve it. Of course, when the moment of truth arrives, Silas is
already dead.
Ironically, even after Silas’ attempt to die in the companionship of Mary and
Warren, the people whom he views as family more than any others, he
ultimately dies alone. Moreover, he dies without ever fulfilling his contract to
ditch the meadow and clear the upper pasture. For all his attempts to fulfill his
duty, achieve satisfaction through hard work, and find a sense of family, Silas’
efforts are unsuccessful. Even the way in which his death is introduced
expresses its bleak isolation: Warren merely declares, “Dead.”
The poem also creates a clear dichotomy between Mary and Warren, between
Mary’s compassionate willingness to help Silas and Warren’s feelings of
resentment over the broken contract. Mary follows the model of Christian
forgiveness that expects her to help Silas because he needs it, not because he
deserves it. Warren, on the other hand, does not believe that they owe anything
to Silas and feels that they are not bound to help him. It is interesting to note
that, of the two, only Mary actually sees Silas over the course of the poem. She
finds him huddled against the barn and instantly recognizes the extent of his
illness. As a result, she is automatically more willing to be compassionate
toward him. Having not seen Silas in his current state, Warren takes the more
rational view of the situation. Had Warren found Silas first, his treatment of the
former farmhand would no doubt have been more compassionate.
Lowell captures the love the woman in her poem holds for her lover by having
her follow a set of patterns. The pattern of her dress, the tears she shed for her
lover, and the garden she paces through each day gives the readers a sense of
this woman’s incompleteness. Lowell also shows how these patterns are
destroyed. The one event of the lover’s death caused the hopeful patterns to be
useless. We all follow patterns in our own lives. Most of these patterns,
however, will constantly need changing for the rest of our lives.
Lowell speaks of a “stiff, brocaded gown” that this woman wears throughout
the entire poem. This dress is none other than a wedding gown. The woman in
the story is waiting to marry her lover who has gone off to war, and while she
awaits his return, she wears this wedding gown. In the first stanza, the woman
speaks of the elegance of her dress, and all the pains taken to look as she
does.”Not a softness anywhere about me,/ only whalebone and brocade”. In the
third stanza, the woman in the poem begins to tire of her richly-made gown.
Despite the discomfort this woman feels in her gown, she still carries within
herself the hope that her lover will be returning soon.
The woman begins to dream of her lover’s return in the fourth stanza. The two
young lovers childishly run through the gardens without having any cares.
However, the woman still wears her wedding dress, while her lover wears his
uniform. Everything that the pattern of her life follows is for her lover. When
she dreams that the two of them are finally together, she is “very like to swoon”.
After finding out about her lover’s death, the woman in the poem reverts to
bitterness. In the fifth stanza and on through the rest of the poem, she refers to
her dress as a “stiff brochade”. Her wedding dress no longer has any meaning
when the man she loves is dead. The gown is no longer a beautiful symbol of
these two lovers’ lives together, but simply a stiff, uncomfortable dress.
Lowell also uses a pattern of water in her poem. The water is a symbol of the
tears that this woman sheds for her husband. This particular pattern, however, is
not mentioned until the twenty-fifth line in the poem. The reasoning behind this
is that the longer the woman’s lover is away, the harder it becomes for the
woman to carry on with her daily patterns. The symbolism – if this one young
flower is chosen to die of all the flowers on the lime-tree, the same could hold
true for her lover. Although she optimistically hopes for the return of her
husband, she nevertheless cries harder than before.
The last pattern that this woman follows is the pattern in the gardens.
Throughout the poem, it is noted that the woman walks up and down the
gardens. The only thing that changes is the scenery of the garden : bright and
cheery atmosphere to that one of despair.
After receiving the message that her lover is dead, the woman begins to think
back to her words her lover spoke to her while they were still together. She
believed all that her lover had told her and now how can she trust what is dead?
All the patterns she followed while her lover was away, where they all a waste?
“Christ! What are patterns for?”
