SAMPLE ANNOTATION

Note: Although this annotation is based on a novel, it follows the same form suggested

for annotating short stories. Notice there is a clearly defined topic and frequent use of

textual examples. Also, while it is not required, the writer of the annotation has discussed

in the conclusion how the discussion ties into her own work. This is a great way to make

the annotation relevant to questions you’re confronting in your own work.

Establishment of the Dreamlike Tone in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

What most interests me about Housekeeping is the book’s haunting, dreamlike

tone. How does Robinson establish this tone?

In the opening pages of Housekeeping, a dreamlike tone is initially established by

the author’s treatment of a train derailment in which Ruth and Lucille’s grandfather dies.

The key to the tone lies in how this event is described. A tragedy in which hundreds of

people die would ordinarily be described as horrific. But Robinson chooses the word

“spectacular.” And then she employs particular telling details: Only three items were

found in the lake following the accident: a suitcase, a seat cushion, and a lettuce. No

limbs or bodies, no horrors here. Having a lettuce as the third item takes us into the realm

of the absurd. We are not meant to grieve those who perished in the crash but to marvel at

the event.

After the derailment, divers search for survivors, and younger boys jump into the

freezing lake “almost exuberantly, with whoops of fear.” The key words here are

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“exuberantly” and “whoops” (the word has a positive connotation). As the boys hit the

lake, people hear the rupturing sound of the layer of ice forming on the lake breaking. All

of this suggests improbability. Following a tragedy of this scale, would young boys really

be jumping into a lake with a sheet of ice on top in a celebratory atmosphere? By opening

with this, the author situates the reader in the realm of the improbable, the fantastic—in a

dream world. While not as fantastic as a man waking up as a cockroach, it is fantastic in

the recounting of events that might perhaps be true, but are odd enough that they seem

unbelievable. This opening hence sets up Housekeeping as a tale, not to be fully believed,

but to be listened to because it has a message to deliver.

Robinson continues to cast doubt about the truth of the events by having

information come from unreliable sources. The two men who were the only survivors of

the derailment were looking off the back of the train as the train sailed into the lake. They

didn’t see any of what transpired. They thought they might know where the train left the

tracks, but the townspeople doubted their version of events. Then a boy who is known to

be a liar says he swam down and touched the sleek window of the train. You can believe

it’s true if you want to but it might just be a tall tale.

Like the derailment, Ruth’s mother’s suicide is recounted in a fantastical way.

Two more of those unreliable boys say they saw a lady sitting on top of her car eating

strawberries in the muddy part of the lake (how likely is it that Helen would not have

been injured with the impact of her car hitting the mud?). They helped her get her car out

of the mud and she promptly gunned the car off the bridge once again. Ruth recounts this

in such a way that the reader knows things may or may not have transpired that way, and

the boys’ version of the story could be another tall tale.

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 The passages about the derailment and Helen’s suicide take us through page 23.

Right from the beginning of the book, then, the boundaries of what is real and what is

remembered or imagined are fluid. Robinson is not just establishing tone or telling us

how to read the book, but telling us about her main character, Ruth. As Ruth herself

states almost at the end of the book, “I have never distinguished readily between thinking

and dreaming” (215). Like everything else in the book, the truth is transient, always

shifting. The dreamlike tone is central to Ruth’s character and central to the book.

The author builds on the dreamlike tone, in which the line between what’s real

and what is imagined or dreamed is unclear, in later passages. Ruth starts to speak in

terms of hypothetical scenarios she imagines in her mind. These sentences begin with the

word, “Say.” Here is an example:

Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her
shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say
that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up
her big black shoes. (116)

And another from the scene where Sylvie takes Ruth out on the lake in a rickety

boat:

Say that the water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I
burst Sylvie’s coat. Say that the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom
and I, miraculously, monstrously, drank water into all my pores until the last
black cranny of my brain was a trickle, a spillet. (1980: 162)

The peculiar sentence construction calls attention to itself, and I wondered why

the author was using this device. I now see that these imaginations are setting up the

conclusion to the book, when Ruth imagines Lucille in Boston, in the last of these

hypothetical scenarios—the author gives us a scene which is presented as if it hadn’t

happened, had only been imagined by the mind’s eye. But the last six words of the book

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(“and always for me and Sylvie”) make the reader wonder whether perhaps it had—

perhaps Ruth and Sylvie had sought out Lucille in Boston.

In the world Robinson creates, what is seen in the mind’s eye seems equally if not

more important than what characters see with their physical eyes. We are told that at the

time of the derailment, “the darkness was impenetrable to any eye,” yet we do see the

derailment in our mind’s eye. It’s what is seen with the physical eye that is not to be

trusted. Ruth says, “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over

the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with

dreams...” (116).

I became interested in tone in this book after thinking about how I want to treat

“realism” in a story I’m working on. I want the story to have the tone of a fable or

fairytale. It is hard to put my finger on just what I am aiming for here. Housekeeping

gave me some ideas, because the story has an otherworldly quality to it although there are

no ghosts or talking animals, etc. Would this book be described as psychological realism?

If not, is it fantastic? I suppose the label is not so important as the effect achieved. In my

story, I am going to think about setting a dreamlike tone from the outset to orient the

reader as to what type of story they are reading. One device that I’ve learned from

Housekeeping is to reveal characters’ imaginings instead of just stating in a

straightforward fashion the events that transpire.