BBL3216 THE NOVEL AND SHORT

STORY IN ENGLISHMEETING 122.2.2014

Dr. Manimangai Mani E-mail : manimanggai@hotmail.com Contact no: 016-5316715 Room : No. 4, Makmal Siber 1,Muzium

Warisan Melayu.

Baker, S., Frye, N., Perkins, M.B. (1997). The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York:Longman.

Hemingway, E. (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. United Kingdom: Jonathan Cape Ltd.

Kennedy, X.J.&Gioia, D. (2003). Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers.

Lawrence, D.H. (2000). The Rainbow. London:Penguin Popular Classics.

The Texts

Peck, J. and Coyle, M. (1993) Literary Terms and Criticism. Houndmills: The MacMillan Press Ltd.

A Worn Path – Eudora Welty The Yellow Wall Paper- Charlotte Perkins

Gilman The Lottery – Shirley Jackson Araby - James Joyce The Storm- Kate Chopin The Old Man with the Enormous Wings- To Hell with Dying – Alice Walker The Serpent’s Tooth -

Short Stories

The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway

The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence

The Novels

Evaluation Test 1 - 10% Quiz - 20% Written Assignment - 30% (due Week 10) Final Exam - 40%

Historical development of novels and short stories in America and Britain

Lesson 1

To understand the historical development of the short stories and novels in Britain and America.

To Identify novels and short stories

Objectives

The roots of the novel come from a number of sources:

Elizabethan prose fiction French heroic romance--vast baroque narratives

about thinly disguised contemporaries (mid-17th century) who always acted nobly and spoke high-flown sentiment

Spanish picaresque tales--strings of episodic adventures held together by the personality of the central figure; Don Quixote is the best known of these tales.

History of novels

The word "novel" (which wasn't even used until the end of the 18th century) is an English transliteration of the Italian word "novella"--used to describe a short, compact, broadly realistic tale popular during the medieval period (e.g. The Decameron).

The novel deals with a human character in a social situation, man as a social being.

The novel places more emphasis on character, especially one well-rounded character, than on plot.

Another initial major characteristic of the novel is realism--a full and authentic report of human life.

The traditional novel has:

a unified and plausible plot structure sharply individualized and believable

characters a pervasive illusion of reality

E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel cites the definition of a Frenchman named Abel Chevalley: "a fiction in prose of a certain extent" and adds that he defines "extent" as over 50,000 words.

The novel, however, arises from the desire to depict and interpret human character. The reader of a novel is both entertained and aided in a deeper perception of life's problems.

What is a novel?

A novel is a long prose narrative that describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story, written by a novelist. The genre has historical roots in antiquity and the fields of medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The novella is an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century.

What is a novel?

Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the relation to reality, the characterization, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits.

Most of these requirements were introduced to literary prose in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.

Characteristics of novels

Short stories date back to oral storytelling traditions which originally produced epics such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Oral narratives were often told in the form of rhyming or rhythmic verse, often including recurring sections or, in the case of Homer, Homeric epithets.

Such stylistic devices often acted as mnemonics for easier recall, rendition and adaptation of the story. Short sections of verse might focus on individual narratives that could be told at one sitting. The overall arc of the tale would emerge only through the telling of multiple such sections.

History of short stories

In Europe, the oral story-telling tradition began to develop into written stories in the early 14th century, most notably with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.

Both of these books are composed of individual short stories (which range from farce or humorous anecdotes to well-crafted literary fictions) set within a larger narrative story (a frame story ), although the frame-tale device was not adopted by all writers.

Short story in Europe

At the end of the 16th century, some of the most popular short stories in Europe were the darkly tragic "novella" of Matteo Bandello (especially in their French translation).

The first short stories in the United Kingdom were gothic tales like Richard Cumberland's "remarkable narrative" "The Poisoner of Montremos" (1791).

Great novelists like Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens also wrote some short stories.

One of the earliest short stories in the United States was Charles Brockden Brown's "Somnambulism" from 1805. Washington Irving wrote mysterious tales including "Rip van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820).

Nathaniel Hawthorne published the first part of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837. Edgar Allan Poe wrote his tales of mystery and imagination between 1832 and 1849.

Short stories in America

Classic stories are "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".

In "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) Poe argued that a literary work should be short enough for a reader to finish in one sitting.

Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident; has a single plot, a single setting, and a small number of characters; and covers a short period of time.

The modern short story form emerged from oral story-telling traditions, the brief moralistic narratives of parables and fables, and the prose anecdote, all of these being forms of a swiftly sketched situation that quickly comes to its point.