The poem ‘Richard Cory’ is a man’s life-story distilled into sixteen lines. The
first two lines suggest Richard Cory’s distinction, his separation from ordinary
folk. The second two lines tell what it is in his natural appearance that sets him
off. The next two mention the habitual demeanor that elevates him still more in
men’s regard: his apparent lack of vanity, his rejection of the eminence that his
fellows would accord him. At the beginning of the third stanza, “rich” might
seem to be an anticlimax – as the second line indicates, in their eyes wealth is
everything. The last two lines of the stanza record a total impression of a life
that perfectly realizes the dream that most men have of an ideal existence; while
the first two lines of the last stanza bring us back with bitter emphasis to the
poem’s beginning, and the impassable gulf, for most people – but not, they
think, for Richard Cory – between dream and fact. Thus the first fourteen lines
are a painstaking preparation for the last two, with their stunning overturn of the
popular belief.
Robinson has sketched in Cory’s gentlemanliness and his wealth, but not his
despondency, and he lets the suicide seal the identity of the man forever beyond
our knowing or judging. On the other hand, he can characterize the chorus just
because they lack individuality. Those who count over what they lack and fail to
bless the good before their eyes are truly desperate. The blind see only what
they can covet or envy. With their mean complaining, they are right enough
about their being in darkness, and their dead-gray triviality illuminates by
contrast Cory’s absolute commitment to despair.
The irony of these lines, and the poem as a whole, depends on the contrast
between the serenity of Cory’s appearance and the violence of his death; its
melancholy, upon our recognizing that Cory – for all his privileges – is as
acutely isolated and spiritually starved as anyone else. “There is more in every
person’s soul than we think”, Robinson observed once, “Even the happy mortals
we term ordinary….act their own mental tragedies and live a far deeper and
wider life than we are inclined to believe possible in the light of our prejudices.”
This is precisely the lesson that the ‘we’ of the poem, Cory’s neighbours in
Tilbury Town, never learn: the night on which Cory shoots himself remains
‘calm’ in their view, and the use of that word only underlines the distance
between him and them.
The speaker appears to contradict himself, or, more exactly, state the truth about
Richard Cory. Cory is not a king, he is human. The narrator then confesses
through his own hyperbole, his own exaggerated viewpoint of the man. In the
next line, the narrator even acknowledges (“But still”) the collective fault of the
people; the lines might be paraphrased as follows: even though we knew deep
inside us Cory was a human, something else inside compelled us to blow up his
proportions (“he fluttered pulses” and “he glittered”). The narrator admits
essentially to this view in lines eleven and twelve.
In light of the narrator’s attitude line one establishes that it is Richard Cory who
comes down town; in other words, Richard Cory makes an attempt to
communicate with the people. His activity contrasts with their passivity or stasis
(‘on we worked and waited”). Nowhere in the poem it is suggested that the
people try to come to Cory. Quite simply the people have erected a barrier
around themselves and their only reaction to Cory is stasis and silence. The
phrase “when he talked” even suggests that Cory makes more than a token
effort.
O’Henry’s ‘After Twenty Years’ is a story about two friends who separated
twenty years ago. One went to west leaving New York to make a fortune, the
other one was a simpleton and a good fellow and stayed in New York. They had
promised each other that they would meet exactly twenty years later at 10 p.m.
so the first arrived. The story takes place around 10 p.m. along a dark, windy
New York City business avenue, mostly within the darkened doorway of a
closed hardware store. This particular location had been a restaurant until five
years ago. The weather worsens as the drama builds going from "chilly gusts of
wind with a taste of rain" to a "fine, cold drizzle falling, and wind had risen
from its uncertain puffs into a steady blow." The plot begins with a policeman
"on the beat" who discovers a man standing in the dark doorway. The man then
proceeds to explain why he is there. He and his best friend, Jimmy Wells had
parted exactly twenty years ago to make their fortunes and had promised to
meet at that spot after twenty years. He had gone west and became rich and was
sure his friend, Jimmy would meet him if at all possible. They talked a while
and the policeman carried on.