Characteristics of short stories

A short story is a brief work of literature, usually written in narrative prose. Emerging from earlier oral storytelling traditions in the 17th century, the short story has grown to encompass a body of work so diverse as to defy easy characterization.

At its most prototypical the short story features a small cast of named characters, and focuses on a self-contained incident with the intent of evoking a "single effect" or mood.

Identifying novels and short stories

In doing so, short stories make use of plot, resonance, and other dynamic components to a far greater degree than is typical of an anecdote, yet to a far lesser degree than a novel.

While the short story is largely distinct from the novel, authors of both generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques.

Short stories have no set length. In terms of word count there is no official demarcation between an anecdote, a short story, and a novel.

Rather, the form's parameters are given by the rhetorical and practical context in which a given story is produced and considered, so that what constitutes a short story may differ between genres, countries, eras, and commentators.]

Like the novel, the short story's predominant shape reflects the demands of the available markets for publication, and the evolution of the form seems closely tied to the evolution of the publishing industry and the submission guidelines of its constituent houses.

Identifying themes, setting and characterization

Lesson 2

theme is an idea or concept that is central to a story, which can often be summed in a single word (e.g. love, death, betrayal). Typical examples of themes of this type are conflict between the individual and society; coming of age; humans in conflict with technology; nostalgia; and the dangers of unchecked ambition.

What is theme?

A theme may be exemplified by the actions, utterances, or thoughts of a character in a novel. An example of this would be the theme loneliness in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, wherein many of the characters seem to be lonely. It may differ from the thesis—the text's or author's implied worldview.

A story may have several themes. Themes often explore historically common or cross-culturally recognizable ideas, such as ethical questions, and are usually implied rather than stated explicitly. An example of this would be whether one should live a seemingly better life, at the price of giving up parts of ones humanity, which is a theme in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Along with plot, character, setting, and style, theme is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.

n works of narrative (especially fictional), the literary element setting includes the historical moment in time and geographic location in which a story takes place, and helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story.

Setting has been referred to as story world or milieu to include a context (especially society) beyond the immediate surroundings of the story.

What is setting?

Elements of setting may include culture, historical period, geography, and hour.

Along with the plot, character, theme, and style, setting is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.

Setting is a critical component for assisting the story, as in man vs. nature or man vs. society stories.

In some stories the setting becomes a character itself. The term "setting" is often used to refer to the social milieu in which the events of a novel occur.

Setting includes three closely related aspects of a work of fiction.

- The physical, sensuous world of the work.   - The time in which the action of the work

takes place.  - The social environment of the characters

(i.e. the manners, customs, and moral values of the characters' society).

Setting can also help to reveal character.   - The environment in which the character lives may

help the reader to understand the character's motives and behavior. (e.g. The theft of a loaf of bread from the rich by a poor, starving person would give one interpretation of a character, whereas the same theft from other poor people would give another. The theft by a rich person of that same loaf of bread would lead to a different impression.)  

- The way that the setting is described can also show the inner feelings of a character.

Setting and character

 Setting in literature is the location and time frame in which the action of a narrative takes place.

The makeup and behaviour of fictional characters often depend on their environment quite as much as on their personal characteristics.

Setting is of great importance in Émile Zola’s novels, for example, because he believed that environment determines character. In some cases the entire action of a novel is determined by the locale in which it is set.

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) could hardly have been placed in Paris, because the tragic life and death of the heroine have a great deal to do with the circumscriptions of her provincial milieu. It sometimes happens that the main locale of a novel assumes an importance in the reader’s imagination comparable to that of the characters. Wessex is a giant, brooding presence in Thomas Hardy’s novels.

The popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romanticized Scotland. Setting may be the prime consideration of some readers, who can be drawn to Joseph Conrad because he depicts life at sea or in the East Indies; they may be less interested in the complexity of human relationships that he presents.

The setting of a novel may be an actual city or region made greater than life, as in James Joyce’s characterization of Dublin. But settings may also be completely the work of an author’s imagination: in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada (1969), for example, there is an entirely new space-time continuum, and in The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) J.R.R. Tolkien created an “alternative world” in his Middle Earth.

Flat and Round characters Flat characters are two-dimensional in that

they are relatively uncomplicated and do not change throughout the course of a work.

Round characters are complex and undergo development, sometimes sufficiently to surprise the reader.