After some time, his friend Jimmy Wells comes and they talk, but due to
difference in features Bob realizes that he is not the real Jimmy. It is then that
Bob is told that he is arrested and is handed a note from the patrolling
policeman who was the actual Jimmy that he had reached on time but could not
arrest his friend himself. Sometimes honesty is more important than personal
loyalty.
O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day, he was called the
American answer to Guy de Maupassant. Both authors wrote plot twist endings,
but O. Henry stories were much more playful. His stories are also known for
witty narration. Most of O. Henry's stories are set in his own time, the early 20th
century. Many take place in New York City and deal for the most part with
ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. O. Henry's work is wide-
ranging, and his characters can be found roaming the cattle-lands of Texas,
exploring the art of the con-man, or investigating the tensions of class and
wealth in turn-of-the-century New York. O. Henry had an inimitable hand for
isolating some element of society and describing it with an incredible economy
and grace of language.
Before beginning his account, the unnamed narrator claims that he is nervous
and oversensitive but not mad, and offers his calmness in the narration as proof
of his sanity. He then explains how although he loved a certain old man who
had never done him wrong and desired none of his money, the narrator could
not stand the sight of the old man's pale, filmy blue eye. The narrator claims that
he was so afraid of the eye, which reminds him of a vulture's, that he decided to
kill the man so he would no longer have to see it.
Although the narrator is aware that this rationalization seems to indicate his
insanity, he explains that he cannot be mad because instead of being foolish
about his desires, he went about murdering the old man with "caution" and
"foresight." In the week before the murder, the narrator is very kind to the old
man, and every night around midnight, he sneaks into the old man's room and
cautiously shines a lantern onto the man's eye. However, because the eye is
always closed and the narrator wishes to rid himself of the eye rather than the
man, the narrator never tries to kill him, and the next morning, he again enters
the chamber and cheerfully asks how the old man has slept, in order to avoid
suspicion.
On the eighth night, the narrator is particularly careful while opening the door,
but this time, his thumb slips on the lantern's fastening, waking the old man.
The narrator freezes, but even after an hour, the old man does not return to sleep
because he feels afraid and senses someone's presence. At length, the narrator
decides to slowly open the lantern until the light shines on the old man's eye,
which is wide open. The narrator's nerves are wracked by the sight, and he
fancies that because of his oversensitivity, he has begun to hear the beating of
the old man's heart.
The beating firms his resolve as he continues to increase the intensity of the
light on the man's eye. The beating grows louder and louder until the narrator
begins to worry that a neighbor will hear the noise, so he decides to attack. The
old man screams once before the narrator drags him to the floor and stifles him
with the mattress. When the narrator stops hearing the beating, he examines the
corpse before dismembering it and concealing it beneath the floorboards. He
laughs somewhat hysterically as he describes how the tub caught all the blood,
leaving no stains on the floor.
By the time he finishes the clean-up, it is four in the morning, and someone
knocks on the door. In a cheerful mood, the narrator answers the door only to
find three policemen who have come to investigate because a neighbor heard
the old man's shriek and alerted the police to the possibility of foul play. The
narrator invites them inside, knowing that he has nothing to fear, and he
explains that he had been the one to yell as a result of a bad dream and that the
old man is currently out visiting the country. He shows the policemen the house
and confidently allows them to search it before bringing out chairs which he, in
his assurance, places on top of the floorboards that hide the corpse.
The narrator's lack of suspicious behavior convinces the policemen that nothing
is wrong, and they sit down on the chairs and chat with him. However, after a
while, the narrator begins to wish that the policemen would leave, as his head
aches and he hears a ringing in his ears. The ringing increases in volume, for
which the narrator compensates by chatting more jovially, but it finally turns
into a dull beating which also begins to rise in volume. The narrator becomes
more and more agitated in his behavior, gesturing wildly and pacing back and
forth, but the policemen hear and suspect nothing.