Characterization

Identifying the use of symbols and metaphors in short story

- A Worn Path by Eudora Welty

Lesson 3

To understand the nature of love To understand the choice of words To draw a parallel between the story and

the legendary life cycle of the phoenix

Objective

Phoenix Jackson is an old, poor black woman. She is on a journey to a clinic to get free medicine for her sick grandson. The route which she takes is dotted with obstacles and we are given detailed narration of the old woman overcoming these obstacles. The bleak surrounding laden with images of further emphasizes the tormenting journey of her journey. She even falls into a ditch when startled by a dog. When she finally arrives at the clinic, a strange quietness envelopes her. When jolted out of her trance, she collects the medicine and turns to start the journey home.

Summary

Phoenix’s unconditional love for her grandson

The nature of love

Words used to describe the difficult path:- A very cold, windy morning- A thorny bush which she got entangled- A barbed-wire fence which she had to crawl

under - A scarecrow which she thought was a ghost- A ditch in which she falls- A log across a creek which she crossed with

her eyes closed.

Choice of words

The phoenix is a mystical bird that has a very long life span which can live for 500 years.

When the phoenix approaches death, it will build a nest on the branches of a tree. Then the nest will burst into flames and burn the phoenix. A new phoenix will arise from the ashes and flies forth to begin a new life cycle.

The cycle goes on repeatedly every 500 years.

The Phoenix

Identifying the protagonist’s emotions in short story

- The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lesson 4

To understand the social setting of the women in 19th century

To observe how a person gradually moves towards insanity

To identify the reasons for the character’s irrational behavior

Objective

It is a passionate account of a distraught woman over her marital situation. It is told in the first person narrative where this woman wants to be independent through her work to maintain her sanity. However, her wishes are ignored by the male chauvinistic in her life, her husband, brother and her doctor.

Summary

She is emotionally and intellectually violated. She finds herself imprisoned in her room with yellow wallpaper and the patterns on it seem to permeate a negative influence upon herself. And as she fights a futile battle for her identity and independence, she succumbs to madness.

Women are oppressed. They are not allowed to have their own thoughts.

The narrator is belittled and ridiculed by her husband, brother and doctor.

The narrator wants to write as a means to express herself but this too is ridiculed by her husband.

Social setting

The narrator is deprived of freedom and confined to a room.

She is intellectually suppressed and not allowed to write.

She begins to concentrate on the patterns of the wall paper and identifies herself with the woman on the paper.

Husband makes her believe that she is weak. She tears the wall paper and begins creeping,

mimicking the woman in the pattern – madness.

Insanity

Oppression by the male society Lack of freedom to express herself Supression of feelings

Reasons behind the narrator’s irrational behaviour

Analysis of irony, symbolism and traditions in the short story

- The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Lesson 5

To identify the features of an unusual relationship between the individual and the society

To analyse the irony, symbolism and traditions in the short story

Objective

This is a story of a village of people who are deeply rooted in tradition. The story starts with the people gathering in a square for the annual lottery. The lottery is carried out by having each member of the village draw out a piece of folded paper from black box. The black box has a long history of being in the village. The lottery is carried out in neighbouring villages too, but in some places, there have been discussions to stop the lottery tradition.

Summary

When they draw their lots, they open the papers in deep silence. One of the papers belonging to Tessie Hutchingson has a black spot on it. The purpose of the lottery becomes clear as she is stoned to death by every member of the society, including her own family.

The society members hold on to a tradition which is archaic and primitive and they do not accept changes unlike other villages.

They accept that every 27th June, someone has to die at the lottery

Tradition of the society

They behave as a community when coming to a single decision but the irony is that the victim of the communal decision is forced on one person, an individual.

Family members of the victim are not affected by the decision but instead turn against each other to fulfill the outcome of the lottery

Irony

Black box – represents a tradition that has been carried out for generations

Old man Warner – history – “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” – is a harvest to increase the harvest.

Individualistic society – selfish when it comes to life and death

Symbolism

Analysis of the relationship between the protagonist’s journey and his personal feeling

- Araby – James Joyce

Lesson 6

To enlist the obstacles which prevent the protagonist to fulfill his intentions

To draw a parallel between the protagonist’s inability to overcome obstacles in the journey to the symbolic Araby and his failure to win the heart of the girl he desires.

Objectives

James Joyce

Born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. Joyce was one of the most revered writers of the 20th century, whose landmark book, Ulysses, is often hailed as one of the finest novels ever written.

His exploration of language and new literary forms showed not only his genius as a writer but spawned a fresh approach for novelists, one that drew heavily on Joyce's love of the stream-of-consciousness technique and the examination of big events through small happenings in everyday lives.