Soon, the narrator begins to suspect that the pleasantries of the policemen are
merely a ruse to ridicule his distress. However, he cannot stand the intensity of
the beating and grows tired of what he perceives as the mockery of the
policemen. He feels that he "must scream or die," so he finally shrieks the truth,
telling the policemen to tear up the floorboards and reveal the beating of the old
man's heart.
Mark Twain uses the narrator as a literary device in his short story Luck ' The
author first uses his own voice to give the story an air of authenticity . He then
changes narrators , building on the original air of authenticity to create a second
authentic narrator . The first person narrator that Twain chooses to tell the
majority of the story is ostensibly a unnamed clergyman , formerly a cornet
(second lieutenant ) in the British army under a lieutenant-general the first
narrator gives the pseudonym Scoresby ' Simply by setting the fiction of the
need for a pseudonym for the lieutenant general , Twain has created the
suggestion of literal truth for the story about to follow . The second narrator ,
however , is an unreliable one .
By stating that Scoresby 's success comes solely from luck , it is clearly
apparent that the clergyman 's opinion would differ from that of the lieutenant
general . There is some question as to why these opinions would differ at least
from the clergyman 's perspective . While it should come as no surprise that
Scoresby would certainly prefer to characterize his success as deriving from
skill, the clergyman could have one of three reasons for having a different
opinion . All of these reasons extend from his knowledge of how Scoresby came
to be a member of the military First, it is possible that Scoresby is truly an
inept , but lucky man. The reader is left to reason for him or herself whether
Scoresby could possibly be that fortunate .
The story traces the career of a military hero from his modest beginnings at
Woolwich to his triumph in battle against the Russians. Years after the war's
end a celebratory dinner is held to honor the famous general, and it is at this
point that the tale begins. During the banquet the narrator, who has been joining
in the chorus of adulation, meets an old acquaintance: a clergyman of
undoubted probity, who dissents from the view that the general is a military
genius. Surprised and intrigued, the narrator asks for more detail, which the
clergyman agrees to supply a few days later. The rest of the short tale is told
retrospectively by this clergyman, who becomes the de facto narrator from this
point on. The clergyman had been the general's tutor when he was a cadet at
Woolwich, and had followed him to the Crimea. The burden of his message is
that the general, far from deserving his fame, was merely the beneficiary of an
incredible string of lucky coincidences.
The narrator knows the clergyman to be honest and reliable, but his bare
assertion that Scoresby's success was due to luck alone would not be believable
without supporting detail. This is precisely what the clergyman supplies.
(According to him, Scoresby was a complete failure as a student, hopelessly
stupid, an absolute fool. Out of pity, the clergyman had tutored him in Caesar's
history; as luck would have it, the examiners asked him only about what he had
been tutored in, with the result that he passed with flying colors. Next came
mathematics. Once again the clergyman helped prepare him, with results that
were even more astounding: Because he was once again asked only what he
happened to know, Scoresby took first place. With such sterling marks, he was
able to graduate and become an officer. ) The Clergyman establishes three
stages in Scoresby's luck: first with Caesar, second with math, finally in the
Crimea.
One needs to keep in mind, however, that Scoresby is not pretending to be
anything he is not. The point of the repetition of the word "unconsciousness" in
the opening paragraph is to emphasize that Scoresby is not performing in the
sense of playing a role. His only performance is the carrying out of his military
duties. He is not engaged in creating a public persona. It is true that the
clergyman comments that Scoresby is "the supremest fool in the universe; and
until half an hour ago nobody knew it but himself and me." But aside from this
assertion the story itself gives no indication that Scoresby shares this awareness.
He is unconscious of being misperceived. A natural fool, he is incapable of
deceit. The clergyman's further assertion in the final paragraph that Scoresby is
as "unpretending as a man can be" confirms this.
AMERICAN LITERATURE – II
IMPORTANT QUESTIONS