Joyce came from a big family. He was the eldest of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and his wife Marry Murray Joyce.

His father, while a talented singer (he reportedly had one of the finest tenor voices in all of Ireland), didn't provide a stable a household.

He liked to drink and his lack of attention to the family finances meant the Joyces never had much money.

Because of his intelligence Joyce's family pushed him to get an education. Largely educated by Jesuits, Joyce attended the Irish schools of Clongowes Wood College and later Belvedere College before finally landing at University College Dublin, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern languages.

Joyce's relationship with his native country was a complex one and after graduating he left Ireland for a new life in Paris where he hoped to study medicine. He returned, however, not long after upon learning that his mother had become sick. She died in 1903.

Joyce stayed in Ireland for a short time, long enough to meet Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid who hailed from Galway and later became his wife.

Around this time, Joyce also had his first short story published in the Irish Homestead magazine. The publication picked up two more Joyce works, but this start of a literary career was not enough to keep him in Ireland and in late 1904 he and Barnacle moved first to what is now the Croatian city of Pula before settling in the Italian seaport city of Trieste.

There, Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak, a list that included Arabic, Sanskrit, and Greek.

Other moves followed, as the Joyce and Barnacle (the two weren't formally married until some three decades after they met) made their home in cities like Rome and Paris.

The narrator, an unnamed boy, describes the North Dublin street on which his house is located. He thinks about the priest who died in the house before his family moved in and the games that he and his friends played in the street.

He recalls how they would run through the back lanes of the houses and hide in the shadows when they reached the street again, hoping to avoid people in the neighborhood, particularly the boy’s uncle or the sister of his friend Mangan.

Araby - synopsis

The sister often comes to the front of their house to call the brother, a moment that the narrator savors.

Every day begins for this narrator with such glimpses of Mangan’s sister. He places himself in the front room of his house so he can see her leave her house, and then he rushes out to walk behind her quietly until finally passing her.

The narrator and Mangan’s sister talk little, but she is always in his thoughts. He thinks about her when he accompanies his aunt to do food shopping on Saturday evening in the busy marketplace and when he sits in the back room of his house alone. The narrator’s infatuation is so intense that he fears he will never gather the courage to speak with the girl and express his feelings.

One morning, Mangan’s sister asks the narrator if he plans to go to Araby, a Dublin bazaar.

She notes that she cannot attend, as she has already committed to attend a retreat with her school. Having recovered from the shock of the conversation, the narrator offers to bring her something from the bazaar. This brief meeting launches the narrator into a period of eager, restless waiting and fidgety tension in anticipation of the bazaar. He cannot focus in school. He finds the lessons tedious, and they distract him from thinking about Mangan’s sister.

On the morning of the bazaar the narrator reminds his uncle that he plans to attend the event so that the uncle will return home early and provide train fare. Yet dinner passes and a guest visits, but the uncle does not return. The narrator impatiently endures the time passing, until at 9 p.m. the uncle finally returns, unbothered that he has forgotten about the narrator’s plans.

Reciting the epigram “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” the uncle gives the narrator the money and asks him if he knows the poem “The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed.”

The narrator leaves just as his uncle begins to recite the lines, and, thanks to eternally slow trains, arrives at the bazaar just before 10 p.m., when it is starting to close down. He approaches one stall that is still open, but buys nothing, feeling unwanted by the woman watching over the goods. With no purchase for Mangan’s sister, the narrator stands angrily in the deserted bazaar as the lights go out.

coming of age the loss of innocence the life of the mind versus poverty (both

physical and intellectual) the consequences of idealization the Catholic Church's influence to make

Dublin a place of asceticism where desire and sensuality are seen as immoral

Themes in Araby

the pain that often comes when one encounters love in reality instead of its elevated form

paralysis These themes build on one another entirely

through the thoughts of the young boy, who is portrayed by the first-person narrator, who writes from memory.

Analysis of characters and their lives and peculiarities in novels

- To Hell with Dying by Alice walker

Lesson 7

To link the maturity of the characters to their acceptance of death

Objectives

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, poet, self-claimed womanist, and activist.

She wrote the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Walker was born in Putnam County, Georgia, the youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant.

Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 ($4,000 in 2013 dollars) a year from sharecropping and dairy farming.

Her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.

In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers.

Since the family did not have a car, she was taken to the hospital one week later. By then she was already blind on the right eye.

When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed.

After graduating in 1965, Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College.

Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children's programs in Mississippi.

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement.

She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi".

They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969. Walker and her husband divorced in 1976.

Novels and short stories The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black

Women (1973) Meridian (1976) The Color Purple (1982) You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down:

Stories (1982) To Hell With Dying (1988) The Temple of My Familiar (1989)

Finding the Green Stone (1991) Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) The Complete Stories (1994) By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998) The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart [a novel]

(2004) Random House ISBN13 9781588363961 Everyday Use (1973). Short stories, essays,

interviews

Poetry collection Once (1968) Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning

(1979) Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems

(1991) Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings

(2003) Collected Poems (2005) Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems

Non-fiction books In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens:

Womanist Prose (1983) Living by the Word (1988) Warrior Marks (1993) The Same River Twice: Honoring the

Difficult (1996) Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's

Activism (1997) Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel

and Adventure (1997)

Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999)

Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001)

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006)

Overcoming Speechlessness (2010) Chicken Chronicles, A Memoir (2011)

Awards and Honors Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1967) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) for The Color Purple National Book Award for Fiction (1983) for The Color

Purple O. Henry Award for "Kindred Spirits" 1985. Honorary Degree from the California Institute of the

Arts (1995) American Humanist Association named her as

"Humanist of the Year" (1997) The Lillian Smith Award from the National

Endowment for the Arts

The Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts & Letters

The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Merrill Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Front Page Award for Best Magazine Criticism from the Newswoman's Club of New York

Induction to the California Hall of Fame in The California Museum for History, Women, and the Arts (2006)

Domestic Human Rights Award from Global Exchange (2007)

The LennonOno Grant for Peace (2010)

Mr. Sweet is a black neighbor of the narrator. The narrator, who is initially a little girl summoned with the rest of her siblings whenever Mr. Sweet is threatening to die. Mr. Sweet is diabetic and on many occasions his health deteriorates to the brink of death. The narrator describes how she and her brothers loved Mr. Sweet, despite the fact that he was an indifferent cotton farmer, a frequent drunk, and an inveterate smoker.

Summary of “To Hell with Dying”

Somehow the faults of the old man, including his falling-down bouts of drunkenness and his slovenly personal appearance, are not impediments to the devotion he inspires or the affection for him on the part of the narrator and her brothers.

Each time the children are summoned, Mr. Sweet is reputed to be at death's door. "To hell with dying," the narrator's father would say. "These children want Mr. Sweet!" Then the youngsters would leap on the man in bed and begin their miraculous revival. By turns tickling and kissing Mr. Sweet, the neighbor kids manage to revive him time after time.

The narrator comes to have faith in her unfailing ability to bring him back to life, and several times the children succeed when the local doctor had given up hope. Nearly two decades pass, and the narrator is in graduate school when another summons comes. She flies back to the rural South and hastens to the bedside of the old man, now over ninety. But this time, after a brief return to consciousness, Mr. Sweet dies.

“Even at twenty-four, how could I believe that I had failed” the protagonist says in disappointment. She inherits Mr. Sweet’s guitar which he used to play to entertain all around him. And now, she plays the guitar in memory of a man who touched many people’s hearts.

Mr. Sweet- A black man who has no purpose to live- His wife is dead and his son has abandoned

him which gave him the reason to drink- The only thing the held him to survive is the

bond he had with the children, his playmates.

Characters

Peculiarities - Each time Mr. Sweet is in the brink of death,

the neighbours would call the narrator and her family to cheer him up.

- The narrator’s father would deliberately say loudly to the dying man, “To hell with dying, man, these children want Mr. Sweet!”

- In this way, the old man cheats death several times.

He dies when he is ninety. The “beautufui children” were now leading their own lives with the narrator pursuing her doctoral studies.

But the irony is that the narrator and her family did not feel the significance of their concern and commitment to Mr. Sweet in evoking him the will to live.

The narrator seemed to treat death rather casually in relation to Mr. Sweet, “It did not occur to us that we were doing anything special; we had not learned that death was final when it did come…”

The children in this story had different outlook towards death. Death never really came as a threat to them as they believed that it could be evaded. This is why they could humour death when it faced them through the person of Mr. Sweet. They had a high level of faith in their ability to stop death. This reflects their immaturity on the topic of death.

The issue of death in the story

“It did not occur to us that we were doing anything special; we had not learned that death was final when it did come. We thought nothing of triumphing over it so many times… it did not occur to us that our father had been dying we could not have stopped it, that Mr. Sweet was the only person over whom we had power”.

THE END